The Department of Justice has announced that they are preparing to file criminal charges for the hacking of Donald Trump’s campaign that was done by the country of Iran. The only problem is that the DOJ doesn’t know who they are even going to indict. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a […]
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Vice President Harris recently received endorsements from some of the worst human beings in the country – a list that includes Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez. The campaign is thrilled about these endorsements, but average Democratic voters don’t like what they’re seeing. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
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America’s Lawyer E115: A gunman was apprehended on Donald Trump’s golf course over the weekend, sparking new fears of domestic terrorism and potential assassination attempts. We’ll bring you the latest details. Boeing is in deep trouble as workers have gone on strike demanding better wages. This strike came after 16 years of workers being forced […]
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A new report has found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing, while companies are slashing the median pay of workers. Also, Donald Trump’s allies are growing increasingly concerned about his campaign, with some who are close to the former president saying that its almost like he’s trying to lose. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This […]
The post American CEOs Are Rolling In Record Profits & GOP Fears Trump’s Child Like Campaign appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
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A new lawsuit brought by right wing religious organizations could soon make political donations a tax-deductible item, which would lead to even more corporate money flowing into our election process. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: A new lawsuit brought […]
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A report published Tuesday by an intergovernmental watchdog paints an alarming picture of the state of global democracy, showing that the quality of elections has declined around the world and losing candidates are rejecting outcomes with growing frequency, further eroding trust in electoral processes and institutions. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A college professor named Allan Lichtman has been called the Nostradamus of American politics for accurately predicting nearly every presidential race for 20 years. He’s made his prediction for this year. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: A college professor […]
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The Department of Justice announced that they had indicted several individuals last week who were allegedly using Russian government money to spread propaganda in the United States. But even if everything in the indictment is true, these efforts were lackluster, at best. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
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The peoples around the world have looked to Venezuela as a vanguard leading Nuestra América in its second independence struggle, against the US. The US rulers operate as the inheritor of the European colonial empires, assuming the right to interfere in other countries’ elections, and dictate who are the winners. No other country – save US underlings in Europe, and Israel – dares to violate international law so brazenly.
The Venezuelan right-wing had no real plan to win a democratic election, but instead prepared for a coup d’etat even before the polls closed. Working with the US government and corporate media, they allege President Maduro stole the July 28 presidential election, then committed human rights abuses to crush protests. This opposition declares it beat President Maduro 70% to 30% but refuses to present their “evidence” to the National Electoral Council (CNE) or Supreme Court. The opposition claimed fraud in every election during the 25-year period of Chavista rule – except twice, when they won.
The attempted coup bears much in common with recent US coup attempts in Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (2013, 2014, 2017, 2019). If the US-backed candidates lose, the election is “fraudulent.” This scheme drove Evo Morales from power in Bolivia. The US even appointed its own president for Venezuela after its 2018 presidential election, and then proceeded to steal tens of billions of dollars of Venezuela’s resources held overseas.
US coup attempts use new tools besides the US-trained military as in the past
First, the US crushes a country with sanctions and economic blockades, causing scarcities and shortages, leading to discontent among the people over worsening living conditions. National Security gangster John Bolton said: “Sanctions are a means of repression and coercion between military warfare and diplomacy.” Richard Nephew, Treasury deputy secretary, adds: “Over the past decade, the most important tool for enforcing American power is the sanctions mechanism.” To justify sanctions, the US relies on its media, intellectuals, universities and think tanks, to make them seem humane to the public. In Venezuela, US sanctions caused government revenue to collapse by 99%, requiring dramatic cuts in the many social programs. The sanctions killed over 100,000 civilians, Venezuelans knew that voting for Nicolas Maduro would mean a worsening of the US-EU economic warfare they face.
Second, corporate media and social media now play a coup-making role similar to that of Pentagon-trained generals in the past. Supervised by the CIA, this media blanketed a targeted country and the world with disinformation against its government, seeking to foment a “regime change” mass movement.
