‘very – Radio Free

Issa Amro: Youth Against Settlements – ‘life is very hard, the Israeli soldiers act like militia’

APR editor — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:11:35 +0000

Palestinian advocate Issa Amro has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his decades of work advocating for peaceful resistance against Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The settlements are illegal under international law — and a record 45 were established last year under cover of the war on Gaza,

Advocacy against the settlements has seen Amro become a target.

He is based in the occupied West Bank, in Hebron — a city of about 250,000 mostly Palestinian people. He founded Youth Against Settlements.

He paints a picture about what daily life is like.

“Our life in West Bank was very hard and difficult before October 7 [2023 – the date of the Hamas resistance movement attack on southern Israel]. And after October 7, life became much harder. . . .

‘Daily harassment, violence’
“So there are hard conditions. No jobs. No work. No movement in the West Bank. Schools are affected . . . There is daily harassment and violence — they attack the Palestinian villages, they attack the Palestinian cities, they attack the Palestinian roads.

“In my city Hebron, it has got much, much harder. People are not able to leave their homes because of the closure of the checkpoints. The [Israeli] soldiers are very mean and adversarial . . .

“The soldiers close the checkpoints whenever they want. In fact, the soldiers act like militia, not like a regular army.

“My house was attacked in the last 20 months . . . ”

At least 55,104 people, including at least 17,400 children, have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza. At least 943 Palestinians, more than 200 of them minors, have been killed in the occupied West Bank.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

"No Kings": 1,800+ Rallies Planned as Trump Threatens "Very Heavy Force" on Army Parade Protesters

Democracy Now! — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:49:20 +0000

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

“No Kings”: 1,800+ Rallies Planned as Trump Threatens “Very Heavy Force” on Army Parade Protesters

Democracy Now! — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:12:14 +0000

A nationwide “No Kings” movement plans to hold over 1,800 anti-Trump rallies across the United States on June 14, the same day as President Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C., as he celebrates his 79th birthday. Organizers are protesting President Trump’s mass deportations, militarized crackdown against protesters, defiance of court orders, and attacks on civil rights. “We’re going to show him on June 14 that real power lies in the people,” says Leah Greenberg⁠, co-founder and co-executive director of ⁠Indivisible. Tanks and other armored vehicles are being transported to Washington, D.C., for the parade, which Marine Corps veteran JoJo Sweatt calls an “egregious overspend.” President Trump threatened heavy force would be used on anyone who protests at the parade in D.C.

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

Erasing Gaza: Genocide, Denial and “the Very Bedrock of Imperial Attitudes”

Media Lens — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:34:31 +0000

Noam Chomsky offered a rule of thumb for predicting the ‘mainstream’ response to crimes against humanity:

‘There is a way to calibrate reaction. If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse, either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent precision.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.27)

Now is an excellent time to put Chomsky’s claim to the test.

A BBC headline over a photograph of an emaciated Palestinian baby read: ‘“Situation is dire” – BBC returns to Gaza baby left hungry by Israeli blockade’

‘Left hungry’? Was she peckish? Was her stomach rumbling? The headline led readers far from the reality of the cataclysm described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 12 May:

‘The entire 2.1 million population of Gaza is facing prolonged food shortages, with nearly half a million people in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death.’

Another BBC headline read: ‘Red Cross says at least 21 killed and dozens shot in Gaza aid incident’

Given everything we have seen over the last 20 months, it was obvious that the mysterious ‘incident’ had been yet another Israeli massacre. Blame had indeed been pinned on ‘Israeli gunfire’ by Palestinian sources, the BBC noted, cautioning:

‘But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said findings from an initial inquiry showed its forces had not fired at people while they were near or within the aid centre.’

Again, after 20 months, we know such Israeli denials are automatic, reflexive, signifying nothing. More deflection and denial followed from the BBC. We had to keep reading to the end of the article to find a comment that rang true:

‘Mohammed Ghareeb, a journalist in Rafah, told the BBC that Palestinians had gathered near the aid centre run by the GHF when Israeli tanks approached and opened fire on the crowd.

‘Mr Ghareeb said the crowd of Palestinians were near Al-Alam roundabout around 04:30 local time (02:30 BST), close to the aid centre run by GHF, shortly before Israeli tanks appeared and opened fire.’

A surreal piece in the Guardian by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett clearly meant well:

‘I have seen images on my phone screen these past months that will haunt me as long as I live. Dead, injured, starving children and babies. Children crying in pain and in fear for their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. A small boy shaking in terror from the trauma of an airstrike. Scenes of unspeakable horror and violence that have left me feeling sick.’

Such honest expressions of personal anguish are welcome, of course, but the fact is that the word ‘Israel’ appeared nowhere in Cosslett’s article. How is that possible? Of the mass slaughter, Cosslett asked: ‘What is it doing to us as a society?’ Her own failure to shame the Israeli genocidaires, or even to name them, gives an idea.

The bias is part of a consistent trend. The Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. BBC insiders have described how the corporation’s reporting is being ‘silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments’.

The bias is not, of course, limited to Gaza. The BBC’s Diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams reported a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian bomber base, noting the ‘sheer audacity’ and ‘ingenuity’ of an attack that was ‘at the very least, a spectacular propaganda coup’.

Imagine the grisly fate that would await a BBC journalist who described an attack on the West in similar terms.

The exalted BBC Verify, no less, began a report on the same ‘daring’ attack: ‘It was an attack of astonishing ingenuity – unprecedented, broad, and 18 months in the making.’

Now imagine a BBC report lauding the ‘astonishing ingenuity’ of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.

In similar vein, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran International Editor, described Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria in September 2024 as ‘a tactical victory to Israel’ and ‘the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller’. Again, imagine Bowen describing a Russian attack on Ukraine as a ‘spectacular coup’ worthy of a thriller.

On X, the former Labour Party, now independent, MP Zarah Sultana commented over a harrowing image taken from viral footage showing a Palestinian toddler trying to escape from a fiercely burning building:

‘This photo should be on the front page of every major British newspaper.

‘But it won’t be — because, like the political class, they’re complicit.

‘It’s their genocide too.’

‘Very Modest Opposition’ From ‘The Morally Enlightened’

People utterly aghast at the political and media apologetics for, indifference to and complicity in the Gaza genocide – that is, people who missed the merciless devastation, for example, of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – might like to focus on an idea as unthinkable as it is undeniable. In their classic book, The Politics of Genocide, the late Edward S. Herman and David Peterson commented:

‘The conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the wiping-out of its indigenous peoples were carried out over many decades, with very modest opposition from within the morally enlightened Christian world. The African slave trade resulted in millions of deaths in the initial capture and transatlantic crossing, with a cruel degradation for the survivors.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.22, our emphasis)

If the ‘very modest opposition’ was ugly, consider the underlying worldview:

‘The steady massacres and subjugation of black Africans within Africa itself rested on “an unquestioning belief in the innate superiority of the white race, … the very bedrock of imperial attitudes,” essential to making the business of mass slaughter “morally acceptable,” John Ellis writes. “At best, the Europeans regarded those they slaughtered with little more than amused contempt.”’ (p.22)

Has anything changed? You may be different, we may be different, the journalists cited above may be different, but as a society, as a collective, ‘amused contempt’ is an entrenched part of ‘our’ response to the fate of ‘our’ victims.

The brutality is locked in by an additional layer of self-deception. A key requirement of the human ego’s need to feel ‘superior’ is the need to feel morally superior. Thus, ‘our’ military ‘superiority’ is typically viewed as a function of ‘our’ moral ‘superiority’ – ‘we’ are more ‘organised’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘civilised’, and therefore more powerful. But a problem arises: how, as morally ‘superior’ beings, are ‘we’ to justify ‘our’ mass killing of other human beings for power, profit and land? How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction? Herman and Peterson explained:

‘This dynamic has always been accompanied by a process of projection, whereby the victims of slaughter and dispossession are depicted as “merciless Indian savages” (the Declaration of Independence) by the racist savages whose superior weapons, greed, and ruthlessness gave them the ability to conquer, destroy, and exterminate.’ (p.22)

‘They’ are ‘merciless’, ‘they’ are savages’; we are ‘God-fearing’, ‘good’ people. The projection is so extreme, that, with zero self-awareness, ‘we’ can damn ‘them’ for committing exactly the crimes ‘we’ are committing on a far greater scale.

Thus, on 9 October 2023, Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, announced that he had ‘ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.’

Barbaric inhumanity, one might think. And yet, this was the rationale:

‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’

In his book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, published in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, wrote:

‘In 1944 the RAF set out to bomb Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. The bombers, however, missed and instead hit a hospital, killing scores of children. This was a tragic accident of war. But in no sense can it be called terrorism. What distinguishes terrorism is the willful and calculated choice of innocents as targets. When terrorists machine-gun a passenger waiting area or set off bombs in a crowded shopping center, their victims are not accidents of war but the very objects of the terrorists’ assault.’ (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, p.9, our emphasis)

Perhaps a plaque bearing these sage words can be sited atop one of the piles of rubble where Gaza’s hospitals once stood. Last month, WHO reported 697 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since October 2023. As a result, at least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. In March 2025, a United Nations investigation concluded that Israel had committed ‘genocidal acts’ in Gaza by systematically destroying its reproductive healthcare facilities.

Netanyahu has himself denounced the Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a reference to a well-known biblical story in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people from the face of the earth: men, women, children – everyone.

Denying Genocide Denial

Another useful way to test Chomsky’s assertion that ‘our’ crimes will be ‘suppressed or denied’ is to check the willingness of ‘mainstream’ media to mention the problem of ‘genocide denial’ in relation to Gaza.

As veteran Media Lens readers will know, the term is routinely deployed with great relish by critics of dissidents challenging the West’s enthusiasm for Perpetual War. In 2011, the Guardian’s George Monbiot devoted an entire column to naming and shaming a ‘malign intellectual subculture that seeks to excuse savagery by denying the facts’. ‘The facts’ being ‘the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.’ Monbiot accused Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens of being political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’.

One can easily imagine a parallel universe in which journalists are having a field day denouncing the endless examples of ‘mainstream’ reporters and commentators belittling, denying or apologising for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Last month, the Telegraph published a remarkable piece by Colonel Richard Kemp asserting that the Israeli army ‘has been waging this hugely complex war for 19 months with a combination of fighting prowess and humanitarian restraint that no other army could match’.

Israel, it seems, has ‘been so determined to avoid killing the hostages and where possible to avoid harm to civilians in line with their scrupulously observed obligations under International Humanitarian Law’.

We can assess the evidence for this ‘scrupulously observed’ restraint in recently updated Google ‘before and after’ images of Gaza, revealing Israel’s erasure, not just of Gazan towns, but of its agriculture. Last month, the UN reported that fully 95 per cent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable by Israeli attacks, with 80 per cent of crop land damaged. According to the report, only 4.6 per cent of it can be cultivated, while 71.2 per cent of Gaza’s greenhouses and 82.8 per cent of its agricultural wells have been destroyed by Israeli attacks.

Using the ProQuest media database, we searched UK national newspapers for mentions of the term ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide denial’ over the last twelve months. We found not a single mention.

No surprise, given that, as Chomsky noted, ‘our’ crimes are systematically ‘suppressed or denied’. Why would the press expose their own genocide denials?

There is another possibility, of course. Could the lack of usage instead be explained by the fact that what is happening in Gaza is not, in fact, a genocide? After all, doesn’t genocide mean killing, or trying to kill, all the people in a given group?

Answers were supplied in a report published by Amnesty International last December, ‘Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. The report concluded:

‘Amnesty International has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, between 7 October 2023 and July 2024, prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Amnesty International has also concluded that these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, who form a substantial part of the Palestinian population, which constitutes a group protected under the Genocide Convention.

‘Accordingly, Amnesty International concludes that following 7 October 2023, Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.’

Amnesty explained the reasoning:

‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis)

The report added a key clarification:

‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”. Equally important, finding or inferring specific intent does not require finding a single or sole intent. A state’s actions can serve the dual goal of achieving a military result and destroying a group as such. Genocide can also be the means for achieving a military result. In other words, a finding of genocide may be drawn when the state intends to pursue the destruction of a protected group in order to achieve a certain military result, as a means to an end, or until it has achieved it.’ (Our emphasis)

As Amnesty noted, other organisations have arrived at similar conclusions:

‘In the context of the proceedings it initiated against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)… South Africa also provided its own legal analysis of Israel’s actions in Gaza, determining that they constitute genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Other states have since made public their own legal determination of genocide as part of their applications to the ICJ to intervene in the case. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967 reached similar conclusions in her reports in 2024. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food concluded that Israel “has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination”.’

Israel’s crimes clearly do qualify as a genocide. The refusal of the press to even discuss the possibility of genocide denial in relation to this assault points to their own complicity and culpability.

The post Erasing Gaza: Genocide, Denial and “the Very Bedrock of Imperial Attitudes” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Trump: ‘We’re going to be very nice’ on China, tariffs and Xi Jinping | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:15:48 +0000

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

Georgia parliament very close to making harsher ‘foreign agent’ bill a law

CPJ Staff — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:26:19 +0000

New York, March 20, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists expresses deep concern after Georgia’s parliament on March 18 approved a second reading of a foreign agent bill that will most likely become law as early as April, creating an existential threat to Georgia’s independent press.

Media groups fear the bill, which ruling party officials call an “exact copy” of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), will be used more punitively than in the United States, where the law has rarely been applied to media and civil society groups.

“CPJ condemns the Georgian parliament’s approval in a second reading of an ‘exact copy’ of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act. In the hands of an increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party, FARA’s overbroad provisions and criminal sanctions could wipe out Georgia’s donor-reliant independent press and media advocacy groups,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Georgian authorities should reject any form of ‘foreign agent’ law.”

Parliament passed a “word-for-word” translation of FARA in an initial reading on March 4, with the ruling party saying it planned to simply adapt U.S.-specific terminology to Georgia’s legal framework. Besides such adaptations, nothing substantial was amended during the second reading, and substantive revisions cannot be made in a final reading, which is expected by April 4, Lia Chakhunashvili, executive director of independent trade group Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, told CPJ. Georgia President Mikheil Kavelashvili is expected to sign it once it reaches his desk, according to Chakhunashvili.

Officials say a Georgian FARA is necessary because foreign-funded organizations “refuse to register” under the country’s existing foreign agent law, passed in May 2024, and harsher penalties are needed.

The FARA bill includes a maximum penalty of five years in prison for non-compliance and omissions, as well as fines. The existing “foreign agent” law only established fines as punishment, though none appear to have been imposed, Chakhunashvili said.

The switch to FARA would also extend the law’s scope beyond organizations, to individuals, and could be used to require news outlets to label their publications as produced by a foreign agent.

Analysts said the Georgian bill lacks the “legal safeguards and nonpartisan enforcement” that exist in the United States and will enable “swift and severe crackdowns.”

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

‘First They Came for the Immigrant’: Immigration Crackdown the ‘Tip of a Very Dangerous Spear’ for Democracy

Newswire Editor — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:46:44 +0000

This week alone, by using new levers of state power and old, inapplicable statutes, the Trump administration has:

Initiated deportation proceedings against a green card holder for protesting on a college campus – a clear attempt to weaponize immigration law to chill political dissent and free speech across the country.
Readied the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, infamously used to justify the internment of Japanese, German, and Italians during World War II, to seize sweeping new powers to conduct indiscriminate mass deportations.
And the sitting Vice President offered a disturbing encapsulation of the right wing project to remake America around MAGA’s preferred image, with J.D. Vance stating on Fox News regarding the Mahmoud Khalil case and implications, “It's about who do we, as an American public, decide gets to join our national community? And if the Secretary of State and President decide a person shouldn't be in America, it's as simple as that.”

The following is a statement from Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, reacting to the larger implications of this week:

“The Trump administration’s expanded immigration crackdown is just the tip of a very dangerous spear for American democracy and Americans’ rights and liberties.

Ripped from the playbook of authoritarian movements, it’s not hyperbolic to say they are looking to dismantle core principles of our democracy, viewing the executive branch and state power as means to seek political retribution, crack down on free speech and subvert or ignore the rule of law. Taken together, these actions take America back to the darkest chapters of our national and world history. The resulting fear, intimidation and chaos is a deliberate feature of their efforts.

To push back and stand up for a different vision of America, we need to be clear eyed about what we’re seeing and the larger stakes and not pretend it’s business as usual. First, they came for the immigrants.”

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

A Very Short History of Our Species

Alton C. Thompson — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 13:33:11 +0000

Our story as humans—Homo sapiens—began about 200,000 years ago. And for over 99% of our time on earth we were foragers (hunter-gatherers). Because of that lengthy period as foragers, we became “designed” for that way of life (see this, p. 43). This book from 1988 discusses many aspects of that design. It neglects, however, to discuss the most important part of our design—the fact that we became designed to be a small-group species.¹

Our lives began to change in significant ways about 12,000 years ago, when the Neolithic Revolution began, and agriculture began to replace foraging in some groups. Here are the important changes:

The sedentary nature of this new way of life fostered a growth in group size.

That development created a situation that enabled individuals with a tendency to dominate others to begin to do so. (Foragers had developed procedures to prevent that from happening; see this article.)

That led to the formation of social classes—and the exploitation of some by others that is a “feature’’ of social class systems.

1. That development, in turn, put our species on a downward course—discussed rather well in this 1979 book >Affluence and Discontent: The Anatomy of Consumer Societies, and illustrated by the “picture” below:

I would like to have found an illustration having a car going downhill—for our course, as humans, has been downward—and not one of “progress”—since the Neolithic Revolution. A car rolling down a hill will gain momentum, which will ensure that it does go over the cliff. Our current way of life is equivalent to that momentum for it makes likely that our species will “soon” go “over a cliff.” Let me explain.

The reason why we’re “headed for a cliff” is the global warming that has been occurring—especially since about 1850. The initial causes of that warming were our burning of fossil fuels and deforestation activities.

Those activities have, though, caused a new causal factor to enter the picture—the thawing of permafrost. There’s this:

Permafrost thaw is one of the gravest yet lesser discussed impacts of climate change. Permafrost covers 24 percent of the surface of land masses in the northern hemisphere and accounts for nearly half of all organic carbon stored within the planet’s soil. As long as this organic matter remains frozen, it will stay trapped in the permafrost. However, if it thaws, microbes will begin to eat the material, causing it to decay and releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Even if a small fraction of these greenhouse gases are released, it will have major consequences on not only the Arctic, but Earth’s entire climate system, as they intensify global climate change.

That thawing likely explains the fact that global warming is now accelerating! Is “feeding on itself”! And therefore will likely be impossible to halt. So that at some point in the “near” future Earth will become unlivable for humans at all locations—and we will go extinct (along with many other species, of course).

Here’s a recent statement about our current perilous situation by 14 scientists:

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al., 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al., 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres, 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP, 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).

As the authors of that article are academics, they are forced to be cautious in their pronouncements. However, there’s this article “out there” with the title “Humans may be extinct in 2026.” Thirty-six scientists have associated themselves with this site, and they are all identified and pictured in the article. They write under the name “Sam Carana’ to protect themselves from retribution by their employers.

It’s stated in this article that:

To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live, in ways that improve the vital signs summarized by our graphs.

A conclusion that I reached in 1984, in this article—in which I presented a 5-wave strategy to bring about societal system change. Not having the financial resources to act on it, I didn’t; but I contacted dozens of individuals/organizations to make them aware of my proposal, in the hope that I would find someone interested in acting on it. Without receiving a single response so far, however!! It’s as if our species has a death wish/drive!! Perhaps had I contacted Bill Gates …. But a recent interview of him that I saw recently convinced me that he is utterly ignorant about our current precarious situation, so that … !

In the 1930s our national government instituted a “greenbelt” program that would “change the way we live” to some degree. But with “burn baby burn” President Trump as our current “leader” there is NO reason to expect this to occur now—with ecovillages being the sort of unit created.

Besides, it’s likely past time for our “salvation”!

Author is currently at a facility in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, for rehabilitation for a fall and dialysis (which he began on January 28 while in a hospital for another reason).

ENDNOTE:

1 This will be commented on shortly. Also see this article.

The post A Very Short History of Our Species first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alton C. Thompson.

A Very Short History of Our Species

Alton C. Thompson — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 13:33:11 +0000

Our lives began to change in significant ways about 12,000 years ago, when the Neolithic Revolution began, and agriculture began to replace foraging in some groups. Here are the important changes:

The sedentary nature of this new way of life fostered a growth in group size.

That development created a situation that enabled individuals with a tendency to dominate others to begin to do so. (Foragers had developed procedures to prevent that from happening; see this article.)

That led to the formation of social classes—and the exploitation of some by others that is a “feature’’ of social class systems.

1. That development, in turn, put our species on a downward course—discussed rather well in this 1979 book >Affluence and Discontent: The Anatomy of Consumer Societies, and illustrated by the “picture” below:

Those activities have, though, caused a new causal factor to enter the picture—the thawing of permafrost. There’s this:

Here’s a recent statement about our current perilous situation by 14 scientists:

It’s stated in this article that:

To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live, in ways that improve the vital signs summarized by our graphs.

Besides, it’s likely past time for our “salvation”!

Author is currently at a facility in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, for rehabilitation for a fall and dialysis (which he began on January 28 while in a hospital for another reason).

ENDNOTE:

1 This will be commented on shortly. Also see this article.

The post A Very Short History of Our Species first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alton C. Thompson.

Feeling Very Fine: Picasso the Printmaker at the British Museum

Binoy Kampmark — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:07:13 +0000

This is Pablo Picasso the way he is rarely seen – at least in so far as the hundred or so pieces at the British Museum’s Picasso: Printmaker have been displayed. The viewer is treated to dazzling marked draughtsmanship that also evinces a mastery of techniques: the use of drypoint and etching, lithographs, linocuts and aquatints.

The span of the work humbles. From the early 1900s (Picasso moved to Paris in 1904, keeping an address at the Washhouse Boat in Montmartre), we find the almost shocking A Frugal Meal, where the much diminished couple sit together in strained impoverishment, their minds abstracted by distance from each other. Struck by malnutrition, we see the sagging bodies, the skeletal fingers, the piece of bread on the side of an empty plate, wine partially filling one glass. Made with a salvaged copper plate, the work also heralds Picasso’s first serious attempt at printmaking.

In 1905, the print Salomé announces a serious yet teasing effort by Picasso to depict the body of the naked dancer before Herod much “like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels”. The outstretched leg suggests the Moulin Rouge.

To the end, we get a sampling of the 347 Suite of etchings from 1968, where the playful, irreverent artist is in full, zesty swing. Along the way, we find Picasso the cubist (Still Life with a Bottle of Marc [1911]), where he keeps fused company with Georges Braque, and the choice morsels from the Vollard Suite (1930-7), where the lure of classical art, animal sexuality and playful mythology is most evident.

The Minotaur is a randy villain governed by instinct, the masculine, beast hybrid that galvanises the work throughout. He connives in the bacchanalian excesses that artist-man-Picasso also engages in. Ignobly, the Minotaur ravishes or suggests it, evident in Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman (1933).

In the lubricious mix are other creatures of Greek mythology. The intentions of the faun in Faun Uncovering a Woman (1936), with a nod to Rembrandt’s depiction of Jupiter and Antiope, are unambiguous. Here, Picasso plays with lust, longing and discomforting moments of predatory assumption. But then comes the masterful 1934 Blind Minotaur being led by a Little Girl in the Night, its aquatint with scraper effect producing a moving work: a sightless minotaur vulnerable, punished for its misdeeds, holding a dove, walking under a sky carpeted with stars.

This theme of visited punishment and regret is also found in The Little Artist (1954), a colour crayon transfer lithograph made after the end of Picasso’s relationship with Françoise Gilot. Three figures dominate: the two children he shares with her, flat and downcast, and Gilot, protectively shadowing them in forbidding form.

The 347 sequence is schoolboy randy and remorselessly mocking. The sublime Renaissance painter Raphael, who the biographer and rumour tiller Giorgio Vasari claimed expired after too much over vigorous intercourse with his lover, La Fornarina, keeps company with unmatched voyeurism, including the Pope’s leering antics. The shift to the contemporary scene is evident in giving the French war hero and President Charles de Gaulle a noticeable member as he consults the female form.

Violence, ever present in the Picasso oeuvre, finds expression in the gladiatorial, ceremonial form of the bullfight. Looking at the displayed prints brings Ernest Hemingway to mind, whose perspective on such a brutal spectacle in Death in the Afternoon (1932) is fine stuffing for Picasso’s moral universe. “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”. The bullfight was “very normal” to Papa Hemingway, with its messages on life, death, mortality and immortality. At the conclusion of the battle between bull and man, “I feel very sad but also very fine.”

Much about Picasso tends to get absorbed into the outsized man’s legacy. The lovers, the infidelities, his preoccupation with violent themes, and the “woman” question. But this exhibition is exhilarating for offering the viewer the sources that moved Picasso while also providing offerings that do, inevitably, show the man at his throbbing, priapic best (and worst). Two young ladies were utterly captivated by the generously erotic depictions, with one squealing in delight, “Now she does have a cunt!”

Beyond the land that is purely mired in cunt and cock, however, we see a delicious lithographic tribute to Lucas Cranach the Elder with its variations, focusing on King David’s lusty longing for the woman he sees bathing, Bathsheba. Picasso renders the king menacing in intention, his head expansive, his harp disproportionately large. One senses sympathy for Bathsheba at the inevitable dishonouring.

There are also reverential tributes to the masters of Spanish painting. El Greco, Velázquez and Goya tower. The latter links the two in terms of a shared interest in the bullfight and their subversion of conventional forms of beauty.

By the time one reaches the end, where the master offers the viewer his own reflection in Picasso, His Work and His Audience (1968) it behoves the spectator to wonder whether feeling fine is, in fact, the sentiment to entertain. For many, it is bound to be. Others, bothered by the desecrations, the defiling, and more besides, are bound to be troubled. But most are unlikely to have even wanted to see Picasso in the first place.

British Museum, November 7, 2024 to March 30, 2025

The post Feeling Very Fine: Picasso the Printmaker at the British Museum first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Trump, Tariffs and Russia: A Very Muddled Policy

Binoy Kampmark — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:51:39 +0000

It has become something of a fixation in the Donald Trump war chest of options that cowing, discomforting and baffling his various counterparts on the international scene with tariffs is bound to work at every corner. Certainly, when it comes to allies, the potency of such announcements is magnified. Nation states, confusing common interests with friendship, have dreams broken before the call of firm, sober diplomacy.

When it comes to dealing with Russia, though, the matter of tariffs sits oddly. In 2024, US imports of Russian goods came in at US$2.8 billion. What is imported from Russia is certainly of value: radioactive materials indispensable for US power stations, nitro fertilisers, platinum.

All this is modest enough, but Trump is convinced that the threat of economic bruising of his own flavour will work to influence Russia’s war policy against Ukraine. Soon after his inauguration, Trump declared that, were a deal to conclude the Russia-Ukraine war not reached soon, there would be “no other choice but to put high levels of taxes, tariffs and sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries.”

Instead of being dismissed out of hand as unworkable and ill-reasoned, the old idea that Russia will be brought to heel continues to tease a coterie of dreamers. The UK paper, The Telegraph, is very much with Trump on this, claiming that “redoubling efforts to cut off the revenue Russia generates from oil and gas imports” will drain Russia’s war effort. This could involve, for instance, targeting the now famous shadow fleet ships that continue to distribute oil and gas in global markets undetected. But importantly, those in the European Union would have to pull their weight in weaning themselves off a continued reliance on Russian fossil fuels, a reliance that has tended to make something of a mockery, not just of unity within the bloc, but of the very policy itself.

The reading by the US president on the state of the Russian economy is woefully ignorant about the coarsening of Moscow’s resilience since 2014, when Western governments began to impose a sequence of sanctions across Russian banking, defence, energy, manufacturing, technology and other sectors that eventually reached their peak after February 2022. That same month, US President Joe Biden was unwarrantedly confident that the sanctions regime would “impair [Russia’s] ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.”

The Council of the European Union, also keeping in step with Washington’s financial excoriation of Moscow, understood that these moves would weaken the Russian war machine’s “ability to finance the war and specifically target the political, military and economic elite responsible for the invasion [of Ukraine].”

The immediate response was steady, if necessary, diversification. Alternative markets were sought, with willing participants. Russian oil found itself in Chinese and Indian markets. Alternative trade routes were pursued. Moscow was making use of the Global South with relish, and its war economy did not collapse. GDP grew by 3.6% in 2023 and made a similar performance the following year.

This is not to say that the Russian economy is a model of peak health, and certainly not one to emulate. It has been battered and boosted in equal measure, given heavy injections of stimulus. Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center describes the country’s economy as “like a marathoner on fiscal steroids – and now those steroids are wearing off.” The real troubles for President Vladimir Putin are more pressing in sustaining not just the war effort but domestic infrastructure and social programs. The juggling act, so far fortuitously favourable to him, is not a sustainable venture.

The broader lesson here is that economic weapons that seek to strangle, coerce and direct a nation state into action are blunt, inconsistent in their application and often counterproductive. The most telling response from the target state is adapting and adjusting to disruption, and Russia shows better signs than most in doing so. Shocks are eventually absorbed.

Furthermore, it seems that Trump’s threats are playing a splendidly inert role in the Kremlin. One public statement made by Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, did suggest that Russia was merely waiting for something more concrete, exempting the president from any lashing words otherwise used for his predecessor. “We have to see what does the ‘deal’ mean in President Trump’s understanding,” the official reflected. “He is not responsible for what the US has been doing in Ukraine since 2014, making it ‘anti-Russia’ and preparing for the war with us, but it is in his power now to stop this malicious policy.”

There may be something in what Polyanskiy says, but in the meantime, Trump will focus on inflicting the most concerted damage that any indiscriminate tariff regimes can do: against countries with which the United States does extensive business with. Mexico and Canada have far more reason to worry than Russia, as do other US allies.

The post Trump, Tariffs and Russia: A Very Muddled Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Baltimore Media ‘Create a False Impression That Youth Are Responsible for a Lot of Very Dangerous Crime’: CounterSpin interview with Richard Mendel on youth crime coverage

Janine Jackson — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:09:23 +0000

Janine Jackson interviewed the Sentencing Project’s Richard Mendel about coverage of youth crime for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241220Mendel.mp3

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

Janine Jackson: Some listeners may know the Sentencing Project for their work calling out racial disparities in sentencing associated with crack versus powder cocaine, and mandatory minimums. A recent project involves looking into another factor shaping public understanding and public policy around criminal justice—the news media. In this case, the focus is young people.

“The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’: How Misinformation Is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore” has just been released. We’re joined now by the report’s author. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us now by phone from Prague. Welcome to CounterSpin, Richard Mendel.

Richard Mendel: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Before we get into findings, what, first of all, is the scope of this study? What did you look at, and then, what were you looking to learn, or to illuminate?

RM: We’ve been seeing, just anecdotally, a big increase in fearful reporting, sensational reporting, about youth crime over the last few years. And we, luckily, in this country had a very long period of almost continually declining youth crime rates, from the mid-’90s to 2010 or so, and continuing positive trends.

And then we saw some increase nationally in the murder rate, and young people took part in that, in 2020 and 2021. But there’s really been an epidemic of scary and problematic reporting, we saw across the country.

We decided to look in depth at how media is covering youth crime, and we decided to pick one jurisdiction, and we looked in Baltimore, but I think that a lot of the findings would probably be seen in other places, too. And what we did was we looked at many of the major outlets, the four main local TV news stations, as well as the Baltimore Sun, and an online paper, a prominent one in Baltimore, called the Baltimore Banner.

We just looked at all their crime coverage to see, first of all, what share of crime coverage is focusing on young people. And then, of the crime, what are they saying about the trends in youth crime, and how are they presenting their information? And that’s what we did, and we found really alarming results.

JJ: Let’s get into it. What were some of the key things revealed by the research?

Richard Mendel: “Young people in Baltimore…are 5% of arrests..and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people.”

RM: What we found is that young people in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Police Department, are 5% of arrests in the Baltimore area, and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people. One station, more than a half of them focused on young people, and really creating a misimpression in the public that the young people are responsible for most of the crime, or a huge portion of it, when it’s really just not true.

Also, a lot of the coverage indicated a spike in youth crime, which really is not supported by the data; the trends are mixed. Some of the findings, in some areas, there are areas of concern, but overall, things are still trending downward, mostly. And just a lot of the rhetoric around young people, really using the sensationalistic, fear-inducing rhetoric to describe their role in crime.

So it was really creating a false impression among the public, presumably, that youth are responsible for a lot of very dangerous crime, and creating a crisis atmosphere in the legislature this year in Maryland to do something about this perceived problem, which is really a creation of the media rather than the fact.

JJ: Before we talk about impacts, I would just note that part of the way that media can just paint a picture about crime rates rising when they are not, or that doesn’t match the reality, is they don’t use numbers. They don’t use statistics, they just kind of tell stories. That was part of what you found, is that they didn’t use data to back up these claims.

RM: In many cases they didn’t. And in other cases, they cherry picked them—there’s overall arrest, there’s arrest for this, there’s arrest for that. And they, in many cases, just focused on the couple of crime categories where the crime rates were going up, and made a huge deal out of that, while ignoring all the other crime categories where youth offending was down. It’s a combination of not reporting, not using data, or not using data in responsible ways.

JJ: Well, of course the point is not just to say that this is inadequate and bad journalism, which it is, but these media problems and the story that they tell have effects.

Fox45 (12/28/22)

RM: For certain. And I think that the Baltimore example is an extreme example. One of the stations in the area made a crusade out of highlighting as much as they can, and in as fearful ways as they can, almost every instance of youth offending. And more than half of the stories on that station were about youth. Many of them were long. And each incident was then followed by going back to show frightening video of previous incidents, and just over and over again, and many assertions that youth crime is out of control. And a banner headline behind the anchors on that station, “City in Crisis,” whenever they were looking at youth crime stories. So it was really just a fearmongering approach.

And it really affected the legislature this year. At the beginning of the Maryland legislative session, the Senate president, at a news conference, said that we need to do something about youth crime this year, because of a “perception problem.” And he even acknowledged that youth are responsible for less than 10% of the crimes, and that they’ve addressed it two years previously, in a comprehensive bill to update their approach to youth justice, that was a two-year study commission, and they really followed the evidence.

And this time, they created a policy environment that was very much crisis-driven, and there were no hearings, there was no expert testimony, there was no process, other than backroom discussion, and come up with something to solve the perception problem created by the media, not to address real problems in the real world.

JJ: I just want to draw you out just on precisely that point, because corporate media frame questions of crime, or of court-involved people, as a problem, a scandal, a controversy. And it has to be a perennial, unsolvable problem, or that boilerplate story goes away. But the reality is, we do know what works to reduce youth crime and to promote public safety. So please talk a bit more about that.

Sentencing Project (3/1/23)

RM: Yes, all of the evidence shows that detention and incarceration lead to bad outcomes. Comparable young people, if they’re based in detention, versus allowed to remain free pending their trial, and if they’re incarcerated following their trial, they do worse than young people who remain in the community.

And it just makes sense. Disconnecting young people from school, disconnecting them from their family, and instead surrounding them by other troubled young people, and disrupting their natural adolescent development, it’s not a good approach. And the results show it, that the recidivism is much higher if you’re punitive towards them. And just involving them in the system, arresting them, disrupting their educations and getting a record like that, really leads to worse outcomes for young people. And the kids who were diverted from the system, again, do much better.

JJ: And so that diversion, what can that look like? It’s not just, don’t do what you’ve been doing, but there are things that have been tried and that have shown success, right, in terms of diverting young people?

RM: Some of diversion programs just connect young people to positive mentors in the community, and there’s a very promising approach of restorative justice, in which the young person meets with the persons that they’ve harmed, and makes apologies, and together craft a solution for the young person to have restored some of the harm that they’ve caused. That leads to much, much higher victim satisfaction, which is an important goal of the justice system, which the traditional system does terrible at, and also leads to better outcomes for the young people.

JJ: Finally, I’m not sure how much media coverage you can expect on the report, though media do love to talk about themselves. But I wonder what audiences you do hope to get this work in front of, and what are just some of the recommendations or things that you would hope folks would take away?

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

RM: We had three goals in terms of the report, and first is to influence media themselves, just to help them see the impact of their current practices. And I think that most reporters are well-intentioned, but I think that they maybe don’t understand the impact of their current approach. And we’re trying to show them there’s some better ways to cover this issue, in terms of the proportion of coverage focused on young people, in terms of presenting trends in fair and accurate ways, in terms of showing the impacts of not having the knee-jerk “more punishment is safer,” because the actual research shows the opposite. So that’s one audience.

Another audience are political leaders that have a responsibility to pursue policies that really do produce the best long-term safety, and not to succumb to pressure created by media narratives like the ones that we’ve seen in Baltimore and around the country.

And the third is to provide a tool for advocates around the country, people who care about this, that there’s ways of pushing back against irresponsible or misleading or imbalanced coverage in the media. And to do studies like this and show, “Hey, the picture that’s being presented is not accurate.” And make sure that the people in the community know and that the political leaders in that community know and that the media in that community know the negative, scary picture that you’re painting isn’t the reality. And the punitive solutions that are being suggested in response to this made-up problem are going to make things worse rather than better.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Richard Mendel, senior research fellow at the Sentencing Project. You can find the report, “The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’” on their website, SentencingProject.org. Richard Mendel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RM: Thank you. Great to be with you.

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

Very little can be done to save thousands in Gaza who will die this winter, doctor says

Democracy Now! — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:30:04 +0000

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

Taiwan says number of Chinese ships in the region ‘very alarming’ | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:31:21 +0000

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

Taiwan says number of Chinese ships in the region ‘very alarming’ | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:15:09 +0000

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

"Instead of ‘Global Warming’ which we all agree sounds Very Scary…" | Vice [2018] | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 18:22:04 +0000

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

"Instead of ‘Global Warming’ which we all agree sounds Very Scary…" | Vice [2018] | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 18:22:04 +0000

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

The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:58:19 +0000

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

—James Madison

Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.

When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

This is true no matter which party is in power.

This is particularly true in the wake of the 2024 election.

Already, Donald Trump, who promised to be a dictator on “day one,” is advancing plans to further undermine the nation’s already vulnerable system of checks and balances.

To be fair, this is not a state of affairs that can be blamed exclusively on Trump.

America’s founders intended our system of checks and balances to serve as a bulwark against centralized power being abused.

As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

Unfortunately, our system of checks and balances has been strained to the breaking point for years now, helped along by those across the political spectrum who, in marching in lockstep with the Deep State, have conspired to advance the government’s agenda at the expense of the citizenry’s constitutional rights.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches.

Yet as law professor William P. Marshall concludes, “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance. The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

The outcome of the 2024 elections is not a revolutionary bid to recalibrate a government run amok. Rather, this is a Deep State coup to stay in power, and Donald Trump is the vehicle by which it will do so.

Watch and see.

Remember, it was the Trump Administration that asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deemed it necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic and “other” emergencies.

In fact, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice quietly trotted out and tested a long laundry list of terrifying powers to override the Constitution. We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…

Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts, the president, or the citizenry.

This is why the Constitution’s system of checks and balances is so critical.

Those who wrote our Constitution sought to ensure our freedoms by creating a document that protects our God-given rights at all times, even when we are engaged in war, whether that is a so-called war on terrorism, a so-called war on drugs, a so-called war on illegal immigration, or a so-called war on disease.

The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.

In this way, we have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a totalitarian government that knows all, sees all, controls everything, and promises safety and security above all comes to power by capitalizing on the people’s fear.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) are established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, ironically enough the same day that Trump won his landslide return to the White House.

Yet there the comparison ends.

So, while we are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs, this year’s electoral victory for Republicans was no win for the Constitution.

Rather, it was a win for the very entrenched, hawkish, establishment power structure that has exhibited no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Deep State works best through imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—who rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

The post The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Humans know very little about the deep sea. That may not stop us from mining it.

Gautama Mehta — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 08:15:00 +0000

In Kingston, Jamaica, by secret ballot, an election was held earlier this month. The lands whose governance was at stake are vaster than any nation, and it’s possible the consequences of the vote will be felt for eons. More than half of the world’s ocean floor is under the jurisdiction of an intergovernmental body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA. Its members have spent the last three decades in deliberations with a single purpose: crafting an international legal regime for a field of commercial activity that does not yet exist. Their mandate is to determine how — and whether — to allow the nations of the earth to mine the sea.

The cold floor of the deep ocean is a place human beings know very little about. One thing we do know is that things there happen extremely slowly. The mercurial forces that condition life for the creatures of the earth’s surface — sunlight, winds, the seasons, the weather — have little reach into the deep-sea ecosystem. When scientists visit, their machines’ tracks in the sediment are still visible a quarter-century later. The world’s oldest living organisms rely on this stability to make their home here, sheltered in darkness under the ocean’s colossal weight.

