People with disabilities are among those most heavily impacted by Trump’s cuts to Medicaid. “I know so many people like me, disabled adults living and thriving now, who were able to get to adulthood because Medicaid existed,” says Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. We feature additional testimonies from disabled members of the advocacy group Caring Across Generations, and speak to Town, who says she fears “so many kids [will] not get a chance to make it to adulthood,” while countless adults “will not be able to live into old age because of these cuts.”

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

A new report authored by Public Citizen Health Care Policy Advocate Eagan Kemp highlights the dangers posed by the men and women whom Trump has put in charge of our health care agencies and the threat they pose to patients, providers and the programs on which they rely.

The report includes details on:

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of conspiracy theory and dangerous anti-science views before his confirmation and during his early months as head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
• Mehmet Oz’s dangerous views on privatization of Medicare and conflicts of interest, and his early efforts to undermine the programs he is supposed to protect as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
• Jim O’Neill’s fringe views and significant ties to for-profit biomedical companies and the dangers they could pose as he serves as Deputy Secretary of HHS.
• Casey Means’s lack of qualifications for Surgeon General and misinformed and conspiratorial thinking on public health issues.

“Trump has nominated unqualified and dangerous people to serve in the most important health positions in the country,” said Kemp “From massive cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, layoffs of key staff, and failures to adequately engage with real emergencies, like the ongoing measles outbreak, America is reaping the bitter fruit of Trump’s terrible cabal. It is clear the Trump Administration will continue to exacerbate existing gaps in our health care system and risk millions more lives. People across the country are already pushing back against their terrible actions, and this must continue if we are to correct course and take back our health care system.”

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

Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near the Equator, robusta beans are often thought of as producing lower-quality coffee. 

In an effort to rebrand robusta, Mullin signed deals with coffee farming cooperatives in Vietnam and created smooth blends. Over the years, she helped a cohort of farmers convert their operations to organic. “We put in huge investments and were certified as the first organic specialty-grade coffee farms ever in Vietnam,” said the CEO and founder. In a few weeks, Copper Cow is planning to launch its first line of organic coffee at Whole Foods and Target.

But the second Trump administration has changed the calculus of her business. Mullin said she “was bullish” about her company’s prospects when President Donald Trump first took office, believing that Vietnam would likely be exempt from exorbitant tariffs since the president has many supporters in the coastal Southeast Asian country. Then, in April of this year, the White House announced a 46 percent tariff on goods from Vietnam. 

The shock left Mullin rethinking the very thesis she had set out to prove. “A big part of our mission is about how robusta beans, when treated better, can provide this really great cup of coffee at a lower price,” she said. “Once you put a 46 percent tariff on there, does this business model work anymore?”

Trump soon paused his country-specific tariffs for a few months, replacing them with a near-universal 10 percent tax. This month, Trump announced on social media that he would lower Vietnam’s eventual tariff from 46 to 20 percent — a sharp price hike that still worries Mullin. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an astounding 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, the nation’s largest importer of coffee, starting August 1. 

“I joke with my partner that I feel like I’m in a macroeconomics class,” said Mullin. In lieu of raising its prices, Copper Cow, which sells directly to consumers as well as to retailers, has scrambled to cut costs by reconsidering its quarterly team get-togethers and slowing down its timeline for helping more farmers go organic. The price of coffee hit an all-time high earlier this year, a dramatic rise due in part to ongoing climate-fueled droughts in the global coffee belt. As the U.S. considers fueling a trade war with coffee-producing countries, “it just feels like such an insult to an injury,” said Mullin. “It’s like, let’s have an earthquake hit a place that is in the middle of a hurricane.”

Economists like to say that demand for coffee is relatively inelastic — drinkers are so attached to their daily caffeine fix that they keep buying it even when prices increase. As the Trump administration mounts its retaliatory trade agenda, that theory will be put to the test. Coffee growers, as well as the roasters and sellers that purchase them in the U.S., are now facing unforeseen geopolitical and economic challenges. “We have not seen tariffs of this magnitude before,” said David Ortega, a professor of food and economics policy at Michigan State University. “There’s no playbook for this.” 

Should Trump’s threatened tariffs go into effect next month, it will likely hurt consumers, as many businesses will pass on the costs by raising prices. But it could also have ripple effects on coffee farms, as companies may cut costs by pulling back on investments in environmentally-conscientious practices like organic or regenerative agriculture. “Our goal was always to slowly convert the rest of our products to certified organic,” said Mullin. “And we feel like that is not an option anymore because of the tariffs.”

Even if the tariffs do not go into effect in August, the ongoing economic uncertainty will likely impact coffee growers in Brazil, which provided 35 percent of America’s unroasted coffee supply as of 2023. As U.S. coffee companies navigate the Trump administration’s evolving trade policies, they are likely to seek out new, cheaper markets for coffee beans. “Suddenly, they become less attached to where they source their coffee from,” said João Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a data platform that helps food companies measure and reduce carbon emissions along their supply chain. 

The problem with that, according to Ortega, is that other countries in the coffee belt, such as Colombia, do not have the production capacity to match Brazil’s and meet U.S. demand for coffee. If the threat of punitive tariffs on Brazil kickstarts an increase in demand for coffee from other countries, that will likely raise prices. For coffee drinkers, “there are very few substitutes,” said Ortega.

These pressures on coffee farmers and buyers are coming after a period of worsening climate impacts. A majority of coffee grown in Brazil — about 60 percent — comes from smallholder farms, grown on about 25 or fewer acres of land. “The current reality they’re operating in is that they’re already very stretched,” particularly because of weather disruptions, said Brites. Coffee grows best in tropical climates, but in recent years unprecedented droughts in Brazil have stunted growers’ yields, forcing exporters to dip into and almost deplete their coffee reserves. Vietnam has been rocked by drought and heat waves — and though robusta beans need less water to grow than arabica beans, making them a relatively climate-resilient crop, growers have also seen their yields decline. (Mullin said she is seeing early signs of harvests rebounding this year.)

Brites speculated that U.S. companies buying from smallholder farms in Brazil may be able to pressure growers into selling their beans at lower prices, adding to the economic precarity that these growers face. “For a lot of these coffee growers, the U.S. is such a big market,” he said, adding that it would take time for them to find new buyers in other markets.

Growers themselves are worried. Mariana Veloso, a Brazilian coffee producer and exporter, said producers are facing logistical challenges — and anticipating more. “If we want to ship a coffee in the next month, we will probably not be able to,” said Veloso, remarking that sometimes cargo ships holding coffee sit at Brazilian ports for weeks before setting out. Shipping companies seem to be delaying shipments from Brazil, said Veloso, perhaps in anticipation of the looming tariffs.

In the U.S., not every coffee company sources from Brazil or Vietnam. But the Trump administration’s existing 10 percent across-the-board tariffs are still rattling the coffee business. “We source coffees from all around the world. So we’re not immune to anything,” said Kevin Hartley, founder and CEO of Cambio Roasters, an aluminum K-cup coffee brand. He added, “You know, 10 percent here and 30 percent there, that’s not trivial.”

Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business. “In coffee farming families around the world, it’s a tough life and the current generation is showing reticence to take off where their parents began,” he said. 

Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce. “Everyone’s looking for a solution for this,” said Mullin, who believes robusta beans can offer a drought-resistant alternative to the ever-popular arabica beans. 

Copper Cow has even started experimenting with a lesser-known varietal of coffee beans called liberica, which requires even less water to grow than robusta beans. “And it’s delicious,” Mullin said. It’s an extremely labor-intensive crop because the coffee plant grows so tall, but one of the farmer cooperatives she works with is starting to plant them now, thinking the investment will be worth it as temperatures keep rising. 

This new era of environmental, economic, and geopolitical challenges has shaken coffee brands. “Everybody’s wondering, in 50 years, will there be much coffee anymore? People are trying to be really realistic about what that world is going to look like,” said Mullin. In the midst of that broader uncertainty, the impact of Trump’s tariffs is another question only time can answer.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Incarcerated people in the US are routinely forced to work for low pay or no pay, while state governments are saving billions of dollars—and private corporations are making billions of dollars—exploiting the slave labor of prisoners. And yet, incarcerated workers have been largely excluded from the ranks of workers the public in general, and organized labor specifically, cares about. What will it take for unions and union members to embrace incarcerated workers as part of the labor movement? In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa explores the history of labor exploitation and labor organizing in America’s prison system.

Guests:

• Katherine Passley is Co-Executive Director of Beyond the Bars, a worker center in South Florida building the social and economic power of workers with criminal records and their families. Passley was named the 2025 Labor Organizer of the Year by In These Times magazine.
• JoeBill Muñoz is an independent Mexican-American documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, video editor, and journalist. Muñoz is the director and producer of The Strike (Hot Docs 2024).
• Bobby Dellelo spent 40 years of his life in prison.  While in prison he earned a BA in sociology, founded the AIDS Education Program, ran the library, and was the president of the National Prisoners Rights Association, the subject of a recently released book, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story In the Movement for Prison Abolition.
• Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a labor writer for In These Times, a labor columnist at Teen Vogue and Fast Company, and regularly contributes to many other publications. Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, is now available from One Signal/​Simon & Schuster.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

As controversy over President Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein continues to dog his administration, we speak with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who has spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator, his rich and powerful associates, and the impact of his crimes. Much of Trump’s political base is in an uproar after federal officials declined to release government files about Epstein and his serial sexual abuse of women and girls, with Trump himself reportedly named in the documents.

“They were friends. They hung out with each other,” Ward says of Trump and Epstein.

Ward was among the first journalists to investigate Epstein when she profiled him for Vanity Fair in 2003. The magazine’s editor at the time, Graydon Carter, cut out the testimonies of two young women who had spoken on the record about Epstein’s abuse. Ward’s podcast and TV series of the same name is Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow, focusing on Ghislaine Maxwell’s role as a facilitator for Epstein’s crimes.

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

“We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future projects terminated,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the bill passed. “And we talked to lawyers in the administration.”

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced what appeared to be a fulfillment of the president’s promise to his party’s right wing. The department’s new guidelines for wind and solar developers now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo “elevated review” by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.

The new guidelines include a granular outline of steps that will now require personal approval from Bergum’s office, rather than being delegated to department bureaucrats as had previously been customary. Experts who spoke to Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some are even worried that the effect of the updated regulations will spill over into private projects, which sometimes have to consult with the Interior Department when their work bleeds into federal lands or a habitat for endangered species.

Since only 4 percent of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, clean industry insiders who have interpreted the new policy narrowly are not yet panicking. But those with a broader interpretation of the text — or those who suspect that the administration will take a broad interpretation — wonder if the new rules will amount to a de facto gag order on the industry. For now, only time will tell just how many of their fears come to pass.  

Much of the memo’s power to wreak havoc for renewables depends on how strictly it’s enforced. The Interior Department maintains a website called Information for Planning and Consultation, or IPaC, which developers often use to plan large-scale projects. You type in the name of a locale, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and IPaC will tell you what kind of federal permitting you might need to move forward. (For example, it would flag if there are any protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) As of last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning users that “solar and wind projects are currently not eligible to utilize the Information for Planning and Consultation website.” This kind of opacity could make it especially hard for developers to plan for an endless bureaucratic battle with Interior. 

“It’s one thing to take away our [tax] credits, but it’s another to basically just put impediments so projects can’t get built,” a source who works for a renewables developer told E&E News. (He was granted anonymity due to his ongoing professional engagement with the federal government.) “The level of review here is so ridiculous.”

Others say that, while the outlook for wind and solar has become much dimmer, the new Interior rules aren’t necessarily a kill shot. “I was personally very worried when I saw it come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, a solar risk management firm. “But after doing more reading, it does seem like it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.” 

An internal report from the investment bank and research firm Roth Capital Partners, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5 percent of projects on private land — specifically, those that require an easement or need to cross public land to connect a transmission line to the main electrical grid — would be affected by the new regulations. 

“If [projects are on] a private piece of land, that’s a totally different story that would not be impacted by this,” said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s plenty of projects that are going to go ahead.” 

Others warn that it will be hard to know anything for certain until the dust clears and the permitting process begins to play out. “Just how broad and wide-scoped the activities listed in the memo were, points towards an attempt to quash [private] projects, not just the ones on federal land,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the Interior Department on issues like wildlife protection.

Regardless of the scope of the memo, any move with the potential to slow the deployment of renewables is almost certainly bad news for American energy, since most other sources of new electricity simply aren’t being built: 93 percent of new energy that came online in 2024 was renewable. But upon taking office, President Trump warned that the United States was reliant on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately set about revoking previously approved federal funding from green energy projects, trying to cancel offshore wind leases, and rescinding clean energy tax credits that had been expanded by his predecessor. How this will lead the nation toward the current administration’s promise of “energy dominance” is unclear. 

“You don’t have enough [electricity] supply to meet new demand,” said O’Brien. “Instead of new capacity coming online — cheap renewables — you have existing gas plants running longer, and so gas demand goes up and prices go up, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs point toward this being a bad, bad scenario.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will new Interior Department rules shackle wind and solar? Insiders are divided. on Jul 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

In 2019, a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific, frustrated at the slow pace with which the world’s governments were moving to address the climate crisis, had an idea — they would take the world’s governments to court.

They arranged a meeting with government ministers in Vanuatu and convinced them to take a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ top court, where they would seek an opinion to clarify countries’ legal obligations under international law.

Six years after that idea was hatched in a classroom in Port Vila, the court will today (early Thursday morning NZT) deliver its verdict in the Dutch city of The Hague.

• READ MORE: Other climate crisis reports

If successful — and those involved are quietly confident they will be — it could have major ramifications for international law, how climate change disputes are litigated, and it could give small Pacific countries greater leverage in arguments around loss and damage.

Most significantly, the claimants argue, it could establish legal consequences for countries that have driven climate change and what they owe to people harmed.

“Six long years of campaigning have led us to this moment,” said Vishal Prasad, the president of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, the organisation formed out of those original students.

“For too long, international responses have fallen short. We expect a clear and authoritative declaration,” he said.

“[That] climate inaction is not just a failure of policy, but a breach of international law.”

More than 100 countries — including New Zealand, Australia and all the countries of the Pacific — have testified before the court, alongside civil society and intergovernmental organisations.

And now today they will gather in the brick palace that sits in ornate gardens in this canal-ringed city to hear if the judges of the world’s top court agree.

What is the case?
The ICJ adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big international legal issues.

In this case, Vanuatu asked the UN General Assembly to request the judges to weigh what exactly international law requires states to do about climate change, and what the consequences should be for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.

Over its deliberations, the court has heard from more than 100 countries and international organisations hoping to influence its opinion, the highest level of participation in the court’s history.

That has included the governments of low-lying islands and atolls in the Pacific, which say they are paying the steepest price for a crisis they had little role in creating.

These nations have long been frustrated with the current mechanisms for addressing climate change, like the UN COP conferences, and are hoping that, ultimately, the court will provide a yardstick by which to measure other countries’ actions.

“I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu said in his statement to the court last year.

“Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

But major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, have argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, are sufficient to address climate change.

“We expect this landmark climate ruling, grounded in binding international law, to reflect the critical legal flashpoints raised during the proceedings,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the US-based Centre for International Environmental Law (which has been involved with the case).

“Among them: whether States’ climate obligations are anchored in multiple legal sources, extending far beyond the Paris Agreement; whether there is a right to remedy for climate harm; and how human rights and the precautionary principle define States’ climate obligations.”

What could this mean?
Rulings from the ICJ are non-binding, and there are myriad cases of international law being flouted by countries the world over.

Still, the court’s opinion — if it falls in Vanuatu’s favour — could still have major ramifications, bolstering the case for linking human rights and climate change in legal proceedings — both international and domestic — and potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation, where individuals, groups, Indigenous Peoples, and even countries, sue governments or private companies for climate harm.

An advisory opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries a powerful cudgel in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

“This would empower vulnerable nations and communities to demand accountability, strengthen legal arguments and negotiations and litigation and push for policies that prioritise prevention and redress over delay and denial,” Prasad said.

In essence, those who have taken the case have asked the court to issue an opinion on whether governments have “legal obligations” to protect people from climate hazards, but also whether a failure to meet those obligations could bring “legal consequences”.

At the Peace Palace today, they will find out from the court’s 15 judges.

“[The advisory opinion] is not just a legal milestone, it is a defining moment in the global climate justice movement and a beacon of hope for present and future generations,” said Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat in a statement ahead of the decision.

“I am hopeful for a powerful opinion from the ICJ. It could set the world on a meaningful path to accountability and action.”

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.

Janine Jackson interviewed media scholar Victor Pickard about the Paramount settlement for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Monthly (6/2/25)

Janine Jackson: Faced with a groundless lawsuit claiming that an interview with Kamala Harris amounted to election interference in favor of Democrats, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, could have struck a symbolic blow for press freedom by saying, “No,” pointing to any number of legal arguments, starting with the First (for a reason) Amendment.

But Paramount isn’t a journalistic institution. It’s a business with media holdings, and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone was in the middle of doing business, trying to sell the corporation to another Hollywood studio, a move that, perhaps quaintly, requires government approval. That now means approval of this government.

And so here we are, with a recent $16 million deal, which is being widely denounced as an outright bribe, and a cold wind blowing through every newsroom.

And yet here we are. The Paramount settlement, says Victor Pickard, is, yes, a stunning display of bribery, greed and cowardice. But we need to understand, it’s also a symptom of a deep structural rot in our media today, a system in which profit trumps democracy at every turn.

Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Victor Pickard.

Victor Pickard: It’s great to be back on the show, Janine.

JJ: Well, I hear that Paramount‘s market value has dropped since Shari Redstone threw press independence on the fire to warm shareholders’ hands. It’s almost as if folks thought it wasn’t a valuable journalistic institution.

Forbes (4/7/20)

I want to launch you into the bigger picture of which this is emblematic, but I first want to insert: Shari Redstone inherited Paramount from her father, Sumner Redstone, who, while some of us were working to show there was a conflict, declared it openly.

In 2004, then-head of CBS and Viacom Sumner Redstone stated at a corporate leader confab that he didn’t want to denigrate then–Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but

from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal, because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people, but from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.

And, later, CBS head Les Moonves—CounterSpin listeners will have heard me say many times—declared laughingly, “Donald Trump is bad for America, but he’s good for CBS, so let’s do it.”

So the structural conflict you’re describing, it’s not a theory. It’s not the stuff of smoke-filled rooms. It’s out there for everyone to see, every day in every way. So the questions have to do with, once we diagnose this problem, what do we do about it?

The Nation (1/30/17)

VP: Thank you for opening up with that softball question. I mean, that is the main problem before us, and everything you just said leading up to this question really lays out that this is a systemic problem that we’re facing, and it requires a systemic fix. It’s not just a case of a few bad apples, or a handful of bad corporations and perhaps a bad journalist, even, but it really is a systemic structural problem. And so we really need to move our frame of analysis from just condemning the latest media malfeasance to really condemning the entire hypercommercialized media system in which we are all immersed, and so clearly serves only commercial values and not democratic values.

So the first step, of course, would be to decommercialize our media, much easier said than done, but that’s something we need to place on our horizon. And not only that, we also need to radically democratize our media, from root to branch, and that means bringing it back down to the local level, making sure that our media are owned and controlled by the public. Even our public media, our so-called public media, aren’t actually owned by the people.

So this is something that we need to work towards. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s something we need to start thinking about now.

JJ: I love the idea of a long-term and a short-term plan, and eyes on the prize. So let’s go back to that. It’s not that we’re going to change things legislatively or politically tomorrow, but there are things on the ground locally. There are models we can build on, yeah?

The Nation (4/15/25)

VP: That’s absolutely true. There’s a number of models that exist today, that have existed in our history and that exist around the world, and we really should be looking at some of those to expand our current imagination about what’s possible in the future. Obviously, we have some great independent local media, and those outlets, those institutions, we should be supporting in any way that we can, through donations, subscriptions, whatever we can, to help them. They’re all struggling, like all local media are right now.

We also, even though I made a sort of snarky comment about our public media a moment ago, I think we do need to look to, as I say, save our public media so that we can change it. As we know, the meager funds that we allocate to public media are currently on the chopping block. It comes out to about a $1.58 per person per year in this country, which is literally off the chart compared to most democratic countries around the world. So we need to look at how we can salvage that, but also, again, expand on it, and build, restructure our public media, so that it’s not just public in name but actually publicly owned.

There are other things that we could be doing, but we just have to start with recognizing that the current commercial system is failing democracy, and will always fail democracy.

JJ: When you talk about public media, and this is a thing, of course, folks are being encouraged to think about it now as “ideological” institutions. First of all, and you’ve said it, but they don’t get a lot of government support to begin with.

Neiman Reports (1/24/22): The US is virtually off the chart when it comes to its ratio of GDP to spending on public media.

But at the same time, progressives, we’ve had plenty of complaints about public broadcasting as it exists in this country. It had a beautiful ideal. It had a beautiful beginning. It hasn’t fulfilled that role.

We have complaints about it, but the complaints that we’re now hearing don’t have anything to do with the complaints that we have about it. So the idea of saving public media might land weird to some CounterSpin listeners, but there’s a reason that we need to keep that venue open.

VP: Absolutely. I mean, it is an ideal, just like democracy itself is an ideal, something that we have yet to actually achieve, but it’s something we can’t give up on just because the current iteration of this model that we have in the US, which is a kind of strange one, again, compared to other public media models around the world, it’s actually a misnomer. It’s mostly supported by private capital.

But if we were to actually fund it in accordance with global norms, we could have a very robust public media system that was not dependent on corporate sponsorships, that was not catering to higher socioeconomic groups, that, again, could actually spend more time engaging with and devoting programming for local communities.

So this is something that’s not inevitable. Like our entire media system, there was nothing inevitable with how we designed it. We need to understand the political economic structures that produce the kind of media that we’re constantly critiquing in order to change it, to create an entirely different kind of media system that’s driven by a different and democratic logic.

JJ: Let me just draw you out on that. We spoke last year, and I would refer interested people to that conversation, about separating capitalism and journalism, and talking about different ways of financing media in the service of the public.

And we understand complaints about “state media.” We hear all of that, and any kind of funding structure should be transparent, and we should talk about it.

But I want to ask you, finally, there are creative policy responses going on, and it’s not about kicking the final answers down the field; it’s really just about making a road while we walk it, and making examples of things, so that we can see that, yeah, they work, and they can move us towards a bigger vision.

CounterSpin (5/6/22)

VP: Absolutely. And as you already suggested, state media and public media are not the same thing. That we publicly subsidize media doesn’t mean it immediately has to become a mouthpiece for the state or the government.

And, indeed, government is always involved in our media. It’s a question of how it should be involved, whether it’s to serve corporate interests or public interests.

I think we can look to what’s happening at the state level, for example, in New Jersey, they’ve long had an Information Consortium network that’s focused on subsidizing various local journalistic initiatives. And it’s a proof of concept of how the state can make these public investments towards publicly accountable media. And we’re starting to see that in many states across the country.

A lot of experiments, some will survive, some won’t. The important thing is that we need to create these non-market means of support for the media that we need. I think that ideal of separating journalism and capitalism, which was always a match made in Hell, we need to find a way to do that, again, to be on our political horizon for the future.

Victor Pickard: “Much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists.”

JJ: Well, I said that was my last question, but I want to ask you another one, because I think a mistake that folks make about FAIR, and possibly about you, is that we’re anti-journalism per se. But we are emphatically pro–good journalism that’s not public relations for power. It’s because we believe in the power of journalism that we are so concerned about these structural constraints.

VP: Exactly. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. And I think much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists. Most journalists don’t go into the profession, they don’t follow the craft, to become rich, or to become mouthpieces of the already powerful. I think it’s generally a noble calling, and we just need to create the institutions and the structures that can allow them to be the great journalist they want to be.

JJ: All right, then. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center, and his most recent book is called Democracy Without Journalism?. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VP: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

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

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for. 

“In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’” 

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky — they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground — but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them. 

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen — and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of The Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions or, InPRA, a working group within NOAA that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.” 

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones — similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child — that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area. 

That said, cell phone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings — including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service — but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.” 

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried — her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by flood waters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house. 

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe, and made his way down to the house through flood waters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.” 

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly. 

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult). But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water. 

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.” 

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort.

“I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.” 

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why flash flood warnings will continue to go unheeded on Jul 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

These days, it doesn’t take much to antagonize MAGA, and James Gunn, the director of the new Superman film, scheduled to be released on July 11,  has set off another outrage cycle.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn said in an interview with the Times of London, “An immigrant that came from other places […] but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, mass deportation plans, and creation of concentration camps like Alligator Alcatraz, Gunn also noted that his film leans into the character’s well-known backstory as an otherworldly refugee, a plot point that has been explored in Superman comics over the years.

MAGA influencers jumped on Gunn speedier than longtime Superman antagonist Lex Luther, General Zod, and Mister Mxyzptlk.  Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the film entirely, declaring it as “another film we won’t be seeing.”

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said as an on-screen graphic blared that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

“I’m going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release,” conservative radio host and OutKick founder Clay Travis complained.

“I can’t believe that we’ve come down to that,” she complained. “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us. I wonder if it will be successful.” MAGA-boosting Fox News host Jesse Watters, meanwhile, followed up by joking that Superman’s cape is now emblazoned with “MS-13.”

The Daily Dot’s Anna Good reported that “Gunn’s version of Superman focuses on empathy, morality, and alienation. These themes have been embedded in the character since his 1938 debut in the first issue of Action Comics. In his interview, Gunn acknowledged that the movie might be received differently in liberal vs. conservative parts of the country.”

Gunn’s take on aligns with the character’s Jewish roots. Created in the 1930s by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sons of Jewish immigrants who fled the European pogroms, Superman was born of a need for hope during a time of rising anti-Semitism.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” Gunn told The Times of London. “But on another level it’s about morality. Do you never kill no matter what — which is what Superman believes — or do you have some balance, as Lois believes? It’s really about their relationship and the way different opinions on basic moral beliefs can tear two people apart.”

Gunn pointed out that “I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online.”

“My reaction to [the backlash] is that it is exactly what the movie is about,” he declared. “We support our people, you know? We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Today, Taiwan is caught in the crosshairs of two imperial rivals: the US and China. This is nothing new for the island nation, which has been a battleground for competing empires for centuries, but what is new is the critical role Taiwan plays in the 21st-century world economy. For example, Taiwan manufacturers 90% of the world’s most advanced microchips—the key component in everything from consumer electronics to the US military’s F-35 fighter jets. In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, co-host Ashley Smith speaks with Brian Hioe, journalist and editor of New Bloom magazine, about the history of Taiwanese struggles for self-determination, the country’s position in the contemporary US-China rivalry, the increasing threat of imperial war, and the urgency of building solidarity among working-class people in Taiwan, the US, and China.

Guests:

• Brian Hioe is a freelance journalist, translator, and one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine featuring radical perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, Hioe has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Studies Programme, as well as board member of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Additional resources:

• New Bloom website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, & Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry
• Brian J. Chen, Boston Review, “Semiconductor Island: The colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy”

Credits:

• Pre-Production: Ashley Smith
• Stdio Production / Post-Production: TRNN

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ashley Smith.

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

On Monday, June 23, a crowd of about 2,000 people surrounded the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet had come for a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association. “Not for sale!” the crowd boomed. “Not one acre!” There were ranchers and writers in attendance, as well as employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of whom use public land to hike, hunt and fish. Inside the hotel ballroom where the governors had gathered, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the New Mexico governor, apologized for the noise but not the message. “New Mexicans are really loud,” she said.

On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage, and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale selloff of public lands. Lee, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was not in Santa Fe, so the crowd focused on Burgum, who earlier that afternoon had addressed the governors about energy dominance and artificial intelligence. “Show your face!” the crowd chanted. But he had already departed the hotel through a back door. That night, a hunting group projected an image of him on the exterior wall of the hotel. “Burgled by Burgum,” it read.

In the weeks before the meeting, the possibility of selling off large swaths of public lands had seemed as likely as at any time since the Reagan administration. On June 11, Lee had introduced an amendment to the megabill Congress was debating to reconcile the national budget. The amendment mandated the sale of up to 3 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, with the vast majority of proceeds going to pay for tax cuts. Although Lee had framed his measure as a solution to the West’s acute lack of affordable housing, it would have allowed developers to select the land they most desired. Under the amendment’s original language, the ultimate power to nominate parcels for sale fell to Burgum and Brooke Rollins, head of the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

In the days after the Santa Fe protest, the outcry from hunting and outdoor recreation groups escalated across the West and the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s amendment violated the chamber’s rules. Republican lawmakers from Montana opposed the amendment; Burgum also distanced himself from it. (“It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill,” he told a reporter on June 26.)

By the time Burgum made his comments, Lee’s effort seemed doomed, and days later he announced that he was removing the amendment; public land advocates celebrated. “This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners,” wrote Patrick Berry, the president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. But the celebration may have been premature. In a social media post announcing his decision, Lee indicated that he would revisit the issue: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land,” he wrote. And powerful forces still support privatization. At the Santa Fe gathering, Rollins had been asked during a press conference about the effort to sell federal land. She told reporters she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Lee’s amendment but supported his broader vision and suggested such efforts will continue regardless of the fate of the amendment. “Half of the land in the West is owned by the federal government,” said Rollins. “Is that really the right solution for the American people?”

The circumstances that led to Lee’s proposal continue to simmer. The American West has an acute lack of affordable and attainable housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Colorado, with a population of 6 million, is lacking 175,000 rental units for people who earn up to 50% of area median income. New Mexico, which has one-third of Colorado’s population, is lacking 52,000 such rentals; Utah, 61,000. But nowhere is the issue as acute as in Nevada, where Las Vegas and Reno are encircled by public land. The state of 3.27 million is estimated to lack 118,000 such rentals.

The lack of housing emerged as a lever for Lee, who has sought to challenge federal control of public lands since he was first elected to the Senate in 2010. A year after winning his seat, he introduced a bill to sell a limited amount of public land, saying, “There is no critical need for the federal government to hold onto it.” In 2013, he and others in his state’s delegation wrote a letter demanding the transfer of federal lands to Utah and angrily accusing the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres nationwide, of “obvious abuse.” And in a 2018 address at a think tank, he compared federal land managers — and people who recreate on public acreage — to feudal lords, ruling from far-off kingdoms on the coasts. He also denounced “elite publications” that advocated for the protection of public lands, and he used the language of political war to describe the conflict over federal land: “It will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” (Lee’s office did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.)

But this spring, Lee found support from unlikely places: the coastal elites he previously railed against seemed open to some of his ideas. The arguments in favor of privatization and development use a word of the season: abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book of the same name argues that burdensome regulatory processes have crushed the American housing market. While the authors focus on increasing supply in urban areas, in April, The New York Times ran an op-ed calling for building housing on public lands. That same week, the Times Magazine, in a piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl,” framed outward growth, including through the sale of public lands, as all but inevitable. The American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, has estimated that the nation could build 3 million homes by opening federal land. In December, AEI leaders advocated for federal land sales in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, promising that disposal could “usher in housing abundance and prosperity.”

When pitching his land-sale bill, Lee adopted a more moderate tone than in years past, focusing squarely on housing. On June 20, he posted on X, “This is to help American families afford a home.” On June 23: “Housing prices are crushing families.” The next day: “This land must go to American families.”

But it’s challenging to build affordable housing on public land for a host of reasons, among them the high cost of infrastructure such as water pipelines and the cumbersome bureaucratic processes involving land agencies. But a primary obstacle is the price of that land itself: When it’s sold at market rate, it’s extremely difficult for developers to create affordable homes. “High land costs alone can kill an otherwise great affordable housing project,” said Waldon Swenson, vice president of corporate affairs for Nevada HAND, which builds affordable rental housing.

In fact, past public land sales have created very little affordable housing. There’s just one prominent test case, in Nevada, where a 1998 law enables the sale of federal land at market rate in the Las Vegas Valley and at steeply discounted prices throughout the state if it’s to be used for affordable housing. Though municipalities can buy BLM land at $100 per acre to create affordable housing, the law has so far created just about 850 affordable units on 30 acres of land. By contrast, the law’s market-value mechanism has enabled the sale of more than 17,000 acres of land at an average of more than $200,000 per acre. In March, the BLM sold 42 acres for $16.6 million. Meanwhile, according to a recent analysis, rents in Clark and Washoe counties have respectively risen by 56% and 47% since 2018.

Lee’s amendment did little to address these issues and lacked any definition of affordable or attainable housing. Furthermore, it allowed private developers to nominate parcels for sale — at market rate only. “It would be an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado law school. John Leshy, a former solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration and an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the bill was “not a well-designed scheme to get more acres out there built with affordable houses.” Leshy, the author of “Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands,” added, “I think it is just a ploy to get your toe in the door to start selling off lots of federal land.”

Congress’ stance toward public land shifted as settlers moved westward, violently displacing tribal nations. During the homesteading era, the General Land Office — a precursor to the BLM — was tasked with disposing of federal lands to states. But in the late 19th century, states began to request that Congress set aside lands for national forests. As a condition of its statehood, in 1896 Utah relinquished any claim to ownership of “unappropriated public lands” — an acknowledgment that appears in its state Constitution. As the conservation movement took off in the early 20th century, lawmakers and presidents set aside more public land. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the BLM’s role in stewarding lands and declared that they would remain public unless their sale served “the national interest.”

Lee has lamented the impact of those historic changes on Utah, where 42% of the state is BLM land, saying in a 2018 speech, “Manifest destiny had left us behind, in some respects.”

A movement in the 1970s tried to reverse those historical currents when Western ranchers and lawmakers calling themselves “Sagebrush Rebels” sought to claim federal lands for states. They found sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan, during a 1980 campaign stop in Salt Lake City, said, “Count me in as a rebel.” Once elected, he nominated as secretary of the Interior James Watt, an attorney who favored transfer of public lands to the states. Reagan also came to rely on an economic adviser named Steve H. Hanke, who arrived at the White House from Johns Hopkins University. Hanke was more strident about getting rid of public lands than Watt; he has written that public lands “represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”

Hanke helped drive an ambitious effort to dispose of national forests and grazing lands, and in 1982 the Interior Department announced plans to sell millions of acres — as much as 5% of the public estate — in order to reduce the national debt. Hanke later joined The Heritage Foundation, entrenching the idea of privatizing lands at the conservative think tank and predicting that Americans would come around to his way of thinking. Since then, the foundation has regularly advocated for selling public lands. (The foundation did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Lee is deeply tied into The Heritage Foundation, which he has called “a guiding light for generations.” In 2016, The Heritage Foundation suggested that Trump nominate Lee to the Supreme Court. Among Utah’s leadership, his positions on federal land are widely held. Last year, the state attorney general filed suit to the United States Supreme Court, seeking to seize 18.5 million acres of federal public land. The court declined to hear the case.

Public lands are popular, especially among hunters, hikers and off-roaders, and periodic efforts to sell them have incurred wrath. In 2017, Jason Chaffetz, the former Utah representative, retracted a disposal bill after a backlash. Last December, a survey of 500 Utah voters commissioned by the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust found that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans supported preserving national monuments in the state. In its preelection policy recommendation known as Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation called for the privatization of everything from public education, using school-choice programs, to Medicare, by automatically enrolling patients in insurer-run plans. But it notably didn’t call for the privatization of the public estate.

Instead, Lee has recently focused the debate on affordable housing. In 2022 and 2023, Lee introduced legislation to sell Western lands called the HOUSES Act. The bill was more prescriptive than his reconciliation amendment: It only allowed states and municipalities to nominate lands for disposal, rather than developers, and it required that 85% of nominated parcels be developed as residential housing, at a minimum of four homes per acre, or as parks. But like his amendment to the reconciliation bill, Lee’s HOUSES Act lacked a definition of affordable housing, and critics suggested that it would lead to the building of mansions. In both 2022 and 2023, when Lee reintroduced the bill, it did not pass out of committee.

But it caught the attention of Kevin Corinth, then the staff director on the Joint Economic Committee, which advises Congress on financial matters. After leaving the Capitol, Corinth joined the American Enterprise Institute, which began focusing on building housing on federal lands. This March, AEI held an event with powerful developers to discuss its ideas, which it called “Homesteading 2.0.” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive who helps oversee AEI’s housing research, said during the event that the proposal “grew out of an effort that Sen. Lee undertook with the HOUSES Act.”

AEI advocates for dense development of single-family homes, but its ultimate vision remains opaque: The group has spoken of creating unregulated “freedom cities” far from existing infrastructure, and its proposals for 3 million houses seem ambitious. Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group in Montana, published an analysis finding that existing public land could support less than 700,000 new homes; Nicholas Irwin, the research director for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Lied Center for Real Estate, said he found Headwaters’ numbers more convincing.

When I asked Pinto for a real-world example that illustrates his hopes for the West, he pointed to Summerlin, a planned community in Las Vegas, and Teravalis, a forthcoming development in Buckeye, Arizona, a rapidly expanding city at Phoenix’s edge. Both are owned by Howard Hughes Holdings, a developer based in Texas.

Housing in Summerlin is not easily attainable — its median home price approaches $700,000. Teravalis, meanwhile, was first proposed more than 20 years ago and has been beset by delays, in part due to ongoing litigation with the state, which claims that the developer has not proven that it can obtain a sufficient water supply. A spokesperson for Howard Hughes Holdings, which bought the development in 2021, wrote that the company is “working with local stakeholders around long-term water policy to support the full build out of Teravalis for more than 300,000 residents over several decades.”

Earlier this year, Pershing Square Holdings, which is controlled by the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, purchased $900 million of stock in the company. (Ackman, a prominent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the executive chairman of Hughes’ board of directors. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment for this article.)

Teravalis’ first lots sold for a steep $777,000 per acre without homes on them, and Hughes’ plans are for 2.8 dwellings per acre — less than a quarter of the figure that Pinto cited as ideal for naturally affordable housing. Hughes is currently planning a grand opening for November. The company did not say how much homes would cost, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The need for new housing in the Phoenix West Valley is urgent, and Teravalis will help meet that demand.”

When given the option, developers often pursue the profit margins of high-end housing. In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing. (SNPLMA relies on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define affordable housing, which it says are units within reach of those making up to 80% of the area’s median income.) Still, to date, only about 900 acres have been set aside for affordable housing projects under the law — and only 30 of those acres have been developed into homes where low-income residents can actually live.

It’s unclear why so few affordable housing projects have been built at a time when they are so desperately needed. Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick attributed it to bureaucratic delays: “It’s taken a long time to get through the process with the BLM.” According to Maurice Page, executive director of the Nevada Housing Coalition, the average time the BLM takes to review projects has recently dropped — from between three and five years to one. Only at that point can a developer close a deal. Tina Frias, CEO of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said such delays can be crippling.

In 2023, the BLM began selling Nevada land for affordable housing for $100 per acre. (Previous SNPLMA affordable housing sales had averaged nearly $35,000 per acre.) Still, local authorities have not requested the transfer of many parcels in recent years. According to the BLM, only three new affordable housing projects are moving toward approval.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “BLM Nevada can only offer land after it has been nominated by an eligible entity and BLM has confirmed that there are no encumbrances or restrictions on the parcel. In many cases, the restrictions referenced by stakeholders originate with the nominating entities themselves.”

SNPLMA’s affordable housing mechanism is also poorly understood. Alexis Hill, the chair of Washoe County’s board of commissioners, which includes Reno, told me she didn’t know whether the affordable housing provision applied there. (It does.) When I asked Biden’s former BLM director, Tracy Stone-Manning, who now leads The Wilderness Society, whether the $100-per-acre provision was applicable statewide, she said she did not know. Squillace, the Colorado law professor, also admitted he wasn’t sure how widely the provision applied.

Steve Aichroth, the administrator of the Nevada Housing Division, acknowledged a disconnect between agencies. His office is hiring an official to work with municipalities and the BLM. “If you came back to us in about a year we’d have better answers,” he said.

In the meantime, both of the state’s Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, have proposed legislation that would open federal acreage for housing and transfer it to trust land for tribal nations — while protecting other territory for conservation. The governor, Joe Lombardo, a Republican, recently signed a bill to invest $183 million of state money in developing housing for lower- and middle-class residents. Elsewhere in the West, New Mexico is leasing state lands to develop apartments. In Utah, the state housing office is encouraging cities to change zoning requirements to increase density; it is also using public funds to finance private developments and looking to build on state lands. Before Lee pulled his amendment, I spoke with Steve Waldrip, who directs housing strategy for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. During our conversation, Waldrip expressed concern that the hyperpoliticized debate around a broad federal land sell-off was hampering focused efforts to alleviate the region’s housing crisis. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve the affordability crisis,” he said.

But some continue to believe a simple solution exists. After Lee’s amendment died, I spoke with Pinto, who directs AEI’s efforts to push for housing on federal lands. He struck a conciliatory tone, given the political climate. (The sweeping GOP bill passed Thursday without Lee’s amendment.) At the moment, Pinto said, there doesn’t appear to be an easy route to sell large swaths of public land for development. “The path forward is to have a much more targeted approach.”

In Nevada, such a thing is already happening. Last year Clark County bought 20 acres from the BLM for $2,000, and the county’s plan is to turn that land into single-family houses for first-time homebuyers. This spring, a new affordable housing development opened in Las Vegas — an apartment complex for people 55 and older with rent starting at $573. The project was built by a developer called Ovation on former public land that was transferred through SNPLMA. It had taken a while — the deal was first proposed in February 2020. But recently, the pace of transfers has picked up. Ovation says it’s also working on a similar project in the city of Henderson. It was nominated for BLM approval last February and, according to Jess Molasky, the company’s chief operating officer, “We hope to be in the ground in the first quarter of next year.”

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abe Streep.

The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

Complicit in genocide

The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

Lack of crucial context

Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

No desire to change

You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

Israel apologists

And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

The truth is coming out

The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

Complicit in genocide

The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

Lack of crucial context

Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

No desire to change

You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

Israel apologists

And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

The truth is coming out

The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

“The megabill isn’t about reform—it’s about rewarding the super rich and doling out fossil fuel industry handouts, all while dismantling the social safety nets on which millions depend for stability. It is a bet against the future.”

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

“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status. Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do–to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” said Joshua Block, Senior Counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”

“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”

Earlier this year, efforts to enact a national ban failed in the U.S. Congress. Since 2020, 27 states have banned transgender youth from playing school sports. Many of these bans allow for invasive forms of sex testing that put all female student athletes at risk and open the door for any school official or adult to question and harass young women.

In Florida, a 15-year-old junior varsity volleyball player was the subject of a police investigation after an anonymous accusation, prompting local officials to draft a 500-page report investigating her medical history, body weight, and anatomy. In Utah, a teenage basketball player was accused of being transgender by a member of the state board of education, leading to threats of violence against her and her family, and a teenager in Maine faced a similar attack from a state senator. In May, President Donald Trump bullied a 16-year-old transgender girl for participating in a high school track meet.

Many women athletes have spoken out against bullying and discrimination against transgender student athletes. This includes Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe, Dawn Staley, Sue Bird, and Brianna Turner, as well as leading organizations fighting for gender equality in athletics including the Women’s Sports Foundation, the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association, and the National Women’s Law Center.