Six corporations control over 90% of the US media and so own the news. They dominate the world media just as the US dollar dominates the world financial system. The all-important weapon, social media, which saturates billions of mobile phones, are in the hands of Elon Musk (X, formerly Twitter), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). Working with the CIA, they can impose an alternative reality, seen in Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, and Venezuela today.
Corporate media describe the elected Maduro government – and the elected ones in Nicaragua and Cuba – as dictatorships.
Delegitimizing Venezuelan elections in advance followed a pattern used in Bolivia (2019) and Nicaragua (2021). The US created automated networks of thousands of fake social media accounts to swamp the public with fake news. These accounts generate streams of posts in a coordinated manner, creating the appearance of popular repudiation of Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, or Daniel Ortega.
Bots were used in a massive way against Evo’s government. The two main coup leaders created 95,000 twitter accounts before the coup to spread the election fraud story and call for violent protests. Over 68,000 false accounts were set up to legitimize the army’s overthrow of Morales and justify killing those protesting the coup.
US social media control in these countries drowns out pro-government and independent voices not just by saturating the online conversation, but by shutting them down. After the US annointed Juan Guaido the Venezuela president, Twitter closed thousands of Chavista accounts to foster the impression that most Venezuelans supported Guaido.
Governments in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia cannot respond effectively to the US media disinformation warfare against them any more than to the US blockades imposed on them. It takes them years to build up national media networks, and even then, their resources are minor compared to what the US commands.
Third, the US relies on cyberwarfare to incapacitate its opponents. In Bolivia in 2019 a cyberattack of the electoral system’s computers disrupted the vote count, preventing the authentic results being issued. The US-backed opposition then claimed Evo delayed the vote count because he was fixing it.
After the July 28 election, 126 digital platforms of the Venezuelan state suffered cyberattacks, the most significant being the CNE, the constitutional agency recording the vote. Hacked over 100 times that night, it could not operate normally, delaying for days the release of the results. Again, this was used to claim the vote totals were being fixed.
At times 30 million cyber attacks per minute occurred between July 28 and August 9th. Such an attack disables Venezuelan government computer systems and paralyzes operations. These large-scale cyberattacks generated hundreds of gigabytes per second (your laptop system memory may have 16 gb).
These attacks falsified IP links, duplicated links, reconfigured government portals and hijacked information. Names and addresses of government workers were released on social media to “comanditos” (opposition gangs), creating physical threats for those affected.
The US powerful media and cyber weapons, able to swamp a country’s airwaves with CIA concocted “news,” while disrupting the country’s response, open the door to violent protests against the government.
Fourth, having created the conditions for opposition leaders to assert the Maduro government stole the election, they then called people into the streets to protest and create chaos or guarimbas. “Comanditos” (small groups paid to instigate violence), caused destruction and violence, killed 25 and injured 192, burned buildings, sacked several regional CNE headquarters, blocked roads, attacked police and military, beat up people who “looked” Chavista, attacked local community leaders, food distribution centers, public schools, hospitals, offices, ransacked warehouses, the transportation system, the electrical grid, all to paralyze the country. The US media could portray to the world a picture of national chaos, inviting military intervention to restore order, meaning a US neo-colonial regime.
These protests (as in Bolivia in 2019 and Nicaragua in 2018, Cuba in 2021) are portrayed in the corporate media as peaceful democracy rallies. When police forces and mobilized Chavista organizations attempt to stop the violence, the corporate media charges democracy protests are being repressed. This has been a habitual corporate media scam in US regime change operations, yet people still fall for it. In fact, the strategy was first used in the coup against the democratic government of Iran in 1953.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez noted the comanditos were financed entirely by NGOs. “When the actions and financing of these groups were investigated, it was discovered that they were financed by organizations of dubious origin from Europe or by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”
Eva Golinger wrote years ago, “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there…The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy [NED], International Republican Institute [IRI], National Democratic Institute [NDI], Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute [AEI], and International Center for Non-Violent Conflict [ICNC].”
