According to the joint statement, both politicians “have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. Extremist rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements is appalling and dangerous.” The violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank had “led to the deaths of Palestinian civilians and the displacement of whole communities.”

The reasoning for the imposition of such sanctions tends to minimise Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s zealous defence of programmatic and systematic displacement and removal of Palestinian existence in the Strip, despite the statement claiming that “this cannot be seen in isolation”. The statement fails to note the warnings from the International Court of Justice that Palestinians in Gaza face the risk of genocide, with a final decision pending on the matter.

Singling out individual members of the Netanyahu cabinet as the convenient lunatics and the devilishly possessed is a point of convenience rather than effect. It is true that, even by certain Israeli standards, a figure like Ben-Gvir is a bit too pungent, a convict of racist incitement, the procurer of assault rifles to West Bank settlers and an advocate for the full annexation of the territory. But identifying the villainous monsters conceals the broader villainous effort, and the Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong did as much in simply calling the two ministers “the most extreme proponents of the unlawful and violent Israeli settlement enterprise.”

The report of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, prefers to note the broader role played by such agents of power as the Israeli security forces, which it accuses of committing war crimes in directing attacks against the civilian population in Gaza, wilful killing and intentionally launching attacks that “would cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians”. Killing civilians seeking shelter in schools also implicated the forces “in the crime against humanity of extermination.” The canvas of responsibility, in other words, is panoramic and large.

Pity, then, that the latest expression of small means by these five powers does not extend to a complete halt to military cooperation, the selling of arms, or engagement across various fields of industry. That would have diminished the hypocrisy somewhat, something that the countries in question are unlikely to do. More’s the pity that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been spared this fit of moral clarity. When considered in substance, the two ministers face the sorts of restrictions that will be mildly bruising at best: travel bans and the freezing of assets.

The move by the Australian Labor government and its counterparts was, in the broader scheme of things, a modest one. It was also worth remembering that Canberra’s decision was made in sheepish fashion, with Wong previously stating that Australia would never unilaterally make such a move, as “going it alone gets us nowhere”. It was seen by Greens Senator Nick McKim as “far too little and far too late”. Sanctions were needed against the “Israeli industrial war machine.” On the other hand, Alex Ryvchin, co-chief of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry suggests that these measures can become a martyr’s tonic. “They have little support in Israel, but this is the sort of measure that will boost their notoriety and make them perhaps more popular”.

Looking ever the marionette in the show, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flapped about in condemning the sanctions, which “do not advance US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire, bring all hostages home and end the war.” Bereft of skills in argumentation, he could only warn US allies “not to forget who the real enemy is.”

The sanctions seemed to cause the condemned two less grief than Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who derided the decision as “outrageous”, “scandalous” and “unacceptable.” It was all part of “a planned and coordinated pressure campaign.” Ben-Gvir was almost smug with the attention and bursting with semitic pride. “We survived Pharoah, we will also survive [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer,” he tooted in a statement.

Smotrich even seemed thrilled by the timing of it all, having been at the inauguration of a new Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron when he heard the news. “I heard Britain had decided to impose sanctions on me because I am thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he boasted. “There couldn’t be a better moment for this.”

One point is certainly true: the selective moves against the dastardly two leaves the murderous apparatus intact, and the IDF war machine undiminished. Most of all, it will do nothing to halt the construction of a single settlement or save a single Palestinian from dispossession.

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

According to the joint statement, both politicians “have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. Extremist rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements is appalling and dangerous.” The violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank had “led to the deaths of Palestinian civilians and the displacement of whole communities.”

The reasoning for the imposition of such sanctions tends to minimise Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s zealous defence of programmatic and systematic displacement and removal of Palestinian existence in the Strip, despite the statement claiming that “this cannot be seen in isolation”. The statement fails to note the warnings from the International Court of Justice that Palestinians in Gaza face the risk of genocide, with a final decision pending on the matter.

Singling out individual members of the Netanyahu cabinet as the convenient lunatics and the devilishly possessed is a point of convenience rather than effect. It is true that, even by certain Israeli standards, a figure like Ben-Gvir is a bit too pungent, a convict of racist incitement, the procurer of assault rifles to West Bank settlers and an advocate for the full annexation of the territory. But identifying the villainous monsters conceals the broader villainous effort, and the Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong did as much in simply calling the two ministers “the most extreme proponents of the unlawful and violent Israeli settlement enterprise.”

The report of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, prefers to note the broader role played by such agents of power as the Israeli security forces, which it accuses of committing war crimes in directing attacks against the civilian population in Gaza, wilful killing and intentionally launching attacks that “would cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians”. Killing civilians seeking shelter in schools also implicated the forces “in the crime against humanity of extermination.” The canvas of responsibility, in other words, is panoramic and large.

Pity, then, that the latest expression of small means by these five powers does not extend to a complete halt to military cooperation, the selling of arms, or engagement across various fields of industry. That would have diminished the hypocrisy somewhat, something that the countries in question are unlikely to do. More’s the pity that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been spared this fit of moral clarity. When considered in substance, the two ministers face the sorts of restrictions that will be mildly bruising at best: travel bans and the freezing of assets.

The move by the Australian Labor government and its counterparts was, in the broader scheme of things, a modest one. It was also worth remembering that Canberra’s decision was made in sheepish fashion, with Wong previously stating that Australia would never unilaterally make such a move, as “going it alone gets us nowhere”. It was seen by Greens Senator Nick McKim as “far too little and far too late”. Sanctions were needed against the “Israeli industrial war machine.” On the other hand, Alex Ryvchin, co-chief of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry suggests that these measures can become a martyr’s tonic. “They have little support in Israel, but this is the sort of measure that will boost their notoriety and make them perhaps more popular”.

Looking ever the marionette in the show, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flapped about in condemning the sanctions, which “do not advance US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire, bring all hostages home and end the war.” Bereft of skills in argumentation, he could only warn US allies “not to forget who the real enemy is.”

The sanctions seemed to cause the condemned two less grief than Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who derided the decision as “outrageous”, “scandalous” and “unacceptable.” It was all part of “a planned and coordinated pressure campaign.” Ben-Gvir was almost smug with the attention and bursting with semitic pride. “We survived Pharoah, we will also survive [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer,” he tooted in a statement.

Smotrich even seemed thrilled by the timing of it all, having been at the inauguration of a new Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron when he heard the news. “I heard Britain had decided to impose sanctions on me because I am thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he boasted. “There couldn’t be a better moment for this.”

One point is certainly true: the selective moves against the dastardly two leaves the murderous apparatus intact, and the IDF war machine undiminished. Most of all, it will do nothing to halt the construction of a single settlement or save a single Palestinian from dispossession.

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

In recent weeks, the Vietnamese government has rolled out a sweeping campaign to crack down on counterfeit goods and to enforce a new tax collection regime. The primary targets have been small businesses.

The prime minister issued a directive on May 24 urging all levels of government to “step up the fight against counterfeit goods.” The government also introduced Decree 70, requiring small businesses to install electronic cash registers connected directly to tax authorities.

The steps appeared sensible, to tighten up protections on intellectual property and move toward greater fairness in tax collection that could boost state revenues.

But there have been negative consequences as many shop owners have chosen to shut down their businesses rather than comply with the government’s measures.

Authorities across the country are launching surprise raids on small businesses to enforce the new regulations, targeting everything from social media-driven enterprises to household market vendors. Businesses which are unable to provide documentation proving the origin of their goods face penalties.

The abrupt and aggressive enforcement has sent shockwaves through the small business community, prompting a wave of mass closures as panicked shop owners shut their doors in protest or in fear.

“I will close my store, I cannot continue like this!” a sobbing store-owner in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s main commercial center, says in a self-filmed video where she talks about the effect of the new policies. The video, which shows dozens of shuttered businesses, was later posted on Facebook and has attracted more than 3 million views.

Local officials in the north-central province of Nghe An say that 80 percent of shops in the region’s largest market have shut down, highlighting the scale of the disruption.

(VTV)

Family-run businesses are a cornerstone of Vietnam’s economy, accounting for 39 percent of all jobs and contributing roughly a quarter of the country’s GDP, according to official government data.

The mass shutdown of household businesses is expected to take a significant toll on the economy, disrupting local employment and supply chains across the country.

While the campaign against counterfeit goods has instilled fear among small business owners, it is the enforcement of a new tax regime that is fueling the most resentment within the business community.

Under the old system, small businesses paid a fixed monthly amount known as presumptive tax, calculated by authorities based on the income reported by the business owners.

But that’s not the only burden they face. There are other ‘unofficial’ payments that are viewed as the cost of doing business in Vietnam, where corruption is deeply entrenched.

A grocery shop owner in Ho Chi Minh City told Radio Free Asia that every month he has to hand over an envelope with 2.5 million Vietnamese dong (or US$100) to local officials who run the market - and that’s even before he gets a visit from police.

“The police drop by from time to time—sometimes asking for a few hundred thousand (dong), sometimes taking things without paying, saying it’s a ‘donation from the shop.’ Whenever their agencies go on trips, training sessions, or attend congresses, they call and ask us to ‘contribute’," said the shop owner, who in common with other business people RFA spoke to for this article, requested anonymity for safety reasons.

A businesswoman operating in one of the major wholesale markets in the capital Hanoi told RFA that “tax evasion is a matter of survival” for many shop owners. Burdened by regular bribes to local officials, she said the only way to keep her store afloat and avoid raising prices is to skirt taxes.

In response to the wave of small business closures, state-run media have depicted shop owners as greedy and irresponsible, accusing them of choosing to shut down rather than fulfill their tax obligations. Those reports have largely ignored the underlying issue of chronic corruption.

“Before demanding transparency from small business owners, the government should first clean up its own house, starting with the local police,” the grocery shop owner in Ho Chi Minh City told RFA.

Translated and written by Truong Son. Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Du Lan for RFA Vietnamese.

But there is a method and mad dash of hope in this formula of once-a-month tributes to hard work, that is, highlighting the hard work of “heroes” in this hard land of penury and disaster and predatory (retaliatory) capitalism.

Today’s piece in my local rag (5/21) is emblematic of my own proof that we can fight the surge of shallow thinking and even shallower writing.

Here, just heading home from assisting at the 60+ Center (senior adult center), I caught this show, on the radio station where I broadcast my own Wednesday show, Finding Fringe. 6 PM, PST, streaming live on kyaq.org.

Hard work of reporting: Thirsting for Justice: East Orosi’s Struggle for Clean Drinking Water (Encore)

East Orosi hasn’t had safe drinking water in over 20 years. The water is full of nitrates, runoff from industrial agriculture, which is harmful to human health. The community has taken action to find a solution, from lobbying at the state capital to working with neighboring towns.

And they may finally have one. New California laws, passed  in the last five years, have opened up funding to build water infrastructure in small towns like East Orosi. But even as laws and funding develop, implementation has been challenging.

We visit East Orosi and talk to Berta Diaz Ochoa about what it’s like living without clean drinking water and the solutions on the horizon in part one of a two part series. — Listen.

Learn More:

• Community Water Center
• Self Help Enterprises
• State Water Resources Control Board

So, imagine, a sound bite around the issues of field workers pulling up crops that are destroying healthy water systems, forcing them to have to drink that toxic water or paying for bottled water to survive. Is water a human right? In California is it.

So, take ANY community, not just the fenceline ones, the communities that are in the sights of the perveyors of criminal capitalism because they are poor and probably BIPOC, and then find how infrastructure and services and even bloody retail enterprises like pharmacies or grocery stores are being gutted by Capitalism, pre-Trump/post-Trump.

You have any axes to grind? You live in a flyover state or rural community?

Here,

Stop trying to save Rural America.

Efforts to write it off as “disappearing” are complicated by the 60 million Americans who call a rural community home.

We must recognize that innovation, diversity of ideas and people, and new concepts don’t need to be imported to rural communities – they’re already there. Rural entrepreneurs and community leaders have always, by necessity, been innovative.

Rural communities have faced some harsh realities in the last generation: they’ve seen manufacturing move overseas, farming monopolized by big outfits with only 5% of rural residents working in agriculture, generational migration to bigger cities, school consolidation, and the absence of basic community resources such as health care and broadband, and, more recently, threats to the lifeline that is the U.S. Postal Service. This, and the pandemic.

Every brightly lit corporate store on the edge of town is a monument to a system that does not build community or advance a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem.

And before the super out-of-touch elite from err, New York City call us bumkins, get over it: Don’t Blame Rural Residents for a Broken Political System

While noting the decades of gerrymandering to enhance the power of rural officials, New York magazine author Ed Kilgore concludes, “Underlying it all are real differences in outlook between different parts of the country, made more important by the distinct institutional features of a constitutional system designed to protect the interests of small, largely nonmetropolitan states.”

Sorry, Ed; the values of citizens of rural areas have as much to do with school violence and immigration resistance as do video games. In fact, Kilgore undermines his own argument by citing Ronald Brownstein’s analysis in the Atlantic of the red-blue divide. Alas, the same Ronald Brownstein reported on CNN just one week later that a prosperity gap was the source of the split between Democrats and Republicans. “Observers in both parties agree that the sense of economic displacement in recent years has intensified the long-standing movement toward the GOP among small-town and rural communities initially rooted in unease over cultural and demographic change.” It’s fair to observe that gun-loving nativists did not create the dismal economic prospects that drove them to vote for candidate Trump.

It is true that after years of civic disengagement, rural voters turned out in record numbers to elect the only coastal elitist who showed up in their communities and asked for their votes. So, Trump won and Clinton lost. Beyond that, any generalization about the impact of rural citizens on national politics is just horsepucky. Rural citizens didn’t create the electoral system that permits unlimited campaign donations to state officials who draw Congressional districts to favor entrenched wealth. In fact, rural citizens are the victims of gerrymandering as much as any disenfranchised cohort that ends up in a noncompetitive legislative district.

Alas, here’s the Google Gulag AI response to “all the problems in rural America”:

Rural communities face numerous interconnected challenges that can be described as “broken systems” due to a combination of historical disinvestment, geographic isolation, and economic shifts.

Here’s a breakdown of some key broken systems in rural communities:
1. Healthcare:

Limited Access: Rural areas often have a shortage of healthcare providers, specialists, and hospitals, forcing residents to travel long distances for care.

Hospital Closures: Rural hospitals are closing at an alarming rate due to financial difficulties and staffing shortages, further limiting access to care.

Lack of Services: Rural areas may lack crucial services like mental health care, substance abuse treatment, and specialized medical care.

2. Economic Systems:

Job Losses: Rural communities have experienced significant job losses due to the decline of manufacturing and agriculture, leading to higher unemployment and poverty rates.

Limited Opportunities: A lack of diverse industries and businesses can limit economic opportunities for residents, particularly young people.
Brain Drain: Young, educated individuals often leave rural areas for better opportunities in urban centers, further weakening the local economy.

3. Infrastructure:

Poor Broadband Access: Many rural areas lack access to reliable, high-speed internet, hindering economic development, education, and access to telehealth.

Inadequate Transportation: Limited public transportation options can isolate residents and make it difficult to access jobs, healthcare, and other essential services.

Aging Infrastructure: Rural areas may have aging infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and water systems, which require significant investment to repair and upgrade.

4. Education:

School Consolidation: Rural schools have been consolidated, leading to longer commutes for students and the loss of local schools as community anchors.

Funding Challenges: Rural schools often face funding challenges, which can impact the quality of education and available resources.

Teacher Shortages: Rural schools may have difficulty attracting and retaining qualified teachers, impacting student outcomes.

5. Social Systems:

Social Isolation: Geographic isolation and limited social opportunities can contribute to social isolation and mental health challenges for residents.

Lack of Community Resources: Rural areas may lack access to essential community resources such as libraries, childcare facilities, and recreational opportunities.

It’s important to note: These “broken systems” are interconnected and often exacerbate each other. The challenges faced by rural communities vary depending on location, demographics, and economic conditions.
Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach involving government, businesses, non-profit organizations, and community members.

+–+ Here is May 21st’s piece.

Identify, Diversify, and Harmonize How We Think this May

By Paul Haeder/Lincoln County (Oregon) Leader
One may wonder how the heck did we get all these national and international days of celebration. It is a feature of Homo sapiens to celebrate accomplishments and honor causes and individuals who make the world, well, theoretically a better place.

May is no exception, and of course, the International Workers’ Day is May 1. In this time of rampant hatred of so many professions by Trump and Company, it goes without saying that his shallow but deeply narcissistic persona just will never grasp the value of the worker.

His entire raison d’être is about tearing down and imploding institutions and attacking individuals for which he deems “the enemy.”

The billionaire classless cabal sees workers as the enemy. And the goals of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 were clear: Shorter work hours; safer work environment; fair wages; elimination of child labor; the ability for the state to regulate labor conditions.

Ironically, I was in Ashland on International Firefighters Day, talking to two captains in the city’s two fire stations. I was told that a few years ago firefighters responded to 1,600 calls annually. Last year, Ashland’s stations went out over six thousand times.

Aging in place and lack of family and support precipitates many of the EMT calls. And a fire engine they are waiting for is still four years out, to the tune of $2 million once it’s completely outfitted.

If you watch the milquetoast mainstream media, you will have recalled the Accused Sexual Predator Trump made a mockery of National Teacher Day by laughing at all the cuts to the hundreds of educational initiatives smart and reasoned individuals over decades had initiated for the betterment of society through the intellectual progress of our youth.

Another group of workers in the bulls eye of Musk, Thiel, Stephen Miller and Vance/Trump is nursing professionals. We see the almost total breakdown of nursing and doctoring in Lincoln County because of the hard reality of a for-profit health care system putting profits over patients. Add to that the lack of affordable housing, and rural counties throughout the land are suffering massive nursing and doctor shortages.

Which then brings us to National Day of Reason, where groups of people see the value in enlightened thinking. You know, valuing the separation of church and state, which for all intents and purposes under this fascist regime has been imploded into a crusade against reasoned thinkers who do not see prayer or faith as central to their lives.

Humanists and Secularists created this National Day in response to the national day of prayer.

Celebrations have taken the form of blood drives, secular events and activities, and in some cases, protests against the National Day of Prayer. Imagine Trump and Company having the wherewithal to wrap their heads around this celebration – the Secular Week of Action when people volunteer to make the world a better place.

Two not necessarily different international recognition days in May include World Day for Cultural Diversity and International Day for Biological Diversity. Did you get the memo yet that Trump-Vance are on the attack against affirmative action and ecological health.

In fact, on the biodiversity front, Trump and Company have “redefined” harm as it is applied to the Endangered Species Act. This pinhead thinking is just the tip of the iceberg of clownish but dangerous moves.

Defenders of Wildlife explains:

“Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying the ESA  to further line the pockets of industry. The vast majority of imperiled wildlife listed as endangered or threatened under the ESA are there because of loss of habitat. This latest salvo to redefine ‘harm’ to eliminate protection for wildlife from habitat destruction, if successful, will further imperil threatened and endangered species. We will fight this action and continue to protect the wildlife and wild places we hold dear as a nation.”

Are you seeing the pattern carried out by billionaires such as Miriam Adelson, Larry Fink and Larry Ellison? Given the fact half of American cities are under air advisories, we have International Asthma Day to lend pause to how destructive these executive actions have been and will continue to be decades from now.

‘Harm’ is what unchecked air pollution in many forms continues to do to young and old. Harmful air advisories come in daily, and the fear is that Trump will just ban the notifications as a way to say, “See, I have cleaned up the air since there are no more warnings.”

Maybe we can pray the polluted air away.

The backers of Trump’s ideal America will see our “secular humanist” society based on science and reason destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of the legal system.

Finally, we have World Press Freedom Day. If you have any deep regard for the so-called Fourth Estate, then shivers should be running up your spine under this anti-journalist regime.

Mickey Huff of Project Censored states press freedom succinctly:

“We have to remember that it’s the independent media that is often the grassroots voice of the people. It is often the independent press that is operating on ethical standards and principles, and it is the independent press that is reporting in the public interest, not the corporate media.”

Diversify your news media diets. Find independent outlets, and for journalists, we need to reform the media and create better avenues for news reporting, including better accuracy and what we call “solutions journalism,” which creates truly constructive dialogue in our communities.

*****

Footnote: And not one mention of the genocide in Gaza, the trillions stolen from Arab nations’ populations, the trillions stolen from citizens of Canada, EU, USA, for the starvation and immolation and rape of a people.

There are no other topics to write about with the same amount of importance that Palestine conveys, from every aspect of War Terror of the Capitalists of both Jewish and Goyim descent.

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

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

Last month, several investors among the nearly 100,000 impacted by a purported 20 billion yuan (or US$2.74 billion) financial scam linked to Shandong province-based Jianghaihui Group spoke with international media outlets, including RFA, hoping to create global awareness about the scandal and prompt corrective action.

Sources on Wednesday told RFA that Chinese authorities had detained many of these investors, accusing them of “being used by overseas anti-China forces,” after they gave the interviews to journalists and shared news articles about the scandal in social media groups or privately.

One of the sources said that more than a dozen depositors in several cities in Shandong province, including Weifang and Zaozhuang, have been placed under administrative detention by local police in recent days.

“All the people who had contacted you (RFA) from here were detained,” said the first source named Wang, who is one of the female investors affected.

“They (the police) said we (victims) were being used by international anti-China forces and that we were all committing crimes,” she added.

Wang, like the other sources RFA interviewed, provided only their surname for security reasons.

In late March, RFA reported that the chairman of Jianghaihui had fled China for the United States, along with his wife, after the company abruptly shut down, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of distraught investors who had deposited their savings in financial schemes run by the firm.

Sources told RFA that the investors have been repeatedly summoned by officials of the local public security organ for interrogations and subjected to detention and constant surveillance for sharing information with international journalists.

“The police used the news posted on major (overseas) websites and detained more than a dozen people. There were some people from other provinces and cities too and others who shared (the reports) with each other. The people from the Public Security Bureau showed me (the reports) and said these were anti-China forces,” said Wang.

The majority of those detained are women, with some of them released two weeks ago, while several others continued to be held, said the second source.

“The detainees said that they did not know that the people interviewing them were journalists … The police demanded us not to contact anti-China forces abroad again,” Zhang, another female investor, told RFA.

Investors said they had believed the fundraising schemes run by Jianghaihui were genuine as they were launched as part of government measures to shore up the balance sheets of private enterprises.

They accused the local government of failing to fulfil its supervisory duties. Through appeal letters, protests, and media outreach, the victims have sought justice for themselves in the Jianghaihui case which they say amounts to “contract fraud.”

Illegal fundraising or contract fraud?

In a letter to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Ministry of Public Security, the investors appealed for a thorough investigation, as well as help in recovering their lost funds and safeguarding their rights.

They also questioned why local police had classified the case as “illegal fundraising.”

It should instead be termed as “contract fraud,” noted the investors, as Jianghaihui had held six major financial business licenses, issued by the government, paid taxes, and cleared annual audits every time.

Since 2023, there have been a spate of similar cases as many financial companies, under the pretext of financing small businesses, have raised large sums of money which they have transferred overseas, leaving helpless investors behind, said a third source.

“Many financing companies in various places … used this model to raise funds in a planned manner, and then transferred the funds out (overseas), and then chose a time to flee (China),” said Le, a resident of Linyi, Shandong.

“Some companies transferred assets and then used a scapegoat agent to take the blame. The people can’t get their money back,” she added.

According to a citizen journalist-run social media X account, “Mr. Li is not your teacher,” police in Beijing on April 22 cracked down heavily on protests by hundreds of Chinese investors who were victims of the recent collapse of Zhongrong International Trust.

Before declaring bankruptcy in 2024, Zhongrong was one of China’s largest shadow banks and managed assets worth $108 billion in 2022.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Trump vows to “make America wealthy again” as he pursues a global trade policy that favors new, sweeping tariffs, a price hike on foreign-made goods arriving for sale in America. Invoking his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, he will impose a 10% tariff on all countries to begin April 5. Further, the U.S. president will impose an individualized reciprocal higher tariff on the countries with which the United States has the largest trade deficits. All other countries will continue to be subject to the original 10% tariff baseline, effective April 9. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

What do some small business owners think about the impacts of more Trump trade tariffs on their enterprises and the U.S. economy generally?

We turn to Frank Knapp Jr., head of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.

“These tariffs are the prelude to stagflation,” he said, “rising inflation and a weak economy, which can result in a deep recession. The tariffs, taxes on imported goods paid by American businesses and consumers, will bring in $6 trillion over 10 years, according to the Trump administration. That’s $6 trillion pulled out of consumers’ pockets, money that Americans won’t be able to spend on goods and services, which slows the economy.”

Consumption spending accounts for two-thirds of the U.S. economy. It is worth mentioning that the federal government, which has a $6.75 trillion annual budget now, collects tariffs. On a related note of tax policy, the president also wants to extend his 2017 tax cuts. That would remove an estimated $5 trillion from the federal treasury over 10 years. 

What of the president’s claim that goods made in America will become more price-competitive for businesses and consumers stateside? Knapp doubts that outcome. 

“All products will rise in price,” according to him, “even if they are 100% made in America, because when foreign products go up in price, the price on all competitor products will rise. It’s the way the market works.  The consumers, small businesses, and the economy will all be losers.”

Walt Rowen owns Susquehanna Glass Company in Columbia, Pennylvania. “These unpredictable tariffs threaten the very existence of family businesses like mine,” he said. “I’m already concerned about Christmas, which I start planning months in advance. I’d normally hire 20 to 30 seasonal workers, but with potential price increases, I can’t even plan production. 

“When costs suddenly spike and planning becomes impossible, we’re left with impossible choices. Small businesses need predictable, smart economic policies that will help us thrive, not policies that could end our family legacy.”

Gabe Hagen, owner of Brick Road Coffee in Tempe, Arizona, is upset with the Trump trade tariffs. “Earlier this year we began construction on our second location,” according to him, “but these tariffs have forced us to adjust the budget for the expansion. With coffee and tea grown exclusively overseas, we have no choice but to import and absorb these increased costs. 

“Small businesses like Brick Road Coffee employ almost half of America’s workforce, yet we’re the ones who feel these tariff changes the most because we lack the buying power of large corporations.”

It is no secret that firms with more capital than competitors can lose money longer and outlast the competition. In this way, the big fish can and do eat up the smaller fish. This market dynamic is not rocket science, folks.

Gladys Harrison owns Big Mama’s Kitchen & Catering in Omaha, Nebraska. “My mother’s vision for the Big Mama’s Kitchen was to do more than just serve food,” she said. “Through our scholarship programs for local students and our commitment to hiring those seeking second chances, we’ve created something much bigger than a restaurant, but that could be in jeopardy. 

“These tariffs will increase costs for our imported spices, and like 71% of small business owners, I’ll likely have to pass these price increases on to customers. We all are going to pay more for everything, which is going to affect all of us.”

The post Trump’s Trade Tariffs and America’s Small Businesses appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Seth Sandronsky.

I join you in your affirmation of life, and I hope that you have sustained the inward peace that follows a refusal to do that which one considers morally wrong, despite the consequences. Imprisonment of the body is certainly a small price to pay for freedom of the spirit.

— Coretta Scott King, September 1969 letter to me in support of my draft resistance activism

Today, April 4, is the 57th anniversary of the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. King was there to support the labor strike of the sanitation workers of that town, a cause which had gathered national attention at the time. He came to Memphis to stand up publicly for their righteous cause despite warnings from many sources that there was serious personal risk if he did so.

King put doing what was morally right ahead of his personal safety. He put the greater good of humankind ahead of everything else. He was a living example who continues to inspire many decades later.

That example meant the world to me at the time as an 18 year old trying to figure out what I should be doing with my life. I had heard Dr. King speak in person twice, once in Lancaster, Pa. at the age of 14 when my father took me to hear him speak at Franklin and Marshall College, and the second time in October of 1967 at Grinnell College in Iowa a couple of months into my freshman year. After that speech, I went up front and was able to shake his hand.

I was still trying to figure it out six months later when King was assassinated. I was struggling with whether I should become an activist, do something about the Vietnam War in particular. Just a month before King was killed, I had been asked by a friend in my dorm if I wanted to go to Chicago to take part in an anti-war demonstration. I remember very clearly how I struggled with what I should do. In the end I decided not to go.

What happened in Memphis literally changed my life. I mark April 4, 1968 as the beginning of my life of progressive activism and organizing because, in response to King’s death, I stayed up late that night putting together a petition to Congress and posted it prominently on the wall in one of the most frequently visited buildings on campus.

The petition was very weak. It called upon Mike McCormack, the then-Speaker of the House and Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, to take action to address the social and economic conditions King had devoted his life to changing. After a couple of days, with signatures of over half of the student body, I sent the petition off to DC.

Ever since, I have done the best I could to follow King’s example, speaking out and organizing and taking action. At the age of 75, I have no intention of ever stopping doing that.

A year and a half after King’s killing I received a personally typed letter from Coretta Scott King, King’s widow and fellow activist for peace and justice. Someone who knew me and who spent some time with her told her about my decision to resist the draft, including a public refusal of induction into the army in early September, 1969. Just like many today trying to end the Natanyahu regime’s genocidal war against Gaza and Palestine, I was willing to risk going to jail, and later did, because of how strongly I felt about the US war being waged on the peoples of Indochina.

Substantive change, change that is desperately needed, doesn’t happen without hard work, without sacrifice, suffering and struggle.

Frederick Douglass is famous for something much deeper that he said on August 4, 1857:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are those who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

King and Douglass were not saying that our lives need to be constant work, constant struggle against the racist, rich and regressive, predominantly white men with whom we must do battle. Both of them were part of an African-grounded culture in which singing and community-building were central. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a movement where singing was essential to the ability of that movement to ultimately win major victories, after years of struggle and sacrifice. And it wasn’t just singing in churches at rallies. People sang in jail. People sang when demonstrating right next to white racists. Singing gave them power.

2025 is a big year for us, and fortunately many of us are stepping up to the plate accordingly. Our grandchildren and great grandchildren and the seven generations to come need us to keep working hard and together to defeat Trump, Musk and MAGA, doing so in a way which lays the basis for the transformative, systemic change so desperately needed in this time of deepening inequality and climate emergency.

Long live the spirit of Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

Shanghai Cafe, Centralia, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

There is growing opposition to the Trump administration’s bid to radically slash federal spending and employment. We turn to Carolina Martinez, who joined the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO) Network as its CEO in 2018. She has served on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, the Berks County Latino Chamber of Commerce board, and the Kutztown University Foundation board, and views a recent proposal to shrink the workforce of the U.S. Small Business Administration with alarm.  Carolina Martinez and I conducted the interview below via email.

Seth Sandronsky: According to a March 21 news release, the U.S. SBA plans: “To return to its founding mission of empowering small businesses and to restore accountability to taxpayers, the agency will reduce its workforce by 43% – ending the expansive social policy agenda of the prior Administration, eliminating non-essential roles, and returning to pre-pandemic staffing levels.” Can you respond?

Carolina Martinez: These proposed SBA cuts are deeply concerning, especially given the timing. We’re experiencing a historic entrepreneurial surge, with over 21 million new business applications filed in just the past four years.

SS: Disasters such as Hurricane Helene last September and this month’s tornado outbreak are devastating communities, leaving paths of death and destruction. Federal aid is crucial to rescue and rebuilding efforts. Not to worry about SBA spending cuts, though. “Core services to the public,” according to SBA’s March 21 news release, “the agency’s loan guarantee and disaster assistance programs, as well as its field and veteran operations, will not be impacted.”

CM: Any SBA reduction in workforce must not impact critical disaster relief, small business lending programs, and other small business support. Programs should continue at least at current levels, so that small businesses will have the capital, coaching, and connections they need to thrive, create jobs, economic activity and tax revenue.

SS: Can you respond to the challenges that small businesses faced before proposed SBA spending reductions?

CM: We know that approximately half of all new businesses don’t make it past their fifth year. However, when entrepreneurs receive proper guidance on business planning, financial management, and marketing strategies – services the SBA provides – their chances of success improve substantially. Limiting these resources would affect many small business owners.

SS: Dreams of being one’s own boss can collide with marketplace realities. For one instance, making ends meet as a self-employed freelance journalist is no golden staircase to prosperity and stability.

CM: Small businesses represent the backbone of our economy, employing almost half of American workers and generating most of our new jobs. Access to affordable capital and expert guidance from the SBA helps our small businesses grow, which is why we’ve historically seen broad bipartisan support for the SBA. We hope the administration will reconsider these proposed workforce cuts to ensure continued support for Main Street businesses.

SS: Thank you.

The post Trump Targets the Small Business Administration  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Seth Sandronsky.

Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about attacks on Social Security for the March 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Strong Arm Press (2018)

Janine Jackson: Social Security has been overwhelmingly popular, and under vehement attack from some quarters, since it began. And for decades, elite news media have generated a standard assessment: It’s the most popular program, hence the “third rail” of politicking, and also, based on willful misreading of how it works, it’s about to be insolvent any minute—the latter notion sitting alongside corporate media’s constant refrain that private is always better than public, just because, like, efficiency and all that.

Now, in this frankly wild, “Only losers care about caring for one another” and “Shouldn’t the richest just control everything?” moment, Social Security is on the chopping block for real. Still, as ever, the attack is rooted in disinformation, but with a truly critical press corps largely missing in action, myth-busting might not be enough.

We are joined now by veteran Social Security explainer and defender Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security: The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.

Nancy Altman: Thank you so much for having me.

Truthout (3/16/25)

JJ: A lot of us are in a kind of blurry, “holy heck, is this really happening?” mode, but titrating out what is actually happening today is important—set aside from whether courts will eventually rule against it, or how it might play out. In “what is happening” news, I’m reading in Truthout via Bloomberg that three individuals representing private equity concerns have shown up at the Social Security Administration. How weird is that? What can that possibly mean?

NA: It’s horrible. And if you can believe it, it is even worse. As soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, the DOGE guys—the DOGE boys, as young as 19—were swarming all over the Social Security Administration. As you said in your introduction, there has been a small group of people, completely out of touch, who wanted to do away with Social Security from the beginning. They’ve always been defeated, but unfortunately, they now are in control of the White House.

It’s Donald Trump. Despite all his lies in the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security, he proposed cuts in every one of his budgets in his first term. It’s Elon Musk, who unbelievably called it “the biggest Ponzi scheme” in history, which is such a slander. And it’s Russell Vought, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who’s architect of Project 2025. And what we’re seeing is Project 2025 on steroids. So you’ve got private venture people there, you have DOGE guys stealing our data, all in an effort to undermine our Social Security system.

AP (2/19/25)

JJ: The line is that, “Oh no, they’re not attacking Social Security itself, just fraud within it.” Now, the bad faith is palpable, but what is your response to that notion, that it’s really just the fraud that’s under attack?

NA: As you said, I wrote a book called The Truth About Social Security, and one of the zombie lies is one of the ones you mentioned. They all say, “Oh, this private sector is so much more efficient and so much better and blah, blah, blah.”

Actually, Social Security is extremely efficiently run. Less than about a half a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. The other more than 99 cents comes back in benefits. That’s so much more efficient than you find with 401k for private sector insurance, where you can get 15, 20% administrative costs and hidden fees and so forth.

And that’s also with improper payments— there are a lot of overpayments, underpayments, which were done because Congress has made it so difficult to administer, and some of it’s just impossible to avoid. But 99.7% of Social Security benefits are paid accurately to the right people, on time in full, and about 0.3%—and again, there’s much more improper payments in the private sector—but of that 0.3%, the overwhelming amount of what are called improper payments are overpayments and underpayments.

So, for example, Social Security requires, to get your benefit, you have to have been alive every day of the month before. Now I think that’s wrong, and I think you should get a proportion of payments, but that’s not how the law works. So if you die on the last day of the month, and you get your payment on the third day of the following month, and the money is put in your account, that’s an overpayment.

Now, it doesn’t just sit there. As soon as the federal government realizes that the person has died the last day, they go in immediately, usually within a day or two, and take that money back. But that is mainly overpayments, underpayments.

Fraud is vanishingly small, and the way that fraud is caught is, first we have an inspector general. Donald Trump fired the Social Security Administration inspector general as soon as he got into office. And front-line workers, and they’ve been firing and inducing all kinds of workers out who are the ones who would catch the fraud.

So although they say they’re going after fraud, waste and abuse, they are creating so much waste. They are abusing the workforce, and through that, the American people. And they are opening the door to fraud, unfortunately.

JJ: I have seen leftists take issue with the “It’s my money” idea on Social Security, because actually it’s an intergenerational program. Now choosing that as a point of emphasis in the current context is a choice that I have thoughts about. But do you see meaningful confusion about whose money is at stake here, and whether workers paying into it today are truly entitled to it?

New York Times (1/14/25)

NA: Here’s where the confusion is. I don’t think there’s confusion on that point. I think most Americans—which is why the program is so wildly popular—recognize that these are benefits they earned. It is deferred compensation. It is part of your earnings.

So you have your current cash compensation, you have deferred compensation in the form of pensions—whether it’s a pension sponsored by the employer or 401k or a defined benefit plan—and you have Social Security. You also have what are called contingent benefits, which are disability insurance, survivors benefits, and those are all earned.

What is the misunderstanding, and this is, again, people like Elon Musk and others who are just spreading lies about this program, are, “Oh, there are all these immigrants who are undocumented people stealing our money.” That is a lie. Those people who are undocumented are unable to receive Social Security, and even if they become documented, and can show that they had made contributions, they still don’t, and I think this is wrong, but they still don’t get the benefits they have earned.

But Americans who are here paying in, it is an earned benefit. And when Elon Musk and Donald Trump say, “Oh, there’s fraud, and we’re going to cut the benefits,” they are cutting your benefits, and people should keep hold of their wallets.

JJ: The fact that it’s just about fraud is one lie. And another one is that the things that are happening are just kind of tweaks. And now the latest, maybe not the latest when this airs, but we hear that people who file for benefits, or who want to change the banks that their benefits go to, now they can’t do it by phone. They have to do it online, through one of those easy-breezy government interfaces, or go into a field office. And that might sound like a minor thing, unless you actually think about it with human beings in mind.

AP (3/19/25)

NA: It is outrageous. And when you connect the dots, Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to cut our benefits. He said that before when he ran in 2016, and every one of his budgets in the first term cut our benefits.

He said it again in 2024. But now that he’s there, I think they’re trying to figure out ways to do it. And what they are doing is they are throwing the program in complete chaos.

People who receive benefits are disproportionately seniors, people with disabilities. Interestingly, it’s the largest children’s program, too, because it’s survivor’s benefits, but it often covers people who have difficulty with mobility.

The internet, as you said, is very hard to use. And, by the way, some of the people that got fired were the people who maintained the website. So I think it’s going to get harder to use, and that’s where the fraud tends to—there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud, but when it occurs, it tends to be online.

Phones are very secure. There’s been no evidence put forward that there’s any fraud that’s being committed through the phone service.

Requiring everybody to go into field offices, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have told the General Services Administration to terminate all the leases, so they’re going to be fewer and fewer field offices. They are terribly understaffed, and the staff that’s there is very overworked.

NIRS (1/25)

So you’re asking millions of additional Americans to waste time, when they could have gotten on the phone and done what they had to do over the phone. Although they need to hire people for the phone, too, because that’s another place with long wait times, and they’re going to get longer, given what they’re doing.

Trump and DOGE and the others who Republican President Dwight Eisenhower called a “tiny splinter group” who hate Social Security, but they tried to privatize it. They were unsuccessful in that. And now what they’re doing is they’re trying to destroy it from within. And we will see pretty soon as it collapses, they’ll say, “Oh, the private sector should run it.” That will be horrible. It will undermine all of our economic security.

JJ: Consistent majorities support Social Security. As we’ve said, some recent polls find people saying we spend too little on it. And that’s why people, like Republican congressperson Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, are saying, “Nobody is touching Social Security” in town halls.

New Republic (2/17/25)

But it’s also why Liza Featherstone, for example, is reminding us that cutting popular programs isn’t a mistake, it’s a conscious effort, and this is what you’re just getting at, it’s a conscious effort to make the government actually useless, so that people will stop thinking of it as a source of anything good. And, one supposes, they will then look to beneficent billionaires. But this is not a mistake, this chaos that Social Security is being thrown into.

NA: Not at all. This is Project 2025 on steroids. The architects of Project 2025 really started this crusade back in the 1970s, actually when I started working on the program. It’s been 50 years. They’ve tried undermining confidence in the program, because it is too popular; even the most conservative-minded Republicans love Social Security, do not want to see it cut, and correctly think that it should be expanded. So they can’t directly confront Social Security, because they’ll all get voted out of office.

So the question is, how can they undermine it while looking like they’re protecting it? And the old standby is this vague “fraud, waste and abuse.” Nobody wants fraud, waste or abuse. But the reality is, they are creating waste and abuse. They are opening the door to possible fraudulent actors. And they’re all doing it, as you say, so that people just give up on government and give more and more money, upward redistribution of our earned benefits, into the pockets of Elon Musk and other billionaires.

JJ: Finally, I think the way that news media talk is meaningful. When they say, “They’re saying these things about Social Security, and they’re untrue,” to me, that lands different than, “They’re saying these things although they’re untrue.” One is narrating a nightmare, and the other is noting a disruption that calls for some intervention.

TheHill.com says that Elon Musk’s false rhetoric on Social Security is “confounding experts and worrying advocates.” Doesn’t say advocates of what. I just personally can’t forgive this demonstrative earnestness of elite media, when they can get emotional, you know, about welfare reform and “we need to cut food stamps.” But now they’re trying to be high and dry about cutting lifelines for seniors and disabled people.

And I’m not talking about all media. There are exceptions. But I want to ask you, finally, what would responsible, people-first journalism be doing right now, do you think?

Nancy Altman: “Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them.”

NA: You so put your finger on it. I mean, it is outrageous, when you think about it, that Donald Trump will be spewing lies about Social Security in a nationwide, televised joint session of Congress, went on for minutes and minutes, talking about all these dead people are getting benefits, and that is a complete lie. It has been debunked a zillion times, including by his own acting commissioner, and yet he went before the nation and said it.

So there is a method to the madness. This is not confounding at all. It’s an effort to convince everybody that the government is full of corruption and fraud, so when they destroy it, they have their cover.

So I think, first of all, what mainstream media should do is call a lie a lie when it happens, and they should try to call it out in real time, and there should be some solidarity. I still can’t believe that the AP was banned from the White House, and all the mainstream media just didn’t all walk out.

So this is a time our institutions, all our institutions, are under a threat. This is the Steve Bannon “Flood the Zone.” So there are so many outrages at once. All of our institutions are being attacked, including the media.

My concern is Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them. I think everybody’s got to be vigilant. I think they’ve got to make their voices heard, and I know there’s going to be protest on April 5. People should turn out for that. And the media should wake up and realize that everything is under assault, including them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NA: Again, thank you so much for having me.

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

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say,  in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays. 

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year. 

But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it. 

For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line. 

“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife. 

A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois. 

“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau. 

That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said. 

He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills. 

Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal. 

“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came. 

“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy. 

“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store. 

Lively helped promote REAP during his time at an environmental nonprofit, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused. 

The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.” 

The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds  “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.” 

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

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Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits. 

“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story. ​​

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers and small business owners were promised financial help for energy upgrades. They’re still waiting for the money. on Mar 21, 2025.

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

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It wasn’t about playing God. Rather, it was a better way to feed the world.

That’s how a biotech company called AquaBounty described its AquAdvantage salmon, the first genetically modified animal approved by the federal government for human consumption. By adding a gene from Chinook salmon to Atlantic salmon and using DNA sequences from eel-like ocean pout as a “growth promoter,” the company said its salmon could grow twice as fast.

The silvery superfish is indistinguishable from other Atlantic salmon, the company said, but, with freshwater tanks and less feed, it can reach market size sooner than its conventional cousins. No ocean required.

But it was all easier said than done. After decades of backlash, boycotts and persistent financial losses, on top of the regulatory slog, AquaBounty hooked its hopes for the future on a village in Ohio with an enterprising name — Pioneer — and an accommodating mayor, Ed Kidston.

Eventually, it fell apart. And the village that hoped for a transformative industry is carrying the cost.

Pioneer, population 1,410, is just south of the Michigan border, in a county where fields of corn are cut by spear-straight country roads. AquaBounty promised 112 jobs, plus resources for schools and infrastructure.

And it promised something different from the metal stamping plant or Menards distribution center that opened in the area in past years. Researchers and advocates have long suggested that the Rust Belt use its water wealth to build a “blue economy.” AquaBounty seemed like a forward-looking prospect.

Although the company never made a profit in its 30-some years of existence, public officials rolled out the red carpet.

AquaBounty got a state permit to withdraw up to 5.25 million gallons of groundwater per day to operate the fish farm. JobsOhio, the state’s private economic development arm, executed an agreement to grant it $1 million. The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority authorized up to $425 million in revenue bonds.

An enterprise zone relieved AquaBounty of 15 years of property taxes. With the help of state dollars, Pioneer extended a road, a project estimated at $1.7 million.

Pioneer, which operates its own electric system, borrowed $3.95 million on the municipal debt market — later upped to $5 million — for a new substation project. The substation would provide a boost to AquaBounty’s energy needs.

And before AquaBounty’s plans were public knowledge, a company owned by Kidston purchased land for $600,000. He later flipped it to AquaBounty for nearly $2.1 million.

The mayor did well. Pioneer and the state did not.

Nearly three years after AquaBounty broke ground, there are no fancy fish tanks. No designer fish. No new jobs. Even with so much public assistance, it’s not clear if AquaBounty will ever finish building the farm. This month, it auctioned off “new” and “unused” equipment from the site.

Neither Kidston, who has said that he was merely trying to help the town, nor AquaBounty responded to questions for this story.

Locals are left to grapple with a partially developed site, a short-circuited growth strategy and questions about whether the project was ever viable.

The saga “could potentially send a message that it’s difficult to develop in Williams County,” said Ashley Epling, who took the helm of the county’s economic development organization after AquaBounty arrived in town.

Todd Roth, who oversees the Williams County engineering department, said the promise of development can require tradeoffs that compel public officials to make difficult decisions.

“How far do we go on hope?” he asked.

In the highlands of Panama, tucked behind padlocked gates and barbed wire, AquaBounty wanted to prove what was possible. There, in 2008, it opened a demonstration facility — a venture that “no one would ever think that anyone in their right mind would do,” said Ron Stotish, former president and chief executive officer.

“We built a small farm basically by hand, with local labor and this local trout farmer,” Stotish said. A visiting reporter told television viewers that it had “shades of Jurassic Park.”

Without precedent for AquAdvantage salmon, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed it as a new animal drug. Inspectors visited AquaBounty’s Panama facility and its hatchery on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. They assessed environmental risks, like transgenic fish escaping and interfering with salmon in the wild. The company said it designed AquAdvantage salmon as sterile females so they won’t reproduce.

Journalists and activists scrutinized AquaBounty too, reporting on a mishap in Panama that cost the company its first batch of commercial-sized fish and supermarkets pledging that they wouldn’t sell bioengineered salmon.

With the fish not even for sale yet, AquaBounty patched together financing to stay afloat, including from a former Soviet oligarch.

Federal approval came in 2015 — for the Panamanian and Canadian sites only. New facilities needed individual approval. Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental and industry groups, including the Center for Food Safety, filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s review. In a case that would take years to resolve, they argued that the agency failed to fully assess the risk of AquAdvantage salmon escaping into the wild.

And genetically modified salmon had an influential foe: U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Following FDA approval, she inserted language into a spending bill that stymied the introduction or distribution of genetically modified fish until labeling guidelines were in place. In comparison to what she dubbed “frankenfish,” she noted that Alaskan fisheries “are world-renowned for their high-quality, productivity, and sustainability.”

Momentum shifted after Canada approved AquAdvantage salmon and the U.S. developed a labeling policy. By 2019, reporters and at least one politician were touring AquaBounty’s small salmon farm in Indiana.

