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 only word choice that has “stoked controversy,” Alex MacDonald reported Monday for Middle East Eye. Others include “conflict,” “property dispute,” and 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.

A majority of likely U.S. voters—and especially younger ones and people of color—support immediately spending much more on coronavirus pandemic relief than the nearly $2 trillion in President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, a poll published Monday by ProsperUS, the Green New Deal Network, and Data For Progress revealed. 

“This new polling shows that voters across the political spectrum see relief packages passed and government spending up until this point as only a down payment on a full recovery.”
—Claire Guzdar, ProsperUS

The survey (pdf) found that 57% of all respondents—including 77% of Democrats, 51% of Independents, and 40% of Republicans—want more pandemic relief passed immediately. Among all likely voters under the age of 45, support for more and immediate relief rose to 66%, while 67% of Black and 60% of Latinx respondents said they want additional stimulus spending now. 

The likely voters were also asked whether they would support a $10 trillion economic recovery package “that includes money to expand and update water, electrical, housing, and transportation infrastructure,” as well as “more money for small businesses and manufacturing, and money for care for elderly and disabled people.”

Sixty-one percent of all respondents either strongly or somewhat support such a move; when the potential package price tag was reduced to $4 trillion, support rose five points to 66%. Among Democratic voters, 81% backed the $10 trillion proposal, while 83% favored a $4 trillion recovery plan.

Fifty-three percent of Independent voters said they back a $10 trillion stimulus, with 55% strongly or somewhat supporting the $4 trillion option. Among Republican respondents, 44% look favorably upon a $10 trillion recovery package, while half said they support spending $4 trillion.

“This new polling shows that voters across the political spectrum see relief packages passed and government spending up until this point as only a down payment on a full recovery, not the end of the public investment needed to get us out of this crisis and build a stronger, more sustainable economy,” ProsperUS campaign manager and spokesperson Claire Guzdar said in a statement.

“An overwhelming majority of voters understand that millions of families and workers are still hurting, and that our path to recovery is still ongoing,” said Guzdar. “Young people and people of color—those most affected by the crises we face—are most supportive”

“Simply put,” she added, “more is required to ensure that we build a more resilient, equal economy that works for more people.”

The poll was conducted from April 21 to April 25. The U.S. government’s April jobs report bolstered calls for a $10 trillion infrastructure plan such as the THRIVE Act introduced by progressive lawmakers last month. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Human rights defenders spoke at a rally in New York City Monday ahead of what they called a “show trial” for attorney Steven Donziger, who was held in contempt of court in 2019 by a prosecutor with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Donziger won (pdf) a historic $9.5 billion judgment against oil giant Chevron in 2013 over the company’s dumping of 16 billion gallons of oil into the Amazon in Ecuador. That ruling has been upheld by three Ecuadorian courts, but Chevron has gone to great lengths to avoid paying the settlement.

Donziger’s federal trial—without a jury—began Monday morning, with right-wing Judge Loretta Preska presiding. As Common Dreams reported last week, Preska is a leader in the conservative Federalist Society, which has backing from oil giant Chevron—the corporation at the center of the case against Donziger.

Dozens of supporters arrived at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Manhattan to speak out against the misdemeanor charge against Donziger, which carries a potential six-month prison sentence and which, Donziger said in a video released Sunday night, is “an effort by corporate America, particularly the fossil fuel industry,” to “attack and silence their critics.”

Called “America’s first corporate political prisoner,” Donziger has been under house arrest for more than 600 days since U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York held him in contempt of court in July 2019, after Donziger refused to disclose privileged client information to the fossil fuel industry.

Kaplan is a former corporate lawyer with investments in Chevron. Aside from Kaplan and Preska’s ties to Chevron, the special prosecutor selected for the trial is a partner at a firm which once counted the oil giant as one of its clients. 

The conflicts of interest in the case have led Donziger’s supporters to decry the attorney’s “persecution” and deem the federal trial a “kangaroo court.” Instead of paying the $9.5 billion settlement to clean up the pollution it dumped into the Amazon, activist and actress Susan Sarandon said at the rally, Chevron instead “chose to silence and persecute Steven…because it’s also a signal to other activists, to other people who are trying to save our environment that you will have dire consequences if you open your mouth and if you take legal action.”

Sarandon echoed the message shared by Donziger on the eve of the trial.

“I’m just a symbol that they want to go so they can use it as a weapon of intimidation to try to stop this work happening, to try to discourage lawyers and campaigners and human rights advocates, environmental justice campaigners from even doing this work,” Donziger told his supporters.

Donziger also noted ahead of the trial that two Chevron lawyers dropped out at the eleventh hour after planning to appear as key witnesses for the prosecution. 

“They know when they take the oath they can’t lie any longer,” Donziger said. “This is what happens when the world watches.”

Donziger’s trial has garnered the attention of nearly 70 Nobel laureates and 200 law students who called on the Department of Justice in recent days to investigate and intervene in the case.  

“We fear that this case will embolden further strategic lawsuits against public participation (‘SLAPP’) and deter other students from representing clients seeking to redress harm by corporations,” the students wrote in a letter released Sunday with signatories representing 55 law schools. “A successful campaign to criminalize Mr. Donziger would suppress the public interest advocacy that is crucial to a fair justice system and social progress.”

Progressive lawmakers including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) have also demanded that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland review Donziger’s case. 

Donziger called on his supporters to “bear witness” to the trial and enter the courtroom during the trial if possible.

“We need as many people as we can to bear witness to what is really set up to be a travesty of justice,” Donziger said Sunday evening. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Following the path of thousands of families who permanently fled the lowest-lying major city in the United States in the wake of storms like Hurricane Katrina, a group of activists from the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Monday began a 400-mile march from New Orleans to Houston to demand President Joe Biden include “good jobs for all” and a Civilian Climate Corps in his $2.26 trillion infrastructure plan. 

“This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city. This is me claiming agency over my future.”
—Chanté Davis, Sunrise Movement

Participants in the Sunrise Movement’s “Generation on Fire” campaign set out from the New Orleans Superdome—the site of so much suffering and a symbol of state failure following Katrina in 2005—and walked along the Mississippi River following a delay due to flash flood warnings. 

The climate campaigners are marching “to make clear that young people are unsatisfied with Biden and Congress’ incremental, watered down proposals,” according to a statement from the group.

With Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, “young people expect more from their political leaders,” the statement added. 

The activists will stop in cities and towns along the march route to stage protests, rallies, and visioning sessions with community members. They will be joined by political leaders, environmental justice advocates, and other supporters. 

“As a young person in the Gulf South, we’re living in constant crisis: hurricanes, superstorms, jobs that break our bodies and could be taken away at any minute,” said Chanté Davis, a high school senior and Sunrise Movement organizer.

“This is an emergency, but it isn’t an accident,” Davis continued. “We know there is money that can provide living wages, stop the climate crisis, and take us back from the edge of survival. There’s always money to rebuild rich neighborhoods after storms, always money for petrochemical plants and oil wells, always money for border walls and jails.” 

“This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city,” Davis added. “This is me claiming agency over my future.”

The White House has touted Biden’s American Jobs Plan as “an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China.”

However, since the plan was unveiled on March 31, Sunrise Movement and other climate campaigners have said it needs to go further. 

Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash said at the time that the plan “lacks a commitment to the full scale of transformation that is needed of our economy.”

“We cannot miss this moment,” Prakash insisted. “Congress must strengthen this plan and Biden must pass it into law as quickly as possible. If Republicans don’t cooperate, do it without them. If the filibuster obstructs progress, abolish it. Money needs to go out the door and flow into communities now.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

After the largest gasoline pipeline in the U.S. was shut down over the weekend due to a crippling cyberattack, environmentalists said Monday the situation is just further reason why the dirty and dangerous fossil fuel industry should be left behind in favor of a transition to clean energy.

“The ongoing shutdown of the Colonial pipeline is just the latest in a long litany of examples of why we must urgently transition off of highly vulnerable and dangerous fossil fuel networks,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, in a statement.“Given the centralized nature of major fossil fuel pipelines, a disruption anywhere along the line can adversely impact tens of millions of people, as we are seeing now.”

The 5,500 mile-long Colonial Pipeline transports gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Texas to New York—delivering almost half of the U.S. East Coast’s fuel supply for approximately 50 million Americans.

Hauter warned that a prolonged shutdown of a pipeline poses a threat to consumer financial security if gasoline prices spike as a result and noted the danger to public safety if unstable pipelines were to release explosive contents.

Environmental activist Bill McKibben also weighed in on the cyberattack on Twitter:

The cyberattack referred to as the most significant, successful attack on energy infrastructure in the nation’s history was reportedly orchestrated by the criminal ransomware gang DarkSide. 

While the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued an emergency declaration in 17 states on Sunday and federal efforts remain underway to restore operation of the pipeline, Food & Water Watch further underscored the necessity of transitioning to renewable energy.

“Wind and solar power networks are by their very nature more distributed, more sensibly scaled, and more resilient than fossil fuel systems,” said Hauter. “Of course, unlike fossil fuels, clean wind and solar power pose no threat to our climate. This latest pipeline disruption makes it ever more clear: We must break free from dangerous fossil fuel dependence, now.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

After weeks of negotiations in Europe, more than 50 members of the Democratic National Committee and state party leaders sent a letter Monday urging U.S. President Joe Biden to scrap his predecessor’s economic sanctions against Iran and return to the nuclear deal that was reached in 2015.

“Lifting Trump’s bad-faith sanctions—which he explicitly imposed on Iran in order to make a return to the JCPOA next-to-impossible—should not be treated as a concession to Iran, but rather as an effort to restore U.S. credibility and enhance American security.”
—53 Democrats

The letter (pdf), organized by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, notes that former President Donald Trump not only “recklessly reneged” on the Iran nuclear deal—officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—in May 2018, despite warnings that doing so heightened the risk of war, but then engaged in a “maximum pressure” campaign that featured devastating sanctions.

“The only result has been a vastly expanded Iranian nuclear program, increased regional instability, near U.S.-Iran war on multiple occasions, and severe economic sanctions that have contributed to a dire humanitarian crisis inside Iran,” the letter says. “As a result, America’s credibility has been severely damaged and its national security damaged. Trump’s decision made America less safe.”

The Democrats commend Biden “for pledging to return to the JCPOA and for beginning a multilateral diplomatic process with other world powers to return all sides to compliance with the accord through the compliance-for-compliance formula,” adding that the deal “is of such critical value to U.S. national security that the issue of who goes first should not become an obstacle.”

“Moreover, lifting Trump’s bad-faith sanctions—which he explicitly imposed on Iran in order to make a return to the JCPOA next-to-impossible—should not be treated as a concession to Iran, but rather as an effort to restore U.S. credibility and enhance American security,” the letter emphasizes.

The Obama administration, for which Biden served as vice president, “did not only prove that diplomacy with Iran works, it also proved that no other policy tool advances American security more effectively than diplomacy,” the letter adds, referencing the initial agreement, the result of nearly two years of negotiations. “We urge you to continue on this proven path of success.”

Key signatories include Minnesota Attorney General and former DNC Deputy Chair Keith Ellison, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), human rights lawyer and former Virginia Democratic Committeewoman Yasmine Taeb, DNC Youth Council Chair Michael Kapp, DNC member and Climate Hawks Vote co-founder RL Miller, DNC member and Ohio congressional candidate Nina Turner, and Michelle Deatrick, founding chair of the DNC Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis.

“Rejoining the Iran nuclear deal and lifting Trump’s bad-faith sanctions is not only supported by rank-and-file Democrats in red, purple, and blue states, but also by our Democratic Party leaders from all across the country,” Taeb said. “President Biden pledged to chart a new course and called for a foreign policy for the middle class that will end forever wars and focus on the immediate domestic crises and that begins by rejoining the 2015 nuclear deal and rejecting Trump’s failed approach on Iran.”

As a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to return to the deal—which tracks with his decades in U.S. politics.

“A Politico review of available records, speeches, and congressional statements found that when it came to Iran, Biden has long tried to walk a careful path, one that is wary, yet hopeful; politically aware, yet politically risky; and often focused on incremental gains in the hopes of seeding long-term results,” foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi reported Sunday.

Both Ellison and Lee highlighted the importance of their party—and president—embracing diplomacy rather than Trump’s more hostile approach.

“Returning to the JCPOA is essential for reassuring the world that the United States’ word is good,” said Lee. “As Democrats, we must put diplomacy at the center of our foreign policy and prove that America fulfills its commitments as a responsible actor on the world stage.”

According to Ellison, “It is essential for the United States to return to the Iran nuclear deal, which necessitates the lifting of Trump’s bad-faith sanctions.”

“The Democratic Party should fight to end rampant militarization and promote multilateralism that enabled the United States to resolve the nuclear issue with Iran without a single shot being fired,” he added.

The letter, which comes after similar recent messages from dozens of Senate Democrats and advocacy groups, follows New York Times reporting that “after five weeks of shadow boxing in Vienna hotel rooms—where the two sides pass notes through European intermediaries—it has become clear that the old deal, strictly defined, does not work for either of them anymore, at least in the long run.”

As the Times reported Sunday:

The Iranians are demanding that they be allowed to keep the advanced nuclear-fuel production equipment they installed after Mr. Trump abandoned the pact, and integration with the world financial system beyond what they achieved under the 2015 agreement.

The Biden administration, for its part, says that restoring the old deal is just a steppingstone. It must be followed immediately by an agreement on limiting missiles and support of terrorism—and making it impossible for Iran to produce enough fuel for a bomb for decades. The Iranians say no way.

Meanwhile, the Times noted, the Israelis “continue a campaign of sabotage and assassination to cripple the Iranian program—and perhaps the negotiations themselves.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Monday told Reuters that “the negotiations are tough and laborious but all participants are conducting the talks in a constructive atmosphere.”

