• Canadian PM Carney tells Trump Canada never for sale as leaders hold first meeting
• Israel plans to escalate in Gaza and take over aid distribution, as critics call it not in line with humanitarian principles
• Hamas says will no longer take part in ceasefire talks with Israel, citing “hunger and extermination war” in Gaza
• CSU students hold hunger strike calling for divestment from Israel
• Trump orders halt to US airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthis

The post Canadian PM Carney tells Trump Canada never for sale as leaders meet; Israel plans military escalation and takeover of aid distribution in Gaza – May 6, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

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

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

One of President Donald Trump’s most intense fixations since returning to the White House has been to take over and overhaul the Kennedy Center, the national arts and culture institution in Washington, D.C. Trump fired the president of the Kennedy Center, replaced the bipartisan board of trustees with loyalists and made himself chairman of the organization, vowing to shift programming away from “woke” art and toward more patriotic themes. On Monday, he visited the Kennedy Center to personally preside over a board meeting. Numerous artists have cut ties with the Kennedy Center since Trump’s takeover, but folk musicians Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman performed a concert at the Kennedy Center last week and used the opportunity to protest Trump’s policies from the stage. “We were considering what the most effective method of protest was” and decided “our voices would be loudest on the stage,” says Brown. “The arts are a fundamental way for people to express ourselves and for us to recognize other people’s stories and experiences and struggles,” adds Coleman.

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

Adam Johnson (Column, 2/3/25): “The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that ‘DOGE’ was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to ‘cut costs,’ ‘find savings’ and ‘increase efficiencies.’”

Having spent nearly $300 million to purchase the US presidency for Donald Trump, Elon Musk now feels entitled to do with it as he pleases. Just how radically Musk plans to remake the country was conveyed to the American people only after the election, when Musk stood behind the presidential seal on Inauguration Day and gave a Nazi salute. Then did it again. Maybe that sort of thing was OK to do in apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up, but it’s jarring to see here in the United States.

Reporters initially struggled to meet the moment (FAIR.org, 2/4/25), downplaying Musk’s salute (the Washington Post described a “high-energy speech“), as well as his broader agenda, which Musk now openly declares a “revolution,” and consists of an unelected billionaire wresting control of nearly the entire executive branch of government. Early media reports went along with Musk’s “efficiency” mantra (Column, 2/3/25), but more recently reporters have started to find their footing, and the dangers of Musk’s project are being conveyed. Sort of.

“Reporters on the battlefield are doing what they can” to expose the radical nature of Trump’s second term, writes media columnist Oliver Darcy (Status, 2/5/25). “The news generals back in the command center, however, are largely abdicating their duties.”

‘Musk’s audacious goal’

Nowhere is this discrepancy more apparent than at the Washington Post, a newspaper famed for opposing a prior Republican president with an expansive view of executive power. These days, however, even as Post reporters like Jeff Stein are busy breaking stories (e.g., 1/28/25, 2/8/25) about the Trump power grab, the paper’s higher-ups are careful not to offend the president or Musk. The Post is even, incredibly, calling on the Constitution-defying billionaire duo to push further.

As Elon Musk seizes extraconstitutional control of the federal budget, Washington Post editors (2/7/25) urge him to use that power to go after Social Security and Medicare.

“To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts,” the Post editorial board (2/7/25) wrote, “Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

While claiming it wants Trump to “erect guardrails” for Musk, the Post urges the president to abandon one of the only guardrails he established—the cutting of Social Security and Medicare, which Trump repeatedly said he wouldn’t do, but recently started waffling on.

To be clear, the Post has long called for cutting so-called entitlements (FAIR.org, 11/1/11, 6/15/23). But to do so at this moment—by encouraging a coup attempt to push further—is quite extraordinary.

The Post’s move comes as its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family, while coaching his paper to take a less critical approach in its coverage (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). Bezos’s ingratiation toward Trump started prior to the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Good news for X from Amazon

The Washington Post (2/4/25) reports on “divergent views among Jewish leaders in how to respond to Musk”: Some object to his ” Nazi-esque salute and Holocaust jokes,” others appreciate his censorship of criticism of Israel.

Bezos has also been busy making nice with Musk, his longtime rival for most powerful man on Earth and in space. On both fronts, Musk now has a decided edge, aided by his control over much of the US government, which both men’s sprawling empires rely on for billions of dollars in contracts.

With Musk’s hand on the public-money spigot, Bezos apparently did him a favor. After Musk openly heiled Hitler, Jewish leaders renewed calls to boycott Musk’s social media platform, X (Washington Post, 2/4/25). “To advertisers—including Google, Amazon and the ADL: Pull your ads now,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “The pressure is working. X’s financial difficulties prove it.”

But the boycott’s pressure was countered by Bezos’s company. “[X] got good news last week, with Amazon reportedly planning to hike its advertising on the site,” the Post (2/4/25) reported, without mentioning Bezos.

While X’s finances “were once so bad that Musk floated the idea of filing for bankruptcy,” things are suddenly looking up, the Financial Times (2/12/25) reported:

Musk famously admitted to overpaying for Twitter after he bought the social media platform known now as X for $44 billion in 2022. But the billionaire’s foray into government has coincided with a turnaround in X’s fortunes, as advertisers, including Amazon, flock back to the platform.

‘Lemmings leaping in unison’

Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/24/25) likened those who condemned Musk’s Nazi gesture to “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff”—because it’s suicidal to notice fascism in high places?

It wasn’t just Bezos’s company that threw Musk a lifeline, but also his newspaper. An initial Post headline (1/20/25), which omitted mention of Musk’s Nazi salute, read “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.” The following day, Post columnist Megan McArdle, echoing the ADL, downgraded Musk’s salute to an “awkward gesture,” the same phrase Post columnist Kathleen Parker used to dismiss those who saw something more sinister as “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff” (Washington Post, 1/24/25).

Interestingly, one of the most vociferous “lemmings” was Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who brilliantly called out Musk’s Nazi salute, but on CNN, and noticeably not in the Post, except once in passing (1/30/25).

Musk responded to Rampell’s CNN appearance by threatening to sue her in a post (1/27/25) to his over 200 million X followers.

I noted at the top that Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump, but that’s only part of the story. Musk also provided inestimable support by transforming X into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Personally, when I logged onto X during the campaign, I routinely saw Musk’s pro-Trump tweets at the top of my feed, even though I didn’t follow Musk at the time.

Since the election, Musk ’s gifts to Trump have continued. X recently agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the company, even though the case was dismissed in 2022. Trump was still appealing the ruling two-and-a-half years later when a deal was cut. “The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number,” the Wall Street Journal (2/13/25) reported.

‘Cheering for change’

New York Times (2/11/25): Many of the federal agencies targeted by Musk “were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.”

It’s quite something for Elon Musk—the world’s richest human and one of the largest government contractors—to gleefully slash public spending benefiting others. Especially when, by one measure, “virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help,” CNN (11/20/24) reported.

While Musk claims to wield a populist’s pitchfork as he attacks “the bureaucracy,” a closer look reveals the work of an oligarch’s scalpel. Musk’s coup team—called DOGE, and consisting mostly of twentysomething male engineers, several of whom appear to share Musk’s racist ideology (New York Times, 2/7/25)—is targeting the federal agencies investigating Musk’s companies, which in addition to X, include Tesla and SpaceX.

“President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting—or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit,” read the opening lines of a New York Times story (2/11/25):

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [Trump’s] moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.

While Trump claims Musk is “not gaining anything” from the arrangement, and Musk says the same, Wall Street sees things differently. Even as Musk says he’s turning his “efficiency” revolution to the Pentagon—the only federal agency never to pass an audit, and where any honest attempt to rein in government spending would begin—stocks for armsmaking companies associated with Musk are surging, while those without ties to him languish. “Palantir, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and robotics and AI specialist Anduril Industries, are cheering for change,” the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25) reported.

In other words, having seized control of the levers of government, an oligarch will now be directing funding to himself and his cronies. That’s Wall Street’s view, anyhow.

It seems to be Bezos’s as well. With Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, competing for billions in government contracts, it makes perfect business sense for Bezos to cozy up to Musk and Trump. From a journalistic perspective, however, it’s nothing short of a disaster, one that’s playing out daily in the pages of the Washington Post.

You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com (or via Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com).

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread on FAIR.org.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

Columbia University students began occupying Hamilton Hall shortly after midnight Tuesday as the university moved to suspend students who joined Gaza solidarity protests, and renamed it Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in January. We look at how it was 56 years ago today, on April 30, 1968, that the hall was also the site of the historic student occupation by students who renamed the building “Nat Turner Hall at Malcolm X University.” We feature an archival newsreel about the 1968 occupation and our interviews with campus activists on the 40th anniversary of the action about how they were protesting Columbia’s connections to the military-industrial complex and racist development policies in Harlem.

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

Under the tailpipe emissions proposal unveiled last April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projected that EVs could account for 67% of all new light-duty vehicle sales by model year 2032. Citing three unnamed sources, The New York Timesreported Saturday that officials finalizing the plan are adjusting it "so that electric vehicle sales would increase more gradually through 2030 but then would have to sharply rise."

The reporting comes after the Democratic president last month secured the crucial endorsement of the United Auto Workers, which followed a monthslong delay partly related to EV policy and came despite criticism from the UAW and residents of Michigan—the heart of the U.S. auto manufacturing industry—about Biden backing Israel's devastating war on the Gaza Strip.

Ali Zaidi, Biden's senior climate adviser, "declined to discuss the details of the final regulation" and a UAW spokesperson "declined multiple requests to interview" union president Shawn Fain, according to the Times.

Others suggested Biden's concession may be worth it to beat former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee. David Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, told the newspaper that "you have more emissions for a few years but you raise the odds that the rule will stick."

However, Hodgkins argued that "with climate change fast accelerating, this is no time to capitulate to corporate demands."

The campaigner continued:

For decades, Big Auto has employed the same playbook as Big Oil to delay and prevent progress on rules that would clean our air, fight climate change, and save lives. Study after study, including the administration's own annual reporting, shows that the technology to reduce emissions and electrify fleets is not only available, but it will save automakers money in compliance fees and consumers money on fueling and overall costs. Yet, decades of the auto industry dragging its feet to take action means that it is further behind the curve.

Automakers have had decades to drive forward the transition to electric vehicles. They have failed time and again. The only factor that will usher in the needed transition to electric vehicles is firm and specific government requirements. Consumers will embrace electric vehicles when automakers make them the attractive option—which they will only do when the government requires them to do so.

"There's still time for the Biden administration to avoid this epic error and recommit to science-backed actions it has started," she stressed. "The world is on fire. We need the Biden administration to maintain strong emissions rules that are one of the biggest extinguishers."

Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous similarly pressured the administration in a Tuesday statement, arguing that "strong EPA vehicle standards are essential to protecting clean air for communities across the country."

"Lobbying by auto manufacturers to stall the transition to electric vehicles could have severe consequences: Millions of Americans breathing deadly car pollution, suffering from the impacts of climate change, and spending too much on volatile gas prices," Jealous warned. "Enough excuses from the auto industry."

"Automakers have had more than enough time to prepare for the EV transition, and funding from the Inflation Reduction Act is rolling out the infrastructure necessary to support it," he added. "We can and must have union-made clean vehicles. We urge the EPA to remain steadfast in finalizing a strong rule that will improve public health and protect our future."

While Biden campaigned as a clear climate-friendly alternative to Trump in 2020, the Democrat has come under fire during his presidency for various decisions—including supporting certain oil and gas projects, continuing fossil fuel lease sales, skipping last year's United Nations summit, and declining to declare a national climate emergency.

Nearly two dozen Sunrise Movement campaigners were arrested at the president's campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware last week and the youth-led climate group held dozens of actions across the country on Monday, warning that "Biden can either follow the lead of the young people who helped elect him in 2020 and declare a climate emergency or he's going to lose in November; backing a genocide and giving up our last chance to avert the worst of the climate crisis will be his legacy."

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

If you get healthcare news from major media outlets, the industry press or even medical journals, you might conclude that private equity investors are “taking over” US healthcare. But when it comes to hospitals and doctors, you’d be wrong.

Intense media coverage of the small part of the healthcare system owned by private equity focuses public attention on policies that won’t affect the twin crises of access and out-of-control costs (NBC, 5/13/20).

Many reporters and researchers have mistaken an episodic cycle of cynical profit-taking as a “takeover.” The reporting focuses public attention away from the power of hospital chains affiliated with universities and churches, which employ far more doctors than private equity, and the US’s refusal to exert political control of the medical industry to rein in costs and cover everyone.