The two cases the Supreme Court has agreed to hear include:

• Little v. Hecox, a challenge brought by one transgender and one cisgender student athlete against Idaho’s 2020 ban on transgender athletes and requirements for sex testing
• West Virginia v. B.P.J., a challenge brought by a teenage transgender girl against West Virginia’s 2021 ban on transgender athletic participation

The two cases charge the bans with violating the rights of transgender and cisgender female students under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. In addition, West Virginia v. B.P.J. argues that the bans violate Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs. Federal courts have blocked enforcement of these bans in both lawsuits.

These cases are part of the ACLU’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket.

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

The decision, he said in a statement that he read aloud during the opening day of a three-day conference of spiritual leaders in Dharamsala, came after years of appeals from Tibetan religious and secular leaders, as well as people and organizations from around the world.

“In particular, I have received messages through various channels from Tibetans in Tibet making the same appeal,” he said. “In accordance with all these requests, I am affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue.”

His statement did not mention China by name, but it said that selecting the next Dalai Lama should be carried out “in accordance with past tradition.”

“No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter,” he said.

The Chinese foreign ministry reiterated on Wednesday that the selection of a new Dalai Lama must follow Chinese law and that it had to take place in China.

(Tenzin Woser/RFA Tibetan)

Tibetan Buddhists believe that when the Dalai Lama dies, his spirit will reincarnate in a new body. A search committee traditionally composed of high-ranking monks and lamas is formed to find a child born within a year of the Dalai Lama’s death who exhibits exceptional qualities and behaviors similar to his predecessor. The current Dalai Lama was two years old when he was identified.

In a book written earlier this year, the Dalai Lama said that his successor would be born in the “free world,” which he described as outside of China.

In 2011, the Dalai Lama said he would decide whether he would have a reincarnated successor “when I am about 90.” The Tibetan spiritual leader turns 90 on Sunday. Celebrations for the milestone birthday kicked off in Dharamsala on Monday.

Reporting by Dawa Dolma, edited by Greg Barber

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

This year’s term, which began in October and ended last week, was a bit different. The justices issued a number of decisions related to climate and the environment, but none of them was a “blockbuster,” according to University of Vermont Law and Graduate School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau. 

Arguably, the decisions that will have the greatest potential consequences for climate and environmental policy came from cases that weren’t explicitly about the planet at all. 

Rather, they were decisions that legitimized the executive branch’s actions to fire personnel and block funding already appropriated by Congress. These actions may have far-reaching effects on federal agencies that work on climate and environmental issues, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of Agriculture, which have already been affected by layoffs and funding cuts, as well as early retirement offers intended to get longtime staffers to voluntarily leave their posts.

“What’s being done is irredeemable,” Parenteau added. “The brain drain, the firing of people, the defunding — those are causing really, really long-term damage to the institutional capabilities of the federal government to implement and enforce environmental law.” 

Three of the court’s decisions help illustrate what has happened. 

Two of them — Trump v. Wilcox and Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees — which came earlier in the session, have made it possible for decisions by President Donald Trump to move forward while they are being litigated in lower courts, reversing orders from federal judges that had temporarily paused them. These decisions have effectively allowed firings without cause at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, and have stopped six federal agencies from bringing back probationary employees that the Trump administration had fired. 

Then last week, on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in Trump v. CASA that limits the power of the country’s more than 1,000 district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential orders. Those judges’ injunctions are now supposed to target only the plaintiffs in a given case. 

“Trump is the big winner in this decision,” Parenteau said. 

One of the the decision’s most immediate consequences is that it will allow Trump’s unconstitutional limits to birthright citizenship to go into effect in July. In theory, it also means that Trump could issue an executive order illegally rolling back some environmental policy, and district courts would have less power to stop it while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts. District court judges can still issue nationwide injunctions against rules from federal agencies, and they can issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders that are challenged by a large number of plaintiffs, as in a class action lawsuit. Circuit court judges’ injunction powers remain unchanged.

Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA Law, said the court’s decisions affecting funding and personnel have “giant implications.” They raise “huge questions about the balance between the executive branch and Congress, and the executive branch’s ability and authority to simply ignore what Congress has appropriated.”

Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said this term’s Supreme Court decisions have been “enabling” the Trump administration in its attempts to shrink the size of the government and eliminate institutional expertise. “It’s hard to quantify, but it’s impossible to deny.”

Although the justices didn’t release any landmark environmental decisions this term, the court took up multiple “unusual cases” that showed its continued interest in environmental statutes and administrative actions, according to Datla. For example, in Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. EPA it decided to allow oil company plaintiffs to sue the EPA for having allowed California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards than the federal government’s.

The Ohio case was “just a regular decision,” Datla said — ”getting deep into the weeds of the record and ultimately disagreeing with what a lower court had done, which is not usually how the Supreme Court spends its time.” Neither case changed existing law or resulted in a big-picture pronouncement about how to apply or interpret the law. And the Diamond case may become irrelevant anyway, since the Senate recently voted — controversially — to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke California’s auto emissions waiver. 

Other notable decisions from the Supreme Court’s term included Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which limited the scope of environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The court essentially said that such reviews don’t have to look at upstream consequences of a given project — such as oil drilling and refining, for projects like railroads that are only directly associated with transporting these fuels — and that courts should defer to federal agencies when deciding what to include in environmental impact statements.

City and County of San Francisco v. EPA found that some of the EPA’s pollution permits under the Clean Water Act are unenforceable unless the EPA writes out specific steps that water management agencies should take to comply with them. But Datla said this was a “quite narrow case” whose national implications are unclear.

The justices have not yet added any explicitly climate- and environment-related cases to their docket for its next session. But Parenteau, the emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he’s nervous that the court will take up a challenge to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. That decision from 2000 said residents of South Carolina had legal standing to sue an industrial polluter, even without proving they had been harmed in a particular way. They just had to show that the pollution had impacted the “aesthetic and recreational values” of the river they liked to swim in. Overturning the case could make it more difficult for environmental advocates to file similar lawsuits. “The Laidlaw case has me very worried,” Parenteau said.

For Carlson, the UCLA Law professor, a longer-term worry is that the court’s conservative supermajority will eventually overturn the “endangerment finding,” a precedent set in 2009 saying that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated by the EPA. “It’s going to get challenged, and it will get challenged up to the Supreme Court,” Carlson said.

Overall, the outlook isn’t good. The executive branch and the Supreme Court “are exhibiting extraordinary hostility to actions on climate change at a time when the planet is burning,” she said. “It’s a pretty depressing story overall.”

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court just ended its term. Here are the decisions that will affect climate policy. on Jul 1, 2025.

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

Alongside an ever more restrictive environment for local journalists, increasingly, Georgia has been denying entry to Western journalists, all freelancers. This crackdown comes as the ruling conservative Georgian Dream party clamps down on mass protests and political opposition following allegations of fraud in the country’s October 2024 parliamentary elections.     

Media repression had already intensified on the heels of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, since which Georgia has denied entry to at least eight Russian journalists associated with Kremlin-critical outlets, as well as two journalists from other post-Soviet countries with critical or pro-Western views. 

Neal’s denial of entry “was clearly intended to dissuade me from further reporting on the vested interests behind the ruling party’s ongoing abuse of power,” he told CPJ. 

Before leaving Georgia in April, Neal had been the target of a sustained smear campaign by Georgian Dream officials and the pro-government press. His investigation in the British news outlet Byline Times revealed cooperation between a U.K.-registered private equity firm with reported close ties to Georgia’s alleged de facto ruler, Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Georgian Dream leaders accused Neal of being part of an international “deep state” anti-Georgia conspiracy. 

“The story clearly hit a nerve,” Neal told CPJ. 

An unprecedented wave

Mamuka Andguladze, chair of the local Media Advocacy Coalition, told CPJ that the recent blocking of Western journalists is “unprecedented” and a “very deliberate policy” by Georgian Dream “to limit critical coverage.” 

CPJ knows of at least five other instances in the past eight months in which Western journalists have been denied entry:

• On October 22, 2024, four days before the elections, border guards at Tbilisi airport blocked the entry of Czech freelance reporter Ray Baseley and held him for 34 hours before placing him on a plane to Poland, Basely wrote on X. He previously had reported on mass protests against Georgian Dream’s introduction of a “foreign agent” law in May 2024 and told the International Press Institute that he believes this was the reason for his denial. The law requires nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” An even harsher law, passed in April 2025, carries prison terms of up to five years.
• On election day, October 26, 2024, border guards refused entry to Swiss photojournalist Stephan Goss, who had covered protests against the “foreign agent” law. Guards confiscated his phone and held him for 12 hours before placing him on a flight to Dubai. 
• On February 12, 2025, French freelance journalist Clément Girardot was denied entry. Authorities also revoked Girardot’s residence permit after he reported on Georgian Dream’s growing authoritarianism for publications like France’s Le Monde and Belgium’s Le Soir.
• On March 30, 2025, officials denied entry to Jérôme Chobeaux, a freelance photojournalist with the Italian agency NurPhoto. Chobeaux, who had covered the anti-government protests, was held for six hours without access to his phone before boarding a plane to Greece.
• On June 11, 2025, border guards at Kutaisi International Airport refused entry to French documentary photographer Marylise Vigneaux. Vigneaux told CPJ that she believed she most likely had been targeted over a collection of her protest photos exhibited at a photo festival in Tbilisi in May.

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party and Georgian border police for comment but did not receive any replies.

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

Alongside an ever more restrictive environment for local journalists, increasingly, Georgia has been denying entry to Western journalists, all freelancers. This crackdown comes as the ruling conservative Georgian Dream party clamps down on mass protests and political opposition following allegations of fraud in the country’s October 2024 parliamentary elections.     

Media repression had already intensified on the heels of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, since which Georgia has denied entry to at least eight Russian journalists associated with Kremlin-critical outlets, as well as two journalists from other post-Soviet countries with critical or pro-Western views. 

Neal’s denial of entry “was clearly intended to dissuade me from further reporting on the vested interests behind the ruling party’s ongoing abuse of power,” he told CPJ. 

Before leaving Georgia in April, Neal had been the target of a sustained smear campaign by Georgian Dream officials and the pro-government press. His investigation in the British news outlet Byline Times revealed cooperation between a U.K.-registered private equity firm with reported close ties to Georgia’s alleged de facto ruler, Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Georgian Dream leaders accused Neal of being part of an international “deep state” anti-Georgia conspiracy. 

“The story clearly hit a nerve,” Neal told CPJ. 

An unprecedented wave

Mamuka Andguladze, chair of the local Media Advocacy Coalition, told CPJ that the recent blocking of Western journalists is “unprecedented” and a “very deliberate policy” by Georgian Dream “to limit critical coverage.” 

CPJ knows of at least five other instances in the past eight months in which Western journalists have been denied entry:

• On October 22, 2024, four days before the elections, border guards at Tbilisi airport blocked the entry of Czech freelance reporter Ray Baseley and held him for 34 hours before placing him on a plane to Poland, Basely wrote on X. He previously had reported on mass protests against Georgian Dream’s introduction of a “foreign agent” law in May 2024 and told the International Press Institute that he believes this was the reason for his denial. The law requires nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” An even harsher law, passed in April 2025, carries prison terms of up to five years.
• On election day, October 26, 2024, border guards refused entry to Swiss photojournalist Stephan Goss, who had covered protests against the “foreign agent” law. Guards confiscated his phone and held him for 12 hours before placing him on a flight to Dubai. 
• On February 12, 2025, French freelance journalist Clément Girardot was denied entry. Authorities also revoked Girardot’s residence permit after he reported on Georgian Dream’s growing authoritarianism for publications like France’s Le Monde and Belgium’s Le Soir.
• On March 30, 2025, officials denied entry to Jérôme Chobeaux, a freelance photojournalist with the Italian agency NurPhoto. Chobeaux, who had covered the anti-government protests, was held for six hours without access to his phone before boarding a plane to Greece.
• On June 11, 2025, border guards at Kutaisi International Airport refused entry to French documentary photographer Marylise Vigneaux. Vigneaux told CPJ that she believed she most likely had been targeted over a collection of her protest photos exhibited at a photo festival in Tbilisi in May.

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party and Georgian border police for comment but did not receive any replies.

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

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

A Hartford woman never saw her car again after it was towed while she sat in housing court fighting an eviction.

A home care worker had her car towed while she hurried to assist a patient down the stairs.

A young man lost his car and slipped into financial instability after he mistakenly put his apartment’s parking sticker in the wrong spot.

Late last month, Connecticut lawmakers, following a series of stories by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica, passed sweeping reforms to the state’s towing laws that will address many of the issues drivers have complained about. The stories highlighted how towing companies can begin the process to sell people’s cars after 15 days, one of the shortest windows in the country.

Reporters heard from dozens of drivers across Connecticut who had to pay exorbitant fees or had their vehicles sold when they couldn’t afford the charges. Many told reporters about the severe consequences they experienced after their cars were towed or sold, including the loss of jobs, personal mementos and housing.

While some people’s cars might not have been towed under the new law, which takes effect Oct. 1, it doesn’t solve all the problems that vehicle owners raised.

Here are some of their stories, as well as whether the changes in the new law would have helped them.

Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.

Home care worker Maria Jiménez circled the Hartford apartment complex for low-income seniors, looking for a place to park. Jiménez drives patients to and from errands like doctor’s appointments and grocery shopping. Her patient that day last November used a cane, and Jiménez planned to park close so that her patient wouldn’t have to walk too far.

Unsuccessful, Jiménez stopped in front of the building’s entrance.

“I turned on the hazard lights and left the car on, just long enough to let her know I had arrived, since I didn’t have her phone number,” she said. Jiménez said she told a few bystanders she would be right back and asked them to keep an eye on her car.

She said she went inside only briefly, and when she returned, the car was gone. Bystanders told Jiménez the car had been towed and that they’d pleaded with the truck’s driver, to no avail.

Tracy Wodatch, president and CEO at Connecticut Association for Healthcare at Home, said many of her members complain about getting ticketed or towed when they’re doing their jobs helping people.

When it happens frequently enough at a particular complex, she said, an agency might speak with the landlord to ask for a designated spot. But there isn’t a statewide mandate.

New Jersey passed a law in 2018 allowing home health care workers, visiting nurses and others to apply for a placard similar to an accessible parking tag to place in their cars.

“Maybe we can talk to the legislators off session to see if there’s anything we can do,” Wodatch said.

The company that towed Jiménez, MyHoopty.com, was in Watertown, and Jiménez was stranded over 30 miles away in Hartford. “How will I get there if I don’t have a car?” she recalled thinking.

MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said the vehicle was parked in the fire lane without its hazard lights on for 17 minutes before it was towed and that the apartment complex had hired MyHoopty to prevent such parking violations.

“This is a critical safety issue, particularly at an elderly housing complex where the emergency access can be a matter of life and death,” Festa said. (MyHoopty has appeared in other stories in our series.)

If you have information about health workers and caregivers being towed while on the job, email Dave Altimari at daltimari@ctmirror.org or Ginny Monk at gmonk@ctmirror.org, or call 203-626-4705.

The apartment complex owners didn’t respond to calls and emails for comment.

Jiménez said she makes about $290 a week. By the time she got to MyHoopty, the company told her the bill was more than $400.

Her husband footed the bill. But it wasn’t easy: “The only reason I could afford it is because I work mornings, I work nights,” he said.

Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.

Marie Franklin paid the parking meter and dashed into Hartford housing court for a December 2023 hearing that would determine if she would get evicted from her apartment. She worried about the parking. People can wait for hours for the judge to call their cases, but the Hartford Parking Authority limits nearby meters to two hours.

So people facing eviction sometimes run the risk of getting a parking violation, getting their cars towed or missing their names being called for hearings, which can cause them to lose their housing in a default judgement for not showing up to court.

Joshua Michtom, a Hartford City Council member and an attorney who has represented children and parents in juvenile court, said although there’s a nearby parking garage, it’s more expensive and it fills up.

“You have to be there, but then you don’t know how long you’re going to have to wait,” Michtom said. “And the courts are not particularly forgiving if you’re not there the moment your case gets called.”

When Franklin’s name was finally called, a judge rejected her plea to stave off eviction. Dejected and stressed about losing her home, she walked out of court only to discover her 2015 Volvo was gone. Franklin had more than a dozen unpaid parking tickets, some of which were nearly 20 years old. She’d forgotten about some, and others were for vehicles she no longer owned. About half of the tickets were for exceeding the meter limit or parking over the line near the courthouse.

“I had paid for the parking meter and everything,” Franklin said. “They drive around, and they look for people’s cars.”

Jill Turlo, CEO of the Hartford Parking Authority, said the agency’s officers use license plate scanners to find people with outstanding tickets. Turlo said “high-traffic metered areas,” like the street the courthouse is on, are “regularly patrolled by parking enforcement.” Turlo said that the parking authority has not received any requests to extend the time for metered parking near the courthouses.

While towing cars for unpaid parking tickets is a common practice for cities, Minnesota passed a law last year barring such tows, seeing them as an unfair burden on low-income families. Several cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, have also stopped such tows after a California appeals court ruled that towing cars for unpaid parking tickets violated people’s rights against warrantless seizures, said Rebecca Miller, an attorney with the Western Center on Law & Poverty.

Hartford has one of the strictest policies in Connecticut. A city ordinance allows tows after two or more unpaid tickets that date back to September 2012. Other cities including Danbury and New Britain don’t tow for unpaid tickets. Norwalk and Waterbury will tow if there are four unpaid tickets; Stamford tows for three unpaid tickets or more than $250 owed, officials in those cities said. The limit in Bridgeport is $100, and New Haven’s is $200.

“We do have an ordinance where we can boot a car for unpaid tickets, but we haven’t used it in years,” said Deborah Pacific, director of the Danbury Parking Authority.

When Franklin went to eviction court, she had been trying to hold onto the place she and her daughter lived while she looked for a new job. Between unpaid fines, late fees, and towing and storage charges, it would have cost almost $3,000 to get her car back, she said.

If you have information about towing near courthouses, email Dave Altimari at daltimari@ctmirror.org or Ginny Monk at gmonk@ctmirror.org, or call 203-626-4705.

“I would have chose to pay whatever I owed to my housing. So my car, there was nothing I could do,” Franklin said.

The vehicle was towed by Metro Auto Body & Towing, which did not return calls and emails for comment. It was later sold by the lender.

After losing her car and housing, Franklin moved to Florida to stay with her son.

Fixed: Apartment residents now have 72 hours if caught without a parking permit or with an expired one.

It’s often little discrepancies that lead to big consequences. When Tishawn Tillman moved into his Hartford apartment in September, he got a parking sticker that allowed him to park in the building’s private lot. He said he wasn’t sure where to put it, so he stuck it on the driver’s side window.

But less than a month later, his car was towed by Cross Country Automotive in Hartford.

“There is absolutely no legal documentation in my lease that says that this has to be strictly on the windshield,” Tillman said.

Minor rule violations such as parking crooked or not backing into a space have caused people’s cars to be towed and then sold when they couldn’t afford the fees. Stories like Tillman’s drove legislators to act. Under the new law, the towing company would have had to warn Tillman, giving him 72 hours to get a new sticker and place it in the right spot. The law also says towers have to get permission from the apartment complex to tow a vehicle unless it’s blocking traffic or parked in a fire lane.

Tillman said he assumed his car had been stolen. But the police told him it had been towed.

Tillman contacted Cross Country: “I asked them, ‘Did you see my sticker?’ And they said, ‘We didn’t see the sticker.’” He said he called the apartment manager, but he wouldn’t help.

“When I realized that neither of the parties were going to budge on the matter, I told them that I wasn’t going to pay the fine, even if I had the money, which I didn’t at the time,” Tillman said.

Tillman said his bill was “$200 but growing every day.”

He filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office, which said it unsuccessfully tried to resolve the issue through its voluntary mediation program and recommended he complain to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Sal Sena, Cross Country’s owner, submitted a letter to the attorney general saying there are signs all over the parking lot explaining the rules. The apartment manager, Jack Matos, wrote to the attorney general that he talked with Sena about giving TIllman a discount on the towing fees.

“I reiterated Tishawn needs to make sure that it’s placed on the windshield,” Matos wrote.

Frustrated, Tillman eventually gave up trying to get his car back.

“I went from being a self-made young man with his own apartment and car to having to burn a hole in my pocket just to get to and from work on ride-share services like Uber and Lyft,” he said.

Fixed: The law allows vehicle owners to reclaim their cars with other documents besides DMV registration.

Shaleah Carr needed two more weeks until her DMV appointment in April to register the Chevrolet Malibu she had just bought from her mom. It was the earliest appointment she could get.

Her boyfriend had taken the car to his brother’s house to work on it when they decided to take it for a test drive. But the car broke down on U.S. Route 5 in South Windsor, and police called for a tow.

Her boyfriend told the tow truck driver that the car was registered to Carr’s mother and that Carr had the title and proof of insurance. But the towing company, Tolland Automotive, wouldn’t release the vehicle to Carr because she wasn’t the registered owner, said the company’s owner, George Fellows. The vehicle was towed on a Friday afternoon, and by the time Carr was able to get to the lot on Monday morning, she owed more than $300.

“I told them I’m on one income and I can’t afford it,” Carr said. “I just paid my rent for that month, and I even asked, ‘Do you guys do payments?’”

Since then, her Malibu has been sitting in the company’s lot.

Carr’s dilemma has happened to people whose cars have been towed across Connecticut — they’ve been unable to quickly register their cars and then blocked from reclaiming them because they’re not registered in their names yet. By the time they can register their cars, so much time has passed that the tow bill is too expensive or the company has sold their car.

The new law gives consumers time to register their car before it can be towed and requires towers to release vehicles if presented with the title or a bill of sale as proof of ownership. The law also requires towers to accept other forms of payment besides cash and demands towers have business hours on weekends so fees don’t accrue while they’re closed.

Fellows said police called them to the scene. “Then we found out that this guy didn’t own the car at all,” Fellows said. Without the owner there, “it had to come back to our shop.”

Carr called her mother. “I was like, ‘You’re going to have to come up here,’ but even if she does, she can’t really do much,” Carr said. “She didn’t have the money to get it back either.”

Carr said the last time she called Tolland Automotive, the bill was $800. Given that she paid her mother only $500 for the car, she said, it almost wasn’t worth trying to get it back anymore.

Fellows said Carr’s mother did come into the office earlier this month with proof of registration, and he is willing to release the vehicle if she pays what is owed.

“It’s all on them,” he said. “I mean they knew what the issue was back then. Why haven’t they come back?”

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Dave Altimari, Ginny Monk and Shahrzad Rasekh, The Connecticut Mirror.

The Supreme Court has sided with South Carolina’s efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. Lower court rulings allowed Medicaid patients to sue over the state’s restrictions on Medicaid funding for their healthcare clinics, which the Supreme Court overturned in a 6-3 decision on Thursday. Rebecca Grant, who writes about reproductive rights, says South Carolina’s restrictions will likely be taken up by other states and could result in the closure of potentially hundreds of reproductive healthcare clinics. Grant outlines the alternative healthcare methods that many are forced to turn to in the face of dangerous and — since the fall of Roe v. Wade — increasingly draconian abortion restrictions. “We know throughout history that making abortion illegal or trying to ban it does not make it go away,” she says. This underground network of abortion access in the United States is the subject of Grant’s new book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom.

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

“It was just one of these unspoken truths within households like mine — low-income, Black households — that there was some sort of distrust with the water,” said Perry, who later learned that Chicago is the city with the most lead service lines in the country. “No one really talked about it, but we never used our tap for just regular drinking.”

Now, as a senior policy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Perry is part of a coalition that fought for stricter rules to force cities like Chicago to remove their toxic lead pipes faster. Last year, advocates celebrated a big win: The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated that water systems across the country replace all their lead service lines. Under the new rule, most water systems will have 10 years to complete replacements, while Chicago will likely get just over 20, starting in 2027, when that requirement kicks in.

But the city’s replacement plan, submitted to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in April per state law and obtained through a public records request, puts it 30 years behind that timeline. 

Chicago’s plan adheres to state law and an outdated EPA rule from the first Trump administration. It aims to replace the city’s estimated 412,000 lead service lines by 2076 — completing 8,300 replacements annually for 50 years, starting in 2027.

The latest federal rule requires Chicago to replace nearly 20,000 pipes per year beginning in 2027 — more than double the speed of the city’s current plan. Documents show city officials are aware of the new requirements, but have not yet updated their plans. 

A delayed timeline will expose many more children and adults to the risk of toxic drinking water, and rising temperatures from climate change may exacerbate the risk by causing more lead to leach off pipes and into water. 

Coming soon: More reporting on Chicago’s lead service lines, plus an interactive map to explore which areas are most at risk. Sign up to be notified when these stories and tools are available.

For Perry, even 20 more years of lead pipes was a compromise.

“People are already being exposed — they’re being exposed daily,” Perry said. “There is no number [of years] that is satisfactory to me, but 20-ish years is better than 50.”

In recent decades, drinking water crises in Washington, D.C., and Flint, Michigan, put the public health threat of lead on the national map. Lead pipes are a danger across the country, where about 9 million lead service lines need to be replaced to adhere to the new requirements. About a million of those are in Illinois — the most of any state in the country. Among the five U.S. cities estimated to have the most lead pipes — Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee — only Chicago has yet to adopt the latest federal deadline. The rest plan to replace their lead pipes within a decade of 2027. 

Lead can damage the human brain and nervous system, kidney function, and reproductive health, and it’s also an underappreciated cause of cardiovascular problems. 

Lead is particularly harmful to children: It can hamper brain development and cause permanent intellectual disabilities, fatigue, convulsions, comas, or even death. Lead exposure during pregnancy can also cause low birth weight or preterm birth. 

Experts emphasize that there is no safe level of lead exposure. 

In Illinois, the Metropolitan Planning Council found that people of color are up to twice as likely as white people to live in a community burdened by lead service lines.

Because of a three-year grace period in the 2024 EPA rule — the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, or LCRI — the city does not have to begin complying with the new replacement requirements until 2027. But Chicago’s plan outlines a timeline that starts the very same year and is significantly slower. 

“I’m not sure what Chicago is thinking there,” said Marissa Lieberman-Klein, an Earthjustice attorney focused on lead in drinking water.

Chicago is facing a Herculean task. Even with a 50-year timeline, it will have to start moving much faster than its current replacement speed: The city will need to replace more lead service lines annually than the total of 7,923 it managed over the past four years ending in March. Of these replacements, about 60 percent occurred alongside repairs for breaks and leaks or water and sewer main replacements. 

Megan Vidis, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Water Management, said Chicago is ramping up its replacement speeds. The city will replace 8,000 lines this year, she said. 

“We have been and will continue to move as quickly as resources allow to replace lead service lines,” Vidis wrote in an email. 

Asked about the feasibility of the current EPA rule’s 20-year replacement timeline, Vidis wrote, “We need substantial additional funding, particularly the kind available to help pay for private side replacements.” That refers to the city’s split ownership structure, where homeowners own one part of the line and the city owns the other.

Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for environmental health at the NRDC, said these financial woes are a reason for Chicago to put forward a more ambitious replacement plan.  

Olson pointed out that $15 billion in national lead service line replacement funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law, expire next year.

“If Chicago isn’t beating down the doors to get that money, that is tragic, because that money could evaporate,” Olson said. “They should be front-end loading as much of the service line replacement as they possibly can.”

U.S. EPA spokesperson David Shark confirmed that Illinois water systems are currently under the new rule. But the agency did not answer specific questions about Illinois’ obligations between now and when the compliance deadlines start in 2027, citing pending litigation on the rule. 

Illinois EPA spokesperson Kim Biggs wrote in an email that the state is operating under the replacement requirements included in the 2021 EPA rule and the state’s law until 2027. 

Lead service lines were required by Chicago’s municipal code — reportedly influenced by lead companies and the plumbers union — for decades after much of the country stopped using them due to health concerns. According to a study published last year, two-thirds of the city’s youngest children — under 6 years old — live in homes with tap water containing detectable levels of lead. 

Drinking water is just one way that people are exposed to lead. It’s also found in soil and paint. But experts estimate that water could make up at least 20 percent of a person’s exposure. 

When lead pipes corrode, the toxic material can dissolve or flake into water and poison residents without their knowledge. Rising temperatures due to climate change could be exacerbating lead risks, and researchers have found that childhood lead poisoning levels spike during hotter periods.

Perry now lives in Oak Forest, one of Chicago’s southern suburbs, but she also owns the home her mother lives in, on Chicago’s South Side. That home has a lead service line, Perry said, and she doesn’t know when it will be replaced.

The city has “a responsibility to the residents in the city of Chicago to protect them at all costs,” Perry said. “There’s no price that’s too high to pay for safe drinking water.”

Chicago’s plan is based on a 2021 state law requiring that water systems with 100,000 or more lead service lines — which includes Chicago — replace all of them within 50 years from 2027. 

At the time of its passage, this state law was stronger than the federal Lead and Copper Rule Revisions of 2021, which did not require replacement in most cases.

Experts and advocates criticized and even sued the EPA over that rule — enacted by the Trump administration in the final days of the president’s first term — saying it weakened existing efforts to achieve safe drinking water nationwide. 

Near the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the EPA finalized the current rule. Most systems across the country must replace all their lead service lines before 2038, with deferral allowances for places with large proportions of lead service lines — like Chicago, which would likely get until mid-2049 to finish. 

The EPA estimated that each year this rule will prevent up to 900,000 cases of low birth weight and 1,500 cases of premature death from heart disease. Many advocates praised the rule, while others noted that two more decades of lead pipes still pose significant health risks in Chicago.

But according to the document the city submitted to the state, Chicago’s plan hasn’t yet caught up to the newer federal law. The plan acknowledges the faster federal timeline but notes that Chicago isn’t abiding by that yet.

The city, its plan states, will comply “if the regulations go into effect.”

Nationally, the regulation is already in effect, Earthjustice’s Lieberman-Klein said, and the EPA does not need to release any additional documents to make that true.

But what city officials might be thinking, she said, is that given the continued rollbacks of many environmental and health regulations by President Donald Trump’s EPA, this requirement might eventually be wiped off the books. 

“It’s possible Chicago is just looking at what this administration has been generally saying about rules promulgated by the previous administration, and it’s saying, ‘We’d like to wait and see what they say about this rule,’” Lieberman-Klein said.

Some congressional Republicans tried to revoke the lead pipe replacement rule legislatively, but they missed the deadline to do so. 

Last year, the American Water Works Association — a water industry organization — challenged the rule in court, alleging that its requirements are not feasible. Environmental groups stepped in to defend the rule, but it remains to be seen whether the EPA will do likewise. The agency declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Chicago’s water department cited the lawsuit as one of its reasons for submitting a plan that doesn’t account for the 20-year replacement timeline. But the rule isn’t on pause, Earthjustice’s Lieberman-Klein clarified.

“The litigation does not stay the rule or change its effective date,” she said. “It still went into effect at the end of October and nothing about the compliance dates have changed.”

Over the past few years, Chicago officials say each service line replacement has averaged about $35,000, although they plan to lower these costs by more frequently replacing the service lines for full blocks at a time. This is much higher than national estimates, which range from about $4,700 to $12,000 per line. 

Regardless, it will be no easy feat for Chicago to piece together the funds to finish the job quickly, and big proposed cuts to federal funding would make a challenging task even harder.

The Trump administration’s proposal for the EPA next fiscal year would cut the agency’s budget by more than half. Part of that plan: slashing almost all the money for the low-interest loan program that states rely on to update water pipes.

Read Next

Trump cuts hundreds of EPA grants, leaving cities on the hook for climate resiliency

Emily Jones

Trump’s budget proposal says “the states should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects.” Chicago’s plan notes that $2 million of expected funding for a program focused on replacing lead service lines in daycares serving low-income communities was lost this year in the blanket elimination of congressional earmarks.

Megan Glover, co-founder and former CEO of 120Water, an Indiana-based company that runs a digital platform to help water systems manage lead replacement programs, wasn’t surprised by the news. Federal funding is a concern for her company’s customers across the country, she said. 

“All grants and earmarks, we’re kind of starting from a ground-zero standpoint,” Glover said. “All of that is kind of up for grabs at this point with the new administration.” 

Anna-Lisa Gonzales Castle is director of water policy at Elevate, a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on water and energy affordability that is also involved with local lead service line replacement programming. She said that ramping up replacement speeds will be a challenge, but homeowners shouldn’t be left on the hook for something that wasn’t their fault.

“We want to see the city move swiftly, and we want to see the federal government and the state bring resources to bear on this too,” she said. “It’s gonna be an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Explore which areas are most at risk from lead pipes. Sign up to be notified when we release more reporting on Chicago’s lead service lines and an interactive map.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago residents risk daily lead exposure from toxic pipes. Replacing them will take decades. on Jun 26, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Keerti Gopal.

One primary advantage of the technology is that you don’t have to clear trees to make way for solar farms. As an added bonus, the water cools the panels, increasing their efficiency. Research has shown that if societies deployed floatovoltaics in just a fraction of the lakes and reservoirs of the world, they could generate nearly a third of the amount of electricity that the United States uses in a year.

As floatovoltaic systems rapidly proliferate — the market is expected to grow an average of 23 percent each year between 2025 and 2030 — scientists are investigating how the technology might influence ecosystems. The shading, for instance, might stunt the growth of algae that some species eat — but at the same time, it might also prevent the growth of toxic algae. The floats might prevent waterbirds from landing — but also might provide habitat for them to hide from predators. By better understanding these dynamics, scientists say that if companies are willing, they can work with manufacturers to customize floatovoltaics to produce as much electricity as possible while also benefiting as much wildlife as possible.

“Renewable energy, low-carbon electricity, is a really good thing for us, but we shouldn’t be expanding it at the cost of biodiversity loss,” said Elliott Steele, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, and coauthor of a recent paper about floatovoltaics and conservation in the journal Nature Water. “This is a great opportunity for us to increase our research and develop smart design ideas and better siting practices in order to have this happy marriage between a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem and renewable energy expansion.” 

Read Next

Coming soon to a lake near you: Floating solar panels

Matt Simon

The majority of floatovoltaic deployments are in human-made water bodies like reservoirs and wastewater-treatment ponds — and these solar panels are no different than ones you’d find on land or on rooftops. They are attached to rafts that are either anchored to the bottom of a reservoir or lake, or attached to shore. Engineers adapt the systems to a specific body of water, for instance taking into account how much levels go up and down, so as to not to beach them in the dry season.

If the reservoir is equipped with a hydroelectric dam, the panels can generate additional electricity during the day. During the dry season, there might be less water to spin those turbines, but plenty of sunlight to make up the gap. And then in the winter, there might be less light but plenty of water. “A hybrid floating solar and hydropower system can have a more stable power output throughout the year,” said Prateek Joshi, an energy researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Overall, we can reduce the variability of generation.”

Though reservoirs are artificial environments, not even they are blank slates — there’s lots of aquatic life that a floatovoltaic system could interact with. “It’s going to modify the habitat no matter what,” Steele said. “Will this modification to the habitat provide risks, or could it actually provide potential benefits for some species? We actually think that some aspects of floating solar could be beneficial for waterbirds.”

Migrating fliers, for example, might stop at a reservoir to feed and find refuge on the floats. “What I can say anecdotally from customers all around the world is that, yes, some waterbird species will congregate,” said Chris Bartle, director of sales and marketing in the Americas for Ciel and Terre, which has deployed hundreds of floating solar systems worldwide.

Where the ecological considerations get trickier is with unforeseen ripple effects. By shading the water, the panels reduce the amount of light available for photosynthetic organisms. If that results in less algae for small creatures called zooplankton to eat, that might mean fewer prey for fishes, and then fewer fishes for birds to eat. At the same time, photosynthetic species that thrive with less light could grow in number. Scientists will need more experiments to fully understand such complexities.

Researchers have also observed fish hiding under floatovoltaic systems, which could help them avoid predation by bigger fish. But that could also provide easy food for fish-eating waterbirds. Thus something as seemingly simple as additional shading can kick off a cascade of ecological impacts. ​​”We are still trying to understand this effect and how it propagates through the food chain, because it’s not straightforward,” said Simone Jaqueline Cardoso, a freshwater ecologist who studies floatovoltaics at Indiana University. “Most of the time we need to monitor for long periods in order to understand the ecosystem effect.” 

These dynamics get even trickier when considering that no two bodies of water are alike — they have unique climates and communities of plants and animals — so floatovoltaic systems will have different impacts depending on where they’re deployed. There’s also the question of coverage: If panels cover 80 percent of a reservoir, that’s going to work differently than covering 30 percent. 

Accordingly, Cardoso and other scientists are doing controlled experiments, playing with the amount of coverage to see how that impacts the growth of algae. “Right now, our puzzle is kind of incomplete,” Cardoso said. “We are trying to put more pieces together and understand the big picture.”

As scientists learn more about how species interact with floatovoltaics, there’s an opportunity for them to collaborate with manufacturers to tweak the systems. Crews might avoid construction during sensitive times for waterbirds, like migration and nesting. Or they might find a way to open up the ideal amount of space between the panels to let more light in, striking a balance between renewable energy generation and a healthy ecosystem. “There can definitely be that kind of compromise between the two,” Steele said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What will the rise of floating solar panels mean for wildlife? on Jun 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world, writes Rami Khouri.

Israel’s attacks on military, civilian, and infrastructural sites throughout Iran and the repeated Iranian retaliatory attacks against targets across Israel have rattled the existing power balance across the Middle East — but the grave consequences of this new war for the region and the world’s energy supplies and economies will only be clarified in the weeks ahead.

It is already clear that Israel’s surprise attack did not achieve a knock-out blow to Iran’s nuclear sector, its military assets, or its ruling regime, while Iran’s consecutive days of rocket and drone attacks suggest that this war could go on for weeks or longer.

The media and public political sphere are overloaded now with propaganda and wishful thinking from both sides, which makes it difficult to discern the war’s outcomes and impacts.

• READ MORE: Trump says US has bombed Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz nuclear sites – and warns against retaliation
• Other Middle East reports

For now, we can only expect the fighting to persist for weeks or more, and for key installations in both countries to be attacked, like Israel’s Defence Ministry and Weitzman Institute were a few days ago, along with nuclear facilities, airports, military assets, and oil production facilities in Iran.

So, interested observers should remain humble and patient, as unfolding events factually clarify critical dimensions of this conflict that have long been dominated by propaganda, wishful thinking, muscle-flexing, strategic deception, and supra-nationalist ideological fantasies.

This is especially relevant because of the nature of the war that has already been revealed by the attacks of the past week, alongside military and political actions for and against the US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing aims in Palestine.

This round of US-Israel and Iran fighting has triggered global reactions that show this to be yet another battle between Western imperial/colonial powers and those in the Middle East and the Global South that resist this centuries-old onslaught of control, subjugation, and mayhem.

Identifying critical dimensions
We cannot know today what this war will lead to, but we can identify some critical dimensions that we should closely monitor as the battles unfold. Here are the ones that strike me as the most significant.

First off, the ongoing attacks by Iran and Israel will clarify their respective offensive and defensive capabilities, especially in terms of missiles, drones, and the available defences against them.

Iran has anticipated such an Israeli attack for at least a decade, so we should assume it has also planned many counterattacks, while fortifying its key military and nuclear research facilities and duplicating the most important ones that might be destroyed or damaged.

Second, we will quickly discover the real US role in this war, though it is fair already to see Israel’s attack as a joint US-Israeli effort.

This is because of Washington’s almost total responsibility to fund, equip, maintain, resupply, and protect the Israeli armed forces; how it protects Israel at the UN, ICC, and other fora; and both countries’ shared political goals to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a puppet regime that is subservient to Israeli-US priorities.

Trump claims this is not his war, but Israel’s attacks against Iran, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon can only happen because of the US commitment by law to Israeli military superiority in the Middle East. The entire Middle East and much of the world see this as a war between the US, Israel, and Iran.

And then today the US strikes on the three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Unconventional warfare attacks
We will also soon learn what non-military weapons each side can use to weaken the other. Missiles and drones are a start, but we should expect unconventional warfare attacks against civilian, infrastructural, digital, and financial sector targets that make life difficult for all.

An important factor that will only become clear with time is how this conflict impacts domestic politics in both countries; Iran and Israel each suffer deep internal fissures and some discontent with their regimes. How the war evolves could fragment and weaken either country, or unite their home citizenries.

Also important will be how Arab leaders react to events, especially those who chose to develop much closer financial, commercial, and defence ties with the US, as we saw during Trump’s Gulf visit last month. Some Arab leaders have also sought closer, good neighbourly relations with Iran in the last three years, while a few moved closer to Israel at the same time.

Arab leaders and governments that choose the US and Israel as their primary allies, especially in the security realm, while the attacks on Gaza and Iran go on, will generate anger and opposition by many of their people; this will require the governments to become more autocratic, which will only worsen the legacy of modern Arab autocrats who ignore their people’s rights and wellbeing.

Arab governments mostly rolled over and played dead during the US-Israeli Gaza genocide, but in this case, they might not have the same opportunity to remain fickle in the face of another aggressive moral depravity and emerge unscathed when it is over.

If Washington gets more directly involved in defending Israel, we are likely to see a response from voters in the US, especially among Trump supporters who don’t want the US to get into more forever wars.

Support for Israel is already steadily declining in the US, and might drop even faster with Washington now engaging directly in fighting Iran, because the Israeli-US attack is already based on a lie about Iran’s nuclear weapons, and American popular opinion is increasingly critical of Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Iran’s allies tested
The extent and capabilities of Iran’s allies across the Middle East will, too, be tested in the coming weeks, especially Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They have all been weakened recently by Israeli-American attacks, and both their will and ability to support Iran are unclear.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this attack as the last step in his strategy to reorganise and re-engineer the Middle East, to make all states dependent on Israeli approval of their strategic policies. A few already are.

Netanyahu has been planning this regional project for over a decade, including removing Saddam Hussein, weakening Hezbollah and Hamas, hitting Yemen, and controlling trends inside Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is gone.

We will find out in due course if this strategy will rearrange Arab-Middle East dynamics, or internal Israeli-American ones.

The cost of this war to Israeli citizens is a big unknown, but a critical one. Israelis now know what it feels like in Southern Lebanon or Gaza. Millions of Israelis have been displaced, emigrated, or are sheltering in bunkers and safe rooms.

This is not why the State of Israel was created, according to Zionist views, which sought a place where Jews could escape the racism and pogroms they suffered in Europe and North America from the 19th Century onwards.

Most dangerous place
Instead, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today.

This follows two decades in which all the Arabs, including Palestinians and Hamas, have expressed their willingness to coexist in peace with Israel, if Israel accepts the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and pertinent UN resolutions that seek to guarantee the security and legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian states.

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world. The US-Israel pursue this centuries-old Western colonial-imperial action to deny indigenous people their national rights at a time when they have already ignored the global anti-genocide convention by destroying life and systems that allow life to exist in Gaza.

Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Dr Khouri can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri This article was first published by The New Arab before the US strikes on Iran.

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

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world, writes Rami Khouri.