Fifth, US coup attempts count on funding NGOs to carry out “regime change.” Besides the CIA-controlled USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI, NGOs receive millions from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. The US uses them to buy an internal opposition, similar to AIPAC in the US – except here AIPAC works to disenfranchise we the people.
NED funds NGOs worldwide to incite color revolutions against those the US empire finds not properly subservient. Between 2016-2019 1600 NGOs received NED grants, highlighting the value the US places on the NGO coup-making tool. Needless to say, the US does not tolerate foreign countries funding NGOs pressing for political change here.
From 2000-2020, the US spent $250 million funding “regime change” NGOs in Cuba. Tracey Eaton wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” Since 1996, the US spent $20-$45 million dollars a year to fund these Cuban groups. These NGOs created the CIA Cuban social media ZunZuneo, and even infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop scene, laying the basis for the 2021 protests.
From 2017 through 2019, USAID admitted giving nearly $467 million to the Venezuelan opposition. USAID committed another $128 million to US appointed president Juan Guaidó. In 2006, Ambassador William Brownfield in 2006 revealed the goals of USAID funding: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital U.S. business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” The NED disclosed in 2010 that agencies funded the opposition $40-50 million annually.
Similar US operations against Nicaragua are revealed in How Billion-Dollar Foundations Fund NGOs to Manipulate U.S. Foreign Policy, In 2018, in the US attempted coup, USAID spent $24.5 million and NED $4.1 million to train and support the opposition movement, while the Soros Foundation gave $6.7 million to propagate fake news.
Venezuela and Nicaragua recently passed laws controlling NGOs – which the US painted as a sign of their dictatorial nature.
How Venezuela Defeated this Five-Pronged Coup Attempt
The Maduro government had campaigned for months educating and warning the people of opposition schemes to disrupt the election, refuse to recognize the results, create new guarimbas, and that united popular action could stop this. They succeeded. The violent coup attempt on July 29-30 failed; on July 31 the terrorists were being rounded up, and calm restored. On August 3, more than half a million Chavistas marched to support President Maduro and peace.
Internationally, the Maduro government benefited from the considerable prestige it had gained standing up to everything the US rulers threw at it. The US has likewise lost much credibility, especially over its full support for the endless massacres in Gaza. It could not even get the subservient OAS to condemn Maduro.
Venezuela, like Cuba, has developed a strong civic-military union supported by thousands of voluntary militias that has been a bastion against the war – economic, military, propaganda, and cyberwar – against the country. Moreover, the Venezuelan military command, like in Cuba and Nicaragua, is dedicated to defending the constitutional order, denying US coup-plotters an opening. A people’s militia in Bolivia, which did not and still does not exist, could have maintained order in October 2019 after the police and military commands declared they would not stop right wing violence.
Besides the mass civic-military union, the Venezuelan government, like Cuba, relies on mobilizing the people. President Maduro’s closing campaign rally culminated in over a million marching on July 25th. Right after the July 28 election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. This was an antidote to the coup attempt and violence, since these mobilizations vastly outnumbered the capacity of the opposition.
After 25 years of the US forcing the Chavista leadership live under pressure cooker conditions, it has been unable to divide them and overturn the revolution as it has so often elsewhere, such as Grenada, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the Soviet bloc, and now threatens Bolivia.
The Maduro government maintains broad popular support because of its commitment to the people. The oil industry was nationalized and its income, while curtailed due to the US blockade, benefits the people. Mass literacy campaigns ended illiteracy. Over 5.1 million homes have been built for the poor. Venezuela has become almost self-sufficient in food production. The CLAP program distributes discounted or free food to 7.5 million families every month. Free health care and education through university are provided to all. Venezuela is overcoming the US blockade with the economy expected to grow 10% in 2024, and has the lowest inflation rate in 14 years. In recognition, about one million Venezuelans have returned home.
Chavismo defeated this coup because of its organic connection with the people, because of the class consciousness that has matured in its citizens since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian process, and because of the political clarity and determination of the Chavista leadership. Their victory is one for the peoples of the world.
