On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:

Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.

‘Finally comes clean’

“In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20,  4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20). 

Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).

Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”

Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) ​​said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”

The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.

It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”

Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.

Government talking points

Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”

In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”

Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered

a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.

The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”

The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently  reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that

Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’

According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.

Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.

The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:

Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.

It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.

More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).

Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (1/29/25)

This week on CounterSpin: A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.”

The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month—because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if  white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization. That lies back of many public and media conversations…so just saying Charles Drew invented blood banks is disruptive! What if Black people aren’t subhuman?

What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances and responses to those circumstances of Black people in these United States—our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history—real history, and not comforting tall tales—connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding and inspiring?

In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo,  “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation.

That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We’ll hear that important conversation again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk and ICE.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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

Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.

One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.

The state election board dismissed a previous version of the challenge, which is now being considered in federal court. Before the election, a Trump-appointed judge denied an attempt by the Republican National Committee to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls based on the same theory.

The latest case is getting attention statewide and across the country. But it has not yet been reported that members of the group that had helped publicize the idea had cast doubt on its legality.

“I don’t comment on pending litigation,” Griffin wrote to ProPublica in response to a detailed list of questions. “It would be a violation of our code of judicial conduct.”

Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, disputed the challenge and called on Griffin to concede. “It’s not appropriate for this election to be decided in court, period. NC voters have already made the decision to send Justice Riggs back to the Supreme Court,” she said.

The theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow promoted it with the help of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.

State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack that those details.

Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot — most often with a driver’s license. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in response to the RNC lawsuit.

Bob Orr, a former GOP state Supreme Court justice who left the Republican Party in 2021, said he too doubts the theory. “I appreciate fighting for every vote: If you honestly think illegal votes have been cast, it’s legitimate to try to prove that,” he said. “But the bottom line is: Did anyone vote illegally? Have you been able to prove one person voted illegally? At this point, no. And we’re weeks past the election and multiple recounts, and there’s no evidence of that.”

In modern history, the state board’s decision on who wins elections has been final, said Chris Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. That includes an even tighter race in 2020, when a Democratic justice conceded to a Republican after protesting her 401-vote loss to the board.

“We’re used to close elections, we’re used to protests, we’re used to candidates pushing every legal action up to the point the state election board rules,” Cooper said. But, he added, there is an important difference with Griffin’s petition, which goes beyond the state election board to the courts.

“This is basically saying the state elections system is wrong, and we’re going to court to try to change the rules of the game after the game has been played — which is unprecedented.”

In July 2024, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network convened online to plan its efforts ahead of the presidential election. Worried about a surge of voter registrations from nonwhite voters who they believed would back Democrats, the activists discussed how to assemble a “suspicious voters list” of people whose ballots they could challenge.

Then, one of the group’s board members, Jay DeLancy, said he had another idea “that’s a lot slicker.”

DeLancy said that if a candidate lost a close election, the loss could be overturned by questioning the validity of voters whose registrations are missing their driver’s license and Social Security information. “Those are illegal votes,” he claimed. “I would file a protest.”

Jim Womack, the leader of the chapter, immediately pushed back: “That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.”

Later in the call Womack said, “I’m 100% sure you’re not going to get a successful prosecution.” And he told the group, “That’s considered to be voter suppression, and there’s no way a court is going to find that way.”

But DeLancy asked for backup from the originator of that theory: Carol Snow. She argued that her theory could in fact overturn the outcome of an election.

“I guess we’re gonna find that out,” Snow said.

Snow is a leader of the conservative activist group North Carolina Audit Force and lives in the state’s rural mountains. After Trump’s loss in 2020, she threw herself into questioning the election’s results. In 2022, she accompanied a pair of far-right activists to a North Carolina election office where the two men unsuccessfully tried to forcefully access voting machines, and she participated in a failed pressure campaign to oust the election director who resisted them, ProPublica previously reported.

She also began filing overwhelming numbers of records requests and complaints to state election officials, an effort that Womack praised on the July call: “I think Carol has shown a way of really harassing — not that we want to do it for harassment purposes — but really needling the Board of Elections to do their jobs by just constantly deluging them.”

Since late 2021, the state elections board had spent far more time on her requests and complaints than those of any other individual, spokesperson Patrick Gannon said in a statement. “Ms. Snow’s constant barrage of requests and complaints causes other priorities and responsibilities to suffer,” Gannon said.

Snow described her work to ProPublica as “simply taking the time to learn about my state’s electoral process” and acting for the public good. “The records I’ve requested are owned by the public. In other words, I’m asking for what belongs to me,” Snow wrote to ProPublica. “If government agencies are understaffed and unable to comply with this state’s Public Records law, they should address the issue with the entities that fund them.”

In the fall of 2023, Snow filed a complaint alleging that North Carolina’s voter registration form did not clearly require voters to provide their driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, as required by federal law — instead that information was coded as optional. Snow later described the missing information as a “line of attack” through which bad actors could cast fraudulent votes using fake identities. (A right-wing conspiracy theory holds that this was how Biden won the 2020 election.)

But she was not able to demonstrate that the missing information had led to anyone improperly voting. After obtaining public records for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, Snow provided the state board with only seven examples of what she called potential double voting. The state board found all seven to be innocuous things like data entry errors.

The state board quickly updated the form to require the information. But from late 2023 through the fall of 2024, six complaints, some of which were partly based on Snow’s theory, were filed with the state election board. Aside from the updates to the form, the state board dismissed the complaints.

By the time of the July call, some of Snow’s peers seemed dismissive as well.

“I’m not suggesting that we can’t arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest using this,” Womack said on the call. “But I would just suggest to you that that’s not the way to win on this thing.”

Yet the information did end up in the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit trying to disqualify 225,000 voters, a challenge DeLancy filed against Riggs’ victory in North Carolina’s most populous county, and, the day after that was dismissed, Griffin’s challenge to over 60,000 voters.

DeLancy wrote to ProPublica that he filed the challenge on his own and did not coordinate with Griffin. He also said he disagreed with Womack’s description of such challenges as “voter suppression.” Instead, he said, he saw it as “a proper response” to the state election board’s “violation of federal law.” “Carol Snow deserves an Order of the Long Leaf Pine for exposing this treasonous behavior on the part of the election officials,” he wrote, referring to an award bestowed by North Carolina’s governor.

Womack wrote to ProPublica that the group he leads “is a non-partisan, neutral organization” that does “not favor one party over another.”

He also said that recordings of the group’s calls are “prohibited and violate our internal policies” and “whatever bootleg recording you may have is unauthorized and may well be altered.” ProPublica has seen a video recording of the call and verified portions of it with some participants.

Though Griffin’s challenge of Riggs’ victory is now being considered in federal court, legal experts say it could still end up back where he intended: in front of the state Supreme Court.

Griffin’s petition is making what experts describe as extreme asks to the Supreme Court: to allow him to bypass the lower courts, to allow ballots to be thrown out without proving that voters did anything knowingly wrong and to essentially decide whether to change its composition to six Republicans and one Democrat.

“Even if they do their best to be open-minded and independent, the facts of the potential conflicts of interest are just too obvious to the public,” said Orr, the former Republican justice.

Griffin has described Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and Newby promoted Griffin’s 2020 run for the court of appeals. What’s more, a ProPublica review of campaign finance reports show that the spouses of three justices, including Newby’s wife, donated over $12,000 to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns. (The husband of the Supreme Court’s other Democratic justice donated to Riggs.)

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to spokespeople for the Supreme Court.

When announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court, Griffin declared, “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

A cartoon illustration that hangs in the Supreme Court depicts all the Republican appellate jurists as superheroes from the Justice League, with Newby caricatured as Superman and Griffin as the Flash.

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

Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris focused heavily on immigration, with the Republican nominee attacking the current administration for not closing the border, and spreading xenophobic and racist conspiracy theories about asylum seekers. “Donald Trump resorted to the same deranged and despicable rhetoric that is meant to divide people. From his very first answer, he was demonizing immigrants,” says journalist Jean Guerrero, who has written extensively about immigration, including the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Guerrero says that while Harris “was able to project strength on the border” and undermine Trump on his “signature issue,” she did not do enough to challenge the narrative about immigrants bringing crime and disorder to the country. “I wish that she had countered him on immigration in a more sustained way.”

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

Prior to that, on June 18, the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express derailed near Gonda in Uttar Pradesh claiming four lives and leaving over 40 injured. The accident occurred at Pikaura, halfway between Gonda and Jhilahi.

Just a day before that, on June 17, a goods train hit the Kanchanjunga Express travelling from Agartala to Sealdaha, near New Jalpaiguri in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal resulting in the derailment of two coaches of the passenger train. At least 11 people were killed and 60 injured.

A number of accidents were reported in October-November, 2023. The worst of them on October 29 when the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train rammed into the stationary Visakhapatnam-Palasa passenger at Kantakapalli station on the Howrah-Chennai line in the Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh, resulting in the derailment of four bogies. At least 11 lives were lost and 60 people injured. Earlier that month, four people were killed and 40 injured as the North East Superfast Express derailed near the Raghunathpur railway station in Bihar’s Buxar district on October 11.

These accidents were reported at a time when the memory of the Odisha train mishap — one of the deadliest in India’s history — was still fresh in everyone’s mind. At least 293 passengers were killed and 1,100 injured on June 2, 2023, when the Chennai-bound Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express hit an iron ore-laden stationary goods train derailing 10 to 12 coaches of Coromandel which fell over on another track. The Bengal-bound Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, plying on that line, subsequently collided with those coaches, derailing three to four of its own coaches. The accident took place near the Bahanaga Bazar railway station in Balasore on the Kharagpur–Puri line under South Eastern Railway’s Kharagpur division.

Often after these accidents, sabotage and conspiracy theories have been floated on social media. For example, within hours of the Balasore tragedy, a section of the Right Wing gave it a communal spin by highlighting the day of the occurrence of the mishap — it was a Friday —  and the alleged existence of a mosque near the accident site. Alt News found in its probe that the building described as a mosque was actually an ISKCON temple. Days later, it was again claimed that the station master’s name was Sharif and he had been absconding. Both the claims were found to be false by Alt News.

‘Rail Jihadi Gulzar Sheikh’

On August 1, BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawala tweeted about a person named Gulzar Sheikh who, Poonawala claimed, put “stones, cycles, obstacles on rail tracks”. “Identify these anti nationals who create railway accidents… God knows who all and how many such elements are doing it to cause train accidents.” he wrote in his tweet which contained visuals of a man carrying and placing objects such as a bicycle and a small cylinder near a railway track.

Identify these anti nationals who create railway accidents

There have been several instances of sabotage / signals being covered with paper/ deliberate obstacles being put on tracks

Look at Gulzar Sheikh.. putting stones, cycles, obstacles on rail tracks

God knows who all… pic.twitter.com/2CMg6E0Mfc

— Shehzad Jai Hind (Modi Ka Parivar) (@Shehzad_Ind) August 1, 2024

Squint Neon on X, who uses his social media handles to amplify communal hate and harass interfaith couples, tweeted the video of the same man placing a bicycle on rail tracks and wrote, “Will @Uppolice arrest Gulzar Shaikh for planning & instigating railway accidents across the country?”

Will @Uppolice arrest Gulzar Shaikh for planning & instigating railway accidents across the country? pic.twitter.com/tcHDWm4WME

— Squint Neon (@TheSquind) August 1, 2024

While both these users directly claimed that Gulzar Sheikh or the likes of them were causing train accidents across the country, others also tweeted the same clips and photos of Sheikh with less direct claims. An X handle named Trains of India was one of them. This user said Sheikh, who hailed from Lalgopalganj in Uttar Pradesh, was putting the lives of thousands in danger.

This is Mr Gulzar Sheikh from Lalgopalganj, UP who puts random things Infront of trains for YouTube Money, He is putting lives of 1000s of passengers in danger.
Strict action should be taken against him, @RailwayNorthern @rpfnr_ @drm_lko Sharing all the information Below pic.twitter.com/g8ZipUdbL6

— Trains of India (@trainwalebhaiya) July 31, 2024

Among other who tweeted on this was Amitabh Chaudhary, who amplifies communal propaganda on a regular basis. He wrote that what the likes of Sheikh did was in known as an act of terrorism in a civilized world.

Subsequently, an X user named Legal Hindu Defence (@legalhindudef) which describes itself as a ‘Volunteer legal group’ filing ‘cases on Hindu hate’, tweeted that a police complaint had been filed against Sheikh. In another tweet about Sheikh’s activities, they wrote, “पहले लव जिहाद, फिर थूक जिहाद और अब रेल जिहादअपने मज़े के लिए ये “72” तरीकों से जिहाद की खोज पर निकले हैं”. [First Love Jihad, then Thook Jihad, now Rail Jihad. For his own fun, he is in search of ’72’ ways of jihad.]

The official X handle of DCP Ganganagar under Prayagraj commissionerate tweeted on August 1 that an FIR (No. 233/2024) under Section 147/145/153 of the Railway Act had been registered by the Railway Protection Force in this regard and the accused was arrested by Nawabganj police. Poonawala also tweeted about the arrest saying, “Rail Jihadi in jail now”.

Done Rail Jihadi in jail now https://t.co/8c9dngp9I1 pic.twitter.com/ApbIik5ePm

— Shehzad Jai Hind (Modi Ka Parivar) (@Shehzad_Ind) August 1, 2024

The Union ministry of railways, too, tweeted about Sheikh’s arrest and his photos, urging people to report such behaviour.

सभी से अपील है कि कोई भी ऐसी गतिविधि करता दिखे तो उसे तुरंत रोकें एवं रेलवे या लोकल पुलिस को सूचित कर देश सेवा का कार्य करें।
भारतीय रेल की ओर से जन हित में जारी। pic.twitter.com/E2sBJI8I1K

— Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia) August 2, 2024

Did Gulzar Sheikh Cause Train Accidents?

No.

According to reports, Sheikh was arrested from his home in Khandrauli village in Kaurihar Block of Allahabad district in Uttar Pradesh. We checked his Facebook page and saw that multiple videos were posted from Lalgopalganj, which is about 13 km from Khandrauli. The tweet by Trains of India, too, identified the location of several of Sheikh’s videos as Lalgopalganj railway station, which is under the Lucknow-Charbagh division of Northern Railway.

We looked for reports of train accident from this area since January 2024 (this is when the YouTube channel was created) and did not find any.

However, according to the Railway Property (Unlawful Possession) Act, 1966, “if any railway servant (whether on duty or otherwise) or any other person obstructs or causes to be obstructed or attempts to obstruct any train or other rolling stock upon a railway by squatting or picketing or during any rail roko agitation or bandh; or by keeping without authority any rolling stock on the railway… He shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine which may extend to two thousand rupees, or with both.”

Besides, The Railways Act, 1989, says in Section 150, “if any person unlawfully puts or throws upon or across any railway, any wood, stone or other matter or thing… or does or causes to be done or attempts to do any other act or thing in relation to any railway, with intent or with knowledge that he is likely to endanger the safety of any person travelling on or being upon the railway, he shall be punishable with imprisonment for life, or with rigorous imprisonment for a term which may extend to ten years.”

Hence, prima facie, there is ample ground for the law enforcement agencies to take action against Sheikh. The charges pressed against him pertain to “entering upon or into any part of a railway without lawful authority”, “wilfully or without excuse interfering with any amenity provided by the railway administration so as to affect the comfortable travel of any passenger” and “by any unlawful act or by any wilful omission or neglect, endangering or causing to be endangered the safety of any person travelling in railway”. The first two offenses are punishable with one to six months’ imprisonment and fine of Rs 100 to 500. The third entails imprisonment up to five years.

However, to set the narrative that it was act of ‘Jihad’ and that Gulzar Sheikh or the likes of him was “planning & instigating railway accidents across the country” or to claim that “he was an anti-national who create rail accidents” or his activities pertained to “terrorism”, and the collective social media clamor to slap the National Security Act against him seem exaggerations meant to divert the attention from the real reasons behind frequent train accidents in this country.

Was a Single Recent Train Accident Caused by an Object on the tracks?

No.

Alt News went through several reports on the investigations into each of the recent train accidents. According to information available at this point, none of them was caused by an object placed on the tracks.

The Balasore accident, the deadliest in recent times, was caused by a combination of technical and human errors. According to the report of the commissioner of railway safety (CRS), south eastern circle, “lapses” at various levels in the signal and telecommunication department were responsible for the mishap accident. The report also states, “Notwithstanding the lapses in signalling work, if the SM/BNBR [station master] had informed the repeated unusual behaviour of the crossover 17 A/B [the loop line—main UP line interface] to the S & T staff, they could have traced the false feed extending to the EI logic for the circuit for crossover 17 A/B.” This essentially suggests that though the primary reason was a fault in signalling, the station master, too, was partially at fault. However, officials and sources Frontline spoke to told the magazine that “this was a tall order: Station Masters were too overburdened to stretch themselves to do more…”

Significantly, Page 38 of the report states, “It is also learned from the PCSTE/SER’s letter that there was a similar incident of mismatch between the intended route set by signals and the actual route taken by the train on 16.05.2022 at BKNM (Bankra Nayabaj) station in the Kharagpur division of South Eastern Railway, due to wrong wiring and cable fault. Had corrective measures been taken after this accident to address the issue of wrong-wiring, the accident at BNBR (Bahanaga Bazar) would not have taken place.”

The CRS report into the Kanchenjunga Express accident in North Bengal stated that the mishap was ‘waiting to happen’ because of multiple lapses in train operations management in automatic signal zones and ‘inadequate counselling’ of loco pilots and station masters.

Preliminary inquiry by the CRS found that a “wrong paper authority or TA 912 to cross defective signals had been issued to the loco pilot of the goods train involved in the crash. The paper authority failed to specify the speed the goods train should adhere to while crossing the defective signal.” [TA 912 is a type of a on-paper order issued by railway authorities to loco pilots in case of a signal failure. This document authorizes the pilot to cross a red signal, which would otherwise indicate that the train must stop.]

In case of the Andhra Pradesh accident in October 2023, the CRS report blamed “systemic safety lapses, including the failure of the anti-telescopic features in the coaches of both trains and the malfunctioning of an automatic signalling system.”

There was no mention of any object placed on the tracks as a possible reason for these accidents. After the Odisha tragedy, Railway Board chairman Vivek Sahai told BBC, “A train can derail for a number of reasons – “a track could be ill-maintained, a coach could be faulty, and there could be an error in driving”.” Digital news platform Indiaspend asked Swapnil Garg, professor of strategy management at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, what could cause derailments. He replied, “One particular incident cannot cause a derailment. It has to be a combination of three, four or five different mistakes before a derailment happens. When there is a signalling failure, mechanical failures and civil engineering failures, we find that these collectively result in a derailment.”

In view of this, the massive hullabaloo around Gulzar Sheikh’s mindless videos and the concerted campaign leading to his arrest seem not only an exaggeration, but also a case of misplaced priority. What appears far more pressing is holding the authorities responsible for the ‘systemic lapses’ underlined time and time again by the inquiries into the recent accidents. On the other hand, a far easier thing to do, particularly if one is holding a brief to save the image of the government, is floating a sabotage theory and finding a scapegoat. Gulzar Sheikh fits the bill perfectly.

Is Gulzar Sheikh the Only Such Content Creator?

No.

Alt News found that there were hundreds of railway-related channels on YouTube and several of them posted content similar to the page run by Sheikh. A channel named Super Express posts videos by placing objects like tooth paste, candy, chocolates, green chilies on the tracks. Another channel named Rj Facts has almost 80,000 viewers and posts short videos exclusively on placing objects railway tracks. The objects in the case of this creator include chocolate bars, lozenges and biscuits. Such YouTube channels are not limited to India. An US-based page named Train Experiments posts similar videos and has 75,000 subscribers.

Another channel named IND Vlogs posted a video June 11, 2018 which, unlike most of the videos in the above channels, actually shows some stones being crushed under moving train wheels. The short video has garnered 10 Lakh views.

Alt News Examined Sheikh’s Videos

Gulzar Sheikh has a YouTube channel GULZAR INDIAN HACKER. It has 2,36,000 subscribers and 4 videos at the moment. As many as 218 videos were deleted on August 2, most of them showing him placing objects on railway tracks. The following screenshot taken on August 1 shows 222 videos.

The ‘About’ section of the channel says “Since Experiment video Banata hu all Experiment Ye video kewal naram cheej rakh ta hu Aur kadak cheej nahi rakh ta hu.” [Since I make experiment videos, these are all experiments. I only keep soft objects. I do not put hard objects (on the tracks)].

We watched at least 20 videos posted by Sheikh before they had been deleted. Not a single video we watched actually showed a train passing over an object placed on the tracks. In every video, the creator places something on the tracks and then steps back. And then there is a cut after which a train can be seen coming down the tracks. In the following video which shows him placing a few eggs on the track, there is a cut at the 0.32-minute mark. Then the train appears. After it leaves, there is no sign of the eggs, smashed or whole.

The cycle video and the cylinder video, which raised the maximum number of eyebrows, were no different. At no point, did they show a train hitting these objects or these object actually lying on the tracks when the train arrives. The condition of the cycle seen at the end of the video makes it apparent that it was not hit by the train. It remains in tact with its paddles functioning. Here is a screen recording of the now-deleted video:

The 53-second clip that users like Squint Neon or Trains of India tweeted shows Sheikh placing or trying to place several objects on the tracks — the cycle, a few stones, a small cylinder (which he can’t place on the tracks because of its shape), a slab of stone or concrete, a bar of dishwashing soap and a chicken with its legs tied. Only the soap bar is seen in the video coming under a moving train. It splinters off in the impact. BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla wants you to believe it is an act of terrorism the likes of which cause frequent train accidents in India.

The post Train accidents: The desperate search for a sabotage theory ends in YouTuber Gulzar Sheikh appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

The New York Times‘ op-ed (6/3/24) broke little new ground but arrived at a timely moment for the public debate.

The lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins has been something of a zombie idea in public discourse, popping up again and again in corporate media despite numerous proclamations that it’s finally been debunked (Conversation, 8/14/22; Atlantic, 3/1/23; LA Times, 6/26/23).

The most recent resuscitation of the theory came in the form of a New York Times guest essay (6/3/24), provocatively headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points”—and notably published the day of a congressional subcommittee grilling of Dr. Anthony Fauci over, among other things, his supposed role in a lab leak cover-up. The paper further bolstered the theory in the Times’ flagship Morning newsletter (6/14/24), which spotlighted Chan’s op-ed.

The author of the guest essay, Dr. Alina Chan, is a well-known proponent of a lab leak origin for SARS-CoV-2 (MIT Technology Review, 6/25/21). Her biggest claim to fame is probably the 2021 book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which she co-authored with London Times science writer Matt Ridley. The book’s case for Covid’s origin in a lab leak was criticized for the evidence—or lack thereof—it presented (New Republic, 12/10/21).

Her guest essay reiterates the book’s arguments. But it also recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse.

Misleading air of authority

Chan’s co-author of Viral, Matt Ridley, is a coal-mine owner who argues that “global warming is good for us.”

Under her byline, the Times identified Chan as a “molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

While true, it’s important to note that Chan’s expertise is neither in epidemiology nor virology, but in gene therapy and synthetic biology, meaning she isn’t exactly a subject expert when it comes to the fields most relevant to SARS-CoV-2 research. But that’s far from clear to the average Times reader, for whom such a bio suggests that Chan is an authoritative figure on the subject.

What’s more, the paper produced flashy data visualizations to accompany the piece and help Chan make her case, lending the paper’s institutional credibility to her argument. That same institutional credibility was further invoked by Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, who shared the article on X the day it was published, proudly stating: “Yes, it’s factchecked. And we now know many outspoken experts opposed to this made similar points in PRIVATE.”

But that credibility is not earned by the quality of the underlying evidence Chan offers.

Lacking critical context

Many of Chan’s arguments aren’t new and have already been discussed in depth in a previous FAIR article (6/28/21), so I’ll be mostly focusing on points not already discussed there.

Near the beginning of the essay, Chan makes multiple dubiously selective references to Shi Zhengli, a WIV scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has received copious attention in discussions of a hypothetical escape of Covid from that lab (MIT Technology Review, 2/9/22).

Chan’s theory benefits from selective retelling of a story told more fully by Scientific American (6/1/20).

Chan notes that at the start of the outbreak, Shi “initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.”

Mentioning this worry to journalists would be a relatively strange thing to do for someone trying to cover up a leak from their lab, which Chan has implied on multiple occasions that the WIV researchers are doing (MIT Technology Review, 6/25/21, 2/9/22; Boston, 9/9/20). Chan also leaves out the vital context that Shi says that in response to her worry, she went through the lab’s records to check if it could have been the source, and found that it couldn’t have been (Scientific American, 6/1/20):

Meanwhile, she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: None of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

At another point, Chan asserts that Shi’s group had published a database containing descriptions of over 22,000 wildlife samples, but that database was taken offline in fall of 2019, around the same time as the pandemic began. The implication is clear: that this action was taken in order to hide the presence of SARS-CoV-2, or a virus close enough to be its predecessor, in WIV custody.

Again, Chan doesn’t mention the reason given, that repeated hacking attempts at the onset of the pandemic led the institute to take their databases offline out of fear that they might be compromised. Nor does she address Shi’s claim that the databases only contained already published material (MIT Technology Review, 2/9/22).

It’s possible Chan believes that these are all lies told in defense of a Chinese coverup, but to not even mention these not-implausible explanations belies a biased and selective presentation.

Schrodinger’s proposal

Chan goes on to argue, “The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with US partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.”

This talking point should be familiar to anyone who has been keeping up with the cyclical resurgences of the lab leak theory over the last few years; a key piece of evidence they point to is a leaked 2018 research proposal by the name of Defuse, which was published three years ago by the Intercept (9/23/21).

The proposal is presented as a damning piece of evidence, with Chan stating that the proposed viruses would have been “shockingly similar to SARS-CoV-2.” She admits that this proposal was rejected by DARPA—in part specifically because it involved modifying viruses in ways that were viewed as overly risky—and never actually received funding. But she still posits that the WIV could have pursued research like it, despite presenting no actual evidence that this ever occurred.

Chan engages in a large amount of conjecture stacking in this section, placing unsubstantiated claim atop unsubstantiated claim to produce an argument that looks compelling at a glance but sits upon a pile of what-ifs.

The entire narrative relies on the assumption that a virus similar enough in structure to have become SARS-CoV-2 was present in the WIV at some point before the pandemic, but Chan never presents anything to substantiate this. None of the known viruses within the WIV’s catalog could have been the progenitor, with even the closest virus there—RaTG13—merely seeming to share a common ancestor.

A less-than-alarming detail

A Wall Street Journal article (6/20/23), cited by Chan, about sick researchers at the Wuhan lab left out the key detail that, according to US intelligence, the researchers had “symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19.”

Her point relating to sick scientists is possibly the most dishonest aspect of the entire piece. Chan states that “one alarming detail—leaked to the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former US government officials—is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019.”

If you only read the Journal article (6/20/23) Chan links to, you may be convinced that these cases represent serious evidence. However, the US intelligence report these claims of sick researchers originate from, which has since been made public, clearly shows the weakness of the claim:

While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to Covid-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.

So the intelligence community was unable to establish that any of the researchers actually had Covid-19 and in fact collected information that showed they presented with symptoms consistent with colds or allergies and inconsistent with Covid, with some even confirmed to have been sick with unrelated illnesses.

This is something the Times should have caught and addressed during a rudimentary factcheck.

Meanwhile, the WIV denies the allegations, and challenged its accusers to produce the names of its researchers who were Covid-19 vectors. Chan’s “alarming detail” is therefore both unsubstantiated and dependent upon the existence of a coverup at the WIV.

Weighing the evidence

New evidence that the virus originated at the Wuhan wet market (New York Times, 2/27/22) didn’t make Chan any less confident in her theory.

The final stage of Chan’s argument is identifying deficiencies in the zoonotic spillover theory. She maintains that Chinese investigators, believing early on that the outbreak had begun at a central market, had collected data in a biased manner that likely missed cases unlinked to the market.

She links to a letter to the editor in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (3/20/24) that criticized one of the major market-origin papers (Woroby et al, 2021) on the grounds that it suffered from a large degree of location bias. Consistent with Chan’s habit of ignoring arguments contrary to her thesis, she fails to mention the rebuttal produced by one of the paper’s authors, alongside another researcher.

It’s true that the evidence on the spillover side is currently incomplete; however, this isn’t necessarily damning. It took over a year to identify the intermediary hosts of MERS; we still haven’t found the one suspected to exist for HCOV-HKU1, first described in 2004; and finding the natural reservoir from which SARS stemmed was a decade-long endeavor (Scientific American, 6/1/20).

Still, the circumstantial evidence present for zoonotic spillover is strong. Early Covid-19 cases, as well as excess deaths from pneumonia—a metric far less likely to suffer from the potential bias Chan mentions—cluster around the Huannan wet market, not the WIV. Multiple distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were also associated with the wet market, as would be expected if it were in fact the origination point.

In fact, five positive samples were discovered in a single stall that had been known to sell raccoon dogs, one of the animals suspected as a possible intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 (New York Times, 2/27/22).

As a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, published in the Annual Review of Virology (4/17/24), states in no uncertain terms:

The available data clearly point to a natural zoonotic emergence within, or closely linked to, the Huannan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

False equivalence 

The New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (Morning, 6/14/24) presents evidence and speculation as equally compelling.

Days after the guest essay’s release, the Times featured it in their popular Morning newsletter (6/14/24), under the headline, “Two Covid Theories: Was the Pandemic Started by a Lab Leak or by Natural Transmission? We Look at the Evidence.”

Newsletter writer David Leonhardt situated the debate by explaining that “US officials remain divided” on which theory is more plausible, then presented the issue with scrupulous balance, offering three brief arguments for each theory “to help you decide which you consider more likely.”

But this is complicated, specialized science, not Murder, She Wrote. Agencies like the Energy Department, cited by Leonhardt as endorsing the lab leak theory, do have teams of people with relevant lab and scientific expertise. (Leonhardt does not note, however, that the department has “low confidence” in its conclusion—see FAIR.org, 4/7/23.) But surely, if we’re to talk about where current thought lies on the likely origins of SARS-CoV-2, the most pertinent information to give a lay reader is what people who are experts in viruses and disease outbreaks believe. And the majority of experts in those fields lean strongly in the direction of a zoonotic spillover origin.

In a 2024 survey of 168 global experts in epidemiology, virology and associated specialties, the average estimate that the virus emerged from natural zoonosis was 77%; half the participants estimated that the likelihood of a natural origin was 90% or higher. Just 14% of the experts thought a lab accident was more likely than not the origin. (The survey excluded experts from China as being from a country rated “not free” by the US-funded think tank Freedom House.) Yet Leonhardt left out this crucial information.

The evidence Leonhardt presented for zoonotic spillover involves actual epidemiological data, as well as biological samples showing SARS-CoV-2 was present in the Huannan wet market where live animals susceptible to the virus were being sold.

The evidence presented for the lab leak, on the other hand, is the bare minimum to establish it as even being a possibility, with the strongest point not even being in direct favor of the lab leak, and instead just reestablishing that there are still missing pieces to fully prove a zoonotic spillover origin. These are not equivalent bodies of evidence in any sense of the word.

After presenting these carefully crafted options, Leonhardt suggested the logical conclusion:

Do you find both explanations plausible? I do. As I’ve followed this debate over the past few years, I have gone back and forth about which is more likely. Today, I’m close to 50/50. I have heard similar sentiments from some experts.

This is where the crux of the issue lies: These two scenarios may both be plausible, but the relative evidence of their likelihood is not a coin toss. For some reason, however, the Times seems to want to pretend that this is the case.

Why now?

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett (1843 12/24/23) argued that the Times had “lost its way” in part because it was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab.”

Why has the Times now chosen to revive the lab leak theory? Perhaps it stems in part from recent accusations that, early in the pandemic, corporate media outlets like the Times were overly dismissive of the lab leak possibility. This sentiment was reflected in a post on X (6/4/24) by Times columnist Nicholos Kristof after Chan’s article was published: “In retrospect, many of us in the journalistic and public health worlds were too dismissive of that possibility when she and others were making the argument in 2020.”

This claim of early “lab leak skepticism” has been brought up as evidence of the Times’ supposed left-wing bias, a false claim publisher A.G. Sulzberger is nevertheless at pains to dispel (FAIR.org, 4/24/24).

It’s hard to deny that the Times‘ Covid coverage has shown a strong animus against China, which has played out in absurd op-eds and news stories like “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?” (1/24/20) and “China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Bind: No Easy Way Out Despite the Cost” (9/7/22). (See FAIR.org, 1/29/21, 9/17/21, 9/9/22.)

Whatever its motive, the paper’s decision to publish an argument for the lab leak theory on the day of Dr. Fauci’s congressional subcommittee testimony—without any contrary op-ed to balance it—was clearly intended to influence the public debate.

The responsibility of the press corps on the issue of Covid origins is to help readers understand in which direction the current scientific evidence points. Instead, it misinformed on the science, validating Republican attempts to turn the serious question of the source of a devastating pandemic into a political football.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Phillip HoSang.

There are two more slots for Konstantin. Jewish. Probably 1/4. His grandfather was a gynaecologist who in 1980 protested openly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, promptly became a nonperson, and his family blacklisted. The fall from Soviet grace was hard (sorry, no ‘grinding poverty’) and grandpa emigrated to Britain.

The real story on grandpa is most likely the following. His Jewish great-grandpa was falsely arrested in the 1920s. However, as an engineer, he was still of use to the new socialism, so he lived out his 10 years in the Gulag with three more years added for the hell of it and exile in Siberia till Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin and sent everyone home. He had been a devoted communist at the start and seems to have left his prison years behind, welcomed back into the socialist fold, allowing his son (Konstantin’s father) to become the celebrated doctor with fancy car and prestige apartment. Thank you, Nikita.

The family quickly became part of the nomenklatura and things looked rosy until 1980. Clearly, the gynaecologist had become a dissident, foolishly poking his finger at the bear at a very delicate time. Being a dissident Jew in 1980 in Russia, with Israel and world Jewry hysterically shouting down naive Soviet calls for peace and socialism, demanding the mass emigration of half the Soviet elite NOW, was not a happy vocation. Unless you planned to leave. Again the story is muddled, but Konstantin’s story is that his parents decided he should join grandfather in England and go to a private school. Many Russians gave up hope in the 1990s and looked to the West for a good future. So at 11, he was put on a plane unaccompanied, and began his long march to fame and fortune at the heart of Russia’s traditional enemy.

His other moniker is dissident. While Konstantin never suffered directly in Moscow and became a devoted anglophile, he seems to have inherited the smart-ass, rabblerouser Jewish gene, and he prides himself in his tussles with political correctness [critical race theory (CRT)], occasionally being banned and censored, which of course only adds to his cachet, provides grist for his podcast and more ‘untold wealth’.

That is how I stumbled upon Kisin. What a puzzle: Jewish Russian emigre, smart, young, anglophile … but ‘alt-right’, as he gleefully admits he’s been called? ‘All very, very Soviet.’ Disser of CRT, trans, lgbtqaetc. And bestselling author at 40. I wanted to piece together this puzzle.

An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West starts with an earnest quote from Solzhenitsyn about the decline of the spiritual life leading to social collapse: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand. Hmm. Kisin as a footnote to Solzhenitsyn’s Jeremiad about the decline of both the Soviet Union and the West, but no. Kisin was referring only to the Soviet Union, still hoping the West will recover its soul. It is more interesting as a picture of the confused attempt to justify abandoning his homeland and embrace its enemy. You feel sorry for him at the end, with no sense of where he belongs.

He starts with the anecdote about opening Tamerlane’s tomb on June 21, 1941, inscribed Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I. Tamerlane was given a proper Muslim burial on December 20, 1942, in time for the Battle of Stalingrad, ensuring the defeat of Hitler, so that had a happy ending. He sees CRT as the equivalent of Tamerlane. ‘Today, the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance once again. The tomb of discord and division has been forced open by a small group of ideological zealots. Retreat is no longer an option.’

True, the world around us is indeed changing at unprecedented speed. People are indeed afraid to express their viewers, men and women are opponents, mention of race separates us. He’s right about CRT, but wrong about just about everything else.

Trust me: West is best

His first two chapter are great but for the wrong reasons. The social legacy of the Soviet Union which morphs into black Americans’ ‘the talk’, advice to children about how to act if they’re stopped by police. He had the same lecture as a child in the Soviet Union (SU), except he was instructed ‘how to keep our private conversations secret from the State.’ Cool. The US is becoming like the SU. He trots out Pavlik Morozov (a Stalin-era story of a boy betraying his ‘wrecker’ father), comparing him to Bernie Sanders (?) as a ‘useful idiot’. ‘They are generally the sort of college-educated westerner who embraces this bankrupt ideology [communism] without having any understanding of its real-world implications.’

He then boldly admits that there was optimal income distribution in the Soviet Union (the elite earned 4x what workers earned) vs the 1000+x difference in the West). This was in fact the secret as to why the SU survived so long (and the reason it is mourned by the vast majority of Russians today). Free health, university education (students actually paid a stipend to study!), no racism, no ‘white privilege’, women’s rights, abortion, child care … Things he is disappointed not to see in the West, which he can’t understand. But there’s a catch in all this. Equality, but where everyone is poor, i.e., the Soviet solution to inequality is to cut off people’s legs, though he doesn’t specify that it’s the rich people’s legs that are cut off, so to speak.

Okay, the SU never managed to ‘catch up’ to the West in money income, consumerism, but that’s not the point. At the Muslim Association of Canada 2024 conference ‘Seizing the moment’, Hussein Elkazzaz addressed this false comparison of the West with the Islamic world, which is really just the other ‘other’ for us in the West, like communism.

It assumes you are western, interested only in money and things, so if, say, Egypt is poor, then it is bad, a failure. But, Elkazzaz asks, can you worship freely? Observer the holy days in a vibrant spiritual community? Bring your children up in a safe environment, without the Hollywood-driven culture undermining morality? Some Muslim Canadians go back when they start a family, as that is what’s really important to them, not money and fancier things.

For communism too, money and commodities were not considered as important as good education, health, holidays, camps for children, culture that was moral. Muslims, more than communists, are caught between the two worlds, spiritual growth or economic growth. And they are never really compatible. The SU was operating under the handicap of state-legislated atheism, officially replacing religion with communist ideology, a bad fit as it turned out, as ideological as capitalist America or Muslim Egypt but without the latter’s spirituality.

A study of East Germany and Bulgaria revealed that women had twice as many orgasms in the socialist bloc than in the West. The men were better husbands, the women weren’t stressed by money worries, everyone was equally ‘poor’. Which is nonsense as people didn’t starve. They lived comfortably. The Soviet Union was widely respected in the global south. That’s why I liked communism. It was people-oriented, a friend of the postcolonial world, not $-oriented (to a fault). I liked that workers were honored vs our capitalists feted and treated like kings.

Re universal health care, Kisin is blissfully unaware, by his own admission, as to why Trump, ‘even the almighty Clintons and Barack Obama, couldn’t figure that one out.’ Really? How about capitalism? But no, Kisin loves capitalism. And let’s not forget sunny Cuba and its woes. Sanctions and subversion for 60+ years. The SU endured the same treatment from 1917 till it finally collapsed 74 years later, bringing down most of the socialist world with all its many advantages.

As for freedom, again Kisin admits his parents, and anyone else who cared, had lively debates at home. Everyone was literate and all the pre-Soviet-era classics of world literature and science were available to all. Yes, you had to watch your tongue in public. The SU was never really at peace with a hostile West, so it was naturally paranoid. If you paid any attention to world affairs, that would have been abundantly clear. Nice Cuba also has to restrain its frustrated population to preserve socialism.

Socialism is not easy to build and is easily destroyed, as the whirlwind collapse of the SU showed. And what comes after it is the nasty what-came-before, only worse, as vengeance must be enacted. So empty shelves are a drag, but as long as no one suffers malnutrition, there is definitely a good case to keep socialism alive in the face of unremitting hostility.

Magical sky men

Kisin identifies the underlying problem being the Russian revolution itself, inspired by ideology rejecting real world capitalism. ‘Instead of wasting time trying to create a perfection, which can’t be achieved, the best we can do is deal with reality as we find it.’ Presumably that goes for all revolutions. Kisin excepts the American revolution and its ideology of liberalism, free speech and consumerism.

Kisin compares the modern West to the cargo cults that sprung up among the Melanesian islanders during and after WWII. The trinkets, guns, SPAM were all magical things these nice sky men brought. The Melanesians are skilled carvers so they fashioned mock guns and headphones of wood and sat in makeshift control towers, even flapping their arms on pretend runways. Lesson? ‘We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They have stood the test of time.’ Oh, really?

His analogy with Melanesians is flawed. They saw the sky men as gods with nice miraculous things, and they wanted the things. They didn’t care about western ideology, which indeed is flimsy and is collapsing before our eyes, much like the Soviet ideology of ‘real existing socialism’ collapsed before his eyes. And the magical things we get from Chinese sky men are ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, leaving us high and dry, much like the Melanesians.

As he described the Melanesians, I was thinking ‘what an apt analogy for the mindless consumerism of the late Soviet period, when anything western, from bubble gum to sleek cars, was worshipped and coveted as if it could magically make Soviets feel happy.

Kisin and his fellow Russians view westerners as naive and ‘drunk on decadence, so accustomed to liberty and prosperity that they take it for granted and appear to be throwing it away, completely unaware of its inherent value and fragility.’ They are replacing it with postmodern ideologies culminating in transgenderism, and the cancelling/ destruction of western culture as racist etc.

Kisin is a mirror image to Dmitry Orlov, a hard-nosed Russian American whose Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2011) compare the collapse-preparedness of the US and the SU, arguing that the SU was a mild collapse compared to what’s in store for a totally unprepared, over-the-top arrogant US. Like Orlov, Kisin sees the weakness underlying western society, but can’t see the bankruptcy of both the ideology and reality of the West. His hopes for a miraculous renewal of western society are doomed, much like Gorbachev’s hopes of renewing ‘real existing socialism’ with hasty market reforms, still trapped in the materialist ideology.

I can sympathize with Kisin’s naivete, as I became a communist and lived in hope of a Soviet renewal, reaffirming the ideology of universal brotherhood, real equality, state-funded health and education. It turned out that that ideology-reality was doomed too. Too far apart there. They are equally far apart in the West now too. How about a reality check? Prosperity? Safety? Life expectancy? Stability? Freedoms? Peace? No comment.

Apologist Kisin and Polyanna Pinker

Kisin is an acolyte of Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) seriously claims the world has never been in such a wonderful state, prosperous, blessed with ‘knowledge, mobilized to improve human welfare’.¹

Kisin is a hard-nosed Russian Brit, with no use for ‘pathological altruism’ or any of the ‘wacky, postmodernist, semi-Soviet viruses’. He chastises the West for too much freedom, e.g., Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson, ‘as if their success was their undoing.’ Well, yes, they did have too much material success. Soviet artists lived the high life but a very modest one. I don’t know of any tragedies of the scale of Michael Jackson there.

When capitalism takes control of culture, it encourages the image of freedom, while poisoning the actual lives being lived. We need constraints, especially artists, something to fight against in the interests of Truth. If there is no truth, only ‘drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll’, of course, overnight success becomes the road to infamy, culture degenerates. Kisin sneers at lefty ‘massive wasters snorting failed theories and downing shots of communism, or occasionally injecting socialism straight into our veins, even though we know it’s bad for us.’ That’s just the price of ‘freedom’.

Poe, Freud and Visigoths

Edgar Allan Poe explains in The imp of the perverse (1845) that knowing something is bad for us is the one unconquerable force that compels us to do it. Freud took this to Einstein when he asked Freud if we could avoid war and conflict. Freud replied that we have a tendency to self-sabotage, Thanatos. People are their own worst enemies and strive to bring themselves and the world to ruin, ‘to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter.’ We distract ourselves from stress, guilt, fear of death with reckless behavior, leading ourselves and the world to destruction.

Kisin can’t explain this (like his incomprehension of the lack of universal health care in the US) except as ‘too much freedom’. That’s no explanation, though again, he is right that we are gaslit into thinking that it’s western culture that’s to blame and that the way forward is backwards, to cancel culture, to yet another revolution. To start again, this time basing our (magical) thinking on race, making sure that there’s a balance of colors everywhere, that this balance, like Lenin’s communism, will somehow bring peace and prosperity. He likens the new ideology to a bacterial infection, which targeted and killed Christianity, the English language and capitalism.

Nonsense! Christianity was in steep decline by the mid-19th century, capitalism is alive and well. Kisin is right about how language is being held hostage (be careful what you say doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), but it’s not just woke culture that’s responsible. It’s technology, pushing us to write like AI. You are now a ‘client’ at the public library rather than a patron.

But a good chunk of cancel culture is well-founded. There’s no getting around it: West was in fact built on slavery, racism, militarism and genocide. Kisin has no time for that. But he has no idea how to stop cancel culture and renew the social fabric. Many argue that ‘a good war’ is the solution’ though he demurs. He wants ‘liberals to have a little bit of grit in their oyster.’

Kisin is caught in his ‘love letter to the West’ by the contradictions of capitalism, where freedom means more sexual violence, and social malaise is solved by war, which conveniently increases profit and leads to greater ‘prosperity’. He bemoans the ‘new tsars’ who want to flatten everything and start again, much like what happened in the Soviet Union and which led to woeful results. He compares the West to the Roman empire brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in the 5th century, quoting Carinal Robert Sarah: Europe has lost the sense of its origins. And, like a tree without roots, it will die. ‘Ancient Greece and Rome were the most advanced civilizations of their day. Technologically, culturally, philosophcally, scientifically and politically. Right up until the moment they collapsed.’ Hello Dmitry Orlov!

From Marx to Islam?

This is what was missing in Marx’s critique of capitalism – the psychological side of any attempt to make socialism work. Contrary to Kisin (and Thatcher), socialism is the only way out of our physical destruction of the world at this point, so we better get on board fast. This (huge) hole in Marx’s social theory was seized upon by CRT, a pseudo-Marxism which views everything via race.

No! Kisin reacts viscerally to CRT, but his hatred of all things Soviet prevents him from appreciating that precious part of Soviet reality: an end to racism, and to make sure, you tax the rich and keep income distribution within bounds. Racism is, in the last analysis, economic. Kisin talks about ‘learning from mistakes’ but has no interest in a fair assessment of Soviet experience as important for us precisely now.

We have to build on what worked in the SU and what didn’t, including psychology as a vital part of any answer. He stands by ‘the marriage of free-market capitalism and western liberal democracy, despite the ‘fact’ that they are both at the center of the problem. He knows that income inequality means a bad society, that ‘people’s subjective experience of life is that they are losing,’ that taxing the rich is the unpalatable answer, i.e., socialism. ‘That the ugliness of socialism is only matched by the grotesqueness of capitalism’s excesses,’ but rather than promoting a political backbone to tax the rich, he lamely concludes that ‘society is usually fucked.’

Kisin considers us ‘by far and away the luckiest people in history.’ He even claims capitalism creates peace (‘The UK is currently a nation at peace.’), meaning Friedman’s Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. So why are Macdonalds trashed and  forced to shut down across the Middle East, as IDF soldiers are fed free Big Macs in pursuit of … by far and away not ‘peace’?

Kisin’s family’s ‘dissident Jew’ status was unpleasant, but understandable. Those that wanted to managed to leave, happy and healthy. The SU was not ‘a complete fucking nightmare’ as Kisin claims. It did not ‘collapse under the weight of its own flaws’ so much as it was subverted to death, done in by paranoia and consumerism. And the post-Soviet ethnic strife was not a return to primordial animal instincts so much as the lifting of a firm social norm of equality, replaced by greed, which loves dissent and strife, the better to chain the masses to a soulless consumerism.

Read some Marx, Kostya! Have another look at your Soviet-Russian homeland which tirelessly fought for peace from 1917 and was met by war, invasion and subterfuge right up until 2024 and for many more horrible, blood-drenched years, until ‘the collective West’ is defeated. Who incited and why the current war in Ukraine? Whose missiles are raining down on Russian Crimea, Belgorod, the Kremlin?

Or better yet, have a look at Islam, which meets your socially conservative goals, but unlike capitalism and like socialism, is not so much concerned with flooding the world with consumer junk, but creating a society where your heath and education are free, where social harmony is maintained by redistributing income, where peace is not just hoped for as a by-product of greed, but is the priority of all people, of society, the ummah. Where we have the best conditions to praise God for the bounties we have been blessed with, where we are encouraged to do this with humility. But then there is not a trace of humility in Kisin’s worship of capitalism and ‘his’ talents (as if he produced them), and his new-found exciting consumerist paradise. Our enfant terrible is really just a terrible infant.

ENDNOTE

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

Photo by Eddie Bugajewski

Paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean has developed a comprehensive explanation based on a synthesis of research and archaeological evidence for what propelled H. sapiens to leave Africa about 70,000 years ago and colonize every part of the world, replacing other existing hominin populations.

The post A Compelling Theory to Explain a Key Trait of Modern Humans appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marjorie Hecht.

Kennedy should not be overcredited, he was merely reflecting the change which was ongoing in America’s self perception, not spearheading it. Nevertheless, this view and his support for civil rights for Blacks, be they impelled by conscience or realpolitik, did much to mainstream the revisionist position. The Great White Benefactor, now in his death throes, gave way to a new reification–the Great White Malefactor. No longer were Whites depicted by White elites and their institutions as uniquely altruistic, rather, now, uniquely venal. While many a ghastly crime has been committed by Whites against others, such horrors are now amplified, assigned solely to him, reproduced endlessly for mass consumption, attributed to “Whiteness” and White culture, and White victimhood at the hands of others ignored, denied or dismissed as justified. Western civilization was entirely good, now wholly base and villainous. The theory of White exceptionalism is maintained, but the script has been flipped and Whites are largely if not wholly responsible for the world’s injustices. So profound and widespread is the new anti-White racism that in a new book on critical race theory, penned by Geraldin Heng of the University of Texas, entitled The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, she refers to White people as a “monstrous race.” Did UT-Austin censure her for such unmistakable racist defamation? No, in fact they gave her an award.

Meanwhile, the old, anti-Black racism remains in force, save now in a more subtle, plausibly deniable form. Together, the two racisms have synergy in that they validate each other and inflame the aggrieved. Both racist delusions, exceptional White virtue and exceptional White vice, are only sustainable by massive distortion of world history and a pseudoscience like critical race theory to invest it with the imprimatur of the academy. If you have any doubts about White iniquity just ask Geraldine Heng, she is, after all, an award-winning author and college professor. What more validation could you want?

The point of the propaganda shift, I insist, is the preservation of the age-old canard of a racial hierarchy of merit. The new Great White Bogeyman paradigm foments racial animosity within the working class and compels the primacy of race in political discourse. The race war is class war in disguise, and the only winners are the plutocrats who oppress us all.

However, of late the Great White Malefactor Theory has come under attack, and from what I believe to be a state-aligned institution–of all places. Wikipedia describes PragerU as: “The Prager University Foundation, known as PragerU, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit advocacy group and media organization that creates content promoting conservative viewpoints on various political, economic, and sociological topics.” It is a mouthpiece for American imperialism whose belief in the sanctity of free-market capitalism never wavers. Their “content” is poorly researched and often inaccurate, and it’s clear that they do not care. Recently, they produced a video, hosted by Candace Owens, entitled “A Short History of Slavery” which has caused quite a stir.

In other venues, Candace Owens, a Black, has stated that American Blacks were doing quite well until the 1960s when they began to receive welfare (aid for the poor), which is daft. She has also said that British colonialism in Africa was a net positive for the colonized, which is daft and obscene. For those who may be unfamiliar with American history, let me assure you that these contentions are not merely incorrect but outlandish, sheer lunacy. Whether Owens is an idiot or just plays one on YouTube need not concern us. In the video in question, she gets it basically right.