“However, time is running out,” Maas added, emphasizing that the goal is the full restoration of the Iran nuclear deal.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The World Health Organization on Monday classified a coronavirus mutation first detected in India as a “variant of concern” for global health, warning that it appears to be more contagious than other strains.

Experts believe the variant, formally known as B.1.617, could be a key driving force behind the devastating coronavirus surge in India, which has been reporting more than 300,000 new infections daily over the past two weeks as the nation’s vaccination program is hampered by shortages that could last months.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Covid-19, said during a press conference that while “we need much more information about this virus variant,” preliminary studies of the mutation have demonstrated “increased transmissibility.”

On Twitter, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan stressed that there is not yet enough information to determine whether the strain is able to evade vaccines or therapeutics and said her organization will be “updating variant data continuously.”

“The pattern now is that one person in the family gets it, the whole family seems to get it,” Swaminathan told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. “This is unlike the first wave. And so I think what we’re seeing is more transmissible.”

First identified in India in December, the B.1.617 variant has since been detected in the United Kingdom, the U.S., Bangladesh, France, and other nations.

The WHO’s reclassification of B.1.617—which was previously labeled a “variant of interest”—came as experts and progressive campaigners continue to warn that people across the globe will remain in danger as long as public health measures are flouted and the coronavirus is allowed to spread uncontrolled among populations without access to vaccines.

“With Africa accounting for only around 2% of global coronavirus vaccinations, health officials on the continent are looking warily at waves of infections sweeping India and elsewhere that have stoked fears of a long tail end of the pandemic,” the Washington Post reported Sunday. “Current timelines for mass vaccination campaigns in most African countries run well into next year—if not further.”

In late March, epidemiologists from dozens of countries said they believe the international community has “a year or less” before coronavirus variants spread widely enough to render a majority of first-generation vaccines ineffective—a nightmare scenario for the world and a major profit opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry.

“With millions of people around the world infected with this virus, new mutations arise every day,” Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, said in March. “Unless we vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Let’s imagine some creative wartime reporting: “On April 26, 1937, the inhabitants of the Basque town of Guernica ‘clashed’ with German warplanes dropping high explosives and incendiary bombs. The town was pulverised in the course of the ‘scuffle’, and up to 1600 people perished.”

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Western corporate media never miss a chance to report blatantly one-sided brutality as ‘clashes’ and ‘scuffles.’

Obviously, the above lines would never be written by any non-delusional person, since the nature of the power relationship between human bodies on the one hand and bomb-spewing airborne monstrosities on the other is quite clear.

Yet, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—itself a euphemism for Israel’s forever war on Palestinians—the Western corporate media never miss a chance to report blatantly one-sided brutality as “clashes” and “scuffles.”

Take, for example, the Great March of Return, the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations that began in the Gaza Strip in March 2018. According to the United Nations, the Israeli military killed 214 Palestinians—46 of them children—in the context of the Great March, and injured more than 36,100. “During the same period,” by contrast, “one Israeli soldier was killed and seven others were injured.”

The media takeaway from the same event: there were “clashes.”

Preferred vocabulary

Now, Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in occupied East Jerusalem have provided news outlets with another opportunity to exercise their preferred vocabulary—insofar as they can be bothered to report on the events at all.

Forty Palestinians, including ten children, currently face eviction from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to make way for more incoming right-wing settlers—the latest round in a decades-long Israeli campaign of forced re-displacement of Palestinian refugee families from 1948.

As if the injustice were not already epic enough, Israeli police have responded to protesters in Sheikh Jarrah by, inter alia, charging them on horseback and dousing the area with tear gas and skunk water—a delightful Israeli invention that has been described as “worse than raw sewage” and “like a mixture of excrement, noxious gas and a decomposing donkey.”

On top of that, Israeli security forces have assaulted Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, firing rubber-coated metal bullets and stun grenades and injuring hundreds.

But for the media, it’s all in a day’s “scuffle”. There were “scuffles” and “clashes” galore in the Washington Post, on the ABC News website, in the Guardian, at Fox News, and again at the Post.

The BBC, for its part, has dutifully kept its audience updated about “clashes” and “confrontations”- while insisting that, in firing stun grenades and the like, Israeli police have simply been acting “in response” to Palestinian provocations (just as Israel is always acting “in response” when it, like, slaughters thousands of people in Gaza).

A New York Times article published on 7 May on Israeli police “confrontations with Palestinian protesters” meanwhile noted that “the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorists were ‘presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalistic cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem.’”

In actuality, of course, the whole Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” is Sheikh Jarrah writ large: a “real-estate dispute” in which the party that violently usurped the bulk of Palestinian real estate in 1948—and that continues to illegally occupy the rest—must cast Palestinians as terrorists in order to justify terrorising, killing and expelling them (pardon, “clashing” with them).

Hypocrisy and deceit

From the get-go, the success of the Israeli enterprise was predicated on a policy of ethnic cleansing – the same policy now playing out in Sheikh Jarrah. But it is not the function of the New York Times and like-minded publications to connect the historical dots and thereby provide a contextualised picture of systematic Israeli dispossession of Palestinians, as opposed to localised “confrontations.”

In actuality, of course, the whole Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ is Sheikh Jarrah writ large.

Furthermore, by quoting patently ludicrous Israeli foreign ministry statements without making it clear that they are patently ludicrous, the Times is merely assisting in the propagation of the Israeli narrative and the normalisation of occupation.

Imagine for a moment that, say, the foreign ministry of Guatemala issued a statement claiming that coronavirus was transmitted by unicorns. Then imagine finding this statement reprinted in the US newspaper of record without some sort of indication that the suggestion was, you know, nuts—and you get an idea of what the Palestinians are up against in terms of global media coverage.

Were the media actually concerned with rigorousness and speaking truth to power, the case of Sheikh Jarrah perfectly exposes the magnitude of Israeli hypocrisy and deceit.

Part of the alleged “justification” for evicting Palestinian families who have resided in the neighbourhood since the 1950s is that, in the 19th century, two Jewish trusts reportedly purchased a section of the area from Arab landowners. And that, in the Zionist view, is that.

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King—the same King who was recently caught on video expressing dismay that a certain Palestinian activist wasn’t shot in the head – offered the following reasoning: “If you are the owner of the property and somebody is squatting on your property, wouldn’t you have the right to take him out from your property?”

George Floyd analogy

It’s a damn fine point indeed—if one considers the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their properties by Israel in 1948, and the millions of Palestinian refugees currently denied the right of return. In other words, there’s loads of stuff to be reported beyond the clash-and-scuffle business—if only the truth were marketable.

Then, of course, there are the media interventions that make Western mainstream coverage look relatively sane in comparison, like the recent one in the Israel Hayom newspaper by Caroline B Glick, who takes us above and beyond clashes and scuffles to “a powder keg, courtesy of Washington”.

The upshot according to Glick is that, not only are US President Joe Biden and the Democrats empowering terrorists throughout the Middle East, there is a “coordinated Palestinian-Western assault against Israeli control over Jerusalem”.

Plus, Palestinian activists committed the diabolical act of adding English subtitles to a video of Israeli police in Sheikh Jarrah pinning a Palestinian to the ground as he says: “You are suffocating me.” Fumes Glick: “The purpose of the video is obvious – the Palestinians seek to draw a direct line between the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Israeli law enforcement in Jerusalem. And it is working.”

The prize for number one criminal offence thus goes not to Israel’s ethnic cleansing, rubber bullet barrages, or police-induced suffocation but rather to—you guessed it- subtitles. And as the direct line between US and Israeli epicentres of oppression shows no signs of slackening, a media that didn’t toe that line would certainly be helpful.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today announced that the Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday, May 12 at 11 a.m., on “Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon.”

Over the past 20 years, the military industrial complex has spent over $2.6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to influence Congress. Currently, the U.S. spends more on our nation’s military than the next nine countries combined and over half of our discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, half of our people are struggling paycheck to paycheck, over 40 million Americans are living in poverty, and over 500,000 Americans are homeless including roughly 40,000 veterans.

Congress has appropriated so much money for the Defense Department that the Pentagon does not know what to do with it. About half of the Pentagon’s budget goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not our troops. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), between 2013 and 2018 the Pentagon returned more than $80 billion in funding back to the Treasury.

A major reason why there is so much waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon is the fact that the Defense Department remains the only federal agency in the United States that hasn’t been able to pass an independent audit. And, over the past two decades, virtually every major defense contractor in the United States has paid billions of dollars in fines and settlements for misconduct and fraud—all while making huge profits on those government contracts.  

Sanders, who has for years pressed the Pentagon to get control of waste, fraud, and abuse by military contractors, has invited Dr. Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Oversight; and Mandy Smithberger, Director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight to testify. Also testifying will be Roger Zackheim, Director of the Ronald Reagan Institute and LTG (Ret) Thomas Spoehr, Director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation.

Hearing Details
What: Hearing of the Committee on the Budget to consider “Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon.”
When: Wednesday, May 12, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ET
Where: Room SD-608. The hearing will also be livestreamed on the Budget Committee’s website and Sanders’ social media pages.
Who: Dr. Lawrence Korb, Mr. William Hartung, Ms. Mandy Smithberger, Mr. Roger Zackheim, and LTG (Ret) Thomas Spoehr.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Numerous corporations have funded the political action committees of state lawmakers backing the recent spate of anti-voter and anti-protest bills, even as many of the companies have spoken out in defense of voting rights and democracy, a report published Monday by Greenpeace USA revealed

“Even though a growing number of companies have spoken out in defense of democracy and voting rights, many of these same companies contributed to legislators sponsoring anti-voter or anti-protest bills during their most recent election campaigns.”
—Greenpeace report

The report (pdf)—entitled Dollars vs. Democracy: Companies and the Attack on Voting Rights and Peaceful Protest—says that 44 state lawmakers sponsored at least one anti-protest bill and one anti-voter bill in the past year. It also reveals that 53 of the 100 top corporate donors to lawmakers sponsoring anti-voter bills also rank among the top 100 contributors to anti-protest measures. 

According to the report, the top 10 corporations that have invested the most money in lobbying for anti-protest bills since 2017 are all fossil fuel companies.

The 10 companies that have contributed the most to state lawmakers sponsoring both anti-voter and anti-protest bills are: AT&T, Dominion Energy, Zurich North America and its subsidiaries, Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries, UnitedHealth Group, Mednax Services, Charter Communications, State Farm Insurance and its subsidiaries, Phillip Morris USA, and Vistra Energy (FKA Energy Future Holdings) and its subsidiaries. 

“Even though a growing number of companies have spoken out in defense of democracy and voting rights, many of these same companies contributed to legislators sponsoring anti-voter or anti-protest bills during their most recent election campaigns,” the report notes.

It states: 

Of the 100 companies who endorsed the April 14 “We Stand for Democracy” statement opposing “any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot,” 12 contributed to the sponsors of 43 anti-voter bills analyzed.

Five of the 10 companies that donated most to sponsors of state anti-voter legislation also rank among the top 10 corporate donors to sponsors of anti-protest bills. Similarly, in the wake of the white supremacist attack on the Capitol, at least 130 companies “paused” political action committee (PAC) contributions to members of the “insurrection caucus.” But at least 47 of these companies contributed to the sponsors of anti-voter legislation introduced since the January 6th insurrection.

Additionally, the report says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the For the People Act—a sweeping plan to expand voting rights, rein in dark money, and strengthen federal ethics rules passed by the House of Representatives in March—even though many individual chamber members have raised concerns about the types of attacks on democracy that the bill aims to address.

Executives from Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, and United Airlines who have voiced opposition to state-level anti-democracy legislation currently serve on the chamber’s board of directors, according to the publication. 

The report notes that anti-protest bills target communities of color and “are a direct response to Black Lives Matter and other BIPOC-led movements, laying bare their racist intent.”

Folabi Olagbaju, director of democracy campaigns at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement that “a healthy democracy is a precondition for a healthy environment. When everyone’s vote counts and when everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed right to peacefully protest is protected, our government becomes more accountable and capable of meeting the demand for racial justice and enacting solutions to the rapidly accelerating climate crisis.”

“We hope this report sheds light on who is behind the attack on our democracy and right to protest, and that it will push corporations to take a stand for strong national standards for voting rights and election reform, and quit supporting politicians who sponsor or vote for anti-voter and anti-protest legislation,” Olagbaju continued. “It’s time to ensure all of us have a say in key decisions that affect us all and our elections reflect the will of the people, not corporations.”

“It is now more urgent than ever to build a just transition away from fossil fuels and fight off attacks against protest and our freedom to vote, so that we can have a planet our communities can thrive on,” he added.

“Corporate platitudes are not enough—we must build a system that ensures our elected leaders listen to every American. Our time is now: Democracy cannot wait.”
—Jana Morgan, Declaration for American Democracy

Jana Morgan, director of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition, said that “despite the promising news of corporations speaking out against anti-voter laws in states like Georgia, Greenpeace’s latest report demonstrates that there’s more to be done to make the promise of democracy real for us all.”

“It’s time to end the dominance of big corporations and big money in our politics, and ensure that our politicians are held accountable to the will of all Americans, and not just the wealthy and powerful,” Morgan continued. “To do so, corporations and our political leaders must support passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These transformative bills will ensure that politicians govern in the best interest of the people, and ensure the freedom to vote for all Americans.”

“Corporate platitudes are not enough—we must build a system that ensures our elected leaders listen to every American,” she added. “Our time is now: Democracy cannot wait.”

The new Greenpeace report follows a Sunday Insider article revealing that several companies have broken their vows to stop contributing to the PACs of U.S. lawmakers who supported the so-called “Big Lie” that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Offenders include Cigna, JetBlue, Koch Industries, and Toyota.