Once in a while, a bit of organic matter from the livelier waters above makes its way down to the ocean floor: a shark’s tooth, the scale of a fish, a shell fragment. Once it’s there, minerals begin to accrete around this core. There are competing theories of the chemical process by which this occurs, but the result is a concretion that grows at the pace of a few centimeters every million years to form a small rock known as a polymetallic nodule. These are often compared to potatoes in size and shape. They’re found around the world, but the largest concentration is in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region the size of the United States in the eastern Pacific Ocean, where trillions of nodules are strewn across the abyssal plains.

In the 1960s, an American mining engineer named John Mero publicized a tantalizing idea: that these nodules were an untapped fortune ready for the taking. Polymetallic nodules contain cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper — metals with a range of industrial applications, most notably in steelmaking, that had played a material role in the economic growth of the U.S. and for which new mines were then desperately sought worldwide. In a 1960 article in Scientific American, and a 1965 book called The Mineral Resources of the Sea, Mero argued that, should a viable technology be devised to vacuum up the nodules at scale, it would yield cheaper access to the increasingly valuable metals than terrestrial mining — and a significantly greater store of them than could be found anywhere on land.

These claims caught the attention of both private industry and governments. In short order, the dredging technology that Mero had imagined was developed, and commercial extraction appeared imminent. All that stood in the way was the task of devising a legal framework to regulate access to the international waters in which the buried wealth lay. In 1973, the United Nations began deliberations over a new so-called Law of the Sea. “With the law straightened out, we could be doing real mining in a couple of years,” one mining executive told the New York Times in 1977.

But all the excitement coincided with a movement in global politics, sometimes called third-worldism, formed in the wake of the 20th century’s anticolonial independence movements. Representatives of the world’s poor countries sought to forestall a reprise of the unequal resource exploitation that had enabled the colonial powers’ development while holding back those in the periphery, and demanded that the treaty include specific rights for developing countries. In 1982, evincing an internationalist spirit that seems almost irretrievably utopian today, the UN issued its third Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), declaring the seabed the “common heritage of mankind,” and established the ISA. This body was given the authority to govern future exploration and eventually regulate mining of the seabed, as well as the responsibility to protect the marine environment from the effects of mineral exploration and extraction. Among its protections for developing countries was a requirement for developed countries that receive licenses to explore the seafloor to set aside half of the regions they survey in reserve for only the developing countries to access.

The industrial powers weren’t thrilled. “The United States, West Germany and virtually every other developed country at that time refused to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention because of the seabed mining provisions,” said Matthew Gianni, the political and policy advisor of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “They thought it was too socialist and gave away too much power to developing countries.” Today, 169 states and the European Union have signed the treaty, but — despite years of failed efforts from American presidents in both parties — the U.S. remains a holdout. Until the Senate votes to ratify UNCLOS, the U.S. cannot access mining concessions in international waters.

Anita Hofschneider

In 2000, the ISA began issuing exploration contracts for national scientific agencies to begin surveying sections of the seabed even before the regulations for actual mining were written. Over the course of its history, in the eyes of its critics, the body has become increasingly friendly to industrial concerns, and in 2010 exploration contracts began to be awarded to private companies.

During this period, a new argument emerged for mining the sea: It might help fight global warming. The minerals in polymetallic nodules are needed for the global energy transition away from fossil fuels, some climate hawks argue, and the ocean is an easier place to get them than the land, where mining tears up rainforests and pollutes communities. The ocean-obsessed filmmaker James Cameron has characterized seabed mining as simply a lesser evil than terrestrial mining.

But it’s not self-evident that allowing some companies to mine the sea would result in decreased terrestrial mining. In fact, there’s an argument that it could actually exacerbate the problems of mining on land. “If you introduce a new source of extraction, you bring competition to the market,” said Pradeep Singh, an ocean governance expert at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. “And if you add a new form of competition, it could force terrestrial mining to grow at an even faster rate in order to wipe out the competition.” Singh speculated that this dynamic could incentivize terrestrial miners to lower their standards in order to stay competitive, rendering mining on land even more destructive. “And then we’ll just end up with seeing more of the same old problems on land, and new problems at sea,” he said.

In 2021, a Canadian mining venture called The Metals Company made the most serious play yet for a license from the ISA to begin extracting nodules from the ocean floor. It has announced plans to file a full application by the end of this year, even in the absence of completed mining regulations. Though the company is headquartered in Vancouver, its application is sponsored by the Pacific microstate of Nauru, via a wholly owned subsidiary in that country — an arrangement that allows it to take advantage of the ISA’s policy of holding surveyed areas in trust for developing nations. “They didn’t have to go out and take a boat and go look for these nodules; they knew that they could get guaranteed nodule-rich areas of the deep sea bed without lifting a finger. All they needed to do was apply for areas in reserve,” Gianni explained. What’s more, the company may have used inside knowledge when deciding which areas to apply for: In 2022, the New York Times reported that ISA staff had shared secret data with Metals Company executives on which sites had the most nodules.

The ISA’s incumbent secretary-general, Michael Lodge, a British lawyer who was first elected in 2016, is generally seen as having made it his mission to get extraction started as soon as possible. During Lodge’s scandal-marred tenure, he made public statements affirming the inevitability of commercial mining and even appeared in a promotional video for the Metals Company. In this month’s election held in Kingston, he lost his bid for a third term to Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, by 79 votes to 34. Her four-year term as secretary-general will begin in 2025.

Because the ISA uses secret ballot voting, we don’t know which countries voted for Carvalho, but the unexpectedly wide margin of her victory reflected a growing discontent among member states with the ISA’s friendliness to the mining industry. This is in part because of rapid and recent advances in the state of scientific knowledge about the deep-sea ecosystem. Many scientists and conservationists now believe that what once appeared to be an ecologically cost-free extraction method — scooping up rocks off the deserted ocean floor — may in fact be profoundly disruptive to that environment’s delicate balance of life.

One of the dangers new research has highlighted comes from the meters-deep bed of very fine sediment in which the nodules sit, with particles far smaller than grains of sand. Dredging up the nodules generates clouds of metallic dust on the seafloor that suffocate organisms there. The mining process also creates a second such sediment plume closer to the water’s surface, where the muddy seawater around the nodules is discharged after extraction, blocking sunlight for midwater organisms and polluting a different ocean ecosystem.

Recent studies have also begun to suggest the nodules themselves play an important ecological role. An extremely abundant genus of sea sponge discovered in 2017 lives on the nodules. An octopus species nicknamed “Casper” for its ghostly appearance, discovered in 2016, lays its eggs on sponges attached to the nodules. And perhaps the most dramatic revelation just weeks before the ISA election: A paper published in July in Nature Geoscience posits that the metals in the nodules create a small electric current and thereby produce oxygen — challenging the widely held assumption that photosynthesis is the only natural means by which oxygen is created on Earth. The full significance of the new findings, and in particular the ecological importance of the ‘dark oxygen’ produced by the nodules, remain unclear.

Perhaps more significant than the risks we know would result from seabed mining are those we haven’t yet learned about; the deep sea remains little understood, and many scientists say our ignorance alone renders mining an irresponsibly reckless idea. “We didn’t know the things we know now when UNCLOS was negotiated, and this makes the ISA’s dual mandate — to both create a code to open deep sea mining and protect the marine environment — contradictory,” said Jackie Dragon, senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace USA. Thirty-two of the ISA’s member states now support a moratorium or a precautionary pause on mining while more research is carried out. Some, like France, go even further and support an outright ban.

Carvalho, the new secretary-general, does not support a moratorium, but many environmentalists cheered her expertise in ocean science and her background as a woman from the Global South. Daniel Cáceres Bartra, regional representative for Hispanoamérica for the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, an organization with observer status at the ISA, said, “The reason we were supporting Leticia was not because of the moratorium or precautionary pause. It was because we thought the ISA needed a change of face and also somebody that would be willing to dialogue with NGOs and observers. We think she’s much more open for that.”

If there is no moratorium and The Metals Company’s ambitions are realized, Carvalho could be the first ISA secretary-general under whose watch there is actual mining in the deep ocean. If this happens, “there’s good reason to believe the environmental implications will be significant,” said Singh. “They would be irreversible on human timescales. For hundreds of years, it would be difficult for the ecology to restore to its original state once we’ve had this direct intervention to extract the minerals.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Humans know very little about the deep sea. That may not stop us from mining it. on Aug 15, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Gautama Mehta.

‘Very Serious Blow To Russia’s Image’, Zelenskiy Thanks Ukraine’s Army | Kursk Attack Update

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 09:43:31 +0000

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

‘Very Intense Here’: Ukraine Fighting Waves Of Russian Infantry | Ukraine Front Line Update

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:48:26 +0000

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

‘Twisters’ is a climate movie, but not a very good one

Jake Bittle — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:45:00 +0000

The words “climate change” make no appearance whatsoever in the new film Twisters. This makes political sense: For a blockbuster designed to maximize the broad appeal of its computer-generated thrills, a direct climate tie-in might have been box office poison. Nevertheless, this summer’s reboot of the classic 1996 thriller of (nearly) the same name tackles a central dilemma of our disaster-prone era. Storms fueled by global warming claim thousands of lives and destroy billions of dollars in property every year, but we can’t quite agree on the right way to direct society’s resources to responding to this fact. When it comes to climate-fueled disasters, should we pledge our chips to scientific research, state-of-the-art engineering, or just moving ourselves out of harm’s way?

In spite of the film’s own best efforts to keep things light, Twisters manages to elevate this dilemma in a somewhat provocative way. The film is not an ordinary, Day After Tomorrow-style fable about the awesome power of nature, but instead a parable about the ethics of climate adaptation, one that dramatizes the ways that scientists, engineers, and profiteers respond to nature’s power. But while the film deserves some credit for broaching the question of what a just and effective disaster response would look like, the way it actually answers this question is about as flat as the Tornado Alley plains in which it takes place.

The protagonist of the film is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), an Oklahoma-born meteorologist with a tornado obsession and an oddly intermittent Southern accent. Kate has a special gift for predicting the weather, demonstrated in the film by the fact that she looks at the sky rather than a computer to figure out if it’s going to rain. As a bright-eyed graduate student, she dreams of developing a chemical solution that could weaken tornadoes before they destroy homes. However — and the spoilers begin here — Kate’s rash attempt to test the idea on a monster storm gets three of her fellow scientists killed.

The bulk of the film takes place five years later when, chastened, Kate is working a boring desk job at the National Weather Service in New York. Out of the blue, her only surviving comrade approaches to ask for help with one last job. Javi (Anthony Ramos) has developed a technology that provides high-resolution scans of tornado dynamics — but only if he can find a way to deploy it just a few feet from an emerging tornado. Javi lures Kate back out to Oklahoma to help his new startup, Storm Par, track down tornadoes so it can deploy the tech and grab the data. When he makes his pitch to Kate, Javi seems to invoke the mounting toll of climate change: “It’s getting worse every year, but now we have a way to fight back.”

Indeed, it is getting worse every year in the real world, too. Annual property losses from tornadoes and other convective storms have risen around 8 percent each year since 2008, according to the reinsurance company Swiss Re, rattling the insurance industry and leading to huge premium price increases in states like Oklahoma. Residents of the Sooner State pay the highest average homeowner’s insurance premium of any state in the United States — higher even than hurricane-prone Florida — a trend driven primarily by tornado and hail claims.

Even so, the science linking climate change and tornadoes is somewhat less certain than Javi implies. On the one hand, warmer air is less stable and holds more moisture, so there’s reason to believe that a hotter world will feature more of the convective storms that spin off tornadoes. However, the twisters themselves are so fleeting and ephemeral that it’s hard to know for sure. There is also some evidence that the geographic extent of “Tornado Alley” has shifted south and east into states such as Alabama, away from the Oklahoma heartland where the film takes place. And insurers argue that it’s mostly increasing population density and inflation in building material costs that are driving the insurance crisis, rather than climatic shifts.

Read Next

Why tornadoes are the hardest disasters to link to climate change

Shannon Osaka

Either way, Javi is right that something’s got to give, and Kate heeds the call. When they arrive in Oklahoma during an epic tornado outbreak, they find they have competition from Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a hotshot YouTuber who has racked up millions of fans by driving a souped-up Dodge Ram straight into the heart of tornadoes. (This gas-guzzling product placement may be the least climate-friendly part of the film.) Tyler soon develops a romantic interest in Kate, which he demonstrates by showing up wherever she goes five minutes later and smirking at her. It seems like a serviceable enough setup: A cute-but-nerdy scientist chases storms for the sake of science and public welfare, while an influencer chases them for clout and personal gain — but there’s a magnetism between them nonetheless.

Except it’s not that simple. It turns out that Storm Par’s lead investor is a real estate developer named Marshall Riggs. Riggs knows that many Oklahomans are underinsured and can’t afford to rebuild after tornadoes, and he wants to scoop up their houses with cash offers so he can develop new subdivisions. Javi started the company to collect data that could protect people from tornadoes, but now he’s doing the bidding of someone who wants to, as one character perhaps a bit clumsily puts it, “profit off of people’s tragedy.” (Why Riggs needs advanced meteorological data to make cash offers on destroyed homes is unclear, and perhaps was never clear to the screenwriters.)

Here, too, the film gets something right in the abstract. It really is common for real estate speculators to descend on areas that have experienced a devastating disaster, like Maui after last year’s Lāhainā fire, and make aggressive all-cash offers for homes. Many fire, flood, and tornado victims lack the kind of insurance coverage that can pay for a full rebuild of their properties, which makes these low-ball offers very difficult to turn down, especially for those with modest incomes. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for instance, hedge funds such as Cerberus Capital Management purchased hundreds of flooded homes at a discount and flipped them as rental houses, easily clawing back their initial investments.

While Kat discovers the more unseemly side of Javi’s business venture, she simultaneously discovers that the hotshot storm chaser Tyler is also more complicated than he seems. Kate dismisses his antics at first (he shoots fireworks into tornadoes and sells t-shirts with his face on them), but she softens up once she sees him and his team giving out free food and supplies to tornado victims. Out of all the people gathered to chase tornadoes, Tyler and his gang are the only ones who are actually helping. Even Kate the do-gooder scientist finds she hasn’t actually done much good — after all, she got her original team killed because she was too thirsty for an academic grant, or so Javi implies during one tense exchange. If you aren’t funneling resources to those who live in the shadow of these storms, what’s the point?

Ham-handed though this plot twist might be, it too tracks a real-world ethical dilemma. Journalists spend their readers’ money to illuminate the stories of disaster victims, and scientists take money from governments and universities to study these storms — but wouldn’t it be better just to give that money to the victims? As if to hammer the point home, the disaster response agency FEMA is conspicuously absent in the film’s portrayal of Oklahoma: Perhaps the agency’s primary disaster relief fund has run out of money in the film, as in reality it almost did last year and may well do this year.

This dilemma raises a further question: If money is best spent reducing suffering, wouldn’t it be better to reduce vulnerability to disasters in the first place rather than just cleaning up after they hit? Twisters pursues this question to a point, but it opts for an easy answer, taking refuge in a fantasy that humans can engineer their way out of disasters without changing anything about the way they build, consume, and live.

After learning the truth about Storm Par’s business model, Kate has a moment of moral reckoning, represented in predictable fashion by a tearful nighttime drive with a Lainey Wilson ballad playing in the background. Desperate to help storm victims, she revives her old idea of a chemical solution that can slow down tornadoes, using newfangled data to perfect the concept. Interestingly, the new film’s endorsement of this brash techno-optimism is an update to the original Twister, in which Helen Hunt’s intrepid scientist tries to design a tool that can collect data to predict tornadoes, rather than destroy them. In the 30 years between the original movie and its reboot, in other words, we’ve graduated from measuring nature to controlling it, an apparent recognition that today’s storms are too dangerous to leave untouched.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to evaluate just how useful Kate’s contraption would really be. It can disintegrate tornadoes, sure, but you have to drive it into a tornado to do it, and the whole problem with tornadoes is that they can appear almost anywhere in a matter of minutes. If millions of homes, stores, and schools are vulnerable to destruction by these disasters, as in fact they are, is a miracle gizmo really the best solution? Probably not any more than cloud seeding is the best solution for a millennium-scale drought, or a multibillion-dollar system of interlocking flood gates is the best solution for sea-level rise.

It’s clear that at least a few people involved with the making of the film intended Kate’s quest to serve as an allegory for climate adaptation in general. Coded references to climate change are everywhere: An early tornado kickstarts some wind turbines, then knocks them over. The climactic twister rolls through an oil refinery and sends a pumpjack hurtling into the water tower, which collapses and almost smashes Glen Powell’s already oddly shaped head. Kate’s mother, a farmer, notes that there seem to be “more tornadoes, and floods, and droughts,” and mourns the climate-related inflation that causes swings in the price of commodity wheat.

By the same token, Kate’s chemical solution could be seen as a stand-in for human ingenuity intended to confront climate disasters. But the big problem with tornadoes, as with the other disasters enumerated by Kate’s mother, is not that we don’t have tools that can blast them into oblivion. Rather, it’s the fact that Javi identifies as he and the residents of the idyllic town of New Reno cower in the town’s elegant movie theater as the film’s climactic twister approaches.

“This theater isn’t built to withstand what’s coming!” yells Javi, pushing the townspeople away from a collapsing wall.

Indeed.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Twisters’ is a climate movie, but not a very good one on Jul 31, 2024.

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

The Dalai Lama’s knee surgery was “very successful,” says personal physician | Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 19:37:45 +0000

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

The Dalai Lama’s knee surgery was “very successful,” says personal physician | Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 19:35:46 +0000

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

The U.S.’s Role in Israel’s Genocide of Palestinians; Texas’ Very Own Big Brother

Jim Hightower — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 19:06:21 +0000

Words from populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower.

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

‘Their Effort to Avoid Accountability Is Very Thinly Veiled’: CounterSpin interview with Katherine Li on Corporations’ First Amendment Dodge

Janine Jackson — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 21:45:52 +0000

Janine Jackson interviewed The Lever‘s Katherine Li about corporations’ First Amendment dodge for the May 31, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240531Li.mp3

Extra! (3–4/95)

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will likely know about what’s been called the “right-wing media machine.” It started, you could say, with ideologues and politicians with ideas, generally ideas about how to hurdle us back to at least the 19th century, legally and culturally. They then created think tanks and funded academics to polish up and promulgate those ideas. And they created and funded media outlets to push those ideas out.

It’s not, in other words, a reflection of a fortuitous coming together of like-minded individuals, but an echo chamber forged with the explicit purpose of maximizing a narrow viewpoint into a false consensus. The news article you read, after all, cites a professor and a pundit and a think tank and a guy on the street who read a thing, so it looks like multiple disparate sources who happen to agree.

Something analogous is happening now with corporations claiming the First Amendment says they don’t have to comply with regulations they don’t want to comply with, because those regulations reflect ideas that are “controversial,” and they can’t be compelled to take a public position on a controversial idea, like, for example, that climate disruption is real. It’s a weird, important maneuver, at once complicated and pretty simple, and it’s usefully unpacked in a recent piece by our guest.

Katherine Li is an editorial fellow at the Lever, where the piece, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” appears. She joins us now by phone from Oakland, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katherine Li.

Katherine Li: Hi, Janine, very happy to be here. And let’s unpack this complicated piece.

JJ: Well, before we get to its current—you could say artful—employment, what is the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment? What do we think was the point of it when it was adopted?

KL: Well, as with the First Amendment, the compelled speech in the First Amendment—the original purpose is to say that the government cannot force people to say something they disagree with. That is perhaps illustrated in a very early compelled speech case that basically says that students do not have to stand up in school and salute the flag or the national anthem if they don’t want to.

Basically, it is to protect people from things that the government is forcing them to do, and it’s kind of to insulate people from government policies that impose things on them. The original intention, I do not believe, and experts I have interviewed for this story do not believe that the intention is for corporates to use such an argument in lawsuits.

Lever (5/23/24)

JJ: All right, well then, let me just move on to asking you to please lay out for us what you call, in the lead to this informative piece for TheLever.com, “the novel legal strategy” that some corporations are now “pioneering,” you say, which sounds very different than “relying on”; they’re kind of trying to make something new here. Explain what you’re seeing.

KL: So traditionally, like I have just mentioned it, is to protect people from the government imposing things on them. But what is considered as speech has really exploded when it comes to the corporate landscape: Are tax returns and contracts considered speech? What does that mean for our government’s power to look into financial wrongdoing, and prevent tax fraud and prevent money laundering, if all of those things are considered as speech, and the government cannot force anybody to “say” and disclose such information?

So the corporates have definitely spotted that, and they have been trying to argue that these financial documents are considered as speech. So it started with drug pricing, it starts with the Corporate Transparency Act, that once there’s a precedent in the court system that says these things are considered speech, more cases are being invited and more cases are coming in this specific landscape. So basically they are saying that these things are considered speech, and therefore the government cannot compel them to disclose this information.

At first it starts with financial information. And right now we’re seeing that in Medicare drug negotiations, it is also happening. These commercial speeches are, according to the lawyers and experts I have spoken to, they don’t believe that these things should be considered; they don’t believe that this so-called commercial speech should be afforded the same amount of protection as traditional political expression, for example, like protesting or writing something in the media, or being censored or being prevented or being forced to make a certain political expression in the non-commercial sense.

So that is why in the article, and according to my experts, they believe this is a new strategy, that corporates are basically exploiting this argument in order to bring more and more cases, and expand the definition of what speech is.

Verge (9/12/23)

JJ: Right. So then they seem as though they are complying with a law, or relying on a law, rather than sort of forging this new way.

Well, I think the examples really bring it home for people, what’s happening here, and there are a number of those examples in the piece, and each one is more disturbing and illuminating than the last. But one key one is, California has a new emissions disclosure law, that major companies doing business in California have to make public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. And we can understand why that’s important, because a company can say, “Well, our home office is zero emissions,” and that’s great, but what about your factories? What’s happening there?

So the public needs this information, this is information that the public is looking for, to get through the PR that these companies—fossil fuel companies in this case—might be putting out. And they’re saying, “No, we don’t need to comply with an emissions disclosure law, because that’s speech”?

KL: That is precisely what is happening. And the thing is, these emissions laws, they target companies with annual revenue above $1 billion. That is not asking our local coffee shop or the marketplace around the corner to figure out how much emissions are in their supply chain. It only really applies to large companies, especially oil companies, very large agricultural factory-farming companies.

So what initially caught my eye in the story is actually the arguments they have in the complaints that they filed against the emission disclosures law. The complaint, if you read it very closely, to anybody with common sense, it almost sounds ridiculous. Some of the arguments are saying that they fear that disclosing their emissions would allow activists, nonprofits and lawmakers to single out companies for investigation, which to me is just another word for accountability. I mean, that’s what our nonprofits and lawmaking agencies, it’s what they’re supposed to do, investigate and help create policy that can improve lives. So to me, it sounds like their effort to avoid accountability is very thinly veiled.

If you look at their complaint very closely, they also complain that this law would be compelling them to change their behavior. They complain that this law is changing and shaping their behavior, when, in reality, isn’t that what any laws and regulations are supposed to do? I mean, in any daily-life law, such as, like, hey, you cannot jaywalk, that is aiming to shape our behaviors, it’s aiming to change our behaviors.

So if you read the complaint closely, their efforts to avoid accountability, it’s honestly very thinly veiled. And it is, in a way, further expanding what is considered as speech, and also the whole circular argument that climate change is somehow “controversial.”

I also looked into the threshold of what could be considered as controversial when I first read their complaint. So then the lawyers I was talking to, the question I brought to them was, how low is the threshold to prove that something is scientifically controversial? And it turned out my instincts were correct, that the threshold of that is extremely low. They just have to prove that there’s a dissenting opinion. They don’t really have to prove that it is scientifically sound, and there’s no one to really check that.

JJ: So it’s just laid in a lap of particular courts, or particular decision makers. And it sounds as though they’re saying, particularly with that low threshold—or that very vague, undetermined threshold—that any regulation, because any regulation is about shaping behavior, it sounds like any regulation, they can dispute, because it’s aimed at asking them to do something different. I mean, am I misreading that, or is it really anti- any regulation whatsoever, in some way?

KL: In some way, that’s what it sounds like. Because if the complaint is about changing and shaping behavior, any regulations, that’s the point of it, changing behavior. And what is so wrong, what could be so wrong about forcing someone to lower their emissions at this point? It sounds like they’re saying that they shouldn’t lower their emissions, because either climate change doesn’t matter enough, or that climate change is not real. Like they said, they think it’s controversial.

JJ: Right. Well, just in case folks don’t understand, and of course we’ll send them to TheLever.com to read the piece, but you also have a food distribution and a restaurant supplies company, Cisco, that’s saying that you can’t force companies to read out notices of labor violations to workers, because they don’t want to. They don’t want to make that information available. And if they talk about labor violations in the workplace, well, that’s a “confession of sins,” and they shouldn’t be forced to do that. So this can reach into pretty much any area of our life, yeah?

KL: Yeah, definitely. Companies argue that if there has been a labor dispute, whatever the result is of that dispute, the company would post a sign somewhere in the facility, basically detailing the labor violation. But it doesn’t really achieve the same effect as reading it out in front of everybody, because it’s the difference between passively posting a sign somewhere and actively informing people what happened. And obviously, if a company has labor violations, they likely don’t want their workers to know. And if workers have also suffered the same violation, if the company reads it out, they might become more aware of it.

JJ: Well, it’s funny—if by funny, we mean perverse—because the narrative of capitalism that we often hear is that it relies on everyone being an informed economic actor, an individual actor who is making economic choices based on knowledge. And here we have corporations actively trying to reduce the available amount of information that a person could have to make decisions about what to buy or where to work or anything like that. It’s weird. This is how corporate capitalism subverts this notion that we hear about Capitalism 101, and building a better mousetrap, and all of that sort of thing.

Katherine Li: “They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore.”

KL: Definitely. Well, about the emissions case, part of their complaint is also that they might be more susceptible to boycott. I do believe that in this day and age, especially people of the younger generations, they’re much more aware of climate change, and a lot of times they would choose companies and products based on their perception of whether that company is being socially responsible enough.

So it’s obvious that a lot of corporates have caught up on that, and they’re now afraid that if they disclose how much they’re actually emitting, people are going to stop buying from them. They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore, because there will be a real concrete number for people to go on, and a number they cannot fake.

They could put on their website all they want, that we have this commitment in 10 years, we have this kind of green commitment; we’re going to become zero emissions by 2030. They could say what they want to say on their website, but once there’s a concrete number out there, none of that is going to work anymore. And they’re really afraid of that, clearly.

JJ: Afraid of an informed public.

Well, this only works with a certain kind of judicial landscape. I mean, you have to count on not getting laughed out of court with what looks to many people like a fairly transparent shenanigan, but obviously they believe that, for some reason, courts are going to be open to this particular kind of argument.

KL: Yes, unfortunately, multiple times courts have been open to this particular argument. And in terms of science, in California, the well-known case would be the Monsanto case.

Food & Water Watch (4/5/17)

For everyone who doesn’t know, Monsanto is a herbicide company. They make this herbicide called Roundup, and there is a certain chemical in it, where a lot of international scientists have said that it could potentially cause cancer in humans. So because science is never 100%, and that knowledge is constantly evolving, there is a loophole for them to say that there is contradicting science. And as we have later found out, Monsanto, the company, has also commissioned scientific studies to say that their product is safe.

And in California, that stood up in court. Because the court doesn’t really look at whether or not Monsanto has engineered this controversy that they’re claiming, this argument was allowed to pass California Proposition 65, which requires a warning label for a whole host of chemicals that could be cancerous and cause birth defects–Monsanto would not have to put that label on their specific herbicide product, because this whole “scientific controversy” thing was allowed to stand up in court.

So the consequences of that is now this argument was expanded. It’s not just one chemical anymore. It’s the entire mechanism of climate change that is being brought into question.

BioSpace (5/8/24)

But the good news here is that sometimes courts are also beginning to hold the line, and recently there have been some positive developments. If you look at the most recent case of the Medicare drug negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, I believe it is the US Chamber of Commerce and different pharmaceutical companies, they were arguing that the Medicare drug negotiations, that the Inflation Reduction Act, is trying to “compel” them to agree with a government-determined price, and that they’re saying that is compelled speech.

So they have brought that point to multiple federal courts, including, most recently I believe, a federal court in Ohio. And these courts have fortunately rejected this argument, basically blocked the case on multiple occasions. So I do believe that courts are becoming aware of that, and that they’re beginning to curb these arguments, because in the past, when they have allowed these arguments to pass, sometimes, likely in the next case, the argument becomes expanded.

JJ: Right. Well, I was going to push you further on that, in terms of, it sounds like courts are cottoning on and pushing back. Are there other policy or legislative responses that seem appropriate here, or is it mainly a matter for the courts? And then, do you have thoughts about—because I have not seen this in other reporting—what media might do in terms of disclosing this, putting some sunlight on this, as part of a pushback against what seems clearly like an anti-regulatory, anti–public information effort?

KL: Well, to answer the first question, I do believe this matter is mainly up to the courts, even though, in terms of lawmaking, there can be laws that make up for what the courts are not doing. At the end of the story that I wrote about this, I mentioned a doctrine called the major questions doctrine. A lot of times what the states are allowed to do and what the states are allowed to regulate, what the federal agencies are allowed to regulate in states, is significantly limited. So a lot of times, these things become left up to courts in a major case, to basically make a decision on whether what the individual states are doing is lawful or not.

I believe that if the federal regulatory agencies oftentimes could have more power to pass more sweeping regulations on these things, and that federal regulatory agencies could have more power to fight these law cases if they are sued on a particular point, for example, like the Inflation Reduction Act…. I believe that federal agencies should be given more power to decide, instead of leaving it up to the courts, because the court doesn’t always hold the line.

They’re beginning to, but, for example, the California emissions disclosure case, it’s still very much up in the air, and it’s an entirely new regulation. No other states have implemented it yet; it’s just California, and there are no federal regulations on how companies could be more accountable for the emissions they’re putting out.

And in terms of how media could report on this, I would say, a lot of times, this type of story, it’s very, very helpful to talk to lawyers, because a lot of the cases that I have found, and also trying to figure out how low the scientific threshold is to basically prove that something is controversial: the lawyers know. They are a treasure trove of past cases, because that is their job. And a lot of times, they really enjoy talking to journalists, laying out their cases, and basically walking you through the steps and loopholes that are in our law, because that is their profession.

I would also say, I can understand that sometimes it’s hard to write about something that doesn’t have a main human character in it. Sometimes it’s hard to make it interesting, and it could be easy to overlook these stories. But personally, I think that even a seemingly boring document could contain very interesting information.

For example, the initial complaint that’s filed against the California Emissions Disclosure Law, if you look at the information closely, it might look like a boring document, but the more you read, you’re like, “Wow, this doesn’t make sense. Am I hallucinating this, or is this real?” So then you go to a lawyer, and verify that information. Is this a trend I’m spotting? Is this a problem? Do you think it’s a problem? And these kind of stories could end up being very interesting.

And I would say that, also, it’s important to look into lobbying data, and frame the story looking at who is responsible, and not only looking at what the problem is. I feel like stories could become much more powerful when you look at the how, the mechanism, the larger mechanism that’s at work, instead of only focusing on one specific event or one isolated event that’s happening. Sometimes the more people, the more professionals, you talk to, you start to see a network and a storyline, and how there’s a loophole, and the mechanism of how things work behind the scenes.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, that’s excellent. We’ll end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Katherine Li. She’s editorial fellow at the Lever, online at TheLever.com, where you can find this informative article, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” that we’ve been talking about. Thank you so much, Katherine Li, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KL: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.

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

Labour, the vampire kangaroo and a very ‘spooky’ dinner engagement

Ethan Shone — Thu, 30 May 2024 13:36:09 +0000

We reveal how an infamous asset manager and an intelligence-linked consultancy have been cosying up to Labour

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ethan Shone.

Hell in a Very Small Place

T.P. Wilkinson — Sat, 18 May 2024 18:15:42 +0000

Hell: the creditor of last resort

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

Between BlackRock and a hard place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Biden Is Very Old and Out of Touch, and Here’s Why You Should Vote for Him

Wajahat Ali — Fri, 03 May 2024 14:53:53 +0000

Joe Biden is far from perfect—and his handling of the genocide in Gaza is worth criticism. But he's better than Trump.

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

🎉Let’s wish a very happy birthday to #LukeWinslowKing!!🎉

Playing For Change — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:24:30 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

INTERVIEW: ‘I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was very dangerous.’

RFA Mandarin — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 14:28:33 +0000

Last year, Li Kai and his family were among 24,000 Chinese nationals who made a grueling trip through Central America to the Mexican-U.S. border as part of the "run" movement of ordinary people seeking political asylum in the United States.

A member of the Hui Muslim minority from the northern city of Tangshan, Li took his family and fled the country after a standoff with the authorities over changes to his mosque – part of the ruling Communist Party’s “sinicization of religion” policy.

In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Li, 44, described his family's experience of “walking the line,” as the risky journey is known in Chinese.

RFA: Can you describe the route you took through the jungle to get to the United States?

Li Kai: Our journey required us to navigate the renowned tropical rainforests of South America, which included a boat ride. We waited two days in Necoclí [Colombia], by the Caribbean Sea, for our transportation. Local people smugglers, or snakeheads, visited our lodging to discuss and plan our path, after which we paid them and prepared to board the boat.

RFA: How much did this part of the journey cost?

Li Kai: For the boat ride and the trek through the jungle, adults were charged US$1,100 each, my eldest child $600, and the youngest $500, totaling $3,300 for my family.

Migrants gather in Necocli, Colombia, a stopping point for travelers taking boats to Acandi, which leads to the Darien Gap, Oct. 13, 2022. (Fernando Vergara/AP)

RFA: What was your experience crossing the Caribbean Sea?

Li Kai: I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was very dangerous. The boat was small, made of fiberglass, which made it especially vulnerable to the unpredictable sea conditions and weather of the Caribbean. We had to travel at night without lights. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for putting my kids in such danger because I had gotten into trouble in China.

I heard that one of these boats had capsized and people had drowned. The whole boat juddered from stem to stern, and we were drenched in water. My children, who had no idea of the danger, fell asleep while I held them tight, one in each arm. After two hours, we reached a landing point at the edge of the rainforest.

RFA: Were there other Chinese people on the boat with you?

Li Kai: Yes, about 90% of the passengers were Chinese, along with a few South Americans. The boat could carry 50 to 60 people, and most of them were from China.

After we landed, we rested overnight, and at 6 a.m. the next day, we took the mountainous trail into the rainforest.

RFA: What was it like trekking through the rainforest?

Li Kai: It was extremely challenging. The terrain was treacherous with cliffs and steep slopes, easy to fall from. I led my kids through it -- they did fine, just followed along. We took brief rests, about 15 minutes each, and it took us around 10 hours to walk it.

Migrants walk across the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama on their journey to reach the United States, on May 9, 2023. (Ivan Valencia/AP)

I wasn't prepared. I was worried that it would be inconvenient to carry food on such a mountainous trail, so I only brought water. The water ran out before we were halfway through, leaving us all thirsty, including the kids.

The first half of the rainforest trail is in Colombia, and the second half is in Panama. When we got to the end of the 10-hour trek, the guide took everyone to an official Panamanian refugee camp.

RFA: How did you wind up at an official refugee camp in Panama after such a clandestine journey?

Li Kai: Due to the large number of people walking the line into the United States … it was likely a humanitarian gesture, to give us somewhere to stay.

RFA: After entering Guatemala, you were picked up by a people smuggler you had contacted earlier to transport you to Mexico, correct?

Li Kai: Yes, after arriving in Guatemala, the previously contacted snakehead was there to meet us. They planned to transport us to Mexico. Seventeen of us were crammed into an 8-seater Honda. Halfway along, they transferred us to a vehicle used for transporting livestock.

We were standing or squatting inside, a mix of Chinese, Blacks, South Americans, every kind of person you can think of. We crossed a river by road into Mexico.

RFA: In Tapachula [Mexico], you bought tickets to Mexico City, but then you were stopped by Mexican immigration en route.

Li Kai: On the bus were us four, along with a few other Chinese and South Americans. During a passport check, they found out we were heading to the U.S. and wouldn't let us go any further. People with children were pulled aside and taken to an immigration facility, while the singles were taken elsewhere. We stayed there for a day until the afternoon of the next day, when we registered and signed some form of promise or agreement, and then they released all four of us.

RFA: At that point, you didn't know where you were or what your next steps would be?

Li Kai: We had no choice but to go back to Tapachula, where we found a snakehead from Guangdong [China]. It became clear that the Chinese snakeheads might have been middlemen, responsible only for Chinese migrants. In Tapachula, there's a restaurant run by a woman who is also a snakehead. The cost for us, two adults and two children, totaled $12,600.

RFA: What was this money for?

Li Kai: It was to get us from Tapachula to Mexico City.

RFA: What happened when you got there?

Li Kai: The snakehead responsible for getting us to the border wall was also Chinese. He charged $700 per person, regardless of age. The next morning, two vehicles picked us up to take us to the next city, Reynosa, very close to the border. Upon entering a hideout, it was filled with Chinese people who had arrived before us.

After waiting a few hours, everyone got into vehicles headed for the Rio Grande. It took 4 hours to get to the riverbank, guarded by local armed gangs. We crossed the river in the latter half of the night and then walked through what seemed like dense grass or a small forest, with vegetation over a person's height.

Li Kai and his wife and children after their arrival in the United States are seen in an undated photo. Faces blurred to protect childrens’ privacy. (Li Kai)

RFA: What about your children?

Li Kai: They went separately; their mother took them because it was too dangerous for women and children to go through the dense vegetation, with the risk of snakes and poisonous spiders. They took a different route.

After emerging, there was another river to cross, leading to flatter ground. Our guide told us we had reached the United States, and then they left us.

RFA: Then you were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol on June 1, 2023?

Li Kai: Men were separated from women and children for checks — bags, clothes, everything except for mobile phones and chargers had to be given up.

Single individuals and families with children were transported in separate buses to a temporary immigration detention center, where men and women were segregated. The mothers stayed with their children, and the men were in another room. After two days, during which time they gave us some food, we were released.

RFA: But your journey wasn't over, was it?

Li Kai: We were taken to a church reception center. We wanted to go to New York, but I was unaware of the free bus service from Texas to New York until I arrived at a local church, which was filled with people from various countries all waiting for transportation. Later, I found out that Texas was sending illegal immigrants to New York by bus as a protest over illegal immigration.

RFA: What happened when you got to New York?

Li Kai: We were dropped off at the Roosevelt Hotel early in the morning. All in all, it was a pretty moving experience.

In China, the narrative about the United States is filled with conflict, evil, chaos and racial discrimination. But the reality was the complete opposite. I'm incredibly grateful for the kindness we were shown upon arrival; it was unimaginable after such a difficult and bitter journey.

RFA: What prompted you to leave China? There was a protest by local Muslims on April 24, 2023, about the mosque in your village. Can you tell us more about that?

Li Kai: Yes, the government was about to demolish it. That Monday, many people went to the mosque to seek advice from the imam. The authorities were ready for us, and there was some physical contact — it got quite chaotic. The crowd was dispersed within an hour, and I rushed back home in a hurry.

Migrants from China emerge from thick brush after being smuggled across the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico in Fronton, Texas, April 7, 2023. (Reuters)

RFA: What exactly happened to cause the conflict between the police and Muslims?

Li Kai: The police accused us of causing a disturbance. They claimed the decision to demolish the mosque and move to another location had been made in consultation with the imam.

The younger members of our community had been barred from entering the mosque, which had caused dissatisfaction, but hadn't led to an outburst until that point. But this time, led by a prominent Muslim from our group, we ended up in a scuffle with the police.

RFA: Were there any injuries during the incident?

Li Kai: I'm not sure.

RFA: Why did you decide to flee immediately afterward?

Li Kai: I was worried that the authorities would target me after the incident, and that there would even be repercussions for my kids, based on a similar thing that happened a few years ago. Children had been barred from entering mosques. Only over-18s were allowed in, so my kids weren’t allowed in either. So I took my wife and kids and left immediately, getting a friend to drive us to Shenzhen.

RFA: Did you have any specific plan when you decided to flee?

Li Kai: No, there was no plan. My main concern was the authorities would come after me because my children were registered as being of Muslim faith at primary school. I had long had a sense of impending crisis about our situation.