The future seemed bright when Stotish left the company at the end of the year. “I’m the guy that won the Super Bowl and then walked out the door,” he said.

AquaBounty’s search for a place to build its first large-scale production facility brought it to the northwest corner of Ohio, where, according to an account written by Kidston, it considered property he owned. He didn’t name the prospective developer in his letter to a state commission, but details correspond almost exactly to AquaBounty.

The company decided to pursue its project elsewhere, Kidston wrote — paralleling AquaBounty’s announcement about a site in Kentucky — but it retained his business, Artesian of Pioneer, to evaluate the water supply at the site it was considering in another state. The company found the water characteristics unsuitable for its purpose, he wrote.

AquaBounty eventually decided to build on property that it bought from Kidston’s company. At the 2022 groundbreaking, Aquabounty President and CEO Sylvia Wulf was enthusiastic about the company’s future in Ohio. “We thought that Pioneer’s the kind of community that would be receptive,” she said in a newscast.

Pioneer would set a template, the company later proclaimed. AquaBounty would build new farms every two years or so. It eyed global markets: Brazil, Argentina, Israel, China.

Ohio was just the beginning.

On a cold night in January 2021, the Madison Township trustees gathered in a truck bay. Kidston, mayor of the village encircled by the township, had requested a special meeting.

First elected in 1995, he’s believed to be Pioneer’s longest-serving mayor, exceeding another Mayor Kidston — his father, Bruce. He has trim white hair, a ruddy complexion and a prominent presence. At last year’s Christmas tree lighting, he dressed as an ornamented evergreen, wearing a crown of lights.

His presence stretches into property and business holdings, including Artesian of Pioneer, founded by his parents, and now specializing in water supply and wastewater treatment. It dips below ground, too. He sparked protests in 2018 and 2019 when he tried to extract and sell up to 14 million gallons a day of groundwater to the Toledo suburbs, which many feared would deplete the local aquifer. Kidston defended the effort, but ultimately the suburbs went with another water plan.

In the truck bay, the topic was a proposal to allow Pioneer to annex about 160 acres from Madison Township so that the village could spur development at its expanded industrial park. Minutes summarizing the meeting indicate that while two Pioneer council members and the Pioneer administrator were present, only Kidston spoke about the proposal with the township trustees that evening.

Kidston signed in as the mayor of Pioneer, according to the minutes and the trustee who said he recorded them. Thanks to a recent purchase, his company Kidston Consultants was one of two landowners of the site. Kidston described his interest in the annexation, what he’d like to accomplish and how development would benefit schools, according to the minutes.

When trustees worried about traffic costs, Kidston offered $5,000 for road maintenance — an annual contribution for 10 years, he indicated.

There was no vote that night. Within days, Kidston wrote an email to several officials who attended the meeting, saying that he was present that night merely as a landowner and representative of the other landowner, not as mayor.

His goal, he added in the email, has always been to ensure that everyone wins. The financial offer was to compensate the township “in exchange for a non-adversarial ‘quick’ agreement,” he wrote.

Kidston then contacted the Ohio Ethics Commission, describing his intersecting interests in a prospective development. His water business had provided services for a company that was interested in a site he’d like to have annexed by Pioneer. The company might also be interested in an ongoing business relationship. He wouldn’t participate in village decision-making about annexation or efforts to secure a tax abatement, Kidston wrote.

An attorney’s response noted that Kidston may retain the same access to governmental entities as any other citizen. But, it said, he cannot use his position as village mayor, “formally or informally,” in any matters involving the proposed annexation of the property, or to secure the annexation of the property. It also said that Kidston cannot take action as a village official “to benefit your personal financial interests or the financial interests of a company with which you have an ongoing business relationship.”

Kidston didn’t attend another special meeting about annexation, held 12 days after the first. But, according to the minutes, Kidston’s company would pay the township $50,000 if the trustees signed an annexation agreement that day. A local development official spoke on behalf of the proposal, telling trustees that she couldn’t guarantee payment from Kidston beyond that day.

The township board unanimously rejected the $50,000 offer. Two of three trustees told ProPublica they felt pressured and had concerns about the ethics of what they considered such an unusual offer, echoing remarks in the local news at the time. (The third trustee didn’t respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Two days later, the trustees approved a deal where Pioneer would pay the township $390.54 annually, the approximate sum the township would forgo in taxes.

Kidston Consultants purchased more than 80 acres on Jan. 22, 2021, three days before the truck bay meeting. The communities approved annexation on Feb. 8. On July 23, Kidston’s company nailed down an agreement to sell the land to AquaBounty. The profit: about $1.5 million.

News of AquaBounty’s arrival spread locally when The Bryan Times published a story a week later: “Salmon farm planned for Pioneer.” It was believed to be the largest investment ever in Williams County.

As AquaBounty made its move into Ohio, everybody seemed to get on board.

There were the JobsOhio grant and the port authority’s bond authorization. There was a 15-year property tax exemption. With assistance from state agencies, the village committed millions to developing roadway and power infrastructure that would support AquaBounty.

Some incentives were contingent. In exchange for the abatement, for example, AquaBounty agreed to maintain a certain number of jobs and donate a percentage of its savings to a county infrastructure fund and area schools.

North Central Local schools could get $750,000 a year for 15 years, Kidston estimated in news reports. Maybe even a million.

The coming jobs would have higher wages than usual for the area, a local economic development official told the county commission. They were new types of jobs, too, suitable for people with biology and chemistry degrees or research expertise.

“We both have personal experiences with people who have left our region or not worked in their field because they don’t have those types of jobs here,” she said.

Now, maybe, that’d change.

Besides financial and infrastructure support, AquaBounty got an unusual state permit to withdraw up to 5.25 million gallons of groundwater a day. The company planned to treat and discharge most of it into the St. Joseph River, where it would eventually flow into Lake Erie instead of replenishing the aquifer.

That instigated a backlash from people who said the plan would draw down the aquifer, thinning lakes and threatening drinking water even beyond Ohio’s borders. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians asked why AquaBounty couldn’t reuse or recirculate more of what it took, and why there wasn’t a review of the impact on wetlands. With the impact from the proposed withdrawal swelling across its border, Michigan’s environmental agency also weighed in with concerns. Sherry Fleming of Williams County Alliance, a grassroots environmental group, said that Ohio “continues to treat water as nothing more than a commodity.”

Some skeptics questioned AquaBounty’s ties to the mayor. “Mr. Kidston swears up and down that the aquifer has enough, and will always have enough water, to withstand 5.2 million gallons of withdrawal a day,” wrote a retiree with a farm to an official with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The mayor sold AquaBounty property and services, he said. “This man has always had a dog in this fight!”

Despite the opposition, the state granted the water permits, explaining that all requirements were met and certain safeguards were in place. But AquaBounty still had a problem: It didn’t have a way of moving water between its farm and the site about a mile east where it planned to withdraw and discharge it — on land owned by Kidston’s company.

Pioneer applied three times for a right-of-way permit so that AquaBounty could build pipelines across private property. The county rejected each request.

Pioneer and AquaBounty sued, arguing that the pipelines are a utility, serving the broader public good. The commission responded that pipelines between two private property owners are not a public utility, and even if they were, nothing compels commissioners to grant the right of way.

Roth, the county engineer, expressed concern at how much government support AquaBounty got before its plans were clearly viable.

They still didn’t have a way to get the water to their farm, Roth said to ProPublica, “and yet, they were starting to get money.”

Problems mounted. The Indiana farm was fined over permit violations for excess pollutants in its discharged water. Due to a ruling in the FDA lawsuit, the agency was further reviewing the salmon’s escape risk.

And expected costs in Pioneer more than doubled from initial estimates, flirting with $500 million. The bonds authorized by the port authority were never issued. (Contacted by ProPublica, an authority official wouldn’t say why.)

In June 2023, about 13 months after breaking ground, AquaBounty announced a pause on construction in Pioneer, citing “a substantial increase in its estimated cost.”

With its stock price deflated, the company was at risk of slipping off the trading market, so it performed a reverse stock split. It sold the Indiana farm for less than it paid, with certain equipment purchased for Pioneer included. It twice replaced the CEO, put one Canadian facility up for sale and announced it was winding down another — its only remaining active farm.

Along a smooth new road, the Pioneer site now sits frozen, roughly 30% complete, according to a company estimate.

Pioneer officials said in a statement to ProPublica that the village has not been advised that AquaBounty has terminated its project. They emphasized that the court dispute over the pipeline was still not settled and that an initial ruling was in the village’s favor. On Friday, a judge ruled against the county’s appeal.

AquaBounty’s interim CEO said in December that the company would “assess alternatives for our Ohio farm project.” To investors, it mentioned higher costs due to inflation.

The outlook is bleak. While AquaBounty once estimated that it would be operational by now, with salmon ready for market in 2025, there was instead an online auction for its “new unused” assets earlier this month: tanks, filters, pumps, even a 200,000-square-foot pre-engineered metal building.

In Pioneer and beyond, there has yet to be a full public accounting of what went wrong.

Not every development can be expected to make it, even with incentives, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of the nonprofit Good Jobs First, which scrutinizes public subsidies in economic development. But, he said, it’s important to vet companies with unproven business plans before spending public resources on their behalf — and to have a transparent process before deals are approved.

“If you’re taking on debt or giving them equity, or you’re laying out cash for utilities,” LeRoy said, “those are risky things.”

JobsOhio’s million-dollar grant depended on the creation of 112 jobs, $222 million in capital investment and a payroll of more than $5.4 million by the end of 2026, according to a spokesperson.

When a company fails to meet grant commitments, he said, “we will claw back our dollars so they can be used for future economic development projects to benefit Ohioans.”

As a private entity with a funding mechanism set up by the state, JobsOhio reveals few details about how it spends its money — a lack of transparency that has long been criticized. The spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about whether AquaBounty received some or all of its grant money.

AquaBounty was expected to pay Pioneer millions of dollars a year for the electricity it used and reimburse it for certain costs associated with building the substation. The $5 million note matures in November. In response to ProPublica’s inquiries about the substation, the village said it will pay any debt that it owes, “even if AquaBounty should cease to exist.” According to the state treasurer’s office, the village, which has about 800 electricity customers, is expected to use its electric revenue to pay the debt.

Local schools also face uncertainty. The district has long struggled with finances, and AquaBounty’s contributions were presented as a salve. But that funding hasn’t materialized. Last year, the district twice turned to taxpayers for help, seeking support for basic needs such as utilities, transportation, staffing and custodial supplies.

At both the March and November ballots, voters rejected it.

The district hasn’t responded to ProPublica’s questions. School board President Kati Burt, Kidston’s daughter, declined to comment.

Mark Schmucker, a Madison Township trustee and former board president, marvels at how officials championed AquaBounty as “the biggest infrastructure project in Northwest Ohio,” despite its shaky history.

“They were going to donate a million to the school every year,” he said. “How can they donate a million to the school when they never made a million in a year? Or showed a profit in 30 years?”

Epling, who has led the county’s economic development agency since 2023, said that the government incentives for the company “were publicly documented and structured with clear performance-based contingencies.”

She added, “Moving forward, my goal is to ensure that economic development efforts are well vetted, clearly communicated and beneficial to the community.”

Late last year, an unexpected provision showed up in a massive bill introduced in the Ohio Legislature. It exempted village mayors and other executive officers from key ethical requirements when they do business with the communities they represent. One of the bill’s sponsors said that other ethics laws would still apply.

Kidston’s company, Artesian of Pioneer, employed the lobbyist behind the provision, according to the bill sponsor and disclosure records.

The Legislature passed the bill. But Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it, citing opposition from the ethics commission.

The change, according to the commission, would “invite misuse of taxpayer money.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Clark.

As the curtain fell at the UN climate summit in Baku last Sunday, frustration and disappointment engulfed Pacific delegations after another meeting under-delivered.

Two weeks of intensive negotiations at COP29, hosted by Azerbaijan and attended by 55,000 delegates, resulted in a consensus decision among nearly 200 nations.

Climate finance was tripled to US $300 billion a year in grant and loan funding from developed nations, far short of the more than US $1 trillion sought by Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States.

• READ MORE: COP29: Pacific climate advocates decry outcome as ‘a catastrophic failure’
• Other COP29 climate crisis reports

“We travelled thousands of kilometres, it is a long way to travel back without good news,” Niue’s Minister of Natural Resources Mona Ainu’u told BenarNews.

Three-hundred Pacific delegates came to COP29 with the key demands to stay within the 1.5-degree C warming goal, make funds available and accessible for small island states, and cut ambiguous language from agreements.

Their aim was to make major emitters pay Pacific nations — who are facing the worst effects of climate change despite being the lowest contributors — to help with transition, adaptation and mitigation.

“If we lose out on the 1.5 degrees C, then it really means nothing for us being here, understanding the fact that we need money in order for us to respond to the climate crisis,” Tuvalu’s Minister for Climate Change Maina Talia told BenarNews at the start of talks.

PNG withdrew
Papua New Guinea withdrew from attending just days before COP29, with Prime Minister James Marape warning: “The pledges made by major polluters amount to nothing more than empty talk.”

Fiji’s lead negotiator Dr Sivendra Michael told BenarNews that climate finance cut across many of the committee negotiations running in parallel, with parties all trying to strategically position themselves.

“We had a really challenging time in the adaptation committee room, where groups of negotiators from the African region had done a complete block on any progress on (climate) tax,” said Dr Michael, adding the Fiji team was called to order on every intervention they made.

He said it’s the fourth consecutive year adaptation talks were left hanging, despite agreement among the majority of nations, because there was “no consensus among the like-minded developing countries, which includes China, as well as the African group.”

Pacific delegates told BenarNews at COP they battled misinformation, obstruction and subversion by developed and high-emitting nations, including again negotiating on commitments agreed at COP28 last year.

Pushback began early on with long sessions on the Global Stock Take, an assessment of what progress nations and stakeholders had made to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C.

“If we cannot talk about 1.5, then we have a very weak language around mitigation,” Tuvalu’s Talia said. “Progress on finance was nothing more than ‘baby steps’.”

Pacific faced resistance
Pacific negotiators faced resistance to their call for U.S.$39 billion for Small Island Developing States and U.S.$220 billion for Least Developed Countries.

“We expected pushbacks, but the lack of ambition was deeply frustrating,” Talia said.

Greenpeace Pacific lead Shiva Gounden accused developed countries of deliberately stalling talks — of which Australia co-chaired the finance discussions — including by padding texts with unnecessary wording.

“Hours passed without any substance out of it, and then when they got into the substance of the text, there simply was not enough time,” he told BenarNews.

In the final week of COP29, the intense days negotiating continued late into the nights, sometimes ending the next morning.

“Nothing is moving as it should, and climate finance is a black hole,” Pacific Climate Action Network senior adviser Sindra Sharma told BenarNews during talks.

“There are lots of rumours and misinformation floating around, people saying that SIDS are dropping things — this is a complete lie.”

COP29 presidency influence
Sharma said the significant influence of the COP presidency — held by Azerbaijan — came to bear as talks on the final outcome dragged past the Friday night deadline.

The Azeri presidency faced criticism for not pushing strongly enough for incorporation of the “transition away from fossil fuels” — agreed to at COP28 — in draft texts.

“What we got in the end on Saturday was a text that didn’t have the priorities that smaller island states and least developed countries had reflected,” Sharma said.

COP29’s outcome was finally announced on Sunday at 5.30am.

“For me it was heartbreaking, how developed countries just blocked their way to fulfilling their responsibilities, their historical responsibilities, and pretty much offloaded that to developing countries,” Gounden from Greenpeace Pacific said.

Some retained faith
Amid the Pacific delegates’ disappointment, some retained their faith in the summits and look forward to COP30 in Brazil next year.

“We are tired, but we are here to hold the line on hope; we have no choice but to,” 350.org Pacific managing director Joseph Zane Sikulu told BenarNews.

“We can very easily spend time talking about who is missing, who is not here, and the impact that it will have on negotiation, or we can focus on the ones who came, who won’t give up,” he said at the end of summit.

Fiji’s lead negotiator Dr Michael said the outcome was “very disappointing” but not a total loss.

“COP is a very diplomatic process, so when people come to me and say that COP has failed, I am in complete disagreement, because no COP is a failure,” he told BenarNews at the end of talks.

“If we don’t agree this year, then it goes to next year; the important thing is to ensure that Pacific voices are present,” he said.

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

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

“We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”

These were the words of Samoa’s Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the UNFCCC COP28 in Dubai last year.

Outside, Pacific climate activists and allies, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors, were calling for a robust and comprehensive financial package that would see the full, fast, and fair transition away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy in the Global South.

This is our Pacific Way in action: state parties and civil society working together to remind the world as we approach a “finance COP” with the upcoming COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11-22  that we cannot be conveniently pigeonholed.

• READ MORE: Year 2024 to be the first to breach 1.5C warming limit
• Other COP29 reports

We are people who represent not only communities but landscapes and seascapes that are both vulnerable, and resilient, and should not be forced by polluting countries and the much subsidised and profit-focused fossil fuel industries that lobby them to choose between mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.

Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) are the uncomfortable reminder for those who want smooth sailing of their agenda at COP29, that while we are able to hold the tension of our vulnerability and resilience in the Pacific, this may make for choppy seas.

I recently had the privilege of joining the SPREP facilitated pre-COP29 gathering for PSIDS and the Climate Change Ministerial meeting in Nadi, Fiji, to provide spiritual guidance and pastoral support.

This gathering took place in a spiritually significant moment, the final week of the Season of Creation, ending, profoundly, on the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the environment. The theme for this year’s Season of Creation was, “to hope and act with Creation (the environment).

Encouraged to act in hope
I looked across the room at climate ministers, lead negotiators from the region and the regional organisations that support them and encouraged them to begin the preparatory meeting and to also enter COP29 with hope, to act in hope, because to hope is an act of faith, of vision, of determination and trust that our current situation will not remain the status quo.

Pacific church leaders have rejected this status quo by saying that finance for adaptation and loss and damage, without a significant commitment to a fossil fuel phase-out that is full, fast and fair, is the biblical equivalent to 30 pieces of silver — the bribe Judas was given to betray Jesus.

In endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and leading the World Council of Churches to do the same, Pacific faith communities are joining their governments and civil societies to ensure the entire blue Pacific voice reverberates clearly into the spaces where the focus on finance is dominant.

As people with a deep connection to land and sea, whose identity does not separate itself from biodiversity, the understanding of the “groaning of Creation” (Romans 8:19-25) resonates with Pacific islanders.

We were reminded of the words of St. Saint Augustine that says: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

As we witness the cries and sufferings of Earth and all creatures, let righteous anger move us toward the courage to be hopeful and active for justice.

Hope is not merely optimism. It is not a utopian illusion. It is not waiting for a magical miracle.

Hope is trust that our action makes sense, even if the results of this action are not immediately seen. This is the type of hope that our Pasifika households carry to COP29.

Reverend James Bhagwan is general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches. He holds a Bachelor of Divinity from the Pacific Theological College in Fiji and a Masters in Theology from the Methodist Theological University in Korea. He also serves as co-chair of the Fossil Fuel NonProliferation Treaty Campaign Global Steering Committee. This article was first published by RNZ Pacific.

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

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Twelve years ago, Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, took the stage at his election night party in Columbus to celebrate winning a second term. Barack Obama had just carried Ohio for the second time, after emphasizing his administration’s rescue of the auto industry. Brown wanted to proclaim that success onstage, but he was losing his voice, so his wife, the writer Connie Schultz, took over for him.

As she got to Jeep expanding its Toledo operations and General Motors building the Chevy Cruze at its rejuvenated plant near Youngstown, Brown started interjecting croaks to make sure she got the details right. “The aluminum is made in Cleveland … the transmission is made in Toledo … the engine is made in Defiance … the airbag is made in Brunswick.”

I thought about that moment often while on the campaign trail in Ohio this month. Brown is running for re-election again. But the political landscape is much changed. Ohio is no longer a presidential battleground. GM no longer makes the Cruze — the Lordstown plant where it was assembled closed in 2019. And Brown, who won his last two races by 5 and 7 points, is in a tight race against a car dealership magnate named Bernie Moreno.

Brown and a dwindling band of Democrats in Ohio are still making the case for a certain kind of Democratic Party — one that cares about the working class, that invests in their towns and factories and values the manufacturing jobs that power the nation. That case should have become easier to make of late. Over the past four years, the Biden administration has championed huge investments in renewable energy and computer chip production; two new Intel plants are under construction near Columbus. Yet the political landscape is tougher than ever for Brown and the last remaining Ohio Democrats.

There are several possible explanations. Sixty percent of Ohio residents have only a high school diploma, an associate degree or a few years of college — a relatively high percentage. Union membership has dwindled from its peak in 1989. And the Biden investments have taken a while to ramp up.

At a Brown rally outside an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall in Dayton, the head of the local building trades council, David Cox, told me that his members were getting more work than they’d seen in 35 years. Then why, I asked, wasn’t this restoring support for Democrats among workers? “It takes a little while for these guys to wake up,” Cox said.

But Democrats often overlook another dynamic at play here, and that’s the role of place: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest — such as Reading and Erie in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Battle Creek in Michigan, Oshkosh and Racine in Wisconsin — where Brown and other Democrats are fighting to hang on to their seats and where Kamala Harris needs to do well (or at least hold her own).

In 2007, the academic Lorlene Hoyt and the city planning consultant André Leroux assembled a nationwide list of “forgotten cities” that were old and small, with a population of 15,000 to 150,000 and a median household income of less than $35,000. Recently, the urban researcher Michael Bloomberg updated it. Of the 179 cities now on the list, 37 are in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And leading the way, with 23 cities, is Ohio.

Pundits often overlook these sorts of places (they tend to focus on big blue cities, deep-red rural areas and the suburbs in between), but given how clustered these smaller cities are in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they will matter greatly in the battle for both the White House and for control of Congress. Lately, two of Ohio’s have gained special prominence: Middletown (population 50,000) as the hometown of JD Vance, and Springfield (roughly 60,000) as home to a large community of Haitian immigrants that both Vance and Donald Trump have made a target of their rhetoric.

I have visited dozens of these cities. They often have handsome downtowns with stately central squares and ornate, century-old bank buildings that rise 10 or 12 stories, but it can be difficult to find a cup of coffee after 2 p.m. or a place to watch a ballgame on TV at night. The local news is full of the sort of items I found a few weeks ago in a newspaper in Lima, Ohio (population 35,000): a report that the area was getting its 12th Dollar General store and a letter to the editor lamenting the closure of a Dana Incorporated auto-parts plant with 280 jobs. Just as troubling, young people are becoming harder to find; they’re more drawn to thriving larger cities, such as Columbus, which has been vacuuming up strivers from across the state.

For decades, these smaller cities leaned Democratic, but in the past decade, they have turned redder. In 2012, Obama won Green Bay, Wisconsin, by nearly twice as large a margin as Joe Biden did in 2020; Obama won Saginaw by an extra 15 percentage points. Even in Biden’s hometown, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Obama’s margin was more than 4,000 votes larger.

What’s so perplexing to liberals about this shift is that many of the people who left the Democratic Party are doing well for themselves; these cities are full of small-business owners, factory workers and retirees with pensions getting by under a Democratic president. But seeing your small city become a shadow of its former self can open you to a hard-edge populist message even if you yourself are managing. That’s what scholars mean by “shared fate,” and it’s what’s missed when we analyze voting behavior only by income or education level or race.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur — an Ohio Democrat who is a city planner by training and, after more than 40 years in office, the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress — understands this visceral reality. Her mother was a union organizer at a spark plug factory, and she has watched these wrenching changes play out from Toledo to the smaller cities she has represented, such as Sandusky and Lorain.

It’s rare to hear her talk up the social issues that often dominate debate on the left. Instead, she is most insistent about whether the nation’s industrial base can support its military, whether small cities have economic development expertise, whether workers at Toledo’s closed power plant can find new jobs. “I believe economics isn’t destiny, but it’s 85% of it,” she told me this month during a visit to a new Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant in Toledo.

For years, she has been struggling to get Democratic leaders to care about left-behind districts such as hers. In 2018, Hillary Clinton boasted that the areas she had carried in her 2016 loss produced two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product, as if votes from the economically thriving areas counted more. Two years earlier, Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, declared, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This logic confounds Kaptur, who is now in a closely fought race with a state legislator, Derek Merrin. “A country can’t survive when vast segments of your population cannot get ahead,” she told me. Last year, to impress on party leaders how much ground Democrats are losing in districts like hers, her office produced a chart ranking the 435 House districts by median income. The moral: Democrats now represented most higher-income districts — in places like the Bay Area, the Northeast and metro Washington — while Republicans dominated in many lower-income ones. Her own district was 341st on the ranking, surrounded by red ones. “Washington has trouble seeing us,” she said. “They need binoculars.”

For Brown, the plight of these small cities is personal, because he’s from an archetypal one: Mansfield (population 48,000), which has lost a string of manufacturers. This month, the first person whom I met upon arriving at its central square was a woman asking for money. Brown’s father was a doctor, but as Brown often reminds voters, he went to school with the children of factory workers, a perspective that set him, like Kaptur, against trade deals such as NAFTA that many other Democrats supported.

“Politicians of both parties have done the bidding of wealthy corporations and sold the country out over and over and over again,” he said at a United Auto Workers hall in Toledo this month.

After the event, I asked him about the difficulties facing small cities. “Those cities were even more damaged than metropolitan areas because young people often tended to leave because there wasn’t the economic opportunity,” he said. “So I pay special attention to them.”

On the campaign trail, this means making more visits to the smaller cities than most other Democrats might. These cities also figure prominently in Brown’s stump rhetoric. “I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a town that looks a lot like Springfield, looks a lot like Zanesville, looks a lot like Hamilton or Middletown” is how Brown opened his remarks outside the union hall in Dayton, a city also on the updated “forgotten” list. After that event, he fell into an extended conversation with a new sort of small-city leader: one of the pioneers of the Haitian community in Springfield, who now owns five houses there and had come to Dayton to see Brown speak.

Without a doubt, Brown’s and Kaptur’s understanding of such places has helped them survive as long as they have as the state turned redder. It’s not as if their opponents have been offering these small cities many concrete solutions of their own. Far from it: Moreno’s ads center on his backing by Trump, and virtually all of the tens of millions of dollars in attack ads being run against Brown by outside groups focus on transgender youth.

There’s a painful irony in this for Democrats such as Brown and Kaptur. For years, they have been urging their party to pay more heed to these scattered outposts of their base: to Mansfield and Middletown, Springfield and Sandusky, all across their state and region. They were largely vindicated in their warnings about trade policy and political fallout, and a national Democratic response finally arrived in the past few years.

But in many places, demoralization had already spread so far, and local institutions had withered so much, that it became much easier for an opposition message based on nationwide culture-war appeals to register. Brown is as vulnerable now as he has ever been — running only 4 points ahead of Harris in the latest poll — and Kaptur’s race is just as competitive. This is doubly painful for them because they have largely skirted the culture-war front over the years, concentrating instead on economic issues.

Brown and Kaptur may well survive their latest challenges. But it’s hard to see how Democrats will revive their standing in Ohio — or enhance their prospects in the nearby swing states that remain more within their reach, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania — without helping these small cities revive, too. As Kaptur told me simply, sitting in her Toledo office overlooking the Maumee River: “They need to be seen.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

I knew I was going to be a musician. I’ve always been artistically inclined and felt if I put my mind to anything, I could “figure it out.” I could never build a car properly—I’m not handy in that regard—but with art, I’ve always been able to improvise. As a guitar player and singer, I was in many bands—I toured, got signed, and tried that whole thing. Then I met Kavi while waiting at tables at Pure Food and Wine, the Bad Vegan restaurant.

No way.

Yeah. I was touring and trying to make it, but I was always interested in the plants growing all around me, even out of the cracks of sidewalks in Brooklyn. As a suburban kid adjusting to living in Brooklyn, it was dirty but I found beauty in the plant life and birds. Kavi and I also began going away on weekends, and I was reading vintage manuals about herbs and gardening. There were always recipes for creams, lotions, and old-fashioned perfumes in the back. I realized, “Oh, I want to make my own stuff.” This was in the early aughts when we were all trying to live like it was the 19th century and doing everything DIY.

Our friends had jewelry stores and shoe stores, making all their own things. Food as a “trend” was blowing up with new attention to ingredients, essential oils, and herbs. I started making things, and we gave them away as holiday gifts to friends. They liked it, and Kavi said, “We should start a business.” She worked at an architecture firm at the time and suggested, “Oh, I could print the labels on the nice printers there.” And I decided, “All right, I’ll hand-make everything else.” And so we did it. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing, but it just exploded.

I remember seeing D.S. & Durga at local indie stores like Bird in the early aughts, many of which sadly no longer exist. This was at the beginning of modern e-commerce, around when Kickstarter was getting off the ground and before Etsy. Even without digital resources or much press, you still quickly developed a cult following.

Someone from Thrillist wrote about us at this time. I didn’t even use the internet that much, and certainly not much was sold there. I think Amazon still just sold books. But we had a website, and people could order there, and we got so many inquiries. And then Anthropologie said, “Will you make us a line?” and wholesale ordered like $26,000 of merch, which was like $26 million to us. I thought, “This is crazy.” We were able to quit our jobs. Then I realized that I could do in fragrance what I was trying to do in music, creating this whole world and discussing historical topics.

And so you just started building a line?

I taught myself how to make fragrance, which is probably the stranger, weirder part of the story. I figured it out by experimenting, writing it all down, and understanding the relationships between aromatic materials. Then I realized, “Oh, I can transition to this.” Kavi was an architect, so she knew design essentials and could work on product design, which ultimately came to be known as branding. We didn’t know what that word meant back then.

You’ve come a long way since mixing scents in your apartment. Has anything changed in your process?

We’ve always been pretty siloed in that I do all the fragrance and all the words, and Kavi does all the design. We have opinions, but there’s a level that we stay within since we trust each other. I might have a layman’s understanding of design, but she understands why X, Y, and Z can’t happen. And the same with fragrance. I just understand, “No, no, this, trust me, this is going to be good. This is the way to do it.”

It’s incredible to think you started this mini-empire by trying things out.

We started with nothing. We didn’t take investments, we funded it ourselves. So all the money kept going back into it. We were living off of it. It was doing well, and we didn’t want to change, but we also knew we wouldn’t be able to compete with the brands we respected with our basic packaging. Kavi wanted to make something much more beautiful and high-end, so in 2015 we bit the bullet and rebranded at scale. You had to spend so much money on the molding to make custom pieces, but it was great because that’s when we really launched. We were already at Barneys, but we were able to have a better presence and also to launch at Liberty and Bonmarche.

What changed with the new look?

People took us more seriously. It’s important that you make the most beautiful thing you can, highlighting the beauty of the juice inside. They’re two parts of the same coin. The other thing is that I realized I was belabored by this old fantasy that we all wanted to live in the 19th century. When that sensibility left my life, I felt so free. Suddenly, I was like, “We can just accept that we are in 2014. And it’s okay. You can build beauty around you, but you don’t need to reject it.” In the beginning, we were intrigued by the way things used to be and were rejecting how far we had gotten as a society. And I think that things took off once we realized you don’t have to dress like Peaky Blinders to feel free inside.

As a Pixies fan, I love that you have a scent called Debaser. Why did you create this perfume? How did you decide what you wanted its essence to be?

I keep a running list of names and ideas. Sometimes, I’ll say, “Oh, it’d be so cool if a thing were named this,” then I’ll say, “Let me try to make that.” Others, I’ll make something that’s so beautiful and be like, “Huh, this could fit for that idea that I’ve always had.” So they’re all different in that regard. Debaser has this big, sexy, but kind of innocent fig fragrance. I was thinking of seventh grade, hanging out with older kids, listening to this provocative music, and how influential it was to me. And how psyched I was to reference the Pixies because I just loved them. That era was so special. We’ve actually given them some bottles.

What was Black Francis’s reaction?

I’ve seen him talk in interviews and say, “Yeah, there’s this brand from Brooklyn that has this Debaser fragrance.”

Did he give any notes?

He said he liked it. They were playing in Brooklyn, and our friend knew them a little bit, so she had us backstage. I actually got to meet a few of them.

What is a dream you have?

I mean, I have a lot of them. I have a whole line that I want to make that will change fragrance. For example, when they created synthesis in computers, you began to see these giant synthesizers – modular synthesizers that were just a million knobs with wires, and almost no one could figure out how to play them live. But the potential was that you could make any sound if you could figure out how to filter a sine wave. And then, in the seventies, Bob Moog decided, “Oh, I can just put these signals and these wires in a certain order and put a keyboard on it. So if anybody can play the keyboard, they could make their own sounds.” And he made the first synthesizers with keyboards—the Moog. Then, look at what happened to the music. So, if you look at my perfume wall, it will be hard to tell someone, “Okay, this is how you make a perfume.” But I have an idea of how to put the keyboard on it and create a series of things that can work together so people can make their own creations. That’s a big dream of mine.

I’m sure you get asked this often, but have you read Perfume?

That’s so funny. No, I’ve never read it, but everyone asks, and I won’t because, not out of stubbornness, but I don’t know how to describe it. There are so many things in this world that I want to read, and I have no time for things that I don’t. If people are mystified by this crazy process of perfume, they’re like, “What? You can make a perfume that smells like basketballs?” But I’m beyond thinking that any of this stuff is impossible. All I do is the same thing a painter or a musician does. I’m taking aromatic materials and putting them to make an image or a scent that brings your mind somewhere, just like a musician or a painter does. It’s not strange to me that it has the same ability as any other art form. We overanalyze everything in this culture.

But there is something special about how a good perfume makes you feel.

I like to talk about the magic of these things. We’re living in a pretty magical universe. There’s just so much happening. The mundane is quite magical. The fact that you and I are breathing – each breath is a miracle. And so I think perfume and art forms, in general, sort of reflect God’s presence in the universe. They’re something that’s inherently magical, but I feel like everything is magical.

Have you ever created something that astounded even yourself?

I mean, I try not to have my head too far up my own ass. I’m just executing ideas, and sometimes I’ll like it. There are happy accidents. I usually will work on something and then try to “beat it” for up to a few months, and most often, I can’t. So it’s strange that there’s just this time where the thing is the best I can do. You just let it come through you. I think I naturally understand how to represent images and other art forms in fragrance. If I was going to make a dish of food that tasted like a car, I think I could figure out how to do that.

Similarly, some creators, like Jen Monroe, do amazing work with food akin to conceptual art to produce these new worlds. When you taste it, you’re transported.

I was writing a book with a chef about this. Because I look at these things as landscapes. You can create a very immersive world in any art form. The thing with perfume and music is they’re both invisible, so that’s the thing that’s extra magic about them. Because visual art is visual art, but with music, there’s this whole architecture of a symphony, but you can’t see it. And it’s the same thing with fragrance.

Do you still have time to do music?

I just came out with a solo album. It’s on Spotify under my name. And then I also have this other band, Hiko Men. We haven’t played in a while, but we made an album during the pandemic, and I also came out with three poetry books, one per year, for the past three years. So, I’m always working on other artistic endeavors.

How do you keep all these ideas in your head, let alone execute them?

Everything’s on my phone. Every single thing I do. In the modern world, there are few inventions I think that are most impactful, and definitely, the Notes function of an iPhone would be high up there for me. Any tiny thought I have can go in there, and it’s all organized, whether it’s a perfume name, a spiritual thought, or a poem. You just get it down. When you’re going to go back and put it into a book, there are the first drafts. To basically have a notebook for your mind at your fingertips that can’t get lost is one of the greatest things that ever happened.

How do you have time to juggle all of this?

You’ve got to make space and make time in your life. I think meditation is the key to everything. You have to spend some time, just as you would take time to sleep or eat. You have to take time to work on conquering the mind, or going into calmness and peace, because that’s a great foundation for everything else.

It’s inspiring that you and Kavi are partners in both business and life. Is it hard to choose when you’re “at work” versus just in the house cleaning or cooking?

I think that there is no separation anymore. But that’s the way for modern life, especially New Yorkers. Everyone’s always accessible on their phone. But we don’t email our team on the weekends unless it’s urgent. We are always kind of available, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming. It’s just intertwined and doesn’t get in the way of our home life. We’re not always together during the day, but we’re in contact. Maybe some married people don’t interact as much during the day because they’re busy at work when they get home, that’s a special time. But we already know what’s been going on, so we don’t need to sit down and download each other on the day. We’re just getting older too. I think people want to do their own thing at home sometimes.

You feel that collaboration and calm when walking into a DS & Durga store.

I don’t know if calm is…but that’s good! I mean, we have the concrete, spikes, black, and a little punk look. The concrete is beautiful, though. The coolest thing to me is that the layers of concrete have become a touchpoint. We have it at our little shop, the shop at Bergdorf, and the branch we’re opening in LA—lines of beautiful, textured concrete.

Is there any question you wish someone would ask that they never have?

It’s funny, people always ask this last question, “Is there anything else?” And I’m like, “You can prompt me endlessly, and I can say stuff, but I’m not trying to say something.” But the work speaks for itself, and I’m very available to talk about things when people ask.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laura Feinstein.

For several years, this compound symbolized the town’s newfound growth propelled by China-backed investments. Locals interviewed by BenarNews mostly credited Bamban’s prosperity to a young, bespectacled mayor, Alice Guo, who is now at the center of a controversy in the Philippines over her suspected role in crimes, corruption, and even espionage.

“There was really an increase in the number of Chinese nationals here when the compound started,” said 61-year-old Vladimir Lingat, a Bamban native who drives a motorcycle taxi.

“[The Chinese nationals] rarely interacted with us. Some of them were boastful, but we were just happy to have passengers and customers,” Lingat told BenarNews in an interview on Sept. 23.

Guo, the former mayor of Bamban, is in Philippine custody after being arrested and deported from Indonesia last month. She faces criminal charges of human trafficking and graft connected to the compound, which was a hub of activity during her mayorship. 

In addition, Philippine officials and lawmakers have floated allegations that Guo may have also been spying for China – Manila’s main territorial rival in the hotly contested South China Sea – but Philippine authorities so far have offered no evidence to back up this suspicion.

This sleepy town in northern Tarlac province was thrust into the national spotlight earlier this year when authorities raided two Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs) operating inside the compound. Officials said they had received tips that crimes and human rights abuses were allegedly being committed inside the property.

In May, the Philippine Senate started its probe into alleged criminal activities involving POGOs. 

Documents presented to the Senate allegedly showed that Guo had personally applied for one of the two firm’s business permits.

Guo had said she once controlled half of the stakes in the company that owned the property where the two POGOs were operating. However, Guo said she had divested from the business before running for mayor of Bamban in 2022.

Guo also allegedly backed the license of the operators before and after becoming mayor, documents presented at the hearing showed.

Senators also questioned the former mayor’s alleged links to mainland China, accusing her of being a “Chinese spy” and faking her Philippine nationality – allegations she has vehemently denied. 

In June, Manila’s National Bureau of Investigation said that the fingerprints of Guo matched those of Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national who arrived in the country in July 2003. Guo Hua Ping was listed as a dependent of a Chinese citizen holding a special investor resident visa, officials said.

But Guo maintained she was a natural-born Filipino.

Guo later fled to Indonesia in July, but was caught by Indonesian authorities and deported to face the charges against her.

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Erlyn Villareal, a food vendor, moved to Bamban in 2011. She told BenarNews she had not heard about Alice Guo back then. 

“We only knew her when she started campaigning for mayor in 2021,” Villareal, a Guo supporter, told BenarNews in an interview on Sept. 23. “All we know is that she has farm businesses here because we know friends and neighbors who are working there.” 

Guo’s predecessor, Jose Antonio Feliciano, endorsed her in the 2022 mayoral election. However, Feliciano admitted he was “not that close” to her and that his relationship with Guo was only “civil” and casual, according to an ABS-CBN news report. 

Feliciano, who served as town mayor from 2013 until 2022, said he had endorsed Guo because he thought the town needed somebody like her, a businesswoman who knew about agriculture, the main source of livelihood for many of its residents.

‘Patronage’ at work 

Some residents said they liked Guo’s election campaign promise of lifting up the town and helping the poor residents. They described Guo as “very sweet” and said she was able to forge a political alliance with the other politicians in the town.

Guo only served as mayor for two years but some locals argued that she had raised their town’s profile. They said they had received a host of financial assistance packages from Guo, and sometimes, even birthday cakes.

This is “patronage and clientelism” at work – a defining characteristic of Philippine politics, said Aries Arugay, head of the political science department at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

“Patronage politics may include establishing clientelist relationships with voters where politicians exchange favors like financial assistance for political support and electoral votes,” Arugay told BenarNews.

This is why even when there was growing evidence against Guo, the people in Bamban would rather look away, Arugay said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.

Pike had moved a few months earlier into a trailer park called Eleanor Oaks, in the neighboring hamlet of Yankeetown, after being priced out of another trailer park on higher ground where he’d ridden out last year’s Hurricane Idalia. 

“Eleven in the morning, they said, ‘get out,’ and four in the afternoon, they cut the power,” he said on Friday. “I’m not sure when we’ll be able to get back in.” 

Eleanor Oaks was in tatters, submerged by storm surge for the second time in just over a year. Trailers sat bent out of shape or strewn across the lot, left-behind cars and mobile homes were stained with muck, and the whole park stank of sewage.

Rescue crews searched the wreckage of the trailer park and Yankeetown for the dozens of residents who had refused to evacuate. The community is more than 5 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but the Category 4 storm delivered more than 10 feet of storm surge — pushing water so far inland that it inundated almost all of Yankeetown.

Helene’s powerful eye spared major cities like Tampa and Tallahassee, instead making a direct hit September 26 on Florida’s sparsely developed Big Bend, a largely lower-income part of the state where towns, like Inglis and Yankeetown, are small, many people live in substandard housing, and where local governments have little capacity to aid with rebuilding. There, communities are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Idalia, which also brought a large storm surge to the region. 

“This stuff’s coming in, it’s fierce, and it’s just unstoppable,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference Saturday in Dekle Beach. “There’s a lot of damage that we’re seeing here. I remember … I walked the streets after Idalia in some of these areas, but this was like, ‘Wow.’ You see some just complete obliteration for homes.”

As residents such as Pike prepared to return to their campgrounds and homes to start over, they seemed resigned. Robert Thomas, 64, just moved to the Eleanor Oaks trailer park three weeks ago. Thomas has lived in Florida since 2018, making him no stranger to major hurricanes, but this was the first time he’s had to evacuate a place he’s still settling into. With the roads blocked, he doesn’t know when, or if, he’ll be able to return. 

“I tried calling over there this morning,” said Thomas, who was waiting with Pike in the grocery store parking lot. “No one answered.” 

Florida’s Big Bend has had worse disaster luck than perhaps any other region in the country this decade — so much so that it has earned the moniker “hurricane alley” — but its recovery has taken place largely out of the public eye. Too far from major vacation destinations, rural communities like Inglis and Yankeetown have a track record of navigating extreme weather disasters without much aid from the government, or attention from the rest of the world. A year after Hurricane Idalia, Florida’s top disaster official, praised the fact that the recovery in Big Bend had required relatively little federal spending.

“Obviously $500 million goes a lot farther in a location like the Big Bend than it does in a highly populated area like southwest Florida,” Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in late August.

But the lack of local resources makes dealing with a hurricane evacuation extremely difficult.

Yankeetown and Inglis deputy fire chief, Kelly Salter, said that the rollercoaster of storms over the past few years has influenced many residents’ decisions about whether to evacuate. Last August, Idalia, also a Category 4, caught many holdouts by surprise. Still reeling from that disaster, residents actually evacuated during the smaller Hurricane Debby earlier this summer, but when Debby produced only a minimal surge, Salter thinks they felt emboldened to resist evacuation orders again. 

Helene’s massive circumference — around 400 miles across — fueled its record-breaking storm surge along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa Bay, which saw more than 6 feet of water, up to the beach towns of the Panhandle, which saw close to 20 feet. Yankeetown experienced an estimated 12-foot surge, Salter said, enough to push water up to the windows of homes that had been touched by just a few inches of flooding during Idalia. 

Dozens of residents who chose not to evacuate found themselves climbing to their rooftops as the storm roared down upon Levy County, in a desperate attempt to escape the rapidly rising, sewage-riddled waters. In Yankeetown, 20 people had to be rescued. More than half were discovered sequestered on their roofs. Although both towns sit entirely within a FEMA-designated floodplain, only around 300 of their more than combined 1000 households hold flood insurance policies.

“One lady said, ‘Well, I’ve been here for 37 years, nothing has happened,’” said Salter. “And I said, ‘But it did this time, and now you’re putting all of us at risk. Now we have to come and get you because you didn’t do what we told you to do in the first place.’”

Helene is the first hurricane where Salter and her crew had any help from federal and state search and rescue teams. 

In the days and weeks to come, the full scope of the damage left by Helene in northwestern Florida’s rural, inland towns will become more clear. What is already obvious is the limited personnel and resources available to help Yankeetown and Inglis rebuild. The budget of Yankeetown is under $4 million, less than the value of some homes in Florida, and its town manager doubles as a local pastor. Salter is not only the deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator, using a Gmail account for her fire department business, but she also owns a construction company. 

“We pretty much have job security here because we have so many hurricanes,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Florida’s Big Bend, small towns bear the brunt of Helene’s impact on Sep 30, 2024.

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

The Middle Class Tax Cut

No matter how it is sliced, diced, or spiced, this middle class tax cut benefits nobody, harms the nation, and questions Harris’ credibility. The presidential aspirant said in her acceptance speech that she will be a president for all peoples in the nation. Singling out a tax cut for the more fortunate does not match her words. Unexplained is why this special class needs a tax cut.

Tax cuts are usual when demand is low, such as in a recession. The present economy is healthy with plenty, and I do mean plenty, of new Teslas in my middle class neighborhood. Elevated consumer demand is subsiding, noted by the decrease in consumer-inflated prices and increase in stock and housing market asset prices. Money is flowing into assets and a middle class tax cut will accelerate the trend.

Taxes transfer money between the government and the public. Neither method adds or subtracts to the money supply nor allows more or less available spending to the economy ─ the purchasing power stays the same, which means the purchasing of goods and services remain the same, and the GDP remains the same  Lowering taxes mainly assists the already employed, and that is not the major priority. Who pays taxes ─ the employed. Who receives tax breaks ─ those who pay taxes. Lowering taxes redistributes federal assistance from needy persons to the employed. Which is preferable, redistributing income so the employed have more to spend or redistributing the income so the underemployed have something to spend?

Stimulating the economy by tax breaks is a psychological phenomenon. The talk, exaggerations, promises, and general optimism of tax breaks fashion a more optimistic public, which supposedly stimulates spending, investment, and courage to carry more debt. Creeping in to the debate is another assumption ─ those who have excess funds will invest and stimulate growth. Not considered is they might invest in speculative ventures that only churn money or might purchase imports, which decreases purchasing power of domestic production.

GDP has steadily grown, with a few bumps, in the last 80 years, and no relation to lowering of taxes has been shown. A government report: Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, Thomas L. Hungerford Specialist in Public Finance, September 14, 2012 at concludes:

The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War. The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced ─ lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.

Because taxable incomes do not include inflation and these have increased greatly during the last decades, it is difficult to compare tax rates in 2024 with earlier tax rates. Peering through data, they seem just as low as they were in 2014, when the government report was published, or at a near historic post-World War II low. Why go lower?

Tax Deduction of up to $50,000 for New Small Businesses

The principal hindrance to starting a small business is the high interest rate. Tax deductions will not help small businesses that have no access to funds and no profits to tax. The proposal affects a minor portion of the small business community and is subsidized by a major portion of the economy ─ those who can also use tax breaks.

This tax benefit is a policy seeking a problem. Newly created small businesses have exploded in the post-pandemic period. An April, 2024 Treasury Department report relates,

Small businesses created over 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019. In the previous business cycle, small businesses created 64 percent of net new jobs.