Additionally, corporate PACs are indirectly funding some of the 147 U.S. lawmakers who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory by donating to congressional committees including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. AT&T, Cigna, Intel, and Pfizer have all donated thousands of dollars to such committees, according to Insider. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – The AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y de Servicios Movimiento 20/32 (SNITIS) and Public Citizen announced today that they have filed the first complaint under the Rapid Response Mechanism of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) against Tridonex, an auto parts factory located in Matamoros in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico.

The case will test whether Mexico’s labor reforms and USMCA’s Rapid Response Mechanism can deliver for Mexican workers denied their fundamental right to organize and bargain for better wages and working conditions. For two years, workers at Tridonex have been harassed and fired for trying to organize with SNITIS, an independent Mexican union of their choice, to replace a corrupt “protection” union. Their lawyer, Susana Prieto Terrazas, gained international media notice after the Tamaulipas governor, who is opposed to labor reform, had her jailed for a month in a state penitentiary that was ridden with COVID-19 on trumped-up charges. Prieto was only released after agreeing to internal exile in another Mexican state and a ban on appearing in labor court.

“USMCA requires Mexico to end the reign of protection unions and their corrupt deals with employers,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “The ongoing harassment of Susana Prieto and SNITIS members is a textbook violation of the labor laws Mexico has pledged to uphold.”

Workers at Tridonex, a subsidiary of Philadelphia-based Cardone Industries Inc., make auto parts, a substantial portion of which are for the U.S. market. Tridonex has refused workers’ legal demand to stop withholding their dues and transferring them to the protection union. The company has fired more than 600 supporters of the independent union, SNITIS, which formed after worker protests in 2019 forced the maquiladoras in Matamoros to raise wages.

“Tridonex workers are suffering from the abuses of a corrupt and criminal union leader, who is protected by the company so that it can continue providing precarious wages and working conditions,” said Prieto. “All of this through oppressors who harass, intimidate and beat the workers with the consent and protection of Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca. We are fighting so that no one ever is afraid of freely electing the union they wish to represent them and to make history, ending several generations of modern slavery.”

Corporations’ denial of workers’ basic rights undermines the livelihoods and lives of workers across North America.

“Tridonex’s suppression of workers’ rights has cost our members in Philadelphia hundreds of good manufacturing jobs, and now they’re doing the same to workers in Matamoros,” said SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry. “USMCA requires Mexico to enforce its labor laws and the Rapid Response Mechanism was designed to ensure facility-specific enforcement opportunities to help workers here at home and in Mexico who want to join together in unions, have safe workplaces, and raise their families with dignity.”

The Tamaulipas state government has acted on the company’s behalf, blocking the workers’ demand for an election and arresting Prieto, who has led worker protest movements in both Tamaulipas and the border state of Chihuahua. Shortly after Prieto was released from jail in Tamaulipas and exiled to Chihuahua, the government there also brought bogus criminal charges against her and, even with the repeated COVID-19-related delays, seem intent on imprisoning her again.

“The glaring violations of the USMCA and of Mexico’s new labor law became evident as we worked with allies in Mexico and Texas to free Susana Prieto after she was jailed for protecting workers’ rights; and we learned more about the mass firings, the fake union’s abuses against the workers she represents at Tridonex and how the state government was entirely ignoring the obligations of the revised NAFTA,” said Daniel Rangel, an attorney with Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “We are honored to join with SNITIS, the AFL-CIO and SEIU on this first USMCA [Rapid Response Mechanism] case.”

Organized labor and civil society groups working with congressional Democrats demanded and won improvements in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement initiated by President Trump, including the Rapid Response Mechanism.

“We stand with Susana and the brave SNITIS members who are demanding respect for their right to dignity and fair wages. We are calling on Mexican authorities to hold Tridonex accountable for its illegal union-busting and to protect Susana from further harassment, intimidation and threats. Her fight for the rights of the workers at Tridonex is our fight as well, and we will work with our allies in Congress and the Biden administration to insist that Mexico fully implements its obligations under the USMCA,” said President Trumka.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Since an apparent crippling cyberattack last Friday, the Colonial pipeline—a primary source of petroleum products for the U.S. East Coast—has been shut down. A prolonged shutdown poses a threat to consumer financial security if gasoline prices continue to rise, as well as a grave public safety threat if the volatile, explosive contents of the pipeline somehow become unstable. In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter issued the following statement:

“The ongoing shutdown of the Colonial pipeline is just the latest in a long litany of examples of why we must urgently transition off of highly vulnerable and dangerous fossil fuel networks. Given the centralized nature of major fossil fuel pipelines, a disruption anywhere along the line can adversely impact tens of millions of people, as we are seeing now. And this says nothing of the grave threat posed by the highly flammable, explosive petroleum products flowing through these pipelines. Any deviation from normal operation elevates the inherent risk posed to communities on the front lines of these pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure.

“Wind and solar power networks are by their very nature more distributed, more sensibly scaled, and more resilient than fossil fuel systems. And of course, unlike fossil fuels, clean wind and solar power pose no threat to our climate. This latest pipeline disruption makes it ever more clear: We must break free from dangerous fossil fuel dependance, now.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – The Asian Development Bank has just released its new Draft Energy Policy which states that the bank “will not finance any new coal-fired capacity for power and heat generation or any facilities associated with new coal generation.” In the draft, ADB concedes that its old energy policy “is no longer adequately aligned with the global consensus on climate change, [and the] ongoing global transformation of the energy sector.”

Chuck Baclagon, 350.org Asia Finance Campaigner issued the following statement:

We welcome this step because it brings to fruition the years of painstaking resistance from communities and organizations against energy projects that come at the expense of health, ecosystems, and the climate.

The exclusion of coal in the new investment policy further affirms that coal is not only bad for the environment and our climate, it is also a bad investment because of the growing risk of coal infrastructure becoming stranded assets. Investors have already caught on to the fact that coal can no longer be the least-cost option for baseload demand, even before factors such as public health impacts and environmental damage are priced in.

We are concerned, however, that the new policy still states that the Bank may still finance natural gas projects (including gas transmission and distribution pipelines, LNG terminals, storage facilities, gas-fired power plants, natural gas for heating and cooking) under certain conditions. 

It is imperative that support for all types of fossil fuels, not just coal, must end. To align with what ADB calls the global consensus on climate change, there must be a swift and early phase-out of existing fossil fuels projects with an accelerated and just transition to a clean, renewable and community-centered energy system.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

More than 170 families of people killed by U.S. police officers during the past three decades joined with over 270 civil society groups Monday to call for a United Nations inquiry into law enforcement violence and systemic racism in the United States, including responses to recent racial justice demonstrations.

“If the Biden administration is serious about addressing police violence and its pledge to lead by the power of example, it should welcome international scrutiny into the nation’s domestic human rights record.”
—Jamil Dakwar, ACLU

“Extrajudicial killings of Black Americans by policemen in the United States is one of the most egregious examples of human rights violations recorded in history,” said Collette Flanagan, founder and CEO of Mothers Against Police Brutality, which is among the group signatories.

“I am in hopes that the U.N. will summon the courage from its previous extraordinary works to hold the U.S. accountable for its violations of human rights by establishing a commission of inquiry,” said Flanagan, whose son, Clinton Allen, was shot to death by a Dallas police officer in March 2013.

The letter to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet comes ahead of her report on systemic racism and law enforcement abuses against people of African descent, which is expected to include the context of slavery and colonialism.

That report was ordered by a U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution passed less than a month after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, last year. His death prompted an earlier letter signed by victims’ families and hundreds of groups. The new letter to Bachelet notes that “the council adopted a watered-down resolution due to enormous diplomatic pressure from the United States under the Trump administration and other allied countries.”

The signatories—which include relatives of Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Michael Brown as well as the ACLU, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, U.S. Human Rights Network, and the International Service for Human Rights—urge the UNHRC to establish an independent commission of inquiry into the police killings and attacks on racial justice activists and journalists covering protests.

“Police violence is not a uniquely American problem, but the impunity and disproportionate killing of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people at the hands of law enforcement are, and it requires the entire international community to act,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, in a statement.

“If the Biden administration is serious about addressing police violence and its pledge to lead by the power of example, it should welcome international scrutiny into the nation’s domestic human rights record,” he added. “The administration must heed the pleas of George Floyd’s family and hundreds of other family members of victims of police violence to establish a U.N. commission of inquiry to hold the U.S. accountable for the rampant systemic racism that perpetuates law enforcement violence.”

“While we commend the Biden administration for leading a cross-regional joint statement on countering racism and signaling other policy changes to address racial inequities,” the letter says, “we believe that a robust international accountability mechanism would further support and complement, not undermine, efforts to dismantle systemic racism in the United States, especially in the context of police violence against people of African descent.”

The families and groups highlight that U.S. police kill nearly 1,000 people per year—including over 300 so far in 2021—but national data show that “98.3% of killings by police from 2013-2020 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime. Between 2005 and 2015, only 54 officers were charged after police-involved killings, despite the thousands of such incidents that occurred over the same time period.”

“Impunity for police killings in the United States, especially those of people of African descent, continues unabated despite the recent settlement in the George Floyd civil lawsuit and the guilty verdict against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis City police officer who murdered him,” the letter adds. “Furthermore, federalism in the United States, long-standing legal obstacles to achieving justice for police killings, and decentralized police institutions of over 18,000 law enforcement agencies (that are not directly accountable to the federal Executive Branch) make it extremely daunting to end impunity, even for well-intentioned federal administrations.”

The signatories urge Bachelet to remind members of the UNHRC “that the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism were grave violations of international law that require states to make reparations proportionate to the harms committed and to ensure that structures in the society that are perpetuating the injustices of the past are transformed” as well as to call on them to “adopt a national plan of action to eliminate systemic racism and racial discrimination and to double their efforts and allocation of resources to achieve racial equality including through the adoption of reparations schemes to remedy historic racial injustices.”

The families and groups also sent a second letter Monday to ministers of foreign affairs of African states, expressing appreciation for their governments’ leadership on the topic and urging them to continue pressuring the UNHRC to establish an inquiry. They write, “We share the high commissioners assessment that we cannot let the urgency felt in the council in June 2020 subside.”

“It’s past time for our nation to tackle racial inequity, injustice, and discrimination that permeates American life and institutions,” said Takira Cook, senior director of the Justice Reform Program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “While progress has come slowly, hopefully an international inquiry can help produce transformative change more rapidly.”

Vickie Casanova-Willis, executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, applauded the “courageous and historic actions of family members and allies which generated an outcry that has reverberated around the world.”

“Their heart-wrenching cries for justice demand full accountability and implementation of the recommendations in [the June 2020 resolution] to ensure that not one more person is murdered by state violence, as police continue to execute African American/African/African Descendant people at a genocidal rate,” she declared. “Continued solidarity demanding human rights standards of accountability is vital to ensure they did not die in vain.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In an entry to his Prison Notebooks, in Notebook 3 of the year 1930, the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci observed of the existing political conditions in his society that, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Today, it is the entire world that finds itself in the midst of such a tension. Capitalism’s addiction to the burning of fossil fuels is heating up the planet, subsequently creating conditions that pose a direct threat to humans and ecosystems. Actually, there are serious indications that we are on the edge of a complete climate breakdown. Even the Brazilian Amazon has turned now into a net emitter. Yet the future ways of powering the world economy are gestating—and it is still far from clear that global warming will be tamed.

Combatting the climate crisis requires a comprehensive social transformation that only the public sector can undertake.

However, this is not to suggest that there are no solutions to the climate emergency facing the planet Earth. In fact, we seem to have the ultimate solution to climate breakdown, but powerful interests do stand on the way and too many people appear to be rather scared of the proposed solution due to misconceptions fostered by those who wish to maintain the status quo for as long as possible, and “damn the consequences.”

Welcome to the Green New Deal!    

The Green New Deal is a plan for tackling the climate emergency by doing away with fossil fuels and relying instead on clean, renewable and zero-carbon energy sources to power economies in the 21^st century. The term itself emerged sometime during the 2007-08 financial crisis, and the first full proposal for a Green New Deal was put together by a UK-based Green New Deal group which drew its inspiration from the history of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Still, while a range of studies on “green economy” were produced shortly thereafter and all throughout the 2010s, it is safe to say that the Green New Deal framework did not fire the public imagination until just a couple of years ago when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass) introduced a 14-page nonbinding resolution calling on the federal government to create a Green New Deal as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reshaping the US economy. Now the Green New Deal is a topic that’s on everyone’s lips. The idea has become the Left’s rallying cry and the Right’s worse nightmare.

But let’s get something straight. While there are various versions, the Green New Deal is first and foremost a rapid decarbonization program, with the government leading the way. The rationale for this is very simple: combatting the climate crisis requires a comprehensive social transformation that only the public sector can undertake, albeit the decarbonization of the economy, in the same vein as the goal of achieving and sustaining an approximation of full employment in capitalist economies spelled out by John Maynard Keynes in his classic work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,  “does not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.”

The co-operation between public and private sectors is necessary for numerous reasons, not least of which is the fact that decarbonization will require both public and private investments. In fact, decarbonization will require highly sophisticated public-private partnerships since it will be the government involved in guiding the process and funding most of the projects associated with the transition to a “green economy” but mainly private firms manufacturing and installing renewable energy technologies.

This is necessary because the task of saving the planet from climate breakdown needs to take place under capitalism.  Why? Because time is fast running out. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in late 2018 warned us that we have 12 years to limit devastating global warming by revealing that carbon dioxide emissions must be cut by 45 percent by 2030 and then to net zero by 2050. Thus, we don’t have the time to wait for capitalism to come to an end. The objective conditions for an alternative socio-economic system may be absolutely ripe, but the transformative human activities to bring about this realization are still too fragile and scattered. And, lest we forget, a Green New Deal, as Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin have argued in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, needs to be global if we can hope to keep global warming at bay, although it will start at the national and local level.