The post The US Attempted Coup in Venezuela uses new Cyber Tools, but cannot Break the Chavista Wall first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
America’s Lawyer E114: The oracle of American politics has unveiled his prediction for which candidate he believes will win the White House this year, so we’ll tell you who it is and why they are the favorite to win. New York governor Kathy Hochul is in deep trouble after one of her aides was arrested […]
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Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo is perhaps best known for spreading the baseless claim on air that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 presidential election. Her source for that “information” was a viewer who also claimed to be “internally decapitated” and said she spoke with the wind. Along with similar misinformation, this false claim landed Fox in court for defamation…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent
Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has successfully thwarted a vote of no confidence after 75 MPs backed him and 32 voted for the opposition.
But the session was not without drama.
Just after 10am, after the opposition leader moved a motion for a vote of no confidence announcing Renbo Paita as the alternate prime minister, Parliament Haus descended into momentary chaos as members questioned why Speaker Job Pomat refused to allow debate after the motion.
The opposition had intended to use the opportunity to highlight pressing concerns that caused MPs to move to the opposition.
The Member for Madang, Bryan Kramer, a former minister of justice and police, challenged the Speaker to follow standing orders to the letter as stipulated in the constitution while Wabag MP Lino Tom accused the Speaker of “stifling the people’s voices” by not entertaining debate.
“The people of this country paid our salaries to debate this. The people need to know why we put in a vote of no confidence,” Tom said.
“This is the right forum where our voices need to be heard”
Speaker admits error
After intense exchanges between the chair and the opposition, the Speaker admitted to making an error in parliamentary process.
But he still proceeded to call for a vote.
PNG’s constitution allows a government a grace period of 18 months before a vote of no confidence can be brought to Parliament. Since 1977, every sitting prime minister has had to fend off threats of votes of no confidence.
James Marape himself, came to power in 2018, through a vote of no confidence.
While Prime Minister Marape may have been successful this time, he still faces the possibility of another vote of no confidence if the opposition musters enough numbers to do so.
Speaking after the vote, Marape said that while votes of no confidence were an essential part of democracy, Section 145 of the constitution, which provides for the process, had been abused in many instances.
“Provincial governors have five years to work. Provincial legislators have five years to work. The most important chair of the land has 18 months . . . and managing 18 months of politics and doing work, comes with great cost.”
The pressure is now on him to prove that that he has the ability and the political will to stem instances of corruption, fix the ailing economy, stem inflation and address crime — the biggest concerns for Papua New Guineans.
Over the next few days, the Prime Minister will announce a cabinet reshuffle to fill vacancies left by MPs who have left.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday the United States must beat China “in the competition for the 21st century,” while her presidential election rival, Donald Trump, said China had feared him and would pay billions in tariffs if he returned to the White House.
Democratic presidential nominee Harris and Republican nominee Trump clashed for 90 minutes in a debate in Philadelphia that was largely focused on domestic issues but touched on foreign affairs, in particular the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and China.
The debate began with probably the biggest concern of U.S. voters, the state of the American economy.
A moderator, referring to a Trump plan to impose tariffs of as much as 20% on all imports, asked if Americans could afford the higher prices that the policy would bring. Trump dismissed that suggestion.
“They’re not going to have higher prices. What’s going to happen, who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years,” Trump said, pointing out that some tariffs he introduced had been retained by the Joe Biden administration over the past three-and-a-half years.
“China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars and so were other countries,” he said.
“We’re going to take in billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump added, referring to his hoped-for second term.
Harris has backed the Biden administration’s targeted tariffs on only certain Chinese imports – such as a 100% rate on electric cars and a 50% rate on solar panels – arguing it will bolster domestic manufacturing without causing wider economic damage.
Trump has proposed an across-the-board rate of “more than” 60% on Chinese imports, and a rate of 10% – or even 20% – on all other imports, in order to revive the U.S. manufacturing sector and reduce reliance on foreign trade.