One of the widely reported “abuses” by private equity–owned providers—“surprise bills” for doctors’ care delivered in hospitals— is simply the exercise of the market forces that are supposed to control costs and expand coverage, but have been failing for a half century.

US media have been in private equity panic mode for several years now. An early entrant informed the American Prospect’s readers “How Private Equity Makes You Sicker” (10/7/19). Time (7/31/23) asked readers, “What Happens When Private Equity Buys Your Doctor’s Office?”; the New York Times (7/10/23) phrased the question as “Who Employs Your Doctor? Increasingly, It’s a Private Equity Firm.” NBC (5/13/20) reported, “Private Equity Firms Now Control Many Hospitals, ERs and Nursing Homes,” and asked, “Is It Good for Healthcare?”

KFF Health News is in the midst of a series called “Patients for Profit: How Private Equity Hijacked Healthcare.” Bloomberg (5/20/20), Common Dreams (11/29/22), Public Citizen (3/21/23), Atlantic (10/28/23), NPR (11/7/23) and a host of others have weighed in.

A bad idea

Profit-focused healthcare is a bad idea, and private equity–controlled companies have outsized influence on nursing homes and specialty hospitals, where patients are held for a long time. There is evidence that private equity–owned nursing homes kill even more patients than the rest of that chronically underfunded and understaffed industry.

But when it comes to general acute care hospitals and physician services, the degree of private equity control has been exaggerated, often with sloppy academic research. Private equity firms employ far fewer doctors than hospitals and insurance companies do, own less than 5% of general acute care hospitals, and are showing signs of exiting these segments of healthcare.

“Private equity” is just one of many vehicles for private investment. (See “What Is ‘Private Equity,’ Anyway?”) Presenting a particular corporate structure as uniquely destructive ignores the history of boom-and-bust cycles of Wall Street investment in hospitals and doctors, and confuses readers about the ultimate winners.

The unfortunate outcome of this misunderstanding is that most media analysis promotes policy changes that apply only to private equity—like increased transparency from private equity firms, limits on some abusive real estate transactions, and post-acquisition restrictions on staffing cuts. These will do nothing to restrain extreme US healthcare costs, to expand access to healthcare or to stop actors with different corporate structures from engaging in the same abusive behavior.

Let’s do it again

This Bloomberg piece (5/20/20) about “how private equity is ruining healthcare” has an anecdote about toilet paper shortages that could have come from a story about how Wall Street-backed firms were ruining healthcare two decades earlier (Fortune, 6/21/99).

The current private equity investment boom in physician practices differs little from the late 1990s, when Wall Street–backed physician practice management companies (PPMs) bought doctors’ practices by the hundreds, and then collapsed in a wave of bankruptcies. Those acquisitions were made not by private equity–controlled entities, but by companies whose stock traded openly on markets like the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, known as “publicly traded” companies.

Media narratives about doctors’ experiences in the earlier Wall Street dive into medicine are nearly identical to current private equity reporting. Doctors start off hoping well-capitalized firms will bring administrative efficiency and growth, while allowing them to focus on patients. They end with unsustainable debt, bankruptcy, fraud and extreme corporate cost-cutting. Two decades apart, Fortune and Bloomberg reported identical iconic toilet paper shortfalls under lurid headlines:

As the top administrator at the 120-doctor Diagnostic Clinic in the Tampa Bay area, Robert Dippong had $250,000 in spending authority before his group became part of MedPartners in 1996. The day after the purchase, he recalls, “I couldn’t even buy toilet paper.”

—”Vulgarians at the Gate: How Ego, Greed and Envy Turned MedPartners From a Hot Stock Into a Wall Street Fiasco” (Fortune, 6/21/99)

A doctor at Advanced Dermatology says that waiting for corporate approvals means his office is routinely left without enough gauze, antiseptic solution and toilet paper.

—“How Private Equity Is Ruining American Healthcare” (Bloomberg, 5/20/20)

When the dust settled in 1999, there were two big winners in the US acute healthcare system: large tax-exempt “charitable” hospital systems, and hospital companies whose stock is sold openly on Wall Street. Not only have these players consolidated their power by acquiring smaller, financially weaker hospitals, they spent the last two decades buying up physician practices, thanks in part to the efforts of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

Shortly after the Wall Street–backed PPM industry imploded, the George W. Bush administration issued new Medicare payment regulations that allowed doctors employed by hospitals to charge more than traditional private practices (Federal Register, 8/1/02). Treatment in a doctor’s office is paid on a different schedule than the same treatment at a hospital’s outpatient department. The 2002 rules legally transformed doctors’ offices, miles away from a hospital’s campus, into a wing of its outpatient department. These changes allowed hospitals to add large “facility fees” on top of fees for doctors’ services, creating a big incentive for hospitals to buy doctors out.

The News and Observer (12/16/12) ran a Pulitzer-finalist series more than ten years ago describing how this process socked patients with large unexpected bills, as Duke University Medical Center and UNC Health bought up doctors across North Carolina. (More on facility fees at Healing and Stealing—10/21/23.)

Corporate consolidation of physician practices accelerated in 2009, when President Barack Obama signed a law requiring a shift to electronic medical records, which created new requirements for capital investment by physicians. Heavily endowed tax-exempt hospital chains and publicly traded hospital corporations were happy to help with those investments—in exchange for ownership or control of a practice.

Who doctors really work for

While there are, as the New York Times (7/10/23) noted, some markets where private equity–backed physician practices have monopoly power, 72% of all US metropolitan areas have no meaningful private equity market power, and often face physician monopolies owned by nonprofit hospitals.

A widely reported April 2022 study—prepared by healthcare consultants Avalere for the Physicians Advocacy Institute (4/22), a nonprofit founded with money from settlements of class action lawsuits by doctors against insurance companies—found that nearly 70% of doctors are now employees, not owners of their practices.

And who employs them? Hospitals, mostly. According to the study data, 70% of doctors who are employees—52% of all US doctors—are employed by hospital systems. The remaining 30% of employed doctors—22% of all US doctors—are employed by “other corporate entities,” which “include health insurers, private equity firms, umbrella corporate entities that own multiple physician practices, etc.”

Private equity employers are only a slice of that remaining pie. Becker’s Payer Issues (2/16/23), a health insurance industry trade newsletter, reported last February that the largest employer of physicians in the US is health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, with 70,000 “employed or aligned” physicians. Nine months later, the company disclosed that the number of “employed or affiliated” doctors had jumped to 90,000 (Becker’s Hospital Review, 11/29/23).

“Aligned” and “affiliated” doctors are not necessarily direct UnitedHealth employees, but insurers and major drug store chains account for a large chunk of doctors employed by “other corporate entities” (New York Times, 5/12/23).

The research on the private equity “takeover” of physician practices reveals the relatively small industrial power of those firms. A study by nonprofit and UC/Berkeley researchers warned that in 28% of US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), a single private equity firm had gained 30% market share in at least one of 10 specialties, and in 13%, a single firm had gained 50% market share in at least one specialty. The study was reported widely in the business press, and formed the basis for a major New York Times story (7/10/23).

Looking through the other end of the telescope, 72% of all US metropolitan areas have no meaningful private equity market power in any specialty at all. Many of the MSAs threatened by private equity are far smaller than nearby areas facing monopoly threats from university- and church-affiliated hospitals.

The Johnstown, Pennsylvania, MSA has 129,000 people. Johnstown has a PE firm with 50% market share in at least one specialty. Seventy miles away, the Pittsburgh MSA, with 2.3 million people, does not. What Pittsburgh does have is the headquarters of the tax-exempt University of Pittsburgh–affiliated UPMC health system, which generated $26 billion in revenue last year, and sits atop $23 billion in assets. UPMC has recently been the subject of antitrust scrutiny from state and federal legislators (WPXI, 1/19/23) and employs more than 5,000 doctors.

Falling off the same cliff

Even as the “takeover” drumbeat reached a crescendo, Envision Healthcare, the largest private equity–owned physician practice in the US, declared bankruptcy last May (Stat, 5/15/23).

In a dissection of the 1990s’ PPM crash, the late Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt (Health Affairs, 1–2/00) pointed out how the value of the PPM companies’ stock depended on a constant growth that was obviously impossible to sustain.

The companies first paid for practices with cash and stock trades. Since, beyond skimping on toilet paper, there are few “efficiencies” from owning practices in different regions, the cash soon ran out, and companies borrowed money to keep the buying spree going. That, wrote Reinhardt, “can spell disaster in periods of revenue downturns,” as the cost of paying back loans exceeds incoming profits. PPMs wound up on a fast track to bankruptcy court.

The PE investment wave has also loaded practices with debt, and is falling off the same cliff, as conditions that prompted firms to buy doctors’ practices have changed.

Decades of US policy have encouraged nearly all US health plans to use administrative rules and financial coercion to strip patients of the ability to choose their doctors and hospitals (KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, 2023). Limiting choice to contracted physician and hospital “networks” is supposed to save money, as insurers pay providers discounted rates in exchange for higher patient volume. As cost control, it has been failing for 50 years, but as an economic opportunity for financial manipulators, it works wonders.

Emergency medicine doctors who resisted becoming hospital employees have been a prime target for PE money, taking advantage of the fact that hospitals must treat patients who show up at the emergency room (NBC, 5/13/20). If a practice that staffs a hospital’s ER doesn’t have a contract with an insurer, they bill at sticker prices much higher than the network discount. So in recent years, patients who went to network hospitals for emergencies have sometimes been treated by “out of network” emergency doctors, who bill them and their insurers at the shockingly higher rates—an appealing situation for private equity.

However, new state and federal laws have curbed surprise billing. The new laws, along with a shrinking pool of doctors who haven’t already been bought out by hospitals or insurers, have touched off a wave of debt-fueled bankruptcies and sell-offs similar to the 1990s. Even as the “takeover” drumbeat reached a crescendo, Envision Healthcare, the largest private equity–owned physician practice in the US, declared bankruptcy last May (Stat, 5/15/23). American Physician Partners, “one of the nation’s biggest employers of emergency physicians,” followed suit in July (American Prospect, 7/29/23).

The real hospital bad guys

American Prospect (10/7/19) explained that “private equity makes you sicker” because “consolidated hospitals harm patients with higher prices and worse outcomes”—but private equity has very little to do with hospital consolidation.

When it comes to hospitals, Philadelphia is ground zero for misdirected media attention on private equity. In 2018, Paladin Healthcare Capital, a private equity firm controlled by investor Joel Freedman, purchased Hahnemann Hospital, promising to invest in needed improvements. Freedman instead drove the hospital into bankruptcy, after selling the land under it to another company he controlled. It’s now the site of a condo development.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) made Hahnemann a symbol of his support for Medicare for All in the run-up to the 2020 primaries (CBS News Philadelphia, 7/15/19). Hahnemann became the go-to example of private equity’s aggressive takeover of hospitals with the intent of selling them to real estate developers. Eileen Applebaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, led with the Hahnemann story in her influential American Prospect reporting (10/7/19) on private equity, warning that

private equity firms are using borrowed money to assemble medical empires across the country. Not only do consolidated hospitals harm patients with higher prices and worse outcomes, but the shaky financial pictures that result habitually lead to massive cost-cutting and closures of unprofitable facilities, which put entire communities at risk of losing access to medical care.

But private equity has almost nothing to do with hospital industry consolidation. By the time Freedman bought and closed Hahnemann, and its St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children affiliate, they were isolated facilities, neglected by their previous owner. And they were under withering competitive pressure from tax-exempt charitable hospitals affiliated with local universities: Temple University, Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Pennsylvania.

‘More symptoms than disease’

The New Yorker (5/31/21) was right to note that “the story of Hahnemann is as much about the structural forces that have compromised many American hospitals…as it is about the motives of private equity firms.”

In 2021, New Yorker writer Chris Pomorski (5/31/21) published a more nuanced retrospective take on “The Death of Hahnemann Hospital.” While detailing Freedman’s managerial incompetence and the transaction that left the land under the hospitals in Freedman’s hands and out of bankruptcy as the hospital closed, Pomorski pointed out the primary villain: The hospital had been the victim of Wall Street–backed neglect for 20 years by the company that sold the hospital to Paladin—the $19 billion publicly-traded Tenet corporation.

Private equity’s maneuvers with Hahnemann, wrote Pomorski,

are more symptoms than disease. The story of Hahnemann is as much about the structural forces that have compromised many American hospitals—stingy public investment, weak regulation and a blind belief in the wisdom of the market—as it is about the motives of private equity firms.