Even so, the decarbonization of the economy through a Green New Deal faces massive opposition not only from the fossil fuel industry and the Republican party but from much of the corporate world and a disturbingly sizeable segment of the citizenry tuned into “free-market” ideology and conspiracies.

Decarbonizing the economy means altering the sources of energy we use. The transition to a clean and renewable-resource economy extends obviously to all material goods, but energy is the starting point as emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes are overwhelmingly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture and deforestation are the second largest contributors.

Achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 is technologically and economically feasible. We already have the technologies in place to make the transition to a carbon-free economy, although some need to be scaled up and new ones will surely need to be introduced in the near future. In fact, in an attempt to help the European Union meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, the French consultancy form Capgemini has identified no less than 55 high-climate technology projects that can form a road map to climate neutrality. And nuclear power and “blue hydrogen” produced through the integration of carbon capture with steam methane reformers are not included on the list.

Equally important, the costs of renewable energy have plummeted all while creating energy through the burning of fossil fuels remains a much costlier and a highly inefficient process. Air pollution from fossil fuels is also responsible for nearly one in every five deaths worldwide, according to a new study published in Environmental Research.

So why is there political mobilization against decarbonization and the Green New Deal, especially when the fundamentals of economics and public health alike favor clean and renewable sources of energy?

The reasons are manifold.

Big Oil and Dirty Coal have been from the beginning the biggest opponents of climate legislation, spending billions of dollars lobbying lawmakers to win concessions for their products and block in turn measures geared towards global warming pollution reductions. Their business activities and profit-making prospects depend on polluting the environment, and damn the implications and consequences of environmental breakdown. Naturally, they are now at the forefront of the opposition to the Green New Deal. 

The supporting cast includes the Republican party, one of the most stalwart allies of the fossil fuel industry and by far the most reactionary party all around in today’s political universe, moderate Democrats, establishment economists, and all those opposed to the idea of the government being the primary driver of an economic transformation or to government intervention in economic affairs in general.

But the Green New Deal is also opposed because of what we may call it’s “green intersectionality”—that is, the idea that environmental devastation and global warming are deeply intertwined with other issues such as economic inequality and racial injustice. Thus, the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal includes, besides achieving carbon neutrality, policies for stronger worker rights, universal health care, spending on public housing, and more. 

The reintroduction of the Green New Deal by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on April 20, 2021, which calls for bold action to transform the economy while eliminating US greenhouse gas emissions within a decade, was immediately slammed by Republicans as a plan to advance socialism.

Reactionary elements and the Republican party leveled the same charge of “socialism” against FDR and the New Deal too. For the Republicans, even the universal health care system, found in virtually all European countries, is socialism. So is taxing the super-rich. But red scare tactics have been the hall mark of the party of the rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, right-wing, and racist people. So no surprise in trying to scare the hell out of American people by equating the Green New Deal with socialism and with outrageous claims that it will take away their hamburgers and “outlaw” cars and plane travel.

What is true, however, is that while the Green New Deal will decarbonize the economy, it will also be egalitarian (Green New Deal jobs will be available to individuals and groups who have been denied access to good jobs; Green New Deal projects will address the concentration of pollution in low-income communities; and the Green New Deal will ensure a fair and just transition  for workers and communities most severely impacted by the climate crisis) and will surely transform capitalism just as the original New Deal did in the 1930s.

Climate breakdown is the defining crisis of our time. And time is running out. But we can still avoid falling off the climate precipice. The Green New Deal is our way out, the opportunity to save people and our planet as well as to remake the world in more egalitarian and just ways. 

What’s so scary or unappealing about that?

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Rights advocates on Monday applauded the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services Department as officials announced a reversal of Trump-era guidance which allowed the discrimination against transgender people in healthcare settings.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said the department will interpret an anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act—which prohibites discrimination “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability”—as the Obama administration did, extending protections for people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than just their sex assigned at birth.

“Everyone—including LGBTQ people—should be able to access healthcare, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
—HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra

Becerra cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision from last June, in which the court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be understood to cover sexual orientation and rejected former President Donald Trump’s claim that “the ordinary meaning of ‘sex’ is biologically male or female,” in a case pertaining to workplace discrimination. 

“The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination,” said Becerra. “It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone—including LGBTQ people—should be able to access healthcare, free from discrimination or interference, period.”

Under HHS’s decision, healthcare organizations that receive federal funding and insurance companies will be barred from discriminating against transgender people. 

The Trump administration’s stance, finalized in a rule that was introduced days before the Supreme Court’s decision last year, subjected transgender and nonbinary people to invasive questions and stigmatizing treatment from healthcare providers as well as the potential to be turned away when seeking care. 

“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” said Becerra.

According to HHS, a quarter of LGBTQ people who have faced discrimination in healthcare settings have later postponed or avoided medical appointments.

The Transgender Law Center called the Biden administration’s decision “vital,” particularly as young transgender people in Arkansas and other states face threats to their ability to access gender-affirming care.  

“We welcome this return to the Obama-era policy banning discrimination against trans people accessing healthcare,” the group said. 

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called HHS’s announcement “an important step” and called on the administration to pass the Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal laws, making clear that people must be protected from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Passage of the Equality Act would mean “LGBTQ+ people’s health—and lives—can’t be used as a political football any longer,” Jayapal said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

America prefers to look forward rather than back. We’re a land of second acts. We move on.

This can be a strength. We don’t get bogged down in outmoded traditions, old grudges, obsolete ways of thinking. We constantly reinvent. We love innovation and disruption.  

Trump is consolidating his power over the Republican Party, based on his big lie.

The downside is a collective amnesia about what we’ve been though, and a corresponding reluctance to do anything about it or hold anyone accountable.

Now, with Covid receding and the economy starting to rebound—and the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol behind us—the future looks bright.

But at the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, let me remind you:

We have lost more than 580,000 people to COVID-19. One big reason that number is so high is our former president lied about the virus and ordered his administration to minimize its danger.  

He also lied about the results of the last election. And then—you remember, don’t you?—he tried to overturn the results.

He twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.

Several Republican members of Congress joined him in the big lie and refused to certify the election. They thereby encouraged the attempted coup.

This was just over four months ago, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our collective memory.

Last Tuesday, the Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before they attacked.

But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech.” It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley’s sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation “for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers,” and as “a fierce defender of the Constitution.”

Last week, “CBS This Morning” interviewed Florida Republican senator Rick Scott, another of the senators who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of any of his sedition. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden’s spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.  

Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election.

What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? At the least, if they must appear, ask them if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why.

Pretending nothing happened promotes America’s dangerous amnesia, which invites more attempts to distort the truth.  

Trump is consolidating his power over the Republican Party, based on his big lie. The GOP is about to purge one of its leaders, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth.

The big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new laws to restrict voting. On Thursday, hours after Florida installed a rash of new voting restrictions, Texas’s Republican-led Legislature pushed ahead with its a bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.

The Republican-controlled Arizona senate is mounting a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County—farming out 2.1 million ballots to GOP partisans, including at least one who participated in the January 6 raid on the Capitol.

Last Monday, Trump even lied about his big lie, issuing a “proclamation” to co-opt the language of those criticizing the lie. “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the BIG LIE!” he wrote.

Most Republican voters believe him.

It is natural to want to put all this unpleasantness behind us. We are finally turning the corner on the pandemic and the economy.

Why look back to the trauma of the 2020 election? Because we cannot put it behind us. Trump’s big lie and all that it has provoked are still with us. If we forget what has occurred the trauma will return, perhaps in even more terrifying form.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The post of U.S. ambassador to Israel is still vacant, but the charge d’affaires, Jonathan Shrier, sent over some objections to caretaker Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last month complaining about the Israeli construction of squatter settlements on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. The “Green Line” that separates Israel within 1948 borders from the Occupied Palestinian territories Israel illegally grabbed by military conquest in 1967 runs through Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government approved 450 housing units in the Har Homa district in the east of the city, and the Biden administration objected that Israel should not be building beyond the Green Zone.

So the new construction in Palestinian East Jerusalem was denounced by Washington. But the denunciation is toothless.

The planting of more and more squatter settlements on land owned by Palestinian families is among the actions that produced massive unrest in Jerusalem on Friday and Saturday. In particular, the Israeli plan to make dozens of families homeless in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood has raised tensions to a fever pitch. The Israeli government pretends not to recognize the property titles of many families there, and prevents them from making additions to their homes. When they do so anyway, the Israelis schedule them for demolition. This behavior is among the reasons that Human Rights Watch has just branded Israel an Apartheid state.

There were further Palestinian protests Sunday night in Jerusalem, as far right wing groups (the Israeli equivalent of Q-Anon) planned to parade through Palestinian neighborhoods waving Israeli flags, just to make it clear who is in control of people’s lives there. Palestinians are not allowed to protest, and the Israeli commandos come in to break heads and throw stun grenades. For a Palestinian to wave a Palestine flag is a crime that could result in long years in jail. That is what the US press calls “clashes” or “skirmishes,” managing to avoid naming Israeli repression.

The Biden administration has revived the old, phony, language about a “two-state” solution. Since Israel is unimpeded in building throughout the West Bank, 60% of which is under direct Israeli military occupation and 40% of which is under indirect Israeli military occupation, no two-state solution has been plausible for at least a decade and maybe more. Speaking of two states that can never materialize is just a way of, in Mitt Romney’s words, “kicking the can down the road.”

So the new construction in Palestinian East Jerusalem was denounced by Washington. But the denunciation is toothless.

Netanyahu knows that it is toothless, and engaged in one of his favorite sports, owning the Libs in Washington. Jerusalem, he said, “is not a settlement,” it is the capital of Israel.

The Biden administration says that the ultimate disposition of East Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. So Washington disagrees, at the moment, with Netanyahu.

But President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken don’t have a leg to stand on in rejecting, Netanyahu’s position, since they decided to ratify the decision of the odious Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Only a handful of countries has agreed to recognize undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a recognition that forestalls final status negotiations. Trump symbolically acquiesced in Netanyahu’s claims. Biden let the symbolism stand.

Although Israelis often attempt to use the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan as a charter of legitimacy, it isn’t. It was never ratified by the UN executive branch, which is the Security Council, and so has no force of law. Moreover, Israeli leaders such as Ben Gurion only paid lip service to it, ignoring it when they could seize further territory by main force.

But even that very pro-Zionist 1947 plan did not award Jerusalem to Israel. The city, given its importance to Jews, Christians and Muslims, was to be under an international regime. But in the 1948 War, Israel captured the west of the city, while Jordanian troops held the east. In 1967, even though Palestinian played no appreciable role in the Six Day War, Israel overran East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The General Assembly had not awarded those to Israel because there were virtually no Jews there.

The Israelis annexed East Jerusalem and other Palestinian West Bank territory, which is an egregious violation of the United Nations charter, which forbids the acquisition of territory by military force. Israel is a signatory. Then the Israeli government began flooding Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. This transfer of population from the Occupying power to militarily occupied territory is a severe violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied populations. The Fourth Geneva Convention was aimed at preventing a repeat of Axis war crimes, as with the attempt of the Nazis to settle occupied Poland with ethnic Germans and to ethnically cleanse Poles from their own country to make way for Germanization.

Today, 370,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, and the Israelis have managed to plant over 200,000 Israelis in squatter settlements on land owned by Palestinians. The goal of the Israeli Right is to evict the Palestinians slowly and gradually (so as to avoid a backlash from the rest of the world) and to replace them with Israeli settlers, so as to create a monochrome Israeli Jerusalem. Currently, the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and being turned into cantons surrounded by Israeli squatter settlements and sometimes cut off from other Palestinians, and they are all heavily surveiled and patrolled by Israeli security forces.

The 5 million Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank view East Jerusalem as their future capital, and Netanyahu’s purpose in life is to prevent that scenario from ever occurring.

The Biden administration gives lip service to a negotiated settlement and a two state solution. But Washington has done nothing at all to prevent the gradual colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by the Israelis over the past for the past 54 years, and so will just go only sending over memos. Sending the memos from Jerusalem is a way of telegraphing that they are not serious.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, Greenpeace USA released a robust analysis of corporate attacks on democracy in the form of contributions to anti-protest bills and anti-voting rights bills. The report, Dollars vs. Democracy: Corporations and the Attack on Voting Rights and Peaceful Protest, has many key pieces of evidence, including:

• Many state legislators and corporations have sponsored and supported both anti-voter and anti-protest bills:
  • 44 state legislators sponsored at least one anti-protest bill and one anti-voter bill in the past year.
    Of the top 100 corporations contributing to anti-voter bill sponsors, 53 are also among the top 100 corporate contributors to anti-protest bill sponsors.
    The 10 companies that invested the most in lobbying for anti-protest bills since 2017 are all fossil fuel companies.
• Even though a growing number of companies have spoken out in defense of democracy and voting rights many of these same companies contributed to legislators sponsoring anti-voting or anti-protest bills during their most recent election cycle.
  • Of the 100 companies who endorsed the April 14 “We Stand for Democracy,” statement opposing “any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot, 12 contributed to the sponsors of 43 anti-voter bills analyzed.
  • In the wake of the insurrection, at least 130 companies “paused” PAC contributions to members of the “insurrection caucus.” But, at least 47 of these companies contributed to the sponsors of anti-voter legislation introduced since the January 6th insurrection.
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the For The People Act (H.R. 1/ S. 1), despite the fact that many individual member companies oppose anti-voter legislation.
  • Executives from six corporations that have spoken out against anti-voter legislation — IBM, Boston Consulting Group, United Airlines, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Ford — currently serve on the Chamber’s board of directors, its principal policy-making body.
  • At least six state and regional affiliates of the U.S. Chamber have also lobbied in favor of anti-protest laws.
  • All of this adds up to a clear takeaway: conservative lawmakers and the corporations that sponsor them are using tactics to squash protests and disenfranchise voters to silence Black, Brown, and Indigenous people protecting their communities.