Harris said Trump as president had “invited trade wars” and resulted in a trade deficit.
“If you want to talk about his deal with China, what he ended up doing is, under Donald Trump’s presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military, basically sold us out,” she said.
“A policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century, which means focusing on the details of what that requires,” Harris said.
“Focusing on relationships with our allies, focusing on investing in American-based technology so we win the race on AI, on quantum computing, focusing on what we need to do to support America’s workforce so that we don’t end up on the short end of the stick in terms of workers’ rights.”
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The debate, hosted by American broadcaster ABC News, was the first time the two have faced each other since Harris entered the race.
President Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the race in late July after stumbling through a debate with Trump, 78, raising concerns among Democrat politicians and donors that voters would not back him in the November presidential poll.
Harris, 59, won the Democratic nomination last month. She is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president.
Trading barbs
Harris took Trump to task for a response to China’s President Xi Jinping over the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
“With COVID he actually thanked President Xi for what he did during COVID,” Harris said, referring to a Trump post on Twitter at the time.
“Look at his Tweet – ‘Thank you President Xi’, exclamation point – when we know that Xi was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of COVID.”
China faced criticism in the early stage of the pandemic for what some health experts said was a bid to cover up the disease and its origin. Beijing rejects that.
Trump criticized the Biden administration’s overall record in international affairs, saying: “The leaders of other countries think that they’re weak and incompetent and they are.”
Harris repeated assertions she made during her nomination speech on Aug. 22 that Trump liked to “cozy-up” to dictators.
“It is well-known that he exchanged ‘love letters’ with Kim Jong Un,” said Harris, referring to unprecedented communication between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader that led to three meetings between Trump and Kim, but no breakthrough on efforts to press North Korea to give up its nuclear and missile programs.
Trump highlighted his relationship with authoritarian Hungarian leader Victor Orban, citing Orban as saying: “You need Trump back as president.”
Referring to himself in the third person, Trump spoke of his standing on the world stage. “China was afraid of him, North Korea was afraid of him … Russia was afraid of him,” he said.
Harris said Trump adored strongmen instead of caring about democracy and the American people.
“These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because it is so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris said. She also cited unidentified U.S. military leaders referring to Trump as “a disgrace.”
Trump attacked the Democrats’ record on immigration and American industry, accusing the Biden administration of “losing” 10,000 manufacturing jobs in August.
“They’re building big auto plants in Mexico, in many cases owned by China. What they have given to China is unbelievable. We will put tariffs on those cars so they won’t come into our country,” said Trump.
Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever reach a goal she set out to achieve as a presidential hopeful in 2019. But at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia — five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race — Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.
Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense.
That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire- and -flood-prone states like California and Florida.
While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change.
Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.
Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it.
Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.
Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.
Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.
“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”
Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future.
Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.
As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.
“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At the presidential debate, fossil fuels and energy politics took center stage on Sep 11, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
With similar Israel divestment motions having been passed at City of Sydney and Canterbury/Bankstown Councils, many had expected the motion to pass in what is supposed to be one of the most progressive areas of Sydney. Wendy Bacon reports on what went wrong.
INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank is tearing apart local councils in Australia, on top of the angst reverberating around state and federal politics.
Inner West Labor Mayor Darcy Byrne has doubled down on his attack on pro-Palestinian activists at the council’s last election meeting before Australia’s local government elections on September 14.
‘Byrne’s attack echoes an astro-turfing campaign supported by rightwing and pro-Israel groups targeting the Greens in inner city electorates.’
With Labor narrowly controlling the council by one vote, the election loomed large over the meeting. It also coincided with a campaign backed by rightwing pro-Israeli groups to eliminate Greens from several inner Sydney councils.
In August, Labor councillors voted down a motion for an audit of whether any Inner West Council (IWC) investments or contracts benefit companies involved in the weapons industry or profit from human rights violations in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The motion that was defeated had also called for an insertion of a general “human rights” provision in council’s investment policy.