Beyond that insight, however, Pomorski missed the bigger story in Philadelphia. As press reports noted (e.g., US News, 7/10/19), Hahnemann was a hospital that primarily treated poor patients. When it closed, patients struggled to find care at other locations, and the abrupt closure placed a heavy burden on surrounding hospitals.

Penn and Temple saw ER visits increase by 12%, and Jefferson, less than a mile from Hahnemann, by 20%, with ambulance volume doubling as emergency patients who lived close to Hahnemann dialed 911 instead of finding their own way to the emergency room. A doctor told Pomorski that the ER became so crowded, ambulances were often diverted to other hospitals, a situation known to cause unnecessary deaths. An emergency physician told Pomorski that “the ER became the scene of ‘daily human tragedies.’”

Beyond absorbing the sudden spike in patient volume and the stress it brought to frontline caregivers, at the institutional level, Jefferson and Penn played another role in Hahnemann’s woes: They were among its agents and beneficiaries.

While Tenet was neglecting Hahnemann, wealthy university hospitals were building medical empires, with “satellite hospitals, physician practices and urgent-care centers.” Pomorski quotes a Hahnemann executive criticizing Freedman for failing to negotiate higher insurance rates to stave off bankruptcy.

Telling details

Philadelphia’s non-profit hospitals had the money for a huge building spree (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/30/21), but not to absorb the doctors and patients from a private equity–backed hospital that went under.

The details are telling. Hahnemann’s competitors, like other large tax-exempt systems, flex their market power to drive up prices. They commanded prices so much higher than Hahnemann that the executive thought it might cost insurers less to give Hahnemann a small raise than to shift its patients to the charitable competitors.

After interviewing two patients who struggled to find specialist doctors when Hahnemann closed, Pomorski also interviewed Jefferson CEO Bruce Meyer. Jefferson hired eight Hahnemann-affiliated ob-gyn doctors to care for Hahnemann patients, but Pomorski neglected to ask why Jefferson didn’t simply hire the rest of Hahnemann’s specialists immediately and absorb their patients. After all, Jefferson had the money to start building a new $762 million specialist physician office tower three-fourths of a mile from the Hahnemann site, months before the New Yorker piece ran (WHYY, 9/10/20).

Penn was in an even stronger position to deal with the challenges. When Hahnemann closed, Penn was already building a palatial new $1.6 billion, 504-room hospital across the street from the existing Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/30/21). The “Pavilion” opened just four months after the New Yorker piece, and includes a new two-story state-of-the-art emergency department, with 61 private rooms (Penn, 10/21/21).

Some problems in nearby ERs were likely inevitable, given that Freedman closed Hahnemann suddenly. But sitting two miles from Hahnemann with a $21 billion endowment, Penn had the resources necessary to figure out how to transition Hahnemann’s patient volume to new locations. The ultimate outcome of Hahnemann’s demise for Penn, Jefferson and Temple is a market with one less competitor, one less hospital willing to take lower rates from insurers.

The real hospital story in Philadelphia is that major nonprofit health systems are at the tail end of a 15-year, $9 billion building boom. The Pavilion is reportedly the largest capital project in Penn’s history (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/30/21), but soon won’t even be the priciest hospital in its own neighborhood. The closely allied Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP), which shares a campus with Penn’s hospital, is building its own $1.9 billion new tower (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/1/20). CHOP says they won’t need to borrow money for the project, but will pay with cash on hand, profits and contributions.

As this article was going to press, Jefferson Health announced a proposed merger with Lehigh Valley Health System. If approved, the merger would create a 30-hospital system across eastern Pennsylvania. The new Jefferson system would become Pennsylvania’s largest employer, surpassing the current champion—the University of Pennsylvania. The combined systems generated $13.8 billion in revenue last year (WHYY, 12/19/23). The question is whether all those billions in construction and revenue will afford Hahnemann’s low-income patients better or even the same treatment as they found at Hahnemann.

Who’s taking over whom?

In Connecticut, a private equity firm is selling its hospitals to a multi-billion-dollar university-affiliated tax-exempt chain—but that doesn’t fit the “takeover” narrative.

The idea that Hahnemann could become a pattern has been a critical element in the private equity takeover, or “hijacking,” narrative. According to CNN (7/29/19), “advocates worry other private equity firms may try it with struggling hospitals in gentrifying neighborhoods all over the US.” In reality, Hahnemann is an example of grotesque wealth extraction from a dying hospital bludgeoned by neglect from a publicly traded company and competition from massively endowed urban “nonprofit” hospitals. Private equity won’t be “taking over” those winners any time soon.

In Connecticut, the reverse is happening. In 2015 and 2016, private equity firm Prospect Medical Holdings bought three tax-exempt hospitals and converted them to for-profit status (CT Mirror, 5/25/16). Prospect bought the financially struggling hospitals after the collapse of a bid from a short-lived partnership between publicly traded Tenet and Yale-New Haven Health, the state’s largest tax-exempt chain, because Tenet found state regulators’ proposed conditions to protect the public “too burdensome” (CT Mirror, 5/31/15).

Prospect’s purchase and conversion was supposed to inject capital into financially struggling Waterbury, Manchester and Rockville hospitals. Eight years later, Prospect is selling all three hospitals. The buyer? Yale-New Haven Health.

The deal gives Yale-New Haven an anchor in Waterbury, Connecticut’s fifth-largest city, where the only other hospital is owned by Trinity Health, a nationwide tax-exempt Catholic chain with 101 hospitals (and a “family” of “nearly 36,500 physicians”). As is common, Prospect moved the real estate to a different subsidiary and leased the land back to its hospital entity, a maneuver documented in detailed local reporting (CT Mirror, 11/16/23).

Yale-New Haven wants state subsidies to deal with the hospitals’ financial distress, even though the YNH system had more than $4 billion in net assets at the end of the 2022 fiscal year, and drives patients to its facilities in close partnership with Yale University, which runs the state’s largest physician specialty practice and has a $41 billion endowment.

Blaming vultures for the kill

When a private equity firm shuts down failing rural hospitals, KFF Health News (6/15/22) presents this as a story about the danger of private equity rather than a collapsing rural healthcare delivery system.

Beyond Hahnemann, rural hospitals are a major focus of private equity media coverage. Some long form reporting on rural hospitals acknowledges the transient nature of private equity investment, but coverage still tends to blame vultures who are actually feeding on carcasses killed by others.

Rural hospitals have been in systemic crisis for decades. A 2022 report (Bipartisan Policy Project, 5/22) estimated that more than 20% are at risk of service reductions or closure. Before closure, desperate owners often cut staff and shut down services, requiring some patients travel long distances for certain types of care. As with Hahnemann, private equity firms have taken advantage of the crisis in some areas, buying hospitals and stripping assets, but the death throes most often are brought on by other owners and failed policy.

In a 3,000 word story headlined “Buy and Bust: When Private Equity Comes for Rural Hospitals,” KFF Health News (6/15/22) described how Noble Health, a three-year old PE firm bought and closed Audrain Community Hospital and Callaway Community Hospital in rural Missouri. Reporter Sarah Jane Tribble makes the anguish and anger of caregivers and patients palpable, but, as with Hahnemann, Audrain was on life support when Noble pulled the plug:

Audrain had struggled before Noble came calling, said Dr. Joe Corrado, a longtime surgeon at the hospital: On an average day in 2019, 40% of beds were empty, as more treatments moved to the outpatient setting and some patients drove an hour to larger hospitals for specialty care.

Distorted research fuels panic 

The story of HCA, which has repeatedly switched from a publicly traded to a privately held for-profit company (New York Times, 8/14/12), illustrates the danger of focusing on corporate structure rather than on the US healthcare system’s perverse economic incentives.

Distorted academic research has fueled the past four years of private equity media panic. The KFF Health News piece on rural hospitals cited a 2021 Health Affairs study (5/21) showing that private equity investments in hospitals “increased 20-fold from 2000 to 2018, and have only accelerated since.” But the study doesn’t credibly support the idea that private equity is “taking over” hospital care at all.

The researchers found “a total of 42 private equity acquisitions involving 282 unique hospitals occurred during the period 2003–17,” which means it took private equity 15 years to make deals involving 5% of US hospitals. The vast majority of these hospitals were owned by private equity for a short period of time, and 74% of the deals involved hospitals that were already for-profit, many bought from companies with their own track records of fraud and national reports of patient abuse.

More than half of the hospitals were bought in just one 17-year-old deal that bears little resemblance to the stories common in major media today. In 2006, Bain Capital bought HCA, the largest for-profit hospital company in the US (CNN, 7/20/06). It was the third time the company “went private.” Six years later, HCA started selling stock publicly again, giving a windfall to Bain and the family of former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose father founded the company (New York Times, 8/14/12).

Before the Bain deal, when the company was known as Columbia/HCA and its stock traded publicly, the hospital chain coughed up what was then the biggest Medicare fraud settlement in history, and faced national publicity about quality of care concerns (Department of Justice, 6/26/03; Vanity Fair, 8/1/98).**

In reality, hospital ownership patterns have been relatively stable since 2000, except that public hospitals are slowly disappearing. According to KFF reporting of American Hospital Association data (2000, 2021), at the turn of the century 61% of community hospitals were private not-for-profits, 15% were for-profit and 24% public. In 2021, 58% of the nation’s community hospitals remained nonprofit, and 24% were for-profit, with much of their growth at the expense of public facilities, whose share dropped to 18%.

Data downloaded from the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project shows that just 390 hospitals are owned by private equity firms, or less than 7% of all hospitals (PE Hospital Tracker, accessed 12/12/23). The majority are psychiatric, long-term acute care and rehabilitation hospitals, specialty facilities whose reimbursement patterns are attractive to private equity investors. Less than 4% of general acute care hospitals are owned by private equity firms.

The Hospital Tracker has useful data (it’s maintained by former colleagues of mine), but the PE Stakeholder Project’s research isn’t immune from pumping numbers up with “takeover” hot air. The web page for the tracker says “34% of private equity hospitals serve rural areas,” a claim repeated by Stakeholder Project researchers in a Health Affairs article (12/18/23) headlined “Private Equity: The Metastasizing Disease Threatening Healthcare.” Thirty-four percent sounds like a big number, but 34% of less than 7% isn’t much. According to the tracker’s data, less than 5% of all rural hospitals are owned by private equity firms.

Bad behavior all around

A Wall Street Journal series (7/25/22–12/26/22) makes clear that ostensibly nonprofit hospitals have the same profit-maximizing behaviors that openly commercial hospitals do.

While some media have fed the public a litany of private equity horror stories, other journalists continue to report that “Nonprofit Hospitals Are Big Business,” as the title of a 2022 Wall Street Journal series (7/25/22–12/26/22) puts it. The Journal and others, including outlets simultaneously reporting on the private equity “takeover,” have demonstrated that tax-exempt and publicly traded hospitals yield to no one in their commitment to wealth extraction and harmful operations, including:

Staff cuts: Private equity coverage often focuses on hospital cost-cutting. At the same time, systematic staffing reductions by Ascension Health prompted an in-depth New York Times investigation (12/15/22) that found that the 140-hospital Catholic system “spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.”

Price increases: KFF Health News and others have reported that insurance payments to gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists and dermatologists in private equity practices are higher than those in non–private equity practices, based on a 2022 study by Johns Hopkins and Harvard researchers (JAMA Network, 9/2/22). The study found that payments to PE-owned practices were 11% higher than a control group.

However, the researchers only compared the prices to doctors in the shrinking universe of independent practices, excluding those “with other corporate ownership and hospital or health system affiliation” from the control group.While the independent doctors had lower prices, including hospital-owned practices may have yielded a different result. A 2018 Journal of Health Economics study (4/22/18) found that “the prices for the services provided by [hospital] acquired physicians increase by an average of 14.1% post-acquisition,” and by more “when the acquiring hospital has a larger share of its inpatient market.”

Closure of Services: Eliminating unprofitable services is a constant theme of reporting on private equity–owned hospitals, especially in rural areas. According to the Wall Street Journal (4/11/21), after then–publicly traded Lifepoint merged two hospitals in Riverton and Lander, Wyoming and rebranded them SageWest, the company closed Riverton’s ob/gyn unit, forcing patients to travel the 30 miles to Lander to deliver babies. Under community pressure, Lifepoint announced that they’d reopen the services, but the company reversed itself again after being bought by the private equity firm Apollo.