Folabi Olagbaju, Greenpeace USA Democracy Campaigns Director, said:
“A healthy democracy is a precondition for a healthy environment. When everyone’s vote counts and when everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed right to peacefully protest is protected, our government becomes more accountable and capable of meeting the demand for racial justice and enacting solutions to the rapidly accelerating climate crisis.

“We hope this report sheds light on who is behind the attack on our democracy and right to protest, and that it will push corporations to take a stand for strong national standards for voting rights and election reform and quit supporting politicians who sponsor or vote for anti-voter and anti-protest legislation. It’s time to ensure all of us have a say in key decisions that affect us all and our elections reflect the will of the people, not corporations. It is now more urgent than ever to build a just transition away from fossil fuels AND fight off attacks against protest and our freedom to vote, so that we can have a planet our communities can thrive on.“

Jana Morgan, Declaration for American Democracy Director said:

“Despite the promising news of corporations speaking out against anti-voter laws in states like Georgia, Greenpeace’s latest report demonstrates that there’s more to be done to make the promise of democracy real for us all. It’s time to end the dominance of big corporations and big money in our politics, and ensure that our politicians are held accountable to the will of all Americans, and not just the wealthy and powerful.

“To do so, corporations and our political leaders must support passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These transformative bills will ensure that politicians govern in the best interest of the people, and ensure the freedom to vote for all Americans. Corporate platitudes are not enough — we must build a system that ensures our elected leaders listen to every American. Our time is now: democracy cannot wait.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Hundreds of academics, public health experts, MPs, peers, charities, NGOs, unions, faith leaders and healthcare workers have signed a letter calling for Boris Johnson to suspend intellectual property rules on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.

It comes after the Biden administration announced on Wednesday it would support a waiver to help scale up global vaccine production to produce safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines for all people, in all countries.

Over 140 academics, development experts, and public health experts, including Mary De Silva Head of Population Health at the Wellcome Trust and members of Independent SAGE like Christina Pagel and Stephen Reicher, have added their names to the letter warning that an intellectual property waiver is “crucial towards ending this global pandemic and achieving worldwide immunity.”

The letter, organised by Global Justice Now, STOPAIDS, and Just Treatment, is backed by more than 80 charities and NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, Save the Children, Transparency International, War on Want, Trócaire. ActionAid, Plan International, and the Fairtrade Foundation.

More than 70 cross-party MPs and peers have added their names to the call, including former Conservative ministers Baroness Verma and Dr Daniel Poulter MP, Liberal Democrats including Foreign Affairs and Health spokesperson Layla Moran, SNP Green MP Caroline Lucas, well-known figures like Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour MPs including Sarah Champion, Chair of the International Development Committee.

Lord Bernard Ribeiro, Conservative peer and former president of the Royal College of Surgeons; Lord Leslie Turnberg, former president of the Royal College of Physicians; Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, human rights lawyer and former shadow attorney general; Lord Malcolm Bruce, former Chair of the International Development Committee have called on the Prime Minister to support the waiver.

Dozens of healthcare workers, faith leaders, Covid survivors, and patient advocates have joined them, alongside the TUC, the UK’s largest union Unison, the University and College Union, the Communications Workers Union, transport unions ASLEF and TSSA, and the Fire Brigades Union.

India and South Africa first proposed an intellectual property waiver at the World Trade Organisation six months ago, backed by more than 100 mostly low-and-middle-income nations. But a small number of mostly wealthy states, including the US, UK, and EU have blocked the move so far

With the European Union “ready to discuss” a patent waiver, signatories are urging the UK government to drop its own opposition to the proposal.

The letter calls on Boris Johnson to “provide the leadership to ensure an end to this global crisis” and to “stand on the right side of history”.

It warns that “defending intellectual property at all costs will not only lead to even more unnecessary loss of lives but is an unprecedented act of collective self-harm.”

World-leading epidemiologists have warned that allowing the virus to spread in low and middle-income countries will increase the risk of vaccine-resistant mutations that could render our current generation of vaccines obsolete by the end of the year.

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, a signatory to the letter, warned in The Times earlier this week that the UK would fall foul of its international human rights obligations if the government remains “complicit” in the “human rights catastrophe” currently being caused by intellectual property restrictions on vaccine supply.

Heidi Chow, Senior campaigns and policy manager at Global Justice Now, said:

“Right now, there are factories sitting idle that could be producing billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines, but intellectual property rules are restricting production to the supply chains just a few companies. 

“It is utterly shameful that the U.K. remains complicit in this crisis. The Prime Minister must now read the writing on the wall, step up and support a patent waiver for the sake of all humanity.”

Protestors will gather outside AstraZeneca’s Cambridge and Macclesfield sites on Tuesday, as the company holds its Annual General Meeting (AGM), to demand the company release its patents on the Oxford vaccine and commit to sharing its vaccine technology and knowhow with the World Health Organisation.

Elizabeth Baines, Campaign Organiser at Just Treatment, said:

“Covid-19 vaccines have been discovered and produced largely thanks to billions in public funding. Suspending patents so the whole world can benefit would be a long-overdue public return on this public investment in innovation. 

“Boris Johnson must do all he can to get doses into the arms of everyone, everywhere. And right now, that means standing up to big pharma, waiving intellectual property, and making these companies share their vaccine technology and knowhow with the World Health Organisation.”

Recent polling from the People’s Vaccine Alliance found that three-quarters of people in the UK want the government to prevent pharmaceutical companies from holding monopolies on Covid-19 vaccines. Support cut across political boundaries, backed by 73% of Conservative voters, 83% of Labour and 79% of Liberal Democrats, as well as 83% of Remain and 72% of Leave voters.

Saoirse Fitzpatrick, Advocacy Manager at STOPAIDS, said:

“Across the world, people are dying needlessly from Covid-19 because we aren’t producing enough vaccines. What charitable programmes like COVAX miss is that this is a problem of supply – and one of the biggest barriers to maximising supply is intellectual property restrictions.

“This letter demonstrates the clear consensus that is emerging around this common-sense solution, backed by experts, patients, politicians, scientists, and economists. The Prime Minister must follow in Joe Biden’s footsteps and support it.”

Moderna, Pfizer/BioNtech, Johnson & Johnson, Novovax and Oxford/AstraZeneca received billions in public funding and guaranteed pre-orders, including $12 billion from the US government alone. An estimated 97% of funding for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine came from public sources.

The companies have paid out a combined $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders this year, enough to vaccinate at least 1.3 billion people, equivalent to the population of Africa.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American ever elected to Congress, demanded Monday that U.S. lawmakers and President Joe Biden take immediate and concrete action in response to Israeli forces’ latest assault on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, where more than 300 Palestinians were injured by rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas.

“This is equivalent to attacking the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians, or the Temple Mount for Jews. Israel attacks it during Ramadan.”
—Rep. Rashida Tlaib

“Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam, and people praying during the holiest days of the holy month of Ramadan have been beaten, gassed, shot, and killed by Israeli forces,” Tlaib tweeted Monday morning. “They are denied medics and forced to use prayer mats as stretchers. A place of peace desecrated by violence.”

The Michigan Democrat went on to call out the bipartisan coalition of U.S. House members who rejected conditioning aid to Israel last month, shortly before Israeli settlers and state forces resumed efforts to forcefully expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem—an effort that sparked outrage from Tlaib, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and other U.S. progressives.

“American taxpayer money is being used to commit human rights violations,” said Tlaib. “Congress must condition the aid we send to Israel, and end it altogether if those conditions are not followed. Statements aren’t working, [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken. Enough is enough.”

“I was seven years old when I first prayed at the Al Aqsa with my sity. It’s a sacred site for Muslims,” Tlaib added. “This is equivalent to attacking the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians, or the Temple Mount for Jews. Israel attacks it during Ramadan. Where’s the outrage, POTUS?”

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said at least 305 Palestinians were injured, several critically, in the Israeli forces’ attack on Al-Aqsa Monday, which came on the Israeli national holiday that marks the country’s seizure of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War of 1967.

“We want Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians. The Biden administration and the language of false equivalency continue to uphold this occupation.”
—Mohammed El-Kurd

Observers feared that tensions and violence would continue escalating throughout the day as thousands of right-wing Israelis were planning to march through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, but the demonstration was reportedly rerouted at the last minute.

“This is good news,” said Yair Rosenberg, senior writer at Tablet magazine. “Hopefully it’s not too late and the police can actually keep the marchers to the new route. Let’s hope more responsible decision-making follows.”

Video footage of the Monday attack posted to social media shows Israeli police beating a Palestinian detained at the compound, women and children scrambling to find cover amid Israeli forces’ bombardment of the mosque, and medics escorting wounded Palestinians away from the chaotic scene.

Khaled Zabarqa, a 48-year-old lawyer who had been praying at Al-Aqsa just before Israeli forces began firing on the compound, asked in an interview with the New York Times, “Why have they been attacking the Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan?”

“The Aqsa Mosque is a sacred place for Muslims,” said Zabarqa. “Israel is starting a religious war.”

On top of the violence at Al-Aqsa, Israeli forces also reportedly attacked Palestinian demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah on Monday as they protested Israel’s ongoing efforts to expel them from their homes.

“They beat me up then a minute later, completely denied they had done such a thing,” one protester who said he was assaulted by Israeli police told Al Jazeera. “This is a terrorist government. This is what a government that protects and abets terrorist ministers within its ranks is.”

In an appearance on Democracy Now! Monday morning, Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd—whose family lives in Sheikh Jarrah—said that “we want more than just condemnations” of Israeli conduct from the U.S. and the rest of the international community.

“We want Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians,” said El-Kurd. “The Biden administration and the language of false equivalency continue to uphold this occupation.”

“I think you can deescalate the situation and the tension and the violence in Jerusalem by ending the occupation. That is the only solution,” El-Kurd continued. “It is insane for Palestinians to continue living under this occupation for 73 years.”

Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, argued in a column for The American Prospect on Monday that “the least Biden can do is stop the harm to Palestinians, which in turn will also prevent harm to Israelis.”

“One of the first steps Biden could take is to unequivocally disavow the Trump administration’s January 2020 ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan, which put a stamp of approval on Israel’s taking of land and resources by force and excluded Palestinians from the process outright,” wrote Zonszein. “The administration should also plainly condemn, as the U.K. has, the systematic efforts by Israel to dispossess Palestinians from their homes.”

“The Biden administration should also enforce America’s own foreign-aid laws by ensuring greater transparency and accountability for how its aid to Israel is currently used, so that Israel is held to U.S. human rights standards and other benchmarks for aid recipients—something that has increasing support within the Democratic Party,” Zonszein added.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

It’s the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything—good, bad and mixed.

Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden’s job performance. “I give him an ‘A’ so far,” Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, “that doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every single thing.”

“In school, an “A” grade commonly means “excellent performance” or “outstanding achievement.” Rendering such a verdict on Biden’s presidency so far promotes a huge misconception and lowers the progressive bar.”

Overall, the policies of the Biden administration have not come close to being consistently outstanding. Awarding an “A” to Biden is flatly unwarranted.

It’s also strategically wrongheaded. If we’re going to get maximum reforms in this crucial period, President Biden needs focused pressure—not the highest rating—from progressives.

In school, an “A” grade commonly means “excellent performance” or “outstanding achievement.” Rendering such a verdict on Biden’s presidency so far promotes a huge misconception and lowers the progressive bar.

Biden does deserve credit for some strong high-level appointments (Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary jumps to mind), a number of important executive orders (many simply undoing four years of horrific Trumpism), and one crucial legislative achievement—the American Rescue Act. The proposed American Jobs Act (a small step toward a Green New Deal) and American Families Act (education/anti-poverty) are also quite progressive.

But Biden has made several major appointments that overtly kowtowed to corporate America—for example, “Mr. Monsanto” Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture and former venture capitalist Gina Raimondo as Commerce Secretary. To mark Biden’s first 100 days, the Revolving Door Project issued an overall grade of B- in its report card on how Biden had done in preventing “corporate capture” of the executive branch by industries such as fossil fuels, Big Pharma and Big Tech.

In an improvement over the Obama era, the Biden administration earned a B/B+ in keeping Wall Streeters from dominating its economic and financial teams. On the other hand, as graded by the Revolving Door Project, Biden got a D- on limiting the power of the military-industrial complex over U.S. foreign policy: “We are particularly alarmed by Biden’s hiring of several alumni of the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish think tank funded by weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.”

Much as “personnel is policy” in the executive branch, the federal budget indicates actual priorities. Biden’s budget reflects his continuing embrace of the military-industrial complex, a tight grip that squeezes many billions needed for vital social, economic and environmental programs. The administration recently disclosed its plan to increase the basic military budget to $753 billion, a $13 billion boost above the last bloated Trump budget. (All told, the annual total of U.S. military-related spending has been way above $1 trillion for years.) And Biden continues to ramp up spending for nuclear weapons, including ICBMs—which former Defense Secretary William Perry aptly says are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world.”

Meanwhile, Biden is heightening the dangers of an unimaginably catastrophic war with Russia or China. In sharp contrast to his assertion on Feb. 4 that “diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” Biden proceeded to undermine diplomacy with reckless rhetoric toward Russia and a confrontational approach to China. The effects have included blocking diplomatic channels and signaling military brinkmanship.

Biden won praise when he announced plans for a not-quite-total U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he has not committed to ending the U.S. air war there—and some forms of on-the-ground military involvement are open-ended.

Unfortunately, little attention has gone to the alarming realities of Biden’s foreign policy and inflated budget for militarism. Domestic matters are in the spotlight, where—contrary to overblown praise—the overall picture is very mixed.

