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.

As states continue to pass laws that dehumanize and endanger transgender kids, the country’s most influential newspapers have not met the challenge of covering the issue. Across the country, 36 states have introduced or passed 127 bills that discriminate against trans kids, including barring trans kids from playing on the sports team that corresponds with their gender, and criminalizing or impeding providing gender-affirming healthcare for them.

The right-wing movement behind these bills has tried to frame the story as a political debate over science and protecting the vulnerable—in the case of the sports bills, the vulnerable cisgender girls who would supposedly be harmed by competing with and against transgender girls; in the case of the bills prohibiting gender-affirming healthcare, the vulnerable trans children who might make the “wrong” decisions about their bodies.

Instead of centering trans voices in coverage of these bills that target them, journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post have tended to cover the story as primarily one of political debate, with real-life impacts sequestered into human interest stories in which the political news is secondary, or relegated to a paragraph or two buried under piles of politicians, scientists, and transphobes debating whether trans people should be denied basic rights.

For instance, the Washington Post  ran a front-page feature (3/16/21) that profiled a transgender teen who “had spoken out on her own behalf, even as conservative legislators in Missouri waged a fight to criminalize treatments for trans kids like her.” Despite the headline’s framing (“A Transgender Girl Struggles to Find Her Voice as Lawmakers Attack Her Right to Exist”), the piece was primarily a human interest piece—a sensitive, empathetic profile that  included only a few brief references to the anti-trans campaign and its impact on her life.

Meanwhile, the Post‘s most in-depth and prominent article centered on the anti-trans campaign came in its sports section (4/15/21), under the headline, “The Fight for the Future of Transgender Athletes.” Who gets to set the framework for that fight in the article? Not the people at its center. Reporter Will Hobson writes that “the issue of transgender athletes has become the most vexing, emotionally charged debate in global sports.”

Look at how Hobson defines “the issue of transgender athletes”: not as an issue confronting transgender athletes, who are under attack in more than half of the states in this country, but one posed by them. Hobson implies that what’s most important in this story is that it’s “vexing,” not to trans people, but to those who are forced to deal with their existence. Under that definition of the problem—the same one used by the right-wing activists doing the attacking, and based primarily on interviews with cisgender “experts”—Hobson’s piece concludes that there simply may be no fair solution.

“It may prove impossible for schools and sports organizations to craft policies that are both fair to all female athletes and fully inclusive of transgender girls and women,” he writes. In other words, inclusion of trans girls may be fundamentally unfair to cis girls.

In effect, this cedes the framework to the right, setting the issue up as a debate, rather than a story about trans people’s (and, more specifically, trans kids’) right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

It’s an approach to coverage entirely in line with that concerning another battle over bodily autonomy in this country: abortion. (Not coincidentally, right-wing legislators have also introduced an unprecedented number of state-level abortion restrictions this year.) As Janine Jackson (FAIR.org, 1/29/16) has argued, reproductive rights are typically presented as political controversies or pawns in the “culture war,” rather than as issues of women’s health, tilting the playing field from the outset in favor of the right. In both cases, those not targeted by the policies—men in the case of reproductive rights, and in the case of trans rights, cisgender people—get most of the quotes and most of the bylines.

For trans people, the outnumbering tends to be even worse. While there are countless outstanding trans journalists, very few have been hired by major news outlets, where their perspectives and access to the trans community would go a long way to providing more fair coverage. And trans sources continue to be outnumbered by cisgender sources in nearly every story about trans issues, too often reserved for adding “color” to a story rather than treated as experts. As the Trans Journalist Association advises:

When reporting a story about trans issues, trans people should be interviewed and quoted as experts, not just subjects. Trans people are the experts on trans lives and experiences.

Of 17 sources quoted in Hobson’s Post piece, three were identified as current or former transgender athletes. One was not interviewed, only briefly quoted. At least three cisgender former athletes were also quoted, plus a dizzying array of experts: endocrinologists, a cultural anthropologist, lawyers, and a psychiatrist.

The New York Times ran a remarkably similar story (8/18/20) highlighting the supposed intractability of the sports issue under the headline, “Who Should Compete in Women’s Sports? There Are ‘Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions.’” It’s telling that the source quoted in the headline—cisgender geneticist Eric Vilain—was previously published on the Times op-ed page (6/18/12) on the issue of gender testing for sports, and began his argument by claiming that we live “in times of extreme political correctness infiltrating almost every societal topic.”

Vilain, once an ally to intersex activists, has also been sharply criticized by both intersex and transgender advocates for his influential stances on genital surgery for intersex babies (acceptable in some circumstances) and testosterone limits for women competing in the Olympics (he helped set them). Why does this scientist with a chip on his shoulder about political correctness, and views hostile to those of the trans and intersex community, get to frame the subject of how trans kids get to participate in sports?

Just like the Post, the Times found the question of trans participation “vexing,” presenting trans people as objects rather than subjects in the matter. Fifteen sources were quoted; four were trans athletes, but none appeared to have actually been interviewed by the Times. (The paper reprinted public statements or quotes from other news outlets.)

Further down in the lengthy piece, a section header was given over to another cisgender scientist playing he said/she said: “‘One group prioritizes inclusion. Another group says we want fairness and safety.’” Though “safety” was mentioned four times in the article as some sort of reason to bar participation, nowhere did it explain how trans kids pose any safety threat to other kids. In fact, the central safety issue in the context of trans kids in sports is the danger to trans kids as a result of being stigmatized, harassed and excluded—which the article failed to mention.

If you dig deeper to discern what exactly the vexing problem is that transgender athletes supposedly pose to others, it appears that many are worried that, because testosterone can confer some physiological advantages on individuals in terms of things like height and muscle mass, it therefore creates an unfair advantage to those with more of it.

But, just like sex, testosterone is not binary; everyone’s body produces testosterone, and while most men produce far more than women, some women produce more testosterone than some men. Rather than accept this human variety just as we accept that all top athletes are exceptional in some—often genetic—way, some world sports organizations have insisted that female athletes whose bodies happen to produce high levels of testosterone medically lower their testosterone levels, regardless of whether it is medically indicated (Wired, 5/11/19).

An earlier prominent Post piece (1/29/21)—”Transgender Girls Are at the Center of America’s Culture Wars, Yet Again”—similarly failed to put those girls at the center of its reporting. The piece featured 11 sources, only one of which was identified as a trans athlete. She was the very last source in the article. More Republican politicians were given space to opine than trans people, giving a platform for transphobic and sexist comments, such as this quote from Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey, whose stake in this matter is that his cisgender daughter plays high school golf: “What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” Or South Dakota Rep. Fred Deutsch: “This is not a hate bill. It’s about biology. It’s science. You can’t change your sex.”

The Post‘s reporting isn’t always quite so cringeworthy. A more recent piece (4/24/21) about the Arkansas law banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender children focused on the families with trans kids impacted by the law, giving them more space than supporters of the bill—though still, no trans people themselves were quoted.

The only front-page New York Times article (3/29/21) this year about the current trans bill battle, “Why Transgender Girls Are Suddenly the GOP’s Culture-War Focus,” was similar. The subhead re-emphasized the headline’s framing of the issue as “a culture clash”—a craven choice of terms for what is in fact a targeted political attack on the humanity of a group that currently makes up 1–2% of the population. The piece quoted or paraphrased seven individuals or groups; none were trans athletes, and only one—ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio—was identified as transgender, period.

The paper has only covered this year’s legislative campaign four times in print. Notably, two of the pieces have been interviews: one with transgender Virginia state representative Danica Roem (4/17/21), and the other with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (4/8/21), who signed into law bills barring trans girls from playing girls’ sports and allowing doctors to refuse to treat trans patients, then vetoed a bill that would prohibit gender-affirming healthcare for trans kids. (That veto was later overridden by the GOP-dominated legislature, enacting the country’s most extreme anti-trans law so far.)

Though they carried different bylines, it’s hard not to see the two interviews as an editorial attempt at balance—in which a trans lawmaker is balanced by a slightly-less-horrifically-transphobic-than-his-colleagues lawmaker. Trans kids—and the rest of the papers’ readers—deserve much better.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

This is what you shall do… stand up for the stupid and crazy…
— Walt Whitman, Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass

A number of readers wondered whether, following my recent piece on The Triplets in the House of Representatives, I was being unfair to the United States Senate, a body that includes at least two people deserving recognition as much as the triplets in the House. I can only acknowledge my oversight with a mea culpa and make amends by directing the readers’ attention to two Senators who, with each utterance, warm the cockles of the trumpian heart and the hearts of all who love and miss the trump.

The two Senators are Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri. Great minds can differ on which of the two men is the dumbest man in the Senate. NBC‘s Joe Scarborough bestowed the label on Josh, calling him the dumbest guy in the Senate, but I prefer to bestow that honor on Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Ron does not have the academic credentials of Josh. Josh attended Stanford, and Yale law school. The lack of those credentials does not, however, deprive him of the right to being first, not second, in the competition.

Ron has served in the Senate since 2010. During that time ample opportunities for him to show his stupidity have presented themselves, and he has rarely failed to take advantage of them. In 2021, however, he has taken positions that in the opinion of this writer give him an insurmountable lead over Josh Hawley. Among his most memorable demonstrations were his comments on the rioters who stormed the United States Capitol as Ron and his colleague took refuge in a safe space in the Capitol building. Ron said of his time being sequestered in a safe space in the Capitol that: “I never felt threatened I didn’t foresee this. They made up their own standards in terms of incitement. The first question was ‘Was this predictable? Was it foreseeable? And the answer was no, it wasn’t. I don’t know any Trump supporters who would do that.”

In an interview in March he said of the rioters that: “I know those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned.” He went on to say that had the rioters been members of the Black Lives Matter crowd he would have been more concerned for his safety. He did not explain why he joined his colleagues in being taken to a refuge where they were protected from the people showing their love for the country by storming its capitol nor has he explained why more than 400 of them have been criminally indicted for trying to prove their love of country.

Ron’s observations about the good intentions of the rioters by themselves, would perhaps not earn him the distinction I have granted him. It is also his expertise on the Covid-19 vaccine. He has repeatedly downplayed the need for people to get vaccinated against the virus. In an interview with Vicky McKenna on April 23 he explained that if a person had the vaccine he or she didn’t need to worry about whether anyone else got the vaccine. As he explained: “So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not. I mean, what is it to you?… So why this big push to make sure everybody gets vaccinated?” The more than 570,000 American who have died could explain why taking the vaccine is important. Anthony Fauci responded to Johnson’s comments saying they were nonsense. He said we have very effective vaccines and it makes no sense to take the Johnson position that if he’s been vaccinated no one else needs to take the vaccine.

Johnson’s competitor is Josh Hawley. Josh is better credentialed than Ron. Josh received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his law degree from Yale Law School. Both of his degrees have served him in poor stead proving, as a president of Harvard once said, the mere fact that you graduate from a great university does not mean you are an educated person. On December 30, 2020, Josh announced by means of a trump like tweet, that he would refuse to certify the vote that Joe Biden had been elected president. “I cannot vote to certify the Electoral College results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.” Not content to express his unwillingness to certify the electoral college results, as the rioters gathered on January 6 preparing to launch their attack on the Capitol, Josh walked by them pumping his fist in the air in a gesture of support. What happened next is history.

Commenting on Josh’s tweets and conduct, John Danforth, a former Missouri Senator said: “Supporting Josh Hawley. . . was the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life. He has consciously appealed to the worst. He has attempted to drive us apart and he has undermined public belief in our democracy. And that’s great damage.” Senator Danforth got that right. Josh Hawley is a national disgrace. So is Ron Johnson. The nut jobs in the House of Representatives have not upstaged the ones in the Senate. The electorate has made sure there are enough to go around.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Space debris is nothing new – Earth’s orbit is so littered with abandoned junk that many countries are working on establishing “best practices” to mitigate it – but the #ChineseRocket has caught the attention of an already paranoid,  pandemic-weary Twitter. “Just a normal Saturday night in 2021,” noted one jittery survivor. Another, viewing experts’ possible routes:  “One of those lines goes right over Nashville. I swear to God, if we have to check ‘space debris catastrophe’ off our bingo card after a tornado, pandemic, derecho…” Observers reported tracking its path like an Amazon order, bemoaned possibly surviving COVID only to die of “rocket dump,” wondered if cops would shoot it down before it could land, offered weather forecasts – “Partly cloudy, with a chance of Chinese rocket” – and shared weird existential geographical riffs. Person 1: “Is Lebanon safe?” Person 2: “In general?” Mostly, there were suggestions for favored targets, including Target. Several people wanted the rocket to land on the Pentagon. Others thought it should hit the Chinese guy who wrote, “I am pray this rocket strikes the residence of a black person or homosexual.” But the winner by a vengeful landslide was….”Mag-A-Loco.”