Israel’s attacks on military, civilian, and infrastructural sites throughout Iran and the repeated Iranian retaliatory attacks against targets across Israel have rattled the existing power balance across the Middle East — but the grave consequences of this new war for the region and the world’s energy supplies and economies will only be clarified in the weeks ahead.

It is already clear that Israel’s surprise attack did not achieve a knock-out blow to Iran’s nuclear sector, its military assets, or its ruling regime, while Iran’s consecutive days of rocket and drone attacks suggest that this war could go on for weeks or longer.

The media and public political sphere are overloaded now with propaganda and wishful thinking from both sides, which makes it difficult to discern the war’s outcomes and impacts.

• READ MORE: Trump says US has bombed Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz nuclear sites – and warns against retaliation
• Other Middle East reports

For now, we can only expect the fighting to persist for weeks or more, and for key installations in both countries to be attacked, like Israel’s Defence Ministry and Weitzman Institute were a few days ago, along with nuclear facilities, airports, military assets, and oil production facilities in Iran.

So, interested observers should remain humble and patient, as unfolding events factually clarify critical dimensions of this conflict that have long been dominated by propaganda, wishful thinking, muscle-flexing, strategic deception, and supra-nationalist ideological fantasies.

This is especially relevant because of the nature of the war that has already been revealed by the attacks of the past week, alongside military and political actions for and against the US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing aims in Palestine.

This round of US-Israel and Iran fighting has triggered global reactions that show this to be yet another battle between Western imperial/colonial powers and those in the Middle East and the Global South that resist this centuries-old onslaught of control, subjugation, and mayhem.

Identifying critical dimensions
We cannot know today what this war will lead to, but we can identify some critical dimensions that we should closely monitor as the battles unfold. Here are the ones that strike me as the most significant.

First off, the ongoing attacks by Iran and Israel will clarify their respective offensive and defensive capabilities, especially in terms of missiles, drones, and the available defences against them.

Iran has anticipated such an Israeli attack for at least a decade, so we should assume it has also planned many counterattacks, while fortifying its key military and nuclear research facilities and duplicating the most important ones that might be destroyed or damaged.

Second, we will quickly discover the real US role in this war, though it is fair already to see Israel’s attack as a joint US-Israeli effort.

This is because of Washington’s almost total responsibility to fund, equip, maintain, resupply, and protect the Israeli armed forces; how it protects Israel at the UN, ICC, and other fora; and both countries’ shared political goals to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a puppet regime that is subservient to Israeli-US priorities.

Trump claims this is not his war, but Israel’s attacks against Iran, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon can only happen because of the US commitment by law to Israeli military superiority in the Middle East. The entire Middle East and much of the world see this as a war between the US, Israel, and Iran.

And then today the US strikes on the three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Unconventional warfare attacks
We will also soon learn what non-military weapons each side can use to weaken the other. Missiles and drones are a start, but we should expect unconventional warfare attacks against civilian, infrastructural, digital, and financial sector targets that make life difficult for all.

An important factor that will only become clear with time is how this conflict impacts domestic politics in both countries; Iran and Israel each suffer deep internal fissures and some discontent with their regimes. How the war evolves could fragment and weaken either country, or unite their home citizenries.

Also important will be how Arab leaders react to events, especially those who chose to develop much closer financial, commercial, and defence ties with the US, as we saw during Trump’s Gulf visit last month. Some Arab leaders have also sought closer, good neighbourly relations with Iran in the last three years, while a few moved closer to Israel at the same time.

Arab leaders and governments that choose the US and Israel as their primary allies, especially in the security realm, while the attacks on Gaza and Iran go on, will generate anger and opposition by many of their people; this will require the governments to become more autocratic, which will only worsen the legacy of modern Arab autocrats who ignore their people’s rights and wellbeing.

Arab governments mostly rolled over and played dead during the US-Israeli Gaza genocide, but in this case, they might not have the same opportunity to remain fickle in the face of another aggressive moral depravity and emerge unscathed when it is over.

If Washington gets more directly involved in defending Israel, we are likely to see a response from voters in the US, especially among Trump supporters who don’t want the US to get into more forever wars.

Support for Israel is already steadily declining in the US, and might drop even faster with Washington now engaging directly in fighting Iran, because the Israeli-US attack is already based on a lie about Iran’s nuclear weapons, and American popular opinion is increasingly critical of Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Iran’s allies tested
The extent and capabilities of Iran’s allies across the Middle East will, too, be tested in the coming weeks, especially Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They have all been weakened recently by Israeli-American attacks, and both their will and ability to support Iran are unclear.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this attack as the last step in his strategy to reorganise and re-engineer the Middle East, to make all states dependent on Israeli approval of their strategic policies. A few already are.

Netanyahu has been planning this regional project for over a decade, including removing Saddam Hussein, weakening Hezbollah and Hamas, hitting Yemen, and controlling trends inside Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is gone.

We will find out in due course if this strategy will rearrange Arab-Middle East dynamics, or internal Israeli-American ones.

The cost of this war to Israeli citizens is a big unknown, but a critical one. Israelis now know what it feels like in Southern Lebanon or Gaza. Millions of Israelis have been displaced, emigrated, or are sheltering in bunkers and safe rooms.

This is not why the State of Israel was created, according to Zionist views, which sought a place where Jews could escape the racism and pogroms they suffered in Europe and North America from the 19th Century onwards.

Most dangerous place
Instead, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today.

This follows two decades in which all the Arabs, including Palestinians and Hamas, have expressed their willingness to coexist in peace with Israel, if Israel accepts the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and pertinent UN resolutions that seek to guarantee the security and legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian states.

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world. The US-Israel pursue this centuries-old Western colonial-imperial action to deny indigenous people their national rights at a time when they have already ignored the global anti-genocide convention by destroying life and systems that allow life to exist in Gaza.

Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Dr Khouri can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri This article was first published by The New Arab before the US strikes on Iran.

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

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC for short, comprises an enormous system of currents that carries water and nutrients across the world and plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate. For years, scientists have warned that the AMOC was slowing down, possibly nearing collapse. The Cold Blob is the most immediately visible proof of its decline, likely a result of Greenland’s melting glaciers, but research on the deep water current’s strength over recent years has varied wildly. 

New studies published in Nature Geoscience last week and in Nature earlier this year offer some slightly encouraging news. AMOC’s decline could be “much more of a slow, gradual change, rather than an immediate change,” said David Bonan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington who served as the lead author on the Nature Geoscience study. The full collapse of the current might not be reached this century, rather than around the midcentury mark as other research has predicted. 

The stakes could hardly be higher. Should the current break down, the most frightening predictions describe a world thrown into chaos: Drought could destroy India, South America, and Africa; the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see dramatic sea level rise; and an arctic chill would spread across Europe. 

“You cannot adapt to this,” said Peter Ditlevsen, the coauthor of a 2023 study and an ice and climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Inside Climate News. “There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.” 

A more gradual change would still cause enormous upheaval, but would give the world more time to put mitigation efforts in place. 

Part of what makes AMOC’s behavior so hard to forecast is that consistent monitoring of the current didn’t begin until 2004, so the historical data is limited. When researchers run models to examine AMOC’s behavior in the past, they sometimes get baffling results. “The new models aren’t working for AMOC,” said David Thornalley, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, who wasn’t involved with the latest research. “Some people would say we don’t 100 percent know what AMOC did through the 20th century.” 

The February study in Nature found that the current is more stable than expected. Winds in the Southern Ocean churn the incoming Arctic water up to the surface and send it northward again. The research showed AMOC slowing between 20 to 80 percent by 2100, but not collapsing entirely. This is obviously a pretty big range, and “even a moderate weakening could affect rainfall patterns, sea level rise, and the ocean’s ability to take up carbon,” said Jonathan Baker, lead author of the study and a senior scientist in the Ocean, Cryosphere, and Climate group at the Met Office, the weather service for the U.K. Between 2009 and 2010, AMOC wobbled — slowing about 30 percent — and sea levels rose 5 inches between New York City and Newfoundland within a year. 

The most recent study in Nature Geosciences narrowed that range to a weakening of 18 to 43 percent by 2100 after investigating how previous models were making their calculations. Models that predict an imminent collapse tend to assume AMOC is fairly strong at the moment, extending to great depths within the ocean and forcing warm surface water deep into the sea. Models that presented the current as weaker, with a shallower reach into the deep ocean, were less affected by warming surface waters. 

Bonan and his team found that the North Atlantic is “a little bit more aligned with these weaker models,” he said. “If you warmed up the surface [water], or if you have increased sea ice melt or Greenland Ice Sheet melt, a lot of those surface properties are probably just going to stay at the upper ocean, rather than going deeper into the ocean.”

Still, Bonan highlighted the need for more advanced models that may be able to better forecast  interactions between ice sheets and the ocean. Thornalley underlined those concerns — without sophisticated modeling of meltwater coming off Greenland, he said, these studies might be painting an overly rosy picture. “If you look at what all the models do after 2100, a lot of them go on to collapse,” he said. 

One problem with estimating a drop-dead date for AMOC is that researchers still don’t understand when the current might reach a tipping point, a threshold that, when crossed, will have a cascading effect from which there is no return. Whether the current dies a slower or faster death won’t matter in the long run if the world breaches that threshold. “It’s a good study,” Thornalley said. “Does it make me calmer about the future? No.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When will a vital system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean collapse? Depends on whom you ask. on Jun 9, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

That’s because the legislation, which President Donald Trump has dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles. Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change — the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent — but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.

That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still currently being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that, once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs, compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.

“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “One of the dynamics is that less clean electricity gets built, and that makes power generation more expensive, because we’re relying more frequently on fossil fuels with higher generation costs.”

Orvis’ group calculated that those higher power generation costs from using coal or natural gas, along with other price increases stemming from IRA repeal, would result in household energy costs rising by more than $33 billion annually by 2035, compared to a scenario in which the IRA were left intact. That works out to roughly $250 more per year per household. Other analysts came to similar conclusions: The Rhodium Group, an independent policy analysis firm, estimates that average household costs could be as much as $290 higher per year by the same date. Princeton University’s ZERO Lab projects that energy costs could grow even higher: Their estimates show that, in a decade, annual household prices will be $270 to $415 higher under the GOP plan.

Energy Innovation’s analysis calculated the effects of repealing the IRA on energy bills and transportation costs across the nation. They found that, if the tax credits for clean energy are taken away, utilities will increasingly rely on natural gas and coal, which have higher generation costs. These costs would then be passed on to customers. Additionally, as electric utilities’ demand for natural gas increases, the cost of the fossil fuel in the market will also rise, further raising household energy bills.

“Gas suppliers can’t respond immediately to large changes in the demand for gas,” said Orvis. “The change in gas demand is pretty large without the tax credits. So you’re really increasing the reliance on gas, and therefore, gas demand and gas prices.”

On the transportation front, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives eliminates IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and undoes the nation’s latest tailpipe standards, which limit the amount of pollution that new vehicles are allowed to emit. The result is a greater reliance on gasoline than would happen under the status quo — and more demand for gasoline means higher prices at the pump, per Orvis’ modeling. 

These price spikes — and the electricity spikes in particular — won’t be felt uniformly across the nation. One key factor is how utilities in a state are regulated. Many states have just one utility that both generates power and provides it to electricity customers. But in so-called deregulated markets such as Texas and Pennsylvania, electricity providers compete on an open market to sell their power.

The rules around how utilities calculate and pass on the costs of generating electricity vary significantly between these two models. In regulated markets with just one provider, the cost of generating electricity and getting it to homes is averaged out and passed on to customers. But the competitive nature of deregulated markets means that customers can see wild fluctuations in price. During peak winter and summer, when demand for power is high, prices can be double or triple normal rates. As a result, customers in deregulated markets see more variation in their bills — because those bills closely track changes in the marginal cost of electricity. If those costs rise in a dramatic and systematic way because IRA repeal leads to fewer sources of energy, customers in deregulated markets will feel the full force of it. Customers in regulated markets like much of the Southeast, on the other hand, will be somewhat cushioned from the increase, because their costs reflect the average of all generation and transmission costs incurred by their utility.

“That helps minimize the impact of repealing IRA tax credits — though it also runs the opposite way and helps reduce savings when market prices go down,” said Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University who led the modeling conducted by the ZERO Lab, in an email. 

These rising costs will come on top of U.S. energy bills that are already ticking upward. Electricity prices have been steadily rising since 2020, and the federal Energy Information Administration recently forecasted that that trend is likely to continue through 2026. Prices have increased for a variety of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting global oil and gas supply chains, extreme heat and other weather shocks, costly maintenance needed to protected the grid from wildfires, and the buildout of additional capacity to meet growing demand. U.S. electricity demand is beginning to rise for the first time in decades, thanks to the construction of new manufacturing facilities and data centers, which support operations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

Orvis said that the IRA has been helping meet that demand and maintain the country’s competitive advantage with China, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill would undermine that progress by reducing the amount of energy available for new manufacturing and AI development — and making the electricity that’s left more expensive for everyone.

“The ironic thing is that what’s in the bill, the net results of it will be completely contradictory to what the [Trump] administration’s stated policy priorities are and will cede a lot of the AI development and the manufacturing to China specifically,” said Orvis. “That’s the important macro context for everything that’s happening now — and some of the un-modelable implications in the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will raise household energy costs on Jun 6, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

That’s because the legislation, which President Donald Trump has dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles. Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change — the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent — but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.

That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still currently being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that, once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs, compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.

“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “One of the dynamics is that less clean electricity gets built, and that makes power generation more expensive, because we’re relying more frequently on fossil fuels with higher generation costs.”

Orvis’ group calculated that those higher power generation costs from using coal or natural gas, along with other price increases stemming from IRA repeal, would result in household energy costs rising by more than $33 billion annually by 2035, compared to a scenario in which the IRA were left intact. That works out to roughly $250 more per year per household. Other analysts came to similar conclusions: The Rhodium Group, an independent policy analysis firm, estimates that average household costs could be as much as $290 higher per year by the same date. Princeton University’s ZERO Lab projects that energy costs could grow even higher: Their estimates show that, in a decade, annual household prices will be $270 to $415 higher under the GOP plan.

Energy Innovation’s analysis calculated the effects of repealing the IRA on energy bills and transportation costs across the nation. They found that, if the tax credits for clean energy are taken away, utilities will increasingly rely on natural gas and coal, which have higher generation costs. These costs would then be passed on to customers. Additionally, as electric utilities’ demand for natural gas increases, the cost of the fossil fuel in the market will also rise, further raising household energy bills.

“Gas suppliers can’t respond immediately to large changes in the demand for gas,” said Orvis. “The change in gas demand is pretty large without the tax credits. So you’re really increasing the reliance on gas, and therefore, gas demand and gas prices.”

On the transportation front, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives eliminates IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and undoes the nation’s latest tailpipe standards, which limit the amount of pollution that new vehicles are allowed to emit. The result is a greater reliance on gasoline than would happen under the status quo — and more demand for gasoline means higher prices at the pump, per Orvis’ modeling. 

These price spikes — and the electricity spikes in particular — won’t be felt uniformly across the nation. One key factor is how utilities in a state are regulated. Many states have just one utility that both generates power and provides it to electricity customers. But in so-called deregulated markets such as Texas and Pennsylvania, electricity providers compete on an open market to sell their power.

The rules around how utilities calculate and pass on the costs of generating electricity vary significantly between these two models. In regulated markets with just one provider, the cost of generating electricity and getting it to homes is averaged out and passed on to customers. But the competitive nature of deregulated markets means that customers can see wild fluctuations in price. During peak winter and summer, when demand for power is high, prices can be double or triple normal rates. As a result, customers in deregulated markets see more variation in their bills — because those bills closely track changes in the marginal cost of electricity. If those costs rise in a dramatic and systematic way because IRA repeal leads to fewer sources of energy, customers in deregulated markets will feel the full force of it. Customers in regulated markets like much of the Southeast, on the other hand, will be somewhat cushioned from the increase, because their costs reflect the average of all generation and transmission costs incurred by their utility.

“That helps minimize the impact of repealing IRA tax credits — though it also runs the opposite way and helps reduce savings when market prices go down,” said Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University who led the modeling conducted by the ZERO Lab, in an email. 

These rising costs will come on top of U.S. energy bills that are already ticking upward. Electricity prices have been steadily rising since 2020, and the federal Energy Information Administration recently forecasted that that trend is likely to continue through 2026. Prices have increased for a variety of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting global oil and gas supply chains, extreme heat and other weather shocks, costly maintenance needed to protected the grid from wildfires, and the buildout of additional capacity to meet growing demand. U.S. electricity demand is beginning to rise for the first time in decades, thanks to the construction of new manufacturing facilities and data centers, which support operations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

Orvis said that the IRA has been helping meet that demand and maintain the country’s competitive advantage with China, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill would undermine that progress by reducing the amount of energy available for new manufacturing and AI development — and making the electricity that’s left more expensive for everyone.

“The ironic thing is that what’s in the bill, the net results of it will be completely contradictory to what the [Trump] administration’s stated policy priorities are and will cede a lot of the AI development and the manufacturing to China specifically,” said Orvis. “That’s the important macro context for everything that’s happening now — and some of the un-modelable implications in the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will raise household energy costs on Jun 6, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Investigative journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis break down the insider knowledge surrounding Joe Biden’s decline—and how the Democratic Party’s culture of silence, conformity, and caution may have sealed its own fate. From the “get in line” politics that killed bold policy and risk-taking to focus groups calling Democrats “sloths,” Stephen and Taya explore why Biden was protected despite clear signs of decline, the Democratic Party’s aversion to bold candidates, what Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had in common, and why the Dems just spent $20 million just to learn how to talk to men.

Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
Written by: Stephen Janis
Studio: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, this is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis.

Stephen Janis:

Hey, Taya. How are you doing?

Taya Graham:

I’m doing great.

Stephen Janis:

Good, good.

Taya Graham:

And I want to welcome everyone to the Inequality Watch Real News React. It’s a show where we challenge the conventional wisdom touted by the mainstream media and use our perspective as reporters to provide some alternative explanations for some of the hard to understand happenings in America and throughout the world.

And today, that means unpacking the great Joe Biden conspiracy.

Stephen Janis:

It is a great conspiracy, Taya, a real conspiracy.

Taya Graham:

I mean, really, it was like a Weekend at Bernie’s-like conspiracy, actually Weekend at Bernie’s sequel.

Stephen Janis:

Let me chime in. For people who don’t know, Weekend at Bernie’s is a movie where a man dies and his younger friends carry him around because they don’t want people to know he’s dead. So it’s like a corpse at a party.

Taya Graham:

Yes. That sounds very morbid, but it was actually a funny movie, or at least back when I watched it.

Stephen Janis:

Exactly.

Taya Graham:

And if you read some of the recent reports about just how out of it Biden was, it sounds like he was the grandpa who fell asleep at the dinner table at Thanksgiving.

But along with these revelations about the depth of Biden’s declining cognitive abilities comes a much more important question: Why was a man who couldn’t function after 5:00 PM allowed to run an entire country, and why didn’t anyone who supposedly had access tell the truth about it? And that’s what our show will discuss today. And our answer, which we’ll share soon is probably not what you expect.

But first, let’s get to the facts. Stephen, the discussion about Biden’s inability to function, according to some of the recently released books, goes back to 2019, involves some really embarrassing moments. I think for example, he couldn’t remember the name of a close aid, or he didn’t recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser that George Clooney was throwing for him.

So what have we learned about Biden’s health while in office, and what do you think the main talking point is there?

Stephen Janis:

We’ll tell you, unlike you and I who basically learned about Biden’s cognitive abilities at that horrific debate, there was a small group of Washington insiders and politicians who now we know knew that Biden was not right. Meaning stretching back to 2020 with congressional Democrats where they’re like, he lost his train of thought. There were a lot of signs.

And so now what happens in Washington when people ignore something right in front of their faces? They do a lot of hand wringing and see who they can blame. The big question is now, well, there’s two big questions right now. Number one, how bad was he, which needs to be clearly established that he was in no position to run a country. And number two, who can we blame so it doesn’t fall on us?

Taya Graham:

Exactly. How will it not be our fault?

Stephen Janis:

Exactly. And that seems to be the biggest preoccupation of Washington and all the Washington insiders is how can I pin this on someone else, and how can I avoid taking any blame? Which is kind of politics as usual.

Taya Graham:

Or to sell a book, which is apparently what CNN’s Jake Tapper is now doing. Did you see how many, gosh, did you see how many ways he tried to sell that book and hawk that book on CNN? It was almost embarrassing.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Every person talking about Joe Biden, even not about Joe Biden, was mentioning Jake Tapper’s book [crosstalk] —

Taya Graham:

You would’ve thought they were working on commission.

Stephen Janis:

Well, it’s extraordinary because Jake Tapper is a quintessential insider, and the quintessential establishment journalist tends to be a bit of a moralizer, likes to sneer at people, and, of course, was constantly sneering at Trump. But I don’t think he was a person who was out ahead of this story either. He tries to make it seem like he was, but I think a lot of, if you went back, I think he was a person who would give the Republicans a hard time for talking about Biden’s condition, or anyone.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. He’s definitely the type that would’ve pushed back and said that the Republican Party was focusing on the wrong thing. But apparently they were focusing on the right thing. And it was a thing, it was like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone was trying to ignore what was right in front of them.

Stephen Janis:

I think this is more about the culture of a party than it is about what the Republicans thought. To me, this is really much more important than Biden, much more important than Biden’s condition, it’s about the culture of a party and why that culture keeps that party from ever winning an election, and, I think, connecting with voters. There’s a lot of things that went on to keep Biden in power that have a lot to do with some of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. It is so much bigger than Biden, and that’s why we have a theory to share of why this really happened,

Stephen Janis:

Which we’ll share shortly, before we go through what I call the conventional wisdom about this.

Taya Graham:

We should take a look at some of the mainstream media explanations that are being touted by pundits. So let’s take a look at some of the reasons that pundits and politicians gave.

So they set up these excuses for Biden running when it’s obvious that he is too old and he’s still getting fierce support from Dem insiders. So what do you think were some of the things that pundits came out with? There were certainly politicians like Rep. Clyburn who even now still defends Joe Biden.

Stephen Janis:

And they certainly haven’t talked much about Dean Phillips, the one guy who ran against Biden, who got thrown out of the party. But I think [crosstalk] —

Taya Graham:

He got thrown under the bus, actually.

Stephen Janis:

I think the general explanation has been that I see that comes out through all the BS is just that he didn’t say anything, she didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t going to say anything even though I knew something and even though I was outraged, and people trying to share secretly or confidential sources, even though I knew something, I couldn’t say anything because they didn’t say anything. So there was this very much, it bumps up against our theory, but really everybody was groupthinking here.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

I’m not going to say anything. Well, you say something. No, I’m not going to say anything. You say something. And that, as we’ll get to, says a lot about the Democratic Party at this point.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, the word groupthink encapsulates it there perfectly. But there’s another angle that people are taking, which was that they’re blaming hubris, they’re blaming Biden’s ego.

Stephen Janis:

I don’t think you can rule that out because I’ve seen politicians hold onto city council seats until they’re 90.

Taya Graham:

That’s so true. Yes, [crosstalk] in Baltimore City, yes.

Stephen Janis:

You can imagine the illustrious power of the presidency is nice. One of his aides was going, you don’t give up the plane, you don’t give up the house. And I mean, it’s kind of understandable if small time politics can be a narcotic, being president is probably a wonder drug. You’re going to be high all the time.

But I also think, and this was discussed on another show, which I thought was a good explanation, that Biden had had a career of turning expectations on their head. He was a guy who, I’m always going to push through, I’m going to find a way to do this, and people have written me off before. I think some people are trying to blame the 2022 midterms where the Democrats outperformed or overperformed expectations, and Biden took credit for it. But personal hubris has a lot to do with this. Why do I want to give this up? It’s great being the president. It’s great to be the king.

Taya Graham:

Right. And he also ran multiple times. So he’s always wanted this office and perhaps his ambition overcame what should have been his intelligence, which is that he was supposed to be a transitional president.

Stephen Janis:

And looking back at what’s happened since, it almost ruined his whole legacy. So it’s a good lesson, like, hey, sometimes it’s time to quit. Not always, but sometimes.

Taya Graham:

You think the Democrats would’ve learned that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but apparently they had to learn this lesson again.

Now, there was another thing they did, which is they blamed his inner circle. So for example, it came out that aides had sought to ensure that he would walk shorter distances or they made sure that he had handrails available when he was mounting stairs, and they had him wear, I think the shoes are called trainers to make sure that he wouldn’t slip. When you have aides essentially baby proofing the world around a politician, I mean, how did someone not speak out? It’s incredible.

Stephen Janis:

Well, it’s weird because a lot of these people who are insiders spend their whole careers, and from my experience as a reporter, they’re like attack dogs. They refuse to look inward. They’re always looking outward. So anyone that mentions anything or says, hey, Biden, he doesn’t perform after 5:00, they get attacked. And these are the attack dogs. And the attack dogs, from what I’ve seen, and I have more experience with Democrats, the attack dogs don’t care about the candidate, what the candidate’s doing, you’re the problem. Anyone who speaks up is the problem. Anyone who writes a story is a problem. It’s always other people who are the problem.

And I’ve seen that fiercely in the Democratic Party. If you buck the narrative you’re going to get — And I think a lot of reporters had talked about that, who wrote about this prior to this moment we’re in now.

So Democrats have these cluster of aides, and Republicans have them too. It’s not a party thing. But I’ve had experience with them. They’re attack dogs. They don’t want to see reality. They think you’re reflecting the wrong reality, even though it’s really actually true. And I think that culture and that, I don’t know, whatever, we don’t care, we’re just going to attack people, we’ll attack the messenger, is pervasive and part of this problem.

Taya Graham:

That’s exactly it. Attack the messenger and not acknowledge the message at all. So you’re showing the anger and the attack dog, but there’s another aspect of it, which is that I think the Democrats were afraid.

Stephen Janis:

Trump has had a huge, profound psychological impact on the Republican Party for a decade now. They are Trump traumatized, and I think they think, well, Trump is this horrible threat to democracy. That’s what the Democrats think. And no matter what we do, we just have to stop it, so we become more risk averse. We are not going to do anything to rock the boat because if we question Joe Biden, we’re just letting Trump in. And I guess I can understand that, but it seems antithetical to the idea you want to beat Trump, but you’re going to have a zombie candidate, or you said you’re going to have a big Weekend at Bernie’s campaign? That’s what I think you get when you become, I think, that enured to the facts. So yeah, that’s a really, really, really important point.

Taya Graham:

OK. Now Stephen, this is our chance to explain our theory as to why Biden was cosseted —

Stephen Janis:

Finally!

Taya Graham:

— And protected and kept in office despite many people knowing that he was no longer capable. And that is the Get in Line theory.

Stephen Janis:

It’s a good theory.

Taya Graham:

OK. It is. Stephen, can you explain this most excellent theory?

Stephen Janis:

OK, so we have covered politics, especially in Democratic state and local, which means our city council, the state legislature, and in the nation’s capital, all levels. And what we have seen in the Democratic Party is what’s called the Get in Line culture that rules the way the party is governed.

And what it means is that you don’t jump out of line, you don’t get ambitious if you’re a candidate, you wait your turn. The way Hillary Clinton came out of the Obama era, and it was her turn. The way Joe Biden emerged from the Democratic establishment. It was his turn because it was no longer Hillary Clinton’s turn. On the local level, I can give you many examples of people who are like, don’t jump the line. Don’t get out of line.

And so sometimes when we talk about democratic politics, we always say Democrats are like all the kids in class who sat at the front of class, always did the assignment —

Taya Graham:

Raise the hand for teacher.

Stephen Janis:

— Never piss off the teacher, gets in line. A lot of Democratic candidates, like our governor, Wes Moore, have these perfect resumes, military service, nothing against that. But they they’re creatures of institutions, and inherently they’re risk averse, and candidates have to get in line.

Now, look at the Democratic example and why this is so important in the case of Biden. Who was our most successful, Taya, electoral president of the past, like, 20 years, right? Who was that?

Taya Graham:

President Obama?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, of course, of course. Now, did he get in line?

Taya Graham:

No, he jumped the line. He sure did. And the establishment Democrats weren’t always pleased about it.

Stephen Janis:

No. They picked Hillary Clinton. And do you remember —

Taya Graham:

Hillary fought him tooth and nail.

Stephen Janis:

Actually, yeah. Do you remember the criticism of him? He’d only been two years in the Senate. Do you remember that criticism?

Taya Graham:

Yes, absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

Right. So the Democrats, in their conventional get in line, it would’ve been Hillary Clinton’s turn, which they tried really hard, but Obama was just too good a candidate and was able to beat her. And then they have this huge electoral success. And then when they go back to their Get in Line policy, which has Hillary Clinton, Biden, and then Biden’s hanging on because all the Get in Line people didn’t want to say anything about it, then you have two out of three losses, two Trump, which who, whether you support him or not —

Taya Graham:

Well, wait a second here. Now you’re coming to a really important point here, which is that when you mentioned that President Obama was not a Get in Line candidate and yet he managed to shoot to the front of the line because of his personal charisma and his ability to campaign, President Trump was also not a get in line guy.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, you taught me.

Taya Graham:

At the time the Republican Party was absolutely [crosstalk] aghast.

Stephen Janis:

Oh my God, Republican establishment was like the Democratic establishment. They didn’t want this guy. He was crazy to them and they didn’t want him, but he didn’t get in line.

Taya Graham:

He sure didn’t.

Stephen Janis:

Hardly. No one wanted him to run. And I think we can all remember that when he ran, because the Republican establishment had Jeb Bush, low… I don’t want to say that.

Taya Graham:

Low energy Jeb?

Stephen Janis:

Low energy Jeb Bush, and people like that being touted.

Taya Graham:

That was kind of sad.

Stephen Janis:

No one thought Trump had a chance, but he jumped the line just like Obama.

Taya Graham:

Wait a second, couldn’t Bernie have jumped the line?

Stephen Janis:

Oh, Bernie’s a line jumper.

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

They really had to hamstring him when he was originally running.

Stephen Janis:

In 2016 with the super delegates.

Taya Graham:

And that really upset a lot of loyal Democrats who felt that Bernie Sanders’s campaign was hamstrung from the inside, that the party attacked him.

Stephen Janis:

We were in South Carolina in 2020 when the Democratic establishment rose up. We witnessed it like a wave and said, not your turn, Bernie, not your turn. It’s got to be Joe Biden. He’s the next in line.

And you could see the results. The results speak for themselves. There’s a disconnect between Democrats and voters because the party is so orderly and so unwilling to take a risk and so unwilling to really conjure policies of any sort. They don’t want to say anything. They don’t want to say Medicare for all like Bernie Sanders says. Why do you think people support Bernie Sanders? Because he’s willing to say Medicare for all. Many Democrats are afraid to say it because of the implications with donors, et cetera.

But the Get in Line candidate and the Get in Line culture is fierce in the Democratic Party locally and nationally. Look at AOC trying to jump ahead [in the] Oversight Committee.

Taya Graham:

Oh, that’s right.

Stephen Janis:

And Connolly, who’s…

Taya Graham:

I mean, you know.

Stephen Janis:

He died.

Taya Graham:

With all respect.

Stephen Janis:

With all due respect.

Taya Graham:

With all due respect, but he was an older gentleman, and obviously not in good health, and instead of picking a young, popular candidate like AOC, they chose him. What does this say about the Democrats when they make choices like this?

Stephen Janis:

AOC would’ve been the jump the line candidate, and AOC would’ve been a bold move. And Democrats keep thinking now with Trump being excessively bold, that somehow they have to be excessively conservative. The real dynamic here is are we going to be a centrist party or a leftist party? That’s not really the right question. Are we going to be a bold party that offers something to people, or are we just going to be the same old, same old who’s next in line, who’s going to run, and who’s going to end up losing again to whomever?

I think you had some interesting information, right, about a focus group that the Democrats did?

Taya Graham:

Yes, there was the… Oh gosh. Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you about this New York Times article.

Stephen Janis:

I really want to hear about it

Taya Graham:

— Media. I wrote about it, and they said The New York Times basically unleashed this brutal analysis. So they have someone who’s done over 250 focus groups for the Democratic Party. And one of the ways they try to really tease out how people think of the party is to ask them, if you had to choose an animal to represent the party, what animal would it be? OK. So for Republicans, they choose like apex predators, they’re like sharks and tigers and stuff. Guess what they choose for Democrats?

Stephen Janis:

I don’t want to hear it.

Taya Graham:

You don’t. It’s terrible. Slugs, sloths, tortoises.

Stephen Janis:

Are you kidding?

Taya Graham:

Does that not speak to all the things we’ve talked about, about Democratic inertia, Democratic institutionalism, calling them a tortoise?

But what was really, now, this is actually kind of sad, I feel bad for the focus group, the gentleman who did the focus group, because he finally got someone to name a different type of animal for the Democrats, and the person said, a deer. And he’s like, oh, wow, that’s interesting. Why did you choose deer? And the guy said, a deer in headlights.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

What does that tell you?

Stephen Janis:

That tells me everything I need to know. But it tells me what we’re already talking about here, and this is very important to remember: the Democrats are afraid. They have no bold proposals, they have no vision, and they’re spending $20 million. What’d you say they spent? $20 million?

Taya Graham:

They were spending $20 million sitting in a luxury hotel to discuss the best way to talk to regular people. So that’s also another great Democratic take.

They also are planning — I was just looking at another article — They’re also planning on pouring a lot of money into influencers. And I think there was an excellent criticism from More Perfect Union, and they said maybe the Democratic Party should actually have a unified platform and unified policy positions and a bold policy platform before you start trying to create your own little influencer group. Maybe you should all be on the same page first.

Stephen Janis:

But paying consultants to do something that you haven’t done yourself, you can’t create a character, or you can’t create a person who people will put their faith in.

Taya Graham:

Well, they keep on saying, we need a Joe Rogan for the left, or we lost Joe Rogan, wow do we fix this? So they’re trying to create a model instead of realizing that, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders, he went on Joe Rogan, he went on Andrew Schulz, he went on Theo Von. And these folks aren’t necessarily… You could argue that some of them are Republicans, some of them are libertarian, or some of them are just independent. And they were open to Bernie. Why? Because of his authenticity, because of his bold ideas, and because he stays on point. I think that’s something that a lot of people really respect about Sen. Sanders.

Stephen Janis:

You can go back to the 1990s and watch.

Taya Graham:

You can go back to the 1990s and hear him talking about oligarchs then. So I think people really appreciate that authenticity and honesty from a candidate.

Stephen Janis:

So if the Democrats have been a bold party and not a stand in line party, Bernie Sanders might be president right now. If he’d been nominated in 2020, I mean, he could have won. You can’t rule that out.

Taya Graham:

But the question here is will the Democrats learn their lesson? Will they allow some line jumpers?

Stephen Janis:

I don’t think so. No. Just the fact that they’re having focus groups paying $20 million instead of [crosstalk] finding a candidate —

Taya Graham:

How absurd is that.

Stephen Janis:

— That has a vision to offer voters, hey, this is what we’re going to do. Politics is, as much as it’s about aesthetics and slogans and everything, it’s still about practicalities. It’s still about envisioning a reality. Maybe you should spend your time finding someone who has a message that people might like, and taking that person and giving them the ability to change and transform this moribund party. You can’t just screech at the top of your lungs. You’ve got to have something to offer people. We’ve written extensively about, we’ll put the articles we wrote about the Democrats having to get something done, which of course they can’t do nationally, but on the local level, we’ll put that link in the comments.

Taya Graham:

Right, we’ve seen it up close.

Stephen Janis:

Democrats have to do something, and they have to stop spending money on consultants, I think.

Taya Graham:

And also they need to learn how to speak to people. One of the things that this article explored, it was a program that they’re creating called SAM. I think it’s like a Strategic Approach to Men. So Democrats are trying to learn how to talk to men. They can’t even talk to the regular public just one-on-one. But folks like Sanders and AOC seem to be breaking through.

Stephen Janis:

That’s what I’m saying. You have to pick the people, the candidates, the people that are dynamic that don’t need to be told how to talk to someone, that actually have a vision that, when they sell it — Well, not sell their vision, but talk about their vision, people are attracted to their vision. So it’s amazing that Democrats keep spending money like this when they’d be better thinking about what is our grand vision and what candidate would actually attract people? What candidate could attract people without having to spend a hundred million dollars on consultants and things like that.

Taya Graham:

You know what, we are not going to pay any money for consultants — Well, as a matter of fact, we should run a poll ourselves. As a matter of fact, we’re going to put a poll down in the live chat and we want to find out how people think about Democrats, if they have any idea on how Democrats can learn to speak to people effectively. What do you think could fix the Democratic Party, if it can be fixed? We would love to know your thoughts in the comments and in that poll. So I’m going to make sure to have a poll in the live chat.

And also, Stephen, for the record, I think we’ve done a pretty good autopsy on the Democratic Party.

Stephen Janis:

I think so.

Taya Graham:

Didn’t cost $20 mil. We did it for free. We shouldn’t have done it for free.

Stephen Janis:

I think it’s pretty clear that they need someone to jump the line, to run, that the Democratic establishment does not want to run, someone with a vision that seems authentic, and someone who’s willing to take risks. You gotta take risks. The risk averse nature of the Democratic Party has turned them into losers in many cases. So yeah, we will be back to breakdown this more, but I think we did a little bit of damage today

Taya Graham:

A little bit, but hopefully the Democrat strategists out there who are spending millions of dollars, maybe they’ll take some time to listen to independent journalists as well as listen to the public, and let them know that they have an authenticity issue and they need to find a way to break the inertia and their Get in Line platform, essentially.

Stephen Janis:

Well, their Get in Line order of things that has led them to…

Taya Graham:

So they’re not considered tortoises anymore.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Well, OK.

Stephen Janis:

That was great!

Taya Graham:

That’s our great free help for the Democratic Party. It didn’t cost $20 million. Maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. But I want to thank everyone who’s watching for joining us for this first of a series of Inequality Watchdog Reacts on The Real News Network. And if you have a topic you’d like us to explore, just throw it in the comments and we’ll take a look. And if you want to see more of our inequality reporting, just take a look for our playlist on The Real News Network channel, and I look forward to seeing you all soon. Right, Stephen?

Stephen Janis:

Yep. We’ll be back.

Taya Graham:

We’ll be back. And as always, please be safe out there.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis.

Investigative journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis break down the insider knowledge surrounding Joe Biden’s decline—and how the Democratic Party’s culture of silence, conformity, and caution may have sealed its own fate. From the “get in line” politics that killed bold policy and risk-taking to focus groups calling Democrats “sloths,” Stephen and Taya explore why Biden was protected despite clear signs of decline, the Democratic Party’s aversion to bold candidates, what Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had in common, and why the Dems just spent $20 million just to learn how to talk to men.

Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
Written by: Stephen Janis
Studio: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, this is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis.

Stephen Janis:

Hey, Taya. How are you doing?

Taya Graham:

I’m doing great.

Stephen Janis:

Good, good.

Taya Graham:

And I want to welcome everyone to the Inequality Watch Real News React. It’s a show where we challenge the conventional wisdom touted by the mainstream media and use our perspective as reporters to provide some alternative explanations for some of the hard to understand happenings in America and throughout the world.

And today, that means unpacking the great Joe Biden conspiracy.

Stephen Janis:

It is a great conspiracy, Taya, a real conspiracy.

Taya Graham:

I mean, really, it was like a Weekend at Bernie’s-like conspiracy, actually Weekend at Bernie’s sequel.

Stephen Janis:

Let me chime in. For people who don’t know, Weekend at Bernie’s is a movie where a man dies and his younger friends carry him around because they don’t want people to know he’s dead. So it’s like a corpse at a party.

Taya Graham:

Yes. That sounds very morbid, but it was actually a funny movie, or at least back when I watched it.

Stephen Janis:

Exactly.

Taya Graham:

And if you read some of the recent reports about just how out of it Biden was, it sounds like he was the grandpa who fell asleep at the dinner table at Thanksgiving.

But along with these revelations about the depth of Biden’s declining cognitive abilities comes a much more important question: Why was a man who couldn’t function after 5:00 PM allowed to run an entire country, and why didn’t anyone who supposedly had access tell the truth about it? And that’s what our show will discuss today. And our answer, which we’ll share soon is probably not what you expect.

But first, let’s get to the facts. Stephen, the discussion about Biden’s inability to function, according to some of the recently released books, goes back to 2019, involves some really embarrassing moments. I think for example, he couldn’t remember the name of a close aid, or he didn’t recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser that George Clooney was throwing for him.

So what have we learned about Biden’s health while in office, and what do you think the main talking point is there?

Stephen Janis:

We’ll tell you, unlike you and I who basically learned about Biden’s cognitive abilities at that horrific debate, there was a small group of Washington insiders and politicians who now we know knew that Biden was not right. Meaning stretching back to 2020 with congressional Democrats where they’re like, he lost his train of thought. There were a lot of signs.

And so now what happens in Washington when people ignore something right in front of their faces? They do a lot of hand wringing and see who they can blame. The big question is now, well, there’s two big questions right now. Number one, how bad was he, which needs to be clearly established that he was in no position to run a country. And number two, who can we blame so it doesn’t fall on us?

Taya Graham:

Exactly. How will it not be our fault?

Stephen Janis:

Exactly. And that seems to be the biggest preoccupation of Washington and all the Washington insiders is how can I pin this on someone else, and how can I avoid taking any blame? Which is kind of politics as usual.

Taya Graham:

Or to sell a book, which is apparently what CNN’s Jake Tapper is now doing. Did you see how many, gosh, did you see how many ways he tried to sell that book and hawk that book on CNN? It was almost embarrassing.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Every person talking about Joe Biden, even not about Joe Biden, was mentioning Jake Tapper’s book [crosstalk] —

Taya Graham:

You would’ve thought they were working on commission.

Stephen Janis:

Well, it’s extraordinary because Jake Tapper is a quintessential insider, and the quintessential establishment journalist tends to be a bit of a moralizer, likes to sneer at people, and, of course, was constantly sneering at Trump. But I don’t think he was a person who was out ahead of this story either. He tries to make it seem like he was, but I think a lot of, if you went back, I think he was a person who would give the Republicans a hard time for talking about Biden’s condition, or anyone.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. He’s definitely the type that would’ve pushed back and said that the Republican Party was focusing on the wrong thing. But apparently they were focusing on the right thing. And it was a thing, it was like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone was trying to ignore what was right in front of them.

Stephen Janis:

I think this is more about the culture of a party than it is about what the Republicans thought. To me, this is really much more important than Biden, much more important than Biden’s condition, it’s about the culture of a party and why that culture keeps that party from ever winning an election, and, I think, connecting with voters. There’s a lot of things that went on to keep Biden in power that have a lot to do with some of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. It is so much bigger than Biden, and that’s why we have a theory to share of why this really happened,

Stephen Janis:

Which we’ll share shortly, before we go through what I call the conventional wisdom about this.

Taya Graham:

We should take a look at some of the mainstream media explanations that are being touted by pundits. So let’s take a look at some of the reasons that pundits and politicians gave.

