WASHINGTON – The Department of the Interior has released the Vineyard Wind Record of Decision, signing off on the first large-scale offshore wind project in the United States. Offshore wind is a key clean energy solution and valuable tool for reducing pollution from the power sector, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). 

Below is a statement by John Rogers, senior energy analyst at UCS.

“This is a really important milestone for U.S. offshore wind, and incredibly exciting not just for this project, but the queue of other offshore wind projects under development. This signals the new administration’s commitment to scientific process and is a really promising sign for clean energy to come. 

“As the first large-scale deployment of offshore wind in the U.S., this project will also be an opportunity to build on our knowledge of how best to fit this important technology into our marine environment. We’ll need to monitor impacts and adjust as the science develops, so we can apply these lessons to make sure we continue advancing offshore wind responsibly. 

“The wind off our coasts has the potential to help us drastically reduce carbon emissions from our electricity use, while helping us meet coastal states’ large power needs and drive economic development on the coasts and beyond. Today’s decision signals that the U.S. offshore wind journey is now well and truly underway.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Through a Record of Decision (ROD), the Biden administration gave final approval for Vineyard Wind 1, an offshore wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. This decision, which comes after years of permitting delays, gives the greenlight to what will be the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the country. Experts expect this decision to spur other offshore wind developments. Vineyard Wind’s project serves as the first step toward realizing the Biden administration’s initiative to develop 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030, which was announced last month. 

Offshore wind’s potential is vast. According to the Environment America Research & Policy Center’s report Offshore Wind for America, offshore wind could meet America’s 2019 electricity use almost twice over and could meet 90 percent of our projected electricity demand in 2050 even as we make the transition to run mostly on electricity rather than fossil fuels. Every coastal region has the potential to get renewable energy from offshore wind, according to the report, with Massachusetts boasting the highest offshore wind potential of any state. 

Construction on Vineyard Wind 1 is expected to begin later this year, and the project will power over 400,000 homes and businesses once it becomes operational in 2023.  

In response, Johanna Neumann, Environment America Research & Policy Center’s Senior Director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy released the following statement:

“Today’s historic decision to approve Vineyard Wind 1 is a huge step forward in America’s marathon to repower itself with clean renewable energy. Clearing this final procedural hurdle on America’s first major offshore wind project is akin to firing the starting gun — it signals to dozens of other projects that it’s time to take off. America only has a tiny amount of installed offshore wind installed to date, but that will soon change now that Vineyard Wind is first out of the blocks.

“It’s fitting to see America’s offshore wind race begin in Massachusetts, given that the Bay State has the highest offshore wind potential of any state in the country. Today’s decision builds on Massachusetts’ status as a renewable energy leader, and gives other coastal states the confidence to boldly tap the abundant renewable energy blowing off our coast. There’s plenty of offshore wind to go around. Bold commitments and regional collaboration can position coastal states to play a key role in moving America to 100% renewable energy.   

“We’ve waited a long time for his moment, and it will be crucial to keep momentum going beyond the starting blocks. We look forward to working with state and federal leaders to drive continued ambition and progress toward crossing the finish line of powering our lives with clean renewable offshore wind.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, as the Senate Rules Committee meets to debate and vote on the For the People Act, Ellen Sciales, Press Secretary for Sunrise Movement, released the following statement:

“Senate Republicans clearly don’t give a shit about democracy. Republicans have posited from their actions and their words that they are more interested in silencing Americans and upholding white supremacist laws than working with Democrats to pass the For the People Act, which would dramatically stregnthen and heal our democracy. The truth is Republicans are terrified of making the vote more accessible because they know suppressing it is the only way they can continue to protect minority rule. 

“Senator Schumer must see past the Republican BS and follow through on his promise to pass the For the People Act. In his own words, ‘failure is not an option’ and ‘everything is on the table.’ Unless he’s lying to us, this means Senator Schumer must commit to abolishing the filibuster and pass the For the People Act swiftly and urgently. If Schumer doesn’t act on this now, the opportunity may never come back when Black and brown Americans, young people, working people are turned away in droves from their polling places in 2022, 2024 and beyond. Democrats need to treat this like an existential threat to the future of governance and a functioning democracy.

“Senator Schumer has a choice to make – will he abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act, or will he be the reason thousands of working people in this country are muzzled by our broken system. As a native New Yorker, I know that if Senator Schumer fails to follow through for us, he has to answer to an angry constituency of people back at home and across the country.”

Sunrise Movement has been a staunch advocate of passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which they see as the only way Democrats can relinquish the corporate stranglehold on U.S. elections and put power back in the hands of the people.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, as the Senate Rules Committee meets to debate and vote on the For the People Act, Ellen Sciales, Press Secretary for Sunrise Movement, released the following statement:

“Senate Republicans clearly don’t give a shit about democracy. Republicans have posited from their actions and their words that they are more interested in silencing Americans and upholding white supremacist laws than working with Democrats to pass the For the People Act, which would dramatically stregnthen and heal our democracy. The truth is Republicans are terrified of making the vote more accessible because they know suppressing it is the only way they can continue to protect minority rule. 

“Senator Schumer must see past the Republican BS and follow through on his promise to pass the For the People Act. In his own words, ‘failure is not an option’ and ‘everything is on the table.’ Unless he’s lying to us, this means Senator Schumer must commit to abolishing the filibuster and pass the For the People Act swiftly and urgently. If Schumer doesn’t act on this now, the opportunity may never come back when Black and brown Americans, young people, working people are turned away in droves from their polling places in 2022, 2024 and beyond. Democrats need to treat this like an existential threat to the future of governance and a functioning democracy.

“Senator Schumer has a choice to make – will he abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act, or will he be the reason thousands of working people in this country are muzzled by our broken system. As a native New Yorker, I know that if Senator Schumer fails to follow through for us, he has to answer to an angry constituency of people back at home and across the country.”

Sunrise Movement has been a staunch advocate of passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which they see as the only way Democrats can relinquish the corporate stranglehold on U.S. elections and put power back in the hands of the people.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Israeli forces are facing fresh condemnation from international human rights experts for their “excessive force” against Palestinian protesters in occupied East Jerusalem that left hundreds injured, and airstrikes into Gaza that killed dozens of people including nine children.

Also under scrutiny are Israel’s attempted evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, which would amount to “war crimes,” Amnesty International said Monday.

In a statement Tuesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reiterated its plea for an end to the violence, and also addressed the retaliatory rockets fired by Hamas into Israel that injured 17 Israeli civilians. The body appealed to Israel and Palestinian armed groups to respect international humanitarian law.

Referring to Israel’s strikes into densely populated Gaza, an area deemed by occupation critics an open-air prison, spokesperson for the High Commissioner Rupert Colville said, “Any attack, including airstrikes, should be directed solely at military objectives and all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid civilian deaths and injury and damage to civilian objects.”

“Israel must also refrain from punitive measures, such as additional closures and restrictions, that punish the entire civilian population of Gaza,” he said.

Israel launched a new round of airstrikes into Gaza on Tuesday, bringing the death toll up to 26, according to the Associated Press. Retaliatory rockets fired from Gaza into Israel resulted in the first Israeli causalities from the latest spate of violence—two people in the southern city of Ashkelon—after which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said military forces would “increase both the strength and rate of the strikes.”

Ahead of the latest round of airstrikes into Gaza, Israeli security forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque for a third consecutive night, “firing rubber-coated steel rounds, stun grenades, and tear gas at Palestinian worshipers inside the mosque in the final days of the holy month of Ramadan,” as Al Jazeera reported. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which says it’s been targeted as it attempted to provide aid to wounded worshipers and protesters, said that over 900 Palestinians were injured between May 7 and May 10 in East Jerusalem.

The repression drew condemnation from United Nations human rights experts Michael Lynk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal. 

“The recent scenes of Israeli police and security forces attacking large crowds of Palestinian residents and worshipers is only intensifying a deeply inflammatory atmosphere in the city. A militarized response to civilian protests against discriminatory practices only deepens social divisions. Respecting rights is the only path forward,”  Lynk, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, and Rajagopal, special rapporteur on adequate housing, said in a statement.

“It is not just an eviction, but a war crime. Remember that. I do not know why the entire world is watching what is happening and letting Israel get away with it.”
—Nabil el-Kurd, resident of Sheikh Jarrah Their statement also references the threatened evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, which have elicited ongoing protests.

“An occupying power is prohibited from confiscating private property belonging to the protected population, and it must respect the body of existing laws which had governed the territory, unless it is absolutely necessary to alter them,” said Lynk and Rajagopal.

“The forced transfer of the population under occupation is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which contribute[s] to the coercive environment now prevailing in East Jerusalem. As well,” they continued, “these evictions breach the right to adequate housing—a core human right in international law.”

Saleh Higazi, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, similarly condemned Israel’s recent actions.

“The latest violence brings into sharp focus Israel’s sustained campaign to expand illegal Israeli settlements and step up forced evictions of Palestinian residents—such as those in Sheikh Jarrah—to make way for Israeli settlers. These forced evictions are part of a continuing pattern in Sheikh Jarrah, they flagrantly violate international law, and would amount to war crimes,” said Higazi.

Nabil el-Kurd, one of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah who’s facing possible eviction, told Amnesty International that Israel’s actions must prompt urgent action from the international community.

“Sheikh Jarrah is sending a message to the whole world, including the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament, the French Parliament, the E.U. Parliament, the International Criminal Court, that what is happening to us is a war crime,” said el-Kurd. “It is not just an eviction, but a war crime. Remember that.”

“I do not know why the entire world is watching what is happening and letting Israel get away with it,” said el-Kurd. “It is time they stopped spoiling Israel.”

In the U.S. , some Democratic members of Congress are calling for a shift in ongoing policies and practices in which the U.S. continues to supply Israel unconditional miliaty aid and defends Israel’s lethal military actions as “self-defense” while rejecting direct criticism of Israeli forces’ deadly attacks on Palestinians and the ongoing illegal occupation.

Those voices include Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and André Carson (D-Ind.).

In a joint statement Monday condemning the Gaza strikes and attacks on worshipers at Al Aqsa, the lawmakers said the threatened evictions are a “direct violation of international law, the Geneva Convention, and basic human rights.” 

“We condemn all violence in this conflict—these acts only serve to advance the political goals of the powerful at the expense of the suffering of the people,” they said.

The lawmakers also denounced the lack of “accountability for Israel’s wanton human rights abuses and continuing illegal seizures of Palestinian land” in the face of mere “lip service to a Palestinian state.”

“It is long past time we finally take action to protect Palestinian human rights and save lives,” the trio said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Israeli forces are facing fresh condemnation from international human rights experts for their “excessive force” against Palestinian protesters in occupied East Jerusalem that left hundreds injured, and airstrikes into Gaza that killed dozens of people including nine children.

Also under scrutiny are Israel’s attempted evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, which would amount to “war crimes,” Amnesty International said Monday.

In a statement Tuesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reiterated its plea for an end to the violence, and also addressed the retaliatory rockets fired by Hamas into Israel that injured 17 Israeli civilians. The body appealed to Israel and Palestinian armed groups to respect international humanitarian law.

Referring to Israel’s strikes into densely populated Gaza, an area deemed by occupation critics an open-air prison, spokesperson for the High Commissioner Rupert Colville said, “Any attack, including airstrikes, should be directed solely at military objectives and all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid civilian deaths and injury and damage to civilian objects.”