Small business optimism is rebounding as inflation falls. Multiple measures of business optimism show substantial increases in recent months. More than 70 percent of small business leaders expect revenues to grow over the next year, the most since the pandemic.

Entrepreneurship continues to surge: the United States is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, 50 percent more than in 2019. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has also risen to 140,000 per month, 30 percent more than in 2019. Over 19 million businesses have been formed since Biden’s inauguration, and these are not just sole proprietorships or fly-by-night operations. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has increased 30 percent from 2019.

The Main Street Alliance(MSA) establishes priorities for small businesses. Its 2025 agenda does not include a suggestion for a tax deduction.  The Alliance advocates for “stronger antitrust enforcement, fair tax policies, and expanded access to capital. This includes efforts to revise the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, support the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and fight against cuts to critical small business funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies.”

MSA “plans on supporting the continued implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, paid family and medical leave, investments in child care, and enhanced subsidies for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.”

Child Tax Credit

Kamala Harris’ economic plans include a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns and a continuation of the pandemic-era Child Tax Credit (CTC). The latter expanded the Child Tax Credits and boosted the benefit to $3,600 for children under six years old and to $3,000 for children from 7 to 17 years of age.

Seems beneficial to subsidize those in need, which are usually growing families. In addition, it is good economics — places funds in hands of those who will spend them for essentials and move them through the economy. The question that Harris has not answered is, “To what level of income will the credits apply?” My recommendation is that credits should also be based on assets and slide off gradually from $60,000 income to $100,000 income. Their effects on inflation need study.

Corporate Tax Rate

Before Trump lowered the maximum corporate tax rate to a flat 21 percent, the 35 percent rate for income greater than $18.3 million, had been relatively constant for 32 years, and economic gyrations had not shown to be due to that rate.

The effective corporate tax rate graph tells another story — corporations have taken advantage of tax breaks and loopholes to reduce their taxes.

The problem is not high corporate tax; the problem is the ability of corporations to avoid paying taxes. If tax breaks and loopholes unique to U.S. corporations, such as accelerated depreciation, using excess tax benefits from stock options to reduce federal and state taxes, and industry specific tax breaks were reduced or eliminated, then the tax rate could also be reduced; the government charges with one legislation and discharges with another legislation. Corporations are responsible for finding loopholes to avoid taxes, and the government is responsible for providing the loopholes.

The posed advantages of a lower corporate tax rate — increased funds for investment translating into increased production, which increases employment and Gross Domestic Product might be true if corporations used the greater part of their profit for increased investment. However, corporations have used the excessive profit for executive bonuses, for stock buybacks, for corporate takeovers, and for augmenting retained earnings. With corporate profits at all-time highs, “S&P 500 Q1 2024 buybacks were $236.8 billion, up 8.1% from Q4 2023’s $219.1 billion and up 9.9% from Q1 2023’s $215.5 billion.”

Left out of the corporate books is responsibility to support infrastructure – transportation, communication, utilities – government research, government loans, credit guarantees, bailouts, assistance to education, job training, subsidies, and other programs that benefit corporations. Shouldn’t corporations repay a fair share of the financial assistance that guarantees their prosperity?

The oft-quoted assertion that high tax rates have been the primary driver for corporations to move facilities to nations that have low tax rates is not proven. Manufacturing close to market and utilization of low labor rates have been the more prominent drivers. Commentators spuriously define the words tax havens, tax deferred, and tax inversions to confuse the public, and promote the mistaken belief that U.S. corporations can change their domicile and easily escape major payments of the corporation’s federal taxes on income earned outside the United States.

Corporations, whose sales contain much intellectual property (Microsoft), are able to shift certain profits on sales, but this cannot easily occur for profits earned from trade or business of defined products manufactured outside the United States. If repatriated, these profits are eventually subjected to U.S. taxes.

The key proposition, which is overlooked,  is that government spends all of corporate taxes and all the money circulates in the economy, some invested, some increasing production, some increasing employment, and all adding to or maintaining GDP.  Why is this proposition “the key proposition?”

Economics becomes simplified when it is realized that all money is debt. The money supply can only be increased by either banks’ lending money from Reserves and essentially creating money, or by the Federal Reserve engaging in Open Market Operations ─ purchasing government debt that is financed by the Treasury Department. Treasury prints money that appear as IOUs at the Federal Reserve.  If money remains dormant as excessive retained earnings or circulates speculatively as stock buybacks,  the money, which is debt is not wisely used; it is comparable  to borrowing money at 6 percent and then, rather than purchasing a product, investing it at 3 percent. All money in the economy is debt and all the debt is paying interest and being constantly retired and renewed.

This last tidbit is, admittedly, controversial and needs more discussion. It is the essential of the capitalist system, which grows by reinvesting profits ─ capital generating capital ─ and where all the money supply, including profits, that is needed to generate capital is equal to the debt in the system. Positive trade balances play a role, but generally, capitalism only moves forward by increasing debt.

Trump Tariffs

One mystery that has clouded the Biden administration is negligence in canceling the Trump administration’s tariffs on goods from China. During their debate, Trump questioned Harris on why, “if the Dems do not support the tariffs, has the Biden administration kept them?” Harris did not supply an answer.

Tariffs are used to either increase government revenue ─ the principal method before the income taxation system ─ or to protect domestic industries.

Former President Trump proudly declared that his tariffs had harmed the Chinese government. Is the function of a U.S. president to harm another government? He also claimed that foreign companies are paying for tariffs. “Multiple studies suggest this is not the case: the cost of tariffs have been borne almost entirely by American households and American firms, not foreign exporters.”

Protection is difficult to gauge; tariffs may have helped some producers and harmed companies who use the imported goods and now have to pay higher prices for the commodity. The export country, in this case, China, can retaliate and raise taxes on imports from the U.S. and harm American industries.

Have the tariffs protected the steel industry, the principal industry in the tariffs? The answer came in December 2023, when Nippon Steel announced a $14.9 billion takeover deal of U.S. Steel.

Conclusion

In conventional economic theory, the government formulates a budget and taxes the public to pay for the budget. If the tax revenues do not reach the expenditures, then either the government cuts the budget ─ done during Bill Clinton administration ─  or issues debt. What is never done is to have taxes planned to follow budget considerations. The promises by presidential contenders of cutting taxes are promises that have no rational; future budgets will be forced to be planned about tax revenue rather than having tax revenue agree with budget plans, a bad way to run a country.

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

There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”

Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn’t actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That’s the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?

Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.

Ian Vandewalker: Thank you. Good to be here.

Brennan Center (5/8/24)

JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it’s a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Post wrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn’t Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?

IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.

New York Times (8/30/23)

JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren’t real, that they’re kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it’s not that actually it’s people who can only give $12?

IV: Right, I mean, I think there’s something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world’s going to come crashing down if you don’t send me $12.”

So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don’t actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.

JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, there’s a political system and there’s a media system, and they’re different.” You’re already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”

IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.

There’s a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.

JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?

Ian Vandewalker: “Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors…has increased even faster.”

IV: So first of all, there’s lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they’re going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.

As I said, small donors, they give to people they’ve heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it’s certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that’s actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.

So it’s hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.

JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don’t have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what’s the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.

IV: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that’s just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it’s hard to say that that’s, as you say, a problem with the system itself.

JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?

IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it’s important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It’s easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there’s data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that’s a very different story.

And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people’s voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that’s good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.

JJ: All right, then, and we’ll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That’s a whole bigger conversation.

IV: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.

JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we’ve been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IV: Thank you. Good to be here.

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

A New Zealand Kanak woman, Jessie Ounei, says young people in New Caledonia feel a sense of anger and betrayal at the way France is attempting to “snuff out” any prospect of independence for its Pacific territory.

France invaded New Caledonia in 1853 and pushed the Kanak people into reservations, denying them civil and political rights for a century.

In parallel with Nga Tamatoa in Aotearoa, a resistance movement sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s driven by young people, including Jessie Ounei’s late mother Susanna Ounei, and the territory has been on the United Nations decolonisation list since 1986.

• READ MORE:  French President Emmanuel Macron lands in Nouméa amid unrest
• LISTEN TO RADIO WAATEA: Interview with Jesse Ounea and David Small
• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Riots broke out last week after the French National Assembly moved to give voting rights to settlers with 10 years residence, which would overwhelm the indigenous vote.

Jessie Ounei told Radio Waatea host Shane Te Pou the independence movement had tried to resist the move peacefully, but once the National Assembly vote happened young people took action.

“It’s a total betrayal. Young people have grown up with a sense of identity and we understand out worth and that’s largely because of the work that was done in the 1960s, 1970s and and 1980s to reclaim our identity so we’re not unaware of our worth or our identity, or how hard done we are being so we were hopeful this was going to be it,” she said.

France ‘pulled the rug’
“But France has totally pulled the rug out.”

Ounei said she had been hearing unconfirmed reports of rightwing settler militias taking vigilante action against the Kanak population.

Asia Pacific Report says French officials have cited a death toll of at least six so far — including three Kanaks, one a 17-year-old girl, and two police officers, and 214 people have been arrested in the state of emergency.

French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Nouméa today in an attempt to create a dialogue to resolve the tensions.

An interview with Jesse Ounei and David Small. Republished from Waatea News, Auckland’s Māori radio broadcaster.

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

On Tuesday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, Germany, unanimously ruled that state parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea have an obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 169 parties to the treaty include several of the world’s top emitters: China, India, the European Union, and Russia. The United States, also a big polluter, is not a party to the convention. 

The tribunal said in its advisory opinion that greenhouse gases count as marine pollution and that state parties to the convention must “take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce and control marine pollution.” 

“The ITLOS opinion will inform our future legal and diplomatic work in putting an end to inaction that has brought us to the brink of an irreversible disaster,” said Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister, according to Reuters.

Nikki Reisch from the Center for International Environmental Law, which supported the island nations’ case, said the advisory opinion lays the foundation to hold big polluters accountable by clarifying their obligations under international law. Reisch said this is the first time an international court has commented on the intersection of oceans and climate change. 

“It’s a landmark decision in that it adds great weight to the growing body of case law and legal interpretations underscoring states’ legal duties to urgently and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect the environment and human rights,” she said. “It’s a testament to the persistent courage and leadership of small island states that have really been at the forefront of the struggle for climate justice and accountability and the forefront of legal developments.” 

In 2022, island nations including Palau and Vanuatu first brought the case before the tribunal. They wanted to know what are the obligations of state parties “to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment in relation to the deleterious effects that result or are likely to result from climate change.” 

The island countries have been dealing with storms, heavy rainfall, coral bleaching, and other negative effects of climate change despite contributing relatively little carbon emissions. In islands like Vanuatu, the climate effects particularly harm Indigenous Pacific Islanders, some of whom are already facing dislocation from their ancestral villages. 

Reisch said the sweeping opinion is particularly significant because it makes clear that complying with the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international treaty on climate change, isn’t enough. 

The opinion said countries should also “take all measures necessary” to ensure their carbon emissions don’t damage other states or their environments. 

State parties to the convention also have an obligation to support developing states with climate adaptation, especially those particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. That includes giving them “preferential treatment in funding, technical assistance and pertinent specialized services from international organizations,” the tribunal wrote. 

The tribunal found state parties also have the legal obligation to monitor greenhouse gas emissions; to report on their observations and analyses, and to protect oceans from acidification. States may even need to restore marine habitats if they’ve been degraded, the tribunal concluded. 

Sarah Cooley from the Ocean Conservancy who gave expert testimony in the case, praised the tribunal’s embrace of climate science. 

“Today’s judgment from (International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea)  is a massive victory for our ocean, communities impacted by climate change, and science in general,” she said.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Small island nations get big climate victory in international maritime court on May 21, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

Between BlackRock and a hard place

According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19^th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

(image: Voting Booth)

This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth.  We’ll hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.

(image: Brennan Center)

Also on the show: You and I may believe that democracy means, at its core, something like “one person, one vote.” That doesn’t mean we can whistle past the fact that many voting people do not believe that. Indeed, some elite media–designated smart people have determined: “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We’ll explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The post Steven Rosenfeld on Election Transparency, Ian Vandewalker on Small Donors appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The post Small Islands, Deadly Stakes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julie Wark.

“Batanes is a small place,” says Mayor German Caccam. “It is like living in a paradise, and we do not like being disturbed by conflicts.” 

But islanders increasingly fear a conflict could be coming. 

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Though Batanes marks the northernmost point of the Philippines, it in fact lies closer to Taiwan, which is only 120 miles (193 km) away. On a clear day, islanders say they can see Taiwan’s southern tip. 

Beyond that lies the Taiwan Strait, another flashpoint in a watery region beset by them. Beijing -- which considers democratic Taiwan one of its provinces and vows to reunite it with the mainland, by force if necessary -- regularly sends warships and airplanes around Taiwan in a show of strength to Taipei.

“The brewing war in the Taiwan Strait brings a lot of concerns to the people of Batanes,” says Caccam, a former teacher who has held the post since 2022. “Because of the proximity to Taiwan, Batanes is likely to be affected.” 

That possibility sets up an interesting dilemma for the islanders. 

The people here feel vulnerable. They are served by a single, small airport that frequently closes due to bad weather. And yet they are wary of hosting soldiers or military equipment for fear of provoking China and being caught up in a conflict that isn’t theirs.

“We are very worried about the situation in Taiwan,” Nida Cartano, a Batanes teacher, told RFA. “Batanes is so small, we don’t have facilities to go into a war with anyone, so we are afraid.

“But hopefully there won’t be any war any time soon.”

The Philippine military has recruited hundreds of reservists in Batanes. In February, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro visited the province to inspect local facilities. He ordered the military to boost the number of Filipino troops stationed in Batanes and to develop more military structures there.

The province is “the spearhead of the Philippines as far as the northern baseline is concerned,” Teodoro told reporters.

China and the Philippines are at odds in the South China Sea, including at the Second Thomas Shoal, an area within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone but where Chinese ships frequently run-off Filipino fishermen.

China bases its sovereignty on the so-called nine-dash line, which dips from the Chinese mainland deep into the South China Sea, encompassing the shoal and other nearby features that Manila views as their own.

But Taiwan is a particularly sensitive topic to Beijing. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson warned the Philippine government against “playing with fire on the issue of Taiwan” and “being exploited by others,” implying military cooperation between the Philippines and its treaty ally the United States.

US troops’ presence

The Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from Batanes, is a critical choke point for Chinese military operations in the region. 

It is also the place where the United States and its allies hold naval drills. Batanes has served as one of the locations for Balikatan, an ongoing annual joint exercise between the American and Philippine militaries. 

Filipino media reported last year that the local government and the U.S. were discussing construction of a sea port on the island chain that could also be used for security purposes and facilitate American access to the area.

Local officials last year discussed the possibility of working with the U.S. to construct a sea port in Batanes that could also be used for security purposes and facilitate U.S. access to the area. 

The U.S. military ultimately declined to get involved in the-estimated $50 million project – a move some believe is tied to local resistance to the idea. 

The decision not to proceed in helping to pay for the port may help remove a source of tension with China. But the U.S. is expected to take part in a couple of other projects in the province, such as helping to upgrade an airport and build warehouses that can also have a dual use. 

And in 2023, the Philippines extended the number of its military bases that U.S. forces can access to nine, including three facing Taiwan. 

Mayor Caccam said residents welcome the Balikatan exercise, which has been held three times, “because it makes us feel more secure.” 

“However, as the mayor of Basco, I am not so amenable with the presence of foreign forces, especially the U.S., because that will make us a target.” 

For now, daily life in Batanes goes on as usual. Women wait in small alleys near the shore to clean and gut the day's catch. 

Unlike areas in the South China Sea where China claims territory, the fishermen of Batanes still have access to their traditional fishing grounds. 

But as tensions rise throughout the region, the people here can’t help but wonder how long their peaceful piece of the world will remain so.

Edited by Jim Snyder and Imran Vittachi

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Luna Pham for RFA and BenarNews.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In early 2019, Tina Marie Marsden needed more time to pay her electric bill. A mother in her mid-40s who lived on a fixed income because of a medical disability, she tried to explain to the local utility that the prospect of having no electricity was more than just an inconvenience. A mechanical pump kept her heart beating, and the pump ran on batteries that needed to be frequently charged. If the batteries ran out, Marsden could die.

Marsden had recently moved nearly 40 miles south of downtown Atlanta to Griffin, Georgia, a city that provides electricity to more than 13,000 residents through the utility it owns. Griffin offered customers only a seven-day period to pay past-due bills before cutting off their power — regardless of their health.

Before moving to Griffin, Marsden had gotten her electricity from Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility. State energy regulators require Georgia Power to delay disconnecting a seriously ill customer for failing to pay if they provide proof of a medical condition. Customers are eligible to request a grace period of up to two months.

After seven days passed, the city shut off Marsden’s power. She called her family, pleading with her relatives to lend her money. She cobbled together enough cash to pay the city, and her power was restored before the day ended.

Her relief was short-lived. That spring, when Marsden again fell behind on her bill, she asked a Griffin employee to consider her need for consistent power due to her heart condition. But the employee warned her that her condition would not keep her from being disconnected for nonpayment. The following month, when she missed another due date, the city cut off her power — and did so multiple more times in the years that followed.

Georgia is one of more than a dozen states that require certain utilities to delay disconnections for seriously ill customers for 60 days or more, according to a National Consumer Law Center report. But Georgia’s regulation does not apply to its nearly 100 small electric utilities. These utilities, which are largely overseen by local elected officials or nonprofit board members, can choose to immediately disconnect seriously ill residents who fail to pay their bills on time. Only a handful of states, including Wisconsin and New York, have oversight of municipal utilities and require them to protect seriously ill customers.

“The theory of municipal utilities is ‘Oh, it’s run by the government, it’s got to be better for people,’” said Charlie Harak, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit that specializes in consumer protection issues. “Few people are closely watching how they operate.”

As is the case in many states, no Georgia agency tracks how often utilities disconnect people who rely on electric-powered medical devices. ProPublica has identified examples of these kinds of shut-offs across the state. In the small south Georgia city of Fitzgerald, the municipally run utility shut off power eight times to a man receiving at-home dialysis treatment. Another utility in Palmetto, less than 25 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta, several times disconnected a woman reliant on a device to treat sleep apnea, even after she submitted a letter from her medical provider saying losing power could kill her. In the northeastern Atlanta suburbs, Lawrenceville’s utility disconnected a woman who used an oxygen concentrator to treat her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, leading her son to file a complaint with the utility. “I didn’t know you could just keep shutting off power w a disabled person on oxygen,” he wrote.

Representatives for the cities of Fitzgerald and Palmetto told ProPublica that the cities have tried to help seriously ill customers, but noted that they don’t have formal policies addressing those customers. (Fitzgerald declined to respond to questions about the customer who was disconnected.) Lawrenceville has a policy stopping disconnections for customers who turn in documentation from a medical professional of a serious illness; utility officials told the son of the woman with COPD about the policy after he complained about the shut-off, according to emails ProPublica received in a records request.

Griffin Mayor Douglas Hollberg, along with the city manager, declined to answer questions about Marsden, even after she signed a document waiving her right to privacy so the city could discuss her account. In an interview, Hollberg said that his utility strives to accommodate seriously ill customers. However, he said, some people “want to abuse the system” and leave other taxpayers footing the costs.

“We're talking about someone that doesn't want to pay their power bill and thinks that we shouldn't shut them off because they don't want to pay their bill,” Hollberg said. “I'm tired of people wanting to have rights beyond anybody else's rights.”

Dozens of Georgia’s other small utilities offered ProPublica a variety of explanations for why these kinds of disconnections are necessary. Some executives said that their utilities address people’s need to power their medical devices on a case-by-case basis, while others pointed to financial assistance programs they provide to help customers in need. One Georgia utility maintains an emergency fund supplied by contributions from its employees; another provides customers with a list of local charities that might be willing to cover their overdue bills.

Other officials expressed concern that allowing seriously ill people long periods of time to pay could cost utilities too much.

“There are people who will not be honest with the power provider, and they will use the medical thing to pretty much say, ‘You can’t cut my power off,’” said Mark Bolton, a spokesperson for Coastal Electric Cooperative, a utility that serves 22,000 customers in southeast Georgia. “But we can’t give you free power forever, either.”

Across the country, people who use electric-powered medical devices have died after their late payments triggered utility disconnections, and not all involved small utilities. In 2015, Lester Berry, a 70-year-old Texan with chronic pulmonary disease, died after a disconnection left him without the ability to use his oxygen-producing device. In 2018, a New Jersey utility with more than 2 million customers disconnected power for Linda Daniels, a 68-year-old piano teacher, who gasped for hours without her breathing machine. Daniels’ death led New Jersey legislators to pass “Linda’s Law,” which requires utilities to confirm with customers whether someone in their home relies on an electric-powered medical device before moving forward with a disconnection.

“No one should fear losing their life because their electricity bill is a few days overdue,” Gov. Phil Murphy said upon signing the law in 2019.

Consumer advocates and medical experts say that utilities — and the officials who regulate them — should protect customers whose health could be imperiled by a disconnection. A handful of smaller utilities in Georgia have adopted policies to postpone disconnections for seriously ill customers, according to information obtained by ProPublica through open records requests and survey responses. Experts and residents who spoke with ProPublica said the additional time allows people to apply for financial assistance from local nonprofits, borrow money from family or friends or negotiate a plan with the utility company to pay their bills.

“More time means I can come up with the money on my own,” Marsden said. “More time allows me to keep my pride, maintain my independence and not have to ask others for money.”

Dr. Peter Kahn, a pulmonologist and critical care fellow affiliated with Yale University’s medical school who studies the health impacts of disconnections, said patients of his who have asked their utilities for extra protections are not “looking for a free ride,” but rather seeking help for crucial needs.

“The cost of fighting with people who are looking for small protections over the long term is just not worth it,” Kahn said.

In 2019, around the second time that Marsden’s power was disconnected, she met a woman through a Facebook group called LVAD Friends, where people trade tips about their experiences with a type of heart pump known as a left ventricular assist device. The friend’s utility had threatened to disconnect her power after she fell behind on her monthly payments.

Concerned for her friend, Marsden traveled to Atlanta to seek help from the Georgia Public Service Commission. She thought her elected energy regulators could delay the city from cutting off her friend’s electricity. Instead, the PSC staff told her there was nothing they could do: The commission could help enforce protections for people who get electricity from Georgia Power but had no authority to oversee the disconnection practices of smaller utilities like the one that provided electricity to Marsden’s friend.

City-run power companies and nonprofit electric cooperatives initially sprang up as an answer to inequitable access to electricity in rural parts of the country. In the early 20th century, officials in rural Georgia built their own grids and farmers banded together to fund the construction of power lines that brought electricity to residents outside of major cities. By the 1950s, the vast majority of rural Georgia residents could light their homes, catching up with people living in larger cities like Atlanta and Augusta.

Over the decades that followed, the PSC heightened protections for seriously ill customers of Georgia Power. But in Georgia, as in a number of states across the country, cities lobbied legislators to fend off state oversight of their utilities. Soon after Marsden moved to Griffin, she realized that seriously ill Georgians outside of major cities were being left behind once again, subject to disconnection practices that threatened their quality of life.

In July 2020, Griffin cut off electricity at the home of Kenneth Parson, a retired trucker with diabetes who needed power to refrigerate his insulin. His wife begged city officials to reconsider their decision during the pandemic. The city said it could only restore power once he paid his bill. For more than two months that summer, Parson stored his insulin in a cooler packed with ice. Griffin later cut off power for Tracey Hardaway, who also needed electricity to store insulin pens. Hardaway said she and her husband had paid all but $30 of a more than $250 bill and promised city officials they would gather the remainder in a couple of days. “They would not keep the power on for those two days,” Hardaway said.

In recent years, Griffin distributed small grants from a $250,000 program that was funded through the federal CARES Act, which provided emergency financial assistance to Americans during the pandemic. Griffin's city manager declined to answer questions about Parson or Hardaway or provide details about whether they received financial assistance from the city.

A few months after Marsden went to Atlanta to advocate for her friend, Griffin disconnected her power for the third time that year. The clock was ticking: Her heart pump’s battery lasted only 12 hours. When the latest disconnection left Marsden without power for three days, she kept the pump running with the help of a neighbor, who let her run an extension cord between their apartments to charge her batteries.

In June 2021, Marsden was only able to pay about three-quarters of her $365 monthly bill and was at risk of disconnection for a fifth time. Before living in Griffin, she had been accustomed to her local government charging her for water, sewer and garbage collection. Here, the city bundled its electricity charges and those other municipal services into a single monthly bill, which meant that she couldn’t choose to pay only for her electricity. After seven days of Marsden not paying the full bill, the city cut off her power again. “I need power to live,” she recalled thinking. “Is Griffin going to let me die over $80?”

That fifth disconnection spurred Marsden to take action. She tracked down disconnection policies of other small cities across the country and found that some were more forgiving than Griffin to people with electric-powered medical devices. She reached out to city officials to encourage them to adopt a better policy, arguing they were unfairly penalizing residents with disabilities.

Her advocacy prompted city officials to review the disconnection policies. In an internal email ProPublica obtained through a records request, a city attorney erroneously told other staffers that Griffin had “adopted the same policies as Georgia Power.” (A city spokesperson declined to comment about Griffin’s interpretation of Georgia Power’s policy.) The response that reached Marsden was disappointing: The city “will not alter this policy,” a city official wrote. But, that official said, Marsden was welcome to charge her heart pump batteries at City Hall.

Frustrated by Griffin’s response, Marsden decided to speak out at the city commission meeting that September. As she waited anxiously to face her elected officials, her heart raced so fast that she was zapped by her defibrillator, which shocks her heart whenever it beats faster than 220 beats per minute. She cried out loud enough for the commissioners to pause the meeting and for someone to call 911.

The paramedics urged Marsden to immediately go to a hospital for observation, but she insisted on speaking first during the public comment period. They reluctantly agreed. Too weak and out of breath to stand at the dais, Marsden sat in the front row of the audience. She criticized the city for its rigid disconnection policy and urged them to protect their most vulnerable residents.

“We are not asking not to pay,” Marsden said. She went on to ask Griffin to change its policies “so customers who need power to live are not at risk of disconnection, or risk loss of life due to disconnections.”

ProPublica surveyed about three dozen municipal utilities and electric cooperatives of various sizes across the state and found a variety of disconnection policies. About a third of those utilities had policies requiring them to delay disconnections for seriously ill customers. College Park, a small city near Atlanta’s airport, gives residents up to six months to pay their bill without disconnection if they submit a letter from a medical provider. The rest of the utilities that responded didn’t have a policy requiring delays in disconnection for those customers.

Palmetto, just southwest of Atlanta, is one of the municipal utilities without a policy, as 56-year-old Aleica Dockery found out in late 2022. Over a decade earlier, a car accident had killed her daughter and left Dockery using a wheelchair. Dockery provided city officials with a letter from a medical provider notifying them she needed continuous electricity to use her CPAP machine, a device that she used to treat her sleep apnea. The medical provider warned that a disconnection “could lead to catastrophic consequences up to and including death.”

Palmetto disconnected her electricity anyway. Dockery at the time received $375 a month in disability payments, making it difficult for her to afford the 10% additional charge for paying her bill even a day late. With utility bills that often reached $350, plus a $30 service fee when Dockery was a week late, those charges added up quickly. Like Griffin, Palmetto provides residents with a single bill that includes water, sewer, trash and electricity; if they don’t pay the full bill on time, the city cuts off their electricity first. “That is the thing that people respond to quickly,” explained city clerk Cindy Hanson, though she added that she did not work for Palmetto when the policy was created decades ago.

Hanson said the small city relies on utility payments from its nearly 2,000 customers to balance its budget. The Georgia municipal utilities that ProPublica surveyed earn, on average, about 40% of their total revenue from providing electricity, though some individual cities’ percentages in recent years range from less than 20% to more than 60%. Local officials use that money to subsidize the costs of running their governments. They also use it to offset discounted power to large companies that set up shop in their cities. Griffin, for example, offers new businesses up to a 30% discount on utility rates for their first three years of operation.

Meanwhile, some utility representatives told ProPublica they were not able to provide automatic discounts or even extended grace periods to residents who use electric-powered medical devices. Instead, they said, they offer help on a case-by-case basis and encourage customers to take personal responsibility for paying their bills. Some cities, like Albany in southwest Georgia, recommend that customers with electric-powered medical devices acquire additional batteries or costly backup options such as a generator. Flint Energies, in central Georgia, does not have an official policy on disconnections for people with medical devices but provides a “courtesy call” to warn each customer that they might want to relocate to a place with electricity, such as a relative’s house, “when all options have been exhausted and a disconnection is unavoidable.”

Several smaller utilities offer advanced pay programs, which operate like a prepaid debit card — and allow a power company to immediately cut off power once a customer has reached their allotted amount of electricity. The utilities often market these plans to low-income customers as a way to help them avoid using more electricity than they can afford. But energy and utility law experts cite studies showing these programs can result in more exorbitant fees and more frequent disconnections than regular payment plans. Some utilities refuse to allow customers on prepaid plans to enter into payment plans, leaving them with limited options if they run out of money for electricity.

Coastal Electric Cooperative’s Bolton said the utility helps seriously ill customers facing disconnection pay bills with one-time donations from an emergency fund called “Helping Hands,” stocked by employees’ voluntary contributions. “That’s kind of an example of having policies that fit the people that you serve, and maybe not trying to be so big that you just have to have a uniform cookie cutter policy for everybody,” he said.

State Sen. Frank Ginn, a Republican who has led two legislative committees that oversee power companies, said smaller utilities work best when they regulate themselves. A former employee of smaller Georgia utilities, he has pushed for reduced state regulation of cities on a number of issues, arguing that such regulation ties the hands of local leaders and raises costs for residents. “We have somebody that’s just looking after the public, and that’s the elected officials,” he said.

Ginn said residents should advocate for themselves with their local elected leaders before reaching the point of being disconnected multiple times. “I guarantee you, if they were on top of the communications better, there would probably be a much better outcome,” he said.

On a chilly morning this past December, Marsden walked into City Hall, hopeful that Griffin was ready to change. After years of Marsden questioning officials, filing open records requests and writing formal complaints, the city was now unveiling proposed changes to its disconnection policy for the first time since she moved there. But as she sat in the audience, Marsden realized that the changes proposed were limited for seriously ill customers. The city was considering only an additional one-day extension for those customers to pay before getting disconnected, as well as a requirement for officials to “attempt to call” customers before disconnecting them.

After the meeting, Marsden approached one of the utility’s staff members to lobby for more protections but secured no promises to strengthen the proposal.

The overall proposal fell short of the best practices experts have identified for utilities seeking to protect seriously ill customers. A report published by the NCLC recommended that utilities give seriously ill customers at least 30 days to pay their bills before being disconnected, with the ability to have their payment period extended, and inform those customers ahead of time if they qualify for the protections.

That night, Marsden had one more chance to convince elected officials. During public comments at the city commission meeting, she urged her elected officials to consider something she’d recently learned through her ongoing research: Other utilities serving residents in Spalding County — where Griffin is located — had provided customers with more time to pay bills before being disconnected.

“I don’t know if you understand how embarrassing it is just to say, ‘I’ve been disconnected four or five times,’” Marsden said. But she said she was willing to share her story “to make sure that we have policies in place, that we’re going to look out for people and that we’re going to protect each other.”

Hollberg, a local insurance agent who serves as Griffin’s mayor, pushed back against Marsden’s plea. He said at the meeting that Griffin once used to lose around $3 million in uncollected bills each year. After cracking down on customers who hadn’t paid, the city now had a tenth that much in delinquent collections, he said. As Hollberg saw it, providing the extra accommodations sought by Marsden — even to the tiny fraction of Griffin’s customers who were seriously ill and facing economic hardship — went against what he believed were his “financial responsibilities” as an elected official.

Hollberg then called for a vote to approve the limited proposal. As Marsden watched from the front row, she strained to maintain her composure. She had fought hard for protections for herself and other Griffin residents and followed all the rules for public input, only to end up barely better off than where she started.

Within seconds, the proposal unanimously passed.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Max Blau and Aliyya Swaby.

Photo by Chad Stembridge

Let me start this journey with my feet on my farm. When people visit it, I notice three main responses. One is an unbidden enthusiasm for the rural paradise we’ve created, the beauty of the place, and our great good fortune in avoiding the rat race and producing honest food from the land. Sometimes, the words are spoken, and sometimes, I only see it in their eyes, but the sentiment that usually accompanies it is: “This is great. I wish I could do something like this, but I can’t because…”

The second response takes in our rustic accommodation, the compost toilets, the rows of hard-won vegetable beds, the toolshed speaking of the work to be done, and the reek of manure and compost with a kind of recoiling pity. It seems to say: “You went to graduate school and got a well-paid job. Then this. How did it go so wrong?” Or the more actively disdainful: “Each to their own. But nobody wants to farm anymore. All that backbreaking work!”

The third response is that of the harsher critic, whose gaze homes in on specifics—the tractor in the yard, the photovoltaic panels on the roof, the tilled beds in some of the gardens. “Look how tied in you are to the global fossil fuel economy and its cash nexus.” This critique comes from both sides of the green divide. “You haven’t properly escaped and found a truly natural way of life,” says one side. “You talk about sustainability, but you’re no better than the rest of us. Besides, small farms like this can’t feed the world,” says the other.

Small farms like this can feed the world, and, in the long run, it may only be small farms like this that can. But criticisms must be addressed—the compromises with the status quo, the low prestige, and the toil associated with an agrarian life, as well as the global flight from the land. One thing that encourages me is that, of the three responses I mentioned above, the first seems the commonest—it simply isn’t true that nobody wants to farm.

But people aren’t willing to farm under just any circumstances. Too often, farming is still a life of unrewarded toil, not because that’s intrinsically how it has to be but because farming is, as it were, the engine room of every society—including our present ones—where the harsh realities and dirty secrets of how it achieves its apparently effortless motion are locked away below decks. They need to be unlocked and shared more widely. But for now, my visitors who say, “I can’t because…” are correct. A congenial small farm life is a viable option for few—not for the massed ranks of the employed, unemployed, or underemployed in the world’s cityscapes, and not for its multitudes of rural poor, who can scarcely make a living from the land. But in both cases, the dream of the small farm lives on, and that’s an important place to start.

Of course, it’s only a place to start, and a sketchy one at that. Notions of the agrarian good life are commonplace around the world, but often, they figure as little more than bucolic symbols, empty of pragmatic content. They seem to lack the power of the urban case for supremacy, which has deep historical roots. City, citizenship, civilization, and civility: so much that we value about our world shares an urban etymology.

But if we want to build good lives on lasting foundations for the future, the time has come to abandon the unilluminating oppositions of city versus country and factory versus farm, as well as associated oppositions like progress versus backwardness.

Regrettably, that’s not how public debate seems to be going. There’s a veritable industry of opinion formers laying their bets only on the first half of those dualities and exhorting us to be “optimistic” about a future presented as urban, capital-forming, high-tech, and non-agrarian. This neo-optimist or progress literature often invokes recurrent myths of human technological problem-solving as an inspiration for transcending present problems.

Take, for example, London’s Great Horse Manure Crisis in the 1890s, where it’s said that people feared the proliferation of horses would bury the streets under their feces, only to find horses were soon displaced by motor vehicles. Or take the idea that fossil fuels saved the whales when kerosene-burning lamps replaced demand for whale oil.

I call these myths partly in the everyday sense that they’re untrue. There never was a Great Horse Manure Crisis in the 1890s. And the industrialized whaling of the 20th century powered by fossil fuels put whales in danger. But they’re also myths in the more profound sense that they’re mystifying and oversimplifying stories that reveal cultural self-conceptions. Our modern culture’s self-conception revealed in these myths is that our problems are discrete, technical ones with one-shot solutions.

These stories are mystifying because they tell tales of fossil fuel-based solutions to predicaments in the past at a point in our current history when fossil fuels present us with problems for which there are no apparent solutions. Right now, we need more than banal assertions that someone’s bound to think of something. And they’re oversimplifying because human capacities for technical innovation aren’t in doubt. What’s in doubt is the human capacity to find purely technical solutions for many current economic, political, cultural, ecological, biological, and geophysical problems with complex, interrelated feedback loops exhibiting imperfect information in real-time.

We need a different narrative that’s less impressed with techno-fixes or dominant notions of civilizational progress. I don’t deny that our contemporary civilization has its successes. But it has its failures, too. I see it in the eyes of those visitors to my farm—who, in material terms, must surely count among the wealthiest people in the world—which betray a life diminished, trammeled by too many of the wrong kinds of obligations. More importantly, I see it in the fact that the world we live in today is just about the most unequal one ever, where nearly 800 million people are undernourished, about as many as the estimated 800 million population of the entire planet in 1750 at the dawn of the modern age.

These undernourished people haven’t missed out on progress but, in large measure, are its victims. If global industrial civilization ever could help the poor and malnourished people of the world to achieve the standard of living we experience in the richer countries, the chances of it doing so now have been extinguished in the face of the numerous internal and external threats that have emerged globally during the questionable march of modernization. So I’d counter the neo-optimist view that the world’s problems can be solved with high-tech fixes delivered by the reigning capitalist economy, it cannot be solved with pessimism but requires an alternative optimism—an optimism that this reigning economy won’t endure much longer and will be succeeded by something that offers a better future.

The better future is a small farm future. I’m not completely optimistic that it’s the future we or our descendants will see. Still, I think it’s our best shot at creating future societies that are tolerably sustainable in ecological terms and fulfilling in nutritional and psychosocial terms. Now is a critical moment in global politics where we might start delivering that future but also where more troubling outcomes threaten us. What might a small farm future look like? How might we get there?

The small farm isn’t a panacea, but what a politics geared around it can offer—what, perhaps, at least some of the visitors who come to our farm can glimpse in outline—is the possibility of personal autonomy, spiritual fulfillment, community connectedness, purposeful work, and ecological conviviality. Relatively few farmers, past or present, have enjoyed these fine things. Throughout the world, there are long and complex histories by which people have been both yoked unwillingly to the land and divested unwillingly from it in ways that are misrepresented when we talk of agricultural “improvement” or progressive “freedom” from agricultural toil. These improvements haven’t been for everyone; the freedom hasn’t been equally shared, and the progress has landed us in a whole raft of other problems that we must now try to overcome. And none of it was preordained.

That’s why it’s urgent at this point in history to think about a small farm future. Taking each of the three words in reverse order, we need to think about the future because it’s clear that present ways of doing politics, economics, and agriculture in much of the world are reaching the end of the line. Wise authors avoid speculating on future events because time usually makes their words look foolish, but such dignity isn’t a luxury our generation can afford.

We need to start imagining another world into being right now.

Modern thinkers have coined numerous terms for how we live to distinguish it from the past: the affluent society, the effluent society, industrial society, postindustrial society, Industria, consumer society, postmodern society, the information society, and the virtual society. These all capture something significant about our times, but they too easily allow us to forget that our modern societies are agrarian societies, just like almost all other human societies over the past few thousand years.

Humanity today relies heavily on just three crops—wheat, rice, and maize—all of which had been domesticated by about 7,000 BCE and are still primarily grown using techniques having basic outlines that would be instantly recognizable to any ancient farmer. Despite the recent hype over industrially cultured nutrients, our future is probably a farm future.

Computers have millions of times more processing power than the ones available in the 1970s. In contrast, average global wheat yields are less than nine times higher than those achieved in the Roman Empire. In dimensions that matter most to our continued existence, we’re less distant from our ancient counterparts than we sometimes think. The agricultural improvements we’ve achieved since those times have often come through processes that draw down on non-renewable energy sources, soil, and water while imperiling climate and ecological stability.

Whether we farm or not individually, almost all of us ultimately are farming people. In fact, there are more farmers today by formal definition—around 2 billion—than at almost any point in history. There are good farmers and bad farmers. The best ones learn to produce what’s needed with a minimum of effort without compromising the possibilities of their successors doing the same or losing sight of their obligations as members of communities. It’s about time we started trying to tell the story of our world from their perspective—not a story of how we transcended agriculture (because we never did), but of how we might transfigure it—and ourselves—to deal with the problems we now face.

This excerpt is from Chris Smaje’s book, A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2020), and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. It was adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post Why Small Farming Is Essential for Creating a Sustainable Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Smaje.

"Japan is determined to support Ukraine so that peace can return to Ukraine," Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said during a surprise visit to Kyiv, becoming the first official foreign visitor for 2024.

"I can feel how tense the situation in Ukraine is now," she told a news conference -- held in a shelter due to an air-raid alert in the capital at the time -- alongside her Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.

"I once again strongly condemn Russia's missile and drone attacks, particularly on New Year's Day," she added, while also saying Japan would provide an additional $37 million to a NATO trust fund to help purchase drone-detection systems.

The Japanese diplomat also visited Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian forces are blamed for a civilian massacre in 2022, stating she was "shocked" by what occurred there.

In a Telegram post, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal thanked "Japan for its comprehensive support, as well as significant humanitarian and financial assistance."

In particular, he cited Tokyo's "decision to allocate $1 billion for humanitarian projects and reconstruction with its readiness to increase this amount to $4.5 billion through the mechanisms of international institutions."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Meanwhile, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told a Stockholm defense conference that the main goal of the country’s foreign policy efforts in the coming years will be to support Kyiv.

“Sweden’s military, political, and economic support for Ukraine remains the Swedish government’s main foreign policy task in the coming years,” he posted on social media during the event.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking via video link, told the conference that the battlefield in his country was currently stable but that he remained confident Russia could be defeated.

"Even Russia can be brought back within the framework of international law. Its aggression can be defeated," he said.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive last summer largely failed to shift the front line, giving confidence to the Kremlin’s forces, especially as further Western aid is in question.

Ukraine has pleaded with its Western allies to keep supplying it with air defense weapons, along with other weapons necessary to defeat the invasion that began in February 2022.

U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed a national-security spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, but it has been blocked by Republican lawmakers who insist Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress address border security.

Zelenskiy also urged fellow European nations to join Ukraine in developing joint weapons-production capabilities so that the continent is able to "preserve itself" in the face of any future crises.

"Two years of this war have proven that Europe needs its own sufficient arsenal for the defense of freedom, its own capabilities to ensure defense," he said.

Overnight, Ukrainian officials said Russia launched 28 drones and three cruise missiles, and 12 people were wounded by a drone attack in the central city of Dnipro.

Though smaller in scale than other recent assaults, the January 7 aerial attack was the latest indication that Russia has no intention of stopping its targeting of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, often far from the front lines.

In a post to Telegram, Ukraine’s air force claimed that air defenses destroyed 21 of the 28 drones, which mainly targeted locations in the south and east of Ukraine.

"The enemy is shifting the focus of attack to the frontline territories: the Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions were attacked by drones," air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat told Ukrainian TV.

Russia made no immediate comment on the attack.

In the southern city of Kherson, meanwhile, Russian shelling from across the Dnieper River left at least two people dead, officials said.

In the past few months, Ukrainian forces have moved across the Dnieper, setting up a small bridgehead in villages on the river's eastern banks, upriver from Kherson. The effort to establish a larger foothold there, however, has faltered, with Russian troops pinning the Ukrainians down, and keeping them from moving heavier equipment over.

Over the past two weeks, Russia has fired nearly 300 missiles and more than 200 drones at targets in Ukraine, as part of an effort to terrorize the civilian population and undermine morale. On December 29, more than 120 Russian missiles were launched at cities across Ukraine, killing at least 44 people, including 30 in Kyiv alone.

Ukraine’s air defenses have improved markedly since the months following Russia’s mass invasion in February 2022. At least five Western-supplied Patriot missile batteries, along with smaller systems like German-made Gepard and the French-manufactured SAMP/T, have also improved Ukraine’s ability to repel Russian drones and missiles.

Last week, U.S. officials said that Russia had begun using North Korean-supplied ballistic missiles as part of its aerial attacks on Ukrainian sites.

Inside Russia, authorities in Belgorod said dozens of residents have been evacuated to areas farther from the Ukrainian border.

“On behalf of regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, we met the first Belgorod residents who decided to move to a safer place. More than 100 people were placed in our temporary accommodation centers,” Andrei Chesnokov, head of the Stary Oskol district, about 115 kilometers from Belgorod, wrote in Telegram post.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, Reuters, and AP

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

"Japan is determined to support Ukraine so that peace can return to Ukraine," Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said during a surprise visit to Kyiv, becoming the first official foreign visitor for 2024.

"I can feel how tense the situation in Ukraine is now," she told a news conference -- held in a shelter due to an air-raid alert in the capital at the time -- alongside her Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.

"I once again strongly condemn Russia's missile and drone attacks, particularly on New Year's Day," she added, while also saying Japan would provide an additional $37 million to a NATO trust fund to help purchase drone-detection systems.

The Japanese diplomat also visited Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian forces are blamed for a civilian massacre in 2022, stating she was "shocked" by what occurred there.

In a Telegram post, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal thanked "Japan for its comprehensive support, as well as significant humanitarian and financial assistance."

In particular, he cited Tokyo's "decision to allocate $1 billion for humanitarian projects and reconstruction with its readiness to increase this amount to $4.5 billion through the mechanisms of international institutions."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Meanwhile, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told a Stockholm defense conference that the main goal of the country’s foreign policy efforts in the coming years will be to support Kyiv.

“Sweden’s military, political, and economic support for Ukraine remains the Swedish government’s main foreign policy task in the coming years,” he posted on social media during the event.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking via video link, told the conference that the battlefield in his country was currently stable but that he remained confident Russia could be defeated.

"Even Russia can be brought back within the framework of international law. Its aggression can be defeated," he said.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive last summer largely failed to shift the front line, giving confidence to the Kremlin’s forces, especially as further Western aid is in question.

Ukraine has pleaded with its Western allies to keep supplying it with air defense weapons, along with other weapons necessary to defeat the invasion that began in February 2022.

U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed a national-security spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, but it has been blocked by Republican lawmakers who insist Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress address border security.

Zelenskiy also urged fellow European nations to join Ukraine in developing joint weapons-production capabilities so that the continent is able to "preserve itself" in the face of any future crises.

"Two years of this war have proven that Europe needs its own sufficient arsenal for the defense of freedom, its own capabilities to ensure defense," he said.

Overnight, Ukrainian officials said Russia launched 28 drones and three cruise missiles, and 12 people were wounded by a drone attack in the central city of Dnipro.

Though smaller in scale than other recent assaults, the January 7 aerial attack was the latest indication that Russia has no intention of stopping its targeting of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, often far from the front lines.

In a post to Telegram, Ukraine’s air force claimed that air defenses destroyed 21 of the 28 drones, which mainly targeted locations in the south and east of Ukraine.

"The enemy is shifting the focus of attack to the frontline territories: the Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions were attacked by drones," air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat told Ukrainian TV.

Russia made no immediate comment on the attack.

In the southern city of Kherson, meanwhile, Russian shelling from across the Dnieper River left at least two people dead, officials said.

In the past few months, Ukrainian forces have moved across the Dnieper, setting up a small bridgehead in villages on the river's eastern banks, upriver from Kherson. The effort to establish a larger foothold there, however, has faltered, with Russian troops pinning the Ukrainians down, and keeping them from moving heavier equipment over.

Over the past two weeks, Russia has fired nearly 300 missiles and more than 200 drones at targets in Ukraine, as part of an effort to terrorize the civilian population and undermine morale. On December 29, more than 120 Russian missiles were launched at cities across Ukraine, killing at least 44 people, including 30 in Kyiv alone.

Ukraine’s air defenses have improved markedly since the months following Russia’s mass invasion in February 2022. At least five Western-supplied Patriot missile batteries, along with smaller systems like German-made Gepard and the French-manufactured SAMP/T, have also improved Ukraine’s ability to repel Russian drones and missiles.

Last week, U.S. officials said that Russia had begun using North Korean-supplied ballistic missiles as part of its aerial attacks on Ukrainian sites.