These closures and consolidations are endemic to the crisis-wracked rural hospital landscape, regardless of ownership. In Connecticut, rural residents waged an identical three-year community struggle to maintain ob/gyn services after tax-exempt Hartford HealthCare bought Windham Hospital. The conflict received both local and national coverage (US News/NBC, 11/21/21). The state finally approved the closure this month, so patients will have to make the 17-mile trek to the nearest ob/gyn unit. Now the tax-exempt owners of two of the state’s three other rural hospitals, Nuvance Health and Catholic Church-affiliated Trinity Health, have also applied to close their ob/gyn services (CT Mirror, 12/11/23).

Wrong focus yields useless policies

The Atlantic (10/28/23) recognizes that private equity’s interest in healthcare is ebbing, but its reform proposals are focused on this admittedly vanishing problem.

Media healthcare misdirection matters because it fuels useless policy solutions, most evident in the conclusions of long form articles in leading opinion magazines and health research journals. After regaling readers with shocking stories and sometimes misleading data, the articles typically wind up pointing to a suite of policies like those found in the recent Health Affairs article (12/18/23) from Private Equity Stakeholder Project staffers Emily Stewart and Jim Baker, and a piece by Joseph Nocera and Bethany McLean in the Atlantic (10/28/23): increased transparency, making it easier to sue private equity owners, and restrictions on financial manipulations like real estate sale-leaseback arrangements.

To their credit, Nocera and McLean inform their readers that private equity firms “appear to have lost interest in acquiring more” hospitals, but the story’s conclusion focused only on solutions to this admittedly vanishing problem, in particular Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

Some of these proposals are sound general public policy, and banning private equity from nursing homes altogether probably makes sense. But a set of proposals targeting one specific corporate structure that controls relatively small slices of physician and hospital services for financial regulation has no chance to meaningfully improve a healthcare system that sends thousands of people to unnecessary deaths, and millions into debt and bankruptcy each year. These policies are a get-out-of-jail-free card for politicians on healthcare policy, allowing them to hold shocking hearings without actually fixing the country’s mess.

Until public officials decide to treat healthcare as a public good, the cycles of exploitation and patient harm will continue, regardless of the corporate structure of hospitals and physician practices. The Atlantic chose to highlight Warren’s bill as potential policy, but could have pointed in a different direction. Warren’s original cosponsors include House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), lead sponsor of the House version of the Medicare for All Act.

The residents of Riverton, Wyoming, have recognized the need for public investment in rural healthcare. They’ve formed a medical district to raise money for a new, publicly controlled hospital. After five years of organizing and planning, the community broke ground in July (Riverton Ranger, 7/15/23).

The community’s work is inspiring, but it also closes a circle that indicts generations of political leaders across the US for failing to accept responsibility for our healthcare system. Decades before private equity giant Apollo bought LifePoint, and years before Riverton’s Hospital was included in a group of rural hospitals that Columbia/HCA spun off to form publicly traded LifePoint, what is now called SageWest Riverton Hospital was a public hospital, controlled by the local community.

*In 2014 and 2015, I lobbied for UNITE HERE! on parts of two bills that dealt with these issues.

**I worked with SEIU on a campaign to organize Columbia/HCA workers in Las Vegas from 1997–99.

The post Private Equity ‘Takeover’ Is Not Driving Healthcare Crisis appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Canham-Clyne.

Climate activist Harjeet Singh joins us for an update on the U.N. climate summit in Dubai, where fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber many countries’ delegations. “It is deeply, deeply problematic to see how fossil fuel lobbyists are taking over these climate talks,” he says, noting that climate activists’ fears of an industry takeover of the world’s foremost gathering for climate governance appear to have come true. “We can’t just allow fossil fuel industry to define what is going to happen here,” Singh warns, as financial interests continue to divert political energy away from decarbonization. Singh is the head of global political strategy with Climate Action Network and works on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a global initiative to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition.

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

In Canada, trans “justice” has gone haywire. “A Certain Madness Amok.”

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

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

A small speeding vehicle allegedly driven by an off-duty soldier set off a chain reaction this week that saw two security guards taken to hospital and the burning of a vehicle belonging to the security company.

Guards from the Alpha Response Security firm and two PNG Defence Force sailors from Basilisk Naval base in downtown Port Moresby were recorded on video on Thursday morning in a heated argument that turned physical.

The reaction was instantaneous as more than 25 sailors arrived in a bus and destroyed two vehicles, burned a vehicle and put two guards in hospital.

• READ MORE: Other PNG military reports

In an all too familiar sight, the scene of soldiers ruling the roads of Boroko was again played out with the public staying far away and gunshots heard as businesses along the Hubert Murray Highway kept their doors locked.

Police stayed clear.

The fear was evident as chatter from the public was kept at a minimum.

Soldiers have once again taken over the streets of Boroko because of confrontations — like they did in 2016.

‘It will be dealt with’
The PNGDF hierarchy comes out with the same response of “it will be dealt with” and then no word, no report and no update to the questions raised by those concerned.

This time though, in 2023, two sailors are now held by military police after they were recorded throwing punches with security guards at the new Boroko Bank South Pacific ATM near the TST supermarket.

PNGDF deputy commander Commodore Philip Polewara said that the sailors’ involvement and the extent of their actions is now being investigated by the military police.

Questions asked of who was in control of such acts were not responded to with protocol of questioning to be followed.

“We are investigating and we will deal with the incident. For now the two sailors involved are in military police custody,” said Commodore Polewara.

Alpha Response Security firm owner Oscar Wei said in an interview he would allow investigations to take place.

In uncovering what occurred, the Post-Courier found that the fight started after the vehicle, a Toyota Mk 2, driven by an off-duty sailor, which nearly mowed down a guard.

Heated argument
A confrontation occurred with the two men returning dressed in their PNGDF uniform and accompanied by another two sailors.

The four men got into a heated argument and fought with the guards before leaving.

As the guards were trying to take down statements of what happened at the Boroko police station, a bus load of sailors arrived and instantly removed the public and other vehicles.

Armed with kerosene, knives, spades and shovels, the windows of three vehicles were smashed with the vehicle parked in the middle of the road set alight by the soldiers.

As swift as their arrival, they departed just as quickly before the Fire Service arrived and stopped the fire.

Attempts to get comments from police about the incident were unsuccessful.

Republished with permission.

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

Police in St. Louis, Missouri, are working to wrest control of their department from the city’s progressive mayor and put it in the hands of the Republican governor.

Law enforcement unions argue that local control has “put politics in policing” and that state oversight would help address an increase in homicides and a drop in police morale and staffing levels. They have rallied around Senate Bill 78, which would reinstate a Civil War-era system of state control overturned by Missouri voters in 2012 — and make St. Louis one of the only major cities in the country without authority over its own police force. The attempt by the Missouri Legislature to strip power away from city officials is a “slap in the face” to constituents in St. Louis, Mayor Tishaura Jones said.

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Police in St. Louis, Missouri, are working to wrest control of their department from the city’s progressive mayor and put it in the hands of the Republican governor.

Law enforcement unions argue that local control has “put politics in policing” and that state oversight would help address an increase in homicides and a drop in police morale and staffing levels. They have rallied around Senate Bill 78, which would reinstate a Civil War-era system of state control overturned by Missouri voters in 2012 — and make St. Louis one of the only major cities in the country without authority over its own police force. The attempt by the Missouri Legislature to strip power away from city officials is a “slap in the face” to constituents in St. Louis, Mayor Tishaura Jones said.

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Free Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

JACKSON, Miss. — The freeze of early 2021 wasn’t the origin of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapse. But the winter storm introduced the country to Jackson’s aging and improperly maintained pipes and water plants, which failed and left residents without clean water for over a month.

The crisis surged back in the summer of 2022, leaving residents without clean water for two months and drawing comparisons to Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoning scandal, another banner example of America’s ruinous infrastructure systems. Here, as in Flint, the federal government stepped in: In November, the Department of Justice appointed a federal manager to take control of the beleaguered utility, and less than a month later, Congress approved $600 million exclusively for the city’s water system.

But the rescue effort is already running up against the realities of local politics, reflecting historic tensions between Jackson and the rest of the state. For decades, state and city leaders have clashed over who should control local spending, services and infrastructure. Now, both the federal manager and the city’s mayor are warning that state politicians are attempting to take over Jackson’s water system, along with hundreds of millions in federal funds meant for repairing it.

At the heart of the feud is Senate Bill 2889, introduced in mid-January by a lawmaker who says his only goal is to ensure the Mississippi capital’s water system is restored.

The legislation would create a new regional water-authority board to oversee the system’s water, sewer and drainage systems. The governor and lieutenant governor would appoint a majority of the board. Over the years, state leaders including the current governor, Tate Reeves, have expressed skepticism about whether Jackson is capable of managing its own affairs. Federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, have also questioned the city’s management of its water and wastewater systems.

The latest move in the Legislature worries the manager, Ted Henifin, who says a regional authority could allow improvements and debt relief to flow out of Jackson and into suburban utilities that join the entity. “I believe the $600+ million in federal funding has created a monster in the Mississippi Legislature,” Henifin told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica in a written statement last week. A federal judge appointed Henifin to the position of interim third-party manager in late November.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba built on Henifin’s critique Monday. “It is a colonial power taking over our city. It is plantation politics. I have not been shy in the ways that I have referenced this,” he said.

The mayor highlighted a litany of other proposed legislation that together would give Mississippi authority over segments of Jackson’s police and court systems. He called the legislative proposals a “unified attack” against the city’s autonomy.

“It reminds me of apartheid,” he said. “They dictate our leadership, put a military force over us and we’re just supposed to pay taxes to the king.”

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, whose office helped design the measure, strongly denied that attempts to divert federal funds were behind the legislation. After the news organizations asked Parker about some critics’ concerns, he and Hosemann agreed that the state should recoup none of the federal funds, and Parker pledged to introduce an amendment that would explicitly prohibit the use of the funds outside Jackson’s city limits.

Henifin was unmoved, saying he was concerned that amendments could be overwritten later, and that a regional utility was the wrong solution for Jackson in any case.

If the Senate bill becomes law, the Mississippi Capitol Region Utility Act would effectively give the state authority over Jackson’s water system once the federal manager’s authority lapses.

That’s because it would grant the governor power to appoint three of the nine members, and the lieutenant governor two, giving statewide leaders, who are white, majority control over water, wastewater and stormwater utilities in Jackson, whose population is 82% Black. The mayor would get four appointments, including one that he would have to select in “consultation” with the mayor of nearby Byram, majority Black, and another chosen with the mayor of Ridgeland, a demographically mixed suburb. The board would then elect a president to formally lead the new regional utility.

In an interview, Henifin said he believes Jackson’s system requires judicial and federal oversight to prevent the mismanagement of critical infrastructure funds, which he estimates would take years to properly spend.

“I think at the end of the day we need an arbitrator, and I think that’s a federal judge in this case.” He said he believes this oversight should be extended to protect the federal dollars, estimating that five years of some form of oversight should be sufficient to lock in the necessary contracts and investments.

He later said that legislative interference might threaten efforts to procure a contract to address the water system’s crucial staffing shortages because the prospect of a change in the water utility’s leadership while a long-term contract is still being executed could scare off large corporations.

Although Parker and Hosemann were complimentary of Henifin in interviews with the Mississippi Free Press, Henifin says neither of the parties involved has ever consulted him. Indeed, he said that Hosemann’s office rebuffed his attempt to set up a meeting. Hosemann acknowledged that he had not spoken with Henifin yet but said he intended to “shortly.”

Parker said that although he lives 200 miles from Jackson, he did experience the city’s water crisis firsthand.

“I have a daughter that I live with during the legislative session,” he said. “I’ve spent numerous times walking down to the swimming pool and dipping water into a cooler, taking it back up to the toilet to flush. We live in an apartment complex that’s had to put portable facilities on the ground floor to allow people to go to the bathroom.”

“I wanted to be very sympathetic and compassionate to the feelings of the mayor and other people who have spent a long time trying to seek answers to this problem,” Parker said. “So in setting up a board that would be overseeing the water and sewer system, my idea was to give the mayor four appointments on a nine-member board.”

He said he believed the governor and lieutenant governor should appoint a majority of the board’s members because Mississippi’s failure to “provide the basic needs and services that our people deserve is reflected 100% back on the governor and the people in this building.”