“Israel must also refrain from punitive measures, such as additional closures and restrictions, that punish the entire civilian population of Gaza,” he said.

Israel launched a new round of airstrikes into Gaza on Tuesday, bringing the death toll up to 26, according to the Associated Press. Retaliatory rockets fired from Gaza into Israel resulted in the first Israeli causalities from the latest spate of violence—two people in the southern city of Ashkelon—after which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said military forces would “increase both the strength and rate of the strikes.”

Ahead of the latest round of airstrikes into Gaza, Israeli security forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque for a third consecutive night, “firing rubber-coated steel rounds, stun grenades, and tear gas at Palestinian worshipers inside the mosque in the final days of the holy month of Ramadan,” as Al Jazeera reported. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which says it’s been targeted as it attempted to provide aid to wounded worshipers and protesters, said that over 900 Palestinians were injured between May 7 and May 10 in East Jerusalem.

The repression drew condemnation from United Nations human rights experts Michael Lynk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal. 

“The recent scenes of Israeli police and security forces attacking large crowds of Palestinian residents and worshipers is only intensifying a deeply inflammatory atmosphere in the city. A militarized response to civilian protests against discriminatory practices only deepens social divisions. Respecting rights is the only path forward,”  Lynk, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, and Rajagopal, special rapporteur on adequate housing, said in a statement.

“It is not just an eviction, but a war crime. Remember that. I do not know why the entire world is watching what is happening and letting Israel get away with it.”
—Nabil el-Kurd, resident of Sheikh Jarrah Their statement also references the threatened evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, which have elicited ongoing protests.

“An occupying power is prohibited from confiscating private property belonging to the protected population, and it must respect the body of existing laws which had governed the territory, unless it is absolutely necessary to alter them,” said Lynk and Rajagopal.

“The forced transfer of the population under occupation is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which contribute[s] to the coercive environment now prevailing in East Jerusalem. As well,” they continued, “these evictions breach the right to adequate housing—a core human right in international law.”

Saleh Higazi, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, similarly condemned Israel’s recent actions.

“The latest violence brings into sharp focus Israel’s sustained campaign to expand illegal Israeli settlements and step up forced evictions of Palestinian residents—such as those in Sheikh Jarrah—to make way for Israeli settlers. These forced evictions are part of a continuing pattern in Sheikh Jarrah, they flagrantly violate international law, and would amount to war crimes,” said Higazi.

Nabil el-Kurd, one of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah who’s facing possible eviction, told Amnesty International that Israel’s actions must prompt urgent action from the international community.

“Sheikh Jarrah is sending a message to the whole world, including the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament, the French Parliament, the E.U. Parliament, the International Criminal Court, that what is happening to us is a war crime,” said el-Kurd. “It is not just an eviction, but a war crime. Remember that.”

“I do not know why the entire world is watching what is happening and letting Israel get away with it,” said el-Kurd. “It is time they stopped spoiling Israel.”

In the U.S. , some Democratic members of Congress are calling for a shift in ongoing policies and practices in which the U.S. continues to supply Israel unconditional miliaty aid and defends Israel’s lethal military actions as “self-defense” while rejecting direct criticism of Israeli forces’ deadly attacks on Palestinians and the ongoing illegal occupation.

Those voices include Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and André Carson (D-Ind.).

In a joint statement Monday condemning the Gaza strikes and attacks on worshipers at Al Aqsa, the lawmakers said the threatened evictions are a “direct violation of international law, the Geneva Convention, and basic human rights.” 

“We condemn all violence in this conflict—these acts only serve to advance the political goals of the powerful at the expense of the suffering of the people,” they said.

The lawmakers also denounced the lack of “accountability for Israel’s wanton human rights abuses and continuing illegal seizures of Palestinian land” in the face of mere “lip service to a Palestinian state.”

“It is long past time we finally take action to protect Palestinian human rights and save lives,” the trio said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Climate campaigners and experts welcomed new renewable power projections released Tuesday by the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the amount of renewable electricity capacity added last year soared by 45% to 280 gigawatts (GW), an increase that the IEA’s analysis expects to become the “new normal.”

Driven by “huge additions of solar and wind,” the increase in 2020 was the greatest year-on-year jump since 1999. The IEA forecasts that about 270 GW of renewable capacity will be added this year, followed by nearly 280 GW in 2022.

In other words, as Greenpeace put it in a Tuesday tweet about the agency’s new report: “The future of energy? Bright and breezy.”

“Wind and solar power are giving us more reasons to be optimistic about our climate goals as they break record after record. Last year, the increase in renewable capacity accounted for 90% of the entire global power sector’s expansion,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement.

“Governments need to build on this promising momentum through policies that encourage greater investment in solar and wind, in the additional grid infrastructure they will require, and in other key renewable technologies such as hydropower, bioenergy, and geothermal,” Birol added. “A massive expansion of clean electricity is essential to giving the world a chance of achieving its net-zero goals.”

Ahead of a global climate summit planned for November, governments are in the process of revealing their updated commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement’s more ambitious goal of limiting global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C. One analysis released last week found that nations’ latest targets put the planet on track for 2.4°C of warming by 2100.

While greater government ambition and action is clearly needed to meet international goals, the latest projections still provided some hope. Heymi Bahar, lead author of the IEA’s new report, told The Guardian that the 2020 renewables boom was “unprecedented.”

Bahar told the newspaper that record-level auctions for new renewable power projects by governments coupled with increased private business investments represents serious “momentum” and is set to become “the new normal for renewable energy.”

The IEA’s new numbers for the next couple years notably have been revised upward by over 25% from the agency’s November estimates.

Carbon Brief pointed out Tuesday that “the IEA has repeatedly raised its expectations for wind and solar over the past decade, drawing fire from critics that say—in the words of a 2019 Reuters article—that it has ‘underplay[ed] the speed at which the world could switch renewable sources of energy.”

Though action is needed across various industries worldwide to reduce planet-heating emissions, the energy sector is by far the biggest contributor. As the World Resources Institute noted in December, “The top three greenhouse gas emitters—China, the European Union, and the United States—contribute 41.5% of total global emissions, while the bottom 100 countries only account for only 3.6%.”

The IEA projects some shifts among top polluters in the years ahead:

China is at the center of global renewable demand and supply, accounting for around 40% of global renewable capacity growth for several years. In 2020, China’s share rose to 50% for the first time due to a rush to complete projects before government subsidies were phased out. In 2021-22 renewables growth in China is set to stabilize at levels that are below the 2020 record but still over 50% above where it was during the 2017-19 period. Any slowdown in China in the coming years will be compensated for by strong growth in Europe, the United States, India, and Latin America where government support and falling prices for solar PV and wind continue to drive installations.

The Guardian reported that the new IEA forecasts don’t take into account recent pledges from U.S. President Joe Biden, who took office in January and has since vowed to halve the nation’s emissions over the next decade. Though the plan represents a major shift from his predecessor, climate justice campaigners argue it is “not good enough” and more must be done.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration have come and gone. While somewhat exaggerated, that milestone is normally considered the honeymoon period for any new president. Buoyed by a recent election triumph and inauguration, he’s expected to be at the peak of his power when it comes to advancing the biggest, boldest items on his agenda.

And indeed, as far as, say, infrastructure or pandemic vaccination goals, Biden has delivered in a major way. Blindly funding the Pentagon and its priorities in the stratospheric fashion that’s become the essence of Washington has, however, proven another matter entirely. One-hundred days later and it’s remarkable how little has changed when it comes to pouring money into this country’s vast military infrastructure and the wars, ongoing or imagined, that accompany it.

If there’s one thing Americans should have learned in the last year-plus, it’s that endless Pentagon spending doesn’t actually make us safer.

For the past decade, debate about the Pentagon budget was governed, in part, by the Budget Control Act, which placed at least nominal caps on spending levels for both defense and non-defense agencies. In reality, though, unlike so many other government agencies, the Pentagon was never restrained by such a cap. Congress continued to raise its limits as military budgets only grew and, no less important, defense spending had a release valve that allowed staggering sums of money to flow without serious accounting into an off-budget fund meant especially for its wars and labelled “the overseas contingency operations account.” The Congressional Research Service has estimated that such supplemental spending from September 11, 2001, to fiscal year 2019 totaled an astonishing $2 trillion above and beyond the congressionally agreed upon Pentagon budget.

Now, however, the Budget Control Act has expired, leaving this administration with a striking opportunity to reorient the country away from trillion-dollar-plus national security budgets and endless wars, though there’s little sign that such a path will be taken.

If there’s one thing Americans should have learned in the last year-plus, it’s that endless Pentagon spending doesn’t actually make us safer. The pandemic, the insurrection at the Capitol, and the persistent threat of white nationalist extremism should have made it all too clear that defending this country against the most significant risks to domestic public health and safety don’t fall within the Pentagon’s purview. In addition, the Department of Defense is perhaps the country’s greatest source of wasteful spending and mismanagement.

Sadly enough, however, it’s likely to be business as usual as long as the money continues to flow in the usual fashion. How striking and inexcusable then that, when it comes to the Pentagon, the Biden administration has visibly wasted its pivotal first 100 days in office on yet more of the same. What we already know, for instance, is that, despite a planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and claims about winding down America’s “forever wars,” the first proposed Biden Pentagon budget of $715 billion actually represents a modest increase over the staggering sums the Pentagon received in the last year of the Trump administration.

Admittedly, there is at least a little good news about the Pentagon’s finances in the Biden era (though it was already included in the last Trump administration Pentagon budget). The overseas contingency operations slush fund is finally being eliminated. While some saw this as a natural consequence of the end of the Budget Control Act, it was definitely a victory over weapons-industry-funded think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies that were trying to persuade lawmakers and the public to “reform” the fund instead.

In addition, the Biden administration’s decision to bring the last troops home from Afghanistan could be an important initial step in drawing down this country’s endlessly expensive wars. It’s estimated that the United States will have spent upwards of $2.5 trillion dollars on the war in Afghanistan alone (including approximately $12.5 billion annually for the next 40 years on the care of its veterans), a conflict in which, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, more than a quarter of a million people were killed.

But Biden must do more if he wants to fulfill his promise to end the forever wars. That includes encouraging Congress to repeal long outdated war authorizations and committing not to let any future conflicts start without actual congressional declarations of war. Meanwhile, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and other war fronts should result in significant Pentagon budget reductions, as has happened historically after wars—but don’t count on it.

The Pentagon Behemoth of Waste

If you want a bellweather for measuring the Pentagon’s influence in America, consider this: even the most disastrous weapons programs regularly get a pass and it’s unlikely the Biden era will end that reality.

Right now, any number of wasteful and troubled Pentagon programs, most notoriously Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, are officially being reviewed. The cost of the creation and maintenance of that jet alone has already ensured that it will be the most expensive weapons program in history: an expected $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Even department officials and members of Congress have — and this is rare indeed — balked at just how expensive and unreliable that fighter aircraft has proven to be. Trump’s outgoing acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called the F-35 a “piece of…,” tellingly leaving the last word hanging, but later referring to the plane as “a monster.” Meanwhile, Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the chair of the House Armed Services committee, has made it clear that he’d like to stop throwing taxpayer dollars down that particular “rathole.”