The mosque incident was the last straw. I left on a Monday night, and by the time the police visited my mother's home looking for me, I was already gone.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Radio Free Asia has been unable to confirm Li's account of his journey independently. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

Media research shows BBC is very far from ‘biased against Israel’

Greg Philo, Mike Berry — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:18:17 +0000

Academics analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found Palestinian perspectives were given far less time and legitimacy

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Greg Philo, Mike Berry.

‘It was very secret’: Uncovering wounds of forced labour in Uzbek cotton

Madina Gazieva — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 14:27:49 +0000

Two Uzbeks who were subjected to forced labour as children open up about the country’s dark cotton production past

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Madina Gazieva.

Everyone please wish a very happy birthday to #SaraBareilles! #marvingaye

Playing For Change — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 17:19:10 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

Interview: ‘This Is a Very Dangerous Time’

Norman Stockwell — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:51:26 +0000

An interview with Phyllis Bennis, peace activist and director of the New Internationalism Project.

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

Interview: ‘This Is a Very Dangerous Time’

Norman Stockwell — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:51:26 +0000

An interview with Phyllis Bennis, peace activist and director of the New Internationalism Project.

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

Attacks on journalists covering elections ‘a very scary trend’: UNESCO

Felipe De Carvalho — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 16:46:41 +0000

UNESCO data reveals that journalists have been attacked, and some even killed, while providing coverage throughout the electoral cycle. Recent years have seen some 759 attacks, and five deaths.

To find out more, UN News’s Felipe de Carvalho spoke to Guilherme Canela, Chief of the agency’s Section on Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists.

He asked Mr. Canela how shutting down the internet – as reporters experienced in embattled Gaza last Friday – can impact journalists.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Felipe De Carvalho.

Attacks on journalists covering elections ‘a very scary trend’: UNESCO

Felipe De Carvalho — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 16:46:41 +0000

With more than 80 countries set to hold elections next year, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is urging governments to ensure that journalists are protected throughout the entire period leading up to the vote.UNESCO data reveals that journalists have been attacked, and some even killed, while providing coverage throughout the electoral cycle. Recent years have seen some 759 attacks, and five deaths.To find out more, UN News’s Felipe de Carvalho spoke to Guilherme Canela, Chief of the agency’s Section on Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists. He asked Mr. Canela how shutting down the internet – as reporters experienced in embattled Gaza last Friday – can impact journalists.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Felipe De Carvalho.

"The Climate is Changing Very, Very Rapidly" | BBC Weather | 30 September 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 12:40:15 +0000

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

Watch a Very Polite Guy Try to Stop a Climate Protest at the US Open #tennis #usopen2023

VICE News — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 14:24:10 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

The Other Americans: Guatemala’s Progressive Left Did Very Well in Recent Elections

Jeff Abbott — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 03:06:24 +0000

The success of Arévalo, who previously served in congress, was unforeseen, as polling had suggested prior to election day that he was not even among the top five candidates.

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

Canadian wildfire smoke brings another wave of ‘very unhealthy’ air to the Midwest, East Coast

Joseph Winters — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:58:51 +0000

Smoke from Canadian wildfires continued to blur skylines throughout the American Midwest and East Coast on Thursday, with Detroit and Washington, D.C., logging the worst air quality among the world’s major cities. Parts of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania showed an air quality index, or AQI, above 200 — considered to be “very unhealthy” for members of the general public.

It’s not as bad as the East Coast “smokepocalypse” from earlier this month, when Canadian wildfires caused parts of the region to register AQI values as high as 486, nearly maxing out the Environmental Protection Agency’s 500-point air quality scale. But New York City, Chicago, and Minneapolis still clocked in among the world’s 10 worst major cities for air quality on Thursday, and more than 120 million people — a third of the U.S. population — were under air quality alerts. State and local agencies have recommended limiting outdoor activity and closing all doors and windows. In the New York City area, officials said they were making hundreds of thousands of N95 masks available at transit centers, fire stations, and in public parks.

“This smoke is insidious,” said Stuart Batterman, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan. He urged people to stay indoors in an environment where the air can be cleaned using a filter.

The smoke is coming from hundreds of wildfires burning all across Canada that the country’s emergency response teams have struggled to contain. Fueled by exceptionally warm and dry conditions, the blazes have consumed some 20 million acres of forest — and more than 250 fires continue to burn “out of control,” according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Among major cities, Montreal and Toronto had the world’s worst air quality on Sunday and Wednesday, respectively, and Montreal continues to suffer from hazardous smog even though the worst of the smoke has now moved south into the U.S.

Strong air currents have driven the smoke as far south as Knoxville, Tennessee, where the AQI remained above 100 on Thursday — considered “unhealthy for sensitive groups” like young children and the elderly, or people with asthma. To the north in Louisville, Kentucky, officials extended a “code red” alert for air quality, meaning everyone should try to limit their time outside. Smoke has also traveled as far east as Portugal, Spain, and France.

Wildfire smoke produces a range of concerning pollutants, some of which fall into a category called “particulate matter,” or PM. The smallest particles — known as PM 2.5 because they measure less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, about one-twentieth the width of a human hair — are particularly dangerous. They are so small that they can lodge themselves in people’s lungs, causing inflammation that’s been linked to an increased risk of dementia, as well as death from lung cancer and heart disease.

The EPA’s air quality index takes into account the amount of PM 2.5 in the air, as well as larger particles and four other major pollutants whose concentrations can be exacerbated by wildfire: ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide.

In the area around Ann Arbor, Michigan, Batterman said there’s been an uptick in hospitalizations related to this week’s wildfire smoke. He warned that the risks aren’t equally distributed, and that lower-income groups may lack the resources needed to protect themselves. “You need a little bit of money to buy and operate an air filter,” he said.

This wave of smoke is expected to dissipate from the U.S. Midwest and East Coast by the weekend, but it’s unlikely to be the last time wildfire smoke hits the regions. As climate change progresses, scientists say more parched, blistering conditions will set the stage for more wildfires and the smoky skies they produce.

“Smoke used to be seen as a California problem,” said Yifang Zhu, an environmental health expert at the University of California Los Angeles. But this month’s skyrocketing AQI values in the eastern half of the country are showing that climate change is affecting everybody. “We’re just expecting more and more wildfires and smoke impacts,” she said.

Already, the Minneapolis Pollution Control Agency says it’s setting new records for bad air quality. The agency has issued 23 air quality alerts so far this year, breaking the previous annual high of 21, set two years ago. “If you think there has been more air quality alerts than you remember — you are correct,” the agency tweeted. “We usually average 2-3 in a season.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Canadian wildfire smoke brings another wave of ‘very unhealthy’ air to the Midwest, East Coast on Jun 29, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Diluted Sovereignty: a Very Australian Example

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 04:44:21 +0000

Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, More

The post Diluted Sovereignty: a Very Australian Example appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:33:46 +0000

Then comes the next stage of Australia’s development. Imperial outpost, dominion, federation, a commonwealth of anxious creation. But through this, there is never a sense of being totally free, aware, cognisant of sovereignty. Eyes remain fastened on Britain. Just as the sovereignty of the First Nations peoples came to be destroyed internally, the concept of Australian sovereignty externally was never realised in any true sense. If it was not stuck in the bosom of the British Empire, then it was focused on the enormity of the United States, its calorific terrors and nuclear protections.

The testament to Australia’s infantile, and contingent sovereignty, is symbolised by the US Pine Gap facility, which is called, for reasons of domestic courtesy, a joint facility. In truth, Australian politicians can never walk onto its premises and have no say as to its running. The public, to this day, can only have guesses, some admittedly well educated, about what it actually does as an intelligence facility.

Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, whose views should never be taken at face value, insists that the facility ensures that “Australia and our Five-Eyes partners maintain an ‘intelligence advantage’” while being “truly joint in nature, integrating both Australian and US operations under shard command and control by Australian and US personnel – which I have had an opportunity to see firsthand.” Hardly.

Another example is the annual rotation of US Marines in the Northern Territory. To date, there have been twelve such rotations, carefully worded to give the impression that Australia lacks a US military garrison to the country’s north. In March, Marles claimed that such rotations served to “enhance the capabilities, interoperability, and readiness of the ADF and the United States Marine Corps and is a significant part of the United States Force Posture Initiatives, a hallmark of Australia’s Alliance with the US.”

To therefore have an Australian Prime Minister now talk about sovereign capabilities is irksome, even intellectually belittling. Under Anthony Albanese’s stewardship, and before him Scott Morrison’s, the trilateral security pact known as AUKUS has done more to militarise the Australian continent in favour of US defence interests than any other.

The logistical and practical implications should trouble the good citizens Down Under, and not just because Australia is fast becoming a forward base for US-led operations in the Pacific.

Last month, President Joe Biden revealed his desire to press the US Congress on a significant change: adding Australia as a “domestic source” within the meaning of the Defense Production Act, notably pertaining to Title III. The announcement came out in a joint statement from Biden and his Australian counterpart as part of a third-in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit. It also was something of a taster for the G7 Summit held in Hiroshima on May 20.

Title III of the DPA “provides various financial measures, such as loans, loan guarantees, purchases, and purchase commitments, to improve, expand, and maintain domestic production capabilities needed to support national defense and homeland security procurement requirements.” It makes no mention about the independence of foreign entities or states which might enable this to happen.

A May 20 joint statement from Biden and Albanese welcomed “the progress being made to provide Australia with a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability, and on developing advanced capabilities under the trilateral AUKUS partnership to deter aggression and sustain peace and stability across the Pacific.”

To add Australia as a domestic source “would streamline technological and industrial base collaboration, accelerate and strengthen AUKUS implementation, and build new opportunities for United States investment in the production and purchase of Australian critical minerals, critical technologies, and other strategic sectors.”

As a statement of naked, proprietary interest, this does rather well, not least because it will enable the US to access the Australian minerals market. One prized commodity is lithium, seen as essential to such green technology as electric cars. Given that Australia mines 53% of the world’s supply of lithium, most of which is sold to China to be refined, Washington will have a chance to lock out Beijing by encouraging refinement in Australia proper. With Australia designated as a source domestic to the US, this will be an easy affair.

Washington’s imperial heft over its growingly prized Australian real estate will also be felt in the context of space technology. Australia will become the site of a NASA ground station under the Artemis Accords. Much is made of allowing “the controlled transfer of sensitive US launch technology and data while protecting US technology consistent with US non-proliferation policy, the Missile Technology Control Regime and US export controls.” Congress, however, will have to approve, given the limits imposed on the Technology Safeguards Agreement.

Australia, as a recipient of such technology, will ever be able to assert anything amounting to a sovereign capability over it. As Paul Gregoire points out, the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations makes it clear that information shared with a foreign entity becomes US property and is subject to export restrictions, though the White House may permit it.

In addition to the announcement, there are also moves afoot to involve Japan more extensively in “force posture related activities” as part of the Australia-United States Force Posture Cooperation policy. That’s just what Australia needs: another reminder that its already watered down sovereignty can be diluted into oblivion.

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

‘We Are Not Taxing the Very Wealthy Enough’: Runaway Inequality About to Get Worse

Jake Johnson — Mon, 15 May 2023 16:06:14 +0000

The United States' astronomical levels of economic inequality are poised to become further entrenched in the coming years as what The New York Times described Sunday as "the greatest wealth transfer in history" gets underway, with the richest members of the Baby Boomer generation set to pass trillions of dollars in assets on to their descendants—often paying little or nothing in taxes.

"Most will leave behind thousands of dollars, a home, or not much at all. Others are leaving their heirs hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of dollars in various assets," the Times reported. "Of the $84 trillion projected to be passed down from older Americans to millennial and Gen X heirs through 2045, $16 trillion will be transferred within the next decade."

The newspaper added that thanks to the loophole-ridden U.S. tax system, "heirs increasingly don't need to wait for the passing of elders to directly benefit from family money, a result of the bursting popularity of 'giving while living'—including property purchases, repeated tax-free cash transfers of estate money, and more—providing millions a head start."

"The trillions of dollars going to heirs will largely reinforce inequality," the Times observed. "The wealthiest 10% of households will be giving and receiving a majority of the riches. Within that range, the top 1%—which holds about as much wealth as the bottom 90%, and is predominantly white—will dictate the broadest share of the money flow. The more diverse bottom 50% of households will account for only 8% of the transfers."

\u201c1/Months in the making, here's the final cut of my story on the long-awaited wealth transfer, no longer in the future tense:\nWe're closer to 2053 than 1992.\nElites are already disbursing to heirs while alive.\nThe masses likely need luck or a paradigm shift\nhttps://t.co/FDKNafpCyV\u201d
— talmon joseph smith (@talmon joseph smith) 1684087876

Don Moynihan, a professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, argued that the Times analysis further demonstrates that "we are not taxing the very wealthy enough."

The Times noted that individuals in the U.S. can pass nearly $13 million in assets to heirs without paying the federal estate tax, which only applies to around two of every 1,000 American estates.

"As a result, although high-net-worth and ultrahigh-net-worth individuals could inherit more than $30 trillion by 2045, their prospective taxes on estates and transfers is $4.2 trillion," the Times observed.

The explosion of wealth inequality in the U.S. over the past several decades has prompted growing calls for systemic reform but little substantive action from lawmakers. In 2017, congressional Republicans and then-President Donald Trump contributed to the inequality boom by ramming through tax legislation that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans.

Now in control of the U.S. House, Republicans are trying to make the Trump tax cuts for individuals permanent and eliminate the estate tax altogether—a move that would give the nation's wealthiest households another $2 trillion in tax breaks.

In April, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) led several of his colleagues in offering an alternative proposal: Legislation that would impose progressively higher taxes on estates worth between $3.5 million and $1 billion, as well as a 65% levy on estates worth more than $1 billion.

"At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, we need to make sure that people who inherit over $3.5 million pay their fair share of taxes," Sanders said last month. "We do not need to provide a huge handout to multi-millionaires and billionaires. It is unacceptable that working families across the country today are struggling to file their taxes on time and put food on the table, while the wealthiest among us profit off of enormous tax loopholes and giant tax breaks."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a co-sponsor of Sanders' legislation, tweeted Monday that "Americans overwhelmingly prefer raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy and huge corporations to making cuts to critical programs like healthcare, medical research, and infrastructure."

"Congressional Republicans need to get on board," the senator added.

\u201cAmericans overwhelmingly prefer raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy and huge corporations to making cuts to critical programs like health care, medical research, and infrastructure. Congressional Republicans need to get on board.\u201d
— Elizabeth Warren (@Elizabeth Warren) 1684159855

Morris Pearl, a former managing director at the asset management behemoth BlackRock and the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, stressed in an interview with the Times that structural changes to the U.S. tax code—not just a crackdown on wealthy tax cheats—are necessary to slow the rise of inequality.

"People are following the law just fine. I generally don't pay much taxes," said Pearl, whose group has warned that democracy "will not survive" unless the rich are taxed much more aggressively.

Stressing the ease with which rich families in U.S. are able to pass assets on to their heirs tax-free, Pearl told the Times that he currently holds stock that his wife's father, "who died a long time ago, bought in the 1970s," an investment that "has gone from a few thousand dollars to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"—unrealized capital gains that are not subject to taxation.

University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have estimated that $2.7 trillion of the $4.25 trillion in wealth held by U.S. billionaires is unrealized.

"I've never paid a penny of taxes on all that," Pearl said of his inherited equities, "and I may not ever, because I might not sell and then my kids are going to have millions of dollars in income that's never taxed in any way, shape, or form."

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

‘Very, Very Scary’: Intensifying Cyclone Mocha Takes Aim at World’s Largest Refugee Camp

Kenny Stancil — Fri, 12 May 2023 17:19:15 +0000

Officials in Bangladesh and Myanmar are preparing Friday to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people as a tropical storm turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis strengthens in the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Mocha is forecast to intensify further before making landfall on Sunday between western Myanmar and the Bangladeshi city of Cox's Bazar, home to the world's largest refugee camp. Roughly 1 million Rohingya people forced to flee Myanmar amid the country's ongoing genocide against them live in the highly exposed district.

"This is a very, very scary storm," tweeted environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, pointing to its severity and current path.

"The government of Bangladesh needs to develop an inclusive evacuation plan."

The evacuation of more than 500,000 people from the Bangladeshi coast "is expected to start Saturday with 576 cyclone shelters ready to provide refuge to those who are moved from their homes," The Associated Pressreported, citing government administrator Muhammad Shaheen Imran.

Bangladesh, a delta nation with more than 160 million residents, is already prone to extreme weather disasters, and that's increasingly the case as the warming Indian Ocean generates more intense and longer-lasting cyclones as well as heavier rainfall.

The impoverished Rohingya refugees living in Cox's Bazar are especially vulnerable to the incoming storm, and it's unclear how many, if any, of them are included in the Bangladeshi government's evacuation plans.

United Nations Refugee Agency spokesperson Olga Sarrado toldReuters that preparations are underway for a partial evacuation of the camp, if necessary. The World Health Organization is also setting up nearly three dozen mobile medical teams and 40 ambulances, along with emergency surgery and cholera kits for the camp.

\u201cCyclone Mocha has me very concerned. Everyone along the Bangladesh-Myanmar coast needs to be on alert. This is a near-worst case scenario for one of the most storm-surge flood vulnerable region in the world. I hate to say it but we\u2019re looking at a potential mass casualty event.\u201d
— Nahel Belgherze (@Nahel Belgherze) 1683834677

"Still reeling from a devastating fire in March that destroyed more than 2,600 shelters and critical infrastructure, over 850,000 refugees risk losing their homes and livelihoods," the International Rescue Committee (IRC) warned in a statement. "Strong wind, heavy rains, and subsequent flash floods and mudslides could destroy shelters, community centers, and health clinics, depriving thousands of essential services and humanitarian aid."

"In preparation, more than 3,000 Rohingya refugees have been trained to respond to flooding and mudslides," said the IRC, which is "scaling up its emergency response in Cox's Bazar." According to the organization: "Three mobile medical teams will be deployed to remote areas in the camps and communities to provide emergency medical treatment. Additionally, a mobile protection unit designed for emergency settings will offer protection services to vulnerable groups such as women, girls, the elderly, and those with disabilities."

IRC Bangladesh director Hasina Rahman lamented how "time and again, we have seen the devastating impact of extreme weather events in Cox’s Bazar. Since 2017, countless shelters, schools, health clinics, and safe spaces for survivors of gender-based violence have been decimated as a result of floods and mudslides, as well as preventable tragedies such as the fire in March this year."

"As a low-lying country with major cities in coastal areas, Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which makes annual weather events—such as cyclones—more intense and frequent," said Rahman. "The impacts—loss of life, destroyed crops, challenges to livelihoods, damage to homes and infrastructure—are often borne by the people and communities who have contributed least to the climate crisis: Bangladesh, for example, emits less than 1% of global CO2 emissions."

While a rapid and just clean energy transition and other far-reaching transformations are needed to mitigate the causes of global warming, developing nations like Bangladesh cannot "cope with continued weather shocks without support that addresses the effects of climate change, such as early warning systems, anticipatory action, improving infrastructure to protect against flooding, and investment into climate adaptation," Rahman noted.

"It is crucial to fortify shelters and critical infrastructure," Rahman continued. "This involves using durable construction materials to strengthen community facilities like child-friendly spaces, learning facilities, and mosques, which serve as safe points during emergencies."

"Additionally, the government of Bangladesh needs to develop an inclusive evacuation plan in collaboration with U.N. agencies, humanitarian organizations, and the refugee and host communities," she stressed. "The plan should prioritize access to emergency shelters, ensuring family unity, and the protection of vulnerable groups, including women, children, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities."

The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration (IOM) observed that "last year, the camps escaped devastation from the Bay of Bengal cyclone Sitrang, which killed 35 people, displaced over 20,000, and caused over $35 million in damages in other parts of the country."

Cyclone Mocha, the first to form in the bay this year, "strengthened Friday into the equivalent of a category 1 Atlantic hurricane and is moving north at 11 kilometers per hour (7 miles per hour)," CNNreported, citing the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. "The storm's winds could peak at 220 kph (137 mph)—equivalent to a category 4 Atlantic hurricane—just before making landfall on Sunday morning."

India's Meteorological Department on Friday projected that "a storm surge of up to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) was likely to inundate low-lying coastal areas in the path of the cyclone at the time of landfall," including Cox's Bazar, the outlet noted.

To assist refugees and local host communities as they brace for Cyclone Mocha, IOM said that it "is strengthening camp infrastructure, preparing for medical emergencies, and supporting volunteers in cyclone preparedness."

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also expressed "grave concerns" about the storm's potential impacts on "already vulnerable and displaced communities" in neighboring Myanmar, where a military junta rules.

"Of particular worry is the situation facing 232,100 people who are displaced across Rakhine. Many of the [internally displaced person] camps and sites in Rakhine are located in low-lying coastal areas susceptible to storm surge," said OCHA. "The suffering of more than a million displaced people and other communities in the northwest is also expected to worsen over the coming days as the ex-cyclone moves inland bringing heavy rain. Displaced people in the northwest are already living in precarious conditions in camps, displacement sites, or in forests often without proper shelter."

In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis inundated Myanmar, killing more than 138,000 people, uprooting 800,000, and affecting 2.4 million.

"Extreme weather hazards will occur more frequently due to climate change in the years ahead. The linkages between climate change, migration, and displacement are increasingly pressing worldwide," IOM pointed out. "To avert, mitigate, and address displacement linked to climate disasters and strengthen people's resilience," the U.N. agency urged policymakers around the world "to implement sustainable climate adaptation, preparedness, and disaster risk reduction measures."

Despite knowing that extracting and burning more coal, oil, and gas will exacerbate the deadly effects of the climate emergency, profit-hungry fossil fuel executives are still planning to expand drilling with the continued support of many governments.

While COP27 delegates agreed to establish a loss and damage fund—after failing to commit to phasing out the fossil fuels that are causing so much harm—previous efforts to ramp up climate aid from the Global North to the Global South have fallen far short of what's needed due to the stinginess of wealthy countries, especially the United States.

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

The GOP Has a Very Anti-American Agenda

Steven Harper — Fri, 12 May 2023 15:13:08 +0000

If you vote for a Republican, you’re selecting someone who—once elected—is unlikely to support your views on the issues that matter to you most. Instead, here’s what you’re choosing:

Guns

The vast majority of Americans favor simple and effective gun control measures. They want:

universal background checks and “red flag” laws that would alert law enforcement to gun owners with serious mental health issues;
a national database for gun ownership;
laws requiring gun owners to store their weapons in a safe storage unit; and
the prohibition of semi-automatic rifles—weapons of war that killers have used in the seven deadliest mass shootings of the last decade.

But elected Republicans oppose all of those measures.

Attacks on Women’s Rights

The vast majority of Americans want to preserve a woman’s right to control her own body.

But elected Republicans unite to enact legislation that outlaws abortion altogether—even for rape, incest, or the health of the mother—or that moves the period of any permissible abortion ever closer to the date of conception and before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.

Stated simply, if you vote for a Republican, you’re probably voting against your personal preferences for the nation.

The Debt Ceiling

Americans want a functional government that doesn’t face a financial crisis every time Republicans decide to hold the nation hostage to their unpopular demands. When Donald Trump was president, neither party in Congress created a debt-limit crisis.

But with President Joe Biden in the White House, elected Republicans have:

abandoned all pretense of “fiscal responsibility”—a perennial GOP rhetorical talking point;
threatened to crash the U.S. economy into recession or worse, create chaos in global markets, increase the nation’s borrowing costs that will increase future federal deficits, and jeopardize America’s international financial credibility; and
united in opposing an increase in the nation’s debt ceiling—despite Congress’ bipartisan authorization of the expenditures that created the debt in the first place and the U.S. Constitution’s command that the “public debt of the United States, authorized by law, shall not be questioned.”

Cult of Trump

Most Americans want honest, courageous, and hard-working leaders with personal integrity.

But elected Republicans refuse to condemn their leading candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, notwithstanding:

his adjudicated liability for sexual abuse and defamation;
his indictment on charges that he paid off a porn star in his effort to win the presidency in 2016;
criminal investigations involving his unlawful retention of highly classified documents and his obstruction of government efforts to retrieve those materials; and
state and federal criminal investigations surrounding his attempt to subvert the 2020 election and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. Although videos of the deadly assault on law enforcement personnel on January 6 are irrefutable, Trump has pledged to pardon the insurrectionists who have been imprisoned for serious felonies.

Threats to Democracy

Most Americans want the United States to remain a democracy. Our forebears fought and died in wars to secure and defend it. In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, congressional Republicans blamed Trump for the January 6 riot. They described it as a heinous and unprecedented attack on the U.S. government.

But now elected Republicans pretend that it never happened, calling the insurrectionists “ tourists” engaged in “peaceful protest.”

Restricting Voting Rights

Most Americans want to make voting easier. After all, it is the bedrock of any democracy.

But elected Republicans pursue voter suppression with a vengeance—literally. Committed to the opposite of democracy, they enact legislation that makes casting a ballot more difficult for those who are likely to vote against them.

Skewed Government Priorities

Most Americans support higher taxes on the rich.

But elected Republicans oppose taxes on the wealthiest Americans, while urging reductions in government spending that target, among other vulnerable groups, veterans, Social Security recipients, Medicare beneficiaries, poor mothers, and infants.

Climate Change

Most Americans want the government to take seriously the existential threat of climate change.

But elected Republicans ignore or ridicule it, while promoting activities that contribute to the destruction of the planet.

Culture Wars

Most Americans despise the polarization that has infected the body politic.

But elected Republicans use culture wars—including the rejection of science—to promote illiteracy and ignorance across a range of issues, deepening the schisms among us. In addition to the topics listed above, here are two more examples:

Your Vote Should Matter

Stated simply, if you vote for a Republican, you’re probably voting against your personal preferences for the nation.

You’re voting against democracy, which is supposed to honor voters’ desires.

You’re voting for those who claim to care what you think, but use such rhetoric to seduce you.

You’re voting for people whose sole agenda is the acquisition and retention of power. Other than Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) desire to retain his slim, four-person GOP majority in the House of Representatives, there’s no reason for him or any true party leader to tolerate the continuing presence of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was a disgrace long before his recent federal indictment for fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and false statements.

Eventually, the actions of elected Republicans betray them—and most of their supporters. But until it’s personal and GOP voters actually feel the impact, they won’t care.

Because in America today, that’s what it means to be a Republican voter.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Steven Harper.

The Very Specific Ways the GOP Budget Will Deeply Harm Hundreds of Millions of Americans

Hannah Story Brown — Wed, 10 May 2023 14:26:25 +0000

There are a lot of things you could say about the GOP’s proposed plan to reduce the deficit. But if we want to be more expansive than just calling it “batshit crazy” and washing our hands of the whole clown show, as we think Biden can and should,then we could point out that the GOP plan is an expression of profound hostility to the idea of a federal government that serves anyone besides war profiteers.

Their proposal illustrates the party’s commitment to a government that fails Americans in many important ways, because the party’s only strategy to preserve power is to harness people’s anger and fear. How better to make people fear that things will be taken away from them than by actually taking things away, and then diverting the blame?

The Republican-proposed cuts to discretionary spending would harm millions of people, invariably causing losses of health, home, life, and opportunity. I’ll dig into the specifics below. A helpful visual representation of the proposed cuts from The New York Times estimates that the GOP plan would cut discretionary spending across the board by an average of 18 percent. But the GOP is also claiming that they would spare defense, veterans’ health and border security from those cuts. If you exclude military spending from cuts, then all the other federal departments and agencies would have their budgets cut by 51 percent. At that point, you might as well throw in the towel, because public services are as good as dead.

The Republican-proposed cuts to discretionary spending would harm millions of people, invariably causing losses of health, home, life, and opportunity.

Forget about avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Forget about public infrastructure projects. Forget about federal student aid. Forget about clean air and clean water and cleaning up contaminated lands. Forget about space exploration. Forget about loans for farmers. Forget about food and workplace safety inspections. Forget about growing union power. Forget about cracking down on corporations when they jack up prices or steal wages or spill a bunch of toxic chemicals in your town or oil in the sea. The U.S. government would pretty much solely be an insurance company with a massive army, as no doubt the founding fathers intended. Right?

Now, there’s no good reason for Biden to concede to these agents of chaos masquerading as serious people. Several legal scholars have spent considerable amounts of time charting the least-harmful path out of this thicket. Most recently, eminent legal scholar Laurence Tribe joined the chorus calling for the U.S. to ignore the debt ceiling and continue to pay its bills. But while the GOP’s plan deserves no serious consideration, it is worth talking about how budget cuts harm federal departments and agencies, and by extension, the public.

There’s no good reason for Biden to concede to these agents of chaos masquerading as serious people.

For so many people, the executive branch is basically a black box: its internal mechanisms mysterious, its value unclear. Earlier this spring, 21 federal departments wrote letters laying out explicitly what 22 percent budget cuts would do to their work. (22 percent is the White House Office of Management and Budget’s estimate of the first year of budget cuts under the GOP plans, with the cuts growing deeper each year.) Among other things, these letters make the case for the value of federal agencies to the American people in franker terms than we usually get from the spokespeople of the administrative state.

So, according to the agencies themselves…

The Harms of the GOP Budget Cuts Include:

The firing of 1,800 food inspectors who conduct mandatory food inspections would cause a shortage of meat, poultry, and eggs available for consumers, and estimated lost production volumes of more than 11.5 billion pounds of meat, 11.1 billion additional pounds of poultry, and over 590 million pounds of eggs, equivalent to a loss of over $89 billion for the industry. It would also cause over $2.2 billion in lost wages for furloughed industry employees.

Funding cuts would have “dramatic impacts” on western states impacted by drought, including by undermining ongoing programs that support 489 dams and 338 reservoirs delivering water to more than 31 million people and 1 of every 5 western farmers. In just one example, spending cuts would increase the likelihood that the water levels in Lake Mead decline to the point that water allocations from the reservoir are no longer possible, and people could lose power from inadequate amounts of water passing over dams. About 25 million people rely on the water from Lake Mead.

Funding cuts at Health and Human Services would cause, among many other impacts, over a million households to be unable to afford to heat their homes; a million elderly adults to no longer receive meals they depend on; and hundreds of thousands of children to lose critical early childhood care that’s often necessary for their parents to be able to work.

Reducing funding for fighting wildfires on public lands by nearly 40 percent across the fire programs, and cutting as many as 1,754 of the 4,468 full-time firefighting positions at Interior, would have devastating ecosystem impact and increase the danger to people in high fire-risk areas. An additional 2,200-2,700 wildland firefighters with the Forest Service would also be furloughed.

Funding cuts would cut off over one million women, infants, and children from a supplemental nutrition program; non-breastfeeding postpartum women, unhoused and migrant individuals, and children would be the first to lose benefits.

Funding cuts would allow more species to go extinct, as the Fish and Wildlife Service’s implementation of the Endangered Species Act is already significantly underfunded and “does not keep pace with current demand” for species to receive critical protections to avoid extinction.

About $156 million in back wages for 135,000 private sector workers would not be recovered because the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division would have to reduce its compliance actions, investigations, and targeted inspections.

Alaskan Natives whose lands are contaminated by arsenic, asbestos, lead, mercury, pesticides, and various petroleum products would lose a significant new program intended to clean up this contamination.

Funding cuts to a rental assistance program that serves approximately 1.3 million families would represent a “historically unprecedented loss of existing affordable housing, a breach of federal contracts, and a repudiation of decades of long-term bipartisan federal investment.” Cuts would likely lead to tens of thousands of evictions.

Funding cuts to the Education Department would impact an estimated 25 million children by cutting more than 60,000 teachers and aids from classrooms serving low income students. It would also decrease aid to all 6.6 million Pell Grant recipients and eliminate Pell Grants for 85,000 students, eliminate FWS financial support for approximately 11,000 students, and eliminate Work-Study financial support for approximately 85,000 students, among other impacts.

And all of this doesn’t even include the damage that the GOP is intending to do to the U.S.’s only piece of climate legislation.

Among the many things you could say about the GOP’s proposed plan to reduce the deficit, then, you could say that it is senselessly cruel, wildly irresponsible, and embarrassingly uninformed.

All of this doesn’t even include the damage that the GOP is intending to do to the U.S.’s only piece of climate legislation.

You could say that it targets the most vulnerable Americans, whether that means vulnerability to wildfires and drought and rising seas, or vulnerability to food and housing insecurity, or to environmental hazards or pollutants, or systemic barriers to education and workplace access, or to wage theft or unsafe working conditions.

You could even say that any child in our underfunded public school system could do better, fairer, and more discerning math. And unlike our political media, children would probably be more likely to cover this calamity as a serious story with real-world impact, rather than assessing it primarily within the context of Biden’s re-election campaign, Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to maintain Speaker, and the stock market.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Hannah Story Brown.

War for Profit: A Very Short History

Brad Wolf — Mon, 08 May 2023 16:09:58 +0000

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

“The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oaths swearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The very bad math behind the Colorado River crisis

Jake Bittle — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:45:00 +0000

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

California and Arizona are currently fighting each other over water from the Colorado River. But this isn’t new – it’s actually been going on for over 100 years. At one point, the states literally went to war about it. The problem comes down to some really bad math from 1922.

To some extent, the crisis can be blamed on climate change. The West is in the middle of a once-in-a-millennium drought. As temperatures rise, the snow pack that feeds the river has gotten much thinner and the river’s main reservoirs have all but dried up.

But that’s only part of the story: The United States has also been overusing the Colorado for more than a century thanks to a byzantine set of flawed laws and lawsuits known as “the law of the river.” This legal tangle not only has been over-allocating the river, it also has been driving conflict in the region, especially between the two biggest users, California and Arizona, both trying to secure as much water as they can. And now, as a massive drought grips the region, the law of the river has reached a breaking point.

Jake Bittle

The Colorado River begins in the Rocky Mountains and winds its way southwest through the U.S., twisting through the Grand Canyon and entering the Pacific at Baja California. In the late 19th century, as white settlers arrived in the West, they started diverting water from the mighty river to irrigate their crops, funneling it through dirt canals. For a little while, this worked really well. The canals made an industrial farming mecca out of desert that early colonial settlers viewed as “worthless.”

Even back then, the biggest water users were Arizona and California, which took so much water that they started to drain the river farther upstream, literally drying it out. According to American legal precedent, whoever uses a body of water first usually has the strongest rights to it. But other states soon cried foul: California was growing much faster than they were, and they believed it wasn’t fair that the Golden State should suck up all the water before they got a chance to develop.

In 1922, the states came to a solution — kind of. At the suggestion of a newly appointed cabinet secretary named Herbert Hoover, the states agreed to split the river into two sections, drawing an arbitrary line halfway along its length at a spot called Lee Ferry. The states on the “upper” part of the river — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — agreed to send the states on the “lower” end of the river — Arizona, California, and Nevada — what they thought was half the river’s overall flow, 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year. (An acre-foot is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water, about enough to supply two homes for a year.)

This agreement was supposed to prevent any one state from drying up the river before the other states could use it. The Upper Basin states got half and the Lower Basin states got half. Simple.

But there were some serious flaws to this plan.

First, the law of the river overestimated how much water flowed through the river in the first place. The states’ numbers were based on primitive data from stream gauges placed at arbitrary points on the waterway, and they took samples during an unusually wet decade, leading to a very optimistic estimate of the river’s size. The river would only average about 14 million acre-feet annually, but the agreement handed out 15 million to the seven states!

While the states weren’t able to immediately use all this water, it set in motion the underlying problem today: The states have the legal right to use more water than actually exists in the river.

And you’ll notice that the Colorado River doesn’t end in the U.S. – It ends in Mexico. Initially, the Law of the River just straight up ignored that fact. Decades later, Mexico was squeezed into the agreement and promised 1.5 million acre-feet, further straining the already over-allocated river.

On top of all of this, Indigenous tribes that had depended on the river for centuries were now forced to compete with states for their share of water, leading to these drawn-out lawsuits that took decades to resolve.

Jessie Blaeser, Joseph Lee, & Anna V. Smith

But in the short-term, Arizona and California struck it rich – they were promised the largest share of Colorado River water and should have been primed for growth. For Arizona, though, there was a catch: The state couldn’t put their water to use!

The state’s biggest population centers in Phoenix and Tucson were hundreds of miles away from the river itself, and it would take a 300-mile canal to bring the water across the desert — something the state couldn’t afford to build on its own. Larger and wealthier California was able to build all the canals and pumps it needed to divert river water to farms and cities. This allowed it to gulp up both its share and the extra Lower Basin water that Arizona couldn’t access. California’s powerful congressional delegation lobbied to stop Congress from approving Arizona’s canal project, as the state wanted to keep the Colorado River to itself.

Arizona was furious. And so, in 1934, Arizona and California went to war — literally. Arizona tried to block California from building new dams to take more water from the river, using “military” force when necessary.

Arizona sent troops from its national guard to stop California from building the Parker Dam. It delayed construction, but not for very long because the boat got tangled up in some electrical wire and had to be rescued.

For the next 30 years, Arizona and California fought about whether Arizona should be able to build that canal. They also sued each other before the Supreme Court no fewer than 10 times, including one 1963 case that set the record for the longest oral arguments in the history of the modern court, taking 16 hours over four days and involving 106 witnesses.

That 1963 case also made some pretty big assumptions: Even though the states now knew that the initial estimates were too high, the court-appointed expert said he was “morally certain that neither in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime, nor the lifetime of your children and great-grandchildren will there be an inadequate supply of water” from the river for California’s cities.

A few years after that court case, in 1968, Arizona finally struck a fateful bargain to ensure it could claim its share of the river. California gave up its anti-canal campaign and the federal government agreed to pay for the construction of the 300-mile project that would bring Colorado River water across the desert to Phoenix. This move helped save Arizona’s cotton farming industry and enabled Phoenix to eventually grow into the fifth-largest city in the country. It seemed like a success — Arizona was flourishing!

But in exchange for the canal, the state made a fateful concession: If the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead were to run low, Arizona, and not California, would be the first state to make cuts. It was a decision the state’s leaders would come to regret.

In the early 2000s, as a massive drought gripped the Southwest, water levels in the river’s two key reservoirs dropped. Now that both Arizona and California were fully using their shares of the river, combined with the other states’ use, there suddenly wasn’t enough melting snow to fill the reservoirs back up. A shrinking Colorado River couldn’t keep up with a century of rising demand.

Today, more than 20 years into the drought, Arizona has had to bear the biggest burden. Thanks to its earlier compromise decades earlier, the state had “junior water rights,” meaning it took the first cuts as part of the drought plan. In 2021, those cuts officially went into effect, drying out cotton and alfalfa fields across the central part of the state until much of the landscape turned brown. Still, those cuts haven’t been enough.

This century, the river is only averaging around 12.4 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin states technically have the rights to 7.5 million acre-feet, but they only use about half of that. In the Lower Basin, meanwhile, Arizona and California are gobbling up around 3 and 4 million acre-feet respectively. In total, this overdraft has caused reservoir levels to fall. It’s going to take a lot more than a few rainy seasons to fix this problem.

So, for the first time since the law of the river was written, the federal government has had to step in, ordering the states to reduce total water usage on the river, this time by nearly a third. That’s a jaw-dropping demand!

These new cuts will extend to Arizona, California, and beyond, drying up thousands more acres of farmland, not to mention cities around Phoenix and Los Angeles that rely on the Colorado River. These new restrictions will also put increased pressure on the many tribes that have used the Colorado River for centuries: tribes that have water rights will be pressured to sell or lease them to other water users, and tribes without recognized water rights will face increased opposition as they try to secure their share.

Mark Armao

And, Arizona and California are still fighting over who should bear the biggest burden of these new cuts. California has insisted that the law of the river requires Arizona to shoulder the pain, and from a legal standpoint they may be right. But Arizona says further cuts would be disastrous for the state’s economy, and the other five river states are taking its side.

Either way, the painful cuts have to come from somewhere, because the law of the river was built on math that doesn’t add up.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The very bad math behind the Colorado River crisis on Apr 26, 2023.

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

Let’s wish a very happy birthday to one of the #PFCBand magical voices: #ClarenceBekker!

Playing For Change — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:45:29 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

We Are Dancing on the Very Edge of Hell

Robert C. Koehler — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 11:35:01 +0000

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

“An emerging compromise on annual defense policy legislation will endorse a $45 billion increase to President Joe Biden’s defense spending plans,” Politico reports. “. . . The deal would set the budget topline of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act at $847 billion for national defense.”

You know, more than the world’s next nine defense budgets combined. We have more than 750 military bases around the world. We’re sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine to keep the war going, in the wake of our two decades of war in the Middle East to rid the world of terrorism . . . excuse me, evil. As a result, the planet is bleeding to death. Not to worry, though. We still have nukes.

How safe and secure can we get?

And here’s Northrop Grumman, presenting to the world the B-21 Raider, an updated nuclear bomber, a.k.a., the future of Armageddon. No need to worry. When Armageddon is ready to happen, it will happen smoothly, at the bargain cost of $750 million per aircraft.