So they set up these excuses for Biden running when it’s obvious that he is too old and he’s still getting fierce support from Dem insiders. So what do you think were some of the things that pundits came out with? There were certainly politicians like Rep. Clyburn who even now still defends Joe Biden.

Stephen Janis:

And they certainly haven’t talked much about Dean Phillips, the one guy who ran against Biden, who got thrown out of the party. But I think [crosstalk] —

Taya Graham:

He got thrown under the bus, actually.

Stephen Janis:

I think the general explanation has been that I see that comes out through all the BS is just that he didn’t say anything, she didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t going to say anything even though I knew something and even though I was outraged, and people trying to share secretly or confidential sources, even though I knew something, I couldn’t say anything because they didn’t say anything. So there was this very much, it bumps up against our theory, but really everybody was groupthinking here.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

I’m not going to say anything. Well, you say something. No, I’m not going to say anything. You say something. And that, as we’ll get to, says a lot about the Democratic Party at this point.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, the word groupthink encapsulates it there perfectly. But there’s another angle that people are taking, which was that they’re blaming hubris, they’re blaming Biden’s ego.

Stephen Janis:

I don’t think you can rule that out because I’ve seen politicians hold onto city council seats until they’re 90.

Taya Graham:

That’s so true. Yes, [crosstalk] in Baltimore City, yes.

Stephen Janis:

You can imagine the illustrious power of the presidency is nice. One of his aides was going, you don’t give up the plane, you don’t give up the house. And I mean, it’s kind of understandable if small time politics can be a narcotic, being president is probably a wonder drug. You’re going to be high all the time.

But I also think, and this was discussed on another show, which I thought was a good explanation, that Biden had had a career of turning expectations on their head. He was a guy who, I’m always going to push through, I’m going to find a way to do this, and people have written me off before. I think some people are trying to blame the 2022 midterms where the Democrats outperformed or overperformed expectations, and Biden took credit for it. But personal hubris has a lot to do with this. Why do I want to give this up? It’s great being the president. It’s great to be the king.

Taya Graham:

Right. And he also ran multiple times. So he’s always wanted this office and perhaps his ambition overcame what should have been his intelligence, which is that he was supposed to be a transitional president.

Stephen Janis:

And looking back at what’s happened since, it almost ruined his whole legacy. So it’s a good lesson, like, hey, sometimes it’s time to quit. Not always, but sometimes.

Taya Graham:

You think the Democrats would’ve learned that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but apparently they had to learn this lesson again.

Now, there was another thing they did, which is they blamed his inner circle. So for example, it came out that aides had sought to ensure that he would walk shorter distances or they made sure that he had handrails available when he was mounting stairs, and they had him wear, I think the shoes are called trainers to make sure that he wouldn’t slip. When you have aides essentially baby proofing the world around a politician, I mean, how did someone not speak out? It’s incredible.

Stephen Janis:

Well, it’s weird because a lot of these people who are insiders spend their whole careers, and from my experience as a reporter, they’re like attack dogs. They refuse to look inward. They’re always looking outward. So anyone that mentions anything or says, hey, Biden, he doesn’t perform after 5:00, they get attacked. And these are the attack dogs. And the attack dogs, from what I’ve seen, and I have more experience with Democrats, the attack dogs don’t care about the candidate, what the candidate’s doing, you’re the problem. Anyone who speaks up is the problem. Anyone who writes a story is a problem. It’s always other people who are the problem.

And I’ve seen that fiercely in the Democratic Party. If you buck the narrative you’re going to get — And I think a lot of reporters had talked about that, who wrote about this prior to this moment we’re in now.

So Democrats have these cluster of aides, and Republicans have them too. It’s not a party thing. But I’ve had experience with them. They’re attack dogs. They don’t want to see reality. They think you’re reflecting the wrong reality, even though it’s really actually true. And I think that culture and that, I don’t know, whatever, we don’t care, we’re just going to attack people, we’ll attack the messenger, is pervasive and part of this problem.

Taya Graham:

That’s exactly it. Attack the messenger and not acknowledge the message at all. So you’re showing the anger and the attack dog, but there’s another aspect of it, which is that I think the Democrats were afraid.

Stephen Janis:

Trump has had a huge, profound psychological impact on the Republican Party for a decade now. They are Trump traumatized, and I think they think, well, Trump is this horrible threat to democracy. That’s what the Democrats think. And no matter what we do, we just have to stop it, so we become more risk averse. We are not going to do anything to rock the boat because if we question Joe Biden, we’re just letting Trump in. And I guess I can understand that, but it seems antithetical to the idea you want to beat Trump, but you’re going to have a zombie candidate, or you said you’re going to have a big Weekend at Bernie’s campaign? That’s what I think you get when you become, I think, that enured to the facts. So yeah, that’s a really, really, really important point.

Taya Graham:

OK. Now Stephen, this is our chance to explain our theory as to why Biden was cosseted —

Stephen Janis:

Finally!

Taya Graham:

— And protected and kept in office despite many people knowing that he was no longer capable. And that is the Get in Line theory.

Stephen Janis:

It’s a good theory.

Taya Graham:

OK. It is. Stephen, can you explain this most excellent theory?

Stephen Janis:

OK, so we have covered politics, especially in Democratic state and local, which means our city council, the state legislature, and in the nation’s capital, all levels. And what we have seen in the Democratic Party is what’s called the Get in Line culture that rules the way the party is governed.

And what it means is that you don’t jump out of line, you don’t get ambitious if you’re a candidate, you wait your turn. The way Hillary Clinton came out of the Obama era, and it was her turn. The way Joe Biden emerged from the Democratic establishment. It was his turn because it was no longer Hillary Clinton’s turn. On the local level, I can give you many examples of people who are like, don’t jump the line. Don’t get out of line.

And so sometimes when we talk about democratic politics, we always say Democrats are like all the kids in class who sat at the front of class, always did the assignment —

Taya Graham:

Raise the hand for teacher.

Stephen Janis:

— Never piss off the teacher, gets in line. A lot of Democratic candidates, like our governor, Wes Moore, have these perfect resumes, military service, nothing against that. But they they’re creatures of institutions, and inherently they’re risk averse, and candidates have to get in line.

Now, look at the Democratic example and why this is so important in the case of Biden. Who was our most successful, Taya, electoral president of the past, like, 20 years, right? Who was that?

Taya Graham:

President Obama?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, of course, of course. Now, did he get in line?

Taya Graham:

No, he jumped the line. He sure did. And the establishment Democrats weren’t always pleased about it.

Stephen Janis:

No. They picked Hillary Clinton. And do you remember —

Taya Graham:

Hillary fought him tooth and nail.

Stephen Janis:

Actually, yeah. Do you remember the criticism of him? He’d only been two years in the Senate. Do you remember that criticism?

Taya Graham:

Yes, absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

Right. So the Democrats, in their conventional get in line, it would’ve been Hillary Clinton’s turn, which they tried really hard, but Obama was just too good a candidate and was able to beat her. And then they have this huge electoral success. And then when they go back to their Get in Line policy, which has Hillary Clinton, Biden, and then Biden’s hanging on because all the Get in Line people didn’t want to say anything about it, then you have two out of three losses, two Trump, which who, whether you support him or not —

Taya Graham:

Well, wait a second here. Now you’re coming to a really important point here, which is that when you mentioned that President Obama was not a Get in Line candidate and yet he managed to shoot to the front of the line because of his personal charisma and his ability to campaign, President Trump was also not a get in line guy.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, you taught me.

Taya Graham:

At the time the Republican Party was absolutely [crosstalk] aghast.

Stephen Janis:

Oh my God, Republican establishment was like the Democratic establishment. They didn’t want this guy. He was crazy to them and they didn’t want him, but he didn’t get in line.

Taya Graham:

He sure didn’t.

Stephen Janis:

Hardly. No one wanted him to run. And I think we can all remember that when he ran, because the Republican establishment had Jeb Bush, low… I don’t want to say that.

Taya Graham:

Low energy Jeb?

Stephen Janis:

Low energy Jeb Bush, and people like that being touted.

Taya Graham:

That was kind of sad.

Stephen Janis:

No one thought Trump had a chance, but he jumped the line just like Obama.

Taya Graham:

Wait a second, couldn’t Bernie have jumped the line?

Stephen Janis:

Oh, Bernie’s a line jumper.

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

They really had to hamstring him when he was originally running.

Stephen Janis:

In 2016 with the super delegates.

Taya Graham:

And that really upset a lot of loyal Democrats who felt that Bernie Sanders’s campaign was hamstrung from the inside, that the party attacked him.

Stephen Janis:

We were in South Carolina in 2020 when the Democratic establishment rose up. We witnessed it like a wave and said, not your turn, Bernie, not your turn. It’s got to be Joe Biden. He’s the next in line.

And you could see the results. The results speak for themselves. There’s a disconnect between Democrats and voters because the party is so orderly and so unwilling to take a risk and so unwilling to really conjure policies of any sort. They don’t want to say anything. They don’t want to say Medicare for all like Bernie Sanders says. Why do you think people support Bernie Sanders? Because he’s willing to say Medicare for all. Many Democrats are afraid to say it because of the implications with donors, et cetera.

But the Get in Line candidate and the Get in Line culture is fierce in the Democratic Party locally and nationally. Look at AOC trying to jump ahead [in the] Oversight Committee.

Taya Graham:

Oh, that’s right.

Stephen Janis:

And Connolly, who’s…

Taya Graham:

I mean, you know.

Stephen Janis:

He died.

Taya Graham:

With all respect.

Stephen Janis:

With all due respect.

Taya Graham:

With all due respect, but he was an older gentleman, and obviously not in good health, and instead of picking a young, popular candidate like AOC, they chose him. What does this say about the Democrats when they make choices like this?

Stephen Janis:

AOC would’ve been the jump the line candidate, and AOC would’ve been a bold move. And Democrats keep thinking now with Trump being excessively bold, that somehow they have to be excessively conservative. The real dynamic here is are we going to be a centrist party or a leftist party? That’s not really the right question. Are we going to be a bold party that offers something to people, or are we just going to be the same old, same old who’s next in line, who’s going to run, and who’s going to end up losing again to whomever?

I think you had some interesting information, right, about a focus group that the Democrats did?

Taya Graham:

Yes, there was the… Oh gosh. Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you about this New York Times article.

Stephen Janis:

I really want to hear about it

Taya Graham:

— Media. I wrote about it, and they said The New York Times basically unleashed this brutal analysis. So they have someone who’s done over 250 focus groups for the Democratic Party. And one of the ways they try to really tease out how people think of the party is to ask them, if you had to choose an animal to represent the party, what animal would it be? OK. So for Republicans, they choose like apex predators, they’re like sharks and tigers and stuff. Guess what they choose for Democrats?

Stephen Janis:

I don’t want to hear it.

Taya Graham:

You don’t. It’s terrible. Slugs, sloths, tortoises.

Stephen Janis:

Are you kidding?

Taya Graham:

Does that not speak to all the things we’ve talked about, about Democratic inertia, Democratic institutionalism, calling them a tortoise?

But what was really, now, this is actually kind of sad, I feel bad for the focus group, the gentleman who did the focus group, because he finally got someone to name a different type of animal for the Democrats, and the person said, a deer. And he’s like, oh, wow, that’s interesting. Why did you choose deer? And the guy said, a deer in headlights.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

What does that tell you?

Stephen Janis:

That tells me everything I need to know. But it tells me what we’re already talking about here, and this is very important to remember: the Democrats are afraid. They have no bold proposals, they have no vision, and they’re spending $20 million. What’d you say they spent? $20 million?

Taya Graham:

They were spending $20 million sitting in a luxury hotel to discuss the best way to talk to regular people. So that’s also another great Democratic take.

They also are planning — I was just looking at another article — They’re also planning on pouring a lot of money into influencers. And I think there was an excellent criticism from More Perfect Union, and they said maybe the Democratic Party should actually have a unified platform and unified policy positions and a bold policy platform before you start trying to create your own little influencer group. Maybe you should all be on the same page first.

Stephen Janis:

But paying consultants to do something that you haven’t done yourself, you can’t create a character, or you can’t create a person who people will put their faith in.

Taya Graham:

Well, they keep on saying, we need a Joe Rogan for the left, or we lost Joe Rogan, wow do we fix this? So they’re trying to create a model instead of realizing that, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders, he went on Joe Rogan, he went on Andrew Schulz, he went on Theo Von. And these folks aren’t necessarily… You could argue that some of them are Republicans, some of them are libertarian, or some of them are just independent. And they were open to Bernie. Why? Because of his authenticity, because of his bold ideas, and because he stays on point. I think that’s something that a lot of people really respect about Sen. Sanders.

Stephen Janis:

You can go back to the 1990s and watch.

Taya Graham:

You can go back to the 1990s and hear him talking about oligarchs then. So I think people really appreciate that authenticity and honesty from a candidate.

Stephen Janis:

So if the Democrats have been a bold party and not a stand in line party, Bernie Sanders might be president right now. If he’d been nominated in 2020, I mean, he could have won. You can’t rule that out.

Taya Graham:

But the question here is will the Democrats learn their lesson? Will they allow some line jumpers?

Stephen Janis:

I don’t think so. No. Just the fact that they’re having focus groups paying $20 million instead of [crosstalk] finding a candidate —

Taya Graham:

How absurd is that.

Stephen Janis:

— That has a vision to offer voters, hey, this is what we’re going to do. Politics is, as much as it’s about aesthetics and slogans and everything, it’s still about practicalities. It’s still about envisioning a reality. Maybe you should spend your time finding someone who has a message that people might like, and taking that person and giving them the ability to change and transform this moribund party. You can’t just screech at the top of your lungs. You’ve got to have something to offer people. We’ve written extensively about, we’ll put the articles we wrote about the Democrats having to get something done, which of course they can’t do nationally, but on the local level, we’ll put that link in the comments.

Taya Graham:

Right, we’ve seen it up close.

Stephen Janis:

Democrats have to do something, and they have to stop spending money on consultants, I think.

Taya Graham:

And also they need to learn how to speak to people. One of the things that this article explored, it was a program that they’re creating called SAM. I think it’s like a Strategic Approach to Men. So Democrats are trying to learn how to talk to men. They can’t even talk to the regular public just one-on-one. But folks like Sanders and AOC seem to be breaking through.

Stephen Janis:

That’s what I’m saying. You have to pick the people, the candidates, the people that are dynamic that don’t need to be told how to talk to someone, that actually have a vision that, when they sell it — Well, not sell their vision, but talk about their vision, people are attracted to their vision. So it’s amazing that Democrats keep spending money like this when they’d be better thinking about what is our grand vision and what candidate would actually attract people? What candidate could attract people without having to spend a hundred million dollars on consultants and things like that.

Taya Graham:

You know what, we are not going to pay any money for consultants — Well, as a matter of fact, we should run a poll ourselves. As a matter of fact, we’re going to put a poll down in the live chat and we want to find out how people think about Democrats, if they have any idea on how Democrats can learn to speak to people effectively. What do you think could fix the Democratic Party, if it can be fixed? We would love to know your thoughts in the comments and in that poll. So I’m going to make sure to have a poll in the live chat.

And also, Stephen, for the record, I think we’ve done a pretty good autopsy on the Democratic Party.

Stephen Janis:

I think so.

Taya Graham:

Didn’t cost $20 mil. We did it for free. We shouldn’t have done it for free.

Stephen Janis:

I think it’s pretty clear that they need someone to jump the line, to run, that the Democratic establishment does not want to run, someone with a vision that seems authentic, and someone who’s willing to take risks. You gotta take risks. The risk averse nature of the Democratic Party has turned them into losers in many cases. So yeah, we will be back to breakdown this more, but I think we did a little bit of damage today

Taya Graham:

A little bit, but hopefully the Democrat strategists out there who are spending millions of dollars, maybe they’ll take some time to listen to independent journalists as well as listen to the public, and let them know that they have an authenticity issue and they need to find a way to break the inertia and their Get in Line platform, essentially.

Stephen Janis:

Well, their Get in Line order of things that has led them to…

Taya Graham:

So they’re not considered tortoises anymore.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Well, OK.

Stephen Janis:

That was great!

Taya Graham:

That’s our great free help for the Democratic Party. It didn’t cost $20 million. Maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. But I want to thank everyone who’s watching for joining us for this first of a series of Inequality Watchdog Reacts on The Real News Network. And if you have a topic you’d like us to explore, just throw it in the comments and we’ll take a look. And if you want to see more of our inequality reporting, just take a look for our playlist on The Real News Network channel, and I look forward to seeing you all soon. Right, Stephen?

Stephen Janis:

Yep. We’ll be back.

Taya Graham:

We’ll be back. And as always, please be safe out there.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament has confirmed the unprecedented punishments proposed for opposition indigenous Te Pāti Māori MPs who performed a haka in protest against the Treaty Principles Bill.

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi will be suspended for 21 days, and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke suspended for seven days, taking effect immediately.

Opposition parties tried to reject the recommendation, but did not have the numbers to vote it down.

• READ MORE: NZ’s Treaty Principles Bill haka highlights tensions between Māori tikanga and rules of Parliament
• Other haka reports

Te Pati Maori MPs speak after being suspended.  Video: RNZ/Mark Papalii

The heated debate to consider the proposed punishment came to an end just before Parliament was due to rise.

Waititi moved to close the debate and no party disagreed, ending the possibility of it carrying on in the next sitting week.

Leader of the House Chris Bishop — the only National MP who spoke — kicked off the debate earlier in the afternoon saying it was “regrettable” some MPs did not vote on the Budget two weeks ago.

Bishop had called a vote ahead of Budget Day to suspend the privileges report debate to ensure the Te Pāti Māori MPs could take part in the Budget, but not all of them turned up.

Robust, rowdy debate
The debate was robust and rowdy with both the deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger and temporary speaker Tangi Utikare repeatedly having to ask MPs to quieten down.

Tākuta Ferris spoke first for Te Pāti Māori, saying the haka was a “signal of humanity” and a “raw human connection”.

He said Māori had faced acts of violence for too long and would not be silenced by “ignorance or bigotry”.

“Is this really us in 2025, Aotearoa New Zealand?” he asked the House.

“Everyone can see the racism.”

He said the Privileges Committee’s recommendations were not without precedent, noting the fact Labour MP Peeni Henare, who also participated in the haka, did not face suspension.

Henare attended the committee and apologised, which contributed to his lesser sanction.

‘Finger gun’ gesture
MP Parmjeet Parmar — a member of the Committee — was first to speak on behalf of ACT, and referenced the hand gesture — or “finger gun” — that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made in the direction of ACT MPs during the haka.

Parmar told the House debate could be used to disagree on ideas and issues, and there was not a place for intimidating physical gestures.

Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said New Zealand’s Parliament could lead the world in terms of involving the indigenous people.

She said the Green Party strongly rejected the committee’s recommendations and proposed their amendment of removing suspensions, and asked the Te Pāti Māori MPs be censured instead.

Davidson said the House had evolved in the past — such as the inclusion of sign language and breast-feeding in the House.

She said the Greens were challenging the rules, and did not need an apology from Te Pāti Māori.

NZ First leader Winston Peters said Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party speeches so far showed “no sincerity, saying countless haka had taken place in Parliament but only after first consulting the Speaker.

“They told the media they were going to do it, but they didn’t tell the Speaker did they?

‘Bunch of extremists’
“The Māori party are a bunch of extremists,” Peters said, “New Zealand has had enough of them”.

Peters was made to apologise after taking aim at Waititi, calling him “the one in the cowboy hat” with “scribbles on his face” [in reference to his traditional indigenous moko — tatoo]. He continued afterward, describing Waititi as possessing “anti-Western values”.

Labour’s Willie Jackson congratulated Te Pāti Māori for the “greatest exhibition of our culture in the House in my lifetime”.

Jackson said the Treaty bill was a great threat, and was met by a great haka performance. He was glad the ACT Party was intimidated, saying that was the whole point of doing the haka.

He also called for a bit of compromise from Te Pāti Māori — encouraging them to say sorry — but reiterated Labour’s view the sanctions were out of proportion with past indiscretions in the House.

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the debate “would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious”.

“Get an absolute grip,” she said to the House, arguing the prime minister “is personally responsible” if the House proceeds with the committee’s proposed sanctions.

Eye of the beholder
She accused National’s James Meager of “pointing a finger gun” at her — the same gesture coalition MPs had criticised Ngarewa-Packer for during her haka. The Speaker accepted he had not intended to; Swarbrick said it was an example where the interpretation could be in the eye of the beholder.

She said if the government could “pick a punishment out of thin air” that was “not a democracy”, putting New Zealand in very dangerous territory.

An emotional Maipi-Clarke said she had been silent on the issue for a long time, the party’s voices in haka having sent shockwaves around the world. She questioned whether that was why the MPs were being punished.

“Since when did being proud of your culture make you racist?”

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” she said, calling the Treaty Principles bill a “dishonourable vote”.

She had apologised to the Speaker and accepted the consequence laid down on the day, but refused to apologise. She listed other incidents in Parliament that resulted in no punishment.

NZ Parliament TV: Te Pāti Māori Privileges committee debate.  Video: RNZ

Maipi-Clarke called for the Treaty of Waitangi to be recognised in the Constitution Act, and for MPs to be required to honour it by law.

‘Clear pathway forward’
“The pathway forward has never been so clear,” she said.

ACT’s Nicole McKee said there were excuses being made for “bad behaviour”, that the House was for making laws and having discussions, and “this is not about the haka, this is about process”.

She told the House she had heard no good ideas from the Te Pāti Māori, who she said resorted to intimidation when they did not get their way, but the MPs needed to “grow up” and learn to debate issues. She hoped 21 days would give them plenty of time to think about their behaviour.

Labour MP and former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe started by saying there were “no winners in this debate”, and it was clear to him it was the government, not the Parliament, handing out the punishments.

He said the proposed sanctions set a precedent for future penalties, and governments might use it as a way to punish opposition, imploring National to think twice.

He also said an apology from Te Pāti Māori would “go a long way”, saying they had a “huge opportunity” to have a legacy in the House, but it was their choice — and while many would agree with the party there were rules and “you can’t have it both ways”.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said there had been many instances of misinterpretations of the haka in the House and said it was unclear why they were being punished, “is it about the haka . . . is about the gun gestures?”

“Not one committee member has explained to us where 21 days came from,” he said.

Hat and ‘scribbles’ response
Waititi took aim at Peters over his comments targeting his hat and “scribbles” on his face.

He said the haka was an elevation of indigenous voice and the proposed punishment was a “warning shot from the colonial state that cannot stomach” defiance.

Waititi said that throughout history when Māori did not play ball, the “coloniser government” reached for extreme sanctions, ending with a plea to voters: “Make this a one-term government, enrol, vote”.

He brought out a noose to represent Māori wrongfully put to death in the past, saying “interpretation is a feeling, it is not a fact . . .  you’ve traded a noose for legislation”.

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.

Between discontinuing Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage for coverage for small businesses owners, family caregivers, and millions of Americans, and kicking 7.8 million Americans off of Medicaid, the Republican tax scam will make basic necessities like food and healthcare more expensive for most Americans in order to pay for tax cuts for themselves, their wealthy donors, and giant corporations.

In April, a dozen congressional Republicans vowed to preserve Medicaid, saying:

“We cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.”

They voted for the bill and its cuts to Medicaid anyways. Now, millions of Americans are staring down cuts to their healthcare while six of those congressional Republicans stand to personally benefit from passing the tax scam.

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

Tuesday’s national election follows months of turmoil after Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached for briefly imposing martial law in a move that sent shockwaves through its democracy.

Lee won by a comfortable margin over his main conservative rival, Kim Moon Soo, raising questions about relations with South Korea’s key ally, the United States, and its main adversary North Korea.

Lee has repeatedly stressed Washington as the foundation of Seoul’s foreign policy, as Yoon did, but he’s expected to take a softer approach toward Pyongyang.

(Lee Jin-man/Pool via Reuters)

During the campaign, Lee promised active engagement with North Korea, unlike Yoon, but the big question is whether North Korea is interested in resuming dialogue.

RFA Korean’s Jaewoo Park looks at whether it’s possible for South Korea to revive the spirit of 2018, when there was a high level of engagement between North and South and U.S. President Donald Trump held historic summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The high-level diplomacy ultimately failed to prevent the North advancing its nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang has since hatched closer ties with Moscow and sent troops and weapons to assist Russia’s war against Ukraine.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jaewoo Park for RFA Korean.

This article was produced by WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, a 2023 ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Richard L. Bean, the longtime superintendent of the East Tennessee juvenile detention center that bears his name, abruptly announced Friday that he will be stepping down. His decision to retire came the day after the Knox County mayor said he had lost confidence in Bean’s leadership.

Bean, 84, has been superintendent of the juvenile detention center since 1972. A 2023 investigation from WPLN and ProPublica found the facility was using solitary confinement more than other detention centers in the state. Sometimes the children were locked up alone for hours or days at a time. That kind of confinement was also used as punishment, in violation of state law.

At the time, Bean broadly defended the practices at the facility, saying he wished he had more punitive abilities and that people who pushed back didn’t understand what was necessary. After the story ran, the head of the detention center’s governing board told local TV station WBIR that he thought the Bean center was “the best facility in the state of Tennessee.”

Renewed scrutiny on the detention center began last week when Bean dismissed two employees, including the facility’s only nurse. The nurse’s termination was first reported by Knox News, and the mayor described her dismissal as “retaliation” because she had reported to state investigators significant issues with medical care at the facility, which she said went unchecked and unaddressed by Bean.

On Wednesday, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and juvenile court Judge Tim Irwin wrote a letter to Bean demanding he reinstate both employees. Irwin is a nonvoting member of the center’s governing board of trustees but selects one of its three voting members.

“These dismissals may well lead to lawsuits against you and the county,” the letter reads, “which could cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The following day, Jacobs wrote a letter to the governor calling for immediate state intervention and detailing issues with medication in the facility going missing, errors with medication reporting and “even medication going to the wrong detainees.”

In a public video statement, Jacobs said he had “no confidence that these issues will be addressed with the center’s current leadership or the governing board that oversees the Bean juvenile detention center.” He called for the Knox County Sheriff’s Office to take over operation of the center but said he has limited power to intervene.

By Friday, Bean announced that he would leave his post as superintendent in two months after he gets the facility “shipshape,” according to a press release. He did not respond to requests for comment but said in the press release that his last day will be Aug. 1.

During WPLN and ProPublica’s investigation of the Bean center, documents revealed that state officials repeatedly had put the Bean center on corrective action plans and had documented its improper use of seclusion yet continued to approve the center’s license to operate without the facility changing its ways.

“What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” Bean told WPLN during a 2023 visit to the facility. “You don’t have a problem if you do that.” Most of the children in the Bean center are not in for murder and instead are awaiting court dates after being charged with a crime.

When asked if he was worried he might get in trouble for the way he was running the facility, Bean said, “If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio.

Here’s a blub — a promotional positive statement about the book:

“We are in a fight for our lives against a rising authoritarian tide, and this clear-eyed, compelling, clarion call of a book has a message everyone needs to hear. We will not save ourselves if we do not also fight for the lives of others–including non-human animals. No one is better positioned than Will Potter to connect the dots between fascism and factory farming, and he does so with energy, conviction, and incredible insight.”

— Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

I’m digging the book he sent me. Stay TUNED.

Yes indeed, things have gotten really really worse, and the book thus far is about ag-gag, the history of those laws, and we go back farther than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, way back to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Even farther back to Matthew in that book about bearing witness, or Islam and the concept of being a martyr, witness, whistleblower.

Oh, I recall this bullshit interview/debate on Democracy Now with Will Potter and the schill goofy woman working for the lobby, man, and the manufactured balance, the false balance, the broken equivalency.

Thirteen Years ago: States Crack Down On Animal Rights Activists And Their Undercover Videos

My most recent radio interview about to hit the airways June 18, KYAQ.org, but DV and Paulokirk readers get the preview here: The right to community. And that is what the politicians and their thug dictators, the corporations, the polluters and the destroyers, want DESTROYED forever. The-Right-to/for/because of Community

So, moving on before I get back to reading Will’s new book, the infamy of AmeriKKKa and the world, as we slaughter not just the billions of birds and bovine and swine, but our fellow human beings.

Bearing witness? Goddamn!

Child Gunned Down by the IDF, His Crime? Being Born Palestinian: Israel is annihilating Palestinian children. Amer Rabee was one of them

Amer had a name. He had a smile. He was loved. He was real. And now, he is gone. We owe him more than silence. We owe Gaza’s starving children more than silence.

*****

I talk about this EVERYDAY — how do we go on without YELLING at the top of our lungs everywhere all the goddamn time?

Progress

[Palestine Will Be Free]

Oh, what great progress! We have come so far

What glorious days I wake up to!
What mirth and joy the mornings conjure.
After starting my day with coffee and Wagyu steak,
I tap-dance to work and present my deck.

All fun and games with the friends at work,
As we discuss last night’s game we streamed.
“Oh, how he shot — and the one he missed —
They should build him a statue in the city’s midst.”

At noon, I got the letter with the bonus check —
My hard work is really stacking the deck!
That called for a celebration, so we went
To this exquisite bar a colleague had picked.

We did good business this year, my boss said,
As our machines were deployed across the East and the West.
We’re ramping up production — the demand is high.
I already smell the next check — oh, how I fly!

We wrapped up another busy day at work,
As we built more machines to send across the pond.
On the way home, I called my spouse,
And we went to her favourite: Roundhouse.

As we got home, on the TV they showed
One of our products being dropped by the shore.
Our President announced, “No holds will be barred,
In support of our friends who always want more.”

Smacking my lips, I looked up the scrip,
Giddy as a kid, I slept like a pig.
More work tomorrow, as we must ship more
Of our fearsome products to our friends by the shore.

Oh, what great progress! We have come so far.
With my MIT degree, I have become a star.
My machines hum low as they cross the sea,
Carving silence where children used to be.

*****

More of the monsters, the criminals, the continuing criminal enterprises of finance and predatory and disaster and penury and polluting capitalism:

JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon calls on US to stockpile bullets, rare earth instead of bitcoin!

Crime boss in a 5,000 dollar suit:

“We should be stockpiling bullets,” he continued.

“Like, you know, the military guys tell you that, you know, if there’s a war in the South China Sea, we have missiles for seven days. Okay, come on. I mean, we can’t say that with a straight face and think that’s okay. So we know what to do. We just got to now go about doing it. Get the people together, roll up our sleeves, you know, have the debates.”

And so the clown show is so on track to take the USA down the path of intellectual-spiritual-agency starvation. No one in the NBC piece is railing against the military and the fool Trump, no-sir-ee.

Army says Trump’s military parade could cause $16 million in damage to Washington streets

The repair costs are part of the estimated $45 million price tag for the upcoming parade.

Bone spurs Trump, man, what a complete Chief Fraud.

“We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it,” Trump added.

The parade will be part of a massive celebration in downtown Washington that includes a number of events, historical displays and a demonstration by the Army’s famous parachute team, the Golden Knights.

The parade itself will include about 130 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 tanks, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 28 Stryker armored fighting vehicles and a number of vehicles towing artillery launchers. More than 50 helicopters will also participate in an “extensive flyover” in the nation’s capital.

The event will also bring more than 9,000 soldiers from around the country to Washington, about 7,000 of whom will march in the parade itself. The event will also include at least eight Army bands, and some troops will ride on the nearly three dozen horses and two mules expected to march as part of a historical section of the parade.

[Photo: Poison Ivy League school Harvard!]

And you thought colleges were places of sanity and caring? Forget about it.

As colleges halt affinity graduations, students of color plan their own cultural celebrations. Affinity graduations recognize the range “of challenges and obstacles” that students from minority backgrounds face as they work toward their degrees, said one professor.

Death spiral in almost 100 percent of American life:

The Harvard joins many other institutions across the country that have canceled affinity graduations after the federal cracked down on funding for colleges. Notre Dame canceled its Lavender Graduation for 50 LGBTQ students, with members of the university’s Alumni Rainbow Community and the Notre Dame Club of Greater Louisville stepping in to host an independent ceremony this month.

Wichita State University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky also canceled some or all of their affinity ceremonies. The Hispanic Educators Association of Nevada said it canceled its event for Latino students because of a lack of financial support.

This is what education once again means to the perversions called US Secretary of Ed.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her department will give the state ten days to sign an agreement rescinding its Native American mascot ban and apologizing to Native Americans for having discriminated against them and attempted to “erase” their history.

JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York education department, dismissed McMahon’s visit as “political theater” and said the school district was doing a “grave disservice” to its students by refusing to consult with local tribes about their concerns.

“These representatives will tell them, as they have told us, that certain Native American names and images perpetuate negative stereotypes and are demonstrably harmful to children,” he said in a statement.

You feeling the dictator’s blues yet? President Trump has long called for escalating the U.S. drug war against Mexican cartels and wants tougher penalties for dealers selling fentanyl and other street drugs in American communities. “I am ready for it, the death penalty, if you deal drugs,” Trump said during a meeting with state governors in February, where he said dealers are too often treated with a “slap on the wrist.”

But despite his tough rhetoric, Trump has sparked controversy by pardoning a growing number of convicted drug dealers, including this week’s move to grant clemency to Larry Hoover, 74, who was serving multiple life sentences in federal prison for crimes linked to his role leading the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples.

“Larry Hoover was the head of perhaps the most pernicious, efficient drug operation in the United States,” Safer said. “They sold over $100 million of drugs a year in the city of Chicago alone. They were responsible for countless murders. They supported their drug territories with ruthless violence.”

*****

A LITTLE pushback?

What? Everything about Trump, man, is the most perverse, weird and dystopian and of course, Snake Oil Salesmanship and Three Card Monty and Chapter 11-13 full bore.

Not digging the Catholic Church, but can you imagine making rabbis tell the truth, the Fortune 300 or 5,000 go before a board of truth and reconciliation? Imagine if the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Maiming Polluting Poisoning Starving Occupied Palestine had to disclose that client-extortionist privilege? Patient-Doctor confidentiality? Doesn’t exist, and DOGE is coming after the food stampers and the disability pittance recipients while the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires get to keep their dirty felonious secrets, well, secrets.

The sickness throughout the land, as Flag Day and Rapist in CHief’s B-Day and the Military Uniformed Mercenary Hired Guns Army have their anniversary, and we continue writing at Dissident Voice and elsewhere the crimes, man, the inhumanity, the absolute Orwellian and Phillip K. Dick nature of this dystopia.

*****

Some of us are tired of surviving

For many in Gaza, death isn’t always the worst outcome.

Mohammed R Mhawish

May 31, 2025

What kind of world forces people to beg for death to feel peace?

I’ve survived so many times now I’ve lost count. I was pulled from the rubble with my son after our home was flattened, walked for hours carrying a bag of bread and the bones of what once was a life, fled neighborhoods, towns, and streets we once called home, only to find no home waiting on the other side, and every time I survived, something else died. Sometimes, it was a friend. Sometimes a cousin and sometimes a colleague. Some other times it was the sound of my son’s laughter and my own belief that living means something.

Survival is not a blessing.

I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain. People wake up every day in a different place than where they were yesterday and find it more crowded and more tired and more broken. Stepping over children sleeping on cardboard under trees is now a normal thing, and the days are all the same. So are the struggles of hunger and water and the bitter metallic taste. The same questions about where we should go next, what we will eat today, and who else we’ve lost.

A reporter captured the moment at midnight, as the sky lit up like day from illumination flares.

Watch the post on Instagram

The caption reads: “We are dying. The Israeli bombing is relentless. Women and children are the victims. No safe places left. No food, no water. Famine is spreading rapidly.”

I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.”

She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.

Another man in Deir Al Balah was standing in the middle of a bombed street and sweeping glass and dirt into a pile. He’d lost two of his daughters, and when I asked him why he didn’t leave earlier, he said, “I didn’t want to spend the last moments of my life running.”

It’s neither courage nor resistance, only exhaustion, the kind that comes with an understanding that in Gaza there is no such thing as a safe place. We just run until our legs and souls give out. And even if we make it out alive, we still carry the weight of every person who didn’t.

In one video, a child sits on top of the rubble sobbing. His father is still trapped beneath the debris.]

Watch the video on X

People always say survival is the goal and we’re lucky to have made it. But there’s no such thing as luck about people dissolving slowly and dying in slow motion.

During my months reporting from there, I saw children who don’t speak anymore. I once saw a boy in Jabalia who used to love cartoons but now just sits and stares at the wall. When I tried to ask for his name, he covered his ears. His mother said he hasn’t spoken since the missile hit their home and took his sister.

When someone cries out of an injury, we know they’re still holding on. But when they just stare at the ceiling as they bleed, we know they’ve already left, even if their body hasn’t.

There is nothing noble about this kind of survival. There is no aftercare or healing.

A young Palestinian student, Shayma, describes what it’s like to be forcibly displaced amid the devastation and having nowhere to go. The camera pans across the flattened neighborhood where she is sheltering. aljazeeraenglish

We don’t want to die. But when some of us fantasize about death, it’s because we’re full of everything that hurts. Our moms whisper that they envy those who died peacefully and quickly. I myself used to shower in cold water at night just to feel something cold. My neighbor lost her baby to dehydration around the time my son and I were diagnosed with malnutrition in March 2024. She still carries his blanket in her bag.

And here my friends tell me to stay strong and safe. But I don’t want strength anymore. I don’t want to be the one who survived everything. I don’t want my son to grow up believing that pain is something you get used to or that losing everything and still breathing means you’re lucky.

We all have our tricks for trying to suffer a little less. Some stop talking about the people they lost because even saying a name is unbearable. Some lie to themselves and pretend their loved ones are still displaced just somewhere they can’t reach. Some stop eating because food feels like a betrayal when the person you used to share it with is gone.

I once believed that writing would help me make sense of it and that putting these stories down would somehow soften them. But even that doesn’t work anymore. I can’t keep writing about mass graves and call it documenting and narrating pain while still living inside it.

There is nothing poetic about this grief. It is ugly and it is heavy and it is repetitive. Sometimes I walk for hours just not to think and keep my body moving while my mind shuts down, or just to delay the next memory from arriving.

I still wake up sometimes believing we’re back home and feel like I’ll hear my mother’s voice and make coffee in our old kitchen.

The truth is, survival, when it’s endless and hollow and filled with nothing but hunger and mourning and fear… it begins to feel like a punishment.

We are alive in ways no one in this world would envy.

So when the people in Gaza no longer pray for safety, it’s because we’ve seen too much and lost too many.

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

It’s graduation season in the United States, and many brave students are taking the opportunity to demonstrate support for Palestinian rights despite an ongoing campus crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. We play excerpts from commencement and graduation addresses at MIT and Harvard and are joined by a student who spoke at Harvard Divinity School’s graduation ceremony. Zehra Imam, a Muslim associate chaplain at MIT, recounts the collaborative, interfaith process of writing her speech with Christian and Jewish classmates and explains why she decided to quote students from Gaza in her address. “This is a moment that calls for courage,” Imam says.

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

DOGE isn’t going anywhere, according to the Trump administration’s own officials. Russell Vought seems to be the new boss in town, but he and Musk’s visions have been aligned from the start. Musk endorsed Vought’s view of the unconstitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act and said that DOGE would work “closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed all the way back in November.

In response to Musk’s departure from DOGE, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser released the following statement: “There is no daylight between Elon Musk and Russ Vought on the aim of greenlighting corporate abuse, as anyone can see from their joint destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. DOGE’s Musk-tied staffers have already burrowed into the government, and having a new boss who has coordinated extensively with Musk isn’t likely to change their actual actions much at all. Musk’s departure obscures but does not actually change the continuity of DOGE’s staff and mission to destroy everything that protects the public from the depredations of the most rapacious oligarchs.”

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

President Donald Trump has vowed to go to the Supreme Court to keep his tariffs in place after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw a court temporarily reinstate the measures, soon after two courts blocked most of the tariffs, saying Trump overstepped his presidential authority. Trump has been infuriated by the legal challenges and lashed out on social media against the Federalist Society and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. We get an update from Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that Trump has invoked to justify his global tariffs. She says the fate of Trump’s tariffs remain uncertain, given that the powers available under the IEEPA “have to be used to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States, and they cannot be used for any other reason.”

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

On an overcast day, a helicopter carrying three salmon scientists zoomed up the valley. As it neared the lake, the pilot banked to the right and flew over the south side of the basin, whirring over a narrow outlet where it drains into the Tulsequah River. He landed on a beach of small boulders and the researchers clambered out one by one.

“We don’t think there are fish here yet,” said one of them, Jon Moore, an aquatic ecologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. “But there will be soon.” 
The lake, so new to the landscape that it doesn’t have an official name, is still too cold and murky for salmon. But that’s likely to change soon: As the Tulsequah Glacier above it retreats, the lake is getting warmer and clearer, becoming a more attractive environment for migrating fish. “It’s going to be popping off,” Moore said.

It’s among hundreds of ice-fed lakes, rivers, and streams in Alaska and western Canada that could turn into prime fish habitat as the planet gets hotter. These new salmon grounds could help counteract other threats to the fish from climate change, such as warming seas and drought. And they could bolster a commercial fishing industry that generates millions of dollars for the state each year. 

The disappearance of glaciers is also creating opportunities for the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Like migrating salmon, mineral exploration companies are moving quickly into areas exposed by melting ice, hoping to strike the next big lode. 

With gold prices booming and demand soaring for copper, a metal necessary for making solar panels and electric cars, mining corporations have backed a number of major projects in the region. The Canadian government is paying for roads and power lines to improve access to them.

This mineral rush promises jobs and revenue for some towns and First Nations in northern Canada. But it’s troubling to many Alaska fishermen, environmental advocates, and Indigenous leaders living downstream, near several salmon-rich rivers that start in Canada and head west across the international border. The Tulsequah River is a major tributary of the Taku River, which runs about 50 miles from British Columbia’s Coast Mountains to the Pacific Ocean just south of Juneau, Alaska. The Taku supports iconic runs of sockeye and coho salmon that power commercial fishing businesses in both countries. In 2023, Moore and other researchers warned in the journal Science that, barring key policy reforms, future mines could impair future salmon habitat in glacier-fed watersheds like the Tulsequah and Taku. 

Alaska Native leaders have called on British Columbia’s provincial government to clamp down on mining in the region, and some First Nations are working to restrict mineral exploration and development in their traditional territories. But Canadian officials largely support the proposed mines, and the Trump administration has stayed quiet on the issue of mining near the border, though Canada’s mineral riches have reportedly attracted President Donald Trump’s interest.

On the Tulsequah River, the stakes are clear. A few miles downstream from the new lake, a ribbon of rust-colored water flows into the waterway: acid runoff from a former gold mine. Contaminants from the Tulsequah Chief mine have been flowing into the river ever since the operation shut down in the 1950s. Alaska’s elected officials, salmon advocates, and Indigenous nations have urged British Columbia’s government and mining companies to clean it up for decades without success. 

The pollution is confined to just a short stretch of river — and fish, including some salmon, still swim in the waters below it. Still, environmental groups often cite the uncontained acid drainage as an example of what can go wrong with mining.