Once upon a time, Americans were assured that, as the country’s future jet fighter, the F-35 would be “more Chevrolet than Porsche“; that is, on the low (and cheap) end of any new mix of future air power. A lot has changed since then. Total program costs have doubled, while the future price of maintaining the planes soared — unlike the planes themselves. Often, in fact, they aren’t in good enough shape to fly, raising serious concerns about whether enough F-35s will be available for future combat. The chief of staff of the Air Force now claims that it’s not the Chevrolet, but the “Ferrari,” of jet fighters and so should, in the future, be used sparingly. The predictable evolution of that plane was described by the legendary late Colonel Everest Riccioni as a modern Pentagon version of “unilateral disarmament.”

At the very least, no more F-35s should be purchased until testing is successfully completed, but such common sense has not, in recent memory, been a notable Pentagon trait — not in the world of the “revolving door” of the military-industrial complex. In this sense, the F-35 program has been typical of our times.  In 2017, when delays and exploding costs led the Department of Defense to consider reducing the program’s size, then-commandant of the Marine Corps General Joe Dunford weighed in on the subject. Largely ignoring F-35 testing data, he promptly declared that the program had indeed reached initial operational capability (which it likely hadn’t). Unsurprisingly, soon after his retirement in 2019, he joined the board of Lockheed.

The future of the Pentagon will largely be shaped by the personnel selected to lead it. In too many instances, they’ve come directly from a defense industry that’s profited handsomely from its soaring budget. In the Trump administration, for instance, figures were selected for the position of secretary of defense who had worked for top defense firms. Retired general Jim Mattis had been on the board of General Dynamics (and returned to it shortly after his stint at the Pentagon ended); Patrick Shanahan came from Boeing; and Mark Esper came from Raytheon.

Is there a more striking indictment of this country’s approach to military budgeting than continuing to buy a weapon because our political system is too corrupt to change course?

Although Joe Biden issued a strong ethics executive order to be applied to his political appointees across the board, so far his administration doesn’t look that different from past ones when it comes to the Pentagon. After all, his secretary of defense, retired General Lloyd Austin III, arrived directly from the board of Raytheon; while Frank Kendall, nominated to be Air Force secretary, comes from the board of Leidos, another top Pentagon contractor, though one that provides services rather than building weaponry. (While often overlooked, service contracts make up nearly half of all the department’s contract spending.)

Spreading defense contracts across congressional districts, a practice known in Washington as “political engineering,” also needs to end. Lockheed, for instance, claims that the F-35 program has created jobs in 45 states. According to conventional wisdom, it’s this reality that makes the Pentagon too big to fail. Though seldom noted, similar money put into non-military funding like infrastructure or clean energy almost invariably proves to be a greater job creator than the military version of the same.

Here, then, is a question that might be worth considering in the early months of the Biden administration: Is there a more striking indictment of this country’s approach to military budgeting than continuing to buy a weapon because our political system is too corrupt to change course?

Militarism at Home

In our recent history, Washington has distinctly been a Pentagon-first sort of place. Often forgotten is how such an approach has negatively impacted communities not just in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or Yemen, but also here at home. To take one example, the Pentagon has played a key role in militarizing this country’s police forces, only contributing to the destructive cycle that was first widely noticed after police used military-grade weapons against those protesting the killing of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Continued police violence targeting the Black community finally gained major attention in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the police response to the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. As colleagues of mine at the Project On Government Oversight have written, the militarization of our police makes the public “both less safe and less free.”

The Pentagon has negatively impacted the policing of America through its 1033 program, which in recent years has transferred staggering amounts of excess military equipment, sometimes directly off the battlefields of this country’s “forever wars,” to police departments across the country. Tools of war now transferred to local police forces include tanks, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, assault rifles, and bayonets, among many other military items. The group Open The Books, dedicated to government transparency, found that since 1993 the program has transferred 581,000 items of military gear worth $1.8 billion to the police. Unsurprisingly, a 2017 study found police departments that received such equipment were more likely to kill the very civilians they are supposed to protect and serve.

At the beginning of the Biden administration, it appeared that the 1033 program would be curtailed. In January, Reuters reported that the president was preparing to sign an executive order that very month, which would at least put significant limits on the program. As of yet, more than three months later, the White House has taken no such action, though in March, Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) did introduce legislation to curtail the program. According to the Security Policy Reform Institute, the National Association of Police Organizations claimed credit for delaying the president’s action.

So today, the military continues to make this country’s police look ever more like they’re occupying some foreign land.

The China Chickenhawks

And if the China hawks who have gained significant power among the Biden foreign-policy team have anything to say about it, funding the Pentagon will continue to be the order of the day.

Not surprisingly, the Biden administration faces increasing pressure over China and the dangers of war, a narrative that seems like a response to a growing public consensus that we can’t continue to put the Pentagon’s needs first. The military services are already beginning to turn on each other as they fight for their share of the future budget pie. Concerned that the money train may finally be preparing to run off the tracks, there’s been a persistent drumbeat of exaggeration about the military threat posed by China.

In that context, the key document Pentagon boosters continue to cite, though it was published in 2018, is a report from the National Defense Strategy Commission. It recommended cutting the entitlement programs that make up this country’s social safety net to pay for a 3% to 5% annual increase in Pentagon spending. Most of the panelists on that commission were defense industry consultants, board members of the giant weapons makers, or lobbyists for the same. Needless to say, they had a financial stake in raising concerns that China would overtake the United States militarily in the reasonably near future.

Indeed, it’s a fact of life that competition with China is now a challenge, but it’s important to maintain a sense of realism about the nature of that threat. As John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World recently showed, in capacity and strength, the U.S. military dominates China’s many times over. “It seems that China has become the new Soviet Union strawman,” Isaacs wrote. “But there’s one big difference: while the Soviet military and nuclear arsenal were a fair match for the United States’, China’s simply aren’t.” The new cold war with China that the Biden administration is already promoting only threatens to weaken this country as resources are diverted away from combating the most serious threats of our time like pandemics, climate change, and white supremacy.

Unfortunately, in February, the Biden administration, having largely bought into this rhetoric, announced the establishment of a new Pentagon China Task Force. The most likely outcome, as my colleague Dan Grazier points out, is that the president and his foreign policy team will provide ample “cover for elected officials to back unpopular policy recommendations that will end up fulfilling the wish list of the defense industry.”

As longtime Atlantic correspondent and defense-reform expert James Fallows has noted, America’s draft-less twenty-first-century wars have essentially ensured that the U.S. has become a “chickenhawk nation.” For those unfamiliar with the term, chickenhawk refers to “those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going” in their place. The net result is that the American public has, in this century, proven remarkably complacent about how Washington has used force, “blithely assuming we would win.” It was bad enough with Afghanistan, Iraq, and the other forever-war countries, but when it comes to China, it’s hard to imagine anything but the most negative outcomes from those encouraging military conflict.

Meanwhile, as with so much related to the Pentagon, the consequences at home of the China scare are already apparent. As has been increasingly obvious of late, overheated rhetoric about the dangers of China have led to an increase in hate-crime attacks against Asian Americans nationwide. While former President Trump’s anti-China rhetoric (“Kung-flu,” “China Virus”) seems to have contributed significantly to this increase in hate crimes, so has the rise in fear-mongering about the China threat and the bolstering of what’s still called “defense” policy that’s gone with it.

This country would undoubtedly benefit from more competition with (as well as cooperation with) China that would strengthen the economy and create more prosperity here. On the other hand, a new cold war atmosphere will allow the Pentagon to horde resources that would otherwise go to our greater public health and safety needs.

Unfortunately, 100-plus days later, the Biden administration has already wasted its first opportunity to change course.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In a statement published Tuesday decrying global violence, Rep. Jamaal Bowman urged the Biden administration “to do all it can to assist in de-escalating” conflicts around the world, while also asserting that U.S. foreign aid “should never be used to harm.”

 “My heart is breaking for people around the world experiencing oppression and hurt.”
—Rep. Jamaal Bowman

“There’s so much we’re dealing with within our own borders that it’s often difficult for Americans to turn our attention to the problems of people overseas, but it’s hard at this moment not to be struck by the extent of suffering around the world,” wrote Bowman (D-N.Y.).

“Whether it’s the infringement of human and civil rights of Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrah, the violence against those praying in the Al-Aqsa mosque during the holy month of Ramadan in East Jerusalem, police violence against Colombians, a military coup in Myanmar, an ignored genocide in Ethiopia, or the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs in China, my heart is breaking for people around the world experiencing oppression and hurt,” he continued. 

Bowman then focused on the latest crisis in Palestine, where protests against the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem and a violent raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque have escalated into what many fear could be the next major assault on Gaza.

According to authorities in Gaza, 28 Palestinians including 10 children have been killed by Israeli forces, while two women—an elderly Israeli and her Indian caretaker—were reportedly killed in Ashkelon as Hamas fighters fired what the militant resistance group said were 137 rockets into Israel. 

“The United States must step in and rapidly broker a ceasefire to de-escalate and bring us closer to a two-state solution,” stressed Bowman.

“The very name Jerusalem means City of Peace,” he continued. “Violently evicting families from their homes in which generations have lived is not an act of peace. A show of strong force during prayer is not an act of peace. Destroying holy sites is not an act of peace. Hamas rocket attacks are not an act of peace. Israeli government airstrikes are not an act of peace.”

“At the end of the day, it is imperative that the United States have an even-handed approach and ensure our nation is not complicit in stoking the flames of conflict through continued settlement expansion and home demolitions that undermine the two-state solution, perpetuate endless occupation, and threaten the long-term security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” the congressman wrote. 

Bowman’s statement came as U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price faced criticism from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and others for failing to condemn Israel’s latest killing of civilians—including children—in Gaza. 

“This is a unique moment with multiple mounting global crises, and the United States has the responsibility to lead,” Bowman concluded. “Our foreign aid to other nations should never be used to harm. I urge the Biden administration to do all it can to assist in de-escalating these tensions around the world.”

The U.S. gave $448 million in aid to Colombia in 2020, the highest amount in nearly a decade. About half of that assistance goes to the nation’s military and security forces, which, according to international human rights groups, continue to commit numerous crimes and abuses. 

Israel receives around $3.8 billion in unconditional annual U.S. military aid and billions more in loan guarantees. Under international law, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as its ongoing settler colonization of Palestinian territory are illegal. Israeli and international human rights groups accuse the country’s government, military, and security forces of perpetrating crimes including ethnic cleansing and apartheid. 

Bowman is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced last month by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) that would place conditions on the billions of dollars in annual military aid given to Israel in a bid to stop its government from using the funds to kill, torture, imprison, displace, or otherwise harm Palestinian children and families.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In a statement published Tuesday decrying global violence, Rep. Jamaal Bowman urged the Biden administration “to do all it can to assist in de-escalating” conflicts around the world, while also asserting that U.S. foreign aid “should never be used to harm.”

 “My heart is breaking for people around the world experiencing oppression and hurt.”
—Rep. Jamaal Bowman

“There’s so much we’re dealing with within our own borders that it’s often difficult for Americans to turn our attention to the problems of people overseas, but it’s hard at this moment not to be struck by the extent of suffering around the world,” wrote Bowman (D-N.Y.).

“Whether it’s the infringement of human and civil rights of Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrah, the violence against those praying in the Al-Aqsa mosque during the holy month of Ramadan in East Jerusalem, police violence against Colombians, a military coup in Myanmar, an ignored genocide in Ethiopia, or the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs in China, my heart is breaking for people around the world experiencing oppression and hurt,” he continued. 