Northrop Grumman itself puts it this way: “When it comes to delivering America’s resolve, the B-21 Raider will be standing by, silent and ready. We are providing America’s warfighters with an advanced aircraft offering a combination of range, payload, and survivability. The B-21 Raider will be capable of penetrating the toughest defenses to deliver precision strikes anywhere in the world. The B-21 is the future of deterrence.”

We’re dancing on the edge of hell.

Is it possible for humanity to evolve beyond this? Prior to Armageddon? Advocating that humanity’s collective consciousness must transcend militarism and an us-vs.-them attitude toward the planet means lying on a bed of nails. Consider the weird and mysterious act of violence that took place recently in Moore County, North Carolina, which may — or may not — have been triggered by a drag show.

Somebody opened gunfire at two electric substations in the central North Carolina county over the weekend, causing multi-million-dollar damage to the power grid and leaving some 40,000 households without power for half a week. While the perpetrator and motive remain a mystery to law enforcement officials, one person wrote on Facebook: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” She then posted a photo of the Sunrise Theater, in downtown Southern Pines, along with the words “God will not be mocked.”

The theater had a drag show scheduled that night, which, prior to the power grid attack, had been vehemently opposed by many right-wingers.

The Facebook claim that the power outage was meant to stop the drag show may have been totally bogus (and also a failure, by the way, with spectators lighting the show with their cell phones so it could go on). Maybe we’ll never know for sure. But even if the poster, furious about the scheduled show, had simply co-opted a motive for the criminal act, essentially ascribing it to God, it’s still indicative that there’s a lot of poison in the air. If you hate something, don’t try to understand it. Go to war. There was, after all, a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs several weeks ago — indeed, mass shootings directed at multiple targets are, good God, commonplace.

I fear that war remains the logical terminus of collective human consciousness. Indeed, war is sacred, or so surmises Kelly Denton-Borhaug, citing as an example a speech delivered by George W. Bush on Easter weekend in 2008. She noted that W “milked” the Easter story to glorify the hell the country was in the process of wreaking in Iraq and Afghanistan, throwing a bit of Gospel into his war on evil: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

She writes: “The abusive exploitation of religion to bless violence covered the reality of war’s hideous destructiveness with a sacred sheen.”

But perhaps even worse than war’s pseudo-sacredness is its normalcy, a la that never-questioned trillion-dollar budget that Congress tosses at the Pentagon every year without fail. And the total pushes up, up, up every year, bequeathing us, for instance, that Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, ready to deliver Armageddon on command.

Short of Armageddon, we simply have armed hate-spewers, ready and ever so willing to kill an enemy at the grocery store or a school classroom or a nightclub.

Understand, love, heal . . . these are not simple words. Will we ever learn what they mean? Will we ever give them a budget?

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

The Internet Needs a Country of Its Very Own

Thomas Knapp — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 05:42:30 +0000

On March 23, Axios reports, Utah governor Spencer Cox signed two bills “aimed at limiting when and where anyone younger than 18 years old can interact online, and to stop companies from luring minors to certain websites.” The laws require social media companies to “instate a curfew for minors in the state, barring them from More

The post The Internet Needs a Country of Its Very Own appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Entire Towns Evacuated as Climate-Fueled Wildfires Start ‘Very Early’ in Spain

Kenny Stancil — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 20:48:39 +0000

A large wildfire raging in Spain's eastern Valencia region forced more than 1,500 people to flee their homes on Friday, providing further evidence of life-threatening consequences of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis and bolstering the case for meaningful mitigation efforts.

Since it broke out in the municipality of Villanueva de Viver on Thursday, Spain's first major wildfire of the year has destroyed more than 7,400 acres of forest, prompting evacuation orders in eight communities across the Castellón province.

As residents sought refuge in shelters run by the Red Cross and other charities, more than 500 firefighters—supported by 18 planes and helicopters—were still attempting to contain the blaze on Friday afternoon.

"While firefighters believed they were managing to control the spread of the flames, strong winds and 'practically summertime temperatures' could reactivate it," Reuters reported, citing a local official.

"Summer is getting longer, it is arriving earlier, and the availability of water and humidity in the soil is unfortunately being reduced, making us much more vulnerable."

Ximo Puig, president of the Valencia region, told reporters the fire came "very early in the spring" and was "very voracious from the beginning."

It's not yet clear what sparked the blaze, but after months of arid conditions in the region, there's no shortage of dry fuel that can act as kindling. Climate scientists have long warned that as unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution causes temperatures to rise and droughts to worsen, wildfire seasons will grow longer and the number and severity of conflagrations will increase.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said, "These fires we're seeing, especially this early in the year, are once again proof of the climate emergency that humanity is living through, which particularly affects and ravages countries such as ours."

None
— (@)

According to Reuters, "An unusually dry winter across parts of the south of the European continent has reduced moisture in the soil and raised fears of a repeat of 2022."

Last year, wildfires destroyed nearly two million acres of land throughout Europe—more than double the annual average over the past 16 years, according to the European Commission. In Spain alone, 493 blazes wiped out more than 750,000 acres.

People in Spain, already suffering from a long-term drought marked by three years of below-average rainfall, are bracing for drier and hotter weather than usual this spring along the country's northeastern Mediterranean coast.

Experts have already started sounding the alarm about the likelihood of another catastrophic year for wildfires, especially if the frequency, duration, and intensity of heatwaves are comparable to last year, which saw records toppled.

"There is every reason to fear that this year too there will be numerous and widespread events."

"Out-of-season fires" are becoming increasingly common, Spanish Environment Minister Teresa Ribera told reporters this week. "Summer is getting longer, it is arriving earlier, and the availability of water and humidity in the soil is unfortunately being reduced, making us much more vulnerable."

Spain is far from alone. "A European Commission report this month observed a lack of rain and warmer-than-normal temperatures during the winter, raising drought warnings for southern Spain, France, Ireland, Britain, northern Italy, Greece, and parts of eastern Europe," Reuters reported. The commission "warned that low levels of water could affect strategic sectors including agriculture, hydropower, and energy production."

Lorenzo Ciccarese from the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research told the outlet that "there is every reason to fear that this year too there will be numerous and widespread events."

The United Nations warned last year that as a result of planet-heating emissions and land-use change, wildfires are projected to increase 30% by 2050 and 50% by the end of the century.

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment report this week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is possible, "but it will take a quantum leap in climate action," including a prohibition on greenlighting and financing new coal, oil, and gas projects as well as a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.

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

Dominion, Tucker Carlson, and the Very Big and More Dangerous Lie

Jeffrey C. Isaac — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:55:25 +0000

The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has gotten a great deal of attention, and rightly so, for it raises fundamental questions about democracy in the U.S. and the ways that it is profoundly corrupted and seriously endangered by an alliance of right-wing media and the Republican Party. And yet beneath the lying exposed in the case are the more dangerous lies at the heart of MAGA ideology. And whether or not the notorious liars at Fox News Corp. believed anything they were saying about Dominion, there is no doubt that the deeper lies remain articles of faith for Fox and the Republican party.

The facts of the case are pretty straightforward.

Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a privately owned company that produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including electronic voting machines. Its technology has been used extensively by many U.S. states. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Trump and many of his supporters promoted the claim—the lie—that Dominion was part of a wide conspiracy to "rig" the election for Biden, exaggerating Biden votes and hiding Trump votes. This claim was persistently and deliberately promoted and amplified by Fox News anchors, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Dominion is suing Fox News Corp. for defamation and damages related to its promotion of false conspiracy theories that have serious harmed the reputation and the revenues of the company.

As information about witness testimony, along with redacted and unredacted documents, has been made public, it seems clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Dominion's core allegation is true: Fox News officials and news anchors actively promoted lies about a Dominion-based conspiracy while knowing that there was no evidence to support these lies, and that its principal sources were Trump fanatics, like Sydney Powell, who lacked any credibility whatsoever. Most notoriously, both Rupert Murdoch and Carlson repeatedly made disparaging remarks about Trump, with Carlson also saying that the Dominion "software shit is absurd."

The revelations, which continue, reveal a shocking cynicism on the part of Murdoch, the Fox corporation leadership, and the principal Fox anchors, especially Carlson, about the importance of the corporate bottom line and about the gullibility of Fox viewers. As long as the viewers are willing to tune in, Fox is willing to supply them with the conspiracy theories they demand, crazy ideas they have been primed to believe by Fox itself—"supply and demand" in action.

It is too simplistic, and too politically comforting, to imagine that we are dealing with a simple question of some manipulative people deliberately telling lies to gullible others.

This cynicism of Fox News Corp. about "news" is incredibly disturbing. It reflects horribly on Fox. It also severely undermines the veracity of the false and crazy things that many millions of Trump supporters believe about the election and about the reliability of those "news" anchors who they have so credulously trusted.

If the accurate news about the lying of "Fox News" is widely publicized, it should play some role in delegitimizing the craziest claims made about "election fraud" in 2020. That would be a good thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Trump supporters are likely to learn little about this, and to disbelieve what they hear. For they have already been corrupted by years of exposure to Fox and more recently to its even farther-right competitors, Newsmax and One America News (OAN), and they are firmly ensconced in the reactionary media bubble.

Regardless, a focus on the intentional lying of Carlson et al, while important, is politically misleading, in the same way that the House January 6 Committee's focus on whether Trump knew he was telling lies was misleading.

The reason: it is too simplistic, and too politically comforting, to imagine that we are dealing with a simple question of some manipulative people deliberately telling lies to gullible others. Because the MAGA ideology runs much deeper than the most outlandish election machine conspiracy theories exposed by the Dominion case, for its consumers but even for its producers. And for those in the grip of MAGA ideology, all empirical evidence is filtered through a distorted frame.

Carlson et al might have privately believed in early January of 2021 that Trump, Powell, Giuliani and their circle were crazy, and that their desperate lying was a problem for Fox, for the Republican Party, and perhaps even for their twisted view of "law and order."

But "The Big Lie" has never been reducible to the most hysterical and desperate claims being made by Trump and his cronies in the aftermath of the November 2020 election.

Behind those hysterical and arguably insane claims was a deeper claim that has always been central to The Big Lie, a claim not about ballot box tampering on Election Day but about a Democratic Party intent on mobilizing millions of people who either do not have the right to vote (dangerous "illegals") or whose right to vote is suspect, because of their lack of "proper" identification, or their (alleged) criminal history, or simply because they require purportedly "special advantages" like mail-in balloting and drop boxes. (Or, let's face it, because they are simply the "wrong kinds" of people, "bad hombres" who hate "American Greatness".)

In short, The Big Lie draws on a range of long-standing Republican tropes about Democratic "voting fraud" and the need for more restrictive voting laws, tropes that have been amplified by Trump and Fox since long before 2016.

Insane conspiracy theories and lies about Dominion machines and foreign vote harvesting (and Jewish space lasers?), and the willingness of people like Carlson and Murdoch and Trump and Giuliani to lie about such craziness, and the willingness of their followers to believe these lies—this lying is one very disturbing thing.

But whatever Carlson and Murdoch and Trump himself actually believed about ballot box fraud on election day, nothing revealed in the Dominion case suggests that any of them doubted the broader and deeper lie—that the Democratic Party is a nefarious group of radicals long committed to violating "election integrity" and to "flooding the polls" with people who do not deserve to be there, to the detriment of those "real Americans" whose popular sovereignty alone matters.

This Big Lie has been and continues to be a staple of Republican rhetoric independent of Trump and his fate, a fate which, to any rational observer, was not worth betting on in early January, 2021—though Kevin McCarthy and his followers managed to regain their Trumpist footing in record time.

And indeed, behind the Big Lie about long-term Democratic "rigging" of elections is the even Bigger Lie that is the true heart of the MAGA message, one regularly disseminated to scores of millions of supporters, and well stated here:

"You are the loyal defenders of our heritage, our liberty, our culture, our Constitution, and our God-given rights. You never stop fighting for America, and I will never, ever stop fighting for you. So as we gather tonight, our country is being destroyed more from the inside than out. America is on the edge of an abyss. And our movement is the only force on Earth that can save it. This movement right here. What we do in the next few months and the next few years will determine whether American civilization will collapse or fail, or whether it will triumph and thrive, frankly like never before. This is no time for complacency. We cannot be complacent. We have to seize this opportunity to deal with the radical left socialist lunatics and fascists. And we have to hit them very, very hard. Has to be a crippling defeat, because our country cannot take it. . . .

Our country is now a cesspool of crime like it's never been before. They've never seen anything like it. Other countries are talking about it. We're talking about democracy. Isn't it great? Then they say, " You had seven people killed in Chicago this weekend. You had 68 people shot." That's not democracy. That's not what we stand for. Savage criminals are being released on cashless bail to continue their violent rampages against the United States of America. Entire communities are being torn to shreds with stabbings, shootings, strangling, rapes, and murders. . . . The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched with the blood of innocent victims, gun battles rage between blood thirsty street gangs, bullets tear into crowds at random killing wonderful, beautiful little children that never even had a chance. They're struck and they're killed, and carjackers lay in wait like predators hunting their prey. . . . Our country is being invaded just like a military force was pouring in. . .

As we take power out of Washington, we also need to take power back from the left wing lunatics who are indoctrinating our youth. We have to finally and completely smash the radical lefts corrupt education establishment. The current system is sick. It's sick. We have the lowest scores almost in the world and we spend more per pupil than any other nation. School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place. It's okay. You can't teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant. Whatever it takes, conservatives must liberate America's children from the captivity of these Marxist teachers unions. . . Across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate, racial, sexual, and political material to America's school children in any form whatsoever. And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.

. . . no matter how big or powerful the corrupt radicals we are fighting against may be, no matter how menacing they appear, we must never forget that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage. This is your country that your American ancestors won with their own courage, defended with their own blood and built with their own hands . . . "

Those words, of course, came from the mouth of Donald J. Trump, speaking at last week's CPAC conference in a DC suburb.

And the sentiments expressed, traceable to Pat Buchanan and George Wallace before him, have been staples of the Republican party, and of its Fox propaganda arm, since Trump's ascendance in 2016.

They are Trump's sentiments, but not only Trump's.

And while much has been made of Ron DeSantis's absence from the recent Trump-worshipping CPAC event, DeSantis has been proclaiming the same MAGA sentiments for years, during star turns at prior CPAC conferences, and from the bully pulpit of the Florida Governor's office, where he is doing his best to translate the sentiments into extremely dangerous laws and policies.

And while much has been made about the fact that Tucker Carlson said he "hates Trump passionately" back in January, 2021, this surely does not mean that he hated Trump earlier or that he hates him now. At this moment Carlson might be partial to DeSantis. More likely he will jump on the bandwagon of whichever right-wing Republican seems most likely to win. But his messaging has for years been consistent, and it is the messaging of MAGA pure and simple: that an evil left hates White, Christian, American "Greatness," and this left must be eradicated. And so this supposed "hater" of Trump is right now using his nightly Fox show to represent—literally re-present—the events of January 6 as not an insurrection but a manifestation of civic pride by decent Americans seeking to "take their country back" and to "support their President." And the supposedly "hated" Trump is now congratulating Carlson for having accomplished "one of the biggest scoops for a reporter in U.S. history," and for exposing the "Criminal Fabricators" of the House January 6 Committee.

We are now in the domain of magical thinking of the worst kind—the magical thinking of political actors in service of authoritarian ideologies, willing to abrogate norms and laws, and do whatever it takes to defeat their "enemies."

Is Carlson now lying on behalf of Trump again? Most assuredly he is. But, again, in a deeper sense it is not quite that simple. For he is serving a supposedly "higher truth," the MAGA "truth" that Democrats and liberals hate America, and so what they say cannot be true, and so it is necessary to reframe what took place and to furnish a more authentic, more patriotic counter-narrative which by definition is true or at least true enough. From this vantage point, the representation of January 6 as a moment of patriotic glory is not a lie—they were carrying American flags and chanting "Make America Great Again," right? But even if this framing ignores obvious evidence or shades the truth, this is all done in a noble cause, in service to a more essential "truth."

This readiness to play fast and loose with truth has long been a central feature of Trumpism, most notoriously associated with outrageous claims made on different occasions by Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Rudy Giuliani, whose breathless "truth is not truth" is now the hook of an MSNBC series. It is sometimes described by commentators as "Orwellian," and with good reason, for Orwell's novel 1984 was a classic account of authoritarian, indeed totalitarian, disinformation, and domination. But perhaps it is one of Orwell's contemporaries, Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of the deservedly acclaimed Darkness at Noon, who best identified the logic in play.

Describing his experience as a young militant of the German Communist Party in the years before Hitler's rise to power in The God That Failed, Koestler recalled a piece of party propaganda in many ways similar to that now purveyed by Fox News. The Socialist party then in power, anathematized by the Communists as a "social fascist" party soft on Nazism, had ordered a police raid on Nazi headquarters and proposed a ban on the wearing of the Nazi uniform. When the Communist press ignored these moves and continued to sneer about Socialist "social fascism," young Koestler was confused, a confusion only intensified when his party superior explained:

"He explained that the party's attitude to the Social Democrats was a set, long-term policy which could not be reversed by a small incident. 'But every word on the front page is contradicted by the facts,' I objected. Edgar gave me a tolerant smile. 'You still have the mechanistic outlook,' he said, and then proceeded to give me a dialectical interpretation of the facts. The action of the police was merely a feint to cover up their complicity; even if some Socialist leaders were subjectively anti-Fascist in their outlook, objectively the Socialist Party was a tool of Nazism; in fact, the Socialists were the main enemy . . . Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation . . . "

For an activist of a party or movement that claims to understand a "higher" or "deeper" truth, beyond common sense and the evident facts of experience, any particular facts can be ignored or reinterpreted to serve what is considered more fundamental. Thus Dominion voting machines were corrupted in 2020, but even if they weren't, the Democrats are responsible for a more fundamental electoral and even civilizational corruption, and so the election was corrupted, and the outcome "rigged," and if so, can we really believe all of the evidence that Dominion machines were not corrupt? And if we really can't trust the evidence, then why treat it as dispositive? Why not just repeat the claims which, even if they can't be proven, can't be disproven in any final sense. Indeed, by constantly repeating the claims, we might make them for all intents and purposes "true." And anyway, the battle against liberal evil is more important than any "small incident" or any particular facts.

The lying of Fox News and its damages to Dominion are significant. But the real damage is much deeper and more dangerous.

What does Tucker Carlson really believe? To what extent is he a liar, and to what extent merely a propagandist in the thrall of a "dialectical reasoning" that he helped to create?

The lying about Dominion is symptomatic of much bigger, deeper, and more insidious Big Lies. However much the facts might seem to call these lies into question, Carlson and his collaborators will continue to repeat them and many millions of their followers will continue to accept them and to act on them. Does anyone really believe all the lies? We can't know. What we can know is that Presidential candidates and Governors and the current Speaker of the House of Representatives and almost his entire two hundred-plus caucus, and millions of their followers, all act as though they believe them. And in doing so, they are destroying the political institutions and the civic culture of America's increasingly fragile liberal democracy.

The lying of Fox News and its damages to Dominion are significant.

But the real damage is much deeper and more dangerous. And no lawsuit—not even manifold legitimate indictments of Donald Trump—can stop it. Only the decisive defeat of the Republican Party, and a Democratic Party empowered and committed to addressing the real problems plaguing American democracy, can stop it.

That is a very tall order. And everything hangs in the balance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jeffrey C. Isaac.

A Very Brief History of Capitalism, Empire, and the Yellow Peril

David Rovics — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 06:50:59 +0000

Unlike the propagandists that publish most of the textbooks that we brainwash our children with in the US, reality-based historians have oft observed that the history of civilization is a history of the ongoing conflict between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, the ruling class and those they would like to More

The post A Very Brief History of Capitalism, Empire, and the Yellow Peril appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rovics.

‘A Very Dark Day’: FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn Withdraws After Relentless Attack by Telecom Lobby

Jessica Corbett — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 21:10:33 +0000

Longtime public advocate Gigi Sohn on Tuesday announced that she asked U.S. President Joe Biden to withdraw her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission after over a year of enduring a smear campaign from dark money groups, telecommunications industry lobbyists, and right-wing figures.

"I could not have imagined that legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets would distort my over 30-year history as a consumer advocate into an absurd caricature of blatant lies," Sohn said in a statement. "The unrelenting, dishonest, and cruel attacks on my character and my career as an advocate for the public interest have taken an enormous toll on me and my family."

While her announcement came just after U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a frequent obstacle to his own party's priorities, confirmed Tuesday that he would not support the nomination, Sohn's lengthy statement—shared with The Washington Post—signaled that she decided to bow out after speaking with her family on Monday.

According to Sohn:

Unfortunately, the American people are the real losers here. The FCC deadlock, now over two years long, will remain so for a long time. As someone who has advocated for my entire career for affordable, accessible broadband for every American, it is ironic that the 2-2 FCC will remain sidelined at the most consequential opportunity for broadband in our lifetimes. This means that your broadband will be more expensive for lack of competition, minority, and underrepresented voices will be marginalized, and your private information will continue to be used and sold at the whim of your broadband provider. It means that the FCC will not have a majority to adopt strong rules which ensure that everyone has nondiscriminatory access to broadband, regardless of who they are or where they live, and that low-income students will continue to be forced to do their school work sitting outside of Taco Bell because universal service funds can't be used for broadband in their homes. And it means that many rural Americans will continue the long wait for broadband because the FCC can't fix its Universal Service programs.
It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that.

After thanking Biden—who first nominated her to the post in October 2021 and has stood by the choice—as well as the hundreds of organizations and advocates who have supported her throughout the process, Sohn said that "I hope the president swiftly nominates an individual who puts the American people first over all other interests. The country deserves nothing less."

During a media briefing Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre praised Sohn.

"We appreciate Gigi Sohn's candidacy for this important role. She would have brought tremendous intellect and experience, which is why the president nominated her in the first place. We also appreciate her dedication to public service, her talent, and her years of work as one of the nation's leading public advocates on behalf of American consumers and competition," said Jean-Pierre, who declined to comment on what's next.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups that rallied behind Sohn not only expressed disappointment that she won't be on the FCC but also took aim at Democratic leadership for failing to adequately stand up for her in the face of dishonest attacks.

"Gigi would have provided the final key vote needed to move forward on major White House priorities including net neutrality, digital discrimination, privacy, network competition, broadband maps, and the digital divide," said Demand Progress communications director Maria Langholz. "Sohn's nomination was marred by right-wing extremist attacks that centered on misinformation and politics of division and hate rather than her record and role at the FCC. While it would be easiest to blame the right-wing for her nomination failing, there was missing urgency and commitment from Democrats in the White House and Senate."

"With Sohn now out of consideration, we expect the White House to provide a strong nomination in the immediate future," Langholz added. "The American people cannot afford to have this stalemate at the FCC any longer. President Biden must expeditiously move forward a nominee who will be a champion on net neutrality and privacy, and avoid delivering big telecommunications companies a victory in the form of an industry-friendly pick."

\u201cThe Democratic failure to stand up to an industry-orchestrated smear campaign has cost the United States a veteran public-interest champion.\n\nThis is a very dark day. #NetNeutrality https://t.co/QbZR53viTq\u201d
— Tim Karr (@TimKarr@mastodon.social) (@Tim Karr (@TimKarr@mastodon.social)) 1678218236

Free Press president and co-CEO Craig Aaron similarly said that "they're probably celebrating at Comcast and Fox today, and their lobbyists deserve most of the credit for concocting lies to derail her nomination. Republicans who willfully spread those lies must be thrilled, too. But they're not the only ones to blame: The failure of Democratic leaders to stand up to industry-orchestrated smears cost the agency—and the nation—a true public servant."

"The abject failure of Democratic leaders to stand up and advocate for their own nominee means that these companies will likely only double down on the kinds of deceitful and dirty tactics they deployed against Sohn," he warned. "We're angry about how Sohn was treated, and we're disturbed that Democratic leaders by and large failed to speak out against the lies, bigotry, and innuendo surrounding her nomination. But the answer here is not going back to the way things used to be at the FCC, when the industry got to hand-pick commissioners. Going backward would be a terrible mistake."

"There will be temptation in the weeks ahead to put forward an industry-friendly nominee to avoid a larger political fight. That's how the agency has worked in the past," Aaron added. "But the public—now more than ever—needs an independent voice at this crucial agency, one who won't cave to the industries they are supposed to regulate. Though Gigi Sohn deserved much, much better, we can only hope this moment will finally serve as a wake-up call to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party."

"Democrats promised to restore net neutrality and FCC oversight of telecom monopolies, and instead they caved to corporate interests and homophobic smears."

Fight for the Future director Evan Greer also expressed concern that the development will be followed by an industry-backed pick.

"Let's be perfectly clear: Democrats promised to restore net neutrality and FCC oversight of telecom monopolies, and instead they caved to corporate interests and homophobic smears. The same telecom companies that were caught red-handed funding a flood of fraudulent comments to the FCC and paying for misleading robocalls to senior citizens to kill net neutrality rules now will seemingly get to pick their own regulator, just as they did with Ajit Pai," Greer said, referring to a former FCC chair.

Internet service providers (ISPs) "are under immense pressure to censor legitimate content, including websites with accurate information about abortion care and LGBTQ issues, with state legislatures passing bills demanding ISPs block entire websites," she noted. "Meanwhile, lack of FCC oversight has enabled collection and sale of cel phone location data that puts vulnerable communities at risk of stalking, harassment, and surveillance. A fully staffed FCC could address these issues. Biden's deadlocked FCC is utterly impotent. And marginalized communities will pay the price for Democrats' incompetence and cowardice."

As for Biden's next nominee, Greer said that "we will fight tooth and nail to ensure that they don't pick another Ajit Pai clone. We demand an FCC commissioner that will fight for the public interest, and one that has no ties to the telecom industry that the agency is supposed to regulate."

This post has been updated with comment from Fight for the Future.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Trump Calls US Democracy a ‘Very Dangerous System’ at CPAC

Jon Queally — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:08:15 +0000

The former presidents of Brazil and the United States took the stage CPAC on Saturday where both fascist politicians continued to sow doubt about their respective electoral defeats as they received standing ovations from the annual convention's far-right attendees.

Brazil's disgraced former leader Jair Bolsonaro—whose supporters stormed government offices in January after his successor, leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was sworn into office—was brought onto the stage this year's "diminished" CPAC gathering to blaring rock music and loud cheers from the crowd.

Addressing the American audience, Bolsonaro indicated once more his doubts that he lost the Brazilian election fairly, saying, "I had way more support in 2022 than I had in 2018, and I don't understand why the numbers said the opposite."

"I thank God for the mission of being president of Brazil for one term," he said, but hinted at a possible third run for president by adding: "But I feel deep inside that this mission is still not over."

When Trump took the podium as the convention's keynote appearance, there again was raucous applause.

During his speech, he singled out Bolsonaro in the audience and said it was a "great honor" to be appearing with the "very popular" former president.

\u201cBolsonaro \ud83e\udd1d Trump\nCPAC Washington\u201d
— Patriota (@Patriota) 1677972787

"Our getting back in the White House is their worst nightmare," Trump said of Democrats and his other political opponents. "But it is our country's only hope."

Trump went on to call the electoral process in the United States a "very bad" and a "very dangerous system" that only he and the far-right attendees at CPAC can overcome.

\u201cTrump claims the 2020 election was so bad, that instead of Biden serving four years, people he talked to in early 2021 were saying "you'll be back [in office] in six weeks, sir"\u201d
— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1677970747

During the speech, Trump vowed to "finish what we started" as the enthusiastic crowd chanted "Four more years! Four more years!"

In the traditional straw poll taken each year by CPAC attendees, Trump won in a landslide, the convention's organizers announced on Saturday, with the former president taking 65 percent of the vote.

The second-place finisher was Florida's far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis, who did not attend the gathering this year despite many viewing him as the strongest GOP challenger to Trump in a possible 2024 primary matchup.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

‘Very Disturbing’: Amid Ohio Disaster, Another Norfolk Southern Train Derails in Michigan

Jake Johnson — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:18:46 +0000

As the small town of East Palestine, Ohio reels from a chemical-spewing train crash, another train operated by the same company—Norfolk Southern—derailed outside of Detroit, Michigan on Thursday, the latest in a string of recent wrecks that rail workers have said are a horrible and predictable consequence of the industry's profit-seeking policy decisions.

According to a local NBC affiliate, a Norfolk Southern representative said that "there were no hazardous materials spilled in the crash," which took place in Van Buren Township.

In a Facebook post, Van Buren Township authorities wrote that "the involved train had one railcar that contained liquid chlorine; however it was located away from the overturned section, and was part of the section of railcars removed first."

"There is no evidence of exposed hazardous materials," the post added. "There are also no reported injuries."

\u201cBREAKING: A train has just derailed outside Detroit. At least six cars came off the track, and one was carrying hazardous materials.\u201d
— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1676571960

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said in a statement that "at this time no one is aware of the release of any hazardous materials" and "the car carrying hazardous material has been put upright."

"It is being removed from the area of the other derailed cars, and EPA is dispatching a team to ensure public safety," Dingell added. "We will continue to monitor the situation very closely and remain in touch with federal, state, and local officials, and release additional information as it becomes available."

State Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D-4) and state Rep. Reggie Miller (D-31) issued a joint press release calling Thursday's crash "very disturbing, especially following the recent incident in Ohio."

In the wake of the East Palestine crash, Norfolk Southern has increasingly been described as a poster child for the hazards associated with a Wall Street-backed model known as Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which prioritizes speed and profits over safety.

"Safety inspection times and personnel have been slashed, hindering efforts to ensure trains are safe before they leave yards or terminals. Crews are dissuaded from reporting safety issues. Workers that persist in raising red flags are often ignored," Motherboard's Aaron Gordon wrote Wednesday. "Norfolk Southern's lax safety practices have been applied to its entire network, reflecting a trend happening across the freight rail industry."

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

More on the China Balloon Episode: Much Ado About Very Little

Mel Gurtov — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 06:45:22 +0000

Photograph Source: Chase Doak – CC BY-SA 4.0

We have just exited Phase 2 of the balloon incident. In Phase 1, “Discovery,” the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy” balloon had crossed over half the US. An air force jet shot the balloon down, displaying Cold War-style toughness with China. In Phase 2, “Evaluation,” new facts have emerged that shed further light on the episode. To wit:

· US intelligence was aware of the balloon from the moment it entered US airspace. Intelligence officials did not consider the balloon a particularly threatening weapon, aware that at least four times in the recent past—including three on Trump’s watch—such intrusions had occurred, all without incident. In fact, senior Trump officials, by their own admission, were completely unaware of those incidents.

· Biden’s hesitancy to shoot down the balloon had as much to do with rabid Republican charges of weakness as with concern about causing debris to fall over populated areas.

· Beijing accepted responsibility for violating US territory, but the larger question of authorization for balloon missions remains. Chinese balloon launches may not be authorized at the highest levels—that is, by Xi Jinping—but may be under lower-level authority, military or civilian. Students of bureaucracy will recognize this possibility immediately: a government agency that acts autonomously, without top-level oversight. It’s business as usual, separate from (in this case) the foreign ministry. Xi surely was aware of balloon activity in general, but not its daily schedule. After all, US officials say Chinese balloons have been spotted in 40 countries on five continents in recent years. That suggests a busy balloon unit that routinely acts on its own—which might even mean sabotaging a diplomatic event that a unit’s leader happens to oppose.

· Thus far the Biden administration has not said the balloon captured important US security data. It might have been a weather balloon and might have been spying on US military installations. A high-altitude balloon is capable of doing both, though its capabilities would seem to be far lower than those of Chinese satellites and other intelligence-gathering devices.

My conclusion: The Chinese balloon was not a significant security threat, the incident should not have been treated as though it was one, and the entire matter should instead have been put on Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s agenda when he visited Beijing as scheduled. That’s what diplomacy is all about: heading off crises. During and since the Cold War, the US and China have had plenty of incidents of far greater magnitude that were settled diplomatically, such as the mistaken US bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the US shooting down of a Chinese jet over Hainan in 2001. Both those incidents involved loss of life. China’s chief foreign policy official, Wang Yi, called Blinken to urge a calm, “professional” approach to their upcoming meeting in light of the balloon incident. But the Americans chose the opposite course, postponing Blinken’s trip and feeding the anti-China sentiment that has swept Congress.

Now we are in Phase 3 of the incident: “Blaming.” The Chinese, not to be outdone by American outrage, charge that US balloon intrusions over China are a “common occurrence,” more than 10 times last year. (The Biden administration denied the charge but referred only to “surveillance” balloons, so China’s claim might be accurate.) China is also using the incident to arouse nationalist feelings—a predictable response to accusations. In an effort to move from defense to offense, Beijing media are stressing the American overreaction, the misguided emphasis on the “China threat,” and the effort to “fan the flames” of conflict.

Expect plenty of the same language on the US side, especially but not exclusively from far-right Republicans. They have been introducing ideologically-driven bills in Congress directed at “the Chinese Communist Party”—bills that would, for example, prevent mainland Chinese from acquiring land, recognize Taiwan as an independent state, limit petroleum product sales to China, prohibit federal support of schools that hire Chinese instructors “funded” by the CCP, and demand reimbursement from China of US COVID-19 aid.

Thus does the spiral of conflict continue, with few voices of reason being heard to stop it.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

Be. Very. Careful. Who. You. Invite. In.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 06:59:16 +0000

Havar sculpture by Shahzia Sikander. Image: Madison Square Park Conservancy.

In his essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times on Feb. 1, 2023, “Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful,”[1] Ross Douthat’s seemingly amorphous warning is really aimed at the two new statues by citizen-of-the-world visual artist Shahzia Sikander, appearing in the public space of the roof of the New York Appellate Court and adjacent to it, in the shape of a flowering female form installed in Madison Square Park.

In one of the more bizarre columns of his that I’ve read, Douthat claims he wants to both “defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation” (which he sees manifested in Sikander’s work), then to warn us about its dangers. While I have no idea what he means by “the rationality of spiritual experimentation,” he attacks what he sees as three contemporary manifestations of it: the current Tik Tok craze, the DMT or “psychonautic” drug experimentation culture, and finally, Sikander’s “statue on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.” Whilst acknowledging that this “golden woman” who wears “a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar” is meant to evoke “female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal” as the artist herself has stated, what disturbs the liberal sentiments of Douthat nonetheless is the fact that “the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions.” It is this “blurring”, or more aptly, a “queering” of heteronormative, white Christian patriarchal belief systems that have shaped America’s justice system from its very founding, that I believe, most disturbs the equanimity of the critic, what gives him pause in his liberal, tolerant worldview. This “blurring” of spiritual traditions is evident to him in the fact that the statue on the rooftop instead of having feet firmly planted in our earthly firmament, instead arises, feet-less, all golden-bathed 8 feet of it, out of a lotus flower, thus evidencing some sort of pantheistic deity, evoking a “nature-spirituality” that turns the human female form into a “magical hybrid plant-animal.” Douthat’s discomfort, fear even, at this queering of the (white) female form, named “NOW” by the artist (which evokes both the need for abortion-rights female lawgivers such as the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg in our current moment when such rights are being repealed, as well as a sly reference to NOW, the premier US women’s rights organization), mounts as he describes the statue it is in dialogue with, erected in the middle of Madison Square Park across from the courthouse. This one, an 18- foot- tall female form wearing a hooped skirt and stylized horns for hair with roots instead of feet, is named “WITNESS” and together the two sculptures make up “HAVAH: to breathe, air, life.” The word Havah, evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, in Douthat’s view “mak[es] a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition”; such a claim might even be acceptable to the liberal-minded side of Douthat, but the fact that the statue like the one atop the courthouse is evocative of a nature-animal-human triptych, is more than our critic, at bottom a Christian conservative (as he himself tells us), can bear. He bemoans, “finally it’s very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.” His veiled critique of Shahzia Sikander’s “anti-Christian” statuary work is more clearly spelled out in the Christian Broadcasting Network’s statement,

The Bible tells us when Eve disobeyed God, sin entered the world. And that’s not exactly something Christians celebrate, much less honor with a statue.

Thus, whatever door to “reasonable spiritual experimentation” is opened up by such allegorical figures as Sikander’s statues, the fact that, in the final analysis, such “symbols… invoke multiple spiritualities at once,” causes grave disturbance in the unipolar, eschatological world view of Douthat, as clearly indicated in the warning with which he concludes his essay, “when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.”

Be. Very. Careful. What. You. Invite. In. Wow! In an age of increasing xenophobia, Islamophobia, and backlash against civil liberties, this is quite a statement to make.

It is Mr. Douthat who needs to be VERY CAREFUL what he says and by so saying, unleashes. The countless Instagram and twitter posts equating Shahzia Sikander’s work with that of the Devil following his own writing, is extremely dangerous—inviting “in” to civic discourse, voices of hate inciting violence against the statues, and by extension, their creator. Just one such twitter post reads, “The next Republican mayor of New York should not only remove but publicly destroy this monstrosity” (@michaeljknowles; my emphasis).

While “Havah” is indeed a reference to Eve, the moniker contains multitudes that ought to have been clear to Douthat and other critics of Sikander’s extraordinarily beautiful and thought-provoking work, experiencing which, brings together affect and intellect, a rare feat indeed. As the artist herself has pointed out, she interprets the term ‘havah’ as meaning (in Urdu, her native tongue), “to breathe,” which becomes a performative “to add air, to change a narrative, to add some space;” She clearly wants viewers to ponder that “Eve is also the first law-breaker, right?”

To break the laws of patriarchy, enshrined in a constitution based on notions of white male Christian supremacy in this nation since its founding, is clearly a bitter pill to swallow for too many, including it seems, Mr Douthat. One has only to think of the brilliant enfolding of the act of breathing into Sikander’s carefully chosen name for her Garden delight, to apprehend its fundamental importance as an act we share with all of God’s creatures on this earth, something this plant-woman embodies instinctively down to her floating roots. To add air, to change the narrative of laws that are unjust, to move, and create space for “other” realities than those seen through the heteronormative lens of dominant power, is the remit of “Havah: to breathe, air, life.” How, in this choice of title for her sculptural installation, can one fail to realize the depth of her political vision and solidarity with the first immigrants to these shores, Africans uprooted from their ancestral lands and sold into slavery to the Christian White Man? Sikander’s feminism is strongly intersectional and transnational in scope, as the title also invokes solidarity with Iranian women protesting for rights for “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Her reference “to breathe” is simultaneously evocative of the “Let Me Breathe” movement for justice galvanized by the death-by- asphyxiation of George Floyd at the hands of racist cops, a gesture Douthat totally fails to notice.

If “NOW” can be seen as an homage to a (reconstituted) white woman (sporting RBJ’s iconic lace collar) as she breaks the legal glass ceiling by passing laws that safeguard(ed) women’s bodily autonomy and the constitutional right to choose, “WITNESS” asks us to pay attention to injustices and oppressions enacted on bodies of color: black, brown, Asian male, female, non-binary, trans. It asks us to bear witness queerly, like the female statue in the park, who even as she is embodied in her womanly form, is a shape-shifter, only part woman, mostly plant, all goddess. This female body that we witness, in dialogue with the golden woman atop the courthouse, “exists in excess of gender itself: it sprouts limbs and lotuses, it endlessly repeats, doubles, multiplies and circles back on itself.”[2] Her curved horns where we might expect to see hair when wearing our straight normative lenses, are not a reference to Satan (as her Christian critics aver)—but rather, viewed through a queer gaze, appear as multivalent references braiding together brown and black women who have been erased from masculinist art and world histories. They recall earlier hair representations in the artist’s oeuvre, including especially her creative depictions of gopi hair in motion. Traditionally seen as handmaidens to the Hindu God Krishna, gopis in her painting and its animation SpiNN, which is Sikander’s reimagining of Mughal court manuscript paintings set in a durbar hall/formal meeting space traditionally reserved for displays of Muslim male kingly authority, infiltrate this masculine-coded space in masses of shape-shifting black hair, to disrupt the rigid frames of patriarchy and sovereignty across religious traditions and colonial histories. The imposing braided horns also bring to mind magnificently braided hairstyles worn by African women, in their ornateness often signifying a decolonial impulse. Anne Bailey tells us how Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, captured in over 1000 photographs, “ a wave of powerful and proud hairstyles that swept across Nigeria in the years following its independence from Britain in 1960”. Similar hairstyles can be seen in the imposing Benin statues from centuries ago, and as a website article tracing women’s hairstyles and their significance across Africa and its diaspora informs us, the

depictions of women with cornrows have been found in Stone Age paintings in the Tassili Plateau of the Sahara, and have been dated as far back as 3000 B.C. There are also Native American paintings as far back as 1,000 years showing cornrows as a hairstyle. This tradition of female styling in cornrows has remained popular throughout Africa, particularly in the Horn of Africa and West Africa.