While Biden has issued some executive orders improving social and regulatory policies, he has refused to issue many much-needed executive orders. Give him an “I” for incomplete, including on the issue of $1.7 trillion in student loan debt that undermines the economy and burdens 45 million debtors, especially people of color. Biden has not budged, even after non-progressive Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have pressed him to use his executive authority under existing legislation to excuse up to $50,000 in college debt per person.

On the subject of healthcare reform, Biden has long been held back by his allegiance to corporate power—as Rep. Jayapal knows well, since she has tenaciously led the Medicare for All battle in the House. Biden has never disavowed his appalling comment in March 2020 that he might veto Medicare for All if it somehow passed both houses of Congress. During the traumatic 14 months of the pandemic since then, while millions have lost coverage because insurance is tied to employment, Biden’s stance hardly improved. Candidate Biden had promised to lower the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60, but even that meager promise has disappeared.

With wealth and income having gushed to the top in recent decades, and especially during COVID, Biden is proposing some tax increases on corporations and the very wealthy—quite popular with voters—to pay for infrastructure and social programs. For example, Biden proposes returning the top marginal tax bracket on the richest individuals from 37 percent to merely 39.6 percent, where it was in 2017 before Trump lowered it. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders campaigned on raising the top tax bracket to 52 percent, while AOC called for raising it to 70 percent, a popular approach according to polls. To put this all in perspective: When the U.S. economy and middle class boomed during the 1950s, the top tax bracket was over 90 percent under Republican President Eisenhower.

We have no quarrel with those who seek to inspire optimism among progressives by pointing out that their activism has already achieved some great things. But activism should be grounded in candor and realism about where we are now—and how far we still need to go.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Sen. Bernie Sanders made clear in an interview Sunday that he opposes the push by top Democrats to restore a tax deduction that overwhelmingly benefited the richest households in the U.S., saying such an effort “sends a terrible, terrible message” at a time of crippling economic pain for poor and working-class people.

“You have got to make it clear which side you are on—and you can’t be on the side of the wealthy and powerful if you’re going to really fight for working families,” Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in an appearance on “Axios on HBO.”

The tax break in question is known as the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which former President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers capped at $10,000 as part of their 2017 tax law. While the GOP tax measure was highly regressive—delivering the bulk of its benefits to the rich and large corporations—the SALT cap was “one of the few aspects of the Trump bill that actually promoted tax progressivity,” as the Washington Post pointed out last month.

According to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), 62% of the benefits of repealing the SALT cap would go to the richest 1% and 86% of the benefits would go to the top 5%. ITEP estimated that temporarily suspending the cap would cost more than $90 billion in just one year.

“There is no state where this is a primarily middle-class issue,” the organization found. “In every state and the District of Columbia, more than half of the benefits would go to the richest 5% of taxpayers. In all but six states, more than half of the benefits would go to the richest 1%.

Nonetheless, prominent Democrats from blue states—which were disproportionately impacted by the SALT cap—are demanding full restoration of the tax break in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, disingenuously characterizing the cap as a major burden on the middle class.

While Biden did not include the SALT cap repeal in his opening offer unveiled in March, Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) are calling for a revival of the deduction.

As Common Dreams reported last month, Suozzi is part of a potentially influential faction of House Democrats that is threatening to oppose Biden’s infrastructure package if the SALT cap repeal is not included.

Though much of the New York congressional delegation has come out in favor of repeal—including progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.)—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said last month that she doesn’t “think that we should be holding the infrastructure package hostage for a 100% full repeal on SALT, especially in the case of a full repeal.”

“Personally,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “I can’t stress how much that I believe that is a giveaway to the rich.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

U.S. President Joe Biden received praise from global health leaders last week for supporting a motion at the World Trade Organization to suspend coronavirus-related intellectual property barriers for the duration of the pandemic, but European Union leaders who have yet to endorse a waiver of Covid-19 vaccine patents are insisting, to the dismay of public health advocates, that the White House should first lift its own restrictions on exporting doses and key ingredients.

“Much more will need to be done to make a ‘People’s Vaccine’ universally available as soon as possible.”
—Jayati Ghosh, UMass Amherst

“Patents are not the priority,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday at the Porto Social Summit. “I call very clearly on the United States to put an end to export bans not only on vaccines but on vaccine ingredients, which prevent production.”

“100% of the vaccines produced in the United States are for the American market,” he said. The French president also criticized the United Kingdom for curbing vaccine exports.

As The Guardian noted, “Neither the U.K. nor the U.S. has a formal export ban, but Washington has deployed the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to fulfill domestic contracts ahead of other orders while the British government’s contract with AstraZeneca also prioritizes U.K. requirements.”

At the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen claimed that “the IP waiver will not solve the problems, will not bring a single dose of vaccine in the short and medium term.”

“The European Union is the pharmacy of the world and open to the world,” she added. “Up to today in the European Union, 400 million doses of vaccines have been produced and 50% of them—200 million doses—have been exported to 90 different countries in the world. So we invite others to do the same.”

While health justice campaigners agree that the U.S. should stop limiting exports, they argue that defeating the pandemic requires expanding the production of vaccines—a challenge made much more difficult by the E.U.’s continued obstruction of the India and South Africa-led proposal for a temporary waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which is backed by more than 100 countries, including, as of last week, the U.S.

Rather than portraying support for the vaccine patent waiver and support for vaccine exports as mutually exclusive alternatives, Rajat Khosla, senior director of research, advocacy, and policy at Amnesty International, asserted that both measures are necessary “if we are serious about addressing” vaccine apartheid.

Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves tweeted that “other countries understand the importance of vaccine diplomacy, but are simply using exports of their own national vaccines for this purpose.”

“No one is marshaling the world’s resources [or] providing global leadership,” he lamented.

According to public health experts, even a vaccine patent waiver, while necessary, is insufficient by itself to increase global supply. In addition to the TRIPS waiver, they say, stronger measures to facilitate the transfer of technology and know-how, as well as massive public investments in worldwide manufacturing, are necessary to ensure universal access to coronavirus tests, treatments, and vaccines.

As Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explained Friday:

While the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines was a truly impressive achievement, it has been tarnished by constraints on global vaccine supply and the related inequities in distribution. As of May 4, less than 8% of the world’s population had received even one dose of any Covid-19 vaccine, while just ten rich countries accounted for 80% of all vaccinations. The reason is not just that rich countries have been buying up all available doses; it is also that there simply have not been enough doses to go around.

But this scarcity itself is largely artificial. Vaccine production has been limited by pharmaceutical companies’ refusal to share knowledge and technology. Though the companies producing the approved vaccines have benefited from public subsidies and publicly funded research, they nonetheless have taken advantage of patent protections to maintain a monopoly, limiting production to their own factories and a select few other companies to whom they have granted licenses.

“Temporarily waiving IP rights is essential, but it is only the first step,” Ghosh wrote. “A waiver agreement would address the previously insurmountable legal side of the problem. But much more will need to be done to make a ‘People’s Vaccine’ universally available as soon as possible.”

According to Ghosh, “The next step is to push for concrete measures to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and technology.”

“From Canada to Bangladesh, many potential vaccine producers with the required facilities have so far been denied the licenses and technical know-how to proceed,” noted Ghosh. “Not a single pharmaceutical company has joined the World Health Organization’s voluntary facility for sharing technology, the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP).”

It doesn’t have to be this way, Ghosh stressed, pointing out that “governments in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, having given large subsidies to develop the approved vaccines, can and should pressure the companies to share the knowledge that public money helped provide.”

“We know this can be done,” she wrote, “because the Biden administration has already persuaded Johnson & Johnson to share its technology with Merck to boost domestic production of its single-dose vaccine. Surely the other companies that have benefited from public support could be pressured to do the same with producers around the world.”

In addition to scaling up knowledge and technology transfer, Ghosh argued that “the case for public production of such vaccines is clear… [and] becomes even stronger when one considers that private vaccine producers have little financial incentive to meet current global needs.”

Faced with “a near-complete breakdown of overstretched health services [that] is resulting in a catastrophic loss of life” in South America and India as well as the potential emergence of vaccine-resistant variants, “we must build and deploy public manufacturing capacities in the U.S. and other countries,” wrote Ghosh.

“World leaders must work together urgently to translate the progress of the WTO waiver into the cooperation needed to produce billions more doses.”
—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen

Peter Maybarduk, director of Access to Medicines at Public Citizen, made a similar case on Friday.

While Biden’s decision to support the TRIPS waiver “is a victory for democratizing technology, for rebalancing power toward governments and away from corporations, and for the power of countries working together to fight the global pandemic,” he wrote, “there is much more to be done to get Covid vaccines to the people who need them.”

“More than one year into the pandemic, a year of global suffering and death, there still is no plan from world leaders to end it; no plan from national leaders anywhere to vaccinate everyone, everywhere,” Maybarduk argued. “A G7 statement this week referenced key steps like technology transfer but stopped short of specific commitments. The world needs urgent manufacturing investments, regulatory cooperation, and intensive sharing of knowledge to radically expand vaccine supply.”

According to Maybarduk:

Top officials are reportedly worried about the political consequences of the United States acting globally before the country achieves some unclear measure of security. Yet that moment, if it comes, may come many months from now, too late for the million people who will die in the interim, and likely too late to combat potential virus variants and economic devastation that threaten security everywhere, including the United States.

COVAX, the equitable vaccine access initiative, is not on track to vaccinate its target of one-in-five people in the global south this year. Global health initiatives, struggling with limited resources, are primarily aimed at managing the ‘acute phase’ of the pandemic in the global south, vaccinating those at the highest risk. The WHO, for all its critical work over the past year, does not, on its own, have the political power to massively expand production or sit across the table from Moderna and Pfizer and establish clear expectations for sharing technology and ensuring global access.

“But President Biden does,” he wrote, before outlining specific steps the federal government can take to “immediately launch a vaccine-manufacturing program designed to meet global need and end the pandemic”:

• Modest capital investments (about $2 billion) can retrofit vaccine-manufacturing facilities and install additional mRNA production lines. Doses can then be manufactured for less than $3 each. U.S. leadership is likely to inspire co-funding by other governments and international organizations. A total investment of less than $25 billion, including whole-of-government efforts to source raw materials and provide technical assistance, can support the rapid production of 8 billion doses of mRNA vaccine, enough for more than half the world’s population.
• The United States should support a massive expansion of manufacturing and establish hubs for vaccine production together with the WHO. Hubs would be located not only in North America and Europe but also in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, democratizing production and improving global health security, particularly if they are accountable to the public and equipped with adaptable technologies, such as mRNA platforms, believed critical to defeating the next pandemic.
• The United States should ensure that technology is shared openly so that scientists and manufacturers worldwide can support vaccine delivery and development. Where necessary, the U.S. government should use its power under existing domestic law to license technology, ensuring its availability and affordability now and for the future. Notably, taxpayers made substantial investments in Covid-19 vaccine research and development, and the U.S. government owns a key patent relied on by the major vaccine makers.

“World leaders must work together urgently to translate the progress of the WTO waiver into the cooperation needed to produce billions more doses,” Maybarduk added. “The United States cannot do this alone. But it will take the world much longer to end the pandemic without us.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Dozens of Afghan families held funerals Sunday, a day after three bombs were detonated outside a school in Kabul, killing at least 68 people and injuring another 165 victims in an act of violence that one survivor suggested was carried out by those who don’t want girls “to study and get educated and move forward.”

According to an eyewitness, nearly all of the victims were girls leaving the building at the conclusion of the school day. Boys attend classes in the morning and girls in the afternoon.

“Countless girls were lying down on the street in blood, some were motionless and many more were screaming from injuries,” said one local resident, who ran to the school gate after he heard the first blast. “I did not know what to do, where to start.”

As Reuters reported:

Explosions on Saturday evening shook the neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, home to a large community of Shiites from the Hazara ethnic minority which has been targeted in the past by Islamic State, a Sunni militant group.

A car bomb was detonated in front of the Sayed Al-Shuhada school and two more bombs exploded when students rushed out in panic.

“I was with my classmate, we were leaving the school, when suddenly an explosion happened, ” said 15-year-old Zahra, who suffered a broken arm.

“Ten minutes later there was another explosion and just a couple of minutes later another explosion,” she said. “Everyone was yelling and there was blood everywhere, and I couldn’t see anything clearly.” 

One unnamed Afghan official told Reuters that “the first blast was powerful and happened so close to the children that some of them could not be found.” Multiple families were still searching for missing relatives in hospitals and morgues on Sunday as burials began.

Sharif Watandoost, a member of a volunteer group helping families bury victims, said that “people are devastated in this region.”

“Everybody in the neighborhood is in grief, they either lost their sister and daughter or a relative or have an injured girl at home,” said Watandoost. “This catastrophe has shocked everybody.”

Several prominent figures around the world condemned the attack, including Pope Francis, who called it an “inhuman act,” and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who described the bombing as a “heinous crime.”

Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Fund, also denounced the “horrific attack.”

“Violence in or around schools is never acceptable,” said Fore. “Schools must be havens of peace where children can play, learn and socialize safely.”

Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday “blamed Taliban insurgents,” but a spokesperson for the group, which has sought to overthrow the foreign-backed government since being ousted from power in 2001, “denied involvement and condemned any attacks on Afghan civilians,” Reuters noted.

The Taliban “insisted they have not carried out attacks in Kabul since February last year, when they signed a deal with Washington that paved the way for peace talks and withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops,” The Guardian reported. “But the group has clashed daily with Afghan forces in the rugged countryside even as the U.S. military reduces its presence.”

Although the U.S. was supposed to have pulled out all of its forces by May 1, President Joe Biden pushed the date back to September 11, a move that prompted the Taliban to forego 10 days of United Nations-led peace talks last month.