One of the great racist myths of the Great White Malefactor school of American history is that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was something White people did to Black. In reality, White European elites and Black African elites were partnered in the abomination. Blacks did almost all of the capturing of slaves and sold them on the coast to White slavers under terms dictated by the Africans. Both elites prospered from the lucrative trade.

A brief history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its origins: The people of ancient China were menaced by a confederation of Steppe nomads whom they called the Qiongnu, which roughly translates, Sinologists speculate, to “the fierce people.” The Qiongnu frequently raided Chinese territory stealing whatever they could and raping, killing and enslaving captives for sale or personal use. Around 250 BCE, Qin Shih Huang united China and became its first emperor. He ordered the building of a wall along the northern border to prevent further attacks. In so doing, he set in motion a mass migration which would change the world.

This wall, later to be expanded to become the Great Wall of China, forced the Qiongnu to move west in order to get around it as brigandage is how they made their living, hideous as that is. As they did, they attacked the Yuezhi people who had once occupied the land now vacated by the Qiongnu. The invasion forced the Yuezhi westward again which in turn forced the migration to the west and south of the peoples now displaced by the newly arrived Yuezhi. This resulted in successive invasions of India.

Like the Qiongnu, the Yuezhi were a federation and one of its constituents, the Kushans, came to dominance, and they were one of the peoples who stormed through the Khyber Pass and struck at India. Unlike their predecessors, they were successful. The Kushan Empire soon became quite large and rich.

There had long been east-west trade across the Eurasian Steppe, but it had always been a dangerous venture. Now, with the stability brought to China by unification and centralization and the rise of the Kushan Empire, trade flourished. At this point there were four empires–Chinese, Kushan, Parthian, and Roman–strong enough to police the trade and provide security from the Pacific overland to the Atlantic. Nearly everyone in Afro-Eurasia would be touched by this trade.

The Silk Road may have been more accurately called the Spice Road. In addition to cookery, spices were used in medicine, cosmetics, and food preservation. They were household essentials. The trade became extensive and many peoples around Afro-Eurasia came to depend upon it.

The peace was not to last. The cascade of falling dominoes initiated by the Great Wall was not yet exhausted. The jostling for land upon the Steppe continued and the Road was harried by marauders as the empires weakened over time. Sections of it fell under the control of Huns, Turkics, and others. In time an empire would arise to capture nearly all of it.

The empire of the Mongols was so vast that it became impossible to maintain. It first broke into a few big pieces and then into many small fragments. Instead of being marked up a few times before reaching Europe, now dozens of statelets inflated the price as spices passed through their lands. By the time they reached Europe the cost was so high they were no longer affordable. The Portuguese sought to circumvent the problem by sailing around Africa. Columbus persuaded the Spanish that one could sail directly west from Spain and reach India.

At every stage of this process atrocities were committed. The Yuezhi did not grant permission to the Qiongnu to claim the land they themselves had expropriated by force. It was taken from them by violence in the same way that the American Indian was dispossessed. The Kushans were not invited into India. If the Mongols were guilty of half the barbarity they boasted of then they are the indisputable atrocity champions. It is estimated that they killed ten percent of the global population.

The discovery of the Americas was the greatest economic boom in human history. So colossal was the windfall that the endless stream of New World precious metals collapsed the Spanish economy. Predictably, the allure of easily acquired riches caused an international rugby scrum for control of the trade.

The Europeans in the Americas are guilty of acts of unimaginable savagery. Imperialism, genocide and slavery predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World, but the scale and scope of the predation he was to introduce had never been seen. This coupled with the diseases he brought resulted in the deaths of as many as 56 million people. So great was the death toll that “new research also reveals that following this rapid population decline and the subsequent reduction in land use, there was a global cooling trend.” It is the worst thing that has ever happened. We in the Americas are living in the world’s largest graveyard.

From the Real History of Columbus

African fought African for market share: the coastal Ouidah raided the smaller tribes of the interior capturing and selling literally millions. Covetous of Ouidah wealth, the Fon attacked and took over the sordid business. Then the Oyo attacked the Fon. And then the Allada and the Ashanti and the Mane and the Kingdom of Kongo and so it went. Some smaller tribes were literally sold out of existence. So profitable was the trade that some tribes abandoned traditional means of subsistence and gave themselves over to the slave trade as their sole occupation. As a result, fields lay fallow and craft production in particular suffered. This weakened Africa and made it more vulnerable to the European imperialism which was to come.

The worst example was the Kingdom of Dahomey. It became a slave state like no other. Half the population was enslaved to perform those tasks necessary to sustain the Kingdom while the other half was engaged in slave capture. Human sacrifices were regularly if infrequently held and the Dahomey kings insisted that the European slave buyers attend the ghoulish ritual. Dahomey was as close to dystopia as we are ever likely to see. The slave trade devastated African society. Culturally it sowed distrust of African for African, and materially it depopulated the continent and deprived it of its young. This in time brought a decline which further embedded Africa in the slave trade, the very thing which was causing this most vicious of cycles.

As stated above, Blacks and Whites were partnered in the slave trade, and both bear responsibility for the ransacking of the New World which likely would not have been possible without Africa’s provisioning the colonizers with millions of slaves. Buyer and seller are guilty. So why is this history suppressed? Why isn’t the Transatlantic Slave Trade presented in an open and accurate way? It isn’t. The American school system teaches that the slave trade occurred because White people are immoral. The reason for such slander is that an honest rendering of events outlined above, precludes race as cause. From Ancient Bactria to imperial Mali and colonial Virginia, people engaged in unspeakable acts, and White, Black, Brown and Asian people all have innocent blood on their hands. The Great White Bogeyman Theory of history serves the interests of the ruling class in that it acts to cow White people with guilt and to give Blacks every reason to fear and loathe Whites. A forthright accounting might make White and Black people feel differently about each other, and that might very well spell the end of capitalism. Interracial working-class cooperation is what American elites fear most; and what Whiteness studies, critical race theory, wokeness, intersectionality and all the other species of insipid race fetishism are intended to avert. When the curtain is lifted and truth revealed, it becomes abundantly clear that it was not race which catalyzed the holocaust that was the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but profit. The people on both ends of the oceanic slave trade were not sadists, they were businessmen.

And this is why PragerU’s video is so confounding. They have just slaughtered one of the sacred cows of American racism. Why? They have just debunked their own racial propaganda, one which has served the plutocracy well for half a century. Why decommission the Great White Bogeyman? Could this be related to the butchery currently occurring in Gaza? With Whites exterminating Browns with impunity perhaps some grandee thought it prudent to preemptively rehabilitate Mr. Bogeyman before too much anger developed and things got out of control. Could it be that this has something to do with the upcoming election? Is it an attempt by the anti-Trump faction to deprive him of discursive ammunition and take the sting out of his strongest talking points? Maybe it is merely a case of the faux social media Right provoking the faux social media Left so that both can attract clicks. Or perhaps it is just the latest tune pounded out on the ol’ Mighty Wurlitzer.

Whatever its purpose it seems a dangerous tack to release that genie from her bottle. It brought a tear to my eye watching several Black YouTubers wail in bewilderment that they had been taught something different. It made me reflect on how much we have been disinformed and made to hate each other, and it deepened my hatred of this loveless capitalist world in which we are condemned to live.

It should be noted that the video was not too heterodox. At the end Aunt Thomasina implores her fellow Blacks to put their faith in Uncle Sam and embrace American patriotism. I don’t believe the young Black YouTubers who reviewed her video will heed that call.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dave Fryett.

President Joe Biden, asked last week what his government planned to do to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, responded by rejecting the idea that the numbers could be trusted. “I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said on Wednesday. “I’m sure innocents have been killed and it is the price of waging war,” he added. “But I have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using.”

A new analysis by The Intercept provides evidence refuting that claim.

Biden’s effort to delegitimize the numbers coming out of Gaza as fake news has created an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis; they note that Hamas governs Gaza and therefore runs the Ministry of Health and is inflating the figures. (Biden later clarified he meant to say he didn’t trust Hamas, not all Palestinians, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Biden’s claim was quickly rejected by human rights organizations that have been active in Gaza for years. The Associated Press noted that the Ministry of Health’s figures from previous conflicts have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. And the State Department itself has long considered the numbers reliable. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health, meanwhile, responded by publishing a list of names of 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children. The list included 2,665 children, but The Intercept found that one 14-year-old boy was listed twice, bringing its total down to 6,746. Otherwise the list does not contain duplicates.

Now that the Health Ministry has published a list of victims, skeptics have suggested that the list may be fabricated and that a paper with names on it proves nothing. Immediately after the publishing of these names, Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby maintained the skepticism, saying that the ministry is “a front for Hamas” and that “we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health at face value.” 

Pressed, Kirby acknowledged civilian casualties were rising. “We absolutely know that the death toll continues to rise in Gaza. Of course we know that. But what we’re saying is that we shouldn’t rely on numbers put forth by Hamas and the Ministry of Health,” he said. A reporter noted that independent reporting suggested “thousands” of civilians had been killed. “We would not dispute that,” Kirby said.

But is the list itself reliable? We interrogated it and were able to corroborate dozens of names on the ministry’s list through a single family. 

Prior to the release of the list, Maram Al-Dada, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Gaza but now lives in Orlando, Florida, had told The Intercept about the deaths of seven relatives on his father’s side of the family and 30 on his mother’s side, in and around Khan Yunis. A week later, that number had risen to 46 total. (He and his family were featured on last week’s Deconstructed podcast.)

We compared the list of his relatives that began to be compiled last week — before the release of the list by officials in Gaza — to the list subsequently made public by the Ministry of Health. Al-Dada and his parents requested that last names not be published, as there is concern in Gaza that Israel has targeted journalists and their families, and might also retaliate against civilians who speak to Western media. The family hopes to emerge from the war with as many relatives still alive as possible.

The list of those killed includes four different last names: 30 members of one branch of the family, nine from another, four from a third, and three from a fourth. 

Of those 46 members of Al-Dada’s family so far lost in the war, 43 appear on the list, from the littlest — a baby girl not yet 1 — to the oldest, a 71-year-old grandmother.

When a building is struck, multiple generations are wiped out. “In Palestine, the society is set up differently than it is here,” Al-Dada noted. “People never leave their place. So families are huge; they all stay close to each other. For example, if you have a son, he will get married and he will build a house right behind your house and this keeps going. That’s why you will find a lot of people are getting killed from the same family.” 

Each name on the list is the story of a profound tragedy. One family’s home had already been bombed, for instance, and so the father and two children sought refuge at his brother’s house. The wife of the family’s father was in Saudi Arabia, undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca, when she learned her husband and children had been killed in a new bombing at her brother-in-law’s house. The bombing also killed the man’s brother.

There have also been many close calls. On Monday, the neighbor of Al-Dada’s grandparents was bombed, killing the family living there. A small piece of shrapnel from the explosion tore through a steel grate, blasted through a white chair and destroyed the family’s refrigerator. His grandmother, who was unharmed, had been sitting in that chair just moments earlier. He shared the following photos with us.

A shrapnel piece, damaged plastic chair, and ruptured refrigerator from the home of Maram Al-Dada’s grandparents in Khan Yunis, Gaza.

A report in HuffPost also found that nearly 20 State Department reports have cited the ministry, and one also argued the ministry may have undercounted. “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation,” the U.S. State Department report read.

The Intercept presented the White House with our new reporting and asked if Kirby and Biden stand behind their claims. We also asked whether the administration has made any independent efforts to gauge the extent of the killing if the Health Ministry’s numbers aren’t reliable, and if, as the administration states publicly, it is concerned about civilian casualties. The White House referred us to public comments made by Kirby and State Department spokesperson Matt Miller that acknowledged civilian casualties.

“We don’t have any way to make an accurate assessment of our own about the number of civilians who have died in Gaza,” Miller told reporters. “There is not an independent body that’s operating in Gaza that can provide an accurate number. But we do have skepticism about everything that Hamas says, but that said, obviously a number of civilians have died, which is why we’re working to do everything we can to minimize civilian harm and get humanitarian assistance in to the civilians in Gaza.”

Far from doing everything it can to minimize civilian harm, the Israel Defense Forces has said its “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division of Israel’s military, said recently, “When our soldiers are manoeuvring we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 aeroplanes overhead destroying anything that moves.”

Al-Dada said his family was firmly apolitical, with zero connections to Hamas. The October 7 attack on Israel surprised them as much as it did the world. 

Since Biden muddied the waters on the extent of the carnage, Israel imposed a total communications blackout on Gaza, while ratcheting up its airstrike campaign and launching a ground invasion. U.S. officials have reportedly issued private warnings to the Israeli government but have still not threatened to withdraw any military, political, or economic support. Instead, the Biden administration is putting together a $14 billion package for Israel that includes money for the Iron Dome, replenishment of weapons, and more.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza produced updated figures: As of Tuesday, October 31, at least 8,525 Palestinians have been killed and more than 21,543 injured since October 7.

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

But following the ruling, Brazilian lawmakers approved legislation that would make marco temporal legal anyway, putting Indigenous lands and communities at risk again.

It’s estimated that Indigenous peoples safeguard nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity with the Brazilian rainforest containing almost a quarter of all terrestrial biodiversity and 10 percent of all known species on earth. However, over the last four years, under former president Jair Bolsonaro’s policies, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development, and an estimated 965 square miles of Indigenous territories lost to extractive industries.

Brazil’s agribusiness sector, which holds significant influence over the country’s conservative congress, has supported efforts to make marco temporal law, citing economic development as the key reason to adopt the legislation. With passage, the law would mark a specific time for when Indigenous land claims could be accepted: if Indigenous communities weren’t on the land they claimed in 1988 – when the Brazilian constitution was passed – they would have no claims to those lands, opening them up for development. 

According to Land is Life, an international Indigenous rights advocacy group, beyond ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling, the bill infringes on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Global watchdogs like Cultural Survival, an organization promoting the self determination of Indigenous peoples plan to fight for the protection of Indigenous lands.

A coalition of seven Indigenous Brazilian organizations have sent an appeal to the United Nations denouncing violence against Indigenous peoples and warning that the approval of the marco temporal bill could lead to more. They have also urged president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to veto the bill.

In the runup to his election, president Lula said he would create a Ministry of Indigenous Affairs headed by an Indigenous person, recognize Indigenous land claims, and put a stop to illegal mining on Indigenous territories and rebuild the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).

The bill now awaits Lula’s approval or veto, but even with a veto, lawmakers can override it with a majority vote in each chamber.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Marco temporal: the anti-Indigenous theory that just won’t die on Oct 16, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lyric Aquino.

The recent and periodic arguments concerning the proposed federal budget, an entrance for initiating threats to “close the government,” highlight how both political sides of Congress wrongly portray the fiscal deficits that have become implicit in federal budgets. Two wrongs do not make a right, and, in this case, they have caused misunderstandings and problems.

Start with the Republican Party

Republicans refuse to admit that an expanded money supply is required to support the increased economic activity of a growing economy and increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP ). This does not mean that an increase in money supply will increase GDP; the implication is otherwise  ─ a given money supply is required to sustain a definite GDP. If production exceeds the money supply for purchasing the goods and cannot be cleared, prices will be cut and deflation will develop. A simple and accepted equation that describes the quantity theory of money certifies this proposition:

GDP = Money Supply x Velocity of Money

With the Velocity of Money constant, GDP cannot increase unless the Money Supply increases, and the Money Supply cannot increase without either banks issuing credit or the Federal Reserve purchasing government notes and bonds, both of which increase total national debt.

More appropriately:

GDP = Consumer spending + Business Investment + Government Spending + (Exports – Imports)

The United States has been running trade deficits for decades, and a portion of government spending equalizes the trade deficit.

TRADE BALANCE

A more significant figure is the Current Account, which is the sum of the trade balance (exports minus imports of goods and services), net factor income (interest and dividends) and net transfer payments (such as foreign aid). If the Current Account is positive, it adds purchasing power to the economy. Since the current account has been in negative for decades, it has been a subtractive figure and an equivalent purchasing power has been transferred out of the economy. The government issues debt to foreign nations and returns the purchasing power to the nation.

CURRENT ACCOUNT

The Republican Party has become the Party vocally rebelling against “big government.” Vocally is the correct word; in practice, Republican administrations have favored deficit spending  ─ look at the record.

The federal debt grew slowly until the Ronald Reagan (RR) administration, in 1982, radically increased the slope of the debt curve and used deficits to recover from a recession and continue prosperity. This is the same Ronald Reagan who is credited with the phrase, “the government is not the solution but the problem,” and “believed that reducing the role of the government would lead to increased economic growth, which in turn would lead to higher revenues that would help pay down the national debt.” During RR’s time in office, the national debt almost tripled, going from $1.14T to $ 3.00T. His Republican successor, George H.W. Bush, continued the rising debt trend until Democrat President Bill Clinton ran surpluses. Republican George W. Bush reversed Clinton’s cautious policies and again rapidly increased the federal debt.

After the severe 2008 economic crisis, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department forced the government into rescue plans that greatly increased the national debt and these plans continued through Democrat Obama, Republican Trump, and Democrat Biden administrations. The reasons for the escalated debt are apparent from an examination of the constituents of public debt.

Of the $30T debt, referenced to June 2021, only about $10T was held by American citizens; about $8T was in the hands of foreign creditors, and $6T was held by the Federal Reserve Bank. Intra-government holdings ─ debt between government agencies ─ of $6T, which is not a public problem, completes the total government debt. This breakdown shows that the fiscal policies are not responsible for the elevated debt; the need for elevated debt is responsible for the fiscal policies that drive the elevated budget.

The principal components of the debt are obligations to foreign institutions, including governments, which results from the negative trade balance ─ $850B in 2022 ─ and from Federal Reserve monetary policies of promoting maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. From its Open Market Operations, the Federal Reserve accumulated a debt of $6T.

The causes of the negative trade balance are the consumer eagerness for imported goods and the lack of growth of U.S. exports. Due to the pause in consumer purchases during the COVID-19 emergency lockdown, exports had a brief spurt after the lifting of the lockdown and then remained stagnant. This is not a direct government problem; it is a direct problem of a private industry that cannot increase exports, competitively combat imports, and reduce the trade deficit. Private industry shifts the problem to the government, which is forced to retrieve the dollars that leave the country by selling debt.

The Federal Reserve opted to print money and finance debt in order to stimulate the economy during the sub-mortgage loan crisis in 2008 and the Covid crisis, and the federal government became a recipient of that debt. If the Republican Party is serious about reducing the debt, it would examine its sources, which are the negligence of private industry to compete with foreign products and the failure of the Federal Reserve to reduce its balance sheet.

The manner in which former Republican President, Donald Trump, approached the trade deficit demonstrated a lack of knowledge in understanding government debt and how to reduce it. Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports, which made imports more costly to the American consumer and increased the trade deficit, which led to additional government debt.

The Republican endeavors to reduce the federal budget and slow the increase in debt have merit but it is being done without thought and only for political reasons. Each year some debt is repaid and the money supply accordingly shrinks. With a current account deficit showing no sign of returning to positive territory, to maintain the GDP, new debt must replace retired debt. If private borrowing cannot do more than keep debt constant, the GDP might remain constant. Lacking an increase in private debt, government debt moves GDP to positive growth. Far-right enthusiasts extol the capitalist system and belittle the government debt that anchors the capitalist system in a positive direction.

The chart shows GDP growing as a combination of consumer and government debt. In 1995, to prevent inflation, a sharp rise in consumer debt initiated a pause in government debt. The opposite occurred in 2008, when a drop in consumer debt prompted a massive uptick in government debt.

Continue with the Democratic Party

The U.S. has low unemployment, a more than-marginal economy, and high inflation. The Republicans have a good point: Inflation has too much money chasing too few goods, so why should the government run a deficit to invigorate the economy and provoke more inflation? Analyzing the budget is beyond the scope of this article. Cutting the budget is not beyond the scope of budget makers. A sharp eye with a sharp pencil can do it. If not, what’s wrong with a tax hike, except, of course, it might harm the Party’s election prospects.

Quote Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.” Without proof, the Republican Party and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform have pushed catchy expressions into our lexicon, casually and with absolute conviction. Two of the most prominent are:

Lowering income tax rates benefits the economy.
Raising income tax rates harms the economy.

These beliefs, which derive from the assumption that if present income tax rates are decreased then total spending in the economy will increase, are shibboleths and not supported by analysis or facts. A simple analysis exposes the fallacies of both expressions.

Taxes transfer money between the government and the taxpayers; neither method adds or subtracts new money nor allows more or less available spending to the economy; in both scenarios, the purchasing power stays the same. The spending may contain different goods and services, but the total purchases of goods and services are identical. Actually, lowering taxes can be detrimental to the economy, while raising taxes may provide definite benefits.

Raising taxes transfers funds from the consumer to the government.
The government assembles huge funds that allow the development and purchase of products, such as airplanes from Lockheed. The manufacturer hires workers to produce the aircraft. The total wages paid to the workers almost match the raised taxes. Spending by the new wage earners ripples through the economy, and, in its final appearance, will almost match the reduced consumer spending of the taxed individuals. Employment, production, and GDP (airplane purchases)have increased ─ give an advantage to tax increases.

Lowering taxes does the opposite; forcing the government to purchase fewer goods and services. The money and spending remain with the already employed and do not incentivize additional employment. Because lowering taxes lowers government revenue, budget considerations might demand an increase in budget deficits.

Lowering taxes mainly assists the already employed, and that is not the major priority. Who pays taxes ─ the employed. Who receives tax breaks ─ those who pay taxes. In effect, lowering taxes redistributes federal assistance from needy persons to the employed. Which is preferable, redistributing income so the employed have more to spend or redistributing the income so the underemployed have something to spend?

Conclusion

Maybe the Biden administration has a good reason for the estimated $1.8T deficit in the 2024 budget, but the present inflation rate of 3.67% encourages a cautious look at increasing demand and pumping an oversupplied economy. Evidently, the Dems fear that the high interest rates will induce a drop in private demand for credit, decrease spending, and trigger a recession. The politicos concluded that the risk of damaging election prospects is higher than the risk of accelerated inflation and getting elected comes before public need.

The last sentence describes the operations of both political Parties ─ their needs come before citizen needs and their policies are designed to benefit themselves. The GOP fails to understand the meaning of government debt and the Dems refuse to use it wisely.

Perceived as a financial evil that corrodes the American government, the green albatross of ongoing federal deficits is an essential element of the free enterprise system ─ a partner to all other debts in an economic order that runs on debt. National debt has a decisive role in maintaining the welfare capitalist system ─ ballast to keep the system floating and reserve energy to prevent it from total collapse. This anti-hero is a prominent savior of free enterprise and those who rail against temporary government deficits without examining its benefits are negligent in their understanding of a capitalist economy and guilty of pushing the economic system into ultimate decline.

Government Debt is not the Problem.
Government legislators are the problem,

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

Photograph Source: JD Hancock – CC BY 2.0

Where once there was robust, enduring debate about the so-called Great Man Theory of History – from Carlyle to Spencer to William James, with bows along the way to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Jacob Burckhardt – today there is nary a word to such effect. More than anything, I suspect, this is due to the fact that there no longer are any readily identifiable great men (or women) among us; they have been summarily displaced by legions of little men and women, who now surround us in virtually every walk of life. This gives life to an emergent Little Man Theory that defines our present and promises to dictate our future.

Where today could we find the likes of Lincoln, Washington, MLK, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, George Marshall, Edward R. Murrow, Tecumseh, Robert Jackson, or Ralph Bunche, to name but a few, who rose to, oversaw, and took control of the great challenges of their time with unsurpassed dignity, while elevating, reassuring, and lighting the way for the rest of us? The answer is, we can’t. They’re nowhere to be found – because they no longer exist. Smallness – of mind and character – is the order of the day in our public figures.

The heroes, icons, and role models of our past were, and remain, worthy of the utmost respect and emulation because of the example they set. What we have in their place today is quite the opposite, exemplified most emphatically by a twice-impeached, four times criminally indicted former President who is the quintessential Little Man – large in physical size, but small in spiritual and intellectual stature. When the Leader of the Free World spends the lion’s share of his time tastelessly bad-mouthing and castigating others, it’s not only bad form, it’s undignified, unworthy of the office, an insult to professionalism and the conduct of statecraft.

Regrettably, this archetypal Little Man isn’t alone; he is, rather, only the most visible, loudly outspoken exemplar of the qualities that define today’s Little Men, most notable for the oppressive regularity with which they disparage, denigrate, diminish, disenfranchise, disadvantage, depress, deceive, divide, and destroy all – human or material – that comes within their ambit.

Irony of ironies, whereas leadership has traditionally been defined in terms of the followership it elicits, the little men and women of today almost universally attract followers from the masses without demonstrating an iota of legitimate leadership; they are, simply stated, anti-leaders whose words and actions are the very antithesis of the characteristics we commonly ascribe to true leaders: myopia where there should be vision; cluelessness where there should be discernment; ineptitude where there should be competence; cowardice where there should be courage; shamelessness where there should be dignity; totalistic selfishness where there should be empathy and altruism; greed and grift where there should be sacrifice. Yet cultish herds of unsuspecting, wishful-thinking, blind sheep persist in bowing to them unsuspectingly and unquestioningly.

For 19^th-century Britons Carlyle and Spencer, the times they inhabited actually produced some Great Men – Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli (and, yes, Queen Victoria) among them – individuals fully capable of shaping the great events of the day. Little wonder that Carlyle would be moved to observe: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

James, straddling 19^th and 20^th century America, also could be said to have been surrounded by a wealth of real-world exemplars of great men – those who both shaped and were shaped by events: Lincoln and Grant; Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois; Edison, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver; Emerson, Whitman, and Twain; even Gilded Age “robber barons” like Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt (whose greatness owed to innovation, jobs, and philanthropic largesse).

Today, it takes great events to make otherwise congenitally little men great; and that just isn’t happening. This lends weight to Spencer’s contention that men are made great by their surrounding societies. There are manifold great challenges before us today that demand greatness in response. But neither pandemics, nor global warming, nor endless war, nor rampant militarism, nor catastrophic natural disasters, nor violent crime and substance abuse, nor hordes of displaced and dispossessed humans the world over have thus far seemed capable of elevating the most prominent individuals in our society to greater heights of achievement. No. Rather are they stuck in, and prefer to remain in, an infinite loop of unfettered self-absorption, self-promotion, self-interestedness, self-indulgence, and self-aggrandizement.

One could easily identify the many Little Men in our midst by name, but it would be petty, catty, and tasteless to do so, even if that would extricate us from charges of unsupported generalization.  Simply look around – most notably in the fields of politics, governance, and diplomacy, but no less in business, science, education, religion, medicine, military affairs, and the arts. Littleness is everywhere evident among those who grab the headlines, demand recognition and deference, and seek the perquisites and privileges of power by promising grandiosity in place of greatness.

If this Little Man Theory is to be acknowledged and ultimately accepted, it must measure up to the call of any theory for testable hypotheses or postulates. These postulates take form in the attributes that seem so clearly to characterize littleness:

+ Narcissism: the unadulterated admiration of self that, ultimately, is the centerpiece of, the motive force behind, the Little Man’s every word and deed.

+ Arrogance: the self-anointed superiority the Little Man considers his rightful standing over all other people and circumstances.

+ Ignorance: the preferred state of cultural, historical, and situational illiteracy the Little Man embraces as a reflection, in his mind, of the superiority of belief and assumption over knowledge.

+ Deception: lying as the norm the Little Man consistently employs to manipulate truth to his advantage.

+ Intolerance: the Little Man’s persistent rejection of difference and diversity as somehow giving the undeserving many unfair advantage over the deserving few.

+ Insensitivity: the empathy-challenged absence of feelings for others the Little Man considers appropriate testimony to his strength and their weakness.

+ Disloyalty: the Little Man’s expectation that others unconditionally give their unreciprocated allegiance to him as an expression of their intrinsic worth.

+  Ambition: the projection of narcissistic motivation by which the Little Man constantly strives, as effortlessly as possible, to get ahead, claim credentialing and privilege, and achieve status and recognition.

Little Man Theory remains mere theory, to be sure, possibly no more than an inchoate proto-theory, because it is yet hypothetical, speculative, and assumptive. It nonetheless warrants our serious attention. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin once famously said: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” It is perhaps ironic that Little Man Theory and the Theory of Evolution seem to have converged on the downside of the latter, thereby signaling that human beings are now in a state of decline that robs us of our pretention of being a superior species.

The little men and women who occupy and seek to occupy the key positions of influence and authority in our lives are society’s, if not humanity’s, hemlock. They do nothing but drag us down to their lowest common denominator level of desultory mediocrity, jealousy, mendacity, dishonesty, and entropy. They force upon us, or we force upon ourselves, division rather than unity, dissensus rather than consensus, self-loathing rather than pride, ungreatness rather than greatness. Why do the words of Woody Allen seem so resonant here: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens”?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gregory D. Foster.

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

ProPublica has been reporting on family courts’ handling of custody disputes that involve allegations of child or domestic abuse. The reporting shows that a disputed psychological theory that’s been rejected by mainstream scientists has widespread influence on outcomes in family court.

Parental alienation is a theory in which one parent is accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent. It is most frequently diagnosed and cited as evidence in divorce and custody cases, even though most mental health professionals reject it as junk science.

The theory was the brainchild of Dr. Richard Gardner, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who made a career as a paid expert witness in more than 400 child custody cases, testifying most often on behalf of fathers accused of sexually abusing their children.

Gardner developed the theory of parental alienation syndrome, a condition in which children wrongly believe they are being abused, and recommended courts treat the children by placing them in the custody of the parent accused of abuse. “Severe” cases, he argued, required “threat therapy” to disabuse children of their distorted beliefs.

Few mainstream professional groups have accepted it as a diagnosable condition. But today, programs across the country claim to treat parental alienation using similar techniques, according to a ProPublica investigation. These programs, which can cost $15,000 or more for a four-day intervention, are court-ordered.

Contemporary advocates of the theory vary in their allegiance to Gardner and his version of parental alienation as a syndrome. Some classify it as a “relational disorder” rather than a syndrome. Others continue to defend Gardner’s conceptualization of parental alienation syndrome, despite Gardner coming under fire in the 1990s for arguing that pedophilia has benefits for human survival.

Demosthenes Lorandos, a lawyer and parental alienation scholar who knew Gardner personally, said he has been misrepresented. “The woke types would go completely crazy and say, ‘Oh my God, he’s advocating for pedophiles,’ which is the opposite of what he was doing,” Lorandos told ProPublica. The controversy surrounded “Richard’s desire to stop false sexual abuse cases,” he said.

Parental alienation is not accepted as a mental health disorder by psychiatry’s diagnostic bodies. The American Psychiatric Association has repeatedly declined to include parental alienation in the DSM-V, the group’s diagnostic manual. Scholars of parental alienation claim it is a rapidly developing field of scientific inquiry and advocate for its inclusion in the diagnostic manual.

It has also been denounced by the World Health Organization and is shunned by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges for failing to meet court evidentiary standards. And in May, a special report released by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council blasted parental alienation as a “pseudo-concept” and recommended member states prohibit its use in family courts.

Madelyn Milchman, a licensed psychologist in New Jersey who researches child custody and traumatic memory, said the theory relies heavily on “perceptions of women in Judeo-Christian societies as hysterical, vitriolic and irrational.” (Gardner’s original rendering of the theory portrayed mothers in this way, she said.)

“Once you start on that train ride, and you believe that the mother has programmed the child, it no longer matters what the child says because the child is not credible, and the mother’s not credible,” said Milchman, who holds a doctorate in psychology. This doubt can lead to a “snowball effect” in family courts, fueled by “experts who testify on behalf of the alienation belief system.”

Some defenders of parental alienation have tried to separate the theory from its gender-focused origins. Jennifer Harman, an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University who serves as an expert witness on parental alienation, argues that doing so overlooks men as victims of domestic violence and abuse.

Parental alienation is diagnosed almost exclusively in family courts — either by privately hired expert witnesses or court-appointed custody evaluators. There, it is used to explain why a minor is claiming that he or she is being abused.

For example, in an ongoing case in Utah, siblings Ty and Brynlee Larson accused their father of sexually abusing them. The father’s attorney argued that the children’s mother was brainwashing them to believe their father had abused them. The abuse had been substantiated by state authorities in 2018. As a result, a court official restricted the father’s visits. Earlier this year, a judge agreed that the mother was alienating the minors and authorized police to place them into the custody of their father. In his order, the judge did not mention the previous findings of abuse against the father. The siblings resisted, barricading themselves in a bedroom in their mother’s home where they used TikTok to call attention to the judge’s orders.

Critics of parental alienation say that its nearly exclusive manifestation in custody litigation — and the fact that it almost exclusively affects children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds — further undermines the argument that it is a legitimate disorder. “True mental health disorders are more equally distributed throughout the population, regardless of socioeconomic status, class or social context,” said Dr. David Corwin, a professor and director of pediatric forensic services at the University of Utah and a past president of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.

Corwin also said that the words “parental alienation” do not need to be used in court to implicate the theory in a custody dispute. In fact, many lawyers and custody evaluators specifically avoid using the term because it has become so polarized. Other commonly used terms that implicate the theory include coaching, used to describe a child being trained by an adult to claim abuse when it did not happen; triangulation, used to describe a parent purposely manipulating a child in order to gain power in a conflict; and pathogenic parenting, used to describe parents projecting delusional beliefs onto their children.

Law enforcement and state child welfare agencies also sometimes cite parental alienation to dismiss allegations of child abuse. In a Colorado custody case ProPublica just reported on, state child welfare agencies decided not to investigate dozens of reports by mandatory reporters who expressed concern that a child was being physically and sexually abused by his father. Authorities appeared to believe that the child had been manipulated by his mother to report abuse so she could gain ground in the custody dispute. The court also agreed that the mother’s conduct met the definition of alienation.

The courtroom is where advocates of the theory have pressed for its acceptance. In Colorado, they have seized on a 2020 state Supreme Court ruling that parental alienation is a form of child endangerment.

The first courtroom battle is to establish that parental alienation is “real,” said Amy J.L. Baker, an advocate for the theory who holds a doctorate in developmental psychology but is not a licensed psychologist. “If you have a Supreme Court that’s already said it is, that door is, like, unlocked.”

Baker co-authored a recent proposal to the APA to include parental alienation in the DSM-V. The group previously rejected a similar request made in 2012.

In cases when mothers allege abuse and fathers respond with claims of parental alienation, it roughly doubled a woman’s chances of losing custody in court, according to a 2020 national study on parental alienation funded by the U.S. Justice Department.

Another study funded by the Justice Department found the primary reason judges award custody to an abusive parent is that the mother is not viewed as credible. Two-thirds of the mothers in the study were dismissed as psychologically unwell and, in some cases, were denied custody even after their concerns about abuse were found to be valid.

Though family court judges operate with maximum discretion and little oversight — family court records are routinely sealed from the public — an increasing number of custody rulings based on parental alienation are being appealed, according to Paul Griffin, a former litigator of child abuse cases and the legal director of Child Justice, a legal assistance group.

“There are not enough lawyers attacking it sufficiently,” Griffin said. “But that could change as parents realize they have grounds to stand on and lawyers realize the higher courts are starting to pay attention to how a junk theory is proliferating unchecked in lower courts.”

A primary concern among those who oppose the use of parental alienation in the court is that it misinterprets evidence that would otherwise indicate child abuse.

“Parental alienation concocts this notion that if a kid exhibits certain symptoms that, incidentally, are the same symptoms of being abused, it was alienation,” said Richard Ducote, an attorney who specializes in defending parents accused of alienation. “It was a very clever idea to take the evidence of a child being abused and recast it.”

But advocates of parental alienation disagree that the theory provides cover for abusers. Harman argues that children’s reports of abuse cannot be relied upon because they are easily influenced, leading to false claims. “I’m accused all the time of protecting pedophiles. I’m like, why would I do that? No, I don’t protect people who are abusive. If anything, I want children to not be abused in any form.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Hannah Dreyfus.

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy Theory!”

“Power elite of war industry in collusion with the US government (i.e., the “corpocracy”) killing hundreds of millions of people for profit, plunder, and more power.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“The power elite cause widespread poverty.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“911 tragedy was an inside job.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US operates a criminal injustice system.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

 “Covid-19 was a CIA operation.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US industry buys and bribes politicians’ votes.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US corpocracy “dumbs down” Americans via contrived public education, mass media propaganda, etc., etc.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

And just who is this denial and conspiracy choral group? America’s power elite, and their functionaries, that’s who! Especially the CIA. It “plausibly denies” responsibility and aims to  divert attention away from its evil actions.

The True Cause Scale

Consider referring to the following “true cause scale” if you haven’t yet decided who exactly and solely is doing all the ruling, ruining, and ridding:

1. Intuition. Aka “gut feelings.”

2. Circumstantial evidence. A causes B because B is always associated with the true existence of A.

3. Eyeball evidence. If I saw what caused A, I know what caused A.

4. Hypotheses and scientific theory. Rigorous and replicable production and testing of data in attempts to discover probable causes. Relatively applicable.

5. Causal inference. A complex and sophistical statistical analysis of data to tease out probable causes. Rarely applicable.

6. Empirical, scientific evidence. Produced from the findings of testing hypotheses and causal inferences. Rarely applicable.

7. Website reports from professional investigative reporters.

I rely on 1, 2, 3, and 7!

“Plausible Deniability”

A CIA Escape Hatch

According to Douglas Valentine, author of three revealing books on the CIA based on his rare access to the agency’s officials, the CIA does not launch any clandestine operation such as engineering a bloody regime change without creating and being able to show “plausible deniability” of their actions. ¹ For example, the CIA underwrites massive killings to install friendly (i.e.. submissive) regimes in foreign countries, and then issues its plausible denials. The public is then spoon fed this fiction via the corporatized news media.

In Closing

Do not believe the plausible denials of America’s corpocracy!

Notes

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Brumback.

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic,  spiral-like  or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century.  Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

• raw materials (land)
• means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
• labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
• commodities (finished products and services)
• money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
• power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

• broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
• deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

• a tendency towards a concentration of capital
• a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
• a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
• phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
• these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
• the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
• crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
• capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
• greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories.  Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone.  I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^th century the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core.  In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

• world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
• world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
• world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
• the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and  France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States.  By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

• scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
• financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
• Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
• Dutch war-making was superior
• the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^th century the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

• artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
• the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
• the chance to colonize space
• an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^th century among workers and peasants
• the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
• the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted  by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Akosombo Dam in the Volta River, inaugurated in 1965 during Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency.

In June, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network published its Sustainable Development Report 2023, which tracks the progress of the 193 member states towards attaining the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘From 2015 to 2019’, the network wrote, ‘the world made some progress on the SDGs, although this was already vastly insufficient to achieve the goals. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and other simultaneous crises, SDG progress has stalled globally’. This development agenda was adopted in 2015, with targets intended to be met by 2030. However, halfway to this deadline, the report noted that ‘all of the SDGs are seriously off track’. Why are the UN member states unable to meet their SDG commitments? ‘At their core’, the network said, ‘the SDGs are an investment agenda: it is critical that UN member states adopt and implement the SDG stimulus and support a comprehensive reform of the global financial architecture’. However, few states have met their financial obligations. Indeed, to realise the SDG agenda, the poorer nations would require at least an additional $4 trillion in investment per year.

No development is possible these days, as most of the poorer nations are in the grip of a permanent debt crisis. That is why the Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for a revision of the credit rating system, which paralyses the ability of countries to borrow money (and when they are able to borrow, it is at rates significantly higher than those given to richer countries). Furthermore, the report calls on the banking system to revise liquidity structures for poorer countries, ‘especially regarding sovereign debt, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises’.

It is essential to place the sovereign debt crisis at the top of discussions on development. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that ‘the public debt of developing countries, excluding China, reached $11.5 trillion in 2021’. That same year, developing countries paid $400 billion to service their debt – more than twice the amount of official development aid they received. Most countries are not borrowing money to invest in their populations, but to pay off the bondholders, which is why we consider this not financing for development but financing for debt-servicing.

The TAZARA Railway (or Uhuru Railway), connecting the East African countries of Tanzania and Zambia, was funded by China, constructed by Chinese and African workers, and completed in 1975.

Reading the UN and academic literature on development is depressing. The conversation is trapped by the strictures of the intractable and permanent debt crisis. Whether the issue of debt is highlighted or ignored, its existence forecloses the possibility of any genuine advance for the world’s peoples. Conclusions of reports often end with a moral call – this is what should happen – rather than an assessment of the situation based on the facts of the neocolonial structure of the world economy: developing countries, with rich holdings of resources, are unable to earn just prices for their exports, which means that they do not accumulate sufficient wealth to industrialise with their own population’s well-being in mind, nor can they finance the social goods required for their population. Due to this suffocation from debt, and due to the impoverishment of academic development theory, no effective general theoretical orientation has been provided to guide realistic and holistic development agendas, and no outlines seem readily available for an exit from the permanent debt-austerity cycle.

Collage of the Aswan High Dam (Egypt), Bhilai Steel Plant (India), and the Eisenhüttenstadt high-rise housing project (German Democratic Republic).

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we are eager to open a discussion about the need for a new socialist development theory – one that is built from the projects being pursued by peoples’ movements and progressive governments. As part of that discussion, we offer our latest dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, which surveys the terrain of development theory from 1945 to the present and offers a few gestures towards a new paradigm. As we note in the dossier:

Starting with the facts would require an acknowledgement of the problems of debt and deindustrialisation, the reliance upon primary product exports, the reality of transfer pricing and other instruments employed by multinational corporations to squeeze the royalties from the exporting states, the difficulties of implementing new and comprehensive industrial strategies, and the need to build the technological, scientific, and bureaucratic capacities of populations in most of the world. These facts have been hard to overcome by governments in the Global South, although now – with the emergence of the new South-South institutions and China’s global initiatives – these governments have more choices than in decades past and are no longer as dependent on the Western-controlled financial and trade institutions. These new realities demand the formulation of new development theories, new assessments of the possibilities of and pathways to transcending the obstinate facts of social despair. In other words, what has been put back on the table is the necessity for national planning and regional cooperation as well as the fight to produce a better external environment for finance and trade.

Anshan Iron and Steel Company was renovated and expanded as one of the 156 construction projects in China that was supported by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

A recent conversation in Berlin with our partners at International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) led to the realisation that this dossier failed to engage with the debates and discussions around the development that took place in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Yugoslavia, and the broader international communist movement. As early as the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920, communists began to formulate a theory of ‘non-capitalist development’ (NCD) for societies that had been colonised and integrated into the capitalist world economy while still retaining pre-capitalist forms of production and social hierarchy. The general understanding of NCD was that post-colonial societies could circumvent capitalism and advance through a national-democratic process to socialism. NCD theory, which was developed at international conferences of communist and workers’ parties and elaborated upon by Soviet scholars such as Rostislav A. Ulyanovsky and Sergei Tiulpanov in journals like the World Marxist Review, was centred on three transformations:

• Agrarian reform, to lift the peasantry out of its condition of destitution and to break the power of landlords.
• The nationalisation of key economic sectors, such as industry and trade, to restrict the power of foreign monopolies.
• The democratisation of political structures, education, and healthcare to lay the socio-political foundations for socialism.

Unlike the import-substitution industrialisation policy advanced by institutions such as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, NCD theory had a much firmer understanding of the need to democratise society rather than to merely turn around the terms of trade. IF DDR’s ‘Friendship’ series features a powerful recounting of the practical application of NCD theory in Mali during the 1960s in an article written by Matthew Read. IF DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be working on a comprehensive study of NCD theory.

Page from Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’), c. late 1700s.

Prior to colonialism, African and Arab scholars in West Africa had already begun to work out the elements of a development theory. For example, ʿUthman ibn Muhammad ibn ʿUthman ibn Fodyo (1754–1817), the Fulani sheikh who founded the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), wrote Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’) to guide himself and his followers on a path to lift up his people. The text is interesting for the principles it outlines, but – given the level of social production at the time – the caliphate relied on a system of low technical productivity and enslaved labour. Before the people of West Africa could wrest power from the caliphate and drive their own society forward, the last caliph was killed by the British, who – along with the Germans and French – seized the land and subordinated its history to that of Europe. Five decades later, Modibo Keïta, a communist militant, led Mali’s independence movement, seeking to reverse the subordination of African lands through the NCD project. Keïta did not explicitly draw a direct line back to ibn Fodyo – whose influence could be seen across West Africa – but we might imagine the hidden itineraries, the remarkable continuities between those old ideas (despite their saturation in the wretched social hierarchies of their time) and the new ideas that were put forward by Third World intellectuals.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-world-needs-a-new-development-theory-that-does-not-trap-the-poor-in-poverty/feed/ 0 412067 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/baltimores-unsolved-trash-chute-deaths-police-interview-unveils-disturbing-sleepwalking-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/baltimores-unsolved-trash-chute-deaths-police-interview-unveils-disturbing-sleepwalking-theory/#respond Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:00:48 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=b5be8fccd8ae2852b650aeae4c263a3a
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/baltimores-unsolved-trash-chute-deaths-police-interview-unveils-disturbing-sleepwalking-theory/feed/ 0 411513 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/08/the-world-needs-a-new-socialist-development-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/08/the-world-needs-a-new-socialist-development-theory/#respond Sat, 08 Jul 2023 09:17:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141892

Over the course of the past century, substantial changes have taken place in debates about social development. Dossier no. 66, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, examines the historical evolution of development theory over four distinct eras, analyses the obstacles that stand in the way of development today, identifies processes that have the potential to advance genuine alternatives, and offers an outline of a new socialist development theory.

Enduring neocolonial structures in the world economy have made it difficult for countries in the Global South to pursue viable development agendas. However, following the 2007–2008 Western financial crisis, large developing states have begun to contemplate the revival of a South-South development agenda. The emergence of South-South institutions, as well as the rapid expansion of China’s trade policy and regional initiatives, have provided developing states with more choices than have been available to them in decades and have reduced their dependence on Western-controlled institutions. These new realities demand the formulation of new development theories, new assessments of the possibilities of, and pathways to, transcending the obstinate facts of social despair. In other words, what has been put back on the table is the necessity for national planning and regional cooperation as well as the fight to produce a better external environment for finance and trade.

The emergence of institutions of South-South cooperation and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project provides new opportunities for socialist movements and governmental projects to work together to formulate a new socialist development theory. This theory must engage with what Samir Amin termed the ‘five controls’ that constrain the development agenda – the West’s monopoly control over natural resources, financial flows, science and technology, military power, and information – and find mechanisms to wrest control over these arenas.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/08/the-world-needs-a-new-socialist-development-theory/feed/ 0 410335 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/alitos-theory-of-ethics-and-living-well/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/alitos-theory-of-ethics-and-living-well/#respond Fri, 30 Jun 2023 21:00:00 +0000 https://progressive.org/latest/alito%E2%80%99s-theory-of-ethics-and-living-well-fiore-20230630/ before the story was actually published.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/alitos-theory-of-ethics-and-living-well/feed/ 0 408707 https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/in-brazil-the-legal-theory-that-could-strip-indigenous-peoples-of-their-land/ https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/in-brazil-the-legal-theory-that-could-strip-indigenous-peoples-of-their-land/#respond Fri, 30 Jun 2023 10:30:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=612727 At the end of May, Brazilian lawmakers approved legislation that would invalidate Indigenous land claims and open protected Indigenous lands to mining, road-building, agriculture, and other extractive industries.

The legislation was overwhelmingly endorsed in the nation’s conservative-dominated lower house and has now progressed to the Senate for approval.

But the bill is moving slowly. That’s because a central piece of the legislation is already being examined in Brazil’s Supreme Court. The legal thesis under examination, marco temporal, has been moving through the courts since 2007 and, depending on the court’s interpretation, could determine the future of Indigenous land in the Brazilian Amazon that has yet to be recognized by the Brazilian government. The ruling would also have major impacts on the constitutionality of the legislation.

“If the ‘marco temporal’ thesis is approved, all Indigenous lands, regardless of their status and region, will be evaluated according to the thesis, putting all 1393 Indigenous Lands under direct threat,” said United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay in a statement.

But what is marco temporal? 

Brazil’s constitution gives Indigenous people the right to claim lands they “traditionally occupied”, and since the adoption of the constitution in 1988, more than 700 Indigenous territories have been claimed. To date, 496 have been officially recognized, or demarcated, by the government, which defines property boundaries and guarantees the possession of the land and the exclusive use of its natural resources to the Indigenous peoples who live on it.

First introduced in 2007, marco temporal, is the idea that if Indigenous communities weren’t on the land they claimed in 1988, when the constitution was passed, they have no claim to those lands. 

For most of Brazil’s history, land occupied by Indigenous peoples was technically owned by the government. The Indian Statute of 1973, contains rules on the relations of the state and Brazilian society with the indigenous communities, and gave Indigenous people the same legal status as children, meaning they didn’t have standing to represent themselves in the state’s legal system—including in land matters.

“At the time, the idea behind the legislation was that Indigenous peoples had to be emancipated from their condition as Indigenous peoples in order to be fully, standing Brazilians citizens,” said Tracy Divine, associate professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami and research fellow for the Washington Brazil Office. “It wasn’t until the 1988 constitution that the state decided that people in Brazil could be indigenous and Brazilian at the same time.”

This means even if Indigenous peoples were occupying traditional lands before 1988, they weren’t allowed to register their land ownership with the Brazilian government which renders their arguments in court as unprovable. 

If accepted, the legal thesis of marco temporal would empower Congress to accept, or reject, Indigenous land claims, instead of the President, making the protection of Indigenous territories more difficult, and create opportunities to change currently accepted territorial boundaries. 

“It goes against the Constitution of the country because the constitution of the country uses the term ‘original rights to land’,” said Divine. “But what the constitution says is that Indigenous peoples have original rights to the land, which would mean that their rights pre-date even the formation of Brazil as a country.”

Marco temporal has its origins in agribusiness and has been adopted and pushed by a variety of developers, loggers, miners and farmers with business interests in the Amazon – areas that may already be protected due to the Indigenous communities that manage their territories or could be protected in the future.

Many marco temporal proponents cite economic development as a key reason to codify the idea, especially for soybean production, cattle farming, and mining. Lobbyists for those industries have been quite vocal in their support.  

Indigenous peoples, however, argue that the lands in question have been theirs since time immemorial regardless of their history with the government, that the constitution backs their claims, and that further development in the Amazon would be detrimental to their health, and that of the rainforest.

It’s estimated that Indigenous peoples safeguard nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity with the Brazilian rainforest containing almost a quarter of all terrestrial biodiversity and 10 percent of all known species on earth.

Over the last four years, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development. During that time, Indigenous peoples lost an estimated 965 square miles of their traditional territories under former president Jair Bolsonaro’s policies.

Since legislators in the lower house passed the controversial legislation, protests have taken place in Brasilia, the nation’s capital and Indigenous groups have blocked roads outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, burning tires and using bows and arrows against police who responded with tear gas. 

At this point, Indigenous peoples in Brazil await the court’s decisions as well as congress’s actions, and while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could ultimately veto the bill, there is fear he could approve legislation that adheres to marco temporal to satisfy the agro industry which constitutes a bulk of the country’s economic survival. Brazil ranks among the top 12 largest economies in the world with their gross domestic product (GDP) estimated at US$1.65 trillion in 2021. The country supplies more than 50 percent of the world’s soybean trade from crops produced on 17 percent of the country’s arable land.

“We knew the right would have a reaction against any pro-indigenous and pro-environment measures taken by Lula,” said Ana Carolina Alfinito, a legal adviser on Brazilian affairs for Amazon Watch. “What we didn’t expect is that this action would be so fast and so intense.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Brazil, the legal theory that could strip Indigenous peoples of their land on Jun 30, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lyric Aquino.

]]> https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/in-brazil-the-legal-theory-that-could-strip-indigenous-peoples-of-their-land/feed/ 0 408432 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/#respond Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:40:51 +0000 https://www.altnews.in/?p=158557 A video surfaced on social media on April 7, 2023, featuring a man addressing a crowd outside a mosque in Farooq Nagar, Nagpur. Facing the gathering that emerges from the...

The post ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’: An elaborate conspiracy theory in response to the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative appeared first on Alt News.