According to an instagram post by @KnowYourCaribbean, rice was hidden in braids in order to help slaves survive the middle passage. The writer shares that “many African women braided rice or seeds into their hair before journeying the Middle Passage, on their way to enslavement or braided it into their children’s hair before separation, so that they could eat.

That Sikander is deeply familiar with these palimpsestic her-stories of the symbols she chooses to deploy in her work with great deliberation as a result of lifelong research and empathy for those whom justice has not served, is manifested through the themes that resonate across, and shape, the body of her work over the past quarter century. And, as she herself has stated many times, these female avatars stand witness to women’s survival, resilience and courage across cultures, races, regions, temporalities.

The Art Newspaper points out, for instance, how “Sikander’s radiant figures” sport hair that is “braided like spiraling ram’s horns and strikes an arms-akimbo power stance.”[3] Spiralling ram’s horns (a recurrent feature across her oeuvre)–are “an ancient symbol, appearing in many cultures throughout history. In some cultures, the ram symbolizes strength and power while it represents fertility and abundance in others”. Sikander has stated many times, that her statues represent the strength and resilience of women, where male power is translated into female power via fertility which is the source of all creativity—including the artist’s own. The braids are thus a reminder of the creativity of the women brought to these shores as slaves, cleverly braiding rice seeds into their daughters’ hair, to resist the devilish power of the slavers. The braids also bring into a shared space of resistance, women gopis of the South Asian diaspora such as Sikander herself, banding together with each other to create a swarming mass of feminist empowerment and visibility in spaces from where they have been excluded for too long. In the same way, her statues and their horned braids recall her evolving painting from the early 2000s, PLEASURE PILLARS, where the central figure is a self-portrait with ram’s horns that joins together female bodies fragmented by the weight of masculinist histories embedded in colonialist and imperialist erasures of the Other.

Her statuesque sculptures like upright, confident Amazons, which as the Art Newspaper reviewer noted, strike “an arms-akimbo power stance,” can be seen also as an homage to the Black Power Salute of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when an intersectional struggle for blacks’ and women’s rights ushered in sweeping progressive changes to the legislature. That era’s shape-shifting energy, when alliances were forged across differences of class, race, gender, sexuality, can be seen to inform this sculptural endeavor of Sikander’s, so badly needed NOW in our times of back-sliding into regressive norms here, there, everywhere. Surely it is no coincidence that this exhibition on the theme of justice, opened on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 16, 2023? A pursuit of justice requires that we constantly re-examine and challenge the stories that have been passed down through the colonial and imperial archives about race and gender and their representation in public space, or rather, lack thereof.

Thus, this work also draws attention to the need for south Asian female representation in the city that the artist has called home for a majority of her life, where the bulk of her oeuvre has taken shape, but where it took over 20 years of creating globally recognized and award-winning art before she received a solo exhibition (at the Morgan Library and Museum, 2021). Justice is representation, acknowledgment, respect for all denizens, no matter their race, ethnicity, color, sexuality, religion, country of origin or gender.

The artist, who claims she “opted not to base the figures on recognisable historic women, but rather a broader representation of the feminine bridging race and culture (my italics)” shows us a way forward into a better, more just future for all, based on a full reckoning[4] of the past that is surely the need of the hour.

Notes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/opinion/american-religion-spirituality.html

[2] Gayatri Gopinath, “Promiscuous Intimacies: Embodiment, Desire, and Diasporic Dislocation in the Art of Shahzia Sikander,” in Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities,” eds. Sadia Abbas and Jan Howard. RISD Museum: Hirmer, 2021, p. 125.

[3] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/01/13/shahzia-sikander-female-figure-manhattan-courthouse-madison-square-park

[4] Indeed, part of the installation at Madison Square Garden includes a video animation called “Reckoning.“

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fawzia Afzal-Khan.

Biden’s New Chief of Staff Might Be Very Bad News

Deconstructed — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:05:17 +0000

President Joe Biden is naming Jeff Zients to be his next chief of staff. Zients, a corporate Democrat, was previously in the White House helping steer its pandemic response and leading vaccination efforts. Previously, Zients helped oversee two health care companies embroiled in Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations, which they paid tens of millions to settle. This week on Deconstructed, Intercept reporter Daniel Boguslaw and The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner join Ryan Grim to discuss Zients’s past in the world of for-profit health care. Zients is also a former Facebook board member, worrying progressives pushing for the administration to rein in Silicon Valley.

Transcript coming soon.

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

A Fresh Plea for the Very Rich to Make a Truly Wise Investment for a More Just Society

Ralph Nader — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 17:50:59 +0000

The super successful mega-investor, Warren Buffett, CEO of the giant conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, was heard to say: There are only 535 members of Congress, why can’t 300 million Americans control them? That’s a pretty fundamental question since our senators and representatives are given their sovereign power by the people. Remember the preamble to our Constitution?

Buffett is a generous philanthropist. Among his contributions, he has given the Gates Foundation (public health projects) about $3 billion each year for over a decade. That’s over $30 billion dollars! Just one $3 billion contribution, devoted to establishing systemic-focused Congress Watchdog locals in every congressional district, would fund such groups for more than thirty years. Their objective would be to organize up to one-half of one percent of adults to volunteer in each congressional district to make sure our elected officials do the general public’s bidding under honest election procedures. The American people and their children have far more commonly desired necessities and wants than the hyped divide-and-rule tactics imposed by the present ruling powers imply. (See, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State by Ralph Nader, April 2014).

I can hear some readers saying, “Well, if Mr. Buffett is such a public-spirited person, why don’t you ask him to do this? You’ve been writing about these groups for many years.” (See my recent columns: Think Big to Overcome Losing Big to Corporatism, January 7, 2022; Facilitating Civic and Political Energies for the Common Good, February 2, 2022; Going for Tax Reform Big Time, March 11, 2022; and Going for Big Watch on Big Budgets, March 31, 2022).

Answer: I did once, broadly, in a written letter. No connection was made. In 2011, I wrote a fictional book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” about a Warren Buffett recoiling from the immediate neglectful aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. In the book, he launched, with 16 other enlightened individuals, a just, step-by-step democratic overhauling of American politics top-down and then bottom-up.

This realistic work of fiction caught his attention. He invited me to showcase the book at his massive annual shareholder’s meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. I went.

At an earlier breakfast, I mused about the story becoming a Hollywood movie. He amusingly asked who would play his character. I mentioned actors like Warren Beatty or Alan Alda.

In any event, nothing came of these interactions. My guess is that having to closely supervise over 70 managers of the sizable corporate subsidiaries of Berkshire requires an intensity of focus and time that is incompatible with the additional project of changing Congress to get good things done – popular as that would be in today’s America.

Some knowing readers might ask why Buffett doesn’t ask his network of some 236 multi-billionaires, who have signed on to his Giving Pledge, to donate half of their wealth to “good works.”

Answer: A condition for the Giving Pledge is that these philanthropists would not urge or ask each other to support their favored causes.

The obvious rejoinder to that impediment might be, “Surely this reflective man, who gets his calls returned, can create the necessary institutional network and public investments to make these long-overdue changes” – again top-down then bottom-up. Probably, yes. But the problem is, neither he nor his collaborators want to be the recipients of daily vitriol and smears so easily conveyed to the world through the Internet. They want to be left to concentrate on their own business or other pursuits in retirement.

So, what it comes down to is the perceived sense of great urgency, coupled with a belief that a group, such as described, is unique to being able to make a significant, lasting difference for the present and for posterity. That is what a civic sense of legacy, demonstrated already by the Pledgors, is – but multiplied many times over by institutional and structural reforms, backed by a critical mass of an alert citizenry, and nurtured by regular civic education for all ages.

If any readers are in a position to have a few of these otherwise predisposed mega-donors come to a discussion about this opportunity, the generic questions to pose to them are: What if? How to? And why not? Taken together, my four books “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us”! Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, and the Fable The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress provide detailed pathways to deep-rooted transformations of our country backed by about four-fifths of the American people.

There are, predictably, many readers who will scoff and stereotype all very rich people with a totally dismissive brush. There are, however, enough examples in American history that expose this wave-of-the-hand as an excessive generalization. Some are not like the rest. Even some of the rest should be given the opportunity to make amends.

Responses are invited: info@csrl.org

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ralph Nader.

The GOP’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Debt Ceiling Scam

Robert Reich — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 16:21:52 +0000

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen just announced that the federal government will hit the limit on total federal debt on January 19, just two days from now.

After that, the Treasury Department will be forced to take “extraordinary measures” to avoid defaulting on the debt, which would likely trigger a global financial crisis.

Congress could defuse this bomb by simply raising the debt limit, as it has dozens of times under presidents of both parties for decades. But the MAGA radicals now in control of the House of Representatives are refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Biden agrees to devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other key programs.

I was involved in a similar fight over the debt ceiling fight twenty-eight years ago, which holds some lessons for what happens now.

In November 1995, Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling unless Bill Clinton agreed to a package of sweeping spending cuts, welfare overhaul, restraints on Medicare and Medicaid growth, and a balanced budget within seven years.

I and other Clinton advisers urged him not to negotiate. Even if the public didn’t understand that the debt ceiling had less to do with the nation’s future debt than with obligations the United States had made in the past, we couldn’t allow the Republicans to hold the economy hostage. The full faith and credit of the United States was at stake. It should not be negotiable.

Clinton agreed. “If they send me a budget that says simply, ‘You take our cuts or we’ll let the country go into default,’ I will veto it,” he said. He called the Republican tactics “economic blackmail,” which they were.

When the Republican House then passed a bill increasing the debt ceiling through December, as well as a continuing resolution that included higher Medicare premiums and other spending cuts, Clinton vetoed both bills. “America has never liked pressure tactics, and I would be wrong to permit these kind of pressure tactics to dramatically change the course of American life,” he said. “I cannot do it, and I will not do it.”

What happened next? The government shut down. And as you may recall, the American public was furious — with the Republicans, who paid dearly in the subsequent midterm elections.

The budget standoff was resolved in early January 1996 but the debt ceiling issue remained. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin wrote to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich that Congress had only until March 1 before the Treasury defaulted on its obligations, Moody’s rating agency announced it was considering downgrading the rating on U.S. Treasury bonds.

Republicans quickly folded, offering to raise the debt ceiling in return for a few modest measures.

The debt ceiling fight of 2011 was different. The Obama administration did negotiate with House Republicans, resulting in the Budget Control Act of 2011. When the debt ceiling had to be raised again in 2013, Obama returned to negotiations. During this standoff, the government was partially closed down. Here again, Republicans took the brunt of the blame.

In these fights, some Republicans presented a fallback position: Instead of raising the debt ceiling, the federal government should prioritize which bills to pay — starting with interest payments to lenders to the United States (holders of federal bonds). That way, they argued, there’d be no technical default.

The idea never went anywhere because such prioritization would still spook credit markets. It would also cause the economy to tank and the stock market to plunge because of the sudden elimination of huge amounts of government spending.

But now, so-called “debt prioritization” is back. According to Friday’s Washington Post, it was part of the secret agreement Kevin McCarthy made with his detractors to support him for Speaker. They agreed that when Republicans hold firm on not raising the debt ceiling, they’ll pass a bill instructing the Treasury to prioritize: 1) first, debt service payments, 2) next, Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, and 3) third, military funding.

Everything else would be sacrificed—including critical federal expenditures such as Medicaid, food safety inspections, border control, and air traffic control. The U.S. would be forced to halt payment for as much as 20 percent of money it already promised to spend.

This could be the most economically irresponsible backroom deal in Republican history (even conservative economists are warning that the consequences could include a stock-market spiral and significant job losses).

It’s also the most politically foolish. It would, in effect, put the interest of bondholders — including Chinese lenders to the United States — over the wellbeing of Americans.

As George W. might say, “bring ‘em on.”

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

The Very Dangerous Reasoning Behind the Freedom Caucus’ Hatred for Kevin McCarthy

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 17:30:43 +0000

While Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be about personality and struggles within the House Republican caucus, it’s really about something much larger: the fate and future of American “big government” and the middle class it created.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the phrase “big government” has been on the lips of Republican politicians. They utter it like a curse at every opportunity.

It seems paradoxical: Republicans complain about “big government,” but then go on to support more and more government money for expanding prisons and a bloated Pentagon budget. Once you understand their worldview, however, it all makes perfect sense.

First, some background.

From the founding of our republic through the early 1930s the American middle class was relatively small. It was almost entirely made up of the professional and mercantile class: doctors, lawyers, shop-owners and the like. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were what we would today call middle class.

Factory workers, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and pretty much all manner of “unskilled laborers” were the working poor rather than the middle class. Most neighborhoods across America had a quality of life even lower than what today we would call “ghettos.”

As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America.

There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, public schools, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.

There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent). As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:

“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.
“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years.
“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. ... Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …
“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”

The Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, though, was a huge wake-up call for American voters, answered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His New Deal programs brought us, for the first time, “big government” and the people loved it. They elected him President of the United States four times!

FDR created Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed the right to unionize, outlawed child labor, regulated big business by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies, and funded infrastructure across the country from roads to bridges to dams and power stations.

He raised taxes on the morbidly rich all the way up to 90% and used that money to build schools and hospitals across the nation. He brought electricity to rural parts of the country, and put literally millions to work in various “big government” programs.

“Big government,” in other words, created the modern American middle-class.

By the 1950s a strong middle class representing almost half of Americans had emerged for the first time in American history.

By the late 1970s it was around 65 percent of us.

And that’s when the billionaires (then merely multimillionaires) decided enough was enough and got to work.

In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.

His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

Today’s challenges to Kevin McCarthy are mostly coming from members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, pretty much a reinvention of the Tea Party Caucus, funded in substantial part by rightwing billionaires and CEOs who share the late David Koch’s worldview.

The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” they’ll tell you. The billionaire “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support the “moochers” who demand everything from union rights to a living wage to free college.

Why, these Freedom Caucus members ask, should their billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support the ungrateful masses through “big government” programs? Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Darwin right?

These Republicans believe our government should really only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires.

That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or food stamps.

And that’s why they hate Kevin McCarthy.

In the past, McCarthy has shown a willingness to compromise and negotiate with Democrats. Most recently, as Congressman Chip Roy pointed out on the House floor yesterday when nominating Byron Donalds to replace McCarthy, he failed to block the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill through Congress that was loaded with what rightwing billionaires consider “freebies” for “taker” and “moocher” Americans.

It appears all or nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members, dancing to the tune first played by David Koch, don’t believe in our current form of American government. They want us to go back to the pre-1930s America, before FDR’s New Deal.

Those were the halcyon days when workers cowered before their employers, women and minorities knew their places, and government didn’t interfere with the business of dynasty-building even when it meant poisoning entire communities and crushing small businesses.

They appear to agree with the majority of the Supreme Court Republicans who recently began dismantling the “big government” administrative state by ending the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses.

They’ve already succeeded, over the past 40 years of the Reagan Revolution, at whittling the middle class down from 65 percent of us to around 45 percent of us: NPR commemorated it in 2015 with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Now they want even more poverty for workers and more riches for their morbidly rich funders, and don’t believe that “moderate” Republicans will get them there. As Ginni Thomas and a pantheon of “conservative” luminaries wrote yesterday in an open letter opposing McCarthy’s speakership:

“[H]e has failed to answer for, or commit to halting, his coordinated efforts in the 2022 elections to promote moderate Republican candidates over conservatives.”

The “conservative” Republicans have already announced that once they get their act together in Congress with a new speaker, their first order of business is going to be to cut more taxes on billionaires.

While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology and policy. It’s about the future of “big government” and whether or not we will continue to have an American middle class.

And as long as Libertarian-leaning billionaires continue pouring cash into the campaigns and lifestyles of Republican members of Congress, this battle that’s been going on for over 40 years to tear apart the American middle-class is not going to end or go away any day soon.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

Fighting Poverty Means Targeting the Very Wealthy

Sam Pizzigati — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 15:37:17 +0000

Some conflicts we can see—and understand—rather easily. Their raw rhetoric will typically help us identify the opposing players and what they’re fighting over.

But sometimes the rhetoric never gets raw. The dominant players smother real differences with appeals to vague values. They paper over real conflicts and choices and leave the general public unaware and uninvolved.

Exhibit A in this sort of smothering? The international dialogue over “sustainable development.”

Ever-heavier concentrations of income and wealth, researchers have shown over recent years, erode social cohesion and democracy.

Over the past decade, nations worldwide have been gathering at a series of global confabs to hammer out what we all ought to be doing to save our planet and bring all peoples living on it up to a decent standard of living. These huddles, back in 2015, appeared to have scored an unprecedented breakthrough.

That September, our global heads of state gathered at the UN in New York and announced they had “adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far-reaching, and people-centered set” of goals and targets that would, among other noble outcomes, “build peaceful, just, and inclusive societies” and ensure our Earth’s “lasting protection.”

“We envisage a world in which every country enjoys sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth and decent work for all,” the assembled dignitaries declared. “A world in which consumption and production patterns and use of all natural resources—from air to land, from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to oceans and seas—are sustainable.”

“We commit ourselves,” the dignitaries added, “to working tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda by 2030.”

We’ve now come about halfway through the years those leaders figured that “full implementation” would take. But that glorious global end state they originally promised, researchers at the Geneva-based UN Research Institute for Social Development noted earlier this fall, now seems frighteningly distant.

“With only eight years remaining to make this ambition a reality,” the UNISD observes in a powerful new report that has so far received far too little global attention, “the context for achieving the vision of Agenda 2030 has never been more daunting.”

Direct and difficult challenges to the goals world leaders so triumphantly announced in 2015 now seem everywhere. The rise of austerity. The backlash against egalitarian and human rights discourses and movements. The worsening climate crisis “threatening our very existence.”

We have, the UN researchers conclude, “a world in a state of fracture, and at its heart is inequality.”

The spirited new report from these researchers, Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract, frames our globe’s continuing maldistribution of income and wealth as the most formidable obstacle the world now faces to a safe and decent future.

“Our current system perpetuates a trickle-up of wealth to the top, leaving no possibilities for shared prosperity,” advises UN Research Institute director Paul Ladd. “It destroys our environment and climate through over-consumption and pollution and offloads the steep costs onto those who consume little and pollute the least.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has of late been sounding similar themes.

“Divides are growing deeper. Inequalities are growing wider. Challenges are spreading farther,” Guterres told the UN General Assembly this past September. “We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.”

Both this bluntness from Guterres and the UN Research Institute’s new report reflect somewhat of a desperate desire for the sort of debate the world’s rich and powerful—and the nations they call home—so desperately want to avoid.

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a former UN human development official and currently a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, has been tracking the internal international community debates that have ended up papering over the dangers of concentrated income and wealth. She sums up her research in a revealing analysis that appears in the new Crises of Inequality report.

The current “Sustainable Development Goal” discourse on “inequality,” Fukuda-Parr points out, fixates almost exclusively “on those who are excluded, marginalized, and living below the poverty line.” This same discourse gives “little attention” to those at “the top of the distribution: the rich and powerful.”

Why speak of “inequality” but essentially address only poverty? The international negotiators who delivered up the new Sustainable Development Goals knew their work had to somehow address the inequity of our global income and wealth distribution. Their predecessors who had produced the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, Fukuda-Parr notes, had come under heavy fire for their “glaring failure to include inequality.”

But how to include inequality became the central question. Would the new Sustainable Development Goals directly address the impact and extent of all the wealth and income that has settled into super-rich pockets? Or would the goals only focus on the “exclusion” of vulnerable and marginalized poor people from economic “opportunity.”

The first approach threatened the privileged status of the world’s wealthiest. The second ignored it. The second won out—by setting targets for the Sustainable Development Goals, Fukuda-Parr explains, that “do not take into account the distribution of wealth within and between countries or make reference to extreme inequality.”

Fukuda-Parr goes into helpful detail on the behind-the-scenes struggle that generated this outcome. Global economic justice groups and some national delegations to the global negotiations wanted the goals to include statistical yardsticks that could tell us whether income and wealth distributions are becoming more or less concentrated. One such yardstick, the Palma ratio, lets societies compare over time the incomes going to a nation’s richest 10 percent and poorest 40 percent.

But the dominant national players in these negotiations rejected any indicator that might show the rich gaining at the expense of everyone else. Their preferred approach: tracking whether or not the incomes of the poor were increasing faster than the national average. Societies where the incomes of the poor were rising faster than that national average, the argument went, were moving smartly to “shared prosperity.”

This narrow perspective on inequality would end up dominating the negotiations. The problem? By conflating “inequality” and “poverty,” as Fukuda-Parr helps us understand, those negotiators most defensive about their home nation’s extreme concentrations of income and wealth had come up with a global framework that “excludes from the narrative the problems of extreme inequality and the power of the wealthy.”

And that exclusion comes with a heavy cost. Ever-heavier concentrations of income and wealth, researchers have shown over recent years, erode social cohesion and democracy, invite monopoly power, and even dampen the economic growth that cheerleaders for grand fortune claim we gain when wealth concentrates.

The poor don’t gain, in short, when societies ignore the rich. The rich just amass more of the clout and power they need to keep getting richer off the poor—and everyone else.

The new UN Research Institute for Social Development report recognizes that reality. Let’s hope this research gains much more global attention. But let’s not just hope. Let’s do whatever we can to help that gain along.

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

INTERVIEW: ‘Behind the shadows, they can do very brutal things’

By Soe San Aung — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 19:26:57 +0000

Toru Kubota, a Japanese documentary filmmaker, was arrested by Myanmar military authorities on July 30 for filming a small anti-junta protest in Yangon. They accused the 26-year-old of violating Myanmar’s immigration laws and encouraging dissent against the army junta which has ruled the country since seizing power in a February 2021 coup. In all, Kubota was sentenced to 10 years in jail and was placed in Insein Prison on the outskirts of Yangon.

On Nov. 17, authorities released Kubota along with more than 6,000 others, including citizens detained for protesting the military takeover, during a broad prisoner amnesty. Kubota spoke with reporter Soe San Aung of Radio Free Asia’s Burmese service about his experiences. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

By Soe San Aung

RFA: Why were you in Myanmar?

Kubota: It’s not like I jumped into the country for the first time this time. I had been in the country more than 10 times before, but it was before the coup. I worked on several projects in Myanmar, including the Rohingya issue, so I really wanted to do something since the coup. And there were some friends who remained in the country doing amazing work; for example, helping other people by serving food to street people. This is the reason why I am making a film about my friend who is doing humanitarian work.

RFA: How has Myanmar changed for you since the coup?

Kubota: Once I started filming, it became obvious people were suppressed very silently. For example, I saw an old lady on the street clinging to my friends and weeping, telling them that she had been beaten by the police and that the police had taken her money. She was making her living by begging, and the police took what little money she had. The lady was weeping and telling this story, but at the same time she was really cautious about someone overhearing her telling the story. This is the situation in the country.

RFA: When the military junta detained you for six days, how did authorities treat you? Did they torture you?

Kubota: No, they didn’t torture me. I was also in custody after I was arrested and after the investigation, and it was kind of funny. They let me stay overnight in the chief officers room with air conditioning for the first night. The second night, they investigated me, but they didn’t punch, beat or physically harm me, But after they found my film, which was about the Rohingya, they felt very distressed. They looked at me in a really disgusted [manner] and stared at me as if to say, “I hate your film.” They told me I would be going to a place like hell. After that, I was taken to a detention cell, which was two meters by five meters and held more than 20 people. The smell was awful, and there was only one toilet. We didn’t have enough space for everyone to stretch our legs and arms, so we had to sleep with our bodies overlapping each other. I understood why they said that place is like hell. I stayed there a couple of days, and it was a really terrible place.

RFA: Why do you think the military regime is sensitive about your documentary about the Rohingya?

Kubota: It is like the Tatmadaw [Myanmar military] is protecting their own people, Buddhist people, from the Islamic forces invading their own territory. That was their strategy, and that was to secure their legitimacy. I think many people were fooled by that strategy as well and actually believed that the Rohingya Muslims were invading, and the military was protecting them. It worked very well for the Tatmadaw to stay in power, too. The police and the soldiers truly believe that we can use their enemies and that foreign journalists and filmmakers like me are sponsored by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, by a huge mysterious fund.

RFA: What did the junta authorities ask you about your project?

Kubota: Where the money comes from. When I said that it was self-funded, they didn’t believe it. They repeatedly asked me [about it]. They pointed to the picture where I was at a film festival holding a very small glass trophy. [They asked] how much was that, or how much award money I got. I think they wanted to create a story that I was sponsored by some other foreign or Muslim forces or organizations. They also asked me about the contributors to the film, but they are not in the country anymore. I just told them the fact that they were not in Myanmar anymore. The other thing was just ordinary stuff like when did I make the [project]. They really wanted me to say that I was sponsored by some organization.

RFA: The junta’s spokesman said you were involved in the protest you filmed. Is that true?

Kubota: I did not participate in the protest. It is clear that I was filming from behind, [but] I did not have a direct connection to any of the protesters. So the fact is I was not involved in the protest, but after they arrested me, they told us to hold a [protest] banner. They told us to go in front of the police station and hold the banner that the protesters had been holding. They took a picture of us holding the banner, and they used it as evidence that I was one of the protesters. They even told me I wrote a banner statement, even though I don’t understand Burmese.

RFA: Tell us about your experience being detained in Yangon’s Insein Prison where you spent three months.

Kubota: What I went through as a foreigner was very mediocre compared to all the other Burmese people going through. I was myself in prison, just one person on my own in a two meter by four meter space. In my block there were 12 cells. In the daytime, I could spend time in the common space, the block area. I spent time studying Burmese. There was only one guy there who taught me Burmese, and I taught him Japanese. I was separated from all the political prisoners in Insein Prison, so I couldn’t get much information. But I saw prisoners secretly showing the three-fingered salute [of the popular protest movement against the junta] and saying “Fighting, fighting,” so I said, “Fighting.” Human interaction was going on in a very hidden way.

Toru Kubota sketched the places where he was held in Myanmar. From left: A detention cell at a police station, Insein Prison and a block inside Insein Prison. Credit: Toru Kubota

RFA: Did you participate in any political prisoner protests during which the prison authorities suppressed inmates?

Kubota: I was on a hunger strike as well for the first six days while I was in detention because I needed to get in touch with the Japanese Embassy, but they didn’t let me do it. So, I told them that I would not eat until I could contact the embassy. But they didn’t beat me. They just gently tried to persuade me to eat, saying they were very worried about my health. I did not see the police or soldiers beating political prisoners.

RFA: You had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, but you were freed during the recent prisoner amnesty in November. Why do you think the junta released you?

Kubota: The first obvious reason is that the Japanese Embassy was pressuring them to release me. Another thing is that the junta used me and the other foreigners it released as propaganda tools to show international society that they became soft, and that the foreigner release is a ruse. Behind the shadows, they can do very brutal things. Our release can overshadow all the brutalities that are still ongoing. It is extremely shameful if I was used as a political tool to overshadow their brutality. Seven students from Dagon University were sentenced to death last week. They’re still killing their own people.

RFA: The Burmese people believe that the rest of the world remains silent about what is happening in Myanmar. As a foreigner, what do you think about what is going on?

Kubota: Burma has not attracted as much attention as Ukraine and other [countries] in the world. But what’s going on is the killings and massacre and genocide of the people. We shouldn’t be silent, saying this is an internal affair. These are crimes against humanity, so we should stand together. More specifically, we definitely should pressure the junta to stop killing people and release the prisoners. There are still more than 12,000 political prisoners detained, and I was one of them. We should continue paying attention to Burma.

RFA: There are some reports that the Japanese government has some business dealings with the junta, and activists are calling for it to cut funding to the junta. What should the Japanese government do?

Kubota: As many activists have pointed out, an organization called the Mekong Watch has also repeatedly pointed out the fact that Japan is being used by the junta. As Japanese citizens, we should be very responsible, and we need to speak out. At the same time we should accept as many refugees as possible from Burma. We haven’t even tried to accept any refugees. The number of refugees in Japan is very small, even though Japan is a country that signed the Refugee Convention.

RFA: Since the coup, the military has targeted not only anti-regime activists but also the media and journalists. Why do you think this is?

Kubota: They arrest and kill journalists in Burma because they want to cover up their ongoing brutality. They don’t want to let the world know about the massacre.

RFA: Will you ever go back to Myanmar?

Kubota: I really wish I could. I really want to support the people of Burma, but currently I cannot enter the country anymore. I might be able to go after the country becomes a place where I won’t be arrested, even though I was filming the protest. I really hope that the country will become a truly safe place for journalists so that we can do our jobs. But there are still many Burmese people working in the country, even though it’s extremely dangerous for them. I have enormous respect for each of them.

Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Soe San Aung.

‘A Very Good Day for Our Republic’ as Key Jan. 6 Insurrectionist Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy

Brett Wilkins — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 22:46:59 +0000

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted Tuesday by a federal jury of seditious conspiracy for his leading role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump and his "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

"Stewart Rhodes being convicted for seditious conspiracy will be a wake-up call for a LOT of other January 6 defendants."

The Washington, D.C. jury deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs guilty of seditious conspiracy, while three other accused—Oath Keeper Kenneth Harrelson, retired Navy intelligence officer Thomas Caldwell, and Ohio militia leader Jessica Watkins—were acquitted of that charge.

Additionally, all five defendants were convicted of obstructing Congress as it convened to certify the results of the 2020 election. Both crimes are punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment.

Seditious conspiracy convictions are exceedingly rare; in 1954 a group of Puerto Rican militants resisting U.S. colonization were found guilty of shooting up the Capitol earlier that year and given lengthy prison sentences that were later commuted by then-President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Numerous militants acting in the name of Islam—including 10 men who planned a series of thwarted bombings in New York City in the 1990s—have also been convicted of the crime.

NBC News legal analyst Glenn Kirschner hailed the convictions as "a very good day for our republic."

"The defendants tried to convince the jury they're patriots, trying to set right a 'stolen' election," he added. "The jury—12 citizens sitting as the conscious of the community—told them, 'you are NOT patriots, you're traitors."

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) tweeted: "We can't move on from January 6th by burying our heads in the sand and pretending it never happened. We can only move on by confronting it directly and ensuring justice is served. Today's convictions for seditious conspiracy are a significant step in that direction."

The Washington Post reports:

The indictment brought against Rhodes, 56, and other Oath Keepers associates in January was the first time the U.S. government leveled the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy in the massive January 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers and ransacked offices, forcing the evacuation of lawmakers.
Rhodes and followers, dressed in combat-style gear, converged on the Capitol after staging an "arsenal" of weapons at nearby hotels, ready to take up arms at Rhodes' direction, the government charged. Rhodes' defense said he and co-defendants came to Washington as bodyguards and peacekeepers, bringing firearms only in case Trump met their demand to mobilize private militia to stop [Joe] Biden from becoming president.

"On January 6, 2021, the Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol, dressed in tactical gear and moving in military-style formations. The group attacked police lines and hunted for members of Congress," Right Wing Watch managing editor Kristen Doerer said in a video posted on social media. "They were integral to the violent attack on the Capitol, and their attempts to undermine our democracy haven't stopped since."

Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair who endorsed Biden for president in 2020, took aim at GOP purveyors of Trump's "Big Lie."

"Accountability for what happened on January 6th matters. But the politicians who urged the insurrection with their lies hide behind their positions to avoid their accountability," Steele tweeted. "While they did not storm the Capitol, their role was no less consequential."

Former federal prosecutor and current George Washington University Law School professor Randall D. Eliason told The Washington Post that "the jury's verdict on seditious conspiracy confirms that January 6, 2021, was not just 'legitimate political discourse' or a peaceful protest that got out of hand. This was a planned, organized, violent assault on the lawful authority of the U.S. government and the peaceful transfer of power."

"Now," he added, "the only remaining question is how much higher did those plans go, and who else might be held criminally responsible."

As the Post noted:

The verdict in Rhodes' case likely will be taken as a bellwether for two remaining January 6 seditious conspiracy trials set for December against five other Oath Keepers and leaders of the Proud Boys, including the longtime chairman Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio. Both Rhodes and Tarrio are highly visible leaders of the alt-right or far-right anti-government movements, and were highlighted at hearings probing the attack earlier this year by the House January 6 committee.

Around 900 people have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the January 6 insurrection. So far, about 450 of the defendants have pleaded guilty.

Trump, meanwhile, recently announced his 2024 campaign for president. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has warned that it will attempt to disqualify him using the 14th Amendment's anti-insurrectionist clause.

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

Why We Should Be Very Skeptical of the Billionaires Who Vow to ‘Give It All Away’

Chuck Collins — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:33:44 +0000

In the United States, we are now treated to regular announcements about benevolent billionaires pledging to share their wealth. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for instance, recently told CNN that he would be giving away the majority of his $124 billion fortune in his lifetime. Further back in 2015, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away what he makes from 99% of his Facebook shares.

At this point, we should assume a skeptical posture. The truth is, pledges like these may take years, decades or even generations to reach their nonprofit destinations—if ever. That’s why we need more public scrutiny of billionaire philanthropy—and much clearer rules to make sure donations actually support real, working charities.

Consider the Giving Pledge, an initiative founded by Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates to increase charitable giving by the extremely wealthy. As of today, more than 230 billionaires from 28 countries have taken the pledge to give away the majority of their wealth.

Presumably, this means we would see declining billionaire fortunes. But on the 10th anniversary of the pledge in 2020, my colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies and I found that the total net worth of the 62 living initial pledgers hadn’t diminished at all. In fact, it had nearly doubled, when adjusted for inflation.

Part of the challenge is that billionaire wealth is simply rising so fast—US billionaires have seen their total wealth increase by $1.5 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic, according to an IPS analysis based on Forbes’ billionaire database. As our economy becomes ever more tilted toward the rich, even committed philanthropists are making money faster than they can give it away.

The increasingly top-heavy nature of today’s giving landscape—and the growing dominance of lightly regulated funds often controlled by donors themselves—is an even bigger problem.

While billionaires do of course still donate to charities, grand philanthropic pledges are often fulfilled by dumping funds into family foundations or donor-advised funds (DAFs) that could exist in perpetuity. Some 30% of charitable donations now flow through intermediaries like these, outpacing direct donations to many traditional charities.

Billionaires may claim enormous tax deductions—not to mention starry-eyed headlines—for parking funds in these intermediaries. But there’s little to no guarantee that money will ever make it to working charities. Foundations are only required to pay out 5% of their assets each year, and most dole out just slightly more than this minimum. DAFs face no annual payout requirement at all. Lax reporting requirements make it difficult to assess their activity, but recent reports suggest that median DAF payouts are shockingly low.

What’s more, billionaire charity is our tax dollars at work. For every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, we the taxpayers chip in up to 74 cents of that dollar in lost federal tax revenue as donors claim deductions in their income, estate and capital gains taxes, among others. That makes it even more outrageous that much of this money may never reach a real, on-the-ground charity.

Because our tax dollars subsidize this system, charity needs to be more transparent, with clear disclosures of when donations reach their recipients. Payout requirements should be increased, with more oversight to ensure that philanthropic money reaches real working charities. Components of these reforms are included in the Accelerate Charitable Effectiveness (ACE) Act, which has bipartisan backing in the Senate, although a vote has yet to be been called since it was introduced in 2021.

There are refreshing exceptions to the troubling trend of billionaires warehousing charitable contributions in private foundations and DAFs. For example, MacKenzie Scott recently announced almost $2 billion in direct gifts to recipient charities, increasing her direct giving to more than $14 billion since 2019. That is news.

In the end, philanthropy will never be an adequate substitute for an effective tax system where billionaires pay their fair share and democratically elected governments make decisions about investment priorities, not billionaires.

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

The Not Very Smart Elon Musk

Sam Pizzigati — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:30:45 +0000

A good day's work for a good day's pay. Should this age-old wisdom apply to overpaid CEOs as well as their workers? A Delaware court will soon decide, a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe, Elon Musk, feeling more than a little bit uneasy.

Musk has also benefited, unlike the rest of us, from billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Delaware's little-known Court of Chancery normally provides business moguls a battleground where they can slug out their big-ticket differences. But the court also gives stockholders a chance to push back against the moguls—and one modest shareholder in the Musk empire has done just that.

Shareholder Richard Tornetta, a former heavy metal drummer, filed suit in 2018 against the company's board for lavishing unnecessary billions upon Musk.

Tornetta's challenge has ended up before the Chancery Court's Kathleen McCormick, a judge who's already demonstrated a distinct lack of patience with Muskian antics. Just this past October, McCormick ruled against Musk in another case. She might well again.

Musk's current Tesla CEO pay plan, notes CNN Business, gives Musk "the largest compensation package for anyone on Earth from a publicly traded company." Under the plan, the higher Tesla's share price goes, the more new Tesla shares Musk gets.

Thanks to that connection, Musk's personal net worth now sits at $189 billion, the world's largest personal fortune. In 2018, the year Musk's Tesla pay deal went into effect, some 40 billionaires worldwide topped Musk on the Bloomberg billionaire charts.

Back in 2018, major shareholder advisory firms recommended that Tesla shareholders reject the pay deal that Tesla's corporate board—a panel that included Musk's brother and assorted close pals—wanted to give Musk.

Musk himself, one advisory firm noted, already had plenty of incentive to work hard for Tesla's success. He owned 22 percent of Tesla's shares even before his new CEO pay deal.

The week-long trial on Richard Tornetta's Delaware lawsuit against Musk and Tesla ended in mid-November. Judge McCormick's decision in the case will likely come down sometime over the next three months.

McCormick's previous ruling against Musk came when the billionaire tried to back out of the deal he cut last spring to buy Twitter. After that ruling, Musk had to go ahead with the purchase. Now he's flailing about, trying to make others pay the price for his impulsive takeover bid. He's already laid off half the Twitter workforce.

If McCormick rules against Musk once again, Musk will still walk away fantastically rich. But he won't walk away happy. His ongoing Twitter debacle—and now the Tesla litigation—have dealt his reputation for unparalleled business "genius" a potentially fatal blow.

Under cross-examination in the Tesla case, for instance, Musk had to concede that he didn't come up with the original vision for Tesla himself, the claim he's been making for years.

Musk turns out to be as flawed as the rest of us. The key difference: Musk has the power and wealth to make others pay for his mistakes.

Musk has also benefited, unlike the rest of us, from billions in taxpayer subsidies. Handouts to his electric car, solar panel, and spaceflight businesses—all "long-shot start-ups," the Los Angeles Times has detailed—gave his companies their secret sauce. Those subsidies launched Musk's unparalleled personal fortune.

So what can the rest of us do to prevent another "brilliant" entrepreneur from building a fortune off the insights, labor, and tax dollars of others? We can deny subsidies to companies that pay their top execs hundreds of times more than what they pay their workers. We can tax the rich at much higher rates.

And we can put Elon Musk atop a rocket and send him off to where he has repeatedly announced he dearly wants to go—to Mars.

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

The Very Best Response to GOP Election Denial? Vote.

Michael Waldman — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 16:16:06 +0000

There’s only one message this morning: get out and vote.

This is the first election in American history in which political leaders are pushing conspiracy theories and lies about democracy itself.

Here’s the good news: more than half of all Americans who will vote in this midterm election have already cast their ballot. Overwhelmingly, they have done so without incident. It has been calm and safe, just like any other year. There are a handful of exceptions—the armed men stalking some drop boxes in Arizona, blocked by a federal court, was the most visible example. But as that ruling reinforced, it is illegal to harass voters or election workers. Law enforcement this year has finally begun to step up to ensure safety.

But even though voters so far are experiencing a calm and normal election process, we all know it is anything but normal.

This is the first election in American history in which political leaders are pushing conspiracy theories and lies about democracy itself. It’s no coincidence that the harassment occurred in Arizona, where prominent election deniers are running for senator, governor, and secretary of state. Michigan is having similar problems. Election deniers are on the ballot for governor and attorney general, while a group is signing up vigilante volunteers to install hidden cameras at ballot drop boxes and carry weapons in anticipation of trouble. There is a straight line between election denial and voter intimidation.

If you experience any form of voter intimidation, you should alert poll workers, local election officials, and the Election Protection hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE. If you are a poll worker and you experience threats or intimidation, call law enforcement. Police departments across the country are coordinating with election officials to ensure that the 2022 election is safe.

And while the voting process so far has been secure, we know that after the voting is over, the process of counting and certifying results may be the subject of conspiracy theories, violent threats, and fake news, as it was in 2020. If these election deniers lose fair and square, will they ever accept the results? That would itself be a challenge to the norms of our democracy.

Our elections are secure. They are trustworthy. And our polling places are safe. Millions of people have already cast their ballots. I urge you to join them. If you haven’t already, please vote.