Bowman then focused on the latest crisis in Palestine, where protests against the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem and a violent raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque have escalated into what many fear could be the next major assault on Gaza.

According to authorities in Gaza, 28 Palestinians including 10 children have been killed by Israeli forces, while two women—an elderly Israeli and her Indian caretaker—were reportedly killed in Ashkelon as Hamas fighters fired what the militant resistance group said were 137 rockets into Israel. 

“The United States must step in and rapidly broker a ceasefire to de-escalate and bring us closer to a two-state solution,” stressed Bowman.

“The very name Jerusalem means City of Peace,” he continued. “Violently evicting families from their homes in which generations have lived is not an act of peace. A show of strong force during prayer is not an act of peace. Destroying holy sites is not an act of peace. Hamas rocket attacks are not an act of peace. Israeli government airstrikes are not an act of peace.”

“At the end of the day, it is imperative that the United States have an even-handed approach and ensure our nation is not complicit in stoking the flames of conflict through continued settlement expansion and home demolitions that undermine the two-state solution, perpetuate endless occupation, and threaten the long-term security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” the congressman wrote. 

Bowman’s statement came as U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price faced criticism from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and others for failing to condemn Israel’s latest killing of civilians—including children—in Gaza. 

“This is a unique moment with multiple mounting global crises, and the United States has the responsibility to lead,” Bowman concluded. “Our foreign aid to other nations should never be used to harm. I urge the Biden administration to do all it can to assist in de-escalating these tensions around the world.”

The U.S. gave $448 million in aid to Colombia in 2020, the highest amount in nearly a decade. About half of that assistance goes to the nation’s military and security forces, which, according to international human rights groups, continue to commit numerous crimes and abuses. 

Israel receives around $3.8 billion in unconditional annual U.S. military aid and billions more in loan guarantees. Under international law, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as its ongoing settler colonization of Palestinian territory are illegal. Israeli and international human rights groups accuse the country’s government, military, and security forces of perpetrating crimes including ethnic cleansing and apartheid. 

Bowman is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced last month by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) that would place conditions on the billions of dollars in annual military aid given to Israel in a bid to stop its government from using the funds to kill, torture, imprison, displace, or otherwise harm Palestinian children and families.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Indigenous rights and climate action groups are set to hold an “Evict Enbridge” celebration on Wednesday and Thursday to mark Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s deadline for Canadian oil and gas company Enbridge to shut down its Line 5 pipeline.

Ahead of Wednesday’s deadline, which Whitmer set last November, the Democratic governor called Enbridge’s continued use of the Straits of Mackinac—under which Line 5 has carried more than half of Ontario’s oil supply since 1953—a “ticking time bomb.”

“Their continued presence violates the public trust and poses a grave threat to Michigan’s environment and economy,” Whitmer said in a statement this week.

Whitmer, who campaigned on shutting down Line 5, announced last November that she was revoking an easement granted by the state of Michigan nearly 70 years ago, saying Enbridge has violated safety requirements. 

Although no oil or gas leaks from Line 5—which carries 540,000 barrels of oil per day—have been reported, the pipeline has been struck by boat anchors and other equipment in recent years. Last year, the line was shut down temporarily after an anchor support sustained damage.

Whitmer said last year that Enbridge violated a rule prohibiting unsupported gaps beneath the pipeline, and another pipeline run by the company spilled more than 845,000 gallons of oil in 2010, affecting the Kalamazoo River. 

According to a 2017 National Wildlife Federation report, more than two dozen spills from other sections of Enbridge’s pipelines exceeded one million gallons.

A 2018 poll of Michigan residents found that 54% of the state wants Line 5 shut down and 87% are concerned about the pipeline spilling into the Straits of Mackinac. 

At the Evict Enbridge event in Mackinaw City this week, environmental justice advocate Winona LaDuke will be among the speakers.

“Will Enbridge shut [Line 5] down or will the public do it for them?” said Honor the Earth, LaDuke’s organization, on social media Monday.

Enbridge has “imposed on the people of Michigan an unacceptable risk of a catastrophic oil spill in the Great Lakes that could devastate our economy and way of life,” Whitmer said when announcing the easement, which was granted despite the fact that the federal government generally regulates oil pipelines.

In February, a federal court ordered state officials and Enbridge to enter mediation, and the company has vowed to continue running Line 5 while the dispute is resolved. Canadian Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said last month that the continued operation of the pipeline is “non-negotiable.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel denounced the company and the Canadian government for putting the state “in a position where Canada stands to gain nearly all the benefit and the state of Michigan bears all the risks.”

According to the Michigan Advance, state officials will need a court order to shut down the pipeline on Wednesday, as Enbridge says it will not comply with Whitmer and Canadian officials have lined up behind the company.  

“Our Great Lakes are more important than Canadian fossil fuel profit using the Straits of Mackinac as a shortcut,” said Michigan group Clean Water Action. “Enbridge had a 50 year easement—it’s been nearly 68 years now. Michigan has given them more than enough time.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As Israel continues its deadly assault on Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, a new analysis released Monday night shows that if congressional lawmakers in the U.S. approve the federal budget unveiled last month by President Joe Biden, the nation would give $1.3 billion more to the Israeli military than to the global climate response.

Although Biden has yet to release his official budget request for FY2022, he shared a preview, which was heavily criticized by progressives.

In his analysis, Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, cited two excerpts from the White House’s spending proposal (pdf):

• “The discretionary request meets the climate emergency head-on, providing $2.5 billion for international climate programs.” (p. 25)
• “The discretionary request fully funds U.S. commitments to key allies in the Middle East, including Israel.” (p. 26)

As Semler explained: “‘Fully funds U.S. commitments to… Israel’ includes giving the apartheid state $3.8 billion in annual military aid—$3.3 billion in ‘base’ bilateral security assistance plus another $500 million for missile defense systems—as outlined [in] the 10-year MOU the Obama-Biden administration reached with Israel in 2016.”

In response to the analysis, Left Flank Veterans, a group of anti-war veterans, said Biden’s spending priorities indicate that the president thinks “preserving apartheid is more important than fighting climate change.”

Semler wrote that “per the Paris accord (and science), U.S. financial contributions to the global climate response should be orders of magnitude higher.” 

Basav Sen, Climate Justice Project director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), recently told Common Dreams that Biden’s pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of this decade “is far from enough,” and encouraged the administration to “commit to paying our fair share for climate mitigation and adaptation in the Global South,” calling current commitments “woefully insufficient.”

“This isn’t charity, this is responsibility,” he explained. “As the world’s largest cumulative greenhouse gas polluter, we owe this to Global South countries who are facing serious consequences of climate change even though they’ve contributed so little to its causes.”

According to a recent analysis of “fair share” climate policies conducted by Friends of the Earth, ActionAid, and the Sunrise Movement, the U.S. should reduce its carbon pollution by 70% compared to 2005 levels by 2030, contribute at least $8 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, and provide up to $3 trillion for green economic recovery and no-strings-attached debt relief in impoverished countries.

“Per international human rights law,” Semler continued, “U.S. military aid to Israel should be zero.”

Two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch released a report, based on over two years of research and documentation, that says the Israeli government’s systematic oppression of Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories amounts to crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Progressives in recent days have denounced the Biden administration for refusing to condemn Israel’s deadly airstrikes on Gaza and for failing to hold Israel accountable after its security forces invaded the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound to attack peaceful worshipers, which was part of a broader assault on Palestinians who are protesting settlers’ attempts to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

“That Biden is prepared to fail so spectacularly on both [mitigating the climate emergency and opposing potential war crimes] warrants a unified response from the Congressional Progressive Caucus about what they plan to do once Biden drops his official budget request,” Semler added.

Lindsay Koshgarian, the program director of the National Priorities Project at IPS, told Common Dreams on Tuesday that “the sum of $2.5 billion in international climate aid, compared to more than $3 billion in military aid to a single country, would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.”

“These are the budget priorities of the past,” Koshgarian added. “There’s an opportunity right now for the U.S. to put its money where its mouth is. Can we invest more to save the world than we invest in arming it? Can we value human rights enough that we restrict our dollars from subsidizing human rights abuses like the system of apartheid and forced evictions happening today in Israel?”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

There are lots of anecdotal reports swirling around about employers who can’t find workers. Just search ​”worker shortages” online and a seemingly endless list of stories pops up, so it’s easy to assume there’s an alarming lack of people to fill jobs. But a closer look reveals there may be a lot less to this than meets the eye.

In a system as large and complex as the U.S. labor market there will always be pockets of bona fide labor shortages at any given time. But a more common reason is employers simply don’t want to raise wages high enough to attract workers.

First, the backdrop. In good times and bad, there is always a chorus of employers who claim they can’t find the employees they need. Sometimes that chorus is louder, sometimes softer, but it’s always there. One reason is that in a system as large and complex as the U.S. labor market there will always be pockets of bona fide labor shortages at any given time. But a more common reason is employers simply don’t want to raise wages high enough to attract workers. Employers post their too-low wages, can’t find workers to fill jobs at that pay level, and claim they’re facing a labor shortage. Given the ubiquity of this dynamic, I often suggest that whenever anyone says, ​”I can’t find the workers I need,” she should really add, ​”at the wages I want to pay.”

Furthermore, a job opening when the labor market is weak often does not mean the same thing as a job opening when the labor market is strong. There is a wide range of ​”recruitment intensity” that an employer can apply to an open position. For example, if employers are trying hard to fill an opening, they will increase the compensation package and perhaps scale back the required qualifications. Conversely, if employers are not trying very hard, they may offer a meager compensation package and hike up the required qualifications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, research shows that recruitment intensity is cyclical. It tends to be stronger when the labor market is strong, and weaker when the labor market is weak. This means that when a job opening goes unfilled when the labor market is weak, as it is today, employers are even more likely than in normal times to be holding out for an overly qualified candidate at a very cheap price.

This points to the fact that the footprint of a bona fide labor shortage is rising wages. Employers who truly face shortages of suitable, interested workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers, and so on. When you don’t see wages growing to reflect that dynamic, you can be fairly certain that labor shortages, though possibly happening in some places, are not a driving feature of the labor market.

And right now, wages are not growing at a rapid pace. While there are issues with measuring wage growth due to the unprecedented job losses of the pandemic, wage series that account for these issues are not showing an increase in wage growth. Unsurprisingly, at a recent press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell dismissed anecdotal claims of labor market shortages, saying, ​”We don’t see wages moving up yet. And presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.”

Further, when restaurant owners can’t find workers to fill openings at wages that aren’t meaningfully higher than they were before the pandemic—even though the jobs are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns—that’s not a labor shortage, that’s the market functioning. The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.

Another piece of evidence against widespread labor shortages is the fact that the labor market added more than 900,000 jobs in March, the seventh highest percent increase in jobs in the last half century. It is difficult to imagine that labor shortages were creating a large impediment to hiring when hiring was happening at such a scale. Further, despite many anecdotes of restaurants in particular not being able to find workers, the labor market added 280,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector in March, the sixth highest percent increase in the last half century, even though average weekly earnings for nonsupervisory workers in that sector equate to annual earnings of just $19,651. With these kinds of numbers it is difficult to take the claims of widespread shortages very seriously.