According to the Associated Press:

The Dasht-e-Barchi area has been hit by several incidents of violence targeting minority Shiites and most often claimed by the Islamic State affiliate operating in the country. No one has yet claimed Saturday’s bombings.

In this same neighborhood in 2018, a school bombing killed 34 people, mostly students. In September 2018 a wrestling club was attacked killing 24 people and in May 2020 a maternity hospital was brutally attacked killing 24 people, including pregnant women and infants. And in October 2020, the Kawsar-e-Danish tutoring center was attacked, killing 30 people…

On Sunday, Hazara leaders from Dasht-e- Barchi met to express their frustration with the government failure to protect ethnic Hazaras, deciding to cobble together a protection force of their own from among the Hazara community.

The force would be deployed outside schools, mosques and public facilities and would cooperate with government security forces. The intention is to supplement the local forces, said Parliamentarian Ghulam Hussein Naseri.

Latifah, a resident of the neighborhood whose elementary-aged daughters escaped the attack, told Al Jazeera that whoever is behind the bombing has achieved their motive of discouraging children from going to school. 

“My girls cried all night last night, waking up saying, ‘Don’t send us to school, school is where you die,’” she said. “Yesterday, it was really education that died in Afghanistan.”

Christopher Nyamandi, the Afghanistan country director for Save the Children, said that “it’s appalling that this has happened.” He emphasized that “schools should be safe havens for children, not zones of war.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Covid-19 pandemic, protracted conflicts, and climate change have created an untenable situation for the most vulnerable, with 155 million people across 55 territories suffering from severe food insecurity, sending acute hunger figures to a 5-year high.

That’s according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, an alliance of humanitarian partners working to prevent hunger and respond to food crises. The Network, which was founded by the European Union, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), released the findings of its 2021 Global Report on Food Crises on Wednesday, May 6.

“Humankind can now pilot a helicopter drone and even split molecules to generate oxygen on the far-off planet of Mars, yet here on Earth, 155 million of our human family are suffering acute hunger and their lives and livelihoods are at risk because they lack the most basic of foods. The contrast is shocking and not acceptable.”
—Qu Dongyu, FAO

The partners have issued an annual report on food crises since 2017, but this year’s publication presents the grimmest snapshot to date of global food insecurity. It reported that 20 million more people faced acute hunger in 2020 than the previous year.

Stating that by the end of 2020, the zero hunger by 2030 goal seemed “increasingly out of reach,” the report categorized 133,000 people in Burkina Faso, South Sudan, and Yemen as being in “catastrophe,” meaning that they need immediate action to prevent widespread death and collapse of livelihoods.

Additionally, it stated that children living in food-crisis countries are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. In the 55 food-crisis countries under review, almost 16 million children under 5 years were acutely malnourished, while 75.2 million children under five years experienced stunted growth.

The Network partners say it is possible to reverse the rising trend of food insecurity, but this requires urgent commitment, finance, and action.

“Humankind can now pilot a helicopter drone and even split molecules to generate oxygen on the far-off planet of Mars, yet here on Earth, 155 million of our human family are suffering acute hunger and their lives and livelihoods are at risk because they lack the most basic of foods. The contrast is shocking and not acceptable,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

The FAO Chief says as the international and humanitarian community prepares for the United Nations Food Systems Summit in September, the information in reports like this one should serve as a guide for solutions to the world’s hunger crises.

“This requires a bold transformation of agri-food systems to be more efficient, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. This includes the development of early warning systems linked to anticipatory actions to protect livelihoods and food security before a shock or the threat emerges,” he said.

U.N. Children’s Fund Executive Director Henrietta Fore told the launch that the situation was worrying. She said Covid-19, with its lockdowns, economic and social shocks, has worsened a fragile nutrition situation.

“In virtually every single one of the crises described in this year’s report, the most vulnerable are young children and marginalized, hard-to-reach populations,” she said. “These children and their communities must be our priority. We need to invest in data and information systems that help us identify hot spots of vulnerability and risk at the sub-national levels in key countries. This information is critical in targeting resources efficiently to reach children, their families and their communities who are most in need.”

While the partners lament the staggering acute food insecurity statistics, the outlook is just as dire. They say threat of famine persists in some of the world’s worst food crises.

“Tragically, this report is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re facing all around the world,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. 

“The global picture is even more bleak when we consider all countries significantly impacted by hunger. For example, chronic hunger, which was 690 million, is now up an additional 130 million people.”

According to the report’s forecast, while conflict will remain the main driver of food crises in 2021, the economic fallout of Covid-19 will worsen acute food insecurity in fragile economies. 142 million people are projected to be in a food crisis, emergency, or famine, in 40 territories for which forecasts are available.

“High levels of acute food insecurity will persist in countries with protracted conflicts by limiting access to livelihoods and agricultural fields, uprooting people from their homes, and increasing displaced populations’ reliance on humanitarian aid for their basic needs,” the report stated.

The Global Network Against Food Crises says while humanitarian assistance is urgently needed, on its own, it is insufficient to deal with the scale of the present crises. The Network says the answer also lies in peace and a transformation of global food systems.

“A system that has the most vulnerable people continuing to bear the greatest burden of global crises is broken. We must take this opportunity to transform food systems, reduce the number of people in need of humanitarian food assistance, and contribute meaningfully to sustainable development and peaceful and prosperous societies,” it said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In Brazil, the popular historical expression “for the English to see” means “for the purpose of appearance, without validity.” It emerged in the nineteenth century, when England, for economic reasons, tried to abolish slavery throughout the world, including in Brazil, whose economy was based on slavery. To deceive the British, the Brazilian Empire placed ships on the coast with the supposed mission of going after slave ships. In practice, however, nothing happened. It was just a staging “for the English to see.”

At the Leaders’ Summit on the Climate, held on Earth Day, April 22, the speech by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to the forty world leaders is a clear example of the use of this popular Brazilian expression, this time expanded: “for the world to see.”

Environment minister Ricardo Salles, who in theory should be defending the environment, has already talked about loosening the laws to give more freedom to agribusiness, the main contributor to deforestation of the Amazon.

The virtual meeting was an attempt by the Brazilian government to persuade the international community that Brazil needs financial support from other countries to save the Amazon rainforest.

Responsible for at least 10% of the planet’s biodiversity, the Amazon—threatened for decades by deforestation—brings moisture to all of South America, influences rainfall in the region, and contributes to stabilizing the global climate. The Amazon also absorbs carbon, a benefit that has acted as a “brake” on the planet’s warming process, but which has decreased significantly over the past few years due to rapid deforestation. 

Now, due to this increasing deforestation, the Amazon may be heating up the global atmosphere instead of cooling it, according to a multi-author scientific study published in March.

For Carlos Minc, former Brazilian environment minister (2008-2010) and currently deputy of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro’s speech didn’t line up with the reality of the ongoing deforestation. 

“What is most striking is the total contradiction between words and facts. Bolsonaro used to say that this history of climate and emissions reduction is cultural Marxism,” Minc says. “And now, he swears that he loves the climate since he was a child. The intention was to say what the others wanted to hear.”

In front of world leaders, Bolsonaro highlighted the commitment of the Brazilian government to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030, but he did not mention that the goal of ending illegal logging in Brazilian forests is an old obligation for the federal government, enunciated by the government of former president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) as a goal for 2020. In fact, the Bolsonaro administration had withdrawn the previous target, when Brazil reformulated its contributions to the Paris Agreement in December 2020.

Ecologists criticize Brazil for performing maneuvers not contemplated under current legislation or agreements.

“A real trap was created based on the actual deforestation that occurred under Bolsonaro’s management, implying to achieve a deforestation volume of at least 8,700 square kilometers per year,” says environmentalist Carlos Bocuhy. “That’s 16% more than the volume Bolsonaro found when he took office. So, the Brazilian government intends to increase deforestation with its own target.”

In 2020, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest reached more than 11,100 square kilometers, with an increase of 9.5% over the previous year, according to the Brazilian Institute for Space Research. That represents about half of the area of the state of New Jersey.

For environmentalists, this means that 626 million trees were felled in just one year—nearly three trees for each Brazilian citizen.

As a result of this deforestation, more than 800 million tons of greenhouse gases were emitted into the atmosphere. Agriculture and the change in land use from forest to pasture are the main causes of these emissions.

Some 80% of the biodiversity of the entire planet is embedded within Indigenous territories, which include just 5% of the world’s population, but in a speech to the United Nations, President Bolsonaro blamed Indigenous people for Amazon forest fires.

In general, the cycle of deforestation and fire in the Amazon rainforest begins with the illegal removal of wood of high commercial value from Indigenous lands or conservation areas. After that, if the land is public, there is the process of land grabbing and deforestation. The group Greenpeace Brazil says about 80% of everything that has already been deforested today has some type of pasture, either for livestock or to give an impression of the legal use of that area, followed by a later claim of title to that land.

On the other hand, Brazilian school books are right when they say that Indigenous people do the best job of preserving nature. Some 80% of the biodiversity of the entire planet is embedded within Indigenous territories, which include just 5% of the world’s population, but in a speech to the United Nations, President Bolsonaro blamed Indigenous people for Amazon forest fires.

The Brazilian constitution of 1988 recognized that Indigenous people are the first residents of Brazil. This means that the right to live in their land of origin predates even Brazil’s existence as a nation. The constitution also established the need to demarcate and protect these lands, but today there are no new demarcations, and the areas that already exist are suffering from the invasion of land grabbers, prospectors, loggers, and deforesters.

Environment minister Ricardo Salles, who in theory should be defending the environment, has already talked about loosening the laws to give more freedom to agribusiness, the main contributor to deforestation of the Amazon. 

In the most recent case, on the eve of the Leaders Summit on Climate organized by the White House, Salles was suspected of trying to cover up the actions of illegal loggers in the largest seizure of irregular wood in the history of Brazil. An operation by Federal Police confiscated more than 40,000 logs from the Amazon rainforest.

On April 14, the superintendent of the Federal Police in Amazonas, Alexandre Saraiva, filed a crime report against the minister at the Supreme Federal Court. The next day, he was fired and replaced. Later, after the Biden Summit, Saraiva rebutted Bolsonaro’s speech, tweeting: “By 2030, deforestation will end, due to the lack of forest.”

In the Climate Summit, Bolsonaro also highlighted the important role of measures to control damage to the Amazon. “Despite the government’s budgetary limitations, I determined the strengthening of environmental agencies, doubling the resources allocated to inspection actions,” he said.

But in practice, the story is different.

Less than 24 hours after finishing the speech asking for the world to “count on Brazil,” the federal government announced a cut of about $45 million in the general budget dedicated to the Environment Ministry, the lowest amount in two decades. Another example of how Bolsonaro’s vetoes affect crucial programs that are carried out by federal agencies.

In addition, the Environment Ministry has bureaucratized the work of inspectors, who have lost their autonomy to impose fines on those who commit an environmental crime, and must report first to their superiors before proceeding.

If all this continues, the only thing for the world to see will be a Brazil without an Amazon rainforest, and a further raging climate crisis.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Mother’s Day is, at its core, about care. When we select Hallmark cards and order flower deliveries, we’re honoring the care provided by moms and other maternal figures. This Mother’s Day, though, marks more than a year into a pandemic that threw the disparities in our care system into stark relief. Women left the workforce in staggering numbers to attend to Covid-related caregiving responsibilities at home. This was disruptive for individual families and the economy at large.

Care workers typically only earn around $16,000 a year, are often without the choice to join a union, and are far more likely to live in poverty or near-poverty than other workers. 

So this year, while of course we should celebrate our mothers, there’s much more to be done. Honoring our caregivers goes beyond individual gestures; it calls for a sweeping investment in care workers and services.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such. For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable, high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women, who still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care burdens are a primary cause of low labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

While workers with caregiving needs rely heavily on care services, care jobs are historically underpaid and undervalued. And because of things like occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market disparities related to structural racism and sexism, women and people of color are concentrated in these jobs.

More than 90% of care jobs are held by women and over half are held by women of color. Further, care workers typically only earn around $16,000 a year, are often without the choice to join a union, and are far more likely to live in poverty or near-poverty than other workers. Investing in home- and community-based care services, and making sure care jobs are good, union jobs that pay a living wage, is an important way to create more racial and gender equity in the economy.

The need for care jobs is growing rapidly and inevitably. Almost one in five net new jobs created over the next decade are projected to be either home health aides or personal care aides. That means that even without investments to make them good jobs, care jobs will exist in immense numbers. The people in these jobs will be almost all women, and they will be majority women of color. Without investments to make them good, union jobs, a huge share of the people in these jobs will earn poverty or near-poverty wages—exacerbating race, gender, and income inequality.

Without investments to make them good, union jobs, a huge share of the people in these jobs will earn poverty or near-poverty wages—exacerbating race, gender, and income inequality.

Investing in our care system isn’t only about race and gender parity. A down payment on care workers and infrastructure also serves as a jobs creator during periods of weakness in the labor market. And because home care jobs require relatively little in the way of equipment and materials, investments in home- and community-based care generate on the order of twice as many jobs as investments in physical infrastructure like roads and bridges.

The finding that investments in care infrastructure generate roughly twice as many jobs as investments in physical infrastructure takes into account not just “direct” jobs created but also “indirect” jobs created in supplier industries, related service sectors and in “respending” jobs. In other words, when we create good care jobs with decent wages for a majority women of color workforce, we create not only those jobs but also the opportunity for more jobs as care workers put their paychecks back into the community.

We are beginning to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis that made it impossible to take care work for granted. We have a crucial opportunity right now to make investments in our care infrastructure—long-run investments in the quality of care of our loved ones and opportunities for workers at all income levels to be able to work because they have stable, high-quality care for the people in their lives who need it.