Inside Russia, authorities in Belgorod said dozens of residents have been evacuated to areas farther from the Ukrainian border.

“On behalf of regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, we met the first Belgorod residents who decided to move to a safer place. More than 100 people were placed in our temporary accommodation centers,” Andrei Chesnokov, head of the Stary Oskol district, about 115 kilometers from Belgorod, wrote in Telegram post.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, Reuters, and AP

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

Over the past six months, authorities have been conducting a dragnet of Vietnam’s activist community, “inviting” people to police stations for warnings, forcing them to meet with security officers at restaurants and cafes, and even arresting them in their homes – as was the case with YouTuber Phan Van Bach on Dec. 29.

In conversations with RFA Vietnamese, three rights campaigners in Vietnam who asked to be identified only by their first initial, citing security concerns, said they had been summoned many times over the past few months by security officers who questioned them about their activities – some of which had occurred several years earlier.

Mr. L, a resident of the capital Hanoi, said he had been “invited” for conversations with police twice in the second half of 2023 alone.

“They claimed they had already arrested all the ‘prominent’ activists and bluntly said that it was time to catch the ‘small fish,’” he said. “After threatening me in that way, they started using psycho tactics, advising me that I should ‘think about [the safety of] my family.’”

Mr. L said that after the second warning, he had “stopped all activities,” fearing that he could end up detained, or worse.

“If I am arrested now, my family would fall apart,” he said.

Besides him, Mr. L said, “almost everyone” who had previously spoken out about Vietnam’s socio-political issues had been told to meet with security forces.

“They began to check on the remaining people – even those who used to post stories online or take part in [pro-democracy and human rights] activities,” he said. “All were invited.”

Mr. L said anyone using YouTube to post videos about sensitive topics was told to stop or face arrest, and that if police were repeatedly ignored after issuing a summons, “they will go straight to that person’s home [to arrest them].”

Targeted ‘whether active or not’

Another activist, who gave his name as Mr. H, told RFA of a similar situation in Vietnam’s commercial capital, Ho Chi Minh City.

He said that while he had refrained from taking part in pro-democracy and human rights activities or criticizing the government for two to three years, he had recently been invited to three separate meetings with police.

“They grilled me about things I had done in the past,” he said, adding that police had also asked him about his Facebook account, as well as foreign media reports about his activities.

“They threatened me, saying my file was ‘completed’ and that they could imprison me at their discretion at any time,” Mr. H said. “I heard that there is currently a campaign underway to arrest all people who have engaged in any previous activism, regardless of whether they are still active or not.”

Mr. B, another human rights activist in Ho Chi Minh City, described a similar situation, noting that even though YouTuber Phan Van Bach had ceased activities in recent years, “they did not spare him.”

“Many [who were targeted] were confused, as they had quit [activism] but were still arrested,” he said.

Eradicating the democratic movement

Commenting on the current situation of activists in Vietnam, rights researcher Minh Trang suggested that Vietnam’s security forces “no longer differentiate between active and inactive activists.”

She said that tactics used by authorities that include “reminding, warning and threatening” activists to stop appear to be working.

“All the prominent activists in Vietnam have been arrested or migrated to another country to live,” she said. “Therefore, the authorities are inviting those who are left to meetings to collect information, create records, and make new arrests. Their goal is to eradicate the democratic movement and civil society activities in Vietnam.”

Nguyen Tien Trung, an activist who authorities sought to arrest throughout 2023 before he fled to Germany as a refugee in December, said the Communist Party wants to “hunt down and wipe out” political dissidents because they worry that global developments beyond their control could negatively affect Vietnam and “cause unrest” at any time.

“The government is afraid that when upheavals take place, and there is a democratic force waiting to take over the leadership, the people will stand up … and remove the totalitarian one-party regime,” he said.

He noted that the war in Ukraine could impact food and oil prices in Vietnam, while potential conflicts resulting from China’s territorial claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea could have profound political implications.

“The Communist Party itself gained power after the end of World War II amid a power grab in the country at that time,” he said. “Therefore, the authorities want to destroy all ‘sprouts and seedlings’ of the democratic leadership so that there is no opposition waiting to lead a popular revolution.”

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

More school uniforms are necessary because authorities are pushing development of STEM education nationwide, and new schools to train new teachers are opening in each province. Students attending the new schools must wear uniforms that match their peers, and there simply are not enough to go around.

One such factory was completed in October in the northeastern port city of Chongjin.

“It is true that  the construction of a school uniform factory is a measure for students, but some residents are anxious,” a resident of Chongjin’s surrounding North Hamgyong province told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

“There are many people in Chongjin who make money by making various clothes using Chinese fabric,” she said. "They hire several women to process clothes. It’s like running a small factory.”

North Korea had state-run clothing factories that produce school uniforms in the past, but following the 1994-1998 famine and economic collapse, many of these factories lacked the raw materials and labor necessary to make the uniforms. 

Since that era, rapid inflation meant that most families could not survive on the salary provided by government-assigned jobs, so many North Korean families had to start businesses trading goods and services in the local marketplace. These days, most families make their livelihood this way.

With school uniforms no longer being pumped out in factories, entrepreneurial residents took it upon themselves to fill the void in the market.

But now the government’s new factories threaten to kill their market share.

Anxious outlook

It isn’t only the small business owners that are worried about the new factories. Their workers are also afraid.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, imported fabrics and zippers from China were hard to come by, and the uniform makers had to temporarily shut down their operations.

“Women who used to work steadily [making uniforms] have been unable to make money because their work has stopped for the past three years when the border was blocked,” the resident said. “They are afraid of the completion of the school uniform factory.” 

The new factories will make more than only uniforms. So people making other kinds of cloth goods are also worried, the resident said.

“Last year, the Chongjin Bag Factory was also opened,” she said. “Many people will lose their livelihood due to the school uniform factory and the bag factory.”

In addition to the Chongjin uniform factory, another school uniform factory was recently completed in the city of Rason, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away.

“They were built by the province itself without central support,” a resident there told RFA. “Clothes processing equipment, such as cutting machines, sewing machines, and ironing machines, were brought in from China by the provincial trade bureau.”

He said that the province rushed to open these factories and they are not yet completely finished. 

“This is because the completion is delayed compared to other provinces,” he said. “Everything is a regional competition.”

Clothing produced by the state-run factories is generally lower quality, so residents may still want to buy their uniforms from the private makers, the he said.

In April, at the start of the school year, students were given factory-made uniforms said to be gifts from the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, the second resident said.

“[They] looked good, but the quality was pathetic,” he said. "Although there are school uniforms given by the government, there are many parents whose children are begging them to buy the nicer school uniforms sold at the market,” the source pointed out.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahn Chang Gyu for RFA Korean.

Image by Ömer Yıldız.

Did you know that there was an international conference held in France on November 9 under the title ‘International Humanitarian Conference for Gaza’s Civilian Population’?

According to the French foreign ministry website, the conference “involved states, main donors, international organizations and NGOs active in Gaza” with the declared objective of promoting “compliance with international humanitarian law, the protection of civilians and humanitarian staff, and the strengthening of humanitarian access”.

If you did not know, we do not blame you. The conference, after all, was meant to distract from the Israeli genocide in Gaza, by giving the impression that Western governments still have the political power to control or, at least, influence the future of Gaza.

As French President Emmanuel Macron was preaching about international and humanitarian laws, we were busy looking elsewhere.

Backed by unhinged US administration and corporate media since October 7, Israel has also wanted us to look their way.

To ensure our gaze remained fixated on Tel Aviv’s political priorities, they fabricated an unprecedented amount of lies; those lies, with time, proved to be part of a centralized Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at lessening the impact of Israel’s military defeat on the collective Israeli psyche.

Additionally, Israel’s hasbara masters wanted to keep feeding already biased Western media with all the needed negative content to wage a defamation war against Palestinians, Gaza and its Resistance.

Not only did Israeli hasbara backfire, but it also showed how low Israel is willing to sink to distract from its genocide in Gaza. By feeding into an existing racist narrative in mainstream media about the supposed savagery and the barbarity of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Israel wanted to pose as the protector of Western civilization and democracy.

This false construct, with time, began falling apart and, again, we looked elsewhere in our search for answers. We looked at Gaza itself, at the atrocities committed by Israel at every hospital, school and neighborhood.

We looked at the lifeless bodies of hundreds, in fact thousands, of Palestinian children, women and civilians, strewn in every street corner, under rubble, even on their own hospital beds.

We looked at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Al-Fakhoura School and Nuseirat Refugee camp, Al-Fallujah, Jabaliya, Khan Yunis and every inch of Gaza that has been bombed, at times repeatedly, since October 7.

The Palestinians themselves were pointing us to where we should be looking – in fact, to where we should have always been looking.

Relentlessly and with unweakened resolve, ordinary people, often weeping, would point at mass graves, at their dead children in their arms, at mutilated bodies of children in hospital morgues, in parking lots, in the streets, and they would say “Look”, “Look what Israel is doing to us”, “Look what the Nazis have done to our children”, and so on.

The word ‘look’, here, is key. When they say ‘look’, they actually mean look, understand, help, do something, anything.

But Palestinian Resistance on the ground, the only actual defenders of those civilians, however uncomfortable this realization makes some of us feel, was also telling us to look, and we did.

In this case, they did not make the announcement ‘Look’ or ‘Shufu’ out loud. Instead, they simply used a small, red triangle, the symbolism of which is likely to influence a generation of Palestinians and millions of youth around the world.

This small, red triangle started as a functional tool in well-produced videos released by the Al-Qassam Brigades, urging us to focus on a specific point in the videos documenting their daily operations against invading Israeli forces.

Amid massive ruins, half-standing buildings, dust and smoke, a small, red triangle would finally appear within this obvious context. To understand the function of this triangle, we needed to understand the story behind it, thus explaining, without a single word, why Palestinians resist.

The equation then becomes simple to understand: Israeli destruction, red triangle, explosion – followed by triumphant shouts of ‘God is great’, ‘Palestine will be free’, and ‘The invaders will be defeated’.

With time, that functionality of the red triangle was transformed to even greater meaning, deeper symbolism.

As millions of people continued to protest Israeli atrocities in Gaza, many carried banners and flags of the red triangle. For them, this symbol not only represented more than Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, but the need for action everywhere else.

Some suggested that the symbolism of the red triangle was inspired by the red triangle of the Palestinian flag, thus arguing that that specific symbol was chosen to purposely delineate a greater national symbol.

In truth, the origins of the small, red triangle do not matter. Sure, maybe it was intended to represent something or maybe it was simply a technical choice made by a young Palestinian tech-savvy fighter, to simply let us know where we needed to look.

What truly matters, however, are the deeper meanings of all of this.

For years – in fact decades – Palestinians have been urging us to look: at their lives under Israeli occupation and apartheid; at the destruction of their homes and orchards, confiscated or stolen by the Israeli military and illegal Jewish settlers; at the fate of their prisoners, thousands of them, languishing in Israeli prisons, simply for resisting the Israeli military occupation; at the Israeli siege on Gaza, and that perpetual episode of suffering and pain, which deprived over two million people of their most basic rights; and at so much more.

Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, many of us did not look.

Thanks to the courage of the Palestinians themselves, and to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, we are finally looking, and we are looking precisely where Palestinians want us to look.

US President Joe Biden could now say whatever he wants in defense of Israel; Macron could hold ten more conferences and pretend to speak on behalf of the international community regarding the Gaza holocaust; and Israel could fabricate a million more lies. But we refuse to look at any of them. We refuse to engage with any of them. Their words, or action or inaction are no longer a priority for us.

Only the Palestinian political discourse matters. Only Palestinian freedom is a priority. Only Palestinian Resistance can push back the Israeli invaders. In short, the priorities of the oppressed, not the oppressor, should matter to all of us.

Indeed, it is about time for the Palestinian voice to reclaim its full centrality in the story of oppression and resistance. So, please, from now on, look, listen and act, in whichever capacity possible. And if you ever struggle in deciphering the difference between Palestinian priorities and all others, simply look for that small, red triangle. It will guide you.

The post One Small, Red Triangle: Palestine, We Are Finally Looking  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

A third round of talks over the global plastics treaty ended in frustration this weekend, as so-called “low-ambition” countries hindered progress by litigating the definition of basic terms like “plastics” and “life cycle.” Observers noted some signs of progress — like growing support for measures to address harmful chemicals that are commonly added to plastics. However, negotiators now have no formal work plan for the five months leading up to the next round of discussions and are significantly behind schedule, according to several advocacy groups that Grist spoke with.

“These negotiations have so far failed to deliver on their promise … to advance a strong, binding plastics treaty that the world desperately needs,” said Ana Rocha, global plastics policy director for the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, in a statement. Another nonprofit, the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a press release that without a “rapid course correction,” the treaty would “succumb to inertia and eventual disaster.”

Last week’s talks were part of a process that’s been ongoing since March 2022, when countries agreed to craft a treaty to “end plastic pollution” by addressing its entire life cycle. The first two rounds of discussions — conducted by an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, or INC, composed of representatives from each country — were dominated by broad and often procedural conversations, with lots of stalling from oil-producing countries. 

This latest session, held at the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, was the first time delegates had a so-called “zero draft” to spar over: basically, a laundry list of potential definitions, objectives, and other considerations for the final agreement, which countries agreed to have ready by the end of next year. Hopes were high that delegates would read through the draft together, make some recommendations, and give the secretariat a mandate to prepare an official first draft by the beginning of the fourth — and penultimate — negotiating committee session in April.

That’s not what happened.

From the outset, a small group of oil-exporting countries including Russia and Saudi Arabia argued that the zero draft did not reflect all countries’ perspectives and therefore could not serve as the basis for negotiations. To assuage these concerns, the secretariat allowed countries to submit some 500 additional proposals, causing the draft to more than triple in length from its original 31 pages. This process was meant to build trust among negotiators — now, there would be no absolutely no way for countries to say their voice hadn’t been heard. 

Bjorn Beeler, general manager and international coordinator for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, said this was a positive outcome: “More countries own more of the text,” he said, and discussions around different submissions helped further negotiators’ understanding of complex issues. Representatives from the International Alliance of Waste Pickers — a group representing the more than 20 million informal workers who collect and sell recyclable trash, mostly in the developing world — were also able to use this process to suggest more language about a “just transition” for these workers.  

Some observers, however, said many of the new submissions to the zero draft were unproductive. 

“‘Repetitive’ is a light way to say it,” Rocha told Grist. “Ninety percent of them were watering down the content” of the text. 

Rocha said the flood of submissions forestalled more important discussions on the treaty’s substance. Rather than moving onto a new draft, the secretariat is now planning to present an updated version of the zero draft ahead of the INC’s fourth meeting.

Adding to the disorder, member states on Sunday ran out of time to reach an agreement on “intersessional work” — the important discussions that happen between negotiating sessions. Because there are only two week-long INC meetings remaining before a final draft is due at the end of next year, this intersessional work is considered critical for progress on issues like what to do about hazardous chemicals and microplastics, and how to finance the treaty.

Jacob Kean-Hammerson, an ocean campaigner for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, said discussions among negotiators will still happen, but they will now be on a strictly informal, voluntary basis. “It’s not a good outcome,” he said, but it wasn’t an accident: “What we saw is just a few countries holding the process to ransom, and not wanting anything out of this treaty.”

Perhaps the biggest sticking point was over the scope of the agreement — whether it should limit plastic production or focus mostly on cleaning up the oceans and preventing litter. Even though countries already agreed at the beginning of the treaty process to address plastics’ “full life cycle” — a term that traditionally refers to everything from production to disposal — oil-producing countries have repeatedly argued for a narrower interpretation of that mandate. This time, members of a loosely defined “group of like-minded countries” — which includes Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — said the plastics life cycle should only begin when a product is disposed of.

“It makes no logical sense,” Beeler said. To him, it looks like a desperate scramble from oil-producing countries to undo the mandate they already agreed to in March 2022, in response to proposals that are more ambitious than they may have expected. “I don’t think Saudi Arabia or Russia would have ever imagined 18 months ago that we’d actually be looking at controls on polymers.”

Some environmental advocates have also resisted the phrase “life cycle,” but for different reasons: They say it implies a circular life cycle for plastics, in which products can be turned back into new items in an infinite loop. In reality, only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled globally, and most products can only be recycled a few times before they have to be discarded.

Still, “life cycle” is in the original treaty resolution — and experts told Grist it would be very difficult to remove it.

A majority of countries have expressed support for some sort of mechanism to address plastic production. But the structure of the INC meetings has given outsize power to countries who refuse to negotiate in good faith. At present, all decision-making has to happen by consensus rather than a majority vote, making obstructionism relatively straightforward. Some observers described oil-producing countries’ delegates as “intransigent.”

With just two more meetings and a little over a year left before a final draft of the treaty is due, some observers wondered whether more time will be needed. It’s unclear what kind of progress the so-called “high-ambition coalition” of countries will be able to make at future INC meetings without more cooperation from the oil-producing nations — especially on the critical issue of plastic production, which is expected to nearly triple by 2060, outpacing the capacity for waste collection services and recycling to keep up.

“Major plastic producers just don’t see a connection between plastic production and plastic pollution,” Beeler told Grist.

Beeler resisted some of the most pessimistic assessments of the INC meeting. Progress is going slower than many activists had hoped for, he said, but the plastics conversation in general has ramped up very fast and most countries still need time to develop their national positions.

To get resistant countries to engage at the next INC, he suggested that it might be helpful to steer the conversation toward reduced growth of the plastics sector. “It’s very hard to say you have to cap production,” Beeler said, especially to countries like Russia that are geopolitically isolated and dependent on fossil fuels. “We have to have a serious discussion about how we deescalate the rapid growth of plastic production.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Small victories and major frustrations mark latest round of plastics treaty negotiations on Nov 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

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On a below-freezing morning in March 2013, Israel Lepe Quezada was crushed to death while working on a dairy farm in northeast Wisconsin. The farm’s owner had found Lepe pinned between the engine compartment and hydraulic arms of a forklift-like machine.

Almost six years later, Blas Espinoza Cuahutzihua was killed when the arms of a skid-steer loader, another kind of farming vehicle, fell on him at the dairy farm where he worked near the Minnesota border. His last words, according to court documents, were to say goodbye to his family.

And one night in March of this year, Florencio Gómez Rodríguez drowned after he drove a skid steer into a 14-foot-deep pond filled with cow manure on a dairy farm where he worked.

When the daughter of the farm owner called 911, she told the dispatcher it was unlikely Gómez had survived. “Usually when you go down, you don’t normally come back up,” she said. “It’s thick.”

An autopsy found traces of manure in Gómez’s airway.

In all three cases, inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, went to the farms. And in all three cases, they left within an hour — without conducting investigations into the deaths.

The inspectors concluded they couldn’t investigate because OSHA is banned from enforcing safety laws on farms with fewer than 11 workers unless they have employer-provided housing known as a “temporary labor camp.”

Since 2009, at least 17 workers, most of them immigrants, have died on Wisconsin dairy farms. Twelve of the deaths happened on farms with fewer than 11 workers. OSHA did not inspect eight of those 12, each time citing the small farms exemption.

Records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews show that the agency may have more power to open an investigation into these farms than even its own leaders seem to be aware of.

When Lepe, Espinoza and Gómez died, it’s unclear whether OSHA inspectors tried to determine if the farmers who employed them provided housing for their workers before deciding there wasn’t a temporary labor camp and leaving. Had the inspectors taken a slightly closer look, they might have learned that the farmers had readily talked with law enforcement officials about providing housing for their immigrant workers.

And if the inspectors had read OSHA’s own files, they would have known that the agency has repeatedly, though inconsistently, inspected small farms after concluding a housing arrangement was a temporary labor camp.

How OSHA interprets and applies its definition of a temporary labor camp — and whether it should consider dairy workers temporary when farms produce milk year-round — has significant implications for the safety of thousands of workers in one of America’s most dangerous industries.

It is the difference between workers’ deaths, injuries or safety complaints being investigated or ignored. Without OSHA inspections, no one ever determined whether the deaths of Lepe, Espinoza or Gómez could have been prevented.

“Nothing was investigated at all,” said Lepe’s sister, Enedina Lepe Quezada. “He died. His body was sent home. We buried him. And then there was silence.”

The three men — all undocumented immigrants from Mexico — died from well-known hazards in agriculture. In two of the deaths, workers were performing dangerous tasks that OSHA includes on its “Dairy Dozen,” a list that is supposed to help inspectors and farmers ensure that farms are safe workplaces.

“We need to do everything to prevent worker deaths,” said Amy Liebman, a chief program officer with the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network who focuses on worker health and safety. “Whether they are on a smaller farm or a bigger farm, the idea behind OSHA going out is to understand what happened and stop it from happening again.”

ProPublica asked OSHA to explain why the agency didn’t open an inspection after the most recent death, that of Gómez in the manure lagoon. Reporters also asked OSHA to clarify whether it continues to view employer-provided housing for immigrant workers as a basis for opening inspections on small farms.

OSHA officials declined interview requests but responded to some written questions. The agency first said that Gómez lived “in a different town and paid for his own housing” and that the farm he worked for did not provide housing for its workers. Reporters told the agency that interviews and law enforcement records showed that Gómez and other workers lived in a house down the road provided by the farm owner and that another worker lived in a trailer on the farm. In response, OSHA officials said that an inspector hadn’t found evidence of a temporary labor camp.

What OSHA calls a temporary labor camp has varied from case to case. The agency has said it wouldn’t consider employer-provided housing a temporary labor camp if the workers’ jobs were permanent. Yet OSHA case records from 2009 to as recently as spring 2022 show that the agency has repeatedly described immigrant or Hispanic dairy workers who lived in employer-provided housing as temporary workers.

ProPublica identified five cases — four deaths and one complaint — on small Wisconsin farms where OSHA said housing for immigrant workers constituted a temporary labor camp, giving it jurisdiction to open investigations.

Former OSHA officials said the agency’s scattered approach might be a byproduct of disorganization or shifting priorities in a large bureaucracy that’s responsible for inspecting hundreds of deaths in all kinds of workplaces each year. Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary at OSHA during the Obama administration, said he was “mystified” that the agency would inspect some small farms that housed immigrant workers but not others. “It is essential for OSHA to have a consistent and consistently applied policy especially when it comes to controversial issues like this,” he said.

This uncertainty creates challenges for dairy farm owners and their workers. Farmers are often unaware that OSHA can set foot on their farms, much less conduct multiday investigations of deaths or injuries. Lawyers and advocates for dairy workers say they don’t even bother calling OSHA when workers are killed or injured on smaller farms because they’re so used to the agency citing the small farms exemption.

Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said that “it would really open the door for a lot of protections for workers” if OSHA consistently inspected small dairy farms that provide housing to immigrant workers.

“If they are politically interested in doing something,” she added, “it looks like they have all the basis to do it.”

The small farms exemption — a limitation Congress has written into OSHA’s budget each year since 1976 — was intended to protect small family farms from government overreach. It’s so ingrained in American agriculture that many dairy farmers assume that OSHA won’t even try to go onto their property.

So when OSHA officials were notified in October 2009 that a worker had drowned in a manure lagoon on a dairy farm in western Wisconsin, they first had to determine whether the small farms exemption would apply.

OSHA inspectors quickly learned that Val-O-Mo Farm, the dairy farm where José Candelario Zacarías Rayón died, had just five workers apart from the farmer’s family members. Zacarías and three other immigrant workers lived in a trailer on the property. In their report, the inspectors dedicated more than a full page to explaining why that trailer counted as a temporary labor camp that would put the farm under the agency’s jurisdiction.

Though dairy work is year-round, Zacarías and the other workers’ status as immigrants made the employer-employee relationship a temporary one, the inspectors wrote. There is “no defined milking season,” they wrote, but workers are hired “with the understanding that they were offered employment” for the “duration of their own choosing and that they were able to come and go from the farm to return to Mexico to visit their families.”

OSHA inspectors wrote that the on-site housing helped ensure the farm always had workers on hand. The workers didn’t own cars and relied on family and friends to help them get food and other essentials. (Wisconsin bans undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, as ProPublica has previously reported.) There weren’t any nearby alternatives for housing, and workers weren’t charged rent, creating incentives to live on the farm. Inspectors also found that “Hispanic employees were provided little time to rest in between shifts and therefore living offsite, although technically allowed, was impractical to the Hispanic workforce.”

The housing arrangement at Val-O-Mo remains standard at dairy farms of all sizes in Wisconsin and other parts of the country. Nationally in 2019 about three-quarters of dairy farms provided housing or a housing allowance to their workers, according to a survey commissioned by a dairy industry association.

OSHA’s investigation found that a guardrail at the push-off platform to the approximately 7-foot-deep manure lagoon had fallen off or been removed several years earlier and had never been replaced.

The farm owners told OSHA they had often warned employees to be careful near the edge of the lagoon’s platform. According to OSHA’s inspection report, Steven Weinzirl, one of the owners, “stated that although he was not denying he personally was at fault,” he believed Zacarías knew what he was doing “since he had been performing the task for nearly two years.”

Weinzirl installed a new guardrail on the manure lagoon after Zacarías’ death, records show.

OSHA also found that Zacarías had worked about 40 hours in the three days leading up to his death, and that he “was in a state of fatigue.” What’s more, inspectors noted, it “was not uncommon for the Hispanic farmhands to perform off the clock work beyond the normal set schedule.”

Workers had also complained about the long hours to the local sheriff’s department when it investigated Zacarias’ death. (The drowning was ruled an accident.) One worker said Zacarías sometimes slept in the cattle stalls in the barn, “saving him the time from walking from the cattle barns back to the trailer house to be able to go to bed so he would be able to get more sleep,” according to the Dunn County sheriff’s report.

One of Zacarías’ nephews, who worked on a nearby dairy farm at the time, said he rarely saw his uncle because they both worked so much. “You work and you sleep,” he said in an interview.

OSHA issued citations to Val-O-Mo for nine safety violations. The agency has few rules that pertain specifically to agriculture, and none about manure lagoons. But OSHA used its catchall “general duty clause” to cite the farm for failing to protect its employees from a recognized danger likely to cause death or serious harm.

Months after OSHA opened its inspection, Weinzirl questioned why the agency considered the trailer a ”temporary labor camp,” records show. But he agreed to correct the safety violations on the farm and paid $4,320 in fines. He declined to comment for this story.

Zacarías was 31 when he died. He left behind a wife in Mexico, according to relatives.

People who study agricultural safety say OSHA inspections are important because they prompt farms to become safer for workers, farmers and their families. Inspectors interview workers about hazards and safety measures, such as whether they received training to operate machinery in a language they understand or if they were taught how to deal with dangerous chemicals. The inspections also show workers that there’s a government agency they can call with confidential safety complaints, though many are unlikely to do so for fear of getting fired or deported. There can also be ripple effects, as other farmers might take corrective actions on their own farms.

After Zacarías’ death at Val-O-Mo, OSHA began to pay more attention to Wisconsin’s dairy industry, which had undergone a dramatic transformation from mostly small, family-run farms to larger operations that required hired labor. Many of those workers were undocumented immigrants.

The agency launched a program dedicated to improving safety on dairy farms across the state. And OSHA continued to use the temporary labor camp provision, even if inconsistently, to investigate deaths from known hazards on small farms. In one case, a 17-year-old boy from Mexico was crushed to death while herding cows into an indoor corral on just his 10th day of work.

Dexter Covey, a former OSHA inspector who conducted some of those investigations, said he understood that many dairy workers were immigrants who traveled back and forth from Wisconsin to visit their families in Mexico. He said inspectors used a clear set of criteria to determine whether housing provided to immigrant workers would allow OSHA to open an inspection. They also interviewed farmers and workers about the housing.

“I don’t think they were trying to hide anything,” Covey told ProPublica.

But the work Covey and his colleagues did to investigate deaths on small farms with housing doesn’t appear to have been well-known to top OSHA officials, both in the Midwest and nationally.

John Newquist, a former assistant administrator for the Midwest region, said he wasn’t aware of those investigations until ProPublica shared a copy of one of the reports with him. Had he known about the investigations, Newquist said, he would have encouraged inspectors to look for worker housing so they could investigate deaths on small farms. He said the small farms exemption was a source of frustration for OSHA inspectors “because you get out there and you can’t do anything because it’s a family farm.”

Years after Newquist retired, one family challenged OSHA’s right to inspect their farm, and the dispute made it to top agency officials in the Midwest. Those officials were resolute about OSHA’s jurisdiction.

In 2017, OSHA received a complaint about an employee who had been injured by a cow on a small farm in northwest Wisconsin. When OSHA inspectors arrived, and in the months that followed, the Byl family said they thought their farm was exempt from inspections because it only had five workers, records show. They questioned whether the trailer they provided should be considered a temporary labor camp when workers weren’t required to live there. Plus, they said their employees weren’t temporary.

“My farm is a family affair and we are taking this to heart,” the Byls wrote to OSHA. “We had no idea we qualified under OSHA standards and we are working diligently to comply.”

The Byls asked the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and their congressional representative, Sean Duffy, to help them verify whether OSHA had jurisdiction over their farm. Both Duffy and the Farm Bureau wrote to OSHA on the Byls’ behalf. A Farm Bureau official even attended a meeting with OSHA and questioned its jurisdiction.

During that meeting, OSHA’s Eau Claire area director acknowledged the “grey or borderline issue surrounding the temporary labor camp definition” but maintained the agency had jurisdiction, records show. OSHA never determined whether a worker was actually injured and, in fact, identified a number of safety features on the farm, including 2-foot-high concrete barriers around the manure lagoon. Still, OSHA fined the farm $650 for its failure to provide workers with safety training or manuals for handling chemicals used on the job.

The Byls declined to comment. Duffy, a Republican who is no longer in office, did not respond to an interview request. A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation referred reporters to OSHA.

Even as OSHA investigated some deaths on small farms in Wisconsin that provided housing to immigrant workers, the agency didn’t investigate other farms with the same sort of housing. In some of these cases, records show, the farmers had spoken openly to law enforcement and medical examiner officials about the housing they provided their workers.

That’s what happened when Lepe died on a farm just outside of Green Bay on March 3, 2013. Records show the owner of the farm told Brown County sheriff’s deputies that Lepe lived in a bunk room above the milk house. A medical examiner’s report notes that Lepe lived on the farm, Ranovael Dairy. OSHA records are limited due to the age of the case, so it’s unclear whether the inspector who went to the farm the following day ever learned this information.

Lepe began his shift at Ranovael Dairy around 6 a.m. on the day he died. The temperature was in the single digits, and he wore pants and a thermal undershirt under his camouflage insulated coveralls and boots.

Less than two hours later, Ray Vanden Elzen, the farm owner, found Lepe crushed by a telehandler, a rough terrain forklift that can be used to move or lift heavy materials and is known to pose significant safety risks. Lepe had gotten pinned between the machine’s engine compartment and its hydraulic arm, according to the sheriff’s report.

“The loader malfunctioned and the hydraulics released, causing the weight of the loaded scoop to fall to the ground,” a sheriff’s sergeant wrote. “This caused the cross arms to crush the mid section of the deceased victim’s body.”

Vanden Elzen could not be reached for comment.

Lepe had worked at Ranovael for about eight years and did “everything” on the farm, Vanden Elzen told Brown County medical examiners. He also told sheriff’s deputies that he knew that Lepe was undocumented and had used an alias “to avoid deportation for several years,” records show.

Lepe had grown up working with cattle on a small farm in the Mexican state of Jalisco, and he enjoyed his job in Wisconsin, his sister told ProPublica.

But it was dangerous. A few weeks before he died, Lepe told his sister that he had lost the tips of two fingers in a farm accident.

Lepe was 29 and a widower. He left behind a young daughter.

Almost six years later, another worker was crushed by similar machinery on a farm on the other side of the state.

Crawford County sheriff’s deputies investigating the Jan. 12, 2019, death of Espinoza on a farm in Steuben, in western Wisconsin, noted that he lived on-site. The farm owner, Eugene Fritsche, even told deputies that Espinoza and another worker left the farm “only one time a week to go shopping for food,” and that they “always stayed on the farm and sent all of their money back to their family in Mexico,” according to a sheriff’s report. The county coroner also said that Espinoza lived on the farm.

Despite this, an OSHA inspector who spoke with Fritsche noted that “the farm did not supply housing” for the two workers. It’s unclear how OSHA reached that conclusion.

Espinoza had been standing next to a skid steer, removing manure and mud from the machine, according to a report from the sheriff’s department and an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit filed against the farm by Espinoza’s family.

At some point, Espinoza became pinned between the machine’s cab and hydraulic arms, which crushed his thighs and abdomen. A co-worker in the milk house heard him scream and ran over.

Fritsche told deputies that he thought Espinoza had accidentally activated the skid steer’s arms to move them downward. He said the machine had safety mechanisms, “but Blas did not have those engaged to lock the arms in place.”

The lawsuit alleges that Fritsche knew that the skid steer had mechanical problems but failed to provide the “necessary protection, training, or concern for Mr. Espinoza’s safety.”

In court records, the farm and its insurance company have denied the allegations. Their attorney declined to comment. A woman who answered the door at Fritsche’s home also declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Espinoza’s family.

Espinoza was undocumented, according to relatives. A sheriff’s deputy who asked Fritsche about his workers’ immigration status wrote that he simply “took what paperwork he was given” by them and “used that information on their employee paperwork.”

Espinoza was 45. He left behind a wife and two children back in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz.

Local authorities ruled both deaths as accidents.

Since Espinoza’s death in January 2019, at least seven other workers have died on Wisconsin dairy farms. One was crushed against a wall by a cow. Another was disemboweled by machinery in a grain silo. Another was pinned under a tractor that had tipped over.

In the most recent death, that of Gómez, who drowned in a manure lagoon on March 28, the OSHA inspector asked about Gómez’s housing but failed to find out where he and other workers lived.

An OSHA inspector showed up to the farm in Melrose, in western Wisconsin, the morning after Gómez’ death and spoke to the owner, Donald Antal Jr. The inspector’s interview notes indicate that the Antal Dairy Farm employed six workers and that Antal said Gómez “did not live on our property.”

But Gómez and a few other men who worked on the farm lived together in a house provided by the Antals for their workers about a half-mile down the road from the farm, ProPublica learned through interviews and law enforcement records. Another worker lived with his family in a trailer on the farm. It’s unclear whether the inspector ever learned about any of this housing for workers or took it into account when deciding that the small farms exemption applied.

On the night he died, Gómez was supposed to be operating a skid steer to scrape cow manure off a barn floor and into the nearby manure lagoon. But nobody could find him.

His coworkers looked out to the black surface of the 150-by-50-foot lagoon. Manure lagoons pose well-known drowning risks; due to their steep walls and manure’s slippery texture, they are nearly impossible to get out of.

Through the dim light from the barn, workers could see several inches of white metal sticking out above the manure. It was a part of the skid steer.

Workers alerted Antal, who rushed to the manure lagoon. Antal’s adult daughter called 911: “A worker fell in the shit pit and sunk and they think he’s dead.”

The skid steer was submerged 15 feet from the edge of the manure lagoon. Firefighters used a boat to reach it so they themselves wouldn’t drown and linked a chain to the skid steer. Then Antal hauled it out with a tractor.

A window at the front of the vehicle was shattered, and manure had filled the cabin. Gómez was inside, slumped over in his seat. He died of asphyxiation, according to the medical examiner’s report.

Gómez had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.18%, more than twice the legal limit for driving. Bonnie Kindschy, the Jackson County medical examiner, said she has no way of knowing whether Gómez would have fallen into the manure lagoon if he hadn’t been drinking. His death was ruled an accident.

Kindschy called OSHA because she believed Gómez’s death was clearly work-related and she thought it needed to be investigated. And OSHA does investigate workplace injuries and deaths regardless of whether workers were intoxicated or using drugs.

But OSHA didn’t investigate Gómez’s death. No other agency that responded to the emergency that night asked whether the lagoon had a barrier in place to prevent people and machines from falling in or, if there was a barrier, whether it was strong enough to hold back a 6,700-pound skid steer.

Jackson County Sheriff Duane Waldera said his department had looked into whether a crime was committed, not farm safety. “We didn’t look into barricades and how farms should be,” he said in an interview.

Antal declined to comment.

Gómez was 32. He was also undocumented, a family member told ProPublica, though the Antals found some type of U.S. identification card with Gómez’s name on it in the “farmhand living quarters,” according to the sheriff’s report.

A Veracruz native, Gómez had worked on Wisconsin dairy farms for about half his life and had worked at Antal Dairy for about 30 days before he died. He left behind a wife and a daughter. He had been saving up to bring them to the U.S.

Outside of their immigrant communities, the deaths of Israel Lepe Quezada, Blas Espinoza Cuahutzihua and Florencio Gómez Rodríguez received little attention.

After Gómez died, the owner of a Mexican grocery store and restaurant more than an hour north of Antal Dairy put a small donation box near the register. A photo of a smiling Gómez in a Green Bay Packers winter hat was taped alongside a handwritten note in Spanish. “We are asking for donations for our friend Florencio who suffered an accident at work,” the note read. “The help is for his family.”

In April, a small caravan of immigrant workers traveled across the Minnesota border to the town of Saint Michael to attend a visitation at the funeral home that handled the arrangements to send Gómez’s body home.

Many of the people who were at the farm the night Gómez drowned, including the medical examiner and the local fire chief, said they wonder if his death could have been prevented.

Tim Kunes, the chief of the Melrose Fire Department, said he learned OSHA had decided not to investigate when he returned to the farm a few days later and spoke with the owner of the farm. He said he was surprised to learn OSHA hadn’t opened an investigation.

Kunes runs a small farm himself, though he doesn’t have any employees. But he said most of his neighbors with dairy farms do have workers, and they’re often immigrants. All of the farms, he said, have fewer than 11 employees.

“So their magic number is 11 and above?” he said.

In general, Kunes said, he doesn’t like the idea of more government regulation or fining small farms. But he knows how dangerous farming can be.

“Could it have been stopped with a couple of simple measures?” Kunes asked of Gómez’s death. “Maybe. We’ll never know.”

Recently Kunes noticed something new when he drove past the Antal Dairy Farm: a fence around the manure lagoon.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

Illustrations by Cuauhtémoc Wetzka for ProPublica

Mariam Elba contributed research. Jeff Frankl and Jeff Ernsthausen contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez.

• Humanitarian aid is beginning to trickle into Gaza, even as fighting continues, and the death toll rises. Some lawmakers are calling for a cease-fire, but the Biden administration says that would only give Hamas time to regroup and carry out more terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, some analysts say more attention should be paid to what comes after the fighting stops and what needs to be protected.
• Day 20 without a House Speaker, and Republicans are starting over; nine lower-level Republican lawmakers including Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota are now running, with none having a clear shot at the gavel.
• Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey pleaded not guilty today to new charges that he conspired to act as an illegal foreign agent on behalf of Egypt while serving as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• President Joe Biden today announces the designation of 31 “technology hubs” across the country to develop new regions geared towards technological industries.
• Former President Donald Trump formally filed for the New Hampshire presidential primary today before speaking at a campaign rally in the town of Derry.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump signs papers as New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan watches, to be on the 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot at the New Hampshire Statehouse, Monday, Oct. 23, 2023, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The post Israel ramps up strikes on Gaza as US advises delaying ground war to allow talks on captives; Hamas militants release two hostages they had been holding captive in the Gaza Strip as third small aid convoy from Egypt enters Gaza – Monday, October 23, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Humanitarian aid is beginning to trickle into Gaza, even as fighting continues, and the death toll rises. Some lawmakers are calling for a cease-fire, but the Biden administration says that would only give Hamas time to regroup and carry out more terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, some analysts say more attention should be paid to what comes after the fighting stops and what needs to be protected.
• Day 20 without a House Speaker, and Republicans are starting over; nine lower-level Republican lawmakers including Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota are now running, with none having a clear shot at the gavel.
• Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey pleaded not guilty today to new charges that he conspired to act as an illegal foreign agent on behalf of Egypt while serving as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• President Joe Biden today announces the designation of 31 “technology hubs” across the country to develop new regions geared towards technological industries.
• Former President Donald Trump formally filed for the New Hampshire presidential primary today before speaking at a campaign rally in the town of Derry.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump signs papers as New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan watches, to be on the 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot at the New Hampshire Statehouse, Monday, Oct. 23, 2023, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The post Israel ramps up strikes on Gaza as US advises delaying ground war to allow talks on captives; Hamas militants release two hostages they had been holding captive in the Gaza Strip as third small aid convoy from Egypt enters Gaza – Monday, October 23, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Humanitarian aid is beginning to trickle into Gaza, even as fighting continues, and the death toll rises. Some lawmakers are calling for a cease-fire, but the Biden administration says that would only give Hamas time to regroup and carry out more terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, some analysts say more attention should be paid to what comes after the fighting stops and what needs to be protected.
• Day 20 without a House Speaker, and Republicans are starting over; nine lower-level Republican lawmakers including Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota are now running, with none having a clear shot at the gavel.
• Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey pleaded not guilty today to new charges that he conspired to act as an illegal foreign agent on behalf of Egypt while serving as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• President Joe Biden today announces the designation of 31 “technology hubs” across the country to develop new regions geared towards technological industries.
• Former President Donald Trump formally filed for the New Hampshire presidential primary today before speaking at a campaign rally in the town of Derry.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump signs papers as New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan watches, to be on the 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot at the New Hampshire Statehouse, Monday, Oct. 23, 2023, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The post Israel ramps up strikes on Gaza as US advises delaying ground war to allow talks on captives; Hamas militants release two hostages they had been holding captive in the Gaza Strip as third small aid convoy from Egypt enters Gaza – Monday, October 23, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Unlike Aldean in his Nashville mansion, my three children and I actually live in a small town in impoverished Hopkins County, Kentucky. I sleep in our only bedroom with my toddler, while my daughter sleeps on the couch and her brother sleeps on an air mattress in the living room.

The guns Aldean sings about are no comfort when my two-year-old needs child care and nutritious meals for her developing brain, when my teens want some privacy in our tiny apartment, or when I need to get to work without a car in a town with no public transit.

Towns like mine don’t need more fear, anger, or violence. We need public investment that helps hard working people get by.

I have two associate degrees and am just 12 credit hours shy of a bachelor’s degree. I work six days a week. But with pay so low, rents so high, and elevated food costs, I can’t make ends meet for my family in the ways they deserve.

We don’t have sufficient child care where I live. I’m lucky that my two-year-old’s grandparents are able to watch her while I’m at work, but I have to work nights because that’s when they’re available. Without transportation, I walk home alone at night — three nights at 10 p.m. and three nights at 3 a.m.

Not long ago, we got a taste of what real investment could look like.

In 2021, even though the nation was still dealing with the pandemic and I’d lost my job as lead stylist at a salon, my family and I got some critical relief from the expanded federal Unemployment Insurance program, which held me over until I got another job.

We got a big boost from the expanded Child Tax Credit, which provided money each month to meet my family’s needs and gave me more time to devote to parenting. We benefited from extra food assistance through SNAP and extra help from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

Suddenly, I could buy my kids new school clothes and supplies. I could pay the rent and utilities on time. My kids had less stress. I had less stress. The difference is hard to put into words. I even joined SaverLife, a national nonprofit and advocacy organization that uses technology to help other struggling people.

Because of policies that invested in families, small businesses, and essential workers, the nation’s poverty rate and child poverty rate dramatically declined. We began to thrive — some of us for the first time in our lives.

But when all congressional Republicans, plus two conservative Senate Democrats, refused to extend these effective investments, all those gains were quickly reversed. After reaching a record low, our country’s Supplemental Poverty Measure increased by a record amount last year.

And now, a handful of extremist lawmakers not only want to make sure those effective pandemic investments in families never return, but they also want to slash all programs that help ordinary people. These extreme demands nearly led to a government shutdown and may well lead to one in the future — an outcome that would be disastrous for hard working small town families.

The expansion of the Child Tax Credit was the most effective anti-poverty program in a long time. By putting aside partisan differences, Congress and the White House could build better financial outcomes for millions of families.

Folks here are generous, but I can’t rely on other hard-pressed families to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Instead, I need my tax dollars to invest in the well-being of my family.

What if families had the support they need to make a better life for themselves? Let’s try that in a small town — and everywhere else.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Amy Adams.

The celebration, known colloquially as Marissa Coal Fest, is a weekend of carnival-like festivities. This year’s, held from August 11 to 13, included a meet-the-miner event, food stands, and a parade featuring the candidates for the coal court who were vying for the titles of Coal Princess, Coal Prince, and the Queen of Coal. 

Despite there only being a few actual coal mines left in the area, coal is sacred here. An underground coal mine and power plant still employs a number of people in town and is a source of pride. Prairie State Energy Campus was built during the last wave of coal-fired power plants in the early 2010s, and still employs hundreds of people. 

[Read more about how Midwest communities are grappling with the end of coal culture]

Though Beverly Terveer was not born in Marissa, and lives in nearby St. Libory, she finds the Marissa community welcoming and friendly. She said that folks around town are the type of people to help each other out after a disaster hits. “It’s a very warm, tight-knit community, but it also has had a big decline because of the coal industry,” said Terveer. 

Despite the fact that Terveer’s house is fitted with a solar panel, a passion project of her late husband’s, she is skeptical of using farmland for renewable energy. 

“I think we still need to keep the electric power grids going with coal,” she said. She attends the coal festival every year and loves to see the town come together.

Scenes from the 2023 Marissa Coal Festival parade. Virginia Harold

Beverly Terveer was one of the many locals watching the Coal Festival parade. Virginia Harold

Most people in town are fiercely protective of coal, and Marissa’s history with commercial coal mining stretches back to the 1850s. Generations of Marissa residents were employed by coal companies — often mom-and-pop operations, unlike the large corporations that dominate the fossil fuel energy sector today. 

For resident Paul Weilmuenster, who was watching the parade from the front porch of his home on Main Street, becoming a coal miner was a no-brainer. 

He started young, at 20, following the career path of his father, who was also a miner. He relished carrying on the tradition. Now, though, he sees how the decline of the industry has meant less investment in the town, a place he’s lived his whole life. 

“Who wants to build a new home, a $300,000 to $400,000 home in Marissa?” said Weilmuenster. 

Still, he’s hoping Prairie State can stay open as long as possible to keep employing local people. 

“So that could be another [400 to 500] people in Marissa losing their jobs — and then what are they going to do?”

A man from the Banana Bike Brigade rides a bicycle with an attached paper-mache lion’s head during the parade. Virginia Harold

Paul Weilmuenster, a former coal miner, watches the parade from his porch with Roy Dean Dickey, a Marissa Village board trustee. Virginia Harold

Although the power plant has served as a huge economic driver for the town, not every Marissa resident has a positive experience with coal. Maria Cathcart is the daughter of a coal miner, but she said that climate change means coal needs to be phased out to prevent further warming from fossil fuel emissions.  

“I see how we’re cutting back on coal, so it is cutting back on, kind of, a tradition, but it needs to be done,” Cathcart said. “We’re tearing apart our world. And we need to stop, because it’s going to get to a point where it’s going to be irreversible.” 

The personal impact of coal on miners’ families was real for her. She remembers her father fondly, but also knows that the career he committed his life to contributed to his death from black lung.

“He actually died in my arms, so it really hurt me,” she said. “I was right there when he died.”

Still, she comes every year to the coal festival with her mother, Carmen. Not doing so is out of the question, even though Cathcart’s relationship to coal and the town itself remains complicated. Life in Marissa revolves around the event, and Cathcart cheered in the crowd when the parade started, alongside everyone else.

Locals set up chairs to watch the parade. Virginia Harold

Coal Queen candidates participate in the parade. Later, they will compete for the title. Virginia Harold

The Coal Festival includes food, rides, and games as part of the weekend-long celebration. And, as the carnival roars in the background and the sun begins to set, the festivities culminate in the annual crowning of a Coal Prince, Coal Princess, and Coal Queen.