And there are far more unemployed people than available jobs in the current labor market. In the latest data on job openings, there were nearly 40 percent more unemployed workers than job openings overall, and more than 80 percent more unemployed workers than job openings in the leisure and hospitality sector.

While there are certainly fewer people looking for jobs now than there would be if Covid weren’t a factor—many people are out of the labor market because of Covid-related care responsibilities or health concerns—without enough job openings to even come close to providing work for all job seekers, it again stretches the imagination to suggest that labor shortages are a core dynamic in the labor market.

One question people raise is whether the expanded pandemic unemployment benefits keep workers from taking jobs. Right now, for example, unemployed workers who receive unemployment insurance benefits get not just the (very meager) level of benefits they would get under normal benefits formulas, but an additional $300 a week. That means that some very low-wage workers—like many restaurant workers—may receive more in unemployment benefits than they would at a job. Is this making jobs hard to fill? There was a lot of fuss about this same question a year ago, when workers were getting a $600 additional benefit a week. There were several rigorous papers that looked at this question, and they all found extremely limited labor supply effects of that additional weekly benefit. If the $600 a week wasn’t keeping people from taking jobs then, it’s hard to imagine that a benefit half that large is having that effect now.

I cut my labor-market-monitoring teeth during the Great Recession, and it was a formative experience. In the aftermath of that recession, there were nearly constant tales of employers who couldn’t find workers. The stories at that time about labor shortages in construction, when the unemployment rate in construction was still close to 13 percent, have a similar feel as claims today of labor shortages in restaurants, considering that the unemployment rate in leisure and hospitality is currently 13 percent. The Great Recession was caused by the bursting of a giant housing bubble that threw many construction workers out of work, and the Covid recession was caused by a public health crisis that shuttered many restaurants.

In both cases, counterintuitive reports about employers not able to find the workers they need really captured the public’s imagination. But a look under the hood reveals that beyond the anecdotes there is little evidence of a real shortage.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Anyone wondering why critical race theory has prompted a mad dash among rightwing legislators and school boards to extinguish it need only look at similar obsessions that have made U.S. democracy an endangered species.

Texas, predictably, is jumping on the bandwagon with the hard right Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick claiming in a rant that Texas (yes, apparently all state residents) “rejects critical race theory and other so called ‘woke’ philosophies that maintain one race of sex is superior to another race or sex…”—a contrived fantasy bearing no relation to what CRT teaches.

Hardly to be outdone, in the past few weeks, Republican dominated states have been in a frantic rush to pass bills outlawing CRT in Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah. Bills are also on the docket in Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and other states.

“The fanatical drive to eradicate a deeper analysis of U.S. history and the ability to engage in critical thinking stems from the same ideology that is at the heart of a similar flurry of extremist legislation from coast to coast to restrict the right to vote, criminalize public protest, block the ability of local jurisdictions to reduce the disproportionate funding of policing, and many other public policies.”

Upon signing Idaho’s bill, Gov. Brad Little disingenuously said it would bar teachers from “indoctrinating” students from claiming that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups—again a dishonest demonization of what they are attacking.

The fanatical drive to eradicate a deeper analysis of U.S. history and the ability to engage in critical thinking stems from the same ideology that is at the heart of a similar flurry of extremist legislation from coast to coast to restrict the right to vote, criminalize public protest, block the ability of local jurisdictions to reduce the disproportionate funding of policing, and many other public policies.

It’s the surest sign of both the depth of structural racism that stains every segment of our society, and how much the dangerous, toxic legacy of four years of Trump and Trumpism has inflamed, abetted, and legitimized white supremacist ideology, and increasingly dominates the behavior of the Republican Party, rightwing media, and its most devoted base.

While the current obsession with CRT and this wave of legislation corresponds with Trump’s push last year to ban “spending related to any training on critical race theory,” the rightwing reaction has a familiar strain.

There’s a direct link to the fights over ethnic studies programs that emerged across the U.S. starting in the late 1960s, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and liberation struggles, that included the largest student strike in U.S. history of 1968-69 to establish an Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

That movement led to the spread of programs not only in colleges and universities across the U.S, but also in many K-12 curricula, driven, as educator, activist Angela Davis notes, by Black, Indigenous People of Color students demanding education relevant to their families and communities and the “capacity to think and act critically in relation to the conditions reflecting our collective lives.” A 2010 Arizona law to ban ethnic studies illustrates the extreme fear and attacks ethnic studies have stirred.

CRT, writes David Theo Goldberg in Boston Review, “functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘wokeism,’ ‘anti-racism,’ and ‘identity politics’—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it.”

The goal, Goldberg added, is also “to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice” rather than the ongoing legacy of centuries of structural racism.

It’s a view that is also based on what racial justice, labor activist Bill Fletcher says harkens back to revanchism, a desire to return to a “white republic” of the days of slavery, the counter revolution to Reconstruction and the repression of Jim Crow laws, and a “particular form of revenge” for what they believe are lost political power and privileges in racial and gender roles, and “they want it back.”

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson, as usual, laid bare a key racist political goal, claiming that Democrats want to “replace” replace white, conservative voters with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” to “dilute” the power of U.S. “Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. To win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.” Subtlety is about as foreign to Carlson as it is to Trump or David Duke.

CRT as a scholarly practice can be traced to at least to the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, especially his 1935 classic “Black Reconstruction.” As a formal academic theory, it dates to a movement of educators from the 1970s and beyond, including Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams Richard Delgado and many others, who sought to situate the persistence of structural racism in legal and political practice and its origins in U.S. history.

Crenshaw explained it to CNN‘s Faith Karimi, as “an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” And how current inequities are “not simply a matter of prejudice,” but “structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” 

In an extensive review of what he describes as the racialized educational background of leading opponents of CRT, Michael Harriot, writes in The Root: “This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn’t racialized. But, apparently, it’s perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness.”

Just as there has been sustained activism by students and educators, particularly in working class communities of color, to protect multi-disciplinary ethnic studies programs that continue to be part of an overall struggle not just for knowledge but also for social, economic and political justice in a multi-racial democracy, the current debate is also about the future of this nation.

At stake is whether we can continue to have the scaffolding of a democracy, and strive to reach a more egalitarian society, not one that is premised on a white supremacist dream of entrenching dictatorial power over who can hold elected office, what is taught in schools, and what views are may be circulated in culture and media.

It means acknowledging and teaching that structural racism is baked into U.S. history and was the ideological framework that justified settler colonialism that committed genocide against Indigenous peoples who had lived here for centuries, and the chattel slavery that enriched both white plantation owners in the South and ship builders, bankers, insurance brokers, and manufacturers who profited off slavery in the North.

That is what built the wealth of the U.S., and the perpetuation of that racism in politics, economic opportunity, the legal system, health care, housing, education, and the failure to provide restitution to the descendants of those harmed by racism that are the source of racial disparities that continue to persist today.

Knowing the real history of the U.S., is essential to advancing the struggles of today to achieve a more just society for all the multi-racial, multi-ethnic people who live in a nation becoming more diverse every day. It undermines the rationalizations for suppressing the rights to vote and protest, and for protecting political and economic power for an entrenched white and corporate elite that continues to profit off structural racism today.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Anyone wondering why critical race theory has prompted a mad dash among rightwing legislators and school boards to extinguish it need only look at similar obsessions that have made U.S. democracy an endangered species.

Texas, predictably, is jumping on the bandwagon with the hard right Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick claiming in a rant that Texas (yes, apparently all state residents) “rejects critical race theory and other so called ‘woke’ philosophies that maintain one race of sex is superior to another race or sex…”—a contrived fantasy bearing no relation to what CRT teaches.

Hardly to be outdone, in the past few weeks, Republican dominated states have been in a frantic rush to pass bills outlawing CRT in Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah. Bills are also on the docket in Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and other states.

“The fanatical drive to eradicate a deeper analysis of U.S. history and the ability to engage in critical thinking stems from the same ideology that is at the heart of a similar flurry of extremist legislation from coast to coast to restrict the right to vote, criminalize public protest, block the ability of local jurisdictions to reduce the disproportionate funding of policing, and many other public policies.”

Upon signing Idaho’s bill, Gov. Brad Little disingenuously said it would bar teachers from “indoctrinating” students from claiming that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups—again a dishonest demonization of what they are attacking.

The fanatical drive to eradicate a deeper analysis of U.S. history and the ability to engage in critical thinking stems from the same ideology that is at the heart of a similar flurry of extremist legislation from coast to coast to restrict the right to vote, criminalize public protest, block the ability of local jurisdictions to reduce the disproportionate funding of policing, and many other public policies.

It’s the surest sign of both the depth of structural racism that stains every segment of our society, and how much the dangerous, toxic legacy of four years of Trump and Trumpism has inflamed, abetted, and legitimized white supremacist ideology, and increasingly dominates the behavior of the Republican Party, rightwing media, and its most devoted base.

While the current obsession with CRT and this wave of legislation corresponds with Trump’s push last year to ban “spending related to any training on critical race theory,” the rightwing reaction has a familiar strain.

There’s a direct link to the fights over ethnic studies programs that emerged across the U.S. starting in the late 1960s, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and liberation struggles, that included the largest student strike in U.S. history of 1968-69 to establish an Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

That movement led to the spread of programs not only in colleges and universities across the U.S, but also in many K-12 curricula, driven, as educator, activist Angela Davis notes, by Black, Indigenous People of Color students demanding education relevant to their families and communities and the “capacity to think and act critically in relation to the conditions reflecting our collective lives.” A 2010 Arizona law to ban ethnic studies illustrates the extreme fear and attacks ethnic studies have stirred.

CRT, writes David Theo Goldberg in Boston Review, “functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘wokeism,’ ‘anti-racism,’ and ‘identity politics’—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it.”

The goal, Goldberg added, is also “to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice” rather than the ongoing legacy of centuries of structural racism.

It’s a view that is also based on what racial justice, labor activist Bill Fletcher says harkens back to revanchism, a desire to return to a “white republic” of the days of slavery, the counter revolution to Reconstruction and the repression of Jim Crow laws, and a “particular form of revenge” for what they believe are lost political power and privileges in racial and gender roles, and “they want it back.”

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson, as usual, laid bare a key racist political goal, claiming that Democrats want to “replace” replace white, conservative voters with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” to “dilute” the power of U.S. “Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. To win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.” Subtlety is about as foreign to Carlson as it is to Trump or David Duke.

CRT as a scholarly practice can be traced to at least to the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, especially his 1935 classic “Black Reconstruction.” As a formal academic theory, it dates to a movement of educators from the 1970s and beyond, including Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams Richard Delgado and many others, who sought to situate the persistence of structural racism in legal and political practice and its origins in U.S. history.

Crenshaw explained it to CNN‘s Faith Karimi, as “an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” And how current inequities are “not simply a matter of prejudice,” but “structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” 

In an extensive review of what he describes as the racialized educational background of leading opponents of CRT, Michael Harriot, writes in The Root: “This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn’t racialized. But, apparently, it’s perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness.”

Just as there has been sustained activism by students and educators, particularly in working class communities of color, to protect multi-disciplinary ethnic studies programs that continue to be part of an overall struggle not just for knowledge but also for social, economic and political justice in a multi-racial democracy, the current debate is also about the future of this nation.

At stake is whether we can continue to have the scaffolding of a democracy, and strive to reach a more egalitarian society, not one that is premised on a white supremacist dream of entrenching dictatorial power over who can hold elected office, what is taught in schools, and what views are may be circulated in culture and media.