#ChineseRocket “Dear China Rocket….we offer this as a sacrifice to save mankind.”

Update: It landed in the Indian Ocean.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

More than 200 Palestinians were wounded and at least one partially blinded over night in East Jerusalem when Israeli police fired rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades at thousands of people who were protesting Israeli settlers and security forces’ ongoing effort to dispossess Palestinians of their land in the occupied territory.

“Too many are silent or dismissive as our U.S. tax dollars continue to be used for this kind of inhumanity.”
—Rep. Rashida Tlaib

Israel’s violent oppression of Palestinians, which has intensified in recent days, continued Saturday.

“What’s happening in Jerusalem and Palestine more broadly is not a ‘clash’ or a ‘scuffle,’ but a state-sanctioned campaign of Israeli violence against Palestinians,” the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) said Saturday. “To pretend otherwise is to minimize the horrors we are witnessing.”

As Al Jazeera reported, several hundred riot gear-clad Israeli police officers deployed to the Al-Aqsa mosque on Friday night, where 70,000 Muslims had gathered at Islam’s third-holiest site for the last Friday prayer of Ramadan. Thousands of worshippers stayed to demonstrate against Israel’s attempted expulsion of Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

According to Al Jazeera, Israeli security forces opened fire on Palestinians at Al-Aqsa and throughout the city on Friday night, shooting people with rubber-coated steel bullets and using stun grenades on crowds that were armed with no more than shoes, chairs, and rocks.

The Palestinian Red Crescent emergency service said Saturday that at least 205 Palestinians had been injured, mostly from rubber-coated rounds and shrapnel from stun grenades. Of the wounded, 88 were hospitalized, including one victim who lost an eye, two with serious head trauma, and two with fractured jaws.

While Israeli settlers, with state support, have been seizing property in East Jerusalem—conquered by Israeli troops during the 1967 Six Day War and unlawfully occupied ever since—for decades, their violent methods of displacement have recently come under increased scrutiny from a handful of U.S. lawmakers who have joined progressive advocates in calling for the defense of Palestinians’ human rights, as Common Dreams reported this week.

The Jerusalem municipality is planning to demolish 100 buildings, home to 1,550 Palestinians, in the neighborhood of Al-Bustan to build a biblical theme park. In Sheikh Jarrah, meanwhile, the Nahalat Shimon settler organization is trying to push 169 Palestinians from a dozen families out of their homes. The United Nations on Friday described the forced evictions, ordered by an Israeli court, as a violation of international law and potential war crime.

Bashar Mahmoud, a 23-year-old protester from the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Issawiya told Al Jazeera that “if we don’t stand with this group of people here, [evictions] will [come] to my house, her house, his house and to every Palestinian who lives here.”

Israel’s Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the eviction of four Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah on Monday, the news outlet noted.

On Saturday, the IMEU shared a video depicting Israeli security forces blocking a major highway to prevent Palestinians from traveling to Al-Aqsa for Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of the year for Muslims. Undeterred, many began walking to the mosque, while others reportedly “forced the roads open.”

Later on, however, Israeli police once again began attacking Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, according to a video shared by Mohammed el-Kurd, a Palestinian resident of the neighborhood. Additional footage shows Israeli security forces unleashing stun grenades on Palestinians in other parts of occupied East Jerusalem.

People “are bracing for more violence in the coming days,” Al Jazeera reported. As the news outlet explained:

Sunday night is “Laylat al-Qadr” or the “Night of Destiny,” the most sacred in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Worshippers will gather for intense nighttime prayers at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Sunday night is also the start of Jerusalem Day, a national holiday in which Israel celebrates its annexation of East Jerusalem and religious nationalists hold parades and other celebrations in the city.

In addition, the Israeli Supreme Court’s verdict on the potential evictions of dozens of Palestinians is expected to be handed down Monday.

The IMEU on Friday said that “Israel’s violence has a clear purpose: ethnically cleanse Jerusalem of Palestinians to allow Israeli settlers to take over Palestinian homes.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—who is leading a petition calling on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to “uphold international law and demand an end to Israel’s illegal evictions of Palestinians, demolitions of Palestinian homes, and theft of Palestinian land” in East Jerusalem—said Saturday that “this is apartheid, plain and simple.”

“Too many are silent or dismissive as our U.S. tax dollars continue to be used for this kind of inhumanity,” she added.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Advocates for press freedom responded with outrage after the Washington Post reported Friday that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records and attempted to obtain the email records of three Post journalists who covered Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs.”
—Cameron Barr, Washington Post

According to the newspaper, Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller and former Post reporter Adam Entous all received letters from the Justice Department earlier this week alerting them that “pursuant to [a] legal process” that reportedly took place in 2020, the DOJ had acquired “toll records associated with” the three journalists’ work, home, or cell phone numbers between April 15, 2017 and July 31, 2017.

“We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists,” said Cameron Barr, the acting executive editor of the Post. “The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”

The records taken include the numbers, times, and duration of every call made to and from the targeted phones between mid-April and late July 2017, but do not include what was said, the newspaper reported. DOJ officials also obtained, but did not execute, a court order to access the reporters’ work email accounts. Those records would have indicated the dates and addresses of emails sent to and from the journalists during that three and a half month period.

“The letter does not state the purpose of the phone records seizure, but toward the end of the time period mentioned in the letters, those reporters wrote a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had discussed the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the United States,” the Post noted.

According to the Post:

Justice Department officials would not say if that reporting was the reason for the search of journalists’ phone records. Sessions subsequently became President Donald Trump’s first attorney general and was at the Justice Department when the article appeared…

It is rare for the Justice Department to use subpoenas to get records of reporters in leak investigations, and such moves must be approved by the attorney general. The letters do not say precisely when the reporters’ records were taken and reviewed, but a department spokesman said the decision to do so came in 2020, during the Trump administration. William P. Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general for nearly all of that year, before departing Dec. 23, declined to comment.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

George W. Bush is back. He is back, this time not to bomb countries and cause the death of thousands. This time the man is back as an artist who advocates for the rights of immigrants, and the U.S. media is on heat.

That death in Iraq is eliminated from the conversation makes it clear that to ‘them Americans’, ‘us Iraqis’ are non-existent.

Bush, the former US president, recently penned an Op-Ed for The Washington Post, and received a round of applause on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘ when the eponymous host complimented him on his painting of American politician Madeleine Albright. He appears on TV to speak about his new book of oil paintings of America’s immigrants, ‘Out of Many, One’, he is not wearing handcuffs, and all rehabilitated. It is all normal.

What is also normal is how the starvation and deprivation of medication that caused the early death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children because of the severe UN sanctions on the country in the 1990s, have fallen into oblivion. To Albright, speaking in a 1996 TV interview, the political price was “worth it“, though she would later express regret for her wording.

Bush’s grinning face seems to be traveling at a smooth pace from one TV show to the next. Kimmel admired his guest’s reflexes when he dodged Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s shoe throw, and the two had a laugh about it. Of course, it slipped Kimmel’s mind to ask his guest about his time ordering cluster bombs be dropped on my family’s house in Baghdad to “liberate it”. It also slipped the host’s mind to ask why in the first place a man would want to throw a shoe at the former president.

For their part, the cheering crowd gave the impression that the next rich guy to oversee the annihilation of inferior beings overseas could as well re-emerge from the gutter and be celebrated as a cool, funny grandpa.

Bush’s blood-stained past tells us the man is dangerous. If Richard Nixon—in the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson—”could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time”, you might lose a finger or two if you extend your hand to shake Bush’s.

And with the way things are going, there’s a big chance he will get away with it—again.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

From fake oil spills in Washington, D.C. and New York City to a “people mural” in Seattle spelling out “Defund Line 3,” climate and Indigenous protesters in 50 U.S. cities and across seven other countries spanning four continents took to the streets on Friday for a day of action pushing 20 banks to ditch the controversial tar sands pipeline.

“Against the backdrop of rising climate chaos, the continued bankrolling of Line 3 and similar oil and gas infrastructure worldwide is fueling gross and systemic violations of human rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights at a global scale,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“It’s time for the big banks to recognize that they can and will be held accountable for their complicity in those violations,” Muffett added. His organization is part of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, over 150 groups that urge asset managers, banks, and insurers to stop funding climate destruction.

The global protests on Friday follow on-the-ground actions that have, at times, successfully halted construction of Canada-based Enbridge’s Line 3 project, which is intended to replace an old pipeline that runs from Alberta, through North Dakota and Minnesota, to Wisconsin. The new pipeline’s route crosses Anishinaabe treaty lands.

Simone Senogles, a Red Lake Anishinaabe citizen and organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network, declared that “no amount of greenwashing and PR can absolve these banks from violating Indigenous rights and the desolation of Mother Earth.”

“By giving credit lines to Enbridge, these institutions are giving the oil company a blank check to attack Anishinaabe people, steal our lands, and further guide this planet into climate chaos,” Senogles said. “Those who financially back Enbridge are directly implicated in its crimes. To put it bluntly, blood is on their hands.”

The Stop the Money Pipeline coalition launched the #DefundLine3 campaign in February. At the time, Tara Houska—a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, tribal attorney, and founder of the Giniw Collective—wrote for Common Dreams:

It is my duty as an Anishinaabe woman that compels me to support people in taking direct action to stop the construction of Line 3. Direct action, like when Water Protectors recently locked themselves inside a section of pipe, blockaded the entrances to construction sites, and locked themselves to trucks being used to carry Line 3 pipeline materials.

It is from this sense of duty that I am asking you to join us in this campaign. Together, I know that we can do this. Throughout history people-powered movements have changed the world. And they sure as hell can stop Line 3.

Appearing on Democracy Now! Friday, Jackie Fielder of Stop the Money Pipeline noted that “Line 3 would result in an additional 193 million tons of greenhouse gases every single year, and it violates Indigenous rights of the Anishinaabe people and their right to free, prior, and informed consent.”

While critics of Line 3 continue to call on U.S. President Joe Biden to intervene and block the pipeline, activists also hope that increasing pressure on banks could quash not only this project but others like it.

“Wall Street may think it can keep profiting off disrespect for Indigenous rights and desecration of the natural world, but it needs to think again,” said Moira Birss, climate and finance director at Amazon Watch. “From the Kichwa in the Amazon to the Anishinaabe in Minnesota, Indigenous peoples and their allies are ramping up resistance, and we will hold accountable the financial enablers of this destruction.”

As 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben explained: “Let’s just say it straight. These banks are trying to profit off the end of the world, and the ongoing desecration of Indigenous land. History will judge them for it, but we’re trying to speed up the process.”

Activists and supporters shared updates from the protests on social media:

“Nearly every major U.S. bank has now promised that they will align their business with the Paris agreement,” noted Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition co-coordinator. “But the fact that those exact same banks are continuing to bankroll a tar sands oil pipeline that is completely incompatible with the Paris agreement and curtailing climate chaos shows just how hollow their promises are.”

The 2015 Paris agreement’s more ambitious goal is to limit global temperature rise to 1.5˚C by the end of the century. However, based on nations’ current plans to cut planet-heating emissions, the world is on track to hit 2.4˚C of warming by 2100, according to a projection published earlier this week by the Climate Action Tracker.

Osprey Orielle Lake, executive director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, asserted that “financial institutions must be held accountable for their role in financing the destruction of the climate, the violation of Indigenous rights, escalating harms to public health during a pandemic, and increased rates of violence toward Indigenous women living near ‘man camps’ associated with pipeline construction.”