]]> A video surfaced on social media on April 7, 2023, featuring a man addressing a crowd outside a mosque in Farooq Nagar, Nagpur. Facing the gathering that emerges from the mosque, he talks about the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. Flanking him on both sides are men holding banners, one of which says, ‘Save daughters, make them study their faith. Our girls are getting converted because they are going astray from the path of their faith’.

‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ (BLT), a conspiracy theory that has gained popularity in certain Muslim groups, revolves around the notion that Hindu men enter relationships with Muslim women with the alleged aim of enticing them away from Islam and persuading them to embrace the Sanatan Dharam. It is a counter-conspiracy theory to the much talked about ‘Love Jihad’ narrative, which holds that Muslim men seduce Hindu women in order to coerce them into converting to Islam. Though the Union government and the National Commission for Women have said that they have no data on ‘Love Jihad’, several BJP-ruled states have given their stamp on the theory by enacting anti-conversion laws and taking other measures.

The BLT theory, on the other hand, has received sustained support through on-ground outreach programmes, speeches by religious leaders, social media campaigns with videos, and news reports churned out by influencers. Asked about his take on the theory, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi, however, told Alt News, “Mohabbat ke mamle main kisi ko taang adane ki zaroorat nahi.” (No one should interfere in matters of love).

What the man in the Nagpur video says gives us a fair idea about how the BLT conspiracy theory is gaining ground. He says,

“I appeal to all the brothers, the banners that you see here are not here just for the sake of it, they are here to wake you up from your neglectful sleep. We are all aware that our daughters are getting apostate (murtad), it is our responsibility to protect our daughters. We should counsel them, protect their faith and make them aware of how many girls are getting apostate. There are strategies in their ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ on how to approach our daughters, trap them and make them leave our faith. It is your, mine and everyone’s responsibility to protect our daughters and to do this we have to wake up from our stupor…”

Payment, Job, Property as Reward: Maulana Sajjad Nomani

One of the popular videos circulating on social media features Maulana Sajjad Nomani, an executive committee member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. In this 7-minute clip, the cleric asserts that around 8 lakh Muslim women have renounced their faith and ran away with Hindu individuals, labelling these women as murtad (apostates). He further claims that the RSS has formed a large team aimed at training Hindu youth for three to six months, equipping them with Urdu language skills and other etiquette, so that they can lure Muslim women. According to his statements, these Hindu men are incentivized with a sum of Rs 2.5 lakh if they succeed in persuading a Muslim girl to abandon Islam. Additionally, they are offered various benefits such as property and employment. The cleric suggests that millions of Hindu youths have now joined this campaign. The remarks were made by Maulana Sajjad Nomani on 31 December 2021 and the speech is available on his YouTube channel.

It appears that Maulana Sajjad Nomani’s sermon draws inspiration from a fabricated letter attributed to the RSS, which has been circulating for some time. This false letter outlines 12 specific strategies for ‘entrapping’ Muslim women, claiming that the RSS would provide a 15-day training program on converting these women and assimilating them into the folds of “Sanatan Dharma”. This letter was recently debunked by Alt News when it was trending with the hashtag #BhagwaLoveTrap or #Bhagwa_Love_Trap. Furthermore, the figure that a grant of Rs 2.5 lakh would be offered to support these couples in establishing their new households, appears to have been taken from an offer made by the members of Akhil Bharat Hindu Yuva Morcha in 2018.

Another religious leader, Maulana Tauqeer Raza, during an interview with ABP Ganga in early March, echoed a similar claim about Muslim women being ‘entrapped’ by Hindu men. According to him, organizations like Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have allegedly offered rewards, including a sum of Rs 2 lakh and other benefits, to Hindu men who succeed in trapping Muslim women. He says that according to a survey, 10 lakh Muslim women have been either seduced, trapped, or kidnapped by Hindu men. Neither Maulana Sajjad Nomani nor Maulana Tauqeer Raza provides the source of these data in their statements. In an interview with Millat Times in April end, Maulana Sajjad Nomani made a clarification regarding his earlier statement. He expressed retracting his previous statement as he was told by an acquaintance that the figure he mentioned in his sermons was wrong. But he expressed that the Muslim community should be concerned even if one girl was being converted, as these allegations should not be taken lightly.

In addition to the aforementioned statements, numerous videos on YouTube have gained thousands of views by discussing the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. These videos are typically presented by individuals who engage in lengthy monologues accompanied by dramatic music.

Secular Miya Bhai (SMB)

This YouTube channel boasts of 1.5 million subscribers and has produced multiple videos focusing on ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. One of the earliest videos found on this subject was uploaded in September 2021, titled “Musalman Sixth Generation Ki Jung Har Rahe Part 1 | Love Trap se Bache,” which garnered over 2 Lakh views.

In this video, the creator asserts that Muslims are losing in the realm of sixth-generation warfare, a psychological battle where the goal is not to capture lands but minds. The video contains a voice-over that launches into a diatribe about the deceptive nature of this warfare, without providing concrete data or evidence. It discusses the concept of “false empowerment” facilitated by social media and highlights instances of non-Muslim men approaching Muslim women under the pretext of learning about Islam, only to gradually manipulate their thoughts.

Within the same month, the uploader shared two additional videos on the same topic. Similar to the first video, the second one lacks substantial content and primarily stirs fear related to the said psychological warfare. The third video in the series presents a nine-step plan aimed at safeguarding the community against the ‘love trap’, which includes suggestions like forming a vigilante team to monitor and address such cases within their respective areas. Between September 2021 and May 2023, this channel produced approximately 36 videos on the subject, with the highest number of uploads occurring in May 2023.

The chart below illustrates the monthly distribution of uploaded videos on the subject.

Haque Media

On May 3, 2023, the channel Haque Media shared a video titled ‘Bhagwa Love Trap Conspiracy Or Myth?‘ The host, Faizul Bari, introduces the programme as a presentation to viewers based on ‘extensive research’. During the broadcast, the anchor discusses numerous cases where Muslim women allegedly eloped with Hindu men, converted to Hinduism, and subsequently faced abandonment or even death at the hands of their spouses after a few months. The anchor highlights the alarming nature of these incidents and raises the question if there is a concerted narrative behind them. To elaborate on this, the anchor presents various statements given by Hindu leaders over the years.

This specific video is of particular importance in the context of this report because it provides an overview of the cases and speeches that are being utilized to promote and substantiate the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ theory. It emphasizes a minimum of 19 instances where Muslim women involved in interfaith relationships have experienced deception, murder, or abandonment by their partners. Additionally, it sheds light on at least 17 occurrences where Hindu leaders or Hindu youth have made derogatory comments about Muslim women or have announced reward programs for Hindu youths who manage to marry Muslim women. Furthermore, it touches upon notable online incidents such as the ‘Bulli bai’ and ‘Sulli deals’ GitHub applications, which garnered significant media coverage. Interestingly, the host also mentions the figures mentioned by Maulana Sajjad Nomani and Maulana Tauqeer Raza. The video portrays these events as the inception of an ongoing campaign, highlighting the need for a defence mechanism for Muslim women against such occurrences.

In the latter half of the video, the host says that Muslim women from all walks of life are becoming victims of this campaign. He claims that Muslim women from strict households are being trapped through mobile games that have inbuilt chat features.

Speaking to Scroll about ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, Faizul Bari said that he saw it as his duty to warn people “about the repercussions of such a relationship. I see it from a religious point of view. It is my religious duty to stop people from indulging in sin.” He added, “We should also speak against interfaith relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women because it causes a feeling of anxiety in Hindu society.”

Raza Graphy

This channel uploaded a video on May 23, 2023, titled, “सरकारी भगवा लव ट्रैप, पूरी प्लानिंग और षड्यंत्र के साथ मुसलमान लड़कियों को फसाया जा रहा जाल में!”. This video, too, contains long monologues with graphics presented in between. In the introductory segment of the video, the host, Muhammed Raza, introduces the term ‘Sarkari Bhagwa Love Trap’.

He begins by narrating an incident from Bareilly where a railway staffer, Ashish, was ‘caught’ with a Muslim woman at a guest house. He says that it was allegedly found that Ashish had explicit photos of multiple women in his phone. According to media reports, members of a Muslim organization received a ‘tip-off’ about the couple and, upon investigating, found the information to be credible. The host uses this example to show what he calls the ‘sarkari’ dimension of the conspiracy. He says that films like ‘The Kerala Story,’ which received endorsement from the Prime Minister and the home minister, are utilized to propagate the concept of ‘reverse Love Jihad’. According to his explanation, it is reverse ‘Love Jihad’ because first the conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’ is established and then the Hindu youth are being encouraged to avenge it.

Reflecting on the Barielly incident, the host asserts that the Hindu community brazenly engages in such actions. He attributes the responsibility for these incidents to the Muslim girls and their parents. According to the host, these girls are fully aware of the faith of their partners, yet they distance themselves from their own community. He further emphasizes that the fault also lies with the girls’ parents, stating that granting them freedom is not inherently wrong, however, some girls take advantage of this freedom and education. The host suggests that if these girls feel tempted, they should simply request their parents to arrange their marriages.

Muslim girls who wear jeans end up in a room with Hindu boys

The host also makes the observation that these girls possess commendable academic achievements, which leads their parents to be lenient and not object to their abandoning the burqa. He says he has personally witnessed numerous cases in his own vicinity where parents would disapprove of their son wearing jeans. However, now the same parents allow their daughters to wear hijabs and jeans, engage in dancing, and share their performances on social media. The host says that daughters of these parents eventually discover their own children in private rooms (he names a popular hotel room aggregator platform) with men from the Hindu community.

The host then proceeds to discuss how law enforcement works in different ways based on the religion of the perpetrator during the Modi regime. He asserts that if a Muslim man is caught with a Hindu woman, he is immediately subjected to mob violence, whereas if a Muslim woman is caught with a Hindu man, society tends to portray it as the Muslim community harassing the girl, leading to complaints being filed against members of the Muslim community. The host highlights an incident that apparently occurred in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and expresses his view that these girls are shameless, as they confront the mob and file cases against them. (We could not find any news report on this said incident; just an unverified video uploaded on Twitter.)

He also talks about another case where a Muslim girl stood up for herself, and continues to put the blame on these girls and other influencers with Muslim names, suggesting that these influencers serve as their source of inspiration. Towards the end, the host brings attention to a tragic incident where a Muslim girl involved in a live-in relationship with her Hindu partner in Noida was murdered by him.

In a telephonic conversation with Alt News, Mr Raza summarized his perspective on ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. “BLT is an organised effort because Hindutva leaders over the years have publicly announced reward programmes and other incentives for Hindu youth if they marry Muslim women. There are multiple Telegram chats of Hindu youth that have gone viral where they are seen making disgusting remarks towards Muslim women. This systematic promotion occurs due to the authorities’ tendency to swiftly initiate ‘investigation’ when a Muslim man marries a Hindu woman, while no action is taken against those individuals who announce such reward programs,” said Raza.

Raza also expressed his opposition to moral policing and emphasized the importance of adhering to legal and constitutional processes. “I am on the side of the Constitution and I believe no one should be harassed,” he added.

Twitter and Instagram Campaigners

A noticeable and coordinated effort to amplify the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ theory is evident on social media platforms. It involves prominent users who amplify news reports of interfaith couples being targeted by mobs, as well as participate in harassing female voices that raise objections to these moral policing activities. Additionally, certain users engage in doxxing and contribute to the perpetuation of this narrative through repetitive amplification. They share graphics depicting the perceived ‘fate’ of Muslim women in interfaith relationships or distribute religious sermons that ‘warn’ the community about perceived ‘forces’ responsible for luring Muslim girls away.

For instance, a user with 44,000 followers shared a tweet about ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, which garnered close to 1.5 lakh views on the platform. It is worth noting that this same user had previously disseminated a fabricated letter attributed to the RSS, which outlined various strategies for Hindu men to Muslim women and even mentioned monetary rewards for these couples. In the same month, this user tweeted news reports about interfaith relationships where Muslim women were either deceived or murdered. He has also tweeted a two-year-old video of Hindutva youth leader Sukhdev Sahdev who talked about strategically targeting Muslim women.

Click to view slideshow.

As of June 7, there is an account that has gained over 2,000 followers despite having only 70 tweets. This account frequently shares information about interfaith couples, sometimes even revealing their social media profiles or residential addresses. It is important to note that this is not an isolated case, as there are several other accounts engaging in similar activities. Furthermore, these accounts relentlessly target and harass anyone who criticizes their campaign, using social media hashtags to direct their attacks towards these individuals. Below is a collage of some of the tweets made by these accounts:

On Instagram, a search for hashtags such as #Bhagwa_Love_Trap, #BhagwaLoveTrap, or #भगवा_लव_ट्रैप reveals a significant number of posts. Among these posts are various content types, including details about interfaith couples, infographics highlighting the risks associated with ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, and other related material. It’s worth noting that some of these posts date back to December 2021, indicating the longevity and prevalence of this type of content on the platform. In the past, News Meter had published a story regarding an Instagram page named ‘Jhamunda_official._’. This account was known for collecting information about Muslim women seen in public places with men of different faith, and subsequently sharing these details online.

Below is a collage of some of the posts that can be found on Instagram using these hashtags.

Click to view slideshow.

 

On-ground Campaigns, Moral Policing and Arrests

On April 7 and April 14, two videos filmed in Nagpur surfaced on Facebook, featuring individuals holding banners outside a mosque and delivering speeches. In one of the videos, a man expresses concern about daughters having phones protected with passwords. He suggests that worldly education should only be imparted if the safety of one’s child is ensured. He also urges the youth to be vigilant of such development and provide counselling to girls who stray away from the community.

On 24 May, in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, media outlets reported that the police registered FIR against 10 unidentified individuals under section 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The charges were related to the distribution of pamphlets containing objectionable content targeting the RSS and the Bajrang Dal on the night of May 20. Subsequently, on May 26, it was reported that five individuals involved in the incident had been identified and arrested. According to police, the pamphlets contained statements alleging that “attempts are being made to turn 10 lakh Muslim girls into Kafirs (non-believers)” and that 800 Muslim girls in Amravati city of Maharashtra were subjected to conversion.

As of June 5, Alt News has documented 31 cases of moral policing perpetrated by Muslim men across different regions of the country. The highest number of incidents occurred in Uttar Pradesh, with 12 cases, followed by Telangana with 4 cases and Madhya Pradesh with 3 cases. The exact locations of four instances remain unverified. It’s important to note that this data has been manually collected by monitoring accounts associated with the propagation of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ conspiracy, and the actual numbers may vary.

In addition to the five arrests made in Indore, there were reports on May 27 about six individuals being apprehended for harassing a man who was out for dinner with his female Muslim friend. Similarly, on the same day, two Muslim youths, both aged 20, were arrested for harassing a Hindu man who was accompanied by his female Muslim friend at an eatery in Karnataka. In Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, a shop owner was arrested following a complaint filed by a Muslim woman who was allegedly harassed and threatened by a group of individuals while she was at a market place with a male Hindu friend. According to a report by The Quint, six individuals were apprehended in Meerut for their involvement in the harassment and intimidation of a Hindu man on May 13. The incident occurred while he was riding a bike with a Muslim woman. Similarly, in Muzzafarnagar, four men were arrested for harassing a Hindu man who was accompanied by his female Muslim friend.

The Anxiety of the Muslim Community and the Agency of Muslim Women

Undoubtedly, in recent years, Muslim women have unquestionably become targets of Hindutva groups through various means such as speeches, video skits, reward programs, anti-Hijab campaigns, digital auctions such as ‘Bulli bai’ and ‘Sulli deals’, and unchecked sexual violence on social media. It is these incidents that are used to justify the Bhagwa Love Trap conspiracy.

For example, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, a video addressing the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ highlights 17 instances where Hindu leaders or youth have made derogatory remarks about Muslim women or have openly declared reward programs for Hindu youth who successfully marry Muslim women. Such statements and announcements have been made in public settings and are of grave concern to society at large. These incidents have instilled a sense of panic within the Muslim community, and the reactions to these events are evident for all to see. In fact, a prominent social activist Khalida Parveen, with extensive experience in grassroots-level work, recently took to Twitter to validate the existence of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ conspiracy, while labelling its counterpart, ‘Love Jihad,’ as mere propaganda.

We reached out to Ms. Khalida Parveen to understand the motivation behind her tweet. According to her, the legitimacy of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ narrative stems from ‘the persistent urging of Hindu youth by influential Hindutva figures to ensnare Muslim girls’. These figures openly declare reward programs and utilize various strategies to amplify their message.

“See, interfaith relationships have been happening for ages, I am least bothered about it. My concern is teenage girls getting trapped. Recently, in my own professional capacity, I have been actively involved in counselling teenage Muslim girls who find themselves entangled in relationships with Hindu boys, only to be subsequently abandoned under the pretext of mere ‘time pass’”, said Ms. Parveen. She added, “These households often have their own internal challenges, which push these girls to seek alternative paths, leading them into these precarious situations. In some instances, these girls even get coerced into substance abuse.”

It is unclear how these teenage relationships prove the existence of ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, as it is not new for teenagers to get into relationships against the will of their parents, then break up or in extreme cases, get into substance abuse through various means.

When we inquired about the cases of moral policing occurring across the country, she said consenting adults should not be subjected to harassment. “At best, these men should offer counselling to these adult women and can inform their families about their daughter. I believe the families should also keep their doors open and not abandon these women when they realise that their life is going to be miserable. This way, they have a reliable support system to fall back on in case of any adversities within their relationship,” said Ms. Parveen.

Furthermore, she recommended that men who encounter such situations should refrain from recording videos and circulating them on social media, instead, they should engage in direct conversations with the families without resorting to physical harassment and intimidation which do not yield any positive result. Above all, she stressed one should not interfere in adult women’s choices and leave them free. “After all it’s their life and they are accountable for their deeds in front of Allah,” said Ms. Parveen.

We tried to reach out to Maulana Sajjad Nomani, but his son convyeed to Alt News that interviewing the MAulana was not feasible.

It’s not that all clerics are on the same page on the BLT issue. In an interview with The Hindu, Maulana Khalid Saifullah Rahmani, the president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) said, “This kind of propaganda is being done by the Sangh Parivar. Some of our emotional orators spice up their speeches with this, which is harmful for Muslims. If something like this does happen, then it is due to co-education and workplaces where there are both men and women working, and this has happened in the past too.”

‘Moral Policing Must be Unconditionally Condemned’

In a telephonic conversation with Alt News, Ghazala Wahab, the editor of FORCE Magazine and the author of the book ‘Born a Muslim: Some Truths about Islam in India’, said that there is no justification for moral policing.

“I object to the term moral policing because it provides a cover of morality to criminal activity. All these acts of vigilantism against women in public places must be regarded as sexual harassment or molestation. No one has any right to heckle and photograph any woman. This harassment in the name of moral policing must be unconditionally condemned. It is important to note that this issue is not limited to Muslim women alone. Over the past 15-20 years, Hindu vigilante groups have been harassing young individuals on the Valentine’s Day. This behaviour has persisted because law enforcement agencies do not take serious action against these criminals. They should be booked under sexual harassment laws and made examples of so that no one gets tempted to become the custodian of a woman’s morality,” said Wahab.

“When a woman, regardless of her religious background, chooses to go out with a man, she is already in a vulnerable position due to the fear of retribution from their parents, neighbours, and extended family. This vulnerability stems from the conservative nature of our society, which is quick to put a woman’s character under the microscope at the first opportunity. Instead of fostering an inclusive and secure environment for young individuals to socialize, we are inadvertently putting their lives at risk by endorsing such vigilantism. It is important to understand that such public naming and shaming can traumatize individuals to the point of self-harm or compel them to flee from home due to the fear instilled by their parents or extended family.”

“Parents also have a role to play. They should perceive these incidents as direct attacks on their children and stand up for them, instead of blaming their children for bringing shame to the family,” she added.

The post ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’: An elaborate conspiracy theory in response to the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/feed/ 0 408132 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief-2/#respond Wed, 28 Jun 2023 14:26:32 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a87c586647cd9730dfc9fcb05ba6afcc
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief-2/feed/ 0 408196 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief/#respond Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:12:40 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=5d3821cedfda8987a3d65f2bb28f34d6

The Supreme Court’s term is ending this week with rulings on several blockbuster cases. On Tuesday, voting rights advocates welcomed a decision in a major election law case that preserved checks and balances in elections. In a 6-3 decision, the justices dismissed the so-called independent state legislature theory that state lawmakers have nearly unlimited power to make rules for federal elections. This ruling will “empower state courts around the country to block gerrymanders, to police the legislatures and to keep legislators from trying to entrench themselves or advance their party with these egregious maps,” says Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. Now the country awaits the Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action and student debt, which Waldman calls “hugely consequential.” Waldman’s new book is The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/28/scotus-rejects-radical-gop-vote-rigging-theory-could-still-end-affirmative-action-debt-relief/feed/ 0 407824 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/supreme-court-rejects-independent-state-legislature-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/supreme-court-rejects-independent-state-legislature-theory/#respond Tue, 27 Jun 2023 18:39:38 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/supreme-court-rejects-independent-state-legislature-theory Today the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Moore v. Harper, rejecting attempts to free state legislatures from checks and balances when making rules for federal elections.

Wendy Weiser, vice president for Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, had the following comment:

“Today the Supreme Court rejected the independent state legislature theory, the radical notion that could have undermined voting rights and upended our elections. The independent state legislature theory is now dead. State courts can now freely enforce constitutional rights and guarantees as they have for hundreds of years. Our system of checks and balances still stands. The court noted that federal courts can, in extreme circumstances, review state court decisions to see if they 'exceed the ordinary bounds of judicial review.’

“We would like to congratulate the litigants in Moore and their attorneys: Common Cause, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Rebecca Harper, the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, and the private law firms that worked with them. And we would like to thank the many constitutional scholars, historians, election officials, retired judges, civil rights groups, members of Congress, and others who filed briefs in the case.”

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/supreme-court-rejects-independent-state-legislature-theory/feed/ 0 407568 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/capitalist-hegemony-in-psychedelic-medicine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/capitalist-hegemony-in-psychedelic-medicine/#respond Wed, 21 Jun 2023 14:05:58 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141292 Excitement around psychedelics continues to grow with thousands set to attend the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver this week. Proponents in the psychedelic space have promoted a strategy to focus on the “medicalization” to gain wider societal acceptance. But this could lead psychedelics to come under greater control, ensuring that they serve as profitable tools to maintain the status quo.

The Quest for Mainstream Acceptance: Magical Individual to Societal Healing

Today, in the effort to win mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, there are a number of voices in the room. Among them, the loudest are the ones who individualize illness through the medical lens while seeking legitimacy through access to powerful medical institutions, civil society, and the corporation in a proclaimed quest to “heal” those suffering in our society. We see anything from features in Forbes about 20-something tech billionaires microdosing to increase productivity, to 60 Minutes interviews with U.S. Iraq war veterans who report being cured from PTSD, to miracle stories of ketamine working with the poor and formerly incarcerated. Ironically, as this piece is being published, a number of these voices will be discussing and debating the path of the psychedelic renaissance at Psychedelic Science conference, taking place June 19–23 and being marketed as the largest conference on psychedelics in history.

Organizationally, some of the best-known names in the psychedelic space are the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the for-profit System Fail 23 mental health company Compass Pathways, and the nonprofit Usona Institute. Many inside these organizations often promote a course of thought claiming psychedelics in and of themselves can “heal” anything from PTSD to societal conflict. It’s as if there is a search for a balm, a real-life soma, to dissociate from the horrors of race and class. For many, psychedelics are the answer to this search.

Of those who believe psychedelics could find their way to addressing greater structural issues plaguing society, the reasoning often goes that “once the individual heals, then we can work on healing society — or even the world.” In one TED talk for example, MAPS founder Rick Doblin — one of the most prominent names in the psychedelic space — claims that psychedelic experiences have “the potential to help be an antidote to tribalism, to fundamentalism, to genocide and environmental destruction.” During the 2021 Fantastic Fungi Global Summit — an annual summit of mushroom enthusiasts — speaker after speaker discussed how important it is to expand the availability of psychedelics to “help heal the world.” We can expect much of the same rhetoric from various presenters at the Psychedelic Science conference.

The result of this theory of individualized mental health supposes that people and their mental lives exist in a vacuum. Trauma happens to an individual, so use psychedelics to heal the individual. But depression, stress, anxiety, etc., are not a result of personal failures but oppressive, exploitative, and alienating conditions of life under capitalism. Doblin and others will have us believe that we can “heal people” without dealing with the conditions of their lives, but by simply using psychedelics to change how they see those conditions. Far from healing the world, this approach reinforces the conditions that lead to the suffering itself.

There is a naivete born of goodwill, good acid, and a lack of structural analysis that could be amusing if the current state of the world were not so dire. It’s a kind of “magical societal healing” mantra that is echoing through the most progressive sectors of the so-called renaissance, i.e., “we simply gain acceptance to powerful institutions, give these drugs to people, getting them into existing systems of oppression and the change will come” or even more then change, “a more just society” will come. But, as we will discuss, in this process the psychedelic community ultimately seeks to incorporate itself into powerful, controlling institutions, which will not only prevent these substances from helping heal the world but also enlist them in maintaining the systems harming us all.

Gramscian Hegemony and Psychedelic Medicine

Proponents of psychedelics seek to gain acceptance for these substances by medicalizing them. Article after article is published on how psychedelics can help treat various forms of psychological suffering. But medicalization could play a role in further entrenching ruling-class control of psychedelics. To further examine this process, it is important to revisit the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

Gramsci terms the control wielded by the ruling-class “hegemony.” Gramsci believed that if the ruling class was unable to maintain control over the masses, the masses may seek to change circumstances around their ongoing exploitation. For Gramsci, the ruling class does not always need to use domination or coercion to maintain its authority — and actually using these forms of control can sometimes be more destabilizing or fragile for the ruling classes. Instead, they can use “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership to gain a high level of consent among the general population. The ruling class manipulates language, culture, even morality itself to subtly convince the masses that the status quo is normal, natural, and the best course for everyone in society. This helps maintain power in capitalist society and make sure the interests of the capitalist state are represented in the minds of the ranks of the masses.

As Bruce Cohen notes in Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness, an institution continually used to impose ruling-class ideology today is the institution of medicine. Control through institutions such as medicine have proved quite effective for the ruling class because they provide a guise of perceived objectivity. Cohen notes,

These civic institutions are much more effective than direct, repressive organs of the state in manipulating the masses due to their perceived detachment from elite control. Hegemonic power is conducted under the guise of objective and neutral institutional practice, though it is in reality nothing of the sort. Instead, intellectuals and professionals are responsible for the legitimation of ruling-class ideas within the public sphere, articulating such values as seemingly natural and taken-for-granted knowledge about the world.

As we discussed in our previous piece, the medical system helps uphold the status quo by finding ways to reduce natural reactions to damaging systems to specific quantified diagnoses, which can be documented and billed for. This allows for the commodification of natural physical and psychological reactions to oppressive systems. Medical professionals can help in “depoliticizing inherently political problems” in the words of physician and activist Vicente Navarro, leading people to believe that individual action or improvement is the answer instead of collective action for societal change. In this way, the institution of medicine helps impose ruling-class ideology by misdirecting condemnation away from violent systems, which benefit the ruling class, and instead onto individuals.

The medicalization of psychedelics is so useful because it gives the guise of neutral exploration of the science for individual therapeutic purposes while at the same time funneling them into a more subtle form of control, which benefits the ruling class. By being presented as scientifically objective, medical professionals can be effective in the task of instituting ruling-class hegemony because as physician and activist Howard Waitzkin argues, “doctors may be more effective in enforcing societal norms than other social control agents; doctors are less accountable to the public and therefore freer to inject class and professional biases into their relationships with clients.”

But it goes further than shifting from system-based analysis to individual-based analysis. The process of medicalization also leads to material control of these substances by institutions that serve the ruling class. The medicalization of psychedelics means substances that can profoundly affect consciousness and one’s perception of society as a whole will be more likely to be “available” strictly through medical gatekeeping. This will lead to more control over how psychedelics are used, what the outcome of their usage is, all while ensuring a profitable market is created within the medical system that poses no threat to the status quo. Psychedelics in the hands of capitalist doctors, therapists, companies, will be used to reinforce capitalist ideology, individualized psychiatry, and a continued obfuscation of the social and structural factors affecting health and well-being.

Why Incorporate Psychedelics as Medicine?

This brings us to questions around why medical control of psychedelics would be useful. We can propose a number of ideas. One compelling theory is suggested by Caitlin Johnstone in her piece “‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ Entirely about Corporate Greed.” The author notes “the abusive nature of capitalism is causing a widespread mental health crisis that our rulers have a vested interest in preventing so the slaves will keep turning the gears of the machine.” The proposals range anywhere from treating alienation and depression resulting from workplace exploitation with psilocybin to giving MDMA to soldiers to make it easier for them to advance imperialist policy through killing and military violence. Could this latter example be why we see military personnel gathering to conferences like Psychedelic Science like moths to a flame?

Psychedelics themselves do not have an inherent right or left ideology built into them. They have the power to either break down or reinforce traditionally held beliefs around people’s relation to themselves, their loved ones, society, and even reality itself. They can threaten hegemonic ideologies, or they can reinforce and deepen the acceptance of ruling-class ideologies. For some, when combined with critical political analysis, psychedelics can reconnect the user to greater inner purpose, reconnect to community, reestablish the interconnectivity of all living things. With this reconnection could come the potential of a realization of the truly destructive nature of oppressive systems. This opens the possibility for one to see the destructive systems outside of him or herself as the true causes of suffering and develop resolve to fight to destroy those systems. When combined with revolutionary political analysis, this can give these substances revolutionary potential in some cases.

We saw at least some of this process play out in the “first psychedelic wave” in the ’60s as there were often direct connections made between psychedelic use and anti-establishment related political practice. It comes as no surprise, then, that now proponents of the medicalization of psychedelics fear a repeat of the hit the movement took at that time. It’s partially why there is a strong focus on not letting anything “go off the rails” and a condemnation of the connection between political practice and psychedelic use.

The political potential of psychedelic use is what makes it even more important for the ruling class to gain hegemonic control over how these substances are used and made available to the public. It makes it that much more important for medical professionals, for example, to help push bourgeois ideology by helping perpetuate individualization and internalization of psychological suffering, for example, ultimately misdirecting the gaze away from a critical, system-based analysis.

When Gramsci discussed hegemony, he saw the process of the ruling class maintaining ideological control as a constant battle in which ruling-class “norms” are constantly destabilized or questioned. This process of questioning ruling-class hegemony becomes heightened in times of crisis. Today, capitalism creates more and more crises around the globe. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the limits to the biomedical model of maintaining health and well-being. Now, postpandemic peaks, overdose deaths are increasing, and suicides are once again on the rise. We see increasing military conflicts around the globe and the current geopolitical landscape compounding things with rising inflation making it harder for people to make ends meet. These co-occurring crises can cause people to question whether ruling-class institutions such as medicine can actually help treat or alleviate the suffering of the masses. In this context, it is no wonder that medicine would naturally incorporate psychedelics as therapeutic modalities as it becomes even more crucial for capitalist class to restrengthen the legitimacy of ruling-class institutions at this time.

The Need for a Revolutionary Perspective in the Renaissance

By incorporating these substances into medicine and other mainstream institutions, proponents can claim that we are moving toward making these substances more available to help a greater number of people. At the same time, the trend will help keep psychedelics from playing any role in pushing the toiling masses to upend the entire system. As we argue above, hegemonic institutions such as medicine can help monitor and control the conclusions reached by those using these substances. And this obviously extends beyond the strict limits of medicine. For example, those acting as guides or doing integration work are going to be some of the most influential people in influencing the conclusions individuals come to from using psychedelics. This makes their political praxis that much more crucial toward influencing outcomes.

We can already see some of the outcomes of the quest for acceptance into hegemonic institutions in real time today — the venture capitalist, the investor bros, fresh from their journey with “my shaman,” having seen the creation and destruction of the universe, now emerge as new beings. And yet the capitalist capture is so complete, their only recourse is to commodify. They have created companies now traded on the NASDAQ — with all the typical bells and whistles of “fair trade,” “sustainability,” and “equity.” But, contrary to what some may hope, the power and money will not shift post-ayahuasca enlightenment. We should know that these drugs have been available to the rich and powerful for 70 years, many whom were the architects of neoliberalism.

We want to be clear, any possibility of psychedelics helping mitigate suffering under capitalism can be positive. But as these substances are incorporated into hegemonic institutions such as medicine, we should ask ourselves, What is our goal? Is our goal to simply blunt suffering, or is our goal to actually reduce and eliminate suffering? If we want to strive for both, we must question the structures these substances are being incorporated into and how they function to further entrench ruling-class control. We must understand how ruling-class hegemony functions through class institutions.

Overall, our hope is that psychedelics can meet their revolutionary potential and have a role in not only mitigating suffering caused by violent systems, but also help us eliminate those systems altogether. But if system-based analysis is absent from the growing renaissance, and if revolutionary politics are not central to our analysis, then the potential to actually fight systems which create suffering does not exist.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Pappas and Dimitri Mugianis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/capitalist-hegemony-in-psychedelic-medicine/feed/ 0 405661 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/coincidence-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/coincidence-theory/#respond Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:12:07 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140886

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/coincidence-theory/feed/ 0 401317 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-raccoon-dog-theory-of-covid-19/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-raccoon-dog-theory-of-covid-19/#respond Wed, 10 May 2023 11:00:33 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=427313

A new paper by a prominent American virologist has called into question a string of high-profile news reports about the role that raccoon dogs may have played in the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Late last month, Jesse Bloom, a computational virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle released a paper in which he analyzed raw genomic data from hundreds of environmental swabs that Chinese scientists collected from cages, carts, and other surfaces at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. The swabs were collected beginning on January 1, 2020, after Chinese authorities abruptly shut down the market amid the worsening Covid-19 outbreak in the city.

The Huanan seafood market’s role in the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic is at the center of a hot debate. Many of the early Covid cases in Wuhan (though not all) have been linked to the market, which was known to sell live animals, including species like common raccoon dogs that are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2. Some have argued that these and other findings make the market the likely site of one or more natural spillover events in which SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population from a raccoon dog or another intermediate animal host. But no infected animal was found at the market, and others have argued that the bustling facility was more likely the site of a super-spreader event, in which a virus that had already entered the human population in late 2019 was amplified. Which was it: the site of the original spillover or only a super-spreader venue? This question has been a key battleground in the tumultuous debate about Covid-19’s origin.

Given this context, the raw data from the environmental swabs have long been seen as a possible clue to what happened at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. But the data only became available to the global research community in 2023, after years in which Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its researchers kept it out of the public domain. The data has since sparked a firestorm of discussion, including numerous stories in mainstream news outlets that have relied on the data to report a link between raccoon dogs and Covid’s origin. Bloom’s new paper helps clarify what has become something of a confused, and confusing, media spectacle.

Bloom’s paper, which was published as a preprint on bioRxiv on April 26, found that the data from the swabs provide no evidence one way or another about whether raccoon dogs or other animals at the market were infected with SARS-CoV-2. It also highlights what is perhaps the most significant limitation of the data from the environmental swabs collected by Chinese scientists. The swabs were collected, Bloom writes, “at least a month after the first human infections in Wuhan.”

“It is just very hard to take data collected that far downstream of initial entry into humans and to convincingly support any precise scenario for how the virus got into humans,” he said in an interview.

“Even if you had animal-to-human transmission in the market in December, by the time you collected samples in January, it could have been easily spreading back from humans to animals,” added Sergei Pond, a computational virologist at Temple University who was not involved in Bloom’s research. “Any self-respecting defense attorney would have a field day with this.”

Members of staff of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team drive their vehicle as they leave the closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, China, on Jan. 11, 2020.

Photo: Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Bold, Exaggerated Headlines

Bloom’s analysis contains other significant insights (more on that below), but he was not the first nor the only scientist independent of Chinese institutions to obtain and analyze some of the raw data from the Huanan market environmental swabs. In March, an international team of virologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists — many of whom have been starring players in the heated scientific and social media debates about Covid’s origins — discovered that a portion of the raw data had been uploaded by Chinese researchers to a global online database. The international group put together their own independent report on the available data and first informed the World Health Organization of their preliminary findings on March 11. Before the report was ready to be released publicly, the press got wind of the team’s work. What followed was a bumper crop of bold headlines.

“The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic in a March 16 headline. “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” announced the New York Times that same day. “New Evidence Supports Animal Origin of Covid Virus through Raccoon Dogs,” wrote the Scientific American a day later. The news of a link between raccoon dogs and Covid’s origins spread like a conflagration.

What was this strong evidence? The Atlantic’s March 16 story described the international team’s work like this:

“A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019,” wrote The Atlantic’s Katherine Wu. “It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.”

Wu reported, among other things, that the international team of researchers had “discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material — much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face.”

At the time The Atlantic published its article on March 16, the international team’s report was not yet publicly available; it wouldn’t be released until the following week. In the days before and after the report’s release, several of its authors gave interviews to top news outlets about their findings. One of the scientists involved in the international team’s analysis was quoted in The Atlantic saying: “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.” Another author told the New York Times: “This isn’t an infected animal. But this is the closest you can get without having the animal in front of you.”

The actual text of the international team’s report, though, offered more limited conclusions than the press statements of some of its authors.

“Declarations in the media are what people as individuals think and their interpretation and different people in the group had different certainty on what you can deduce,” said Florence Débarre, a French evolutionary biologist and one of the authors of the international team’s report, who did not speak to The Atlantic for its story.

The international team’s report appeared on Zenodo on March 20. Contrary to the quoted assertions of a few days before, the published report did not claim that its findings could only sensibly be explained by infected animals at the market, or that its work was the closest you could get without having an infected animal in front of you. What it did convincingly show was that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold at the market in the run-up to its closure on January 1, 2020. “It was a significant finding given that the Chinese CDC had not mentioned them before in the context of these data,” Débarre said.

The international team’s report also said that the genetic material from susceptible nonhuman animals were at their “highest frequency” in stalls in the southwest corner of the market, where live wildlife was known to have been sold and where most SARS-CoV-2 genetic material was collected. And the team’s report engaged in a metagenomic analysis of the data they had from the environmental swabs: Among other things, the team parsed the mix and quantity of animal genetic material found in environmental swabs that had been designated as positive for SARS-CoV-2 by the China CDC.

The team found that there were several SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs from the market that also contained some quantity of genetic material from raccoon dogs and other susceptible mammals. As the New York Times reported in its March 16 story, one swab, in particular, caught the researchers’ eyes: a swab labeled Q61. This swab was collected from a cart in the southwest corner of Huanan market on January 12, 2020; it was designated as positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the China CDC’s data set; and when the international team analyzed the contents of the swab, it contained a large quantity of raccoon dog genetic material and very little human genetic material.

As one of the team’s scientists told the New York Times: “We were able to figure out relatively quickly that at least in one of these samples, there was a lot of raccoon dog nucleic acid, along with virus nucleic acid.”

In the end, based on these and other findings, the international team stated the following in their report: “Although we cannot identify the intermediate animal host species from these data, a plausible explanation for the co-occurrence of the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 and susceptible animals is that a subset of these animals were infected. Combined with the previously published observation of the strong association of the earliest reported Covid-19 cases with the west side of the market, and the clustering of SARS-CoV-2-containing environmental samples near the wildlife stalls, this provides further support for the hypothesis that wildlife were the source of the first human SARS-CoV-2 infections.” Elsewhere in the report, the authors write that their findings identify “these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”

View of a raccoon dog at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City on Aug. 6, 2015.

Photo: Alfredo Estrella /AFP via Getty Images

Statistically Insignificant

This is where Jesse Bloom entered the picture. After the international team’s work made major headlines across the news media, the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the Huanan seafood market swab data online, in a revision to an earlier preprint from February 2022. A peer-reviewed version was then published in the scientific journal Nature. That paper confirmed the presence of raccoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market but noted that the environmental samples “cannot prove that the animals were infected.” At this point, Bloom decided to jump in too and take his own look at the raw data.

Bloom’s analysis took a slightly different approach than the international team that preceded him. Among other things, he was working from a more complete data set, which had been released by the Chinese researchers after they posted their paper. And Bloom not only looked at the quantity and type of animal genetic material in the environmental swab data, but he also analyzed and published the quantity of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material found in the swabs. When Bloom looked under the hood, he made some surprising findings.

For instance, he took a close looked at swab Q61: the swab featured in the New York Times article that contained a great deal of raccoon dog genetic material and was also purportedly positive for SARS-CoV-2. What Bloom found was that the swab indeed contained a significant quantity of raccoon dog genetic material but very low amounts of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material.

As Bloom reports in his paper, “This sample tested negative by RT-qPCR and appears to have been called positive on the basis of containing 1 of ~200,000,000 reads that mapped to SARS-CoV-2.”

In other words, as Sergei Pond explained, the swab Q61 that got all that media attention was not all it was reported to be.

“One read out of 200,000,000 is completely statistically insignificant,” said Pond. “It really had no SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence based on genetic analysis there was SARS-CoV-2 in that sample. One read out of 200,000,000 — it could have been a low level of trace contamination.”

What’s more, as Bloom’s preprint reports, Q61 was the only swab above a certain threshold for raccoon dog genetic material that contained any SARS-CoV-2 RNA at all: “13 of the 14 samples with at least 20% of their chordate mitochondrial material from raccoon dogs contain no SARS-CoV-2 reads, and the other sample [swab Q61] contains just 1 of ~200,000,000 million reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2.” When Bloom plotted the quantity of animal genetic material found in the swabs with their SARS-CoV-2 RNA content, he determined that there was in fact a negative correlation between the abundance of SARS-CoV-2 and genetic material from raccoon dogs in the swabs.

“I wouldn’t read too much into these correlations, but to the extent SARS-CoV-2 genetic material is associated with any of the material from these species, it is not with species that we think could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “It just sort of suggests that by the time these samples were collected, SARS-CoV-2 was all over the place, probably unrelated to the distribution of the animals and animal products [at the market].”

Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which has been closed for about three years since the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus, on Dec. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kyodo via AP

Media Hype vs. Scientific Method

Bloom notes that his preprint confirms many of the international team’s findings, including the presence of raccoon dogs and other susceptible mammals at Huanan market in the run-up to January 1, 2020. But the bottom line, Bloom said, is that “when looked at carefully these data are not sufficient to conclude anything either way about whether there were infected animals.”

He also had pointed words (at least in the context of a staid scientific paper) for the media coverage of this matter. The findings from his preprint, Bloom writes, “are somewhat inconsistent with related media articles that emphasized co-mingling of raccoon dog and viral material (Wu 2023; Mueller 2023) — in fact, raccoon dogs are one of the species with the least co-mingling of their genetic material and SARS-CoV-2.” Instead, Bloom found that the greatest co-mingling of viral and animal material involved species that were “almost certainly not infected with SARS-CoV-2,” such as fish and livestock.

James Alwine, a virologist and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written on the Covid origin debate and favors the natural spillover hypothesis, said he worries about the negative impact that sensational headlines and overhyped press statements have on the credibility of scientists.

“I must say I am always worried about the sensationalism that comes out with every one of these discoveries, because it just goes against my idea of how science should be talked about to the public,” he said. “And you know,” he added, “scientists are humans just like all of us, they get carried away and don’t always say the right things. But it has a deleterious effect.”

Apart from the media coverage, Alwine was keen to point out that the papers from Bloom and the international team actually show the iterative scientific process at work. Indeed, Bloom and some of the key scientists from the international team have had a professional and fruitful debate since their respective publications appeared. Several authors on the international team, including Débarre, have offered feedback on Bloom’s preprint. Bloom, in turn, slightly revised the piece to incorporate some of their comments.

Débarre, for her part, noted that despite Bloom’s findings regarding the Q61 swab, the international team still showed that raccoon dog genetic material was located in the same area of the market, indeed in the same stall, where other separate swabs found SARS-CoV-2 material.

“Overall we pretty much agree with what Jesse Bloom concludes,” she told me. “It is more a matter of interpretation in how you weigh other data and other pieces of evidence to form an interpretation.”

In terms of the broader picture — the overall debate about the origin of Covid-19 and whether it spilled over from nature or emerged out of a lab — Bloom told me he remains agnostic.

“I mean it is obviously hard when you are interpreting what is all circumstantial evidence. All publicly available evidence right now about how SARS-CoV-2 entered humans, it is all circumstantial,” he said.

“I think it is very unclear how SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans,” he added.

Since incorporating the comments he received, Bloom has submitted his preprint for peer review at a scientific journal. According to Débarre, the international team is working on new analyses that it hopes to submit for peer review at a future date.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-raccoon-dog-theory-of-covid-19/feed/ 0 393814 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/#respond Wed, 03 May 2023 19:41:12 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/sandra-day-o-connor

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor played a greater role than previously known in handing the highly contentious 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, a document released Tuesday by the Library of Congress revealed.

It has long been known that O'Connor—who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan and was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court—wanted Bush to win the 2000 election, at least in part because of her right-wing views; her admiration for his father, former President George H. W. Bush; and because she wanted to retire after a Republican president nominated her replacement.

However, the newly released documents—part of a trove of former Justice John Paul Stevens' papers—include a four-page memo O'Connor sent to her colleagues on December 10, 2000, even before they heard arguments in Bush v. Gore. Her memo laid the groundwork for the controversial 5-4 ruling that stopped Florida's court-ordered recount in a too-close-to-call contest between Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore and gave the presidency to the Republican Texas governor.

In her memo, O'Connor attacked the unanimous November 21, 2000 Florida Supreme Court decision that the results of manual ballot recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties must be included in the final state tally, while giving the three counties five days to certify their results.

"Before there was 2020 there was 2000."

During that period, Bush's legal team appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court while self-described "dirty trickster" Matt Schlapp and future seven-count felon Roger Stone led an effort to fly hundreds of paid operatives to Florida to harass and intimidate Miami-Dade officials—the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot"—in a bid to thwart their court-ordered work.

"I am concerned that the Florida Supreme Court transgressed the lines of authority drawn by Article II of the federal Constitution in substantially changing the state Legislature's statutory scheme for the appointment of presidential electors," O'Connor wrote.

"The Florida Supreme Court provided no uniform, statewide method for identifying and separating the undervotes," she noted, a reference to instances when voting machines could not read ballots.

\u201cBefore there was 2020 there was 2000 ....\n\nhttps://t.co/8gHDBXXdgK\u201d

— Jocelyn Benson (@Jocelyn Benson) 1683072858

"Accordingly, there was no guarantee that those ballots deemed undervotes had not been previously tabulated," O'Connor asserted. "More importantly, the court failed to provide any standard more specific than the 'intent of the voter' standard to govern this statewide undervote recount. Therefore, each individual county was left to devise its own standards."

O'Connor noted that the Florida Legislature "has created a detailed, if not perfectly crafted statutory scheme that provides for the appointment of presidential electors by direct election," and that "the Legislature has designated the secretary of state as the 'chief election officer.'"

Florida's secretary of state at the time, Katherine Harris, was not only a Republican, she also co-chaired Bush's campaign in the state. On November 26, 2000 Harris declared Bush the winner in Florida by 537 votes, even though there were counties still tallying ballots.

Ignoring this obvious conflict of interest, O'Connor said the Florida Supreme Court "disregarded the secretary of state's delegated duty to exercise her discretion to determine whether to accept the state's late returns" and whether a manual recount requested by Gore was warranted.

Gore had asked for recounts in four heavily Democratic counties amid drama over dimpled, pregnant, and hanging chads; butterfly and caterpillar ballots; write-in votes; overcounts; undercounts; and a bewildering barrage of strange new terms. Some political commentators have argued that Gore's failure to request a statewide manual recount may have been a fatal miscalculation.

\u201cA reminder that the Republicans successfully stole a presidential election 23 years ago...and their hackish Justices on the Supreme Court played a key role in their doing so. https://t.co/2qkSr2svmt\u201d

— @Ben_Alpers@mastodon.online \ud83d\uddfd (@@Ben_Alpers@mastodon.online \ud83d\uddfd) 1683070110

The day after O'Connor circulated her memo, Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Reagan appointee and frequent swing vote, wrote to right-wing Chief Justice William Rehnquist endorsing her "very sound approach."

Rehnquist—who was appointed by Republican former President Richard Nixon—was a proponent of what is now called the independent state legislature theory (ISLT), the fringe right-wing notion that state lawmakers alone can regulate federal elections. Hard-right Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the five votes for Bush, also embraced the dubious theory.

Prominent purveyors of former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" have cited ISLT when pushing state lawmakers to help overturn President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Thomas' wife Ginni Thomas—who in 2000 solicited resumes for positions in the presumptive Bush administration before her husband cast his decisive vote in Bush v. Gore—unsuccessfully pressed Arizona state lawmakers to invoke ISLT in service of Trump's ill-fated effort to reverse his 2020 loss.

Notably, Bush's legal team in Bush v. Gore included current right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina voting rights case currently before the court, could decide the legal validity of ISLT.

\u201cOne member of George W. Bush's legal team was especially enthusiastic about the "independent state legislature" theory: Brett Kavanaugh. \n\nHere he is endorsing it in 2000. \n\nNow Kavanaugh gets a chance to write it into law. Talk about a long game. https://t.co/VlnfRdeCy6\u201d

— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern) 1670424929

On December 12, 2000 the justices ruled in a 7-2 per curiam opinion that Florida's court-ordered recount must be stopped on equal protection grounds, and 5-4 that there was no other way to recount all of the contested votes in a timely manner. Rehnquist, Kennedy, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas voted in favor of Bush, while Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Stevens dissented.

In his stirring dissent, Stevens presciently noted that "although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judges as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Four out of the five justices who sided with Bush were accused of conflicts of interest: Rehnquist and O'Connor were septuagenarians who had stated their desire to retire during a Republican presidency—the latter reportedly exclaimed "this is terrible" in response to a TV news report showing Gore leading on election night; Thomas' wife was headhunting personnel for a potential Bush administration; and two of Scalia's sons worked for law firms representing Bush. None of the four justices recused themselves from Bush v. Gore. Bush later nominated Eugene Scalia for U.S. labor solicitor.

\u201cWhen I was a kid I really really looked up to the Supreme Court justices. We all learned how they get lifetime appointments to make sure they can\u2019t be influenced etc\u2026with Thomas, Alito, O\u2019Connor, Kavanaugh, and all\u2026I definitely don\u2019t feel the same way.\n\nhttps://t.co/6YZYqMFvAM\u201d

— Yuh-Line Niou (@Yuh-Line Niou) 1683092690

O'Connor—who is now 93 years old—would come to have regrets, which she expressed years after her 2006 retirement. In 2013, she told the Chicago Tribune editorial board that Bush v. Gore "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," she said. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

There were other reasons why some commentators refer to the 2000 presidential election as "stolen." Chiefly, massive voter disenfranchisement resulting from racist policies of Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—the GOP candidate's brother—played what one federal civil rights official called an "outcome-determinative" role in the state's, and therefore the nation's, results.

Scalia infamously dismissed his friend Bader Ginsburg's concerns over Black disenfranchisement as the "Al Sharpton Footnote," and habitually advised Americans disturbed by Bush v. Gore to "get over it."

\u201cThe article included extensive evidence that Ginsburg was right to be concerned. When Scalia died 2 years later, his obnoxious & dismissive Sharpton remark - which said a great deal about who he was - didn\u2019t make it into the many think pieces about his tenure on the Court.\u201d

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sherrilyn Ifill) 1683083845

However, it was ultimately the Supreme Court's cessation of the unfinished Florida recounts, and Gore's subsequent meek acquiescence "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy," that handed victory to Bush.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/feed/ 0 392369 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/tucker-carlson-purveyor-of-hate-out-at-fox/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/tucker-carlson-purveyor-of-hate-out-at-fox/#respond Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:03:41 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/tucker-carlson-racism-fox

Less than a week after avoiding a trial regarding its election lies with a $787.5 million settlement, Fox News announced on Monday that its top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, is leaving the network effective immediately.