Parker said he initially believed that residents in Ridgeland drew water from Jackson’s treatment plant. Though the facility itself is located in Ridgeland, reporters told Parker that Ridgeland does not currently receive water from Jackson’s water system; they also told him that parts of Ridgeland may use Jackson’s greater sewage system. He then suggested the bill may have included that city’s mayor in light of that fact.

He expressed surprise over Henifin’s comments and strongly denied any intent to divert money away from Jackson.

“There is no intent on my part to stack a board in any way, shape or form that would give preferential treatment to the fringe areas of the water authority,” he said. “My hope would be that if the majority of the water authority is within the city of Jackson, I would hope that the governor, lieutenant governor and mayor would put people on the board from those geographic areas.”

Parker said he intends to speak with Henifin as his bill makes its way through the Senate.

“Crafting something like this is an extreme challenge.”

The bill gives the surrounding municipalities a path to join the new capital water authority, transferring their assets and debts to it, a common feature of regional utilities.

The news organizations asked Parker if any part of SB 2889 prevented that regionalization from allowing federal funds to be dispersed to utilities outside Jackson. Parker said he would look into that question. A day later, Hosemann said he had agreed with Parker that they should address any gaps that might allow money to be spent outside of the authority itself.

Lumumba said the feud over spending the federal funds highlights the friction between the state’s majority-white leaders and the majority-Black capital city.

“It is plantation politics,” Lumumba said. “It’s consistent with this paternalistic relationship that the state of Mississippi believes that it maintains with the city of Jackson.”

Lumumba compared it to the 1% Sales Tax Commission, a system the Legislature designed to assert control over spending derived from a special sales tax Jackson maintains to fund infrastructure projects.

The mayor identified other bills as part of what he considers an assault on the city’s right to self-determination, including bills to expand the Capitol Police’s territory. Another bill would create an independent court system of unelected judges and prosecutors for that same area. Lawmakers said the legislation was needed to respond to a rise in crime rates.

“It’s all a unified attack,” he said.

In a response to additional inquiries, Hosemann’s Deputy Chief of Staff Leah Rupp Smith said they defer to Parker on the legislation but “share a desire with all parties to find a long-term solution,” and she said that a regional utility authority “has been viable in other parts of our state.” They said they planned to meet with Henifin the week after next.

Parker said his conversations with the mayor have been “productive and congenial.” He added that they “share an interest in ensuring all people served by the systems have access to safe and reliable water and wastewater services at a fair and reasonable cost.”

In recent years, Lumumba has clashed repeatedly with Hosemann over Jackson’s autonomy. “The last time I met with him, he said that I needed to look at a possible relationship with the state of Mississippi, because ‘what did I think, that Biden was gonna write me a check?’”

“I recently told him I do, and he did,” the mayor said of Biden.

Senior reporter Kayode Crown of the Mississippi Free Press contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press.

Thousands of Peruvians took to the streets of the nation's capital on Thursday demanding the resignation of Dina Boluarte—the unelected U.S.-backed president—justice for the more than 50 people killed during the six-week uprising, the return to power of jailed former President Pedro Castillo, and the dissolution of the Congress that ousted him.

The protesters, many of them Indigenous Aymara and Quecha people, traveled to what they called the "Takeover of Lima" from all over the nation of 34 million inhabitants to take part in mostly peaceful demonstrations against what opponents call a "coup regime." The demonstrators carried banners with slogans including "Out, Dina Boluarte," "Dina, Murderer," and "Not One More Death."

"We want justice, we don't want our dead to be forgotten," protester Zulema Chacón toldThe Guardian.

"We want that usurper out, she doesn't represent us," she added, referring to Boluarte.

Carrying a Bible, protester Paulina Consac, who traveled 750 miles from the Andean city of Cusco to coastal Lima, told the Associated Press that "our God says thou shalt not kill your neighbor. Dina Boluarte is killing, she's making brothers fight."

Referring to the right-wing-controlled Congress that overthrew Castillo—a leftist who was democratically elected but moved to dissolve the legislature before it could overthrow him—shopkeeper Delia Zevallos told The Guardian that "they are the thieves and they lie and lie to us."

"The people have woken up, we're not children anymore, we know how to read and write... and no one can tell us what to do," she added.

Pedro Mamani, a student at the National University of San Marcos, said that "we're at a breaking point between dictatorship and democracy."

According to Defensoria del Pueblo, Peru's national ombudsman, the 6,000-7,000 demonstrators who marched on Plaza 2 de Mayo and Plaza San Martín were peaceful. However, "violent groups" attempted to reach the building housing Peru's Congress. A massive fire broke out at a building near Plaza San Martín late in the evening; there was no indication that the blaze was related to the protests, although some on the left accused police of causing the inferno.

Defensoría del Pueblo reported injuries to 13 civilians and four of the more than 11,800 police officers deployed in the capital. The ombudsman said at least 53 people including one police officer have been killed and hundreds more were wounded since Castillo was ousted on December 7.

Protests continued elsewhere Thursday, including in the southern city of Arequipa, where a group of around 200 people attempted to storm Rodríguez Ballón International Airport. One protester, identified as 30-year-old Jhancarlo Condori Arcana, died after being shot in the abdomen by police at the airport.

Boluarte said during a nighttime television address that the protests had "no social agenda" and that protesters wanted to "break the rule of law, generate chaos and disorder, and seize power."

Earlier on Thursday, Boluarte met with officials from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose spokesperson, Maria Hurtado, said earlier this month that the agency was "very concerned at the rising violence."

Weighing in on the protests in a Spanish-language tweet, U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kenna—a former CIA agent appointed by former President Donald Trump whom Castillo claims met with Boluarte the day before his removal—said it's "fundamental that the forces of order respect human rights and protect the citizenry."

Commenting on the uprising, former Greek Finance Minister and progressive activist Yanis Varoufakis tweeted that "the protesters in Peru are right: When the elected president is deposed in a palace coup, only fresh elections can cure the rift and restore democracy."

"Solidarity with Peruvian democrats = solidarity with democracy," Varoufakis added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

At least 17 people were killed by state security forces in southern Peru Monday while protesting the government of unelected President Dina Boluarte and the ouster and imprisonment of former leftist leader Pedro Castillo.

The Peruvian Health Ministry published the names and ages of 17 victims of what's being called the Juliaca massacre, which took place in the Indigenous Aymara city of Juliaca, the capital of San Román province in the Puno region of southeastern Peru near Lake Titicaca and the Bolivian border. The youngest of the slain protesters is a 17-year-old girl, Nataly Aroquipa, who was reportedly shot in the abdomen.

"At nine o'clock at night on January 9, 2023, we recorded 17 deaths in Juliaca, and one further death due to events related to the road blockade in Chucuito, Puno. The total number dead since the coup is now at 46," Defensoría del Pueblo, the national ombudsman's office, said on Twitter. In addition to the deaths, at least 500 protesters have been injured, according to officials.

Local media report one Peruvian National Police officer, identified as Sonco Quispe José Luis, was burned to death in his patrol vehicle during a protest, and two pistols and a rifle were stolen from his car.

Puno Gov. Richard Hancco Soncco on Tuesday declared three days of official mourning in honor of those killed in Juliaca, while rejecting "any act of violence and the exaggerated use of public force by the Peruvian National Police and the Peruvian Armed Forces."

The killings happened on the seventh day of a national strike. Protesters—who Anahí Durand, Castillo's minister for women and vulnerable populations, said are "the excluded, marginalized, informal, rural, and Indigenous"—are demanding Boluarte's resignation, the closure of Congress, immediate elections, and a new constitution.

Peru's National Coordinator for Human Rights (CNDDHH) condemned the killings and asserted that "Boluarte and her ministers" are "responsible for the massacre in Juliaca."

Marta Hurtado, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, on Tuesday called on "security forces to comply with human rights standards and ensure that force is only used when strictly necessary, and, if so, in full compliance with the principles of legality, precaution, and proportionality."

Hurtado, who also asked protesters to "show restraint," urged Peruvian authorities to "carry out prompt, impartial, and effective investigations into the deaths and injuries, holding those responsible to account and ensuring victims receive access to justice and redress."

Speaking Monday evening in a televised address, Peruvian Prime Minister Alberto Otárola defended the actions of state security forces. Otárola declared that "we will not cease in our defense of the rule of the law," while blaming the violence on groups backed by "foreign interests and the dark money of drug trafficking" who want to "destroy the country."

While condemning the "seizure of airports, aggression against other people—including law enforcement—preventing the movement of ambulances, and all forms of attack on public or private property" perpetrated by some protesters, the national ombudsman reminded police and military forces of their "duty to comply with current regulations and international standards on the use of force."

The current protests began following the December 7 overthrow and arrest of Castillo—a democratically elected former rural teacher and union organizer—by the country's right-wing-controlled Congress after he moved to dissolve the legislature in a bid to preempt a move to dismiss him for "permanent moral incapacity."

Incensed by Castillo's promise of sweeping social reforms and a new constitution, Peru's oligarchs and the National Society of Industries, the country's leading business group, had long sought his removal.

On December 16, a judicial panel of Peru's Supreme Court of Justice ordered Castillo imprisoned for 18 months while prosecutors investigate charges of rebellion and conspiracy against the former Peruvian president.

Boluarte has proposed holding elections in April 2024.

Countries recognizing Boluarte's government include the United States, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay. The leftist leaders of Latin American and Caribbean nations including Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have condemned Castillo's removal.

While there is no evidence of direct U.S. involvement in Castillo's ouster, the ex-president sounded the alarm over a meeting held the day before his removal at the Government Palace in Lima between Boluarte and U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kenna, a former longtime CIA agent appointed by then-President Donald Trump.

The United States has a long history of supporting right-wing dictatorships in the region. During the 1970s and '80s, successive U.S. administrations backed "Operation Condor," a coordinated effort by right-wing military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and, later, Peru and Ecuador in which around 60,000 leftists were killed and tens of thousands others arrested and tortured.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you’ve probably never heard of.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.

Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert Reich.

Notes:
Andy Lee Roth is Associate Director of Project Censored, co-editor of the Project’s annual volume of censored stories, and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. He has published widely on media issues. Nolan Higdon is a university lecturer in media studies and history. He’s also the author of “The Anatomy of Fake News,”

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

The post The Twitter Takeover of Elon Musk, Declassification of More JFK Documents, and The Top 25 Most Censored Stories of the Year appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

There has been some speculation about how this will work, but the basic idea seems to be that once people have bank cards connected to their Twitter accounts, content creators could, for example, charge users $1 to watch their videos. The money would be paid into an account held with Twitter, which would pay interest, gradually turning a social media platform into a sort of bank: a fintech start-up, but with 400 million users to try and tap.

"I was one of the key people behind x.com which became PayPal," Musk said to Baron. "I know how to make a way better PayPal. There's a product plan I wrote in July of 2000 where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial product in the world, we're going to execute that plan."

Beyond his public comments, though, may be some shadier plans to recoup the significant amount he paid for the site—in a deal he initially tried to wriggle out of. Twitter's revenue comes almost entirely from its ability to target adverts based on its capacity to know huge amounts about its users, meaning the firm has endless conflicts internally, and sometimes externally with government regulators, about privacy.

In the past few days, numerous senior staff responsible for compliance, privacy and security have resigned, shortly before they were due to file documents with US authorities overseeing their privacy practices. With Musk pushing engineers to develop new products rapidly—in a meeting with staff yesterday he floated the risk of bankruptcy—there is a suggestion that the engineers are being asked to 'self-verify' that their products meet privacy regulations, rather than subjecting them to the usual tests.

Financialisation

There are lots of obvious problems with Musk's plan, even if he manages to avoid a death spiral to bankruptcy in the coming weeks as advertisers pull out. Perhaps most fundamentally, he's going to struggle to get people to pay for a service they are used to getting for free, especially when he's just slashed many of the staff who hold it together.

For many Twitter users, the anonymity it's historically allowed has been a key attraction. The two major countries where Twitter use is most prevalent are Japan, where 46% of people have an account, and Saudi Arabia, where 40% do. When I asked Japan expert Nevin Thompson why Twitter is so popular in the country, he pointed to the fact that, unlike Facebook, for example, it doesn't require you to use your real name. "Very generally speaking—Japan's not a monolith—privacy is highly valued," he said.

In Saudi Arabia, the need for privacy is, for obvious reasons, even stronger, though significant questions already hover over that, with prominent Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal being one of Twitter's main investors.