“In solidarity with Indigenous leaders, we are calling for fossil fuel divestment to protect the water and climate, and the health and survival of Indigenous communities,” she said. “As multiple crises in 2021 proliferate, business as usual must not and cannot continue.”

“Now is the time for financial institutions to align with the Paris agreement, respect human rights, divest from Line 3 and planet-wrecking companies, and instead invest in our communities, renewable energy, and a regenerative economy,” she added. “There is no time to lose!”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As Palestinians on Friday continued to resist attempts by Israeli settlers and state security forces to drive them out of the Al-Bustan and Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined other Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives who have expressed outrage over the expulsion effort and solidarity with those fighting for their homes. 

 “The Israeli military is forcing families from their homes during the holy month of Ramadan and inflicting violence. It is inhumane and the U.S. must show more leadership in safeguarding Palestinian rights.”
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Israelis and Palestinians clashed again Thursday evening in Sheikh Jarrah before Israeli police intervened to separate them. The Times of Israel reports 15 people were arrested, all of them Palestinians.

With state support, Israeli settler colonists have been seizing homes and property in the neighborhood, which was conquered by Israeli troops during the 1967 Six Day War and has been unlawfully occupied ever since. Earlier this week, video footage of Israeli settlers attempting to steal a Palestinian family’s home went viral, drawing worldwide attention and sparking condemnation by human rights advocates. 

Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) tweeted a portion of the video on Wednesday while calling on the U.S. State Department “to immediately condemn these violations of international law.”

Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Friday added her voice to the chorus of condemnation of the Sheikh Jarrah evictions. 

“We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem,” she said in a statement. “The Israeli military is forcing families from their homes during the holy month of Ramadan and inflicting violence. It is inhumane and the U.S. must show more leadership in safeguarding Palestinian rights.”

Other progressive lawmakers including Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), José “Chuy” García (Ill.), Cori Bush (Mo.), André Carson (Ind.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Debbie Dingell (Mich.), Betty McCollum (Minn.), and Mark Pocan (Wis.) have also weighed in on the issue on social media this week.

Newman and Pocan are leading a letter (pdf) to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing “deep concern about Israel’s imminent plan to forcibly displace nearly 2,000 Palestinians in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Al-Bustan and Sheikh Jarrah,” and calling upon the department “to exert diplomatic pressure to prevent these acts from taking place.” 

The letter continues: 

According to media reports, the Jerusalem municipality is planning to build a biblical theme park—Gan Hamelech—in Al-Bustan neighborhood near the walls of the Old City after it demolishes 100 properties, which are home to almost 1,550 Palestinians, 63% of whom are children.

In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, 169 residents, including 46 children, from 12 different families have received eviction notices so their homes can be occupied illegally by Israeli settlers.

From 1967 to 2017, Israel demolished an estimated 5,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, according to a report by the Land Research Center. According to B’Tselem… from 2018 to 2020, Israel demolished another 349 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. 

The letter notes that “East Jerusalem is part of the West Bank, and under international law, Israel is in military occupation of this territory, notwithstanding its illegal incorporation of East Jerusalem within the Jerusalem municipality and its subsequent illegal de jure annexation of East Jerusalem.” 

It then points out Israel’s obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to refrain from destroying Palestinian property, while citing Article 8 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which states that “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly,” is a war crime. 

“Police violence against Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah who only want to remain in the homes they’ve lived in for generations is state-sponsored persecution. NO U.S. taxpayer dollars should support the annexation of Palestinian land or destruction of Palestinian homes.”
—Rep. Betty McCollum

President Joe Biden has not released a public statement on the situation in East Jerusalem, reflecting a campaign promise by Blinken—then a top adviser—to keep differences between the U.S. and Israel “behind closed doors.” 

However, in a statement to Middle East Eye, a State Department spokesperson said that “we are deeply concerned about the potential eviction of Palestinian families in the Silwan neighborhood and in Sheikh Jarrah, many of whom have lived in those homes for generations.”

“As we have consistently said, it is critical to avoid unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions or take us further away from peace, this includes evictions, settlement activity, and home demolitions,” the spokesperson added.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Wildlife advocacy groups are sounding the alarm about a new “extermination” law in Idaho, signed this week by GOP Gov. Brad Little, that will allow hunters and private contractors to kill up to 90% of the state’s gray wolf population—about 1,350 animals.

“Backed by an array of misinformation and fearmongering, the state Legislature stepped over experts at the Idaho Fish and Game Department and rushed to pass this horrific wolf-killing bill,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.

“And Republican lawmakers have promised that this is just the beginning, even though the new measure would doom 90% of Idaho’s wolves,” Zaccardi noted. “We’re disappointed that Gov. Little signed such a cruel and ill-conceived bill into law.”

Before Little approved the measure, Fast Company reported that “it’s one of a handful of Western states’ aggressive pushes to cull predator populations. But, this one goes a step further: hiring hitmen for wolves.”

The law increases the funds allocated to Idaho’s Wolf Depredation Control Board from $110,000 to $300,000. According to Fast Company:

With that money, the bill calls for hiring private contractors to kill (or, using the bill text’s language, “dispose of”) wolves. In past years, wolves were killed via controlled hunting seasons, or government bodies like the Wildlife Services (a federal body whose job it is to keep animal populations down); the use of these contractors is “unprecedented,” Zaccardi says. The bill explicitly empowers these freelance assassins to use creative ways to shoot wolves, including from ATVs, snowmobiles, and motorized parachutes.

The development in Idaho follows a series of anti-wolf bills in Montana signed into law this year by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte—who violated his state’s hunting regulations in February, when he killed a black wolf on a private ranch near Yellowstone National Park.

A rider proposed by congressional Republicans and attached to a federal budget bill a decade ago stripped gray wolves of Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections in Idaho, Montana, and parts of Oregon, Utah, and Washington state. The Trump administration’s delisting of gray wolves in the lower 48 states took effect in January.

“We must not abandon fragile wolf-recovery efforts and allow anti-wolf states, hunters, and trappers to push these iconic species back to the brink of extinction.”
—Sarah McMillian, WildEarth Guardians

Critics of the recent delisiting highlighted conditions in Idaho to make the case for retaining  national ESA protections. Last September, conservationists revealed that a record-breaking 570 wolves, including dozens of pups, were brutally killed in the state over a recent one-year period.

Samantha Bruegger of WildEarth Guardians said at the time that “Idaho’s reckless, violent, massacre of wolves and their pups not only showcases the worst of state wildlife ‘management,’ it shines a light on the darkest corners of humanity.”

Other leaders at the organization echoed that sentiment this week.

“WildEarth Guardians and our allies filed a lawsuit 10 years ago in an attempt and overturn this undemocratic, spiteful wolf rider because we believed the wolf delisting rider violated the U.S. Constitution,” noted executive director John Horning.

“While our lawsuit wasn’t successful because Congress simply closed the courthouse doors,” Horning said, “the hateful and ongoing attempts to completely decimate wolf populations in Idaho and Montana warrant national outrage and action by Congress to restore wolf protections in the northern Rockies.”

Sarah McMillian, the group’s Montana-based conservation director, concurred that the “barbaric” situations facing wolves in her state and Idaho “prove that the gray wolf still needs federal Endangered Species Act protections.”

“As we clearly warned 10 years ago, the state ‘management’ of wolves essentially amounts to the brutal state-sanctioned eradication of this keystone native species,” McMillian said. “State ‘management’ of wolves in Idaho and Montana harkens back to an era when people sought to exterminate wolves altogether, and nearly succeeded.”

“These types of actions were not only deplorable in the early 1900s, but they have zero place in science-based management of a keystone species in 2021, especially in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and nature crisis,” she warned. “We must not abandon fragile wolf-recovery efforts and allow anti-wolf states, hunters, and trappers to push these iconic species back to the brink of extinction.”

Western Watersheds Project similarly blasted the new laws, and the legislators behind them, as politically motivated rather than informed by science.

“These bills recall the anti-predator hysteria of the early 1900s that originally led to the near-extirpation of wolves from the lower 48 states, and represent a gross overreach by Montana and Idaho’s legislative bodies,” said Jocelyn Leroux, the project’s Washington and Montana director. “Rather than allowing science and agency professionals to be the leading voice in wildlife management, these state legislatures instead have executed a blatant power grab on behalf of a small group of anti-predator fanatics.”

“The campaign to exterminate wolves continuously disregards facts,” Leroux charged, pushing back against claims about wolves causing livestock losses. “This type of uncontrolled slaughter is what led to the original listing of gray wolves and will have broad ecosystem impacts.”

Talasi Brooks, staff attorney for Western Watersheds Project, pointed to the measures as proof that action is needed at the federal level to protect gray wolves.

“The actions of Montana and Idaho this year show that these states are unfit to manage large predators,” Brooks said. “Federal supervision is necessary to make sure wolf management is based on sound science and not directed by anti-wildlife extremists. We will be keeping a close eye on wolf populations in the northern Rockies.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, the United States Chamber of Commerce called on the federal government to end $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefits that were a part of President Joe Biden’s 1.9 trillion dollar COVID-19 aid package.  Morris Pearl, former managing director at Blackrock, Inc., and Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, issued the following statement in response:

“Today’s statement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is absurd and appalling. Claiming that today’s disappointing jobs report is a result of expanded unemployment insurance is nothing more than a cruel tactic to pressure the administration into helping companies that they represent to continue to underpay and exploit their workforce. Our leaders are supposed to be helping to increase wages for low paid workers, not helping employers to keep wages down.

Over the past few weeks large corporations that do not pay their employees a livable wage have expressed their belief that extended unemployment benefits reward Americans not to work. Instead of blaming struggling workers, they should take this moment to self-reflect. Maybe— just maybe— paying their workers more than starvation wages would incentive workers to reenter the workforce.

And if they really believe that people are committing fraud to illegally collect benefits when they could be working, they should be calling for enforcement of the existing rules, not to terminate benefits for millions of law abiding citizens.

It is sickening that the Chamber is crying for help from the federal government to help solve its employment problem by hurting the millions of still-unemployed Americans suffering from the pandemic. These are the same companies who made billions during the course of the pandemic while their workers lost their jobs, homes, and quality of life.

We do not have a shortage of willing workers in this country. We have a shortage of employers who are willing to pay workers enough to live. The U.S Chamber should be ashamed of itself.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today across 8 countries, 4 continents, and 50 U.S. cities, hundreds of climate and Indigenous rights activists are protesting 20 banks that have backed loans for Enbridge, the company constructing the Line 3 tar sands pipeline through Anishinaabe territory in Minnesota. The protests feature elaborate and artful displays such as a body mural in Seattle spelling “Defund Line 3,” a fake oil spill in New York, a large floating banner display in Chicago, a fake oil spill and giant dance party in D.C., and a street mural in San Francisco. Activists also effectively shut down branches of the 20 target banks in San Francisco, Seattle, London and others protested outside of branches in Japan, Switzerland, Sierra Leone, Costa Rica, the Holland, France and Canada.

“It [Line 3] violates Indigenous rights of the Anishinaabe people and their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent,” said Stop the Money Pipeline Communications Coordinator Jackie Fielder in a Friday segement on Democracy Now! Actor Mark Ruffalo and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib both tweeted in support of the #DefundLine3 actions.

The protests are a part of Stop the Money Pipeline’s #DefundLine3 Global Day of Action and come after Enbridge secured a three-year $1.0 billion Sustainability Linked Credit Facility with CIBC, Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia), Bank of Montreal (BMO Capital Markets), RBC Capital Markets and TD Securities. As of November 2020, these banks are also the biggest funders of Enbridge, having dedicated $48.45 billion to the company from 2016 to 2020 – including $9.11 billion in 2020 alone. The details of what makes the new credit facility “sustainability-linked” have not been disclosed. On May 6, a day ahead of the actions, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on international lending agencies to stop financing major fossil fuel projects, which he said are no longer economic investments. Three tribal nations—the Red Lake Nation, White Earth Nation, and Mille Lacs Bands of Ojibwe—are suing to stop the pipeline in court, arguing that it violates their treaty rights.