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

Make America Truly Great…For the Very First Time

Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:11:14 +0000

Political violence is on a bloody and disturbing rise in the United States. Early Friday morning, an intruder broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home, attacking her 82-year-old husband Paul with a hammer, fracturing his skull. The intruder, David DePape, 42, was arrested. DePape's online presence is a horrifying mix of conspiracy theories, racism, election denial and antisemitism. "Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy?" DePape screamed at Paul Pelosi, using a phrase chanted in the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Pelosi managed to call 911, leaving the call connected so the dispatcher could hear as he tried to negotiate with the intruder. The dispatcher called on the San Francisco Police to conduct a wellness check. DePape attacked Pelosi as the police arrived, and was quickly arrested. Pelosi was rushed to the hospital. DePape has been jailed, charged with multiple state and federal crimes.

Normalizing and inflaming political violence, as Donald Trump and his Republican enablers are doing, ensures more bloodshed.

In a primetime address in Union Station in Washington, DC, President Biden said, "We don't settle our differences with a riot, or a mob, or a bullet, or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box." That is how it is supposed to go. Donald Trump's demagogic takeover of the Republican Party and his lie that the 2020 election was stolen has propelled the United States into a dark and dangerous era. Racism, xenophobia, Christian Nationalism, and a welter of other bigotries are being whipped up by Republican officials desperate to hold onto power. This toxic stew is backed by an increasingly well-armed and radicalized rightwing minority, masking their criminality behind self-styled militias and patriotic slogans.

"Make America Great Again," Trump proclaims, never saying when in our painful, tumultuous history America was, in fact, "great." That phrase's acronym, "MAGA," has been embraced by Trump's supporters and his many detractors, as both a battle cry of the right and a catchall warning used by defenders of democracy.

"American democracy is under attack because the defeated former president of the United States refused to accept the results of the 2020 election," Biden said Wednesday. "He has made the Big Lie an article of faith of the MAGA Republican, the minority of that party…They have emboldened violence and intimidation of voters and election officials."

Since Trump's 2020 loss, threats against election officials have intensified. The Brennan Center for Justice issued a report in 2021 that detailed reports from states across the country, of numerous confrontations and threats against election workers—many laced with racism and anti-semitism. Republican state legislatures accelerated the voter suppression crusade, passing scores of laws aimed at restricting access to the vote. Early voting, mail-in voting, Voter ID laws and even, in Georgia, a law making it illegal to provide water to someone waiting in line to vote, have all been enacted.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll, released last week, found that two in five voters are concerned about the threat of violence or intimidation at polling places during these midterm elections, and that two-thirds of registered voters expect extremists to carry out acts of violence if they are unhappy with the election results.

In Arizona, masked, armed vigilantes wearing body armor were monitoring a 24-hour ballot drop box location. The League of Women Voters of Arizona went to federal court and won a temporary restraining order against the voter intimidation group, Clean Elections USA. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chair Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer issued a joint statement that included the line, which itself serves as a measure of how bad things have gotten, "Don't dress in body armor to intimidate voters as they are legally returning their ballots." So far, at least six instances of voter intimidation have been reported to the Justice Department by Arizona's Secretary of State.

In rural Nye County, Nevada, election deniers suspicious of ballot-scanning devices successfully compelled the county to adopt hand-counting of ballots. The county clerk resigned in protest, and the hand counting has not been going well. Human errors abound and the process has been ordered halted. But not before Nye County Republican Party Central Committee Vice Chair Laura Larsen, wearing a gun, ejected a legal election observer from the ACLU, attempting to confiscate the person's notes.

The attack on Paul Pelosi was part of a failed attempt to either kidnap or assassinate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, second in line to assume the presidency. In response, prominent Republicans from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to Donald Trump, Jr. joked about that attack.

Normalizing and inflaming political violence, as Donald Trump and his Republican enablers are doing, ensures more bloodshed. The resilience of our democracy depends on free, fair and vigorous participation from all eligible voters. Political violence must be condemned, and countered with massive voter turnout.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

‘Very Soon. Get Ready’: Trump Signals 2024 Announcement Imminent

Julia Conley — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 13:34:17 +0000

Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday night signaled to his supporters in Sioux City, Iowa that he's close to making an announcement about the 2024 election, as his advisers are reportedly preparing for a campaign launch days after the midterms.

As Axios reported Friday, Trump's aides are "discussing announcing the launch of a 2024 presidential campaign on November 14."

In Sioux City, the former Republican leader told a rally crowd of a presidential run, "In order to make our country successful and safe and glorious, I will very, very, very probably do it again."

"Get ready, that's all I'm telling you—very soon," he added. "Get ready."

The remarks came five days before the midterm elections, in which Trump urged the Iowa crowd to vote against Democrats, as recent polls indicate Republicans have a good chance of taking at least the U.S. House.

The former president's influence over the midterms has been made clear as a majority of Republican candidates endorse Trump's "Big Lie" regarding the 2020 election, which he continues to baselessly claim was rigged in President Joe Biden's favor.

According to CNN, some of Trump's top aides are advising him to announce his 2024 campaign in one of the swing states that Biden won narrowly.

The news that Trump may launch his campaign on November 14 comes as the Department of Justice weighs whether it will bring charges against him over his retention of confidential government documents after he left office in 2021 and his involvement in attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election and organize the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The DOJ is considering appointing a special counsel to oversee the two investigations into Trump if he runs for president again.

The Hottest US Senate Races on a Very Hot Planet

Karyn Strickler — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:14:31 +0000

Vote Climate U.S. PAC's priority U.S. Senate races are all very close and could go either way on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th. They are all critical for climate-action, reproductive choice and American democracy itself. According to Cook Political Report, all of our priority candidates including: John Fetterman (D), Pennsylvania; U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D), Nevada; U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D), Georgia; U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D), Arizona and Mandela Barnes (D), Wisconsin, are in toss-up races.

There is no comparison between our priority candidates and their opponents on climate change.

Vote Climate U.S. PAC is the only website in the country to provide a climate change Voter's Guide for candidates for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Governors and Statehouses (partial). (Always click the green + button for detailed research.) Like most Voter's Guides, we score incumbents on pivotal climate votes in Congress. We also assess a candidate's position: what do candidates say about the issue; leadership: what do they do; and putting a fee on carbon polluters. The average of those scores creates their Climate Calculation.

In 2022 for the first time, we indicate if a candidate supports Roe v. Wade. We see a strong connection between climate and choice, so while it is not part of our Climate Calculations, we have included support or opposition to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, in our national climate change voter's guide.

There is no comparison between our priority candidates and their opponents on climate change. Four of five of the opponents have a Climate Calculation of 7.5 or less and the other one scores 28.75, all failing grades on any scale. Every opponent opposes Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion and many of them are 2020 election deniers. These are the races that we believe will most advance climate action and reproductive choice.

In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman's (D) Climate Calculation is 92.5. He understands the importance of action on climate change as a top priority issue. On his official campaign website, Fetterman states, "I believe that climate change is an existential threat, and we need to transition to clean energy as quickly as possible."

In our 2020 Vote Climate U.S. PAC analysis of the partisan divide on Climate Calculations, with U.S. Senate challengers, the Republican mean was 17.7, the Democratic mean was 90.7, with a +73 difference for the Democrats. The partisan divide was worse for incumbents. And that was an improvement from the 2018 party analysis. Our 2022 partisan analysis will be available soon.

Still, Democrats have major room for improvement on the issue. America needs leadership for climate-specific legislation, like a fee on carbon polluters. For example, for a Climate Calculation of 100, candidate John Fetterman would need to take a strong, public position and advocate in favor of a U.S. fee on carbon polluters. His position is unclear. He seems to lean a bit heavily on fossil fuels, saying, "But we must [transition to clean energy] in a way that preserves the union way of life for the thousands of workers currently employed or supported by the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania and the communities where they live." We must get off fossil fuels within a decade, if we hope to slow climate change. Fetterman supports Roe v. Wade. (See our Voter's Guide Scoring Criteria for Challengers for more information. Both candidates in this PA race are challengers, so they share the same criteria.)

John Fetterman's (D) Climate Calculation of 92.5 compares to his opponent whose overall Climate Calculation is an abysmal 7.5 out of a possible 100. The opponent disagrees with the scientific consensus that climate change is real and human-made, from burning fossil fuels. He opposes Roe.

In Nevada Catherine Cortez Master (D) has a Climate Calculation of 87.5. In a 2019 press release on climate change innovation, the Senator stated, "We cannot put off solutions to carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, and we can't ignore the effects of climate change, visible all around us." She consistently votes pro-climate and shows leadership by making climate change a top priority issue. In a 'Medium' blog post the Senator wrote, "I'm also proud to support the Clean Energy for America Act, which would reduce carbon pollution over the next decade."

As an incumbent U.S. Senator, she received a 100 on her position, 100 on her climate votes, 100 on her leadership, but a 50 on her carbon fee score. She would need to take a strong position, advocating for a fee on carbon polluters for a Climate Calculation of 100. Her position on that issue is unclear. If she clarified that position, she could be Vote Climate U.S. PAC, Climate Hero. She supports Roe. (See Voter's Guide Scoring Criteria for Incumbents for more information.)

Her opponent has a Climate Calculation of 28.75 because he does not take a clear position on whether climate change is real and human-made, from burning fossil fuels and he has no known, or an inconsistent position on a U.S. carbon fee. He opposes Roe.

In Georgia, incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock (D) has a Climate Calculation of 81.25. For position, he got a score of 100. For votes, we picked 5 U.S. Senate votes and Senator Warnock received a 100 on votes. But for Vote Climate U.S. PAC, there is more to a Climate Calculation than what candidates say and how they vote. It's also about what they do, also known as leadership. If incumbents don't make public statements and advocate for action on climate change as a top priority issue, which would earn them a score of 100, but they do still advocate for climate action, they get a 75 on leadership, as Warnock does.

A carbon fee is a fee imposed on fossil fuels intended to dramatically reduce or eliminate the emission of carbon dioxide from those sources. A carbon fee would aid in the switch from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy and slow climate change and is a policy which Vote Climate U.S. PAC considers the singular, most effective.

For a Climate Calculation of 100, U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, like many other of our priority candidates, would need to take a strong, public position and advocate in favor of a U.S. fee on carbon polluters. His position is unclear. Senator, your constituents and your country deserve to know where you stand on this issue. Since don't know, Senator Warnock got a 50 which means he has no known or inconsistent position on a U.S. carbon fee. Plus, we need stronger leadership on the issue of climate change.

Warnock's opponent has a ridiculously low Climate Calculation of 7.5 because despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, he disagrees with the scientific consensus that climate change is real and human-made, from burning fossil fuels. He has no known, or an inconsistent position on a U.S. carbon fee. He is a 2020 election denier. He not only opposes Roe, but he has been accused of paying for several abortions for his former girlfriends. Right-wingers don't care because he is a vote for them, regardless of his hypocrisy. Let's hope that swing voters care and progressives turn out on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th.

Our priority candidate in Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly (D) has a Climate Calculation of 82.5. He understands the importance of climate action as a top priority issue. On his campaign website, it states "Mark has seen the planet change from space, and wanting to stop that and protect our state and our planet is part of what inspired him to run. Mark knows that if we harness the power of American ingenuity and determination, we can mitigate the risks of climate change."

Senator Mark Kelly has demonstrated leadership by advocating for climate action. In a 2019 Facebook post, Senator Kelly told, "Congress that we need immediate action on climate action." In an October 2021 interview with White Mountain Independent it said, "Regarding energy and climate change, Senator Kelly recognizes the role that traditional fossil fuels play in the production of electricity and the creation of jobs in Arizona. He also sees Arizona's drought and wildfire conditions being made worse by the effects of climate change." We do not know his position on a fee on carbon polluters. He supports Roe. His opponent has a Climate Calculation of 7.5. He opposes Roe.

In Wisconsin, priority candidate Mandela Barnes (D) Climate Calculation is 92.5. She understands the importance of action on climate change as a top priority issue. In a video on his official campaign website, Candidate Barnes states, "Climate change is already taking a toll on our communities, from our cities to our family farms. We've got once in a generation storms coming every year now. We need bold, powerful action to address climate change that breathes new life into the manufacturing industry." We don't know her position on a fee on carbon. She supports Roe. Her opponent demonstrates a lack of leadership with public statements, advocacy or votes against climate action. He opposes Roe.

Please use and share our Vote Climate U.S. PAC Voter's Guide for candidates for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Governors and Statehouses (partial). (Always click the green + button for detailed research.). Vote Climate and Vote Choice on Tuesday, November 8th.

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

It Is Bizarre—and Very Alarming—That the GOP Could Win This Thing

Jeffrey Frankel — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 11:30:57 +0000

Despite their hostility to most voters' economic interests—and to democracy itself—the Republicans are still favored to win.

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

Your Very Own Social Network

Mark Fiore — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 21:00:00 +0000

It seems that buying your own social network is the thing to do these days. It’s enough to make me want to buy my own social network . . .

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

On the Death of Rayan Suliman and Palestinian Children’s Very Real Fear of Monsters

Ramzy Baroud — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:48:51 +0000

Children of my Gaza refugee camp were rarely afraid of monsters but of Israeli soldiers. This is all that we talked about before going to bed. Unlike imaginary monsters in the closet or under the bed, Israeli soldiers are real, and they could show up any minute - at the door, on the roof or, as was often the case, right in the middle of the house.

The recent tragic death of a 7-year-old, Rayan Suliman, a Palestinian boy from the village of Tuqu near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, stirred up so many memories. The little boy with olive skin, innocent face and bright eyes fell on the ground while being chased by Israeli soldiers, who accused him and his peers of throwing stones. He fell unconscious, blood poured out of his mouth and, despite efforts to revive him, he ceased to breathe.

Rayan’s story, though tragic beyond words, is not unique but a repeat of other stories experienced by countless Palestinian children.

This was the abrupt and tragic end of Rayan’s life. All the things that could have been, all the experiences that he could have lived, and all the love that he could have imparted or received, all ended suddenly, as the boy lay face down on the pavement of a dusty road, in a poor village, without ever experiencing a single moment of being truly free, or even safe.

Adults often project their understanding of the world on children. We want to believe that Palestinian children are warriors against oppression, injustice and military occupation. Though Palestinian children develop political consciousness at a very young age, quite often their action of protesting against the Israeli military, chanting against invading soldiers or even throwing stones are not compelled by politics, but by something else entirely: their fear of monsters.

This connection came to mind when I read the details of the harrowing experience that Rayan and many of the village children endure daily.

Tuqu is a Palestinian village that, once upon a time, existed in an uncontested landscape. In 1957, the illegal Jewish settlement of Tekoa was established on stolen Palestinian land. The nightmare had begun.

Israeli restrictions on Palestinian communities in that area increased, along with land annexation, travel restrictions and deepening apartheid. Several residents, mostly children from the village, were injured or killed by Israeli soldiers during repeated protests: the villagers wanted to have their life and freedom back; the soldiers wanted to ensure the continued oppression of Tuqu in the name of safeguarding the security of Tekoa. In 2017, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy, Hassan Mohammad al-Amour, was shot and killed during a protest; in 2019, another, Osama Hajahjeh, was seriously wounded.

The children of Tuqu had much to fear, and their fears were all well-founded. A daily journey to school, taken by Rayan and many of his peers, accentuated these fears. To get to school, the kids had to cross Israeli military barbed wire, often manned by heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

Sometimes, kids attempted to avoid the barbed wire so as to avoid the terrifying encounter. The soldiers anticipated this. “We tried to walk through the olive field next to the path, instead, but the soldiers hide in the trees there and grab us,” a 10-year-old boy from Tuqu, Mohammed Sabah, was quoted in an article by Sheren Khalel, published years ago.

The nightmare has been ongoing for years, and Rayan experienced that terrorizing journey for over a year, of soldiers waiting behind barbed wires, of mysterious creatures hiding behind trees, of hands grabbing little bodies, of children screaming for their parents, beseeching God and running in all directions.

Following Rayan’s death on September 29, the US State Department, the British government and the European Union demanded an investigation, as if the reason why the little boy succumbing to his paralyzing fears was a mystery, as if the horror of Israeli military occupation and violence was not an everyday reality.

Rayan’s story, though tragic beyond words, is not unique but a repeat of other stories experienced by countless Palestinian children.

When Ahmad Manasra was run over by an Israeli settler’s car, and his cousin, Hassan, was killed in 2015, Israeli media and apologists fanned the flames of propaganda, claiming that Manasra, 13 at the time, was a representation of something bigger. Israel claimed that Manasra was shot for attempting to stab an Israeli guard, and that such action reflected deep-seated Palestinian hatred for Israeli Jews, another convenient proof of the indoctrination of Palestinian children by their supposedly violent culture. Despite his injuries and young age, Manasra was tried in 2016, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

Manasra comes from the Palestinian town of Beit Hanina, near Jerusalem. His story is, in many ways, similar to that of Rayan: a Palestinian town, an illegal Jewish settlement, soldiers, armed settlers, ethnic cleansing, land theft and real monsters, everywhere. None of this mattered to the Israeli court or to mainstream, corporate media. They turned a 13-year-old boy into a monster, instead, and used his image as a poster child of Palestinian terrorism taught at a very young age.

The truth is, Palestinian children throw stones at Israeli soldiers, neither because of their supposedly inherent hatred of Israelis, nor as purely political acts. They do so because it is their only way of facing their own fears and coming to terms with their daily humiliation.

Just before Rayan managed to escape the crowd of Israeli soldiers and was chased to his death, an exchange took place between his father and the soldiers. Rayan’s father told the Associated Press the soldiers had threatened that, if Rayan was not handed over, they would return at night to arrest him along with his older brothers, aged 8 and 10. For a Palestinian child, a nightly raid by Israeli soldiers is the most terrifying prospect. Rayan’s young heart could not bear the thought. He fell unconscious.

Doctors at the nearby Palestinian hospital of Beit Jala had a convincing medical explanation of why Rayan has died. A pediatric specialist spoke about increased stress levels, caused by “excess adrenaline secretion” and increased heartbeats, leading to a cardiac arrest. For Rayan, his brothers and many Palestinian children, the culprit is something else: the monsters who return at night and terrify the sleeping children.

Chances are, Rayan’s older brothers will be back in the streets of Tuqu, stones and slingshots in hand, ready to face their fears of monsters, even if they pay the price with their own lives.

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

Brazil’s Lula Reemerges in a Very Different Political World

Sonali Kolhatkar — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 06:00:47 +0000

Photograph Source: Valter Campanato/ABr – CC BY 3.0 br

Brazil’s first round of elections, held on October 2, yielded a major victory for the man who held the presidency from 2003 to 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Winning 48 percent of the vote in a multicandidate race, Lula now heads to a runoff against incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who won 43 percent. It’s the first chapter of a dramatic comeback for a leader who was once hailed as the epitome of Latin America’s resurgent left, who was then imprisoned on corruption charges by a politicized judiciary, eventually was released, and has now emerged onto the political scene in a very different nation than the one he once led.

A founding member of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), Lula ran for president several times before winning in 2002. A year later I recall sitting in a huge stadium in Porto Alegre for the second annual World Social Forum (WSF), getting ready alongside tens of thousands of people to hear the new president speak. The WSF was an organized response to the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders annually hobnob with corporate executives to explore capitalist solutions to the problems created by capitalism.

In 2003, the crowds that had gathered in a Porto Alegre stadium to explore alternatives to capitalism greeted Lula with coordinated roars of “olè olè olè Lula!” It seemed at that moment that everything could change for the better, and that, in the words of Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who also addressed the WSF, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” Indeed, Lula’s rewriting of Brazil’s economic priorities emphasizing benefits for low-income communities was a welcome change in a world seduced by neoliberalism. He went on to win reelection in 2006.

In subsequent years, Lula moved closer toward the political center. Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, says, “I don’t think Lula is this radical left-wing person” today. In an interview she explains, “many social movements had criticisms of the Workers’ Party before because they thought [the party] could move to make structural changes in Brazil.” Still, she maintains that Lula’s changes to Brazil were profound. “The amount of investment that the Workers’ Party did, in education for example, [was] unprecedented.” She asserts that “they really made concrete improvements in the lives of people.”

Fast-forward to 2018 and Bolsonaro swept into power, glorifying the ugliest aspects of bigoted conservatism and making them central to his rule, and decimating Lula’s legacy of economic investments in the poor. Business executives in the U.S. celebrated his win, excited at the prospect of a deregulated economy in which they could invest, and from which they could extract wealth.

Today Latin America’s largest democracy has been shattered by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Bolsonaro’s fascist and conspiracy-fueled leadership elevated snake oil cures above commonsense scientific mitigation. The Amazon rainforest has suffered the ravages of unfettered deforestation, and its Indigenous inhabitants have been exploited beyond measure.

Bizarrely, some corporate media pundits in the United States place equal blame on Bolsonaro and Lula for Brazil’s worrisome status quo. Arick Wierson writes on NBCNews.com, “these pressing problems are the result of the policies and actions of Brazilian leadership over the past two decades—inextricably linked to both the Lula and Bolsonaro administrations.”

The Economist advises Lula to “move to the center” in order to win the election, implying that his social and economic agenda is too leftist. A PT spokesperson told the Financial Times that if Lula wins a third term in the October 30 runoff election, he plans to focus on the “popular economy,” meaning that “the Brazilian state will have to fulfill a strong agenda in inducing economic development,” which would be achieved with “jobs, social programs, and the presence of the state.”

It speaks to the severe conservative skewing of the world political spectrum that a leader like Lula is still considered left of center. According to Mendonça, “I don’t think that investing in education and health care, in job creation, is a radical idea.” She views Lula as “a moderate politician,” and says that now, “after a very disastrous administration of Bolsonaro, Lula again is the most popular politician in the country.”

Most Brazilians appear to have tired of Bolsonarismo. A Reuters poll found that Lula now enjoys 51 percent support to Bolsonaro’s 43 percent ahead of the October 30 runoff race. But, just as the 2016 U.S. presidential race yielded a win for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the candidate who had been widely expected to win, there is no guarantee that Lula will prevail.

And Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed the “Tropical Trump,” has worryingly taken a page out of the disgraced American leader’s 2020 election playbook in claiming ahead of the first round of elections that Lula loyalists plan to steal the election. “Bolsonaro has been threatening not to accept the result of the election,” says Mendonça. “His discourse is very similar to Trump’s discourse.”

Just as Trump—in spite of damning and overwhelming evidence of his unfitness for office—remains disconcertingly popular among a significant minority of Americans, Bolsonaro enjoys a stubborn level of allegiance within Brazil. He has reshaped the political landscape so deeply that the lines between reality and propaganda remain blurred.

“We had years and years of attacks against the Workers’ Party,” says Mendonça. She asks us to “imagine if all mainstream media [in Brazil] were like Fox News.” Additionally, Bolsonaro has built what she calls “a huge infrastructure to spread fake news on social media.” And, like Trump, Bolsonaro enjoys support from evangelical churches.

“The challenge is how you resist that type of message,” worries Mendonça. She dismisses claims that Brazil is politically polarized as too simplistic, saying that it “doesn’t really explain that there was this orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil.” Putting Brazil into an international context, she sees Bolsonaro as “part of this global far-right movement that uses those types of mechanisms to manipulate public opinion and to discredit democracy.”

The nation and the world that a resurgent Lula faces are ones that require far more sophisticated opposition and organized resistance than when he last held office more than a decade ago.

Ultimately, the challenges facing Lula, the PT, and Brazilians in general are the same ones that we all face: how do we prioritize people’s needs over corporate greed, and how do we elevate the rights of human beings, of women, people of color, Indigenous communities, LGBTQ individuals, and the earth’s environment, in the face of a rising fascism that deploys organized disinformation so effectively?

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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

The Climate Emergency Is Very Much Here. Now We Must Act.

Andreas Karelas — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 14:17:20 +0000

In Florida, Hurricane Ian ripped homes from their foundations, mangled boat docks and left at least 2.6 million people without power. Floridians shared pictures of flamingos sheltering from the storm in public bathrooms and sharks swimming up the flooded streets.

Welcome to the age of climate change.

As we assess the devastating effects of Hurricane Ian, it’s time to take a closer look at climate adaptation. How ready are we for the climate impacts that are here now and are on track to become scarily worse?

Clean energy powered micro-grids with battery storage will prove not only to be a cost-effective way to reduce carbon pollution, but they would also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters.

The age of climate change

Since the late 1980s, scientists have been warning the public with dire predictions of how our climate will change in a warming world, yet it always felt like a far-off threat in the distant future. Surely, we collectively assumed, given the alarming predictions, society would get its act together to avoid such a hellish nightmare of a future.

But we didn’t, and now the hellish nightmare is here.

Category 4 Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida with up to 150 mph winds making it the fifth strongest hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in history.

That’s after it devastated Cuba days prior, knocking out the entire island’s power grid, leaving 11 million people in the dark. Not surprisingly, protests are erupting from Cubans in need of power, food and aid.

This storm hit less than two weeks after Hurricane Fiona slammed into Puerto Rico leaving 3.3 million people without power.

Before the hurricanes came a month of floods. In August, 35 people were killed in extreme floods in Kentucky.

Record-setting rains in Jackson, Mississippi, flooded the water-treatment plant leaving 60,000 people without access to running water. Historic underinvestment in Jackson due to “racist funding policies,” according to the NAACP president, set the stage for this calamity.

Historic floods in Pakistan put one-third of the country under water, impacting 33 million people and displacing 8 million. The flooding doesn’t look like it will recede for 6 months. Yet, somehow this was just a blip on the news, quickly forgotten, like many disasters. Notably, Pakistan has contributed less than 1 percent of historic global carbon emissions.

The list of disasters goes on and on: 400,000 people were displaced in Vietnam this week after Typhoon Noru. China is in the midst of its worst drought on record. California hasn’t been this dry in 1,200 years. Over 18 million people in the Horn of Africa face hunger due to an unprecedented drought and crop failure.

The magnitude of the threat to human life and how this confluence of crises will play out is nothing short of terrifying.

Sadly, this is what a warming world looks like at just 1.2 degrees Celsius. While the nations of the world agreed to try and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, current policies set us on the path to 2.7 degrees Celsius.

Mitigation

Now, before we throw our hands up and declare it the end of days, know this: We can turn this around if we act swiftly.

World-renowned climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State and his team explain the latest scientific understanding, noting scientists believed “that even if humanity hypothetically halted all heat-trapping emissions overnight, carbon dioxide’s long lifetime in the atmosphere … would … keep global temperatures rising for 30 to 40 more years. … But guided by subsequent research, scientists dramatically revised that lag time estimate down to as little as three to five years. … This revised science means that if humanity slashes emissions to zero, global temperatures will stop rising almost immediately.”

Given that solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history, according to the International Energy Agency, things are starting to look up. A recent study from Oxford found that a swift transition to renewable energy will allow us to decarbonize the economy by 2050 and save $12 trillion in the process.

Adaptation

But climate impacts are here today. We need to double down on climate adaptation now.

Ideally, the fossil fuel companies that have admitted to deceiving the public on climate should be paying for mitigation and adaptation measures around the world. While there are over 20 climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, we don’t have time to wait for the verdict.

We must start building resilience right away. Clean energy powered micro-grids with battery storage will prove not only to be a cost-effective way to reduce carbon pollution, but they would also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters.

In Jackson, Mississippi, a nonprofit organization called 501CTHREE has set up portable water-filtration “water boxes” at community centers, providing clean water for residents, a solution they pioneered in Flint, Michigan. These are the types of community-based solutions we need in place today — before the next disaster hits.

But first, we must acknowledge that we have a problem. A recent study found that the majority of Americans (66 to 80 percent) favor strong climate action. However, when the same people were asked how many other Americans shared their view, they incorrectly believed it was only around 40 percent. How absurd. Here we are all sitting at home worrying about climate change, thinking we’re the only ones, when in fact the vast majority of us want to see change.

To coordinate mitigation and adaptation efforts at scale, we have to unflinchingly look climate change in the face, call it what it is and start talking to each other about it. As one headline of an Esquire article recently put it, “In the End, Climate Change Is the Only Story That Matters.”

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

A very British censorship: How UK law helps oligarchs silence journalists

Oliver Bullough — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 14:11:53 +0000

OPINION: So-called ‘SLAPP’ cases – like the one now facing openDemocracy – have a chilling effect on scrutiny

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Oliver Bullough.

Just 12% of Americans Think the US Healthcare System Runs ‘Very’ or ‘Extremely’ Well

Jake Johnson — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 13:17:43 +0000

New survey data released Monday shows just 12% of Americans think healthcare in the United States is handled "extremely" or "very" well, further evidence of the deep unpopularity of a profit-driven system that has left roughly 30 million without insurance coverage and contributed to the country's stunning decline in life expectancy.

"In the richest country in the world, no one should die or go into debt just because they don't have access to healthcare."

The new Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that 56% of the U.S. public believe healthcare in general is handled "not too well" or "not at all well," while 32% believe healthcare is handled "somewhat well."

In all, just 1 in 10 Americans feel the U.S. healthcare system as a whole and healthcare for older adults are handled well or extremely well.

"The poll reveals that public satisfaction with the U.S. healthcare system is remarkably low, with fewer than half of Americans saying it is generally handled well," AP notes. "The poll shows an overwhelming majority of Americans, nearly 8 in 10, say they are at least moderately concerned about getting access to quality healthcare when they need it."

The survey results will come as no surprise to those who have attempted to navigate the byzantine U.S. healthcare system to obtain basic care, which often comes at such prohibitively high costs that millions each year are forced to skip treatments to avoid financial ruin as insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies rake in huge profits.

The AP/NORC findings, based on interviews with 1,505 U.S. adults between July 28 and August 1, 2022, show that just 6% feel prescription drug costs are handled well or extremely well in the U.S., where pharmaceutical firms have broad authority to set prices as they please.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev: A very Russian contradiction

Jeremy Morris — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 12:36:57 +0000

Missing from most Western accounts is how Gorbachev’s thinking was both socialist and liberal

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jeremy Morris.

Americans are convinced climate action is unpopular. They’re very, very wrong.

Kate Yoder — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 10:30:00 +0000

It can be hard to guess what others are thinking. Especially when it comes to climate change.

People imagine that a minority of Americans want action, when it’s actually an overwhelming majority, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications. When asked to estimate public support for measures such as a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, most respondents put the number between 37 and 43 percent. In fact, polling suggests that the real number is almost double that, ranging from 66 to 80 percent.

Across all demographics, people underestimated support for these policies. Democrats guessed slightly higher percentages than Republicans, but were still way off. “Nobody had accurate estimates, on average,” said Gregg Sparkman, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at Boston College. “We were shocked at just how ubiquitous this picture was.”

The research was published just two weeks after President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s most ambitious climate legislation to date. Some experts say it could be a turning point. Such sweeping legislation might signal to people that climate policies are popular enough to pass, paving the way for more policies that would help the United States reduce emissions.

The new study provides the most thorough look yet at the very meta question of what Americans think other people think about climate action. Sparkman and researchers at Princeton and Indiana University Bloomington surveyed more than 6,000 Americans last spring, asking them to estimate the percentage of people that would support the following policies: instituting a carbon tax that would return revenue to Americans, mandating 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, putting renewable projects on public lands, and adopting a Green New Deal. All the estimates barely topped a third. In fact, at least two-thirds of Americans support all of these policies, according to polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and some policies, like renewables on public lands, have the support of four-fifths of the country.

But what happens if people aren’t aware of this support? They may think their opinions are unpopular, making them less likely to express those thoughts to their friends and family — which can lead to something called a “spiral of silence.” “People conform to their perception of social norms, even when those perceptions are wrong,” Sparkman said.

This dynamic could not only inhibit organizing, but also dampen politicians’ will to act. If elected officials believe climate policies are broadly unpopular, they may be less likely to vote for such measures. Preliminary research suggests that policymakers are susceptible to the same misperceptions that the public has about popular opinion, Sparkman said. One study found that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of putting restrictions on carbon emissions in their local district.

Activists protest at a “Fight for Our Future” rally in Washington, D.C., April 23, 2022. Paul Morigi / Getty Images for Green New Deal Network

Closing this misperception gap would be made easier by knowing what, exactly, is causing it. One theory is that mental shortcuts are leading people astray. “It’s really hard to envision millions of people at once and what they think, but we have to boil it down somehow,” Sparkman said. He suggested that people may be relying on top-of-mind examples to generate a picture of the country, thinking of a noisy, climate-denying minority and assigning them too much weight. Or they might imagine that basically no Republican would support these policies, knocking out almost half the country. In reality, virtually all Democrats, most independents, and about half of Republicans want action.

Then there’s the issue of media coverage presenting a skewed picture. Until recently, U.S newspapers gave opponents of climate action outsized sway, according to one study that analyzed articles from major outlets from 1985 to 2013. And it doesn’t help that perceptions of public opinion can sometimes lag behind by a decade or two. People may anchor their estimates on the past, failing to account for recent changes.

Making support for climate action more visible might help people understand how popular it really is. Sparkman’s research suggests that people who lived in states with more protests about climate change had a more accurate perception of how Americans felt about policies to address the crisis, even controlling for party affiliation.

Even a mental picture of a crowd clamoring for action might yield similar results. Informing people that a policy has widespread backing is an effective messaging tactic for mobilizing the public, said Danielle Deiseroth, a climate strategist and polling analyst at the think tank Data for Progress. It reinforces a sense that the policy is popular and gives people social “permission” to support it themselves.

Deiseroth hopes that the Inflation Reduction Act — projected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — could be another positive signal. “We already took the big step of passing a national investment in climate change,” she said. “That’s one step to show that this is popular enough that it passed in the Senate, and after many years, we finally passed a bill.”

When the government takes action on an issue, it can sometimes shift perceptions of social norms quickly, Sparkman said. Many people assume that beliefs drive action, but it’s often the other way around. A study last year found that people in the United Kingdom judged the risk of COVID-19 based on how drastic the policy response was: When the government imposed strict lockdowns, people began believing that the threat was more severe.

The Inflation Reduction Act could contribute to a “thunderclap of signals that, ‘Yes, as a country, we do care,’” Sparkman said. “It’s very high time for us to dispel this myth that Americans don’t care about climate change.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Americans are convinced climate action is unpopular. They’re very, very wrong. on Aug 29, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan Is Very Good Economic Policy

Max B. Sawicky — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 11:00:36 +0000

On August 24, the Biden White House announced its plan to provide relief for Americans carrying student debt. The amount of debt cancellation may be as much as $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, and otherwise $10,000, in either case for individuals with annual incomes under $125,000 and married couples earning less than $250,000.

There are other features of the plan that will help alleviate the debt burden — such as a 5 percent cap on payments of loans in relation to monthly incomes — but those are the headline numbers.

Let’s roll through the arguments for and against relief. This is an intra-Democratic Party debate as much as a partisan one. You can guess where the Republican Party is on this — wholeheartedly opposed to the idea of debt cancellation. No ambiguity there. But in the case of Democrats, we have serious people on both sides. The criticisms don’t hold water, and the policy should be welcome.

"The inflation impact of greater amounts of relief is typically exaggerated. A lot more would not be bad."

Nothing substantial is likely happening in Congress for the remainder of this year, meaning that further major policy change depends on executive action by the White House. The legal boundaries for President Biden’s scope of action have been in dispute, so the new debt relief plan could get tangled up in legal challenges.

During his election campaign, Biden committed to at least $10,000 of relief, disappointing those who wanted more. Calls for higher levels are daunting for an administration that is spooked by the ongoing inflation spike. The threat of inflation is contested, but there is no question that the price increases of the past year have yet to settle down. This seems to be the favorite whipping boy for the Republicans, though its power in the face of other worries by voters, such as the potential of an authoritarian turn of the federal government, may be doubted.

The cost of debt relief is easily misunderstood. We get topline numbers of the total cost, maybe $300 billion, but the entire amount would not have an immediate impact on consumer spending, and therefore no immediate effect on the price level. Rather, as every borrower knows, their debt payments are spread out over years, if not decades. The inflation impact depends on the extent to which savings in monthly payments are channeled into consumer spending.

The Biden administration has maintained a moratorium on student debt repayments since it took office. Its plan calls for restarting payments in January 2023. Since those payments, even when reduced by the new relief, reduce the current spending power of debt holders, the impact of the debt cancellation policy is not inflationary, but precisely the opposite, whenever the pause in payments due to the pandemic ends, as economists Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have pointed out. In the context of the current economy and current policy (including the pandemic “pause” in payments), the debt relief policy is deflationary in the longer term. Since the administration is also extending the pause until the end of 2022, over the next four months, there could actually be a positive effect on price levels. How much?

Suppose the plan leads to $300 billion in relief, as many outlets are projecting. If required payments resume next year, the positive inflation impact is limited to the next four months. What is the inflationary impact of an extra $10 billion ($300 billion spread over ten years prorated to four months) in extra spending, compared to total personal consumption spending of $4.25 trillion in the second quarter of this year? Not much. Here the inflation fear belongs in laugh test territory.

Using economic modeling rather than just a calculator, economists at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College found evidence for a similarly limited impact on inflation if the government was to cancel the entirety of student debt (now at $1.6 trillion), and their analysis from 2018 includes no account of any payment pause. In the models, debt relief provides a Keynesian boost to employment and includes a variety of added social benefits, but that study was done four years ago. The likelihood of a bump in GDP in the wake of this year’s spectacular job growth is diminished, compared to 2018.

Perhaps envy is the feeling that comes up most often in the debt relief debate, with opponents claiming some version of “I paid my debt, it’s not fair for somebody else to get a break.” This is very personal for both sides — those who paid and those trying to pay — and hence it’s politically important. But it’s foolish from a policy standpoint. Any reform could help somebody while failing to help somebody else for whom the remedy no longer applies. Is it fair to provide a benefit to a person that somebody in the past failed to receive, because there was no program to provide that benefit? By that line of thinking, no reforms would ever be tenable.

Another common complaint is that Joe Sixpack will pay the student debt of some Ivy League, big-shot attorney. It doesn’t work that way. Nobody is paying off anybody else’s loans. Nobody’s tax dollars are earmarked to some mythical “loan pay-off” account. Taxes next year depend on total federal spending, the state of the economy, and more frivolous factors. It is true that “other things equal,” the cost of the Biden plan is reflected in total spending, paid for by borrowing or taxes. But other things are never equal, so the impact of the plan on your taxes is utterly unknowable.

The bigger dilemma, envy aside, is that relief for existing borrowers does nothing to resolve the problem of costs for future students. Schools might be tempted to increase tuition, knowing that some of their current students’ ability to borrow is increased after the windfall from debt relief. “You got $10,000 in relief, so you can borrow another $10,000.” A pressure in the other direction is that higher tuition discourages new students from entering higher education with no certain prospect of relief in the future.

The politics of envy are complicated somewhat by confusion over debt relief for the rich. The value of “means-testing” is said to be budget savings, but essentially every analysis indicates that the budget savings from excluding very wealthy families from any benefit are minimal. The big dollar savings are with the broad upper-middle class.

The relief forthcoming will be limited to individuals with incomes up to $125,000, and families below $250,000. These amounts are well above median levels, but they still expose many higher-income families to continued liabilities. Not surprisingly, in dollar terms, most debt is held by those with higher incomes, since one’s ability to borrow in the first place hinges on income. So these income limits should indeed reduce the cost of the program significantly.

Opposition to means-testing is often justified by reference to the administrative costs of distinguishing among those eligible and ineligible. Administrative cost, however, is a function of investment in administration. The increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed through the Inflation Reduction Act will help. In general, the long-term shrinkage of the federal civil service outside of defense and homeland security makes it more difficult to run every sort of program. This problem is bigger than student debt.

There are frequent claims from some entranced by Modern Monetary Theory that budget costs are meaningless because spending power, for all practical purposes, is able to shoulder very broad debt relief. I would agree that, in economic terms, there is room for much greater relief — but the political constraint remains. Short of the general public being converted to an MMT point of view, there remains a political limit to the extent of debt relief, albeit disguised as an aversion to providing relief to “the rich.”

Analysis of the distributional impact of debt relief—the impact on income inequality — is tricky. It depends on what you’re comparing to what. A simple take is that the $10,000 cap on relief will still help many middle- and working-class Americans in percentage terms (the increase in spendable cash compared to their incomes). For the rich, if they were eligible, it would be a drop in the bucket. There is also an impact of reducing the racial wealth gap.

We are bound to see criticism of any policy in the form of “The money we are wasting on debt relief for the rich could buy millions of hamburgers for the homeless.” Of course, these same critical parties would likely object to the latter option for one reason or another. The truth is that such an alternative is not currently on the table, nor will the debt relief policy, once it’s in the can, constitute any constraint on fiscal policy under the next Congress. The comparison is meaningless.