Scenes from the carnival grounds. Virginia Harold

MacKenzie Jetton, a local high school graduate, was named 2023 Coal Queen. Virginia Harold

Photography by Virginia Harold

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Photos: This small Midwestern town still crowns its Coal Queen on Oct 4, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Siri Chilukuri.

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa says the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is focused on how they will approach the next seven years to achieve the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Addressing the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development in New York on behalf of AOSIS, PM Fiame said world leaders needed to leave nationalism behind and urgently put action to the rhetoric they had been propagating for the past eight years.

“Climate change, the global financial crisis, the covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions have taught us that we are even more closely connected than we wish to acknowledge, and that choices made on one end have far and wide reaching devastating impacts on those of us who are many, many miles away,” told the UN High Level Political Forum.

• READ MORE: Other UN SDG reports

“If we are going to uphold and deliver on our strong commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ and ‘reaching the furthest behind first’ we will have to leave nationalism behind and urgently put action to the rhetoric we have been propagating for the past eight years.”

PM Fiame said it was “time to stop kicking the can further down the road and doing bandage fixes”.

“We have to begin to earnestly address our global development issues, if we are going to begin speaking of a ‘summit of the future’ and ‘for future generations’.

“The sad reality is if we do not take care of today, for many of us, there will be no tomorrow or future.

‘We can do this together’
“We believe we can do this together, as the international community, if we return to the strong resolve, we had following the MDGs and knowing that if nothing drastic was done we would be worse off than we were as a global community in 1992 in Rio when we spoke of “the future we want,” Fiame said.

Faced with continuous and multiple crises, and without the ability to address these in any substantial and sustainable way, SIDS were on the “proverbial hamster wheel with no way out”, the Samoa Prime Minister said.

Therefore what was needed was to:

“Firstly, take urgent action on the climate change front — more climate financing; drastic cuts and reduction in greenhouse emissions, 1.5 is non-negotiable, everyone is feeling the mighty impacts of this, but not many of us have what it takes to rebounded from the devastation.

“This forthcoming COP28 needs to be a game changer, results must emanate from it — the Loss and Damage Fund needs to be fully operationalised and financed; we need progressive movement from the global stocktake; and states parties need to enhance NDCs.

“Secondly, urgent reform of the governance structure and overall working of the international financial architecture. It is time for it to be changed from its archaic approach to finance.

“We need a system that responds more appropriately to the varied dynamics countries face today; that goes beyond GDP; that takes into account various vulnerabilities and other aspects; that would look to utilise the Multi-Vulnerability Index, Bridgetown Initiative and all other measures that help to facilitate a more holistic and comprehensive insight into a country’s true circumstances.

‘More inclusive participation’
“This reform must also allow for a more inclusive and broader participation.

“Thirdly, urgently address high indebtedness in SIDS, this can no longer be ignored. There needs to be a concerted effort to address this.

“As we continually find ourselves in a revolving door between debt and reoccurring debt due to our continuous and constant response to economic, environmental and social shocks caused by external factors,” Prime Minister Fiame said.

“I appeal to you all to take a pause and join forces to make 2030 a year that we can all be proud of,” she said.

“In this vein, please be assured of AOSIS making our contribution no matter how minute it may be. We are fully committed. We invite you to review our interregional outcome document, the ‘Praia Declaration’ for a better understanding of our contribution.

“And we look forward to your constructive engagement as together we chart the 10-year Programme of Action for SIDS in 2024,” she said.

Fiame said the recently concluded Preparatory Meetings for the 4th International Conference on SIDS affirmed the unwavering commitment of SIDS to implement the 2030 Agenda as they charted a 10-year plan for a “resilient and prosperous future for our peoples”.

A ‘tough journey’
“We do recognise that the journey for us will be tough and daunting at times, but we are prepared and have a strong resolve to achieve this. However, we do also recognise and acknowledge that we cannot do this on our own.”

The summit marks the mid-point of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It will review the state of the SDGs implementation, provide policy guidance, mobilise action to accelerate implementation and consider new challenges since 2015.

The summit will address the impact of multiple and interlocking crises facing the world, including the deterioration of key social, economic and environmental indicators. It will focus first and foremost on people and ways to meet their basic needs through the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

This is the second SDG Summit, the first one was held in 2019.

Republished from Pacnews.

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

There are two big reasons for this funding gap. The first is that FEMA doles out adaptation money through competitive grant programs, which means that a local government needs significant funding and staff to put together an application that stands a chance of attracting federal dollars. The second is that federal law requires the agency to fund only those adaptation projects that pass what it calls a “benefit-cost analysis.” In other words, a city must prove that its proposed project prevents more damage than it costs to build. Big infrastructure projects like sea walls and stormwater pipes are much more likely to pencil out in dense cities with high property values than in smaller, low-income towns.

“We know we have work to do in this area,” said David Maurstad, a senior FEMA official, when he acknowledged the funding gap during congressional testimony on the subject last year.

This week, FEMA finally moved toward narrowing that gap. The agency announced a new loan program that will give states a total of $500 million to dole out to local governments in the form of low-interest loans for small-scale adaptation projects. This way, not only can local officials representing small towns, minor cities, and tribes can skip the extensive application process associated with federal grants, but they also don’t have to justify their projects in cost-benefit terms.

“There’s large infrastructure projects that communities need to fund in order to adapt to the changing climate, but there’s often many small projects that need to get done as well,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s associate administrator for resilience, in a press conference announcing the program on Tuesday. “The burden of getting a smaller project done that actually has a major impact on reducing human suffering is very high.”

The agency is piloting the program by sending $50 million in “seed capital” to seven states — Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia — as well as Washington, D.C. The states will get about $6 million each, and they’ll be able to loan that money out to smaller governments at interest rates of less than 1 percent. (The benchmark interest rate for mortgage and credit card lending in the U.S. is currently around 5.5 percent.) The local governments can use that money to buy out homes that are in the path of fire or flood, elevate streets, or repair water infrastructure. States will decide how long local governments will have to pay the loans back.

In Washington, D.C., officials are planning to loan money to pay for storm drain upgrades in a public housing complex that has faced frequent flooding. The District of Columbia has already received money to upgrade a stormwater pump station through FEMA’s other climate adaptation initiative, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, but the new loan will help officials pursue projects that wouldn’t qualify for that grant money.

Because states themselves will be running the loan programs, rather than the federal government, borrowers won’t have to worry about following the extensive federal spending guidelines that often hamper adaptation projects, or about passing a strict cost-benefit analysis. Experts have criticized federal benefit-cost regulations for placing too much emphasis on property values and neglecting to consider intangible assets like community cohesion and cultural heritage.

Furthermore, the program is a “revolving” loan fund, meaning states can reuse FEMA’s seed capital over and over again. If a state gives a city a loan of $1 million and the city pays the loan back after five years, the state will then have just over $1 million to lend out somewhere else. The program doesn’t have an expiration date, which Salinas said makes it “a more durable source of financing” than the agency’s other grant programs. The loan interest rates are far lower than cities tend to pay for standard municipal bonds, so the risk of default is low.

Anna Weber, an adaptation policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program could help fill the gaps in FEMA’s still-nascent effort to finance climate adaptation.

“The underlying way that we distribute funding for hazard mitigation currently serves to drive resources to places that already have resources,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential for this program to slot into this patchwork of funding in a way that fills in some gaps.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA rolls out climate adaptation loans for small and overlooked communities on Sep 14, 2023.

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

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

People living on the east side of Harris County, Texas, have an unlikely bond with residents of Berre-l’Étang in southern France: They all inhale toxic chemicals from plants owned by LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies.

In the summer of 2020, LyondellBasell’s 2,471-acre industrial complex in Berre-l’Étang had more than half a dozen major incidents in which flares released large amounts of chemicals into the air. Thick clouds of smoke drifted over the community of 14,000. The flares burned so brightly, photographs show, that the normally pitch-black night was replaced by what looked like a prolonged sunset. The smoke carried benzene and other toxic substances to Marseille, France’s second-most-populous city, 10 miles away.

A year later in Texas, two major chemical releases at LyondellBasell facilities in Harris County forced residents of Jacinto City, Galena Park, and neighboring towns to shelter indoors. One of those incidents killed two workers and sent dozens to area hospitals.

Last year Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop examined LyondellBasell’s record in Harris County, and that project made us curious about the company’s performance outside the United States. We chose to look at Berre-l’Étang because both it and Harris County are at the center of their countries’ petrochemical industries — and both struggle to balance the economic benefits they gain with the concerns of residents who are breathing noxious fumes. 

In eastern Harris County, 10 oil refineries process 2.6 million barrels of crude oil a day, and thousands more facilities store or manufacture the chemicals the industry uses and produces. Petrochemical plants loom over houses and playgrounds. A terminal holding millions of barrels of chemicals is seven blocks from a middle school. 

Berre-l’Étang lies in one of the most heavily industrialized areas of France, where it and nine other towns surround a 60-square-mile lake, Étang de Berre. A 2017 study of some of those towns found that 63 percent of the population had at least one chronic disease. The French national average is 37 percent.

Local officials in France appear to have even less power to deal with industrial emissions than those in Texas, where state regulations are notoriously lax. Activists in both countries complain that regulators prioritize the economic well-being of polluting industries over the environment and public health. 

In 2018, Éliane Jurado, a retired teacher living in Berre-l’Étang, created a citizens platform, LibAIRté, pledging to “defend the air quality of my grandchildren until my last breath.” LyondellBasell’s 2020 flaring — a process that burns off excess gas and relieves pressure — galvanized support for the movement and forced the city government to organize a town-hall meeting. 

But in the end, Jurado says, nothing happened. She left Berre-l’Étang in 2021 and is still looking for someone to take over LibAIRté’s Facebook group, which at one point had 1,300 members. 

A LyondellBasell spokesperson said the company declined to comment for this story.

The LyondellBasell facility has been a fixture in Berre-l’Étang since 1934, and authorities have known for years that it emits high levels of cancer-causing chemical agents such as benzene and 1,3-butadiene. The enormous industrial complex hosts one of the world’s largest olefin steam crackers, a butadiene extraction unit and polypropylene and polyethylene plants. It produces chemicals that are used in consumer products, like food packaging, furniture, automobile parts, construction materials, and toys. 

LyondellBasell acquired the facility in 2008, a year after Leonard Blavatnik, a secretive, Soviet-born billionaire, combined U.S.-based Lyondell Chemical and Netherlands-based Basell Polyolefins to form LyondellBasell. The company has been based in Houston since then.

According to an article in New York Magazine, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Blavatnik came under scrutiny for his past ties with the Soviet Union but hasn’t faced any significant repercussions. He retains the largest share in LyondellBasell Industries, which is traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange, via his holding company Access Industries.

LyondellBasell operates more than three dozen chemical facilities in Europe, including many with a history of pollution incidents. But none has been as life-altering as the plant in Berre-l’Étang, where it dominates local politics, people’s livelihoods and public-health discourse. 

A database maintained by France’s Ministry for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion shows that between 2008 and August 2022, the complex recorded more than 150 incidents, including flaring and fires, gas leakage, and power failures.

For years, studies conducted by French government scientists concluded that the health of people living in the industrialized communities that surround Étang de Berre isn’t much different from the health of people in other parts of France. A 2012 study by the Institute of Health Surveillance, a government agency that has since been merged into the National Public Health Agency, reached that conclusion using hospitalization data for cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and cancer. The data only records severe health issues.

But in 2017, a group of U.S.-based public health researchers collaborating with independent French scientists reached a very different conclusion after conducting the first community-based participatory survey on residents’ health. 

Instead of being restricted by the limitations of hospitalization data, they knocked on the door of every fifth residential unit and asked people directly about their health. Using that data, they found that residents of the industrialized area were dramatically less healthy than people in France as a whole.

About 12 percent of residents had been diagnosed with cancer, while estimates for the national average ranged from 4-6 percent at that time. Diabetes patients constituted about 13 percent of the region’s population compared with 5 percent nationally. Asthma and skin conditions were even more common.

“This means that residents in this industrial zone are experiencing a higher burden of health issues than others in their region or France as a whole,” Alison Cohen, an epidemiologist with the University of California, San Francisco, who co-led the study, told Public Health Watch in a recent email.

Cohen’s interest in the region dates to 2011 when, as a Fulbright grantee, she studied the European Union’s approaches to regulating chemicals compared to the process in the United States. In 2015, along with an American and a French colleague, she published a report that analyzed three state-funded studies, including the 2012 study, and found that the previous reports didn’t reflect the public’s lived experiences.

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Residents “were not included in designing those studies, and many felt that their questions were not addressed and thus the findings were not relevant, or believable, to them,” Cohen’s later  study noted in 2017. “There were also several studies that either never concluded and/or never fully released findings to the public. Distrust and frustration regarding professionally driven health studies was high in this industrial zone.”

Cohen and her colleagues designed their research to answer the most pressing questions the residents had about their health. They worked with community members at all stages of their research, including its design and interpretation.

Their findings instantly made headlines and spurred a wave of environmental activism that put France’s Public Health Agency on the defensive. 

Stacy Algrain, a climate-justice activist who grew up in Berre-l’Étang, focused on the report in a campaign she organized against LyondellBasell. While studying environmental policy at Sciences Po, Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, she founded Penser L’après, an organization aimed at educating the public about a range of issues, from climate change to pluralism to patriarchy. 

Algrain says her values were shaped by her upbringing in a town overshadowed by the towering stacks of the LyondellBasell plant.

“I grew up here. I know every corner of this lake, its richness, and its beauty, but when I say the name of my city, the answer is, ‘Ah, OK, the city with the factories and the chemical smell?’” she wrote on Twitter in September 2020. “[I’m] chronically ill for 5 years, and although the link [of the illness] with my surroundings may be difficult to establish, I do not want another person, another child to hear this as well.”

In the neighboring town of Fos-sur-Mer, the study by Cohen and her colleagues inspired about 100 residents to file a criminal complaint that referenced several major factories, including one owned by steel giant ArcelorMittal, which, in 2016, released 23.5 tons of benzene from its Fos-sur-Mer factory, according to the newspaper Le Monde. It also stirred separate civil lawsuits that targeted ArcelorMittal and two other companies. LyondellBasell, which has a 133-acre plant in Fos-sur-Mer, was not mentioned in the lawsuits.

The criminal complaint is unprecedented in France, where courts have never been asked to impose criminal liability on industries for pollution that may harm public health. In the past, workers generally accepted the health risks in exchange for high salaries, Julie Andreu, the attorney representing the Fos-sur-Mer residents in the lawsuits, told Public Health Watch. But as the incidents have become more frequent, she said, they “are less and less accepted by the population.” 

ArcelorMittal, whose annual revenue was $79 billion last year, has faced relatively modest penalties.

In a 2018 civil lawsuit it was fined the equivalent of about $16,000 for releasing excessive amounts of benzene.  Andreu said the company was also fined about $1,600 a day — for a total of $299,000 — until it complied with the European Union’s benzene standards six months later. 

An investigation by Marsactu, a regional news outlet, later revealed that French labor inspectors had found that employees at the site had been exposed to benzo(a)pyrene at a level 32 times higher than European Union standards allow. Benzo(a)pyrene is an extremely toxic hydrocarbon that can affect the nervous, immune and reproductive systems. 

In March this year, Disclose, a nonprofit newsroom in France, obtained documents showing that two of ArcelorMittal’s steel plants — one in Dunkirk and the other in Fos-sur-Mer — account for 25 percent of France’s industrial pollution and exceeded French and European pollution limits for more than 200 days in 2022. In June authorities ordered ArcelorMittal to temporarily shut down its Fos-sur-Mer site due to dust exposure and toxic chemical release. Days later, a judge reversed the order, arguing that the immediate shutdown would “seriously undermine the freedom of trade and industry.”

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Most of the citizen complaints against ArcelorMittal were dismissed by a judicial court, although Andreu is appealing that decision. One of the complaints involved Sylvie Anane, a Fos-sur-Mer resident who had died a year earlier from several cancers and cardiovascular conditions. In the order rejecting another case, a judge was quoted in a newspaper as saying that ArcelorMittal’s emissions were acceptable given “the consideration constituted by national industrial development.”

The judge also said residents had accepted “the foreseeable risk linked to the pollution by industrial activity” when they chose to live close to the industries.

“Basically, the judge blamed residents for pollution by saying, ‘You had it coming,’” said Algrain, the activist. “Others are saying if you’re not happy with the way you’re living or the living conditions, you can just leave.”

The remaining cases against ArcelorMittal and the other factories are pending. Public Health Watch reached out to ArcelorMittal but has not received a response.

Andreu said several residents recently asked her to file a separate administrative action against the French government for negligence.

“We believe the state, which is aware of the risks, has not acted on its own findings and has exposed the population to risk,” she told Public Health Watch. 

The public outrage over ArcelorMittal in 2018 helped fuel a similar outcry over LyondellBasell’s persistent emissions. 

Activists in Berre-l’Étang led by Éliane Jurado and her group, LibAIRté, joined the organization that had helped mobilize the Fos-sur-Mer lawsuits. By 2020, flaring in the LyondellBasell factory in Berre-l’Étang was so common that even residents of neighboring towns were outraged. Several mayors wrote a joint letter, threatening LyondellBasell with a similar lawsuit. Eric Le Dissès, the mayor of Marignane, asked President Emmanuel Macron to initiate a state investigation into the pollution incidents, according to a newspaper report.

“One municipality attacking an American company such as LyondellBasell would be like David against Goliath,” said Stéphane Le Rudulier, one of the mayors. “So we unified to send a common message so that we are taken seriously.”

Notably absent in the crusade against LyondellBasell was Mario Martinet, the mayor of Berre-l’Étang. LyondellBasell is by far the city’s largest employer, with 1,300 workers. It contributes the equivalent of about $369 million to the local economy each year.

Instead of signing the joint letter, Martinet called for talks and meetings with the petrochemical giant and local stakeholders. At one of those meetings the mayor shared the stage with his deputy, Marc Campana, who oversees the city’s environment portfolio. Campana, a labor union leader, worked for LyondellBasell at the time.

The meeting became contentious, according to news reports. 

“My son has cancer, my husband contracted a serious blood disease, and my daughter has inflamed eyes,” one woman said. 

“I live under the torch,” another said, referring to the giant flares. “The noise level is intolerable. I could not enjoy my summer outdoors. For days, we found a yellowish deposit at home.” 

One of the LyondellBasell officials at the meeting, Sébastien Mathiot, argued that the company had invested heavily in reducing emissions and that the emissions rate had drastically decreased since 1980.

Eric Mesle, the plant’s operations manager, promised that flaring incidents like the ones the city experienced “should never happen again in the years to come.” 

But less than two months later, a new round of flaring at the plant continued for two days and could be seen miles away.

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Algrain, the climate activist who grew up in Berre-l’Étang, said the meetings were meaningless.

The political leaders basically “make it look like they really ask the industrial companies to change their behavior, but it appears to me that they are on the same side,” she said.

“From what I saw, it was just a lot of speeches. The discourse in these meetings, it’s always the same: ‘Don’t worry — it has no impact on your health, and it’s going to be OK.’”

Public Health Watch reached out to Mayor Martinet for comment but has not received a response.

In January 2022, LyondellBasell’s Berre-l’Étang facility had another major incident. Its steam cracker unit caught fire and released a huge plume of blackish smoke that a local newspaper said was visible for hours. 

The company announced it would invest more than $163 million to modernize the facility, reducing CO2 emissions by 37 percent — or 30,000 tons — per year. It estimated the work would be completed in less than three months.

During the construction period, there were multiple flaring and fire events, which the company attributed to maintenance and shutdown of the plant.

But in June 2022 — after the renovation was complete — residents were awakened by the raucous sound of a siren at the plant. The company told town leaders that its siren system had malfunctioned and the situation was under control.

But some residents disagreed, commenting on Facebook that they feared harmful chemicals had been released. One woman posted snapshots of findings from air quality monitors installed by AtmoSud, a local environmental organization. They showed spikes in benzene levels at that time.

“Considering how unbreathable it was and that it stung the eyes, I doubt very much that the benzene was not very dangerous,” another commented.

Two months later, there was a fire at the site, originating from an oil pump. 

Another fire broke out in April of this year on the plant’s steam cracker. Flares and smoke could be seen outside the site. The company said at least one employee had been injured.

Back in Harris County, Texas, three facilities owned by LyondellBasell have had at least 17 air “emission events” since Jan. 1 of this year, according to a Public Health Watch review of reports maintained by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Some lasted only a few minutes, according to the company’s reports to the state agency. Others went on much longer: 15 hours, 27 hours, 56 hours, 69 hours. Chemicals released included sulfur dioxide, which attacks the respiratory system; hydrogen sulfide, a gas that can be deadly in high concentrations and causes eye, throat and nose irritation at low levels; and carbon monoxide, which in sublethal doses can cause headaches, nausea and rapid breathing.

LyondellBasell has been trying to sell one of the problematic facilities, Houston Refinery, which was responsible for a 2021 chemical release that forced thousands of people to shelter in their homes. After two attempted sales failed, the company announced that it would close the 100-year old refinery by the end of this year due to the cost of overhauling it. According to Reuters, analysts estimated that the facility would require about $1 billion in upgrades to continue operations. 

In May, however, LyondellBasell announced that it would postpone the closing until 2025 and increase plant capacity to 95 percent, up from 85 percent in the first quarter of 2023.

“Favorable inspections and consistent performance have given the company confidence to continue safe and reliable operations at the Houston site,” LyondellBasell said in a statement on its website. The company said it anticipates spending “moderate” amounts of money on maintenance in 2023 and 2024. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a small French town where Houston-based LyondellBasell is a fixture, residents complain of unending pollution on Sep 5, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Nazmul Ahasan.

The moves come amid concerns that President Xi Jinping’s administration lacks technocrats capable of overseeing a recovery. The economy has struggled to rebound following the lifting of COVID-19 measures in December 2022, despite X’'s attempts to manage a consumption-led recovery.

"The country's economic recovery has been a wave-like development and a tortuous process," state news agency Xinhua quoted a statement from the People's Bank of China as saying.

The statement – released Sunday following a meeting between the bank, the National Financial Regulatory Administration and the China Securities Regulatory Commission – called for "efforts to push for the continuous improvement of economic performance, endogenous driving force and social expectations, and continuously defusing risks and hidden dangers," the report said.

"Financial support for the real economy should be strong in intensity, steady in pace, sound in structure and sustainable in prices," it said.

Analysts were doubtful that the steps would be effective.

"It said they would be supporting micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, but they didn't say that going in this direction would resolve unemployment," U.S.-based commentator Zheng Xuguang told RFA Mandarin.

"The main sectors targeted by the bank's previous lending policies are still a minefield, so they are looking for new directions."

Zheng said there aren't many options available in the current economy, especially as the central government in Beijing has ruled out bailing out cash-strapped local governments, whose finances are deeply bound up with local property markets.

"If they invest in local governments or property developers then that would be a bailout," Zheng said. "It's not really the way to go about [stimulating] true economic growth," he said.

On Monday, the bank said it lowered its one-year benchmark lending rate by 10 basis points to 3.45% and keeped the five-year rate unchanged at 4.2% amid broader concerns about a rapidly weakening currency.

Weak data

The move comes amid flagging indicators of consumption, exports and investment, including the collapse of the property sector – which amounts for a quarter of Chinese GDP – U.S. restrictions on technology exports and a massive slow-down in foreign investment.

The three top financial institutions also plan to find ways to "prevent and defuse debt risks, while intensifying the mechanisms for risk monitoring, assessment, prevention and control" to prevent systemic risks, Xinhua said.

China's central bank has also pledged to keep liquidity reasonably ample and its policy "precise and forceful" to support the economic recovery, Reuters quoted its second-quarter monetary policy implementation report as saying.

However, there are concerns that those to whom Xi Jinping has entrusted the Chinese economic recovery aren't well qualified to deliver.

"Xi Jinping and his closest advisers do not know much about the economy," Lam, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation, told Nikkei Asia in a recent interview. "After the 20th Party Congress in October ... most of the people he promoted are not technocrats.

"They know very little about international trade, international finance, etc. They are mostly party apparatchiks who specialize in ideology ... propaganda. Most of them do not speak English," Lam said, adding that the former head of the People's Bank of China, Yi Gang, had a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois, while his recently promoted successor Pan Gongsheng got his from China's Renmin University.

Xi's record on the economy has already prompted calls for a return to the foreign and economic policy of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping.

The reform era ushered in by Deng after the fall of late supreme leader Chairman Mao Zedong saw people freed up to make money as fast as they liked, and the start of a burgeoning private sector and a decades of export-led economic growth, while political ideology and authoritarian rule took a back seat.

Worsening property crisis

Xi is widely seen to be moving in the opposite direction, cracking down on private sector wealth and power and boosting the state-owned economy while eroding the freedoms enjoyed by the country's middle classes.

Earlier this month, real estate developer Country Garden missed interest payments on U.S. dollar bonds, failing to pay US$22.5 million in interest due on debt securities with a total value of US$1 billion.

Last week, property developer China Evergrande filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection as part of one of the world's biggest debt restructurings, as anxiety grows over China's worsening property crisis and its impact on the weakening economy.

The developer collapsed under accumulated debts in late 2021, sending the global economy briefly into a spiral and leading to protests in China by would-be homeowners who claimed to have been defrauded on off-plan homes that were never built or completed.

Chang Ting-hwan, an associate professor of the Department of Finance at Taiwan's Jianxing University of Science and Technology, said Evergrande has filed for bankruptcy in the hope of negotiating interest-free or delayed repayment and to temporarily protect its assets in the United States. 

Asked why the company didn't file for bankruptcy in China, Chang said: "Maybe the government doesn’t agree with it declaring bankruptcy just yet, because it may affect a great many creditors and there could be a riot, so they need to prepare first."

But analysts said they still don't expect a bailout for private property developers.

"There's no way that China is going to bail out real estate companies," U.S.-based commentator Ren Songlin told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. "They're not going to get involved in such loss-making businesses."

"They can't just go handing money to Evergrande CEO Xu Jiayin," he said, adding that many of the big real-estate companies have ties to the families and associates of former ruling Chinese Communist Party leaders like Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and that Xi Jinping is unlikely to care if they lose out.

"The question of whether or not to bail out Evergrande has never been on the table for Xi Jinping," Ren said. "As far as the Chinese Communist Party is concerned, it's a private enterprise, so why would they do that?"

‘Ghost towns’

Chang said other property companies – like Country Garden – are also in dire straits.

Most of Evergrande's developments are in major cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, making it easier to find people willing to take them over if the company declares bankruptcy, he said.

But that task will be much harder when it comes to the "ghost towns" created by Country Garden, he said.

"Country Garden builds towns in the middle of nowhere, and in out-of-the-way places," Chang said. "Even if housing prices fall, young people won't be interested in buying property there, which is even more worrying."

An employee who answered the phone at a branch of the state-run China Construction Bank in the southern province of Guangdong confirmed that lending policies have indeed been tightened for real estate companies.

"The real estate bubble has burst, so loans to real estate companies have been tightened, corporate loans have been enlarged, and enterprises are being encouraged to invigorate the economy," she said. "China's economy will definitely not be able to rely on real estate in future."

"[But if] small, medium and micro enterprises run into difficulty, the banks will try their best to grant them a loan," the employee said.

A journalist from the northern city of Tianjin who gave only the surname He for fear of reprisals said there is scant room for economic growth now that most of the economy is under state control.

"Commercial behaviors are being restricted by state power, so ruin is inevitable – there is no way to grow or develop," He said.

"State power lacks creative ability – it can only destroy things or consume. It can't create commercial activity."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. Professor Ramana is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India, and is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

It seems inconceivable to me that anybody who has any sense of history would think about nuclear power— either the fission version or the hypothetical future nuclear fusion version— as an environmentally sustainable source of electricity.

Professor MV Ramana

What we are lacking in climate change today—simply because we’ve been so late in trying to act on it—is the urgency. The IPCC puts out report after report saying how high emissions are, how rapidly it has to be decreased if we have even a fighting chance of meeting a 1.5℃ target. And by putting off this kind of action, those calls are becoming more and more desperate. And I think that desperation is probably what’s driving some of these groups to say, “Well, you know, let’s make friends with everybody, and so on, and so forth.” But the challenge there is that every dollar we spend on nuclear power is a dollar that’s not spent on renewables, on energy efficiency, on other ways of trying to deal with [the climate crisis.]

Professor MV Ramana

As I’ve said on prior programs— nuclear power today is unneeded, unsafe, uninsurable, uncompetitive, irresponsible, very secretive, and not willing to suffer the verdicts of the marketplace.

Ralph Nader

Paul Deslauriers is a grassroots organizer, who has consulted over two hundred organizations involving mergers, restructuring, work process flows, teamwork, management coaching, and asset management. The work involved diverse groups such as the Alaskan Inuit, Icelandic communities. In 2002 Mr. Deslauriers became a full-time activist, coordinating nearly three hundred grassroots groups focused on government system change. He has written a number of guidebooks on organizing including Seven Steps to Reclaim Democracy: An Empowering Guide For Systemic Change, Reclaim Paradise: RESET for the Common Good, and Common Sense: How we are Reclaiming Democracy and Resetting for the Common Good.

When you have a core team that is really dedicated in trying to bring about systemic change, and you have the foundation that you need, then you can really develop and grow this without a lot of divisiveness.

Paul Deslauriers

When you have volunteers, you have to have the right motivation, the right structure, the right training so that you can work cohesively and collaboratively together. And that’s so crucial for anyone who wants to start a similar group.

Paul Deslauriers

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

Try That In A Small Town argues that if you in any way "act a fool" - “Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/Carjack an old lady at a red light/Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store...Cuss out a cop, spit in his face/Stomp on the flag and light it up" - vigilante justice will find you: "See how far ya make it down the road/Around here, we take care of our own." In a later verse Aldean, who was on stage when a gunman opened fire in 2017 at a Las Vegas music festival, killing 60 people and wounding over 800 in this country's worst gun massacre, sings, “Got a gun that my granddad gave me/They say one day they’re gonna round up/Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck/Try that in a small town.” As he sings, images of rowdy protests, including post-George-Floyd BLM actions, flash frantically onscreen; at one point, a Fox News chyron screams, "State of Emergency Declared in Georgia" - though it turns out much of the footage is from protests in Canada and Europe.

Most egregious, Aldean's backdrop is the stately Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where in 1927 a white lynch mob strung up and murdered 18-year-old Black man Henry Choate after dragging his body through the streets with a car. One goon reportedly taunted the teen by holding up the rope beforehand and sneering, "Well, that sends you to hell - here you go!" before they hanged Choate and threw his body over the balcony; the rope dangled there for several weeks. The violence is said to have haunted Maury County: At least 20 Black men and boys were lynched or "disappeared” by the local Klan in that era, and it was the site of the 1946 Columbia Race Riot that almost saw the lynching of Thurgood Marshal. It's unclear if the producers of Aldean's flag-waving video - American, not Confederate, so good on him - chose the site because of or (improbably) unaware of its history, though some critics argue that would be even worse: "It just reinforces that Tennessee’s racist history is truly inescapable." Regardless, the song has enough Birth of a Nation, extrajudicial law and order dog whistles - his small town is "Full of good ol' boys, raised up right/If you're lookin' for a fight" - horror-struck critics have deemed it both "an ode to sundown towns" and "a modern lynching song."

Predictably, Aldean denies this. While the song was released in May, the video - and outrage - wasn't released until July 14. "When u grow up in small town, it's that unspoken rule of 'we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,'" he wrote at the time. "It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost...I hope my new music video helps y’all know that u are not alone in feeling that way." Cue wizened old guy in video musing "what this community and a lot of farm communities stand for - somebody needs some help, they’ll get it." Awww. That sounds so sweet. Given the song's menacing imagery and belligerent rhetoric - "Ya think you're tough/ Well, try that in a small town...You cross that line, it won't take long/For you to find out...Try that in a small town" - it also sounds like disingenuous bullshit, ugly light years away from "community" and "respect." Aldean's "angry cocktail" of country music, willful blindness, nostalgia and paranoia about anything "other" or "from away" - Nikki Haley's pining for the "simple" days of "faith, family and country" when marginalized people had no rights - is a perfect, heedless distillation of what MAGA world wants this country to be: Make America White (also straight and Christian) Again.

As usual, rural (white) towns play a key role in this well-burnished mythology, serving as the defenders of America's heartland against a perilous, communist, dystopian landscape - big cities, bad crimes, foreign food, weird ideas, dirt, noise, people of color. But painting small-town America as a pristine, peaceful utopia is more bullshit. In small towns, poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, lack of health care, boarded-up businesses, mean-spirited scapegoating of "others" and the opioid/fentanyl epidemic are rampant; food deserts are growing, farm communities are shrinking; vigilante justice still isn't justice, and local politics are often inept, corrupt, racist, rich-centric like the rest of the country. Deaths from the "unholy trinity (of) cars, guns and drugs" are 20% higher in rural small towns than big cities. Gun violence is everywhere: Uvalde, Newtown, Parkland are small towns, their shooters were young local (white) men, the Las Vegas shooter was an angry white man from Iowa, 2/3 of all fatal shootings involve rural white men - who often shoot themselves - with no "marauding bands of BLM protesters" in sight, and to paint gun violence as a big-city, left-leaning issue is "dog-whistling past the graveyard." It's also, says Nashville's Sheryl Crow, "just lame.”

The country music that supposedly represents these communities likewise boasts its own hypocrisies, discrepancies and racist history. An art "created around whiteness," its executives segregated country music from the start into "race music" and "hillbilly music," thus perpetuating a white-dominated genre that "borrowed from Black musicians but rarely centered on them," or even gave them credit. While it long had its progressive exceptions - Jimmy Rodgers, Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, with many more upcoming - it was historically reactionary. Enter Aldean, dubbed by some country purists "barely a country artist" but more a "mid-tempo arena retro rocker" whose hot new song is "a clownish, poorly-written, trite and reactionary piece of audio refuse," a "dated, untimely, unnecessarily strident... grandstanding embarrassment" without charm and a "poorly-attempted cultural statement that has clearly proven counter-productive," though it's making tons of money "being marketed well to people with terrible taste in music." The song is now #1 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs, with views of the video soaring from 350,000 to 16.6 million. Capitalism loves controversy - and evidently lots of lies.

Aldean, it turns out, may be crazy about small towns, but he's not from one, nor does he live in one. He grew up in Macon, where he attended private school, and he lives in Nashville, a city of over 700,000. He also doesn't write his own songs - "he picks them out of a catalog like a karaoke singer" - nor did he write this one: It's written by Neil Thrasher, Kurt Allison, Tully Kennedy and Kelley Lovelace, "none of whom are Jason Aldean," so "you'd have to ask them if it's about Blacks, Jews, Antifa, homeless people, or they're just mad some teenager stole their flag." "What we have here is a prep school dilettante who was raised in a big city, singing a song he didn’t write, about an experience he never had," writes Noah Berlatsky. He adds the song nonetheless remains "ugly and evil (because) Aldean is in fact speaking for an American tradition (that) is not limited to small towns but very much includes them, and Aldean remains "a garbage fire of a human being." Still, he questions condemning Aldean as a fake, thus conflating authenticity with morality: "It's odd to criticize a racist for not being true to his racist posturing, for not being the rugged small town bigot of his songs." At some point, he suggests "we stop caring so much about who is 'real' and start caring more about who is good."

The consensus: Aldean's neither. After a few days of backlash, Country Music Television pulled the video. Aldean squawked the critiques were "meritless," he doesn't even mention race and, "Cancel culture is a thing...if people don’t like what you say, they (try) and ruin your life, ruin everything." More squawking from the loathsome likes of Marcia Blackburn - "I stand with Jason Aldean" - Jesse Watters - "(This is) "open season on all of us" - and lying Sarah Huckabee: CMT "caved to the woke mob." Then the video re-appeared, with BLM protests edited out. Meanwhile, Aldean kept touring, whining and sounding like a vengeful, dumb-as-a-rock thug. In Boston, he inexplicably compared his song to the Marathon bombing: Boston should understand his message "better than anybody...Any of you guys that would’ve found those guys before the cops did, I know you would’ve beat the shit outta them...It's about people getting their shit together and acting right." In Hartford on Sunday, protesters gathere - "There is comfort in breaking bread together” - to don gowns and bear photos of Aldean in rainbow glory: "Try That In A Ball Gown." Critics had thoughts about "societal expectations" for the chunky singer. "I am sure he looked beautiful in that gown without the photo-shopping" and "the belt buckle really ties it all together." Talk about taking care of our own.

Jason Aldean - Try That in a Small Town (Official Music Video)youtu.be

Activists fixed the image of Aldean with a rainbow ballgownTwitter/Reddit photo

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

If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

Yet the song gets it wrong.

You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.

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

The post The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

The post The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

When Zulene Mayfield received a call from a reporter last summer, she was surprised. A journalist working at Philadelphia’s public radio station had contacted her for a story about a plan to develop a liquefied natural gas facility in her hometown of Chester, Pennsylvania, a city that sits along the Delaware River just southwest of the Philadelphia International Airport.

Since 1992, Mayfield has led an environmental justice group called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living. She formed the group to address local concerns about the concentration of waste disposal facilities throughout the city, most notably incineration and waste treatment plants. Chester is home to one of the country’sbiggest incinerators, a waste-to-energy facility owned by the Covanta corporation, which burns trash from up and down the East Coast.

The facilities, Mayfield said, were sickening residents in Chester, an overwhelmingly Black and low-income community. Over the years, Mayfield helped lead several campaigns to stop new incineration and waste treatment plants from setting up shop in Chester. So she was disturbed when she learned about a proposal for a new $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility in her backyard. Mayfield, who is deeply enmeshed in the community’s environmental health scene, had heard nothing about it until her group received a press inquiry.

“We learned about it last year by way of a reporter calling us up for a quote,” Mayfield told The Intercept. “It had not even been on our radar. We knew nothing about it, even though they had been secretly moving around in the city and throughout the state trying to get political support to bring it here.” 

An energy company called Penn America had been shopping the plan around to local and state officials for years with no notice to the community, WHYY reported last June. The LNG facility, which would pipe in natural gas, then liquify it for export, seemed to have already attracted bipartisan buy-in.

Top: Rail cars carry materials to the Trainer Refinery between the Covanta incineration facility and the block of local activist Zulene Mayfield’s abandoned house. Bottom: Zulene Mayfield speaks at an action highlighting the dirty investments in polluting facilities in Chester, Pa., on June 10, 2023.

Photos: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

Democrats in Pennsylvania had promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but former Gov. Tom Wolf and members of his administration met with Penn America Energy to help shepherd its plans as early as 2016. Republican lawmakers, for their part, formed the Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force in November 2022 to study plans for the proposed facility. The task force is stacked with industry executives, including one from the American Petroleum Institute, which launched a global campaign to promote liquefied natural gas as “clean” energy in 2020.

Once the plan for the LNG facility became public, community members, including Mayfield, were barred from testifying at public hearings. Instead, the task force hosted presentations by industry players, including former Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who now co-chairs an industry-funded nonprofit advocacy group that pushes for natural gas.

The proposed facility could have terrifying consequences for a city already burdened with intense health and economic disparities brought on in part by other energy facilities like the Covanta incinerator, Mayfield said. “This thing is so scary to me,” she said of the LNG proposal. “Out of all the things we’ve ever fought outside of the incinerator, the safety issue for this thing is dangerous to me.”

With President Joe Biden intensifying the quest to make the U.S. the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, similar scenes are playing out in old industry towns across the nation. Residents in Florida’s North Port St. Joe were surprised last year when they learned that their efforts to restore the community were running up against secret plans by officials and energy executives to build a new liquefied natural gas facility. Environmental groups failed to stop another liquefied natural gas facility in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans. And community organizers in Gibbstown, New Jersey, across the river from Chester, have been fighting another proposed liquefied natural gas export terminal since 2019; the project is currently on hold after a federal agency declined to renew its permit earlier this year.

The Biden administration has amplified calls to expand the production of liquefied natural gas to ease a shortage in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Republican lawmaker who started the task force to explore the proposed liquefied natural gas plan in Chester said she did so after the Russian invasion with hopes that Pennsylvania could help fill the void. Some environmental groups, though, have described the Ukraine war as a false pretense to ramp up fossil fuel production. The groups criticized Biden for echoing calls to boost liquefied natural gas production made by former President Donald Trump and leaving Trump-era regulatory rollbacks in place.

Biden’s stance on liquefied natural gas production has chafed climate groups that had been hopeful about his ambitious climate platform in the 2020 presidential campaign. As a candidate, Biden promisedto put $2 trillion in climate investments to move the country toward net-zero emissions, fix crumbling public infrastructure, and create an office in the Department of Justice to address the disparate impacts of climate change. Instead, Biden has pushed for major carveouts for the fossil fuel industry in the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion clean energy subsidies.

His latest calls to expand production have frustrated some environmental groups andmembers of Congress, who have pointed to the potential for adverse effects on minority communities and poor neighborhoods. “This will only be exacerbated with the addition of the proposed projects,” more than 40 members of Congress wrote in a May 8 letter to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. 

A mother of five walks with her children near the Covanta incineration facility in Chester, Pa., on June 28, 2023. All of her children have asthma, but their conditions worsened since moving from one area of Chester to this block a few years ago.

Photo: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“It’s definitely not a clean energy alternative,” said Itai Vardi, the research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility and fossil fuel watchdog. “Those living near LNG facilities are front-line communities that suffer the direct impact of this LNG boom that is backed by the current administration.”

Biden’s push to increase liquefied natural gas exports runs counter to his climate policy, Vardi added. Increased liquefied natural gas exports have also been shown to raise the overall price of gas for domestic customers, contributing to higher gas utility bills.

“Increasing and encouraging LNG exports runs counter to the very nice talk of decarbonizing the U.S. economy and supposedly helping other countries in their efforts to decarbonize,” Vardi said. “At the same time, boosting LNG for export is a very stark contradiction.”

For some climate advocates, it’s been difficult not to notice that controversial projects like the proposed Chester LNG export facility tend to get plopped down in communities struggling with legacies of industrial pollution.

“Many of these projects are sited in and have disproportionate impacts on environmental justice communities and communities that already face disproportionate burdens with industry,” Morgan Johnson, staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s certainly problematic, given the administration’s expressed goals on climate and environmental justice, when these projects have impacts that are so significant on those fronts.”

Climate and Pollution Concerns

While four major environmental groups endorsed Biden last month, there’s been little evidence of major change in places like Chester. Once a major hub for shipbuilding and industry, Chester has been in receivership since 2020, filed for bankruptcy late last year, and is currently at risk of disincorporation, meaning its government would be dissolved and its boundaries erased. The city has a high poverty rate and one of the country’s worst pension underfunding crises.

And the Covanta incinerator emits more pollutants in parts per million than any similar plant in the country, according to a New School study. The federal government has documented disproportionately high levels of cancer and asthma for decades.

Mayfield and environmental advocates fighting LNG expansion in other nearby towns say Chester’s health and economic issues will only worsen if plans to construct the facility proceed.

Left/top: Founded before Philadelphia, Chester, Pa., is a historic town that was settled in 1644. Right/bottom: 1.7 miles from the Covanta incineration facility, the Trainer Refinery contributes to the air quality concerns of the surrounding towns all within a few mile stretch along the Delaware River. Photos: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“It just carries forward this environmental racism and institutional bias towards dumping everything on the community that they think they can get away with dumping it on,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, which fought to stop the liquefied natural gas facility in Gibbstown and has worked with Mayfield’s Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living to get more information about the Chester proposal. “But they can’t get away with doing it in Chester.”

The company shopping plans for an LNG facility in Chester, Penn America Energy, isn’t based in Pennsylvania at all; the firm’s headquarters is in New York City. Franc James, the CEO, started the firm in 2015 “to find new ways of unlocking more value from Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus and Utica natural gas resources,” according to his LinkedIn.

The project would require the construction of a new gaspipeline to ship natural gas to the site for liquefaction. (Texas Eastern, a division of pipeline giant Enbridge, told The Intercept it has abandoned a plan to expand pipelines in greater Philadelphia.) Production, storage, and shipping of liquefied natural gas is more carbon intensive and increases risk for fossil fuel leaks. While liquefied natural gas gives off less carbon dioxide than both coal and oil, it still produces methane, another greenhouse gas that’s more potent than carbon dioxide.

Producing and transporting the liquified gas can create up to 10 times the carbon emissions of moving the fuel in gaseous form through a pipeline. While James has said the Chester plant would run on as much renewable power as possible, most LNG plants also use a portion of natural gas for on-site power. One environmental advocate told WHYY the proposed plant would be the largest new source of air pollution in southeast Pennsylvania. [TK comment James]

Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland and former Mayor John Linder have met numerous times with Penn America officials and said they support the LNG project in Chester because it would bring economic investment and job opportunities.

Margaret Brown, a local resident in Chester, Pa., told The Intercept that 11 out of 17 homes on her block, as well as her mother, had residents who died of cancer, primarily lung cancer.

Photo: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“As Mayor I feel that it is important to explore every possible avenue that would lead to more businesses and jobs coming to the City of Chester,” Kirkland said in a statement to The Intercept. Asked about his meetings with the company, Kirkland said, “I won’t address any meeting dates, but I can say that before any decisions are made I would consider the environmental impact on the Residents of Chester.”

Chester City Council Member Stefan Roots said he won’t take a position on the proposal until he sees “more than a few artists sketches.” Roots told The Intercept, “There is no comprehensive LNG proposal to evaluate, review or consider.”

In service of its plan to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia, and Latin America, Penn America has reportedly eyed a privately owned 60-acre site on the Chester waterfront. The site’s owner, Michael Gerace, told the Philadelphia Inquirer last year he didn’t want to sell the plot and was using it for business. (Gerace did not respond to a request for comment.)

The facility’s potential proximity to Delaware River, an interstate waterway, could raise issues for other states to consider, said Carluccio of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network. Delaware state law has prohibited LNG facilities anywhere along its coastal zone since 1971 because the risks of environmental pollution are considered too dangerous. That zone includes the Delaware River where the proposed Chester site sits.

“It’s even more insidious when you realize it’s going to affect New Jersey,” Carluccio said, “and it’s going to affect Delaware.”

Darlynn Johnson, standing with her son beside the train tracks that lead to the Trainer Refinery and next to the Covanta incineration facility, tells people to wear a mask whenever they go outside.

Photo: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“Dog and Pony Shows”

The Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force is led by state Rep. Martina White, a Republican who represents parts of far northeast Philadelphia and is secretary for the state House Republican Caucus. Other members of the group include natural gas industry executives from American Petroleum Institute Pennsylvania and EQT Corporation, the country’s largest natural gas producer. Philadelphia Gas Works, the city’s gas utility; the Port of Philadelphia, the city’s powerful building trades; and two state environmental and economic agencies are also represented on the task force. Two Democrats and one Republican from the state’s general assembly are members.

Testimony at the first two task force meetings in April and May came from fossil fuel industry leaders and lobbyists at the American Petroleum Institute, a drilling industry trade group called the Marcellus Shale Coalition, and the corporate law firm K&L Gates. Representatives for the fossil fuel transport industry also testified in support of expanding LNG exports. Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Neil Chatterjee and a local labor leader also testified.

During his introduction at the April meeting, Pennsylvania state House Rep. Joseph Hohenstein, one of the Democrats on the task force, said White had rejected all of his recommendations for witnesses from environmental justice groups. “Perhaps we should all be concerned with answering hard truths from the communities that you’ve excluded today,” Hohenstein said. White responded that all organizations who requested to participate were allowed to submit testimony.

Democratic state Rep. Carol Kazeem, who represents Chester but is not on the task force, testified against the plan at the May hearing. Kazeem noted that despite the task force being named for Philadelphia, Chester is the prime candidate for the facility. She said the city was at risk of repeating the mistakes of its industrial history that had saddled the community with health issues.