Carlson's final show was Friday evening, and he closed the broadcast by telling viewers, "We'll be back on Monday," suggesting he wasn't aware of his imminent departure.

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" played a key role in the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of spreading misinformation about its election software as its hosts and guests repeatedly claimed votes cast for former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020 had been "flipped" for Democratic President Joe Biden.

Carlson had been expected to testify in the case before it was settled just before the trial was scheduled to begin last month. While claiming on-air that questions about the validity of the 2020 election results were part of "legitimate discourse and inquiry," uncovered text messages between Carlson and his producer showed that he found Trump's claims about the election "disgusting" and "destructive."

In addition to promoting lies about Biden's victory, Carlson spent his 14-year tenure at Fox News—as a contributor, panelist, co-host, and starting in 2016 as host of his own prime-time show—attacking immigrants and asylum-seekers, advancing the white supremacist "Great Replacement Theory," and urging police to crack down on racial justice protesters.

Economist Robert Reich noted that Carlson's exit does not mean that the network will "start telling the truth."

\u201cTucker Carlson might be gone, but if you're counting on Fox News to suddenly start telling the truth, don't hold your breath.\u201d

— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1682353106

While Fox News has given no indication that its other hosts, commentators, and guests will stop promoting similar ideas, consumer rights watchdog Public Citizen President Robert Weissman called Carlson's departure "flat-out great news."

"Anything that reduces the reach of this purveyor [of] hate, racism, reaction and authoritarianism is a positive step for America and the world," he said.

With Carlson gone, said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Fox News officials "just need to take out the rest of the trash."

Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, said Carlson was likely pushed out because he had become "toxic" for the network, even as it relied heavily on him and his millions of viewers.

\u201c2/ That said, Tucker was extremely important to Fox News. When Fox\u2019s audience backlashed back in 2020, they put Tucker out front and center. \n\nTucker is also the *only* Fox personality that has been able to convert Fox viewers to Fox Nation subscribers.\u201d

— Angelo Carusone (@Angelo Carusone) 1682350953

"Fox News without Tucker is basically a wet paper towel: fragile and functionally useless," said Carusone. "They will try and get their footing back fast, but don't let them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/tucker-carlson-purveyor-of-hate-out-at-fox/feed/ 0 390107 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/07/roaming-charges-broken-windows-theory-of-political-crime/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/07/roaming-charges-broken-windows-theory-of-political-crime/#respond Fri, 07 Apr 2023 06:01:24 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=278434

Broken window, Alcatraz Prison. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“In my country, you go to prison first, then become president.”

– Nelson Mandela

+ People griping about the trivial nature of the charges against Trump seem to have forgotten that the aggressive enforcement of trivial offenses has been the hallmark of American policing for 40 years, put into vicious deployment by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Trump cheering him on. With hundreds of thousands of people arrested and jailed for minor offenses like subway fare evasion, loitering, jaywalking, or selling single cigarettes, isn’t it time we applied the Broken Windows Theory to political crimes and hold to account the people who enforced it on others?

+ Trump’s defenders say he’s been overcharged and that the crimes he may have committed were misdemeanors not felonies. They’re probably right. Overcharging is a common tactic of prosecutors to coerce guilty pleas. His own Justice Department aggressively overcharged as a matter of policy, always seeking the top charge and maximum penalty, especially in death penalty cases, which they fast-tracked. But let’s say Trump’s crimes were misdemeanors. New York City averages 125,000 misdemeanor arrests every year, 490 each day. There’s nothing exceptional about it. It’s one of the most common experiences in America. Welcome to the club, Donald.

+ Nearly all financial crimes are a matter of putting entries where they shouldn’t be and not putting them where they should be or, in the age of TurboTax, checking boxes that shouldn’t be checked and not checking boxes that should be, in order to conceal an underlying scheme, which is sometimes a massive rip-off (See: Bernie Madoff) and sometimes a sordid pay-off.

+ Trump’s Justice Department and many of the judges he appointed to the federal bench endeavored to undermine Miranda and other protections for criminal defendants that I assume Trump is wrapping himself tightly in at this moment.

+ If Republicans believe it’s okay to ignore indictments by “Soros-backed” prosecutors, I guess the rest of us are free to ignore the rulings of Federalist Society-backed judges and Supreme Court justices…

+ A month before the 2016 election Fox reporter Diana Falzone pitched a story on Trump’s hush money payments, but Falzone claims her editor killed the piece, saying: “Good reporting Kiddo, but Rupert wants Trump to win.”

+ Stephen Miller: “What is Donald Trump’s crime?…His crime is refusing to bow or bend to the corrupt and rotten foreign policy establishment that is used to always getting their way in this country.”

+ Let’s review: Trump appointed the Deep State’s top torturer to run the CIA, put 1000s of troops on the ground in Syria and stole their oil, broke Obama’s drone strike record, sanctified Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, separated children from their parents at the border, extracted pledges of higher military spending from NATO countries, plotted to kill Julian Assange then indicted him on espionage charges, wanted to bomb and invade Mexico…

+ Marjorie Taylor Greene (White Power-GA), after being freshly sanitized for mass consumption by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes: “Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today. Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus! Jesus was arrested and murdered.”

+ Next weekend on 60 Minutes, Lesley sits down with Eugene Connor. His friends affectionately call him Bull. He likes dogs. In his spare time, Bull invented a new firehouse, so powerful it could knock down a cow. But he tells Lesley he promises not to use it …. on farm animals.

+ Greene to Tucker Carlson on New York City: “It’s disgusting. It was repulsive, it smells bad. I think it’s a very terrible place.” I guess it was the mere sight of blacks, gays and Jews she glimpsed from the confines of her Uber that set off her olfactory alarms, because this professional bigot’s district contains some of the largest confined feeding operations in the country.

+ In the statement of facts used to justify Trump’s indictment, the prosecutors have resurrected the story of the Trump Tower doorman, who was paid $30,000 by AMI (the parent company of the National Inquirer) to stay silent about his allegation that Trump had an affair an affair with a former housekeeper.  He didn’t stay quiet very long, though. In 2018 Dino Sajudin issued a statement saying: “I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump “which produced a child.”

+ There’s some karma here. For years rightwing media has pushed the story that Bill Clinton has a “black love child” named Danney Williams, the biological issue of an alleged affair with a Little Rock prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams.

+ In thinking about the extramarital sex lives of our presidents–Jefferson, Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, George HW Bush, Clinton, Trump–they all share a passionless, abrasive, rapine quality. None of these men were Romantics. They didn’t have “relationships” with women. They used them, sometimes brutally, and moved on. One of JFK’s longtime mistresses, Mimi Beardsley, a White House intern who the president cornered in Jackie’s powder room for the first of many rushed sexual encounters, said he never once in two years kissed her on the lips.

+ Warren Harding paid his mistress Carrie Phillips–a German spy who attempted to blackmail Harding into opposing US entry into World War I–$5000 a month to keep their 15-year-long affair secret.

+ One of the problems with the Trump presidency is that he apparently had a lot of sex before being elected (even if he had to pay for it eventually) and none afterwards. Not the optimal scenario for someone with the supreme command over 4,000 nuclear warheads.

+ Trump spent the day before his arraignment hacking golf balls with Gary Player. It should surprise no one that Player was a propagandist for the South African apartheid regime, paid by the government to entice international business elites to come play golf in SA.

+ Will the indictment of Trump really “destabilize” Democracy? Other “democracies” seem to have survived indicting their former leaders, including France’s Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Moshe Katsav, South Korea’s Park Geun-hye and Lee Meung-bak, Japan’s Kakuei Tanaka, Taiwan’s Chen Shiu-bian, Malaysia’s Najib Razak, and Argentina’s Isabel Kirchner…

+ It’s not true that Trump is the first ex-President in the US to be indicted, that would be Jefferson Davis, the president of the 11 states in the Confederacy. Davis’ trial for treason and sedition was scheduled to start on February 15, 1869, when, after Davis had spent two years in a military prison, federal prosecutors abruptly entered a nolle prosequi order (statement of decision not to prosecute) in order to “heal the nation.”

+ Trump himself should have been somewhat familiar with the booking process. After all, his father Fred had been arrested twice–first in 1927 at a Klan (yes, that Klan) rally-turned-riot and again over building code violations at a low-income housing project he owned in Maryland in 1976, when Donald was 30 and working for his father’s real estate company.

+ Trump has reportedly raised $7 million since his indictment. (His lawyers and staff still won’t get paid.)

+ We’ve entered the My Pillow Promo Code Stage of Capitalism…

Roger: “If you don’t go to MyPillow and use promo code STONE, it’s very difficult to finance this show or pay our bills. As we speak, Mrs. Stone is on the phone with our health insurance provider who, for reasons we don’t understand, attempted to cancel our health insurance.” pic.twitter.com/wrljHsqRu2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 3, 2023

+ Now that Trump has been charged, arrested and booked, he might have a more legitimate claim to being the first black president than Clinton or Obama. Of course, he’d have to release his booking and arrest report, long-form naturally.

+ And if he doesn’t quite qualify as the first black president, he may well be the first Country and Western president. Consider the parallels to Conway Twitty.

+++

+ A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at 134 school shootings and found that the presence of armed guards increased deaths by 2.83 times.

+ In 2014, there were 273 mass shootings in the US. The number has risen sharply ever since: 283 in 2016, 417 in 2018, 610 in 2020 and 290 in 2021. In the first three months of 2023, there already have been 135 mass shootings.

+ The first three months of U.S. gun violence in 2023:

+ 4,529 gun deaths
+ 8,085 gun injuries
+135 mass shootings
+197 children shot
+1,258 teenagers shot
+268 incidents of defensive gun use
+368 unintentional shootings
+ 6,138 suicides

+ An investigation by the Baltimore Banner reveals that since the start of the academic year last fall, two dozen high school-age teens have been shot in Baltimore within approximately two blocks of 16 different schools.

+ Republicans in Tennessee tried to expel three Democratic members of the state legislature (Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson) for expressing support for peaceful protesters (many of them high school students) calling for new gun safety legislation in the wake of the Covenant School in Nashville. The three Democrats have been accused of leading “an insurrection” that “stormed the capitol.” Yet, there were no injuries, no property damage and no arrests. The protestors went through the building’s security, which was operated by officers from the Tennessee Highway Patrol, and left the galleries willingly when the chamber went into recess.

+ Rep. Gloria Johnson: “We’ve had members pee in each other’s chairs. We’ve had members illegally prescribe drugs to their cousin-mistress, and nothing happened. But talk on the floor without permission, and you’ll get expelled.”

+ In the end, the Tennessee legislature expelled the two black men (Jones and Pearson) and retained the white woman (Johnson).

+ A couple of months after the murder of  Tyre Nichols by Memphis cops, the Tennessee legislature has voted to override police accountability measures passed by voters, strip civilian review boards of their power, and make it difficult to investigate abuse and excessive force.

+ The female incarceration rate in the US is more than 6 times higher now than in 1980.

+ And once in prison, their menstrual cycles are exploited as a form of punishment, degradation and humiliation.

+ “A routine discomfort”: how the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals describes solitary confinement in prison.

+ Pro Publica has published a devastating exposé of the secret gratuities, trips and  Clarence Thomas has pocketed from his sugar daddy, Harlan Crow, a Dallas tycoon who is a big time GOP donor. For two decades, Thomas has been indulged by Crow with yearly vacations and soirees, including international cruises on Crow’s super-yacht, flights on Crow’s Global 5000 jet, and retreats at Crow’s east Texas ranch and private resort in the Adirondacks. Crow even took Thomas to the Bohemian Grove gathering of the world’s top male power-brokers, a confab which the anti-globalist right has portrayed as a kind of annual Black Mass of the financiers of the Deep State, where the members satiate themselves on the blood of sacrificed infants.

+ In the wake of these revelations came the inevitable calls for new ethics rules for members of the court. But this entirely misses the fact that were already rules and laws in place and Thomas violated them, knowing he’d never be held to account.

+ Clarence Thomas: Reparations for me, but not for thee.

+ Paul Roland: “From Jim Crow to Harlan Crow in one generation.”

+ Even in his short tenure on the court, Abe Fortas was one of the most consequential and progressive jurists in American history. Yet Fortas resigned (and rightly so) after it was revealed he was paid for teaching a summer law course at my alma mater, American University, and had received and returned a $20,000 check from the Wolfson Foundation, a charity run by the family of Wall Street financier Louis Wolfson, who had been indicted for securities fraud (ie, falsifying business records and checking the wrong boxes). So will Thomas the bag man, resign? You’re kidding, right? Yeah.

+ In 2019, the US Department of Justice issued a blistering survey of the state of Alabama’s failures to protect incarcerated people from violence, sexual abuse, excessive force by staff. Since then 698 more incarcerated Alabamians have died in state prisons.

+ Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade, the LAPD operated one of the country’s few “abortion squads,” tracking down women who had terminated their pregnancies. Why hasn’t this become a James Ellroy novel?

+ According to a report in Vice, ICE (remember them?)  has been using 1509 summonses to demand data from elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics.

+ More than three million people in the US are on probation or parole. About 750,000 of them have no health insurance. They risk incarceration if they can’t do things like pass regular drug tests.

+ A Bureau of Justice Statistics study of victims of child sexual abuse in detention facilities found that among 499 substantiated incidents, perpetrators faced legal action only 31% of the time, and that incidents were typically handled internally, with a reprimand or discipline, demotion or temporary suspension.

+ Despite the howls about the supposed leniency of NYC prosecutors and recent bail reforms,  inmates spend an average of 115 days at the city’s Rikers jail, four times the national average. Most of them are stuck in jail awaiting trial.

+ If you read most of the coverage (and especially that in the New York Times) on the results of the Chicago mayoral primary, you’d probably come away convinced that former mayor Lori Lightfoot lost because she was soft on crime. Thus it must have come as a shock to you to learn that she was replaced by someone even “softer” on crime than she supposedly was: Brandon Johnson, who handily defeated the tough-on-crime candidate Paul Vallas. In the run-up to the election, the head of the Chicago Police Union said at least 1,000 officers would quit their jobs if Johnson was elected. Let’s see if it happens.

+ Wisconsin seems intent on becoming the Tennessee of the Great Lakes. Even before Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz won election to the state’s Supreme Court, Wisconsin Republicans have vowed to impeach her and remove her from office. And given the gerrymandered supermajority Republicans enjoy in the Wisconsin state house, it looks like they have the votes to do it, even if they’ll have to concoct a reason.

+ At least, the virulent concession rant from Protasiewicz’s opponent, Dan Kelly, who lost by an 11-point margin, wasn’t cribbed from Nixon’s Checker’s speech…

+ State Police in Michigan are now classifying what anti-police bias incidents as hate crimes.

+ Speaking of Michigan, it has sentenced more minors to life without parole than any other state.

+ $2.8 million: the amount the city of Portland has settled in dozens of claims and lawsuits for injuries cause by Portland police during the 2020 protests.

+ In Australia, Indigenous children between the ages of 10 and 17 are 24 times more likely to be placed in detention than other kids their age.

+ The City of Belleair Beach, Florida, has banned all political gatherings of more than 10 people on city parks, streets and sidewalks.

+ In 1963, Fanny Lou Hamer toured the Deep South as an organizer for SNCC, giving “citizenship classes” on a stipend of $10 a week. Hamer taught poor blacks in the region how to read, how to take voter registration tests, how to set up bank accounts and how to get lawyers. She was arrested and beaten multiple times. Chases out of towns by sheriffs and thugs. She never backed down. When she finally got back home that summer in a pile of mail she found a water bill for $9000. Her house had no running water.

+++

+ You know things are off the rails when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the only person in the administration and one of the very few in the entire government to urge de-escalation of the war-mongering rhetoric on China…

+ Ted Cruz: “China is waging 1000 year war against the United States. And still the Biden White House and the Democrat Party is structurally pro-China.” Is that in dog years, Ted?

+ Ted Olsen, the former Solicitor General under George W. Bush, who once argued in favor of the decision to prosecute terrorism suspects at Guantanamo is now calling that effort “doomed from the start” and is urging Biden to settle the remaining 9/11 cases rather than pursue death-penalty trials. “It’s an open sore that needs to be resolved,” said Olson. “It can’t go on forever.” Olson’s wife Barbara died in one of the hijacked planes.

+ Many backers of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have predicted a big winter/spring offensive that would decisively recapture the ground lost last year, if not drive all the way to Kiev and topple the Ukrainian government. Well, that hasn’t materialized. Instead, the battle for Bakhmut, now in its ninth month, is looking like a reverse image of the siege of Stalingrad. Russia has been forced to announce a very unpopular conscription of another 147,000 young people and they’re having to plead with China and Iran for more weapons, parts and drones. So why aren’t things going as planned (as if they ever do in a war) or expected? One reason might be found in a fascinating piece in Popular Mechanics, which examines the depleted and outdated state of Russia’s space satellite system, which is vital for not only surveillance of Ukrainian troop and weapons movements but also for the targeting of high-tech Russian weapons. According to Popular Mechanics, “Russia has just two optical intelligence (photographic) satellites in orbit now.” And only one of those passes over Ukraine. Moreover, the article notes that “while the GLONASS GPS satellites work, users (troops in the field) lack terminals and electronic maps to utilize satellite navigation…which only exacerbates the Russian military’s rigid and compartmentalized command system.” Settle in, this is going to be a long and bloody war, where neither side can secure advances or capitalize on the other’s retreats.

+ A map showing every US Air Force bombing raid on Laos from 1965 to 1973…

+ In the months before the D-Day invasion, the US Air Force presented a plan to bomb the railroad infrastructure of occupied France in order to stall the reinforcement of German positions before the Allied forces had secured a foothold in Normandy.  The plan came with a terrible caveat: the bombings might kill as many as 70,000 French civilians. Even Winston Churchill, whose record is as bloodstained as any 20^th century leader’s, was aghast. But the prospect of killing so many thousands of people the US came to liberate didn’t faze the Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, who said simply: “It must be done.” For the US, the price has almost always been worth it.

+ It’s hard to think of Richard Nixon as the voice of reason, but in 1959 after meeting with Fidel Castro Nixon advised Eisenhower to maintain diplomatic ties with Havana. Ike refused. He wanted Castro killed, telling the CIA’s Col JC King Fidel‘s assassination would “accelerate the fall of his government.”

+ During the 1960 presidential campaign when Robert McNamara invented the “missile gap” to make JFK seem more hawkish (which he was in many ways) than Nixon, the operational nuclear arsenal of the US outnumbered the Soviet arsenal by a ratio of 17 to 1.

+ In 1961, Che Guevara tried once again to reopen ties with the US when he met with JFK advisor Richard Goodwin in Uruguay. Che said that Cuba was willing to cut ties with the USSR (who he never trusted) and compensate US companies for confiscated property if the US would recognize legitimacy of Cuban govt. JFK never even replied. The Prince of Camelot did respond in a way with Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s plan–supervised by RFK–to assassinate Fidel & covertly overthrow the Cuban government. Having been a staffer for Joe McCarthy, Bobby was a virulent Red-Baiter–a driving force behind the US’s insane Cuba policy. (See Kai Bird’s book on the Bundy brothers, The Color of Truth)

+ Che saw more clearly than Fidel the dangers of Cuba becoming a vassal state of any other nation, although after the US rejected normalization they weren’t left with much choice. Still the economic consequences were dire and it nearly got the entire island obliterated. The Cubans learned quickly they would have little if any say in the relationship. They were given no choice but to accept the long-range missiles Khrushchev placed in Cuba. Khrushchev flatly rejected Fidel’s plea they be open about it, citing the US precedent of placing missiles in Turkey. Khrushchev even deceived his own ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, who ranks with Chou En-lai as one of the most skilled diplomats of the 60s and 70s. Dobrynin, who unknowingly lied to the UN about the missiles, later said: “It was a moral shock that stayed with me for years to come.”

+ We seem intent on repeating even the dumbest follies of the Cold War but with even more incompetent leaders on all sides. When the USSR shot down the U-2 spy plane flown by Gary Powers, the initial US response was to claim it was a NASA flight doing a meteorological survey over Turkey. When Moscow displayed the photographs from the U-2 to the world, Khrushchev quipped: “Ours take better pictures.” But the Soviets didn’t exactly inspire confidence themselves. When Khrushchev ordered the U-2 shot down, one of the new S-75 missiles hit a Soviet MiG-19s instead.

+ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken urged his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to release Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich. There’s an obvious solution: a falsely-imprisoned-on-espionage-charges reporter swap of Gershkovich for Julian Assange.

+ 4166: the number of years Hunter Biden would have had to serve on the board of Burisma ($50,000 a month) to pocket the amount of money Jared Kushner has banked ($2.5 billion) from Middle East governments.

+ Israel is currently holding 971 people in administrative detention, the highest number in 20 years. All but four of the detainees are Palestinians. None of them have received a trial.

+ Some of those now detained were beaten first, while worshiping inside the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan…

BREAKING: Israeli police brutally beat Palestinian worshippers inside al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan. pic.twitter.com/IiFU10qI5c

— IMEU (@theIMEU) April 4, 2023

+++

+ A 25-year rail engineer for Norfolk Southern has filed a federal whistleblower suit. Lance Johnston was fired after he reported a defective brake that could have caused a derailment. A Norfolk supervisor told him to use the train anyway. Johnston said operations really began deteriorating 4 years ago when Norfolk adopted “efficiency measures” known in the industry as “precision-scheduled railroading.” Johnson said the cutbacks meant there were not enough people to repair and maintain trains.

+ A recent US Labor Department investigation of more than 50 garment-sewing contractors and manufacturers discovered labor violations in 80% of the cases.

+ At least Harvard practices what its economics department teaches: impose starvation wages on its workers.

+ Speaking of Harvard, in a suspected “Swatting” event, Harvard University campus raided the Leverett House dorm room of four black students, who were held at rifle-point by the rent-a-cops. All based on a prank call to 9/11.

+ Carleton University has hired private Investigators to surveil and film students, instructors and teaching assistants who are striking against ‘exploitative’ wages at the Ottawa-based college.

+ Meanwhile, in Colorado, an intelligence agency called the Colorado Information Analysis Center has been monitoring student groups that planned non-violent protests against gun violence. The Colorado spy shop, a so-called fusion center, was established to prevent “acts of terrorism, taking an all-crimes/all-threats approach.” Instead they’ve apparently been snooping on the legally protected free-speech rights of students.

+ Last week a federal appeals court has ruled that Elon Musk violated US labor law when he Tweeted in 2018 that Tesla employees would lose their stock options if they joined a union.

+ About 17% of the people who bought new cars this year have an auto loan payment of $1000 or more–the highest share on record. The average monthly payment for a new car loan, according to the Wall Street Journal, was $730.

+ “Protect the children” (from everything except early, preventable deaths) is such a perverse political platform to run on. But it seems to be working best in precisely those places where the deaths of young people are the highest….

America is the only place in the world or modern history where lifespans are shortening and people are dying earlier. This shocking turn is not driven by middle-aged “deaths of despair” but by those among children and teenagers, often by violence.

+ Ashish Jha: “If you are up to date with your vaccines and you get treated with Paxolovid, and you get an infection, you just don’t die of this virus. Almost no one dies of this virus.” Number of people in the US who have died of Covid-19 since Jha became Biden’s Covid-19 Response Coordinator: 135,000 and rising at a rate of more than 300 a day.

+ There have been 170,300 excess deaths in the UK since the start of the pandemic, according to the Continuous Mortality Investigator (CMI). The total has increased by 18,900 in the first 12 weeks of 2023.

+ San Antonio has highest rate of Sexually Transmitted Diseases of Texas’ large cities. Nearly 20% of San Antonio’s residents under 65 lack health insurance.

+ As obesity rates about young people in the US surge, the Air Force has been forced to loosen its body fat standards to address sagging recruiting levels.

+ Oregon just became the first state in union to allow children who enroll in Medicaid at birth to stay until age six.

+ Kentucky has become the 38th state to legal medical cannabis. A reminder that Al Gore–as Cockburn and I reported in our biography of the Ozone Man–opposed the legalization of medical cannabis even as his sister Nancy endured excruciating pain while dying of cancer…

+ Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams…for starters.

+ Joe Manchin on whether he’ll run for re-election: “I just can’t sail off into the sunset even though I have a boat.” If he sails anywhere in his yacht, it ought to be into as smog-bound coal slurry pond…

+ The Nebraska High School Press Association filed a lawsuit against the Cornhusker state’s Northwest School District for shutting down a student newspaper at Grand Island Northwest High School for publishing LGBT stories.

+ Florida Republicans have introduced a bill to impose a criminal ban on Pride events throughout the state if anyone present is dressed in drag. The bill would also ban live performances of this bill would ban live performances of musicals like Rocky Horror Picture Show, La Cage au Faux and Hair.

+ Meanwhile, down at Mar-a-Lago…

You’ve got your mother in a whirl ’cause she’s
Not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, let’s stay out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine

Trump's warmup music tonight includes Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" pic.twitter.com/9UfxvUVupS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2023

+ The Supreme Court is now to the Left of Biden on trans athletes…

+ The Kansas state legislature just overrode the Governor’s veto to enact a law enabling schools to perform genital inspections of children to determine if they are transgender, which is a clear case of actual child sex abuse in the name of fighting imagined child sex abuse.

+ For decades my working assumption was that most Americans wanted their government to be helpful and generous to the poor and weak, knowing that it wouldn’t be. Now it seems more and more people want the government to be mean and cruel to the marginalized expecting that it will be…

+ Milan Kundera: “But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”

+ Here are the cast members of Irving Berlin’s traveling WW II U.S. military play This Is The Army putting their makeup and wigs on in the dressing room before a performance of the “Ladies of the Chorus” skit…

National Archives.

+ FoxNews’ Pete Hegseth: “The more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are. If you went to the Ivy League, prove to me you have any common sense at all.” Lachlan Murdoch: Princeton; Ron DeSantis: Yale/Harvard; Laura Ingraham: Dartmouth; Trump: Penn/Wharton; Pete Hegseth: Princeton/Harvard…So, I guess he’s got a point.

+ But why do so many MAGA politicians habitually lie about attending the same elite universities they profess to hate?

+++

+ Don’t be a climate doomsayer, we’re admonished. You’ll scare the children. Okay, okay. We’ll try to be more upbeat. Look for the bright side. Emphasize the positive developments, such as they are. Then you read that globally new oil and gas projects either approved in 2022 or slated to be approved between 2023 and 2025 “could cause 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions,” an amount that is more than 30 times the United States’ total carbon dioxide emissions in 2021.

+ According to a new report by researchers from the University of Michigan and Stanford, methane pollution in the Gulf of Mexico totals 600,000 metric tons a year. The average methane levels in federal waters were three times higher than official inventories, and 13 times higher in state waters. This grim disclosure didn’t deter Biden from offering one of the largest oil lease sales in history in the Gulf, opening up for drilling an area the size of Italy…

+ As the UAE prepares to host the next climate summit, Sultan Al Jaber is overseeing the expansion of the nation’s oil and gas production to 7.5 billion barrels of oil–90% of which would have to remain in the ground to meet the net zero scenario established by the International Energy Agency.

+ The European Parliament voted to list “ecocide” as an international atrocity on par with genocide. Ecocide statutes could soon be part of domestic law in all 27 countries of the EU.

+ Up to 38% of air pollution that poses a threat to human health in UK cities is the result of agriculture, more than produced by the cities themselves.

+ According to the latest data from NOAA, global sea-surface temperatures are now in excess of 21°C, temperature that has not been previously recorded at any time of year.

+ By studying sediment from the last ice age, scientists now calculate that melting ice sheets can collapse at a rate of 600 meters per day, far faster than previously believed.

+ Parking lots consume an average of 20% of the prime locations in U.S. city centers.

+ According to a study by Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (the city’s planning department), between 2001 and 2018 car trips within Paris’ city limits declined by 60%, while car trips between the city and its suburbs have fallen by 35 percent. Meanwhile, car crashes have fallen by 30 percent and mass transit ridership to jump by almost 40 percent in that time.

+ Since the mid-1990s Norway has been taxing their oil and gas industry at 78%, building a public fund worth $1.9 trillion. That’s $350,000 for every adult and child in Norway.

+ There was a 64% percent increase from 2021 to 2022 in European private jet traffic. Private flights climbed from 350,078 to 572,806, and the emissions more than doubled, according to a new research paper commissioned by Greenpeace.

+ The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) seems to be falling apart from the inside. The UN-sponsored alliance was set up to transition their insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. Two of the Alliance’s founding members, Zurich and Munich Re, have withdrawn in the last week.

+ 1067 bison were killed outside Yellowstone Park this year–a record high and moral low.

+ This year, fewer than 170,000 fall Chinook are expected to return to Central Valley rivers. That’s down from highs of over a million as recently as 1995.

+ Now derailing trains are spilling fascist brewed near-beer into Montana trout streams…

+++

+ Tanya Tucker on her move to LA in 1978: “I was the wildest thing out there. I could stay up longer, drink more and kick the biggest ass in town.”

+ Who killed the Brady Bunch? Sanford and Son, which, in one of the great triumphs of urban black culture, crushed the white bread suburban banality in the ratings when they went head-to-head on Friday nights, driving the mawkish show off the air in 1974.

+ The artist and writer Gary Indiana on the transformation of the East Village from the 1980s to 2023: “It’s completely changed, so it’s not even possible to compare. This used to be a block full of prostitutes, and the parallel block on 12th Street, that was where all the pimps worked on the corner. There used to be a slumlord bar on the corner called Eileen’s Reno Bar. Gay people wouldn’t even go there — it was all transgender people, Mafiosi, a serial killer in one instance — but I would go there all the time. The neighborhood gay bar was on Fourth Street and Second Avenue. There was Princess Pamela’s, and if you’d go at two in the morning, Miles Davis would be there eating chicken. There was a time when, if I walked from here to Houston Street on Second Avenue, I would know almost everybody that I saw. I have no particular love for New York whatsoever. When I’m here, I spend most of my time right here. I don’t like going out there.”

+ Stephen Spielberg on Joan Crawford: “She is 5 feet 4, but looks 6 feet on the screen. In a 2-shot with anyone, even Gable, your eyes fix on her. She is imperious, yet with a childlike sparkle. She is haughty, yet tender…in her range she can perform better than any of her contemporaries.” “Childlike sparkle?” Joan Crawford??

Policemen are Hiding Behind the Skirts of Little Girls

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor
Daniel L. Hatcher
(University of California)

What Is Intergenerational Justice?
Axel Gosseries
(Polity)

Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
Gregg Mitman
(New Press)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Sundown
Eddie Chacon
(Stones Throw)

The Birth of Bop: the Savoy 10
Various Artists
(Craft)

All Roads Lead to Home
Talbot, Molina, Lofgren & Young
(Reprise)

Reading Was My Salvation

“Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From “Superman” to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world. I would check off these books on the library order form and never expect to get them until they came. Leaning against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I read.” (Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades of Solitary Confinement)

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/07/roaming-charges-broken-windows-theory-of-political-crime/feed/ 0 385937 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/house-gop-refuses-to-denounce-white-supremacy-and-great-replacement-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/house-gop-refuses-to-denounce-white-supremacy-and-great-replacement-theory/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 16:01:26 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/republicans-white-supremacy

Led by ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee this week warned that Republicans doubled down on "a dangerous lie" when they refused to back a statement denouncing white supremacy.

Raskin (D-Md.) was joined by all 20 Democrats on the committee in signing a brief, straightforward statement condemning "white nationalism and white supremacy in all its forms, including the 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory," which claims that white Americans are intentionally being "replaced" by people of color, particularly through immigration policy.

"These hateful and dangerous ideologies have no place in the work of the United States Congress or our committee," reads the statement.

Raskin sent the statement along with a letter to committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), saying he was driven to call on his 26 Republican colleagues to sign on to the statement after the panel held a hearing in February titled "On the Front Lines of the Border Crisis."

In that hearing, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) asked whether immigrants arriving in the U.S. via the southern border are "changing our culture" and both Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed an "invasion" by migrants and asylum-seekers is taking hold at the U.S.-Mexico border.

None

— (@)

In his letter to Comer, Raskin noted that he had explained to the chairman at the hearing that "such language borrows from the 'Great Replacement' theory, the central dogma of contemporary white supremacy," and that the theory has been invoked by white nationalists who have committed deadly acts of domestic terrorism in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and Pittsburgh.

Republican lawmakers including Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have also alluded to the theory in their attacks on Democratic immigration policy.

Presented with the facts about the rise of white supremacy in the U.S. at the hearing and in Raskin's letter, Comer and the committee's other Republicans refused to sign the statement.

None

— (@)

A spokesperson for the committee's Republicans claimed the Democrats were attempting to "distract from President Biden's border crisis and their failure to conduct oversight of it for two years," and did not address the embrace of the Great Replacement theory by Republican lawmakers and domestic terrorists.

The Biden administration has garnered condemnation from progressives and human rights advocates for a number of anti-immigration policies, including his expansion of the Trump-era Title 42 expulsion policy and his current reported consideration of migrant family detentions.

As the Trump and Biden administrations have pushed anti-immigration programs, advocates have maintained that the "crisis" at the border is one of denying asylum-seekers their internationally recognized right to seek refuge in another country.

"Politicians and media pundits quickly reduce this mounting humanitarian crisis to 'border security,'" wrote Farrah Hassen of the Institute for Policy Studies at OtherWords in January. "That narrow focus puts real solutions out of reach—and imperils the universal right to seek refuge from danger."

In his letter, Raskin noted that Republicans have been given previous opportunities to condemn white supremacy.

"On June 8, 2022, following the racially motivated Tops Supermarket mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, House Democrats passed H. Res. 1152, a resolution to condemn the 'Great Replacement' theory and affirm the commitment of the People's House to combating white supremacy and race hatred," wrote Raskin. "Despite then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's acknowledgment that white supremacy and white nationalism are 'definitely not American,' not a single House Republican voted in favor of the resolution."

"As chairman, you have another opportunity to take a public stand against the deliberate amplification of dangerous racist rhetoric that has had deadly consequences in this country," he continued, referring to Comer. "If committee Republicans intend to continue examining the southern border and related policies, it is imperative for every member of this committee to make clear to the American people that we speak with one voice to reject dangerous conspiracy theories and racist and antisemitic ideology in our committee's deliberations and decision-making."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/house-gop-refuses-to-denounce-white-supremacy-and-great-replacement-theory/feed/ 0 378530 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/10/why-defeating-hochuls-right-wing-judicial-nominee-is-important-beyond-new-york/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/10/why-defeating-hochuls-right-wing-judicial-nominee-is-important-beyond-new-york/#respond Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:52:02 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/kathy-hochul-right-wing-judicial-nominee

To recap for anyone not lucky enough to be a New Yorker: for the last few months, leftists in the state have been fighting a fierce battle with Governor Kathy Hochul over her decision to nominate a conservative judge, Hector LaSalle, to lead the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court. Hochul lost the first (and possibly last) skirmish in that battle, as the State Senate's Judiciary Committee voted not to send LaSalle's nomination to the floor for a full vote, though it remains possible Hochul will sue the State Senate to try and force that vote.

LaSalle's initial defeat is good news for anyone who wants to halt the Court of Appeal's recent rightward drift. The judge's record indicated he would rule in favor of prosecutors and police, and against defendants and suspects; in favor of corporations, and against unions; and that his positions on issues from consumer protection to domestic violence to immigrant rights were indistinguishable from those held by a Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett.

As nice as it is to stop a conservative judge, there's a larger importance to the LaSalle nomination and (hopeful) defeat, one that is relevant to our national fights over judges, and even to how we think and talk about the law. The people pushing LaSalle were also pushing the false, but terribly common, idea that law is a neutral body of rules and precedents from which certain truths can be divined, and certain rulings naturally flow. In this reading, the statutes and judicial rulings that comprise the law are different from essays, novels, films, the Bible, or other texts, all of which lend themselves to multiple, equally valid interpretations. Law is special, akin to mathematics, easily knowable and usually certain. LaSalle's defeat represents a defeat of this false ideology.

This lie, indulged in by Republicans and Democrats both, is perhaps the most destructive one in our national discourse, and all too often the excuse for why we can't have a society that cares for everyone. It's a lie with a long history, undergirded by seductive philosophical musings and parroted by powerful parties with nefarious vested interests.

It's also in direct competition with another school of thought that sees law more realistically, as the product of flawed humans being wielded by other flawed humans. LaSalle's critics may not have been versed in this philosophy called legal realism, but they intuitively knew that judges who rule for the powerful and against the oppressed may do so for reasons found in their own heads, not in any statute or decision.

LaSalle's defenders framed his record in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has closely watched Supreme Court confirmation battles. When critics pointed to the awful real-world consequences of many rulings he supported, we were told that such rulings were just "procedural" or that LaSalle was, sadly, powerless to rule otherwise, so constrained was he by the iron shackles of precedent. To take one example, LaSalle's vote to allow Cablevision to sue its union workers personally for union activity undertaken during a labor struggle was excused as a decision about mere process. Don't you get it?, cried Hochul and her minions. Law is complicated! Sometimes injustice must be sanctioned, because that's how law works! How naïve of you to think otherwise!

Hochul and her allies didn't engage on the substance of LaSalle's cases—who won, who lost, and what happened. Instead, their apologetics emphasized the impersonal processes of law, the alleged rules of the game, the highly technical nuances that laypersons just couldn't understand. In this, they drew inspiration from what is probably the dominant theory of law today among academics: so-called "legal positivism," and specifically the version thereof popularized by philosopher H.L.A. Hart in his 1961 book The Concept of Law. Nothing better explains the defenses of LaSalle than legal positivism.

Legal positivists believe that law can be accurately determined to a high degree by review of statutes and decisions. Individual judges are of minimal importance, their role reduced to an intake of precedent and an output of analysis. Legal positivism is not concerned with the social, cultural, or psychological dynamics that led to the creation of any given law or judicial decision—the focus is on the process by which law is created, not the reasons for its creation. In this sense, legal positivism is a theory that discourages looking beyond the textual documents that comprise a legal system. All you need is right there on the page.

Hart himself believed most cases were "easy," and required minimal judicial creativity. When John Roberts told Congress that the job of a judge is akin to an umpire, calling balls and strikes, he was tipping his hat to legal positivism.

Legal positivism is a harmful philosophy, not least because it claims neutrality in the form of deference to existing "rules." But of course, that's wrong, because the rules themselves are ideological, written by the powerful to protect the powerful. LaSalle's critics have implicitly understood this. They may not have known it, but by focusing on the consequences of his rulings, and arguing that LaSalle could and should have ruled differently, the anti-LaSalle coalition was standing up for legal realism, and against the positivists.

"Law is what the judge had for breakfast." This old quote—usually attributed to the late legal philosopher and judge Jerome Frank—has alternately been used by the enemies of legal realism to highlight the supposed radicalism of this school of legal philosophy, or by the most radical realists themselves, to boil their ideas down into one pithy phrase. In that sense, it is sort of the "Defund The Police" of jurisprudence, embraced by both its proponents and their worst critics.

Everyone, though, agrees on what it is means. In sum, a judge's rulings do not emanate from careful study of precedent and statute, which will allow for only one "correct" ruling. Rather, judges are human beings (one of Frank's greatest works is called "Are Judges Human?") with their own biases, predilections, histories, neuroses, and yes, ideologies, and their rulings—what we call "law"—are a mishmash of all those things stirred up and spewed across the page. Even what the judge had for breakfast factors in (something that turns out to be quite literally true). Law has no gravitational center—it is whatever the powerful person in the robe decides, for whatever reasons they decide it.

The funny thing is that pretty much every attorney who has actually practiced in a courtroom accepts the general precepts of legal realism (which is the progenitor of modern theories like critical legal studies, or Marxists analyses of law). Judges often make wacky rulings. They aren't usually high-profile—maybe no one outside of the courtroom will ever even know about them—but they are vitally important to the litigants being ruled over. Any practicing lawyer can tell you about the cases they knew they lost the second the judge opened their mouth, before the evidence was presented or legal arguments made, because the judge decided they liked one side and didn't like the other (and this is a mild example—imagine the judge ruling on the riot his wife helped start). This is a reality of litigation.

But when lawyers leave the courtroom and ascend to the halls of power and/or the ivory towers, they suddenly become great defenders of this immense, alienating system we call law, and legal positivism gives them the tools to defend it. There is a great desire to believe that law is larger than individuals, that it is a system we can trust and that we can "know" in an epistemological sense. If the process is fair, perhaps we won't be so angry after it chews us up and spits us out.

Nowhere does this ideology become clearer than during fights over judicial appointments. Any given judge's defenders, conservative or liberal, strive to cast their preferred judge as the "neutral" choice, the one who will not "legislate from the bench" (a literally meaningless phrase), but will instead pull out their trusty old trowel and brush and excavate until the correct answer—of which there is only one—reveals itself. This is how the law maintains its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Judges, we are told, are not politicians but archeologists, and do not create but only reveal. This has been the trope embraced by the LaSalleians, just as it was the trope of the Kavanaugh partisans, the Coney Barrett boosters, the Alito enthusiasts. (Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's absolute refusal to acknowledge that perhaps it might be better for her to retire under a Democrat than a Republican is a very legal positivist framework, as it eschews politics in favor of some nebulous judicial neutrality.)

That this is such clear bullshit is supremely frustrating. One wonders if Kathy Hochul somehow missed the recent loss of the alleged "right" to abortion, on the books for almost 50 years. A result like that should call into question the idea that law is stable, knowable, and easily grasped.

Understand—there is no correct answer to the question of whether the Constitution recognizes a right to abortion. Rather, there are schools of judicial interpretation—which are always and without exception embraced by judges to give legal weight to that judge's preexisting ideology—that will find one way or the other. When the Supreme Court has a certain number of one sort of ideologue, abortion will be a constitutional right. When it has the other, it will not.

None of LaSalle's critics know why he ruled against union workers, or in favor of phony "crisis pregnancy" centers, or to allow prosecutors to strike dark-skinned women from a jury (yes, he ruled this way). It doesn't matter. What matters is that these decisions protected the powerful at the expense of the powerless. If your ideological leanings involve uplifting the powerless, you should not want a judge who would rule in this way, no matter his excuse for doing so.

It is a huge credit to LaSalle's critics that they focused their attack on the outcomes of rulings rather than LaSalle's alleged judicial philosophy, or his "experience," or respect for precedent. Precedent is not real—it's an excuse for a judge to do what they were already determined to do, something rightwing judges understand well.

We should never trust someone who claims that law is independent from ideology, or from politics, or from how a judge feels about dark skin or unions or abortion. Law is politics practiced in a courtroom instead of a ballot box. Hector LaSalle is as much a politician as his benefactor, Kathy Hochul. And if you wouldn't vote for LaSalle to represent you in a legislative body, there's certainly no reason to want him to be a judge, no matter what excuses he proffers for the ills he has done.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by John Teufel.

We speak with renowned legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw about right-wing efforts to curtail the teaching of African American history, queer studies and other subjects that focus on marginalized communities. The College Board, the nonprofit group that designs AP courses for high school seniors, recently revised a curriculum for a course in African American studies after criticism from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others who maligned it as “woke indoctrination.” The new curriculum removes Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer theory as required topics, and drops many major writers, including Crenshaw, from the reading list. “Anybody who’s concerned about our democracy, anyone who’s concerned about authoritarianism has to wake up and pay attention to this, because this is how it happens,” she says. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to study the overlapping or intersecting social identities and systems of oppression, domination or discrimination people experience.

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

In the modern lexicon of supporters of the liberal ideology, the word “democracy” means a certain positive phenomenon, to the triumph of which humanity must certainly strive in all spheres of public life. They declared despotism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, totalitarianism and other similar negative things as the antipodes of this phenomenon.

Many politicians in Western countries are now inclined to assert that the central place in world politics and international relations is occupied not by a system of relations between sovereign states, based on universally recognized norms of international law, but by the struggle of democratic political regimes against authoritarian ones, which should be conducted in accordance with “the rules” established by them. The list and content of such rules are not available; for some reason they are kept secret. But one thing is clear, namely that they have little in common with generally recognized norms of international law.

The content of “democracy” has key importance since it is considered to be an indisputable universal humanitarian value to which a wide range of vital, positive social functions are attributed. However, with the definition of democracy, not everything turns out to be unambiguous. “Once upon a time,” says John Dunn, professor of political theory at King’s College, Cambridge, “democracy was a specific form of political structure. Today, the clarity and certainty of this designation are lost” [3:12,19, 21]. Let’s try to understand this more thoroughly.

In search of a definition of democracy

In 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica claimed that democracy in political science is «that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.” “The essence of modern representative government,” its authors concluded, “is that the people do not govern itself, but periodically elect those who shall govern on its behalf” [28:1-2].

The classics of Marxism-Leninism designated universal suffrage as a form of domination of the propertied class. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1950, characterized democracy as one of the forms of the state: “The class in whose hands the state power is,” the publication said, “determines the nature of the corresponding democracy.” Slaveholding, feudal and bourgeois democracies stood out. The dictatorship of the proletariat was called a democracy of a “new, highest type” for the whole people in connection with the liquidation of the exploiting classes in the country and the establishment of socialist property [2: 658-659].

The Great Russian Encyclopedia characterizes democracy as a political system “in which the people is recognized as a source of power, citizens have equal political rights and freedoms that allow them to participate in the management of public affairs directly or through their representatives and political decisions are made in accordance with the will of the majority” [7].

The term “democracy” is used to characterize the functional principles of organizations and institutions (intra-party, industrial democracy). Democratic political regimes differ in the form of government (presidential, parliamentary, mixed), the type of administrative-territorial structure (unitary states, federations, confederations), the degree of centralization of power and other characteristics. Distinctions are made between types of democracy (direct, plebiscite, representative). Supporters of “elite democracy” believe that “the institutions of liberal democracy do not prevent the preservation of the elitist nature of political power,” in which the main role is played by competing elites and the participation in politics of the bulk of citizens is limited to periodically held elections [8: 62].

Experts defending the theories of “pluralistic democracy” focus on the competition of various political forces (parties, political organizations, pressure groups, and social movements). Proponents of the theories of “democracy of participation” advocate the expansion of direct participation of citizens in the management of a state. The theorists of “deliberative” democracy believe that the degree of democracy of the system is directly proportional to the number of public discussions on actual issues that ensure the democratic nature of decision-making [7].

In the theories, democracy is also characterized as the power of the people, as the power of the majority with due consideration for the opinion of the minority, as a political regime in which the people or their majority serves as a source and carrier of state power, as a synonym for good governance, as an opportunity for everyone to freely participate in the direct management of their state, society and personal destiny.

In 2021, US President Joseph Biden stated that democracy is the best way to ensure the development of society, that “democracy is action” and “inaction is not an option” and that it needs to be protected and strengthened [1]. What exactly needs to be protected from what and what is to be strengthened, the American president did not specify. The call to strengthen and update something that does not have a clearly defined framework and more or less clear content seems rather strange. If we keep in mind the understanding of democracy as an expression of the will of the majority, such public statements appear to be meaningless rhetoric.

With a wide variety of complementary characteristics of democracy, their core remains that, under a democratic order, the content of politics and decisions taken in the state is determined by the demands and sentiments of the majority of the citizenry and are expressed at democratic elections procedures.

Questions about the current democracy

Many critics of democracy believe that the majority of citizens have neither sufficient knowledge nor skills of state activities, nor high morals, and therefore only a minority of the most worthy and competent citizens can successfully manage the state. Elite theorists have come to the conclusion that democracy is undesirable and impossible since “in any society, political power is inevitably concentrated in the hands of an elite that is better organized, has moral and intellectual superiority over other citizens and is able to effectively use its resources to preserve power.” [7]

The great Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky considered universal, equal voting “the most ridiculous invention of the XIX century.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that the principle of universal and equal voting with extreme inequality of individuals, their abilities, their contribution to public life, different ages, life experiences and degrees of rootedness in this area and in this country is the triumph of meaningless quantity over meaningful quality [18].

Richard Dawkins, an outstanding modern biologist, said after the Brexit referendum that the vast majority of Britons should not have voted in the referendum because they did not have the necessary knowledge in the field of economics and politics. “You might as well organize a national plebiscite to decide whether Einstein’s calculations are correct, or allow passengers to vote on which lane the pilot should land the plane,” he said [20: 70-71].

Friedrich August von Hayek, a representative of the Austrian school of neoliberalism, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, believed that a democratic state, understood as the power of the majority, guarantees social justice, thereby disrupting the natural course of market development and undermining individualism. Therefore, he opposed unrestricted democracy, considering it “no better than any tyranny” [19:157].

British professor John Dunn emphasizes that democracy is, first of all, a formula that allows one to imagine subordination to power and to the will of others without sacrificing one’s personal dignity or jeopardizing individual and family interests (3: 27).

Holding elections in a representative democracy allows the true source of state power – the people – to carry out a symbolic transfer of the right to express its will to a relatively narrow circle of elected representatives, who turn into real carriers of both legislative and executive power in the state for the entire period of their legislature. The fuller the scope of the powers conferred on elected deputies by law, the fewer opportunities there are for the majority of voters to actually participate in the management of the state, society and personal destiny and ensure that political decisions are made in accordance with their will.

In the House of Commons of the British Parliament, for example, there is a doctrine of independence of a deputy from voters, since s/he allegedly represents the whole nation, and not individual groups of voters. S/he does not have any responsibilities towards voters, does not have to report to them and cannot be recalled.

In the overwhelming majority of states deputies do not have any requirements for the mandatory execution of the will of voters. In this way liberal democracy provides an opportunity to separate the symbolic source of state power from its real bearer, performing the function of a first-level political filter.

The “samples” of British democracy demonstrated to the world during the leapfrog of the country’s chief executive since 2016: from David Cameron to Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, Elizabeth Truss to Rishi Sunak, committed mainly by influential figures of the ruling Conservative party without participation of voters, serve as a vivid illustration of the differences between the declared democratic values and real political practice of the British liberal democracy.

And no one in their right mind could come to the conclusion that the United States is ruled by its people, but a significant majority of those who somehow govern this country have been able to do so with the kind consent of this people (3: 83).

Public policy issues for the coming years are not put to the vote during the elections. To claim that voters express their will in relation to the future policy of the state is as ridiculous as to build the current state policy based on the statements of the famous predictors of the future of Cassandra, Nostradamus, Messing or Vanga.

Candidates in elections, in an effort to attract votes, are often forced to make unfulfilled or harmful commitments, as a result of which democracy degenerates into “populism”. Attempts to be guided in state policy by momentary moods of the majority of the population, who for the most part do not have a deep understanding of the strategic priorities of domestic and foreign policy, international relations, priority areas for the development of science and technology, the tasks of the state demographic, resource, educational, environmental, migration, infrastructure policy and other specific areas, are suicidal. As a rule, the ideas at the centre of election campaigns and the subsequent real policy of the executive have usually little in common.

As a result, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his book “The Third Wave”, governments created as a result of elections may be ineffective, corrupt, short-sighted and irresponsible; they may be guided by special interests and be unable to pursue policies that the public good requires. Such qualities may make such governments undesirable, but they do not make them undemocratic [12:62]. It is not possible to consider the activities of such governments as the realization of the will of the majority of citizens.

In the overwhelming number of countries, the authorities are not very concerned about the fact that the results of voting are determined by the majority of citizens: only in 22 countries of the world does legislation stipulate the mandatory participation of citizens in voting, and only 11 states apply it in practice. Usually, the legislation stipulates the minimum percentage of voters who took part in the voting to recognize the elections as held. With the highest voter turnout, a maximum of 70-80% of citizens take part in the elections. Even if in these cases the majority of citizens who took part in the vote cast votes for the candidates, it is extremely rare that their number is more than half of the total number of all voters.

Thus, the main function of democratic elections is not so much the precise determination of the verdict of the majority of voters, as the very conduct of elections and the public legitimization of the resulting system of state power. At the same time, the number of votes cast for their winners is of secondary importance and can vary widely.

In a normal situation, the election of deputies can take place by the votes of 25, 30, 40 or % of the total number of voters. In 2012, 43.51% of registered voters took part in the referendum in Croatia on joining the European Union. Although the majority of votes (66.27%) were given in support of this step, however, this step, which is crucial for the fate of the country, was actually approved by only about a third of the country’s citizens.