The Tulsequah Chief mine stopped producing gold more than 60 years ago but still leaks acid drainage into the Tulsequah River. Environmental groups often cite the pollution, which is confined to a relatively short stretch of river, as an example of what can go wrong with hard rock mining.
Max Graham / Grist

A small Vancouver-based company, Canagold, wants to reopen and expand a different gold mine on the other side of the river from the shuttered Tulsequah Chief. The opening of a new mine could coincide with the expansion of salmon grounds in the upper Tulsequah watershed. Moore and his colleagues hope that their projections of emerging fish habitat in the lake that drains into the Tulsequah River will be incorporated into environmental assessments for new mining proposals like Canagold’s. 

In some watersheds, nearly all of the projected habitat lies within a few miles of mining claims. Even though no fish swim in those lakes and streams now, that could change in just 20 or 30 years, the lifespan of a typical mine, said Chris Sergeant, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Washington who works with Moore on the Tulsequah and nearby rivers. Sergeant wants regulators to consider this prospect before they approve a mine. Accounting for this future habitat is especially important, he added, “because there just aren’t that many places where salmon are doing well.”

News articles describing the effects of climate change on salmon usually tell an alarming story: Fast-warming oceans and rivers are threatening an iconic fish that thrives in cold water, while record droughts are drying up their streams. 

Some of these grim effects were on display last September about 250 miles south of the Tulsequah Glacier at Meziadin Lake, a long basin ringed by hemlocks and firs, near the small mining town of Stewart, British Columbia. It’s one of the province’s most abundant spawning areas for sockeye salmon.  

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In a typical year, hundreds of thousands of sockeye fill Meziadin Lake and the surrounding creeks. Two creeks that feed the lake, Hanna and Tintina, have a reputation for being especially prolific. Each September they swell bank to bank with sockeye, splashing, spawning, and dying en masse. These runs can be so plentiful that wolf packs and grizzly bears sometimes catch fish within feet of each other.

But last year, during what should have been the peak of Tintina’s sockeye run, only a handful of salmon made it upstream. After a summer of high temperatures and drought, the creek was flowing at its lowest level in recent history, said Kevin Koch, a fish and wildlife biologist who works for the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, a First Nation whose traditional territory encompasses the area. Below a highway bridge, the slow, sad creek looked more like a pond. A thick mat of algae blanketed its bottom. 

Two years ago, “you would have seen hundreds of fish,” Koch said, looking down from the bridge on a crisp day last fall. He saw none.

Hanna Creek, a couple miles away, also trickled at a historic low, according to Koch — though some ruby-red fish still wriggled in its mucky water. 

What’s happening at Hanna and Tintina is only part of the picture, though. As the planet warms, a third creek that flows into Meziadin Lake has also transformed in a stunning way, but one that’s actually helping salmon.

For a long time, Strohn Creek gushed out of a huge glacier, and hardly any sockeye swam in its turbid water. While glacial runoff helps make some streams more habitable for salmon by keeping them cool, it also can have the opposite effect: Streams that flow directly from glaciers are often near freezing, too cold even for the cold-loving fish. And they’re full of silt, which blocks the sunlight that forms the basis of the food chain. Salmon eat insects and tiny marine animals called zooplankton; the insects and zooplankton eat algae; and the algae feeds off the sun.

As the glacier above Strohn shriveled up and retreated from a mountain pass in the second half of the 20th century, its runoff started to drain down the other side of the Coast Mountains, away from Strohn Creek. Without a torrent of ice melt, the creek lost its silt and warmed up enough that, after a few decades, salmon now spawn there in the thousands. “There was this huge shift happening before our eyes,” said Naxginkw Tara Marsden, who directs the Gitanyow Nation’s sustainability program. 

Approaching Strohn Creek to observe the peak of last year’s sockeye run, Koch brushed aside alder branches and yelled to alert lurking brown bears. 

“This spot is one of the most pain-in-the-ass spots for grizzlies, where I’m taking you,” Koch said. “So sorry about that.” 

The stream came into view. Half-eaten fish carcasses were strewn along its banks, and dozens of bright-red salmon splashed in its shallow blue waters. Their tails slapped the surface as they fought against the current.

In some years, more sockeye return to Strohn than to Hanna or Tintina Creek. Scientists think it could be a bellwether: There are countless creeks like Strohn across Alaska and western Canada — glacial streams that could transform into salmon havens as the ice above them melts. Fish are turning up in these new spots surprisingly quickly. Hundreds of miles from Strohn Creek, scientists found pink salmon in a stream in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park less than a decade after it emerged in the wake of a receding glacier.

According to a paper in Nature that Moore co-authored in 2021, nearly 4,000 miles of new salmon streams could appear in Alaska and northwestern Canada by the end of the century. The gains could be “enormous,” Moore said.

And that estimate — one of the only published projections of emerging salmon habitat near glaciers — doesn’t account for new lakes, like the unnamed one below the Tulsequah Glacier, or streams or rivers that already support a handful of salmon but could boast a lot more. By one rough, unpublished estimate from Moore and his colleagues, the extent of lake habitat accessible to salmon in the 4.5-million-acre Taku River watershed could double over the next 100 years.

This all sounds promising for a species under siege, but salmon researchers warn that the region’s mining boom could stand in the way. 

In the Nass River watershed, which encompasses Strohn Creek and Meziadin Lake, some 99 percent of emerging salmon habitat is within roughly 3 miles of mineral claims, according to Moore and Sergeant’s study. 

Around the same time that Gitanyow leaders first witnessed the salmon bonanza in Strohn Creek, about eight years ago, they also discovered that companies looking for valuable minerals had staked mining claims in the mountains upstream, including beneath some of the small glaciers and snowfields that drain into the creek. 

It was a glimpse of the mineral rush that now spans hundreds of miles of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, from Meziadin Lake in the south to the Tulsequah Glacier in the north. Nicknamed the Golden Triangle for its metal-rich rocks, the region first lured prospectors 150 years ago. They led horses across glaciers, and tunneled thousands of feet into the ice using steam-powered equipment and sleds. 

Today, they travel by truck and haul drills by helicopter. Driven by record-high gold prices and demand for copper, northwest British Columbia drew some $250 million in investments in mineral exploration last year, accounting for more than 60 percent of the industry’s total expenditures across the province, according to British Columbia’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. A government report in 2022 estimated that more than $900 billion worth of metals could be sitting beneath the Golden Triangle. That figure stands at well over $1 trillion with today’s record-high gold prices.

The mining industry’s mark on northwest British Columbia is hard to miss. Ore trucks thunder along the region’s main highway, hauling loads from a large copper mine, built a decade ago and now set to expand. A hefty 200-mile transmission line skirts the same road: a $500 million project developed in 2014 largely to power new mines with hydroelectricity. Large signs bearing the names of mining companies — Teck, Newmont, Skeena Resources — stand beside gated gravel roads that spur off the two-lane highway.

Deeper in the Coast Mountains, the gold and copper rush happens mostly out of sight, across roadless, heavily glaciated terrain. Roughly one-fifth of all the mining claims in northwest B.C. are covered by glaciers, according to a report released last year by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a global watchdog group. As those glaciers melt, they’re exposing outcrops of gold and copper that are luring mineral companies, whose geologists then drill into bedrock freshly exposed to the sun after thousands of years under ice. Mining companies are even staking claims beneath glaciers, poised to move in as soon as the ice melts. 

“The glacier might melt at some point, and you want to be the first person” to see the rocks beneath it, said Matthew Reece, a U.S. Forest Service geologist based in Juneau who oversees mining in Alaska’s national forests.

Vancouver-based Scottie Resources Corp., one of the companies with claims in the mountains near Strohn Creek, has a few prospects that could attract more investors as nearby ice thaws. Hoping to find more gold, the company is drilling into the rock near a long-shuttered underground mine in a mountain partially covered by a glacier. Old tunnels, built decades ago, allowed miners to dig up just a sliver of the deposit. Scottie Resources is discovering more gold as the ice above it melts, according to Thomas Mumford, the company’s vice president of exploration. 

“We are literally the first humans to look at those rocks,” Mumford told Grist.
Not far from Scottie’s claims, another small Canadian firm, Goliath Resources, recently discovered gold and copper in a small island of rock surrounded by a massive ice field. “I get the question, ‘Why hadn’t someone drilled it before?’” Roger Rosmus, Goliath’s chief executive, said in an interview posted on YouTube last year. “It was actually buried under the glacier and permanent snowpack, which are no longer there. We got lucky.”

Reviewing filings from Canadian securities regulators, corporate presentations, and marketing materials for investors, Grist identified more than 20 companies that tout the promise of melting glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia. That number, likely an undercount, could grow as demand increases for metals like copper, and as more ice disappears. Last year, a private company named B-ALL Syndicate, partly funded by Goliath, launched a “large-scale exploration and prospecting program” aimed specifically at melting snow and ice across the region. 

Most of these companies, including Goliath and Scottie, are small and based in Canada, where they can take advantage of generous tax policies. They tend to be funded by investors who like taking risks, or are eager for tax write-offs. Just a tiny fraction of prospects ever become producing mines. 

Government support can help boost their chances, though — and the industry in northwest British Columbia has received a good deal of it over the past decade. Just last year, Canada’s federal government and British Columbia’s provincial government committed $140 million to upgrade the region’s only major road, Highway 37, explicitly to support production of “critical minerals.” Those are elements, like copper, that Canadian officials have deemed essential for national security and renewable energy.Some Alaskans, including the state’s Republican U.S. senators have worried that funding for Canadian mines could also come from the U.S. government, potentially boosting mining upstream from Alaska and endangering the state’s fishing industry. The Biden administration directed tens of millions of dollars to mineralprojects in Canada, also in the name of national security and clean energy as it considered Canada akin to a domestic source.

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The Trump administration has yet to say if that funding will continue. Trump himself has signaled strong support for mining on the American side of the border: On his first day in office in January, he signed an executive order to develop Alaska’s minerals and other resources “to the fullest extent possible.” 

But Trump has also tried to unravel the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which established tax credits and other financial incentives that have spurred mining in both the U.S. and, indirectly, Canada. And some analysts have warned that certain tariffs Trump has threatened to put on Canadian goods could hamper Canada’s mining industry and the U.S. mineral supply chain.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has called for a halt in sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to Canadian mines, citing past pollution, like the old, acid-leaking gold mine along the Tulsequah River. “I join many in Southeast Alaska who do not believe that our pristine waters are adequately protected,” she wrote to Biden in 2023. 

Murkowski’s plea came even though she has supported mining elsewhere in the state. Earlier this year, she praised Trump’s Alaska-focused order.

Many Alaska Native leaders have also been lobbying against mining in Canada upstream from their communities. Worried about threats to salmon and other traditional food sources, the biggest Indigenous nation in Southeast Alaska — the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska — wants the B.C. government to put a hold on mine permitting in transboundary watersheds until Canada and the U.S. agree to a framework for resolving mining disputes in the region. The council has also asked for a permanent ban on storing waste behind large dams above salmon-bearing rivers that cross into Alaska.

Are critical minerals “more critical than our lives?” Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida government, asked an audience of tribal citizens, environmental advocates, and government officials at a conference in Juneau last year. “More critical than the fish?”

Government regulators and industry representatives contend that mining can be done safely, without harming salmon. All mining in British Columbia “is subject to a robust environmental review process, whereby any potential impact to wild salmon habitat must be avoided and mitigated,”according to a spokesperson for the province’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. Regulators in the province ensure that any activity in mountain watersheds “adheres to the highest standards of environmental protection,” he wrote in an email.

The mining industry is also a vital source of jobs and revenue for two First Nations in the region: the Nisga’a and Tahltan. Over the past two decades, those nations have made deals with mining corporations for production royalties or cash payments, as well as commitments to hire their citizens. Tahltan leaders have also signed a series of agreements with the provincial government that gives the Tahltan a voice in regulatory decisions on a few mining projects in the nation’s traditional territory.

While small Canadian companies have been scouring rocks near receding glaciers, publicly traded mining giants have also been investing in prospects across Alaska and B.C. One of North America’s biggest, Newmont Corp., bought a company with two operating mines in northwest B.C. in 2023, and it’s now seeking to develop a third, in partnership with another mining giant, Vancouver-based Teck Resources. 

That development, Galore Creek, would be a massive open-pit copper and gold mine 25 miles from the Alaska border, in an area ringed by receding glaciers. In 2023, Teck and Newmont’s geologists discovered minerals in rocks there that had been covered by ice a few years before. Last year, Canada’s department of natural resources handed the companies $15 million to build a key access road to a proposed processing site.

Galore Creek’s backers are marketing the mine as a climate solution: It’s sitting on an estimated 12 billion pounds of copper, enough to make it one of North America’s biggest sources of the mineral. Since copper is great at conducting electricity, it’s especially useful for building energy equipment like solar panels and transmission lines. S&P Global projected in 2022 that demand for the metal would double by 2035. 

But Teck, Newmont, and other mining corporations that could benefit from copper subsidies aren’t just after copper. Most of them are also looking for gold, which is used mainly for jewelry and in financial markets and considered less important for developing renewable energy than copper and other minerals like lithium and cobalt. The Biden administration didn’t consider gold “critical” but Trump promoted it along with dozens of other minerals in an executive order he signed earlier this year to spur mining nationwide. In addition to the copper that Galore Creek’s owners like to advertise, their mine could yield some 9 million ounces of gold, worth roughly $29 billion at current prices. 

Critics argue that huge corporations shouldn’t be getting clean energy subsidies to dig gold out of the ground. The mining industry’s marketing of critical minerals, while miners largely hunt for gold, is “one of the biggest greenwashing efforts on Earth,” said Mary Catharine Martin, a spokesperson for SalmonState, an Alaska-based mining watchdog group.

One company that’s focused primarily on gold is Canagold, with its proposal to resurrect a mine along the Tulsequah River, some 40 miles from Juneau and about 8 miles downstream from the future sockeye lake that Moore and Sergeant are studying. Canagold bought the site in the 1990s and still hasn’t started producing. Soaring gold prices, driven by Trump’s tariffs and global economic uncertainty, however, have injected new life into the project, known as New Polaris. Canagold has proposed shipping construction materials by barge up the Taku River from Alaska and building an airstrip where the company would load ore concentrate onto planes to fly out of the mountains.

The success of New Polaris hinges in part on a unique agreement between Canagold and the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose traditional territory encompasses the site and the Tulsequah River. Their agreement, announced in 2023, gives the nation a say — by a vote of its citizens — in whether the mine gets built. 

The Taku River Tlingit nation is also a key partner on Moore and Sergeant’s salmon research: The nation’s fisheries coordinator, Mark Connor, co-authored the 2023 policy analysis in Science that first noted the prevalence of mining claims near future salmon habitat. (Marsden, with the Gitanyow nation, was also a co-author on that paper.)

To keep emerging fish habitat intact, Taku River Tlingit established their own protected area, prohibiting mining across 60 percent of the Taku River watershed. In the other 40 percent, the First Nation allows some development with its approval. New Polaris sits in that zone, and the nation’s leaders are confident that Taku River Tlingit citizens will have a say in whether a mine ultimately gets built. 

“We already have verbal agreements with the company that they will not proceed with a mine should our citizens, or the majority of our citizens, not agree with that,” said Rodger Thorlakson, Taku River Tlingit First Nation’s lands and resources manager. 

Canagold, however, doesn’t have similar agreements with Indigenous governments downstream in Alaska. Clarence Laiti, president of the Douglas Indian Association in Juneau, said he’s “very, very concerned” about mining in the Taku River watershed. For decades, Laiti caught salmon for a living at the mouth of the Taku, some 30 miles below New Polaris. “It’s everybody’s river,” he said.

On the beach along the upper stretch of the Tulsequah River, 8 miles upriver from New Polaris, the three salmon scientists — Sergeant, Moore, and Brittany Milner, one of Moore’s doctoral students — unraveled a 30-foot seine fishing net. To learn more about the habitat, they catch, record, and release fish in dozens of spots along the river. They had never seen salmon this far up the river, this close to the new lake. They still sample the spot, though, because they think fish could appear any year as the water warms.

Milner grabbed one end of the long net and stood on shore. Moore took the other end and waded into the water, slowly walking in a circle to corral any fish that might have been lurking. Once again, they caught nothing. 

About a week later, the researchers flew back to check a dozen small, cylindrical minnow traps that they had set in the lake itself. To their astonishment, they found a Dolly Varden, a common species of char, the first fish they’d ever seen in the new lake. 

“It was kind of surreal,” said Milner, who had set the trap in a shallow area near the mouth of a stream that was slightly warmer than the rest of the lake. Dolly Varden, which can tolerate very cold water, often move into glacial lakes and streams before other species. 

“I’m assuming the fish was just in the lake swimming around and was able to find this pocket of a little bit warmer water,” Milner said. “I was really stoked.”

The rest of the traps came up empty: still no salmon. But to Milner and the other scientists, that one Dolly Varden sure looked like a sign of more to come.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who will benefit from melting glaciers? on May 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.

“Republicans are stealing health care from 13.7 million Americans to give trillions in tax handouts to billionaires.

House Budget Committee Republicans only voted against this plan because they want to make it even crueler. Make no mistake, Republicans still plan to bring it to the House floor next week.

Their plan will kill people. It will close hospitals, especially those in rural areas and inner cities, across the country. It will also close nursing homes, since Medicaid pays for over 60 percent of nursing home care.

The ripple effect of these cuts will hit every single person in this country. The hospital closest to you may close. If not, it will become more overburdened as uninsured people are forced to use the emergency room for care.

Unless you are a billionaire, your standard of living and your health care will get worse if this despicable plan becomes law.”

Further reading: Republicans Plan to Rip Medicaid Away from Millions of Seniors — All to Give Tax Cuts to Billionaires

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

Charlie: It’s sweet that you picked up on that. We didn’t really set out to make the record with the idea that it would be self-titled. We were working with a larger body of work and being pushed by our collaborators to be ambitious… Initially we were working with 20-plus songs and we boiled it down to 19. Just having that range, it did feel like a culmination of everything we’ve done as a band so far.

Will: To answer your question, “Do we feel like we’re still introducing ourselves?”: I think in a lot of ways, yeah. I think we’re lucky to have fans who have liked us for some years and then we’re also lucky to have the new fans, too. I think we’re constantly introducing ourselves and I think that’s something you’re required to do as a musician who tours and puts music out—to be available to continue that journey of revealing yourself through the music.

One of the beautiful things to me about Hovvdy is how you have built this fan base over time. Your songs address growth as this thing that’s constantly happening, and I think listeners feel they’re growing beside you. Do you notice that connection or impact?

Will: I think that’s a cool observation. When you find some music, or even a show or something that you can connect to, and that is with you for a long time, there is something to that—feeling like you grow up with the characters, or you grow up with the music, or the music grows up with you. I think we have a lot of fans close to our age and some people who’ve listened to us for a long time through their 20s and into their 30s, like us. It’s a really rewarding thing when people share that our music helped them through something or helped them pass something or navigate something.

Charlie: We use songwriting as a way to process the whole range of emotions, and ideally that comes through in the music and the fans also have that cathartic experience.

I see your music as putting who I am and who I want to be in the same room. It gives me this breathing room, so I have the structure but there’s still progress to be made.

Charlie: I don’t think we’re a band or songwriters that necessarily are singing about humanity or something. We keep it pretty close and pretty hyper-personal. Maybe that’s a way to alleviate the pressure. I don’t think we go into a record being, “Oh, I need to write a song that is going to help someone through some really intense shit in their lives or solve some sort of problem.” We’re just writing about mundane, very common family, relationship, and personal shit.

Can you talk a little bit about how you both started writing songs—even if it was before Hovvdy was formed—and how your process has evolved

Will: I definitely wrote some songs with a high school band and stuff like that… My early to mid-twenties was when we started the band and I had just recently started writing songs again and trying to learn a guitar. As far as our process, I think it’s changed a lot. We still bring our ideas to the table and try to get everything down and try to grow each other’s ideas with the recording and the arranging of the record. But we have progressed in a lot of ways, in that the lines of communication are a little bit more open than they’ve been. We’re sharing ideas in their younger stages rather than when the song’s done.

Charlie: I grew up playing piano and drums and never wrote songs pretty much until Hovvdy. I always played drums in a post-rock band and always saw myself more as a support musician, but I was such a big fan of so much music and so many songwriters. It’s been a long 10-year run of hopefully getting better every record.

I also think when you spend time with another person in any capacity, you start to trade off bits of yourself, almost through osmosis. Are there certain themes you’ve found yourself exploring more after working with each other for 10-plus years, even if it wasn’t something you consciously set out to do?

Charlie: I think the unique thing about the band is that me and Will could be on opposite sides of the planet and write six songs and combine them, both of us not having heard the other’s songs, and they would feel like a cohesive Hovvdy record. I just think our upbringings and our disposition… We’re very different guys but, somewhat remarkably, the themes in our songs do tend to run parallel. I don’t really know how but it’s probably that osmosis you’re talking about.

Will: I think musically, we meet each other more as time goes on. Whether it be the style of guitar playing or whether it be knowing I can rely on Charlie or our great band to help add some balance. I think we share a lot of interests musically, and so throughout time, those have melted together. I feel our little motifs or our little individualities have strengthened as well. And then also us both getting better and more confident as individual songwriters.

Is there something you think the other person is able to express more clearly or that you admire about their creative process?

Will: I’ve always loved the direct, visceral songwriting Charlie has. In particular how it relates to managing life, family, and love, and hurt. I think it is empowering to hear songs that have an emotional tangibility. I think earlier… maybe for both of us, but for me particularly, the lyrics maybe meant something to me, but as a listener, it might be more challenging to find what’s going on. Hearing the way that Charlie writes directly has helped me and I know that he’s gotten better at it throughout time too. I think we both build on our own strengths.

Charlie: I think Will is in a lot of ways a more poetic songwriter than I am. What a particular song is about doesn’t necessarily hit you right in the face. It develops over time. He’s also just a little less complacent to do the same thing over and over. I feel like Will was the first one to bring some more electronic elements into the fold, and Auto-Tune vocals, and just being more wide open and experimental in the record-making process. Whereas I am more Virgo…

Will: …If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Charlie: Yeah. “No, they like this. Let’s just keep doing this.”

Will: Which is strong, too.

Charlie: It’s a push and pull with that and I think it works.

What have you learned from working together about what it means to lead and what it means to serve something or someone else?

Will: In the context of touring, it is pretty black and white. It’s the easiest example of what you’re talking about, which is making sure you perform and play and sing along with the other person’s song. And then I think emotionally, and as far as workload and managing the band, we have our strengths in those ways, too. I feel like supporting each other is a big part of the duo thing. A lot of times, it comes maybe in a backdoor way. Whether it just be letting someone find their own way, whether it be with a song or with a concept or with a band decision… I think it’s a big part of the band, for sure. Even if it’s not very verbal. I think there are moments where you have to be more direct: “I’m here for you.”

When you are trimming songs for an album and seeing what fits, are there songs that don’t make it on that you save in your pocket for another time?

Charlie: If it’s a song that I really like, or if it just doesn’t fit on the record, it gets shelved and might come out in another way. My creative priority is Hovvdy and Hovvdy records. Putting our best foot forward means writing really vital, fresh material. A lot of times, we will maybe regurgitate an older idea. But the song as a finished product is really coming together in the present.

There’s a sense in your music that art isn’t just a way to express something, but a way to become a better person or friend or partner. Has the process of writing and reflecting helped you become a better communicator or helped you say things you don’t usually express as openly?

Charlie: Definitely songs I’ve written have resulted in processing and having a deeper understanding for the people in my life. Or me writing about certain things where, if you know me, you know what the song is about. My uncle who I never talk to hearing a song and it really hitting for him strengthens that relationship and that understanding. It’s awesome.

Will: I think that’s the hope, right? You put yourself out there and share your thoughts and ideas in hopes of having a better understanding, and it leads to better communication. Maybe as I reflect throughout the years, and as I’m down the road a little bit, I’ll have a clearer understanding of the impact that having the songwriting outlet might have had on me.

Charlie: I feel Will’s daughter will hear songs off our last record and it’ll be really enlightening for her.

Will: I might need a little bit of space from it all to realize that.

Charlie: A lot of the time, I think songwriting is a way for me to maybe say something that I’m not even quite ready to say, and start that processing.

There’s also a vulnerability to writing about those family relationships you’re talking about. Whether it’s about the love aspect itself, or distance, regret, letting someone down, or feeling let down. Do you ever worry about being too revealing? Or does sharing make it more bearable?

Charlie: I think there’s always a tiny bit of risk involved. I feel if something were too much, I would probably know it. I would have that instinct or my wife or Will would be like, “Bro, that’s too much.” I think if you were too on the nose with it, it would just be corny, maybe. So try to still make it artful and musical.

Are there any boxes you feel yourself pushing against or something you still hope you can improve or expand upon?

Charlie: It’s not like I consciously am trying to not put pressure on myself. But I do just want to keep music a very inspired, cathartic, therapeutic process. In terms of the lyrics, no, I don’t feel like I need to say any particular thing or expand lyrically in any particular way. But sonically, for sure. I think we as a band want every record to feel fresh and impressive and exciting. We’re working on our sixth record right now, and if we were like, “It has to be our best thing we’ve ever made,” I don’t know. That would be tough.

Will: I’m at a stage now where I’m striving to be more solid as a musician and to be able to play more instruments and play them well, and know how to fit [them] into a song and not overplay… It feels like at the beginning of the band, a part of what made us unique was that we weren’t necessarily the best guitar players or whatever and we relied on our limitations to create our sound. As time goes on, I think we’re both trying to just be better musicians, have more tools, have more tricks, have more things that we can bring.

I think a lot about repetition and how certain ideas or memories come back no matter how many times you try to express them. Do you ever feel like there’s a subject you might have explored before but you want to run with it in a new way or approach it with more experience and clarity?

Charlie: I think certain things or certain traumas or experiences you never fully get past, and how you deal with them changes over time. I’ll probably be writing songs about my father, or my absent dad issues, for potentially forever. Or as long as I need to.

Will: Revisiting and rekindling a fear or a thought happens naturally the more you write. I think the themes in our band are fairly consistent. Maybe one thing we could do even more is write songs that are outside of ourselves a little bit more. But because of how we’ve done it thus far, I think it’s only natural that things reappear.

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

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Columbia University has agreed to a $750 million settlement with 576 patients of a former doctor who sexually abused them while working at the school.

In 2023, a ProPublica investigation, published with New York Magazine, revealed how Columbia had ignored women, undermined prosecutors and ultimately protected a predator. Obstetrician-gynecologist Robert Hadden worked at the university for 20 years despite decades of complaints about him.

The university had even cleared Hadden to see patients three days after he was arrested when a patient called 911 to report that he had assaulted her during a postpartum exam. University higher-ups had been informed of the arrest but allowed Hadden to continue working for another five weeks. Patients he saw during that time also reported being assaulted.

The latest settlement, combined with payouts from previous cases, means that Columbia will have paid out more than $1 billion to resolve claims of sexual abuse by Hadden. Columbia also said that it has now settled more than 1,000 claims of sexual abuse by Hadden’s former patients.

Hadden was convicted of sex crimes in federal court in January 2023 and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Laurie Kanyok, the patient who called 911, said the settlement is bittersweet. “It’s emotional because it’s been 13 years,” she told ProPublica.

She also said that financial compensation does not amount to justice.

“I’m grateful that I’m involved in this,” Kanyok said. “At the same time, I feel like I want to see people held accountable and not just somebody’s insurance company or checkbook.”

Unlike in other high-profile cases involving sexual abuse by doctors, no administrators from Columbia have been fired or have stepped down as a result of the Hadden case.

In a statement, Columbia acknowledged failing to protect Hadden’s patients. “We deeply regret the pain that his patients suffered, and this settlement is another step forward in our ongoing work and commitment to repair harm and support survivors,” the statement said. “We commend the survivors for their bravery in coming forward.”

The latest settlement puts Columbia on par with the largest payout ever by a university to settle sexual abuse claims. In 2021, the University of Southern California agreed to pay $1.1 billion to survivors of George Tyndall, a university gynecologist who abused thousands of women.

Anthony DiPietro, the attorney who handled most of the Columbia claims, said the lesson from this week’s settlement is clear: Institutions “cannot continue to cover up sexual exploitation and abuse by their doctors because they’re going to be held accountable.”

Weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, Columbia announced that it would set up a $100 million settlement fund for patients who did not want to file civil suits. Survivors have about another week, until May 15, to submit a claim.

As part of the same announcement, Columbia also said it would notify all of Hadden’s nearly 6,500 former patients of the doctor’s crimes and that it would commission an external investigation to examine failures that allowed the abuse to go on for so long.

Asked about the status of that investigation, which was announced a year and a half ago, the university said it is ongoing. Columbia did not give a time frame for the report’s completion.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Bianca Fortis.

The Republican plan calls for ramping up oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters, opening at least 4 million acres of public lands for new coal leasing, reinstating multiple highly contested mining leases, authorizing a massive road to aid mining in some of the most pristine wilderness areas in the country, and legislating increased timber production on public forests.

“This extreme proposal shows that House Republicans are hellbent on following Trump’s plan to sell out America’s public lands and offshore waters to the world’s worst polluters,” says Ashley C. Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Republicans are treating our most precious wild places as nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.”

The bill would overturn several landmark decisions made by the Biden administration to prevent irreparable harm to sensitive resources. The bill mandates the following:

• Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska: Four more oil leases that would disrupt polar bear habitat, caribou calving grounds, and the migration patterns of other wildlife.
• Cook Inlet, Alaska: Six oil lease sales, putting fragile endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales at risk from seismic testing and oil spills.
• Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota: Reverses a mining ban on 225,000 acres of federal land and opening it to Twin Metal’s sulfide mining, which threatens to pollute the adjacent Boundary Water wilderness.
• Brooks Range Wilderness, Alaska: Reverses a ban on the 211-mile Ambler mining road that would stretch across the vast unspoiled wilderness of the Brooks Range, to facilitate an industrial mining complex on behalf of a foreign mining company. Caribou migrations may also be affected as the road intersects their migration paths.

The bill includes other provisions that expand extractive industries and undermine environmental protections. For example, it reduces royalties for oil producers, establishes rental fees for renewables on public lands, and directs agencies to increase timber harvests by 25%. It also allow project sponsors to pay a fee to cover environmental review and receive expedited completion.

“From oil drilling in the Arctic and Gulf, to coal mining in the Boundary Waters, to chopping down majestic old-growth trees across the country, a slew of ruinous projects are fast-tracked by this pay-to-play reconciliation package,” Nunes said. “This is nothing short of a plan to let Trump’s friends get rich by destroying our landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife habitat.”

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

This essential premise has been embedded in various climate agreements signed since the 1990s, including the most recent pact inked at the 29th Conference of Parties, or COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, late last year. There, wealthy countries agreed to provide $300 billion per year to developing nations by 2035.

Wealthy countries, however, have frequently failed to live up to their promises, slowly eroding the Global South’s trust in a multilateral approach to the climate crisis. Over the last three months, the Trump administration has only accelerated that process. First, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 climate treaty to keep global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Then, Trump cut funding for various international climate programs, including the Just Energy Transition Partnerships and other initiatives supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development. And most recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent criticized the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, prominent financial institutions that have made climate a priority in recent years, for straying from their mission. 

“The IMF was once unwavering in its mission of promoting global monetary cooperation and financial stability,” Bessent said last week. “Now it devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.”  

These changes in the U.S.’s stance are taking place at a time when the European Union is also slashing its development funding, which includes climate aid. Countries including the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands have cut as much as 37 percent of their aid budgets, moving the money instead to defense and stimulus measures. According to one analysis, the aid cuts add up to nearly $40 billion.

While it’s unclear exactly how much total climate aid will be lost as a result of these changes, the figure is a substantial portion of international climate finance. The U.S. alone provided $11 billion last year — 8 percent of global climate aid. Much of that has already been lost this year through cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Aid and the Green Climate Fund. 

“We are at a very uniquely devastating moment,” said Harjeet Singh, founder of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, a nongovernmental organization based in India, and a climate justice activist. “The U.S.’ retreat, more fossil fuel production, no climate finance or aid, and trust in the multilateral system at the bottom — that’s where we are. It’s not inspiring.”

The resulting vacuum in leadership is increasingly being filled by countries in the Global South, primarily China. In the wake of the Trump administration’s yo-yoing on tariffs, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s commitment to climate action at a meeting of global leaders. In a speech last week, Xi announced that China would set more stringent emission targets ahead of COP30, the annual climate conference taking place in Brazil later this year. 

“However the world may change, China will not slow down its climate actions,” he said. 

At the same time, China is forging stronger alliances across the world. With tensions rising between the United States and European countries over tariffs, China has been deepening diplomatic ties in Europe. Similarly, it has called for a “Dragon-Elephant tango” with India, a country with which it has historically clashed over border disputes. 

“We’re seeing an inflection point in the global world order,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, a climate finance expert at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a former climate negotiator for the United Kingdom, European Union, and small island states. “It’s accelerated in a matter of weeks, something that was probably going to take decades.”

The shift in the global order toward the East is being recognized by top climate officials. COP30 President André Correa do Lago told reporters last month that with the U.S. retreating from climate leadership and Europe prioritizing defense spending, countries in the Global South have an opportunity to step forward. 

“The Global South has an important role to play at this stage,” he said. “We followed the agreements and engaged in extensive debates but remained constructive. We accepted the Paris Agreement, among others. However, the North’s commitments related to financial support and accelerating emission reductions have not materialized as planned.”

It’s unclear exactly what these changing political dynamics might mean for climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil, in November. For one, the distinction between developed and developing countries has been enshrined in climate agreements since the convening of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992 international treaty and process by which countries limit global temperature rise. That crucial classification was based on countries’ economic status at the time — and hasn’t been revised since. As a result, even as countries like South Korea, Singapore, United Arab Emirates have grown economically and contributed increasingly more to climate change, they continue to be classified as developing nations during climate negotiations. 

While developing countries have worked to preserve the distinction on paper, many have contributed funding to poorer nations outside of the United Nations framework in recognition of their responsibility to help tackle climate change. According to one estimate, China, for instance, has provided $24 billion in climate aid to Global South countries since 2016. In 2023, during COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates pledged $100 million to help emerging economies manage the losses that have already resulted from a warming planet. Similarly, Brazil, Russia, and India have also contributed billions of dollars to multilateral banks and other international institutions that provide climate aid.

Ultimately, these shifts in climate action and funding may allow for new partnerships to form and new climate leaders to emerge.

“If advanced economies are pulling back and ceding power and influence, and other countries are stepping up, shouldn’t we recognize that?” said Joe Thwaites, an expert on international climate funding at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “That realignment is going to determine how successful a lot of climate action is going to be in the next decade or two.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who will finance global climate solutions? Not the West. on May 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Image by Ash Hayes.

To conquer a place is to fundamentally subdue its population. This must be clearly differentiated from ‘occupation’, a specific legal term that governs the relationship between a foreign “occupying power” and the occupied nation under international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.

When Israeli forces were ultimately compelled to redeploy from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a direct consequence of the persistent resistance of the Palestinian population there, the United Nations resolutely insisted that the Gaza Strip remained an occupied territory under international law.

This position stood in stark contradiction to that of Israel, which conveniently produced its own legal texts that designated Gaza a ‘hostile entity‘ – thus, not an occupied territory.

Let us try to understand what appears to be a confusing logic:

Israel proved incapable of sustaining its military occupation of Gaza, which began in June 1967. The paramount reason for Israel’s eventual redeployment was the enduring Palestinian Resistance, which rendered it impossible for Israel to normalize its military occupation and, crucially, to make it profitable – unlike the illegal settlements of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Between 1967 and the early 1970s, when Israel began investing in building illegal settlement blocks in the Strip, the Israeli military under the command of Ariel Sharon relentlessly strove to suppress Palestinians. He employed extreme violence, mass destruction, and ethnic cleansing tactics to subdue the Strip.

Yet, at no juncture did he achieve his ultimate and comprehensive objectives of complete subjugation.

Subsequently, he invested in his infamous, but failed ‘Five Fingers‘ plan. At the time the head of the Israeli army Southern Command – which included Gaza – Sharon stubbornly believed that the only way to defeat the Gazans was by severing the contiguity of the Strip, thus hindering organized resistance.

In pursuing this aim, he sought to divide Gaza into so-called security zones where the main Israeli Jewish settlements would be built, fortified by massive military build up. This would be joined by Israeli military control of key routes and the blocking of most coastal access.

However, this plan never fully actualized, as creating these ‘fingers’ required that Palestinians on both sides of the ‘security zones’ would have to be pacified to some extent – a condition that reality on the ground never delivered.

What did actualize was the building of isolated settlement blocks: the largest was in the southwest of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt, known as the Gush Katif, followed by the northern settlements, and finally the central settlement of Netzarim.

Housing a few thousand settlers, and often requiring the presence of a far greater number of soldiers assigned to protect them, these so-called settlements were essentially fortified military towns. Due to the limited geography of Gaza (181 square miles or 365 square kilometers) and the stiff resistance, the settlements had limited space for expansion, thus remaining a costly colonial endeavor.

When the Israeli army emptied the last illegal settlement in Gaza in 2005, the soldiers snuck out of the Strip in the middle of the night. At their heels were thousands of Gazans who chased the soldiers until the last of them fled the dramatic scene.

That singular and powerful episode alone is more than sufficient to allow one to assert with unwavering certainty that Gaza was at no point truly conquered by Israel.

Though Israel withdrew its permanent military presence from the main population centers of the Strip, it continued to operate within so-called buffer zones, which were often significant incursions into Palestinian territory, far beyond the armistice line. It also imposed a hermetic siege against Gaza, which starkly explains why the majority of Gazans have never stepped a foot outside the Strip.

Israel’s control over airspace, territorial water, natural resources (mostly Mediterranean gas fields), and much more readily led the UN to its immediate conclusion: Gaza remains an occupied territory.

Unsurprisingly, Israel vehemently opposed this reality. Tel Aviv’s true desire is absolute control over Gaza, coupled with the convenient and self-serving designation of the territory as perpetually hostile. This twisted logic would grant the Israeli military an endlessly exploitable pretext to initiate devastating wars against the already besieged and impoverished Strip whenever it deemed convenient.

This brutal and cynical practice is chillingly known within Israel’s military lexicon as ‘mowing the grass‘ – a dehumanizing euphemism for the periodic and deliberate degradation of the military capabilities of the Palestinian Resistance in an attempt to ensure that Gaza can never effectively challenge its Israeli jailors or break free from its open-air prison.

October 7, 2023, ended that myth, where Al-Aqsa Flood Operation challenged Israel’s long-standing military doctrine. The so-called Gaza Envelope region, where the late Sharon’s Southern Command is based, was entirely seized by the youth of Gaza, who organized under the harshest of economic and military circumstances, to, in a shocking turn of events, defeat Israel.

While acknowledging the UN designation of Gaza as occupied territory, Palestinians understandably speak of and commemorate its ‘liberation’ in 2005. Their logic is clear: the Israeli military’s redeployment to the border region was a direct consequence of their resistance.

Israel’s current attempts to defeat the Palestinians in Gaza are failing for a fundamental reason rooted in history. When Israeli forces stealthily withdrew from the Strip two decades ago under the cover of night, Palestinian resistance fighters possessed rudimentary weaponry, closer to fireworks than effective military instruments. The landscape of resistance has fundamentally shifted since then.

This long-standing reality has been upended in recent months. All Israeli estimates suggest that tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed, wounded, or psychologically impaired since the start of the Gaza war. Since Israel failed to subdue the Gazans over the course of two relentless decades, it is not merely improbable, but an outright absurdity to expect that Israel will now succeed in subduing and conquering Gaza.

Israel itself is acutely aware of this inherent paradox, hence its immediate and brutal choice: the perpetration of a genocide, a horrific act intended to pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of the remaining survivors. The former has been executed with devastating efficiency, a stain on the conscience of a world that largely stood by in silence. The latter, however, remains an unachievable fantasy, predicated on the delusional notion that Gazans would willingly choose to abandon their ancestral homeland.

Gaza has never been conquered and never will be. Under the unyielding tenets of international law, it remains an occupied territory, regardless of any eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces to the border – a withdrawal that Netanyahu’s destructive and futile war cannot indefinitely postpone. When this inevitable redeployment occurs, the relationship between Gaza and Israel will be irrevocably transformed, a powerful testament to the enduring resilience and indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people.

The post The Myth of Conquest: Why Gaza Will Never Be Subdued by Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

The Supreme Court’s  unanimous ruling April 10, however, supported a lower court’s order that the Trump regime must facilitate Garcia’s “release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”  And to report “the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Part of that ruling, added by three justices , was providing Garcia with the U.S. Constitution’s due-process right to determine his innocence by trial. They dismissed Trump’s legal team’s two arguments as “plainly wrong.”

Added to the mix was El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, visiting Trump, who chimed in to state he didn’t “have the power to return him to the United States.” A preposterous claim for a dictator.

Such Trump-type arguments also fly in the face of presidential precedents set in American history, beginning with George Washington  in dealing with the Barbary pirates in the 1790s off the North African coast. They would capture merchant ships carrying American goods and imprison the crews unless “tributes” were paid by the young U.S. government.  Washington had learned his lesson. So early in his second term, he sent a three-man diplomatic delegation to negotiate tribute amounts to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli to successfully free 83 American sailors. Such bribery certainly was presidential interference in foreign-country affairs. In different ways, it still is.

How does that differ in principle from U.S. interference in foreign countries and Trump paying a $6 million tribute  to Bukele to imprison 238 men , mostly Venezuelans , all denied due process about gang membership? He plans to send more, even U.S. citizens .

A legal reprise of the Garcia case reveals why he never should have been among those—also denied due process—thus, illegally flown to El Salvador imprisonment.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was never a gang member in his native El Salvador or the U.S. In sworn testimony and documentary evidence given to a Maryland federal court, he and his family were constantly targeted for extortion by a Barrio-18 gang in El Salvador because of their successful food business in Los Nogales. When its leaders tried to recruit Kilmer’s older brother, the family sent him to relatives in Maryland and to eventual U.S. citizenship. When the gang then demanded their 16-year-old Kilmar or they would harm the entire family. They paid up—but sent him to the Maryland family to seek asylum from that gang.

Garcia was never in trouble in either country. He began working in construction with an eye to eventually joining the sheet-metal industry as a journeyman and joining its union. He was 24 when he decided to change jobs and in 2019 went to Home Depot seeking one. So did three suspects of MS-13 membership. The county police swooped in and collared all four, but in fairness never included Garcia in the arrest records.

Meantime, Garcia married a citizen with two children and a third on the way. His wife sued the government about the false arrest. The judge did heavy interrogation about criminal conditions in Nogales as justification for Garcia’s fears for his life from Barrio-18 retaliation. Strong evidence convinced the judge to bar his removal to El Salvador “due to a credible fear of persecution.”

The lawsuit triggered ICE’s attention, however. Its agents seized and detained Garcia for weeks to deport him through the “removal” procedure, but were stymied by the previous judge’s protection ruling. By that time, he applied for asylum and did the annual check-ins with immigration officials.