“My community, where I still reside along with my children and family, has been promised economic salvation each time an industrial plant is proposed,” Kazeem said, mentioning Chester’s incinerator and its old paper plant. “It has happened a dozen subsequent times.”

What Chester did get, Kazeem said, was a 27 percent childhood asthma rate, a 19.3 percent infant mortality rate, an increase in health risks and illness among seniors, and loss of jobs and corporate investment. “What we didn’t get was the promise of permanent jobs, and also financial emancipation,” she said.

Despite efforts to site the project in Chester, hearings for the proposed facility have been mostly held in Philadelphia and surrounding areas. Mayfield said the location of the hearings, the task force name, and the obstruction of testimony from those opposed to the project are designed to keep Chester residents out of the loop.

Top: Standing in front of the Covanta incineration facility, Margaret Brown says she wears a mask whenever she goes outdoors. Bottom: Because Darlynn Johnson’s three older children have asthma, she says of her 1-year-old son Darriel, “I’m pretty much sure he’s going to have asthma.”

Photos: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“This whole thing is deceptive,” Mayfield said. “Everybody knows that they’re trying to bring it to the city of Chester. Chester has never been part of Philadelphia in any stretch of the imagination. Now we’re including it.”

The project won’t move forward until the task force finishes its hearings and submits its recommendations to the new Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, with the report expected by November. The plan would have to clear several layers of permitting and approval at the federal and state level before construction could begin. (Shapiro’s office declined to comment.)

With community members like those in Mayfield’s group opposed to the proposed plant and barred from testifying at public hearings, Carluccio said she expects the task force to recommend that the plant move forward.

According to a Penn America project plan reported last year by WHYY, the company had originally projected a four-phase timeline, with development between 2016 and 2019, construction between 2019 and 2023, pipeline construction from 2022 to 2023, and operations from November 2023 to December 2043. People associated with Penn America, including its lobbying firm, Malady & Wooten, have contributed to campaigns for White since 2016 and Kirkland, Chester’s pro-LNG mayor, since 2018. “Penn America was greasing their wheels for building their facility in Chester,” Carluccio said. “They got outed by the fourth estate, and now they’ve slowed down their ambitious schedule that they announced right after they were outed, while this LNG Task Force carries out a year’s worth of basically holding dog and pony shows.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

In the afternoon, Alice Srp sits in her dining room and looks at the Mississippi River. She is talking about the train derailment that happened earlier this year in East Palestine, Ohio, when the horn blares again, stopping the conversation.

“That situation in Ohio was so sad,” Srp said. “You feel for those people, but your heart is thinking, ‘Are we going to be [next]?’”

Alice Srp sits on the porch of her home in Camanche, Iowa. She said trains have become increasingly filled with hazardous oil and chemicals, and she worries about future disasters along the Mississippi River. Grist / John McCracken

A large sign welcomes visitors to Camanche, Iowa. The town, located on the banks of the Mississippi River, is one of the many railroad communities increasingly worried about potential train disasters involving toxic chemicals. Grist / John McCracken

Later that evening, the horn cuts through the noise at the Poor House Tap at the edge of town. As the train roars by, its resonance is dulled a bit by the chatter of patrons and the barks of Zoe, a labradoodle who knows there are treats behind the bar. She is unmoved as the sound cuts through town, grabbing the attention of locals.

Camanche, located on the banks of the Mississippi River three hours east of Des Moines, is no stranger to the sound of trains. But for some people in this town of 4,500, the familiar sounds of a train whistle now bring an unfamiliar reaction: fear.

After a train derailed in East Palestine in February — resulting in a towering black plume of smoke, the burning of toxic chemicals, and the evacuation of the town — health concerns still linger, and cleanup woes have plagued the rural community. 

In the months since, residents in railroad communities across the country have become increasingly worried about the potential disaster aboard trains. Camanche has become a hotbed of concern over an international railroad merger projected to triple the number of trains moving through town. 

Canadian Pacific Railroad, a major rail company headquartered in the province of Alberta, officially purchased Kansas City Southern Railroad in April. The merger, estimated to cost Canada Pacific $31 billion, is the first merger of major railroad companies in two decades.

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With this new merger comes a first-of-its-kind rail line connecting Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This route will also directly link Canadian tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries, with increased traffic along the way. 

Crude oil could be shipped from Canada to Texas and Mexico, refined into petrochemicals on the Gulf Coast, then shipped across the country to its destination. 

Camanche currently sees around eight trains a day. After the merger traffic picks up, the city is expected to see upward of 21 trains a day. Other cities along the merger route will see a similar increase, raising the odds of another disaster like the one that struck East Palestine. What separates Camanche is the unique way that railroad tracks isolate residents, creating particularly frightening possibilities for the town.

Standing in Kitt Swanson’s driveway, the first thing you notice is how close the home is to the tracks. She said the trains don’t seem to bother Kiyiyah, her docile Alaskan malamute, but the rails are a few feet from her backyard and shake the house each time a train passes.

Swanson, who has lived in the home for three years, said she worries she and the roughly 1,000 people on the river side of the tracks are without help when trains pass through. When a train comes through town, the only way out for her and others on this side of the tracks is by boat. 

“I’m a brittle Type 1 diabetic,” Swanson said. “If I need EMS care, how am I going to get it when all the tracks are blocked?”

Here lies the problem with the expected increase in rail traffic. When a train comes through Camanche, all seven of the crossings are blocked at the same time. This creates a steel wall, isolating more than 1,000 residents from the rest of the town. The only way out is by boat or to wait for the train to pass.

The merger, combined with the fact that freight companies have increased the length of their trains in recent years, means that these residents may be in more danger than ever of being cut off from help, should disaster strike.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, train lengths have increased 25 percent from 2008 to 2019, with trains averaging at least 1.4 miles long. The same report found that some rail companies operate three-mile-long trains every week. 

“Our biggest concern is simply that we don’t want people to be isolated from emergency services,” said Dave Schutte, the fire chief of Camanche.

Emergency services are in a bind when trains come through town. Schutte said he’s seen the trains block the tracks for over 10 minutes, which, under the right circumstances, could be life or death for some. 

He said the city voiced its concerns to both the rail companies and the Surface Transportation Board, or STB, the federal agency in charge of regulation of rail and other modes of transportation. He said it was a long shot going into the discussions that something would change given the power that the rail businesses have. 

“They only looked at super busy crossings in big cities where they have high traffic,” Schutte said. “To me, [being a small town] doesn’t devalue the importance of having those crossings open when they need emergency services.”

Now that the merger has been approved, Schutte said he’s focused on emergency preparedness in case of future derailments or blocked crossings. Right now, the city is developing a plan to evacuate residents via boat if a derailment blocks access to residents during an emergency.

This method has been internally described as the Dunkirk Method, a reference to the World War II evacuation of more than 300,000 British and French soldiers by boat.

In addition to potential emergency response delays, Schutte is also worried about the risks of what’s being carried on the trains, given the disaster in Ohio earlier this year.

“Just seeing what could happen to the community, and the devastation of just how bad it really could be depending on what chemicals are on the train, certainly elevates that concern even more,” Schutte said.

Ashley Foley, a mother of three who works from home, said the regular movement of chemicals and oil on rails is a concern that keeps her up at night, worrying about the safety of her family.

“If a train is going slow and it derails, it’s still scary, but the likelihood of us surviving would be higher,” Foley said. “Now with the stuff that they’re carrying, with trains going faster and being longer, I lay in bed at night and I wonder if tonight’s gonna be the night that it comes off the tracks and wipes out the backside of the house.”

While visiting Camanche, Grist observed a train car with at least eight oil tankers moving through the town after 9 p.m. 

Before 38 train cars derailed in Ohio earlier this year, vinyl chloride was a little-known chemical. Now, national media attention has raised awareness of what’s being carried on the trains that move through the nation’s rural backyards.

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, or FRA, and the Association of American Railroads, there are more than 140,000 miles of railway in the U.S., the majority of which are in rural regions. 

Oil is transported predominantly by pipeline. But oil capacity in pipelines is dwindling, with rail emerging as a popular means of moving crude oil. Between 2010 and 2014, oil by rail topped almost 1 million barrels a day, which represented 10 percent of American crude oil at the time.

At the time, questions over the safety of transporting oil by rail were in the spotlight after a disaster in Canada. In the early hours of July 6, 2013, an oil train jumped the tracks in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, and derailed, killing 47 people and leveling the area’s downtown, which has yet to recover.

Now that Canadian shale oil will have a direct path through the United States, concerns over oil explosions caused by train derailments have been rekindled. And though global oil demand is poised to slow, fossil fuel companies are pivoting to a similarly toxic industry. 

Petrochemicals are manufactured from fossil fuels and used in a variety of industries, from plastics to fertilizers. In the past decade, fossil fuel companies have raced to build out their plastics divisions, refining oil into petrochemicals along the Gulf Coast and polluting the predominantly Black communities around them.

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Global plastic production is estimated to quadruple by 2050, and with it, the risk of transporting volatile chemicals. Vinyl chloride, the now-infamous chemical that escaped from toppled train cars in East Palestine, is a petrochemical and known carcinogen.

The rail industry knows this, and train executives are betting on the continued growth of the petrochemical and plastics markets.

Speaking at an investors’ earnings call in October 2022, Canadian Pacific Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer John Brooks said the rail company is starting to see petrochemicals shipped out of the Heartland Petrochemical Complex in Alberta, Canada. This newly built petrochemical facility is owned by Canadian energy company Inter Pipeline. Canadian Pacific is the only rail company it uses. 

“Our partnership with Inter Pipeline expands Canadian Pacific’s plastic service to both export and domestic markets, and this volume growth will be a tailwind for us,” Brooks said.

When asked to comment, Canadian Pacific referred Grist to its STB merger application.

While oil and rail are betting on the petrochemical markets, environmental groups are working to prevent their expansion. 

“We just don’t need it,” said Eric de Place, former director of the advocacy organization Beyond Petrochemicals. “They want to triple global plastics consumption, and we already have too much plastic.”

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De Place said the pollution and public health dangers seen in East Palestine, Ohio, happen almost every day for communities around the country that reside near petrochemical facilities, just without the spectacle of a massive smoke cloud.

“The derailment in Ohio was horrifying, but in some way, it’s just a moving version of what happens in stationary locations all the time,” he said.

Heading west on Iowa Route 30 to Camanche, the Mississippi River is only visible through split-second cracks in the industrial corridor walling off the nation’s second-longest river.

Along the way, a massive corn mill owned by Chicago-based Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, or ADM, stretches for miles along the river. ADM is a leader in agriculture and food processing, making a variety of products, including corn oils, enzymes, and ethanol. 

On an early Saturday morning in mid-May, roughly 80 oil tanker cars could be seen sitting along the tracks at the ADM facility. Their destination, and contents, were unknown. (ADM did not respond to a request for comment.) Some of these cars included rail placards that notate that hazardous materials are onboard, a practice created by the U.S. Department of Transportation and used to determine risk in emergency response situations.

Camanche, like many cities along the banks of the Mississippi, became a solidified community in the mid-19th century, relying on a commercial corridor sculptured by rails and barges to haul timber, clams, pork, and grain across the country. 

Since the first tracks split through the city in 1857, the contents of trains have changed drastically. Alice Srp, who lives by the Mississippi River and has lived in Camanche for over 55 years, said she’s seen this shift in her lifetime. 

“Rather than cargo containers and [lumber], these are round oil tankers,” Srp said. 

Srp said the merger will make emergency response harder for the older population who live on the river side of the tracks. She also worries that, even if a future derailment isn’t fatal, an oil spill could become an ecological nightmare for the region, given that the tracks run parallel to the river.

In May, the dividing line between train tracks and the Mississippi blurred. Camanche saw its third-highest river levels in history, and parts of the tracks in town were underwater. Findings from the U.S. Department of Transportation and global research point to increased hazards and damages to railroads due to climate-fueled flooding.

While rail and water commerce compete for cargo, they often go hand in hand when it comes to location. According to Railfan & Railroad Magazine, railroads are historically built next to rivers to decrease grading and curves along a train’s route, and many routes across the country often followed the “natural courses of water.”

The relationship between railroad corridors and rivers is likely to get more turbulent as flooding becomes more frequent due to a warming climate. In late April, a train derailed in Western Wisconsin along the Mississippi River during heavy rain, dumping train cars into the river.

Despite ongoing concerns about the impact of increased rail traffic on the Mississippi River, the Canadian Pacific and Kansas City rail merger continued. In its final environmental impact statement, the Office of Environmental Analysis for the STB wrote that the negative impacts of the merger would be “negligible, minor, and/or temporary.”

The office also found that the merger would increase the transportation of hazardous material on more than 5,800 miles of rail lines through 16 states, including Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio. 

“You feel like you’re just run over and it doesn’t matter,” Srp said.

Residents in Camanche aren’t alone in their opposition to the merger. 

Eight communities from Chicago suburbs formed the Coalition to Stop CPKC to oppose the merger. Chicago’s freight industry is the largest in the country and, according to the coalition, the merger will increase traffic by 300 percent in the next three years.

Despite the deal’s federal approval, these suburban communities are pushing back. On May 11, the Coalition to Stop CPKC filed an appeal to prevent the merger, citing a need to review the public safety and environmental impacts. 

“The (Surface Transportation Board) ruling shows us three things,” said Jeff Pruyn, the mayor of Itasca, Illinois, a community two hours east of Camanche. “It ignored our concerns for the quality of life in our communities, it ignored our concerns about the negative consequences on economic development in our communities, and most importantly, it ignored our concerns for safety.”

When reached, the STB declined to comment for this story, citing the pending appeal litigation. 

In Bensenville, Illinois, another community opposing the merger, the presence of the transportation sector divides the town. On one side, there are quaint bungalows, old-fashioned street lights, and a downtown with cobblestone streets and a commuter train station.

On the other side of Bensenville, a village of more than 18,000, sit two massive transportation facilities: Chicago O’Hare International Airport and the Bensenville Yard, a massive rail terminal. According to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, 50 percent of all freight trains in the country pass through Chicago’s varied rail corridors and terminals.

This terminal already sees a variety of cargo, including hazardous materials. On a Saturday morning in mid-May, a train of an estimated 150 cars made its way through Bensenville, headed to the terminal. Grist observed roughly nine train cars marked with a hazard placard for the industrial chemical styrene monomer, an explosive “probable human carcinogen” used to make rubber and other plastics.

There were also 11 train cars marked with a hazard placard for “Not Otherwise Specified” hazardous materials and at least 12 oil tankers with no visible hazard placard.

Safety is not only a concern for the cities and towns seeing increased rail traffic, but also for those working the rails. In the immediate aftermath of the Ohio derailment, the working conditions of railroaders were called into question. 

Mark Burrows, a retired railroad engineer from Chicago, said the rail industry has been stretched thin and lacks adequate protection for workers. It suffered a blow to worker protections when President Biden signed a bill blocking a national rail strike last year. Rail, fossil fuel, and petrochemical companies celebrated the strike’s defeat.

Burrows said he’s seen the industry become increasingly consolidated, hurting the well-being of workers.  He retired in 2015 after roughly four decades. 

He said he saw an increase in oil tankers in his last years of working in the Chicago area and the Bensenville yard. It is possible that workers are more aware of the hazards they deal with daily, he said, but the “draconic and barbaric” working schedules and conditions have them operating at maximum capacity at all times, to avoid being penalized or worse. 

“What we now know as Precision Scheduled Railroading just obliterates our normal working agreements,” said Burrows, a member of Railroad Workers United. “And it caused a speedup, having these guys work like maniacs.”

“Precision Scheduled Railroading” is a type of rail traffic management that focuses on increasing efficiency by reducing staff and lengthening trains.

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For Burrows, derailments and poor working conditions are symptoms of the industry’s efforts to maximize profits. 

He said that establishing better working conditions for staff, creating a nationalized railroad system, and reforming how hazardous materials are classified and transported could all prevent future disasters on the tracks. 

“If you ask me what’s the definition of a hazardous train: If it is just one damn car of ammonia, or chlorine, or anything that’s uber hazardous, then that should be considered a hazardous train,” Burrows said. “Because all it takes is for one car to open up.”

About 1,000 miles west of Camanche, the sound of train horns worries Ingrid Wussow. 

“I think we are at the precipice of a lot of devastating things if we don’t start making decisions that put our environment first,” she said.

Wussow, the newly elected mayor of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, has joined other surrounding municipalities in a push against expanding oil trains directly through her downtown.

A planned 88-mile railway expansion would connect the oil-rich Uinta Basin in Utah to Union Pacific rail lines, linking Western oil to Gulf Coast refineries.

While the new railway has been on the table since 2014, Wussow said that concerns over the shipment of hazards like oil have been renewed in recent months.

The increase in oil drilling and an expanded fossil fuel market flies in the face of global climate goals. This burning of fossil fuels will continue to exacerbate the climate crisis, resulting in extreme weather events such as flooding and mudslides.

Besides a potentially deadly derailment and oil train explosion in Glenwood Springs’ downtown district, Wussow shares the same concern as other environmental groups and municipal leaders in the region: increased oil by rail along the Colorado River. The expansion is estimated to ship 4.6 billion gallons of waxy crude oil per year through Colorado, a hundred miles of which would run right beside the river.

The Colorado River is the source of drinking water for roughly 40 million people and is currently experiencing a historic drought. Wussow said the river is the “lifeblood” of the region, drawing tourists and recreation throughout the year. 

Wussow added that many residents would be put in danger by increased oil train traffic moving full speed through railroad towns. She said communities have already seen the risk posed by increased hazards on rail lines moving through their towns. 

“East Palestine, Ohio, is an example of how damaging and concerning these derailments are,” she said.

In Camanche, the dangers of rail contents and the obstacles they pose to public safety aren’t lost on city administrator Andrew Kida, who doesn’t mince words when looking back on negotiations with Canadian Pacific. 

“Canadian Pacific doesn’t give one rat’s behind about people,” Kida told Grist.

As part of the merger negotiations, the city of Camanche was offered, and its council eventually turned down, over $200,000 per railroad crossing to shut down up to three crossings. This would permanently close the sections of the road that intersect with the tracks. Camanche counter offered with $2.5 million and the railroad company declined. Larger cities accepted offers in the millions of dollars to shut down crossings. 

Kida told Grist that he is now working on using Iowa state law to force the railroad companies to pay for infrastructure that would allow for better access for emergency response.  
Kida said he would have preferred the oil that is now moving through his town be sent from Canada by pipeline, as a shale oil derailment in the nearby Mississippi River marshland would “make cleaning up the Exxon Valdez look like child’s play.”

“All they’ve done is taken the Keystone pipeline and put it on wheels and run it right next to the Mississippi River,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Railroaded on Jul 12, 2023.

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

Most recently, the country’s leadership in developing countries’ advocacy for climate reparations culminated in the creation of an international fund to pay for climate-driven loss and damage at the 27th United Nations climate change conference, or COP27, in Egypt last November. While the details are yet to be determined — which countries will pay into the fund, how much they’ll contribute, and who the recipients will be — the creation of the fund was a major win for low-income nations. Vanuatu also recently persuaded a majority of the countries in the United Nations to seek an advisory opinion on the responsibility of states to tackle climate change from the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, the world’s highest court.  

Vanuatu’s climate minister, Ralph Regenvanu, recently spoke to Grist about the three-year campaign that led to the United Nations resolution requesting an opinion from the ICJ in March, his frustrations with the infighting among developing countries at the Bonn climate conference earlier this month, and his hopes for COP28.

What follows is a transcript of that conversation, shortened and edited for clarity, with explanatory notes from Grist appearing in brackets.

Q. You are an anthropologist by training and were previously Vanuatu’s minister of foreign affairs. What drew you to the Ministry of Climate Change?

A. My background and my passion are cultural heritage management and trying to make sure that Indigenous communities try to maintain this tradition-based lifestyle that they’ve been leading as much as possible. My very earliest career was doing that kind of work in recognition of the fact that territories governed by Indigenous people have been proven to be the last remaining reserves of biodiversity. So from that background, I got into politics about 15 years ago to change legislation regarding the use of land in my country, which was detrimental to Indigenous peoples’ control of territory. That’s why I got into politics. Since then I’ve been moving to different ministries, and I got into foreign affairs, which is where I initiated the move to take the issue of climate change to the International Court of Justice in 2019. 

Q.

What prompted you to consider the ICJ as a legal avenue as opposed to other strategies?

A. The idea actually came from the students at the law school of the University of the South Pacific. One of their assignments was to come up with a legal measure that would be one of the most effective to deal with the effects of climate change that the South Pacific is facing. They came up with this idea of seeking an advisory opinion from the ICJ, and they actually got quite passionate about it, as students do, and formed a group called Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change. When their assignment was finished, they sent letters to all Pacific Island states asking if any state was willing to take this up. I was minister of foreign affairs at the time, and I was the only one who said, “Yes, I’m interested.” I recall distinctly they all came and saw me, sat in an office, and we talked about it, and I said, “Look, I’ll do it. Vanuatu will take this on board.”

Q.

The first step in the process was to get a resolution passed in the United Nations seeking an advisory opinion on climate change from the ICJ. How did you get the majority of states, many of whom have vastly different interests, on board? 

A.

One of the very successful diplomatic strategies that we did was to establish a core group of countries representing all areas of the world who would work with us on drafting the actual question that we asked the court. By the end of 2021, we had the ideal question, but then we set up this core group at the beginning of 2022, and we included countries from the EU [European Union]: Germany, Romania, Lithuania, and Portugal.

We said, “Look, we want you to help us refine this question until we can all agree on it.” So the idea was if we get everyone in this core group to agree on the question, they’ll be representing their regions essentially, and then that would mean we get the buy-in.

When I went to COP27 — I was the new climate change minister by then — I remember distinctly trying to negotiate with Germany because Germany was the key. They were the key ones pushing back.

Q.

Was there a key moment when Germany came on board? What do you think made the difference?

A.

A key difference was Jennifer Morgan. [Morgan was the executive director of the environmental organization Greenpeace and was subsequently appointed as Germany’s special representative for international climate policy in 2022.] She came on board last year. She was a great help within the German administration. Eventually, we got that agreement by February, which was a great moment. 

When we got to the 29th of March, which was the day it was on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly, I flew to New York for it. Everyone was in the bag except China and the U.S. The evening before, the Chinese ambassador of Vanuatu announced that China would not be objecting to the resolution. And one week prior the U.S. had indicated they would not vote against it either.

Q.

What were the negotiations with the U.S. like? What were some of their concerns?

A.

They were the country that was most against this whole thing. They were just really, really adamantly against it, saying they would lobby against it. 

Q.

Were you concerned about what might happen if the U.S. brought the full force of its lobbying muscle against the resolution?

A.

Obviously, it was a huge, huge concern for us. The U.S. was the country most actively opposing it. China was kind of silent, but we learned at the end that they were lobbying behind the scenes as well against it.

We got to the vote, and I remember turning up at the United Nations that morning just hoping no one was going to object, and it happened like that. It went through with no objection. It was a huge moment. [The resolution passed by voice vote, and the U.S. and China did not oppose the measure or call for a formal up-or-down vote.]

Q.

How did you feel in that moment?

A.

I was in tears. It was an amazing feeling. The vote went through in the morning first thing, and then the rest of the whole day, I was sitting there listening to all states comment on it. Many states — China, the U.S., Saudi Arabia — were against it. That was important for them to make those statements. 

Q.

Assuming the ICJ issues a favorable opinion, what would it mean for the Pacific Islands, but also the rest of the world?

A.

Well, an ICJ advisory opinion is not binding. It’s just persuasive. But it is persuasive universally at all levels. It’s persuasive in terms of all negotiations about international legal instruments. It will have a bearing on how we talk at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We hope it’ll help with negotiations. It’ll help make certain arguments untenable. And we hope that it will assist the litigation that is already ongoing everywhere. 

I hope it will also clarify issues of climate finance. There’s a current push right now to say it’s not states that should be financing this global problem, it should be private companies, banks, and so on. So maybe the ICJ finds states actually have an obligation to finance. That’s a key one. Especially, what’s happening in Bonn right now with the argument increasingly coming up that it’s not states that actually have to put forward the public finance and that should be obtained from other sources.

We would have never said this during the lead-up to the advisory opinion getting approved, but we are also definitely looking at litigation as a state. I imagine it would happen as a torts case against fossil fuel companies. 

Q.

You’ve been following the climate change conference that took place in Bonn, Germany. The negotiations were tense with states unable to agree on even the agenda for the conference until the day before the two-week conference was due to close. What are your takeaways from the Bonn conference?

A.

It’s very, very disappointing. It’s a real pity that these new arguments are coming up now that the loss and damage fund has been agreed upon. There’s a failure by a number of middle-income developing countries to recognize the particular vulnerabilities of the very vulnerable countries. They are basically holding the needs of very vulnerable countries hostage to other agendas. 

[At COP27, the loss and damage fund was set up to benefit developing countries that are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change — as opposed to middle-income countries like India and China that are now major emitters — in recognition of the challenges faced by low-income countries that have contributed the least to global warming.] 

We were able to get loss and damage over the line at the last minute at COP27 because we argued that that loss and damage should be a fund that targets the most vulnerable, the most needy. That’s how at the last minute we got the EU and everyone to agree to the loss and damage fund. 

So now at Bonn, it seems there’s an attempt to reopen that whole thing, and that’s disappointing. We have a group of countries that are not the most vulnerable, that are using the developing country banner or grouping to argue that [historically low-emitting] developing states should be funding the development of countries like India and China, and Saudi Arabia, for example. For a country like Vanuatu, that’s very disingenuous, and it’s almost reprehensible. 

Q.

With Bonn behind us, what are your expectations for COP28, which will be held in December in Dubai? 

A.

This COP is going to be instrumental, but it’s not looking good. We want fossil fuel phase-out language coming out of this COP. But the way it’s going, it doesn’t look like we will get it. We really need to shift to saying, “fossil fuels have got to stop,” because what’s happening now is that people have started talking about carbon markets. I don’t want to talk about carbon markets. It’s a cop out. The United Arab Emirates presidency has come up with “fossil fuel emissions phase-out.” That’s very dangerous language.

It’s just talking about carbon capture. It’s not talking about stopping taking fossil fuel out of the ground. The big thing that has to happen is the world has to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and stop giving money to fossil-fuel extraction. That’s the money we need for loss and damage and for just transition. 

Q.

You mentioned the COP28 presidency. The United Arab Emirates selected Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the country’s oil company, to lead the climate talks. What effect has that decision had on the credibility of COP28? 

A.

When the presidency was announced, we gave them the benefit of the doubt. We’re waiting to see what actually happens. So far, it hasn’t been good. “Fossil fuel emissions phase-out,” for example, that’s definitely wrong. The fossil fuel companies are the problem — full stop. They need to stop fossil-fuel extraction. You cannot be at the table if you’re continuing to extract fossil fuels. If you don’t stop plans for new extraction, then you’re not part of the solution. You are part of the problem. 

It’s looking more and more like the fears about the UAE COP presidency are being realized by the way things are going. We continue to entertain the hope that there will be a different outcome, a change, a paradigm shift in the attitude to fossil fuels coming out of COP28. That’s all we can do. We just hope for the best.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a small island nation is taking climate change to the world’s highest court on Jun 27, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Newspapers front pages displayed in a newsstand in Bedminister on June 9, 2023, in New Jersey.

Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

I may have let out a weird animalistic hoot of joy when the news broke that former President Donald Trump had been indicted on federal charges. There’s something about Trump’s essence that maddens all former children who long ago always did the assigned reading, only to see their lazy bully classmate bloviate their way into the Ivy League thanks to their rich dad. “At long last he’s paying the price for not following the rules,” we think.

And yet, there’s something discordant about hearing from the New York Times that this is “the first time a former U.S. president has faced federal charges.” The Washington Post made the same point, with a subheadline saying, “Political earthquake as GOP frontrunner is now first ex-president indicted by the DOJ.”

Your disquiet may grow if you truly consider that no U.S. president has ever been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. Richard Nixon was impeached but resigned before he could be tried by the Senate. Bill Clinton was impeached, and Trump was impeached (twice), but both were acquitted in their Senate trials.

How can this be? Trump is extremely bad, and honestly, I’m still smiling today as I imagine him screaming, “UNFAIR!” at the squirrels on his New Jersey golf course. But it makes no sense to believe he’s the only president in American history who’s ever acted so maliciously that he deserves to face potential consequences.

To understand this, you might want to read “Murder on the Orient Express,” the 1934 mystery by Agatha Christie.

In the novel, detective Hercule Poirot boards the famous train in Istanbul. There are only 14 other passengers in first and second class. On the second night, the train is forced to stop in Croatia due to a huge snowdrift, and the next morning, a businessperson named Samuel Ratchett is discovered dead in his cabin, indicating that the killer must still be on board.

The evidence is peculiar. Ratchett has been stabbed 12 times, but some of the wounds appear to have been inflicted by someone who’s right-handed, and some appear to be from someone left-handed. Some came from someone extremely strong, some from someone weak. And a fusillade of other clues all point to different suspects on the train.

Poirot considers it all and then gathers all the possible suspects together, along with his friendd who’s a top executive of the railroad line. He suggests two theories of the case:

1. The victim was murdered by someone who’s no longer on the train, who somehow got on board and then escaped unnoticed.

2. Ratchett was murdered by everyone. All the passengers had a motive to kill him, each one stabbed him, and no individual can rationally be held responsible separate from the others.

Poirot says he’ll let his friend decide which theory makes the most sense. After pondering it briefly, his friend says it must have been the unknown stranger and that’s what he’ll tell the police.

This is American politics — and politics generally — in miniature and why it’s nearly impossible for societies to punish the perpetrators of great crimes: Anything terrible on a large scale demands broad elite endorsement and participation. When it comes to major evils, most people at the top must be guilty for it to happen in the first place. And so everyone gets away with it.

Think about the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and Nixon were most responsible for it, murdering perhaps two to four million people across Indochina. (We don’t have a more exact number because we’ve never cared enough to make a serious effort to find out.)

But achieving this body count, far greater than any serial killer could ever dream of, obviously required buy-in from far more people than just these two presidents. How could any legitimate justice process convict just Johnson and Nixon? The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in the House of Representatives 416-0 and in the Senate 88-2. Congress affirmatively voted to fund the war for years.

Or take the war on terror, which appears to have caused 4.5 million deaths. The post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force flew through Congress with only a lone House member voting against it. Even Bernie Sanders voted yes. 296 members of the House and 77 senators voted for war with Iraq. As in “Murder on the Orient Express,” there was a lot of stabbing by a lot of people.

This dynamic holds true to an extent even when a society is conquered. The Nuremberg trial process included prosecutions beyond the most famous Nazi officials. But of over 3,000 potential cases, most were dropped, and by the 1950s, those sentenced to prison had almost all been released — because the U.S. needed German elites to help us run Germany. The trials of Japanese war criminals were even less consequential for the same reasons, with Emperor Hirohito explicitly excluded from any responsibility.

However, it is occasionally possible for societies to address minor crimes that major figures commit by themselves or with a small circle of cronies. Probably Trump’s most significant crime was his support for the Saudi war on Yemen, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But Trump shares his guilt with a large chunk of the U.S. political system, so that’s fine. It’s the hush money for Stormy Daniels and mishandling of classified documents that have tripped him up.

I hate taking away from anyone’s enjoyment of Trump’s troubles, especially given the shameless delight that they’ve brought me. I understand the temptation to look at what’s happening and believe that the system works. The problem is that this is correct: The system is working — it’s just not anything resembling a system of justice.

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

Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s ‘absolute advantage’ principle – countries should focus on what they do ‘best’, rather than diversify their economies. It seemed churlish to me, that developing countries such as Argentina should only produce raw materials, while wealthy countries such as Germany went ahead with technological development.

Argentina, at that time, was still a major producer and exporter of beef. My peers and I had no access to José Hernández’s epic poem ‘Martín Fierro’, about the gauchos of the pampas, the cowboys of the plains of Argentina, but we knew of the ferocious compadritos (‘streetcorner thugs’) and cuchilleros (‘knife fighters’) from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. There were cowboys mixed in here, loners who sat on their horses on Argentina’s flatlands and gathered their cattle for the market. No longer do these horsemen define Argentina’s rural society. Today, the countryside is defined by the small farmer and the agricultural proletariat who work for the large agribusinesses and are the protagonists of the country’s fortunes.

According to Argentina’s National Agricultural Census, the number of agricultural holdings (EAPs) in the country decreased by roughly 41 percent between 1988 and 2018, due to the increasing concentration of land into the hands of a small elite.

In 2021, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) noted that Argentina remains ‘a major exporter of agricultural products’, which, at that time, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s exports (as of April 2023, agricultural goods accounted for 56.4% of the country’s exports). The main products are grains (wheat, maize), soya, and beef. Argentina’s agribusinesses enthusiastically entered into the global soybean market, even producing a ‘soy dollar’ scheme to encourage greater exports so that the country could earn dollars to offset its major foreign exchange crises.

Argentina has been wracked by three consecutive years of drought (exacerbated by the climate catastrophe) and faced pressure from the increasing acreage for soybeans in the other four leading producers (Brazil, the United States, China, and India). The production of soybeans has transformed Argentina’s countryside, drawing in over half of the country’s arable lands and concentrating production into the hands of what the economist Claudio Scaletta called the ‘invisible giants’ (corporations such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Argentina, Bunge Argentina, Dreyfus, and Noble Argentina). It is no longer cattle that run through the pampas; it is now the soybean flowers that tilt in the breeze.

In this graph, we can see the proportion of agricultural holdings, or EAPs, categorised according to size (hectares), in orange, as well as the share of total surface area that each category accounts for, in yellow. The majority of the productive EAPs are small; as they increase in size, the number of farms is reduced, but the amount of land they account for increases.

Our latest dossier, Whose Land Is It and What Is It For? An Unfinished Debate about Land Access in Argentina (June 2023), explores some of the most startling contradictions that afflict Argentina’s rural landscape. The most obvious incongruity is that Argentina has more than enough arable land to feed its 46 million people, and yet hunger is growing in the country. Most of the food consumed by the people is produced not by the large agribusiness conglomerates but by family farms, and yet these family farms are disappearing as families find it impossible to economically sustain themselves and make the trek from rural areas to the cities in large numbers. Rising landlessness and hunger have produced the social reality out of which new forms of political protest have appeared: verdurazos (‘vegetable protests’) and panazos (‘bread protests’), often led by rural social organisations, confront the ridiculous situation in which those who farm the soil cannot eat its crops.

A few years ago, I spent some time with small-scale farmers outside La Plata. Wildo Eizaguirre of the Federación Rural told me that the greatest burden for farmers such as himself is rent. Antonio García as well as Else and Mable Yanaje agreed that rent is a dead weight for them. The cost of land is prohibitive and their tenure on the land is uncertain. It prevents the farmers from making capital improvements to the farm or even from buying equipment (such as tractors) to make their labour more productive. These farmers neither own the fields nor do they control the pathways to the market. Brokers buy their produce at the lowest prices and then take them to be processed or sold directly to supermarkets. The money is made elsewhere than on the fields.

The land access bills proposed in Argentina in recent years are based on two key laws, the Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law (no. 27118, 2014) and the Indigenous Territories Emergency Law (no. 26160, 2006).

It is out of the struggles of people such as Wildo and Mable that Argentina’s government passed key laws such as the Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law of 2014 and the Indigenous Territories Emergency Law of 2006 (repeatedly extended in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2021). The Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law seeks to ‘construct a new rural life in Argentina’ and guarantee ‘access to land for family, peasant, and indigenous agriculture, given that land is a social good’. These are powerful words but, in the face of the power of the agribusiness, they are not often translated into deeds. The law itself does not close off the class struggle. In Brazil, for instance, the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST) uses the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to the letter as a legal justification for its land occupations. And yet, punctually, Brazil’s agribusinesses and their political allies try to criminalise the MST occupations with a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, which MST leader João Paulo Rodrigues correctly considers an opportunity to hold a public dialogue about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social equality.

In 2020, the International Land Coalition and Oxfam released an important report called Uneven Ground. Land Inequality at the Heart of Unequal Societies. There are 608 million farms in the world, the report notes, most of them being family farms (with 2.5 billion people involved in smallholder farming). The largest 1% of the farms, however, control more than 70% of global farmland, while 80% of the farmers are smallholders who operate less than two hectares. Land concentration, the report shows, has increased dramatically since 1980. Meanwhile, according to a study by Luis Bauluz, Yajna Govind, and Filip Novokmet, in Latin America the top 10% of landowners capture up to 75% of the agricultural land value, while the bottom 50% own less than 2%. As the dossier highlights, in Argentina the disparity is extremely sharp: 80% of family farmers (who are characterised as smallholders) occupy around 11% of demarcated agricultural land, while the big landowners who make up 0.3% of farmers occupy almost double that land. The tendency towards land concentration is hastened by the power of multinational agribusinesses and by the increasing use of farmland as a financial asset by private equity firms and asset managers (as Madeleine Fairbairn argues in her book Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush, 2020). On the African continent, farmers are being pushed off the land due to ‘nature conservation’ and the growth of the mining sector (such as we documented in Xolobeni in South Africa).

Over the past century, peasant movements have put forward a demand for ‘agrarian reform’ as the antidote to capitalism’s devastation of the countryside. In the foreword to our dossier, Manuel Bertoldi of the Federación Rural writes, ‘We must start talking without fear about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, agroecology, and about socialism as an alternative system, since it is through socialism that these ideas become viable’.

In recent years, a number of proposals, such as the ‘March to the Countryside’ programme, have been put forward to address Argentina’s agrarian crisis.

The Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote with great feeling about the only piece of land to which the peasants are entitled, their graves. In 1955, he composed the verse ‘Morte e Vida Severina’ (‘Death and Life of Severino’), where he wrote,

– The grave you’re in
Is measured by hand,
The best bargain you got
In all the land.

– You fit it well,
Not too long or deep,
The part of the latifundio
Which you will keep.

– The grave’s not too big,
Nor is it too wide,
It’s the land you wanted
To see them divide.

– It’s a big grave
For a body so spare,
But you’ll be more at ease
Than you ever were.

– You’re a skinny corpse
For such a big tomb,
But at least down there
You’ll have plenty of room.

Farmers and peasants around the world know that their struggles are existential, a feeling that gripped the Indian farmers and peasants during their ongoing struggle against the privatisation of the marketplace for agricultural commodities. They want land to live, not just for their graves.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/09/for-argentinas-small-farmers-the-land-is-predictable-but-the-markets-are-not/feed/ 0 402108 https://grist.org/equity/theres-big-climate-money-out-there-for-small-towns-but-will-they-get-it/ https://grist.org/equity/theres-big-climate-money-out-there-for-small-towns-but-will-they-get-it/#respond Thu, 25 May 2023 10:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=610451 This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Tybee Island in Georgia has a rain problem.

The small barrier island’s stormwater system, fed by storm drains across the coastal community, funnels into a pipe that comes out on the beach at the southern tip of Tybee. But that pipe gets regularly buried by sand.

“What happens is when it gets covered with sand, and the tide rises, there’s nowhere for the stormwater to go,” said Alan Robertson, a Tybee resident and consultant for the city. 

The water backs up in the system and wells up out of the drains, flooding the roads. It’s a chronic problem, he said, that the city is trying to solve. 

“The city has to clear this every day,” Roberston said. 

Tybee’s not alone. All over the country, old stormwater systems struggle to keep up with increased rainfall due to climate change. Rising sea levels and groundwater — also from climate change — squeeze the systems from the other end. Infrastructure like roads, hospitals and wastewater plants need to be shored up against flooding. Residents need protection from heat, wildfire, floodwater, and other climate impacts.

All of that is expensive. The good news for local governments tackling these problems is that lots of state and federal money is out there to fund resilience projects. The recent federal infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act are adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the pot.

But there’s also bad news: The money is often hard to actually get, and that difficulty can amplify inequities for communities that need help the most.

“All these great numbers and these great programs means absolutely nothing if communities that need it most can’t have access to it,” said Daniel Blackman, a regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The funding often comes through competitive grants, with applications that are complicated and highly technical. They take time and expertise that under-resourced local governments often lack.

“One of the major capacity constraints of a lot of these local governments are that they have few grant writers on staff,” said Michael Dexter, director of federal programs for the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network.

Local government staff with plenty of work on their plates can often struggle to keep track of the different funding opportunities, coordinate the necessary partners, or come up with the local match funding some grants require.

“A lot of communities shy away from going after grant funds just because of that,” said Jennifer Kline, the coastal hazard specialist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Coastal Management Program.

Without a dedicated, expert grant writer and plenty of staff, communities may miss out on these huge amounts of money. That’s especially true in communities of color where old, racist policies discouraged investment and growth, according to Nathaniel Smith, founder of the Partnership for Southern Equity.

“If you look at many of the communities that face the greatest challenges, a lot of times people just assume that it happened by happenstance,” Smith said. “And that couldn’t be furthest from the truth.”

He pointed to redlining, a set of policies under which banks refused loans in areas deemed to be high-risk, which were primarily Black neighborhoods, as well as the construction of highways that obliterated thriving Black communities. There were also federal policies that encouraged suburbanization and white flight from cities. When schools are funded with property taxes so that wealthier and whiter areas have better equipped schools, that also amplifies the inequities, he said.

“All of these things have helped to facilitate a competitive advantage of, in particular, white communities and well-resourced communities,” Smith said.

For many of the same reasons, those same historically disinvested places — often communities of color — stand to be hit hardest by climate change: they often have less shade to reduce heat, are less protected from flooding, and face more of the health problems that climate change makes worse.

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The Biden administration is trying to address this disparity with its Justice40 initiative, which promises to put 40 percent of federal climate funding toward historically disadvantaged communities. The process for identifying those communities has been criticized for some of the metrics it uses, for failing to account for cumulative burdens, and for not explicitly incorporating race. Because it’s broken down by census tract, Dexter said, the program can miss “localized need.” In places where a poor neighborhood is near a wealthier one, for instance, the average income across the tract could be too high to qualify.

“There’s still obviously uncertainty about how that’s gonna be implemented in some of these various different grant competitions,” he said.

And communities that qualify still have to successfully apply for and win those grants.

Through a program called the Justice40 Accelerator, Smith’s group and several partners offer funding and technical support to help eligible places get that money. The program has so far trained two cohorts, a total of 100 environmental and community groups from across the country. Along with grant writing help and mentorship, the accelerator provides $25,000 to each participating organization to help them develop their proposals.

“It takes real resources and time and support to ensure that local communities are positioned to compete,” Smith said.

So far, the program boasts an 81 percent success rate for its cohorts’ grant applications, totaling more than $28 million in funding awarded.

Many of the state and federal agencies that dole out grants offer help as well. The EPA, for instance, recently announced $177 million in funding for 17 of what it’s calling Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers. Their goal is to help “underserved and overburdened” communities access federal funds. The centers, mostly based at universities or environmental groups, will provide training on grant writing and management as well as practical assistance like translation services for community outreach and meetings.

“It’s not going to solve every problem,” said Blackman. “But what it’s going to do is it’s going to address the concern you have in those individuals being able to write and access federal funding and grants.”

Kline’s DNR Coastal Management Program also provides assistance in finding and applying for grants. Dexter said his group, the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network, does too.  

What’s not clear is whether all of that is enough.

“I was gonna say that’s the $100 million question,” Dexter joked. “No, that’s the $1 trillion, multiple-trillion-dollar question.”

And it’s just one of the looming questions in these early stages of the IRA and infrastructure law rollouts. No one knows yet if there’s enough help for places that need it, or if those communities know the help is out there. It’s also unclear whether the assistance programs will help local governments not just apply for and win grants, but administer them and deliver the projects on time – itself a time-consuming and difficult process.

There’s some reason for hope, Dexter said, even as communities scramble for funding and groups like his scramble to provide enough support: The new federal laws are designed to offer funding over several years, instead of immediately. This is an important lesson learned, he said, from 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and its heavy emphasis on “shovel-ready” projects. This time, some of the funding can be used for planning, and there is a bit more time for cities to get their ducks in a row.

“Hypothetically, that leads to this great scenario where a community might come in, in year one, access planning funding, and then by year three or four be able to access the implementation funding for that project,” Dexter said. 

That’s exactly the system Tybee Island is working with now. Robertson maintains a spreadsheet of projects that need funding. He has plans for how some of the work can unfold over multiple grant cycles. 

“We’re in a pretty good space now,” he said. “We can be much more responsive to many more opportunities because we have identified these projects.”

While stormwater remains a problem, the city has gotten grants to build protective dunes and elevate flood-prone houses.

But Tybee Island got lucky: Robertson, a resident with grant writing experience, stepped up after Hurricane Matthew devastated the island in 2016. The city contracted with him, and he deliberately worked to build up this grant capacity.

As the wave of new federal funding comes, other communities are looking for similar help.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s big climate money out there for small towns. But will they get it? on May 25, 2023.

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

]]> https://grist.org/equity/theres-big-climate-money-out-there-for-small-towns-but-will-they-get-it/feed/ 0 398189 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/28/braverman-should-go-to-the-french-camps-to-see-why-people-get-in-small-boats/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/28/braverman-should-go-to-the-french-camps-to-see-why-people-get-in-small-boats/#respond Fri, 28 Apr 2023 11:46:25 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/suella-braverman-no-good-reason-small-boats-asylum-seekers/
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Nicola Kelly.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/28/braverman-should-go-to-the-french-camps-to-see-why-people-get-in-small-boats/feed/ 0 391129 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/#respond Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:36:46 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/libraries-don-t-want-book-bans

Growing up in Milwaukee, the local branch of the public library was always just a bus ride away. But when my family moved to central Pennsylvania when I was entering high school, we lived in a rural region that didn't even have a public library.

In the '90s, before the internet was widely available, the loss of a robust library system left me feeling cut off from the world. This is one reason I've spent the last 20 years living in a rural community, where I serve as library director for a school district.

After decades building resources and capacity in our small school districts, some of which don't even have a public library, it's been devastating to see the growing ferocity of attacks against our libraries over the past couple of years.

Our small town school districts and public libraries are facing immense pressure from national groups that turn massive external funding into fake grassroots outrage in our communities.

More than half of U.S. state legislatures have proposed or passed bills that would severely restrict access to information, threaten First Amendment rights, and punish entire communities by withholding funding critical library services—all for the sake of keeping books off the shelf that do not suit the taste of a few individuals.

Our small town school districts and public libraries are facing immense pressure from national groups that turn massive external funding into fake grassroots outrage in our communities. The grassroots origins are fake, but the outrage is very real.

The outrage we see on the news is not a reflection of our small towns: It's imported by groups that aim to overwhelm and tear down our public schools and libraries. Book challenges of yesteryear were often sparked by a child bringing home a single book that prompted parents' concerns. Today's attempts to ban books are overwhelmingly driven by externally generated lists.

According to the American Library Association, 40% of book challenges in 2022 involved requests to ban 100 or more books at a time. Most of these books were either by or about LGBTQ+ folks and people of color.

This outrage over diversity in literature does not reflect the increasing diversity in our small towns. According to the Housing Assistance Council, in 2018 there were more than 2,000 rural and small-town census tracts where racial and ethnic minorities made up the majority of the population. In another study, the Movement Advancement Project in 2019 showed that an estimated three million or more LGBTQ+ people called rural America home.

When censors come after books that reflect the diversity in a community, they're attempting to erase the stories of community members themselves.

School librarians like me strive to build diverse collections that bring the world to the shelves of every town and ensure that every reader finds their story. When readers find their own stories in a library, they read more and grow into lifelong learners.

Such robust collections are built through professional—not ideological—standards, and every student benefits.

Access to books that represent a variety of cultures and viewpoints may boost a student's development and well-being, according to a 2022 white paper from the Unite Against Book Bans coalition. Diverse books also cultivate empathy and provide a springboard for families to have meaningful conversations.