It means acknowledging and teaching that structural racism is baked into U.S. history and was the ideological framework that justified settler colonialism that committed genocide against Indigenous peoples who had lived here for centuries, and the chattel slavery that enriched both white plantation owners in the South and ship builders, bankers, insurance brokers, and manufacturers who profited off slavery in the North.

That is what built the wealth of the U.S., and the perpetuation of that racism in politics, economic opportunity, the legal system, health care, housing, education, and the failure to provide restitution to the descendants of those harmed by racism that are the source of racial disparities that continue to persist today.

Knowing the real history of the U.S., is essential to advancing the struggles of today to achieve a more just society for all the multi-racial, multi-ethnic people who live in a nation becoming more diverse every day. It undermines the rationalizations for suppressing the rights to vote and protest, and for protecting political and economic power for an entrenched white and corporate elite that continues to profit off structural racism today.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

India is now ground zero for COVID-19.

On Saturday, it suffered a record of more than 335,000 new infections and more than 4,000 deaths in one day. Hospitals are running out of oxygen and beds. Morgues and crematoria are overwhelmed.

In total, a staggering 22.6 million people in India have been infected, with 246,116 deaths.

With 1.3 billion people, India is the second most populous country in the world. From across the country and across the world, there are increasing demands that Prime Minister Narendra Modi order a lockdown of the country to help staunch the spread of the virus.

If we are to address common global threats such as contagions or climate change or nuclear war, we must develop a global perspective.

This may be imperative, but one can understand the reluctance to do it. When Modi enforced a 21-day lockdown last year, it helped squelch the spread of the disease but caused a 24% economic contraction in the first quarter of 2020 and widespread desperation among India’s large numbers of migrant workers.

More recently, at the same time Modi put off another lockdown, he displayed Trumpian irresponsibility by holding a mass political rally with thousands of largely maskless people crowded together and refusing to halt the huge Hindu pilgrimage of millions to bathe in the Ganges River. To some extent, as The Lancet, a medical journal, noted, this is a “self-inflicted catastrophe.”

With India in distress and much of the world desperate for access to vaccine supplies, supplier nations have been slow to respond. China is by far the largest supplier of vaccines, having shipped more than 240 million doses to countries across the world, more than the rest of the world combined. China promises to ship 500 million more.

China, fierce rival of India, immediately stepped in to promise to supply countries that India was forced to cut off to fight its own outbreak. China’s vaccine is not as effective as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, but it surely is better than nothing.

Last week, the Biden administration finally challenged the U.S. drug industry, announcing that the White House would support an international waiver of intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. This is a long overdue measure, but if the industry continues to resist, the negotiations are likely to take months that the world can ill afford. Though the companies benefited greatly from government subsidies and guaranteed purchases—and have seen their profits and stocks soar—they have a large stake in controlling production to ensure continued profits over time.

The Biden administration decision—if aggressively enforced—will put public health over private profit.

As the pandemic rages in India and Brazil, it poses a continued threat to the world. If it isn’t brought under control everywhere, new variants will develop and most likely spread, even to countries that have succeeded in inoculating their populations. The pandemic is truly a global threat that requires a global mobilization.

At the national level, global cooperation has been slow to develop. Instead, the surge to supply countries in need is propelled less from a unified global effort and more from a competitive national “vaccine diplomacy,” with India, China, Russia and now the U.S. vying to win hearts and minds through vaccine supplies.

Fighting the pandemic isn’t just the responsibility of governments. This is a global, human tragedy. The pandemic spreads through the air, so no people are safe unless all are safe. We need at outpouring of citizen action — telethons by stars and musicians, increased donations from foundations, mobilization of volunteers, ramping up of production of supplies — to ensure that vaccines are available and citizens are mobilized to receive them. We need increased global efforts to get the vaccine into rural areas and into the poorest ghettos and barrios of the poorest nations.

Joe Biden announced that he would rely on science for advice, but we can’t rely on science or on government alone. Popular mobilization is essential.

If we are to address common global threats such as contagions or climate change or nuclear war, we must develop a global perspective. Now it becomes ever more apparent that, as Dr. Martin Luther King taught long ago, “all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. … As long as diseases are rampant … no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America.”

In the global struggle to meet the threat of Covid-19, this basic truth is more important than ever.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

India is now ground zero for COVID-19.

On Saturday, it suffered a record of more than 335,000 new infections and more than 4,000 deaths in one day. Hospitals are running out of oxygen and beds. Morgues and crematoria are overwhelmed.

In total, a staggering 22.6 million people in India have been infected, with 246,116 deaths.

With 1.3 billion people, India is the second most populous country in the world. From across the country and across the world, there are increasing demands that Prime Minister Narendra Modi order a lockdown of the country to help staunch the spread of the virus.

If we are to address common global threats such as contagions or climate change or nuclear war, we must develop a global perspective.

This may be imperative, but one can understand the reluctance to do it. When Modi enforced a 21-day lockdown last year, it helped squelch the spread of the disease but caused a 24% economic contraction in the first quarter of 2020 and widespread desperation among India’s large numbers of migrant workers.

More recently, at the same time Modi put off another lockdown, he displayed Trumpian irresponsibility by holding a mass political rally with thousands of largely maskless people crowded together and refusing to halt the huge Hindu pilgrimage of millions to bathe in the Ganges River. To some extent, as The Lancet, a medical journal, noted, this is a “self-inflicted catastrophe.”

With India in distress and much of the world desperate for access to vaccine supplies, supplier nations have been slow to respond. China is by far the largest supplier of vaccines, having shipped more than 240 million doses to countries across the world, more than the rest of the world combined. China promises to ship 500 million more.

China, fierce rival of India, immediately stepped in to promise to supply countries that India was forced to cut off to fight its own outbreak. China’s vaccine is not as effective as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, but it surely is better than nothing.

Last week, the Biden administration finally challenged the U.S. drug industry, announcing that the White House would support an international waiver of intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. This is a long overdue measure, but if the industry continues to resist, the negotiations are likely to take months that the world can ill afford. Though the companies benefited greatly from government subsidies and guaranteed purchases—and have seen their profits and stocks soar—they have a large stake in controlling production to ensure continued profits over time.

The Biden administration decision—if aggressively enforced—will put public health over private profit.

As the pandemic rages in India and Brazil, it poses a continued threat to the world. If it isn’t brought under control everywhere, new variants will develop and most likely spread, even to countries that have succeeded in inoculating their populations. The pandemic is truly a global threat that requires a global mobilization.

At the national level, global cooperation has been slow to develop. Instead, the surge to supply countries in need is propelled less from a unified global effort and more from a competitive national “vaccine diplomacy,” with India, China, Russia and now the U.S. vying to win hearts and minds through vaccine supplies.

Fighting the pandemic isn’t just the responsibility of governments. This is a global, human tragedy. The pandemic spreads through the air, so no people are safe unless all are safe. We need at outpouring of citizen action — telethons by stars and musicians, increased donations from foundations, mobilization of volunteers, ramping up of production of supplies — to ensure that vaccines are available and citizens are mobilized to receive them. We need increased global efforts to get the vaccine into rural areas and into the poorest ghettos and barrios of the poorest nations.

Joe Biden announced that he would rely on science for advice, but we can’t rely on science or on government alone. Popular mobilization is essential.

If we are to address common global threats such as contagions or climate change or nuclear war, we must develop a global perspective. Now it becomes ever more apparent that, as Dr. Martin Luther King taught long ago, “all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. … As long as diseases are rampant … no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America.”

In the global struggle to meet the threat of Covid-19, this basic truth is more important than ever.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – The rights to freedom of demonstration, health and a healthy environment are non-negotiable and must be fully respected everywhere across the world. Based on these principles, 350.org makes public its support for the peaceful demonstrators who are taking to the streets in several Colombian cities, demanding changes in social, health and economic policies. Above all, they are demanding an immediate end to police, military and state violence against unarmed citizens.

“It is unacceptable that the Colombian government allows repressive and extremely violent police actions against a large majority of unarmed and peaceful citizens, who are only exercising their right to demand changes that they consider essential for the country”, said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America director.

According to AFP, and also based on reports from the Colombian NGO Temblores, the police actions are leaving a terrifying toll. In just the first three days of the protests, there were a total of 1181 cases of police violence, 92 victims of abuse of force, 26 deaths, four victims of sexual aggression, 672 arbitrary detentions and 12 aggressions to the eyes of the demonstrators. 

Colombian media outlets that extensively cover environmental and human rights issues – such as La Silla Vacía, Cero Setenta and Pacifista – are also recording the irresponsible actions of the police in several areas, as well as the enormous peaceful response of thousands of Colombians to these abuses.

“Development is done by including people in decision-making and supporting the improvement of the quality of life of communities. The case of fracking in Colombia goes in the opposite direction in both aspects. The country has the opportunity to review its public policies in this area and invest in a Just Recovery immediately, as many of the protesters are calling for,” added Zugman.

For ideas for a Just Recovery in Colombia and around the world, see these sessions from 350.org’s April 2021 Global Gathering for a Just Recovery.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – The rights to freedom of demonstration, health and a healthy environment are non-negotiable and must be fully respected everywhere across the world. Based on these principles, 350.org makes public its support for the peaceful demonstrators who are taking to the streets in several Colombian cities, demanding changes in social, health and economic policies. Above all, they are demanding an immediate end to police, military and state violence against unarmed citizens.

“It is unacceptable that the Colombian government allows repressive and extremely violent police actions against a large majority of unarmed and peaceful citizens, who are only exercising their right to demand changes that they consider essential for the country”, said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America director.

According to AFP, and also based on reports from the Colombian NGO Temblores, the police actions are leaving a terrifying toll. In just the first three days of the protests, there were a total of 1181 cases of police violence, 92 victims of abuse of force, 26 deaths, four victims of sexual aggression, 672 arbitrary detentions and 12 aggressions to the eyes of the demonstrators. 

Colombian media outlets that extensively cover environmental and human rights issues – such as La Silla Vacía, Cero Setenta and Pacifista – are also recording the irresponsible actions of the police in several areas, as well as the enormous peaceful response of thousands of Colombians to these abuses.

“Development is done by including people in decision-making and supporting the improvement of the quality of life of communities. The case of fracking in Colombia goes in the opposite direction in both aspects. The country has the opportunity to review its public policies in this area and invest in a Just Recovery immediately, as many of the protesters are calling for,” added Zugman.

For ideas for a Just Recovery in Colombia and around the world, see these sessions from 350.org’s April 2021 Global Gathering for a Just Recovery.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

During the pandemic, low-wage workers have lost income, jobs, and lives. And yet many of the nation’s top-tier corporations have been fixated on protecting their wealthy CEOs, even bending their own rules to pump up executive paychecks.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 51 of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers moved bonus goalposts or made other rule changes in 2020 to give their CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.

“It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates obscene wealth for a few at the top and economic insecurity for so many of the rest of us.”