According to Enbridge’s Environmental Impact Statement, Line 3 would result in an additional 193 million tons of greenhouse gas being released into the atmosphere each year. According to one study, Line 3 would result in as much additional greenhouse gas being released into the atmosphere as the building of fifty new coal-fired power plants. Already, Enbridge is investigating claims of human trafficking after state documents obtained by the Minnesota Reformer show that the Violence Intervention Project in Thief River Falls requested roughly $250 for hotel rooms for at least two women who say they were assaulted by pipeline workers.

Key permits for the pipeline were granted to Enbridge by the Trump Administration weeks before Trump left office. Critically, the tide is turning on these destructive projects: President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and Governor Whitmer of Michigan recently ordered a shutdown of Enbridge’s Line 5.

The protests are part of an ongoing campaign demanding that financial institutions stop financing climate chaos and violations of Indigenous rights. More than 250 people have now been arrested for taking action to stop the construction of Line 3. Since the #DefundLine3 campaign launched in February 2021, activists have sent more than 700,000 emails and 7,000 calendar invites to bank executives, protested at bank branches in 16 states, and made more than 3,000 phone calls, demanding that financial institutions stop funding Line 3.

The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8 trillion of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to a report by a coalition of NGOs, even though  a significant proportion of existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is to remain below 2C, the main Paris target.

Participating organizations are a part of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, a coalition of over 150 organizations focused on holding the financial backers of climate chaos accountable. www.stopthemoneypipeline.com 

Simone Senogles, Red Lake Anishinaabe Citizen, Organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network:  “No amount of greenwashing and PR can absolve these banks from violating indigenous rights and the desolation of Mother Earth. By giving credit lines to Enbridge these institutions are giving the oil company a blank check to attack Anishinaabe people, steal our lands, and further guide this planet into climate chaos. Those who financially back Enbridge are directly implicated in its crimes. To put it bluntly, blood is on their hands.”

Bill McKibben, founder 350.org:“Let’s just say it straight. These banks are trying to profit off the end of the world, and the ongoing desecration of Indigenous land. History will judge them for it, but we’re trying to speed up the process.”

Matt Remle, Lakota, Co-Founder of Mazaska Talks: “The Indian wars never ended. Instead of mining for gold, they’re drilling for oil and gas. Instead of laying railroad tracks through tribal hunting, fishing and gathering grounds, they’re laying pipelines. Wall Street financed Westward expansion and manifest destiny. Wall Street is financing violations against treaty rights and the climate crisis. Tribal opposition and calls for upholding Tribal treaty rights continues to be met with indifference and State sanctioned repression.  Settler colonization never ended. Despite this our peoples continue to resist. It would serve the broader population well to understand that our fight is their fight.”

Moira Birss, Climate and Finance Director at Amazon Watch: “Wall Street may think it can keep profiting off disrespect for Indigenous rights and desecration of the natural world, but it needs to think again. From the Kichwa in the Amazon to the Anishinaabe in Minnesota, Indigenous peoples and their allies are ramping up resistance, and we will hold accountable the financial enablers of this destruction.”

Carroll Muffett, President, Center for International Environmental Law (Washington, DC/Geneva, Switzerland) “Against the backdrop of rising climate chaos, the continued bankrolling of Line 3 and similar oil and gas infrastructure worldwide is fueling gross and systemic violations of human rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights at a global scale.  It’s time for the big banks to recognize that they can and will be held accountable for their complicity in those violations.”

Osprey Orielle Lake, Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN): “Financial institutions must be held accountable for their role in financing the destruction of the climate, the violation of Indigenous rights, escalating harms to public health during a pandemic, and increased rates of violence toward Indigenous women living near ‘man camps’ associated with pipeline construction. In solidarity with Indigenous leaders we are calling for fossil fuel divestment to protect the water and climate, and the health and survival of Indigenous communities. As multiple crises in 2021 proliferate, business as usual must not and cannot continue. Now is the time for financial institutions to align with the Paris Agreement, respect human rights, divest from Line 3 and planet-wrecking companies and instead invest in our communities, renewable energy and a regenerative economy. There is no time to lose!”

Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline, Coalition Co-coordinator: “Nearly every major US bank has now promised that they will align their business with the Paris Agreement. But the fact that those exact same banks are continuing to bankroll a tar sands oil pipeline that is completely incompatible with the Paris Agreement and curtailing climate chaos shows just how hollow their promises are.”

Amara Jones- Youth Emergency Auxiliary Service-Sierra Leone: “With current carbon emission rates, we are emitting more carbon than the Earth can properly sequester. Thus, we need solutions that will help the Earth speed up its sequestration process. To restore healthy levels of CO2, we need to sequester one trillion tons of carbon dioxide.”

Leila Mimmack, Fossil Free London: “Today, Londoners are standing with the water protectors and activists who have been relentlessly campaigning against Line 3.  We want to bring the voices that have been protesting this destructive pipeline to the doorsteps of these banks in London’s financial hub. Billions of dollars have been invested into Line 3 and these institutions are complicit in crushing indigenous treaty rights and the further locking in of the climate crisis. We stand in solidarity calling out these banks to Defund Line 3.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Under a debt relief plan won by advocates in the early 2000s, Sudan could see a drastic cut in its $50 billion debt this summer, according to the IMF and the World Bank. 

“Sudan’s debts would be cut by 85% under the debt relief plan,” said Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious development group Jubilee USA Network, which was a major force for the creation of the debt reduction process. “Debt relief cannot come soon enough for Sudan as the country struggles with the pandemic and a 50% poverty rate.”

Thirty-seven, out of thirty-nine eligible countries, received debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative or HIPC. In order for Sudan to receive a debt reduction it must meet IMF economic reforms and clear missed debt payments. The United States loaned $1.1 billion to Sudan to clear debt payment arrears to the World Bank and convened creditors to secure debt relief.

“The United States is an important leader in Sudan debt relief and is playing a crucial role in expanding debt relief policies during the pandemic,” shared LeCompte, who worked with Republican and Democratic administrations for more than a decade on debt policies. “This relief for Sudan can support economic growth and stabilize a hard-won peace in a country where conflict raged for 17 years.”

After Sudan obtains debt relief, Eritrea remains the lone country that could qualify under the HIPC debt relief plan won by Jubilee USA.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pushing back on the right-wing narrative about the reason for real or perceived labor shortages in some markets nationwide, progressives on Friday told corporations that if they want to hire more people, they’ll need to start paying better wages.

Soon after the Labor Department released its April jobs report, the U.S. Chamber of Congress blamed last month’s weak employment growth on the existence of a $300 weekly supplemental jobless benefit and began urging lawmakers to eliminate the federally enhanced unemployment payments that were extended through early September when congressional Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. 

“We do not have a shortage of willing workers in this country. We have a shortage of employers who are willing to pay workers enough to live.”
—Morris Pearl, Patriotic Millionaires

“No. We don’t need to end [the additional] $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in response to the grumbles of the nation’s largest business lobbying group. “We need to end starvation wages in America.”

“If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there’s a simple solution,” Sanders added. “Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”

According to the Chamber’s analysis, the extra $300 unemployment insurance (UI) benefit results in roughly one in four recipients taking home more pay than they earned working.

In response to that claim, Sanders’ staff director Warren Gunnels said: “If one in four recipients are making more off unemployment than they did working, that’s not an indictment of $300 a week in UI benefits. It’s an indictment of corporations paying starvation wages.”

“Raise your wages and benefits or flip your own damn burgers and sweep your own damn floors,” Gunnels added.

Other progressives like former labor secretary Robert Reich and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also chimed in.

“We do not have a shortage of willing workers in this country,” Morris Pearl of the Patriotic Millionaires said in a Friday afternoon statement responding to the Chamber. “We have a shortage of employers who are willing to pay workers enough to live.”

“Claiming that today’s disappointing jobs report is a result of expanded unemployment insurance is nothing more than a cruel tactic to pressure the administration into helping companies that they represent to continue to underpay and exploit their workforce,” Pearl continued. “Our leaders are supposed to be helping to increase wages for low paid workers, not helping employers to keep wages down.”

“Instead of blaming struggling workers,” Pearl continued, “large corporations that do not pay their employees a liveable wage… should take this moment to self-reflect. Maybe—just maybe—paying their workers more than starvation wages would incentive workers to reenter the workforce.”

Writing for Jacobin earlier this week, Sandy Barnard noted that another overlooked factor is the increased morbidity rates among food and agricultural workers, which increased more than any other occupation during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a recent study from the University of California–San Francisco.

“Living, breathing people… have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits,” Barnard wrote.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) responded to the Chamber’s demands for an end to enhanced unemployment benefits by arguing that “the interests of big business are at war with the interests of the working class.”

“They will spend millions of dollars to take $300 a [week] away from you and your family, to force you to work for them for pennies,” she added. “Their greed has no bounds.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In a bid to better the Biden administration’s plan to expand school lunch programs for U.S. children, three Democratic lawmakers and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday introduced a bill that would make all school meals free for every student, regardless of their household income. 

“Every student should have the opportunity to learn, grow, and focus in school, without worrying about where their next meal will come from.”
—Rep. Gwen Moore

Sens. Sanders (I-Vt.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) along with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) introduced the Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 (pdf), a reprise of a similar 2019 bill from Sanders and Omar.

If passed, the new version would eliminate reduced-price meals and “permanently provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all school children regardless of income, eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement,” according to a statement issued by Omar’s office. 

Unlike the 2019 version, which had no Senate co-sponsors, the new iteration of the bill is backed by nine other Democrats, including  Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.).

In the House, it is co-sponsored by 34 Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), Cori Bush (Mo.), Raúl Grijalva (Az.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). 

The bill is also endorsed by more than 370 organizations including the School Nutrition Association, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, Food Research and Action Center, Hunger Free America, UnidosUS, Children’s Defense Fund, and National Action Network.

No Republican lawmakers support the measure, which follows an announcement last month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that schools nationwide can keep offering students free lunches until the end of June 2022 as part of what it called the Biden administration’s “commitment to provide safe, healthy meals free of charge to children as the pandemic continues to threaten the food and nutrition security of our most vulnerable.”

The USDA also announced last month that the Biden administration will launch a national summer food program to feed more than 30 million children from low-income households. 

In a statement introducing the bill, Omar said that “no child in the richest country in the world should face hunger.”

“One in six children in my state of Minnesota don’t know where their next meal will come from,” Omar continued. “Families across Minnesota and nationwide are still struggling from the fallout of the pandemic, and children are often bearing the brunt of this crisis.”

“I am proud to partner with my colleagues to implement a universal school meals program to ensure all of our children have the nutrition they need to succeed,” she added. 

“One in six children in my state of Minnesota don’t know where their next meal will come from.”
—Rep. Ilhan Omar

Moore said in the same statement that “every student should have the opportunity to learn, grow, and focus in school, without worrying about where their next meal will come from.”

Sanders concurred, adding that “every child deserves a quality education free of hunger.”

“What we’ve seen during this pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works,” he said. “We cannot go backwards.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The pharmaceutical industry, which thought it had entered the can-do-no-wrong stage of public esteem thanks to its development of COVID-19 vaccines in record time, just got taken down a peg by the Biden administration.

On Wednesday, the administration said it supports waiving patent protections for those same vaccines to help combat the pandemic around the world.

Drugmakers, which were counting on lavish profits from the vaccines, squealed like stuck pigs. Phrma, their leading trade group, called the policy “an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.”

 The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, called it “a dangerous precedent” and a “myopic decision.”

Shares of vaccine companies fell after the announcement Wednesday. Moderna, whose COVID vaccine is the firm’s only commercial product, fell nearly 10%.

On the other side of the discussion was U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who issued the formal announcement. “This is a global health crisis,” she said, “and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.”

Even some healthcare experts who support the waiver acknowledged that it probably won’t immediately get shots into the arms of people in India and South Africa, two countries that are being overwhelmed by COVID-19 and face a shortage of vaccines.

It may even have some downsides. “Vaccines are very complex biological products, very different from other drugs,” says William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re not products that can be made in any facility anywhere.”

Vaccine making requires not merely patent rights, but transfers of know-how related to the intricacies of the process. The consequences of manufacturing mishaps can be dire. “God forbid, if some bad batches are made or contaminated,” Moss says, “that could have a ripple effect on vaccine confidence.”