Interestingly in the Garcia case, for all the remarks about non-interference in El Salvador’s affairs, in April 2017 when Trump  was just inaugurated as president, he wangled the release from Egypt’s dictator president Abduel-Fattah el-Sissi’s of an Egyptian-born woman who became an American. She did three years of “confinement” on bogus charges of child abuse at her charity agency before finally being acquitted. Trump seemingly taking credit for her release, grandly chartered a U.S plane to Cairo to bring her home. A year later he was triumphant about winning release of three Americans  from North Korea.

Yet it was sour grapes from him in December 2022 when President Joe Biden wrested  national women’s basketball star Brittney Griner  in a prisoner exchange from a nine-year sentence in Russia for carrying a cannabis compound into the country. Or in August 2024 when Biden succeeded in getting three Americans—one was a Wall Street Journal reporter—released from Russia in another prisoner exchange.

Trump insinuated on his social media that cash  had been exchanged by Biden and added: “Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”

In other words, Trump was certainly well aware that foreign interventions for prisoners is nothing new to American presidents using either cash or President Teddy Roosevelt ‘s foreign policy of “speak softly, but carry a big stick,”

The Supreme Court’s  April 7 unanimous ruling that the Trump’s administration had to get Garcia’s release from El Salvador has been awakening the public about the laws protecting us individually and the three separate powers of Constitutional government. That Congress, not presidents, make the laws. The Supreme Court determines their constitutionality, and the president must “faithfully” carry out its orders.

In its handling of this case, the high court ruled that Trump’s administration must:  “comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with due process of law, including notice and an opportunity to be heard, in any future proceedings. It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” The court mainly agreed with a previous U.S. District court ruling that the government must “facilitate” Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador. That judge had ordered Trump’s legal team to report daily about their progress.

The only news about Garcia, has been from the U.S. embassy  in El Salvador which on April 12 reported: “…Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center….He is alive and secure in that facility.”

Now, unlike Washington’s Day, the 1997 federal Leahy Law  forbids using taxpayer revenue for “assistance to foreign security forces that have credible allegations of human rights such as torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, or rape.” A State Department report of 2023 cited El Salvador prisons’ for guards’ regular beatings of inmates and electric shock treatments, and other abuses.

Upon learning Trump’s people had done nothing about Garcia by April 15, that district judge ordered four of his officials “to provide documentation and answer questions under oath about what steps they had done to comply” with her previous order by April 28. Penalty for non-compliance would be a contempt of court ruling and fines or imprisonment. A Trump pardon would add yet another charge in impeachment proceedings and this time an ouster by a Senate trial.

Ignoring the rulings supporting Garcia’s Constitutional due-process rights and the power of the courts’ branch of government, Trump’s plan is more of the same—for all American citizens who also would be denied those rights. After all, he urged Bukele to build five more mega-prisons  (capacity: 40,000 ) to house them. He obviously expects American taxpayers to foot the bills for construction, staff salaries, and maintenance.

Moreover, his counterterrorism adviser  just announced that supporters of Garcia were aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists” and, thus, committing a federal crime?

That, of course, would include Supreme Court members, the judges involved in the Garcia opinions, his Maryland Senator, several House members —and eventually all who support Constitutional rights such as due-process trials in this country.

Since then, yet another instance of wrongful seizure for the El Salvador prison has come to light about a 20-year-old Venezuelan brought into the U.S. as a child. A Maryland federal judge’s opinion  on this asylum lawsuit was that it violated “a legally binding, court-approved settlement last year of a lawsuit against the summary deportation of migrants who arrive as children.”

On Inauguration day, Trump swore to obey the oath of office —“and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unless a new Amendment is passed to limit due process to U.S. citizens or to delete it, that right is included for all residents of this country illegal or not. But his towering rage  at due-process appeared in late April both on his social media page and the next day in a White House press conference. It furnishes prime evidence for another impeachment—and this time a Senate trial for his ouster. Or, as in the case of former president Nixon facing that fate, key Republicans march to the Oval Office and successfully demand Trump resign.

Said he on record about the 21 million illegals he intends to deport:

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take…200 years.” His false assumption is, of course, that in future all those kidnapped and dispatched to his five taxpayer-funded El Salvador prisons—including his political enemies—are “violent criminals and terrorists.”

Fortunately, the 4th District Appeals court just agreed unanimously to quash an emergency appeal by his administration against the contempt of court rulings for not returning the kidnapped and given due-process rights. The longtime (1983) Reagan-appointed judge, Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote the court’s ringing opinion about Trump’s snatching Garcia without those due-process rights. It also sets precedent to protect those Trump regards as “home-grown” enemies:

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

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Connecticut’s attorney general has sent his second warning in a month to the low-cost carrier Avelo Airlines, telling the startup it has jeopardized tax breaks and other local support by agreeing to conduct deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Democrats in the Connecticut legislature, meanwhile, are working to expand the state’s sanctuary law to penalize companies like Avelo for working with federal immigration authorities.

The backlash comes after Texas-based Avelo signed an agreement early this month to dedicate three of its 20 planes to carrying out deportation flights as part of the charter network known as ICE Air. It also follows a report by ProPublica, which Connecticut Attorney General William Tong cited in an April 8 letter to Avelo, revealing flight attendants’ unease over the treatment and safety of detainees on such flights. The concerns airline staffers raised included how difficult it could be to evacuate people wearing wrist and ankle shackles.

“Can Avelo confirm that it will never operate flights while non-violent passengers are in shackles, handcuffs, waist chains and/or leg irons?” Tong’s April 8 letter asks. “Can Avelo confirm that it will never operate a flight without a safe and timely evacuation strategy for all passengers?”

Tong then issued a public statement on April 15 reiterating his concerns.

In an April 3 email to Avelo employees obtained by ProPublica and other publications, CEO Andrew Levy called the deportation contract “too valuable not to pursue” at a time when his startup was losing money and consumer confidence was declining, leading Americans to take fewer trips. Avelo would close one of its bases, in Sonoma County, California, and move certain flight routes to off-peak days as resources shifted to ICE Air. Deportation flights would be based out of Mesa, Arizona, and would begin in May.

Avelo has a major hub in New Haven, Connecticut, and it recently expanded to Bradley International Airport near Hartford. In 2023, the airline won a two-year fuel-tax moratorium from state lawmakers after extensive lobbying.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was among the nearly 300 attendees at a rally outside the New Haven airport. “Avelo has to change its course,” he said. “To the president of Avelo: You really stepped in it.”

Members of the public are raising objections as well. An online petition calling for a boycott of Avelo unless it drops its new ICE contract has collected almost 35,000 signatures since April 6. And protests are spreading from Connecticut to cities the airline serves across the country, including Eugene, Oregon; Rochester, New York; Burbank, California; and Wilmington, Delaware.

Tong’s letter to Avelo demanded that the airline produce a copy of its ICE Air contract. The attorney general also asked if Avelo would deport people in defiance of court orders, pointing to March flights to El Salvador carried out by another charter airline, GlobalX, after a federal judge ordered that the planes be turned back. Neither ICE nor GlobalX responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Levy answered Tong with a one-page letter. In it, Levy suggested that if Connecticut wanted more information about Avelo’s ICE Air contract, it should file a public records request. (Federal statistics show that such requests to ICE typically take months or years to be answered.)

If the attorney general wanted to know more about the use of shackles on deportation flights, Levy continued, he should ask the Department of Homeland Security. If Tong wanted to know more about evacuation requirements, he should address questions to the Federal Aviation Administration. For Avelo’s part, Levy assured Tong, the airline “remains committed to public safety and the rule of law.”

“Regardless of the administration or party affiliation,” an Avelo spokesperson told ProPublica in an emailed statement, “when our country calls our practice is to say yes. We follow all protocols from DHS and FAA.”

A Democrat-sponsored bill to expand Connecticut’s sanctuary law has now cleared its House Judiciary Committee in a 29-12, party-line vote, over the strong objections of Republicans, and awaits a full vote on the floor. If it passes, any companies — including airlines — proposing to do business with the state must pledge not to “cooperate or contract with any federal immigration authority for purposes of the detention, holding or transportation of an individual.”

Meanwhile, Avelo’s fuel-tax moratorium expires on June 30. So far, no legislation has been introduced to extend it, and activists are urging Connecticut lawmakers to let the tax break die.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by McKenzie Funk.

Ceremonies in Ho Chi Minh City will be attended by “delegations led by high-level leaders, political parties, international organizations, peace movements and anti-war movements, including those from the U.S.,” according to Vietnam’s foreign ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang.

The New York Times cited four anonymous U.S. officials as saying that the Trump administration “recently directed senior diplomats – including the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Ambassador Marc Knapper – to stay away from activities tied to the anniversary on April 30.”

Veterans have also been told they will get no official help in organizing anniversary events, the newspaper said.

Noting that the ministry had not specifically verified the contents of the New York Times report, Hang told a regular press briefing Thursday the South’s surrender 50 years ago in the city then called Saigon holds a deep significance for both Vietnam and the U.S.

“Vietnam’s victory on April 30, 1975 is a victory of human conscience and righteousness, one that put an end to the losses and sufferings, for not only the people of Vietnam, but also to countless American families,” state media quoted her as saying.

Some U.S. officials told the New York Times that Trump may not want officials attending an event on the same day as his 100th day in office, particularly one marking a U.S. defeat.

Radio Free Asia contacted the U.S. State Department to ask about the newspaper’s claims but had not received a reply at the time of publishing.

Hang pointed out that Vietnam-U.S. relations have been on the highest comprehensive strategic partnership level since 2023 and next week’s events are intended to celebrate a spirit of cooperation.

“The April 30 anniversary is an occasion to honor the values of benevolence, of peace, of reconciliation and in the spirit of putting the past aside and striving towards the future,” said the ministry spokesperson.

The report comes amid growing uncertainty in U.S.-Vietnam relations. Vietnam was hit with a steep 46% tariff on its exports to the U.S., posing a serious threat to its export-driven industrialization.

The move was met with disappointment in Hanoi, where Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said that it “did not reflect the strong bilateral relations between the two nations.”

Officials from two countries are reportedly in talks for a potential trade agreement, which is expected to lead to a lower tariff rate, though the extent of the adjustment remains unclear.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mike Firn for RFA.

The government announced Wednesday that it will introduce an amendment to ensure that the planned company, Great British Energy, will not have slavery in its supply chains.

China is the dominant global player in the renewable energy market including solar energy. The BBC cited customs data that Britain imports more than 40% of its solar photovoltaics from China.

A key component is polysilicon sourced from the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, where minority Uyghur Muslims have faced persecution including use of their forced labor.

In 2021, the U.S. Labor Department listed polysilicon as a product made with forced labor in China in violation of international standards.

The British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had initially rejected an amendment to the Great British Energy Bill to include provisions to prevent purchase of solar panels made with slave labor.

However, on Wednesday, it changed track.

“Great British Energy will act to secure supply chains that are free of forced labor, under an amendment brought forward by the government today,” the Department of Energy Security said in a news release.

It said a new measure in the bill “will enable the company to ensure that forced labor does not take place in its business or its supply chains.”

The opposition Conservative Party described it as a “humiliating U-turn” for Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, but it was also supported by some members of the ruling Labour Party.

Rahima Mahmut, executive director of the activist group Stop Uyghur Genocide, welcomed the amendment, posting on X that it was a “massive step toward justice.”

Forced labor is on a long list of serious human rights problems that have been documented in Xinjiang and is cited along with the incarceration of an estimated 1.8 million people in detention camps since 2017 and forced birth control by the U.S. government and others as evidence of genocide of the Uyghurs.

China denies the rights abuses.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.

The U.S. and China are waging a tit-for-tat trade battle, which threatens to stunt the global economy. The U.S. imposed tariffs of 145% on Chinese imports, prompting China to retaliate with tariffs reaching 125% on American goods. The U.S. also has imposed new tariffs on most other countries.

Trump told a White House news conference that “145% is very high” and could be lowered through China-U.S. negotiations.

“It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero ‒ used to be zero. We were just destroyed. China was taking us for a ride.”

“But ultimately,” Trump said, “they have to make a deal because otherwise they’re not going to be able to deal in the United States. So we want them involved, but they have to ‒ and other countries have to ‒ make a deal, and if they don’t make a deal, we’ll set the deal.”

Trump’s remarks came after comments Tuesday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said the high tariffs are unsustainable and that he expects a “de-escalation” in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

“I do say China is going to be a slog in terms of the negotiations,” Bessent said, according to a transcript reviewed by The Associated Press. “Neither side thinks the status quo is sustainable.”

Trump did not say if he also thought the situation with China was unsustainable. He said the U.S. was “doing fine” with China.

“We’re going to live together very happily and ideally work together,” he said.

The tariff shock therapy, Trump has said, is aimed at encouraging a revival of American manufacturing, which fell as a share of the economy and employment over several decades of free trade and competition from production in lower-cost countries.

Any changes could take years as many American corporations have made substantial investments in overseas production. Efficient manufacturing in the U.S., like elsewhere, is reliant on components produced in other countries.

Higher tariffs could also raise costs for Americans and U.S. corporations while simultaneously lowering incomes for exporting nations.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday said more than 100 countries have approached the U.S. for trade talks and 18 have submitted proposals, but China was not among them.

Leavitt said she did not have anything to report on communications between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump said last week that Washington and Beijing were in talks on tariffs and expressed confidence that the world’s two largest economies would reach a deal over the next three to four weeks. He declined to say if he had spoken to Xi.

China’s commerce ministry said it had been maintaining working-level communication with its U.S. counterparts.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

Soybeans – which feed the production of China’s 435-million-strong pig industry – remains America’s top agricultural export, selling more than 27 million metric tons or over half of the $24.6 billion in total U.S. agricultural products Beijing imported in 2024.

The steep tariff hikes on agricultural products like soybeans and corn, both major components of hog feed, will drive up the cost of breeding livestock and translate into higher food prices for ordinary consumers for China – the world’s largest producer and consumer of pork, industry insiders said.

On April 11, China announced 125% tariffs on U.S. imports, in retaliation to U.S. President Donald Trump’s increase of duties on Chinese imports to 145%. With this, the total tariff on U.S. soybean imports rose to 135%, after adding in the 10% duty China imposed on certain U.S. agricultural products in March.

At an estimated 125% tariff hike, the CIF – cost, insurance, and freight – price of U.S. soybean imports will rise to $1,026 per metric ton, nearly double that of Brazilian soybeans at about $580 per metric ton, prompting China to increase its soybean shipments from Brazil, said the derivatives marketplace operator, CME Group.

(China Stringer Network via Reuters)

Ever since the world’s two largest economies engaged in an earlier trade war in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as U.S. president, China has been turning to countries like Brazil to meet its demand for farm goods. It has also made a push for more self-sufficiency, reducing its reliance on imports of U.S. agricultural products.

Today, China has significantly increased its reliance on Brazil, the world’s top soybean producer, importing 72.5 million metric tons of Brazilian soybeans in 2024, up from 19 million metric tons in 2010. In comparison, U.S. soybean imports stood at 27.2 million metric tons in 2024, largely unchanged from its 2010 levels.

China is now making a similar push to import more of the protein- and oil-rich seeds from Brazil to meet the demand of its hog industry, but hog farmers believe this won’t be enough to stem the impact of high tariffs on U.S. agricultural imports.

“For soybeans and corn, they (the government) can import from wherever they want. We ordinary people have no choice,” said Sun Jun, a hog farmer in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan.

To be sure, the composition of soybeans and corn is high in feed for livestock, including pigs, poultry, and cattle.

Sun estimates that an animal feed weighing 100 kilograms (220.5 pounds) would typically contain around 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of corn and wheat, and 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of soybean meal, a by-product of oil extraction from soybean seeds.

“Once the price rises, it will directly push up the breeding cost,” said Sun.

Sun now buys about 3 metric tons of hog feed every month, which costs about 14,000 yuan (US$1,915) per month, he said.

That’s already a one-third increase from an estimated 10,500 yuan (US$1,436) in cost he would have incurred for the same amount of hog feed a week earlier, based on the price of 3.46 yuan (49 U.S. cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds), as listed by Chengdu Development and Reform Committee then.

(Florence Lo/Reuters)

The impact of rising feed costs will be felt by ordinary consumers through higher food and meat prices, said industry insiders.

“The breeding costs of the livestock industry are already very high … The price of meat (as a result) has been rising for more than half a month and is bound to increase,” Lu, a resident of Linyi, Shandong, told RFA.

Lu, like some of the other industry insiders RFA interviewed for this story, provided only her first name for safety reasons.

“The tariff increase will ultimately be borne by consumers,” she added.

From a macro perspective, China remains highly dependent on agricultural product imports, said Li Qiang, who previously worked at the Agricultural Product Pricing Bureau.

“25% of the food needed by mainlanders depends on imports, and mainly comes from the United States, mainly wheat and soybeans,” added Li, who is a resident of Qingdao prefecture-level city in Shandong province.

Shandong, which is a key player in China’s hog breeding industry, has seen the construction of multi-story pig farms that are at the center of the country’s efforts to ramp up domestic production to cut its reliance on pork imports.

But China’s food and catering sector, which imports much of its pork and beef from the U.S., will not be spared the effects of the tariff hikes, say industry insiders.

Since the start of April, the price of high-end steaks has increased by 30% to 50%, said Geng, the head of a restaurant in Wuhan city in Hubei province.

His company purchases beef from Inner Mongolia, but high-quality steaks still need to be imported from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, said Geng.

“If tariffs are added, the price will be even more expensive,” he added.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington

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

This is an overhead view of the Holman Correctional Facility. Photograph Source: www.PrisonInsight.com – CC BY 2.0

This week, I reached out to the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) for comment on the problems with the heating system in Bullock Prison. ADOC did not respond to multiple requests for comment on various aspects of this story.

The ADOC has not responded to my requests for comment in the years since my book Doing Time was published. To be clear, I don’t believe that is personal, or has anything to do with my work. It seems the two main sources who were in touch with me when I wrote the book no longer work there. And of course, I assume the Department is quite busy. I’m running a small operation here, and there are no doubt more important emails than mine to respond to. In any event, I’m just saying, it’s been a while.

By early March, though the heating system is still not fixed, the weather has warmed up a bit outside and prisoners say the administration has at least tried to improve the hot water with modest results, but that after a few people shower consecutively (in a dorm of over 80 people) the water goes cold again.

As reported in the first three parts of this series, January and February were brutal months in the prison. By the end of February, prisoners had reportedly started fires in a couple of dorms. Others were considering it throughout the prison, discussed whether or not to start rioting, filled out complaint slips, appealed to all levels of employees from officers to the warden.

As mentioned one of my recent articles, it’s worth bearing in mind as you read this series that the Department of Justice reported in its 2019 Notice Regarding Investigation of Alabama’s State Prisons for Men that a “February 2017 inspection by engineering consultants hired by ADOC noted that not a single facility has a working fire alarm.”1

Many prisoners have gotten sick. It seems the ADOC’s strategy has been to ride out the unusually cold weather for the region rather than pay to fix the problem.

At the end of February, in the midst of all this, as the conditions grow increasingly inhumane and the prisoners increasingly agitated and unwell, as tension builds between them and the guards, I interview a Bullock prisoner for the first time who I’ll call “Cecil” in these articles. She’s been in Alabama prison for over 15 years, mostly in maximum security prisons, transferred to many prisons in the state during her single sentence, as most Alabama prisoners are, and has been in Bullock under a year.

She spent a lot of time in Holman and participated in the riot there in 2016, in which fires were started and the warden and an officer were stabbed, probably the most significant Alabama prison riot in recent history. (See the video below made by prisoners and published by AL.com at the time.)

The events went on for a couple of days.2

I interview Cecil about her previous experiences and her thoughts on what is happening now in Bullock. Cecil is transgender and uses she/her pronouns.

Of all the prisons she’s done time in, she spent the most in Holman. “I’ve been to Holman five different times,” she says. “Holman is wild. You remember back in 2016 when they had riots and they had all the stuff on the news about the cubes getting set on fire and the warden getting stabbed and all that, the police getting stabbed? Yeah, I was one of the ones involved in that.”

She reflects, “It was crazy. They was oppressing us. They was coming in, putting their hands on us, taking our stuff, and just handling us wrong. They have the standard operating procedures they have to go by too, and they wasn’t going by it. So, we bucked on them, and it got a little wild, and the warden got stabbed. The police got stabbed. It was crazy.”

According to the ADOC’s spokesperson at the time, “About 100 inmates [were] believed to have been involved in the riot.”3

Asked what that experience was like for her, “It was wild,” Cecil answers, “because I did two years in lockup, almost got a free world case behind it too, but they dropped the free world case and they just gave me a disciplinary and made me do two years in segregation. It was wild, because my family was looking at me like I didn’t want to come home, like I didn’t love them anymore, and all type of stuff.”

Asked to elaborate on the motivations of the riot and how prisoners got organized to do it, “Well, we was in a dormitory setup where there’s like 180 people to a dorm, and the dorms are separated between A, B, C, D, and E dorms. E is in a trailer outside the camp. And we all was getting on some shit where we were going to come together and stand up against our oppressors and not continue to let them handle us and put down on us,” says Cecil.

“So, when the officers came into the dorm, they tried to spray us with the mace and all that,” she continues. “That’s why they ended up getting stabbed. And the warden came in and tried to push one dude. That’s how he ended up getting stabbed, because we all came together as one, and unified, and tried to fight against them and try to make the situation and the conditions better for ourselves. And they did shut Holman down, kind of sort of, a couple of years later behind that. They’ve still got E dorm open…. But they condemned…. the main camp. They shut that down.”

The Montgomery Advertiser reported on the announcement at the time:

The Alabama Department of Corrections will close the main building and dormitory at Holman prison, relocating more than 600 prisoners to other facilities around the state in a move Commissioner Jeff Dunn called ‘the culmination of years of neglect’ of Alabama prison facilities.4

They of course kept the State’s only death chamber there, however. As Dunn told The Advertiser, “[C]urrent plans are to maintain the execution facility which will ‘require basic utilities,’ and the department is currently in discussions with engineers and other experts about how to do that.”

Holman has a notoriously problematic sewage system in one of its tunnels.5 Plumbing and sewage disasters are another theme throughout the system, as HTR readers know.6

Looking back now on her experience with the 2016 Holman riot, “I wish I could change it,” says Cecil, “because it’s really what’s still keeping me in prison. What I done to come to prison is not what’s keeping me in prison. It’s what I’ve been doing since I’ve been in prison that’s keeping me in prison. So, it’s kind of like, I regret it, but it happened, so I can’t take it back. So, it’s something that I’ve got to live with. You know what I’m saying?”

Asked if the riot brought prisoners together in any way, “Yeah, it did. It brought people together, but it was more of a violent stand than anything, than a peaceful stand,” she says.

Cecil says other longstanding problems with the prison system in general, which prisoners are dealing with now in Bullock, are “the food, and the temperatures in the dorms, as far as the heat and the air or whatever. The food is just horrible. You wouldn’t feed a dog some of the stuff that we eat in here.”

She reiterates something that many prisoners have told me over the years, that there are boxes of food in the kitchens that say “not fit for human consumption,” but, “They still feed it to us though,” she says.

“And the temperatures are kind of up and down, for real, because there’s no heat really in the dorms. It’s really just like living outside, for real,” she continues. “That’s why a lot of us are sick with runny noses, coughing, cold chills, and fevers and all type of stuff. They really don’t have enough medical assistance and stuff to tend to everybody’s problems. So, they’re really just overlooking it, for real, and it’s contagious, so you will really get other people sick off you being sick. So, it’s really starting to be an epidemic, for real.”

She says illness is “going around in every dorm, for real. Every dorm in the camp, you’ve got people that are sick…. To go to the infirmary, or the healthcare [ward], to get medical assistance, they make you fill out a sick call slip, and it really takes two or three days before they even screen you for the sick call for your medical problem. So, it’s not like you can go to the emergency room like on the street, like in the free world, like in society.”

Cecil might have come up for parole earlier, she tells me, but while in prison has gotten “violent disciplinaries like stabbing cases and some things that I’m really not proud of, because they’re violent, but there are things that I was pushed, that I was coerced to do, because I have to stand my ground. I have to stand up for myself in here, because I really don’t have nobody but myself in here. By me being transgender and by me being gay, it’s like I’m outcasted. And nobody sticks up for me. Nobody stands up for me. Nobody speaks up for me. So, I have to do it for myself.”

Asked if she’d ever done anything like that in the free world, “No, I’d never stabbed a person, never,” she says, adding that Alabama prisons “will turn you violent, just because you have to stand up for yourself and stand your ground.”

Focusing on Bullock specifically, Cecil feels “the staff members, they don’t respect us. They don’t respect us as much as they do at the maximum security prisons,” she says. “They respect level is totally different. They talk to you crazy here. They put their hands on you. Officers jump on you. They smack you around. They spray you. They do all type of stuff.”

Further, the overcrowding “causes a lot of stress and depression on us,” says Cecil, “because it’s an open bay dormitory, and it’s not a cell block, so you really don’t have privacy. Everything is out in the open.”

Discussing the heating problems and the recent cold weather, “I went to the window and looked outside and seen all the snow on the ground,” she says. “I haven’t seen snow like that in my whole life other than when I had went up North, when I went up to Boston, Massachusetts one year when I was like 13.”

Confirming what others have said in previous interviews, Cecil reiterates that the heat still not working “and they came in and took some lights out the ceiling, and the part where the lights go, there are holes in the ceiling, and there’s air coming through the ceiling from where the lights are supposed to go. They took like 20 lights out the ceiling and there’s air coming through the ceiling, and it’s blowing right down on our bunks. There’s no heat in the dorms. It feels like we’re outside in the freezing cold.”
She and other prisoners she knows have complained, “but there haven’t been any changes,” she says.

Beatings, Bonfires, Floods (Bullock Prison, Alabama)

From late February through March, I continue interviewing prisoners in Bullock Prison in Union Springs, Alabama, about the cold, the heating and hot water systems not working, fires started, riots contemplated, and other topics.

For those who missed the previous articles in this series: Prisoners have reported on the topics mentioned above throughout the past four articles on Bullock Prison. In Part Two, one source in late February even reported that prisoners were contemplating beating up guards and taking their winter clothing. In Part Four, I interviewed a prisoner, now in Bullock, who participated in the 2016 riot in Holman Prison in Atmore, in which an officer and the warden were stabbed and violence continued in the prison for a couple of days.

I continue interviewing her through late February and March about the situation now in Bullock. I refer to her as “Cecil” in these articles. She is transgender and uses she/her pronouns.

Asked if, based on her experience, there’s been any risk of a riot happening in the prison at any point in the past couple of months, she’s says it’s been relatively quiet compared to her previous experience in Holman, but that, “Just the other day, a white guy got into it with an officer in the chow hall, and they got to fighting and the dude took the police’s night stick from him and beat him with it. That happened the other day, the other morning, in the chow hall with [an] officer.”

Cecil continues, “The officers have just been over edge ever since, been putting their hands on people, jumping on folks, just out of retaliation over what happened to their co-worker. So, it’s kind of crazy in here right now. They took our snack line from us today,” and, “Even though we didn’t have anything to do with it, we’re still being punished for it,” she adds.

With the lockdown comes “controlled movement. They restrict your privileges like store privileges, snack line privileges, yard privileges, library privileges,” and more, she explains, and some of these “privileges,” like yard time, Bullock prisoners hardly ever get anyway.

Confirming what others have said throughout this series, Cecil tells me there have been fires set in Bullock in recent weeks and months: “It was cold, and they had a bonfire going down there in [another] dorm.1 They were trying to stay warm down there. That [dorm] is at the bottom of the camp. They had some big fires,” she says.

The Department of Justice has repeatedly pointed out over the years that not a single one of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ male prisons has a working fire alarm.

Although the temperatures have finally warmed up a bit (without the Alabama Department of Corrections fixing the heating system through the entirety of this winter) problems with the weather and the infrastructure of the prison continue year-round, as storms sweep the country this weekend.

“It’s been raining a lot lately, the last couple of days,” says Cecil when I interview her this weekend. “Water comes into the dorm when it floods. When it’s raining outside, the water leaks into the dorm and it causes a big flood in the dorm by the doors, because if you don’t put any blankets or anything down to stop that water from coming under the doors, it’s just leaking right into the dorm. It’s like that in every part [of the prison]. Even the gym is halfway flooded.”

The post Alabama Prisons “Will Turn You Violent” (Bullock Prison) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Vernon Whalan.

Patco Strike protests. Photo: Socialist Worker archives.

I had recently turned twenty-one in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired thirteen thousand striking air traffic controllers. It was a hot muggy August day in Boston. I remember that myself and one of my oldest friends Bill Almy were driving past the Boston Common, the country’s oldest public park and refuge for the city’s residents in the downtown area, when it was announced on the radio. Bill’s car has no air conditioning which added to the already stifling atmosphere of Reagan’s first term in office. We both looked at each other and wondered what would come next.

The Reagan administration’s destruction of PATCO was an historic turning point, not simply for the organized trade union movement at the time, but for the fortunes of the entire U.S. working class during the four decades that followed. “Concessions” became the watchword of contract negotiations. The ongoing deregulation in the airlines, banking, and trucking industries meant that such unions as the UAW, the Steelworkers, and the Teamstersshrank to the margins or literally disappeared from key sectors of the U.S. economy, while new, non-union employers emerged. In many ways, we have never recovered from the destruction of PATCO four decades later.

Today, Donald Trump and his chief hatchet man and Nazi sympathizer Elon Musk are carrying a much greater and deeper attack on basic constitutional rights, legal rights of workers, and the already thread bare welfare state that exists in the United States, something Reagan could not have imagined.​ Some call, “PATCO on steroids.” Faced with an existential crisis during the PATCO strike, the AFL-CIO, the United States’ main trade union federation led by Lane Kirkland, fumbled the ball. They protested loudly, organized a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C., and then told people to vote in the upcoming 1982 election.

If anything the AFL-CIO’s tepid response emboldened our enemies. Will the organized trade unions’ response to the Trump-Musk offensive fare better today?

PATCO

A few months before PATCO went on strike, newly sworn-in President Ronald Reagan had survived an assassination attempt. He was leaving a luncheon meeting with leaders of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest trade union federation. Ironically, the man who killed the trade union movement was saved by a trade union official. He was much closer to death than revealed at the time, but Reagan recovered and began to project the jovial virility that appealed to many conservative voters and working class, male Democrats. The clever White House propaganda about his recovery boosted his popularity.

While Reagan won a landslide victory over the hapless, Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, he was viewed as a throwback to the McCarthy era. Reagan’s militant anti-Communism and dangerous swagger many feared would lead to nuclear war with the U.S.S.R. But, the assassination attempt wiped all that away, at least for a while. Veteran Washington Post reporter, the late David Broder wrote at time:

“The honeymoon has ended and a new legend has been born. … As long as people remember the hospitalized president joshing his doctors and nurses — and they will remember — no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.”

So, when air traffic controllers hit the picket lines on August 3rd, 1981 across the country, the political advantage was with Reagan. The whole story is best told in Joseph A. McCartin’s Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.

Speaking from the Rose Garden of the White House, Reagan struck a moderate, almost reasonable tone compared to the current President Donald Trump. He leaned on his own history as a union president (he was president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and a lifetime member of an AFL-CIO union), he defended the right the right of private sector workers to strike, and praised supervisors and workers who crossed the picket line in the name of public safety. But drew the line at public sector workers. Reagan declared, “If they don’t report for work in forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

Like many people who’ve written about the labor movement during the past four decades, PATCO, the acronym for the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, was at the heart of any analysis of the collapse of U.S. trade unions for the two decades that followed. The facts are well-known. Little has changed with understanding what transpired and why since then. Nearly two decades ago, I wrote:

“You can rest assured that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety, the Republican candidate for president, Ronald Regan promised Robert Poli, the head of PATCO in a letter dated October 1980.

PATCO, along with a handful of other unions including the Teamsters led by Mafia patsy and FBI informer Jackie Presser, endorsed Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, while the bulk of unions in the AFL-CIO endorsed the incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter, whose administration had broken every promise it had made to the labor movement in his four turbulent and disappointing years in Office.”

Jimmy Carter was widely despised in the labor movement. William Winpisinger, the head of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the only avowed “socialist” on the AFL-CIO, during an interview with the the New York City-based Village Voice, he was asked what could Carter do to redeem himself in Labor’s eyes? He responded, “Die.” In fact, Reagan’s blueprint for breaking the PATCO strike was drawn up by the Carter administration. The New York Times reported on August 6, 1981:

It was more than 20 months ago that the Federal Government began planning its response to a nationwide strike by air traffic controllers. Officials at the Federal Aviation Administration said today that they started in January 1980 to draft a detailed contingency plan for operating airport control towers and radar​ scopes with supervisory personnel, on the assumption that members of the controllers’ union might strike.

Reagan Administration officials enthusiastically polished and put into effect the plans first drafted in the Carter Administration. In the Federal Register of Nov. 13, 1980, the aviation agency published a ‘’national air traffic control contingency plan for potential strikes and other job actions by air traffic controllers.’’

PATCO’s picket lines were large and confident during the first days of the strike, but the atmosphere changed rapidly. I was a young member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and a student at UMass-Boston at the time. I have a hazy memory of going out to the PATCO picket line at Boston’s Logan Airport. A history of PATCO’s Boston Local 215 is available here. Kevin Murphy and Peter Lowber of Boston interviewed Local 215 Bill Robertson for Socialist Worker. Over one thousand trade unionist rallied in support of PATCO, which included teachers, postal workers, and Mike Ferman, PATCO’s eastern regional vice-president, who told the crowd:

“To hell with the laws against the air traffic controllers striking. If there’s an unjust law, if there is a fascist law, we’re right to break it. We’re right to fight it.”

My political education in labor struggles and socialist politics was in its early stages. Watching history unfold before me was thrilling but the confident atmosphere in the early days of strike turned darker after Reagan began to make good on his threats. The ISO’s monthly newspaper Socialist Worker had a tiny circulation but it’s first editorial “Union Buster Reagan”, though slightly behind political developments, captured what was at stake:

“They [PATCO] deserve to win — and they deserve the unqualified support of all airline workers — pilots, attendants, and ground and maintenance workers — and all workers. They can also teach Ronal Reagan a lesson. The president and his administration will take as much away from workers as they possibly can — with cuts and in contracts. The time to stand up and fight is now.”

A fractured labor movement

PATCO and its members were not simply badly prepared for the upcoming battle with the Reagan administration, it was so naïve as to be living in a delusional world. After Reagan fired PATCO strikers, the union’s president Robert Poli told the New York Times, “I have to say it was a surprise. ‘’I believe the air traffic controllers of the country, and myself included, never thought that would happen.’’ Why? Socialist Worker wrote at the time:

Ronald Reagan, of course, campaigned for president by boasting that he was a friend of labor and that he had himself once been a union officer. Some workers, apparently believed him. But if there were any doubts at the time, there should be none now. He is anti-union, and intends to give his backing to the union-busting campaign now in full swing in this country.

Reagan was successful with the postal workers. His threats — also of military intervention, firings, fines — worked against “militant” [postal] union presidents Vincent Sombrotto and Moe Biller.

Will they work against Robert Poli, the head of the air traffic controllers’ union and the 15,000 union members? Perhaps.

It became very clear that Reagan was not interested in bludgeoning PATCO into concessions but its destruction. Poli and the rest of the PATO leadership had not simply miscalculated what Reagan was up to but their own power. The New York Times reported in late October 1981:

The union believed that a walkout would dramatically curtail air travel and that the airlines and business executives, whose private flights would also be reduced, would bring pressure on President Reagan to accede to the union’s demands.

An article in a Seattle controllers’ newsletter before the strike said: ‘’Our power stems from one, and only one, source. That is our ability to withold our services en masse, thereby halting the air transportation system of this country.’’

Although air travel has been curtailed and passengers have been subjected to vexing delays, enough has been continued — about 80 percent, the Government says — to allow the system to function.

There was widespread sympathy for the air traffic controller among union workers in the airline industry, and in some eagerness to do something to support them. However, real solidarity — not verbal protests or wind-bagging at rallies — was not forthcoming. The most important union here was the Machinists led by William Winpisinger. PATCO appealed for support. The editors of the revolutionary socialist Against the Current (ATC) magazine wrote:

What was Winpisinger’s response to the PATCO workers’ request for support? He declared himself in full support and sent a letter to every airport IAM local, calling on them to give the fullest support to PATCO, with the small proviso that under no conditions should they take job actions.

This was followed by Winpisinger’s public pronouncement that every IAM local was free to “act according to their consciences” on the PATCO strike. This could of course be interpreted in two ways — as encouragement to act, or as a form of legitimation for those who did not want to do anything.

The test came when the San Jose, California, IAM, under pressure from its ranks, actually demanded that the International give them support in attempting to shut down the local airports. Winpisinger’s response was a prudent silence.

Without the IAM striking in support of PATCO with the full support of the AFL-CIO, the strike was doomed.

For those familiar with the history and politics of the U.S. labor movement this inaction was not a surprise. William Serrin, the chief labor reporter for the New York Times wrote at the time:

The strike also demonstrate[d] the fractiousness of the union movement. The movement has always been less idealistic and united than its statements and songs suggest, Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in August.

Moderate unions, often with nothing to lose, oppose nuclear power; construction unions support it. Liberal unions often oppose military production; more conservative unions favor it, for it means jobs. Public sector unions, out of self-interest, support tax increases and oppose tax reduction referendums; private sector unions campaign for reduced taxes and are often vexed by the rising wages of public workers.

But a singular lack of solidarity marked this strike.

Solidarity Day

The lack of Solidarity on the picket line for PATCO appeared to be made up for by the AFL-CIO’s massive Solidarity Day march on September 19, 1981. For many people, the march was a direct response to Reagan’s strike breaking, but plans for the march were conceived much earlier. AFL-CIO leaders, especially federation leader Lane Kirkland, were frustrated and annoyed at being shunted aside by Ronald Reagan, who attempted to appeal directly to the ranks of the labor movement, with some success.

Reagan’s destruction of PATCO gave added urgency to Solidarity Day on top of his draconian cuts to social welfare spending and regressive tax cuts for the Uber wealthy. Historian Timothy J. Minchin Labor Under Fire gives us a vivid description of the vast outpouring of opposition to Reagan’s policies that the march expressed:

“Although it was initiated by the AFL-CIO, the march mobilized a broad swath of the American population. Its leaders — including civil right icons such as Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, and Coretta Scott King — were diverse. Closely monitoring events, the Reagan administration estimated that no fewer than 250 organizations were taking part, including 100 unions, and a variety of civil rights, religious, and civic groups. Turnout was impressive. According to the National Park Service, 260,000 people attended Solidarity Day, more than the number that turned out for the iconic March on Washington in 1963 or the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969.”

Many participants and observers put the number at somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 demonstrators, including six thousand PATCO strikers. It was no doubt a personal triumph for Lane Kirkland. Minchin’s book Labor Under Fire reveals many things about the organizing of the march that will surprise many people today, including, “Kirkland also permitted communist and socialist participation in the march.” It’s worth noting that the Teamsters were absent from Solidarity Day. If you look at the Teamster magazines for August, September or October 1981, you would never know that there was a PATCO strike, Reagan broke the union, or there was a massive labor march in Washington, D.C. in full view of Teamster headquarters.

I remember Solidarity Day quite vividly. It was a beautiful day. For national demonstrations, it was typical to drive down Washington from Boston late on Friday night and gather blurry-eyed with comrades and friends of the ISO, who made their way to the capital. There was a big push to get the tiny membership of the ISO out to the march. As the old ISO internal bulletin put it: “Most important — everyone should be there. It’s quite difficult, to be blunt, to imagine a socialist who would not want to be on this demonstration.”

Traveling around D.C. was made a lot easier because the public transit system was free that day, because the AFL-CIO covered the cost. The ISO gathered in this sea of people and were encouraged to march close but behind the Machinists contingent. While Kirkland allowed the left to participate in the march and Winpisinger’s reputation on being on the left, this didn’t work its way down to the ranks of the IAM, many of whom worked in the defense industry. Anti-communism was a very real thing. I remember there being a lot of tension, at least initially, with revolutionary socialists mingling so closely but it eventually dissipated.

Two of my most important memories of the march was that union contingents were well organized including banners, signs, and jackets, but many were uncomfortable with chanting slogans. The other memory was following the demonstration the ISO had a public meeting to assess the day. I remember the late Milt Fisk speaking and saying something like, “Some day I hope we can see workers in these great numbers, not just walking away after a great demonstration of strength, but to actually seizing power.” It was the first time I heard someone describe what a workers’ revolution would look like in the United States.

But, how to assess what Solidarity Day really meant? Minchin pointed to a serious problem with Solidarity Day from the very beginning. He wrote, “In protesting against the Reagan administration’s cuts, the AFL-CIO was on the back foot. A key problem was that the rally was held after the administration enacted its budget and tax programs, robbing it of the ability to block these polices.” True, however, the problems ran even deeper.

Socialist Worker’s editorial “Solidarity Day: It must be turned into action” declared that, “Solidarity Day was a fantastic success.”

“But there were important problems as well. First and foremost, the march was not used to organize and build support for the 12,000 PATCO strikers, despite the fact that some 6,000 air traffic controllers took part in the march and were greeted enthusiastically by nearly everyone they met.

The PATCO strikers are still fired. Their union is being destroyed. And daily the picket lines are crossed by all the other airport and airline unions. Secondly, it is clear, despite the absence of politicians on the podium, that the prime purpose of the demonstration was to give the Democrats a boost in their efforts to recover from Reagan’s victories in November [1982] and in Congress. A machinists banner read “Get Ready for Teddy.”

There were thousands of American flags on the march, even some confederate flags. At one point a huge part of the rally rose to sing “God Bless America.” The United Auto Workers union passed out tens of thousands of hats with the slogan “Buy American.”

Finally, the editorial continued:

The march can “only be the beginning” — if it means that more people take from it the lesson that words are not enough, especially in the case of PATCO. Action is absolutely necessary. And the lesson that rank and file organization is necessary, if the movement is to be built and carried on. And that the politics of the movement, including a socialist current, must be built.

Reading all of this four decades later, while I’m aware that there are many differences today, I’m also struck by how broadly similar and the political tasks for us remain the same.

The post “PATCO on Steroids”: Will Labor’s Response be Different Today? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

We speak with the award-winning author and journalist Omar El Akkad, whose new book about the war on Gaza is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book expands on a viral tweet El Akkad sent in October 2023, just weeks into Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian territory, decrying the muted response to the carnage and destruction unfolding on the ground. He wrote, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” He joins Democracy Now! and says the book explores how people respond to injustice and grapple with their own role in it. “It’s in large part trying to figure out my place in this society,” says El Akkad. “I happen to live on the launching side of the missiles, and as a result, it’s very, very easy for me to look away. And what happens when you decide you’re not going to look away?”