With similar motions having been passed at City of Sydney and Canterbury/Bankstown councils, many had expected the motion to pass in what is supposed to be one of the most progressive areas of Sydney.
It could have been a first step towards the Inner West Council joining the worldwide BDS (boycotts, disinvestments and economic sanctions) campaign to pressure Israel to meet its obligations under international law.
MWM sources attest that the ructions at Inner West Council are mirrored elsewhere in local government. This from Randwick in Sydney’s East:
Global to grassroots
Last week, Portland Council in Maine became the fifth United States city to join the campaign this year, while the City of Ixelles in Belgium announced that it had suspended its twinning agreement with the Regional Council of Megiddo in Israel.
When the Inner West motion failed, some Palestinian rights campaigners booed and shouted “shame” at Labor councillors as they sat silently in the chamber. The meeting, which had nearly reached its time limit of five hours, was then adjourned.
Byrne’s alternative motion was debated at last week’s meeting. It restates council’s existing policy and Federal Labor’s current stance that calls for a ceasefire and a two-state solution.
This alternative motion was passed by Labor councillors, with the Greens and two Independents voting against it. Both Independent Councillor Pauline Lockie and Greens Councillor Liz Atkins argued that they were opposing the motion because it did not do or change anything.
The Mayor spent most of his speaking time attacking those involved with protesting at the August meeting. He described their behaviour as “unacceptable, undemocratic and disrespectful”. There is no doubt that the behaviour at the meeting breached the rules of meeting behaviour at some times.
But then Byrne made a much more shocking and unexpected allegation. He said that the “worst element” of the behaviour was that “local Inner West citizens who happened to have a Jewish sounding name, when their names were read out by me because they’d registered . . . to speak, I think all of them were booed and hissed just because their names happened to sound Jewish.”
News Corp propaganda
This claim is deeply disturbing. If true, such behaviour would definitely be anti-semitic and racist. But the question is: did such behaviour actually happen? Or does this allegation feed into Byrne’s misleading narrative that had fuelled false News Corporation reports that protesters stormed the meeting?
In fact, the protesters had been invited to the meeting by the Mayor.
This reporter was present throughout the meeting and did not observe anything similar to what the Mayor alleged had happened.
Later in the meeting, the Mayor repeated the allegation that the “booing and hissing of people” based “on the fact that they had a Jewish sounding name constituted anti-semitism”.
Retiring Independent Councillor Pauline Locker intervened: “Sorry, point of order, That isn’t actually what happened. . . . It wasn’t based on their Jewish name.”
But Bryne insisted, “That’s not a point of order — that is what happened. It is what the record shows occurred as does the media reportage.”
Other councillors also distanced themselves from Byrne’s allegation. Independent Councillor John Stamolis also said that although he could not judge how the Mayor or other Labor councillors felt on the evening, he could not agree with Byrne’s description or that it described what other councillors or members of the public experienced on the evening.
Greens Councillor Liz Atkins said that there were different perceptions of what happened on the night. Her perception was that the “booing and hissing” was in relation to support for the substance of the Greens motion for an audit of investments rather than an attack on people who spoke against it.
She also said that credit should be given to pro- Palestinian activists who themselves encouraged people to listen quietly.
Fake antisemitism claims
Your reporter asked Rosanna Barbero, who also was present throughout the meeting, what she observed. Barbero was the recipient of this year’s Multicultural NSW Human Rights Medal, recognising her lasting and meaningful contribution to human rights in NSW.
She is also a member of the Inner West Multicultural Network that has helped council develop an anti-racism strategy.
“I did not witness any racist comments,” said Barbero.
Barbero confirmed that she was present throughout the meeting and said: “I did not witness any racist comments. The meeting was recorded so the evidence of that is easy to verify.”
So this reporter, in a story for City Hub, took her advice and went to the evidence in the webcast, which provides a public record of what occurred. The soundtrack is clear. A listener can pick up when comments are made by audience members but not necessarily the content of them.