Many experts are looking to other solutions, such as compulsory licensing of COVID vaccine technology in return for royalty payments.

In that light, the administration’s move on patent waivers can be seen as largely symbolic. But one should never overlook the power of a symbol, and this one packs a major punch. Let’s examine why, while explaining what the waivers would and wouldn’t accomplish.

First, here’s the backdrop.

As the vaccines roll out, the inequities among countries and regions stand out in ever-sharper relief. More than half the adult U.S. population has received at least one dose, but in India and South America the statistic is less than 10% and in South Africa less than 1%.

That’s not a localized disaster, but a threat to the entire globe. Unvaccinated populations on this scale can spread the virus far and wide while harboring variants that could pose a challenge to existing vaccines.

If the developed world is reserving vaccine supplies for itself even after it has secured a sufficient supply, that’s a humanitarian offense and a threat to national self-interest. Just 10 rich countries have administered nearly 80% of the world’s COVID vaccines, according to the U.N. (it didn’t identify the 10). Meanwhile, not a single shot has been given in about 130 nations with 2.5 billion people.

Such statistics are the foundation of international pressure to waive patent protections for the vaccines, the policy to which the U.S. now prescribes.

Lurking in the background are the massive revenues and profits that Moderna and other vaccine producers have already begun to receive from these products.

Moderna on Thursday reported its first-ever quarterly profit, of $1.2 billion on sales of $1.9 billion for the quarter ended March 31, almost entirely from the COVID vaccine.

Pfizer said its COVID vaccine had contributed $3.5 billion to its quarterly revenue of $14.6 billion, though it didn’t break out the vaccine’s share of its $5.3-billion quarterly profit. The company said the vaccine could contribute as much as $26 billion to its top line this year.

How much in profits these companies deserve from the vaccine is an open question, in part because much of the fundamental research that went into the products was government-funded.

Pfizer and Moderna claim the rights to vast amounts of intellectual property that will be useful, if not necessary, for others to develop vaccines in the future.

As I reported earlier, federally funded basic and applied research at the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department and academic labs created the foundation for the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. In fact, almost no drugs reach market in the U.S. without such funding.

Federal funding of the Moderna effort has been even more generous: The company collaborated directly with the NIH in developing its vaccine and received federal grants totaling nearly $1 billion during the development and trial stage.

“We do have some particular stake in the intellectual property underlying the mRNA technology” used by Moderna and Pfizer, NIH Director Francis Collins said last May.

Government scientists, moreover, are listed as inventors on some patent applications filed by Moderna; if the patents are granted, the NIH told Axios last year, “the U.S. government will hold ownership interest in the patents.”

Indeed, government rights to one recently issued patent, known as ‘070, that is allegedly key to Moderna’s vaccine, could be worth $1.8 billion this year alone if the government enforces it, according to a study by the New York University law school.

The government hasn’t sought royalties thus far, but the NYU paper suggests that it could use its patent claims to force Moderna to make its vaccine more widely available around the world.

So let’s turn now to the patent waiver. No experts really consider it the be-all and end-all for getting more vaccines into arms globally. Even if no patent claims existed for the vaccines themselves, drug companies hold patent rights on many manufacturing processes and other elements essential to turning out the final product.

Raw materials for the vaccines and manufacturing capabilities are in short supply around the world, experts say, and those may be even more crucial factors limiting distribution to needy countries and regions. Vaccine manufacture is a complicated process, far more than turning out pills; global capacity was already strained before the making of COVID shots became an international priority.

“We have contractual and infrastructural problems, not an intellectual property problem,” healthcare experts Ana Santos Rutschman and Julia Barnes-Weise wrote this week — there’s not enough vaccine manufacturing infrastructure, and contracts reached by vaccine developers and their business partners tend to direct existing supplies toward rich nations.

The most serious issue connected with patent waivers may be the complexity of obtaining them. Under international rules, waivers require unanimous consent before the World Trade Organization.

For that reason, America’s most respected pandemic expert, Anthony Fauci, is wary of relying on waivers to jump-start international vaccine access.

“Going back and forth, consuming time and lawyers in a legal argument about waivers — that is not the endgame,” Fauci told the Financial Times earlier this month. “People are dying around the world and we have to get vaccines into their arms in the fastest and most efficient way possible.”

Even Trade Representative Tai acknowledged that negotiations over the waivers “will take time, given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”

The best thing that may come out of the patent waiver debate could be a fresh look at how pharmaceutical research and development is funded, and how its benefits should be distributed. The industry is using the success of its COVID vaccine efforts as an object lesson in the virtues of the free market in drug R&D, but that’s wrong.

“Telling the story of the mRNA vaccines as a tale of a successful patent system is a serious rewrite of history,” says economist Dean Baker, a longterm critic of industry’s stranglehold on patent rights. “This is a story where two companies [Moderna and Pfizer] stand to make tens of billions in profits off of decades of publicly funded research, while putting relatively little of their own money at risk.”

Thus far, the debate over intellectual property in pharmaceuticals has been conducted almost entirely on the industry’s turf. The Biden White House’s new approach to vaccine patents may shift the playing field in favor of the public interest.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Research from the World Health Organization points to tens of millions of displaced people across the globe who won’t currently be able to access coronavirus vaccines—leading to concerns about the ability of the international community to end the pandemic, The Guardian reported Friday.

Public health experts say that many countries are not accounting for refugees, migrants, and internally displaced people in their plans to vaccinate their populations.

The WHO reviewed 104 vaccination plans around the world, finding that more than 70% of them excluded migrants. The exclusion means more than 30 million people, including nearly five million in India, where the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak is now taking place, may not have access to the vaccines.

In Indonesia, refugees are among those being “systematically excluded” from the country’s vaccination program, which uses a digital ID system for recipients, journalist Jacob Kushner tweeted.

The plans also excluded about five million refugees and asylum-seekers, including 1.8 million in Colombia, and 11.8 million internally displaced people, including 2.7 million Nigerians—bringing the total number of people with no path to vaccination to more than 46 million. 

The failure of governments to plan to vaccinate people who are displaced or migrating “is not an oversight,” tweeted writer John Smith. 

“Most of those who live in prosperous nations don’t care if [displaced people] live or die and that doesn’t bode well for us in the long or short term,” Smith said.

The COVAX facility, which is co-led by the WHO, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, and Gavi: the Vaccine Alliance, approved in March a channel of vaccine doses that will be reserved for the most vulnerable people in the world, who have no access to the life-saving vaccines.

The channel will redirect 5% of the doses allocated to COVAX to the most vulnerable people, including displaced people. The doses will be administered by NGOs including Doctors Without Borders.

COVAX estimates that 33 million people could obtain doses from the channel, but it’s unclear whether or how the other 13 million displaced people counted by the WHO will be able to access the vaccines.

The United Nations’ refugee agency this week called for Covid-19 vaccines to be made available to people who have been displaced, warning that fully protecting public health for the global community “means protecting refugees.”

“To build back stronger from the pandemic, fair and equal access to Covid-19 vaccines is needed for everyone everywhere, including displaced people,” the UNHCR said.

“As we learned from the outset of Covid-19 and all the restrictions put in place, availability of testing, and access to healthcare for coronavirus, no one is safe until everyone is safe, and that is absolutely the same for vaccination programs,” Nadia Hardman, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

BOISE, ID – Idaho Governor Brad Little has signed a gray wolf extermination bill into law allowing hunters, trappers, and even paid private contractors to slaughter 90% of the gray wolves in Idaho, up to 1,350 wolves in total.

According to Western Watersheds Project, the new law authorizes year-round wolf trapping on private lands, including during the season when pups and nursing pups and females are most vulnerable. The law allows killing wolves by all means used to kill coyotes, including night hunting with night-vision equipment, aerial gunning, as well as hunting from snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles and other brutal methods. It also allows an individual to purchase unlimited wolf tags and to use those tags for hunting, trapping, and snaring in any unit where the season is open.

This new wolf extermination law in Idaho is only possible because ten years ago this week federal Endangered Species Act protections were stripped from gray wolves in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and northern Utah via a rider attached to a must-pass budget bill by U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID).

This undemocratic move a decade ago—which blocked any judicial review of the rider—opened the floodgates for widespread wolf killing in the northern Rockies, including by hunters, trappers, and state and federal agencies. Over the past few years, state “management” of wolves in the northern Rockies has included Idaho Fish and Game (IDFG) hiring a professional hunter-trapper to go into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness to slaughter wolves and IDFG conducting aerial gunning operations to kill wolves in some of the most remote roadless federal wildlands remaining in the lower-48 states.

More recently—during a 12-month period from July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020—hunters, trappers, and state and federal agencies killed 570 wolves in Idaho, including at least 35 wolf pups. The state of Idaho also allows a $1,000 “bounty” paid to trappers per dead wolf, including wolves slaughtered on America’s federal public lands and deep within designated Wilderness areas.

The dire situation for wolves in Montana following the 2011 delisting rider is much the same. Fresh off revelations that Governor Greg Gianforte violated state hunting regulations in February when he trapped and shot a collared Yellowstone wolf, Gov Gianforte has since signed numerous draconian bills to slaughter more wolves. New barbaric laws in Montana allow hunters and trappers to kill an unlimited number of wolves with a single license, allow a wolf “bounty,’ allows trappers to use cruel strangulation neck snares, extend the wolf-trapping season, and authorize night-time hunting of wolves on private lands and baiting of wolves.

“The barbaric situation facing wolves in Montana and Idaho prove that the gray wolf still needs federal Endangered Species Act protections. As we clearly warned ten years ago, the state ‘management’ of wolves essentially amounts to the brutal state-sanctioned eradication of this keystone native species,” said Sarah McMillian, the Montana-based conservation director for WildEarth Guardians.

“WildEarth Guardians and our allies filed a lawsuit ten years ago in an attempt and overturn this undemocratic, spiteful wolf rider because we believed the wolf delisting rider violated the U.S. Constitution. While our lawsuit wasn’t successful because Congress simply closed the courthouse doors, the hateful and on-going attempts to completely decimate wolf populations in Idaho and Montana warrants national outrage and action by Congress to restore wolf protections in the northern Rockies,” said John Horning, WildEarth Guardians’ executive director.

“State ‘management’ of wolves in Idaho and Montana harkens back to an era when people sought to exterminate wolves altogether, and nearly succeeded. These types of actions were not only deplorable in the early 1900s, but they have zero place in science-based management of a keystone species in 2021, especially in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and nature crisis,” said McMillian. “We must not abandon fragile wolf-recovery efforts and allow anti-wolf states, hunters, and trappers to push these iconic species back to the brink of extinction.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Following careful evaluation Amnesty International has decided to re-designate Alexei Navalny as a “Prisoner of Conscience.”

In February, Amnesty took an internal decision to stop using the “Prisoner of Conscience” term for Navalny, due to concerns relating to discriminatory statements he made in 2007 and 2008 which may have constituted advocacy of hatred. The Russian government and its supporters used that internal decision, which we had not intended to make public, to further violate Navalny’s rights. That was the height of hypocrisy, coming from a government that not only attempted to kill Navalny by poisoning, but has carried out unconscionable acts over the past two decades, including torture, enforced disappearances and widespread repression of political freedoms in Russia and abroad, as well as war crimes in Syria.

As a result of this episode, Amnesty has commenced a review of its overall approach to the use of the term ‘Prisoner of Conscience’. As an initial interim step, our approach has been refined to not exclude a person from designation as a Prisoner of Conscience solely based on their conduct in the past. We recognize that an individual’s opinions and behavior may evolve over time. It is part of Amnesty’s mission to encourage people to positively embrace a human rights vision and to not suggest that they are forever trapped by their past conduct.

Moreover, when Amnesty International designates an individual as Prisoner of Conscience, this in no way involves or implies the endorsement of their views. Amnesty only concurs with opinions that are specifically consistent with the protection and promotion of human rights. Some of Navalny’s previous statements are reprehensible and we do not condone them in the slightest. As a human rights organization, Amnesty International will continue to fight racism and all forms of discrimination wherever they exist.