While we celebrate all the mothers and caregivers this year, let’s take the opportunity to think bigger, too. It’s time for bold, structural solutions to recognize that care work is real work that powers our economy. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the lives of care workers and families across the country.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about fascism, generally in the context of Republicans denying people their right to vote or Donald Trump sending an armed mob to murder five people at the U.S. Capitol to try to install him as America’s first strongman dictator.

Corporations and the very rich have seized control of the political process through the use of their considerable economic power.

Indeed, authoritarian governance is a major aspect of fascism. But there’s another piece to the puzzle, and it is playing out right now across America, and getting almost no coverage whatsoever.

It’s when giant corporations are able to control government and thus stop things like a national healthcare system, rational gun control laws, free college, or even the tiniest tax on carbon. When they’re able to push through “criminal justice reform” that makes it nearly impossible to prosecute corporate CEOs when their companies kill workers, consumers, or even poison entire communities.

It’s when they don’t do it through presenting strong and defendable ideas in the public realm and before Congress, but by pouring cash into the pockets of individual politicians and their parties.

It’s when corporations and the very rich have seized control of the political process through the use of their considerable economic power, after having used that power to change laws so they can legally buy politicians.

When government gives corporations this core power to write laws, and, in exchange, corporations facilitate government power to suppress dissent and marginalize non-fascist political parties, a country finds itself on the edge of classical fascism.

The word fascism comes from the Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks with a rope around it, typically adorned with a hatchet on the top. There’s one carved into the podium in the United States Senate, an homage to the ancient Roman Republic which originated it and partly inspired our Constitution.

The idea is that a single stick can easily be broken, but a bundle of sticks is almost impossible to break. Similarly, a single state may be vulnerable, but a collection of states, united together, is unbreakable.

But the Roman fasces, although that symbol was used throughout history as a symbol of the ancient Roman Republic, took on a completely different meaning in the late 1920s when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini derived from it the word fascism.

To him, fascism met something quite different than just the strength of a united country. It meant the literal merger of corporate and state interests, ultimately facilitating a strongman authoritarian government. Corporations and the government becoming interpenetrated and intertwined, ruling the country together, with a “tough guy” in charge.

The “tough guy” or authoritarian leader would then shower his own beneficence on the corporations that funded his political power.

Mussolini was so enthusiastic about this that he declared the essential merger of state and corporate power. As he said in The Labour Charter (Promulgated by the Grand Council of Fascism on April 21, 1927, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, April 3, 1927, p. 133):

The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organized in their respective associations, circulate within the State.

Giant corporations across Italy competed for Mussolini’s favor, and for the government contracts that could doubly flow from it. Not to mention the political power that could grant profits, tax cuts, and immunity from being held responsible for everything from industrial accidents causing the death of workers to deadly pollution killing entire communities.

Today, as a substantial number of Republican politicians are actively working to subvert democracy and establish a merger of corporate and strongman rule, what Mussolini called fascism, those politicians are also being supported and encouraged by large numbers of major American corporations. 

In exchange for that support, particularly during the Trump administration but also on a state-by-state basis where Republicans control state governments, those corporations get everything from tax cuts to assistance in avoiding unions to a pass on pollution or even corporate malfeasance that kills people, like we just saw with the for-profit corporate power grid in Texas.

We are moving from the early technical dimensions of fascism to the true realization of Mussolini’s vision. 

If these Republican politicians and the corporations supporting them are successful, and a Republican strongman like Trump or his imitators (Scott, Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, etc.) again achieves the presidency, we will fully enter an American version of that which Mussolini created in Italy in 1927.

Over 120 American corporations vowed, after the January 6 insurrection, that they would no longer make campaign contributions to those Republicans who fought certifying the 2020 election.

But the lure of fascism for a corporation is extraordinary. 

 AT&T, CIGNA Health, Ford Motor, and Pfizer have broken their commitment not to support insurrectionists. More will, no doubt, follow soon.

The benefits of fascism include huge profits for the company and its stockholders; massive payouts to senior executives and members of the board of directors; not just tax breaks but actual subsidies with taxpayer’s dollars of a whole variety of activities including R&D and even free land; complete immunity for the executives when their decisions destroy communities or even kill people; and a steady flow, back-and-forth, between government regulatory agencies and the very corporations regulated by them.

It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that as long as Republicans are offering this fantastic dream world to America’s corporations, those companies might toss out a few news releases saying they’re not going to support fascistic Republican politicians, but that that seemingly moral stand would collapse almost instantly.

As Daily Beast investigative reporting found, corroborating the groundbreaking reporting that Judd Legum has been doing for weeks on his popular.info website, at the very least AT&T, CIGNA Health, Ford Motor, and Pfizer have broken their commitment not to support insurrectionists.

More will, no doubt, follow soon.

But how could they do otherwise? Modern corporations are an altogether different animal from those in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s when corporations went out of their way to be, or to at least seem to be, good citizens of the community and the nation.

The Reagan administration in the 1980s essentially re-wrote the rules of corporate governance. 

It used to be the corporations had a responsibility to their local community, to their workers, to their shareholders, and to their customers. Their senior executives and Board of Directors had a responsibility to the institution of the company itself. Prior to 1980, the average CEO in a large American corporation had worked in that company for about 30 years, typically climbing from the bottom to the top. And the average CEO only earned 30 times what the most poorly paid employee made.

That was the norm in America up until the 1980s. But the Reagan administration, through a series of administrative law changes, re-wrote those rules.

They adopted an idea that had been kicking around among rightwing cranks like Robert Bork and Milton Friedman for years, that had been scorned by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and even President Richard Nixon. 

It was that a corporation has only one, single obligation to only one, single entity: to increase profits and thus dividends and its share price for its shareholders.

The Supreme Court, stacked with corporate shills by bought-off politicians, has since ratified that new perspective in a series of decisions peripheral to it, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

Stockholders frankly don’t give a rat’s ass about how the corporation is run or what it does, so long as it keeps cranking out cash every quarter so the dividend checks continue to arrive.

So now corporations don’t have to answer to their communities, their employees, their customers or even the idea of the permanence of the institution. All they have to answer to is profits for stockholders.

And the stockholders frankly don’t give a rat’s ass about how the corporation is run or what it does, so long as it keeps cranking out cash every quarter so the dividend checks continue to arrive. Which is why corporate CEOs now make over 300 times what their lowest-paid employee makes, and in some sectors it’s thousands of times more.

As many of us pointed out back in the 1980s, and I wrote about at length in my book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People, this was almost certain to cause American business and the American government to reconfigure themselves along the lines of the classical, Mussolini definition of fascism. It would lead to the merger of corporate and state interests, and the end of electoral democracy.

America does have a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, or Tom Cotton. It goes deep, now, into the very structure of corporate America. 

If America is to survive as a democratic republic, we not only must repudiate strongman authoritarianism; we also must change federal rules regarding corporate governance to repudiate shareholder primacy, block fascism, and thus restore corporate behavior to something resembling sanity and responsibility. 

This piece initially appeared on The Hartmann Report.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Old adages can often come across as trite. But a trite old adage, we always need to remember, can also speak truth. Consider, for instance, the time-worn maxim that immediately comes to mind whenever we see the awesomely affluent stumble in their personal lives. Just another reminder, we tell ourselves, that “money can’t buy happiness.”

Earlier this week, Billionaire America’s most celebrated couple, Bill and Melinda Gates, stumbled. The pair announced Monday they’re divorcing after 27 years together. Money, apparently, still can’t buy everything that really matters.

Even money by the billions upon billions. The three richest individuals in the world—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk—have now all turned out to be divorced men. Musk leads that parade. He’s already divorced a life-partner three times.

What’s going on here? Does this week’s latest billionaire break-up have something profound to tell us? Let’s dig a bit. And where might we start? How about here: No one—at least no one who claims to be leading a rational life—pursues wealth simply to become wealthier.

Reasonable people and societies treat wealth as simply a means to an end. Greater wealth, we believe, can improve our lot in life, help us become, in a word, happier. But ever more wealth, we also understand, doesn’t ensure us ever more happiness.

“Many very rich men are unhappy,” as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus intoned, “and many in moderate circumstances are fortunate.”

“It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness,” quipped Frank McKinney Hubbard, the early 20th-century Indiana humorist, over two millennia later. “Poverty and wealth have both failed.”

Few of us today would quibble with either Herodotus or Hubbard. We generally look askance at people who turn their lives into single-minded races after riches. So do most social scientists who’ve done research into what makes us happy. Their work suggests a possible social formula for happiness: If most people in a society can sit back, think about their personal situation, and conclude they’re doing better than they used to be doing and about as well as most everyone else, you have the makings of a generally happy society.

The world’s wealthiest nation, the United States, doesn’t come close to fitting this profile. Average Americans today are not contentedly contemplating how nicely their personal fortunes have improved. They’re struggling to get by, to catch up to where they expected to be, and watching while other people—incredibly wealthy people—seem to be leading ever more luxurious and comfortable lives.

And what about those incredibly wealthy people? Most of us have learned not to take their luxury and comfort at face value. Every week, we thumb through the magazines at supermarket checkout counters and read about how wretchedly unhappy the personal lives of rich people can sometimes be. Even storybook couples—like Bill and Melinda Gates—can split. Their wealth cannot fix what ails them.

“Money brings some happiness,” as the playwright Neil Simon once put it. “But after a certain point it just brings more money.”

And trouble. Living with great wealth can be like living amid fun-house mirrors. Wealth distorts. You can never be sure about what you see. Is this person nodding approvingly at what I say because I have expressed a keen insight or because I might contribute to her cause? Is the smile on his face a sign of undying affection or lust for my fortune?

“After I’ve gone out with a man a few times, he starts to tell me how much he loves me,” heiress Doris Duke, worth $1.2 billion at her death in 1993, noted back in her more youthful days. “But how can I know if he really means it?”

Someone who holds great wealth, suggests philosopher Philip Slater, can never know.

“If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won’t have any trouble finding lovers,” Slater notes, “but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth.”

The wealthy respond to this reality in various ways. Some become angry. Others become wary of any intimate relationship. And still others respond by seeking a safe refuge. They find intimacy in their fortunes.

“Money,” as the industrialist Armand Hammer boasted, “is my first, last, and only love.”

Sports impresario Jack Kent Cooke, the real estate and media tycoon who owned four different pro sports teams, might have chuckled at that line. Over his 84 years, Cooke amassed a near-billion-dollar fortune—and four wives. He died in 1997. In his will, Cooke mentioned every wife by name and left not a penny to any of them. J. Paul Getty, 20th-century America’s Big Oil king, outdid Cooke. He divorced five times.

All relationships, not just romantic couplings, tend to be twisted by wealth. Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously pointed out, “and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.”

Bill and Melinda Gates, as a couple, did their best not to become hard and cynical. They devoted substantial chunks of their time to philanthropy. Now giving, of course, can certainly be a wonderful source of joy, perhaps the greatest source of joy of all, and the wealthy, by dint of their fortunes, certainly have more to give than anyone else. But the dollars the wealthy can so easily afford to give too often bring no great joy.

For the wealthy, giving can become just another burden, partially because nearly everyone they encounter expects them to give. Billionaire Larry Tisch, a one-time fixture on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest, often complained he received “thirty requests for money a day.” That constant drumbeat of entreaties makes giving an obligation, not a source of satisfaction. If you resist that obligation, you’ll be resented. If you accept that obligation, then you start feeling resentful. You gave because you felt forced.

Over the course of a wealthy person’s lifetime, the resentments, the frustrations, the burdens add up. For George Bernard Shaw, the most acclaimed playwright of his time, the mix did not paint a pretty picture.

“You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty,” Shaw would note in his seventies, “but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.”

Some exceptionally rich Americans consciously set out to overcome the burdens and strains that must always come with great wealth. These affluent steel themselves against wealth’s temptations. They set out to lead normal lives. Some of them even somewhat succeed. Mitchell Fromstein, the CEO of Manpower Inc., ended the 1990s living in the same four-bedroom suburban Milwaukee home he and his wife had purchased back in the mid 1970s, before Fromstein started pulling in several million a year. He was driving a twelve-year-old Mercedes when the Wall Street Journal profiled him in 1999.

“I’m not trying to keep up with anybody,” the 71-year-old explained. “We don’t need a lot of things to be happy.”

Any wealthy person in America could follow that sort of path. But hardly any do. Why not? If enormous wealth makes for such a burden, as so many sages over the years have contended, then why do so few wealthy people ever attempt to put that burden down? America’s sociologists of wealth have an answer. Grand private fortune, they contend, may indeed poison normal human relationships. But grand private fortune also empowers, on a variety of intoxicating fronts.

Occasionally, of course, a wealthy person will resist those seductions. Back in 1999, for instance, a Michigan-based construction mogul, Bob Thompson, sold his asphalt and paving business and shared the $130-million proceeds from the sale with his 550 employees.

“What was I going to do with all that money anyway?” asked Thompson. “There is need and then there is greed. We all need certain basic comforts, and beyond that it becomes ridiculous.”

Why can’t all rich people be like that, we wonder. If we happened to become rich, we tell ourselves, we would certainly be like that. Nonsense. If we became rich, we would feel the same burdens rich people feel—and be seduced by the same pleasures. The wisest among us, people like the essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, have always understood this reality.

“To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave,” as Smith wrote in 1931, “is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.”

“I have known some drunks who were happy at times,” the philosopher Philip Slater added half a century later, “but I’ve known no one who devoted a long life to alcohol and didn’t suffer from it, and I believe the same to be true for wealth.”

Still, as George Bernard Shaw observed in the 1920s, some wealthy people do seem to be able to live lives largely trouble-free.

“Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches,” Shaw noted. “They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work.”

In other words, concluded Shaw, the happy rich “do not live like rich people at all.” They “might therefore,” he concluded, “just as well have ordinary incomes.”

And if they did, we might all be happier.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.