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

Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, joins us as President Trump’s defiance of the courts is pushing the United States toward a constitutional crisis, with multiple judges weighing whether to open contempt proceedings against his administration for ignoring court orders. On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg criticized officials for continuing to stonewall his inquiry into why planes full of Venezuelan immigrants were sent to El Salvador last month even after he ordered the flights halted or turned around midair. Boasberg noted in his order that Trump officials have since “failed to rectify or explain their actions,” giving the administration until April 23 to respond. This comes as Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador but was blocked from seeing or speaking to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who was sent to CECOT on the March flights in what the Department of Homeland Security has admitted was an “administrative error.” Both the Trump administration and the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele have refused to release and return Abrego Garcia. This week, federal Judge Paula Xinis said the administration had made no effort to comply with the order, and said she could begin contempt proceedings. “The government is providing no information, not even the most basic factual information about what’s been happening,” says Warren.

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

The Ream Naval Base was officially inaugurated earlier this month, featuring a new pier capable of handling much larger vessels, a dry dock for repairs, and other upgraded facilities. China’s involvement in the project has raised concerns among rival powers, who fear Beijing could use the base as a strategic foothold.

While noting concern about China’s growing move to secure overseas military outposts, Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said the port call by the Japanese ships – the Bungo and the Etajima – will help Cambodia to have a naval port that is open and transparent.

“It will contribute to the further openness of the port and it is important in achieving stability and peace in the region,” said Nakatani on Tuesday, adding that the visit “symbolizes friendship and closer security cooperation” between Japan and Cambodia.

The two ships left Japan in January and are currently on a four-month mission that includes multinational exercises in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East. The vessels are set to stay at the Cambodian port from April 19-22.

In recent years, Japan has strengthened its ties with Cambodia in an effort to counterbalance China’s growing influence in the region. Cambodia invited Japan to make the first port call at the upgraded site.

The Cambodian government said it was giving priority to Japanese warships as a tribute to the “high level of openness in cooperation, relations and mutual trust between the two sides.”

China and Cambodia began working on the redevelopment of the Ream Naval Base in June 2021, with the project largely funded by Beijing.

However, actual construction did not commence immediately. It wasn’t until June 2022 that a formal groundbreaking ceremony was held, marking the public start of the project.

The ceremony was attended by high-ranking Cambodian and Chinese military officials, highlighting the strategic importance of the development to both countries.

The redevelopment plan included extensive upgrades to existing facilities and the addition of new infrastructure, such as a pier capable of docking larger warships, a dry dock for ship repairs, and expanded logistical and operational support structures.

Satellite imagery in the following months showed rapid construction progress, fuelling speculation – particularly among Western governments – that the base could host Chinese naval forces in the future.

Last year, two Chinese warships were docked at the port for several months while the upgrade was underway.

While both Phnom Penh and Beijing denied that China would be granted exclusive military access to the base, U.S. officials expressed repeated concerns. They said the development lacked transparency and could signal the establishment of a permanent Chinese military presence in the Gulf of Thailand, a strategic maritime gateway to the South China Sea.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

This week’s special guest, Adrian Karatnycky, has been on the frontlines fighting for democracy both at home and abroad. In his critically acclaimed book Battleground Ukraine, Adrian traces Ukraine’s struggle for independence from the fall of the Soviet Union to Russia's genocidal invasion today, drawing important lessons for protecting democracies worldwide. He has worked alongside civil rights legend Bayard Rustin and the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in America. He also supported Poland’s Solidarity movement, which helped bring down the Iron Curtain, and played a key role, along with iconic Soviet dissident, writer, and Czech statesman Václav Havel, in preserving Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the 1990s, when many thought the Cold War had ended. 

In part two, we discuss the PayPal Mafia’s war on Ukraine as part of a broader global assault on "wokeism" (a.k.a. Empathy and democracy), Adrian’s impressions of meeting Curtis Yarvin, and how the war in Ukraine can ultimately end. For part one of their discussion, available in the show notes, Andrea and Adrian explore how Europe and the free world can survive the chaos of Trump’s America First isolationism and Russia’s weaponized corruption and election interference. 

Thank you to everyone who joined the Gaslit Nation Salon live-taping with Patrick Guarasci and Sam Roecker, senior campaign advisors for Judge Susan Crawford, discussing their victory against Elon Musk in the pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race. The recording will be available as this week’s bonus show. 

Thank you to everyone who supports Gaslit Nation–we could not make the show without you! 

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Show Notes:

Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia by Adrian Karatnycky https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269468/battleground-ukraine/

Part I of Our Discussion: Can the Free World Survive Putin and Trump? https://sites.libsyn.com/124622/can-the-free-world-survive-trump-and-putin

EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

• April 28 4pm ET – Book club discussion of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower  

• Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.

• Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.

• Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?

• Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community 

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Photo credits: Public domain and Steve Jurvetson (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is sending its first satellites into space. The company’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, seems keen to challenge all things Musk—including Elon’s SpaceX Starlink system.

The satellites in Amazon’s $10 billion-plus Kuiper Atlas project are being launched with the Lockheed Martin-designed Atlas V rocket, at Cape Canaveral’s Space Force Station.

OK, a few thoughts on the matter that corporate media probably won’t contemplate.

Astronomical Funding

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama’s White House trumpeted an increase in NASA funding. Obama said it would “help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth” and help companies produce “new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere”—first to an asteroid, later to Mars. I’m just a little unclear about how, overall, sending hundreds of billions of dollars into space has been improving my daily life so far. If you ask me, money for reliable bus service would help a lot more. Universal medical care. Free higher education.

The benefits to the planet’s most massive corporations are obvious. I hear Amazon’s lining up deals in Britain, Indonesia, Australia, and potentially Taiwan.

This lucrative new space race feeds off the human need for information, especially where internet access is sparse.

Profit Streams

Yes, Starlink connects people in far-flung places with internet services. And it calls these people markets. It’s not hard to imagine unbanked populations being converted into profit streams, once they’re online.

Moreover, when wealthy companies secure US government backing, they can become political instruments, manipulating the populations they claim to serve. Polish taxpayers have forked over an annual $50 million to provide Starlink’s services to Ukraine. But Poland’s foreign minister tweeted out concerns about the trustworthiness of US-based Starlink. Be quiet, small man, Musk snapped back. (Musk then bragged about having challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat.)

People with unfathomable wealth take more billions in handouts from the US military in the name of national security. General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force, recently named SpaceX as a recipient of nearly $6 billion more. Saltzman called the contract “a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Got it. Warfighters gonna warfight. Blam! Zonk! Kapow! Splat!

Cosmic Sprawl

So here comes Jeff Bezos, a prominent player in Donald Trump’s troupe of lickspittles since January. With the Trump regime now describing Amazon Prime as a model for deportation, who knows? Maybe “alien enemies” (those people who have autism awareness tattoos or otherwise ruffle the regime’s feathers) could be shipped into orbit.

In any case, Amazon’s space project will pile 3,200+ satellites onto the tens of thousands that Elon’s launching into the low Earth orbit (within a 1,200-mile band around Earth). Space scientists have long pressed for reviews of the satellites’ impact on the delicate balance of elements and molecules in the air when these things ultimately burn up in our atmosphere.

And the Federal Communications Commission enables it all.

Welcome to outer space in the Anthropocene.

The post Bezos Versus Musk: Which Billionaire Will Trash Space the Most? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The United States risks isolating itself by pursuing unilateral trade restrictions, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Friday during a visit of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to Beijing.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has launched an escalating tariff war with China, imposing a total of 145% in duties on Chinese imports this week. Beijing has retaliated by hiking tariffs on American goods to 125%.

“There are no winners in the tariff war and standing against the world ultimately results in self-isolation,” Xi said, as cited by Xinhua news agency.

Xi called on China and the European Union to “jointly resist unilateral bullying” in order to protect their legitimate rights and interests, and uphold international rules and order.

The EU, which has been targeted with a 20% tariff by the US, has warned of significant global economic repercussions and has vowed to take countermeasures. Earlier this week, Trump declared a 90-day pause on reciprocal duties for most US trading partners, including the EU, allowing a window for negotiation.

Brussels has adopted a policy of “de-risking” towards Chinese imports, balancing protective trade measures such as tariffs on electric vehicles with efforts to maintain constructive economic relations.

The Chinese president also stated that regardless of changes in the external environment, the country would remain steadfast, focused, and would efficiently manage its own affairs.

“For over seven decades, China’s growth has been fueled by self-reliance and hard work, never depending on favors from others and never backing down in the face of unreasonable suppression,” Xi explained.

Trump argues that the increased duties are needed to address trade imbalances and stop China from “ripping off the USA.” Earlier this week, he opined that the “proud” Chinese would have to “make a deal at some point.”

China has slammed Trump’s “abnormally high tariffs” on Chinese products as “unilateral bullying and coercion.” The move by the US president represents “a serious violation of international economic and trade rules, as well as of basic economic laws and common sense,” Beijing stressed.

The trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has disrupted global markets, sent oil prices to four-year lows and caused concerns over global supply chains.

The post Xi Warns US Will Isolate Itself first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/12/xi-warns-us-will-isolate-itself/feed/ 0 525383 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/emergency-forest-cutting-will-exacerbate-wildfires/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/emergency-forest-cutting-will-exacerbate-wildfires/#respond Fri, 11 Apr 2025 05:48:28 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=360026 On April 3rd, the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, issued an Emergency Order (EO) to accelerate logging on national forest lands. The alleged emergency is the presumed increase in wildfires across the West. Unfortunately, most of the rationales for this “emergency” are based on flawed assumptions about “active” management (better known as logging) and the More

The post Emergency Forest Cutting Will Exacerbate Wildfires appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Logging site in the Oregon Coast Range. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

On April 3^rd, the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, issued an Emergency Order (EO) to accelerate logging on national forest lands. The alleged emergency is the presumed increase in wildfires across the West.

Unfortunately, most of the rationales for this “emergency” are based on flawed assumptions about “active” management (better known as logging) and the purported increase in wildfires.

The EO states that: “National Forests are in crisis due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management.”

Despite recent years of significant wildfires, the overall acreage charred is less than in historical conditions. To quote from one recent study:

“Our results indicate, despite increasing area burned in recent decades, that a widespread fire deficit persists across a range of forest types and recent years with exceptionally high area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees.”

The Secretary gets away with such misleading assertions by using a concept known as a sliding baseline. If you were to compare the acres of high-severity fires with those of the 1970s, they would have increased. However, this overlooks the fact that between 1940 and 1988, the overall climate of the West was cooler and moister.

What happens if the climate is cooler and moister? You have fewer ignitions and less fire spread.

However, if you look back further in the fire record than the 1970s, you will find that during periods of drought, the acreage burned by wildfires is significantly higher. During the “Dust Bowl” years of the late 1920s-early 1930s, as many as 50 million acres were burned across the West.

We are currently experiencing extreme weather characterized by high temperatures and severe drought, primarily attributed to human-induced carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Climate is the controlling factor in increases in wildfires and insects, such as bark beetles. To quote from the above study: “wildfire area burned (WFAB) in the American West was controlled by climate during the 20th century (1916–2003).”

Furthermore, rather than compounding fire severity and insect outbreaks, as claimed by the Secretary, active management, particularly logging, compounds the influence of climate change.

For example, a review study examining 1,500 wildfires found that the percentage of high-severity fires was highest in areas with “active management. “In contrast, lands where logging and other active management practices are excluded, such as wilderness areas and national parks, had lower levels of high-severity burns.

There is a reasonable explanation for these findings. When you log the forest, the canopy opens to greater sun dries soils and surface fuels. This means trees suffer from what is essentially dehydration and are far more flammable.

Thinning the forest also allows for greater wind penetration. High winds accounted for rapid fire spread. High winds, in particular, can throw embers over or around any “fuel reductions,” essentially making thinning or prescribed fires ineffective.

And while the Secretary suggests that invasive species are problematic, he neglects to mention that logging roads are one of the primary vectors for spreading weeds and disease into the forest.

When all is said and done, the best way to protect our national forests is not to promote “active management” but to reduce it.

Our forests have existed for millions of years, long before humans colonized the continent to manage them. And one has to presume that if they survived for tens of millions of years without human intervention, they certainly don’t need any now.

The post Emergency Forest Cutting Will Exacerbate Wildfires appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/emergency-forest-cutting-will-exacerbate-wildfires/feed/ 0 525103 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/kill-these-cuts-before-they-kill-us-federally-funded-researchers-warn-doge-cuts-will-be-fatal/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/kill-these-cuts-before-they-kill-us-federally-funded-researchers-warn-doge-cuts-will-be-fatal/#respond Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:48:58 +0000 https://therealnews.com/?p=333379 On April 8, national 'Kill the Cuts' rallies mobilized unions across the country to protest the Trump administration’s DOGE-fueled cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs.]]>

On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs. As organizers stated on the Kill The Cuts website:

“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding NO cuts to education and life-saving research.”

In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, we take you to the front lines of the Kill the Cuts rally that took place in Washington, DC, and we speak with workers and union representatives whose lives and work have already been affected by these cuts.

Speakers include: Margaret Cook, Vice President of the Public, Healthcare, and Education Workers sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA); Matt Brown, Recording Secretary of NIH Fellows United (United Auto Workers Local 2750); Rakshita Balaji, a post-baccalaureate researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Amanda Dykema, shop steward for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1072 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Additional links/info:

• Kill the Cuts website
• NIH Fellows United website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “What’s really behind Trump’s war on federal unions?”
• Jocelyn Kaiser, Science, “NIH under orders to cancel $2.6 billion in contracts”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

I got work. Who protects us? We protects us. Who protects us, who protects us, who protects us? We protects us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to another on the Ground edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I’m here in Washington DC right in front of the US Capitol Building where dozens of local union members and union leaders just held a rally as part of a national Kill The Cuts Day of Action. Similar protest rallies were held today from California to Illinois to New York. Organizers called for the National Day of Action to raise awareness and fight against the Trump Musk administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to federal research, health and education. As the homepage of the Kill the Cuts website states by cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care.

The Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding no cuts to education and lifesaving research. The National Day of Action is sponsored by a plethora of labor unions, including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the Communications Workers of America, ame, SEIU, the Debt Collective and more. I came down to the DC action to talk to union members about this fight and what their message is to the Trump administration, to the labor movement and to the public.

Speaker 3:

Alright, we’re our last speaker. We have got Margaret Cook, who is the vice president of the Public Healthcare and Education Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. Let’s give it.

Margaret Cook:

I am a little short. Let me move this back a bit. Good afternoon everybody. Yes, I am your last speaker and I promise I won’t be like a Baptist preacher. I’m not going to keep you for another hour. My name is Margaret Cook and I am the public healthcare and education worker sector Vice President of Communication Workers of America representing over 130,000 state municipal and higher education workers across the country in Puerto Rico, including thousands of researchers, lab technicians, public healthcare clinicians and nurses, and thousands of additional support and wraparound staff, many of whom have seen their work shut down, cut off, and possibly killed by these cuts. You’ve heard from all of these people about today. Cuts that are illegal, cuts that are unethical, cuts that are immoral cuts that are unacceptable, cuts that are fatal. And I don’t mean just figuratively

Speaker 1:

Because

Margaret Cook:

As you’ve heard today, these cuts to research that will, these are cuts to research that will save lives. And so our message is pretty clear today. Kill these cuts before they kill us. I’m proud to stand here today with all these other members and leaders from labor who are going to work each day to deliver care and discover solutions for each and every one of us, which is a lot more than you can say for the people who are doing the cutting. You got the world’s richest man on one hand and the world’s most arrogant man on the other.

These men are living in a fantasy world, which may explain one of the reasons why they are so hostile to science. I’ve sat back and I’ve listened to them talk about how they need to cut back on the size of our federal government and to do so by going on a rampage against these workers who are doing some of the most critical and vital work that our government does. Well, what they aren’t telling you because they’re liars and cheats is that today the size of the federal workforce is the smallest it has been since the Great Depression at just over 1.5% of the jobs in this country, years of plundering public dollars for corporate greed, decades of austerity and slashing and burning the public good has left our government smaller than it has ever been, and these jackals aren’t done tearing away at it. And for what? Let’s cut the crap on the racist dog whistles about DEI, setting aside for the sake of argument, the fact that we do need to address inequality and injustice. Are you really telling me that the cuts to people working on cancer research is about DEI, that the cuts to people working to deliver vital aid and care is about DEII see right through it and I know you do too.

The reality is we need more public investment, not less because what is it that our investments really do? What these workers do is they discover, they educate, they provide care, and they prevent and act in emergencies, in labs and research settings across this country, these workers are discovering cures and treatments for diseases that threaten all of us. My grandfather died two days ago from stage four cancer, and my mother currently has stage two in campuses and schools. They’re educating and helping elevate the knowledge of future generations in clinics and hospitals and public service facilities. They’re delivering care to people who need it and in dire straits from outbreaks of viruses like measles. Measles, y’all.

These are people who put themselves at risk to protect the rest of us, and that’s who Trump and Musk and a bunch of kids without any real world knowledge and experience are trying to fire Trump and Musk whose genius lies and putting their name on work and breakthroughs of other people and then have the nerve to charge rent for it well enough. This money is the public’s and we demand that it be used for the public good. Not one penny less. No. I firmly believe for us to meet the incredible challenges and realize the potential of our country, we need so much more public investment. That’s why we’ve got to unite across our unions, across all kinds of work and across our communities to stand up, speak out, resist these attacks, and defend the services and work we do for the people we serve and work for. Lives are on the line. These cuts are wrong. So I say again, kill these cuts or they’ll end up killing us. Thank you.

Matt Brown:

My name is Matt Brown and I’m the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United. We’re a local of the UAW number 27 50.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Matt, thank you so much for talking to me, man. The kill cuts rally just concluded here. The Senate building is right behind us, but for folks who aren’t here right now and are listening to this, can you just say a little bit about what we just witnessed? What brought you guys out here today?

Matt Brown:

Of course. Yeah, max, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the pod and what brought us out here is saving the completely devastating cuts that are currently happening to publicly funded research here in the US at NIH Fellows United. We’re members of the intramural scientific team at the NIH that are working on things like carrying cancer and making treatments for diabetes, and we’re partnering up with all the folks that are being affected by the cuts to the extramural side of the NIH. So all of the universities and other institutions that receive grants to work on those same things outside of the NIH. And yeah, it’s been really great to see all of these people come together to save the life-saving work that we’re all doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Say more about the extent of these cuts and the impact on research intra and extramural. I guess give listeners a sense of how deep this goes and what the impacts are really going to be.

Matt Brown:

This is truly an existential crisis for biomedical research in America. Flat out the cuts to the intramural program have seen thousands of jobs cut from the people that support the science that we do. And on the extramural side, the cuts that we’re seeing to grants these so-called indirect costs, it’s a bit of a jargon term that can be hard to parse, but really that goes towards supporting the life-saving research that we do. The cuts that we’re seeing are going to decimate the amount of research that we can get done on these awful diseases that people face. And like I said, this is an existential question, do we want biomedical research to continue or not?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what about, let’s talk about the flesh and blood workers who are making this research happen and the working people who benefit from that research. Who are these cuts actually hurting right now?

Matt Brown:

These cuts are going to affect every single person. Historically, scientists and researchers have been considered somewhat apolitical quote because, hey, who doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by cancer? Right? It’s pretty easy to fund cancer research because it can be so devastating. And so yeah, everybody’s going to be affected by this. It’s not just the researchers here at NIH and Bethesda. It’s not just the researchers at universities, but it’s going to be every single person who has or has known someone with a really awful life altering disease.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what’s the message? What was the rallying message that we heard here today for folks in attendance and folks who aren’t in attendance? What are these unions doing to fight back and what are you saying to other folks about how they can get involved?

Matt Brown:

Well, really what I think the rallying call is, is to look around us. It’s look at who are the people that are trying to save each other’s lives. Here it’s the organized workers that are involved in biomedical research around the country. We’re not hearing things from NIH leadership. We’re not hearing things from university leadership. We’re hearing things from the organized researchers who are getting their butts out here to try to save what we do. And that’s really what this is, is it’s about getting as many people out here as possible and all moving in the same direction to not just save our jobs and not just save science, but to save lives around the country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And last question. I mean, there were a number of different unions present here and represented here. What does it mean that this is such a crisis, that it is bringing together different sides of the labor movement and uniting around a common fight?

Matt Brown:

Absolutely. And actually that’s a very special question to me because as NIH Fellows United we’re one of the unions that was part of organizing this as well as reaching out to other universities, one of them being my former bargaining unit with teachers and researchers United, which is local of UE 1 97. And so

Yeah, it’s been really special to see people come together and not just start organizing the workers in their own workplaces, but reaching out to everybody else in their own regions, in their own careers and making sure that we’re all pointed at the same thing, which is saving lives. This is obviously not some sort of move towards government efficiency, that everything that the Trump and Musk administration is doing right now is entirely done to antagonize workers and make us feel like we’re hopeless. But things like today show us that we’re not and we need to continue doing things like this along in the future to make sure that they can’t move on with their destructive agenda.

Rakshita Balaji:

So hi, my name is Rakshita Balaji Currently I’m a post-baccalaureate fellow, a researcher at the NIH. So what that means is I’ve been spending the last almost two years now post-graduation from getting my undergrad degree working at the NIH and getting training in order to prepare myself for success in my next step of my career stage, which is to go to graduate school and I’ll be a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania coming this fall. So what I’m interested in is neuroscience research, and that’s what my career trajectory has been so far.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, congratulations on your acceptance and good luck. We need you out there. For folks who are listening to this who only see an acronym when they hear NIH, I’m not asking you to sort of describe everything that goes on there, but could you just give folks a sense of who actually works in the NIH and what kind of work is being done there?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, this is a great question and a question. I actually had myself when I was young and going into the NIH or the National Institute of Health, I was 22 when I joined, and I actually also had no idea what goes on behind those gates. And it turns out what I’ve learned so far is that the N NIH is full of awesome people who are passionate about their work, but they’re also not, maybe the scientists you think of in the media that work isolated in a lab in an ivory tower doing crazy experiments. These are people who have families, people who have loved ones who have been affected by diseases and people who really want to make a difference in healthcare in America. And so I just want to first make the point that the NIH is full of regular people who just happen to love what they do and love science, just like everyone in this country is passionate about what they work on.

And so National Institute of Health is comprised by a bunch of different sub institutes. So they’ll work on things like allergies and diseases, cancer, pain, neuroscience, looking at neurodegenerative diseases, looking at aging. There’s a bunch of different types of research that’s going on in order to serve every subset of someone’s health profile and all of the different types of diseases or different afflictions that people can have throughout the us. And what’s also really special about the NIH in particular is their ability to use their knowledge and their resources to target diseases and conditions that are not necessarily as prevalent. So for example, rare diseases where people oftentimes don’t always find care in their own physician settings or don’t always find the right answers, just going to the doctor that doesn’t have the research or the exploratory privileges that people do at NIH. So for example, we look at diseases where the population of people that suffer from them can be so small, yet they don’t go ignored because our clinical center has people who are specialized in learning about specific genetic mutations or specific, I think that’s, yeah, specific genetic mutations for example, or specific diseases that don’t always get studied.

And so the NIH not only tries to serve the general public in terms of looking at complete profiles of people’s health, but they also can target their resources to looking at things that oftentimes go under the radar and give care to people who oftentimes don’t find answers whenever they go to the doctor and they actually find those answers in possible treatments at the NIH.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you tell folks listening what these cuts, everything Doge and the Trump administration are doing, what does this all look like from your side of things and how are you and your colleagues been responding to it? What do you want folks on the outside to know about what it looks like on the inside?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so the first thing that really comes to mind when I was thinking about these cuts, especially what’s happened February 14th, April 1st, it’s almost like a trap door. You’re sort of walking into work, you’re getting prepared. Maybe you got your kids ready for the day, maybe you got up and made breakfast and lunch and you made sure that everyone was ready, you got into work and suddenly the four just falls apart beneath you because you no longer have access to your work email. You no longer have access to your data. You are no longer as appreciated as you thought you once were as a federal employee, and all of a sudden you are left stranded without a job, maybe on administrative leave, not knowing if you’d have the chance to come back. And it sort of is almost like a disappearing act is what it really felt like for no apparent reason.

And that’s the worst part to hear that the numbers are the most important thing. How many people can they get rid of? How many people can they actually eliminate? Rather than thinking about how many lives are actually just being torn from underneath people? That’s kind of all I can describe it as. It’s a really strange disappearing act. You don’t know, we had the manager of our building, someone who takes care of our building when we have leaks or have issues with our labs, be fired on this random day and then reinstated the next. It’s all very chaotic. And this chaos is preventing us from actually being able to move forward with our work, which might’ve been the goal, but actually ends up harming way more people than just us doing the work, but the people that we’re trying to serve. So that’s the best way I can describe it. It was immediate, it was forceful, and it was completely and utterly uncalled for. I mean, we had people who were dedicated employees for over 10 years, 20 years, just suddenly say, I’m no longer able to come in. People who couldn’t even email anyone telling anyone that they were fired and had to shoot texts to people that they knew because they were immediately locked out of their computer. I mean completely. It just felt like a huge slap in the face.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think the response from so many people has been fear and shock, and it’s almost been immobilizing because there’s so many executive orders, so many cuts, so much bad news hitting us day after day, which we know is part of the quote, flood the zone strategy. But what we are seeing, especially in recent weeks is anger, mobilization, organizing and the coming together like today of different unions. So there are different kinds of actions that folks are taking, whether it be going to these town halls and screaming at their elected officials or writing emails or doing mass protests. What we’re seeing here today is more about what unions and what workers can do when they come together with their labor power to fight this. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about that. What is the message here about what workers and unions in these agencies and what the labor movement can do to fight back against the Trump agenda?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so I think the first word that comes to mind is solidarity. I mean, we’ve now seen that an ultimate betrayal take place from our own employers and from our own administration showing us that we’re not valued. And so the only solace and the primary solace that I think is the most powerful has been within one another. We come into work, the morale has been extremely low. It feels like you’re trudging through molasses just trying to get one day to the other. And really all you can do with all that pent up frustration in order to not let it implode you is to actually share it with others and to bring community about it. And I think the most important thing that our union has brought about is that sense of solidarity, that sense of information, connection, network, especially when the actual protocol for all of these things has been so unclear going from a fork in the road to a riff, more acronyms might I add. The only place that we can really get answers is by sharing information and having open lines of communication with one another. And so the community that we fostered, I think that’s our strength and that’s what we want to preserve through all of our labor movements and unions is to understand that knowledge is power and we’re not afraid to share it with one another. We’re not afraid to speak the truth time and time again and to talk about our experiences and we will not be shut behind a door and left out of this conversation anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what comes next? I guess for folks listening to this, what’s your message about why this is the time to get involved and what they can do?

Rakshita Balaji:

I think with regards to when is the time, my only answer would be when else is the time? This whole period of time since the inauguration has felt like an avalanche, like you mentioned, it’s a barrage of information that usually makes little to no sense and has harmed so many people. So what other time do we have? I think because the only question I’d have, when else do we come out and do this as we need to be active and keep pushing back in the moments that things are happening and that’s how change occurs, what people can do. I think if you’re hopefully angry just like we are, you can call your representatives, keep telling them the stories, especially if you have been a victim of these removals from your job or a victim of the lack of funding for your research or even how this administration has been shaking up your life.

Those are important stories. Your story is as important as everyone else’s, and to not undervalue the power of your voice, whether it’s calling your representative, showing up to these protests, being in unison and harmony with other people, because not only will you find solace in that, but you’ll create strength and to look and try to plug into your local communities as well because typically you’re not the only one who’s going through this. And you can definitely find people who are willing to help you, willing to give you information and speak up. Don’t be afraid to ask questions whether it’s about, regardless of, for example, if you’re worried about things related to your immigration status, if you’re worried about things related to how your funding’s going to work, how you’re going to receive, are you going to receive a pension? These questions that have gone unanswered, echo it as much as you can because through those echoes, you’ll find answers within other people and eventually those echoes will be heard by people who can do more to help make a change and actually protect us from these kinds of ridiculous actions.

And again, if you’re angry, I think anger only will boil up inside of you if you let it fester. So the best thing to do is to release it at places like this, find local movements, do some searching, and look for places you can actually get your voice heard. And I promise that you don’t, don’t feel like you need to be someone special with the name or an acronym that helps you move forward. Just let yourself be heard and give yourself grace during this time too. And I hope that together we’ll be able to make this change together. Don’t lose sight of the power we have within one another when it feels like we’re being towered over. We actually are on an even playing field if we have each other, and we can begin to even that out in numbers if not in position.

Amanda Dykema:

My name is Amanda Dykema and I am a shop steward with AFSCME Local 10 72 at the University of Maryland College Park.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Amanda, thank you so much for talking to me today. I know you got a lot going on and the crowd is dispersing, but I wanted to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what we just witnessed here and what brought all these folks out here to DC today?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah, well, I think you saw people from all kinds of different unions and different kinds of workplaces who are all impacted by the same thing, which is these cuts that are happening to research and medicine and scientific innovation and education, and they’re hitting all sectors. And what we’re seeing is at the University of Maryland, faculty’s grants that were approved and have been ongoing for years being abruptly terminated with no cause. We’re seeing faculty grants that went in last year not being reviewed on review panels and we’re seeing cancellation of programs that have had huge impacts for things like expanding the STEM pipeline to people who have been historically excluded from it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What’s on the ground impact of this? What would you want folks to know who are maybe just hearing about that and they’re saying, oh, that’s good. That’s eliminating waste. It’s getting rid of woke programs. What do you want folks to know about what these cuts are actually doing to your members and the people who benefit from their work?

Amanda Dykema:

So my members at the University of Maryland, we support all university services. You can see my t-shirt says we run this university. And so what it does for our members is those of us who work for research centers are concerned about the futures of their jobs. And for our students, we’re seeing student workers who are being let go because the funding’s not there anymore. For students who were looking for careers in these sectors who came to the University of Maryland to learn how to do this kind of research, if a research lab gets shut down, they’re not able to learn how to do that. They’re not able to prepare for grad school, they’re not able to go on. But mainly what we’re seeing is a chilling effect that faculty, students, and staff really have to work together and get organized to fight against. They want people to stop this kind of research. They want people to be scared, and we are here to get organized and work together so that we can fight against that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What are the long term effects? If that doesn’t happen, if these things go through unchallenged, what are the long-term effects going to be for the University of Maryland specifically and higher ed in the United States more broadly?

Amanda Dykema:

That’s a big question. I’ll give it my best shot. The University of Maryland is a preeminent public research university. It’s the flagship of the state, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding every single year, and it funds all kinds of work. We heard today from a climate scientist. I work really closely with a lot of people in the College of Education who do work on K 12, and we have researchers in the humanities, in history, in museums, in data science. All of those agencies that fund that type of work have been subject to significant cuts, and those people will not be able to do their jobs or there’ll be a greatly reduced scope and the trickle down effect or the very obvious effect of their research. And when it comes to broader impacts on society, we’re not going to see those things. We’re not going to learn what is the best way to teach kids what is the best way to create climate resilient communities? We’re not going to learn those things if we don’t have this research funding.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what was the message today about how workers and unions can fight back? I mean, it was really powerful to see so many different unions represented

Amanda Dykema:

Here,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so that in itself seems significant. But I guess where does it go from here? What can rank and file folks listening to this do to get involved?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah. Well, the number one thing, I’m going to say it every time is get organized. If you have a union at your workplace, join it. We’re more powerful together. If you don’t have a union at your workplace, work on getting one because we’re not going to be relying on whether it’s the president or whether it’s university administrators. We can’t rely on them to protect us. We have to work together to protect ourselves. But otherwise, the thing I really heard today was a lot about medical advances and people’s health. We’re going to see, if someone is not familiar with a research university, they might not know what this means, but if they go to their doctor and there’s not a clinical trial available for their diagnosis, they’re going to see what it means. And so I think what we’re trying to do now is reach out to our legislators who, the thing I haven’t said so far is that research is a huge economic driver for every state in this country.

And so we’re reaching out to our legislators to say, not only on its merits should this research be funded, but this is going to gut communities. This is people work in these labs and then they go and they spend their paychecks in their hometowns. And so what we’re asking is for people to understand that this isn’t a kind of an ivory tower thing that only impacts universities. It’s a thing that impacts everyone in this country. Senator Markey talked about health doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, and so people need to realize how this will impact them and their loved ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, which is like the largest or one of the largest employers of that entire state.

Amanda Dykema:

Exactly. I’m from Michigan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah,

Amanda Dykema:

Now that you’re listeners will care, but yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and any final messages that you have because we are also at the same time that these cuts are being pushed through experiencing a violent, vicious state crackdown on the very right to dissent against such things to speak out against such things, and universities are becoming the flashpoint for that war on free speech.

Amanda Dykema:

Well, I think the other reason we’re all here today, the people who came to this rally, we work at agencies like NIH and institutions like the University of Maryland, and we have to pressure our administrators to stand strong in the face of this. Trump clearly wants to stifle free speech, but what is a university, if not a place where people learn and grow through free speech expression and exposure to ideas. And so if that’s really our value, we have to call upon not only our legislators, but our administrators at these institutions to stand strong.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank the guests who spoke with me today. It’s cold out here in DC and I’m about to head back home to Baltimore. But I also want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism like this that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez reporting from Washington DC. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/kill-these-cuts-before-they-kill-us-federally-funded-researchers-warn-doge-cuts-will-be-fatal/feed/ 0 524961 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/rfa-journalist-while-i-have-a-voice-i-will-tell-the-truth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/rfa-journalist-while-i-have-a-voice-i-will-tell-the-truth/#respond Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:49:23 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=c9ba6daa969b6533fb85eaa6feb55213
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/rfa-journalist-while-i-have-a-voice-i-will-tell-the-truth/feed/ 0 524959 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/retirees-welcome-news-that-ssa-phone-services-will-remain-available-to-the-public/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/retirees-welcome-news-that-ssa-phone-services-will-remain-available-to-the-public/#respond Wed, 09 Apr 2025 21:54:08 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/retirees-welcome-news-that-ssa-phone-services-will-remain-available-to-the-public Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, issued the following statement regarding the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) reversal of its decision to end phone services for benefit claims:

“Organizing and mobilizing works. From the moment DOGE announced its dangerous plan to eliminate SSA telephone services, our members sprang into action—making thousands of calls to elected officials, organizing rallies and demonstrations, and demanding the protection of the services they have earned and paid for.

“We are grateful that our voices were heard. As of today, most Americans will still be able to apply for their earned retirement, survivor, or disability benefits through the method that works best for them—whether by phone, in person, or online.

“Forcing millions of seniors and people with disabilities to rely solely on an understaffed network of closing field offices or an online-only system would have placed an unreasonable burden on vulnerable people and done little to curb fraudulent claims.

“We will continue to fight to ensure that SSA is fully staffed and that local field offices remain open and accessible to the public.”

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/retirees-welcome-news-that-ssa-phone-services-will-remain-available-to-the-public/feed/ 0 524796 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/will-the-philippines-be-a-battleground-for-us-china-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/will-the-philippines-be-a-battleground-for-us-china-war/#respond Wed, 09 Apr 2025 17:40:49 +0000 https://therealnews.com/?p=333251 Territorial conflict in the South China Sea has been driving tensions between China and the US vis-a-vis the Philippines. How likely is a clash?]]>

Since 1565, the Philippines has been in the grip of one imperialist power after another. Even after independence, the archipelago remains a kind of functional US colony. Now, territorial conflict in the South China Sea could turn the Philippines into a battleground for US-China war. Josua Mata joins Solidarity Without Exception to discuss the Philippines long history of colonization and resistance.

Production: Ashley Smith
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Ashley Smith:

Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith, who along with Blanca Misse, are co-hosts of this ongoing podcast series. Solidarity Without Exception is sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and produced by The Real News Network. Today, we’re joined by Josua Mata to discuss the Philippines, a country caught in the crossfire between the US and China over hegemony in the Asia Pacific.

Josua Mata is the General Secretary of the Filipino Labor Federation, SENTRO, which organizes workers across many sectors in the country. The Philippines has long been a battleground between empires fighting for dominance over the Asia Pacific. The US replaced Spain as the country’s colonial overlord in 1898 through President William McKinley’s Spanish-American War. The US used that war to seize control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, projecting its imperial power over the Americas and Asia. Japan drove out the US during World War II, imposing its own brutal dominance over the country, only to be replaced after its defeat by the United States.

Ever since, Washington has used the Philippines as a base to project its hegemony in Asia. Today, the country is caught between the intensifying conflict between the US and China in the region. The Philippines elite has historically been a willing collaborator with the US. Washington backed the country’s dynastic families, including the notorious dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, until it was overthrown in the People’s Power Revolution in 1986. Because the uprising did not have a party of its own to lead a thoroughgoing transformation of society, the liberal elite were able to hijack the revolution.

While they did reestablish democracy and kick out the US military bases, they enacted Washington’s neoliberal reforms that have driven the country into debt and devastated the living standards of the working class and peasantry. They also collaborated with the US in challenging China’s construction of military bases in the South China Sea. China established those bases to project its regional power, control shipping lanes, and secure access to fisheries and drilling rights to the undersea oil and natural gas reserves.

The Philippines challenged Beijing’s encroachment into what it regarded as its sovereign territory, winning a case under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in The Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration. China has not recognized or obeyed that decision, stoking what has become a semi-militarized conflict between China and the Philippines. But amid spiraling poverty, the masses of the country grew disappointed with the liberal elite, opening the door to the return of authoritarian forces.

Far-right populist Rodrigo Duterte won election in 2016. He launched his so-called War on drugs that massacred tens of thousands of people, escalated the government’s brutal repression of the Muslim separatist groups in Mindanao, and tilted the Philippines toward China in the hopes of securing investment as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. After the end of his term in office, Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, ran as the vice president on the presidential ticket of Marcos son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr.

Their joint dynastic ticket one handily, but the pact between the families has fallen apart. Marcos has back to the US and permitted the International Criminal Court to arrest Rodrigo Duterte and place him on trial in The Hague for the mass killing he carried out in his so-called war on drugs. Now, Sara Duterte is mobilizing protests against Marcos, thrusting the country towards political conflict between dynastic elites.

Amidst this conflict, the Marcos government is whipping up nationalism against China’s ongoing encroachment on its seas. The Trump administration is pouring fuel on the fire. It dispatched Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia to escalate the US confrontation with China. He promised to back the Philippines, Taiwan, and other countries in the region against Beijing. Thus, the Philippines has become yet another flashpoint between the US and China in their ongoing rivalry.

In this podcast, Josua Mata lays out an alternative approach for working people. He advocates progressive internationalism. He calls for the demilitarization of the region, international solidarity from below against both imperial powers as well as the region’s elite, and the transformation of the contested seas into a commons to be shared by the region, and developed in the interests of the people and our planet. Now on to the discussion with Josua Mata.

The Philippines has been a battleground of empires, various imperial powers, really for centuries. And I really couldn’t help but think about that when President Trump and his inaugural address referred to President McKinley and the Spanish American War, which the US used to take over the Philippines and impose a brutal occupation and semi or direct colonial rule of the country for decades. So what is the history of the Philippines’ experience of colonization by different imperialist powers and how have Filipinos resisted?

Josua Mata:

Well, we normally would start the history of the Philippine labor movement by tracing it all the way to the time that we were struggling against pain. In fact, the working-class hero, Andres Bonifacio, is considered as a working-class hero, primarily because he was the one who founded the revolutionary organization that fought Spain after 300 years of colonial rule.

And to be honest, that revolution have already won almost all the territories in the country except for Manila, particularly the fort, the world city of Manila, and some small parts in the provinces. But primarily, the Katipunan, which was what it was called them, was already able to liberate most of the areas from Spanish colonial rule. However, that was also the time when the American colonial project started, and it started with the coming of Commodore George Dewey and where they staged our mock naval battle in Manila Bay.

And then they took over Fort Santiago, pretending to have a firefight with the Spaniards, just to give them the semblance that they are really fighting for their dignity, when if fact it’s really a mock bottle. And then they started fooling the Filipino forces then by telling them that this is something that they came to the Philippines to help the revolution. Of course, the Philippine Republic was already declared as an independent country then. But then, as soon as George Dewey was able to amass enough resources coming from, enough reinforcements, I mean, coming from the US, then they started to have this really brutal fight with the Filipino revolutionaries.

Eventually, of course, we were overtaken by more superior technology and much more better trained American soldiers who were fresh from their experiences in practically decimating the Native American Indians in North America. So, a lot of the things that they did here in the Philippines were actually efforts to perfect what they have learned in killing the Native American Indians. And in turn, what they learned from the Philippines are exactly the same things that they brought with them to Vietnam.

So, to answer your question quite clearly, how was the Filipino experience when it came to American imperial control? Well, the simplest answer is that we were the first Vietnam. So Japan came in, and then the Americans, of course came back with MacArthur’s promise of, “I shall return.” And he did return, but unfortunately when he did, he was more interested in making sure that the elites that he had befriended when he was still the security advisor of Manuel L. Quezon, that was the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, he was more interested in making sure that the elites are able to regain their power, their prestige, and even their economic wealth, to the point that he was so eager to pardon everyone who practically collaborated with the Japanese.

And that is so unlike the practice that he demonstrated. That’s so unlike what he did when he was the proconsul of Japan, where he literally punished everyone who had ties with the military’s Japanese empire, except of course, the Japanese leaders who have very strong ties with those who amass so much wealth plundering every country in this part of the world. So, the so-called Yamashita gold, this actually historical reality, and it is suspected that MacArthur readily pardoned many of the Japanese war criminals in exchange for some share of that looted gold. So, those are two very different approaches.

So for example, as soon as they returned to the Philippines, one of the first things that the US government did was to help the elite to destroy the armed Huk Rebellion, which is essentially an armed group controlled by the old Communist Party, who were fighting with the peasants who wanted, of course, to have a control over the land that they have been historically cultivating. That’s so contrary to what MacArthur did in Japan, where one of the first thing he imposed was punishing, undergoing agrarian reform in order to dismantle, partly, also to dismantle the Zaibatsus that armed the imperial government of Japan. It’s a contrasting way of dealing with a colonial country, and obviously it has to do with the loyalties of MacArthur to the elites in the Philippines.

Ashley Smith:

So, in the wake of World War II, the Philippines eventually achieves a kind of nominal independence, but with serious control by the United States through military bases, through economic domination.

Josua Mata:

That’s right. And that’s one of the biggest problems, the so-called parity rights that Americans imposed on the Philippines, wherein American capitalists would have the same rights as Filipinos in running their business in the country, or even in exploiting our natural resources. And that was one of the nastiest things that made sure that even if we have nominal independence, the country practically continues to serve as a colony, a new colony of the US, if you like.

Ashley Smith:

So, now we’re in a situation where the United States is still the predominant power in Asia, but it faces a rival for its dominance in the form of China. And the Philippines is caught in the middle of this conflict between the US and China. And China in particular has been trying to assert its control of the South China Sea, and with that, islands fisheries, undersea natural resources, oil, natural gas, and shipping lanes. And the Philippines has been caught in between the US and China. So, what is the character of this conflict between the United States and China, and what impact has it had on the Philippines?

Josua Mata:

Well, clearly this is a fight between two imperial powers, and the Philippines is being caught between them, and that’s not a good place to be. On the one hand, the US, because of its historical ties to the country, and because it has an existing mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, it is dangling this promise that they would come to the aid of the Philippines if it is attacked militarily by a foreign aggressor, in this case, for example, China.