Even if users do sign up for Twitter Blue, even if Musk and co can iron out the problem they already have with scammers buying verification, relegating bots to the bottom of everyone's timeline will do little to solve Twitter's actual problem. The majority of lies and abuse come from unashamed named accounts; the issue isn't @xxxvaccinesarefake123, it's @realdonaldtrump and @FoxNews.

And so the company ends up with the same big questions it's always had. Who does it allow? Who does it ban? What kinds of speech are acceptable, and what aren't? Can I use the N-word? And if not, then what about other terms of abuse for hundreds of other kinds of minoritised peoples around the world, including terms in different languages, and those that have evolved meaning in different ways in different cultures?

If I avoid using those terms, can I endlessly harangue women of colour? Am I allowed to post pornography? Or graphic images of dead people? Or photos of someone else's children without their consent?

Can I, as Trump and his supporters did in 2021, use Twitter to attempt to overthrow the US government? Can I, as Egyptian democrats did in 2011, use it to try to overthrow the Egyptian government? And who decides which side of the line Venezuela sits on?

Until last week, these editorial questions were largely determined by the market. Advertisers wanted enough controversy to ensure potential consumers came to the site and saw their products, but they didn't want their posts marred by association with the wrong kinds of nastiness, the kinds that might put customers off.

As Sunny Singh argued on Monday, the result was hardly great.

"As a woman of colour," she wrote on openDemocracy, "my experience of the platform has always been vitiated by an overarching sense of violence: gendered, racialised and sexualised abuse has always been commonplace there. As I have written before, simply being online as a visible minority has long been seen as an invitation for abuse."

Quoting the feminist theorist Flavia Dzodan, she adds, "the 'theatre of cruelty' remains at the heart of Twitter's model, where abuse and violence against those who are historically marginalised is not only constantly, repeatedly, incessantly enacted but also presented as entertainment for audiences who have grown increasingly desensitised to this collective sadism and its effects. Over the past decade, this has developed into a near-perfect feedback loop: celebrities, journalists and politicians enact, lead and encourage abuse of marginalised peoples in either legacy or social media, and the abuse is then replicated and boosted on the other."

What's changed is that Musk has cast himself as emperor, and bought the amphitheatre. He can't decide who wins the fight. But he can choose what weapons the gladiators are allowed; whether, when things get a bit dull, to release a lion or two; whether, at the end of the day, to put his thumb up or down.

Or, to put it another way, the richest man in the world, a man who this week urged voters to back the Republican Party in the US midterm elections, has appointed himself as editor-in-chief of one of the world's biggest media outlets.

And, whatever he says about the rules not changing, a number of previously banned accounts have already been allowed back onto Twitter, while speculation circles about whether more bans—including Trump's—will be lifted.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that at least some of those who produce free content for Twitter have walked away, including celebrities Stephen Fry, Gigi Hadid, Whoopi Goldberg and Jameela Jameel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, numerous advertisers appear to have followed them, in a move that Musk moaned was "an attack on the first amendment", as though his firm has a legal right to advertising revenue.

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

Tesla CEO Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Thursday after a chaotic, months-long buyout process, leaving the richest man on the planet in control of one of the world's most widely used social media and communication platforms.

Musk wasted no time imposing himself on the company, swiftly firing several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal.

"Elon Musk has a thirst for chaos and utter disregard for anyone other than himself and should not own Twitter."

"The bird is freed," Musk tweeted late Thursday.

A self-described free speech absolutist who has proven in practice to be anything but, Musk has yet to fully detail his vision for Twitter, but critics of the takeover fear that the billionaire's suggestions thus far—including reversing the permanent bans of former President Donald Trump and potentially other figures such as the hate-spewing conspiracy monger Alex Jones—could further deluge the platform with disinformation ahead of key elections in the United States and Brazil.

As The New York Times observed, "Twitter said it would prohibit misleading claims about voting and the outcome of elections, but that was before Mr. Musk owned it."

"Elon Musk's plans for Twitter will make it an even more hate-filled cesspool, leading to irreparable real-world harm," said the Stop the Deal Coalition, an alliance of groups that includes Accountable Tech, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The coalition has urged Congress to investigate Musk's acquisition of Twitter. (The purchase is reportedly already facing an investigation by federal regulators.)

"Musk's plans will leave the platform more vulnerable to security threats, rampant disinformation, and extremism just ahead of the midterm elections," the coalition said. "Elon Musk has a thirst for chaos and utter disregard for anyone other than himself and should not own Twitter."

The coalition noted that, to fund the Twitter purchase, Musk is "accepting financing from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar—two countries run by repressive regimes." Saudi Arabia and Qatar are hardly bastions of free speech: Earlier this month, the Saudis sentenced 72-year-old U.S. citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi to 16 years in prison over tweets criticizing the regime.

Almadi's son told The Washington Post that the kingdom has tortured his father in prison.

"Elon Musk owning one of the world's most powerful communication platforms is dangerous for us all," the Stop the Deal Coalition continued. "As Musk runs Twitter to the ground, let this serve as a warning to other platforms that they will be held accountable for ignoring public safety and dismantling the guardrails designed to protect our information ecosystem."

In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday morning, Musk said the reason he purchased the company "is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence."

But Musk's stated openness to free expression appears not to apply to his employees, Tesla customers, or journalists covering his companies.

"In November 2020, former Tesla employee Stephen Henkes said he was fired from his job at Tesla on August 3, 2020 after raising safety concerns internally then filing formal complaints with government offices, when the company failed to fix and communicate accurately with customers over what he said were unacceptable fire risks in the company's solar installations," CNBC reported Thursday.

"Musk and Tesla have also sought—not always successfully—to silence customers," the outlet added. "For example, Tesla used to compel customers to sign agreements containing non-disclosure clauses as a prerequisite to have their vehicles repaired," the outlet added. "In 2021, Tesla asked customers to agree not to post critically to social media about FSD Beta, an experimental driver assistance software package that some Tesla owners could test out using their own cars and unpaid time to do so."

"Musk is the face of 21st-century tech-based, extreme capitalism."

Musk, like other billionaire CEOs, is also a union-buster.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board upheld a judge's ruling that Tesla unlawfully fired an employee involved in union organizing. The labor board also affirmed the finding that Musk illegally threatened workers "with the loss of their stock options" if they decided to form a union.

David Nasaw, emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote in a column for the Times on Thursday that "Musk is the face of 21st-century tech-based, extreme capitalism, just as the robber barons, who built our railroads, and Andrew Carnegie, who supplied those railroads and the builders of modern American cities with steel, embodied the exuberant and expansive industrial capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

"Mr. Musk has exploited the opportunities emerging in a rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus and acquired a small army of investors and a fleet of lobbyists, lawyers, and fanboys (known as Musketeers)," Nasaw continued. "He has sought to position himself as a tech genius who can break the rules, exploit and excise those who work for him, ridicule those who stand in his way, and do as he wishes with his wealth because it benefits humanity."

"It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies," Nasaw added. "Elon Musk is a product of his—and our—times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics."

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

The warning came as a key senator proposed doubling U.S. military aid to Taiwan to $10 billion as part of a defense spending bill. Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday also used his opening speech for the 20th Communist Party National Congress to vow Beijing would “never promise to renounce the use of force” to reunify with Taiwan.

Speaking alongside former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at Stanford University, Blinken said U.S.-China policy on Taiwan had proven “incredibly successful” for decades, with both sides prioritizing the maintenance of peace.

But he said that was no longer the case.

“There has been a change in the approach from Beijing toward Taiwan in recent years,” Blinken said. “Instead of sticking with the status quo that was established in a positive way, a fundamental decision [was made] that the status quo was no longer acceptable and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” 

“If peaceful means didn’t work, then it would employ coercive means – and possibly, if coercive means don’t work, maybe forceful means – to achieve its objectives,” he said. “And that is what is profoundly disrupting the status quo and creating tremendous tensions.”

Blinken said U.S. pledges to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from Beijing – eschewing decades of “strategic ambiguity” about whether the U.S. would directly confront China – had been forced by the elevated threats of such an event, which he said would be devastating.

“On semiconductors, if Taiwanese production were disrupted as a result of a crisis, you would have an economic crisis around the world,” Blinken said. “So there’s a profound stake not just for us but for countries around the world in preserving peace and stability when it comes to Taiwan and the straits, and to making sure that the differences that exist are resolved peacefully. So that’s why we’ve been so engaged on this.”

Kharis Templeman, an expert on Taiwan at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who attended Blinken’s talk on Monday, said that his comments reflected a changing situation between Beijing and Taiwan.

“It’s fair to say the majority view in the Biden administration is that Xi has moved from deterring independence as his top priority, to making progress toward unification,” said Templeman. But he added that “the comment about a ‘much faster timeline’ is a bit misleading.”

“Faster than what?” he said. “Faster than waiting indefinitely, but nothing more certain than that. I do not see a consensus within the administration that Xi has set a concrete deadline for achieving unification, or even that it needs to happen while he is still in charge. Anyone who tells you a specific deadline is reading too much into the tea leaves.”

The comments came as the United States seeks to ramp up military support for Taiwan in the wake of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, which has raised global concerns about the threat of a similar invasion of Taiwan.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) last week filed an amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act that doubles military aid to Taiwan to over $10 billion, doubling the $4.5 billion initially proposed by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). The Senate is expected to vote on the bill next month.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by David Conn, Lucas Amin.

Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did.

Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, we learned Wednesday, is going to spend $42 million on the midterm elections, focusing on flipping evangelical Hispanics toward the GOP.

Leonard Leo, head of The Federalist Society so famous for providing Trump and McConnell with rightwing judges to pack federal courts and the Supreme Court, recently received a $1.6 billion contribution, tax-free.

So much money is sloshing around in our political system — both what we know of and the billions in truly dark money that we know nothing about — that honest politicians are buried and actual criminals are stepping up.

Donald Trump‘s phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was probably the clearest illustration of this recent incarnation of his lifelong criminality. Although it’s rapidly being eclipsed by his theft and probable sale to foreign dictators of classified documents.

Over the last 40 years, career criminals like Trump have increasingly moved out of the business world and the streets and into politics, something for which we can thank the Supreme Court.

There are, among us, a small number of individuals who are career criminals. They have literally spent their entire lives skirting or outright breaking the law, and not only believe the law doesn’t apply to them, but actually delight in getting away with their crimes.

Because all of us have, at one time or another in our lives, broken a law or told lies; we tend to assume that these career criminals are just like us but only got caught in that one unlucky moment, like that time you drove home after a second glass of wine, or made up an excuse to tell your boss.

But they’re not like you and me. There’s something fundamentally different about these people. And the failure to recognize that goes to the core of the crisis within the Republican Party and our overall political system today.

Back when I was in my late teens, I got a job as a manager of a GNC store in a mall in Okemos, Michigan. There was a test that I had to give to all job applicants to determine their “honesty.”

The test asked really weird questions, along the lines of:

“One of your very best employees just came to you to return some money to the till, money that she had borrowed from the till because a few months back she needed it to help pay for an emergency medical procedure for her child. She has saved up to pay the money back, and is now trying to do so. What do you do?”

Or: “Your mother just called and told to you that she’s been shoplifting at the local store when her food stamps run out and your younger sister is really hungry. What do you do?”

The test, from a national testing chain, went on with 20 or 30 similar questions. In almost every case, the only correct answer to the multiple choice test was, “call the police and send them to jail.”

I protested to my district manager, saying that I would’ve flunked the test, or would’ve had to lie to pass it. There’s no way I turn in my mother or call the police on somebody with a sick child.

My manager pointed out to me that the only way to pass the honesty test is to lie on it, and it was actually designed that way. They expect people to say that they will call the police even for the tiniest of crimes. I protested that I thought that was crazy, that we were requiring people to lie to pass an honesty test, and that made no sense at all to me.

What he explained was that there’s no test in the world that can tell if a person really and truly will or will not call the police on anyone. But the test does tell whether a person understands the difference between right and wrong.

“I know it’s hard for you to realize or believe,” he said as I recall, “but there are some people who literally don’t know what is right and what is wrong. And the people who don’t have that basic understanding, or do know but don’t think the rules apply to them, are the ones most likely to steal from us or let their friends come shoplifting.

“The test expects people to lie by representing themselves as being honest, because to lie on the test they would first have to know the difference between right and wrong, so they could lie and say that they would always do the right thing.”

One of the big challenges the American media and our political system have with Donald Trump and a number of his enablers is that, like the people I was testing to filter out from our potential pool of employees, they are actually career criminals with no deep understanding of, or respect for, right and wrong.

They may know the words and concepts, but truly believe they don’t apply to them.