The transformation of the actual minority of votes cast in the elections into a virtual majority is especially evident in the creation of coalition governments, during which political entities that received an insignificant number of votes in the elections can acquire a disproportionately strong influence on government policy, clearly distorting the will of the majority of voters.

Any citizen in a democratic state theoretically has the right to vote and be elected. The most important feature of the existing systems of democratic elections is the participation in them only of registered political entities authorized to nominate parliamentary candidates and provide them with political, financial and propaganda support. These structures serve as second-level political filters that ensure that future deputies follow the policies of the political associations that nominated them and perform the functions of an insurance sertificate that protects power structures from non-systemic candidates entering them. As a rule, members or supporters of political parties are admitted to participate in elections from among persons professionally engaged in political activities and members of the ruling elite of this state get into the number of deputies. Independent or self-nominated candidates deprived of their support have no practical opportunities to be elected.

Means of influencing the public mood of citizens during election campaigns are of great importance, in particular, policy in the field of mass communications and information. Legislative consolidation of freedom of speech and the press seem to be guaranteed for all citizens, but the ability to really influence public sentiment requires ownership of the media and control over the content of published materials, which turns media owners into an essential element of ensuring the power of the ruling elite of society.

During the presidential campaign in the United States, the political opponents of the acting president deprived him of the right to use the social network Twitter. Within the framework of this network, there was a secret group that monitored certain topics in the interests of the Democratic Party. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his network restricted access to materials that reported on the corruption of Joe Biden and his son [17: 55].

In real social life, there is a carefully camouflaged paradox: the protection of power and ensuring the interests of the ruling elite of society, representing a clear minority of citizens, is justified as the implementation of the will of majority of citizens through democratic elections, that is, as the triumph of democracy, and political and state systems seeking to protect and satisfy the socio-economic and other interests of the genuine majority of citizens are declared authoritarian, despotic, having no right to exist and are subject to replacement by “democratic” ones.

In this regard, the well-known Russian scientist S. Karaganov asks a logical question whether democracy is really the crown of political development if it acts only as one of the instruments of governance of societies by the ruling oligarchies. “But if this is just a tool,” he said, “maybe we should stop pretending that we are striving for democracy? And to say directly that we want a society of personal freedom, prosperity for the majority, security and greatness for the country?” [4]. The head of the Constitutional Court of Russia, Valery Zorkin, found it necessary to emphasize that “the model of liberal representative democracy … is clearly no longer coping with modern challenges” [5:5]. In this regard, he called for the search for a more effective model of people’s rule, and not for orientation to Western models.

Modern trends in the development of liberal democracy

Although the real reason for the ability of highly developed Western states to provide a relatively high level of well-being of the population was their access to cheap natural and human resources of former colonies and dependent territories, this was presented in public propaganda as a result of the existence of liberal democratic regimes in them.

As stated by F. Fukuyama, from the beginning of the 1970s to the first decade of the XXI century, allegedly due to the increase in the number of democracies in the world from 35 to more than 110, world production of goods and services has increased fourfold, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has decreased from 42% of the world population in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008 year [24].

According to the prominent American statesman S. Talbott, in 1974 less than 30% of the world’s countries could be classified as democratic, and in 1996 their share reached 61% and 54% of the world’s population lived in them [27: 48,50]. Mark Blyth, a columnist for Foreign Affairs magazine, believes that it was democracy that made it possible to tame markets, establish restrictive financial rules and expand social security systems [22].

Such causal relationships, however, do not stand up to contact with reality.

Countries classified as liberal democracies, for example, India, can not always boast of a high standard of living and the absence of poverty. And such richest countries of the world as Qatar, UAE, Singapore, Brunei, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are not counted among the liberal democracies.

By the end of 1979, after the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on granting independence to colonial countries and peoples, the number of UN members increased by 102 states and reached 153 countries instead of 51 at the time of the UN’s creation in 1945 [11: 91-92]. Most of the newly independent states simply inherited the political systems of the former metropolises. There are no merits of liberal democracy in that.

Thanks to the efforts made by developing countries to implement the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, their economies began to grow faster than the economies of developed countries [13:116-117,129]. Over the years of the implementation of the UN-approved Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Program (SDGs), the average income of 50 percent of the poorest people in the world has almost doubled, the number of those who live on less than $ 1.90 a day – the threshold of “extreme poverty” – has decreased to about 700 million. The global maternal and infant mortality rate has halved. Almost all children have access to primary education. HIV mortality/AIDS has been declining since the beginning of the millennium [21]. There is no connection between these processes and the procedures for holding democratic elections.

In 1980, per capita income at purchasing power parity in France, Germany and the USA was 20-30 times higher than in China and India, by 2014 the gap had narrowed for India to 6-10 times, for China to 3-4 times. At that time, the US economy exceeded China’s by more than 10 times, China’s GNP was only 8% of the American one. In 2014, the Chinese economy exceeded the US economy by purchasing power parity, the French economy by four times, India’s GNP reached 40% of the American, Brazil – almost 20%. China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico exceeded the indicators of the fourth European economy – Italy, and Egypt, Pakistan and Thailand – the indicators of the Netherlands.

In 1990, the countries classified by Freedom House as “authoritarian” accounted for 12% of world income, currently they are responsible for 33% [26]. Of the 15 countries with the highest per capita income, almost two-thirds of the states, according to the classification of the liberal democrats, are «undemocratic».

Hundreds of millions of people living in conditions of so-called “authoritarianism” offer their citizens a standard of living that increasingly rivals the level of the richest countries in the West. American political scientist D. Simes, referring to the «enlightened authoritarianism» of Singaporean Lee Kuan Yew, who helped millions of people get out of poverty and ensure racial and social harmony in the country, considers it not obvious that democracy surpasses “respectable” authoritarian states [15].

In the global well-being index, compiled by Credit Suisse Bank, China’s indicator surpassed the average European level. It took the first place in terms of the growth rate of well-being: from 2000 to 2021, it increased eight times [16:48].

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands stated that society no longer has the resources to maintain a “welfare state”, it should be replaced by a “state of participation” in which each person is responsible for his own financial security [9: 45]. According to the American E. Warren, democracy is on the defensive at home and abroad, in connection with which it requires an economic policy that benefits all Americans, not just a small elite [29].

American experts have come to the logical conclusion that it is impossible to make reasonable predictions about the future of liberal democracy without thinking about the consequences of reducing the relative economic influence of the democratic alliance. The path to prosperity, they believe, no longer lies exclusively through liberal democracy and the affirmation of its values. The number of liberal democracies in the world, according to the observations of American experts, has begun to retreat in almost all regions of the world [24].

Many major international indicators of “democracy” demonstrate the serious decline of the United States: the Economist intelligence unit downgraded the United States to a “flawed democracy” in 2017, the European International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance classified the United States as a “retreating democracy”, Freedom House currently assessed the democratic quality of the United States on a par with Romania and Croatia, an independent group of international observers, The Electoral Integrity Project, based on the analysis of elections held in different countries from 2012 to 2014, attributed the United States to the group of countries with moderately fair elections, which were inferior in this indicator to Mongolia, Rwanda and South Africa. As a result, R. Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated that “from 20% to 40% of Americans would like to have a strong leader who is not obliged to follow democratic rules” [25].

Vice-President of the Carnegie Endowment T. Carothers, assessing American democracy, pointed to the inability of the main political parties of the United States to work productively together, the control of elites over legislative processes, the lack of confidence in the legislature, the growing number of populists in the country playing on intolerant views of the population, the lack of transparency in the financing of election campaigns, problems with registration voting participants, low voter turnout, numerous offenses committed by law enforcement agencies during the elections. Many Americans are already ready to admit, concluded T. Carothers, that the image of the United States as a model of an effective democratic system is very outdated, the imperfection of the US political system casts doubt on efforts to promote democratic principles in other states [23].

Liberal democracies, “authoritarianism,” and people’s power

The idea of supporting democracy abroad originated in the USA in 1980-1990. In his speech at Georgetown University, US President Bill Clinton argued that countries that choose their leaders can become reliable partners in trade and diplomacy and threaten the world less than countries with other forms of government. He has made democracy support a priority of the administration’s diplomacy in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The State Department, the Agency for International Development and the US National Endowment for Democracy participated in financing democracy support programs in other countries.

In 2000, at the suggestion of the United States, the international organization “Community of Democracies” was established in Warsaw to strengthen democratic norms and institutions around the world through the joint efforts of governments, civil society and the private sector. In 2012, at the initiative of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, T. Jagland, the World Forum for Democracy was founded, which has been meeting annually in Strasbourg since then. In September 2022, the head of the European Commission announced the EU’s intention to present a Pact for the Protection of Democracy in order to protect member countries from foreign influence and disinformation. She did not specify how to solve these problems with the help of periodically held elections.

In December 2021, US President Joe Biden organized the World Summit of Democracies, to which representatives of more than 100 countries were invited [10]. At the summit, the White House announced the launch of the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which included support for independent media, physical and judicial protection of journalists, the fight against corruption, the promotion of technologies necessary for the development of democracy, the protection of free and fair elections, support for women and LGBT communities. The measures proposed by him did not affect any of the problems of American democracy listed by T. Carothers. The reasons why these issues are linked to determining the will of the majority of voters in the elections have not been clarified.

The US President announced his intention to allocate $424 million to protect press freedom, fight corruption and support free elections around the world. The US State Department has been asked to create a Global Anti-Corruption Consortium. It is planned to allocate $33.5 million and $5 million, respectively, to support women and LGBT communities. Another $55 million is planned to be spent on helping countries carry out democratic reforms. Thus, the United States, according to Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation K.I.Kosachev, is actually creating a “fund for interference in internal affairs” of states disloyal to the West [6].

Naturally, special attention in the proposed measures is paid to ensure the ability of the mass media to exert a decisive influence on the mass mood of voters in a spirit pleasing to the ruling elite. The issues of monopolization of the media and the formation of an ideological “mainstream” using methods of hidden political censorship, in particular, external review of political science scientific articles, remained outside the scope of the problems that concern supporters of liberal democracy.

And what about Russia?

The search for an effective model of democracy for Russia, obviously must focus on the completeness of the powers transferred by voters to their representatives and the right to nominate candidates for subsequent elections. The formation of a system of genuine democracy in the country could be facilitated by granting the right of legislative initiatives on certain issues not only to deputies of representative authorities, but also to such influential non-profit organizations as public chambers of various levels, Popular Front organizations, trade unions, creative and amateur associations, research institutions. This could be facilitated by periodic reporting of deputies to voters on the implementation of their instructions and pre-election commitments, the right of voters to recall their representatives ahead of time.

Effective people’s power should ensure broad involvement of citizens both in the process of daily management of public affairs at various levels, and in the realization of their socio-economic, political, humanitarian, cultural and other rights and freedoms. This could be facilitated by holding referendums on topical issues of the life of the state and regions, expanding the powers of regional legislative bodies in regulating the life of the population, and providing financial support to civil society organizations in regulating volunteer and amateur activities.

As part of efforts to create an effective system of people’s power, it is necessary to expand beyond political parties the circle of non-governmental organizations and movements authorized to nominate candidates for deputies at various levels, provide them with political support and assist in the election campaign.

The most important prerequisite for the active and interested participation of citizens of the country in the governance of Russia as a social state is the orientation of state policy to ensure the diverse interests, rights and freedoms of the vast majority of its population, as well as the maintenance of state structures and institutions that monitor compliance with the laws and rules of cohabitation of all citizens of the country. It is necessary to develop right in this direction theoretical research and practical recommendations of Russian scientists concerning the system of people’s power and the creation of conditions for reliable legitimization of the state authorities formed in this way.

As part of efforts to create an effective system of people’s power, it is necessary to expand beyond political parties the circle of non-governmental organizations and movements authorized to nominate candidates for deputies at various levels, provide them with political support and assist in the election campaign.

The most important prerequisite for the active and interested participation of citizens of the country in the governance of Russia as a social state is the orientation of state policy to ensure the diverse interests, rights and freedoms of the vast majority of its population, as well as the maintenance of state structures and institutions that monitor compliance with the laws and rules of cohabitation of all citizens of the country.

It is necessary to develop and promote theoretical research and practical recommendations of Russian scientists concerning the system of people’s power and the creation of conditions for the reliable legitimization of the state authorities formed in this way.¹

First published at TFF.

1. 1. Without Russia: The strange meaning of Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” is explained (in Russian). (Accessed on 25.12 2022)

   2. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The Second Edition. Volume 13, 1950 (in Russian).

   3. Dunn John. Don’t be fascinated by democracy. Moscow, Gaidar Institute Publishing House. 2016 (in Russian).

   4. Sergey Karaganov, From constructive destruction to assembly, in Russia in Global Politics (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   5. The Constitution: The need for point changes. Expert. No. 42 (in Russian)

   6. Kosachev spoke about the US program “For Democratic Renewal” (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   7. Ledyaev V. G., Democracy. The Great Russian Encyclopedia (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   8. Mechanic Alexander. The spiral of democracy. Expert No. 16, April 16-22, 2018 (in Russian).

   9. Obukhova Evgeniya, Pakhunov Konstantin. The Welfare state says goodbye to you. Expert. No. 44. 2018 (in Russian).

   10. Ovchinsky Vladimir, Zhdanov Yuri. A summit for democracy or a summit for a new cold war? (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   11. Orlov A.A., Machitidze G.G. The UN in the modern world. A view from Moscow. On the 75th anniversary of the UN. Moscow, MGIMO-University Publishing House, 2020 (in Russian).

   12. Mikhail Rogozhnikov. The fourth wave of democracy. Expert. No. 5 (in Russian).

   13. Rymalov V. V. Structural changes in the world capitalist economy. Moscow. Publishing house “Thought”, 1978 (in Russian).

   14. The Summit for Democracy or the summit for a new Cold War? (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   15. Dmitry Simes: Dangerous American illusions about world democracy, The National Interest, USA), (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   16. Igor Sechin. The second abduction of Europe. 2022. Expert. No. 45 (in Russian).

   17. Alexander Smirnov. Elon Musk’s social revolution. 2022. Expert No. 50. 2022 (in Russian).

   18. Solzhenitsyn Alexander. How can we equip Russia? Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 20, 2018 (in Russian).

   19. Hayek Friedrich August von., Competition, labor and the legal order of free people. Fragment of Essays. St. Petersburg: Pneumo, 2009 (in Russian).

   20. Harari Yuval Noah. 21 lessons for the XXI century. Moscow, Sinbad Publishing House, 2020 (in Russian).

   21. Banerjee Abhijit V. and Duflo Esther. How Poverty Ends. The Many Path to Progress – and Why They Might Not Continue. (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   22. Blyth Mark, Capitalism in Crisis. What Went Wrong and What Comes Next? (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   23. Carothers Thomas, American democracy also needs support (in Russian). (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   24. Fukuyama Francis. The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy. (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   25. Rachel Kleinfeld. Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy. (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   26. Mounk Yascha and Foa Roberto Stefan, The End of the Democratic Century. Autocracy’s Global Ascendance. May/June 2018 Issue The Best of 2018 Politics & Society. URL: (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

   27. Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State. Democracy and the National Interest. Foreign Affairs, November/December 1996

   28. The Encyclopedia Britannica. A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. Eleventh Edition. Volume VIII. Cambridge University Press, 1910

   29. Warren Elizabeth. A Foreign Policy for All. Strengthening Democracy at Home and Abroad. (Accessed on 30.12. 2022)

The post Democracy in Theory and in Practice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lev Voronkov.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/03/democracy-in-theory-and-in-practice/feed/ 0 369619 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/01/desantis-targets-diversity-programs-tenured-professors-in-unhinged-attack-on-higher-ed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/01/desantis-targets-diversity-programs-tenured-professors-in-unhinged-attack-on-higher-ed/#respond Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:44:03 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/ron-desantis-education

Taking aim yet again at higher education, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday proposed sweeping changes to the state's university system, including banning state funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and critical race theory education, as well as forcing tenured professors to undergo reviews at any time.

Speaking during a press conference at the State College of Florida in Bradenton, DeSantis said he is asking the state Legislature to cut all funding for programs he believes are "ideological."

Referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—which aim to promote fair treatment and full participation—and critial race theory, a graduate-level framework dealing with systemic racism, DeSantis said that "we're also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida. No funding, and that will wither on the vine."

Apparently not satisfied with a state law requiring tenured professors at state colleges and universities to undergo reviews every five years, DeSantis also called for legislation that would subject such educators to reviews at any time, at risk of their jobs.

"Yes, we have the five-year review of all the tenured faculty, which is, which is good… and the board of trustees has to determine whether they stay or go. But you may need to do review more aggressively than just five," he said.

"I've talked with folks around the country who've been involved in higher ed reform, and the most significant deadweight cost at universities is typically unproductive tenured faculty," the governor added. "And so why would we want to saddle you as taxpayers with that cost if we don't have to do that?"

United Faculty of Florida (UFF), the union representing college and university educators in the state, said it would fight DeSantis' proposals.

"The United Faculty of Florida stand in lockstep opposition to any and all so-called 'reforms' that will actually destroy our state's world-class degree programs and their ability to serve our students," UFF President Andrew Gothard said in a statement. "We will not allow Florida's future to be sacrificed for cheap political points."

Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Francie Diep and Emma Pettit contended that "it's been a dizzying month for higher ed in the Sunshine State."

As the authors explained:

The recent avalanche of activity began in late December, when DeSantis' office requested that state colleges and universities list their spending on programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory. Florida's Republican House Speaker, Paul Renner, later asked the same campuses to turn over a mountain of additional DEI-related information.

DeSantis' office also requested that state universities report data on transgender students, and he appointed six new trustees to the New College of Florida's board because, according to his press secretary, the small liberal arts institution has put "trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning."

"What I find most troubling is that DeSantis is putting out a blueprint for other governors and state legislatures,” Kristen A. Renn—a professor at Michigan State University who researches LGBTQ+ college issues—told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "He's doing these things in ways that anybody else can pick this up and do it."

DeSantis—a potential 2024 presidential candidate—has also come under fire for other policies and actions including rejecting a college preparatory African-American studies course, banning unapproved books from K-12 libraries, and the Stop WOKE Act, a CRT ban that applies to schools from the primary through university levels and is meant to combat what the governor called "wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism."

Mia Brett, legal historian at The Editorial Board, last week compared Republicans' attacks on education across the country to similar moves by the leaders of Nazi Germany during the early months of their regime.

"I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this is directly out of Nazi laws passed in 1933. Though if this Republican effort is successful, you might not be able to learn things like that anymore," she wrote, adding that the legislation banning courses on CRT and racial and gender identity are a "chilling erosion of academic freedom and a huge step toward fascist academic control in the service of right-wing narratives."

"While it's still legal to teach history, remember where such efforts have led and take them seriously," Brett ominously warned.

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

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

This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until May 3.

Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore colorblind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory — which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure — would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

But a clash with state law seemed inevitable, once Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, proposed what he called the strongest legislation in the nation against “the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Last April, DeSantis signed the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” into law. It bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to another and prohibits teachers from making students feel guilty for past discrimination by members of their race. And it specifically bars portraying racial colorblindness — which the law labels a virtue — as racist. A DeSantis spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, told me in an email that the law “protects the open exchange of ideas” (italics in the original) by prohibiting teachers from “forcing discriminatory concepts on students.”

Whatever one thinks of critical race theory, the state’s interference limits the freedom of professors who are experts in their fields to decide what to teach their students. Cox worried, not without reason, that the law effectively banned him from discussing his ideas in class, and that teaching the courses could cost him his livelihood. Cox, who is the only Black professor in the sociology department, will not be considered for tenure until this fall. His salary was his family’s only income while his wife stayed home with their baby.

A month before the fall 2022 semester was set to start, he scrapped both courses. Students scrambled to register for other classes. “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” said Cox, who taught a graduate course on inequality and education instead. “I’m completely unprotected.” He added, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”

Cox’s decision, along with another professor’s cancellation of a graduate course because of similar apprehension, created an unusual gap in the sociology curriculum at UCF, which, with almost 69,000 students, is Florida’s largest university.

Cox’s department chair, Elizabeth Mustaine, said she went along with the professors’ wishes because “I thought: ‘I’m not going to stress anyone out about this. It’s crazy.’” Still, she added, “it’s an absolute tragedy that classes like this get canceled.” Of the 39 courses offered this past fall by a department that specializes in the study of human society, none focused primarily on race.

In just over two years, critical race theory has gone from a largely obscure academic subject to a favorite bogeyman for Republican candidates. Activists such as Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, conceived of targeting CRT to foment a backlash against measures enacted following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. At that time, Rufo told me in an email, “school districts across the country suddenly started adopting ‘equity statements,’ hiring ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucrats, and injecting heavily partisan political content into the curriculum.” Black Lives Matter and the left were riding high, said Rufo, who denies that structural racism exists in America. In our email exchange, Rufo described “the fight against critical race theory” as “the most successful counterattack against BLM as a political movement. We shifted the terrain and fought on a vector the Left could not successfully mobilize against.”

The anti-CRT campaign quickly expanded from sloganeering to writing laws. Seven states, including Florida, have passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory. Those laws face impediments. On Nov. 17, 2022, a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the higher-education provisions of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark,” Judge Mark Walker wrote. The DeSantis administration filed a notice of appeal on Nov. 29 and is seeking to stay the injunction pending that appeal. The 11th Circuit, where most of the judges are Republican appointees, will hear the appeal, with briefs to be filed in the next few months and oral arguments potentially this coming summer.

Additionally, with DeSantis’ landslide reelection — after a campaign in which he repeatedly denounced “woke” education — and Republicans gaining a supermajority in both chambers of the state’s Legislature, they are likely to look for new ways to crack down on CRT and what they perceive as higher education’s leftist tilt. And at the federal level, conservatives are drafting a “potential suite of executive orders in 2024,” in case the next presidential election goes their way, to “disrupt the national network of left-wing ideological production and distribution,” according to Rufo.

It’s easy to dismiss the conservative crusade against critical race theory as political theater without real consequences. But most colleges and universities offer social science and humanities courses that address racial inequality and systemic racism, and the anti-CRT laws are already having repercussions for people who teach or take these classes in red states. Moreover, the push against CRT is hitting academia after decades of declines in the proportion of professors protected by tenure, meaning that most faculty members are not in positions secure enough to resist political pressure. Now, forced to consider whether they face any legal or career risk, some are canceling courses or watering down content, keeping quiet rather than sharing their expertise with students.

“When you implement a law like this, you’re asking professors to leave out things that clearly happen or have happened in the past,” Grace Castelin, a UCF undergraduate who plans to introduce a resolution in the student senate condemning the law, told me. “It’s making us more ignorant in this generation and generations to come.”

Fearful that legislators will retaliate by cutting their budgets, few top university administrators have publicly criticized the laws, which put institutions as well as individual teachers at risk. Indeed, UCF Provost Michael Johnson told faculty last July that the university would “have to take disciplinary action” against any faculty member who repeatedly violated the Individual Freedom Act because it couldn’t afford to lose a “catastrophic amount” — $32 million — in state funding linked to graduation rates and other metrics. (Johnson declined an interview request.)

Other states have left professors similarly undefended. In Tennessee, which passed a law much like Florida’s, the provost of the state university’s flagship Knoxville campus made clear to professors that the administration wouldn’t necessarily help them. If they were sued under the law, Provost John Zomchick told faculty, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general would decide whether the university would represent them in court. “People freaked out,” said Anne Langendorfer, a senior lecturer at UT Knoxville and the president of a union for campus workers at the state’s public universities.

A university spokesperson, Kerry Gardner, said that the attorney general makes the final decision in “any situation” where individuals are sued in their capacity as university employees. Administrators “wanted to be fully transparent about how the process works,” while assuring faculty that “we will take every step to defend them,” Gardner said. Zomchick, she added, “does not agree with the view of some faculty” that the law “infringes on the First Amendment or academic freedoms.”

With uncertain support from above, most full and associate professors at least enjoy the protection of tenure, which shields scholars whose insights or research are politically unpopular. Tenured professors can’t be fired without cause and a hearing by their peers. Other faculty typically work on contracts, which the university can decide not to renew without specifying a reason.

Some tenured professors in Florida have resisted anti-CRT pressure. The historian Robert Cassanello, the president of the UCF chapter of United Faculty of Florida, was comfortable becoming a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits contending that the Individual Freedom Act violates free speech. Cassanello, who keeps a life-size cutout of Karl Marx in his office window, told me that he’s less threatened by the law than his untenured colleagues are.

By contrast, Juan Salinas, an assistant sociology professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, declined to be a plaintiff. “For me to stick my name out, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Salinas said. “If I had tenure, I would be more active.”

But even having tenure didn’t feel like “adequate protection” to Scott Carter, the other UCF sociologist who scrapped a course on race in the fall semester. “It’s very sad for students,” Carter told me. “They won’t get the experience of hearing from scholars on contemporary race relations.”

Perhaps the surest indication that tenure helps safeguard critical race theory and other controversial curricula is that conservatives are trying to jettison it. In 2021, Georgia’s public-university system made firing tenured faculty easier. After the University of Texas’ faculty council adopted a resolution last February supporting professors’ right to teach critical race theory, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for abolishing tenure for new hires at the state’s public universities. Last April, DeSantis signed a bill authorizing reviews of tenured professors every five years.

The tenure divide has a racial dimension. At many state universities, tenured faculty are overwhelmingly white. Untenured faculty are more likely to be people of color. In the fall of 2018, 7.4% of full professors and 10.9% of associate professors — the two ranks most likely to be tenured — were Black or Hispanic, compared with 11.8% of assistant professors and 17% of instructors, lecturers and others, according to the American Association of University Professors. Women are also disproportionately concentrated in untenured positions.

Besides having less job security than their tenured colleagues, many untenured faculty have less say in which courses they teach. One visiting assistant professor of sociology at an Oklahoma university, who requested anonymity to speak about her workplace, specializes in gender research; her dissertation was on urban women’s experiences with menstrual practices in Kathmandu, Nepal. She wasn’t familiar with critical race theory. But after Oklahoma in 2021 banned “any orientation or requirement” in higher education “that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race and sex,” she found herself assigned to teach a course on racial and ethnic relations.

“I have consistently seen this course taught by nontenured professors,” she told me. “That’s been the trend,” perhaps because of “tenured professors not wanting to do the dirty work.”

Universities themselves helped create the vulnerability that conservatives are exploiting, saving money — and, in the case of public institutions, offsetting budget cuts — by shifting to a less tenured teaching force. Tenured professors have declined from 39% of faculty in 1987, the earliest year for which comparable figures were available, to 24% in 2020, according to an AAUP analysis of federal data. There has been a corresponding increase in the proportion of what are known as contingent faculty, who aren’t tenured or on a path to it — instructors, lecturers, teaching faculty who don’t do research and adjuncts — from 47% in 1987 to 67% in 2020. The remaining 9% are tenure-track faculty like Cox. Two of Florida’s youngest public universities — Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Polytechnic University, which opened in 1997 and 2014, respectively — do not currently grant tenure at all.

This past fall, Florida Gulf Coast’s social and behavioral sciences department offered one race-focused course, “Race and Culture.” The former FGCU sociologist Ted Thornhill had stirred conservative protests by teaching courses on “Racism and Law Enforcement” and “White Racism,” and by founding a Center for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Since Thornhill left in June 2022 for a tenure-track post in the Pacific Northwest, no one has been teaching those courses. (Another instructor is scheduled to teach “Racism and Law Enforcement” this summer.) The university refashioned the center to focus on “the Study of Race, Gender, Ethnicity and Culture,” dropping the word “critical.”

“I knew it had a short life expectancy,” Thornhill told me.

FGCU President Michael Martin said that the center was renamed not to appease conservatives but to encompass groups such as Latinos, Native Americans and Jews. Still, Martin acknowledged that academia has become “overly politicized,” and that Florida “has been out in front of some of this.”

In the past, when academic freedom was threatened, tenure proved to be one of its most effective defenses. During the McCarthy era, when tenured professors were accused of having Communist sympathies, “their institutions had to go through the motions of a formal investigation,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities.” “Non-tenured teachers had no such rights.” The Cornell physicist Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist who remained politically active, “could not be quietly dropped from the faculty” in the early 1950s, at the height of the Red Scare, because he had tenure, and he was eventually promoted to full professor.

The sociologist Shantel Buggs is hoping to become a rarity: a tenured Black woman in Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. In 2021, the college had one tenured Black woman. Overall, it had two tenured Black faculty and 59 white faculty.

The daughter of two Marines, Buggs was the first college graduate in her family. She has won teaching awards, published book chapters and articles in refereed journals, developed new courses and helped establish an anti-racism task force on campus. When UCF offered her a tenured associate professorship in 2021, Florida State gave her a raise to stay.

“Your work is powerful, timely, and extremely socially relevant, and you have quickly gained national recognition in your areas of expertise,” Buggs’ department chair at Florida State, Kathryn Tillman, wrote in 2021. Tillman also called her a “fantastic teacher and mentor.”

As the Individual Freedom legislation was being enacted, Buggs detected a subtle recalibration of her prospects. In April 2022, Buggs told me, Tillman urged her to take advantage of a COVID-19 extension and delay her candidacy for tenure by a year. Buggs protested. “I thought it was unfair that I be asked to wait to go up for promotion in this political climate because what I teach and what I research will place a target on me,” she said. But she agreed, she said, after Tillman expressed concern that higher-ups might deem her publication record insufficient for tenure. (Tillman told me via email that she can’t comment on personnel issues.)

One course that Buggs had developed and taught was “Critical Race Theory.” She last offered it in the spring of 2021. The following September, she learned that it was the only Florida State course listed on the Critical Race Training in Education website, which has been featured on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and describes CRT as a “radical ideology” that challenges “the very foundations” of American democracy. Buggs discovered that the website was a project of something called the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

The term “insurrection” alarmed her. Anxious that she might be trolled or harassed, Buggs was receptive in May 2022 to another Tillman request — to change the name of the course. Tillman told me that she and Buggs had discussed whether another title would help avoid “potential misperceptions about the course’s intent. Together, we agreed to give it a try.” The course, which Buggs plans to teach in the upcoming semester, was relisted as “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.”

The purpose of the Critical Race Training in Education website is to “document what students can expect at a particular campus,” according to William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and the president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Jacobson told me that, because he had criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, Cornell alumni petitioned to have him fired, a faculty statement denounced him and a student group called for boycotting his courses. “Considering what I have gone through, I am very sympathetic to left-leaning faculty who come under attack, but it also is clear that the overwhelming campus cancel culture is from the left towards the right, not the other way around,” he said.

A Florida State spokesperson told me critical race theory scholars should have no concern that their specialty will hurt their tenure chances. But Katrinell Davis, the director of the university’s African American Studies program and the only tenured Black woman in the college of social sciences, says she is “saddened” by Buggs’ predicament. “Her trajectory as a scholar may be impacted” by the Individual Freedom Act “and because of the doubts that might arise around the value of CRT,” Davis told me.

For her part, Buggs said she is open to leaving Florida for another state where she can teach critical race theory without legal consequences, but she doesn’t want to. “I have enjoyed working here,” she told me. “I’m a stubborn person. I don’t want to give DeSantis the satisfaction.”

Buggs also worries that the political climate is rubbing off on students. In the past year or two, Buggs said, some students have begun to “ding” her in evaluations as judgmental or biased. Last spring, one called her a “misandrist” — a man-hater. “Part of what pissed me off is, he got an A,” she said. She has added a disclaimer provided by the faculty union to her syllabi: “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief.”

Other untenured teachers at Florida State are tweaking their pedagogy. When the doctoral candidate Taylor Darks taught a section of Buggs’ “Race and Minority Group Relations” course this past fall, she invited students to suggest questions for discussion — but told me that she generally weeded out queries that mentioned “white privilege.” And Tyler McCreary, an assistant geography professor, made what he calls a “strategic adjustment” in his fall 2022 honors course on environmental justice. For a class project on a pipeline in northern Canada that affects Indigenous people, McCreary told me he’s been “much more cautious of not just critiquing the development but making sure to include the company’s perspective.”

McCreary, who is up for tenure this year, has also shifted his teaching method from lecturing to class discussion. He wants to avoid complaints under another new Florida law that allows students to record professors’ lectures for evidence of political bias. The law doesn’t apply to class discussion, because students must consent to be recorded.

Parked one October afternoon on the Florida State campus was a minibus covered in graffiti of various political persuasions. One commentator had scrawled “Socialism Sucks,” only to have another cross out “Sucks” and replace it with “Is Sexy.” Outside, a field rep for Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, invited passersby to a speech by the group’s founder, the talk show host Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, which has spent millions of dollars through its advocacy and political arms backing Donald Trump and candidates he endorsed, has what it calls a “watchlist” dedicated to “unmasking radical professors.”

The minibus was intended to signify Kirk’s opposition to censorship. But when I asked him at his talk that night in Tallahassee’s civic center whether he supports laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, he said he does, and that it’s not a free-speech issue. “It’s a matter of curriculum, right?” he said. “Should we teach the flat-Earth theory in physics, right? Should we teach bloodletting in biology? … There are some ideas that are so reprehensible and provably wrong, they shouldn’t be anywhere close to an academic environment.” (Kirk bridles at the very notion of systemic racism: In his talk, he referred to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death as “Floydapalooza, when we decided to destroy our entire country around a lie that America is systemically racist, which of course we’re not; we’re the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.”)

Kirk’s denial of systemic racism is at odds with the experience of students half a mile away, across the railroad tracks, at the public, historically Black Florida A&M University. Founded in 1887, and located since 1891 on a former plantation, FAMU has long been slighted by the state. When Nathan B. Young, the school’s president from 1901 to 1923, supplemented its agricultural and vocational programs with liberal arts, state officials feared that too much learning might make Black students dissatisfied with manual labor, and dismissed him. After World War II, hoping to avoid desegregating white law schools, Florida opened a law school at FAMU. In 1966, the state prohibited FAMU from enrolling a new law school class and transferred funding to Florida State, which wanted its own law school. FAMU’s law school reopened in 2002 in Orlando, where it wouldn’t compete with Florida State’s.

This past September, a group of FAMU students sued the state of Florida, accusing it of discriminating by underfunding FAMU compared with traditionally white schools. Among the disparities cited: In 2015, the state moved the almost $13 million budget for a joint FAMU-Florida State engineering college from FAMU’s general operating revenues to a separate line under Florida State’s authority. (A Florida State spokesperson said that presidents of both universities had agreed to the shift.) Also, the lawsuit says, linking funding to measures such as four-year graduation rates hurts FAMU and other universities that primarily serve low-income students.

In November, the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the benchmarks used to determine funding are “wholly neutral,” and that the goal is to “reward institutions who have better student outcomes,” not to “diminish the performance of historically black institutions.”

In contrast to Florida State’s lush, impeccably maintained campus, FAMU’s shows signs of neglect, including cracked walkways and rusted pipes. Interviewed on campus, plaintiffs in the lawsuit described more indignities: beds with broken frames, a dormitory infested with rats and cockroaches, computers so old that current professors had used them when they were undergraduates.

One of those plaintiffs, FayeRachel Peterson, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, told me that some of the labs she worked in as a FAMU undergraduate lacked vital equipment. She and her classmates frequently had to finish their lab work at Florida State. “FAMU tries its best to give us what it can with what’s given to them,” she said. “What’s given to them is less than what’s given to others.”

Another student, Nyabi Stevens, a third-year psychology major, told me that the state’s treatment of FAMU illustrates the importance of discussions that the Individual Freedom Act is trying to silence. “That’s what the lawsuit is about — pointing out the systemic racism we see,” she said. “I came to an HBCU so I can learn about my history. I am very proud to be in the lawsuit and be a voice for people who don’t have a voice.”

UCF students who wanted to learn about critical race theory this past fall had few options. Not only had the three sociology courses been canceled, but an anthropology course on racism was nixed because not enough students signed up for it.

One course that did survive has “flown under the radar,” Christian Ravela, an associate humanities professor, told me. His 18 students learned “how colorblindness has become the dominant racial ideology” and examined the anti-CRT movement, including the Individual Freedom Act, he said. Ravela received tenure in 2022. If he hadn’t, “I would have been most likely to just request to cancel the course.”

The preliminary injunction against the Individual Freedom Act pleased untenured faculty who teach critical race theory, but it hardly allayed their concerns. “There is still an ongoing battle,” Jonathan Cox, the UCF professor, told me. “It seems just as likely that if a more conservative appeals judge reviews this, they will simply reinstate the law. Regardless, DeSantis and his conservative majority in the Florida Legislature will probably continue working to keep this law and others in place.”

After canceling his two fall courses on race, Cox has committed to teaching “Race and Ethnicity” in the semester that’s about to begin. His wife has returned to work, so the family could get by on her income if he were to lose his job. Beyond that, he said: “I just decided, ‘I’m not going to run from it.’ This is what I teach. This is what I study. There’s tremendous value in students learning about these things.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Daniel Golden.

The crisis started with an email: It was September 2016 and Pietro Gallo, a former police officer from Rome, was writing the Italian foreign intelligence service. He was in his cabin aboard the VOS Hestia, a 200-foot rescue ship, on the tail end of a mission patrolling international waters off the coast of Libya. Two colleagues, Floriana Ballestra and Lucio Montanino, also ex-cops, huddled nearby. The three worked as security guards for the international charity Save the Children, which ran the VOS Hestia, and they were writing to report a crime.

Gallo had found a generic email address for the intelligence service after a few minutes of Google searching. The three explained that they had witnessed suspicious activities by humanitarian NGOs working near the Libyan coast. They had tried contacting police in the Sicilian port of Trapani, but they believed the police weren’t acting because the whole affair was too big. “In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling,” Gallo later told Montanino.

Nearly 200,000 people arrived in Italy by sea that year after fleeing Libya aboard inflatable rubber dinghies or repurposed wooden fishing boats. More often than not, they were rescued by European coast guard vessels or humanitarian organizations long before reaching Italian waters. Gallo looked at a map of the Mediterranean Sea. The ships seemed to pick people up so close to the African coast and then bring them all the way to Europe. The towering Vos Hestia was one of over a dozen humanitarian assets patrolling the area. He wondered: Who was behind the organizations sending ships to sea? How could they have so much money? Gallo had his doubts, but he knew one thing: Something sketchy was going on, and it was his duty to find out what.

“In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling.”

The Maltese NGO Moas and the Italian Red Cross transfer migrants and refugees to the VOS Hestia, run by Save the Children, after a rescue operation off the Libyan coast on Nov. 4, 2016.

Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

Related

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

A rescuer stands on a ship on Nov. 4, 2016, with the Iuventa, a vessel run by the German NGO Jugend Rettet, in the background.

Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

In one wiretapped conversation, an employee of MSF described the Iuventa as a “rebel boat.”

Migrants disembark from the VOS Hestia in the port of Crotone, Italy, on June 6, 2021.

“Investigators abused their power to figure out what I was working on.”

Related

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

“I asked him about his work as a fireman and he just went blank.”

Migrants and refugees are transferred to the VOS Hestia rescue ship run by Save the Children on Nov. 4, 2016.

Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

“I felt the treason of my country. It completely changed my view of the Italian judicial system.”

“When they seized the Iuventa, I said, I have to get off this ship. Otherwise they’ll throw me overboard.”

Representatives of Jugend Rettet speak during a press conference in Trapani, Italy, on Sept. 19, 2017.

Photo: Lena Klimkeit/picture alliance via Getty Images

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

Signals from U.S. Supreme Court justices during oral arguments in Moore v. Harper on Wednesday heightened concerns that the right-wing majority may issue a ruling that partly or fully embraces a "dangerous" legal theory and would radically transform federal elections.

"Their theory would invalidate constitutional provisions in every single state, many tracing back to the founding."

The case stems from the North Carolina Supreme Court striking down a congressional map drawn by GOP state legislators as a partisan gerrymander. North Carolina Republican lawmakers unhappy with that decision are now pushing the "independent state legislature" theory (ISLT), an argument that the U.S. Constitution gives only state legislatures control over the regulation of federal elections, without checks from state constitutions, courts, or governors.

"This reckless case out of North Carolina could explode the unifying understanding that power ultimately rests with the people of this country," said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, after about three hours of arguments on Wednesday. "We cherish our right to vote in free and fair elections. But that sacred right could be undermined if the court disregards the essential role checks and balances serve in our federal elections."

A pair of ACLU experts, Kristi Graunke and Ari Savitzky, warned earlier this week that "if the Supreme Court adopts the North Carolina legislators' proposed rule in Moore, it will make it even easier for state legislatures to suppress the vote and subvert election results, and it will give both political parties the green light to draw gerrymandered election districts."

Legal reporters and other observers noted after the arguments Wednesday that the high court seemed to be split into three camps for this case: right-wing Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch "appeared willing to embrace" ISLT, according to Reuters, while liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor came across as concerned that the theory threatens U.S. democracy.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak explained that "the remaining members of the court—Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—seemed to be searching for a compromise under which state supreme courts would generally have the last word on disputes over state laws governing federal elections but be subject to oversight from federal courts in rare cases."

Liptak pointed out that when Roberts suggested to David Thompson, the North Carolina GOP legislators' lawyer, that a 1932 Supreme Court decision about the U.S. Constitution's election clause undermined his argument, the attorney "responded with a distinction that did not seem to persuade the chief justice or his colleagues."

After also highlighting that exchange, Politico reported:

Kavanaugh's and Barrett's questions to Thompson were less revealing than those from Roberts. But Kavanaugh seemingly suggested that the version of the independent state legislature theory advanced by the North Carolina lawmakers was going too far. He noted that North Carolina was trying to go further than then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist's concurrence in the 2000 case Bush v. Gore, which is the origin of the theory that state courts have overstepped their role and that they could be hemmed in in some way.

Kavanaugh also raised a brief from the Conference of Chief Justices, a collection of chief jurists from the states, asking how to square their writing about the history of state courts applying state constitutions to federal elections, with the independent state legislature theory. Barrett, meanwhile, also seemed skeptical at times of the argument that Thompson was advancing, noting that state constitutions could be amended.

But later, Roberts' questioning to Neal Katyal, who represented the groups that challenged the initial legislatively drawn maps, showed how some of the court's swing conservative justices could still potentially rule in favor of the GOP lawmakers without embracing the most robust interpretation of the independent state legislature theory.

Just ahead of this week's arguments, Eliza Sweren-Becker and Ethan Herenstein at the Brennan Center for Justice, pointed out that "in recent months, the theory's proponents have tried to persuade the Supreme Court and the broader public that there are more moderate, less problematic variants of the theory out there."

"But there's no 'lite version' of the independent state legislature theory," they asserted. "The gerrymanderers who put the theory on the Supreme Court's doorstep in Moore v. Harper are asking for a radical upending of election law and all the chaos that comes with it, no matter how they try to soft-pedal it."

During arguments Wednesday, the trio of liberal justices touched on concerns that have mounted from pro-democracy groups since June, when the high court agreed to hear Moore.

Mother Jones' Ari Berman highlighted one of those moments:

"This is a theory with big consequences," Justice Elena Kagan told Thompson, getting to the heart of the huge significance of the case. "It would say that if a legislature engages in the most extreme forms of gerrymandering, there is no state constitutional remedy even if the courts think that that's a violation of the constitution. It would say that legislators could enact all manner of restrictions on voting, get rid of all kinds of voter protections that the state constitution in fact prohibits. It might allow the legislatures to insert themselves and to give themselves a role in the certification of elections and the way election results are calculated. So in all these ways, I think what might strike a person is that this is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country.'

"Our position is that checks and balances do apply, but they come from the federal Constitution and the panoply of federal laws like the Voting Rights Act," Thompson responded.

Berman also stressed that "the overwhelming bulk of historical evidence refutes the idea that the Founders intended to give state legislatures such unchecked power," and shared Sotomayor's comment to Thompson that his position could only prevail "if you rewrite history."

As the two ACLU experts similarly wrote earlier this week:

Proponents of the independent state legislature theory try to hang their hat on the U.S. Constitution, but their position is contrary to the Constitution's original and ordinary meaning. The Framers fundamentally understood the power of "legislatures" to be drawn from and limited by written constitutions. They fought a war to break away from a runaway legislature, and they founded a new government based on the precept that legislatures and all government bodies can only act within the limitations placed on them by written constitutions ordained by the people. The suggestion that the Framers trashed that fundamental principle when it comes to legislating the rules of democracy makes no sense.

The theory is also contrary to the constitutional principle of federalism, whereby federal courts are bound to respect the various ways in which states organize their own governments, and to allow the state lawmaking process, including activity by state courts, to operate without undue interference. Deferring to the governmental arrangements set forth in state constitutions is a basic tenet of federalism. But the independent state legislature theory would require federal courts to constantly intervene in politicized conflicts between state legislatures and state courts over state constitutional matters—and then to reorder the way that the checks and balances of state government are arranged in the state's own constitution to put a thumb on the scale for the state legislature. That arrangement would dishonor federalism principles.

Katyal, a former acting solicitor general, issued similar warnings to the justices on Wednesday, saying that "I'm not sure I've ever come across a theory in this court that would invalidate more state constitutional clauses as being federally unconstitutional, hundreds of them, from the founding to today."

"The blast radius from their theory will sow elections chaos, forcing a confusing two-track system with one set of rules for federal elections, and another for state ones," he continued. "Case after case would wind up in this court with a political party on either side of the dais."

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, who is representing the Biden administration in the case, also told the court that ILST rejects U.S. history and "would wreak havoc in the administration of elections across the nation."

"Their theory would invalidate constitutional provisions in every single state, many tracing back to the founding," she said. "That would sow chaos on the ground as state and federal elections would have to be administered under divergent rules and federal courts, including this court, would be flooded with new claims, often at the eleventh hour, in the midst of hotly contested elections."

Some who have raised the alarm about ISLT in recent months have recalled the attempt by former President Donald Trump—who is now seeking the GOP's 2024 nomination—and his allies to reverse President Joe Biden's victory in 2020, which culminated in a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol that briefly delayed certification of the election results.

As Slate's Mark Joseph Stern wrote Wednesday: "It's the argument that Trump deployed when he tried to nullify millions of votes in 2020. And it's the argument that Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, relied upon when lobbying state legislators to appoint 'alternate electors' who would support Trump."

Notably, despite his wife's involvement in what Stern and others have called Trump's failed "coup," Justice Thomas has not recused himself from this case.

"In the end, Moore v. Harper probably comes down to Justice Amy Coney Barrett," Stern argued. "Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all endorsed the ISLT in the past. Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, clearly have no desire to revive it. So Moore is in Barrett's hands, and it serves as the ultimate test of her self-proclaimed originalism."

Fears about how the six right-wing justices, including three Trump appointees, will rule in the case have fueled fresh calls for expanding the court—though legislation to do so is unlikely to pass any time soon, with Republicans set to seize control of the U.S. House of Representatives in under a month.

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

The Supreme Court is considering a North Carolina redistricting case that could have far-reaching implications for voting rights in the 2024 election and beyond. At stake in Moore v. Harper is whether North Carolina Republican lawmakers had the authority to overturn a state Supreme Court ruling that redrew the state’s congressional map due to partisan gerrymandering. The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to embrace the notion of “independent state legislature theory,” a radical conservative reading of the Constitution that claims state lawmakers have sweeping authority to override courts, governors and state constitutions. “The stakes are really, really high,” says law professor Franita Tolson, who teaches at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

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

By now, word is out about the election-detonating dangers posed by the so-called "independent state legislature theory." So in recent months, the theory's proponents have tried to persuade the Supreme Court and the broader public that there are more moderate, less problematic variants of the theory out there. But there's no "lite version" of the independent state legislature theory. The gerrymanderers who put the theory on the Supreme Court's doorstep in Moore v. Harper are asking for a radical upending of election law and all the chaos that comes with it, no matter how they try to soft-pedal it.

The consequences, as we and others have described in extreme detail many times before, would be devastating.

Moore, which is up for oral argument on Wednesday, has the potential to turn American elections upside down. The North Carolina legislators who brought the case to the Court want to restore their extreme gerrymander of their state's congressional map. To do so, they're asking the Court to mainstream a fringe, ahistorical reading of the U.S. Constitution that would grant them and other state legislators near-exclusive authority over federal elections by eliminating the system of checks and balances that has governed for over two centuries. If the legislators get their way, governors, state courts, state constitutions, and even the people themselves could lose their say in shaping the laws for federal races.

The consequences, as we and others have described in extreme detail many times before, would be devastating. The theory wouldn't just kneecap the nationwide movement against partisan gerrymandering. It could also eliminate—for federal elections—state constitutional provisions that protect your right to vote, such as those that ensure your right to cast an absentee ballot, establish automatic voter registration, and even guarantee fair elections or equal protection of the law. In all, the theory could upset more than 170 constitutional provisions, more than 650 state statutes, and thousands of policies that make elections run smoothly.

No one would want to own these consequences, not even the theory's proponents. So they started retreating from the theory as soon as they raised it, using their briefs to offer the Court a series of purported compromise positions that would (ostensibly) lead to fewer disruptions of existing elections practices and rules.

But the legislators' approach is as mealy-mouthed as it is incoherent. They propose their compromises and ask for the most extreme version of their theory in virtually the same breath, never truly backing away from it. And, at a logical level, the compromises inevitably lead to the most extreme outcome. That's because the theory rests on the radical proposition that state legislatures and state legislatures alone get to make the rules for federal elections (save for potential interventions from Congress or the federal courts). So, even if the gerrymanderers tell the Court that governors' vetoes or independent redistricting commissions would be spared, the theory's logic would inevitably eliminate them.

But, a justice sympathetic to the theory might propose, perhaps the theory could be cabined in those ways. Wouldn't that be all right?

Let's dispel that notion quickly. Any version of the theory would have devastating and intolerable consequences. Indeed, the two most prominent limiting principles that the independent state legislature theory's supporters propose are not only inconsistent with their theory but would also not limit the damage much at all.

First, the gerrymanderers have suggested that certain "procedural" state constitutional provisions could still constrain state legislatures when they regulate federal elections, so long as the provisions only regulate how laws are made, not what the laws say. This "version" would likely preserve governors' power to veto legislation and voters' power to reject legislation via referenda. It might also salvage independent redistricting commissions. But it would doom crucial voting protections for federal elections.

For example, this version would eliminate state courts' power to enforce anti-gerrymandering provisions for congressional map drawing. The high courts in Florida, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have all relied on these provisions to strike down gerrymanders enacted by both parties. It would also prevent state courts from enforcing substantive constitutional rights, like protections on the right to vote that are enshrined in the constitutions of nearly every state. Constitutional provisions that make it easier to vote could be eliminated, such as those establishing automatic voter registration in Michigan and Nevada or those guaranteeing absentee or mail voting in 16 states. As would constitutional provisions that establish ranked-choice voting in Alaska and Maine and voting machine testing procedures in Montana and Ohio.

Second, some supporters of the theory—and Justice Samuel Alito—have proposed that state courts could enforce "specific" constitutional provisions, just not "general" or "open-ended" ones, when judging federal election disputes. Under this rule, key state constitutional guardrails that safeguard the right to vote could fall, with provisions that protect free speech, fair elections, and equal protection all declared too vague for state courts to enforce. That alone is an astounding and radical proposition. There's more, though: Most state court judicial review would be eliminated. And state court decisions in every state in the country could be nullified.

The principle could also limit governors' and election officials' contributions to election rulemaking for federal elections, wiping out thousands of administrative policies that govern the nuts and bolts. This would affect everything from voter registration, polling place locations, and vote-counting processes to voting machine procurement, audit procedures, and election security protocols.

Each of these approaches would be impossible to administer and would introduce mass confusion into our election system because they rely on unintelligible distinctions between "substance" and "procedure," "open-ended" and "specific" legal provisions, and so on. That promises an explosion of federal lawsuits as litigants desperate to get a win throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. What's more, each requires state election administrators to use two different sets of rules when administering state and federal elections, which happen simultaneously, creating even greater confusion and room for error.