Among these 51 rule-rigging companies, average CEO compensation was $15.3 million in 2020, while median worker pay was $28,187 on average. The average CEO- worker pay ratio: 830 to 1.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

If you’ve chosen to read this, it’s a fair bet you’re been aware for quite some time that the Republican Party has gone completely insane—especially if you agree with that classic definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Time and again the GOP and their scarecrow leader Donald Trump have proven the wisdom of that definition. Although all 50 states officially confirmed the results, for more than half a year, Republicans have challenged ad nauseum last November’s legitimate election of Joe Biden. Dozens of their frivolous lawsuits have been thrown out of courts. Currently, a ridiculous and baseless recount by QAnon aficionados in Maricopa County, Arizona, goes on and on—their latest ploy examining some 40,000 ballots for traces of bamboo, which would indicate these votes were fakes sent from China (!)

I’m not making this up.

And of course, throughout, there’s the endless braying via social media and right-wing radio and TV of unfounded claims that the vote was manipulated. Trump is our one true president, they shout (and so does he), a deranged notion that makes me cold and clammy all over.

The prize for the wackiest quote of the past week or so goes to Debra Ell, a Michigan Republican organizer, who told Ashley Parker and Marianna Sotomayor of The Washington Post, “I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified.”

Now then, she continued, please leave me be so I can await the weekly saucer that whisks me to my timeshare on the Planet Mongo.

Okay, that part I made up. Fake news.

This all would be funny (and yes, some of it is, for sure), but for the fact that belief in this fantasy is screwing up the rest of the country, a land already reeling from more than a year’s worth of death and disease and the four plague years of the Trump White House. It has become the litmus test for membership in the GOP; you either buy this patently false canard or you get out of their party. Those few Republicans who have upheld the accuracy and legality of the election have been censured or fired—the aforementioned Ms. Ell, for example, is involved in an effort to remove the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director just because he said “the election wasn’t stolen” and that the loss was Trump’s fault. Blasphemy! Unclean!

You see what’s happening to Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney from Wyoming. Third in the GOP House leadership, daughter of the former vice president, this arch conservative had the temerity not only to suggest that the election was honest but also to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6 deadly assault on the Capitol.

Last Monday, during an American Enterprise Institute conference at Sea Island, Georgia, she told attendees, “We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen. It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”

She followed up with an op-ed in The Washington Post: “Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law…

The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval. America is exceptional because our constitutional system guards against that. At the heart of our republic is a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power among political rivals in accordance with law. President Ronald Reagan described this as our American ‘miracle.’

Cheney concluded, “History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”

As a result, she’s losing her job as House Republican conference chair to the ambitious and opportunistic Rep. Elise Stefanik of upstate New York, who has attached herself to Donald Trump like a limpet on a big dumb ocean rock.

This, even though Cheney consistently voted for almost everything Trump wanted when he was president—more so than Stefanik (92 percent vs. 77 percent)—and she still sides with the far right and votes no, no, never on almost anything significant from Democrats on the other side of the aisle.

Nonetheless, by calling out the danger and speaking truth about the election and Trump’s perfidy, for her loyalty to country and Constitution, she must be expelled. The once-upon-a-time party of Honest Abe has decided that reality is a worn-out concept that just gets in the way of their obeisance to the “say anything” madness of Trump.

They see him as the key to electoral success and political power, despite his and their losses. This is one reason they keep claiming victory in the presidential election in direct contradiction of the facts — now including internal polling data Republican leadership have been sitting on that demonstrate Trump’s toxicity in swing districts. As per The Post, “Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.”

“Right now, it’s basically the Titanic,” dissident Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger said of his party Sunday on CBS‘ “Face the Nation“. “We’re in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And meanwhile, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat.”

Still, there’s method to this madness. It’s a distraction, yes, like the nonsensical culture wars of hamburgers and Mr. Potato Head, but more important, the claims of fraud and an illegitimate presidency are being used to barrage and undermine every single piece of policy Joe Biden and his team are attempting to implement. Last week, his “Grim Reaper” identity intact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a press conference back in his home state of Kentucky that, “One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration.”

What’s more, the steady din of Republican allegations, no matter how absurd, serves not only to reinforce the Big Lie about the elections, it also emboldens the forces of voter suppression that use these deceits to justify legislation that further denies the ballot to anyone who doesn’t pass the GOP test for what it means to be an American. That would imit suffrage to those who are white, Christian, conservative, filled with anger, suspicion and fearful of change that’s inevitable.

Increasingly, Republicans in Congress also are using it to justify the fatal insurrection of January 6 that sought to overthrow the results of the Electoral College and attack elected officials. Many on the Hill actively are working to prevent a thorough investigation of what really happened—and who was involved.

Back in the 1950s, many in the Republican Party embraced the anti-Communist witch hunts of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, false allegations that destroyed the lives of many innocent men and women. It was not until other members of the party demonstrated the courage and integrity to stand up and speak out against him, ultimately bringing him and his deranged cruelty to an end.

That version of the Republican Party is long gone. Instead, we see an assemblage of mad grievance hollowed out at the core, lacking morality or grace. Yet another man named McCarthy chooses to be a leader of it, to use the currents of hate to become Speaker of the House and reverse-engineer us back to our recent Trump years of malfeasance, corruption, and governmental inertia. And all of it without a trace of decency or genuine concern for the needs of the American people. (This despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot, Kevin McCarthy loudly attacked Trump for his involvement. Now, he has flipped in spectacular fashion, executing a neat jacknife with somersault into the Mar-a-Lgo swimming pool. Trump good, he says.)

While expressing perplexity at these goings on, Biden presses ahead, rooting for his proposals, attempting to enlist a modicum of Republican participation while knowing it may be useless. Slowly, history will reveal the full extent of the egregious acts the GOP has committed and lead us to what we must believe will be their ultimate defeat and humiliation. For now, we must continue to hammer back against their lies, support good and sincere governance as we now see it occurring once again, and not allow the Trumpistas to seize power as they did before, either at the election box or through an underhanded conspiracy to overthrow democracy. To stop resisting their falsehoods and schemes would really be, what’s the word? Oh yeah,  insane.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Dozens of the largest low-wage employers in the United States manipulated their own rules during the coronavirus pandemic to hand wealthy CEOs substantial raises while their vulnerable frontline workers struggled to get by with inadequate paychecks, meager benefits, and flimsy on-the-job protections.

That’s according to a new report (pdf) released Tuesday by the Institute for Policy Studies, which found that 51 of the nation’s 100 biggest low-wage employers—including Tyson Foods, Coca-Cola, Chipotle, and YUM Brands—used numerous tactics to boost executive pay in 2020 while offering their workers few safeguards against the pandemic and resulting economic meltdown.

“It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates prosperity for a few at the top and precarity for so many of the rest of us.”
—Sarah Anderson, Institute for Policy Studies

“Common manipulations included lowering performance bars to help executives meet bonus targets, awarding special ‘retention’ bonuses, excluding poor second-quarter results from evaluations, and replacing performance-based pay with time-based awards,” the report notes. “Companies enlisted an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants in an effort to give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.”

For example, the board of Chipotle—a company notorious for violating worker safety and health regulations—inflated CEO Brian Niccol’s total compensation to $38 million in 2020 by “toss[ing] out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and exclud[ing] Covid-related costs, a bit of financial magic that artificially boosted Chipotle’s operating income and helped give Niccola 136% raise.”

At the companies that altered their rules to reward top executives amid the deadly pandemic, CEO pay averaged $15.3 million in 2020, up 29% from 2019. By contrast, the report found that median worker pay at those companies fell by 2% to an average of $28,187.

“The 100 S&P 500 corporations we analyzed all paid median compensation under $50,000 in 2020,” the analysis notes. “Some did offer frontline employees paid leave and small pay increases during the pandemic, usually around $2 per hour, but in nearly all cases this modest extra Covid-19 support was only temporary. The real largesse flowed only to C-suites.”

Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Project and lead author of the report, said in a statement that “it’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates prosperity for a few at the top and precarity for so many of the rest of us.”

“By inflating executive compensation while their workers struggled during a pandemic,” Anderson added, “corporate boards have strengthened the case for tax penalties on huge CEO-worker pay gaps.”

The report offers several recommendations for reining in massive and growing CEO-worker pay gaps, including passage of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act of 2021, legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in March.

That bill would increase the corporate tax rate by 0.5% for companies that pay their CEOs over 50 times more than the median worker, and 5% for companies that pay their chief executives over 500 times more than the median worker.

“As millions of families struggle to keep food on the table during a global pandemic and economic crisis, it is more important than ever that we close the CEO-worker pay gap and ensure that companies pay their workers the wages they deserve,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

In a Tuesday blog post, Anderson noted that the measure “would generate an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be used to create good jobs and meet human needs.”

“If the bill had been in place in 2020, Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,078 to 1, would have owed an extra $1 billion in federal taxes—enough to fund 13,502 clean energy jobs for a year,” Anderson wrote. “Amazon, with a 1,596-to-1 pay ratio, also would have owed an extra $1 billion, enough to underwrite 115,089 public housing units for a year.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Dozens of the largest low-wage employers in the United States manipulated their own rules during the coronavirus pandemic to hand wealthy CEOs substantial raises while their vulnerable frontline workers struggled to get by with inadequate paychecks, meager benefits, and flimsy on-the-job protections.

That’s according to a new report (pdf) released Tuesday by the Institute for Policy Studies, which found that 51 of the nation’s 100 biggest low-wage employers—including Tyson Foods, Coca-Cola, Chipotle, and YUM Brands—used numerous tactics to boost executive pay in 2020 while offering their workers few safeguards against the pandemic and resulting economic meltdown.

“It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates prosperity for a few at the top and precarity for so many of the rest of us.”
—Sarah Anderson, Institute for Policy Studies

“Common manipulations included lowering performance bars to help executives meet bonus targets, awarding special ‘retention’ bonuses, excluding poor second-quarter results from evaluations, and replacing performance-based pay with time-based awards,” the report notes. “Companies enlisted an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants in an effort to give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.”

For example, the board of Chipotle—a company notorious for violating worker safety and health regulations—inflated CEO Brian Niccol’s total compensation to $38 million in 2020 by “toss[ing] out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and exclud[ing] Covid-related costs, a bit of financial magic that artificially boosted Chipotle’s operating income and helped give Niccola 136% raise.”

At the companies that altered their rules to reward top executives amid the deadly pandemic, CEO pay averaged $15.3 million in 2020, up 29% from 2019. By contrast, the report found that median worker pay at those companies fell by 2% to an average of $28,187.

“The 100 S&P 500 corporations we analyzed all paid median compensation under $50,000 in 2020,” the analysis notes. “Some did offer frontline employees paid leave and small pay increases during the pandemic, usually around $2 per hour, but in nearly all cases this modest extra Covid-19 support was only temporary. The real largesse flowed only to C-suites.”

Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Project and lead author of the report, said in a statement that “it’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates prosperity for a few at the top and precarity for so many of the rest of us.”

“By inflating executive compensation while their workers struggled during a pandemic,” Anderson added, “corporate boards have strengthened the case for tax penalties on huge CEO-worker pay gaps.”

The report offers several recommendations for reining in massive and growing CEO-worker pay gaps, including passage of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act of 2021, legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in March.

That bill would increase the corporate tax rate by 0.5% for companies that pay their CEOs over 50 times more than the median worker, and 5% for companies that pay their chief executives over 500 times more than the median worker.

“As millions of families struggle to keep food on the table during a global pandemic and economic crisis, it is more important than ever that we close the CEO-worker pay gap and ensure that companies pay their workers the wages they deserve,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

In a Tuesday blog post, Anderson noted that the measure “would generate an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be used to create good jobs and meet human needs.”