Bryne has alleged speakers against the motion were booed when their “Jewish sounding’ names were announced. Our analysis shows none of the five were booed or abused in any way when their names were announced.
There was, in fact, silence.
Five speakers identified themselves as Jewish. Four spoke against the motion, and one in favour.
Two of the five were heard in complete silence, one with some small applause at the end.
One woman who spoke in favour of the motion and whose grandparents were in the Holocaust was applauded and cheered at the end of her speech.
One man was interrupted by several comments from the gallery when he said the motion was based on “propaganda and disinformation” and would lead to a lack of social cohesion. He related experiences of anti-semitism when he was at school in the Inner West 14 years ago.
At the conclusion of his speech, there were some boos.
One man who had not successfully registered was added to the speakers list by the Mayor. Some people in the public gallery objected to this decision. The Mayor adjourned the meeting for three minutes and the speaker was then heard in silence.
The speakers in favour of the motion, most of whom had Palestinian backgrounds and relatives who had suffered expulsion from their homelands, concentrated on the war crimes against Palestinians and the importance of BDS motions. There were no personal attacks on speakers against the motion.
In response to a Jewish speaker who had argued that the solution was peace initiatives, one Palestinian speaker said that he wanted “liberation”, not “peace”.
Weaponising accusations of anti-semitism to shut down debate
Independent Inner West Councillor Pauline Lockie warned other councillors this week about the need to be careful about weaponising accusations of race and anti-semitism to shut down debates. Like Barbero, Lockie has played a leadership role in developing anti-racism strategies for the Inner West.
There are three serious concerns about Byrne’s allegations. The first concern is that they are not verified by the public record. This raises questions about the Mayor’s judgement and credibility.
The second is that making unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism for the tactical purposes of winning a political argument demeans the seriousness and tragedy of anti-semitism.
Thirdly, there is a concern that spreading unsubstantiated allegations of anti-semitism could cause harm by spreading fear and anxiety in the Jewish community.
Controversial Christian minister
The most provocative speaker on the evening was not one of those who identified themselves as Jewish. It was Reverend Mark Leach, who introduced himself as an Anglican minister from Balmain. When he said that no one could reasonably apply the word “genocide” to what was occurring in Gaza, several people called out his comments.
Given the ICJ finding that a plausible genocide is occurring in Gaza, this was not surprising.
Darcy Byrne then stopped the meeting and gave Reverend Leach a small amount of further time to speak. Later in his speech, Reverend Leach described the motion itself as “deeply racist” because it held Israel accountable above all other states.
Boos for Leach
In fact, the motion would have added a general human rights provision to the investment policy which would have applied to any country. Reverend Leach was booed at the conclusion of his speech.
One speaker later said that she could not understand how this Christian minister would not accept that the word “genocide” could be used. This was not an anti-semitic or racist comment.
Throughout the debate, Byrne avoided the issue that the motion only called for an audit.
He also used his position of chair to directly question councillors. The following exchange occurred with Councillor Liz Atkins:
Mayor: Councilor Atkins, can I put to you a question? I have received advice that councillor officers are unaware of any investment from council that is complicit in the Israeli military operations in Gaza and the Palestinian territories. Are you aware of any?
Atkins: No. That’s why the motion asked for an audit of our investments and procurements.
Mayor: I’ll put one further question to you. The organisers of the protest outside the chamber and the subsequent overrunning of the council chamber asserted in their promotion of the event that the council was complicit in genocide. Is that your view?
Atkins: I don’t know. Until we do an audit, Mayor . . . Can I just take exception with the point of view that they “overran” the meeting? You invited them all in, and not one of them tried to get past a simple rope barrier.
Byrne says it’s immoral to support a one-party state
During the debate, Byrne surprisingly described support for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestinians as “immoral”. He described support for “one state” as meaning you either supported the wiping out of the Palestinians or the Israelis.
In fact, there is a long history of citizens, scholars and other commentators who have argued that one secular state of equal citizens is the only viable solution.