Donald Trump has been scamming, grifting and stealing his entire life, going all the way back to stealing his father’s money from his parents and his siblings. He is a career criminal.

Many of the people he surrounded himself with are, similarly, career criminals even though they appear to have had high profile, high powered positions in government or industry.

Even Forbes magazine called Trump’s commerce secretary, billionaire Wilbur Ross, a professional “grifter” for all the scams he has perpetrated in his career, and now we learn that Clarence Thomas’ wife was allegedly in on trying to overthrow our democracy.

While fundamentally dishonest people has been a problem for our society and business community for centuries, it has particularly become a problem in our political world since 1976 and 1978.

That was when the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that billionaires or corporations giving massive amounts of money to politicians and political parties is no longer considered bribery or corruption but, instead, is “free speech“ protected by the First Amendment.

Never before in all of American history had bribing politicians been considered free-speech, until the Buckley v Valejo and First National Bank v Belotti Supreme Court decisions as I laid out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

In 2010, conservatives of the Court doubled down on these decisions and even expanded their scope with Citizens United.

The result after these SCOTUS decisions was an ocean of corporate and billionaire money flowing into politics, sweeping Ronald Reagan into the White House on a tsunami of cash from the fossil fuel industry.

In the 40+ years since then, billionaire and corporate bribery of politicians has become the norm, and even institutionalized with national and state-based “policy networks,” PACs and SuperPACs, and dark money groups like the ones affiliated with Mitch McConnell that just poured tens of millions into this year’s elections.

All this money now sloshing around in our political system has produced the result the dissenting Supreme Court justices worried about.

It’s become a giant magnet that draws career criminals and authoritarians into politics, and then helps them become fabulously wealthy as they do the bidding of the corporations and wealthy people who fund their elections and careers.

It’s normalized the “revolving door” where people go into government positions, particularly in regulatory agencies, and make decisions that benefit giant corporations while drawing a modest government paycheck, only then to leave government and pick up multi-million dollar a year jobs in the industries they were regulating.

Trump is a career criminal, and he has surrounded himself with career criminals. Just look at their mob-like meeting just a week or so ago on one of his golf courses: it was right out of The Sopranos.

But he and many of his criminal Republican allies could never have gained power if the Supreme Court, back in the 1970s, hadn’t struck down the “good government” laws that came out of the Nixon bribery scandals and other laws to keep money out of politics, like the Tillman Act that dates back to 1907.

Because of these Supreme Court decisions equating money with free speech, our political system is now overrun with grifters, con artists and career criminals.

Even worse, this dark money spree Republicans are enjoying courtesy of rightwing billionaires and giant corporations is also empowering the recurrent criminal underbelly of the political world itself: authoritarians.

Authoritarians like Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, and Trump each came to power through manipulating the political system in ways that, if not overtly in violation of criminal statutes, were certainly so dangerous to democracy that they’re rightly described as “crimes against the nation.”

Job one of the new Congress must be to overturn these corrupt Supreme Court decisions and get big money — and the criminals it draws and empowers — out of American politics.

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

Part 2 of a two-part series on the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover. Read part 1: The world must not wash its hands of Afghanistan’s misery

The advent of Taliban rule in Afghanistan a year ago this month, after two decades under the more liberal, internationally supported Afghan National Government, threw the Afghan populace backward through a time warp.

The return to Taliban oppression has been most traumatic for women and girls, who suddenly find themselves in the equivalent of the Middle Ages again with respect to their rights and prospects.

Today’s Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans high-school education for girls and restricts females from working, with very limited exceptions. This not only robs girls and women of their futures, but has a much larger impact on Afghan society and the country’s standing in the world.

• READ MORE:  The world must not wash its hands of Afghanistan’s misery
• Other reports on Afghanistan since the Taliban takover

A lot has changed since 2001
Guided by a traditionalist, nativist dogma, the Taliban pursued a similar policy when it previously ruled most of the country from 1996 to 2001. Since then, however, much has changed for Afghan women, especially in the cities.

Nationwide, female literacy doubled — although granted it is still low — and women were eager for education and new opportunities. Some went into politics and public service.

After the 2019 election, 27 percent of Afghan parliamentarians were women, the same percentage as in the current US Congress. Every ministry and government division had at least one woman at a senior decision-making level — I myself was one of them.

More than 300 female judges, 1000 prosecutors and 1500 defence lawyers worked in the government’s judicial system.

Although women were less well represented in business than in government, there were more than 17,000 women-owned businesses in the country. Women were also prominent in other professions including diplomacy, academia and teaching, journalism, and civil society organisations.

Public opinion polls showed that most Afghan men favoured these new roles for women.

Mixed signals
With the Taliban takeover, girls and women suddenly found themselves disempowered, without work and facing severe hardship.

At first, however, there was some hope that the “new” Taliban would act differently from before. Indeed, when we in the Afghan National Government were negotiating with the Taliban pursuant to the 2020 Doha Agreement calling for reconciliation, the Taliban negotiators indicated a willingness to accept a more liberal female role in society.

However, in contrast to the Afghan government’s mixed-gender negotiating team, our counterparts were all male.

Once in power, the Taliban initially sent some mixed signals. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs was closed. By September, schools for boys were reopened, but only elementary schools for girls.

Some women were kept in government offices only to be dismissed when men were trained to replace them.

In December, the Taliban did issue a decree that women could refuse marriage and inherit property, but otherwise nearly all their new measures have been repressive. As a result, the presence of women in Afghan society has been drastically curtailed, and in areas such as political life it is now zero.

The Commission on Human Rights was terminated. A May 7 decree forced women to cover their face in public, with threat of serious penalties.

Another on May 19 banned women from appearing in television plays and movies. Women journalists are required to cover their whole bodies, heads, and faces while reporting.

Deprived of women’s skills
There is no woman in the leadership and administration of the Taliban. None of the female judges, military officers, and women employees in the previous government have been allowed to return to their jobs.

Although a small number of women are allowed to work in the health, education, and journalism sectors, they cannot be effective or free to pursue their ambitions because of the severe restrictions imposed by the Taliban. This also affects aspirations; why should women even seek education if virtually no professional opportunities are available to them?

Although even male members of the mujahedeen have complained about the lack of opportunity for their women, the Taliban so far have privileged the most traditionalist elements of their base—even if they sometimes come up with excuses designed to hold out hope that they will change course later, like blaming the closure of girls’ schools on a supposed lack of female teachers.

The suffering from this is experienced not just at the individual and family level, but also by society as a whole, which is deprived of the skills of half its people.

Ironically, the Taliban also suffers, since it will never be accepted as a legitimate part of the international community if it denies basic rights and opportunities in education, employment, speech, and participation that are almost now universally regarded as fundamental rights of all mankind, including in most of the Islamic world.

It is hard to be optimistic about the future. But at the very least, foreign governments, the United Nations, and civil society organisations should continue to encourage Afghan women in any way possible and deny the Taliban government recognition and support beyond humanitarian assistance so long as it continues its brutal repression of women.

Dr Zakia Adeli was the Deputy Minister of Justice and a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Kabul University before she was forced to leave the country following the Taliban takeover last August.

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

Part 1 of a two-part series on the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover. Read part 2 tomorrow: The Taliban’s Return Has Robbed Afghanistan’s Women and Girls of Their Future

A year after the fall of Kabul and the end of the US military mission in Afghanistan, the country remains a place of misery.

No foreign government has recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government, and much of the modern economy has collapsed. The new rulers have not kept earlier promises, including high-school level education for girls and an amnesty for former Afghan government soldiers and civil servants.

Following a survey earlier this year, the United Nations pointed to many outrageous deficiencies in internationally recognised human rights. Moreover, the July 31 drone killing of 9-11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in a safe house in central Kabul showed that key elements of the Taliban leadership still harbour international terrorists, the original cause of the US intervention 21 years ago.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Afghanistan since the Taliban takover

Fragile rule
Afghanistan seems trapped in a vicious circle, and the 38 million people living in the country are the frontline victims of a profound and still deepening tragedy. Without human rights, the Taliban regime will not enjoy UN membership, widespread diplomatic recognition, robust international humanitarian assistance or a broader base of legitimacy.

Without outside support, which financially accounted for 40 to 50 percent of the Afghan GNP prior to the Taliban takeover, Taliban rule remains fragile.

The one positive element in this bleak picture is that military violence has lessened. Despite some resistance from the competing Islamic State Khorasan terrorist group, or ISIS-K, and various other factions, Taliban rule appears unchallenged in the short term.

But in the longer term, the inflexibility and fragility of the Taliban authorities raise fundamental questions about whether their victory a year ago was just another phase in a longer civil war.

In some rural areas of the south long under Taliban control, life goes on much as before. But the loss of jobs in the more modern urban sectors and the scarcity of food has forced many Afghans back into an almost primitive economy, selling household possessions and sometimes even children to survive.

The world cannot simply wash its hands of this situation. There are three overriding US and NATO interests; ensuring that Afghanistan does not again becomes a haven and training ground for international terrorists; easing the world’s largest humanitarian/human rights crisis; and assisting endangered Afghans eligible for emigration.

Honoring US commitments
The al-Zawahiri case demonstrated the need for a strong reminder to the Taliban of their obligation not to harbour terrorists. However, this goes beyond monitoring known terror groups and must include steps to prevent the rise of a new generation of extremists. There are reports and video evidence of madrassa religious schools being established all over Afghanistan, primarily by Pakistani extremist groups.

This must be a high priority in any international discussions with the Taliban.

On the humanitarian and human rights fronts, in the wake of the al-Zawahiri case the US initially terminated talks with the Taliban over a possible release of former Afghan government financial reserves for humanitarian assistance. But recently American officials decided to go ahead with the talks after all, in light of fears over a looming hunger crisis in the coming winter months.

Other humanitarian assistance is needed, but must be administered through established international humanitarian groups, not the Taliban itself. Moreover, the world needs to remain united in not recognising the Taliban until they extend fundamental, universally-recognised human rights to all citizens, including female ones.

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

We speak with one of the reporters who this week exposed the secretive Chicago industrial mogul who has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. The donor is Barre Seid, who donated all of his shares in his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to the nonprofit group run by Leonard Leo, who helped select former President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees. “This transaction was all structured in a way that really gamed the rules around donations to nonprofits,” says Andrew Perez, a reporter for The Lever, who co-authored an exposé about Seid headlined “Inside The Right’s Historic Billion-Dollar Dark Money Transfer.”

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

A year on from the fall of Kabul, Australian reporter Lynne O’Donnell returned to Afghanistan — and now says she’ll never go back.

O’Donnell returned for three days last month, only to be detained, forced to retract articles, and coerced into making a public apology for accusing the Taliban of sex slavery.

During this harrowing time, she was in close contact with Massoud Hossain, a Kabul-born photojournalist.

• READ MORE: Lynne O’Donnell: Taliban detained, abused and threatened me
• Afghanistan, the Taliban and the liberation narrative: Why it is so vital to be telling our own stories — Pacific Journalism Review
• LISTEN TO RNZ SATURDAY MORNINGS: Lynne O’Donnell and Massoud Hossain describe their ordeal
• See a gallery of Massoud Hossain’s images

The pair have worked together in Afghanistan for years, and both are on a Taliban death list.

Hossain is currently based in New Zealand, where he has been given asylum.

O’Donnell is a Foreign Policy columnist and was Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press (AP) between 2009-2017.

Hossaini is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist who joined AFP in 2007. In 2021 he won the William Randolph Hearst Award for Excellence in Professional Journalism.

They talk to RNZ broadcaster Kim Hill on their experiences and how they see the future for Afghanistan.

O’Donnell’s introduction to her Foreign Policy report on July 20:

“I returned to Afghanistan this week, almost one year after the withdrawal of the US military cleared the way for the Taliban’s victory. I wanted to see for myself what had become of the country since I flew out of Kabul on August 15, 2021, hours before the Islamists began what many residents now refer to as a ‘reign of terror’…

“I left Afghanistan today after three days of cat-and-mouse with Taliban intelligence agents, who detained, abused, and threatened me and forced me to issue a barely literate retraction of reports they said had broken their laws and offended Afghan culture. If I did not, they said, they’d send me to jail.”

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.

Rhode Island is the latest state where, with approval ratings falling for President Joe Biden and other national Democrats, progressive groups are mounting challenges to take over the state-level Democratic Party. With Biden failing to enact his agenda and Republicans stripping basic rights from people across the country, Rhode Island progressive candidates are pushing to build a majority with the power to govern in local and state-level politics. Similar slates are running progressive candidates in 11 other states this cycle, part of recent attempts among organizers to find smaller-scale wins despite the party’s national-scale failures.