From coast to coast and across the heartland, Americans remain overwhelmingly committed to libraries, despite what manufacturers of moral panic may claim.

Recent polling shows large majorities of voters across party lines reject the idea of banning books from school and public libraries. Ninety percent of voters have high regard and trust for librarians, and similar percentages say that school and public libraries play an important role in their community.

As we move into National Library Week, I hope Americans will join me and 90% of our neighbors in supporting libraries and librarians—and in rejecting the manufactured outrage of book banning groups.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Christopher Harris.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/feed/ 0 389981 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/fiddling-with-national-dc-beltway-crap-while-we-burn-in-our-local-yokel-tracks/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/fiddling-with-national-dc-beltway-crap-while-we-burn-in-our-local-yokel-tracks/#respond Sat, 22 Apr 2023 14:04:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=139474

[Photo: Area mayors pleading for state help to plug funding gaps included, left to right, Rod Cross of Toledo, Susan Wahlke of Lincoln City and Dean Sawyer of, Newport.]

Amazing, no, that in Newport, part of Lincoln County, Oregon, having this big confab, of people, citizens and “stakeholders” alike wondering what the state of the state of decay is as it plays out in Salem (OR capitol) and the blue-red divide — Portlandia gets the votes, while the eastern part of Oregon is vying to break-away into Greater Idaho.

The Oregon Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee has been hosting a series of public hearings across the state, and the committee brought its roadshow to Newport last Friday, where a crowd of around 350 people filled the Newport Performing Arts Center.

Activists, mayors, schoolteachers, community leaders, a doctor, a sheriff and a judge were among scores of supplicants who sat before the high-powered legislative panel to plead for a share of the proposed $32.1 billion state budget. The delegation, chaired by Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, included 22 senators and representatives, divided evenly and spread behind a table on the PAC stage. (source)

Because Capitalism IS a casino, disaster, predatory, zombie, usury, inverted totalitarian economic system, then the elephant in the room is, again, you want Socialism or Barbarity, or Savagery or Socialism, give that discussion a spin.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. That is, we can’t have seven, ten or more cities in one region competing for arts, entertainment, conferences, etc. We can’t have logs from Lincoln County on trucks heading east while trucks from Georgia with logs are going west to Oregon. That old Minute Maid and Tropicana real thought experiment: orange juice concentrate tankers, one coming from Florida, heading for California, the other from California heading into Florida.

We have convention center after convention center vying for concerts, events, fun giant car shows and circuses. Yeah, how is that working out? Everything is privatized, and the socialized costs paid by USA taxpayer is given to the Fortune 10,000, big and small, this and that.

We are here, on crumbling Highway 101, and the weather has been hail, grapple, snow, rain, and alas, we are in a food-health care-services-construction desert, that is, everything costs twice or thrice more than that real cancerous place, the greater (sic) Phoenix area.

Cancer?

So, you pick the Central Coast of Oregon, for lifestyle, and air, and, well, you have to put up with broken sewer systems and three times the cost for milk and gasoline than the cancer of Arizona:

We have people wanting pieces of that federal and state $$$ pie, but in the end, the elephant in the room is, well, “How much can these local and state and federal representatives throw at war, at merchants of death, at big Pharma Thugs, at finance and insurance and Wall Street and hedge finance? How many tax breaks/abatements/giveaways do THEY get, and how hard is it to place our community as well as 20,000 other communities onto the radar of the policy makers, to see that our important issues, people, communities and places of common purpose are worthy of sustainablity? Look at the list of folk wanting some recognition and discussion, from the Newport News Times:

Familiar community leaders took the stage under the PAC spotlights, including Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers and Lincoln County District Court Judge Sheryl Bachart, who argued for more staff to manage the “safe release” of those incarcerated back into the population.

Lesser-known voices called for equal consideration, including elementary school teacher Tamara Madden, who urged the panel to fully fund a $10. 3 billion, K-12 education budget. She said money is needed to stop the “revolving door” employee crisis, especially among support staff including cafeteria workers and janitors.

In all, 61 people gave testimony, while those left out were told to submit written statements. Rep. David Gomberg, who represents Lincoln County’s House Dist. 10, said the declarations underscored how “small towns face big expenses.” He was not unduly optimistic, however.

“I’ve had some success in bringing home dollars by using my seniority, knowledge of the process and a little bit of legislative guile,” he said after the event. “But it’s going to be tough this year because the federal money is no longer flowing into Oregon.”

Again, we talk about Mulvaney and Bud and Trump and Biden and Twitter and Ukraine-USA War Leaks and celebrities of every stripe, including that freak Mulvaney and freak Kid Rock. This is what we TALK about, and K12 is vapidly sinking to new miseducation lows.

It is all divide and conquer, but also distraction(s) to the max, the endless EMFs and pixels and screen scrolls, all the flips of the dumb phone screens, all those Substack crap-o-la blogs, navel gazing shit (and some is good, but really, how many lifetimes do we have finding the diamonds in the rough?), all the endless manure of Mainstream Mush Masturbating for MIC Media, all those so-called hip and edgy folk with Podcasts, all those shows, all of it, this is more than just taking space and time and human breath away from everyday people. It is the fodder, it is the endless ether, the drone and drab and supercillious crap that actually gets deeply embedded into the zeitgeist but also into the gray matter collectively, in the womb and near the tomb.

It all connects, those endless millions of hours dedicated to USA, Ukraine, twenty years of hate spat out and tossed sat China and Russia and Cuba and African nations and and (and) and___________________. It all calcifies in the glands of most americanos and all americanos’ hormones are rushing in all the wrong places, until, we have DSM-V pages of maladies accounting for our mass fear, and entire books of contraindications and intended and unintended consquences of the dirty and mold and fungus and viruses, and bacteria and prions and poisons and chemicals that are all part and parcel the American Way, from smalltown Newport to big time New York City.

Endless dysfunction, endless Americanism, endless stupidity around who we are as a nation, which is definitely a country of horror, terror, thefts, murders, beheadings, starvations, poisonings of the wells, shocks and awes, hit squads, black jack booted goons, Mafia’s, Gangs of New York/LA/Chicano et al. It is a country that now threatens to send in the Merchants of War to Mexico, and it all is ALL connected to the fact local communities are dragging, suffering, smeared into almost non-existence.

“Once you call 911, your journey will be long, challenging and fraught with hurdles”

The cops want more cops, the sheriff wants more SWAT participants, the courts want more prosecutors; the system is broken, as little rural Lincoln County has high levels of meth addiction, homelessness, Domestic Violence, untreated psychiatric issues, broken development disabilities situations, aging not so well in place, and this is it, man, a community meeting, with lawmakers, and the bottom line is:

Keep on doing the same dirty thing, and expect miracles: “Local officials repeated a common theme, telling legislators that rising costs outstripped their limited budgets.”

Bigger than just show me the money:

Ahh, YIMBY or NIMBY, that is the question, until that elephant in the room is shampooed and manicured and stomping us all to death:

Ironic, that CIA-controlled, the dirt bag TV-Cable monster, NBC, CNBC, all of them, putting this one out:

They just don’t know how many trillions are dedicated and stolen for the Military Industrial Complex. It goes so much deeper than “just” the end producte, whether a flak jacket or Humvee or jet or missile or satellite. Believe you me, it’s all the R & D, all the colleges and universities, all the PR, legal outfits, services, goods and services, from buttons to bullets, and this country is tied to war war war. The average price of a gallon of gasoline, counting all the costs, external and personal, is around $27 a gallon. War, sanctions, digging, pollution, harm to planet, people, community; cancers and culled economies. Hit men for Shell, BP, Exxon, and endless insurance scams, the cars costing $80,000, those microchips, those highways, the amazing amount of work one has to do to keep tires treaded and oil clean and the damn engine running, w/ tune ups, the endless time spent in an ICE or EV (internal combustion engine or electric vehicle) as our lives are sucked away. Fracking, embedded energy, wars wars wars.

Yeah, more than $27 a gallon when you count the nations broken, destroyed by oil monarchs and oil tycoons.

Again, if you build your society on tourism, on Air B & B, on endless vehicles coming in and toilets and washer machines flusing and dumping, then here we are. From the Newport News Times:

Startling news emerged with many requests, including how 400 units of affordable housing have been stalled by a faulty sewer system in Lincoln City. Mayor Susan Wahlke told the panel the town’s infrastructure, which serves 40,000 tourists “on a busy weekend,” could fail at any moment.

The horizona ain’t pretty when we throw money at celebrities, junk, over-priced and under-quality medicine, and the war war war. Tax giveaways and the rich hoarding it all.

For transit, the infrastructure grades range from a B in rail to a D-. Five category grades — aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports — went up, while just one category — bridges — went down. In 2021, stormwater infrastructure received its first grade: a disappointing D. Overall, 11 category grades were stuck in the D range, a clear signal that our overdue infrastructure bill is a long way from being paid off. (source)

Not that I have faith in engineers, civil engineers, who are also part and parcel embedded in America the free, the brave, the best. Remember NOL, and that lie? Find my two parts to the story of, The Storm, as in Katrina!

On Haeder’s blog, in the Podcast arena, scrolling down looking for these images!

Arrogant, macho, idiots, the US Corps of Engineers, and engineers in general. And they went after Ivor van Heerden, after him at the university where he taught.

Look, I was at Good Samaritan Hospital, for my spouse’s colonoscopy. We had to travel 90 minutes one way to get it done, and that meant an overnight stay. And, she opted for being knocked out, which I did not opt for when I had my age 50 screening (in Europe, the majority do not get put under, either). So, one doctor with the drugs, and then the gastro doctor. It was, again, another teachable moment.

Yep, that screening costs us, insured, whatever, from $2,800 to $4,700. She had four nurses, and then in the operating arena, maybe two docs, two nurses and then an endoscope assistant/nurse.

Ahh, the lovely coast, and the lack of everything, because it’s all about the US Chamber of Commerce, bed and breakfasts, short term rentals, endless lines of people hunting for tidepools, taffy, t-bones, tequila and toasty beach fires.

One of her nurses, a male, he was proud of his military service, his bullet in the foot (he said he had a corpsman status … a hospital corpsman is an enlisted medical specialist of the United States Navy, who may also serve in a U.S. Marine Corps unit), proud of his 19 years at the hospital, and proud of his entertainment center, sons and teaching them about Naco Libre and Jack Black. He said he was on the USS Nimitz, aircraft merchant of death ship, and how when Whitney Houston sang the racist national anthem for what, the Stupor Bowl, how there wasn’t a dry eye on the deck.

He’s another arrested developed 40-something, with tattoos all over, and yammering about Rambo and Jack Black (he said the guy, Black, sang the second best Anthem after Houston).

Lisa Marie Presley came up, and I said, “Yeah, too bad she’s gone.” Here we go, a guy with 100% service connected VA benefits, with a job that pays $120K, Cadillac health insurance, this is what he said: “I have no sympathy for her. She was a drug addict. When I came back from war, I didn’t use drugs. I bought a crotch rocket (motorcycle) and then when that was too dangerous, I started walking.”

Ahh, so I did push back, saying, “Yeah, I was a social worker for veterans, most on some form of self-medication, and all my female vets had been raped by their own men, so, nah, I have a different take on drug abuse.”

This fellow is just chopped liver in the scheme of things, but think about millions upon millions of boy-children raising other boys (their own). Imagine that, boys hearing a medical services guy, a nurse, who has zero sympathy or empathy for drug users. At Good Samaritan.

The USA in a nutshell, well, there are so many nutshells out there, teachable moments for me. It’s not surprising or upsetting to me, because it is par for the course, since I was probably younger than 13, man.

Man Lost of Tribe? Me? Come on, get over it. Imagine that, a nuke-powered merchant of death ship with 5,000 sailors on it. There’s the rub, no? How much to run it, to fix it, to outfit it, to treat the injured, to pay the sailors, to feed and clothe and air condition them? How much do we pay for their de-enlisting and then coming into society with those “I give a fuck about people who are addicted to drugs and die” attitudes.

Yeah, a guy who loves that insipid overpaid poor acting talentless Jack Black, no, overweight by MD standards (this nurse was carrying too much BMI himself) and, damn, I know about stories of Black snorting and doing speedballs and downing mass quantities of Chris Farley booze.

Who is living in a van down by the dump, or by the highway, or alley (no, not a river)? Oh, veterans, those poor ass achey-breaky hearts. Addicts. Here’s a high school teacher and coach, making fun, man, making fun of the down and out.

Well, we know how comic Chris died: On December 18, 1997, Farley was found dead by his younger brother John in his apartment in the John Hancock Center in Chicago. He was 33 years old. An autopsy revealed that Farley had died of an overdose of a combination of cocaine and morphine, commonly known as a “speedball”.

“I’m not laughing at me. I’m laughing at this person who’s committing so much who’s two feet away from me,” Sweeney said, adding that it has happened more often doing improv than her time at the legendary NBC comedy show, with the notable exception of the Farley sketch.

“When Chris Farley did the ‘down by the river’ Matt Foley, I was in that. They had to cut around me because I was laughing. Because it was like I had the best seat in the house for the funniest friggin’ thing that was happening on the planet.”

Can Americans ever be genuine, or is it just in our fucked up dimwit, TV Boob Tube Shit, Disney and McDonalds, Sesame Street and Tele Tubby, the endless drip drip drip of Holly-Dirt and Masterpiece Theater.

There are no Bruce Willis moments for our ocean communities, for sure. No Build Back Better. We are screwed, man, soap on a rope, rope a dope, all of it, we are screwed because we do not strike them all.

How much will the next war be? No better than D-minus from the engineers! More more war pornography. Watch three fellows you will NEVER see on your TV. This is scary, brothers and sisters. No Bud Lights here!

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/fiddling-with-national-dc-beltway-crap-while-we-burn-in-our-local-yokel-tracks/feed/ 0 389707 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/20/small-minds-think-alike-clarence-thomas-and-george-santoss-yacht-race-to-corruption/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/20/small-minds-think-alike-clarence-thomas-and-george-santoss-yacht-race-to-corruption/#respond Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:54:03 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corruption-of-george-santos-and-clarence-thomas

"We sail the ocean blue and our saucy ship's a beauty. We're sober men and true, and attentive to our duty." —Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

It was like manna from heaven for a reputation that had been tarnished by, among other things, a yacht. Just when it looked like a yacht might sink George Santos, Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginny, sailed to his rescue on an even bigger yacht. Of course, the context was slightly different. Nonetheless, it was a much needed distraction and one for which George is almost certainly grateful. And it was not merely the yacht that came to George's rescue. It was Clarence's failure to comply with rules about disclosing his sources of income. But I get ahead of myself.

Beginning before, and shortly after George was elected to the House of Representatives, countless investigations were launched into his political and personal finances. Prompting the investigations were his financial disclosure statements that suggested he was a better fiction writer than businessman. For example, in 2020 George's financial disclosure statements indicated that in that year he had almost no income and virtually no assets. One year later his financial disclosure statements revealed an annual income of more than $750,000 and significant assets that included, among other things, a condo in Brazil.

Among the explanations offered by George for the increase in his personal income and wealth during that period was the commission he received from his service as a broker in the purchase and sale of a $19 million, 141-foot super yacht that, for our purposes, we will refer to as the "Soros" yacht to distinguish it from the other yacht that is part of our story.

While the Soros yacht was making headlines, the rescuing yacht sailed into the sea of public consciousness.

The Soros yacht was purchased by Raymond Tantillo of Long Island, New York, from Mayra Ruiz of Miami, Florida. George explained that it was that transaction that was one of the sources of his increase in personal wealth during that period. When asked about the transaction, Mr. Ruiz, the seller of the yacht, declined to comment. His lawyer said her client "was not interested in making any statement other than the fact that he has already publicly disclosed that he does not know who George Santos is and has never contributed to his campaigns and has never done any business with him." How George received a hefty commission from the sale of a yacht owned by someone who "has never done any business with him" is something George will probably be given the opportunity to explain, since reports suggest that both state and federal authorities are investigating his role in that sale. It is not, however, a work of fiction that has come to George's rescue. It is an unlikely rescuer—an even bigger yacht.

While the Soros yacht was making headlines, the rescuing yacht sailed into the sea of public consciousness. The yacht that came to George's rescue is a $500 million vessel owned by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman. Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginny, have taken many trips on that yacht as the guests of Harlan and his wife, the pair of whom Clarence describes as their "very close personal friends."

It was not the fact that Clarence and Ginny were on the boat that caused eyebrows to rise. It was that the trips the Thomases took with Harlan and his family aboard his yacht, on his private plane, and as guests at his private resorts, trips that reportedly had a value in some cases of more than $500,000, were not disclosed on any of the reports filed with the United States Supreme Court where Clarence is an employee and is required to complete a form disclosing personal gifts. Gifts considered "personal hospitality" are not required to be disclosed, and Clarence thought those hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts qualified as an exemption under the "personal hospitality" rules. (Those rules were amended in March of this year to help Clarence understand that gifts of that magnitude were different from going out to dinner with "very close friends" and, therefore, had to be disclosed.) It was not only the Thomas yacht rides that helped George out. It was Clarence's inability to accurately report the sources of his income. And that, it turns out, is exactly the same problem George has.

Numerous reports suggested that all the financial statements George filed before and after he was elected to Congress had many internal inconsistencies that made it impossible to determine what his sources of income were. Clarence, it turns out, had the same problem in the reports he is required to file in the Supreme Court.

According to the Washington Post, Clarence has for many years said on the financial disclosure forms he is required to file that he received income from a real estate firm that has not been in existence since 2006. Apparently no one told him that in filing such reports he should not report income from sources that ceased to exist many years ago. I am sure Clarence will correct this minor oversight on his part.

It has long been said that great minds think alike. The foregoing suggests it is also true for small minds.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Christopher Brauchli.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/20/small-minds-think-alike-clarence-thomas-and-george-santoss-yacht-race-to-corruption/feed/ 0 389104 https://grist.org/health/harvard-study-air-pollution-dementia-risk/ https://grist.org/health/harvard-study-air-pollution-dementia-risk/#respond Thu, 06 Apr 2023 10:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=606784 Just a small increase in the pollution people breathe can raise their risk of developing dementia, according to a new study that lays the groundwork for stricter air quality regulations. 

The analysis, conducted by researchers at Harvard’s medical school, was released on Wednesday in the BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal. It’s the most comprehensive look yet at the link between the neurological condition and exposure to PM2.5 — fine particles that are 2.5 microns wide or less released by wildfires, traffic, power plants, and other sources. Dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of mental functioning that includes Alzheimer’s disease, afflicts more than 7 million people in the United States and 57 million worldwide.

The study found that the risk of dementia rose by 17 percent for every 2 micrograms per cubic meter increase in people’s annual exposure to PM2.5. For context, the average American is exposed to an average of 10 micrograms per cubic meter every year, much of it from burning fossil fuels; during Beijing’s most polluted years a decade ago, the city hovered around 100 micrograms.

“Two micrograms per cubic meter is not that much,” said Marc Weisskopf, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental epidemiology and physiology at Harvard University. “You know, that could easily be the difference between being in Boston versus a rural part of Massachusetts.”

That even small increases can raise dementia risks suggests that governments need to revamp their rules. The Environmental Protection Agency places the limit at 12 micrograms per cubic meter, and the European Union puts the threshold at a comparatively lax 25 micrograms.

The Harvard study is an “alarm” the EPA should pay attention to, said Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and volunteer spokesperson for the American Lung Association, who was not involved with the new research. He called for the agency to “get very aggressive” on reducing particulate matter with new guidelines that account for the dementia risks laid out in this new report.

“It is devastating to think that it’s, once again, another penalty that’s being paid by people who live in areas with poor air,” El-Hasan said. “It’s another penalty they have to pay, risk not only for their lungs, not only increased cancer risk or heart risks for heart problems, but mental problems as well. And it’s sad, as a society, that that has to be the case.”

In light of the thousands of scientific studies showing how particulate matter hurts people’s health, the EPA recently proposed tightening its limits for PM2.5 to 9 or 10 micrograms. The agency said that these stricter standards could prevent more than 4,000 premature deaths each year and save $43 billion in health costs in 2032. But health advocates have argued that the EPA’s proposal still falls short of what’s needed. It also doesn’t take the risk of dementia into account, unlike more established research on heart and lung conditions.

“The literature has been growing rapidly recently, but it’s a little bit maybe too new for the EPA,” Weisskopf said. 

For the most recent report, the Harvard researchers looked at more than 50 studies that assessed the link between dementia and air pollution, then narrowed the batch down to 16 using a new tool that can detect bias in studies. For example, many epidemiological studies rely on large stores of medical data that don’t include people who aren’t able to afford medical care. Despite concerns that scientists might have been overestimating the link between dementia and PM2.5 exposure, the study showed that, if anything, the effect was underestimated, Weisskopf said.

It doesn’t bode well, especially as climate change threatens to undo decades of progress on air pollution. The number of Americans exposed to wildfire smoke, for instance, has increased 27-fold over the last decade, with fires amped up by hotter temperatures routinely blanketing cities in the U.S. West in plumes of smoke.

It’s worth noting that pollution isn’t the only factor behind the rise in dementia, much of which can be attributed to an aging population. Previous research suggests that about 40 percent of dementia cases are preventable, as smoking, education, and cardiovascular health also play roles. Air pollution doesn’t appear to be as big a risk factor as smoking, Weisskopf said, but because it touches basically everyone, it can have a huge effect across the population.

Scientists are not sure when exposure to PM2.5 is the most harmful — when people are young, old, or throughout their entire life? Most studies only look at exposure in the years directly preceding the onset of dementia. “Until we understand that better, there’s going to be still some fuzziness,” Weisskopf said.

The study’s findings could be used to calculate the cost-benefit analyses that are used to develop environmental regulations. Establishing the link between dementia and PM2.5 has “huge societal and financial implications,” Weisskopf said, “because the amount of money that gets spent on dementia care and caring for people and treating people is enormous.” Last year, medical costs for dementia, which affects roughly 1 in 9 Americans who are 65 and older, added up to about $592 billion in the United States.

“Doing the right things in terms of air quality doesn’t just improve everyone’s life, make our lives longer and more productive, but it also costs society less,” said El-Hasan.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Even a small increase in pollution raises risk for dementia on Apr 6, 2023.

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

]]> https://grist.org/health/harvard-study-air-pollution-dementia-risk/feed/ 0 385667 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/are-humanitarian-visas-the-solution-to-the-uks-small-boats-crisis/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/are-humanitarian-visas-the-solution-to-the-uks-small-boats-crisis/#respond Wed, 29 Mar 2023 07:26:35 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/are-humanitarian-visas-the-solution-to-the-uks-small-boats-crisis/ Compromising on humanitarian visas could allow the Illegal Migration Bill to end territory-based asylum in the UK

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Zoe Gardner.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/are-humanitarian-visas-the-solution-to-the-uks-small-boats-crisis/feed/ 0 383026 https://grist.org/technology/how-a-small-business-in-arizona-is-helping-decarbonize-concrete/ https://grist.org/technology/how-a-small-business-in-arizona-is-helping-decarbonize-concrete/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=604655 Block-Lite is a small concrete manufacturer in an industrial corridor of Flagstaff, Arizona. The third-generation family business makes bricks and other masonry materials for retaining walls, driveways, and landscaping projects. The company was already a local leader in sustainability — in 2020, it became the first manufacturer in Flagstaff to power its operations with on-site solar panels. But now it’s doing something much more ambitious.

On Tuesday, Block-Lite announced a pioneering collaboration with climate tech startups Aircapture and CarbonBuilt to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stash it in concrete blocks. The companies estimate the project will reduce the carbon footprint of Block-Lite’s products by 70 percent, creating a model they hope could reshape the industry.

Concrete creates an enormous problem for the climate. It’s one of the literal building blocks of society, and it has been growing more carbon intensive each year. Most of that carbon doesn’t come from manufacturing concrete, but from the production of its main ingredient, cement. Cement production is responsible for some 10 percent of industrial carbon emissions in the U.S. 

CarbonBuilt has developed a solution that addresses the issue in two distinct ways. First, the company found a proprietary way to replace cement with a mix of inexpensive, locally-sourced industrial waste materials. CEO Rahul Shendure told Grist they include common byproducts of coal plants, steelmaking, and chemical production that would, for the most part, otherwise be destined for landfills. The company’s second feat is the way its equipment hardens that slurry into concrete blocks — by curing it with carbon dioxide. That’s where Aircapture comes in. The company will build one of its machines which extract carbon dioxide from the ambient air directly on Block-Lite’s site. 

“Our technology is pretty flexible in where we source CO2 from,” said Shendure. “The thing that’s different about this project in particular is that we’re sourcing the carbon dioxide from direct air capture technology.”

It’s an idea that a handful of other companies are pursuing. In February, a similar partnership between another direct air capture company called Heirloom and concrete startup CarbonCure demonstrated its process for the first time. This also isn’t CarbonBuilt’s first project — the company is retrofitting a concrete plant in Alabama called Blair Block. In that case, the CO2 will come from burning biomass in a boiler.

The Flagstaff project is breaking ground, in part, thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Four Corners Carbon Coalition, a group of local governments throughout the Southwest that pool resources to finance projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The coalition was born of the realization that communities with ambitious goals to become carbon neutral will likely need to invest in such solutions, many of which are still embryonic. 

“If one local government tries to do this on their own, it’s gonna be extremely costly and time intensive, and we don’t have the technical expertise,” Susie Strife, the sustainability director for Boulder County, Colorado, a founding member of the coalition, said in an interview with Grist last year. “We’re trying to aggregate resources and create a sort of a local government platform for carbon dioxide removal.”

Read Next

Why Boulder County and Flagstaff are enlisting cities to suck carbon out of the atmosphere

Emily Pontecorvo

In addition to that funding, Shendure said the company plans to sell carbon credits for the CO2 that Aircapture’s equipment pulls out of the atmosphere, as well as for the carbon reductions from using less cement. “We’ve got a letter of intent from a buyer and that’s going to be critical to this project,” he said. “There’s a lot of companies right now that are paying premium credit prices for emerging technologies so that we get more of these out there in the real world.”

Block-Lite did not respond to Grist’s inquiry, but in a press release, the company suggested that the new concrete products would be no costlier than its current offerings. “All too often sustainable building materials require a trade off between cost and performance, but what is unique about this project is that there’s no ‘green premium.’” Block-Lite said. “We’re going to be able to produce on-spec, ultra-low carbon blocks at price parity with traditional blocks which should speed adoption and impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a small business in Arizona is helping decarbonize concrete on Mar 10, 2023.

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

]]> https://grist.org/technology/how-a-small-business-in-arizona-is-helping-decarbonize-concrete/feed/ 0 378467 https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/ https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/#respond Sun, 26 Feb 2023 14:00:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=603116 This story was originally published by InvestigateWest, an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

As she drove into Butte, Montana, six years ago to visit her son, environmental epidemiologist Suzanne McDermott couldn’t ignore the gouged-out mountain that loomed over the town.

It’s the result of decades of open-pit mining that continues to this day in Butte. McDermott was stunned at how close the mining pits were to homes and businesses. In town, she noticed parked cars with a film of dust that looked as if ash had fallen from a fire. Her son, who worked for the local newspaper, later told her of children who had developed mysterious ailments in Butte. 

“It just struck me that there’s something very unhealthy going on here,” said McDermott, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

Butte, a once-booming city, is home to a massive Superfund site overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Past mining has polluted the soil and water in and around Butte, and when Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) abandoned the mine in 1982, it left a pit that’s since filled with water so toxic that it kills flocks of birds that land on it.

But what troubled McDermott most wasn’t the poisoned Berkeley Pit. It was the active copper and molybdenum mine right next to it, operated by Montana Resources, a company owned by the richest man in the state, Dennis Washington. At the edge of town, she could look across the street and watch the dust from the mine rise into the air and drift over to people’s homes.

Locals have wondered for years whether that dust carries heavy metals that may be slowly poisoning them. The EPA and health officials, however, have maintained what strikes many as two conflicting messages: One, that previous open-pit mining in Butte left behind a toxic legacy necessitating a major cleanup effort. And two, that the current open-pit mining operation is safe.

McDermott and other independent scientists have questioned that narrative through a series of small, underfunded studies in recent years. They’ve received pushback from the mining companies in town, ARCO and Montana Resources.

But they’ve also run into a more unlikely foe: the EPA.

Emails obtained by InvestigateWest reveal a cozy relationship between EPA officials and the mining companies in Butte. Thousands of pages of documents detail how the EPA coordinated with the very companies they’re supposed to be regulating to attack researchers like McDermott and smear peer-reviewed science that has raised alarms over current mining practices. 

In one email, EPA toxicologists directly urged Montana Resources to fashion a response meant to pressure scientists into retracting their findings. In another, the mining company asked if the EPA could dig into the funding sources of McDermott and another researcher. In a third correspondence, the EPA deferred to a mining company official for guidance on public messaging.

The documents provide a rare, important glimpse into how a regulatory agency can fall under the influence of industry, said Christopher Sellers, an environmental health researcher at Stony Brook University who reviewed the cache of records. Sellers has studied how the EPA could side with private industry and warned of such scenarios under the Trump administration, but had never seen his concerns put into practice so clearly.

“You have it there, a paper trail — at least for this scientific sort of arena where a lot of these political battles or battles of regulation are now fought,” Sellers said.

The EPA declined interview requests for this article and would not answer questions about individual emails between the agency and industry officials. Instead, spokesperson Richard Mylott provided an emailed statement stating that the EPA had a responsibility to consult with all parties in response to new research.

In Butte, the scientific battle has obscured the answer to a longstanding question: Whether the thing that’s long been the livelihood in the small mining town could also be costing lives. 

“There’s an alliance that has developed over the years between the EPA and the mining company. It’s clear as day,” McDermott said. “Our government should be working for us and not some company.”

Raising alarms

In 2019, McDermott and two other scientists published a study that said the current mining in Butte may be tied to a “potential public health emergency.” The study compared Butte samples of meconium — a baby’s first poop — to those from South Carolina where no mining operations exist. The Butte samples had metals at levels thousands of times higher than South Carolina.

The researchers originally thought of the study as a pilot and hadn’t planned to publish it. But the results were so shocking that they felt they needed to make them public. 

One of the other scientists on the study, however, argued prior to publication against including the “public health emergency” line. That scientist was Katie Hailer, a bioinorganic chemist at Montana Technical University in Butte, who thought the claim would strike at the heart of the town’s identity. 

“I knew that that sentence was going to cause issues,” Hailer says. “But I underestimated the number of issues that sentence was going to cause.”

Butte’s always been a mining town. In the early 1900s, its underground mines — manned by some 10,000 miners — supplied the copper for the country’s electrical grid, and it gave the “copper kings” of the time incredible wealth.

Today, Butte’s population of 34,000 is less than half of its heyday. Abandoned mine shafts are scattered around a shrinking university and historic brick buildings. Still, Montana Resources employs nearly 400 people, and Hailer knows the current mine wields influence. Any suggestion that it might be dangerous could threaten people’s livelihood. But that 2019 study wasn’t the first to take aim at the mine in Butte. 

Two years earlier, Hailer published a paper that found higher metal levels in Butte subjects’ hair as compared to another Montana city. Notably, the Butte subjects had significantly elevated levels of arsenic in both their hair and blood. Hailer urged caution in interpreting the results, due in large part to the small sample size used in the study, and the research didn’t attract much attention.

“It really wasn’t talked about at all in the community for two years,” Hailer said.

On the other side of the country, McDermott, meanwhile, researched Butte as sort of a passion project in her career of studying environmental impacts on human health. While she often receives federal funding for large studies, she self-funded the smaller Butte research, she says. She previously examined death data for Butte residents, finding that adults living in and around Butte had higher rates of cancer deaths and other diseases than the rest of the state. In a separate study, she also found a higher incidence of brain and central nervous system cancers in children living in and around Butte compared with other areas of Montana. 

Neither study established the cause as coming from heavy metals or active mining, though arsenic and other heavy metals are known to cause cancer. 

Meconium, McDermott and Hailer thought, could potentially show how mining in Butte exposes humans to dangerous metals. For good measure, they enlisted the help of Jamie Lead, a nanoscientist in the top 1 percent of cited scientists worldwide in 2019.

In an effort to soften any possible blowback from the EPA, Hailer presented the raw data to EPA officials months before the study was published. But Hailer says the EPA was disinterested and didn’t dig into the questions raised by the data.

Then the study was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. A couple weeks later, the local media got their hands on it. The article sent waves across the community.

Suddenly, the EPA was interested.

Siding with industry

In the weeks after the meconium study was published, toxicologists from the EPA working on the Superfund site in Butte sent a flurry of emails to public agencies, local health officials, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking for input.

But the EPA also sought guidance from Montana Resources, the mining company, and ARCO, owned by oil giant BP. In emails with those industry officials, the EPA openly coordinated strategies to rebut the study, aligned on public messaging and discussed tracking the funding of the researchers.

McDermott, it should be noted, admits that the meconium study has its weaknesses. Looking at metals in meconium is a relatively new area of research. In fact, in an effort to finalize a methodology for future research, McDermott is now working on a large study — with a grant from the EPA — to analyze meconium in New York City.

Looking back now, she says that it was not a “good comparison” to compare Butte meconium to South Carolina. She suspects that the collection process of the samples may have differed in the two locations, and that may account for part of the vast difference between the two.

Despite the criticisms of the study, however, Hailer and McDermott maintain that the Butte samples raise enough questions for the EPA to conduct further research on the issue. The presence of arsenic alone is alarming, Hailer says.

“Every one of those samples had detectable arsenic at levels that I would say are on the higher end [compared to other published research],” Hailer says.

Ron Sahu, a mechanical engineer and independent consultant on environmental regulatory compliance, says the meconium study raised “important questions that deserve to be run down.” It isn’t a perfect study, but any flaws should be addressed through scientific inquiry, he says. 

“If you think there are methodology problems, then let’s fix them,” Sahu says. 

The EPA quickly focused on the South Carolina data. It argued that metal levels in that state were not only low compared to Butte’s samples, but they were also out of line with samples from other studies that measured metals in meconium. The differences with the South Carolina data have not been fully explained since Lead, the nanoscientist, has declined to share the data. (He did not return a message seeking comment for this story.)

The EPA contends that the Butte levels are roughly in line with other meconium studies if the South Carolina data is taken away. But comparing Butte samples to other studies can also present problems. Some studies on meconium measure dry weight, while others used wet weight, for example. Other studies involving meconium, McDermott notes, were also done in places where there were toxic accidents, making comparisons to Butte less helpful.

Instead of doing a larger study, the EPA led an attack in direct coordination with the mining companies. In one email, the EPA asked Mark Thompson, the vice president of environmental affairs for Montana Resources, if he could pressure Hailer and McDermott into walking back their findings, based on a company consultant’s review of the study.

“We believe that any scientist that see’s (sic) both our review and your review would only have one conclusion,” wrote Nikia Greene, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the Superfund site in Butte. “So if you decide to send an email please do not copy us, but let us know what you decide.”

Thompson didn’t send the email. As he recalled in an interview with InvestigateWest, he told EPA officials at the time that “no one’s going to give a shit what the mine says or what ARCO says,” and that the EPA should be asking other state or federal agencies to analyze the study instead.

In a statement to InvestigateWest, Mylott, the EPA spokesperson, said that the agency had a “responsibility to objectively evaluate the McDermott study” and communicated with “various parties” to do so, including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Butte-Silver Bow Health Department, and the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

“These actions reflected a desire to develop and share accurate information and encourage accountability in clarifying the study,” he said. 

Other emails suggest Montana Resources had direct influence over how the EPA responded. In one email, Thompson asks Greene at the EPA, “Have you made any progress with the publication that published the paper?” Later, the EPA would ask for the journal to retract the study. That request was rejected.

The emails show how Montana Resources felt comfortable asking the EPA for additional help. Later in 2020, Thompson saw a flier asking for volunteers for a pilot study led by McDermott and another researcher, David Hutchins. He sent an email to Greene and local health officials.

“David Hutchins and McDermott are up to their old ways. Any chance on tracking their funding?” Thompson asked.

Greene forwarded the email to three other officials with a note that said, “FYI: This is on the verge of unethical. Charlie and I are looking into this. …We will keep you posted.” The EPA would not discuss the email with InvestigateWest. 

But in an interview, Thompson says that the EPA did, in fact, agree to “dig into the federal funding side of things” to see if a federal source was funding McDermott’s research. If so, Thompson says, the EPA “wanted to call that into question.”

“There were some conversations about, you know, where’s this money coming from? Shouldn’t they have something to say about the quality of what’s being used with their money?” Thompson says.

Hailer said Montana Resources also tried to pressure Montana Tech, her employer. Shortly after the meconium study was published, she was told that Montana Resources requested a meeting with her boss with the intention of silencing Hailer. (The dean of her college at the time confirmed that Montana Resources requested the meeting, but declined to go into specifics on what was discussed.)

Hailer tried to stay out of the public eye for two years following the meconium study, but she’s still working on research related to the mining in Butte, albeit without major funding support. She hadn’t seen the emails obtained by InvestigateWest until now.

“I’ve already experienced, and seen firsthand, this interwoven relationship between ARCO, Montana Resources, and EPA,” Hailer says. “It’s completely inappropriate. You can’t have the people that made the mess also get to be the people that tell the community how they’re going to clean up the mess.”

‘Regulatory capture’

The coordination between the EPA and the companies they are meant to police was a central concern for many scientists during the Trump administration.

When Donald Trump became president in 2016, he appointed Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, previously Oklahoma’s attorney general, had a cozy relationship with the fossil fuel industry and a record of suing the EPA. Shortly after taking over as head of the EPA, emails were released that showed that as AG, Pruitt “coordinated with industry officials to fight unwanted regulations from Washington.” 

A team of researchers took a hard look at the EPA under Pruitt, analyzing his speeches, political appointments and actions. In a paper published in 2018, they determined that the EPA was so pro-business that it was “enabling a form of regulatory capture.” That is, the EPA was working more for the industries it’s supposed to be regulating than the public interest. 

Sellers, the Stony Brook University professor, and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that while the EPA has often leaned in favor of industry officials, the Trump administration was “unprecedented” for opening the doors to industrial influence. The agency was set on undermining its own rules and regulations and undercutting its own budget in order to help industry, he said. The administration also stacked industry representatives on scientific advisory committees. Corporate scientists, Sellers says, were part of “gaming the scientific system” in favor of industry, according to the paper. 

But at the time of writing the paper, Sellers admits that they didn’t have many real-world examples of the EPA working for industry. 

“We didn’t really have a paper trail to prove, ‘Here’s an industry approach, here’s what they want the agency to do, here’s the agency actually responding and doing it, basically,’” Sellers says. 

The communication between the EPA and Montana Resources regarding McDermott and Hailer’s research, however, is “significant,” Sellers says. He added, though, that there are no legal consequences for the EPA taking a certain side in a scientific debate. 

A safe place?

Steve McGrath has lived in the Greeley neighborhood that’s directly across from Montana Resources for decades. Throughout the day, he can see rocks being blasted and trucks roving back and forth across the mine to haul ore. While some in Butte don’t worry about the dust emanating from the mine, McGrath can’t ignore it.

“The people in this neighborhood are continually getting bombarded by this dust,” McGrath says.

Ten years ago, McGrath, who also works as an analytical chemist at Butte’s Montana Technical University, brought a bag of gray dust that had accumulated at his house to a local health department meeting. (Local health officials did not respond to requests for comment.)

“I asked, ‘Is this a health concern? Should I be worried about it?’” McGrath recalls. “And the reply I got from them was that it’s simply a nuisance and outside the purview of their regulation.”

Thompson, with Montana Resources, has been at the public meetings where neighbors of the mine have brought a piece of glass from their backyard filthy with dust. He agrees with them on one thing: More research is needed to get to the bottom of this. But in his view, independent scientists are attacking mining in Butte with scant evidence. And the dust in the Greeley neighborhood, he argues, isn’t as bad as people say.

“I’m not seeing what they’re seeing,” Thompson says.

Montana Resources has spent millions on dust mitigation. The company, he says, believes in being a good neighbor. After all, Thompson’s own son lives in the Greeley neighborhood closest to the mine. 

“My kids asked me, ‘Am I in a safe place?’” Thompson says. “And I said, ‘You’re fine.’ I’m pretty confident. I’ve got my own family on the line.” 

Montana Resources has funded studies looking at dust impacts in Butte, but residents often won’t trust studies funded by the mining companies. Besides, those studies often have their own limitations. 

For instance, Montana Resources hired an engineering firm to analyze particulate matter in the Greeley neighborhood in 2021. The research, also backed by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, found that particulate matter levels were safe because they met federal standards. 

Sahu, the independent consultant, studied the data and said that was the wrong conclusion to reach. For starters, except for lead, there are no federal standards for individual metals in the air such as arsenic, copper or molybdenum — metals of concern in Butte. The EPA’s standards for particulate matter are looser than those of the World Health Organization. In the Greeley neighborhood, annual averages were recorded from 2018 to 2020 that would exceed the WHO limit. The Biden administration proposed stricter standards in January, taking aim at the Trump administration for retaining the looser standards.

“You cannot conclude that if you meet the standards, that therefore, you are safe,” Sahu said at a meeting in Butte last year. 

Ed Banderob, president of the local neighborhood community development corporation near the mine, has lived in Butte for roughly 15 years. Today, despite the handful of independent studies in the last decade, he still feels like he doesn’t fully understand the risk of living where he does. Banderob maintains that Butte residents have no intention of shutting down the active mine — “we’re not that stupid,” he says. They just want answers. 

“Our position is that it would be best to recognize the problems and openly address them,” Banderob said. “Their attitude has been, ‘If we can sweep it under the rug, that’s the best way to go.’” 

McDermott sees the pattern in Butte continuing: The EPA, mining companies and other governmental officials aren’t making a good faith effort to find answers, McDermott argues. Instead, they focus on “red herrings.” 

“They keep doing little things to make people feel better, to keep people distracted,” she says. For McDermott, that’s not how science should proceed. 

“Why not repeat my studies? Why don’t you contract with the university and have them do the sample and the analysis, instead of screaming at me that I’m wrong?” McDermott says. “That’s how science progresses.”

This report was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Newly revealed records show how the EPA sided with polluters in a small Montana mining town on Feb 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Wilson Criscione, InvestigateWest.

]]> https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/feed/ 0 375553 https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/ https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/#respond Sun, 26 Feb 2023 14:00:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=603116 This story was originally published by InvestigateWest, an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

As she drove into Butte, Montana, six years ago to visit her son, environmental epidemiologist Suzanne McDermott couldn’t ignore the gouged-out mountain that loomed over the town.

It’s the result of decades of open-pit mining that continues to this day in Butte. McDermott was stunned at how close the mining pits were to homes and businesses. In town, she noticed parked cars with a film of dust that looked as if ash had fallen from a fire. Her son, who worked for the local newspaper, later told her of children who had developed mysterious ailments in Butte. 

“It just struck me that there’s something very unhealthy going on here,” said McDermott, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

Butte, a once-booming city, is home to a massive Superfund site overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Past mining has polluted the soil and water in and around Butte, and when Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) abandoned the mine in 1982, it left a pit that’s since filled with water so toxic that it kills flocks of birds that land on it.

But what troubled McDermott most wasn’t the poisoned Berkeley Pit. It was the active copper and molybdenum mine right next to it, operated by Montana Resources, a company owned by the richest man in the state, Dennis Washington. At the edge of town, she could look across the street and watch the dust from the mine rise into the air and drift over to people’s homes.

Locals have wondered for years whether that dust carries heavy metals that may be slowly poisoning them. The EPA and health officials, however, have maintained what strikes many as two conflicting messages: One, that previous open-pit mining in Butte left behind a toxic legacy necessitating a major cleanup effort. And two, that the current open-pit mining operation is safe.

McDermott and other independent scientists have questioned that narrative through a series of small, underfunded studies in recent years. They’ve received pushback from the mining companies in town, ARCO and Montana Resources.

But they’ve also run into a more unlikely foe: the EPA.

Emails obtained by InvestigateWest reveal a cozy relationship between EPA officials and the mining companies in Butte. Thousands of pages of documents detail how the EPA coordinated with the very companies they’re supposed to be regulating to attack researchers like McDermott and smear peer-reviewed science that has raised alarms over current mining practices. 

In one email, EPA toxicologists directly urged Montana Resources to fashion a response meant to pressure scientists into retracting their findings. In another, the mining company asked if the EPA could dig into the funding sources of McDermott and another researcher. In a third correspondence, the EPA deferred to a mining company official for guidance on public messaging.

The documents provide a rare, important glimpse into how a regulatory agency can fall under the influence of industry, said Christopher Sellers, an environmental health researcher at Stony Brook University who reviewed the cache of records. Sellers has studied how the EPA could side with private industry and warned of such scenarios under the Trump administration, but had never seen his concerns put into practice so clearly.

“You have it there, a paper trail — at least for this scientific sort of arena where a lot of these political battles or battles of regulation are now fought,” Sellers said.

The EPA declined interview requests for this article and would not answer questions about individual emails between the agency and industry officials. Instead, spokesperson Richard Mylott provided an emailed statement stating that the EPA had a responsibility to consult with all parties in response to new research.

In Butte, the scientific battle has obscured the answer to a longstanding question: Whether the thing that’s long been the livelihood in the small mining town could also be costing lives. 

“There’s an alliance that has developed over the years between the EPA and the mining company. It’s clear as day,” McDermott said. “Our government should be working for us and not some company.”

Raising alarms

In 2019, McDermott and two other scientists published a study that said the current mining in Butte may be tied to a “potential public health emergency.” The study compared Butte samples of meconium — a baby’s first poop — to those from South Carolina where no mining operations exist. The Butte samples had metals at levels thousands of times higher than South Carolina.

The researchers originally thought of the study as a pilot and hadn’t planned to publish it. But the results were so shocking that they felt they needed to make them public. 

One of the other scientists on the study, however, argued prior to publication against including the “public health emergency” line. That scientist was Katie Hailer, a bioinorganic chemist at Montana Technical University in Butte, who thought the claim would strike at the heart of the town’s identity. 

“I knew that that sentence was going to cause issues,” Hailer says. “But I underestimated the number of issues that sentence was going to cause.”

Butte’s always been a mining town. In the early 1900s, its underground mines — manned by some 10,000 miners — supplied the copper for the country’s electrical grid, and it gave the “copper kings” of the time incredible wealth.

Today, Butte’s population of 34,000 is less than half of its heyday. Abandoned mine shafts are scattered around a shrinking university and historic brick buildings. Still, Montana Resources employs nearly 400 people, and Hailer knows the current mine wields influence. Any suggestion that it might be dangerous could threaten people’s livelihood. But that 2019 study wasn’t the first to take aim at the mine in Butte. 

Two years earlier, Hailer published a paper that found higher metal levels in Butte subjects’ hair as compared to another Montana city. Notably, the Butte subjects had significantly elevated levels of arsenic in both their hair and blood. Hailer urged caution in interpreting the results, due in large part to the small sample size used in the study, and the research didn’t attract much attention.

“It really wasn’t talked about at all in the community for two years,” Hailer said.

On the other side of the country, McDermott, meanwhile, researched Butte as sort of a passion project in her career of studying environmental impacts on human health. While she often receives federal funding for large studies, she self-funded the smaller Butte research, she says. She previously examined death data for Butte residents, finding that adults living in and around Butte had higher rates of cancer deaths and other diseases than the rest of the state. In a separate study, she also found a higher incidence of brain and central nervous system cancers in children living in and around Butte compared with other areas of Montana. 

Neither study established the cause as coming from heavy metals or active mining, though arsenic and other heavy metals are known to cause cancer. 

Meconium, McDermott and Hailer thought, could potentially show how mining in Butte exposes humans to dangerous metals. For good measure, they enlisted the help of Jamie Lead, a nanoscientist in the top 1 percent of cited scientists worldwide in 2019.