This means that by confirming Navalny’s status as Prisoner of Conscience, we are not endorsing his political program, but are highlighting the urgent need for his rights, including access to independent medical care, to be recognized and acted upon by the Russian authorities.

Alexi Navalny has not been imprisoned for any recognizable crime, but for demanding the right to equal participation in public life for himself and his supporters, and for demanding a government that is free from corruption. These are acts of conscience and should be recognized as such.

In contrast, President Putin and the Russian government are restricting political freedom and acting in a brutal repression of anyone who seeks accountability and justice. It is they who are deliberately choosing to act without any trace of conscience.

Amnesty International made a wrong decision, which called our intentions and motives into question at a critical time, and apologizes for the negative impacts this has had on Alexei Navalny personally, and the activists in Russia and around the world who tirelessly campaign for his freedom.

It is Amnesty International’s firm commitment to actively fight injustice and oppression wherever it occurs. The Russian state is condemning Alexei Navalny to a slow death. That must be immediately stopped.

We continue to call on everyone to campaign with us for Alexei Navalny’s immediate and unconditional release from prison, and for his immediate and unconditional access to independent expert medical care.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) Friday announced legislation to expand on the success of the universal free lunch approach recently extended by the USDA, and bring long-term relief to millions of food-insecure families. The Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 would permanently provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all school children regardless of income, eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement. 

The Universal School Meals Program Act is cosponsored in the Senate by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.); and in the House by Reps. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Joseph Morelle (D-N.Y.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), Andre Carson (D-Ind.), Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.), Marilyn Strickland (D-Wash.), and J. Luis Correa (D-Calif.).

The bill is also endorsed by over 360 organizations, including the School Nutrition Association, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), Hunger Free America, UnidosUS, Children’s Defense Fund, and National Action Network.

“In the richest country in the world, it is an outrage that millions of children struggle with hunger every day,” said Sen. Sanders. “Every child deserves a quality education free of hunger. What we’ve seen during this pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works. We cannot go backwards. I am proud to introduce this legislation alongside my colleagues to ensure no student goes hungry again.” 

“No child in the richest country in the world should face hunger,” said Rep. Omar. “One in six children in my state of Minnesota don’t know where their next meal will come from. Families across Minnesota and nationwide are still struggling from the fallout of the pandemic, and children are often bearing the brunt of this crisis. I am proud to partner with my colleagues to implement a universal school meals program to ensure all of our children have the nutrition they need to succeed.” 

“Many children in New York and across the country rely on school meals to keep from going hungry,” said Sen. Gillibrand. “This important legislation will deliver essential resources for school meal programs to ensure no student is ever denied a school meal. With USDA currently providing universal school meals through the 2021-2022 school year, now is the time to take bold action and make universal school meals a permanent reality. As a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, I will fight for the inclusion of the Universal School Meals Program Act in the upcoming Child Nutrition Reauthorization and look forward to a robust debate on this important legislation. I thank Senator Sanders for his leadership to end child hunger and I will keep fighting to pass the Universal School Meals Program Act so that all children have a reliable source of meals and schools have the resources to administer these critical programs.”

“I remember the challenges of keeping my three kids fed, but I felt reassured knowing that when they were in school, they would receive nutritious meals,” said Rep. Moore. “Every student should have the opportunity to learn, grow, and focus in school, without worrying about where their next meal will come from. It’s why I am so honored to join my colleagues in introducing the Universal School Meals Program Act.”

The USDA estimates that 12 million children in the United States lived in food insecure homes at the height of the pandemic. By offering universal school meals this past year, schools across the nation have played an important role in combatting the spike in child hunger brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Through a combination of federal waivers, many schools for the first time were able to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their income. Following this success, the USDA recently announced it will extend these waivers for the 2021-2022 school year and continue to provide meals to all students for free.  

While the extension of these short-term waivers will come as a relief to many families, without a permanent solution to provide free meals to all students, schools will eventually have to revert to the complicated myriad of paperwork and programs that leave out or discourage too many children from accessing meals throughout the day.  

Almost 30 million children in this country rely on free or reduced-price lunch. If the pandemic waivers are allowed to expire, many students from homes with incomes just above 130 percent of the poverty line, $34,450 for a family of four, will not be able to receive free meals at school. Research supports universal access to school meals. When all students are able to access breakfast and lunch at school, all students benefit.  

The Universal School Meals Program Act provides for the long-term with the most cost-effective and inclusive model for ensuring all students have access to nutritious meals without overwhelming barriers such as stigma, burdensome paperwork, or threats to have their children taken away. 

Prior to the pandemic, school participation rates in the universal school meals program more than doubled from 2014 to 2018. This legislation builds off that success and offers major benefits to students, families, public schools, and communities. Studies show that students with access to free breakfast have improved attendance rates and perform better in school. Free and accessible school meals have also shown to reduce financial stress for students and families, improve health outcomes in students, reduce stigma associated with the programs, and lead to fewer behavioral incidents and lower suspension rates.

For communities, the inclusion of local foods in school meal programs protects and promotes small family farms, enriches local economies, and provides nutritious ingredients for our kids. Every dollar spent on local food generates over two dollars in local economic activity, and local food programs provide hands-on education about proper nutrition, regional crops, traditional Native foods, farming techniques, and environmental stewardship. That is why this legislation provides up to a $0.30 per meal incentive for schools that procure 25 percent of their food from local sources. If all schools met the 25 percent local food criteria for school meals, it would provide local farmers with an additional $3.3 billion in income per year, a 28 percent increase in local food sales – an enormous investment for our rural communities. 

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, 75 percent of school districts reported carrying school lunch debt, which in some cases can be hundreds of thousands of dollars and has led to reports of heinous and unacceptable scare tactics to collect. This bill would reimburse schools for all of their delinquent school meal debt and stop the harassment of parents and students. 

The Biden administration recently announced more than 30 million children will get nutrition assistance over the summer as a result of the American Rescue Plan. Under the Universal School Meals Program Act, nutrition assistance over the summer would be made permanent for all children regardless of income, including for families that struggle to get their children to meal sites, often an issue in rural areas. This bill also expands the number of allowable meal services for child care providers, and empowers schools to collect relevant data using existing resources instead of putting the burden on individual families to report their income. 

Read the bill summary here.   
Read the legislative text here.
Read full list of organizational support here.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Analysts expected Friday’s April jobs report to “deliver the strongest showing since August,” projecting that the U.S. economy added as many as a million jobs last month.

So when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced Friday morning that the economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, experts and reporters scrambled to decipher and explain the massively underwhelming figures.

“If Biden intends to take this economic crisis seriously, he will include a $10 trillion investment over the next decade into the American Jobs Plan to end the unemployment crisis and put millions of people to work in good, union jobs.”
—Ellen Sciales, Sunrise Movement

But progressives argued that the disappointing report makes at least one thing clear: Much more stimulus is needed to repair the damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic and rebuild for a sustainable, more equitable future.

“It is time for [President Joe] Biden to pull us out of this economic spiral,” Ellen Sciales, press secretary for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in a statement Friday. “Jobs are not going to magically come back. We need action now.”

Sunrise is specifically calling on the president to dramatically expand the scope of his American Jobs Plan by bringing it into line with the goals of the THRIVE Act, legislation introduced last week by Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). That bill proposes spending $10 trillion over the next 10 years to create millions of jobs, build out the nation’s renewable energy infrastructure, and transform U.S. care institutions.

Sciales said that “if Biden intends to take this economic crisis seriously, he will include a $10 trillion investment over the next decade into the American Jobs Plan to end the unemployment crisis and put millions of people to work in good, union jobs stopping the climate crisis.”

Biden “must” include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Markey’s Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) in the package and “call on Congress to swiftly pass it, creating good jobs for 1.5 million people across the country, while helping them put food on the table, revitalize their communities, and boost our economy,” Sciales continued. “Millions of people are out of work, and the unemployment rate is rising. The real risk isn’t doing too much—it’s doing too little.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, echoed that message in a tweet Friday, declaring, “We need the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan to go big and bold, rebuilding our economy and helping lift up our communities.”

“There’s just no question about it,” Jayapal added.

According to the new BLS report, the official unemployment rate ticked up slightly in April to 6.1% and the U.S. economy remains 8.2 million jobs short of the pre-pandemic level—figures that Democratic lawmakers cited as further evidence of the need for additional investment.

“Progress is being made, but it is clear that we have a long way to go before our economy is back on solid ground,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chair of the Joint Economic Committee, said in a statement. “While the American Rescue Plan provided much needed emergency relief for the American people, big, bold action is required to recover.”

Calls for robust child care spending in the next economic recovery package were also bolstered by the new report, which found that the number of women employed or looking for work declined by 64,000 in April.

“Today’s jobs report is a stark reminder of what American families know all too well: child care is infrastructure,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “If we want moms and dads to go back to work as this pandemic subsides, we need to provide them with the child care they need.”

“Compared to February 2020, there are nearly two million fewer women in the labor force,” Warren added. “That’s catastrophic for the labor force and it’s a crisis for women’s long-term economic security—endangering their pay, their promotions, and their chance at productive and fulfilling careers. I’m calling for a $700 billion investment in our child care infrastructure because that’s the number we need to make affordable, high-quality child care a reality.”

Biden administration officials, the president himself, progressive lawmakers, and policy analysts were quick to reject the notion that federally enhanced unemployment benefits are dissuading people from rejoining the workforce—a long-standing right-wing narrative that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and congressional Republicans eagerly deployed after the BLS report dropped.

During a press briefing on Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that “if it were really the extra benefits that were holding back hiring, you’d expect to see” states and sectors with high wage replacement rates for unemployment benefits having more difficulty adding jobs.

“In fact, what you see is the exact opposite,” said Yellen.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for his part, tweeted that “we don’t need to end [the additional] $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need.”

“We need to end starvation wages in America,” Sanders added. “If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there’s a simple solution: Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As a child, I loved Barbie dolls and crafting Barbie stories with my friends. Getting a new outfit for Barbie—especially when I could pick it out myself at the nearby toy store—filled me with joy. But I grew up on Marlo Thomas’ “Free to Be You and Me” and Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman, hear me roar …” so it didn’t take long for me to start questioning Barbie’s absurd high-heel-ready feet, disproportionately large breasts, and long legs, and her astonishing materialism that had subtly impacted both my self-image and my desires.

As a tween and teen during the 1970s’ second-wave feminist and nascent environmental movements, I felt as if I was waking up from the 1950s’ values of my parents. When my mother wanted to teach me to cook, I refused. She’d never taught my brother, four years older than I, so I sure wasn’t going to buy into the sexism inherent in her desire to prepare me to be a good wife who would cook the family meals. (Ironically, I wound up being the designated cook in our household, but my husband is the designated dishwasher and housecleaner, so I call it good.)

By the time I graduated from college, I’d gotten rid of the high-heeled shoes I’d worn to boost both my 5’1″ height and my self-image, despite my mother’s objections. “But they make you taller,” she’d implored. I stopped wearing make-up, too, ignoring my mother’s comment, “But it makes you prettier.” By the time I was in graduate school, and a full-fledged second-wave feminist and environmentalist, I was busy deconstructing the sexist, consumerist messages conveyed by Barbie.

My colleague, Holly Rodriguez, 13 years younger than I, also loved Barbie dolls as a child, but the message she gleaned was quite different. Barbie changed her life.

Reframing Barbie

Holly’s mother entered college in 1964 with dreams of becoming a teacher. Two years later, rheumatic fever nearly killed her, and instead of returning to college after she recovered from her lengthy illness, she got engaged to Holly’s father. Not finishing her degree was one of the biggest regrets of her life, so when she had Holly, she was adamant that her daughter graduate from college.

She perceived her Black Barbies as independent, career-oriented, self-sufficient, kickass examples of what Black women could accomplish. Holly’s mom wanted to make sure her children had a sense of love and appreciation for their brown skin, so she painted any kind of figurine that came into the house brown. Growing up in the south, Black dolls—especially Black Barbie dolls—were uncommon, and Holly’s original Barbies were white, so Holly’s mom asked Holly’s dad, a jazz musician, to buy Black Barbies whenever he performed in Washington, DC. While her friends had white Barbies, Holly’s collection of Black Barbies grew.