The group, the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, is seeking to capitalize on the moment of weakness for conservative Democrats and backing 50 candidates in the state this cycle, for offices ranging from governor to state legislators. The group supports candidates who have committed to backing a Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care, and not taking money from lobbyists, fossil fuel companies, or corporate PACs.

“The left has been losing in states for 50 years.”

Democrat Matt Brown, a gubernatorial hopeful and former Rhode Island secretary of state, speaks to a group of people at a nomination papers training event in North Kingstown, R.I., on July 3, 2018.

Photo: Steven Senne/AP

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

“We have to do federal politics, and we finally have to do what we should have done a long time ago, which is deep state politics.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Although the interview took place before the laws were repealed, the issues discussed remain highly relevant. That is because farmers are concerned that the government is dragging its feet on a number of issues more than six months after the legislation was repealed, not least a guaranteed minimum support price for produce procured by the public and private sectors, loan default injustices and other matters that have fuelled and deepened the country’s agrarian crisis.

The government’s apparent reluctance to implement the demands of farmers might indicate that the global corporations and financial institutions behind the legislation remain steadfast in seeking to secure what the laws aimed to bring about – the full-scale neoliberal marketisation of India’s agrifood sector, including the displacement of peasant farmers and independent, indigenous enterprises.    

The interview took place with prominent UK-based campaigner Ranjit Singh Srai.

Ranjit Singh Srai:  There has been much said about PM Modi’s new farm laws in terms of the motivation and the potential effect on farmers as well as the wider population. The government’s narrative has been pushed by its media friends and those taking part in the agitation have had their arguments patronisingly rubbished and simply been targeted as foreign agents, criminals and even terrorists. How do you see the outcome of any implementation of these new laws and the motivation behind them?

Colin Todhunter:  The new farm laws are being narrowly framed by certain commentators and sections of the corporate media. We hear they will be good for farmers and good for consumers. Farmers will have more freedom of choice when it comes to selling their produce and we will see more distribution networks and opportunities emerge.

We also hear that farmers will receive good prices as well. Farmers are concerned about the minimum support price mechanism being done away with. But we also hear that this will not occur and, even if it does, it will not matter so much because farmers will still be receiving good prices as a result of the farm legislation.

So, it is all being portrayed as a great success for farmers, for consumers and for the agribusiness corporations. Once this narrative is established, as it has been, it becomes easy to portray anyone who questions any of it as being somehow politically motivated.

But this depiction of those who protest or raise uncomfortable questions about the farm laws is little more than a diversion. To properly understand the new legislation and the reasons behind it, we must go back 30 years to India’s foreign exchange crisis.

At that time, the IMF and the World Bank granted India the equivalent of £90 billion worth of loans (around double that figure in 2022 given inflation) in return for the government dismantling its state seed supply system and reducing public funding for agriculture. India was also directed to shift towards the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange and to move 400 million people from the countryside into the cities.

Although many factors are at play, reducing the public sector’s role and the consequent lack of support for agriculture in general have to a large extent fuelled the ongoing agrarian crisis in the country.

This plan for agriculture has been going on for a long time regardless of which party has been in power. But under the current administration and with the implementation of the three farm laws, this programme is set to be accelerated.

The farm legislation is intended to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a mere facilitator of private capital, leading to the entrenchment of industrial agriculture and the replacement of small-scale farms. To put it in simple terms, the legislation is intended to deliver a knockout blow to small holder agriculture and the peasantry.

(It must be added here that this form of agriculture remains vital. Contrary to much mainstream thinking, it can be said that rural India subsidises urban India. It provides a vast but cheap pool of labour to work in more menial positions. Millions migrate between city and village, especially when times get tough. When work dries up – or when the COVID-related lockdown was enforced – they headed back to their villages to survive. Moreover, the money earned in the city can be insufficient to live on and farming activities bring in much-needed revenue.)

The norm will eventually be industrial GMO commodity crop agriculture suited to the needs of the likes of Cargill, Archer Daniel Midlands and India’s giant retail and agribusiness giants as well as global agritech seed and chemical corporations. It could result in hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work given that India is heading towards or is already experiencing jobless growth.

It is unfortunate that prominent journalists and media outlets in India are celebrating the new farm legislation and have attempted to discredit farmers who are protesting as being anti national. As if handing over the sector to foreign corporations is in any way serving the national interest. What prominent figures are actually doing, whether they are aware of it or not, is cheerleading for the destruction of local markets and small-scale enterprises – farmers, hawkers, food processers or mom and pop corner stores.

By implication, they are helping to ensure that India is surrendering control over its agrifood sector to global players. They are doing the bidding of the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and global agrifood corporations which want India to eradicate its buffer food stocks and dismantle the public food distribution system.

To understand what is planned for agriculture, we also need to understand what is planned for retail. This, too, could decimate millions of livelihoods in the retail sector. For example, Walmart entered India in 2016 with a multi-2.1billion dollar takeover of the retail start-up Jet.com. In 2018, this was followed by a takeover of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

In 2020, Facebook and a US based private equity firm committed over 7 billion U.S. dollars to Reliance Jio. It means that customers will soon be able to shop using Facebook’s chat application, WhatsApp.

These are key developments because, by monopolising digital retail platforms, these companies will not only control data about consumption and consumer preferences but will also control data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. The online world and the offline world are not separate; they are intertwined. E-commerce platforms will be able to shape the entire physical economy.

What is concerning is that Amazon and Walmart have sufficient global clout to ensure they become a duopoly, controlling much of Indian agriculture, including the nature of agricultural production itself. Markets will no longer matter; so-called platforms will take over.

At the same time, the aim is to allow financial speculators and global agribusiness to buy up rural land and amalgamate it. The end game is a system of contract farming that serves the interests of big tech, big agribusiness and big retail. Small-holder agriculture and small-scale retail are regarded as impediments to this.

Through what is called ‘data-driven agriculture’, with the data owned and controlled by corporate interests, the farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of genetically engineered seeds and input are required and when the produce needs to be ready.

Traders, manufacturers, and cultivators who remain in the system will become slaves to the platforms and stripped of any independence. It is a clear concern that India will cede control of its entire economy its politics and its culture to these all-powerful modern-day East India companies.

By reducing public sector buffer stocks, side-lining the role of the Food Corporation of India and by introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of unscrupulous billionaires who run Walmart, Reliance, Amazon, Facebook and the like.

Bayer, Cargill and the big tech giants and the rest of the corporate entourage that will benefit from the new legislation are depicted as the saviours of Indian agriculture and Indian farmers. But we should remind ourselves of how Monsanto sucked around $900 million from Indian farmers courtesy of its genetically modified seeds, while leaving small-scale and marginal farmers in what a pre-eminent US academic called a “corporate noose” of dependency and indebtedness.

Despite what industry-funded lobbyists and academics might say, BT cotton in India has been a failure. Monsanto helped itself, not Indian farmers.

RSS:  PM Modi’s Hindutva, based on majoritarianism and authoritarianism, is working closely with, and is supported by, huge corporations that are taking over many sectors of the economy. To what extent do you see these new agricultural laws in that context?

CT:  Both foreign and home-grown billionaires like Adani and Ambani have pushed for the farm laws and are determining policy in India. We are witnessing a crisis of democracy. The new farm legislation is but a symptom of this crisis.

Neoliberal globalisation is ultimately based on the deregulation of international capital flows, euphemistically called financial liberalisation. The dismantling of Bretton Woods and the deregulation of global capital movements have deepened the level of dependency of nation states on capital markets. In India, we can see the implications.

Global finance is in a position to dictate domestic policy. Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital and India’s foreign exchange reserves have been built up by borrowing and foreign investments. For policymakers, the fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign capital inflows.

The Indian government has chosen to submit to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend and giving up any notion of economic sovereignty. And as the state withdraws from aspects of public policy (under World Bank directives), the space left open becomes occupied by private players. We will see this with the new farm laws because this is what they are designed to  facilitate.

It is clear that the ongoing farmers protest in India is not just about farming. Given that around 60% of the population still rely on agriculture for a living, we are witnessing a struggle for the heart and soul of the country.

There is an intensifying struggle over space between local markets and global markets. The former are the domain of independent small-scale producers, cultivators and enterprises. The latter are dominated by large scale international retailers, commodity traders and the rapidly growing and highly influential e-commerce companies.

It is essential to protect local markets and indigenous, independent small-scale enterprises and farmers. This will ensure that India has more control over its food supply, the ability to determine its own policies and its own economic independence. In other words, the protection of food and national sovereignty and the capacity to pursue genuine democratic development.

But as a result of the farm legislation, we could see India bidding for food with borrowed funds on the open market. Instead of the Food Corporation of India continuing to procure and physically hold food stocks, thereby ensuring a degree of food security, the country will be at the mercy of international traders. This is why Modi places so much stress on the policy of foreign direct investment. Foreign reserves will be needed to procure food stocks. This constitutes a recipe for further dependency. It constitutes a reliance on foreign finance and global corporations.

Mainstream economic thinking passes this subjugation off as liberalisation. How the inability to determine your own economic policies and surrendering food security to outside forces is in any way liberating is perplexing to say the least.

It is interesting to note that various reports from international human rights organisations recently downgraded India from being a free democracy to a partially free democracy. One report says India is now an electoral autocracy. How they ever considered India to be a free democracy in the first place is open to question. But these reports focused on the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, clampdowns on freedom of expression and the restrictions on civil society since PM Modi took power.

The undermining of liberty in all these areas is cause for concern in its own right, but this trend towards divisiveness and authoritarianism serves another purpose. It diverts attention from the corporate takeover of the country, including agriculture. Whether it involves a divide and rule strategy along religious lines, the churning out of nationalistic sentiments, the suppression of free speech, pushing the farm bills through parliament without proper debate or the use of the police and the media to undermine the farmers protest, a major undemocratic heist is underway that will fundamentally adversely impact people’s livelihoods and the cultural and social fabric of the country.

RSS:  You have, in your writings, linked self-determination with economic sovereignty and the need to challenge the authority and machinery of an over-powerful central state. To what extent can we protect the sovereignty of people and their livelihoods when, since 1947, one colonial master was simply replaced by another?

CT:  On one side of this equation, there are the interests of a handful of multi billionaires who own corporations and platforms that seek to control India. On the other side, there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors, cultivators and small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever-greater profit.

Indian farmers are on the frontline against global capitalism and a colonial style de-industrialisation of the economy. This is where the struggle for democracy and the future of India is taking place.

There is a need for a fundamental reorganisation of the prevailing globalised food system. We require a system that reduces dependency on global conglomerates, external proprietary inputs, long supply chains, distant volatile commodity markets and patented technologies. Practical solutions to the agrarian crisis – it is a global crisis and these solutions universally apply – must be based on placing the farmer at the centre of policies. Policies centred on localisation, self-sufficiency, food sovereignty and agroecological principles.

India, like other countries, must delink from neoliberal globalisation. It must manage foreign trade and expand indigenous markets by protecting and encouraging small-scale enterprises, including smallholder agriculture. It must increase welfare expenditure by the state and commit to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and income.

Genuine food security, in principle, derives from food sovereignty, which, in a broad sense, is based on the right of people and sovereign states and regions to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies. Instead of rolling back the public sector and surrendering the food security of the nation to foreign corporations, there is a need for India to further expand official procurement and public distribution.

This would occur by extending government procurement to additional states in India and expanding the range of produce under the public distribution system. It would not only boost rural incomes but also address hunger and malnutrition, which is still a major issue in the country. If policymakers are really serious about boosting the rural economy, they would reject the corporate agenda and a reliance on rigged and unstable markets.

And if the various coronavirus-related lockdowns have shown anything, it is that regional and locally owned food systems are now required more than ever. But a solution that would genuinely address rural distress and malnutrition does not suit the agenda of global corporations.

This is why ordinary people need to push back and assert self-determination and democratic development, involving challenging the dominance of private capital and disputing the authority of central states which work to consolidate state-corporate power above the heads of ordinary people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

The post Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Drama: A Hand Overplayed? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lee Hall.

The post Afghan Evacuees Still Lack a Clear Path for Resettlement in the U.S., 7 Months After Taliban Takeover appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tazreena Sajjad .

The post Russian Takeover of Chernobyl Poses Grave Health Threat appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karl Grossman, Christie Brinkley and Joseph Mangano.