In sum, the independent state legislature theory, in any form, poses an extraordinary threat to American elections. The only way to avoid this chaos is for the Court to reject the theory, in all its purported forms.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Eliza Sweren-Becker, Ethan Herenstein.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Benali Hamdache.

Orientation

History of the emotions

“Emotions” are one of those words that everyone thinks understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18^th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:

• Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in the second half of the 19^th century that emotions were thought about as physiological
• Emotions had no separate categorization of its own. It was rolled up into temperament and passions.

Plato was as distrustful of emotions as he was of pleasure. Emotions were part of appetite and a lower form of humanity. Rationality and mathematics were believed to be true. Aristotle, as he often did, struck a balance and said that reason and emotion went together. The Stoics, including Seneca, understood the passions to be dangerous and the cause of imbalances. Reason should put passions in their place. St. Augustine distinguished emotions of human frailty from emotions of God. Reason was separated from emotions since emotions could not be trusted. For Hobbes, the passions are bodily sensations and are the primary sources of action, which prompt both war and peace. Passions could go in two directions. One way was towards an object which was appetite and the other was away from object, which was aversion. Respite from passions make rational decisions possible and the basis for a social contract. Descartes, as most of us know, separated the mind from the body and believed emotion had no place in the mind, which was rational and mathematical.

The status of the emotions began to improve with Spinoza who wrote that both the mind and the emotions were part of nature. Locke added that emotions could be positive as well as negative and added the empathy people have with each other. Hume warned against the rising tide of passion, saying that passions controlled reason. Hume did not think that reason drove emotions. Rather, reason was just a calculator for a way out of predicaments that the passions had created. Rousseau championed natural feelings as more reliable than reason and despised “factious or sham feelings produced by civilization”.

How well do you know what emotions are?

To demonstrate how people’s understanding of emotions can be more confusing than you might suspect, try responding to the following statements below. Except for the eighth bullet, try to decide if each statement is mostly true, conflicted or mostly false. Don’t take more than a minute to answer each one, as my point for this article is to examine your spontaneous answers to these statements. After you’ve marked the bullets true or false, give a reason or two which justify each answer. Then answer bullet eight with a paragraph. The first part of this article is designed to address your answers before discussing other topics. Here are the statements:

1. Feelings and emotions are the same thing.
2. Emotions are irrational and are the opposite of thoughts.
3. Emotions are biological and out of our conscious control.
4. Emotions happen first and thoughts follow in order to explain them.
5. Negative emotions such as hostility and venting (screaming and throwing things) get those emotions out of your system so they don’t build up.
6. Changing your interpretations of thoughts about events that happen to you can change your emotions.
7. A two-year old cannot feel angry.
8. What kind of conditions might exist in which you wouldn’t know how you feel?
9. In general, women are more emotional than men.
10. Emotional ranges are universal regardless of one’s social class.
11. Non-verbal body language, like gestures and postures, are truer expressions of emotions than what people tell you about their emotions.
12. Regardless of the type of society, if a heterosexual woman finds her husband in bed with another women it is natural to feel jealous.

A Cognitive Theory of the Emotions

Are feelings and emotions the same thing?

Usually people use the terms “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably. I think this is a loss of a great opportunity to differentiate physiological states of arousal (feelings) from cognitive interpretation of events (emotions). While most feelings are biological and out of our control, (fight-flight, pleasure-pain; frustration-contentment), our emotions are under our control. But what do I say, as a counselor, when a member of my Men Overcoming Violence support group says to me “but my anger is out of my control. What do you mean I have control of them?”. Feelings like dry mouth, sweaty palms, headache simply start the process. Which emotion results from these bodily conditions depends on how the physiological state is interpreted. One interpretation is a panic attack. Another is anxiety while still another is anticipating the happy unknown of a wedding ceremony.

Emotional reactions from thick to thin

In order to have interpretations, the person has to give meaning, and in order to do that the person has to think.  “Wait a minute” the participant in Men Overcoming Violence, says “when I get angry it happens very fast, I don’t think about which emotion to have, I just have them. How do you explain that?”. The problem is many of us think of thinking as thick – weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of pants or trying to understand what is causing a leak in the pipe. We have less practice imagining thinking that is thin and happening quickly. How do we account for differences in the speed in which we think?

A child is not given a universal set of emotions which, like buttons, the child pushes on and off. She has physiological states of arousal and the child is slowly taught how to translate that state of arousal into emotions like hurt, confusion, or sadness. The time it takes to have an emotion is mediated by the set of interpretations the parent socializes in the child. As the child reacts to situations, the situations become more familiar, so both the thinking process and the emotional go faster. Soon the emotion is unconscious and automatic. It becomes so habitual that it seems “natural, that is, biological. No emotion is biological. Feelings are biological, emotions are ontogenetic (part of individual development), social, cultural and historical, as we shall see.

Emotional reactions from thin to thick

In the last section I said there that as people are presented with situations that are familiar and predictable their emotional reaction speeds up and eventually becomes unconscious. But what are the conditions under which your emotional reactions will slow down? This can happen when a person is put in an increasingly unusual situation. For example, suppose I broke up with someone I loved after five years. We had differences over wanting children, where we wanted to live and how much money we expected each other to make. So we break up. It is a relatively small town and we are at the point that the last thing either of us wants to do is run into each other. But errands are errands, so I head for downtown. In the distance about three blocks away I think I see her. I duck inside a storefront and watch as the figure moves towards me. How do I feel? Sad, disappointed, angry but relieved. I am frozen in place. Then I see another figure is joining her and they hold hands. Now I am filled with new emotions. Outrage, as I decide not enough time has passed by to justify this. Was she seeing this guy while we were still together? What the fuck?? It gets worse. About a block away I see her partner is a woman. Now all the gaskets are blown. Fortunately, the store front was a clothing store that I can enter to possibly avoid running into them. Fortunately for me she and her girlfriend don’t come in. I flee the scene for home. Do I know how I feel? There is only so much complexity that can be integrated. I friend calls later in the afternoon to see how I am doing. He asks, “how are you feeling?”. My true answer is that I don’t know how I feel. It will probably take me a few days to answer a question like this coherently.

Are emotions irrational and the opposite of thoughts?

Emotions are not irrational and the opposites of thoughts. There are rational and irrational thoughts, not rational or irrational emotions. Irrational thoughts are things like, “my boyfriend is cheating on me because he is talking to a female neighbor for 30 minutes. I am jealous”. The thought is irrational because the woman is jumping to specific conclusions without much evidence. Being jealous is only irrational because the thought is irrational. If the same woman claims that her husband is flirting with the neighbor and might be sleeping with her because she has many experiences of her husband having had casual sex is rational. Here, in this situation, the emotion of jealousy is rational. All emotions follow thought. Emotions are rational or irrational just as thoughts are. Feelings are biological and prerational but only emotions can be irrational or rational

Are emotions biological and out of our control?

Emotions are neither biological nor out of our control. Emotions are ontogenetic, social cultural and historical. Having a particular emotional reaction may be hard to change but that does not mean they are out of our control. As an Italian American man, I am socialized to express anger rather than hurt, sadness or confusion first. Can that be changed? Yes, but it requires a great deal of psychological work. Many men in the Men Overcoming Violence program learned how to do that, but it took them 40 weeks of meeting once a week for two hours. On the wall we had a large list of emotions on a 5×10 foot piece of butcher paper. At the top were seven kinds of emotion. But underneath each emotion there were seven other emotions going from strongest to weakest intensity. Every time a man in the program said he was angry, we would insist that he include at least 2-3 other emotions so he could become aware of the emotional variety of his emotional states that he was unaware of up to that point.

Thoughts precede and create emotions

As is probably obvious by now emotions don’t come first and thoughts follow. First comes interpretation of what events mean and then the emotion follows. The order is:

• Interpretation of what the situation means – dangerous/safe; structured/loose;
• Feelings sweaty palms, dry-mouth, heart racing;
• Emotion – fear, anger, disappointment.

Does the hydraulic theory of emotions work?

Allowing yourself to vent—yell, scream and throw things does not make you have less emotion. What it does is help you form a habit of escalating to the point where it gets easier and easier. “Getting it of your system” is part of an old way of looking at emotions called the “cathartic theory of the emotions” that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It has been called the “hydraulic” theory because it pictures emotions as rising up like water in a bathtub which will overflow if it is not drained. Freud had this theory and so did humanistic psychologists like Fritz Perls during the early 1970s. Reichian therapists would give people tennis rackets and have them flail the couch of the therapist, hoping to get their anger out of their system. It was not until the 1980s when cognitive psychologists argued that emotions don’t work that way (see Carole Tavris, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion).

Emotions emerge over the course of ontogenesis moving from simple to complex

Is anger present from birth or is it the product of a developmental process that only arises at a certain age level? Some theorists of emotion claim that there are universal emotions such has surprise, disgust, love, hurt, sadness. My point here isn’t to claim what the right batch is. Rather it is to say whatever the right batch is, it takes time for them to emerge. So to the question can a two-year old express anger, my answer is no. Let me give an example. If you are watching a two year old child play with a toy and you get up and put a barrier in front of the toy and you watch the child try to figure out how to get around the barrier to the toy the child may be frustrated, but they are not angry at you. In order to be angry the child has to perceive that there are a certain social roles and rules that are normal. Anger comes over the violation of these rules. If the child was six years old and you again placed a barrier between them and their toy, chances are good they would be spending more time challenging why you put the barrier up than they would trying to overcome the barrier. Why? Because as the child’s parent, it is highly unusual for you to behave in such a sadistic way. There are complex emotions like jealousy, envy and revenge which require the mastery of rules and roles before they make sense.

How Emotions are Socialized  

Are women more emotional than men?

At least in Yankeedom, it is common to say that women are more emotional than men. This is really not the case at all. Socially, women and men are given a range of emotions that it are safe to express and another set that is more or less forbidden.

If we start out with straight women and straight men we can say, women are taught to express a wider set of emotions such as sadness, hurt, fear, confusion, humiliation and love. Men are socialized to be angry, brave and courageous. What is interesting is that if a woman crosses the line and expresses forbidden emotions, she is threatened by being called gay or a lesbian. We all know that when a woman is assertive at work she is called a bitch. On the other hand, can you imagine how a male attendant at a gas station would feel if after finally agreeing with his wife that they were lost came into the store and said:” I feel embarrassed, humiliated and confused because I can’t figure out how to get to such-and-such a place”? The guy might not give him the correct directions right away. He may first say “Get hold of yourself, man”.

There are at least two ways to think about having an emotion. The first is emotional impression and the second is emotional expression. An emotional impression is when an emotion is registered internally. An emotional expression is whether you decide to express the emotion to someone else. Often, women may express emotions more. But that does not mean women are more emotional than men.

Expression of emotions and social class

It is not true that all classes in capitalist societies have the same range of expression of emotions. In the first place, it matters what kind of religion the social class is committed to. If we consider the differences between men and women and we examine Catholic working-class women and men we will find they will express a greater range of emotions than the Protestants will. The protestant working class (at least the white working class) tend to be shut down emotionally.  Working-class men and women generally have a hard life and it makes sense they will have thicker skins.

Middle class men and women have better jobs which requires less armoring. They will be more open emotionally than the working class. This is amplified by how committed middle class people are to therapy. Out-to-lunch, class-oblivious, humanistic psychology proclaims that the more open the person, the healthier they are. They fail to understand that if you live in rough neighborhoods, attend rough schools and take orders from a boss all day long, it pays to have a thick skin.

Upper-middle class men generally are the happiest in their work. Woman in upper middle-class positions at work have to be more careful, since they are in danger of being called a bitch for asserting their authority. They also have to be careful about being labelled as too emotional at the slightest turn.

The upper classes are generally old money conservatives. Both men and women tend to repress emotions and they generally feel that the very expression of emotion is bad taste. They carry on an aristocratic tradition which prides itself in never breaking down, whether in love or war.

Happiness and social class

Socialists would be very happy with the results of research about which social classes are happy and which aren’t and why. It seems intuitive to say that the upper classes are happier than the working class because they have an easier life. But research shows that this isn’t quite the case. What we know for sure is that money does bring happiness when money delivers the working class into a middle-class position. However, there is no necessary correlation that money buys happiness as one moves from middle class to upper class. It is not predictable that upper class people will claim to be happier than those who are middle class. All this means is that when money provides the foundation for a good life, people respond well. But beyond middle class there is no correlation between money and happiness. To say money can’t buy happiness is not true. Happiness can increase as we ascend from poor to middle class. A formula for a good economic social policy is that if you want happier people, try to make all workers middle class.

Differences between classes in becoming civilized and becoming disciplined

As we will see shortly when we discuss the history of emotions, the process of becoming civilized brought with it a whole different range of social and psychological emotions. But for now we want to ask, does the process of becoming civilized apply to all social classes from the 17th through the 19th centuries? In my book Forging Promethean Psychology I argue that the working class and the poor in absolutist states or nation-states never became civilized, but they did become disciplined.

How was becoming disciplined different from becoming civilized? The first difference had to do with the population in question. Becoming civilized was the psychogenetic socialization process of the middle and upper classes. Being disciplined mostly applied to the working class and the poor. The second difference was in the types of influences used. The process of becoming civilized involved softer influences such as rhetoric, charisma, symbolic power, and legitimacy. Discipline, at least initially, involved hard influences such as physical force, the threat of force (coercion), economic deprivation, politics, and later, legitimation.

The third difference was the direction of the class forces operating. Becoming civilized, as Norbert Elias writes was a competitive process for status among classes who were roughly equal – aristocrats, merchants, and intellectuals. Becoming disciplined initially involved top-down orders. Poor or working class people had to obey the authorities or face consequences. Discipline came from the top: Calvinist and Lutheran theologians to their parishioners; from military authorities to their soldiers; and from the state to its subjects.

Following Elias, becoming civilized in the courts of Europe involved a new set of emotions for aristocrats such as shame, embarrassment, superiority and envy. For the working class under disciple, they had another set of emotions; fear, suspicion, paranoia and guilt. It is easy to think classes in other societies had the same set of emotions, but this is not true. Elias says that the situation in 16^th and 17^th century Europe was unique.

Cross-Cultural Emotions: How They vary from society to society

Collectivism vs Individualism

In his book Cultural Psychology, Steven J. Heine reports that broadly speaking individualists of industrial capitalist societies are more likely to express emotions than collectivists and they are certainly more likely to express negative emotions. This is not hard to understand. People in collectivist societies are interdependent upon each other and consider most as extended kin at work and in their villages. They cannot afford blow-ups. On the other hand, because the relationships between individuals in industrial capitalist societies are short-term and appear voluntary (following social-contract theory), they are more likely to tolerate a falling out.

Another common distinction is between cultures of honor (herding societies) and cultures that are not (farming societies). As has been pointed out in the book Cultures of Honor herders are far more suspectable to insult because: a) their wealth is mobile rather than stable; b) their population is sparse; and c) they have no protection from the state in terms of land disputes. Farmers are more likely to tolerate insult because their wealth in land is stable, they can count on the state for intervention and the land is densely populated. They are less likely to settle disputes with duels or shoot-outs. The differences between southerners and northerners in the United States follows.

Finally, Ruth Benedict characterized the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Shame is embarrassment at letting the group down. Guilt has little to do with groups. Guilt is remorse over a volition of a law, or a holy book. Puritans show a great deal of guilt. She also made a distinction between Dionysian cultures which are expressive and Apollonian cultures which were more reserved.

Analogical messages: gestures, postures 

Most people well understand that it is necessary to do emotional work on the job and at home. Emotional work means a) showing emotions you do not have and; b) hiding the emotion you do have. This is especially true in customer-service work. However, people also imagine that their analogical communication (gestures, postures) is somehow less deceptive and imagine they are a more reliable gage than verbal expression of emotions. But cross-cultural research shows this is not the case. For example, Yankees may think that the A-Okay sign is universally recognized when among Southern Europeans, it is a crude gesture. In our Men Overcoming Violence group, a Yankee man innocently propped up his feet on a stool in front of an Iraqi man sitting across the way. He soon found out the showing the sole of one’s foot to someone from Iraq is the greatest insult. If there are gestures and postures that are universal, they are few and far between. They may be harder to hide than the verbal expressions but their origins lie deep in the local context of the culture which vary from region to region.

Cross-cultural nature of jealousy

The following is paraphrased from the textbook Invitation to Psychology by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris. A young wife leaves her house one morning to draw water from the local well, as her husband watches from the porch. On her way back from the well, a male stranger stops her and asks for some water. She gives him a cupful and then invites him home for dinner. He accepts. The husband, wife and guest have a pleasant meal together. In a gesture of hospitality, the husband invites the guest to spend the night with his wife. The guest accepts. In the morning the husband leaves early to bring home breakfast. When he returns, be finds his wife again in bed with the visitor. At what point in this story will the husband feel angry? The answer depends on the culture.

• A North American husband would feel very angry at a wife who had an extramarital affair.
• A North American wife would feel very angry at being offered to a guest as if she were a lamb chop.
• But a Pawnee husband of the 19^th century would be enraged by any man who dared to ask his wife for water.
• An Ammassalik Inuit husband finds it perfectly honorable to offer his wife to a stranger, but only once. He would be angry to find his wife and guest having a second encounter.
• A century ago, a Toda husband in India would not feel angry at all because Todas allow both husband and wife to take lovers. However, both spouses would feel angry if one of them had a sneaky affair, without announcing it publicly.

 In most cultures people feel angry in response to insult and the violation of social rules. But they often disagree about what an insult is or what the correct rule should be. Here we have four different cultures lined up on the political spectrum in their attitudes towards hospitality and sexuality.

The most extreme right wing is the Pawnee Indian who draws the line at talk at the well. In the center right is a Yankee husband who is outraged at his wife having a martial affair. But on the liberal side of the spectrum we have the Inuit who draws the line not at having an affair, but at having sex twice. The Toda, the most radical has no problem extramarital sex. The problem is if it is done in an underhanded manner.

History of the Emotions

Broadly speaking, it used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods. It was only at the beginning of the 18^th century that emotions were thought of as originating from some part of the mind or the body. After 1860 emotions were seen as cultural, universal, inclusive of all species, biological, physiological and hard-wired.

What does it mean that emotions have a history? Does it mean that new emotions emerge in different historical periods? To say this is to challenge universalis ideas of emotions being static or possibly circulating in different historical periods. In my book Lucifer’s Labyrinth I follow Elias’ description of how differences from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe produced new sets of emotional reactions.

Emotions in the Middle Ages

As Elias says, people in the Middle Ages lived a life that was intense, brutal and short. They lived life to the fullest with the time they had. Their psychological life alternated between sensory saturation and religious mortification about what they had done. Middle Age people were more violent and could tolerate more pain. As Elias said, they live their life between the super-ego and the id. The ego was less developed.

The warrior class in the Middle Ages could be characterized as courageous, impetuous, wild, cruel and living in the present. But when these warriors were forced into the courts by the king and the merchants, they had to adapt themselves to court life. Above all, they needed to control themselves. Now their characteristics included being prudent, restrained, self-contained, timely, refined, more humane and more gossipy. Their every mood required foresight for the future, hindsight into the past (people they may have offended) and insight and self-reflection to make sure their behavior was not offensive. So within a century, the emotional life of one class significantly changed.

Emotional life in the Baroque and the 18^th century

There are also major differences in the emotions between the Baroque 17^th century aristocrats and the 18^thcentury merchants during the Enlightenment. The aristocrats of the 17^th century had superiority complexes, were preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones” and cultivated a cool nonchalant attitude. On the other hand, some 18^th century merchants strove openly to be happy, and were motivated by their quest for serenity. Their emotions were controlled by reason, not so much by what was expected of them. The emotional life between the aristocrats and merchants differed in many other areas such as attitude toward the senses; attitude towards pain; attitude towards animals; bodily conduct; sleeping patterns and attitude towards dying.

From honor and glory to avarice and ambition: warriors vs merchants

As we’ve said, the values of aristocrats in Europe were honor and glory. But for the merchants in the 18^thcentury these values would not do. As Albert Hirschman traces a movement from glory and honor to “interests” in his book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray tells the story of how these values were undermined by two new values: avarice and ambition. Both these motivations were despised by all classes in the Middle Ages. But with the rise of merchants there was a slow process by which avarice and ambition were changed from vices to virtues, which supported merchant capitalism

Emotional life of Romantics: late 18^th to mid 19^th century

Lastly, in the 18^th century with the rise of romanticism, early romantics had a new attitude toward the emotions which differed drastically from the Enlighteners. Lionel Trigger in his book Sincerity, points out that with romanticism came new emotions: the importance of being sincere and the importance of being authentic. Being sincere was the exact opposite to the aristocratic of haughtiness and masquerading. It meant saying what you meant and meaning what you said. Being authentic came out of the romantic notion that everyone had a true self as opposed to the roles both aristocrats and merchants had to play. Being authentic meant showing people your true self. Sincerity and authenticity were hugely important to humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Summing Up: Evolution to an Emotion

We are now finally in a position to describe the evolution to an emotion. The first step, or point zero, is an external event that triggers the emotion. Let’s say you work as a cook in a restaurant and your ex shows up for dinner with her new boyfriend.

• Physiological state of arousal:
  • Physiological – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth
  • Feelings – confusion, frustration, pain, discomfort
• Internalized socio-cultural, class and historical forces
  • Type of society – industrial capitalist
  • Social class – all working class
  • Cross-cultural – Mexican American; Italian
  • Gender – heterosexual – man – woman
  • Point in history – 21^st century crumbling Yankee empire
• Cognitive appraisal
  • Automatic thoughts; cognitive interpretations; explanatory styles
  • Assumptions – all this from the cognitive psychology of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
• Analogical messages
  • Gestures, posture, clothing
• Situational constraints
  • You are working and you can’t leave
• Display rules and emotional work
  • What feelings do you have to show that you don’t have?
  • What feelings do you have that you can’t show?
• Emotional impression
  • Hurt, anger, fear, jealousy, disappointment, relief
• Emotional expression
  • Optional
  • Act like you don’t care

Under normal circumstances which are routine, all eight of these steps could be processed in less than ten seconds because of years of practice. But because of the unusualness of this particular circumstance, our poor cook may take days to process what the situation means and what array of emotions he has.

As we have seen, the cognitive theory of the emotions has revolutionized the theory of emotions by arguing that emotions come from thoughts. But cognitive psychology implies that the individual makes up their own mind about which emotions they have. In the evolution to an emotion steps, the second step is entirely missing. A communist theory of the emotions would have social, cultural, class and historical mediators in place.

The hardest step for people in capitalist society to understand about this evolution is the second step. How could internalized socio-cultural, historical and class forces be inside of people rather than outside? Wouldn’t these forces come later, at the end?

The inclusion of step two attacks the idea that emotions are private, inside people and under their control. A communist theory of the emotions says that emotions are not private. They are products of a particular type of society, a particular social class, a particular kind of culture existing in a certain point in history. All these forces exist prior to the time you were born and they are socialized into you by your caretakers mostly unconsciously, especially in the first five years. The initial internalized socio-cultural, class and historical conditions are inside you whether you like it or not. That is our fate.

Later, as we mature, we become more active in dialectically reciprocating with these forces so that our class status might change. We might go to live in a different country (culture) or go to live in a socialist society. We might work as economic advisors to contribute to the world historical economy shifting Eastward in the 21^st century. Whereas fate are the conditions that we are given when we are born, destiny is what we make of those conditions. However, even if you are active on all these fronts, step two is the infrastructural plumbing of all emotions and its creates and sustains all the steps that follow. The content of the infrastructural plumbing may change, but the presence of a plumbing infrastructure will not.

What Capitalism Can Do to Our Emotions

Capitalist psychology splits the individual from his social, cultural, historical and class identity. Then it takes the stripped-down, isolated, alienated individual as human nature as its point of departure. Most every psychological problem is rooted in the chaotic and contradictory interactions of the four systems as they interact.

Alienation Under Capitalism

Alienation is the inversion of subject and object, creation and creator. It is a reversal of ends and means so that the means acquire a life if their own.

Members of capitalist society are alienated in:

• the products of their labor;
• the process of producing the products;
• the other people they are producing with;
• the power settings in which the product is distributed;
• the biophysical environment; and
• their self-identity

The products of their labor: commodity fetishism: hoarding, manic consumption

Marx talked about how under capitalism commodities acquire a life of their own, and become disengaged from the situation which produced them. Commodities, rather than becoming a means to an end for living, become an end in itself. Erich Fromm defined a particular kind of pathology which he called the hoarding mentality and the marketing pathology in which people are obsessed with the accumulation of commodities. The emotional life of a consumer is anxious and destabilized because their identity is centered around the acquisition of new commodities, whether they need them or not. Most capitalist psychologists treat accumulation of commodities and capitalist mania for accumulation as not worth identifying as a pathology as it’s not even in the diagnostic manual.

The process of producing the products: insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion             Under capitalism, the workday has lengthened from 40 to at least 50 hours of work in the last 50 years. There is less security about having a job and the average worker is more likely to have two jobs with no benefits. For workers a job is just something to put up with. Life begins when an individual has leisure time. Work under capitalism still possesses a religious root as a way to repent from original sin. This adds extra distress for workers during a recession or a depression when workers cannot find a job but blame themselves for not having a good “work ethic.”

Other people they are producing with: competitive anxiety anti-group mentality Almost a hundred years ago neo-Freudian Karen Horney claimed that it was competition between workers and between workers and other social classes that produced anxiety. As I mentioned in my article What is Social Psychology Part II, that groups under capitalism are treated as:

• no more than the sum of individuals;
• less than the sum of individuals;
• an entity that has a super-personally separate life from individuals.

To give you an example of the third framework, when people join a group at work, they often dissolve into it. They reify the group. They make the group a thing, above and beyond anything they can control. When an individual withdraws from the group, the group is renounced as a resource, as the individual believes their problems are so precious that no one could possibly understand them.

When the individual tolerates the members of a group, the individual renounces the capacity of the member being tolerated to change. The tolerating member does not consider that other members might be restless also, and they are not alone in putting up with members who are hard to manage. When individuals rebel against the group, they assume that other group members are conservative, never change or are stuck in their ways. If the individual tries to dominate the group, the dominating individual renounces their ability to get what they want through the collective creativity of the group. What withdrawing, toleration, rebelling or dominating have in common is that they are zero-sum game, with winners and losers.  The best example of a group that is treated as less than the sum of individuals, is in the Lord of the Flies novel. A group being less than the sum of individuals exists in the hyper-conservative imagination of Gustave Le Bon in his books about crowds, or in mass media’s depiction of mass behavior during natural disasters where crowds develop a hive mentality.

The power-setting in which the product is distributed: apathy, myopia

Unions in the United States gave up a long time ago providing a vision for workers in terms of having a say in the decision making on the job. This leads to apathy. In addition, the specialization of labor discourages understanding what is going on in the entire production process. People do their job over and over and know nor care what is going on in other parts of the production process. “That’s none of my business”.

Alienation from nature: physical deterioration shortening life-span

This form of alienation under capitalism has reached a currant volatile form in the areas of pollution extreme weather. John Bellamy Foster has called this a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. Air pollution worsened breathing for people with lung problems and added new physical problems. Extreme weather has made both winter and summer conditions hazardous almost everywhere in Yankeedom. The lack of state planning over Covid has either killed millions of people or given them Long-Covid. The United States life span has declined 2.7 years since Covid began. The US is the worst at managing Covid, having the highest number of infections and deaths. Environmental psychologists have long known that getting out into nature reduces stress and has long-term benefits. But thanks to capitalism, communing with a nature which is unpolluted is getting harder and harder to find.

Alienation from self: the illusion of free will under capitalism – depression

Capitalist psychology assumes people are fundamentally selfish, as if we individuals are like Hobbes’ atoms, greedy, insensitive, grasping and mindlessly crashing into each other. Whether it is Freud’s ego or the behavioral motivation of pain or pleasure, individuals’ primary motivation is self-interest.

Under capitalism individuals have supposed “free will”, meaning they may more or less freely choose their situations.  Religious institutions, educational expectations, economic and political propaganda, legitimation techniques, mystification and collusion in the end have no bearing on what happens. In spite of everything, free will wins over the type of society we are raised in, our social class, our culture or the historical period in which we live. With these unrealistic expectations about freedom, the individual is likely to internalize the real-life constraints and blame themselves for their less than idyllic life.

For a communist psychology, all these forms of socio-political control affect free will. While none of these processes by themselves or even all together determine a person’s free will, the options people choose to exercise are significantly constrained.

Capitalists eternalize capitalist relations                                                       Capitalists eternalize alien relations under capitalism and treat them as if they were always there. They project how people learn, think, emote and remember under capitalism into other historical periods. For example, they present narcissism, attention-deficit disorders or manic-depression as present in tribal or state civilizations just as much as they are under capitalism.

Emotions under Communism                                                                   Everything that follows is based on the real experience of workers in worker cooperatives, behavior in natural disasters and workers’ experiences in revolutionary situations. These emotional states represent communists at their very bestrather than all the time. Under communism people are seen as primarily collectively creative. This is demonstrated in practice when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers’ councils in revolutionary situations or even how they behave during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Consuming commodities are a means to an end. There is no hoarding or manic consumption in communism since the primary identity of a worker is fulfilled on the job because they love their work.

Workers are not anxious or insecure about work because there is more than enough work for everyone. The number of hours of work per day will shrunk because technology, no longer controlled by capitalist, is available to do mechanized part of the work, leaving people more time for the creative parts of the job.

Social unconscious: recalling the great moments in revolutionary situations

For a communist psychology, what is unconscious, at least for the working class is a “social” unconscious. It is the repressed memory of the human past, dead labor, that causes this individual to have “social amnesia” and not care about their own history. However, when the collective-creative memory is revived, out pours the wisdom that has accumulated from revolutionary situations: the heroic stance of the Paris Commune; the heroism of Russian factory councils and the workers’ self-management experiments in Spain from 1936-1939.  To make this social unconscious conscious is to make the working class shapers of history rather than just being a product of it.

Pro-group basis of communist psychology 

In all these examples the group attitude under capitalism is a whole never more than the sum of its parts. The goal of communist psychology is to cultivate a “social” individual who gradually comes to see the activity of building and sustaining groups as the key to emotional health. Even though in socialist psychology, the group as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, the group is still the creation of concrete individuals. The group has no mystical identity floating above individuals. While there is no group without individuals, through the collective creativity of members, the group acquires a synergy whose products are more than what any individual can do by themselves. A communist psychology creates these win-win situations through cooperation.

A socialist psychological group challenges people who withdraw or dissolve into the group by asking what the group can do to give then what they want. The group confronts those who tolerate others by asking them why they are putting up with other members – what would need to happen for things to be different. To those who rebel the group asks “what are you rebelling against and how could we change things to make the group more attractive to you?”. To those who try to dominate the group, socialist group therapy does not moralize against dominators. We simply say that you are losing out on the collective creativity of others by trying to subjugate them.

Our job involves exposing the unconscious commonalities between people that lie beneath our individual differences. It means making a long-term commitment based on the belief that the commonalities between most working-class and middle-class people far outweigh our differences.

The idea is that if you learn to build the collective power of a one group, you can then go out into the world and change it by your newfound capacity to change groups wherever we go, now and into the future. Learning how to change groups through the collective creative capacity of the group moves us from being products of history to being co-producers of it. A rich, co-creative group life is the key to emotional well-being under communism.

Conclusion

Under capitalism we have an emotional life with elements that include hoarding, manic consumption, narcissism, short-attention span, insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, apathy, myopia, unnecessary physical deterioration, a shortened lifespan and depression. Under communism people are relaxed, serene, enthusiastic, creative, and happy and that goes with the research on happiness described earlier in this article.

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments on the “independent state legislature theory,” a dubious reading of the Constitution that would let state lawmakers gerrymander and suppress votes without the traditional limitations imposed by governors, state judges, and state constitutions. Checks and balances — so central to our country’s vision — would be wiped out. 

The framers didn’t intend this outcome. The text of the Constitution does not compel it. Throughout history, it didn’t even come up. And anyone with an elementary-school understanding of checks and balances should recognize that it’s a bad idea. It must also be noted, the Supreme Court has already rejected it, most recently in 2015. 

And yet, in Moore v. Harper, the theory is being taken seriously by the high court. Its proponents hope that new justices will yield a different outcome, in the same way that opponents of reproductive rights managed to overturn Roe v. Wade without achieving a meaningful change in national opinion. 

If this all sounds outlandish, well, it is. And it is a bit complex, a bit arcane.

A key way to stop this radical move is to start by raising public awareness. At a time when even justices are warning that the Supreme Court is squandering its legitimacy, public attention will matter. 

We at the Brennan Center are playing our role in warning people of the dangers of the independent state legislature theory. We have explainers on both the theory itself and Moore v. Harper, the case pending before the Supreme Court. We compiled an academic literature review to show that the theory exists purely on the fringes of scholarship. And Brennan Center lawyers, some of the world’s experts in this field, have fanned out to help educate legislators and the public.

Today the Brennan Center launched a new effort to explain the risks: a short, animated video that we hope you will watch and share widely. Broad understanding of (and opposition to) the independent state legislature theory will force the Supreme Court to think twice about adopting this radical and disruptive idea.

They may protest loudly to the contrary, but the justices are well aware of public opinion. It’s important that an unwise ruling would be seen for what it would be: a radical step that would undermine American democracy. Let’s make sure they know that we know. 

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

The post Debunking the Latest 2020 Conspiracy Theory from a Leading Trump Election Denier appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Steven Rosenfeld.

Orientation

History of the emotions

“Emotions” are one of those words that everyone thinks they understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:

• Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that emotions were thought about as physiological
• Emotions had no separate categorization of its own. It was rolled up into temperament and passions.

Plato was as distrustful of emotions as he was of pleasure. Emotions were part of appetite and a lower form of humanity. Rationality and mathematics were believed to be true. Aristotle, as he often did, struck a balance and said that reason and emotion went together. The Stoics, including Seneca, understood the passions to be dangerous and the cause of imbalances. Reason should put passions in their place. St. Augustine distinguished emotions of human frailty from emotions of God. Reason was separated from emotions since emotions could not be trusted. For Hobbes, the passions are bodily sensations and are the primary sources of action, which prompt both war and peace. Passions could go in two directions. One way was towards an object which was appetite and the other was away from object, which was aversion. Respite from passions make rational decisions possible and the basis for a social contract. Descartes, as most of us know, separated the mind from the body and believed emotion had no place in the mind, which was rational and mathematical.

The status of the emotions began to improve with Spinoza who wrote that both the mind and the emotions were part of nature. Locke added that emotions could be positive as well as negative and added the empathy people have with each other. Hume warned against the rising tide of passion, saying that passions controlled reason. Hume did not think that reason drove emotions. Rather, reason was just a calculator for a way out of predicaments that the passions had created. Rousseau championed natural feelings as more reliable than reason and despised “factious or sham feelings produced by civilization”.

How well do you know what emotions are?

To demonstrate how people’s understanding of emotions can be more confusing than you might suspect, try responding to the following statements below. Except for the eighth bullet, try to decide if each statement is mostly true, conflicted or mostly false. Don’t take more than a minute to answer each one, as my point for this article is to examine your spontaneous answers to these statements. After you’ve marked the bullets true or false, give a reason or two which justify each answer. Then answer bullet eight with a paragraph. The first part of this article is designed to address your answers before discussing other topics. Here are the statements:

1. Feelings and emotions are the same thing.
2. Emotions are irrational and are the opposite of thoughts.
3. Emotions are biological and out of our conscious control.
4. Emotions happen first and thoughts follow in order to explain them.
5. Negative emotions such as hostility and venting (screaming and throwing things) get those emotions out of your system so they don’t build up.
6. Changing your interpretations of thoughts about events that happen to you can change your emotions.
7. A two-year old cannot feel angry.
8. What kind of conditions might exist in which you wouldn’t know how you feel?
9. In general, women are more emotional than men.
10. Emotional ranges are universal regardless of one’s social class.
11. Non-verbal body language, like gestures and postures, are truer expressions of emotions than what people tell you about their emotions.
12. Regardless of the type of society, if a heterosexual woman finds her husband in bed with another women it is natural to feel jealous.

 A Cognitive Theory of the Emotions

Are feelings and emotions the same thing?

Usually people use the terms “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably. I think this is a loss of a great opportunity to differentiate physiological states of arousal (feelings) from cognitive interpretation of events (emotions). While most feelings are biological and out of our control, (fight-flight, pleasure-pain; frustration-contentment), our emotions are under our control. But what do I say, as a counselor, when a member of my Men Overcoming Violence support group says to me “but my anger is out of my control. What do you mean I have control of them?”. Feelings like dry mouth, sweaty palms, headache simply start the process. Which emotion results from these bodily conditions depends on how the physiological state is interpreted. One interpretation is a panic attack. Another is anxiety while still another is anticipating the happy unknown of a wedding ceremony.

Emotional reactions from thick to thin

In order to have interpretations, the person has to give meaning, and in order to do that the person has to think.  “Wait a minute” the participant in Men Overcoming Violence, says “when I get angry it happens very fast, I don’t think about which emotion to have, I just have them. How do you explain that?” The problem is many of us think of thinking as thick – weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of pants or trying to understand what is causing a leak in the pipe. We have less practice imagining thinking that is thin and happening quickly. How do we account for differences in the speed in which we think?

A child is not given a universal set of emotions which, like buttons, the child pushes on and off. She has physiological states of arousal and the child is slowly taught how to translate that state of arousal into emotions like hurt, confusion, or sadness. The time it takes to have an emotion is mediated by the set of interpretations the parent socializes in the child. As the child reacts to situations, the situations become more familiar, so both the thinking process and the emotional go faster. Soon the emotion is unconscious and automatic. It becomes so habitual that it seems “natural”, that is, biological. No emotion is biological. Feelings are biological, emotions are ontogenetic (part of individual development), social, cultural and historical, as we shall see.

Emotional reactions from thin to thick

In the last section I said there that as people are presented with situations that are familiar and predictable their emotional reaction speeds up and eventually becomes unconscious. But what are the conditions under which your emotional reactions will slow down? This can happen when a person is put in an increasingly unusual situation. For example, suppose I broke up with someone I loved after five years. We had differences over wanting children, where we wanted to live and how much money we expected each other to make. So we break up. It is a relatively small town and we are at the point that the last thing either of us wants to do is run into each other. But errands are errands, so I head for downtown. In the distance about three blocks away I think I see her. I duck inside a storefront and watch as the figure moves towards me. How do I feel? Sad, disappointed, angry but relieved. I am frozen in place. Then I see another figure is joining her and they hold hands. Now I am filled with new emotions. Outrage, as I decide not enough time has passed by to justify this. Was she seeing this guy while we were still together? What the fuck?? It gets worse. About a block away I see her partner is a woman. Now all the gaskets are blown. Fortunately, the store front was a clothing store that I can enter to possibly avoid running into them. Fortunately for me she and her girlfriend don’t come in. I flee the scene for home. Do I know how I feel? There is only so much complexity that can be integrated. A friend calls later in the afternoon to see how I am doing. He asks, “how are you feeling?” My true answer is that I don’t know how I feel. It will probably take me a few days to answer a question like this coherently.

Are emotions irrational and the opposite of thoughts?

Emotions are not irrational and the opposites of thoughts. There are rational and irrational thoughts, not rational or irrational emotions. Irrational thoughts are things like, “my boyfriend is cheating on me because he is talking to a female neighbor for 30 minutes. I am jealous”. The thought is irrational because the woman is jumping to specific conclusions without much evidence. Being jealous is only irrational because the thought is irrational. If the same woman claims that her husband is flirting with the neighbor and might be sleeping with her because she has many experiences of her husband having had casual sex is rational. Here, in this situation, the emotion of jealousy is rational. All emotions follow thought. Emotions are rational or irrational just as thoughts are. Feelings are biological and prerational but only emotions can be irrational or rational

Are emotions biological and out of our control?

Emotions are neither biological nor out of our control. Emotions are ontogenetic, social cultural and historical. Having a particular emotional reaction may be hard to change but that does not mean they are out of our control. As an Italian American man, I am socialized to express anger rather than hurt, sadness or confusion first. Can that be changed? Yes, but it requires a great deal of psychological work. Many men in the Men Overcoming Violence program learned how to do that, but it took them 40 weeks of meeting once a week for two hours. On the wall we had a large list of emotions on a 5×10 foot piece of butcher paper. At the top were seven kinds of emotion. But underneath each emotion there were seven other emotions going from strongest to weakest intensity. Every time a man in the program said he was angry, we would insist that he include at least 2-3 other emotions so he could become aware of the emotional variety of his emotional states that he was unaware of up to that point.

Thoughts precede and create emotions

As is probably obvious by now emotions don’t come first and thoughts follow. First comes interpretation of what events mean and then the emotion follows. The order is:

• Interpretation of what the situation means – dangerous/safe; structured/loose;
• Feelings – sweaty palms, dry-mouth, heart racing;
• Emotion – fear, anger, disappointment.

Does the hydraulic theory of emotions work?

Allowing yourself to vent—yell, scream and throw things does not make you have less emotion. What it does is help you form a habit of escalating to the point where it gets easier and easier. “Getting it of your system” is part of an old way of looking at emotions called the “cathartic theory of the emotions” that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It has been called the “hydraulic” theory because it pictures emotions as rising up like water in a bathtub which will overflow if it is not drained. Freud had this theory and so did humanistic psychologists like Fritz Perls during the early 1970s. Reichian therapists would give people tennis rackets and have them flail the couch of the therapist, hoping to get their anger out of their system. It was not until the 1980s when cognitive psychologists argued that emotions don’t work that way (see Carole Tavris, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion).

Emotions emerge over the course of ontogenesis moving from simple to complex

Is anger present from birth or is it the product of a developmental process that only arises at a certain age level? Some theorists of emotion claim that there are universal emotions such as surprise, disgust, love, hurt, sadness. My point here isn’t to claim what the right batch is. Rather it is to say whatever the right batch is, it takes time for them to emerge. So to the question can a two-year old express anger, my answer is no. Let me give an example. If you are watching a two year old child play with a toy and you get up and put a barrier in front of the toy and you watch the child try to figure out how to get around the barrier to the toy the child may be frustrated, but they are not angry at you. In order to be angry the child has to perceive that there are certain social roles and rules that are normal. Anger comes over the violation of these rules. If the child was six years old and you again placed a barrier between them and their toy, chances are good they would be spending more time challenging why you put the barrier up than they would trying to overcome the barrier. Why? Because as the child’s parent, it is highly unusual for you to behave in such a sadistic way. There are complex emotions like jealousy, envy and revenge which require the mastery of rules and roles before they make sense.

How Emotions are Socialized 

Are women more emotional than men?

At least in Yankeedom, it is common to say that women are more emotional than men. This is really not the case at all. Socially, women and men are given a range of emotions that are safe to express and another set that are more or less forbidden.

If we start out with straight women and straight men we can say, women are taught to express a wider set of emotions such as sadness, hurt, fear, confusion, humiliation and love. Men are socialized to be angry, brave and courageous. What is interesting is that if a woman crosses the line and expresses forbidden emotions, she is threatened by being called gay or a lesbian. We all know that when a woman is assertive at work she is called a bitch. On the other hand, can you imagine how a male attendant at a gas station would feel if after finally agreeing with his wife that they were lost came into the store and said:” I feel embarrassed, humiliated and confused because I can’t figure out how to get to such-and-such a place”? The guy might not give him the correct directions right away. He may first say “Get hold of yourself, man”.

There are at least two ways to think about having an emotion. The first is emotional impression and the second is emotional expression. An emotional impression is when an emotion is registered internally. An emotional expression is whether you decide to express the emotion to someone else. Often, women may express emotions more. But that does not mean women are more emotional than men.

Expression of emotions and social class

It is not true that all classes in capitalist societies have the same range of expression of emotions. In the first place, it matters what kind of religion the social class is committed to. If we consider the differences between men and women and we examine Catholic working-class women and men we will find they will express a greater range of emotions than the Protestants will. The protestant working class (at least the white working class) tend to be shut down emotionally.  Working-class men and women generally have a hard life and it makes sense they will have thicker skins.

Middle class men and women have better jobs which requires less armoring. They will be more open emotionally than the working class. This is amplified by how committed middle class people are to therapy. Out-to-lunch, class-oblivious, humanistic psychology proclaims that the more open the person, the healthier they are. They fail to understand that if you live in rough neighborhoods, attend rough schools and take orders from a boss all day long, it pays to have a thick skin.

Upper-middle class men generally are the happiest in their work. Woman in upper middle-class positions at work have to be more careful, since they are in danger of being called a bitch for asserting their authority. They also have to be careful about being labelled as too emotional at the slightest turn.

The upper classes are generally old money conservatives. Both men and women tend to repress emotions and they generally feel that the very expression of emotion is bad taste. They carry on an aristocratic tradition which prides itself in never breaking down, whether in love or war.

Happiness and social class

Socialists would be very happy with the results of research about which social classes are happy and which aren’t and why. It seems intuitive to say that the upper classes are happier than the working class because they have an easier life. But research shows that this isn’t quite the case. What we know for sure is that money does bring happiness when money delivers the working class into a middle-class position. However, there is no necessary correlation that money buys happiness as one moves from middle class to upper class. It is not predictable that upper class people will claim to be happier than those who are middle class. All this means is that when money provides the foundation for a good life, people respond well. But beyond middle class there is no correlation between money and happiness. To say money can’t buy happiness is not true. Happiness can increase as we ascend from poor to middle class. A formula for a good economic social policy is that if you want happier people, try to make all workers middle class.

Differences between classes in becoming civilized and becoming disciplined

As we will see shortly when we discuss the history of emotions, the process of becoming civilized brought with it a whole different range of social and psychological emotions. But for now we want to ask, does the process of becoming civilized apply to all social classes from the 17th through the 19th centuries? In my book Forging Promethean Psychology I argue that the working class and the poor in absolutist states or nation-states never became civilized, but they did become disciplined.

How was becoming disciplined different from becoming civilized? The first difference had to do with the population in question. Becoming civilized was the psychogenetic socialization process of the middle and upper classes. Being disciplined mostly applied to the working class and the poor. The second difference was in the types of influences used. The process of becoming civilized involved softer influences such as rhetoric, charisma, symbolic power, and legitimacy. Discipline, at least initially, involved hard influences such as physical force, the threat of force (coercion), economic deprivation, politics, and later, legitimation.

The third difference was the direction of the class forces operating. Becoming civilized, as Norbert Elias writes, was a competitive process for status among classes who were roughly equal – aristocrats, merchants, and intellectuals. Becoming disciplined initially involved top-down orders. Poor or working class people had to obey the authorities or face consequences. Discipline came from the top: Calvinist and Lutheran theologians to their parishioners; from military authorities to their soldiers; and from the state to its subjects.

Following Elias, becoming civilized in the courts of Europe involved a new set of emotions for aristocrats such as shame, embarrassment, superiority and envy. For the working class under disciple, they had another set of emotions: fear, suspicion, paranoia and guilt. It is easy to think classes in other societies had the same set of emotions, but this is not true. Elias says that the situation in 16th and 17th century Europe was unique.

Cross-Cultural Emotions: How They vary from society to society

Collectivism vs Individualism

In his book Cultural Psychology, Steven J. Heine reports that broadly speaking individualists of industrial capitalist societies are more likely to express emotions than collectivists and they are certainly more likely to express negative emotions. This is not hard to understand. People in collectivist societies are interdependent upon each other and consider most as extended kin at work and in their villages. They cannot afford blow-ups. On the other hand, because the relationships between individuals in industrial capitalist societies are short-term and appear voluntary (following social-contract theory), they are more likely to tolerate a falling out.

Another common distinction is between cultures of honor (herding societies) and cultures that are not (farming societies). As has been pointed out in the book Cultures of Honor herders are far more susceptible to insult because: a) their wealth is mobile rather than stable; b) their population is sparse; and c) they have no protection from the state in terms of land disputes. Farmers are more likely to tolerate insult because their wealth in land is stable, they can count on the state for intervention and the land is densely populated. They are less likely to settle disputes with duels or shoot-outs. The differences between southerners and northerners in the United States follows.

Finally, Ruth Benedict characterized the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Shame is embarrassment at letting the group down. Guilt has little to do with groups. Guilt is remorse over a volition of a law, or a holy book. Puritans show a great deal of guilt. She also made a distinction between Dionysian cultures which are expressive and Apollonian cultures which were more reserved.

Analogical messages: gestures, postures

Most people well understand that it is necessary to do emotional work on the job and at home. Emotional work means a) showing emotions you do not have and; b) hiding the emotion you do have. This is especially true in customer-service work. However, people also imagine that their analogical communication (gestures, postures) is somehow less deceptive and imagine they are a more reliable gage than verbal expression of emotions. But cross-cultural research shows this is not the case. For example, Yankees may think that the A-Okay sign is universally recognized when among Southern Europeans, it is a crude gesture. In our Men Overcoming Violence group, a Yankee man innocently propped up his feet on a stool in front of an Iraqi man sitting across the way. He soon found out the showing the sole of one’s foot to someone from Iraq is the greatest insult. If there are gestures and postures that are universal, they are few and far between. They may be harder to hide than the verbal expressions but their origins lie deep in the local context of the culture which vary from region to region.

Cross-cultural nature of jealousy

The following is paraphrased from the textbook Invitation to Psychology by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris. A young wife leaves her house one morning to draw water from the local well, as her husband watches from the porch. On her way back from the well, a male stranger stops her and asks for some water. She gives him a cupful and then invites him home for dinner. He accepts. The husband, wife and guest have a pleasant meal together. In a gesture of hospitality, the husband invites the guest to spend the night with his wife. The guest accepts. In the morning the husband leaves early to bring home breakfast. When he returns, be finds his wife again in bed with the visitor. At what point in this story will the husband feel angry? The answer depends on the culture.

• A North American husband would feel very angry at a wife who had an extramarital affair.
• A North American wife would feel very angry at being offered to a guest as if she were a lamb chop.
• But a Pawnee husband of the 19th century would be enraged by any man who dared to ask his wife for water.
• An Ammassalik Inuit husband finds it perfectly honorable to offer his wife to a stranger, but only once. He would be angry to find his wife and guest having a second encounter.
• A century ago, a Toda husband in India would not feel angry at all because Todas allow both husband and wife to take lovers. However, both spouses would feel angry if one of them had a sneaky affair, without announcing it publicly.

 In most cultures people feel angry in response to insult and the violation of social rules. But they often disagree about what an insult is or what the correct rule should be. Here we have four different cultures lined up on the political spectrum in their attitudes towards hospitality and sexuality.

The most extreme right wing is the Pawnee Indian who draws the line at talk at the well. In the center right is a Yankee husband who is outraged at his wife having a martial affair. But on the liberal side of the spectrum we have the Inuit who draws the line not at having an affair, but at having sex twice. The Toda, the most radical has no problem with extramarital sex. The problem is if it is done in an underhanded manner.

History of the Emotions

Broadly speaking, it used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods. It was only at the beginning of the 18th century that emotions were thought of as originating from some part of the mind or the body. After 1860 emotions were seen as cultural, universal, inclusive of all species, biological, physiological and hard-wired.

What does it mean that emotions have a history? Does it mean that new emotions emerge in different historical periods? To say this is to challenge universalis ideas of emotions being static or possibly circulating in different historical periods. In my book Lucifer’s Labyrinth I follow Elias’ description of how differences from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe produced new sets of emotional reactions.

Emotions in the Middle Ages

As Elias says, people in the Middle Ages lived a life that was intense, brutal and short. They lived life to the fullest with the time they had. Their psychological life alternated between sensory saturation and religious mortification about what they had done. Middle Age people were more violent and could tolerate more pain. As Elias said, they live their life between the super-ego and the id. The ego was less developed.

The warrior class in the Middle Ages could be characterized as courageous, impetuous, wild, cruel and living in the present. But when these warriors were forced into the courts by the king and the merchants, they had to adapt themselves to court life. Above all, they needed to control themselves. Now their characteristics included being prudent, restrained, self-contained, timely, refined, more humane and more gossipy. Their every mood required foresight for the future, hindsight into the past (people they may have offended) and insight and self-reflection to make sure their behavior was not offensive. So within a century, the emotional life of one class significantly changed.