When Holly was six, her mother called her into the family room. She had a pink Barbie Corvette convertible on her lap and a Ken doll in her hand. (For those who don’t know, Ken is Barbie’s boyfriend.)

“I want to show you something,” Holly’s mom said as she attempted to put the Ken doll in the driver’s side of Barbie’s car. “You see this?”

“He doesn’t fit, Mommy,” answered Holly.

“That’s right,” she said, putting the car and the Ken doll down. “He doesn’t fit into the driver’s side of Barbie’s car because it’s her car, not Ken’s.”

She pointed to all of Holly’s Barbie toys. “And you see how Barbie’s name is on everything?” she continued. “That’s because all of these things belong to Barbie. She owns them. You know why?”

“No,” Holly answered.

“Barbie owns all of her own things because she went to college, and because she went to college, she has had many careers—teacher, model, businesswoman, and much more.”

Holly remembers her mom looking at her intently and saying, “One day, you are going to grow up and go to college, and when you do, you’ll be able to have any career you want, just like Barbie. And then you will be able to get whatever you want on your own, by yourself, and not have to depend on anybody else to get you what you want.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Holly’s mother made sure that Barbie, a doll her daughter adored, would not convey the persistent sexist and racist messages of the time. She turned Barbie into the key to empowering her impressionable daughter.

Holly continues to love Barbie dolls because Barbie was her role model. She perceived her Black Barbies as independent, career-oriented, self-sufficient, kickass examples of what Black women could accomplish.

The importance of our stories

Before I met Holly, I wouldn’t have imagined that what I perceived as an example of a physically compromised, materialistic, sexist toy for girls could ever come with such a different story, let alone one so powerful.

I’m reminded that the stories we are told (and that we tell ourselves), and the ways in which realities are framed and perceived, can diverge profoundly. I came to see Barbie as a woman who couldn’t even stand on her own two feet. Thanks to the story Holly’s mother told her, Holly saw Barbie as a woman who could not only stand on her own two feet but who also represented a mother’s faith in her daughter’s ability to achieve her own dreams and aspirations.

While Barbie may not have been my role model, Holly’s late mom now is.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed S.B. 90, the voter suppression law pushed by his state’s Republican legislators, the advocacy group People for the American Way demanded information about how the signing of the bill came to be closed to all media other than Fox News. 

The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) Friday calling on the governor’s office to release all communications and records related to the planning and execution of the signing, which was made available to “Fox & Friends” viewers via an exclusive live feed. 

The signing took place in West Palm Beach at Club 45, an organization which supports the agenda of former President Donald Trump.

PFAW’s request noted that even “The FLORIDA Channel, the state’s taxpayer-funded television channel of record,” was excluded from covering the signing of a bill which will directly affect Florida voters in upcoming elections, as it restricts the use of mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes and forbids people and groups from giving any “items”—including food and water—to voters who are waiting in line to cast their ballots.

Republicans including DeSantis, PFAW said in a statement Thursday, are “doing everything they can to reinstate disenfranchisement and disempowerment of the people in an attempt to regain power. The legislation signed by Governor DeSantis is a voter suppression bill pure and simple.”

Adele Stan, director of PFAW’s Right Wing Watch project, signed the FOIA request and issued a statement Friday accusing DeSantis, who is believed to have presidential ambitions, of orchestrating “a self-serving publicity stunt at the same time he is signing away his constituents’ constitutional rights.”

“He chose a very specific and national audience before which to display his bona fides in advancing the false narrative of widespread voter fraud in order to disenfranchise Floridians,” Stan said. “We look forward to finding out more about how and why this event was planned.” 

By broadcasting the event for a national audience on a network which amplified false claims by DeSantis and Trump last year about fraud in the 2020 election, PFAW President Ben Jealous said, “DeSantis’s antics went from deplorable to disgusting.”

“Depriving people of their voting rights is a deeply vile attack on civil rights, and DeSantis turned it into a sleazy publicity grab,” said Jealous. “We filed this FOIA request because the people of Florida deserve to know the rationale behind DeSantis’s actions, including the reasons why other press were excluded from the event. We, and they, could make a pretty good guess, but we’d rather just know the facts.”  

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – In response to the news that the unemployment rate rose to 6.1% and that the US economy only added 266,000 jobs in April, Ellen Sciales, Press Secretary of Sunrise Movement, issued the following statement:

Today’s news makes clear that Biden must drastically expand the American Jobs Plan. The American people – the ones who worked like hell to elect him and invested their hope and their future in his agenda—cannot afford to wait any longer. It is time for Biden to pull us out of this economic spiral. Jobs are not going to magically come back. We need action now. 

“If Biden intends to take this economic crisis seriously, he will include a $10 trillion investment over the next decade into the American Jobs Plan to end the unemployment crisis and put millions of people to work in good, union jobs stopping the climate crisis. Specifically, Biden must include Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey’s Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) in the package and call on Congress to swiftly pass it, creating good jobs for 1.5 million people across the country, while helping them put food on the table, revitalize their communities and boost our economy. 

“Millions of people are out of work, and the unemployment rate is rising. The real risk isn’t doing too much—it’s doing too little.”

Sunrise Movement has demanded the administration make a $10 trillion investment over the next 10 years, or a $1 trillion investment per year, in infrastructure, both material and social, to take on the crises the nation is facing. In April, they released an explainer on Why $10 Trillion, expressing the need for legislation like the BUILD Green Act, the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, Clean Cars and Clean Transit for America, and more. This would also account for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey’s Civilian Climate Corps (CCC), a $132 billion investment over the next 5 years.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The leftist Democratic Socialists of America, which helped congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get elected in 2018, looks to be a big political player again in New York City’s 2021 municipal elections.

The group has not yet endorsed anyone for mayor—the top prize in New York’s June 22 Democratic primaries. But all 51 city council seats are up for grabs this year, and the DSA has members running for six of them—including Queens public defender Tiffany Cabán and Brooklyn tenant activist Michael Hollingsworth.

With two state senators and five representatives out of 213 lawmakers, the New York State Legislature already has the country’s largest DSA legislative caucus. These Democrats share a leftist platform that includes guaranteeing housing as a human right and ending mass incarceration

The DSA has upended local politics in this Democratic stronghold, and its wins extend well beyond New York—into Virginia, Nevada and beyond. How did socialism jump from the fringes of American politics into its very center?

American socialist history

The DSA’s roots trace back to the Socialist Party of America, which was formed in New York in 1901 to promote such issues as establishing an eight-hour workday and public ownership of utilities like water and electricity.

Writer Upton Sinclair, Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were prominent early members. But many early American socialists were Jews and Eastern European immigrants—groups that were considered well outside mainstream “white” society at the time.

My research as a historian of American socialists finds that early 20th-century socialists found electoral success by running candidates who represented the economic and racial diversity of their communities and championed the issues that mattered to working-class, immigrant constituencies.

In 1918—the heyday of New York’s socialist caucus, when socialists held 10 of 121 seats in the State House—socialist politicians were teachers, settlement house lawyers and union leaders. They proposed New York’s first birth control bill, allowing advocates to give women educational pamphlets about contraception, and put forward programs to create old-age insurance and rent control.

The Socialist Party began losing members to the growing Communist Party in the 1930s. By the mid-20th century, it had responded to Americans’ growing anticommunism with a rightward turn. In 1972, party leaders actually renamed the party the Social Democrats, USA because so many people associated the word “socialist” with America’s great antagonist, the Soviet Union.

The DSA, past and present

Disillusioned, the activist and Marxist professor Michael Harrington left the organization and in 1973 formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later merged with another leftist group, the New American Movement, to form the Democratic Socialists of America.

Unlike the Socialist Party of America, which was a registered political party and ran candidates on its own ticket, the DSA is a political group. Harrington wanted to create the “left wing of the possible” within the Democratic Party.

For four decades, DSA members have mostly run in Democratic primaries, attempting to push the party leftward—on the Iraq War and NAFTA, for example—while endorsing Democratic presidential nominees from Walter Mondale to Barack Obama.

It had some early local successes. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, DSA members were elected to city councils nationwide and won mayoral races in liberal college towns like Berkeley, California; Ithaca, New York; and Burlington, Vermont, where the openly socialist politician Bernie Sanders was mayor from 1981 to 1989.

In 2016, Sanders ran for president. His campaign, coupled with Donald Trump’s subsequent victory, created a surge in DSA membership among young voters. The group’s median age dropped from 68 in 2013 to 33 by 2017. The DSA now claims over 90,000 dues-paying members, up from 6,000 in 2015.

The DSA’s electoral strategies also changed after 2016, partly due to the influx of new members and partly in frustration with mainstream Democratic candidates.

In Democratic primaries across the country, DSA candidates ran to replace older, centrist, white incumbents with young leftists who promised to fight for “Medicare for all” and to “hold elected officials accountable.”

It was a winning strategy for the Trump era. Since 2016, DSA-backed candidates have won district attorney races from Philadelphia to Travis County, Texas, and hold four seats in Congress. Forty DSA members sit in 21 state legislatures. DSA members hold five of Chicago’s 50 city council seats.

The professional backgrounds of today’s DSA legislators resemble those of their forebears. New York State Sen. Jabari Brisport, elected in 2020, was a teacher and tenant organizer. New York State Rep. Phara Souffrant Forrest was previously a tenant organizer and nurse.

The DSA’s legislative proposals—rent control, free college and reproductive rights—are classic socialist issues, updated for the 21st century. The Democratic Party has now embraced many of these proposals, but moderates like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have not.

As in the past, the DSA tends to back candidates from marginalized groups—whether African American, Caribbean, South American or South Asian—who reflect the racial makeup of the neighborhoods they represent.

Angry Dems and DSA infighting

The DSA’s growing political profile has caused tensions within the Democratic Party.

Shortly after DSA-backed candidates in March 2021 swept all five leadership positions in the Nevada Democratic Party, many longtime party staffers quit rather than work under the new leftist leadership. But first, according to the Nevada Independent and other local newspapers, the Democratic staffers transferred US$450,000 from the DSA-controlled Nevada Democratic Party coffers into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is controlled by the National Democratic Party.

Some DSA policies that diverge sharply from the Democratic party line—such as its support for the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for its militarized occupation of the Palestinian territories—draw fierce criticism from other Democrats.

The DSA has also been accused of having a “race problem.” Despite running primarily candidates of color, the organization’s leadership is largely white and male. Some DSA members say the group silences the concerns and voices of people of color.

After new groups arose within the DSA to recruit more Black leaders, the DSA’s national committee announced in February 2021 that it would start an initiative to better attract, mentor and retain people of color.

In the 20th century, American socialism cracked under the weight of infighting and social change. Can the modern DSA survive its 21st-century challenges?

Its next test is in New York City on June 22.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

GOP federal regulators on Thursday blocked the continuation of a probe into whether former President Donald Trump violated campaign finance law when his personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election—sparking calls for action by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Two Republicans on the Federal Election Commission, Trey Trainor and Sean Cooksey, concluded (pdf) that pursuing the case “was not the best use of agency resources.” Although Democratic FEC Chair Shana Broussard and Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, disagreed, continuing the investigation required four supportive votes. A third GOP commissioner recused himself and an Independent commissioner was absent.

“Now it’s up to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to hold Trump accountable and make clear that no one is above the law,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at the pro-democracy group Common Cause, in a statement. “The clock is ticking; a five–year statute of limitations for Trump’s campaign finance crimes gives the DOJ only five more months to prosecute these crimes.”

On January 22, 2018, Common Cause filed complaints with the DOJ and FEC alleging that the payment to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was an unreported and illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. Following public statements from Cohen, the group amended its complaints that March.

“The FEC’s nonpartisan career staff attorneys recommended that the commission find reason to believe that Trump, his campaign committee, and the Trump Organization committed the violations alleged in Common Cause’s complaints,” Ryan noted. He charged that the GOP commissioners’ decision to not hold the ex-president accountable for “blatantly and intentionally” violating federal campaign finance law “is just the latest display of dysfunction at the FEC.”