In an effort to soften any possible blowback from the EPA, Hailer presented the raw data to EPA officials months before the study was published. But Hailer says the EPA was disinterested and didn’t dig into the questions raised by the data.

Then the study was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. A couple weeks later, the local media got their hands on it. The article sent waves across the community.

Suddenly, the EPA was interested.

Siding with industry

In the weeks after the meconium study was published, toxicologists from the EPA working on the Superfund site in Butte sent a flurry of emails to public agencies, local health officials, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking for input.

But the EPA also sought guidance from Montana Resources, the mining company, and ARCO, owned by oil giant BP. In emails with those industry officials, the EPA openly coordinated strategies to rebut the study, aligned on public messaging and discussed tracking the funding of the researchers.

McDermott, it should be noted, admits that the meconium study has its weaknesses. Looking at metals in meconium is a relatively new area of research. In fact, in an effort to finalize a methodology for future research, McDermott is now working on a large study — with a grant from the EPA — to analyze meconium in New York City.

Looking back now, she says that it was not a “good comparison” to compare Butte meconium to South Carolina. She suspects that the collection process of the samples may have differed in the two locations, and that may account for part of the vast difference between the two.

Despite the criticisms of the study, however, Hailer and McDermott maintain that the Butte samples raise enough questions for the EPA to conduct further research on the issue. The presence of arsenic alone is alarming, Hailer says.

“Every one of those samples had detectable arsenic at levels that I would say are on the higher end [compared to other published research],” Hailer says.

Ron Sahu, a mechanical engineer and independent consultant on environmental regulatory compliance, says the meconium study raised “important questions that deserve to be run down.” It isn’t a perfect study, but any flaws should be addressed through scientific inquiry, he says. 

“If you think there are methodology problems, then let’s fix them,” Sahu says. 

The EPA quickly focused on the South Carolina data. It argued that metal levels in that state were not only low compared to Butte’s samples, but they were also out of line with samples from other studies that measured metals in meconium. The differences with the South Carolina data have not been fully explained since Lead, the nanoscientist, has declined to share the data. (He did not return a message seeking comment for this story.)

The EPA contends that the Butte levels are roughly in line with other meconium studies if the South Carolina data is taken away. But comparing Butte samples to other studies can also present problems. Some studies on meconium measure dry weight, while others used wet weight, for example. Other studies involving meconium, McDermott notes, were also done in places where there were toxic accidents, making comparisons to Butte less helpful.

Instead of doing a larger study, the EPA led an attack in direct coordination with the mining companies. In one email, the EPA asked Mark Thompson, the vice president of environmental affairs for Montana Resources, if he could pressure Hailer and McDermott into walking back their findings, based on a company consultant’s review of the study.

“We believe that any scientist that see’s (sic) both our review and your review would only have one conclusion,” wrote Nikia Greene, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the Superfund site in Butte. “So if you decide to send an email please do not copy us, but let us know what you decide.”

Thompson didn’t send the email. As he recalled in an interview with InvestigateWest, he told EPA officials at the time that “no one’s going to give a shit what the mine says or what ARCO says,” and that the EPA should be asking other state or federal agencies to analyze the study instead.

In a statement to InvestigateWest, Mylott, the EPA spokesperson, said that the agency had a “responsibility to objectively evaluate the McDermott study” and communicated with “various parties” to do so, including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Butte-Silver Bow Health Department, and the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

“These actions reflected a desire to develop and share accurate information and encourage accountability in clarifying the study,” he said. 

Other emails suggest Montana Resources had direct influence over how the EPA responded. In one email, Thompson asks Greene at the EPA, “Have you made any progress with the publication that published the paper?” Later, the EPA would ask for the journal to retract the study. That request was rejected.

The emails show how Montana Resources felt comfortable asking the EPA for additional help. Later in 2020, Thompson saw a flier asking for volunteers for a pilot study led by McDermott and another researcher, David Hutchins. He sent an email to Greene and local health officials.

“David Hutchins and McDermott are up to their old ways. Any chance on tracking their funding?” Thompson asked.

Greene forwarded the email to three other officials with a note that said, “FYI: This is on the verge of unethical. Charlie and I are looking into this. …We will keep you posted.” The EPA would not discuss the email with InvestigateWest. 

But in an interview, Thompson says that the EPA did, in fact, agree to “dig into the federal funding side of things” to see if a federal source was funding McDermott’s research. If so, Thompson says, the EPA “wanted to call that into question.”

“There were some conversations about, you know, where’s this money coming from? Shouldn’t they have something to say about the quality of what’s being used with their money?” Thompson says.

Hailer said Montana Resources also tried to pressure Montana Tech, her employer. Shortly after the meconium study was published, she was told that Montana Resources requested a meeting with her boss with the intention of silencing Hailer. (The dean of her college at the time confirmed that Montana Resources requested the meeting, but declined to go into specifics on what was discussed.)

Hailer tried to stay out of the public eye for two years following the meconium study, but she’s still working on research related to the mining in Butte, albeit without major funding support. She hadn’t seen the emails obtained by InvestigateWest until now.

“I’ve already experienced, and seen firsthand, this interwoven relationship between ARCO, Montana Resources, and EPA,” Hailer says. “It’s completely inappropriate. You can’t have the people that made the mess also get to be the people that tell the community how they’re going to clean up the mess.”

‘Regulatory capture’

The coordination between the EPA and the companies they are meant to police was a central concern for many scientists during the Trump administration.

When Donald Trump became president in 2016, he appointed Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, previously Oklahoma’s attorney general, had a cozy relationship with the fossil fuel industry and a record of suing the EPA. Shortly after taking over as head of the EPA, emails were released that showed that as AG, Pruitt “coordinated with industry officials to fight unwanted regulations from Washington.” 

A team of researchers took a hard look at the EPA under Pruitt, analyzing his speeches, political appointments and actions. In a paper published in 2018, they determined that the EPA was so pro-business that it was “enabling a form of regulatory capture.” That is, the EPA was working more for the industries it’s supposed to be regulating than the public interest. 

Sellers, the Stony Brook University professor, and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that while the EPA has often leaned in favor of industry officials, the Trump administration was “unprecedented” for opening the doors to industrial influence. The agency was set on undermining its own rules and regulations and undercutting its own budget in order to help industry, he said. The administration also stacked industry representatives on scientific advisory committees. Corporate scientists, Sellers says, were part of “gaming the scientific system” in favor of industry, according to the paper. 

But at the time of writing the paper, Sellers admits that they didn’t have many real-world examples of the EPA working for industry. 

“We didn’t really have a paper trail to prove, ‘Here’s an industry approach, here’s what they want the agency to do, here’s the agency actually responding and doing it, basically,’” Sellers says. 

The communication between the EPA and Montana Resources regarding McDermott and Hailer’s research, however, is “significant,” Sellers says. He added, though, that there are no legal consequences for the EPA taking a certain side in a scientific debate. 

A safe place?

Steve McGrath has lived in the Greeley neighborhood that’s directly across from Montana Resources for decades. Throughout the day, he can see rocks being blasted and trucks roving back and forth across the mine to haul ore. While some in Butte don’t worry about the dust emanating from the mine, McGrath can’t ignore it.

“The people in this neighborhood are continually getting bombarded by this dust,” McGrath says.

Ten years ago, McGrath, who also works as an analytical chemist at Butte’s Montana Technical University, brought a bag of gray dust that had accumulated at his house to a local health department meeting. (Local health officials did not respond to requests for comment.)

“I asked, ‘Is this a health concern? Should I be worried about it?’” McGrath recalls. “And the reply I got from them was that it’s simply a nuisance and outside the purview of their regulation.”

Thompson, with Montana Resources, has been at the public meetings where neighbors of the mine have brought a piece of glass from their backyard filthy with dust. He agrees with them on one thing: More research is needed to get to the bottom of this. But in his view, independent scientists are attacking mining in Butte with scant evidence. And the dust in the Greeley neighborhood, he argues, isn’t as bad as people say.

“I’m not seeing what they’re seeing,” Thompson says.

Montana Resources has spent millions on dust mitigation. The company, he says, believes in being a good neighbor. After all, Thompson’s own son lives in the Greeley neighborhood closest to the mine. 

“My kids asked me, ‘Am I in a safe place?’” Thompson says. “And I said, ‘You’re fine.’ I’m pretty confident. I’ve got my own family on the line.” 

Montana Resources has funded studies looking at dust impacts in Butte, but residents often won’t trust studies funded by the mining companies. Besides, those studies often have their own limitations. 

For instance, Montana Resources hired an engineering firm to analyze particulate matter in the Greeley neighborhood in 2021. The research, also backed by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, found that particulate matter levels were safe because they met federal standards. 

Sahu, the independent consultant, studied the data and said that was the wrong conclusion to reach. For starters, except for lead, there are no federal standards for individual metals in the air such as arsenic, copper or molybdenum — metals of concern in Butte. The EPA’s standards for particulate matter are looser than those of the World Health Organization. In the Greeley neighborhood, annual averages were recorded from 2018 to 2020 that would exceed the WHO limit. The Biden administration proposed stricter standards in January, taking aim at the Trump administration for retaining the looser standards.

“You cannot conclude that if you meet the standards, that therefore, you are safe,” Sahu said at a meeting in Butte last year. 

Ed Banderob, president of the local neighborhood community development corporation near the mine, has lived in Butte for roughly 15 years. Today, despite the handful of independent studies in the last decade, he still feels like he doesn’t fully understand the risk of living where he does. Banderob maintains that Butte residents have no intention of shutting down the active mine — “we’re not that stupid,” he says. They just want answers. 

“Our position is that it would be best to recognize the problems and openly address them,” Banderob said. “Their attitude has been, ‘If we can sweep it under the rug, that’s the best way to go.’” 

McDermott sees the pattern in Butte continuing: The EPA, mining companies and other governmental officials aren’t making a good faith effort to find answers, McDermott argues. Instead, they focus on “red herrings.” 

“They keep doing little things to make people feel better, to keep people distracted,” she says. For McDermott, that’s not how science should proceed. 

“Why not repeat my studies? Why don’t you contract with the university and have them do the sample and the analysis, instead of screaming at me that I’m wrong?” McDermott says. “That’s how science progresses.”

This report was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Newly revealed records show how the EPA sided with polluters in a small Montana mining town on Feb 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Wilson Criscione, InvestigateWest.

]]> https://grist.org/health/newly-revealed-records-show-how-the-epa-sided-with-polluters-in-a-small-montana-mining-town/feed/ 0 375554 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/31/how-us-policy-devastated-small-dairy-farms-and-boosted-corporate-monopolies/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/31/how-us-policy-devastated-small-dairy-farms-and-boosted-corporate-monopolies/#respond Tue, 31 Jan 2023 20:37:36 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/dairy-farms-monopolies

Food & Water Watch on Tuesday released an analysis of the U.S. dairy farming industry—the climate and food justice group's third in-depth report on the economic costs of food monopolies—revealing how corporate consolidation has helped push small family farms out of business over the past two decades, while worsening the climate emergency.

In The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: Dirty Dairy Racket, Food & Water Watch (FWW) explains how factors including the gutting of farm supply management policies and higher production costs have helped cause rapid consolidation in the dairy sector, with 70% of family-scale dairy farms shutting down between 1997 and 2007.

"Corporate consolidation is at the heart of our food system's dysfunction," said Rebecca Wolf, food policy analyst for FWW. "Corporate-directed policymaking is throwing America's dairy industry into crisis. Family-scale dairies are collapsing at an alarming rate, and those that manage to hang on face rising costs, negative returns, and mounting debt, while consumers are sold an illusion of pastoral, sustainable milk products."

Just 30% of U.S. milk is now produced at family farms, while 83% of milk sales are controlled by just three dairy cooperatives: Land O' Lakes, DFA, and California Dairies, Inc.

In addition to forcing small farms to shut down, the consolidation of the dairy production industry has "serious climate implications," said FWW, with the shift to factory farms resulting in the doubling of annual methane emissions from the sector between 1990 and 2020.

"We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment," the group tweeted.

\u201cIn addition to polluting air and water, our research shows that the growth of megadairies is bad for small farmers. We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment. https://t.co/BIzjauXfUI\u201d

— Food & Water Watch (@Food & Water Watch) 1675191692

FWW traced the loss of family-scale farms back to factors including the loss of dairy price supports in the early 2000s, which caused production prices to rise even more sharply than they previously had for two decades, while sale prices rose far less quickly. This left the average family farm almost entirely unable to turn a profit—doing so just twice between 2000 and 2021—and in many cases, forced them to eventually close.

The "disastrous 1996 Farm Bill" also ended commodity grain supply management policies, allowing oversupplies to flood the market and "ushering in the era of factory farms," with family farms unable to compete with large facilities. Milk production rapidly increased since 1997, further driving down sale prices.

"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible."

Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd told FWW that dairy farm families "have our backs against the wall."

"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible," said Lloyd. "We need to manage the growth of dairy supply and we can do this with solid dairy policy that looks out for farm families and rural communities and not corporate profits."

The report argues that "there is a clear way forward," making recommendations including "a comprehensive federal supply management program that actively works to match supply with demand and does not use the export market as a dumping ground for oversupply."

"Curbing overproduction can bring a higher price to farmers through the market instead of through taxpayer-funded government payments and bailouts," reads the report. "It will also reduce the pressure to expand herd sizes and thereby avoid more factory farms and the entailing climate emissions."

FWW also called Congress to "stop the megamerger frenzy among agribusiness" by passing legislation to halt agribusiness mergers and ultimately ban factory farms, phasing them out and investing in a "just transition" for factory farm workers by 2040.

"The next Farm Bill is a critical opportunity to reverse course, by restoring supply management and reforming the farm safety net," said Wolf. "Passage of the Farm System Reform Act and Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act will help ensure we stop digging a deeper hole by halting consolidation and factory farm proliferation."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/31/how-us-policy-devastated-small-dairy-farms-and-boosted-corporate-monopolies/feed/ 0 368710 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/why-a-small-city-in-ukraine-is-a-focal-point-in-the-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/why-a-small-city-in-ukraine-is-a-focal-point-in-the-war/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2023 06:50:36 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=272713

Since the Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive started gaining momentum in September 2022, the Russian army has largely been on the defensive. Russian drone and missile strikes continue to target Ukraine’s major cities, but its military forces have retreated from attempts to take Kherson, Kharkiv, or any other major Ukrainian settlement. Strong defensive fortifications built by Russian and Ukrainian armed forces across the frontline have stalled major advances as troops from both sides have mostly opted to dig in.

But the Kremlin has directed thousands of its forces since August 2022 to attack the small Donetsk city of Bakhmut. The war has in several ways been an “old-fashioned conflict, based on attrition, on devastating artillery strikes, and on dug-in positions reminiscent of the trenches of World War I,” as opposed to some of the quick offensives and counteroffensives that were seen during the first part of the current conflict.

According to a January 10, 2023, article in PBS NewsHour, the Ukrainian-backed governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, “estimated more than two months ago that 90 percent of Bakhmut’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.” The fighting and destruction have only intensified since Kyrylenko made this statement, but the Kremlin appears intent on capturing Bakhmut for propaganda purposes and to tout a tactical victory after months of retreats. According to a Ukrainian analyst, “Bakhmut is mostly a political goal for Russia—it’s being done mostly for the sake of propaganda reasons to show everybody that after so many months and utter failures in Kherson and Kharkiv, it still can capture a more or less significant city,” stated a TRT World article.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought to prove that Ukrainian forces still have the capability to hold back the Russian advance, and made a surprise visit to Bakhmut on December 20. On January 9, 2023, Zelenskyy declared that the defense of the nearby city of Soledar had led to the gain of “additional time and power for Ukraine.” But the Ukrainian armed forces have had to divert “significant reinforcements” to the battle from other parts of the country since January, according to Britain’s Ministry of Defense. And despite heavy Russian casualties, high Ukrainian casualties have also become a concern for Kyiv.

Western and Ukrainian officials have often downplayed the strategic importance of Bakhmut, depicting it as a sinkhole for Russian forces that may result in a “Pyrrhic victory.” Nonetheless, the phrase “hold Bakhmut” has become a Ukrainian rallying cry, and Zelenskyy’s visit demonstrated the growing symbolic importance of controlling the city.

Bakhmut, however, does possess some strategic value. Few major settlements exist to its west until the Dnieper River, and the flatter and open terrain would make Ukrainian attempts to reinforce from this direction vulnerable to Russian surveillance and firepower. Ukraine also has relatively poor road infrastructure, and Bakhmut serves as a critical juncture of transport and communication lines for Ukrainian forces in the region, including strategic supply lines to the Ukrainian-controlled settlements of Siversk, Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk.

For Russia, seizing Bakhmut would allow it to disrupt these supply lines, as well as take pressure off the battle over Russia-controlled Kremmina, which Ukrainian forces have been fighting to recover. Bakhmut is therefore key to Russian attempts to consolidate and stabilize the Donbas, where Russia has fought since 2014 and initially made gains in 2022, before the Ukrainian counteroffensive in September.

Taking or destroying key industrial centers in the Donbas region will also reduce Ukraine’s industrial output, leading to its economy suffering further.

Bakhmut stands out as the only major area where Russian forces are on the offensive, but the frontline has been relatively stable up until recently. Yet throughout January 2023, Russian forces have moved to the city’s flank and made increasing gains in the nearby town of Soledar. After weeks of fighting, the Kremlin stated that Soledar had been captured on January 13, this was later confirmed by the Institute for the Study of War and Ukrainian armed forces.

Russian forces have enjoyed an advantage over Ukrainian forces in artillery numbers, and an early transition to a wartime economy by the Kremlin has further helped sustain months of relentless artillery strikes by it. Nonetheless, Russia has turned to countries like North Korea in recent months to obtain more artillery, and its artillery fire has decreased in recent days, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

But Ukraine’s more limited artillery capabilities have also recently been threatened. Despite pleas for more 155-millimeter artillery rounds, Western manufacturers have struggled to supply an adequate quantity and ramp up production. This has forced the U.S. to ask South Korea for artillery and Washington also secured hundreds of thousands of 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine from its stockpiles in Israel. Meanwhile, according to U.S. defense officials, “A third of the roughly 350 Western-made howitzers donated to Kyiv are out of action at any given time.”

Western countries have now been focusing on delivering more advanced weapons to Ukraine, such as missile defense systems, tanks, and armored vehicles. Recent pledges by the UK and Canada to supply Ukraine with heavy vehicles (as well as pressure on Germany and the U.S. to do so as well) will no doubt help Ukrainian forces on the frontline. But with Russia currently dictating where the fiercest fighting will take place, Bakhmut’s vulnerability to artillery has made holding it a significant challenge.

Local militia groups and the Russian military have naturally played essential roles in the ongoing battle for Bakhmut and its surrounding regions. But perhaps most notable is that much of Russia’s recent progress has been made by the Russian private military company, Wagner.

Wagner has operated in Ukraine since 2014 and has expanded its reach to countries across Africa and the Middle East, while the company’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been keen to demonstrate his private army can accomplish major military objectives. Additionally, the deaths of Wagner mercenaries are not counted as official Russian casualties, making the costly effort to take Bakhmut easier for the Russian public to stomach. In early January 2023, the first Wagner fighters, who were “secretly pardoned convicts” recruited by the company returned home after completing their contracts, causing controversy in Russia and highlighting the role of the non-state actor in the conflict.

Western and Ukrainian observers believe that Wagner troops have suffered casualties in the thousands. Prigozhin, meanwhile, stated on a telegram channel in November 2022 that “Our goal is not Bakhmut… [itself] but the destruction of the Ukrainian army and the reduction of its combat potential, which has an extremely positive effect on other areas, which is why this operation was dubbed the ‘Bakhmut meat grinder.’”

It is also suspected that Prigozhin aims to seize the salt and gypsum mines in the region, similar to other Wagner efforts to gain access to resources across conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East.

The outsized role of Wagner in the battle, as well as Prigozhin’s growing profile in Russia, has led to significant tension between the oligarch and the Russian military. After the capture of Soledar, Prigozhin claimed this was solely due to Wagner, while the Russian Defense Ministry claimed a few days later that victory was thanks to the Russian armed forces without mentioning the Wagner mercenaries.

The dispute between the Russian military and Wagner has come amid a leadership shakeup among the top brass of the Russian military. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, replaced Sergei Surovikin as the Ukraine campaign’s overall commander on January 11. The change indicates the Kremlin’s frustration with the fledgling promises of the Russian armed forces. Nonetheless, the slow success of Russian artillery strikes in Soledar combined with Wagner troops shows that the two can work together.

But Bakhmut, so far, remains elusive for the Kremlin. Whichever side controls the city will have an advantage over any potential offensives later in 2023 and will have more say over where the next major battles take place. While Ukraine’s armed forces remain united under a more centralized command, the Kremlin will have to be careful of the growing tension between its armed forces, local militia groups, and private military companies.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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

The analysis — by Headwaters Economics, an independent research group that focuses on community development and land management — warns that local match requirements are putting rural communities in particular at a disadvantage. Many lack the resources to both apply for grant projects and also to sustain their portion of funding through the lifetime of a project. 

Yet many of these rural communities are on the front line of climate change. 

“They’re experiencing floods, they’re experiencing fires, and we see these events getting more and more extreme,” said Kristin Smith, a researcher at Headwaters Economics and the author of the analysis. “These are also the places that tend to have really small local governments.” Such communities are in a poor position to get the money together to invest in the projects they need to keep them safe. 

Local match requirements for federal resilience grants usually manifest as a fixed percentage of a project’s cost, without considering the size or wealth of a community. But critical climate resilience infrastructure projects are often more expensive in rural places than urban ones, since rural communities need larger-scale projects to cover a greater geographic area. With a smaller tax base to help cover the costs of these fixed-priced projects, rural governments find it difficult to secure the finances to cover grant requirements. 

A relatively new federal program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, was launched in 2021 to support climate resilience projects that protect vulnerable communities from natural disasters. The bipartisan infrastructure law is providing $1 billion over five years for the program. At its conception, BRIC was touted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a more equity-focused program that would better assist disadvantaged communities. But an analysis of BRIC’s first year found that the projects that the program had selected for funding were heavily concentrated in wealthier, coastal regions of the country — in part, Headwater Economics argues, because of the local match requirement. BRIC prioritized applications from communities that could pay a higher match. “The intent was to incentivize local investments, but in practice the scoring rubric made it more difficult for smaller communities to compete,” Smith’s analysis found. 

Match requirements are just one factor that prevent rural and under-resourced communities from getting the climate resilience grants they need. A lack of expertise and access to professional grant writers can also contribute to rural communities’ failure to compete successfully for resilience grants against larger and better-resourced communities. These barriers have eroded rural trust in federal institutions.  

Some rural communities have opted out of the process of applying for grants altogether. But Smith sees hope in a new federal program that will provide direct technical assistance to local communities that need help with grant writing and project identification and design, as well as simply navigating the federal system.  

In the long term, Smith and her fellow researchers at Headwaters Economics have proposed bigger-picture solutions to the local match requirement. One proposal is to allow a wider variety of expenses, such as long-term maintenance costs, to count towards a local match, which would acknowledge that communities are already invested in the overall success of the project even if they lack the finances to pay upfront costs.

A second option would be for states to create specific funds to help local governments meet local match requirements. A number of states have already done so: Colorado has allocated $80 million of its general budget to help counties, municipalities, and federally recognized tribes pay for local matches. Texas has also created a fund specifically to provide matches for community flood projects.

Finally, getting rid of the local match requirement altogether may just be the most equitable solution. The local match “is something that is preventing rural communities from applying for federal funding,” said Smith. With an elimination of the local match requirement, as well as stratifying grant funds so that poor rural communities aren’t competing directly against larger, wealthier communities, Smith argues, “you’re making big strides to having a more equitable distribution.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The unexpected barrier preventing American small towns from accessing federal climate funds on Jan 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Brett Marsh.

A Utah-based gunmaker came under fire again Tuesday for rebranding a semi-automatic rifle for children inspired by the AR-15 that's so commonly used in U.S. mass shootings.

A year ago, WEE1 Tactical—maker of the lightweight JR-15 assault-style rifle that "operates just like mom and dad's gun"—sparked outrage with marketing featuring pacifier-sucking baby skulls with gunsights for eye sockets. The gun made headlines again in 2022 after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted that students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas "needed JR-15s to defend themselves" against a gunman who killed 19 children and two staff members with an AR-15-style rifle.

Since then, WEE1 Tactical has shifted its branding strategy. The baby skulls are gone; now the JR-15 represents "a great American tradition," a "small piece of American freedom," and "American family values."

Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center and author of a 2016 study on the firearms industry's gun-grooming of American children, led criticism of the JR-15 rebrand.

"WEE1 Tactical has adopted this supposedly kinder, gentler marketing approach because it knows from experience that most Americans are shocked and disgusted by the idea of manufacturing semi-automatic assault rifles designed for grade schoolers," Sugarmann said in a statement. "The company's persistence in selling assault rifles for children makes clear the need for continued vigilance by parents and communities as well as legislative action."

WEE1 Tactical is displaying the JR-15 at SHOT Show 2023, a major National Shooting Sports Foundation trade show that opened Tuesday at the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. That's about three miles from where a man armed with 24 guns including 14 AR-15-type rifles massacred 60 people at a 2017 country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The JR-15 is not an AR-15, the civilian version of the M16 and its more modern offshoot, the M4 carbine, used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War era. Instead of the NATO-standard 5.56 mm bullets fired by the AR-15, the JR-15 uses .22 caliber rounds which, while still potentially deadly, are much smaller, far less powerful, and commonly associated with a youth's first hunting or sporting rifle.

However, gun control advocates note that children made up nearly 1,700 of the more than 44,000 people killed with guns in the United States last year. Earlier this month, a 6-year-old brought a gun to his elementary school in Newport News, Virginia and allegedly shot his teacher during an altercation.

"Call me crazy but just weeks after a 6-year-old shot his teacher I don't think it's a great idea to be releasing a kids version of the AR-15," tweeted David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida, in which the gunman used an AR-15-style rifle to murder 14 students and three staff.

In California, state Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-19) last year introduced a bill that would ban the marketing of guns to children.

Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a study showing that roughly 26,000 U.S. children would still be alive if the country had the same child gun death rate as Canada.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Republicans began their control of the 118th Congress Tuesday with a narrow majority that failed six times to elect a speaker but had in hand "hit-the-ground-running" plans to pass legislation that critics say will "protect wealthy and corporate tax cheats" by rescinding tens of billions of dollars in new Internal Revenue Service funding in the Inflation Reduction Act.

On Monday, Steve Scalise (R-La.), a party leader, said that the lower chamber's first order of business after electing a speaker will be taking up the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.

"This Republican bill is ill-named because what it actually does is protect tax cheaters by repealing most of the new IRS funding set forth in last year's Inflation Reduction Act," Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic wrote.

In a December 30 letter to House Republicans, Scalise said the legislation—along with 10 other bills and resolutions he proposed—would let GOP lawmakers "hit the ground running in our first weeks in the majority."

Scalise said in the letter that the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Act "rescinds tens of billions of dollars allocated to the IRS for 87,000 new IRS agents in the Inflation Reduction Act."

Although the "87,000 new IRS agents" claim has been widely debunked, it has nevertheless become a GOP talking point.

Writing for The American Independent, Josh Israel noted: "It has appeared in ads run by the campaigns of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and North Carolina Republican Senate nominee Rep. Ted Budd; it has been used in Senate Leadership Fund attack ads in Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio; and the right-wing Club for Growth Action and Congressional Leadership Fund have run spots lying about the number of new IRS agents. The Senate Republican conference's official Twitter account and those of dozens of other House and Senate Republicans have also tweeted the bogus 87,000 number."

As Mechanic pointed out, "From 2010 to 2018, even as the IRS received 9% more tax returns, its annual budget was slashed by $2.9 billion—a 20% reduction that cost the agency more than one-fifth of its workforce."

"Virtually no partnerships were audited in 2018," he continued. "By then, with [former President] Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the kneecapped IRS was scrutinizing the individual returns of just 0.03% of those $10 million—plus taxpayers, down from a peak of 23% in 2010. Audits of the $5 million—to—$10 million filers fell from just under 15% to a scant 0.04%."

Mechanic added:

A fair subset of superwealthy Americans doesn't even bother filing. The Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration reported in 2020 that nearly 880,000 "high income" non-filers from 2014 through 2016 still owed $46 billion, and the IRS was in no condition, resource-wise, to collect. The 300 biggest delinquents owed about $33 million per head, on average. Fifteen percent of their cases had been closed without examination by IRS staffers, and another one-third weren't even in line to be "worked."

"The recently enacted IRS funding—$80 billion over 10 years—was meant to remedy this shameful state of affairs," he wrote.

Despite the disunity evident in the speaker struggle, House Republicans appear united when it comes to slashing Social Security, gutting ethics safeguards, and pursuing policies like the IRS defunding measure that exacerbate inequality in one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Lee Enterprises. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

It was the last Friday in October, and barges filled with mounds of glistening coal sat parked in the Ohio River below Lee Esther Logan’s high-rise public housing apartment complex in Cairo, Illinois. Wispy white clouds streaked a baby blue sky. The panoramic waterfront view is one that normally gives Logan peace as she takes it in from the brown recliner on her balcony.

But on the day I visited her, Logan wasn’t at peace. She was anxious.

Two days prior, officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had called Logan and about 60 of her fellow public housing residents to a meeting. An engineering assessment has found that the Connell F. Smith Sr. Building may not be structurally sound enough to withstand an earthquake. The federal government plans to raze their home, and they have to move out by early next year, the federal housing officials told them.

The building mostly houses seniors and people with disabilities and is also home to a small number of children and their parents. Officials told the residents they’d get vouchers and moving assistance. But that’s of little comfort to the many residents who want to stay in Cairo.

Since its population peaked at 15,000 residents in the 1920s, Cairo has faced decades of population and economic decline. It’s now one of the poorest cities in Illinois, and its population has dropped to about 1,600. There’s no grocery store or gas station — and most critically for the high-rise residents facing eviction, there’s an extreme shortage of safe rental options. That means that under HUD’s plan, most residents will have to move at least 30 miles away to find available units in other towns’ public housing complexes or private-market rentals.

The decision sent residents reeling. Logan’s close-knit, majority-Black town sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, where the borders of Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri meet.

When newcomers visit, they’re often struck by the blight of a hollowed-out city: streets lined with boarded-up homes, vacant buildings and empty lots. The Smith building itself holds a lot of history — not all of it good. Constructed in 1968, it’s named for a former housing authority board member who, the decade before, had affixed a flashing neon arrow to his garage roof; it pointed at the home of an attorney who was working to integrate Cairo’s public schools alongside Thurgood Marshall. In an essay, Langston Hughes described it as a 4-foot “red arrow of bigotry.”

But for residents, a strong sense of community remains. Cairo is known regionally for its historic churches — some of which still gather a spirited crowd on Sundays — ties to American history, music festivals, acclaimed barbecue and standout high school basketball teams over the years. It’s one of the few small towns in southern Illinois to offer a children’s orchestra and ballet lessons.

For many of the seniors and people with disabilities who live at the Smith building, the prospect of heading out of town — for some, the only place they’ve ever lived — is daunting.

“A lot of people are scared. I’m scared,” said Logan, 55, a disabled woman who has spent her entire life here. “I don’t want to leave Cairo.” I heard many neighbors echo her concerns as I knocked on doors that afternoon. “I don’t know where I’m gonna go. I’m 83 years old,” said Harry “Mack” McDowell Jr., a retired car salesman who is still grieving the death of his wife in July and who is dreading having to apartment shop and move during the holidays.

Few federal agencies have a mission so squarely aligned with what Cairo needs: to uplift disadvantaged people and places and, as HUD describes it on its website, “to deliver on America’s dreams.”

But HUD has let generations of Cairo residents down time and again. And although HUD could oversee the building of new apartments in the city, it has no plans to do so.

Cairo isn’t just another Midwestern river town befallen by hard economic luck.

The storied epicenter of a region colloquially known as “Little Egypt,” Cairo holds a central place in the American story. The town, the most southern point in a northern state, was a key station on the Underground Railroad and a Midwestern staging area for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union armies along the Mississippi artery.

It had been a mostly white city until thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans fled on steamers headed north along the Mississippi River during the height of the war. The federal government sent them to Cairo and housed them in what were called “contraband camps,” shanty tents set up near the riverbanks where people had little to eat and disease ran rampant.

At the war’s end, the camps disbanded and many people left. But at least 3,000 Black Americans stayed in Cairo and established a vibrant, though largely segregated, community of churches, schools and businesses. By the early 1900s, nearly 40% of the population was Black, and the strongly organized community leveraged its political power to win elected seats in town.

Despite those gains, white supremacists maintained the balance of power and ensured that Cairo’s Black population remained locked out of the best jobs and public schools. Jim Crow-era policies that followed Reconstruction remained firmly rooted in Cairo well after they’d begun to unravel elsewhere.

Housing discrimination was a common thread.

In the 1940s, the town built two large family housing complexes: one for Black families using cheap wood materials at the site of the old “contraband camp” and one for white families built of brick.

In 1972, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in the town. Numerous Black citizens testified about being forced to live in the segregated and dilapidated public housing complex; they were terrorized by rodents and white vigilantes who, for months, fired into the apartment complex from the Mississippi levee, shattering windows and streets lights, to intimidate a Black civil rights leader and his followers who lived there. The commission concluded that federal housing officials had known about the town’s defiance of federal fair housing laws for years but done little.

More than 40 years later, I, along with several colleagues from The Southern Illinoisan, documented unsafe conditions in the same buildings cited in the federal report. They had fallen into even worse disrepair. There were severe foundational issues. Homes were overrun with mice and roaches. Doctors expressed alarm at the number of mothers bringing in children with asthma and other breathing problems from mold. The heating system was so poor that many families used their gas ovens to stay warm in the winter. Similar to the commission’s findings, our reporting revealed that HUD had known about problems and done little. In 2016, on the heels of our investigative series, HUD exercised its rarely utilized authority to remove the housing authority based in Cairo from local control and place it into federal receivership.

A year later, under President Donald Trump and his HUD secretary, Ben Carson, the federal agency announced the closure of two family housing complexes in Cairo, and 10 months after that, two more in nearby Thebes. The buildings were home to about 500 people, and most of them ended up leaving the area to find housing. The community was livid — not at HUD’s decisions to tear down buildings long past their prime but at the fact that HUD would not commit to replacing even a small fraction of what had been lost.

At the time, federal officials promised they would do what they could to maintain the public housing that remained in Cairo, including the high-rise where Logan lives. At least 14 families forced out of the demolished homes moved into the Smith building. And residents were hopeful that President Joe Biden’s administration might take a different approach.

But to residents in Cairo, last month’s announcement is another broken promise in a long line.

“Here we go again,” a frustrated Thomas Simpson, Cairo’s mayor, quipped on his way out the door of the meeting with HUD officials. He’s working with other community leaders to open a co-op grocery store. And he’s hopeful that plans to build a new inland river port in town — a development that Gov. J.B. Pritzker has committed $40 million in state funds toward — will boost the region’s economy.

But HUD’s continued gutting of his community makes it hard to stay a step ahead, he said. After more than seven years under HUD control, the local housing authority has not managed to replace a single unit in his town. The mayor believes HUD has overstated the urgent need for people to move. (HUD does not typically assess seismic risk; it ordered an architectural assessment after an agency official noticed cracks in the building in 2021. The study identified problems but did not make any recommendations, and there’s no HUD policy that dictates what is an acceptable seismic risk for a public housing property). He’d like to see the agency slow down and come up with an alternative solution.

One is already on the table.

A developer with extensive affordable housing experience has offered HUD a plan to build a 40-unit housing community in Cairo at the site of one of the previously demolished homes. The roughly $5 million needed for the project already exists in the housing authority’s coffers. And the developer who pitched the solution, Nashville, Tennessee-based U.S. Management Services, is already under contract with HUD to develop a long-term plan for the housing authority and its tenants in Cairo. The owner of the development company told HUD he could complete the Cairo project in six months by shipping in manufactured homes.

But while a HUD official later told me that the project hasn’t been rejected outright, he said that the deal is more complicated than meets the eye. More detailed questions, he said, would have to be directed to HUD’s spokesperson. Christina Wilkes, HUD’s press secretary, did not specifically respond to my questions about the proposed development. In an emailed response, she said the agency is “committed to partnering with the Mayor and community leaders to develop a plan for the future, based upon the Mayor’s vision.”

The mayor, however, said HUD only notified him of its plan to demolish the Smith building a few hours before notifying the residents, even though the agency first noticed problems with the building more than a year ago. He wants the agency to pursue all viable options to keep people in Cairo. And if the agency goes ahead with the plan to move people out of the high-rise, those residents will take their vouchers with them, leaving insufficient funding for the new units.

On the afternoon that HUD broke the news, the residents and other community leaders packed into the meeting room shoulder to shoulder. People spilled into the hallways. A few residents shed tears; others begged HUD officials to come up with another solution. Community leaders admonished the agency for the pain it has caused the town.

Phillip Matthews, a pastor and community activist, stood up, stared the officials down and told them to deliver this message to their superiors in Washington on behalf of the town: “It’s not happening this time.”

“This was not an easy decision,” a defensive HUD official fired back. “If you think it was, you’re sorely mistaken.”

At the meeting, a HUD official promised to share the town residents’ concerns with higher-ups in Washington. But the agency has not backed off of its plans to move people from the building in Cairo, located in Alexander County. “The safety of the HUD assisted residents is our top priority and moving them to safe housing as soon as possible is our focus at this time. If there is any future ACHA housing, it would allow former ACHA residents the first priority to return,” Wilkes, the HUD spokesperson said, referring to the Alexander County Housing Authority that is in receivership.

In the days that followed that tense meeting, residents and community leaders have fought back. The state’s attorney filed a lawsuit challenging that HUD had not followed its own requirements for when a public housing property is slated to be demolished. That resulted in a county judge issuing a temporary restraining order, which has since expired; the case was then transferred to federal court, where it is pending. (HUD has maintained that it hasn’t violated any laws or regulations with its announcement.) Political leaders wrote letters to HUD advocating for the town. And residents say they plan to flood a housing authority board meeting next week, where HUD officials are expected to officially vote on the plan.

Kaneesha Mallory, who lives in the building slated for demolition with her 2-year-old daughter Bre’Chelle, is holding out hope that HUD will have a change of heart. She’s lived in other places but never felt the same sense of belonging.

“This is home. My roots are here in Cairo,” she said. “If you move anywhere else, you won’t find nowhere else like Cairo.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest.

After two weeks of negotiations at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (COP27) talks at an Egyptian resort, it is now down to the wire.

Diplomats have created proposals on the controversial loss and damage agenda that will be decided upon by politicians.

Robust discussions at the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh have seen many collaborations and discord resulting in negotiators not reaching agreement on funding that would see vulnerable countries compensated for climate change-fuelled disasters caused by developed nations.

• READ MORE: ‘Loss and damage’ negotiations dominate COP27’s final day as talks run past deadline
• Other COP27 reports

A key milestone was reached on Friday morning (New Zealand time), when the European Union shifted its position to support the G7 and China which includes Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Pacific.

The EU along with the United States pushed back this agenda as it feared being put on the hook for payments of billions of dollars for decades or even centuries to come.

However, developing nations and their allies have been able to stir up support, with major voting in favour for the set up of a loss and damage facility. Australia has chosen to keep the discussion open while the US maintained an isolated position, showing no flexibility.

Now, there are three options on the table for politicians to agree upon and they were due to be debated over the next few hours.

Climate change with Al Jazeera.

The Pacific’s call
The Pacific through the G7 and China has stressed the urgency of establishing a loss and damage framework at this COP.

Samoa Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa today called on the nations to place the same level of global urgency as seen for the covid-19 pandemic to meeting the 1.5 Celsius degree pathway.

Fiame said more action was needed on upscaling ambition on funding for loss and damage and must remain firmly on the table as nations continued to witness increasing occurrences and severity of climate change impacts everywhere.

Option one also entails need for loss and damage to be a separate funding from adaptation and mitigation.

Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Satyendra Prasad, explained there were gaps in trying to conflate the funding intended for other purposes with compensation as they were not the same thing.

Prasad said vulnerable people in the Pacific “are facing the loss of livelihoods, of land and of fundamental cultural and traditional assets”. These were non-economic losses that could not be compensated through adaptation and mitigation funds.

Financial support for loss and damage must be additional to adaptation funding but also differently structured. Option one calls for existing funding pledges to be made operational in the interim for vulnerable nations.

Short notice funding
Pacific’s Adviser for Loss and Damage Daniel Lund said when responding to damage caused by extreme weather events, finance needed to be available at short notice.

Lund added that current funding available was for project-based support under the Green Climate Fund which took around one year from proposal submission to receiving the first disbursement of funds,

“Something like that doesn’t work when the loss and damage are immediate.”

Republic of Palau’s Minister of State, Gustav Aitaro, in his address to world leaders, said, “every time we have a typhoon, we have to shift funds and budgets allocated for breakfast for students to address the damage. We have to shift funds from our hospital to address the damage, and it becomes such a big burden for us to look for funds to replace that.”

He pleaded with parties to understand the Pacific’s situation as it was a matter of life and death and their very existence depended on it.

“How do I explain to young kids in Palau, the children who live on that atoll, that their homes have been damaged by typhoons and we have to rebuild them over again and again? If they ask me why is it a recurring situation, what do I tell them? Who do we blame?

“Our islands, our oceans are our culture, it’s our identity in this world. I’m sure our developing countries share the same concerns and this is why we are asking them to help.”

Kicking the can down the road
Australia and the US have put forward options two and three for consideration. They propose a soft power influence.

They are proposing more time be given to iron out the finer details to establish a loss and damage finance in COP28 and operationalise the funding by COP29 in 2024.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen as saying: “The world is unlikely to come to an agreement at COP27 over contentious calls for wealthy nations to pay loss and damage compensation to developing countries.”

He said: “Let’s just see how the internal discussions go. But I mean, I doubt very much it’ll be a full agreement on that at this COP.”

The two countries who have spent time in the wilderness of climate diplomacy, have also proposed developed nations continue to tap into climate funding made available through bilateral and multilateral arrangements.

This proposal also suggests that any funding made available for vulnerable states can be channelled through developed nation governments, proposing it does not need to be faciliated by a governing body like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The Pacific feels this is problematic. Pacific negotiator Sivendra Michael explained: “This is volatile as it depends on the government of the day.”

Finding a way for more capital
Time reports US climate envoy John Kerry as saying: “We have to find a way for more capital to flow into developing countries.”

Kerry added: “I think it’s important that the developed world recognises that a lot of countries are now being very negatively impacted as a consequence of the continued practice of how the developed world chooses to propel its vehicles, heat its homes, light its businesses, produce food.

“Much of the world is obviously frustrated.”

While the US allowed loss and damage finance to be added to the meeting’s formal agenda for the first time, it took the unusual step of demanding that a footnote be included to exclude the ideas of liability for historic emitters or compensation for countries affected by that pollution.

World leaders will now spend the next few hours deciding on which option to take on loss and damage finance.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Gideon Rachman reported October 31 in a Financial Times column that, “… senior U.S. officials point out that the smallest tactical nuclear weapons might kill hundreds of people, rather than thousands — and devastate and irradiate just a few square miles.”

Rachman’s use of the phrases “might kill hundreds” and “just a few square miles” is outrageous in its callous trivialization of what would occur in the kill zone.

The crude, “small” atomic bomb the United States used to smash and burn Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device. This “small” atom bomb incinerated five square miles and “…turned into powder and ash the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children,” as historian Howard Zinn noted in his essay The Bomb. Likewise, in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell reported that the bomb’s detonation resulted in “killing 100,000 people immediately, and fatally injuring at least 50,000 others.”

Today, the “smallest” U.S. nuclear weapons are B61gravity bombs which have a maximum explosive force of between 50 and 170 kilotons, and so are between three and eleven times more devastating than the U.S. Hiroshima bombing. There are 2.9 million people in Kyiv, so one 170-kiloton U.S. B61 could potentially kill 1.5 million of them, and burn 40 square miles with firestorm.

The creation of firestorm or mass fire — simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, causing a great volume of air to heat, rise and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery — is the unique contribution that nuclear weapons make to humankind’s mechanized destruction. At Hiroshima, “The fire covered an area of roughly 4.4 square miles and burned with great intensity for more than six hours,” according Dr. Lynn Eden in Whole World on Fire, her 2004 study of how and why the U.S. government vastly underestimates the destructiveness of nuclear weapons by failing to consider damage from firestorms.

Rachman and the unnamed “senior officials” vastly understate the physically, medically, socially and ethically grotesque explosive and incendiary force of so-called “tactical” hydrogen bombs. They either misunderstand or have lied, and they cynically imply that the uncontrollable, indiscriminate mass destruction of civilian populations using fire and radiation is a military “tactic.”

Richard Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb reports, “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy [Hiroshima] fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.” In The Bomb, Zinn notes that of 1,780 nurses in Hiroshima, 1,654 were killed or so badly injured that they could not work.

CNN reported on September 26 that nuclear weapons called “tactical” have “explosive yields of 10 to 100 kilotons of dynamite, [and] are also called ‘low yield.’” But Pentagon boss General Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used anytime is a strategic game-changer.”

Reuters reported on October 17, “These 12-ft B61 nuclear bombs, with different yields of 0.3 to 170 kilotons, are deployed at six air bases across Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands.” These “forward deployed” U.S. H-bombs are so provocative and destabilizing that hundreds of European and U.S. dissidents, including Members of the European Parliament and this reporter, have committed acts of civil resistance against air bases hosting them.

Whether conscious or subconscious, the chronic dread of impending catastrophe caused by the manufactured and ceaseless threat to “go nuclear” — known as deterrence — was described in all its homicidal absurdity by the coldblooded Winston Churchill in 1955. He said about our governments’ nonstop readiness to commit massacres with nuclear weapons: “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

By trivializing the effects of today’s nuclear weapons, Rachman, his unnamed senior officials, and his editors at FT, demonstrate that, unlike Churchill, they either lie about what they know or know nothing at all about the established facts of thermonuclear explosions. Such misinformed or intentional minimization weakens the near-universal stigma of criminality that adheres to the Bomb, and increases the possibility that Hiroshima could be repeated. Such horrifying nuclear “small” talk sanitizes and routinizes military schemes for deliberate mass murder, as if such a thing could be tactical.

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

On October 24, Konde.co was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that temporarily brought down the independent local news website, according to news reports and the publication’s editor-in-chief Luviana Ariyanti, who emailed with CPJ. DDoS attacks flood websites with requests to prevent them from functioning.

Konde.co has faced persistent harassment since it was founded in 2016, according to Ariyanti. Reporting on women’s issues and marginalized groups has attracted opposition in the Muslim majority nation, where conservative religious groups have political sway.

“Indonesian authorities must fully investigate this cyberattack against Konde.co,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “It’s not the first time Konde.co has been attacked for reporting on sexual violence in Indonesia and it won’t be the last unless officials show that they take such incidents seriously.”

Ariyanti said the first cyberattack was launched at around 3:30 p.m. on October 24, soon after Konde.co published what she described as a “viral” report on a rape case involving Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises officials. A second cyberattack was launched around 11:30 p.m. the same day, Ariyanti said. Konde.co is preparing information to present to local police to investigate.

In 2016, a fundamentalist group threatened to sue Konde.co for defaming the Muslim religion over an infographic it published about sexual violence in local Islamic boarding schools, known as pesantran, Ariyanti said. Konde.co reported the threat to the National Commission on Violence Against Women and Indonesia’s Press Council and it was subsequently dropped.

On May 15, 2020, Konde.co’s Twitter account was hacked and temporarily shut down during an in-person discussion the publication hosted about sexual violence on a university campus in the city of Yogyakarta, Ariyanti said. The perpetrators were never identified, she said.

Indonesia’s Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment on the October 24 cyberattack on Konde.co.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.