Even after debt relief is carried out, the overarching appeal of Bernie Sanders’ plan for free college will remain, so long as tuition costs remain exorbitantly high. The inflation impact of greater amounts of relief is typically exaggerated. A lot more would not be bad.

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

Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan Is a Very Good Economic Policy

Max B. Sawicky — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 16:13:00 +0000

The critics are wrong—cancelling student debt will actually help ease inflation and benefit working-class borrowers.

This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Max B. Sawicky.

Why Lithium Power Politics Are Playing Out Very Differently in Chile and Bolivia

Vijay Prashad – Taroa Zúñiga Silva — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 05:53:50 +0000

In late July, a large sinkhole appeared near the town of Tierra Amarilla in Chile’s Copiapó province in the Atacama salt flat. The crater, which has a diameter of more than 100 feet, emerged in one of Chile’s most lucrative regions for copper and lithium extraction. The nearby Candelaria mining complex—80 percent of the property is owned by Canada’s Lundin Mining Corporation and 20 More

The post Why Lithium Power Politics Are Playing Out Very Differently in Chile and Bolivia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad – Taroa Zúñiga Silva.

The Very Strong People Can Defeat the Corporate Jerks

Jim Hightower — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 10:30:05 +0000

It gets little national media attention, but regular grassroots communities and coalitions are mounting—and winning—such gutsy fights against corporate exploiters all across America

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

He Was Accused of Sexual Assault, She of Using Drugs. The Military Dealt With Them Very Differently.

by Ren Larson, Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 10:00:00 +0000

by Ren Larson, Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Military commanders have the power to detain service members ahead of trial through a process known as pretrial confinement. Commanders consider whether the suspect may flee or reoffend and if less severe restrictions can keep the person out of trouble. An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune into the Army’s use of pretrial confinement found that soldiers who were detained weren’t always the ones accused of the most serious crimes.

Below are examples of how a soldier accused of sexual assault and another accused of drug offenses were treated differently.

Christian Alvarado

Private first class

Olivia Ochoa

Private

Charged in total with:

Christian Alvarado:

Nine counts of sexual assault involving five women
One count of aggravated assault by strangulation
Two counts of making a false official statement

8% of sexual assault cases tried or arraigned at courts-martial in the past decade resulted in pretrial confinement

Olivia Ochoa:

Three counts of drug use or possession
Seven counts of disobeying or disrespecting officers
One count of failing to obey an order

18% of drug cases tried or arraigned at courts-martial in the past decade resulted in pretrial confinement

In deciding whether to place soldiers in pretrial confinement, commanders can consider previous misconduct. Their alleged misconduct included:

Before the first sexual assault allegation, Alvarado was arrested by local police for firing a gun outside his girlfriend’s house. He was reprimanded by the Army.

Ochoa was written up repeatedly for misconduct that included a messy room, not having enough water in her water bottle and being late to work.
Ochoa was reprimanded when she and another soldier were accused of sexual harassment after repeatedly flirting and slapping each others’ butts and thighs during formation.
She was punished for drinking.

Commanders also look at the nature of the offenses that may be tried at court-martial. Their alleged offenses included:

Alvarado admitted in a statement to sexually assaulting a soldier named Asia Graham.
He was accused of sexually assaulting an Army chaplain's assistant.
He admitted in a text message that he had sexually assaulted and strangled a civilian named Lee, who agreed to be identified by her middle name.

Ochoa admitted to consuming THC, the compound that gives marijuana its high.
Army investigators found psychedelic mushrooms and what they believed to be a vape pen in her room.

Before invoking pretrial confinement, commanders can place restrictions on soldiers’ freedom. Their restrictions included:

Protective orders required Alvarado to stay at least 100 feet away from Graham and the chaplain's assistant.
Army commanders issued another protective order after Lee accused Alvarado of sexual assault. They then limited where Alvarado could be when he was at Fort Bliss. He could still live off post.
He was required to check in with commanders multiple times per day, in person or by phone.

Ochoa was limited to specific places on post at Fort Huachuca.
She needed to sign out of her barracks and be accompanied by a buddy wherever she went.
She was required to check in with the drill sergeant’s office hourly.

They allegedly broke their restrictions by:

Alvarado failed to consistently check in with his commanders four weekends in a row.

Ochoa visited stores from which she was barred on back-to-back days.

They were put in pretrial confinement for:

Alvarado was placed in pretrial confinement eight days after a fourth and fifth woman accused him of sexual assault. This was a month after he first started to miss check-ins and nine months after the first two sexual assault accusations.
He eventually spent 108 days in pretrial confinement.

Ochoa was placed in pretrial confinement for refusing commanders’ orders to return to her room about three weeks after she was caught with drugs. A military magistrate ordered her release, saying she hadn't violated her restrictions. Commanders soon confined her again, immediately after she visited prohibited stores on post.
She eventually spent 103 days in pretrial confinement.

They were convicted of:

Christian Alvarado:

Sexually assaulting Graham and Lee
Strangling Lee
Lying to investigators

Alvarado was sentenced to 18 years in a military prison and given a dishonorable discharge. His case is under automatic appeal by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, which can overturn convictions and reduce sentencing. In a letter, Alvarado told ProPublica and the Tribune that he is innocent. He and his attorney declined to answer the news organizations’ questions.

Olivia Ochoa:

Consuming THC
Possessing psychedelic mushrooms
Disobeying or disrespecting superior officers four times

Ochoa was sentenced to time served after receiving credit for the more than 100 days she spent in pretrial confinement. She was given an other-than-honorable discharge, which her lawyer is appealing, and had to forfeit some wages as part of her plea deal. Ochoa and her attorney maintain that commanders treated her unfairly and that the length of time she spent in pretrial confinement was excessive.

Source: U.S. Army records of trial, disciplinary documents and criminal investigation reports; Army Court-Martial Information System.

Graphic by Fernando Becerra and illustrated portraits by Kate Copeland for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ren Larson, Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill.

Critics Worry FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid Will Prove ‘A Very Good Day’ for Trump

Brett Wilkins — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 21:06:49 +0000

While some supporters of Donald Trump called for defunding law enforcement or even waging civil war following Monday's FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, other backers of the former U.S. president believe the raid is actually a boon to his reelection prospects.

Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin—who now condemns her former boss' purveyance of the deadly "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—said Tuesday on CNN's "New Day" that the U.S. Justice Department may have "just handed Trump" the 2024 Republican nomination "or potentially the presidency."

"If it's seen as some sort of massive overreach and not something incredibly serious this is a very good day for Donald Trump," she added.

Politico's Meridith McGraw writes:

While Trump's team was bullish about the political benefits of being targeted by the FBI, the situation comes with clear and obvious downsides. Legal experts said that it would be highly unlikely that the agency would have taken such action without clear evidence of wrongdoing—noting the rarity of a former president being targeted so aggressively. The search would require the signoff of a federal judge or magistrate, who would issue the warrant based upon evidence of a potential crime.
On top of that, Trump is embroiled in a number of legal dramas and headaches, in addition to being the focus and target of the House January 6 committee. Focus groups of Trump 2020 voters have shown that even they have grown wary of the drama that accompanies his political ventures and are ready to move on.

Appearing alongside Farah Griffin on CNN Tuesday morning, Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio said he thinks Trump's inner circle is "delighted" by Monday's search of the ex-president's Palm Beach home.

The Very Good People of Kansas

Robert Reich — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:41:05 +0000

Kansans, like most Americans, know the difference between what should be left to personal choice and what should be public. But in its ardor to fuel the culture war, the GOP forgot.

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

Bernie Sanders Explains the Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly of the Inflation Reduction Act

Bernie Sanders — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 13:54:03 +0000

The following are the prepared remarks delivered by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 regarding the Inflation Reduction Act calling for an amendment process ahead of an expected.

Statement on Reconciliation

M. President: I want to say a few words about the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” which I believe may be coming to the floor this week.

At this moment in American history we have more wealth and income inequality than at any time in the last 100 years with 3 people owning more wealth the bottom half of American society and CEOs of large corporations making 350 times more than their average workers.

But, before I do, I want to put this reconciliation bill into the context of where we are as a nation politically. And that is not a good place.

According to the most recent Gallup poll the approval rating for Congress is at 16% with massive numbers of people disapproving of the work we are doing here.

Further, according to a recent University of Chicago poll, a strong majority of Americans believe that the government is “corrupt and rigged against me.”

Further, according to a [USA Today] poll a very strong majority no longer believes that the Democratic or Republican parties are responding to their needs and we need to move to a multi-party system. And, most frighteningly, there is a growing number of Americans who believe that they may have to take up arms against their own government in order to accomplish what they think needs to be done.

All of this speaks to a very dangerous moment for American democracy and resembles the conditions that existed in Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s which led to fascism and totalitarianism.

Watch the floor speech:

And I should mention that, as we speak, while working families are falling further and further behind economically the billionaire class through their super-PACs are doing everything they can to elect members of Congress who will support the wealthy and the powerful against the needs of average Americans.

The people of this country believe, in my view correctly, that we have a corrupt political system dominated by the rich and the powerful and we have a rigged economy in which large corporations are seeing huge profits while the middle class and working families continue to decline.

We don’t talk about it much here in the Senate or in the corporate media, but at this moment in American history we have more wealth and income inequality than at any time in the last 100 years with 3 people owning more wealth the bottom half of American society and CEOs of large corporations making 350 times more than their average workers.

That is the overall context in which this reconciliation bill is coming to the floor.

Now, I have heard from some of my colleagues that the Build Back Better legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and supported by some 48 out of the 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus and by the President of the United States is dead.

Now, I don’t know if that is absolutely true or not. But I do know that if it is true it would be a disaster for working families all across this country who are desperately trying to survive economically.

So let me very briefly tell you what was in the original Build Back Better bill which is not in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

And everyone of the provisions that I’m going to mention has overwhelming support from the American people according to poll after poll after poll.

At a time when the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation on earth, this bill does not extend the $300 a month per child tax credit that you had last year.

If you are a parent today paying $15,000 a year for childcare, the average cost in America, this bill ignores that crisis completely and does absolutely nothing for you.

And, of course unlike the original Build Back Better plan this bill does not provide free and universal Pre-K.

At a time when 45 million Americans are struggling to pay student debt and when hundreds of thousands of young people every year are unable to afford a higher education this bill does nothing to help them. The original Build Back Better plan provided 2 years of free education at community colleges. Not enough, but an effort to begin addressing the crisis of higher education in this country. Needless to say, this bill ignores that issue completely.

If you are an elderly American, one of the millions who are unable to afford to go to a dentist or buy the hearing aids or eyeglasses that you need, this bill does nothing to expand Medicare to cover these basic healthcare needs. Millions of seniors will continue to have rotten teeth and lack the dentures, hearing aids or eyeglasses that they deserve.

This bill does nothing to address the major housing crisis that we face or build one unit of safe and affordable housing.

Further, at a time when millions of elderly and disabled Americans would prefer to stay in their homes rather than be forced into nursing homes, this bill does absolutely nothing to address the home healthcare crisis in America. We will continue to lack the decent-paid staffing that we need to address this crisis.

Everybody agrees that we have a major housing crisis in this country. Some 600,000 people are homeless sleeping out on streets across the country. In addition, nearly 18 million households are spending an incredible 50 percent of their incomes for housing. Yep, you guessed it. This bill does nothing to address the major housing crisis that we face or build one unit of safe and affordable housing. Just another issue that we push aside.

M. President, one of the criticisms against the original Build Back Better plan is that it would be inflationary because it would increase federal spending. That criticism is untrue. Every nickel spent in this bill would be fully paid for by increased taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. Unlike the recently passed micro-chip corporate welfare bill that adds $79 billion to the federal deficit, unlike the proposed military budget that came out of the Senate Armed Services Committee which would increase defense spending by $45 billion more than the Pentagon even requested, Build Back Better would not have increased the deficit at all.

Now, M. President, let me say a few words about what is in this legislation, a bill which has some good features, but also some very bad features.

Prescription Drugs

The good news, M. President, is that the reconciliation bill finally begins to lower the outrageous price of some of the most expensive prescription drugs under Medicare.

According to the most recent data, if we do nothing, Medicare will spend about $1.8 trillion over the next decade on prescription drugs and our nation, as a whole, will spend $5 trillion. That is simply unsustainable.

But, M. President: here’s the bad news.

The prescription drug provisions in this bill are extremely weak, they are extremely complex, they take too long to go into effect and they go nowhere near far enough to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry whose greed is literally killing Americans.

Under this legislation, Medicare, for the first time in history, would be able to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry to lower drug prices.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the negotiated prices would not go into effect until 2026 – 4 years from now.

Further, in 2026, only 10 drugs would be negotiated with more to come in later years.

Moreover, with the possible exception of insulin, this bill does nothing to lower prescription drug prices for anyone who is not on Medicare.

Under this bill, at a time when the pharmaceutical companies are making outrageous profits, the pharmaceutical industry will still be allowed to charge the American people, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

M. President, if we are really serious about reducing the price of prescription drugs we know exactly how we can do it.

For over 30 years, the VA has been negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry to lower the price of prescription drugs. Moreover, for decades, virtually every major country on earth has done exactly the same thing for all of their people.

The result: Medicare pays twice as much for the exact same prescription drugs as the VA and Americans, in some cases may pay ten times as much for a particular drug as the people of any major country on earth.

In other words, when it comes to reducing the price of prescription drugs under Medicare – we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

We could simply require Medicare to pay no more for prescription drugs than the VA.

And, M. President, if we did that, we could literally cut the price of prescription drugs under Medicare in half in a matter of months, not years. In February, I introduced legislation with Senator Klobuchar that would accomplish that goal.

Under that legislation, we could save Medicare $900 billion over the next decade. That is nine times more savings than the rather weak negotiation provision in this bill. And, by the way, that money could be used to add comprehensive dental, vision and hearing benefits to every senior in America. It could be used to lower the Medicare eligibility age to at least 60. And it could be used to extend the solvency of Medicare.

What are the other prescription drug provisions in the reconciliation bill?

Well, under this legislation, pharmaceutical companies would essentially be prohibited from increasing prescription drug prices above inflation pegged to the year 2021.

Should we be making sure that pharmaceutical companies cannot increase their prices above inflation? Yes. But let’s be clear. This provision would lock in all of the outrageous price increases the pharmaceutical industry has made in recent years and would do nothing to lower those outrageous prices.

The good news is that if this legislation is signed into law it would provide far more funding for energy efficiency and sustainable energy than has ever been invested before.

Under this legislation, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors would be capped at $2,000 a year. That is a good provision that will benefit up to 2 million seniors who currently pay over $2,000 a year for prescription drugs. But the $25 billion cost of this provision would be paid for not by the pharmaceutical companies making record-breaking profits. No. It would be paid for by increased premiums on virtually every senior citizen in America, although there is a provision to “smooth out” those premium increases.

The current reconciliation bill would also provide free vaccines for seniors – the only population for which vaccines are not already free. That is a good thing that should have been done a long time ago.

Finally, M. President, in terms of prescription drugs, it looks like the reconciliation bill will cap co-pays for insulin at $35 a month – which is a good step forward for people with health insurance, but would do nothing to lower the cost of insulin for the 1.6 million diabetics who are uninsured and who need our help the most.

Affordable Care Act

Moreover, M. President, this legislation will extend subsidies for some 13 million Americans who have private health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act over the next three years. Without this provision, millions of Americans would see their premiums skyrocket and some 3 million Americans could lose their health insurance altogether. This is a good provision, but let’s not fool ourselves. The $64 billion cost of this provision will go directly into the pockets of private health insurance companies that made over $60 billion in profits last year and paid their executives exorbitant compensation packages.

It would also do nothing to help the more than 70 million Americans who are uninsured or under-insured and it would do nothing to reform a dysfunctional healthcare system that is designed not to make people well, but to make the stockholders of private health insurance companies extremely rich.

Climate Change

Now, M. President, this legislation also provides $370 billion over the next decade to combat climate change and to invest in so-called energy security programs.

The good news is that if this legislation is signed into law it would provide far more funding for energy efficiency and sustainable energy than has ever been invested before.

This is substantially lower, however, than the $555 billion in the original Build Back Better plan which understood that climate change is an existential threat to the planet and has to be addressed in an extremely bold way.

But this legislation does provide serious funding for wind, solar, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, energy efficient appliances and low-income communities that have born the brunt of climate change.

But, M. President, the ugly news that very few people in the media or Congress wants to talk about is that it includes a huge giveaway to the fossil fuel industry – both in the reconciliation bill itself and in a side deal that was just made public yesterday.

Under this legislation, the fossil fuel industry will receive billions of dollars in new tax breaks and subsidies over the next 10 years – on top of the $15 billion in tax breaks and corporate welfare that they already receive every year.

In my view, if we are going to make our planet healthy and habitable for future generations, we cannot provide billions of dollars in new tax breaks to fossil fuel companies that are destroying the planet. On the contrary, we should end all of the massive corporate welfare that the fossil fuel industry already enjoys.

The ugly news that very few people in the media or Congress wants to talk about is that it includes a huge giveaway to the fossil fuel industry – both in the reconciliation bill itself and in a side deal that was just made public

Under this legislation, up to 60 million acres of public waters must be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before the federal government could approve any new offshore wind development. To put this in perspective, M. President, 60 million acres is the size of Michigan.

M. President let me read to you the headline that appeared in a July 29th article in Bloomberg: “Exxon Loves What Manchin Did for Big Oil in $370 Billion Deal.”

According to Bloomberg, the CEO of Exxon Mobil called the reconciliation bill “a step in the right direction” and was “pleased” with the “comprehensive set of solutions” included in the reconciliation bill.

Barrons recently reported that Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum are just a few of the fossil fuel companies that could benefit the most under this bill.

Now, M. President, if the CEO of Exxon Mobil, a company that has done as much as any to destroy this planet, is “pleased” with this bill then I think all of us should have some very deep concerns about what is in this legislation.

Further, under this bill, up to 2 million acres of public lands must be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before leases can move forward for any renewable energy development on public lands.

In total, this bill will offer the fossil fuel industry up to 700 million acres of public lands and waters to oil and gas drilling over the next decade – far more than the oil and gas industry could possibly use.

And, M. President, that’s not all. The fossil fuel industry will not just benefit from the provisions in the reconciliation bill. A deal has also been reached to make it easier for the fossil fuel industry to receive permits for their oil and gas projects.

This deal would approve the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline – a fracked gas pipeline that would span 303 miles from West Virginia to Virginia, and potentially on to North Carolina.

This is a pipeline that would generate emissions equivalent to that released by 37 coal plants or by over 27 million cars each and every year.

M. President, let me quote a statement from 350.ORG on this subject: “This latest bill has a few good pieces: lengthening the tax credits for green energy projects from two to ten years to ensure steady growth in the wind and solar industry; providing incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles; and installing heat pumps to make green energy use more widespread. However, the amount of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry is so wide in scope, that it turns all of the gains in addressing the climate crisis into a moot point.”

Here is what the Center for Biological Diversity had to say on this bill: “This is a climate suicide pact. It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy development to massive new oil and gas extraction. The new leasing required in this bill will fan the flames of the climate disasters torching our country, and it’s a slap in the face to the communities fighting to protect themselves from filthy fossil fuels.”

In my view, we have got to do everything possible to take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry, not give billions of dollars in corporate welfare to an industry that has been destroying our planet.

Tax Reform

Finally, M. President, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality; at a time of soaring corporate profits; and at a time in which we have a broken tax system riddled with all kinds of loopholes for the rich and the powerful, this bill makes a few modest changes to reform the tax code.

Under this bill, corporations will be required to pay a minimum tax of 15%. That is the good news. The American people are sick and tired of companies like AT&T, Federal Express and Nike making billions of dollars in profits and paying nothing in federal income tax. This provision has been estimated to raise $313 billion over the next decade.

Further, under this bill, the IRS will finally begin to receive the funding that it needs to audit wealthy tax cheats. Each and every year, the top 1 percent are able to avoid paying more than $160 billion in taxes that they legally owe because the IRS does not have the resources they need to conduct audits of the extremely wealthy. This bill begins to change that.

Now is the time for every member of the Senate to study this bill thoroughly and to come up with amendments and suggestions as to how we can improve it.

This bill would also make very modest changes to the so-called carried interest loophole that has allowed billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street to pay a lower tax rate than a nurse, teacher or firefighter.

But the bad news is that this bill does nothing to repeal the Trump tax breaks that went to the very wealthy and large corporations. Trump’s 2017 tax bill provided over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent and large corporations. In fact, 83% of the benefits of the Trump tax law are going to the top 1% – and this bill repeals none of those benefits.

And M. President, let’s not forget. It is very likely that Congress will be doing a so-called tax extenders bill at the end of the year that could provide corporations up to $400 billion over the next decade in new tax breaks. If that occurs that would more than offset the $313 billion in corporate revenue included in this bill.

So that, M. President is where we are today. We have legislation which unlike the original Build Back Better plan ignores the needs of working families in childcare, Pre-K, the expansion of Medicare, affordable housing, home healthcare, higher education, and many other desperate needs.

This is legislation which, at a time of massive profits for the pharmaceutical industry, and when we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, takes some very modest steps to lower or control the price of medicine.

This is legislation which has some good and important provisions pertaining to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, but, at the same time, provides massive giveaways to the fossil fuel industry whose emissions are destroying the planet.

This is legislation which appropriately ends the absurdity of large, profitable corporations paying nothing in federal income tax but, at the same time, leaves intact virtually all of Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy and very large corporations.

M. President this more than 700-page bill after months of secret negotiations became public late last week. Now is the time for every member of the Senate to study this bill thoroughly and to come up with amendments and suggestions as to how we can improve it.

I look forward to being part of that process.

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

Sanders Rips Manchin: He ‘Represents the Very Wealthiest People in This Country’

Jake Johnson — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:59:01 +0000

Sen. Bernie Sanders lambasted fellow Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday for sinking the Democratic Party's latest effort to pass renewable energy funding, accusing the West Virginia Democrat of acting on behalf of his corporate and billionaire donors instead of the working class of his home state.

Rejecting the notion that Manchin "abruptly pulled the plug" on the majority party's revived push for a scaled-back reconciliation package ahead of the November midterms, Sanders told ABC's Martha Raddatz that there was "nothing new" about the West Virginia senator's move last week, when he reportedly told the Democratic leadership that he wouldn't support new climate spending or taxes on the wealthy.

Senate Democrats now plan to push ahead with an even narrower bill that would extend soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies and let Medicare negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.

"If you check the record, six months ago I made it clear that you have people like Manchin, [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema to a lesser degree, who are intentionally sabotaging the president's agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want," Sanders said Sunday.

"The problem was that we continue to talk to Manchin like he was serious. He was not," added Sanders. "This is a guy who is [a] major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires. You think this guy is serious?"

Sanders reacted with open disdain to Manchin's insistence that he's holding up Democrats' plans for renewable energy investments, Medicare expansion, and other priorities over genuine concerns about high inflation, an argument the West Virginia senator has been using for months to justify his obstruction.

"Same nonsense that Manchin has been talking about for a year," Sanders said. "West Virginia, it's a beautiful state, and I've had the pleasure of being there—great people. It is one of the poorest states in this country. You ask the people of West Virginia whether they want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and eyeglasses."

"Ask the people of West Virginia whether we should demand that the wealthiest people and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes," he continued. "Ask the people of West Virginia whether or not all people should have healthcare as a human right, like in every other country on Earth. That's what they will say."

“In my humble opinion," Sanders added, "Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”

Manchin—chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—is the top beneficiary of oil and gas money in Congress this election cycle, and he's received campaign donations from a number of billionaires who previously donated to former President Donald Trump, including investor Ken Langone and private equity executive Mark Rowan.

As Politico reported last week, new campaign finance disclosures show that "business magnate Bill Gates gave Manchin $2,900, as did former Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides and Morris Goldfarb, whose G-III Apparel Group owns brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, DKNY, and Karl Lagerfeld."

"A number of high-powered executives maxed out to Manchin between April and June," the outlet noted, "including banker Warren Stephens, hotel executive Tom Baltimore, Motorola CEO Greg Brown, Home Depot CEO Edward Decker, Yum! Brands CEO David Gibbs, Gillette CEO James Kilt, and Robert Kraft and his son Jonathan."

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

The Very Unstable Genius

Richard C. Gross — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:40:55 +0000

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” –William Shakespeare, King Lear What so many have realized, what so few have refused to recognize and what the like-minded have failed to criticize nearly cost us our country, our democracy, to an obsessed, unhinged man-child who pretends to be president. We survived that proverbial bullet to More

The post The Very Unstable Genius appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

Rights Advocates Decry ‘Very Frightening’ Court Ruling Upholding Anti-BDS Law

Julia Conley — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 14:51:08 +0000

"This is not just about boycotts," said one critic. "This is opening the door to strip away First Amendment rights of all Americans."

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

A Very Special Human Being

Ted Glick — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 04:31:49 +0000

I’ve attended a lot of special ceremonies over my lifetime remembering or honoring people I know. Most memorable ones include my mom and dad’s retirement dinner in 1966 in Bangor, Maine, my son’s graduation from Rutgers University in 2005, the funerals of my (many) aunts and uncles and my parents, and two dinners in New York City in the 1980s honoring anti-racist, southern, progressive leaders Anne Braden and Victoria Gray-Adams.

Today’s special ceremony across the street from my house at the Demarest local elementary school was different. This one honored Dominick Delli Paoli, retiring after 22 years as a crossing guard at the age of 92. For all of those later years of his life, he helped to get kids between the ages of 5 and 11 safely across Broughton Avenue in Bloomfield, NJ every school morning and afternoon.

But Dominick was so much more, and that is why he was honored in the elementary school gym today by hundreds of excited, appreciative and beautiful children, as well as the school principal, teachers, other staff and a few neighbors.

Up until the last couple of years when his health declined, Dominick usually didn’t go home after the morning shift. He went inside the school, volunteering to help in any way he could. If the custodial staff needed an extra hand for something he was available. He often helped out teachers by reading to their students; he also assisted in the cafeteria. When school was dismissed, he returned to his work as a crossing guard before he returned home.

Dominick came to work early, and what he did while waiting for the kids to arrive was to walk past the homes across the street from the school. If there was a newspaper that had been thrown onto a driveway he would pick it up and put it next to the front door.

I remember a time when I saw Dominick after returning from one of my early morning bike rides. I was feeling down, feeling as I sometimes do the weight of our wounded and struggling world, wondering if the work that I and many others are doing to change it is ever going to yield significant results. I had ridden my bike into the garage where I park it, and as I came out Dominick surprised me by being right there. In his hands was our daily-delivered newspaper, and he offered it to me. I took it, mumbled a thank you and went inside.

Immediately, I started feeling different. That small act of Dominick’s, knowing it to be something he does regularly out of the goodness of his heart, really affected me. It was as if he were an angel being there to pick me up in my hour of need, my need for inspiration. I was very touched, and changed.

At today’s retirement ceremony Dominick was presented with one plaque from the school and at least 100 handmade cards and posters from the Demarest children. After the brief ceremony honoring him, Dominick didn’t speak, too overwhelmed to do so he said later. But he acted. He began walking down the aisle, shaking hands and hugging any of the children who wanted that personal contact. Many, many did.

After the kids and their teachers left the auditorium back to their rooms, a few of us who knew him and the principal talked for a few minutes. Dominick reminisced about the many things which he did as a volunteer in the school for so many years. He talked about how much he enjoyed doing so, how much he loved the children. That was why he did what he did.

Dominick is a very special person, but he’s not alone. There are people like him everywhere, in every country, every city, every town, every neighborhood. They are the salt of the earth people who give hope, who quietly and modestly hold things together by their example and their love. Long live the example of Dominick Delli Paoli!

The post A Very Special Human Being first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

New Revelations Show Ginni Thomas ‘Very Much a Part of Seditious Conspiracy’

Julia Conley — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:51:13 +0000

Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, lobbied far more Arizona state lawmakers than previously known to try to overturn the state's 2020 election results—a revelation that reignited calls on Friday for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election.

"As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas' work was three weeks ago, it's even more glaring now."

In addition to emailing two state representatives in November and December 2020, calling on them to "choose" electors who would grant former President Donald Trump a victory in the state, Thomas used a platform called FreeRoots.com to call on 27 other state lawmakers to put aside President Joe Biden's victory. The Washington Post, which first reported the news, obtained the emails Thomas sent via Arizona's public records law.

On November 9, as part of a campaign organized by Every Legal Vote—a group that has supported Trump's "Big Lie" that the election was stolen from him—Thomas sent an email saying the lawmakers must "stand strong in the face of political and media pressure" and claiming they had the "power to fight back against fraud."

"The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was very much a part of the seditious conspiracy" that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett on Friday in response to the new reporting.

Prior to the January 6 rally—which she briefly attended—Thomas also wrote to 22 state House members and one state senator on December 13, a day before they were scheduled to count their votes, warning them to "consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don't stand up and lead."

"Never before in our nation's history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures," Thomas wrote.

When the letters to two lawmakers were reported by the Post last month, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was among the critics who said Thomas's efforts to keep Trump in office represented a "conflict of interest."

Thomas's husband was the lone dissenter earlier this year when the court rejected Trump's bid to block the release of presidential records regarding the January 6 insurrection.

The Thomases have long claimed that they keep their work separate from one another, but journalist Mark Joseph Stern said Friday, "As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas' work was three weeks ago, it's even more glaring now."

Thomas's lobbying of 29 state lawmakers to overrule the will of Arizona voters represented "a completely egregious attack on democracy by the wife of a sitting SCOTUS justice," tweeted Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).

Friday's revelations come two-and-a-half months after the Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the election, calling on him to "save us from the left taking America down."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) issued a "friendly reminder that Ginni Thomas has a government position and absolutely should not," referring to her position on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, to which Trump appointed her.

"Her egregious actions to push the White House Chief of Staff and others to overturn a free and fair election make her a threat to democracy and should disqualify her for any role of public trust at the Library of Congress or anywhere else in government," said CREW in April.

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

Kashmir’s tribal women suffer very poor menstrual health. What’s to blame?

Shefali Rafiq, Saqib Mugloo — Sat, 28 May 2022 07:52:00 +0000

Gujjar and Bakarwal women in India experience period poverty – as do 500 million girls and women globally

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Shefali Rafiq, Saqib Mugloo.

Interview: ‘It has become very risky for me to do the job.’

By Ye Kaung Myint Maung — Wed, 04 May 2022 00:19:00 +0000

Myanmar freelance photojournalist Ta Mwe, a pen name he uses to protect his security, the pseudonym named for his security, has won awards for his news photos of the crackdown on anti-military junta protests following the Feb 2021 coup that ousted the country’s elected civilian government. To mark World Press Freedom Day, Ye Kaung Myint Maung of RFA’s Myanmar Service spoke to Ta Mwe about his work on the conflict.

RFA: Can you tell me about the award you won?

Ta Mwe: I have won the jury’s choice for honorable mention in Southeast Asia and Oceania category of the World Press Photo awards. (I submitted) a series of 10 black and white photos about the Spring Revolution in Myanmar. My photo series covers the scenes from the early days of protests after the military coup in 2021. The contestants in this category are required to submit their ten best photos from their work that depict the story. So I picked my ten best photos taken in four months, from February to May of last year.

RFA: Can you tell me about your career as a photographer?

Ta Mwe: I started my career in photo journalism as a citizen journalist. Around 2007, I started taking photos using my phone and uploaded them anonymously to Burmese language blogs on Blogspot.com. Around 2011, I started working as a full-time photographer. I had worked as a full-time photojournalist for a local weekly journal, then became a freelance photographer.

RFA: What can you tell me about the situation of press freedom in Myanmar at the moment?

Ta Mwe: The situation has become extremely difficult for journalists now. When we cover news activities on the ground, we first need to find a route to flee from the scene and escape arrest, before we start doing anything like taking photos or interviewing people. We have to figure out how to ensure our own security before we hit the ground. As I have covered flash mob protests in Yangon, I have planned carefully which streets to run away on as soon as I finish taking photos. It has become very challenging. When I grab a taxi on my way back from the coverage, I don’t do it in the streets close to the scene. I walk a few blocks to hide the traces of my identity before I take a taxi. Before, there were several news media and several photographers working at the scene. They now have either been arrested or gone into hiding.

RFA: We have seen that informants for the military authorities are everywhere. How risky it is for the journalists to do their jobs under those circumstances?

Ta Mwe: As when I was covering the flash mob protest in Yangon, I have to be at the scene before the activities happen and check the surroundings if there are authorities in plain clothes near the scene. There could be informants at the scene. If I think it is not safe to cover the activities closely, I have to take photos from a distance. It has become very unpredictable. I think the chances of spotting the informers are 50/50. Sometimes, I can easily distinguish the informants from the crowd because of their appearance. But other times, I cannot distinguish them. I hear that sometimes they suddenly come out of a parked car to arrest people. It has become very risky for me to do the job.

RFA: Now you are at a safe location. What do you expect to do to continue your work?

Ta Mwe: I am now at a safe location. But I will keep doing the journalism work by recording the happenings in Myanmar and disseminating them to the world, because we are witnessing a historic turning point in Myanmar. For someone of my age, it is very significant. I will keep covering the news happening in Myanmar from a distance. If it is possible, I will go and cover it on the ground.

RFA: What kind of message do you want to pass to concerned leaders around the world, working to restore peace and democracy in Myanmar?

Ta Mwe: As a journalist, I am risking my life to report news about Myanmar so that the concerned leaders around the world can make the right decisions. It is their job to make an informed decision. I believe it is my job to send out the correct information, regardless of the risks. I hope they will make the right and unbiased decision based on the information received from us. I also would like to implore them to work harder to secure the release of journalists in detention. Without journalists working on the ground, the people in Myanmar will be under an information blackout, and concerned leaders around the world will have many blind spots in their decision making and they will not make the best decision. I would like to appeal them to try hard for the release of journalists in prison and support those who are in hiding or evading arrest.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ye Kaung Myint Maung.

“A Very Dangerous Moment”: Russian & U.S. Escalation Raises Risk of Direct Military Clash in Ukraine

Democracy Now! — Tue, 03 May 2022 16:11:55 +0000

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

“A Very Dangerous Moment”: Russian & U.S. Escalation Raises Risk of Direct Military Clash in Ukraine

Democracy Now! — Tue, 03 May 2022 12:40:50 +0000

As President Biden seeks $33 billion more for Ukraine, we look at the dangers of U.S. military escalation with Medea Benjamin of CodePink and George Beebe of the Quincy Institute. He is the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. The massive spending in Ukraine that outweighs public funding to combat the coronavirus pandemic shows that “there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia, and I don’t think that accords, actually, with the priorities of the American people,” says Beebe. “To support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, 'Negotiations now,'” says Benjamin.

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

The Very Important Case Against More Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Daryl G. Kimball — Mon, 02 May 2022 15:46:49 +0000

Russian President Vladimir Putin's brutal war on Ukraine, along with his implied threats of nuclear weapons use against any who would interfere, has raised the specter of nuclear conflict.

Biden made the right decision to cancel Trump's proposed nuclear SLCM, and now Congress needs to back the president up.

Last month, CIA Director William Burns said that although there is no sign that Russia is preparing to do so, "none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons."

As the war drags on, it is vital that Russian, NATO, and U.S. leaders maintain lines of communication to prevent direct conflict and avoid rhetoric and actions that increase the risk of nuclear escalation.

Provocations could include deploying tactical nuclear weapons or developing new types of nuclear weapons designed for fighting and "winning" a regional nuclear war.

For these and other reasons, U.S. President Joe Biden was smart to announce in March that he will cancel a proposal by the Trump administration for a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM), a weapon last deployed in 1991.

Before President Donald Trump, two Democratic and two Republican administrations had agreed that nuclear-armed cruise missiles on Navy ships were redundant and destabilizing and detract from higher-priority conventional missions.

Moreover, re-nuclearizing the fleet would create serious operational burdens. In 2019, Biden called this weapon a "bad idea" and said there is no need for new nuclear weapons. He was right then and is right to cancel the system now.

Nevertheless, some in Congress are pushing to restore funding for a nuclear SLCM to fill what they say is a "deterrence gap" against Russia's tactical nuclear weapons arsenal and to provide a future president with "more credible" nuclear options in a future war with Russia in Europe or with China over Taiwan. A fight over the project, which would cost at least $9 billion through the end of the decade, is all but certain.

The arguments for reviving the nuclear SLCM program are as flimsy as they are dangerous. Serious policymakers all agree that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. But deploying nuclear-armed cruise missiles at sea would undoubtedly increase the possibility of nuclear war through miscalculation.

By deploying both conventional and nuclear-armed cruise missiles at sea, any launch of a conventional cruise missile inherently would send a nuclear signal and increase the potential for unintended nuclear use in a conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary because the adversary would have no way of knowing if the missile was nuclear or conventional.

Furthermore, even if Russia's stockpile of 1,000 to 2,000 short-range nuclear warheads is larger in number than the U.S. stockpile of 320, there is no meaningful gap in capabilities. Superficial numerical comparisons ignore the fact that both sides already possess excess tactical nuclear destructive capacity, including multiple options for air and missile delivery of lower-yield nuclear warheads.

Both also store their tactical warheads separately from the delivery systems, meaning preparations for potential use would be detectable in advance.

If one president authorized the use of these weapons under "extreme" circumstances in a conventional war, as the policies of both countries allow, neither side would need or want to use more than a handful of these highly destructive weapons.

Although tactical nuclear bombs may produce relatively smaller explosive yields, from less than 1 kiloton TNT equivalent to 20 kilotons or more, their blast, heat, and radiation effects would be unlike anything seen in warfare since the 21-kiloton-yield atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

Proponents of the nuclear SLCM claim that if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon to try to gain a military advantage or simply to intimidate, the U.S. president must have additional options to strike back with tactical nuclear weapons. They further argue that he should strike back even if that results in nuclear devastation within NATO and Russian territory.

Theories that nuclear war can be "limited" are extremely dangerous and ignore the unimaginable human suffering nuclear detonations would produce. In practice, once nuclear weapons are used by nuclear-armed adversaries, there is no guarantee the conflict would not quickly escalate to a catastrophic exchange involving the thousands of long-range strategic nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Russian arsenals.

As Gen. John Hyten, head of U.S. Strategic Command, said in 2018 after the annual Global Thunder wargame, "It ends bad. And the bad, meaning, it ends with global nuclear war." As the supercomputer in the 1983 movie War Games ultimately calculated, "The only winning move is not to play."

Adding a new type of tactical nuclear weapon to the U.S. arsenal will not enhance deterrence so much as it would increase the risk of nuclear war, mimic irresponsible Russian nuclear signaling, and prompt Russia and China to build their own sea- or land-based nuclear cruise missile systems. Biden made the right decision to cancel Trump's proposed nuclear SLCM, and now Congress needs to back the president up.

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

The US Supreme Court Has a Very Serious Clarence Thomas Problem

Bill Blum — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 11:13:30 +0000

As I have written before, the U.S. Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy driven by a growing public perception that the court is a political institution dominated by conservative activists masquerading as impartial guardians of the Constitution.

Thomas's wife had texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows twenty-nine times between early November 2020 and mid-January 2021, urging him to push to overturn of the results of the presidential election.

No single justice is more responsible for this crisis than Clarence Thomas. Scandal and controversy have plagued Thomas since he was credibly accused of sexual harassment by law professor Anita Hill during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearing. Since then, he has carved out a well-deserved reputation as the court's most rightwing jurist. Thomas is also an ardent proponent of "originalism"—the legal philosophy that holds that the Constitution should be understood today as closely as possible to the way it was understood when it was written in the eighteenth century.

In 1993, according to The New York Times, Thomas told two of his law clerks that he planned to serve on the court until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals "miserable."

On January 19 of this year, Thomas attempted to make good on that pledge in the case of Trump v. Thompson. By a margin of 8-1, the court rejected a lawsuit filed by the former President to block the National Archives from releasing White House documents sought by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Thomas was alone in his dissent.

Were it not for some dogged sleuthing by investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Thomas's dissent might have been forgotten amid the many other conservative votes he has registered during his lengthy career. Writing in The Washington Post on March 24, Woodward and Costa reported that Thomas's wife, Virginia (who goes by the nickname Ginni), had texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows twenty-nine times between early November 2020 and mid-January 2021, urging Meadows to push to overturn of the results of the presidential election.

The text messages have sparked demands from Democrats and legal commentators that Thomas recuse himself from all future cases related to the insurrection and any other litigation surrounding the 2020 election.

So far, Thomas has not publicly addressed his wife's texts, nor has he given any indication that he will heed calls to not participate in such matters.