“If the bill had been in place in 2020, Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,078 to 1, would have owed an extra $1 billion in federal taxes—enough to fund 13,502 clean energy jobs for a year,” Anderson wrote. “Amazon, with a 1,596-to-1 pay ratio, also would have owed an extra $1 billion, enough to underwrite 115,089 public housing units for a year.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pressed repeatedly by reporters during a briefing on Monday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price refused to condemn Israel’s killing of children with airstrikes on Gaza, offering evasive and mealy-mouthed responses that members of Congress slammed as unacceptable.

“We cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel’s state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians—including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors, and the murder of Palestinian children.”
—Rep. Mark Pocan

Asked straightforwardly whether he condemns the killing of Palestinian children, Price replied that the Biden administration does not “have independent confirmation of facts on the ground yet” and is “hesitant to get into reports that are just emerging.”

“Obviously, the deaths of civilians, be they Israeli or Palestinians, are something we would take very seriously,” added Price.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted late Monday that “this unsurprising response is devoid of empathy and concern for human suffering.”

“He can’t even condemn the killing of children,” Omar added.

Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst, called Price’s remarks “spineless.”

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza on Monday killed 24 people, including nine children. Israel claimed it was targeting “Hamas operatives” and said the airstrikes were retaliation for rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, which reportedly caused several injuries.

Hamas claimed responsibility for a rocket attack in Jerusalem, where Israeli security forces injured more than 300 Palestinians earlier Monday in an assault on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest site.

At the start of Monday’s briefing, Price stressed “Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself and to defend its people and its territory.” But asked whether Palestinians have the same right, Price quickly reverted to defending the broad principle of self-defense while refusing to answer the question.

“It is long past time we finally take action to protect Palestinian human rights and save lives.”
—Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and André Carson

“We believe in the concept of self-defense,” said Price. “We believe it applies to any state.”

Given that Palestinians are a stateless people living under Israeli military occupation, they would not have a right to self-defense under Price’s standard, as Associated Press reporter Matt Lee pointed out.

“Are you saying the Palestinians don’t have a right to self-defense?” Lee asked, to which Price replied, “I was making a broader point not attached to Israel or the Palestinians in that case… I’m not in a position to debate the legalities from up here.”

Following the State Department press briefing, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) tweeted that “we cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel’s state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians—including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors, and the murder of Palestinian children.”

“U.S. aid should not be funding this violence,” Pocan added.

Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) sent a similar message in a joint statement issued Monday, declaring, “We are horrified by the violent assault by Israeli forces on the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the continued violent attacks on the Palestinian people during the holy month of Ramadan.

“We continue to provide the Israeli government with over $3 billion in military aid every year—with no conditions or accountability for wanton human rights abuses and continuing illegal seizures of Palestinian land,” the lawmakers continued. “For decades, we have paid lip service to a Palestinian state, while land seizures, settlement expansion, and forced displacement continue, making a future home for Palestinians more and more out of reach.”

“It is long past time we finally take action to protect Palestinian human rights and save lives,” the trio said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Amid reporting that Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 20 Palestinians, including nine children, rights activists and journalists on Monday called out some members of the media for covering the latest developments with language that misrepresents the power dynamics of the region.

After Israeli forces injured hundreds of Palestinians with rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas at the Al-Aqsa Mosque—and refused to stand down—Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded with the deadly airstrikes, claiming to strike “Hamas terror targets.”

As Jack Mirkinson of Discourse Blog and many other critics pointed out, outlets including the Associated Press, BBC, New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post used “clash” or “clashes” to describe the attack on the mosque, which is a holy site for Muslims and Jews. As Mirkinson wrote Monday:

This is not a “clash” between two equal sides. This is a straightforward attack by Israel on Palestinians. For days, the Israeli government has been systematically assaulting Palestinians worshipping at one of the holiest sites in Islam, during Ramadan, all while enforcing a move to ethnically cleanse a Jerusalem neighborhood of its Palestinian residents. Israeli forces have fired rubber bullets and stun grenades, injuring hundreds of people. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem has been filmed lamenting that Palestinian activists weren’t shot in the head.

Israel is one of the most militarily advanced countries in the world, thanks to the United States. It is the government in charge. It is the occupying power. It is the one taking active steps to displace Palestinians, to attack worshipers at a mosque. The asymmetry at play is beyond overwhelming.

Some reports “are completely bewildering,” he wrote, while others “are clearly so nervous about veering from the script that even when they start strong, they descend into near-gibberish.”

Mirkinson was far from alone. In a statement Monday night, Linda Sarsour, executive director and co-founder of MPower Change, the largest Muslim-led digital advocacy organization in the United States, said, “These are not ‘clashes.’”

“They are attacks,” Sarsour continued. “They are violent assaults by an occupying force. They are acts of ethnic cleansing, carried out by Israeli forces, on Palestinians, for worshipping at the Al-Aqsa Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, or for merely existing in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.”

As Common Dreams has reported in recent days, attempts by Israeli settlers and security forces to drive Palestinians out of the Al-Bustan and Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem have sparked global condemnation—including from some progressive U.S. lawmakers.

“What we’re seeing aren’t ‘clashes,’” Sarsour emphasized. “What we’re seeing is the oppression of an apartheid state, against people engaged in peaceful worship during the holiest nights of the year for Muslims around the world.”

“The Palestinians are a resilient people,” she added. “They want freedom and liberation. They want to live with dignity. They want justice—all universal values, rights, and principles we all deserve. Let’s stop the whitewashing of their systemic, violent oppression.”

“Clashes” isn’t the word choice that has “stoked controversy,” Alex MacDonald reported Monday for Middle East Eye. Others include “conflict,” “property dispute,” the terms used when referring to structures at “the Old City complex which houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Western Wall.”

Reporters, rights advocates, and progressive lawmakers also called out U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price  for how he handled questions from journalists on Monday, including his refusal to explicitly condemn the IDF’s reported killing of Palestinian children in the airstrikes.

“Washington is increasingly twisting its tongue in knots trying to square what they say is their support for human rights with support for Israel as it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity,” tweeted Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst, with a video clip.

U.S. Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, also weighed in, tagging Price’s official Twitter account:

Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept—which last month published a thorough examination of U.S. President Joe Biden’s record on foreign and military issues, including “what would become a career-spanning defense of Israeli militarism”—pointed out that Price’s responses were not surprising.

“The questions from reporters here are solid. And the answers from the State Department spokesperson are, unfortunately, not shocking,” Scahill said. “This is a bipartisan horror and Joe Biden has a very long history of defending Israel’s gratuitous violence and killings.”

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who, along with Tlaib, was the first Muslim woman elected to Congress—took to Twitter Monday to address an issue Price was questioned about: the right to self-defense.

Meanwhile, some Israeli Jews took to the streets chanting “Yimach Shemam,” a Hebrew phrase that means “may their names be erased,” which was denounced as “sick,” “shocking,” and “revolting.”

“Hard to capture how deeply horrifying this video is. Thousands of Israeli Jews singing about revenge… dancing as a fire burns on the Temple Mount,” said Simone Zimmerman, director of B’Tselem USA and co-founder of IfNotNow. “This is genocidal animus towards Palestinians—emboldened and unfiltered.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Amid reporting that Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 20 Palestinians, including nine children, rights activists and journalists on Monday called out some members of the media for covering the latest developments with language that misrepresents the power dynamics of the region.

After Israeli forces injured hundreds of Palestinians with rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas at the Al-Aqsa Mosque—and refused to stand down—Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded with the deadly airstrikes, claiming to strike “Hamas terror targets.”

As Jack Mirkinson of Discourse Blog and many other critics pointed out, outlets including the Associated Press, BBC, New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post used “clash” or “clashes” to describe the attack on the mosque, which is a holy site for Muslims and Jews. As Mirkinson wrote Monday:

This is not a “clash” between two equal sides. This is a straightforward attack by Israel on Palestinians. For days, the Israeli government has been systematically assaulting Palestinians worshipping at one of the holiest sites in Islam, during Ramadan, all while enforcing a move to ethnically cleanse a Jerusalem neighborhood of its Palestinian residents. Israeli forces have fired rubber bullets and stun grenades, injuring hundreds of people. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem has been filmed lamenting that Palestinian activists weren’t shot in the head.

Israel is one of the most militarily advanced countries in the world, thanks to the United States. It is the government in charge. It is the occupying power. It is the one taking active steps to displace Palestinians, to attack worshipers at a mosque. The asymmetry at play is beyond overwhelming.

Some reports “are completely bewildering,” he wrote, while others “are clearly so nervous about veering from the script that even when they start strong, they descend into near-gibberish.”

Mirkinson was far from alone. In a statement Monday night, Linda Sarsour, executive director and co-founder of MPower Change, the largest Muslim-led digital advocacy organization in the United States, said, “These are not ‘clashes.’”

“They are attacks,” Sarsour continued. “They are violent assaults by an occupying force. They are acts of ethnic cleansing, carried out by Israeli forces, on Palestinians, for worshipping at the Al-Aqsa Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, or for merely existing in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.”

As Common Dreams has reported in recent days, attempts by Israeli settlers and security forces to drive Palestinians out of the Al-Bustan and Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem have sparked global condemnation—including from some progressive U.S. lawmakers.

“What we’re seeing aren’t ‘clashes,’” Sarsour emphasized. “What we’re seeing is the oppression of an apartheid state, against people engaged in peaceful worship during the holiest nights of the year for Muslims around the world.”

“The Palestinians are a resilient people,” she added. “They want freedom and liberation. They want to live with dignity. They want justice—all universal values, rights, and principles we all deserve. Let’s stop the whitewashing of their systemic, violent oppression.”

“Clashes” isn’t the word choice that has “stoked controversy,” Alex MacDonald reported Monday for Middle East Eye. Others include “conflict,” “property dispute,” the terms used when referring to structures at “the Old City complex which houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Western Wall.”

Reporters, rights advocates, and progressive lawmakers also called out U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price  for how he handled questions from journalists on Monday, including his refusal to explicitly condemn the IDF’s reported killing of Palestinian children in the airstrikes.

“Washington is increasingly twisting its tongue in knots trying to square what they say is their support for human rights with support for Israel as it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity,” tweeted Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst, with a video clip.

U.S. Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, also weighed in, tagging Price’s official Twitter account:

Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept—which last month published a thorough examination of U.S. President Joe Biden’s record on foreign and military issues, including “what would become a career-spanning defense of Israeli militarism”—pointed out that Price’s responses were not surprising.

“The questions from reporters here are solid. And the answers from the State Department spokesperson are, unfortunately, not shocking,” Scahill said. “This is a bipartisan horror and Joe Biden has a very long history of defending Israel’s gratuitous violence and killings.”

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who, along with Tlaib, was the first Muslim woman elected to Congress—took to Twitter Monday to address an issue Price was questioned about: the right to self-defense.

Meanwhile, some Israeli Jews took to the streets chanting “Yimach Shemam,” a Hebrew phrase that means “may their names be erased,” which was denounced as “sick,” “shocking,” and “revolting.”

“Hard to capture how deeply horrifying this video is. Thousands of Israeli Jews singing about revenge… dancing as a fire burns on the Temple Mount,” said Simone Zimmerman, director of B’Tselem USA and co-founder of IfNotNow. “This is genocidal animus towards Palestinians—emboldened and unfiltered.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.