“The Senate must pass the For the People Act, which includes provisions to significantly restructure the agency so it can do its job for the American people and enforce the law, in addition to including many tried and tested solutions to hold power accountable and make democracy work for everyone,” he said, referencing a bill of popular pro-democracy reforms the House passed in March.

While Trump welcomed the FEC’s decision in what he described as a “phony case,” Ryan was far from alone in denouncing it.

“To end corrupt partisan decisions by the FEC on enforcement of campaign laws, we need the reforms in the For The People Act,” declared Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), lead sponsor of the upper chamber’s version of the bill.

“There is ample evidence in the record to support the finding that Trump and the Committee knew of, and nonetheless accepted, the illegal contributions at issue here,” Broussard and Weintraub said in a statement Thursday.

“To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10-year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality,” the pair said. “But putting that aside, Cohen testified under oath that he made the payment for the principal purpose of influencing the election. This more than satisfies the commission’s ‘reason to believe’ standard to authorize an investigation.”

Cohen—who served time in prison after being convicted of campaign finance violations, lying to Congress, making false statements, and tax evasion—admitted to making hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign to Daniels and another woman who say they had affairs with Trump, which the former president denies. In 2019, Cohen submitted to Congress a copy of a check Trump wrote from his personal bank account that the former fixer claimed was a reimbursement for paying off Daniels.

“The hush-money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump,” Cohen said in a statement to the New York Times after the commission dropped the case. “Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the FEC committee could rule any other way is confounding.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Following yesterday’s signing by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of the state’s massive voter suppression law at an event closed to all press except Fox News’ morning talk show, democracy organization People For the American Way filed a FOIA request for all records and communications leading up to the planning and execution of this event. Adele M. Stan, director of the organization’s storied Right Wing Watch project, notes that even FLORIDA Channel, the state’s taxpayer-funded television station, was excluded from the event in favor of a live feed to Fox and Friends. Stan and People For the American Way President Ben Jealous released the following statements:

 “The people of Florida have a right to know if their governor is deliberately using his office for a self-serving publicity stunt at the same time he is signing away his constituents’ constitutional rights,” said Stan. “And the timing can’t be ignored; DeSantis is expected to announce his bid for re-election soon, and the governor is believed to have presidential ambitions. So he chose a very specific and national audience before which to display his bona fides in advancing the false narrative of widespread voter fraud in order to disenfranchise Floridians. We look forward to finding out more about how and why this event was planned.”

“It’s bad enough that Ron DeSantis and far-right politicians in Florida are trying to rob Floridians of their right to vote,” said Jealous. “But in making the signing of a voter suppression bill the highlight of a Fox News morning talk show, DeSantis’s antics went from deplorable to disgusting. Depriving people of their voting rights is a deeply vile attack on civil rights, and DeSantis turned it into a sleazy publicity grab. We filed this FOIA request because the people of Florida deserve to know the rationale behind DeSantis’s actions, including the reasons why other press were excluded from the event. We, and they, could make a pretty good guess, but we’d rather just know the facts.”  

Read the full FOIA request here: https://files.pfaw.org/uploads/2021/05/PeopleForTheAmericanWay_Florida_Signing_FOIA_Request_2021-05-07-1.pdf 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, the GOP-controlled Texas House passed the nation’s most recent voter suppression bill, reigniting calls for U.S. Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act to nullify state-level attacks on the franchise. 

“It’s old Jim Crow dressed up in what our colleagues are calling election integrity.”
—State Rep. Jessica González

A version of the measure, Senate Bill 7, is expected to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Despite the opposition of voting rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers in Texas—who, according to the Austin American-Statesman, drew up more than 100 amendments to challenge provisions in S.B. 7 “they believed would make it more difficult to vote, particularly for nonwhite Texans and those with disabilities who require help to cast a ballot”—Republicans in the state House advanced the bill on an 81-64 party-line vote that took place just after 3 a.m. local time.

Nearly 20 amendments were successfully added to the bill, including ones that modified some racist language, limited criminal liability for errors made by voters and those who help a person with a disability to vote, and ensured that voter registration applications are sent to high schools.

But the legislation would still prevent county officials from sending mail-in ballot request forms to all registered voters and allow so-called poll watchers to occupy polling places, while the version passed by the state Senate would reduce the number of voting machines at precincts in major cities.

“Every day the Republican Party is working to strip Americans of their right to vote,” Stand Up America managing director Christina Harvey said in response to the bill’s passage. “And this shameful law passing the Texas House is just their latest attack on our democracy.”

State Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-128), the bill’s author and an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump, “began the debate by saying S.B. 7 was designed to boost flagging confidence in the integrity of elections, ensure that every vote cast was legal, and thwart vote harvesters and others who coerce or cajole voters to cast ballots a certain way,” the Statesman reported.

After he asserted that S.B. 7 is meant to “help all voters,” Cain faced hours of questioning by Democratic lawmakers. 

“Is this bill simply a part and a continuation of the big lie perpetrated by Donald Trump that he really won the election?” asked state Rep. Chris Turner (D-101).

S.B. 7—one of at least 361 restrictive voting bills introduced by Republicans in 47 states since January—comes in the wake of last year’s historic turnout, which was fueled to a significant degree by an expansion of mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic. Cain, however, told Turner that “this bill is not about 2020.”

Denying any connection between the baseless claims of voter fraud made by right-wing lawmakers and media outlets in the wake of President Joe Biden’s victory last November and the GOP’s nationwide efforts to suppress ballot access since then, Cain added that “a lot of these [bills] are a long time coming.”

Turner, however, was not convinced, saying S.B. 7 is designed to target urban areas and undermine voting by Texans of color who tend to support Democrats.

“Make no mistake, the backers of these election bills believe it will help Republicans and hurt Democrats. We all know that,” Turner said. “It’s a straight-up assault on voting rights.”

As the Statesman reported:

Rep. Rafael Anchía (D-103) took exception to S.B. 7’s statement of purpose that said the bill was designed to “preserve the purity of the ballot box”—a phrase used historically to deny the right to vote to Black Texans and create all-white primaries, he said.

“Are you aware of the history of that?” Anchía asked.

No, Cain replied, adding: “I’m sorry to hear that.” The phrase was taken directly from the Texas Constitution, he said, noting later that he’d entertain an amendment to change “purity” to “integrity or something.”

While the phrase was struck from S.B. 7, state Rep. Jessica González (D-104) said that “it’s old Jim Crow dressed up in what our colleagues are calling election integrity.”

González and others noted that the bill’s protections for poll watchers would likely result in the intimidation and harassment of Black and Latino voters.

“The backers of these election bills believe it will help Republicans and hurt Democrats.”
—State Rep. Chris Turner

Originally, the bill contained a provision that would bar election officials from removing poll watchers unless they break the law, but after pushback from Democrats, changes were made.

Under the revised bill, poll watchers would not be allowed to photograph private information or ballots and may be removed for committing a “breach of peace” in polling places, so long as they are warned prior to removal.

Thanks to the efforts of lawmakers like González—who said that “we should be encouraging more Texans to vote, not try to turn someone who makes a simple mistake into a felon”—the bill was also amended to lower criminal penalties for voters who make mistakes and protect from prosecution caregivers who assist a person with a disability to vote.

“The state Senate has approved a separate measure that also limits early voting rules and bans drive-through voting,” The Hill reported. “The House bill will have to be reconciled with the Senate bill before a measure can go to Abbott’s desk for his possible signature.” As the news outlet noted, the governor “has expressed support for signing an election reform bill, meaning a form of the legislation is likely to become Texas law.”

If that happens, Texas will join Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah as the states that have passed voter suppression bills into law this year.

MOVE Texas, a pro-democracy advocacy group, drew attention to a voting rights rally at the state Capitol on Saturday, which is part of the John Lewis National Day of Action meant to counteract the GOP’s assault on U.S. democracy.

In her statement, Harvey insisted that “Congress has the power to nullify much of this law, and the responsibility to act immediately to prevent Republicans in Texas and dozens of other states from keeping millions of eligible Americans from casting their ballots in future elections.”

“Time is of the essence,” said Harvey. “The only path forward now is to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to stop this outright assault on the freedom to vote.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Seventeen days after jurors in a state trial found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd last May, a federal grand jury on Friday indicted Chauvin and three of his former colleagues for allegedly violating the unarmed Black man’s civil rights during his deadly arrest.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) announced Friday that Chauvin, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane stand charged with “federal civil rights crimes for their roles” in Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. 

According to a DOJ statement, the three-count indictment (pdf) alleges that “all four defendants, while acting under color of law, willfully deprived Mr. Floyd of his constitutional rights.”

“Chauvin’s actions violated Mr. Floyd’s constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer and resulted in bodily injury to, and the death of, Mr. Floyd,” the DOJ statement said. 

Chauvin is currently awaiting sentencing scheduled for June 25 after being convicted on April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter for kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. 

The second count of the indictment charges that “Thao and Kueng willfully failed to intervene to stop Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force, resulting in bodily injury to, and the death of, Mr. Floyd.”

“Finally, count three of the indictment alleges that all four defendants saw Mr. Floyd lying on the ground in clear need of medical care and willfully failed to aid him,” the DOJ said. “The indictment alleges that by doing so, all four defendants willfully deprived Mr. Floyd of his constitutional right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law, which includes an arrestee’s right to be free from a police officer’s deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs.”

In the same statement, the DOJ announced a separate two-count indictment (pdf) charges Chauvin with “willfully depriving a Minneapolis resident who was then 14 years old of the constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer.” That indictment stems from a September 4, 2017 incident in which Chauvin, “without legal justification, held the teenager by the throat and struck [him] multiple times in the head with a flashlight.”

Additionally, the second indictment also “charges that Chauvin held his knee on the neck and the upper back of the teenager even after [he] was lying prone, handcuffed, and unresisting, also resulting in bodily injury.”

The federal indictments come three months before the scheduled state trial of Kueng, Lane, and Thao, who in June 2020 were charged with aiding and abetting Floyd’s murder. 

All four of the indicted individuals were fired by the Minneapolis Police Department after Chauvin murdered Floyd—who allegedly spent a counterfeit $20 bill in a local convenience store. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Seventeen days after jurors in a state trial found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd last May, a federal grand jury on Friday indicted Chauvin and three of his former colleagues for allegedly violating the unarmed Black man’s civil rights during his deadly arrest.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) announced Friday that Chauvin, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane stand charged with “federal civil rights crimes for their roles” in Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. 

According to a DOJ statement, the three-count indictment (pdf) alleges that “all four defendants, while acting under color of law, willfully deprived Mr. Floyd of his constitutional rights.”

“Chauvin’s actions violated Mr. Floyd’s constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer and resulted in bodily injury to, and the death of, Mr. Floyd,” the DOJ statement said. 

Chauvin is currently awaiting sentencing scheduled for June 25 after being convicted on April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter for kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. 

The second count of the indictment charges that “Thao and Kueng willfully failed to intervene to stop Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force, resulting in bodily injury to, and the death of, Mr. Floyd.”

“Finally, count three of the indictment alleges that all four defendants saw Mr. Floyd lying on the ground in clear need of medical care and willfully failed to aid him,” the DOJ said. “The indictment alleges that by doing so, all four defendants willfully deprived Mr. Floyd of his constitutional right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law, which includes an arrestee’s right to be free from a police officer’s deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs.”

In the same statement, the DOJ announced a separate two-count indictment (pdf) charges Chauvin with “willfully depriving a Minneapolis resident who was then 14 years old of the constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer.” That indictment stems from a September 4, 2017 incident in which Chauvin, “without legal justification, held the teenager by the throat and struck [him] multiple times in the head with a flashlight.”

Additionally, the second indictment also “charges that Chauvin held his knee on the neck and the upper back of the teenager even after [he] was lying prone, handcuffed, and unresisting, also resulting in bodily injury.”

The federal indictments come three months before the scheduled state trial of Kueng, Lane, and Thao, who in June 2020 were charged with aiding and abetting Floyd’s murder. 

All four of the indicted individuals were fired by the Minneapolis Police Department after Chauvin murdered Floyd—who allegedly spent a counterfeit $20 bill in a local convenience store. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.