This is by no means the first time Justice Thomas has faced recusal demands as a result of his wife's aggressive political activism and his own intransigence. In 2011, seventy-four House Democrats signed a letter calling for Thomas to stand aside from any appeals involving the Affordable Care Act in light of Ginni Thomas's record as a highly paid lobbyist working against national health care reform. He declined.

Thomas also failed to recuse himself from the court's Muslim travel ban ruling in 2018 (Trump v. Hawaii), even though Ginni Thomas reportedly had been paid $200,000 in 2017 and 2018 by a group supporting the ban.

By the fall of 2020, as the election approached, Ginni Thomas's insider connections to the bases of conservative power expanded. She became a leader in Groundswell, a coalition of hardliners dedicated to fighting progressivism and keeping Donald Trump in office. Parlaying her resume and her marriage to Clarence Thomas, who Trump once described as his "favorite Justice," she gained extraordinary access to Meadows and the inner circles of the White House.

Although Ginni Thomas has denied trying to influence her husband's deliberations, her text exchanges with Meadows raise deeply troubling ethical concerns. Among the messages is one she sent to Meadows on November 24, 2020, disclosing that she had discussed the election issue with "my best friend." While the texts do not identify the friend, this is a term the couple have routinely used to refer to each other over the years.

Given that backdrop, Clarence Thomas's participation in the Thompson case was entirely improper and outrageous. A federal statute stipulates that "Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." A subsection of the same statute requires Justices and judges to disqualify themselves when they know that their spouses have any financial "or other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding."

The federal statute is similar to laws in place across the country that apply to state-court judges. Like the federal statute, such laws are designed to avoid not only actual instances of judicial bias but also the appearance of bias.

Even if Thomas didn't know about his wife's text messages or her admitted attendance at the Stop the Steal demonstration preceding the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, he certainly knew about her activism in general as well as her devotion to Trump. In the view of NYU Law School Professor Stephen Gillers and other prominent legal ethicists interviewed by The New York Times, Thomas had an affirmative duty to inform himself as to her activities. As Gillers put it, Justice Thomas "cannot close his ears and pretend that he's ignorant. Conscious avoidance of knowledge is knowledge."

Unfortunately, there is little, if anything, that can be done to bring Thomas to heel. The Constitution provides him with lifetime tenure. Impeachment, however justified, is a pipedream, given the two-thirds Senate majority needed for conviction. Also out of reach, at least for the foreseeable future, are efforts to expand the size of the court or to impose term limits on the justices.

The Supreme Court stands at the pinnacle of the U.S. legal system. Yet its members are free to ignore the federal recusal statute and, unlike every other federal and state court in the nation, our highest court bewilderingly lacks a binding written code of ethics. There is no way to appeal its decisions.

According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 52 percent of Americans believe Thomas should step down from all 2020 election cases. As more details about the plot to overturn the election are revealed and more related cases reach the court, that percentage is likely to increase.

Maybe someday Thomas will have his reckoning. Let's just hope that day arrives before 2034, the year he long ago set for his retirement.

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

The Leaked WTO Covid Patent Waiver Text Is Very Bad

Fatima Hassan, Leslie London, Yousuf Vawda — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:41:34 +0000

In October 2020, South Africa and India's governments tabled a bold proposal (PDF) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily waive intellectual property (IP) protections for producing COVID-19 vaccines and other coronavirus-related medical tools for the duration of the pandemic.

The South African leadership now needs to do right by the people of the Global South who have long been suffering from the greed and protectionism of the Global North—it needs to reject the leaked text and insist that members go back to the drawing board.

The proposal aimed to address an urgent problem: multinational pharmaceutical companies and their backers using their monopoly power to prevent vaccine and medical product manufacturers across the world from scaling up production to meet global needs.

It has been more than a year since the proposal was tabled, and the ongoing disparities in access to timely supplies of vaccines and other key technologies show the need for a waiver agreement is still as urgent as ever. However, despite 65 members co-sponsoring and a total of 110 countries backing the proposal, the WTO has still not managed to pass the waiver.

The negotiations have "dragged out" because the pharmaceutical industry and the countries supporting it—mainly the United States and the European Union—maintained that the waiver proposal is not necessary as there already is "sufficient flexibility" in the existing rules. The reality, of course, is that the same countries and industries undermining the waiver proposal today have been opposing the use of public health flexibilities in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), such as compulsory licensing and parallel importation, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. For years, they have used a combination of trade threats and litigation to suppress challenges to the worrying patent dominance of the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, the so-called "flexibilities" in the existing rules are not "sufficient" at all.

The dragging out of negotiations has had a catastrophic consequence: a vaccine and treatment apartheid. Amid a global shortage, rich countries swiftly hoarded all the vaccines they needed and then some more, leaving many developing and least developed countries way behind in the queue, despite what COVAX had promised. Since the waiver proposal was first tabled, at least 5.5 million people have died, and the pandemic's "death toll has been four times higher in lower-income countries than in rich ones."

A breakthrough that is anything but

After months of fruitless negotiations, missed deadlines and cancelled meetings, some three weeks ago, the media reported that South Africa, India, the US and the EU are close to reaching a compromise on the waiver, and published a document purported to be the "leaked" text of an agreement.

The US then said "there has been no agreement" but added that the leaked text "offers the most promising path toward achieving a concrete and meaningful outcome". While also cautioning that "not all the details of the compromise have been ironed out", WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala hailed the leaked text as a "breakthrough" and even announced her intention to take it to all 164 members of the WTO for discussion. Now, WTO members are reportedly being pressurised by the WTO secretariat into rubber-stamping the leaked text.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations, academics and researchers have analysed the leaked text and highlighted several fatal flaws. There is now a growing consensus among experts that this proposed "compromise" cannot produce a meaningful deal and should be rejected. Here is why:

One small step forward—several steps back

The leaked text does include one small step towards allowing some manufacturers to scale up production to meet some global needs.

The TRIPS Agreement states that compulsory licences that allow countries to suspend patents must be employed predominantly for supplying the domestic market, so only less than half of a product produced under a "compulsory licence" may be exported. Thus, if there is no viable domestic market for the product, it would not be economically feasible for the holder of the licence to use it. The leaked text proposes to lift that requirement so that a producer may export the majority or all of the quantity produced (here, only vaccines).

The leaked text, however, immediately undermines this very small step by imposing restrictions on which countries may take advantage of the lifting of the domestic use requirement. By confining the eligibility criteria only to developing countries that "exported less than 10% of world exports in 2021", it excludes major possible vaccine and treatment suppliers, such as China. This approach may severely restrict global production capacity and prevent people in the Global South from swiftly accessing the medications and vaccines they need.

India and South Africa's waiver proposal included all COVID-19 medical technologies, but the leaked text mentions only "vaccines, and their ingredients and processes". According to the leaked text, waivers on diagnostic technologies and medicines are to be decided in the six months after the agreement is reached, though no reason is provided for this carve-out. Because WTO processes move at a snail's pace, this addition may never materialise. So, while patients in the Global North are already receiving new antiviral medicines to treat COVID-19, those in the Global South are being told to wait—perhaps indefinitely.

Moreover, the leaked text does not waive patent obligations and intellectual property protections entirely—so it will be difficult to engage in local manufacturing at scale in developing countries. This could hamstring the WHO mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa, possibly exposing it to litigation and delaying access to life-saving vaccines even further.

The leaked text contains several TRIPS-plus provisions, including the requirement for licence applicants to "list all patents" covered in their applications, imposing a huge burden on them to work through non-transparent patent landscapes (according to the document "pending patents" and "patents that may not have been published" must also be listed). The leaked text also mentions requiring the details of the entities authorised to use, the duration of the licence, and the quantities and destinations for export, to be communicated to the WTO. These are unnecessary and onerous conditions that could hinder crucial efforts to increase production and expand vaccine and treatment access around the world.

Furthermore, the leaked text does not waive current protections on "trade secrets" and other "undisclosed information", without which technology transfer will be delayed. The only aspect of "undisclosed information" that the leaked text references is a clarification relating to "clinical trial and other data required for regulatory approval of a follow-on product", which is already available as flexibility in the TRIPS Agreement. In fact, the leaked text adds on a "necessity" test—a standard that is exceptionally difficult to satisfy in the WTO.

States should not be pressured to accept a bad deal

By bringing the waiver proposal to the WTO, South Africa—alongside India—assumed a position of global moral leadership. If it now succumbs to pressure and endorses the leaked text, it will risk losing the respect of the 110 nations that supported the proposal and sowing division among them. Such a misstep could irreparably break south-south solidarity. So too, the respect of civic groups and others that have supported the waiver for over 17 months.

Furthermore, accepting a "bad deal" now could make it impossible to secure meaningful intellectual property reforms that would allow the world to be prepared for future pandemics.

Protecting their billion-dollar for-profit pharmaceutical industries at the WTO and other international forums has always been a priority for the EU and the US and this is unlikely to change after the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the Global South should be wary of accepting such compromises.

This is why civil society organisations and concerned individuals in South Africa recently urged South African Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel "not to surrender to US and EU on the TRIPS Waiver negotiations" in an open letter.

"The government and the negotiating team have played a critical and leading role in bringing together … member countries of the WTO to support such a waiver and engaged the opposition from rich countries with reasoned arguments," they wrote. "President Ramaphosa stated at the AU–EU Summit that Africa would still be getting the 'crumbs from the table' of the West without the TRIPS Waiver. That's exactly what the leaked text is—'crumbs'—and it is unacceptable."

Indeed, millions of people across the Global South, including Nobel laureates, researchers, clinicians, advocates, activists and even former world leaders, did not support South Africa and its original and bold waiver proposal for the past 17 months just to settle for "crumbs".

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Fatima Hassan, Leslie London, Yousuf Vawda.

Why the GOP Is Very Afraid of Students Learning the Real History of Reconstruction

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 15:13:48 +0000

Reenactors under the direction of performance artist Dread Scott retrace the route of one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history on November 09, 2019 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The 1811 uprising of slaves, mostly armed with hand tools, began in southeastern Louisiana, ultimately growing in size to roughly 200 to 500 slaves from sugar plantations in the area. (Photo: Marianna Massey/Getty Images)

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

Navy Decisions on Red Hill Jet Fuel Tanks Very Costly to Military Families, Taxpayers, and Hawaii’s Environment

Ann Wright — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 10:44:24 +0000

Total Congressional funding for all aspects of the Navy's Red Hill water contamination debacle is now over $1.1 billion according to Hawai'i Congressional representative Ed Case and billions more are needed to complete clean-up, defueling and closing of the massive leaking Red Hill jet fuel storage facility.

Three months into the health crisis, the military has still not sent a toxicology team to the military medical facilities to help address the long term health concerns of the families.

In a news release on March 9, 2022, Rep. Case said, "These funds ($700 million) are in addition to the $403 million in emergency funding we obtained in another bill we passed just weeks ago, bringing Congress' total funding for all aspects of Red Hill in the current fiscal year alone to over $1.1 billion. But billions more will be required to complete all aspects of the cleanup, stabilization, defueling and closing of Red Hill and the relocation of its fuel and build fuel storage capacity elsewhere."

The Red Hill funding appropriation includes $50 million to the Navy for planning and design of future water treatment and distribution infrastructure projects to address the Red Hill drinking water contamination.

A paltry $5 million was included for the improvement of the safety of underground fuel storage tanks at Red Hill as the Navy works to defuel the facility.

The majority of the Red Hill funding includes "$686 million for continued support to displaced service members, civilians and their families." Thousands of military families were housed in Waikiki hotels for up to three months and were provided temporary living allowances for food and other services.

The appropriation requires the Pentagon give Congress a report within 90 days that would identify future military construction and remediation requirements for Red Hill's permanent shutdown.

While the Red Hill water crisis strained relations between military leaders and lawmakers, Hawaii's congressional delegation has lobbied their Congressional counterparts to increase military budgets and operations in Hawaii and the Pacific, not only for Red Hill issues, but other military items, including the "will-it-ever-die" Homeland Defense Radar and Pearl Harbor shipyard.

After two months of military teams "flushing" main pipes and household water taps in the affected areas and testing of only 5% of the 9,715 homes, on March 17, 2022, the Hawai'i State Department of Health cleared the drinking water for the last of 19 zones that contained military and civilian family housing and Navy operational buildings that were contaminated by jet fuel.

With the amendment of the health advisory, the military housing offices for the residential areas notified by email residents from the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (JBPHH) commanding officer stating their water is safe to drink.

The families who are still occupying temporary alternate lodging are expected to return to their residences within two days.

Most families are not using the water coming from the housing taps. With clean water distribution sites that have provided clean water to families for over 3 months being discontinued on March 21, many families have told local media that they will be purchasing water for drinking and showering as they do not trust the water coming from their "flushed" taps.

Military families who have returned to their homes are reporting air contamination in their homes with many persons having headaches and needing to leave their homes for fresh air. Tap water poured into pans is still showing sheens of fuel. Pets are still refusing to go into yards that have been sprayed with water from sprinkler systems.

Additionally, three months into the health crisis, the military has still not sent a toxicology team to the military medical facilities to help address the long term health concerns of the families.

The Honolulu Board of Water Supply has now appealed to Oahu residents and businesses to voluntarily reduce their water consumption with 20% of Honolulu's drinking water wells offline in an attempt to reduce the jet fuel plume from moving into more of O'ahu's aquifer.

Should voluntary water reduction not work, a mandatory reduction will occur in the summer months.

Citizen activism continues to shut down Red Hill in less than the projected one year The Department of Defense projects. The possibility of further major leaks remains a possibility as long as the massive 20 story jet fuel tanks contain fuel only 100 feet above Honolulu's water supply.

Many Native Hawaiians say the success in the shut down of Red Hill fuel storage facility may be a turning point for the wider island community to join Native Hawaiians in challenging the military's role in Hawai'i.

University of Hawaiʻi Professor of Hawaiian Studies Kamanamaikalani Beamer said at the heart of that conflict is the military's terrible record of care of Hawaiʻi's natural resources.

"Trust is based off of historical relationships and evidence and people's behavior and all we really have to go off of here in Hawaiʻi, unfortunately, is a series of actions that have been negligent to our islands' resources," Beamer said.

Healani Sonoda-Pale, a Native Hawaiian community leader, said, "It's unfortunate that this crisis happened, but the silver lining is being able to raise the consciousness of other communities and groups that otherwise would never actually critique the role of the military here in Hawaiʻi."

The water contamination at Red Hill brought together federal, state, and local officials as well as a large and vocal group of citizens in opposition to the massive jet fuel storage tanks remaining open.

Sonoda-Pale said the "community's perception of the military will play a critical role in conversations around its soon-to-expire state land leases, such as the Pohakuloa and Kahuku training areas."

The strained relations of the Hawai'i public with the U.S. military caused Rear Admiral Tim Kott, Commander of the Navy Region Hawaiʻi, to issue a statement that the Navy is deeply committed to restoring the trust of all people of Hawaiʻi, including Native Hawaiians:

"We know, however, that process will take time and must be earned through our actions not just words. We've committed to the closure of Red Hill and have made great strides to return safe drinking water to families in military housing; however, much work remains."

"As we continue our efforts to close the fuel storage facility, we hope to work with the Native Hawaiian community to help guide us towards a better future that balances the interests of the environment, the native host culture, as well as the nation," Kott told Hawaiʻi Public Radio.

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

Interview: ‘They were very moved that I volunteered to join the war’

By Wang Yun — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 17:40:44 +0000

Yi Qiwei, a U.S. national born in China, recently joined the International Legion of Defense of Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion, alongside an estimated 20,000 other foreign nationals. Yi, a writer who grew up in a family of Chinese officials and now divides his time between the U.S. and Japan, started out helping refugees fleeing Ukraine, before signing up to fight for Ukraine. He spoke to RFA's Mandarin Service about his daily life as a soldier, and his reasons for joining the war:

RFA: Mr. Yi, where are you now?

Yi Qiwei: I'm in Ukraine now, and I don't know how to pronounce the name of this place, Szeginie, I think

RFA: Where is this place roughly? It's on the western border of Ukraine, isn't it?

Yi Qiwei: It's a small village across the border from Medyka port in Poland.

RFA: What is the situation there now?

Yi Qiwei: It was pretty straightforward getting in [from Poland], although the line to get out [of the country] was nearly three miles long.

RFA: You entered Ukraine from Poland, right?

Yi Qiwei: Yes, it is better to enter Ukraine from Poland, because there are not many people.

RFA: There are still large numbers of refugees leaving the country, right?

Yi Qiwei: A lot, a lot.

RFA: Did you see any Chinese among them?

Yi Qiwei: No, I didn't.

RFA: Why did you go to Ukraine?

Yi Qiwei: I came here to join the army. So, we didn't go through immigration. We went first to Medyka, Poland, where there was an assembly point, where we reported for duty ... then they gave us a pass.

RFA: Can you show us your pass?

Yi Qiwei: It's in electronic form. I can't let you see it because of my personal details.

RFA: You said you came from Poland, where did you come from before that?

Yi Qiwei: I originally came [to Europe] to dance [at] the Tomorrowland Winter music festival in France. I wanted to take advantage of the spring break to come out and have a good time. I flew directly from the United States. I had been planning to go to the French Alps from the Netherlands to dance. But then this war happened.

RFA: You decided on the spur of the moment to join the Foreign Legion?

Yi Qiwei: Yes, I made an on-the-spot decision.

RFA: Why did you decide to join the Foreign Legion?

Yi Qiwei: When I went to the central square in the Netherlands, there were a lot of people demonstrating there that day, which was a big shock to me. Why? Because there were so many protests across the whole of Europe, including Poland, London, Amsterdam. All of the major cities. Ukraine started its Foreign Legion program shortly after that, in early March.

I have had a dream of being a soldier since I was a child, so there's that. Secondly, I wanted to be able to come back alive and show my daughter her handsome father who has been on the battlefield. I really thought like that at first. But when we went out there to distribute supplies and arrange transportation and accommodation for refugees, the effects of war are clearly visible. A lot of the kids are around the same age as my daughter. They're so young, and they're sleeping in a train station, sleeping in McDonalds, and in such cold weather. It's really pitiful.

RFA: You are now in Ukraine. How does this village relate to the battlefield?

Yi Qiwei: Poland and Ukraine have a total of five ports, and this is actually one of the five ports from which refugees can leave.

Yi Qiwei (C) stands in the Polish border city of Medyka in an undated photo, before crossing into Ukraine. Credit: Yi Qiwei

RFA: When you saw these scenes, you said that you had a dream of becoming a soldier, but this war happened in a complex international situation. How do you view this war?

Yi Qiwei: I think this war is wrong. Everyone will say that war is wrong, or that war is bad, but why is it bad? I'm leaving soon, and I don't know where they will deploy me, whether it's to the logistics corps or the front line. I'm very scared.

I think that only when you really experience war, will you understand what it entails. That's to say, you won't want to experience it again. Only people who have never been through it go online to clamor about the happiness and interests of the people being sacrificed for the rise of a great power.

RFA: What do you think of the Chinese government's stance on the war?

Yi Qiwei: Let's just focus on people. Once we start talking about a stance, then we have to basically say whether Russia is in the right or Ukraine is in the right. But let's talk about people and about life. That should come before national interests and ideology. If a country has life, it can get stronger, and its economy can develop.

RFA: But you are actually risking your own life when you go to war. How do you square that with yourself?

Yi Qiwei: My role in this war is minimal. I am like a pebble. Even if I die, no one will care. What I want to say to everyone you can only get a better understanding of what's going on by experiencing it, as opposed to blindly believing in whatever propaganda. If China says Russia is in the right, then the [pro-CCP] Little Pinks aren't going to echo anything the U.S. says. But what about Ukraine? I have dealt with government departments, and I hail from a family of government officials, so I know that there are a lot of mutual vested interests involved.

RFA: What is people's attitude to you as a person of Chinese heritage.

Yi Qiwei: They were very moved that I volunteered to join the war at the age of 25, and with a family [back home]. Once, when I'd told them my story, someone from the church next door invited me to pray with them, so I think the power of faith helps people tend towards goodness.

RFA: What will you do tomorrow?

Yi Qiwei: I'm going to take a nap now. I've already told the military personnel that I'll report at about 2:30 p.m.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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

“Happiness is very necessary,” Taipei resident on the International Day of Happiness

Radio Free Asia — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 03:34:33 +0000

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

“Happiness is very necessary,” Taipei resident on the International Day of Happiness

Radio Free Asia — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 22:00:54 +0000

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

Ukraine’s Zhytomyr Region Reels From ‘Very Scary’ Russian Attacks

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 14:06:40 +0000

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

Let’s Just Say It Very Clearly: The US Supreme Court Is Corrupt

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:42:17 +0000

So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her rightwing work on behalf of America's oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump's January 6th "rally" up to her eyeballs.

Let's just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.

No other federal court in the nation would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant's favor.

But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret "energy group" that was planning the seizure and sale of Iraq's oil fields as he and Bush lied us into the war that opened those oil fields up to exploitation.

No other federal court would allow a judge to give a speech before a group that was funding a case before them and then rule in favor of that group's openly stated goal, but that's exactly what Neal Gorsuch did when he addressed the Fund for American Studies, itself funded by the Bradley Foundation that was helping fund the Janus v AFSCME case that gutted union protections for government workers.

No other federal court would allow a judge to swear revenge against a particular nonprofit corporation (in this case the Democratic Party), saying in his confirmation hearings that, "What goes around comes around," and then rule in cases directly affecting that organization (like voting rights) but Brett "Beerbong" Kavanaugh did just that.

No other federal court would allow a judge to rule on a case where he owned a half-million dollars worth of stock in the company presenting amicus arguments before the court—it's illegal in many states—but John Roberts did just that in the ABC v Aereo case. As did Roberts, Bryer and Alito in 25 of 37 other cases where they owned stock, according to the good-government group Fix The Court.

No other federal court would allow a judge's wife to openly interact with and advocate for the interests of dozens of litigants before the court over decades, and take nearly a million dollars from a group regularly helping bring cases before his court but Clarence Thomas and his wife have done both, as recently revealed in a shocking New York Times profile.

And now the Court is on the verge of gutting the EPA—the agency Justice Gorsuch's mother infamously ran into the ground before resigning in disgrace during the Reagan administration—using Gorsuch's own BS "textualist" rationale to go after the agency today.

In addition, these Republican appointees are openly shooting down Democratic efforts to fight gerrymandered maps while supporting GOP efforts to impose them on states.

Is there no way, to paraphrase Shakespeare, to rid ourselves of this Court's corrupt behavior? Turns out, Congress has that power—although they haven't used it since Ulysses Grant was president and reorganized the Court.

Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal court system, and gives to Congress itself the power to create the lower federal courts. It also says that Supreme Court judges may only serve on the court if they behave themselves:

"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour…."

It also requires Congress to regulate the Supreme Court. Article III, Section 2 says:

"[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

The issue of the Supreme Court needing regulation from the "first among equals" legislative branch (Congress), as specified by the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, has been with us for 101 years.

Most people remember William Howard Taft as the one-term progressive Republican president who followed Teddy Roosevelt into the White House in 1909 and was beaten for re-election by Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

But after his retirement from the presidency, Taft became the first former president to serve as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1921. He was our 27th president and 10th Chief Justice.

In 1921, it came to the attention of the nation and to Chief Justice Taft that US District Judge Kenesaw Landis was taking five times his annual salary as a judge from what was then called "Organized Baseball"—five years after ruling in their favor.

The scandal provoked Congress to pass, in 1922, a law creating a body that would provide advice and oversight to the federal judiciary. It came to be known as the Judicial Conference of the United States.

The scandal also prompted Chief Justice Taft to accept the unpaid chairmanship of The American Bar Association's (ABA) newly formed commission to write ethics rules for federal judges.

Taft's commission wrote, in 1923, the first Canons of Judicial Ethics, which included 34 categories of judicial conflicts and misbehavior that would either disqualify a judge or require their recusal from cases before them. They included conflicts of interest, personal financial investments, and even behavior in the courtroom itself.

Taft, in delivering the Canons, made it clear they should apply to all federal courts, including his own Supreme Court. Within a decade, every state in the union had adopted the Canons for their own courts.

The Canons, however, had no enforcement mechanism, particularly when it came to the Supreme Court. After all, who would judge the highest court in the land? That opened the door for literally a century of the Supreme Court ignoring Taft's work.

The issue came to the fore again in 1969 when Republicans went nuts when it was revealed that Justice Abe Fortas—a very liberal (Republicans called him a communist) LBJ appointee—had taken $15,000 for a summer teaching post, was receiving time-delayed payments from a law former client, and, worse of all, was secretly advising President Johnson.

Under massive incoming fire from Republicans and their friendly media, Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court on May 14, 1969. Over the next three years, the ABA put together a new commission to update Taft's original Canon on judicial ethics.

That commission released their new Code of Judicial Conduct in 1972, and it was adopted by the Judicial Conference of the United States, in 1973. The Supreme Court, however, chose to ignore it, arguing that they were above such considerations.

By that time the Supreme Court had made itself, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the most powerful of the three branches of government, asserting the power to second-guess both Congress and the President.

Ironically, in his 2011 annual report about the state of the judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts made lengthy and effusive reference to former Chief Justice Taft and his work with the ABA's commission on judicial ethics. His report, however, conveniently omitted the fact that Taft had loudly and publicly asserted it should apply to the Supreme Court.

Instead, Roberts noted rhetorically, "Some observers have recently questioned whether the Judicial Conference's Code of Conduct for United States Judges should apply to the Supreme Court."

I'll spare you extended quotes from Roberts' report, which you can read here, but the bottom line is that in his opinion the Court can tell the 1923 ethics recommendations, and the subsequent ones from 1973, to go screw themselves. The Supreme Court, in his mind, is answerable to nobody but itself.

As Sam Alito said, "I'm not aware of problems on the Supreme Court itself…we would not sit back. We would take action that's appropriate."

Back when Roberts was a young lawyer working for Reagan and trying to come up with a way to overturn Brown v Board and Roe v Wade, he was fond of quoting Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.

This gave Congress the power, Roberts wrote, to simply overturn both Brown and Roe by passing a law creating an "exception" that the Supreme Court couldn't rule on issues of race or abortion (his lengthy writings for Reagan are in my book on the Court).

But now that he, himself, is in charge of the Court there's nary a peep from Roberts—in his 2011 Report or anywhere else—about Congress' power to regulate the Court.

In recent years multiple laws have been proposed to pick up the slack Roberts left to his fellow justices. Louise Slaughter proposed legislation in the house in 2015 that would require the Court itself to come up with its own code of ethics.

It went nowhere, and, besides, it would violate the basic premise of law dating back to Publius Syrus in 50 BC, cited by John Locke in the 17th century, and finally quoted by Madison in Federalist 10 that "no man shall be the judge in his own case."

President Biden's commission on the Courts recently recommended that the Supreme Court adopt an "advisory" code of behavior, but Roberts didn't even bother to comment.

Most recently, Senator Chris Murphy introduced the Supreme Court Ethics Act that would seek to regulate the Court's out-of-control politicking and conflicts-of-interest. Predictably, it was blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Public outrage is building: the Court's approval rating is now around 40 percent, an historic low. Congress needs to act, requiring them to adopt and conform to the federal code of judicial ethics at the very least, and expand the Court at best, before an entire branch of government sinks into an irredeemable partisan muck of corruption.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

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

The Stakes Are Very High in Ukraine

John Burroughs — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:44:31 +0000

If the Ukraine crisis erupts into war—even intensified limited war in Eastern Ukraine with overt Russian intervention—the consequences will be severe and far-reaching.

Among possible courses of action: neutrality for Ukraine; an alternative European security arrangement; a long-term moratorium on NATO expansion; or some combination of the foregoing and other measures.

A non-comprehensive list includes: vastly greater loss of life due to armed conflict in Ukraine; destabilization of global peace and security, not least the always urgent pursuit of nuclear arms control and disarmament; and impairment of the will and capability for cooperation on climate protection, public health, and other vital matters.

The proximate cause of the crisis is Russia's menacing behavior, including deployment of troops and equipment near the border with eastern Ukraine and in Crimea and Belarus, and conducting a nuclear forces exercise in Belarus.

Especially in context and combined with Putin's at times bellicose rhetoric, these actions are unlawful threats under the fundamental UN Charter prohibition of the "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

In the case of the exercise, it is also an unlawful threat because it is contrary to general international law to threaten the commission of an illegal act—here the use of nuclear weapons.

Longer-term causes of the crisis are the utterly reckless declaration, made in 2008, the last year of the second George W Bush term, that NATO membership is in principle open to Ukraine and Georgia; and more broadly the long history since the mid-1990s of US and NATO disregard of Russian security interests and proposals.

To take just one example, when the first GW Bush administration determined that the US would withdraw from the ABM Treaty, Russia proposed renegotiation of the treaty. The US answer was simple: No.

The United States then proceeded to establish missile defense facilities in Romania and Poland that Russia, with some reason, regarded as destabilizing.

The only rational path is diplomacy. At two Security Council meetings on Ukraine, on January 31 and February 17, this was the refrain of all Council members, including Russia.

Diplomacy is indeed mandated by the UN Charter, which requires member states to "settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."

As the Russian response to a US proposal conveyed, there is some common ground for negotiation on such matters as limits on military deployments and regional arms control, conventional and nuclear. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Michael McFaul surveys possible topics in this recent Foreign Affairs article.

However, as Russia has been insisting, what is lacking above all is US interest in addressing Russia's categorical opposition to even the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. Instead, the United States has been mechanically saying that foreclosing that possibility is a "non-starter".

This displays a lack of the creativity and imagination that diplomats on occasion are quite capable of putting to good use. Among possible courses of action: neutrality for Ukraine; an alternative European security arrangement; a long-term moratorium on NATO expansion; or some combination of the foregoing and other measures.

Also, a resolution of the status of eastern Ukraine will have to be reached, with the people of that region having a voice in the outcome. Similarly, the status of Crimea will have to be addressed or the issue deferred.

The stakes are very high. Energetic, creative, and determined problem solving is imperative.

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

‘Very Dangerous’: Putin Recognizes Self-Proclaimed Republics in Ukraine as Independent

Common Dreams staff — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 17:48:15 +0000

Ukraine's foreign minister appealed for diplomacy, saying "it's exactly now that we all should calmly focus on de-escalation efforts."

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

Noam Chomsky: ‘American democracy is in very serious danger’

anthony — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 16:39:00 +0000

Noam Chomsky: ‘American democracy is in very serious danger’

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Amanda Mars

January 25, 2022. EL PAÍS.

At 93 years of age, Noam Chomsky still writes, gives lectures and interviews, and stands out front for what he believes is right. He is part of the European progressive movement Diem25, and has raised alarms about the risks of climate change while becoming the scourge of Trumpism. He is also the father of modern linguistics, having established the theory of generative grammar in the 1950s. A prolific author, renowned philosopher and incorrigible activist, he was arrested for opposing the Vietnam War, blacklisted by Richard Nixon and supported the publication of the Pentagon Papers. More recently, he urged Americans to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. Since 2017, he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, and spoke to EL PAÍS by video call from his home. The professor’s gray hair appeared on the screen at the precise time, and while the years have weakened his voice, his thoughts remain as sharp as ever.

Question. I read that you wrote your first essay when you were only 10 years old, and it was about the Spanish Civil War. Is that correct?

Answer. Yes, and I can date it exactly, because I know what it was about. It was about the fall of Barcelona. So it was February, 1939. Sure, it was not a great article, but it was an article about the spread of fascism in Europe, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Barcelona. From my 10-year-old point of view, it looked as if the world was coming to an end, as if fascism was uncontrollable.

Q. I read that when you were a child, you began working at a kiosk with an uncle, selling newspapers. Or that you helped him, at least. I would like to know, how did that mark you, how did that influence you?

A. There is a good deal of irony, tragic irony, in that question. I grew up in the Depression. I was a child in the early 1930s. My family were immigrants, mostly unemployed, with really bitter suffering from the Depression, but there was an atmosphere of hope, aspiration and expectation, because of the labor movement. The labor movement was reviving. It had been crushed by force during the 1920s, but it was reviving. There were militant labor actions, there were political parties, radical political parties. There was debate, discussion, cultural activities. There was a sense of: “We can all get out of this together.” In fact, if you look at what happened in the 1930s, the effect in Europe was fascism, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, other minor figures. That was Europe. The reaction to the Depression in the United States was social democracy. The New Deal, Roosevelt’s New Deal, pressed by labor activism, popular pressure, led to the modern era of social democracy, picked up by Europe after the Second World War. Now that was 90 years ago. Look at today, there are other crises today, very serious ones. Europe is holding on to some form of social democracy. The United States is leading the way to proto-fascism, the reverse of what happened in my childhood.

Q. What about the pandemic? You mentioned the Great Depression, and the effect that had on the US and Europe, but can the pandemic play a similar role in the sense of “We can do this together?”

A. It should. And there are some signs of it. So when you get to the local level, you do find people cooperating with one another, helping each other. In many poor places around much of the world, local groups have just gotten together to help people in need, sometimes in remarkable ways. The favelas in Brazil are among the most miserable slums in the world. I’ve seen them. They’re run by biker gangs, drug cartels. The police are also extremely violent. Well, what’s happened during the pandemic is that the gangs, the criminal gangs that have been terrorizing the favelas have been organizing people to deal with the crisis. In the favelas, plenty of people don’t even have water. They’re working to help people at least have access to water, to have access to vaccines, to help each other in need. If there’s somebody, an old man stuck in an apartment who can’t get food, they bring him food, things like that are happening on the ground. Now, go to the leadership level. What are they doing? They’re monopolizing vaccines for themselves. They are demanding that the huge pharmaceutical corporations, which are super rich, should maintain control of the exorbitant patent rights that were given to them by the neoliberal regime, a regime which is radically opposed to free trade.

Q. Not only in the US, but also in Europe, why are the far right winning votes?

A. They have taken over. I mean, they always dominate the system, of course, in Spain as well. But in the last 40 years, they’ve had an overwhelming triumph in gaining power and wealth. Just take a look at some of the numbers. In the United States, the Rand Corporation, a very respected quasi-governmental corporation, did a study of the transfer of wealth from the working class and the middle class. Their estimate is $50 trillion, $50 trillion stolen from the working class and the middle class, and put into the pockets of the super rich, and the people that run and own the corporate sector. That’s pretty substantial. And that’s an underestimate. Reagan opened the door to tax havens, for example, lots of other ways to rob the public. There has been a major period of massive class war, and they have gained enormous power. It’s been very destructive to the population of working people in the United States. Male workers, for their wages, are actually, in real terms, about where they were in 1979. A lot of wealth has been accumulated, but it’s gone into very few pockets. Europe had its own form of this. The austerity programs in Europe badly damaged working people and the poor, and enriched the very rich, not as extreme as the United States, but it happened. It’s led to anger, resentment, what’s called populism, which is very different from traditional populism, but a sense that, “The world’s going wrong, we don’t like it.” This is fertile terrain for demagogues of the Trump/Orban variety, and they’re capitalizing on it.

Q. One year on from the assault on the US Capitol, what are the consequences?

A. The assault on the Capitol was an effort to overthrow an elected government. Very explicitly, their claim was coming from Trump that the election was stolen, so let’s march on the Capitol and save our country from the stolen election. Well, an effort to overthrow an elected government is what’s called a coup. It almost succeeded. It’s now been reported extensively. We have videotapes, we have details. A few people, Republicans, in fact, refused to go along, and prevented the coup from succeeding. But it has been followed by a soft coup, which is taking place before our eyes. You read about it every day. The Republicans are planning carefully to ensure that next time, their coup will succeed. They’re doing it very systematically, perfectly in the open, at the state level where elections take place, trying to ensure that the people who run the elections physically are there when you cast your vote, the election monitors make sure that they are right-wing Republicans, who will ensure that if people vote the wrong way, the vote won’t be counted. The Republican Party is no longer a political party. It’s a neofascist party. The United States is a technologically advanced society, and culturally advanced, in some sectors, but culturally pre-modern in other sectors. That’s Trump’s voters, and he’s a very effective demagogue. He has succeeded in tapping the poisons that run right under the surface in American society, bringing them to the surface, mobilizing them. They are now a group who worship Il Duce, the leader chosen by God. He’s got them in his control. Those are the ones who stormed the Capitol, and are now planning to ensure that next time it’ll work. American democracy is in very serious danger.

Q. Has the Biden administration been more progressive than you expected?

A. Well, I didn’t expect much, frankly, but the domestic programs have been better than I expected. Actually, to a large extent, they were designed by Bernie Sanders, representing the more progressive wing of the base of the Democratic Party. He has an important position as a director in the department of the budget that sets up the programs. The major Biden program [Build Back Better], the one that’s being thought about right now, was initiated by Sanders. In social welfare, the United States is a laggard, way behind other countries. Take such simple things as maternity leave. There are about six countries that don’t have it, the United States, and a couple of Pacific islands. Everybody else has it. The United States? Can’t have it. Republicans? 100% opposed. The Democrats like [Senator Joe] Manchin have blocked it. That’s the richest, most powerful country in the world, but efforts to try to develop simple social democratic measures are blocked by private capital, and by the neoliberal ideology, which is radically opposed to them.

Q. Do you still consider yourself an anarchist, and what does that mean?

A. Like virtually every term of political discourse, the term “anarchism” is used in widely different ways. The same is true of liberal, conservative, socialist, Marxist, they mean all sorts of things. In the case of anarchism, the idea is that any form of hierarchy, domination, authority, whatever it may be, in any aspect of life, from the family, to international affairs, any such relationship has to justify itself. It’s not self-justifying. So if a community, decides democratically that they want to have traffic rules, drive on the right side of the road, stop at a red light, I think they’re subjecting themselves to authority. But I think you can argue that it’s legitimate authority. On the other hand, very few relationships withstand this critique. And the task of an anarchist is first of all, to discover them, which is not a small task, reveal them, to bring people to contemplate and deliberate about them, and then, to change them, if they find them legitimate. Even that first step, discovery, is not easy, right at the present time. So if you had asked my grandmother whether she was oppressed, she wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about. She was living the way a woman was supposed to live, taking care of the house, taking care of the children, doing what her husband tells her. That’s not oppression, that’s just life. Well, to discover that that’s a form of oppression takes work and effort.

Q. What about work?

A. What’s a job? A job, for most people, is spending most of your waking hours following orders from a master, who is a totalitarian master. They can give orders of a kind that Stalin couldn’t have dreamt of. Stalin couldn’t have told people that you’re allowed to take a five-minute bathroom break or that you’re not allowed to talk to that person next to you. And maybe your master is kind enough to allow you the leeway, but it’s the master’s decision. That’s called getting a job. Today, most people think that’s the norm. They react like my grandmother did, and would, if you’d asked her if she was oppressed. That wasn’t always true. To go back to the early Industrial Revolution of working people, bitterly opposed this form of autocracy, which was taking away their dignity, their rights and keeps reviving today. Plenty of people are saying the same thing. In fact, many of the people who are just refusing to go back to work, the so-called Great Resignation, are saying it in their own way.

Q. Is it possible to have an organized economy without some kind of authority?

A. Sure. In fact, Spain gave us very good examples of it. Take a look at the Mondragon collective conglomerate. It’s been around since the 1950s, worker-owned, largely worker-managed. You can find flaws, if you look, but to a large extent, in fact, to an unusual extent in the world, it’s a substantial, successful, long-standing conglomerate that is based on the idea that the participants in a community should control it.

Q. You also talk about consent, how people consent to authority and are willing to accept authority, sometimes, no matter if it’s not legitimate or justified.

A. Human nature covers the range of options available to humans. If you read classical liberals, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others, their conception was that the essence of human nature is freedom from arbitrary constraint. They didn’t live up to it, by any means, but we’re talking about the thinking of, say, John Stuart Mill, leading classical liberal thinker in England, that his view was that in an enterprise, the working people in the enterprise should own and run it. That was classical liberalism. Of course, all of this was crushed by capitalism, which took a different course of authority, domination, subordination to a master. And in its extreme savage form, the kind of neoliberalism that’s been imposed in the last 40 years or so, with devastating effects almost everywhere.

Q. Do you consider yourself a pragmatic thinker?

A. We should do what we can do, not seek to do what we can’t do. There’s no point in romantic gestures, which are going to not only fail, but lead to the worst outcomes. We have to face the world as it actually is, and act in ways which will improve it, overcome problems and lead to a better world. I had friends, back in the ‘60s, who decided they wanted to have a revolution. So they would go out to a factory, say, the General Electric factory, and hand out Mao’s Little Red Book at the gates of the factory, to organize the working class for a revolution. Well, you can imagine what happened. That’s not the way we bring about change. What they did is strengthen support for reaction, and support for the war. You have to face the world as it is, not the way you would like it to be. You try to create the world that you would like, but by facing the world as it is.

This content originally appeared on chomsky.info: The Noam Chomsky Website and was authored by anthony.