But interestingly, actually, for many presidents in the past, it was so difficult for them to be very categorical about coming to the aid of the Philippines, to the point that you’re not really sure whether the US would actually support the Philippines or not. And with Trump around, many are obviously now having a problem because nobody knows if Trump would actually lift a finger to help Filipinos. And why would he, when he’s so preoccupied with ejecting everyone who is not a white American in his own country? Why would he then spend time, energy and resources and American lives to save Filipinos? So that’s a big question mark.

Now, that is putting the current government in a quandary because it casted its lot with American power, and it started having a much more robust, if you like, stance to US intervention and intrusion, if you like, in our part of the world. Now, that’s problematic for them because now they have been supported by the previous government of the US, the Biden administration, to stand fast, fight back. Now they’re not so sure whether the Americans would really come to their support. And I think that clearly is the problem, because in the first place, why did they decide to side with the US in this conflict and eventually be used as a pawn of one imperial power as against another rising imperial power?

Now, having said that, China on the other hand, is obviously keen on making sure that it can exercise its own manifest destiny in this part of the world. They have been very, very clear, if the US run the Americas throughout history as if it’s its own backyard, they should have the, “Same right to do that,” quote, unquote. Which then puts Filipinos, particularly the fishermen who have traditionally been going out to those parts of the South China Sea, which we now call the West Philippine Sea, in order to do their livelihood. And prior to this conflict, it has been said that Filipinos, Taiwanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, even Indonesians were all free to gather resources peacefully and in coexistence when there was no conflict. But then, now that’s not possible because China was asserting its nine-dash lines, which is now back to 10-dash lines in a very, very aggressive manner.

But in the meantime, rather than call for sobriety and call for making sure that there’s no potential for any flashpoint that could lead to war, unfortunately my country, the government, my government opted to bring in and invite more military arrangements, not only with the US, but also with several other countries like Japan, Australia. Now they’re forging now another agreement with New Zealand. They’re trying to forge an agreement with Germany as well as in India. And what would that mean? It means that this would only lead to more militarization of that part of the world. And with more naval forces loitering in that area, then you have an ever-increasing possibility of having a flashpoint that could lead eventually to war. So, this is a very, very dangerous moment for all of us.

Ashley Smith:

One thing I wanted to get you to talk a little bit more about was the Philippine elite and how it has vacillated the Duterte government, which was the predecessor to the current Marcos Jr. government, tilted seemingly towards China, and then Marcos has swung back to the United States pretty decisively. And what explains this vacillation, and also how is it related to the kind of increasing authoritarian nature of the Filipino government itself and its rule over the country?

Josua Mata:

Well, first of all, to be clear, while we have always called the country a democratic country, we have very, very little experience in actual democracy in this country. Ever since we gained our, “Independence,” quote, unquote, from the American empire, our nominal freedom, if you like, we’ve always been ruled by the elites who are much more subservient to the US empire than to anyone else. And the US empire has always been happy to keep them happy, our elites happy, as long as they allow the US bases to continue untouched in this part of the world, for a longest time. That changed somehow when we finally managed to kick out the US bases, but then the economic ties are still so strong.

So let me put it out first. We don’t have much experience in democracy in this country. That’s the first point. The second point I want to say is that our economy has always been designed to serve the needs of capital, particularly, specifically US capital. And most of our elites have almost always directed their economic transactions to be part of the US global capitalist system. However, with the rise of China, it gave an opportunity for some parts of the elites in the country to have their own entry to global trade. But that’s a very small part of the elite, but that was given much more space when Duterte came to power. But let’s not forget that Duterte came to power primarily because he was supported by China, not just financially, but also politically.

And the reason is, and this is where it gets weird, the reason is because Duterte is the kind of leader that actually fits perfectly well with the kind of politics that we have in this country, which is a highly personalistic kind of politic, where our politics is essentially dominated by personalities, specifically by family dynasties. For example, in this current Congress, more than 85% of all congressmen are actually part of the political dynasties. Our mayors, about 68% of our mayors are part of political dynasties. We have a president who is a Marcos, his sister is a senator, his son is a congressman, and he’s got several uncles and nieces and cousins who are congressmen and mayors and local government officials. That’s the kind of political system that we have.

And Duterte came to the picture when these political dynasties have started asserting themselves once again in our history with a vengeance. It’s like having political dynasties on steroids at that point in time. But you see, Duterte has had a really bad experience with the US, and because he takes things personally, when he was applying for a visa, he apparently was rejected being given a visa, and that he took that personally. And since then, he has become anti-American and packaging his anti-Americanism as part of a nationalist position in the Philippines. Which is funny, because while he keeps claiming that he is nationalist, the first thing he did was actually, after he declared that he’s no longer with the US empire, he then shifted immediately and told Xi Jinping himself, of China, that now he would depend on China. So that’s really incredible.

And I told you, that’s where it gets funny, because here’s the personal preference of a president that is essentially affecting the entire country. But that link goes deeper if you look more closely, because his family is suspected of having very, very deep links with Chinese businessmen, particularly those who are operating in the shadow economy of China, which means the underground economy, specifically the drugs trade. So, there’s that very strong suspicion in this country, that they’ve always been linked to the Chinese triads. And that’s why he had that preference of being with China.

So, you have here the personal interconnection of political clan who is now using, who is now intent on using their power in order to deepen that connection and to favor the economic interest of their family. But then, we only have one term for presidents in this country, and that was specifically designed to prevent a dictator from ruling us, so that means he only had six years to be a dictator. So there’s a natural limit for dictatorship in this country. So when Marcos won by running a campaign where both the Duterte family and the Marcos family are in close unity, and they call themselves UniTeam, as soon as he won, I don’t think he had any intention of moving away from China.

In fact, what we now know is that he had all the intention to keep going, to keep the relationship going with China. The problem is, he felt insulted after China promised exactly the same things that they promised to Duterte, but they never delivered. So, all the billions of investments that Xi Jinping promised to Duterte, none of it actually materialized. Even the official development programs that they promised, of all the many things that they promised, including massive railway infrastructure, none of that materialized. The only thing that materialized are two bridges that were built by China.

So Marcos felt insulted by that, and that’s from what I heard, is that that’s one reason why he immediately shifted to the US. But I also think it’s because the Marcoses have always been closed to the US. They’ve been trained. The children of Marcos Senior were trained in the US. They never graduated, but they can claim that they have actually stepped inside a US university like Princeton, but I’m not so sure what they learned. But the outlook has always been closer to the US as a family more than anything else. But more importantly, he has also to contend with the fact that the military infrastructure in this country, the military personnel, the ideology, as well as the doctrines that they’re using are all developed using the US influence. So, the military has always been pro-US. So that’s also one reason why it’s not that difficult for Marcos to shift to the US away from China.

So that’s how things are, I mean if you look at why the elites would vacillate between the two countries. But now, it’s important to talk about, so what do the people really know about this conflict? Because the way it is being presented to the public is that this is a fight for national sovereignty. This is a fight for our own freedoms. But the elites, and even parts of the left, has been failing to explain the fact that one of the things that pushed the Philippine government to file a case in the UN was primarily because those who have commercial interests, the Filipino oligarchs who have commercial interests to drill the fossil fuels that are supposedly found in those areas, and they failed to drill because China has been preventing them. That is actually what pushed the country to file an arbitration case.

Now, we all know what happened when the Philippine case was heard, UNCLOS made a decision that favors the Philippines, but now their problem is how could they have it enforced when China doesn’t recognize that decision? And that’s why we are now in this situation, because parts of the elites, parts of the oligarchs wanted to get their hands in the fossil fuels buried in that part of the world. And yet, they’re mobilizing people’s sentiment to support what is necessarily a nationalist position to defend our territory, and that we find very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:

Now, let’s talk a little bit more about the conflicts that are happening in this clash over the islands of the so-called South China Sea. Are we headed towards a conflict between the Philippines, backed by the US, with China? How close to an actual military conflict? Because it seems like it’s gotten close and then both have backed off, and then it’s gotten close again. And so we’re kind of feeling like we’re at the edge of a military conflagration.

Josua Mata:

To be honest, I don’t think China wants to start a war. It doesn’t help them. It just won’t help them. And I don’t think US wants to have a war as well, not even the Philippines. So nobody wants to have a war, but let’s not forget that’s exactly the attitude of most world powers before World War I. Nobody wanted the World War I, but then it was too late when everyone realized that European powers were actually sleepwalking into a world war, so that’s exactly what we have right now.

I don’t think anyone wants to have a war, but the fact that you’re increasing militarization in that area, where China has built its artificial islands and then put up naval bases and air facilities for their air forces, and then the Philippines started arming itself as if we have all the money to do it when we can’t even feed our people properly. Now, we’re even looking at the possibility of buying submarines.

So I really don’t understand what’s the plan here, because do we intend to arm ourselves to the teeth, thinking that we can actually frighten the Chinese away? Where is the end game if you try to militarize? And now you’re inviting everyone, all your allies to have military arrangements with you. So all this militarization is the problem, and unfortunately there’s no pushback that I can see, nor do I hear, even among the progressive elements of the society. It’s as if everyone just accepted that there’s no other solution to the problem but to try to arm ourselves, and come up with more military arrangements so that we can all push China out of those islands, and that’s very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:

Yeah. So, what impact has this increasing military budget, this sleepwalking dynamic into a military conflagration, what impact has that had on the domestic politics of the Philippines? What impact has it had on working people, both at the ideological level, what people are thinking, and also on the economy of the country and the experience of working class life?

Josua Mata:

Well, let’s start with economy, which is the simplest thing to explain because we’re not a rich country, despite the way many of our economic mismanagers would try to brag, that we are almost at the middle income level country. We are still a poor country. We still have many people who don’t even have access to electricity or access to sanitation. So we still need resources in order to develop the economy so that we can provide material needs of our people.

Now, you have to funnel a huge chunk of that money to military expenditures in order to modernize supposedly our military forces. And so what’s a concrete impact? This year, in 2025, the government just signed, the president just signed a budget, a trillion peso budget. Now it’s like 5 trillion pesos, if I’m not mistaken, and there’s zero budget or zero subsidy for field health. Field Health, that’s the health system in this country, zero subsidy so that they can now use it in order to put more money and more resources into militarization.

But more importantly, because this is an election period, then politicians would want to have a capacity to dip their hands into the coffers so that they can actually buy their way back to power. So that’s the economic impact. We have to shift a lot of our resources, much needed resources away from social expenditure into military expenditure.

Ideologically, for me the bigger problem is that there’s a stark increase or there’s a tendency to encourage nationalist thinking, which again is very dangerous, because for me it means that you put a premium on your own country, and therefore, it prepares everyone to fight anyone else outside of the country. And that obviously is the foundation for war. That’s the psychological preparation for war, if you like.

And who would suffer first and foremost in a war? It’s the working class, specifically the women and the children who are all unarmed, the civilians. And whose interests would this kind of war be waged for? Well, obviously, this is what the oligarchs and the powers that be are not explaining. It’s actually in the interest of the oligarchs who wanted to drill fossil fuel in that part of the world.

So that really is what the government is not explaining to the working class. And that is what we in SENTRO are really explaining to workers. And we are trying to tell everyone that militarization is not the only solution. In fact, militarization is the worst solution that you can ever think of, if it is called a solution in the first place. I don’t think we are in a situation where we only need to choose between Beijing or Washington.

These are false choices. These are imperialist powers who wanted to have the upper hand in the global competition for resources, for markets, et cetera. And both of them will not do anything good for the Filipino people. But then, the elites are forcing the Filipino people to take sides, and these binary choices that they’re presenting are all false choices. I think the more appropriate response should come from an international response, particularly from the labor movement, where the first question that all workers should ask is that, what is it that we can do to make sure that there is no war?

Ashley Smith:

One of the things that is clear in the US-China rivalry, in particular, is that every corner of the earth is affecting every other corner of the earth. You can’t separate any region of the world geopolitically. They’re all interrelated. And in particular, the impact of what happens in Europe has an impact of what happens in Asia.

So right now, Trump is trying to foist a pro-Russian imperialist deal on Ukraine, which basically forces Ukraine to give up 20% of its territory, no security guarantees, which means there’s likelihood for more war, but Trump has pushed for that deal. And many in Asia have thought if Ukraine falls, Taiwan’s next, and then there’s lots of other countries that are in the path. Because what it’s affirmed is a kind of annexationist imperialism by these great powers, the United States under Trump, Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China.

On the other hand, people have also said that Trump is trying to strike a deal over Ukraine to redeploy forces of the United States to Asia for a sharper confrontation with China. So, like you said earlier, it’s a little bit hard to figure out what Trump is really up to. What’s the plan behind this deal in Europe and what’s its impact going to be on China? So what’s your take on what is going on there in Europe and what’s impact it’s going to have on Asia?

Josua Mata:

Well, to be honest, as I said, many are now wondering could the country actually rely on the US? Because the country, as I said, it’s locked with the US, but now with Trump and his extremely volatile positioning and highly unpredictable way of conducting foreign policy, nobody actually knows what would happen. So that’s what people are wondering about in this part of the world. And I think that’s a natural result of the strategy when you start casting your luck with the US. So, now you’re in that kind of a dilemma, precisely because you did what you did.

Now, having said that, I think Trump’s positioning in Ukraine right now, whether it pans out or not, already sends a very strong message to everyone else, that you cannot rely on the US, you cannot rely on Trump. And that’s also the reason why I think the Philippine government, particularly the president, is starting to figure out how to recalculate things.

And this is where his statement about, remember we have Typhon missiles here that were deployed by the US. Now, I’m not so sure if we have the nuclear weapons here, nuclear warheads here. Hopefully not because that’s unconstitutional. But we both know that the US, it’s not the first time. If ever the US deploys a nuclear weapon in a country with constitutional bans against nuclear weapons, it’s not the first time. They did it with Japan, right? So without the Japanese government actually knowing about it. So I wouldn’t be surprised.

But having said that, now Marcos is saying, “Oh, I’d be happy to return the Typhon missiles, provided that China, you will stop harassing us and you will respect our rights,” et cetera. So to me, that’s a signal that he’s trying to recalibrate his own positioning, knowing fully well that he can no longer rely fully on what the US will do. So that’s one impact, at least that I can see.

But the worrisome thing for me is that it also tells us that weak countries have no say in solving the problems of this world, but even if these problems are the ones that are faced by these weak countries. I cannot imagine how Ukrainian people right now feel. Their future is being decided by two superpowers without them having any voice at all.

And that’s, I think, also the message to everyone in this part of the world. Whether Trump would launch a much more militarist front, whether Trump would be much more militaristic in dealing with China when it comes to the West or the South China Sea or Taiwan or not, the fact is, it is very clear that he will make the decision without thinking of consulting, whether the Taiwanese people or the Filipino people who would be affected by his decision, and that that’s just not good for anyone.

Ashley Smith:

So now, let’s turn to what progressive forces in the Philippines and what the left and the trade union movement can do. You’re one of the leaders of one of the key unions in the Philippines. So, how should the labor movement, oppressed people, workers more broadly, the peasant movement in the Philippines position themselves in this sharpening rivalry, this instability, the unreliability of the United States? What are the traps that should be avoided, and what are the kind of solutions that the working class movement in the Philippines should put forward?

Josua Mata:

That’s one of the questions that we have been trying to grapple with for many, many years now, since this whole thing started. And we’re still developing our ideas, but one thing is very clear for us at the onset. We can never respond to these problems coming from narrow nationalistic thinking. That, for us, is a disaster, which unfortunately is what the elites are peddling in order to gather more support for their position.

And unfortunately, many in the left in the Philippines, many in the progressive movement, including the left in the Philippines, who are also so steep into nationalist thinking, even in their own ideological moorings, is finding it, because of their own steep nationalist thinking, they are finding it very difficult to step away from that. But that’s the biggest trap, if you like, if you get into this nationalist thinking that, “We should wave the flag and defend those islands as our own.” That’s just going to lead to war.

Now, that was very clear for us from the very start. It was also very clear to us that the key issue here are the fossil fuels that are supposedly buried down there, but we’re in the midst of a climate crisis, and this is a real climate crisis. So, are we saying that we’re going to wage a war only to dig up and kill each other, only to dig up those fossil fuels so that we can burn the planet even more? That’s just absurd.

So, people should also sit back and think very clearly, is that the way you want to make use of these resources? Now, obviously we would have to burn some fossil fuels if you want to lift people from poverty, of course. But then, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we be thinking along the lines of, how do we do this in a way where we can minimize the impact on climate? And isn’t it better to think about these resources as something that all of us in this part of the world can use and not just the Filipinos?

I’m a socialist. As a socialist, I’ve always been raised with the thinking that resources are things that we should be sharing with everyone, no matter what your nationality is. So why can’t we think of, so this is second thing that we thought of immediately, is that why can’t we think of these islands of regional commons, where everyone who’s had any claim on it, let’s just all sit down and let’s all agree on how we can make sure that we can make use of these resources in an equitable way?

And then finally, clearly the solution to prevent the intensification or to prevent any potential military conflict, I think the solution is simply to call for a complete demilitarization of that area. And this is where we don’t have any support, even among the progressive groups in this country. Again, it’s because I think of this one-track thinking, that the only solution or the only response that you can present to a bully like China is to present a military solution. That, again, would only lead to disaster.

So these are some of the key things that we’re trying to develop at this point in time. But the problem here is that we still have yet to develop a broader constituency for this thinking, because there are very, very few people who would subscribe to this idea in a situation where nationalist thinking nationalist solutions are so powerful, even among the left in this country.

Ashley Smith:

A couple of final questions I wanted to ask you. First about this moment, because this moment that we’re living through has both these kind of interstate conflicts and inter-imperial conflicts, but it also has been 15 years of explosive struggle from below, pro-democracy movements, national liberation movements, revolutionary uprisings, especially in the Middle East. And a lot of them have not broken through and rebuilt the society in a progressive way, yet.

And one question, because of the Philippines history of intense pro-democracy struggles, explosive pro-democracy struggles, in particular the People’s Power movement that toppled the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos’ father, Ferdinand Marcos, what lessons do you think the left in the Philippines, and more broadly and globally, should people draw from the experience of these struggles, and in particular in the Philippines, from the People Power movement?

Josua Mata:

It’s a perfect question to end this discussion, and I’d like to remind you that in a few days time, we will actually celebrate or commemorate EDSA Revolution. And then this current government, the Marcos government, is trying its darnedest best to make sure that people actually forget it. So, I think the first thing that our first job is to make sure that people don’t forget. That’s the first job. And as we have often heard, the battle, the fight against authoritarianism, dictatorship is actually a fight against forgetting. It’s a fight to make sure that our memory is not left behind or it’s not forgotten. It’s a fight for memory. It’s a fight for historical memory. And that is the first thing that I think we lost as a progressive movement, as part of the left in the Philippines. And so that’s one lesson.

Many people no longer have the idea that the Marcos dictatorship was a really dark moment in our history. Most people may have heard of that and they have probably read of that in our textbook, but they have no clue on what it actually means. To the point that workers, 61% of voters even voted for Marcos during the last election. Now, that really is frustrating, because most of these voters are working class people, and they have forgotten that when the father declared the martial law, the first ones that he arrested were not the politicians. It was the trade union leaders. The first thing that he tried to destroy was not just the democratic systems that we have, but the labor movement that can potentially be an opposition to his martial law. So, the battle for memory, I think is something that we need to keep fighting for.

The second lesson that we can learn from the People Power, the failed People Power Revolution in this country, is that it is always important to make sure that there is an organized mass, an organized force that can provide the backbone, if you like, for the continuous push for social transformation. What we had in the EDSA Revolution was a political moment, a moment where we had the potential to transform society by ushering a thorough going social reform, a social transformation, if you like. The problem is People Power Revolution was largely led by people who were unorganized.

And the only organized forces that you can imagine that you can see during that period where the military and the politicians, the elite politicians. They were the only ones who had the machinery, the organization to make sure that the gains of the revolution could be pushed towards their agenda. Because the dominant left at that point in time, made a mistake of ignoring People Power Revolution because they have this sectarian belief, this Stalinist belief that the only way to wage a revolution in the Philippines is only through armed struggle, nothing more. So that effectively sidelined the Communist Party, which then led to… That was his historical error that led to them being sidelined.

Maybe I should say it this way. My political upbringing was when I joined the EDSA Revolution. I was still a student then, and I was a working student. And I distinctly remember when there was a call for people to come to EDSA. And at that time, many of us didn’t realize what was happening. Many of us didn’t know until much, much later that EDSA was actually started when a coup d’etat, a military coup d’etat of General Ramos and the secretary of defense minister at that time, minister of defense at that time. And really, they were planning a coup d’etat against Marcos because he knew he was dying and they were afraid that it’s the wife, Imelda, now together with General Ver, who would take over. Nobody knew that at that point in time.

And that plot, that coup plot, which they wanted to launch in 1984, was postponed to 1985 because the Americans managed to convince Marcos to hold snap elections. So they postponed it, but then they wanted to do it again, they were discovered by de Marcoses. And that forced Fidel Ramos and Enrile to come out in public, have a press conference and declare that they’re no longer supporting Marcos. The funny thing is, a funny footnote, actually, is that Imelda and General Ver could have nipped that pressy in the bud had one of the aides actually had the gall to disturb them during a party they were having.

No, it’s true, this is true. I think it’s a wedding party. They were having a wedding party and nobody wanted to disturb them. And then by the time they found out about it, it was too late. Enrile and the General Ramos were already able to start mobilizing support for them for their rebellion, if you like. But people heeded the call of cardinal sin. Who supported Marcos for a long time, but then eventually turned away from him. These are people, who are like me at that point in time, who were not organized. And we were there out in the streets. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t take a bath. You don’t eat much, except when there’s food, except that you can always rely on someone giving you food in the streets when we were manning the barricades.

And then when we heard that finally Marcos has left, everybody was so jubilant, everybody was crying, dancing, laughing, and then the first thing that we thought of, “We should sleep.” So we all went home, we slept, not knowing that the elites were up constructing the new system, so by the time that we woke up welcome back, we woke up to a government that’s once again run by the oligarchs. That is the biggest lesson. You don’t wage a revolution, and then on the verge of your victory, you go to sleep.

Which means it only brings us back to what many of us who are practitioners of professional revolutionaries, if you like, it only brings us back to the point that we always know that nothing beats people being organized, knowing fully well, not just what they are against, but what they really want. Because if we don’t have that organization with very clear vision and strategy on how do you want to transform society, then someone else will step in and hijack what we have started.

Ashley Smith:

Exactly. So this podcast is entitled Solidarity Without Exception. So I wanted to ask you about what you think about the popular struggle in the Philippines and its relation to similar ones in Palestine and Ukraine. Because so often, progressives fall into a trap of selective solidarity, siding with some popular struggles but not other popular struggles because of the camp that those struggles happen in, either a Russian or Chinese camp, or as an American camp, and people don’t have universal solidarity with progressive struggles from below. So, in the context that we’re in, of rising inter-imperial antagonism, increasing national oppression, and with that, growing popular struggle of various kinds from below, how do we build a kind of new internationalism that practices solidarity without exceptions? And what are the openings for that kind of internationalism today?

Josua Mata:

I think the problem in the Philippines, for us in the labor movement, is not the kind of problems that you’re facing that you just mentioned. Our problem is that there’s not much solidarity among Filipino working class and the labor movement, simply because people are so tied up with their day-to-day struggles. But don’t get me wrong, when I started the labor movement three decades ago, one of my first international work was actually supporting Burma. It wasn’t called Myanmar then.

So I was supporting Free Burma Coalition, not as an individual, but as part of the labor movement. I was then working as an education officer of the hotel unions, and I was very, very proud that we were providing spaces for the Burmese, the exiled Burmese leaders. Whenever they come to the Philippines, we actually host them, and so that they can meet quietly in one of the hotels that we organize. So, it’s so easy for us to be very, very involved in that kind of solidarity.

But then, looking back, one wonders so why are many trade union leaders then were very supportive of the struggle for Burma, but then when we asked them to look at the situation of the Muslims in Mindanao who were also waging their own war for their freedom, and who were for the longest time were being treated as if they are our own Palestine, then why is it that it’s so difficult for them to support that?

And that was really a nagging question that led my organization to actually have a program to combat the prejudice that many Catholics, if you like, Christians, if you like, against Muslims. Because in the first place, that fight for freedom of the moral people was never a religious fight. It was a completely secular fight for the freedom of people who have never agreed to be part of the country.

So, we realized that it’s not easy for people to readily provide solidarity to them because they have been fooled into thinking that this is a religious war. So we had to launch a massive, within our organization, we had to launch a massive education campaign to address the prejudice and make sure that at the minimum the labor movement should at least be able to ensure that its membership is a constituency for peace. So, that’s the lesson we draw for that.

But the problem for us now is that it’s so difficult for us to get the people to support, for example, the struggle of the people in Ukraine or even in Palestine. We hold rallies, we hold activities, we hold actions, but it’s this small community of activists and believers and not the general public. That is the kind of challenge that we have right now. And I attribute that to the fact that people are so burdened with day-to-day living, that’s just difficult for them to… The bandwidth for solidarity, if you like, is so limited. And that is a challenge that we have to figure out, “Now, how do we address that?”

So yes, having said that, I completely believe that real solidarity is the solution to the problems that we’re facing, even in the West Philippine Sea or the South China Sea, if you like. The starting point in our efforts to develop working class narrative to the so-called China question has always been to understand the workers of China. We firmly believe that there’s no way we can build solidarity with the Chinese working class, unless people understand that they, like us, are workers who are suffering not just the atrocious behavior of capitalists, but they’re also suffering from dictatorship of the Communist Party of China.

Unless Filipino workers starts thinking along those lines, the elites would always have the power to sway them to wave the flag and wage a war against the Chinese people. And that’s going to be a war that will decimate the working class only to profit the oligarchs.

Ashley Smith:

Thanks to Josua Mata for that revealing discussion of the Philippines, its working class struggle against the country’s dynastic rulers, the necessity of the country’s left opposing the US and China’s militarism in the Asia Pacific, and advocating for regional demilitarization. To hear about upcoming episodes of Solidarity Without Exception, sign up for the Real News Network newsletter. Don’t miss an episode.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ashley Smith.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/09/will-the-philippines-be-a-battleground-for-us-china-war/feed/ 0 524734 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/musician-and-actor-will-oldham-on-accepting-a-creative-challenge/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/musician-and-actor-will-oldham-on-accepting-a-creative-challenge/#respond Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-and-actor-will-oldham-on-accepting-a-creative-challenge Historically you’ve made records sans producers. What made David Ferguson the right person to slot into that role on The Purple Bird, the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album?

The big one is the length of our friendship, professional relationship, and my relationship with where he is. He lives in Goodlettsville [Tennessee]. We tracked in Nashville and mixed in Goodlettsville, at his place. My relationship to place is very important when it comes to life and work. Beginning with the blatantly titled, I Made a Place, I’ve felt it’s a good idea to make records in Louisville, Kentucky and with people who are in Louisville, for many reasons. In terms of continuity, in terms of moving forward and looking back, and in terms of recognizing and respecting the relationships that exist with audience members, the relationships that could potentially exist.

Ferg is an extension of the place that I understand Nashville to be because of the kinds of friends that I have or have had there, some of whom have moved away, some of whom have died. It’s still mythologically a really important musical city and Ferg’s professional life has been spent there. When it comes to music, he’s a man of high standards, a human being of high standards. He has nurtured a community over the years of musicians and writers that he finds to be supernaturally talented as well as a joy to be around, at least for a few hours a day every once in a while.

It was an unspeakable honor that he instigated each step of The Purple Bird, beginning with collaborative writing sessions. Ferg’s access to musical wealth is immense, and I’m always overjoyed with whatever he shares. He shares generously but sparingly, if that’s not too much of a contradiction. If he sends me a text with a song he thinks I would like—which happens about once every three years—it’s a little gift from heaven because it’s packed with all kinds of information. Why did he share this with me? What did he like about it? His desire to get into collaborative situations with me was breathtaking.

Did you have to establish that trust and friendship with the other players? Or was it already there because Ferg was at the helm?

I was aware that a challenge was being thrown down. I didn’t know how I would respond to that challenge. At the same time, at every step I felt that I was up to the challenge, and Ferg probably wouldn’t have thrown down the challenges if he didn’t think that I was up to them. This wasn’t about, “Don’t feel bad about yourself, Will. You can do this.” It wasn’t that at all. It was that we’d spent enough time together that he thought, “This guy Will, he’s ready to play.” And he put me on the team.

As a teacher, there’s a delicate balance of setting high standards for students, but also meeting them where they’re at.

I know I’ve made the mistake of thinking someone was ready to do work that they weren’t ready for, and vice versa. It’s about recognizing that you don’t want to be the agent of a situation in which you or anybody else feels shame, frustration, or failure because you weren’t paying enough attention or were being overly optimistic. What age do you work with?

High school.

You’re creating their roadmap for understanding all existence. You don’t want to be the person of authority and experience who puts somebody in a position to fail. It’s not worth it unless you are willing to somehow make up for it, and you may not have time to make up for it… I’ve been in situations where I am, for whatever reason, experientially, creatively, or even actually incapable of fulfilling what’s been asked of me. Those are very confusing, potentially painful, and destructive situations.

Ferg doesn’t want to be involved with negativity if he can help it. He’s smart and wise enough to get involved with situations that aren’t going to spew out a lot of negativity. I knew that going in. I do get tired of talking about this, but the beginning of our relationship was a similar situation: the Johnny Cash recording session where Ferg was the engineer. It was an unspoken question, but the big question on the table in that room that day was, “Are you capable of just working with this artist Johnny Cash? Are you capable of just working with him?” Not bullshitting and throwing a lot of self doubt in there, not fucking up, but just being present. Do you have the answers that will be asked? Do you have the musical abilities to get through this small but significant task of getting through this song? This is sort of an extension of that, 20 some years later, where Ferg puts me in the room with Pat McLaughlin right away and thinks it will work. We come out with a song, “Boise, Idaho,” that we’re all kind of elated by.

What did these songwriting sessions look and feel like?

[Playing a show,] when you go to sound check, everybody sets up, and you’re waiting for the front-of-house person to say, “Okay, could I get your stage-right vocal please?” That’s when you know things have begun. Until then, you can be tuning, running a song, talking to your family on the phone. Anything. In these songwriting sessions, there is nobody. It’s this “hand of god” kind of thing that was magnificent to witness. You realize as a self-employed, creative kind of person that there isn’t anybody, almost any time, who is guiding me in what I’m supposed to do. If I had a manager, maybe. If I worked with a major label, perhaps. Or if I had what passes for a producer in most recording situations, again, maybe.

In this instance, I have to understand how to make a record. I have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Here we are in these writing sessions with no mommy or daddy saying, “Do this.” [Instead it’s like,] “Okay, you’ve all been doing this for decades now, so just do it.” [The other musicians] had been in this situation many times before. I hadn’t been in that situation before. It was always at least two people with the experience and one person without the experience: me.

The way that Ferg makes records makes absolute sense to me and to everybody involved: the songwriters and all the session players, and Sean Sullivan, who was the chief engineer. We are privileged to get in the room with other people who want to use their minds to create a song and recording. People who want to use their skills and their experience to make something that is… I want to use words like “natural,” although it’s not fair to people for whom maybe a digital workspace is a natural extension of their creative life. It isn’t for me, and it isn’t for any of these people. What they like to do is be in the room with people, feel the energy, exchange ideas, exchange the energy—and that’s what they call making music. That’s what I call making music. I don’t connect with tuned and edited music. It just doesn’t work for me.

Working with an entire team of musicians who all cut their teeth in a pre-digital landscape must have made a big impact.

I’m convinced the record is imbued with this elevated spirit of hope and joy because of the hope and joy inherent in the experience of making the record itself. That comes from these musicians figuring out incredible ways of bringing a song to life that can be then shared with an audience. Progress and technological development gets in the way of that and subverts or contradicts what they know in terms of determining a good way to do something. What’s happened in music—as well as virtually every other field of human endeavor—is that people see the end result and don’t even think about reverse engineering it. They think, “How can I get something that sounds like that?” And then they go for it, not realizing that the sound is the end of complex processes.

To pick just an obvious one: Auto-Tune. All due respect to Auto-Tune; Auto-Tune can be great. I’m not trying to diss Auto-Tune or people who use Auto-Tune. But the main reason Auto-Tune is around is so that people don’t have to do the work to sing in tune. So people will seem like they’re better singers than they are. Ultimately that means we end up getting potentially weaker songs, weaker recordings, weaker music, because we’re not listening to things that people struggled to make. That’s the sustenance that we get from our music. Just like how the sustenance we get from our food is not because it resembles food, it’s because it is food. I think we are experiencing that culturally as well… There are long-term effects of people consuming things that are not what they resemble.

Tell me about your relationship to your singing voice and how it’s changed over time.

I won’t go so far as to be ashamed and embarrassed when I listen to recordings of my voice from 30 years ago. At the same time, I am often completely shocked at what I hear. I have a lot of mixed feelings about whatever the human entity known as Bob Dylan is. As a kid, I was taught, or you always read, “Oh, he’s a terrible singer.” I found myself constantly and consistently moved by many of his on-record vocal performances. I’m thinking, “I don’t understand. What do they mean he’s a terrible singer? Or that Leonard Cohen is a terrible singer? Or Daniel Johnston?” He maybe didn’t have the technical voice where people would say he’s a great singer, but he was very, very powerful. You knew what he was going for; it resonated with you as a listener.

I always had good intentions with my singing, and I always knew what I wanted to sing. I could to use my voice to its maximum potential. That means after years and years and years that I have, I think, greater ability to communicate and express than I did in my twenties. The desire was there and I would record songs and perform them. There are some people who develop or evolve or “progress” into a technical capacity that might not end up serving the music, or at least the relationship between the audience and the music. I appreciate hearing the complexities of the artists whose work I take in. The complexities include periodic failures, experimentation, and good-hearted attempts at doing something.

The record is one of the most joyful, hopeful pieces of music I’ve heard in a long time. What else is bringing you hope?

We do have this six-year-old who brings us a lot of hope and joy every day. She is remarkable. And this is my spot where I sit and work on songs. Outside of the window at this time of year, I can see two red-tailed hawks’ nests. In a month or two, I will see the hatchlings start to learn to fly. That makes me very happy seeing these hawks, and the barred owl has just moved back into the neighborhood for the year. They’ll be making all sorts of obscene noises for the next seven or eight months. These are great things.

Will Oldham recommends:

Music: Kentucky Mountain Music by various artists

Book: A Pattern Language by Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, Jacobson, Fiksdahl-King, and Angel

Place: Red River Gorge, Kentucky

Artist’s work: Bob Thompson, Louisville-born painter

Practice: Delete IG (& FB) for a month, then reinstall it (if you want/need to) for a month, then re-delete it, etc. You don’t want to remember your social media interactions when you’re on your deathbed

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/musician-and-actor-will-oldham-on-accepting-a-creative-challenge/feed/ 0 524427 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/will-the-u-s-build-sea-walls/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/will-the-u-s-build-sea-walls/#respond Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:41:44 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157260 Antarctica is coming apart, crumbling into the sea, much, much faster than anybody ever thought possible. After all, it was only a couple of months ago when polar scientists called an extraordinary emergency meeting to discuss shocking developments: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Source: Our […]

The post Will the U.S. Build Sea Walls? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Antarctica is coming apart, crumbling into the sea, much, much faster than anybody ever thought possible. After all, it was only a couple of months ago when polar scientists called an extraordinary emergency meeting to discuss shocking developments: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Source: Our Science, “Your Future: Next Generation of Antarctic Scientists Call for Collaborative Action,” Australian Antarctic Research Conference, November 22, 2024).

Another more recent new study using data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program is now overshadowing those panicky voices of polar scientists in November 2024. The new study should rattle the cages of every political leader in the world: “This simultaneous decline across both poles reinforces fears that Earth’s polar regions may be undergoing synchronized climate destabilization.” (“Antarctica’s 2025 Sea Ice Collapse Shocks Scientists and Raises Fears of a New Climate Normal,” Daily Galaxy, April 3, 2025)

“While Antarctica’s summer ice was hitting rock bottom, the Arctic was also seeing near-record-low winter ice… with multiple low-ice years piling up, the question of whether this represents a tipping point is gaining traction in the scientific community.” Ibid.

Irreversibility of Cascading Ice Sheets

The tools that once revealed subtle changes in Antarctica are now capturing dramatic losses, lending weight to concerns that Antarctica’s sea ice system is approaching irreversibility. The polar scientists’ emergency meeting in November 2024 sent a chilling message to the world; “The experts’ conclusion, published as a press statement, is a somber one: if we don’t act, and quickly, the melting of Antarctica ice could cause catastrophic sea levels rise around the globe.” (Source: “Emergency Meeting Reveals the Alarming Extent of Antarctica’s Ice Loss,” Earth.com, Nov. 24, 2024)

“Truth be known, before very long we’ll see cities inundated and catastrophic flooding events, especially in low-lying coastal cities. All of these changes, we can plot them and if we look exponentially, we see really catastrophic effects in the next few years, certainly in the next decade or two the world will be completely different than it is now.” (Peter Wadhams, professor emeritus, Ocean Physics, Cambridge University, author of A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic)

Extensive research into how to stop this cascading freight train barreling down the mountainside concludes that the only salvation that’ll work soon enough is to stop burning fossil fuels, for example, gasoline-powered cars.

Building Sea Walls?

“Last year, when the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a vast network of seawalls and gates to shield NY and New Jersey Harbor, it argued that the fifty-three-billion dollar ($53B) project was a very good deal, although it ‘will not totally eliminate flood risks’ in the area, it would cost much less than repairing the city after every storm, Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated nineteen billion dollars in damage to NYC alone.” (Source: “Can Sea Walls Save Us?” The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 2023) Alas, $53B “will not totally eliminate flood risks.”

Across the globe, there is no organized worldwide mitigation plan underway to prevent both poles from crashing much faster and faster yet, which requires an immediate stop to burning fossil fuels. Good luck with that! Therefore, massive flooding is almost guaranteed to hit the world’s coastal megacities, like Miami, New York, and London. But nobody knows how soon, which, in and of itself, dictates taking immediate action to fund, engineer, start building seawalls, tall seawalls.

According to the above-referenced polar scientists’ emergency meeting: “The services of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica — oceanic carbon sink and planetary air-conditioner — have been taken for granted. Global warming-induced shifts observed in the region are immense. Recent research has shown record-low sea ice, extreme heatwaves exceeding 40°C (104°F) above average temperatures, and increased instability around key ice shelves. Shifting ecosystems on land and at sea underscore this sensitive region’s rapid and unprecedented transformations. Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea-level rise is possible within our lifetimes. Whether such irreversible tipping points have already passed is unknown.”

That paragraph contains the formula for rising sea levels beyond anybody’s imagination!

According to Earth.org, coastal megacities are at serious risk, e.g., Bangkok, Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh City, Cardiff (UK), New Orleans, Manila, London, Shenzhen, Hamburg, and Dubai as well as megacities Miami and New York City. Many Florida and East Coast cities are high risk, e.g., Ft. Lauderdale, Norfolk, Hampton, Charleston, Cambridge, Jersey City, Chesapeake, Boston, Tampa, Palm Beach. It’s a long list.

What’s the likelihood of the Trump administration building seawalls to protect coastal cities? It can’t happen soon enough.

In the year 2020: “Trump Blocked Over Plans to Build Wall Around Irish Golf Resort,” CNN World, March 12, 2020: “Donald Trump’s hopes to protect his coastal Irish golf resort from erosion with a protective wall have been dashed by planning authorities.”

The post Will the U.S. Build Sea Walls? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/will-the-u-s-build-sea-walls/feed/ 0 524222 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/trump-will-never-accept-responsibility-but-his-disappointed-voters-should/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/trump-will-never-accept-responsibility-but-his-disappointed-voters-should/#respond Mon, 07 Apr 2025 05:55:47 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=359810 On April 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged another 2,000 points, the S&P 500 fell another 322 points, the Nasdaq index officially entered “bear market” territory, and global markets continued to react predictably to US president Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war insanity. On April 4, the bodies of four US soldiers killed in More

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Photograph Source: Marc Nozell – CC BY 2.0

On April 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged another 2,000 points, the S&P 500 fell another 322 points, the Nasdaq index officially entered “bear market” territory, and global markets continued to react predictably to US president Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war insanity.

On April 4, the bodies of four US soldiers killed in a training exercise on Lithuania’s border with Belarus — part of the US government’s continued posturing in support of Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia that Trump had pledged to end “within 24 hours” of taking office  —  arrived at Dover Air Force Base.

On April 4, Israeli forces, armed with American weapons and enjoying Trump’s support and approval, killed at least 60 Palestinians, most of them civilian women and children, in Gaza.

Trump had more important things to attend to than any of those matters, though. He headed for Trump National Doral Golf Club to enjoy a golf tournament. Not just any golf tournament, mind you: A foreign import (Saudi-owned LIV) that competes with American-made golf (PGA). Naturally, he followed up his day of expensive imported recreation with an appearance at a $1 million dollar per person fundraiser for the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

As always, I strongly approve of presidents leaving the White House to partake of golf and gladhanding. A president focused on such things may be temporarily preoccupied and thus momentarily less able to wreck the American economy, get US troops and foreign civilians killed, etc.

My complaint here isn’t with Trump, really. He is what he is, and I knew he was a snake when you picked him up. It’s with Trump’s enablers, and more specifically with those enablers who’ve been getting on my last nerve lately with a particular five-word chorus heard daily across the fruited plain:

“I didn’t vote for THIS!”

Yes. You. Did.

Nearly three months into Trump’s second presidency and after three consecutive presidential campaigns, none of his supporters have any excuse for not knowing his record of keeping bad promises, breaking good promises, and hitting the links or headlining a “friendly crowd” event whenever putting on a suit and answering tough questions might get embarrassing.

At least the supporters who continue to make excuses for him — “he’s playing 6D chess and you just don’t understand,” “the DEEP STATE is making him do all the bad things he does,” etc. — can be explained:  Half of Americans possess below-median intelligence.

And those who, at any point, have finally admitted to themselves and others that they fell for a scam should be supported, commended, and consoled.

But the “I didn’t vote for THIS!” crowd? They clearly follow current affairs. They clearly know their votes enabled this craziness. Now they want absolution without first accepting responsibility for what they did.

One variant: “The choice was Trump or Harris. I just went for the lesser evil.” Nope. Every state ballot except New York’s (where you could write in) offered AT LEAST three choices … and no one forced you to vote at all.

Own your actions. Then go and sin no more.

The post Trump Will Never Accept Responsibility, But His Disappointed Voters Should appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/trump-will-never-accept-responsibility-but-his-disappointed-voters-should/feed/ 0 524115 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/will-the-u-s-build-seawalls/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/will-the-u-s-build-seawalls/#respond Mon, 07 Apr 2025 05:16:43 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=359722 Antarctica is coming apart, crumbling into the sea, much, much faster than anybody ever thought possible. After all, it was only a couple of months ago when polar scientists called an extraordinary emergency meeting to discuss shocking developments: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Source: Our Science, More

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Image by Parker Hilton.