Emotional life in the Baroque and the 18th century

There are also major differences in the emotions between the Baroque 17^th century aristocrats and the 18th century merchants during the Enlightenment. The aristocrats of the 17th century had superiority complexes, were preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones” and cultivated a cool nonchalant attitude. On the other hand, some 18th century merchants strove openly to be happy, and were motivated by their quest for serenity. Their emotions were controlled by reason, not so much by what was expected of them. The emotional life between the aristocrats and merchants differed in many other areas such as attitude toward the senses; attitude towards pain; attitude towards animals; bodily conduct; sleeping patterns and attitude towards dying.

From honor and glory to avarice and ambition: warriors vs merchants

As we’ve said, the values of aristocrats in Europe were honor and glory. But for the merchants in the 18th century these values would not do. As Albert Hirschman traces a movement from glory and honor to “interests” in his book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray tells the story of how these values were undermined by two new values: avarice and ambition. Both these motivations were despised by all classes in the Middle Ages. But with the rise of merchants there was a slow process by which avarice and ambition were changed from vices to virtues, which supported merchant capitalism

Emotional life of Romantics: late 18th to mid 19th century

Lastly, in the 18th century with the rise of romanticism, early romantics had a new attitude toward the emotions which differed drastically from the Enlighteners. Lionel Trigger, in his book Sincerity, points out that with romanticism came new emotions: the importance of being sincere and the importance of being authentic. Being sincere was the exact opposite to the aristocratic of haughtiness and masquerading. It meant saying what you meant and meaning what you said. Being authentic came out of the romantic notion that everyone had a true self as opposed to the roles both aristocrats and merchants had to play. Being authentic meant showing people your true self. Sincerity and authenticity were hugely important to humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Summing Up: Evolution to an Emotion

We are now finally in a position to describe the evolution to an emotion. The first step, or point zero, is an external event that triggers the emotion. Let’s say you work as a cook in a restaurant and your ex shows up for dinner with her new boyfriend.

• Physiological state of arousal:
  • Physiological – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth
  • Feelings – confusion, frustration, pain, discomfort
• Internalized socio-cultural, class and historical forces
  • Type of society – industrial capitalist
  • Social class – all working class
  • Cross-cultural – Mexican American; Italian
  • Gender – heterosexual – man – woman
  • Point in history – 21st century crumbling Yankee empire
• Cognitive appraisal
  • Automatic thoughts; cognitive interpretations; explanatory styles
  • Assumptions – all this from the cognitive psychology of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
• Analogical messages
  • Gestures, posture, clothing
• Situational constraints
  • You are working and you can’t leave
• Display rules and emotional work
  • What feelings do you have to show that you don’t have?
  • What feelings do you have that you can’t show?
• Emotional impression
  • Hurt, anger, fear, jealousy, disappointment, relief
• Emotional expression
  • Optional
  • Act like you don’t care

Under normal circumstances which are routine, all eight of these steps could be processed in less than ten seconds because of years of practice. But because of the unusualness of this particular circumstance, our poor cook may take days to process what the situation means and what array of emotions he has.

As we have seen, the cognitive theory of the emotions has revolutionized the theory of emotions by arguing that emotions come from thoughts. But cognitive psychology implies that the individual makes up their own mind about which emotions they have. In the evolution to an emotion steps, the second step is entirely missing. A communist theory of the emotions would have social, cultural, class and historical mediators in place.

The hardest step for people in capitalist society to understand about this evolution is the second step. How could internalized socio-cultural, historical and class forces be inside of people rather than outside? Wouldn’t these forces come later, at the end?

The inclusion of step two attacks the idea that emotions are private, inside people and under their control. A communist theory of the emotions says that emotions are not private. They are products of a particular type of society, a particular social class, a particular kind of culture existing in a certain point in history. All these forces exist prior to the time you were born and they are socialized into you by your caretakers mostly unconsciously, especially in the first five years. The initial internalized socio-cultural, class and historical conditions are inside you whether you like it or not. That is our fate.

Later, as we mature, we become more active in dialectically reciprocating with these forces so that our class status might change. We might go to live in a different country (culture) or go to live in a socialist society. We might work as economic advisors to contribute to the world historical economy shifting Eastward in the 21st century. Whereas fate are the conditions that we are given when we are born, destiny is what we make of those conditions. However, even if you are active on all these fronts, step two is the infrastructural plumbing of all emotions and it creates and sustains all the steps that follow. The content of the infrastructural plumbing may change, but the presence of a plumbing infrastructure will not.

What Capitalism Can Do to Our Emotions

Capitalist psychology splits the individual from his social, cultural, historical and class identity. Then it takes the stripped-down, isolated, alienated individual as human nature as its point of departure. Most every psychological problem is rooted in the chaotic and contradictory interactions of the four systems as they interact.

Alienation Under Capitalism

Alienation is the inversion of subject and object, creation and creator. It is a reversal of ends and means so that the means acquire a life if their own.

Members of capitalist society are alienated in:

• the products of their labor;
• the process of producing the products;
• the other people they are producing with;
• the power settings in which the product is distributed;
• the biophysical environment; and,
• their self-identity

The products of their labor: commodity fetishism: hoarding, manic consumption

Marx talked about how under capitalism commodities acquire a life of their own, and become disengaged from the situation which produced them. Commodities, rather than becoming a means to an end for living, become an end in itself. Erich Fromm defined a particular kind of pathology which he called the hoarding mentality and the marketing pathology in which people are obsessed with the accumulation of commodities. The emotional life of a consumer is anxious and destabilized because their identity is centered around the acquisition of new commodities, whether they need them or not. Most capitalist psychologists treat accumulation of commodities and capitalist mania for accumulation as not worth identifying as a pathology as it’s not even in the diagnostic manual.

The process of producing the products: insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion

Under capitalism, the workday has lengthened from 40 to at least 50 hours of work in the last 50 years. There is less security about having a job and the average worker is more likely to have two jobs with no benefits. For workers a job is just something to put up with. Life begins when an individual has leisure time. Work under capitalism still possesses a religious root as a way to repent from original sin. This adds extra distress for workers during a recession or a depression when workers cannot find a job but blame themselves for not having a good “work ethic.”

Other people they are producing with: competitive anxiety anti-group mentality

Almost a hundred years ago neo-Freudian Karen Horney claimed that it was competition between workers and between workers and other social classes that produced anxiety. As I mentioned in my article What is Social Psychology Part II, that groups under capitalism are treated as:

• no more than the sum of individuals;
• less than the sum of individuals;
• an entity that has a super-personally separate life from individuals.

To give you an example of the third framework, when people join a group at work, they often dissolve into it. They reify the group. They make the group a thing, above and beyond anything they can control. When an individual withdraws from the group, the group is renounced as a resource, as the individual believes their problems are so precious that no one could possibly understand them.

When the individual tolerates the members of a group, the individual renounces the capacity of the member being tolerated to change. The tolerating member does not consider that other members might be restless also, and they are not alone in putting up with members who are hard to manage. When individuals rebel against the group, they assume that other group members are conservative, never change or are stuck in their ways. If the individual tries to dominate the group, the dominating individual renounces their ability to get what they want through the collective creativity of the group. What withdrawing, toleration, rebelling or dominating have in common is that they are zero-sum game, with winners and losers.  The best example of a group that is treated as less than the sum of individuals, is in the Lord of the Flies novel. A group being less than the sum of individuals exists in the hyper-conservative imagination of Gustave Le Bon in his books about crowds, or in mass media’s depiction of mass behavior during natural disasters where crowds develop a hive mentality.

The power-setting in which the product is distributed: apathy, myopia

Unions in the United States gave up a long time ago providing a vision for workers in terms of having a say in the decision making on the job. This leads to apathy. In addition, the specialization of labor discourages understanding what is going on in the entire production process. People do their job over and over and know nor care what is going on in other parts of the production process. “That’s none of my business”.

Alienation from nature: physical deterioration shortening life-span

This form of alienation under capitalism has reached a currant volatile form in the areas of pollution, extreme weather. John Bellamy Foster has called this a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. Air pollution worsened breathing for people with lung problems and added new physical problems. Extreme weather has made both winter and summer conditions hazardous almost everywhere in Yankeedom. The lack of state planning over Covid has either killed millions of people or given them Long-Covid. The United States life span has declined 2.7 years since Covid began. The US is the worst at managing Covid, having the highest number of infections and deaths. Environmental psychologists have long known that getting out into nature reduces stress and has long-term benefits. But thanks to capitalism, communing with a nature which is unpolluted is getting harder and harder to find.

Alienation from self: the illusion of free will under capitalism – depression

Capitalist psychology assumes people are fundamentally selfish, as if we individuals are like Hobbes’ atoms, greedy, insensitive, grasping and mindlessly crashing into each other. Whether it is Freud’s ego or the behavioral motivation of pain or pleasure, individuals’ primary motivation is self-interest.

Under capitalism individuals have supposed “free will”, meaning they may more or less freely choose their situations.  Religious institutions, educational expectations, economic and political propaganda, legitimation techniques, mystification and collusion in the end have no bearing on what happens. In spite of everything, free will wins over the type of society we are raised in, our social class, our culture or the historical period in which we live. With these unrealistic expectations about freedom, the individual is likely to internalize the real-life constraints and blame themselves for their less than idyllic life.

For a communist psychology, all these forms of socio-political control affect free will. While none of these processes by themselves or even all together determine a person’s free will, the options people choose to exercise are significantly constrained.

Capitalists eternalize capitalist relations 

Capitalists eternalize alien relations under capitalism and treat them as if they were always there. They project how people learn, think, emote and remember under capitalism into other historical periods. For example, they present narcissism, attention-deficit disorders or manic-depression as present in tribal or state civilizations just as much as they are under capitalism.

Emotions under Communism

Everything that follows is based on the real experience of workers in worker cooperatives, behavior in natural disasters and workers’ experiences in revolutionary situations. These emotional states represent communists at their very best rather than all the time. Under communism people are seen as primarily collectively creative. This is demonstrated in practice when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers’ councils in revolutionary situations or even how they behave during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Consuming commodities are a means to an end. There is no hoarding or manic consumption in communism since the primary identity of a worker is fulfilled on the job because they love their work.

Workers are not anxious or insecure about work because there is more than enough work for everyone. The number of hours of work per day will shrink because technology, no longer controlled by capitalist, is available to do mechanized part of the work, leaving people more time for the creative parts of the job.

Social unconscious: recalling the great moments in revolutionary situations

For a communist psychology, what is unconscious, at least for the working class, is a “social” unconscious. It is the repressed memory of the human past, dead labor, that causes this individual to have “social amnesia” and not care about their own history. However, when the collective-creative memory is revived, out pours the wisdom that has accumulated from revolutionary situations: the heroic stance of the Paris Commune; the heroism of Russian factory councils and the workers’ self-management experiments in Spain from 1936-1939.  To make this social unconscious conscious is to make the working class shapers of history rather than just being a product of it.

Pro-group basis of communist psychology 

In all these examples the group attitude under capitalism is a whole never more than the sum of its parts. The goal of communist psychology is to cultivate a “social” individual who gradually comes to see the activity of building and sustaining groups as the key to emotional health. Even though in socialist psychology, the group as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, the group is still the creation of concrete individuals. The group has no mystical identity floating above individuals. While there is no group without individuals, through the collective creativity of members,the group acquires a synergy whose products are more than what any individual can do by themselves. A communist psychology creates these win-win situations through cooperation.

A socialist psychological group challenges people who withdraw or dissolve into the group by asking what the group can do to give them what they want. The group confronts those who tolerate others by asking them why they are putting up with other members – what would need to happen for things to be different. To those who rebel the group asks “what are you rebelling against and how could we change things to make the group more attractive to you?”. To those who try to dominate the group, socialist group therapy does not moralize against dominators. We simply say that you are losing out on the collective creativity of others by trying to subjugate them.

Our job involves exposing the unconscious commonalities between people that lie beneath our individual differences. It means making a long-term commitment based on the belief that the commonalities between most working-class and middle-class people far outweigh our differences.

The idea is that if you learn to build the collective power of a one group, you can then go out into the world and change it by your newfound capacity to change groups wherever we go, now and into the future. Learning how to change groups through the collective creative capacity of the group moves us from being products of history to being co-producers of it. A rich, co-creative group life is the key to emotional well-being under communism.

Conclusion

Under capitalism we have an emotional life with elements that include hoarding, manic consumption, narcissism, short-attention span, insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, apathy, myopia, unnecessary physical deterioration, a shortened lifespan and depression. Under communism people are relaxed, serene, enthusiastic, creative, and happy and that goes with the research on happiness described earlier in this article.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Progressive campaigners in North Carolina warned Monday that a once-fringe conservative legal theory set to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming months poses a serious threat to representative democracy.

"If the Legislature were to be successful in Moore v. Harper, it could threaten the state court's ability to provide this crucial check on the legislative branch."

The nation's highest court is expected to hear Moore v. Harper, a case involving North Carolina's racially rigged congressional map, sometime in December or early next year—meaning the outcome won't affect the 2022 midterm elections.

After North Carolina's GOP-controlled Legislature prejudicially redrew the state's congressional map to lock in 10 of its 14 districts for Republicans, the state Supreme Court struck down the map, which it described as an "egre­gious and inten­tional partisan gerry­mander... designed to enhance Repub­lican perform­ance."

Republican state lawmakers appealed, citing independent state legislature theory (ISLT), which the pro-democracy group Common Cause calls a "dangerous legal argument" increasingly popular in right-wing circles positing that federal elections can only be regulated by a state's lawmakers, not its judiciary—or even its constitution.

The elections clause and presidential electors clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly empower state legislatures with regulating federal elections and appointing electors, respectively.

However, according to the Brennan Center for Justice:

The dispute hinges on how to under­stand the word "legis­lature." The long-running under­stand­ing is that it refers to each state's general lawmak­ing processes, includ­ing all the normal proced­ures and limit­a­tions. So if a state consti­tu­tion subjects legis­la­tion to being blocked by a governor's veto or citizen refer­en­dum, elec­tion laws can be blocked via the same means. And state courts must ensure that laws for federal elec­tions, like all laws, comply with their state consti­tu­tions.

Proponents of the inde­pend­ent state legis­lature theory reject this traditional read­ing, insist­ing that these clauses give state legis­latures exclus­ive and near-abso­lute power to regu­late federal elec­tions. The result? When it comes to federal elec­tions, legis­lat­ors would be free to viol­ate the state consti­tu­tion and state courts could­n't stop them.

Purveyors of former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—including Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas—invoked ISLT during their efforts to pressure state lawmakers to help overturn President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.

Experts including Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and distinguished conservative jurist, have warned than ISLT is a central pillar of the "Repub­lican blue­print to steal the 2024 elec­tion."

Speaking of the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court hearing of Moore v. Harper during a Monday webinar co-hosted by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause, said that "the date has yet to be set, but what we do know is the question at issue: Whether state legislatures should be given absolute and supreme power to create voting laws and redistricting maps for congressional elections."

Feng blasted what she called the GOP's "down and dirty" map rigging as "illegal and unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders with devastating consequences for voters, particularly Black voters, and their ability to elect candidates of their choice."

"The danger is not just that partisan political leaders will be able to draw lines without any kind of checks, but also that we the people will no longer have a representative government," she asserted. "Our government will be of, by, and for the politicians, not regular people."

Common Cause North Carolina executive director Bob Phillips called his state "number one in gerrymandered maps and number one in redistricting lawsuits."

"I don't know if there's any other state in America that holds this distinction, but every single election from 2012 up to 2020 was run and held… by maps that were eventually ruled unconstitutional," he said during the webinar. "So we do have this sordid past."

"We have had some success in the state courts in getting relief for the people of North Carolina, which we feel is vitally important," Phillips added. "And if that was taken away by the… U.S. Supreme Court making the wrong decision, we can just imagine what it would mean in North Carolina and across the country, with legislatures being able to rig the congressional lines freely and suppress the vote whether it's purging voters, making barriers to voter access, and just an assortment of things."

"The state courts must not be taken out of the equation," he insisted.

Tyler Daye, the policy and civic engagement manager at Common Cause North Carolina, said during the virtual meeting that "my first experience voting was in gerrymandered congressional districts."

"I used to live in the old 12th District, which stretched from Charlotte to Greensboro," he explained. "That district packed Black voters to dilute our voting power. It looked more like a river than a congressional district."

Daye was referring to the practice of "packing" voters of color into the same district in order to prevent them from having greater political power in surrounding ones. The related practice of "cracking" is the splitting of communities of color to dilute their power in a given district.

"Learning about how my voting power was being diluted made me want to get involved in the fight to end gerrymandering."

"[My] district has been called the most gerrymandered district in the country," Daye added. "Learning about how my voting power was being diluted made me want to get involved in the fight to end gerrymandering."

"Thankfully, the North Carolina state Supreme Court acted as a check on the state Legislature in a landmark ruling for our state," he said. "Ultimately, the North Carolina Supreme Court appointed special masters to draw the congressional map we currently have. These maps are not perfect, but they are a significant improvement over the extreme gerrymanders in the original congressional map."

"If the Legislature were to be successful in Moore v. Harper, it could threaten the state court's ability to provide this crucial check on the legislative branch," Daye warned.

Allison Riggs, legal counsel in the case and co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told attendees that "we are optimistic about the case we're bringing to court."

"In 2019, five of the U.S. Supreme Court justices in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts said that litigants and folks fighting for fair maps were not condemned to scream into a void and could go to state courts to seek relief under state constitutions," Riggs noted, referring to a case in which she argued against a previous North Carolina congressional map that had been struck down by a district court due to partisan gerrymandering.

"If the rogue theory being pushed here—the independent state legislative theory—were applicable the way it's being argued," she continued, "then the five justices who wrote that opinion would have no reason to have said it… It would be passing, illogical, and strange for them to have said go to state courts and state constitutions if the U.S. Constitution prohibited that."

"Likewise, there have been a number of cases over the past 200 years that strongly stand for the position that state courts and state processes matter in reviewing redistricting plans and reviewing election laws," Riggs added. "So what the North Carolina legislative leaders are proposing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court now is radical and is a dramatic departure from what we've seen for hundreds of years."

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

Fox News (7/19/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen.

The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years.

And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward.

We  hear these conversations again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina.

The post Matt Gertz and Eric K Ward on White ‘Replacement’ Theory appeared first on FAIR.

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

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

One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history.

Luke Harris

Listeners will have heard of the campaign against ‘critical race theory,’—a set of ideas of which rightwing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching.  

CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and

deputy director of the African American Policy Forum.

Late last June we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and

Joe Torres

unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of ‘hidden history’ that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021.

We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021.

The post Luke Harris and Joe Torres on America’s Racist Legacy appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

The follow­ing is adap­ted from oral testi­mony given Thursday before the United States House Commit­tee on Admin­is­tra­tion.

As you know, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, a case in which some North Caro­lina legis­lat­ors have asked the Court to embrace the so-called inde­pend­ent state legis­lature notion. This is the radical claim ("theory" is too gener­ous a term) posit­ing that the Consti­tu­tion removes the normal checks on state legis­latures when they regu­late federal elec­tions.

Even if the Court embraces this radical notion, Congress can thwart many of its worst consequences.

You've already heard that this claim is wrong. Consti­tu­tional text, Amer­ican history, Supreme Court preced­ent, sound policy, and common sense all refute the idea.

I'll focus on the crush­ing consequences for Amer­ican voters and our multiracial demo­cracy if the Supreme Court turns this fringe notion into law. Here are four examples of what this idea could allow.

First, the notion would green­light partisan gerry­man­der­ing of congres­sional districts.

• For instance, a state legis­lature could draw an extreme partisan gerry­mander without consequence—some­thing that state courts would other­wise strike down as illegal under the state consti­tu­tion.
• That's just as back­wards at it sounds: state lawmakers could viol­ate their own consti­tu­tions.
• Redis­trict­ing commis­sions in up to nine states could become defunct.
• And fair repres­ent­a­tion could become more diffi­cult, even impossible.
• That's because the Supreme Court already took federal consti­tu­tional protec­tions off the table, ruling in the Rucho case that federal courts cannot stop partisan gerry­man­der­ing.
• The Court offered up state courts as the answer. But if state courts can't stop partisan gerry­man­der­ing, the tactic will thrive.

Second, the radical claim would remove constraints on voter suppres­sion.

• For example, a legis­lature could elim­in­ate early voting—even if it's guar­an­teed in the state consti­tu­tion, and even if the people enacted it by ballot initi­at­ive.
• The state's governor would be unable to veto such a decision. And a state court would be power­less to stop it.
• Yes, voters could bring their case to federal court. But the Supreme Court has gutted the most power­ful provi­sions of the Voting Rights Act and under­cut other federal voter protec­tions.

Third, the notion would create elec­tion chaos, disen­fran­chising voters and over­whelm­ing elec­tion offi­cials. 

• The claim would undo hundreds of elec­tion laws enshrined in state consti­tu­tions, enacted by ballot initi­at­ive, and imple­men­ted through admin­is­trat­ive rules.
• Policies enacted through direct demo­cracy—like mail voting, same day regis­tra­tion, and even voter ID—could be wiped off the books for federal elec­tions.
• Voters could be blocked from voting for candid­ates for federal office, even if they are eligible and were prop­erly registered to vote.
• A range of other policies estab­lished in state consti­tu­tions, rather than legis­la­tion, would be voided. The right to cast a secret ballot, for instance, is guar­an­teed in 44 state consti­tu­tions.
• Elec­tion offi­cials would be forced to admin­is­ter a two-tiered system, with differ­ent policies for state and federal elec­tions. It will be unclear which rules actu­ally apply. And if elec­tion offi­cials don't know what the law is, voters surely won't.

Fourth, the notion would remove crit­ical checks against elec­tion inter­fer­ence and sabot­age. 

• The radical idea could enable legis­latures to manip­u­late elec­tion outcomes. For instance, they could enact arbit­rary rules for count­ing votes.
• The claim would invite legal chal­lenges asking federal courts to throw out ballots cast in reli­ance on state consti­tu­tions, laws enacted by ballot initi­at­ive, or policies imple­men­ted by elec­tion offi­cials.

To be clear, the inde­pend­ent state legis­lature claim is not a license to coup. Federal law prohib­its state legis­latures from over­turn­ing the results of an elec­tion. But the notion would open the door to anti­demo­cratic shenanigans. And even failed efforts to manip­u­late elec­tions erode trust—and, ulti­mately, parti­cip­a­tion—in our demo­cracy. 

Even if the Court embraces this radical notion, Congress can thwart many of its worst consequences. The Elec­tions Clause, the very same consti­tu­tional provi­sion that activ­ists seek to weapon­ize against demo­cracy, gives Congress the power to enhance and protect voting rights and ensure fair repres­ent­a­tion.

That's why, regard­less of how the Supreme Court rules, I urge you to revisit and pass the Free­dom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. The bill would set national stand­ards for voting access, prohibit partisan gerry­man­der­ing, and add federal protec­tions against elec­tion inter­fer­ence and sabot­age. This legis­la­tion is crit­ic­ally needed.

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

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

Photo by MILLER PHOTOGRAPHY

Democrats, the Cato Institute’s Andy Craig points out at The Daily Beast, are trafficking in panic over an upcoming Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper.

While the case is nominally about who gets to decide whether newly drawn political district lines pass constitutional muster,  its particulars intersect with controversy over something called the “independent state legislature doctrine,” and therefore with disgraced former president Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election using slates of fake alternate electors” to replace the real ones.

If the Court gets this wrong, the Democratic Party line goes, state legislative majorities can just throw out presidential election results that don’t go their party’s way, and instead appoint presidential electors who support their preferred candidates.

Craig’s case against the panic is solid: While the US Constitution does say that “[e]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors,” it also provides that “Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors.” That time is “election day,” currently set by federal law as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Once that election has been held, the electors have been chosen. No backsies. If a state legislature wants to choose electors in some other way, it has to act BEFORE the election rather than in a fit of pique afterward.

There is, however, a larger issue with the “independent state legislature” doctrine, and that issue is whether state constitutions (and state court rulings under those constitutions) may in any way constrain a legislature’s power to “direct” the “manner” of choosing electors.

Could, for example, the Florida Senate and Representatives just unilaterally decide to choose its presidential electors based on the outcome of a bipartisan game of strip poker, where each hand is worth an elector in addition to a discarded pair of boxer briefs?

The answer is no.

Florida’s state constitution specifies the manner of choosing electors, and Florida’s legislature is bound by that constitution.

Where federal jurisdiction is concerned, another part of the Constitution is worth looking at. Article IV, section 4 specifies that “[t]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”

While we could argue over precisely what constitutes a “republican form of government,” a lawless legislature, declaring itself unbound by the votes of the electorate and the constitution which empowers it to govern, clearly doesn’t meet the standard.

Neither would a military junta which used the Texas Army National Guard to seize control of Austin, or a crank who declared himself emperor of New Hampshire from his Manchester apartment.

State legislatures may only “direct” the way electors are chosen within the strictures set by their states’ constitutions, and they can’t retroactively change those procedures after the date set by Congress for an election.

It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will use Moore v. Harper to void the US Constitution, state constitutions, and its own power to enforce the “republican form of government” clause.

So don’t panic. Yet.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

We speak with pioneering scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about the growing Republican effort to ban critical race theory — an academic field that conservatives have invoked as a catchall phrase to censor a variety of curriculums focusing on antiracism, sex and gender. Crenshaw has launched what she calls a “counterterrorism offensive” against the Republican efforts with a “summer school” inspired by the Freedom Summer movement of the 1960s. The school debunks the “both sides-ism” debate Crenshaw says is upheld by mainstream media, and highlights the importance of critical race theory in building a multiracial democracy. “There’s no daylight between the protection of our democracy and the protection of antiracism,” says Crenshaw.

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

The post The Antithesis of the Great Replacement Theory Isn’t Liberalism; It’s Immanence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

The post The Antithesis of the Great Replacement Theory Isn’t Liberalism; It’s Immanence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

“These are not merely abstract philosophical questions,” Táíwò lectured. “People are fighting wars over, among other things, different answers to these questions.”

Remarkably, many of these wars were won by those on the side of “free and equal,” Táíwò pointed out. Think of the American and French revolutions: Their ideas about inalienable rights and consent of the governed quickly transformed from heresy to common sense. This common sense, however, failed to provide the promised rights and freedom to most of the world. Women in the U.S. only won the right to vote more than a century after the American Revolution, and around 750 million people lived under some version of colonial rule by the middle of the 20th century. Even as they gained independence, redrawing the borders of the modern world, disparities endured. Black South Africans, for instance, didn’t secure voting rights until 1994.

“Just for reference,” Táíwò said, pausing for emphasis, a large beaded necklace with an Africa-shaped pendant hanging over his gray T-shirt, “I’m older than that. That happened in my lifetime.”

This tension between what philosophy says about the world and the ways the world actually works is what animates Táíwò’s teaching and writing. A 32-year-old assistant professor, he’s already one of the country’s most publicly prominent philosophers, and he’s certainly the most vocal philosopher working on issues related to climate change. Less than five years ago, he was toiling in relative obscurity on his PhD at UCLA; today he publishes regularly not only in professional philosophical journals, but also in publications like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and too many others to list. His first two books, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture, have both been published within the last six months. He tweets to his 48,000 followers daily.

When I first called Táíwò on the phone in February, I told him that, if I had to gloss Reconsidering Reparations, I would call it “a theory of everything for the social justice left.” I didn’t mean this to sound flip. If anything I meant it as a compliment about the book’s deftness in connecting issues as seemingly disparate as disability rights, fossil fuel divestment, basic income proposals, and police reform.

“Just for the record,” he responded, laughing, “that doesn’t sound flip at all.”

That Reconsidering Reparations became a “theory of everything” with climate change at its center is something of an accident. When he sat down to write his first book, Táíwò was interested in staking a position in a far narrower debate: Under what conditions could a program of reparations for those disadvantaged by the legacy of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade actually achieve justice? 

Táíwò’s notion of justice is broad. While many philosophers have traditionally conceived of justice as concerned above all with the resources available to people, Táíwò thinks the concept must be expanded to consider their “capabilities” — what kind of lives they are empowered to lead, not just the money and goods they have. If you want to achieve justice in a sense this expansive, he argues, redistributing cash and other material resources will only get you so far.

Over and over again, the question of how to realize this justice led Táíwò to climate change. Given its disproportionate effects on populations for whom the legacies of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade loom the largest — think the tens of millions of Bangladeshis who stand to be displaced by sea-level rise, or the unique vulnerability of the entire African continent to temperature rise and decreased rainfall — each additional degree of global warming seemed to undermine the good that any reparations project could do.

“Are any of these other measures that we take toward racial justice going to have staying power in a world that’s 3 degrees hotter?” he has said. “In a world where there is rampant instability in our energy and housing systems? In a world of mass human displacement? In a world where the elites of the world feel very threatened?”

Though Táíwò is loath to declare loyalty to a particular ideology, he readily identifies as a leftist, and his views on climate change perhaps sit most comfortably under the umbrella of eco-socialism. Still, he is willing to follow his philosophical arguments to positions that are controversial in some leftist quarters. He has argued, for example, that carbon removal is an essential tactic in the pursuit of environmental justice, and he has opposed calls for bans on solar geo-engineering research, calling such arguments “performatively colonial.” What he opposes most of all is moralizing: If political purity gets in the way of improving the actual life experience of people now and in the future, then it has no place in his account of justice.

“He’s not a doctrinaire anything, in the end. You really see this in his interest in climate politics. He’s like, ‘Let’s just do whatever works when it comes to this really urgent problem,’” said Daniela Dover, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford who taught Táíwò when he was a graduate student. “I don’t feel like I can predict what he’s going to say.”

While Táíwò’s ultimate vision is of a world where economic and political power is massively redistributed, it’s clear that he thinks rapid decarbonization is the world’s most immediate priority. Every degree of warming puts his conception of a just world further out of reach. 

“It’s very difficult to not treat climate change as one of the central questions confronting philosophers and people in general,” he told me.

What sets Táíwò’s work apart is that he thinks the English-speaking world’s traditional accounts of justice are increasingly useless — and that the challenges posed by climate change can demonstrate why.

Anglo-American political philosophy still operates in the shadow of John Rawls, whose 1971 doorstop A Theory of Justice single-handedly revived an academic field that many considered dead. Rawls argued that justice consists of whatever principles all of a society’s members would agree to if they were to assume what he called a “veil of ignorance” — in other words, if they did not know the exact circumstances under which they would live.

The idea is that a state could pursue justice by basing its laws and rules on principles that people would endorse if they knew nothing in advance of facts like their race or income. If every country operated on these grounds, then we would live in a just world. Whether or not you’ve heard of Rawls, if you have an idea that justice is more or less synonymous with something like fairness — and that the laws of states and governments should be set up in a way that advances this fairness — your thinking bears the mark of his influence.

Táíwò thinks this approach might make sense if we all lived in completely autonomous countries with representative and functional governments. But we don’t. Given this, Táíwò argues that we cannot pursue justice without recognizing that we live in an interconnected world that distributes risks and benefits in profoundly unequal ways, regardless of what any of the 193 members of the United Nations might want. This is largely, Táíwò argues, because we are still living out the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and European colonialism, which established global patterns of wealth and resource accumulation that push some countries toward failure and others toward success, decades after many colonized countries gained independence.

Indeed, the very fact that we live in a world composed of nation-states — and the shape and institutions of those states themselves — is the product of these worldwide historical developments. Africa’s present-day borders, for instance, are largely the work of colonial administrators. (In 1885, European leaders staged a now-infamous conference in Berlin to hammer out the details; no Africans were invited.)

When looking at contemporary disparities, like the two-decade gap in life expectancy between an American and a Nigerian, Táíwò sees the winds of this history at work, delivering unearned benefits to some and unwarranted burdens to others. Sometimes, those currents scramble our moral expectations, our tidy accounts of heroes and villains. One chapter in Reconsidering Reparations notes that some early Georgetown students’ parents leased the labor of enslaved Africans to the university to cover their tuition, and that Georgetown itself sold hundreds of enslaved people to balance its books. Right after that, however, Táíwò observes that the benefits Georgetown accumulated in part through the slave trade now flow directly to him, a Black man, paying his salary and lending him the institutional prestige that helped him secure the contract to write this very book.

This paradox is at the core of Táíwò’s argument about the perils of a certain kind of identity politics, an argument he makes in a recent essay that became his latest book, Elite Capture, published in May: Identifying a single person who can accurately and fully represent the voices of a marginalized group is easier said than done.

“Treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford,” he writes. In the worst cases, this well-meaning presumption can enable the “elite capture” of justice-oriented projects. That might look like the Black mayor of Washington, D.C., having “Black Lives Matter” painted onto city roads while sidestepping the demands of protests on those same streets. For Táíwò, the emerging norm in social justice organizations and universities of automatic deference to people like him risks uplifting an already-privileged few in place of actually improving the lives of the oppressed.

​“Perhaps,” he writes, “after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside. But probably not.”

The story of Táíwò’s own ascent to the chattering class underscores not only the moral perils he sees in a certain brand of identity politics, but also the ways that history tees up life outcomes in ways that only become visible in retrospect — another major theme of his work.

President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a sea change in U.S. immigration policy, making “skilled labor” the primary determinant of an individual’s ability to immigrate, rather than ethnicity and national origin. Large-scale immigration from countries in Asia and Africa became possible, and Táíwò’s parents left Nigeria in the early 1980s to pursue graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Táíwò was born. His childhood memories start in the suburban Midwest. His mother’s career as a pharmacologist took the family from the affluent suburbs of Cincinnati to the affluent suburbs of Indianapolis and then to nearby Muncie — “Parks and Rec Indiana,” as Táíwò calls it. As a kid, he was absorbed by Ender’s Game, the mythology of the Star Wars expanded universe, and Super Smash Brothers Melee.

The legacy of anti-colonial independence movements loomed large in the memories of Táíwò’s parents — they taught their children the pan-African anthem — but so too did the 1967 Nigerian Civil War, which saw the country fracture along ethnic and religious lines as the predominantly Igbo populations in the southern Biafra region seceded following ethnic cleansing in the Muslim-dominated north. Táíwò recalls that many of the other Nigerian-Americans he knew in the Midwest “had genocide in living memory.” As they struggled to convince him to practice the piano, Táíwò’s parents reminded him how lucky they were to own one: In Nigeria, they’d had to leave their piano behind after the war broke out.

This backdrop shaped how Táíwò experienced political events in the U.S. In April 2001, when Táíwò was 11 years old, an unarmed 19-year-old Black man named Timothy Thomas was shot by police officers in a Cincinnati neighborhood a few miles from Táíwò’s home. The community uprising that followed bore a striking resemblance to those that would follow Michael Brown’s death in Missouri in 2014, and George Floyd’s in Minnesota in 2020. It shook Táíwò’s inchoate sense that American life could be insulated from the kind of violence his parents had left behind in Nigeria. In neighborhoods not far from their quiet Ohio suburb, it often wasn’t.

An experience later that year, however, underscored the vast privilege that accompanied the family’s American citizenship. After finding out that hijackers had steered planes into the World Trade Center, Táíwò began stashing Pop-Tarts and other imperishables in his bedroom. His parents, mystified, asked him what he was doing. He explained that this is what he’d picked up from them about what war meant: needing to prepare for deprivation and insecurity. They laughed — such precautions were not necessary in a country like the U.S. They wouldn’t be leaving their piano behind.

“Part of the point of their immigrating here,” he reflected in an interview as an adult, “was to become the sort of people that war didn’t happen to.”

These experiences informed a principle at the core of Táíwò’s philosophical viewpoint: that justice is a question of how both resources and personal security are distributed between different countries and communities as well as within them.

A “directionless and unmotivated” student, in his own words, Táíwò aced standardized tests but got unremarkable grades — he didn’t like being told what to do, and even less being told what to think — dashing the Ivy League hopes of his parents. Still, he was able to get into Indiana University on a scholarship. He started out studying economics and political science, thinking those were the disciplines that could answer his nascent questions about why society was organized the way it was. He quickly became disillusioned, and that disillusionment crystallized one day while he was studying macroeconomics. The textbook offered as an example a man in Bangladesh who worked as a taxi driver, tailor, and an array of other odd jobs.

“The book was like: Why is this person poor?” Táíwò said to me. “I expected an answer that would have to do with anything about Bangladesh. And the answer was like: ‘This guy doesn’t understand the principles of specialization and trade.’”

Read Next

California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far.

Joseph Lee

“Their assumptions seemed to background stuff that I thought should be foregrounded,” he remembered of those courses. “I just figured philosophy was the place you went to think about background assumptions.”

With his first philosophy courses, Táíwò was hooked. Applying to graduate school to continue studying philosophy after he earned his bachelor’s degree in 2012 was a natural choice, given the ambient pressure he still felt from his parents to pursue higher education. But he had little investment in making a career as an academic. His stint as a saxophonist in his high school band led to him dabbling in a handful of other instruments, including guitar, and he was more interested in becoming a musician. (He’s described his musical sensibility as “somewhere between The Roots and Miles Davis.”) UCLA didn’t seem like a bad place to make that happen. He took a year off before grad school to try his hand at it.

“Failing to become a musician was a very good thing for me,” he admitted.

At UCLA, Táíwò studied under philosophers who encouraged him to pursue the broad, big-picture questions that animated him — questions about how contemporary society is structured, and how it could be restructured in a just way — rather than reorienting himself toward the arcana associated with academic philosophy. The wide scope of Táíwò’s inquiry led him to take much of his coursework outside his home department, in classes on history and cultural studies. Táíwò’s dissertation advisor, the philosopher AJ Julius, described their time together as the “uncommon experience of watching someone in permanent revolution.”

“He came into it knowing he was always going to be an outsider to the institutions of professional philosophy, but determined to use those institutions for his own purposes,” said Dover, who sat on Táíwò’s dissertation committee. “I didn’t feel I had anything to teach him at all.”

Though this approach may make Táíwò an outsider to contemporary philosophy, with its emphasis on ever-narrower definitional questions, it also makes him more like the classic conception of a philosopher — Táíwò’s ambition is no less than Aristotle’s when the latter sat down to spell out exactly how to live the good life. In asking questions about things as fundamental as the nature of justice, Táíwò found himself arguing with some of the philosophical tradition’s towering figures — an argument that plays out, among other places, in the pages of his first book, Reconsidering Reparations, where he takes on John Rawls.

Táíwò thinks Rawls’ famous theory of justice is wrong on multiple counts. The first is its focus on states. Táíwò argues that many governments are incapable of securing just or fair outcomes for their citizens, because many of the biggest disadvantages they experience are imposed externally: Think here of the tiny Pacific island nations that stand to disappear altogether due to sea-level rise caused largely by emissions from early-industrializing countries like the United Kingdom. History has set some states up to succeed, and others to fail.

Second, Táíwò argues that Rawls proposed a “snapshot view” of justice: It establishes what a just set of outcomes would be at a single point in time, failing to recognize that circumstances today were often created in the past — and that what looks like justice to people alive today may harm their grandchildren. Building out coal power, for example, might make sense to present-day residents of a country like India — it’s cheap electricity that can power air-conditioning on increasingly scorching summer days — but such decisions contribute to global warming that will bring suffering to future generations.

“The nature of the system is that it moves resources from yesterday to today to tomorrow,” Táíwò writes.

To answer skeptics of his account of the guiding role that historical forces play in the present, Táíwò asks simply that we take a look at the best available data about the world around us (which is helpfully laid out in Appendix B of Reconsidering Reparations): The vast majority of former colonial powers, like the U.K. and France, have average incomes well over twice that of many of their former colonies. Metrics on life expectancy, maternal mortality, dietary adequacy, literacy, sanitation access, civil liberties, and political rights follow similar patterns. Taken together, these disparities make formerly colonized countries most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change — an ironic outcome, given that their late industrialization makes them least responsible for climate change in the first place. 

Environmental injustice and climate change, in other words, dole out damage in profoundly unequal ways. This is visible not just between countries, but also within them; the theft of land from Indigenous peoples in North America, for instance, has made their descendents more vulnerable to extreme heat and drought. Much of this sounds familiar, or at least intuitive, to those immersed in the rhetoric of the environmental justice movement. It’s all connected. But Táíwò provides a grand unified theory that explains why it’s all connected, and points to ways of remaking the world in accordance with philosophical principles of justice.

To some, a philosophy that accounts for the combined injustices of all of modern history might appear to put an ideal world out of actual reach. But although Táíwò is most thorough in his account of the way the world actually is, he doesn’t lose sight of the ideal. Instead, he ratchets his ambitions for the ideal higher. Because the colonial world order remains a force in people’s lives, a reparations project that achieves justice cannot simply compensate for past and present damages — it must be what Táíwò calls a “worldmaking project,” concerning itself not just with wealth and resource distribution but with building and maintaining environments that allow everybody to flourish within them. In this sense, he considers his project a “constructive” approach to reparations.

Táíwò thinks that this is best pursued by prioritizing the self-determination of individual communities, their ability to chart the course of their own destinies. On the local scale, he’s spoken approvingly of citizen assemblies in contrast to the mass electoral politics we normally associate with democracy. (Recent experiments in this form have contributed to securing abortion rights in Ireland and wind power in Texas.) On the global scale, he calls for reviving egalitarian visions of an alternate international system, such as the New International Economic Order that Ghana, Nigeria, and dozens of other decolonized countries demanded of the United Nations in the 1970s.

These ideals may seem far off, but much of Táíwò’s time and energy is spent arguing for concrete, intermediate steps toward these goals. He recently teamed up with three other academics to publish a proposal outlining the possibility of a publicly owned, democratically controlled carbon removal authority in the U.S., which could be modeled after municipal water or trash systems, or regional electric cooperatives. In April, he co-authored a report documenting the ways that the U.S. and other rich countries could immediately restructure or cancel debt owed by poor countries as a first step in a program of climate reparations.

“Climate reparations should not be thought of simply as compensation for past environmental, economic, and social damages, but as world making,” the report reads. “Debt justice and enhanced climate finance should help build a platform for countries in the Global South to achieve low-carbon development and robust, resilient infrastructure.”

Read Next

Are white people bad for the environment?

Eve Andrews

On a cursory read, the sweeping history of what Táíwò calls “global racial empire” could lead you to think there’s no room in his account for human agency, for bucking the course of history and changing the world right now. But Táíwò doesn’t think history dictates what people do. History may create the constraints and boundaries within which people make choices, but they still make choices. The more those boundaries are expanded, the more actions that are available to people, Táíwò’s argument goes. And, perhaps, if people are more free and empowered, they will be more likely to coordinate and solve big problems like climate change.

In our conversations I got the sense that, if there’s one thing about Táíwò’s account that keeps him awake at night, it’s how close this belief is to an article of faith, rather than a reasoned philosophy. He knows there’s no guarantee that greater human freedom and empowerment will stop climate change, or bring about justice. If given more choices, people might pick the wrong ones. Nevertheless, Táíwò thinks it only makes sense to let them try.

“He’s hoping to find a common-sense radicalism,” Julius told me. “I think he’s trying to help radical thought and common sense to recognize themselves in each other.”

The day I visited Táíwò in Washington, the city’s famous cherry blossoms were in early bloom. The gray sky delivered ominous bursts of wind, warnings of the tornado that would touch down just across the Potomac River later that evening. Nevertheless, we successfully avoided rain as we walked past Georgetown’s tony townhouses to Martin’s Tavern, a watering hole for the city’s well-heeled. Táíwò patiently and thoughtfully fielded my questions as fragments of chatter about registering kids for prep school floated by from other tables. Sensing my anxiety about leaving the right amount for a tip, he quietly threw a few extra bills on top of the check as we walked out. Knowing the correct amount mattered less than giving someone a little more money right now. It might not have been ideal, but it got us part of the way there.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything on Jun 21, 2022.

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

In Laudato Si: On care for our common home (2015), Pope Francis argues that one cannot rest with mere description of the symptoms of the ecological crisis without acknowledging its human origins. “A certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us” (p. 78). It certainly has and my first two CP articles on the Pope’s Critical Theory set out his philosophical-religious reasons for why it has gone off-kilter. In chapter 3, “The human roots of the ecological crisis,” Pope Francis now focuses on the “dominant technocratic paradigm and the place of human beings and of human action in the world” (ibid.).

Technology: creativity and power

Humanity’s considerable technical prowess over the last two centuries – stream engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution and robotics, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies—has provided humanity with enormous benefits. We are right to rejoice: Pope John Paul II exclaimed that “science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity” (p. 79). Pope Francis adds his praise: “How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications? How could we not acknowledge the work of many scientists and engineers who have provided alternatives to make development sustainable?” (ibid.). Humanity, it appears, has a relentless impulse to overcome all material limitations.

Pope Francis also admits that “technoscience” can improve the quality of life, it can “also produce art and enable men and women immersed in the material world to ‘leap’ into the world of beauty. Who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper? So, in the beauty intended by the one who uses new technical instruments and in the contemplation of such beauty, a quantum leap occurs, resulting in a fulfilment which is uniquely human” (ibid.). Yet we must acknowledge that nuclear energy, knowledge of our DNA and many other abilities we have acquired has given us “tremendous power” (p. 80). Mega-corporations have the “economic resources” to use them and gain “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used” (ibid.). “Nothing ensures”: these are portentous words as we stand back from the twentieth century and weep as we see an array of military technologies (including nuclear weapons) killing millions upon millions of people, driven by both those nations claiming to be “democratic” and those who do not. Francis emphasizes that today we have “an increasingly deadly arsenal of weapons available for modern warfare. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it” (ibid). These are searing and troubling questions.

Pope Francis believes that technologies (military and otherwise) are captive to myths of progress – “as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such” (ibid.). Here’s the rub: our “immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience …. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us” (p. 81). We don’t: a reckless, manic spirit is wandering around the geo-political landscape. For Francis, our freedom to make ethically responsible choices that enable all life to flourish can be “handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (ibid.).

The globalization of the technocratic paradigm

Pope Francis thinks that the “problem” goes even deeper: “it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” (p. 82). Flowing in the Critical Theory tradition of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas, Francis argues that logical and rational procedures oriented to control over an external object is “already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something, formless, completely open to manipulation” (ibid.). Here, reason becomes instrumental rationality: domination over things and people. Pope Francis maintains that modern technical rationality does not receive “what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand” (ibid.).

Now, human beings no longer “extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational” (ibid.). Once the relationship slips into confrontation, there are no limits imposed on human actors. In the 1970s, the discourse of “limits to growth” crept into our thinking, challenging the idea there was an “infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit” (ibid.). Illustrations abound — as forests are cut to shreds to make way for cattle ranching (or some super-highway) and the coral reefs are bleached of life and colour.

The challenge for both secular and religious persons is to reject the idea that technological products are neutral. They aren’t. They “create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (p. 83). But it is one thing to shift one’s thought (or even world-view); it is quite another to overcome the “technological paradigm.” Technology, the Pope states, “tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic” (ibid.). Francis argues that the technocratic paradigm also “tends to dominate economic and political life” (p. 84). Neo-liberal globalized capitalism (my phrase) seizes technological advances to maximize its profits without “concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the economy” (ibid.). And our environment deteriorates. Market growth has not solved world hunger; and a technological quick-fix is inconceivable.

Driven by greed and delusion, a profit-driven, militarized economic system shows “no interest in mor e balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations” (ibid.). How can one disagree with Francis’ incisive condemnation that a sort of “’superdevelopment’ of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation” (p.85) defines our reality? Pope Francis confronts us with our failure to “see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth” (ibid.). He believes that the “fragmentation of knowledge” leads us away from our ability to appreciate the whole and the relationships between things.

Problems pertaining to the environment and the poor cannot be “dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests. A science which would offer solutions to the great issues would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to acquire today. Nor are there general ethical horizons to which one can appeal” (p. 86). One of Francis’ most penetrating critiques of our present response to ecological crises is his affirmation that a profound “perspective transformation” must occur: “there needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” (ibid.).

We need to broaden our vision; this choice is ours to make. We can create another type of development and just progress. We can limit and direct technology. People throughout the world have invented less polluting means of production and created non-consumerist ways of life. “An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently through a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?” (p, 87). A new resistance exists in the cracks and crannies of life in our cities and rural areas: if one looks carefully. This new resistance, Pope Francis adds, is fueled by a “growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere” (ibid.).

The crisis and effects of modern anthropocentrism

Francis states that the “intrinsic dignity” (p. 89) of the world is compromised when nature is reduced to an “insensate order, a “cold body of facts,” or “raw material to be hammered into useful shape” (p.88). He thinks that modernity is “marked by an excessive anthropocentrism” that stands in the way of strengthening social bonds. The time has come to pay renewed attention to reality and the limits it imposes; this in turn is the condition for a more sound and fruitful development of individuals and society” (p. 89). Pope Francis reminds us once again that our “’dominion’ over the
universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship” (p. 90). “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for ‘instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature” (ibid.). The latter words are Pope John Paul II’s.

Francis warns humanity of a “misguided anthropocentrism”: shifting to a biocentric world-view entails ‘adding yet another imbalance, failing to solve present problems and adding new ones. Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility are recognized and valued” (p. 91). Nor can we assume to heal our relationship with nature “without healing all fundamental human relationships. Christian thought sees human beings as possessing a particular dignity above other creatures; it thus inculcates esteem for each person and respect for others. Our openness to others, each of whom is a ‘thou’ capable of knowing, loving and entering into dialogue, remains the source of our nobility as human persons. A correct relationship with the created world demands that we not weaken this social dimension of openness to others, much less the transcendent dimension of our openness to the ‘Thou’ of God” (p. 92). One can hear echoes of Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Buber’s I-Thou personalism in these words just read.

Pope Francis links the “culture of relativism” with the “cult of unlimited human power” (p. 93). “The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labor on them or enslaving them to pay their debts. The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests. It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage” (ibid.). We satisfy our own desires and immediate needs, says Francis, in the “absence of objective truths or sound principles” (ibid.). The prevalent ideology of our times is—as we know—a post-modern relativism where truth is banned from the discourse.

Francis believes the lack of “objective truths” makes it difficult to place limits on “human trafficking, organized crime, the drug trade. Commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species” (p. 94). “Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentalism, ore eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted? This same ‘use and throw away’ logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. We should not think that political efforts or the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided” (ibid.). Pope Francis’ concluding words for this chapter are that a “technology severed from ethics will not easily be able to limit its own power” (p. 103).

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Welton.

In Laudato Si: On care for our common home (2015), Pope Francis argues that one cannot rest with mere description of the symptoms of the ecological crisis without acknowledging its human origins. “A certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us” (p. 78). It certainly has and my first two CP articles on the Pope’s Critical Theory set out his philosophical-religious reasons for why it has gone off-kilter. In chapter 3, “The human roots of the ecological crisis,” Pope Francis now focuses on the “dominant technocratic paradigm and the place of human beings and of human action in the world” (ibid.).

Technology: creativity and power

Humanity’s considerable technical prowess over the last two centuries – stream engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution and robotics, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies—has provided humanity with enormous benefits. We are right to rejoice: Pope John Paul II exclaimed that “science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity” (p. 79). Pope Francis adds his praise: “How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications? How could we not acknowledge the work of many scientists and engineers who have provided alternatives to make development sustainable?” (ibid.). Humanity, it appears, has a relentless impulse to overcome all material limitations.

Pope Francis also admits that “technoscience” can improve the quality of life, it can “also produce art and enable men and women immersed in the material world to ‘leap’ into the world of beauty. Who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper? So, in the beauty intended by the one who uses new technical instruments and in the contemplation of such beauty, a quantum leap occurs, resulting in a fulfilment which is uniquely human” (ibid.). Yet we must acknowledge that nuclear energy, knowledge of our DNA and many other abilities we have acquired has given us “tremendous power” (p. 80). Mega-corporations have the “economic resources” to use them and gain “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used” (ibid.). “Nothing ensures”: these are portentous words as we stand back from the twentieth century and weep as we see an array of military technologies (including nuclear weapons) killing millions upon millions of people, driven by both those nations claiming to be “democratic” and those who do not. Francis emphasizes that today we have “an increasingly deadly arsenal of weapons available for modern warfare. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it” (ibid). These are searing and troubling questions.

Pope Francis believes that technologies (military and otherwise) are captive to myths of progress – “as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such” (ibid.). Here’s the rub: our “immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience …. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us” (p. 81). We don’t: a reckless, manic spirit is wandering around the geo-political landscape. For Francis, our freedom to make ethically responsible choices that enable all life to flourish can be “handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (ibid.).

The globalization of the technocratic paradigm

Pope Francis thinks that the “problem” goes even deeper: “it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” (p. 82). Flowing in the Critical Theory tradition of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas, Francis argues that logical and rational procedures oriented to control over an external object is “already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something, formless, completely open to manipulation” (ibid.). Here, reason becomes instrumental rationality: domination over things and people. Pope Francis maintains that modern technical rationality does not receive “what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand” (ibid.).

Now, human beings no longer “extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational” (ibid.). Once the relationship slips into confrontation, there are no limits imposed on human actors. In the 1970s, the discourse of “limits to growth” crept into our thinking, challenging the idea there was an “infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit” (ibid.). Illustrations abound — as forests are cut to shreds to make way for cattle ranching (or some super-highway) and the coral reefs are bleached of life and colour.

The challenge for both secular and religious persons is to reject the idea that technological products are neutral. They aren’t. They “create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (p. 83). But it is one thing to shift one’s thought (or even world-view); it is quite another to overcome the “technological paradigm.” Technology, the Pope states, “tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic” (ibid.). Francis argues that the technocratic paradigm also “tends to dominate economic and political life” (p. 84). Neo-liberal globalized capitalism (my phrase) seizes technological advances to maximize its profits without “concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the economy” (ibid.). And our environment deteriorates. Market growth has not solved world hunger; and a technological quick-fix is inconceivable.

Driven by greed and delusion, a profit-driven, militarized economic system shows “no interest in mor e balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations” (ibid.). How can one disagree with Francis’ incisive condemnation that a sort of “’superdevelopment’ of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation” (p.85) defines our reality? Pope Francis confronts us with our failure to “see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth” (ibid.). He believes that the “fragmentation of knowledge” leads us away from our ability to appreciate the whole and the relationships between things.

Problems pertaining to the environment and the poor cannot be “dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests. A science which would offer solutions to the great issues would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to acquire today. Nor are there general ethical horizons to which one can appeal” (p. 86). One of Francis’ most penetrating critiques of our present response to ecological crises is his affirmation that a profound “perspective transformation” must occur: “there needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” (ibid.).

We need to broaden our vision; this choice is ours to make. We can create another type of development and just progress. We can limit and direct technology. People throughout the world have invented less polluting means of production and created non-consumerist ways of life. “An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently through a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?” (p, 87). A new resistance exists in the cracks and crannies of life in our cities and rural areas: if one looks carefully. This new resistance, Pope Francis adds, is fueled by a “growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere” (ibid.).

The crisis and effects of modern anthropocentrism

Francis states that the “intrinsic dignity” (p. 89) of the world is compromised when nature is reduced to an “insensate order, a “cold body of facts,” or “raw material to be hammered into useful shape” (p.88). He thinks that modernity is “marked by an excessive anthropocentrism” that stands in the way of strengthening social bonds. The time has come to pay renewed attention to reality and the limits it imposes; this in turn is the condition for a more sound and fruitful development of individuals and society” (p. 89). Pope Francis reminds us once again that our “’dominion’ over the
universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship” (p. 90). “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for ‘instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature” (ibid.). The latter words are Pope John Paul II’s.

Francis warns humanity of a “misguided anthropocentrism”: shifting to a biocentric world-view entails ‘adding yet another imbalance, failing to solve present problems and adding new ones. Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility are recognized and valued” (p. 91). Nor can we assume to heal our relationship with nature “without healing all fundamental human relationships. Christian thought sees human beings as possessing a particular dignity above other creatures; it thus inculcates esteem for each person and respect for others. Our openness to others, each of whom is a ‘thou’ capable of knowing, loving and entering into dialogue, remains the source of our nobility as human persons. A correct relationship with the created world demands that we not weaken this social dimension of openness to others, much less the transcendent dimension of our openness to the ‘Thou’ of God” (p. 92). One can hear echoes of Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Buber’s I-Thou personalism in these words just read.

Pope Francis links the “culture of relativism” with the “cult of unlimited human power” (p. 93). “The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labor on them or enslaving them to pay their debts. The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests. It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage” (ibid.). We satisfy our own desires and immediate needs, says Francis, in the “absence of objective truths or sound principles” (ibid.). The prevalent ideology of our times is—as we know—a post-modern relativism where truth is banned from the discourse.

Francis believes the lack of “objective truths” makes it difficult to place limits on “human trafficking, organized crime, the drug trade. Commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species” (p. 94). “Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentalism, ore eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted? This same ‘use and throw away’ logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. We should not think that political efforts or the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided” (ibid.). Pope Francis’ concluding words for this chapter are that a “technology severed from ethics will not easily be able to limit its own power” (p. 103).

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Welton.

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

This story was co-published by ProPublica and FRONTLINE as part of an ongoing collaboration.

Cecelia Lewis did not want to share her story.

In fact, she just wanted all of this to go away.

Late last year, I was on the phone with a former colleague, talking about the local coverage of campaigns against critical race theory across metro Atlanta. CRT maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color; it’s rarely taught in K-12 public school systems but has still become a lightning rod in districts around the country — and a catalyst for conservative political candidates seeking to fire up their base.

He mentioned that a woman had quit her job in the Cherokee County School District before she had started and wondered what had happened to her.

We talked about a lengthy statement she’d written for the Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News, explaining her decision to resign. The letter was published a week and a half after an ugly scene at a school board meeting during which parents railed against the hiring of Lewis (a Maryland middle school principal), as well as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (which Lewis had been brought on to helm) and CRT (a formerly arcane, currently politicized concept that Lewis hadn’t even heard of). I later learned people who had gathered outside the building where the meeting was held were beating on windows. School police and other law enforcement officers escorted board members to their homes, where some received ongoing security.

In that letter, Lewis, who had quit the morning after the meeting, explained the DEI plan she would have implemented in Cherokee and how it would benefit all children. And she mentioned she’d been threatened by people who have no idea who she is and what she stands for.

Seemed like something worth deeper reporting.

A comment posted at the bottom of a Cobb County Courier article caught my eye: A reader, who didn’t reveal their identity, warned that Lewis was heading to Cherokee’s neighboring Cobb County School District.

Sure enough, Lewis’ LinkedIn profile showed that she’d worked in Cobb County for a mere two months following her resignation in Cherokee. She had been overseeing social studies for that district. No one had reported on what happened to her in Cobb.

At the same time, I’d been filing open records requests to the Cobb County School District related to COVID-19. I noticed a cache of emails that showed how the then-school board chairman was receiving guidance from a local attorney about conservatives’ definition of CRT, its supposed dangers to children and how the concept was infiltrating corporations and schools.

The school board — like many others across the country in 2021 — had taken a vote against CRT. The vote was the same month that Lewis started working there.

I wanted to know exactly what happened to Lewis in both districts and how it went down. I also wanted to know who was behind the how.

I started contacting Lewis via LinkedIn in December, shortly after talking to my former colleague and trying to connect the dots between what little I knew about her brief time in Georgia. She didn’t write back. But I had some hope that I’d hear from her because I received alerts that she was at least looking at my LinkedIn profile.

She’s considering it, I thought.

Earlier this year, I found her email address and followed up. Still no answer.

I continued filing records requests in the two school districts and, through emails I received from those requests, learned more about the players behind the campaign to run her out. In both Cobb and Cherokee, people had sent similarly worded complaints to the districts, demanding to get rid of Lewis.

Then I found people who were upset about what happened to Lewis. One of them knew a good bit more about what led up to that ugly school board meeting in Cherokee.

That person had a recording of an organizing meeting days prior in a golf course clubhouse. There was also a private Facebook group filled with hysterical posts about Lewis, including some that announced false Lewis “sightings” around the county.

Two of the presenters at the clubhouse meeting are leaders of groups that encourage the public to anonymously report educators for perceived transgressions relating to curriculums, inappropriate books or lessons, or guest speakers — or to just submit any anonymous tip.

Beyond giving me details about the efforts to oust Lewis, the recording and posts provided insight into local and national conservative networks involved in strategies to overthrow school boards, vilify Parent Teacher Associations and pass state legislation to ban a slew of concepts from curriculums. At the clubhouse meeting, the crowd watched a video from Prager University that outlined how white people are being made out to be racists no matter what they say or do — because, well, CRT. They also listened to a controversial recording of a Manhattan high school principal caught on tape talking about the demonization of white children. The group was being coached on how to speak at school board meetings in a way that could land them an appearance on Fox News.

This all struck me as highly coordinated.

By March, I decided to see if meeting me might change Lewis’ mind about talking. I knew she had moved back to Maryland, so I traveled there to do some old-fashioned door-knocking, meet some folks who knew Lewis and get a direct, handwritten message to her (my ProPublica business cards hadn’t been printed yet!).

While I was sitting in my hotel room, she called.

She still didn’t want to go on the record, but we talked for hours that day and hours the next. I told her why I wanted to tell her story, and she began to piece it together for me. I learned that she hadn’t even initially applied for that DEI position. Cherokee’s district leadership encouraged her to do it after she interviewed for a job as a coach for teachers. But Lewis still would not go on the record, and she wasn’t too interested in meeting me. She had concerns. Safety and privacy concerns.

My ears perked up when, during our initial call, she mentioned an upcoming school board meeting in her own district. I decided to go sit in the back, to get a feel for the area. I heard some of the same anti-CRT lines in Maryland that I’d heard in Georgia. This time it tied back to the district’s hiring of its first Black superintendent.

Again, the language suggested there was coordination. People don’t learn these things on their own. They’re coached in the ways I’d heard in that recording of the Cherokee County clubhouse meeting.

I left Maryland without an interview I could use in my story. But I kept reporting.

I got more emails from the Georgia districts. I spoke to school employees in Cherokee and Cobb counties; they defended Lewis and felt sorry these things happened to her. Most of them said they thought of her often. One, who was disappointed I’d tried to visit Lewis, thinking it was a step too far, was especially protective of her. She didn’t want me to cause her further harm, and I had no interest in doing that.

I also attended a Cherokee County School Board meeting, standing in a long line waiting to get through the metal detectors that had been installed because of the uproar over Lewis and CRT a year earlier. In that line, women were passing around what they called evidence of lewd material in school library books. There was an informal circle of people forming around me. Some knew one another. Some were introducing themselves, knowing they shared a common goal in book banning. One woman declared that a parent leader was a “Marjorie,” as in a follower of controversial Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is not afraid to say anything, anywhere. Another raised her hand and proudly said, “I’m a Marjorie, too.”

Everyone in my immediate vicinity was passing around material provided by a blond woman: laminated pages of books she felt should be banned from school libraries. Well, almost everyone. No one handed them to me. Nor did anyone hand them to the Black mother standing behind me with her high school daughter.

As I continued reporting in the weeks to come, it became apparent that none of the blowback Cecelia Lewis faced in Georgia was actually about Cecelia Lewis. She happened to land in the wrong job in the wrong state at the wrong time. And yes, based on the details you’ll find in the story I ultimately wrote, the wrong skin color.

(In response to a detailed list of questions covering all aspects of Lewis’ experience in the Cherokee County School District, its chief communications officer responded that “we have no further comments to add.” In response to similar questions to the Cobb County School District and its school board, a spokesperson responded: “Cecelia Lewis was employed by the Cobb County School District during the summer of 2021, voluntarily submitted her letter of resignation in early fall of 2021, and like every Team member, her contributions and work for students was greatly appreciated.”)

In late April, Lewis agreed to take another call from me, this time via Zoom, where we could actually see each other for the first time. By then, we were inching toward the year anniversary of her resignation from Cherokee County. When I told her what I’d learned through records and interviews — and how my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon, found examples of educators across the country who faced similar backlash — she said she’d consult her family, her district and her pastor and pray on making a decision as to whether she’d talk to me on the record.

A few days later, my phone lit up with a call from her. She wanted to share her experience — so that it may help people understand the extraordinary challenges so many educators are facing.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr.

The ancient idea of “God” signified, for Jurgen Habermas, the “idea of the unified, invisible God the Creator and Redeemer” (“A conversation about God and the world,” in E. Mendieta (Ed.) Religion and rationality: essays on reason, God, and modernity (2002). This perspectival breakthrough enabled humans to gain a “standpoint that utterly transcends the this-worldly.” The world, perceived as a created order, was both apart from the divine other and its life-sustainer. But Habermas argues that the modernization process gradually eroded the radical separation of God and world. Indeed, the finite spirit appropriated the divine standpoint: objectifying “creation” and transforming it into a law-governed “nature.”  The grand affirmation of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” in Genesis was unceremoniously replaced with the “big-bang theory” – 13.8 billion years ago.

In Laudato Si: Our care for our common home (2015), Pope Francis most assuredly rejects the idea that God as Creator has vanished from human consciousness throughout the world. One might say, to over-simplify, that two forms of human consciousness co-exist in tension in our world: secular and religious. This article focuses on chapter two, “The gospel of creation.” Francis begins by raising the question of why a document addressed to “all people of good will” should include a “chapter dealing with the convictions of believers?” (p. 50). He observes that there are those who “firmly reject” the idea of a Creator as irrelevant in areas of politics and philosophy or dismiss as irrational the “rich contribution which religions can make toward an integral ecology and the full development of humanity.” However, Pope Francis insists that “science” and “religion” can “enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both” (ibid.).

One possible entry-point for a secular person might be to choose to enter into the “religious imaginary;” then consider the created world “as if” a creator had fashioned it. This is a kind of “spiritual thought-experiment” that acknowledges that we, as human beings, have an interior and spiritual life. This interior subjectivity is awakened, if you will, by the “cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry …” (ibid.). These riches include the sacred scriptures of numerous faith-communities. Pope Francis reminds us, rightly, that the resolution of the ecological crisis requires various branches of the sciences and other forms of wisdom, including religious and poetic languages. But Francis’ fundamental purpose in Laudato Si is to “show how faith convictions can offer Christians, and some other believers as well, ample motivation to care for nature and for the most vulnerable of their brothers and sisters” (p. 51). He is not taking us through the intricate maze of “theologies of creation.”

What do Biblical accounts say about creation?

Francis states that the Genesis account of creation includes humanity. Once man and woman were created, Genesi 1:31 says, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.” We were created in the “image of God,” a tricky notion, but it expresses the deep truth that humans have “immense dignity.” Habermas states that the affirmation of the “human rights” of all persons is a secular translation of the religious figure of the “image of God.” We are not just “somethings” – as Benedict XVI once said. We are capable of self-knowledge, self-possession and entering into communion with others. “How wonderful,” says Francis, “is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world of pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles!” (p. 52).

 Francis says that the “symbolic and narrative language” (ibid.) of the book of Genesis opens the perceptual imagination to consider that human life is “grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself” (p. 53). Each of these relationships, Pope Francis avers, “have been broken, both outwardly and within us” (ibid.). Secular persons can, I think, place secular understandings of the damaged natural world and bewildered sense that “something is awry” against the Pope’s affirmation that the “harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations” (ibid.). If we think and act “as if” the creational order was good and harmonious and became conflictual (cf. Gen. 3: 17-19), we can turn away from what has been called “arrogant humanism.”

Tilling and keeping the earth

We can accept our limitations and, perhaps, and take our place on earth as if we have been commissioned to “till it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). It may be, too, that secular persons can draw on the natural and biological sciences that impellingly reveal how profoundly linked our human species is to all other creatures. We are not apart from nature; but we have cognitive, ethical and spiritual capacities to fulfil our caretaker role that separate us from all other creatures. Here, Pope Francis’s call for dialogue between science and religion is pertinent: the secrets of the workings of creation are revealed to us and are integral to our care for the earth and all of its creatures. The Genesis text – humans are to “have dominion” over the earth (Gen. 1: 26) has often been distorted to mean that humankind is the Lord of Nature and can treat it as a “thing” and not a “living presence.”

By the mid-19^th century, the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge grants humankind technical power over nature had pushed aside Christian affirmations that God commands us to understand and care for all creatures. The world had been disenchanted and secularized. Today, Pope Francis observes, “universal reconciliation with every creature” (Saint Bonaventure’s lucid phrase) is far from occurring: “sin is manifest in all its destructive power in wars, the various forms of violence and abuse, the abandonment of the most vulnerable and attacks on nature” (ibid.). We do seem to be at war with nature – and the guiding presence of the radically other has vanished from our consciousness like a wisp of morning mist. As God recedes, so does our ability to set restraints on how we work and live with the natural world and all of its creatures. Our spirits, so it seems, have been de-regulated. Nothing either blocks or prevents our malignant use of nature, be it shooting wolves or depleting the cod fish of Newfoundland.

We are not God

The Judeo-Christian imaginary animates Pope Francis’ declarations that: “We are not God. The earth was here before us to respond to the charge that Judeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of Genesis account which grants man ‘dominion’ over the earth (cf. Gen.1: 28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature” (p. 54). Francis rejects this interpretation outright: “’Tilling’ refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations ‘The earth is the Lord’s” (ibid.). “Clearly,” says Pope Francis, “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures. Indeed, Francis draws our attention to a text in Deuteronomy 22: 4, 6 that counsels us to protect the birds sitting on nests – “you shall not take the mother with the young” (p. 55).

“Tyrannical anthropocentrism” rules our day. One manifestation of this disease of the soul Francis points to is granting priority to “being useful” and not simply “being.” Our perception of the usefulness of creatures obscures a fundamental teaching of the Catechism of the Church, namely, that: “Each of the various creatures, willed into its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things” (p. 56). That’s a lovely insight: but this perception of how we ought to see all creatures, minute to mammoth, as manifestations of God’s wisdom, rubs against the secular consciousness. Yet today, traces of the religious consciousness are present in the rapt attention and wonderment of naturalists as they reveal and revel in the amazing designs in ant hills or the humble honey-bee.

For Pope Francis, Christians are urged to “praise God the Creator, ‘who spread out the earth on the waters, for his steadfast love endures for ever’” (Ps. 136: 6) (p. 58). Even the sun and moon and all shining stars are invited to join in the choir of praise. As Astro-physicists and astronomers marvel at the unimaginable vastness of space, their spiffy high-tech telescopes challenge their theories almost daily. Who could conceive of dark matter or dark energy? It is as if the cosmos is a wondrously intricate puzzle that can never be mastered, fully understood. Here, again, we might detect traces of the religious consciousness that acknowledges a mighty creative force, or mind, that presented humankind with a labyrinthine gift to explore forever.

Distinguishing creation and nature

Pope Francis zeros in on the way the word “creation” has a broader meaning than “nature.” By this he means that God has a “loving plan in which every creature has its own value and significance. Nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion” (p. 60). “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Ps. 33: 6). This simple verse cuts to the heart of the secular belief that the universe emerged as the result of “arbitrary omnipotence” (ibid.). Rather, the “world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance” (ibid.). And this decision, Pope Francis teaches us, is of the “order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things” (p. 61). If this be so, then every creature is the “object of the Father’s tenderness” (p. 61). And if that is so, then humankind must be treat all creatures affectionately.

 Lots has been written about how “Judeo-Christian thought demythologized nature” (ibid.). Nature was, in itself, not divine (or spirit-infused). “In doing so, it emphasizes all the more our human responsibility for nature. This rediscovery of nature can never be at the cost of the freedom and responsibility of human beings who, as part of the world, have the duty to cultivate their abilities in order to protect it and develop its potential. If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to develop intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power” (p. 62). This lucid statement provides the core idea for ecological education of young and old.

Humans possess a uniqueness

Pope Francis presents us with the faith-affirmation that, “even if we postulate a process of evolution,” humans “also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes a direct action of God and a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a ‘Thou’ who addresses himself to another ‘thou.’ The biblical accounts of creation invite us to see each human being as a subject who can never be reduced to the status of object” (p 64). Adorno and Horkheimer would be comfortable, I surmise, with these thoughts of Francis. So would Habermas and Taylor.

For a final thought, which excludes other important critical insights not yet mentioned, Pope Francis accentuates the important truth that it is “mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of ‘might is right’ has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all” (ibid.). But the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus who said of the powers of his age that the “rulers of the Gentiles lord it over” the poor and vulnerable are at radical odds with perceiving the horns of the rhino or the fin of a shark as commodities to make big bucks.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Welton.

Image by Max Böhme.

In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright[1] to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in itself. In such an academic context, one of the highest services an intellectual can perform is simply to return to the basics of theoretic common sense, stated clearly and concisely. Society is very complex, but, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, insofar as we understand it at all, our understanding can in principle be expressed rather simply and straightforwardly. Not only is such expression more democratic and accessible, thus permitting a broader diffusion of critical understanding of the world; it also has the merit of showing that, once you shed the paraphernalia of most academic writing, nothing particularly profound is being said. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix constitutes an exemplary demonstration of this fact, and of these virtues.

Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping “culturalist” critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian “metanarrative” that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (“Orientalism and Its Afterlives”), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said’s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that—as materialists argue—merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world. 

More

The post Common Sense in the Form of Theory appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping “culturalist” critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian “metanarrative” that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (“Orientalism and Its Afterlives”), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said’s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that—as materialists argue—merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world.

The Class Matrix continues his engagement with these issues, this time in the form of a systematic critique of cultural theory, specifically of its inability to explain the sources of stability and conflict in modern society. Materialism, in contrast—i.e., a primary emphasis on such concepts as class structures and objective economic interests rather than “discourses,” “cultures,” “identities,” and “meanings”—is quite capable of explaining society, and can rather easily be defended against the criticisms of (some) culturalists. The book’s admirable lucidity serves several functions: first, Chibber is able to present the arguments of a variety of “culturalisms,” from Gramscians’ to the Frankfurt School’s to those of the post-1970s cultural turn, very clearly and in a way that illuminates the stakes of the debate; second, his eloquent reconstruction of (aspects of) cultural theory lays the ground for an equally eloquent, and much more thorough, exposition of structural class theory, which is shown to have no difficulty (contrary to the claims of culturalists) in explaining the longevity and stability of capitalism; third, the discarding of all unnecessary verbiage and jargon makes it clear just how intellectually trivial these long-running “theoretical” debates are in the first place. One can have a perfectly defensible and sophisticated understanding of the modern world on the basis of a little critical common sense and knowledge of history.

Chibber starts by presenting the culturalist case. Why didn’t the West become socialist in the twentieth century, as Marxists predicted? Evidently Marx had gotten something wrong. In fact, it was argued (in the postwar era), he neglected the role of culture in forming the consciousness of the working class. Mass culture and the diffusion of dominant ideologies were able to reconcile the working class to capitalism, indeed to generate active popular consent for it. This analysis amounted to a demotion of the classical Marxist emphasis on the conflictual dynamics of the class structure—which supposedly would naturally lead to proletarian class consciousness and thereby revolution—in favor of the cohesive functions of mid-twentieth-century culture. Later culturalists took this argument a step further by rejecting the Marxian theory altogether, arguing that culture is actually prior to structure: what people are really presented with are not unmediated structures or objective material interests but “constellations of meaning” (p. 6), social identities, local cultures, contingent processes of socialization that shape how actors understand the many structures they are located in. One cannot (pace classical Marxism) predict behavior from people’s structural locations and the interests they supposedly define, because people first have to interpret structures, a process that is highly contingent and variable. Subjectivity, therefore, is primary, and the objectivity of class structures tends to evaporate.

Chibber’s response to this postmodernist argument, in effect, is that while it is perfectly true every structure is steeped in culture and agents’ subjectivity, this hardly implies the causal inertness of class location. Capitalist institutions don’t exactly impose high interpretive requirements: everyone is capable of understanding “what it means” to be a worker or a capitalist. If you lack ownership of the means of production, you either submit to wage labor or you starve. The economic structures force themselves on you. “[T]he proletarian’s meaning orientation is [therefore] the effect of his structural location” (p. 34). Similarly, the capitalist has to obey market pressures (structures) in order to survive as a capitalist, so he, too, is compelled to subordinate his normative orientation to objectively existing capitalist institutions. In fact, it is the postmodern culturalists who are in the weaker position: how can they explain “the indubitable fact of capitalism’s expansion across the globe and the obvious similarity in its macrodynamics across these regions” without accepting materialist assumptions (p. 45)?

Having dispatched this particular objection to materialism, Chibber moves on to other difficulties. Given the antagonistic relations between worker and capitalist (which Chibber elaborates on in detail), why hasn’t collective resistance, and ultimately revolution, been more common? The obvious answer, contrary to cultural theory, is that the asymmetry of power between worker and capitalist is so great that workers find it quite difficult to fight successfully for their collective interests. The insecurity of the worker’s position (for example, he can be fired for union activity) makes it easier and safer to pursue individualized modes of advancement or resistance. Moreover, the intrinsic problems of collective action—free rider problems, difficulty in securing agreement among large numbers of workers, etc.—militate against class consciousness and collective resistance. Classical Marxists were wrong to assume that the most rational path for workers would always be the “collective” path. In fact, contingent cultural considerations play an important role in the formation (in any given case) of class consciousness—although culture always remains constrained by material factors.

Having successfully and eloquently deployed common sense in his first two chapters, Chibber now turns, in the lengthy third chapter, to an explanation of how capitalism has endured. Here, too, he prefers common sense to the idealistic arguments of many Gramscians and New Left theorists, who pointed to bourgeois “cultural hegemony” and ideological indoctrination as having manufactured consent among the working class. One problem with this theory is its dim view of workers: “Culturalists are in the embarrassing position of claiming implicitly that while they can discern the exploitative—and hence unjust—character of the employment relation, the actors who are, in fact, being exploited, who are experiencing its brute facts, are not capable of doing so” (p. 91). There are, admittedly, other possible understandings of the basis of mass consent, more materialistic understandings, but in the end Chibber rejects these as the primary explanation for capitalist stability. Instead, he argues that workers simply resign themselves to capitalism—they “accept their location in the class structure because they see no other viable option” (p. 106). What Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations” keeps the gears of capitalism grinding on, generation after generation, including in the absence of workers’ “consent” to their subordination.² In short, the class structure itself—the enormous power asymmetry between employer and employee—underwrites its own stability, and there is no need to invoke “consent” at all (even if such consent does, perhaps, exist in certain periods).

There remain a couple of other issues Chibber has to address in order for his defense of materialism to be really systematic. First, what about the old, E. P. Thompsonian charge that “structural theories bury social agency” (p. 122)? Is this necessarily the case, this conflict between structure and agency? No, as long as one acknowledges the role of reasons in motivating people’s actions. “The structure is not reproduced because it turns agents into automatons but because it generates good reasons for them to play by its rules” (p. 123). A structural process may be rather deterministic in its outcome, but it “is generated by the active intervention of social agency” (p. 126). Given the structures of capitalism, people rationally adapt to them, regulating their behavior in accord with them. Structure thus exerts its causal force precisely through agency.

Of course, agency also exists in tension with structure insofar as agents can flout institutional norms or even rebel against particular structures. This point brings us to another question Chibber considers, namely the relation between structural “determinism” and contingency, another favorite concept—along with agency—of the postmodern cultural turn. His argument here is quite rich and nuanced, much too subtle, in fact, to be summarized in a short book review. (It goes without saying that I have merely been outlining his arguments, hardly doing justice to their richness.) One might think that such an austere structuralism as Chibber defends would be unable to account for the contingency of social processes, but through a fairly ingenious analysis he is able to answer this objection, too. Even prima facie, however, the objection doesn’t hold much water, because capitalist relations are evidently compatible with an immense variety of social structures, such that between nations and even within a nation there can be great heterogeneity of local cultures. In a world of infinitely many structures and cultures interacting and overlapping, all of them being activated and enlivened by countless individual free wills, there is clearly a place for contingency on both small and large scales. Materialism can therefore accommodate the “argument from contingency.”

The Class Matrix, in short, is a quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is. They might, perhaps, be able to make the case that there is a greater role for culture than Chibber allows (although he does grant the importance of cultural considerations at many points in his arguments), but they certainly can no longer sustain the claim that materialism is deeply flawed.

In fact, that claim could never have been sustained anyway, because, in the end, materialism—the causal primacy of class structures (and the theoretical implications of this doctrine)—is little more than common sense. The average member of the working class, more insightful (realistic) in many ways than most intellectuals, could tell you about the overwhelming importance of economic institutions. If classical Marxism got certain predictions wrong, that wasn’t because of any inherent flaws in historical materialism; as Chibber shows, it was because the original theorists misunderstood the implications of their own theory. There was never a good reason to think socialist revolution would “naturally” happen as workers “naturally” achieved greater class consciousness. These predictions were but a projection of the hopes of Marxists, not logical entailments of materialism. In our own day, when the historic achievements of Western labor movements have been or are in the process of being destroyed, it is unclear what the way forward is—except, as ever, for working-class self-organization and critical materialist understanding of society. Toward the latter task, at least, The Class Matrix makes a valuable contribution.

1. See Russell Jacoby’s savage review of Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias entitled “Real Men Find Real Utopias,” Dissent, Winter 2011, for an exposure of the intellectual emptiness of a certain type of “theoretical” sociology.
2. This argument, indeed much of the book, is anticipated not only, as it were, by common sense (most workers could tell you they don’t embrace their position but simply find it inescapable), but also by a brilliant book Chibber doesn’t cite: The Dominant Ideology Thesis, by Nicholas Abercrombie et al. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980). Incidentally, I myself have grappled with the question of why socialism hasn’t happened yet and have offered a quite different, and perhaps more original, explanation than Chibber. See my paper “Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of Revolution,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 9, no. 1 (2021), as well as the shorter articles “Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism,” New Politics, May 5, 2020; and “Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution,” Socialist Forum (Summer 2021).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

Nothing says disinformation like the arrival of the UK’s ex-Bond-like spy Christopher Steele into the limelight to share his latest propagandistic pontifications.

Recently, Steele said of Russian president Vladimir Putin that he was gravely ill and that his possible illness may have played a part in the decision to mobilize and attack Ukraine.

In a Sky News report a few days ago, Steele was quoted:

Certainly, from what we’re hearing from sources in Russia and elsewhere, is that Putin is, in fact, quite seriously ill. It’s not clear exactly what this illness is – whether it’s incurable or terminal, or whatever. But certainly, I think it’s part of the equation.

No evidence is proffered, beyond the speculation. Why anyone would give an Eden fig what the slitherin Steele thinks about anything at this stage is anyone’s guess.

In the same Sky piece, Kyrylo Budanov, a Ukrainian general says that Vlad’s “illness” required him to be surrounded  by medical personnel at all times and that “the Russian leader is seriously ill with cancer and that a coup to remove him is under way in Russia.”

In a Yahoo piece, Budanov went further, stating that Putin is in a “very bad psychological and physical condition and he is very sick.”  And  “Budanov went on to suggest that the purported illness had incited plans within Russia for a coup.”

New Lines magazine, a middle east-oriented publication, ran a tale of a Russian oligarch on tape who claimed that “very ill with blood cancer.” But the smoking tape has yet to materialize. But at least the headline was frank in its assessment of the story: “Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?” Duh.

Vlad is “mental.”  Vlad is “gay” as Shakespeare.  Vlad, like Catherine, has a thing about riding horses topless. He must go!

A Replacement theory is born.

Well, there’s certainly enough bad blood to go around.  But nothing says Russian backwardness than reference to blood cancer, conjuring up the days of consumption, the bloody napkins of Dostoyevky’s long novels. The coughs. The failing souls. Only a village idiot would fail to see that Vlad has to go. Or maybe the combined media reports want to insinuate that Vlad’s gettin’ some comeuppance on the poison front after his attempted assassinations of politcal opponents not long ago. Remember Alexei Navalny’s coma in a gulag archipelago hospital?  (No man is an island — my ass!) What a hoot! So, with the help of some CIA “assets,” maybe Putin has come to understand that they can “do stuff too.” Or maybe it’s all retarded speculation. Like Charly in the story, “Flowers for Algernon,” bringing back to the Low IQ district, one Miltonian aphorism he coined in his time as genius: “They also serve who only sweep and buff.” So, that he didn’t forget it, he put the nitwitticism on a t-shirt. Rubbernecks, with Che tees, gawked.

Christopher Steele. Name conjures up Superman somehow. Christopher Reeves (RIP, and no relation to George Reeves, the TV Superman who lost a race with a speeding bullet). But a more nancified version.  Something closer to Reilly: Ace of Spies. Well, we know how that ended. Great soundtrack in that series though. Who can forget the Gadfly themefrom Shostokovich, a totally appropriate musical reference for the mood created by all these sordid sagas. So, Steele the gadfly, but no Socrates (who was also known in ancient Athens as a gadfly), although like the great suicided philosopher, Steele isn’t keen on democracy (or suicide) either.

Steele’s got some broad strokes, but he’s not an active member of MI6 or the government — that we know of,  and hasn’t been back to the USSR since the 90s when there weren’t any more SSRs. He lives off seeming to be well-informed, an insider getting daily briefs, like he’s got the Home Secretary’s ear. But he’s just goss on steroids. Bluster gas for taxpayer cash.

Steele is the kind of contractor that we should worry about. Edward Snowden describes the type in detail in the “Homo Contractus” chapter of his embattled and purse-seized memoir, Permanent Record.  Contractors are a scourge. They are off-the-books, unaccountable to the public, dangerously full of shit about their worth.

Steele is the kind of guy you would hire to find dirt on UN security members to have a dossier ready for later extortion of said members, such as the vote in the UN before the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Remember all the gay lies: Colin Powell, Cony Rice, GW Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Smoking Guns, WMD, Mushroom Clouds?  The US, through the NSA, sought the UK’s help, through GCHQ, to find dirt on UN members to strong arm them into voting for an invasion of Iraq.  A whistleblower passed the attempt on to the Press and the dirt was never had. The UN voted No; the US, once again showing contempt for the global body established to prevent future wars  invaded Iraq anyway. This was the subject of the film, Official Secrets.

When last seen Steele was slinking back into the shadows after causing a major disruption of the 2016 American presidential election by trying to foist his so-called dossier on the American public through — of all venues — the longtime beloved lefty magazine, Mother Jones. What an asshole! The dished up dirt turned out to be low grade compost you couldn’t grow weeds in. The left, out to get Trump at any cost (and can you blame them?), took the bait, and MoJo took a hit on its journo credo, and lots of hippies took a hit off bongs they’d closeted years before. This was gonna be a long resistance.

The Horowitz Report showed that Steele’s dossier on Trump was poop. And that it was initiated into the MSM stream, surreptitiously of course, by the Clinton campaign, and led to the FBI’s illegal wiretapping and gathering of pointless information of minor figures in the 2016 Trump campaign. As the Rolling Stone put it: “‘Corroboration Zero’: An Inspector General’s Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke.” The trick was to make Trump and his campaign were under scrutiny by the FBI — coincidently at the same time that FBI James Comey was putting pressure on the Clinton campaign for legitimate reasons.

It’s unfortch for us prurient folks, but the dossier really didn’t have any giddy up photos of multiple Miss Universes peeing on the bed that the Obamas slept in when they visited Moscow sometime long ago in the past. Had there been such photos they would have ended up on Page 3 of Rupert Murdoch’s UK publication, The Sun.  Obama can do stuff, too, like link the Trump presidency to collusion with the enemy, Russia, and call into question the birther-conspiracist’s legitimacy from the get go. Hell, some of us thought that there would be a Lefty Jan 6 back in 2017.  But, alas, the left has no Yippies any longer who could descend and levitate the gravity of the situation. No Sun photos. We had to fantasize from MoJo’s worked up dossier. So many lefties fooled into imagining racist golden showers.

And where in the world is Cofer Black, director on the board of Burisma? He’s been known to do stuff, too.

Just remember that as we enter the maws of the Singularity merge, each one of us is replaceable. Dismissed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21)

This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now.

And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Policy Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place.

The post Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

The post Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” Theory Derives from an American Nazi appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Juan Cole.

The mass shooter who killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday posted a racist manifesto online before targeting a majority-Black neighborhood. His writings took heavily from conservative conspiracy theories that white people were in danger of being replaced by people of color. This so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory has been promoted by major far-right media figures including Tucker Carlson of Fox News. “What it does is create a dynamic where believers view immigrants and nonwhite people as an existential threat not only to themselves physically but to their position in society,” says Nikki McCann Ramírez, associate research director at Media Matters for America, who has researched how Carlson uses his show to launder white nationalist ideology. We also speak with prominent antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi, who says mainstream conservatives are increasingly parroting extremist talking points.

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

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

Image Source: Gutenberg Encyclopedia – CC BY-SA 3.0

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our entire society.

Acceptance of the idea that a chemical imbalance causes depression transformed the public’s comfort level about taking antidepressants. With a belief that a chemical imbalance caused their depression, accompanied by repeatedly hearing that Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance,” it seemed irresponsible not to take these antidepressants.

So between 1988 (when the first of the SSRIs, Prozac, hit the market) and 2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. By 2013, 16.7 percent of American adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs; and a 2022 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey (March 30-April 11) reported 23.5 percent of American adults (29.6 percent women) “took prescription medication for mental health.” Among children, Psychology Today reported in 2021: “In the USA, 1 in 12 children are on psychiatric drugs, including 1.2 percent of pre-schoolers and 12.9 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.”

If you knew that psychiatric drugs—similar to other psychotropic substances such as marijuana and alcohol—merely “take the edge off” rather than correct a chemical imbalances, would you be more hesitant about using them, and more reluctant to give them to your children? Drug companies certainly believe you would be less inclined if you knew the truth, and that is why we were early on flooded with commercials about how antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance.”

So, when exactly did psychiatry discard its chemical imbalance theory? While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Pies is not the highest-ranking psychiatrist to acknowledge the invalidity of the chemical imbalance theory.

Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

The jettisoning of the chemical imbalance theory should have been uncontroversial twenty-five years ago, when it became clear to research scientists that it was a disproved hypothesis. In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” But how many Americans heard about this?

In a 2007 survey, 84.7 percent of 262 undergraduates believed it “likely” that chemical imbalances cause depression. While I cannot locate a more recent survey, my experience with patients, the media, and even many doctors is that the majority of them continue to believe in the chemical imbalance theory of depression.

Somewhat analogously, a 2015 survey reported that 42 percent of all Americans—and 51 percent of Republicans—continue to believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. Once attached to a belief, it is difficult for many people to let go of it. Carl Sagan, a fierce advocate of skeptical inquiry, observed, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Ronald Pies claimed in the Psychiatric Times in 2014 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists, fulfilled its obligation to inform the general public with a 2000 public statement that begins: “The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers.” Pies did acknowledge that psychiatry should have been clearer and louder, “Shouldn’t psychiatrists in positions of influence have made greater efforts to knock down the chemical imbalance hypothesis, and to present a more sophisticated understanding of mental illness to the general public? Probably so.”

Don’t feel like you were not paying attention if you did not know that psychiatry has long discarded the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. It was news to National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel, and she is the granddaughter of psychiatrist John Spiegel, a former president of the APA.

In her 2012 NPR story, Spiegel recounts how as a depressed teenager, she and her parents were told the following by a Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist about her depression: “It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then, Spiegel tells us, the psychiatrist handed her mother a prescription for Prozac.

As a journalist, Spiegel did some digging. She talked to Joseph Coyle, Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience and editor of one of psychiatry’s most prestigious journals, who told her: “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. . . . It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”

Spiegel tried to discover why psychiatry has not made greater efforts at publicizing its jettisoning of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Alan Frazer, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told her that framing depression as a chemical imbalance has allowed patients to feel better about taking a drug and to “feel better about themselves, if there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency, and the drug was correcting it.”

Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?

Trust is important in all of healthcare, but it is absolutely vital in helping someone with depression. In my three decades plus as a practicing clinical psychologist, my experience is that depression is a reaction to loss and other pains, and a loss of trust is one of those pains. Thus, discovering that one has misplaced trust in a doctor can make one’s depression worse.

Primum non nocere—first do no harm—should be common sense for any healthcare professional, but perhaps a regular reminder is necessary.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

Image Source: Gutenberg Encyclopedia – CC BY-SA 3.0

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our entire society.

Acceptance of the idea that a chemical imbalance causes depression transformed the public’s comfort level about taking antidepressants. With a belief that a chemical imbalance caused their depression, accompanied by repeatedly hearing that Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance,” it seemed irresponsible not to take these antidepressants.

So between 1988 (when the first of the SSRIs, Prozac, hit the market) and 2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. By 2013, 16.7 percent of American adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs; and a 2022 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey (March 30-April 11) reported 23.5 percent of American adults (29.6 percent women) “took prescription medication for mental health.” Among children, Psychology Today reported in 2021: “In the USA, 1 in 12 children are on psychiatric drugs, including 1.2 percent of pre-schoolers and 12.9 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.”

If you knew that psychiatric drugs—similar to other psychotropic substances such as marijuana and alcohol—merely “take the edge off” rather than correct a chemical imbalances, would you be more hesitant about using them, and more reluctant to give them to your children? Drug companies certainly believe you would be less inclined if you knew the truth, and that is why we were early on flooded with commercials about how antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance.”

So, when exactly did psychiatry discard its chemical imbalance theory? While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Pies is not the highest-ranking psychiatrist to acknowledge the invalidity of the chemical imbalance theory.

Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

The jettisoning of the chemical imbalance theory should have been uncontroversial twenty-five years ago, when it became clear to research scientists that it was a disproved hypothesis. In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” But how many Americans heard about this?

In a 2007 survey, 84.7 percent of 262 undergraduates believed it “likely” that chemical imbalances cause depression. While I cannot locate a more recent survey, my experience with patients, the media, and even many doctors is that the majority of them continue to believe in the chemical imbalance theory of depression.

Somewhat analogously, a 2015 survey reported that 42 percent of all Americans—and 51 percent of Republicans—continue to believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. Once attached to a belief, it is difficult for many people to let go of it. Carl Sagan, a fierce advocate of skeptical inquiry, observed, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Ronald Pies claimed in the Psychiatric Times in 2014 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists, fulfilled its obligation to inform the general public with a 2000 public statement that begins: “The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers.” Pies did acknowledge that psychiatry should have been clearer and louder, “Shouldn’t psychiatrists in positions of influence have made greater efforts to knock down the chemical imbalance hypothesis, and to present a more sophisticated understanding of mental illness to the general public? Probably so.”

Don’t feel like you were not paying attention if you did not know that psychiatry has long discarded the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. It was news to National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel, and she is the granddaughter of psychiatrist John Spiegel, a former president of the APA.

In her 2012 NPR story, Spiegel recounts how as a depressed teenager, she and her parents were told the following by a Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist about her depression: “It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then, Spiegel tells us, the psychiatrist handed her mother a prescription for Prozac.

As a journalist, Spiegel did some digging. She talked to Joseph Coyle, Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience and editor of one of psychiatry’s most prestigious journals, who told her: “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. . . . It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”

Spiegel tried to discover why psychiatry has not made greater efforts at publicizing its jettisoning of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Alan Frazer, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told her that framing depression as a chemical imbalance has allowed patients to feel better about taking a drug and to “feel better about themselves, if there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency, and the drug was correcting it.”

Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?

Trust is important in all of healthcare, but it is absolutely vital in helping someone with depression. In my three decades plus as a practicing clinical psychologist, my experience is that depression is a reaction to loss and other pains, and a loss of trust is one of those pains. Thus, discovering that one has misplaced trust in a doctor can make one’s depression worse.

Primum non nocere—first do no harm—should be common sense for any healthcare professional, but perhaps a regular reminder is necessary.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

The post With Humanity on the Brink, Should We Trust Deterrence Theory, or Disarmament? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Martin.

The post With Humanity on the Brink, Should We Trust Deterrence Theory, or Disarmament? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Martin.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced the US will soon begin training the Ukrainian military in using howitzer artillery in an unnamed country. Presumably this will be in a NATO member state. If Russian intelligence found out where, might it attack to stop the howitzers from being deployed against Russian forces in Ukraine? Almost assuredly not, as that would trigger a wider war, invoking NATO's self-defense provision, which would be catastrophic for Russia.

Humanity should not be held hostage to uncertain, speculative considerations of what exactly will deter nuclear-armed rivals from taking steps that could escalate to Armageddon.

So, while the urgent focus should be on diplomatic negotiations to end this senseless war, arming Ukraine to defend itself in the meantime tacitly rests on conventional deterrence theory, assuming Russia will be deterred from certain aggressive actions, not wanting to risk a war with the NATO alliance.

But do we really know where Russia's "red lines" are? Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon be desperate, or at least under serious pressure. The war isn't going as easily as he thought it would, tens of thousands of Russians have been jailed for protesting his abomination, and maybe some in his inner circle might think it time to usher him out of the Kremlin, to a foreign country that would take him and his money.

Obviously, the risk of miscalculation and escalation in wartime is high. Deterrence theory, which is little discussed, depends on not just knowing the military capabilities of the adversary, but estimating its mindset, especially how it will react to unpredictable circumstances.

So, as the US and the West provide weapons and other forms of defense or intelligence support to Ukraine, military and civilian leaders must guesstimate what Russia's response will be. To not do so, or to rely on the mistaken notion of escalation dominance, that our military superiority would allow us to prevail at any level the conflict might escalate to, would be reckless. (Russia appears to have made this mistake in its attack on Ukraine, though hopefully we won't find out, as further escalation could be catastrophic.)

For now, confidence may be relatively high Russia will not risk a wider war with NATO and the US. However, Putin made a thinly veiled nuclear threat early on in the conflict, and a French official reciprocated. And Russia's nuclear policies include possible first-strike use of short range, tactical nuclear weapons.

When the thousands of nuclear weapons of both sides (including not just the US and Russia, but also those of France and Britain, and the estimated hundred or so US nuclear warheads on bombers in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy and Turkey) are considered, can we afford to rely on very imprecise notions of what will or won't deter Russia from taking this or that action? Or, can we be absolutely sure the US or NATO allies won't miscalculate, over-react or dangerously escalate tensions in response to something Moscow initiates?

Humanity should not be held hostage to uncertain, speculative considerations of what exactly will deter nuclear-armed rivals from taking steps that could escalate to Armageddon.

Again, the focus should be to end this awful war immediately. Officials of the US, UN, Ukraine, Russia, China or whomever might contribute to diplomatic negotiations to save lives need to make this their top priority. Every day this war continues is a pointless tragedy, especially as the likely outcome is already known—Ukraine will not join NATO (though Finland might, certainly not what Russia calculated), Russia will likely keep Crimea, and some form of independence will be formalized for the two self-proclaimed republics in the Donbas region.

Assuming responsible adults in governments can walk and chew gum at the same time, steps to address nuclear dangers all around are also urgent. Though seemingly side issues, de-escalation by the US and Russia, to reduce any chance of the use of even "smaller" nuclear weapons, could not only lessen that potential, but might even contribute to ending the war. There may be a face-saving value in this to Putin, though that is a secondary concern.

Immediately, the US and Russia could declare No First Use policies, not just in the current war, but overall, with each country stating it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in any conflict. They could challenge the other seven nuclear weapons states (Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) to do the same. Simultaneously, the US and Russia could take all nuclear weapons off high-alert status.

Further steps are needed, including ending the sole authority for a US president, or any executive of a nuclear weapons state, to decide to launch nuclear weapons. Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry's book Thermonuclear Monarchy:Choosing Between Democracy and Doom, makes the simple but compelling case that allowing one person (currently all men in the Nuclear Nine) to initiate a nuclear war that could end most if not all life on Earth makes a mockery of whatever notions of democracy we think we have attained. In the US, there is a proposal to end such sole authority for the president, requiring a Congressional declaration of war before a president could launch nukes.

All the nuclear weapons states, starting with Russia and the US, are in the initial stages of overhauling and upgrading their entire nuclear arsenals, the exact opposite of what they should be doing, reducing and eliminating them. At a time of a global pandemic and rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, spending trillions of dollars—in the US alone, this nuclear weapons forever scheme will likely cost $2 trillion of our tax money over the next three decades—to "modernize" nuclear arsenals is the height of irresponsibility. Let's cancel these handouts to the weapons contractors and put the resources to better use.

"In what seems like another world but is in fact now supported by 86 countries, the Nuclear Nine should join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons."

The US should start by canceling plans to replace its Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and in fact should ditch this leg of the nuclear triad entirely, relying on the less vulnerable nuclear bombers and submarines for the time being as we work to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons globally. The US and Russia could lead in this regard, either negotiating new arms reduction treaties or making unilateral, reciprocal reductions, as Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1991.

Lastly, in what seems like another world but is in fact now supported by 86 countries, the Nuclear Nine should join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Negotiated in 2017 without the support of the nuclear states, the treaty will have its first official meeting of states party to the treaty (and others may attend as observers) in Vienna, Austria in June. The treaty was negotiated not just by nation-states, but also with the participation of civil society organizations.

Taking this path will not likely be quick and easy, and there could be twists and turns and forks along the way. But the current war in Ukraine, status quo of relying on shaky notions of deterrence theory, and upgrading nuclear arsenals instead of reducing and eliminating them, is surely a road to nowhere.

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

Republican senators grilled Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson over her views on critical race theory on the second day of her confirmation hearing to become the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. “The Republicans are mischaracterizing, misquoting, taking out of context words and speeches that Judge Jackson has made,” says Alexis Hoag, professor at Brooklyn Law School. The non sequiturs create a distraction for “a woman who is overqualified for this position,” Hoag adds. Hoag is a former federal public defender and also discusses the significance of Jackson’s background as a federal public defender.

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

The post The Mad Man Theory May Have Its Mad Man appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Some laws are ridiculously broad, making it impossible for teachers to develop a well-rounded curriculum. For instance, in Tennessee, lawmakers enacted a ban forbidding any classroom material which demonstrates “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.” Penalties for recorded slip-ups may include fines against individual educators or revocation of their teaching licenses. Schools may even face losing state funds or their school district’s accreditation.

In the Spring 2021 issue of City Journal magazine, author Christopher Rufo, a leader in the burgeoning anti-CRT movement, wrote an article criticizing Portland public school teachers for encouraging 100 days of Black Lives Matter protests in the city that summer. In the article, Rufo included the full names of several teachers who attended protests, which spurred vicious online hate. Then in June 2021, after several educators showed their support for the Zinn Education Project’s “pledge to teach the truth,” The Daily Wire published each one of the 5000 names signed on the petition, carefully organized by state and community. Following The Daily Wire’s article, teachers on the list faced countless complaints demanding their immediate dismissal.

Editors of Rethinking Schools maintain a teacher’s purpose is to inspire questions and curiosity, to foster growth and intellectual freedom, not hide information from young minds. Massive labor unions like National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have stood in staunch opposition to the sweeping anti-CRT bills and bans.

“Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in July 2021.

In May 2021, the Washington Post published an article which gave an overview of critical race theory and described the coordinated GOP effort to ban its teaching in public schools. However, the article did not consider the impact these severe and inflexible bans may have on teachers’ livelihoods. Similar 2021 articles by the New York Times and ABC News approached the issue from a political perspective but neglected labor rights and teachers unions entirely. To this day, no corporate coverage has centered teachers and their students in this long-winded battle for the truth.

Source: Rethinking Schools Editors, “Confronting the Right-Wing Attacks on Racial Justice Teaching,” Rethinking Schools, Fall 2021.

Student Researcher: Magret Nunes and Kenyon Kremin (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

The post Conservative Lawmakers in Several States Push Sweeping Bans on Critical Race Theory in Classrooms appeared first on Project Censored.

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

The post Blockade on Critical Race Theory in Texas Public Schools appeared first on Project Censored.

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