Many, including the Australian government, do not agree. Nevertheless, the award-winning journalist and expert on the Middle East, Antony Loewenstein, argued that position in The Sydney Morning Herald in November 2023.
Mayor in tune with Better Council Inc campaign
All of this debate is happening in the context of the hotly contested election campaign. The Mayor is understandably preoccupied with the impending poll. Rather than debating the issues, he finished the debate by launching an attack on the Greens, which sounded more like an election speech than a speech in reply in support of his motion.
Byrne said: “Some councillors are unwilling to condemn what was overt anti-Semitism”.
This is a heavy accusation. All councillors are strongly opposed to anti-semitism. The record does not show any overt anti-semitism.
Byrne went on: “But the more troubling thing is that there’s a large number of candidates running at this election who, if elected, will be making foreign affairs and this particular issue one of the central concerns of this council.
“This will result in a distraction with services going backwards and rates going up.”
In fact, the record shows that the Greens are just as focused on local issues as any other councillors. Even at last week’s meeting, Councillor Liz Atkins brought forward a motion about controversial moves to install a temporary cafe at Camperdown Park that would privatise public space and for which there had been no consultation.
Labor v Greens
Byrne’s message pitting concern about broader issues against local concerns is in tune with the messaging of a recently formed group called Better Council Inc. that is targeting the Greens throughout the Inner West and in Randwick and Waverley.
Placards saying “Put the Greens last”, “Keep the Greens Garbage out of Council” featuring a number of Greens candidates have gone up across Sydney. Some claim that the Greens are fixated on Gaza and ignore local issues.
Better Inc.’s material is authorised by Sophie Calland. She is a recently graduated computer engineer who told the Daily Telegraph that “she was a Labor member and that Better Council involves people from across the political aisle — even some former Greens.”
She described the group as a “grassroots group of young professionals” who wanted local government officials to focus on local issues.
“We believe local councils should concentrate on essential community services like waste management, local infrastructure, and the environment. That’s what councils are there for — looking after the needs of their immediate communities.”
On Saturday, Randwick Greens Councillor Kym Chapple was at a pre-poll booth at which a Better Council Inc. campaigner was handing out material specifically recommending that voters put her last.
Chapple tweeted that the Better councilwoman didn’t actually know that she was a councillor or any of the local issues in which she had been involved.
“That does not look like a local grassroots campaign. It’s an attempt to intimidate people who support a free Palestine. Anyway, it feels gross to have someone say to put you last because they care about the environment and local issues when that’s literally what you have done for three years.”
She then tweeted a long list of her local campaign successes.
Never Again is Now astroturf campaign
In fact, the actual work of distributing the leaflets is being done by a group spearheaded by none other than Reverend Mark Leach, who spoke at the Inner West Council meeting. Leach is one of the coordinators of the pro-Israel right-wing Christian group Never Again is Now.
The group is organising rallies around Australia to campaign against anti-semitism.
Reverend Mark Leach works closely with his daughter Freya Leach, who stood for the Liberal Party for the seat of Balmain in the 2023 state election and is associated with the rightwing Menzies Institute. Mark Leach describes himself as “working to renew the mind and heart of our culture against the backdrop of the radical left, Jihadist Islam and rising authoritarianism.
Leach’s own Twitter account shows that he embraces a range of rightwing causes. He is anti-trans, supports anti-immigration campaigners in the UK and has posted a jolly video of himself with Warren Mundine at a pro-Israeli rally in Melbourne.
Mundine was a No campaign spokesperson for the rightwing group Advance Australia during the Voice referendum.
Leach supports the Christian Lobby and is very critical of Christians who are campaigning for peace.
Anti-semitism exists. The problem is that Reverend Leach’s version of anti-semitism is what international law and human rights bodies regard as protesting against genocidal war crimes.
For #NeverAgainisNow, these atrocities are excusable for a state that is pursuing its right of “self-defence”. And if you don’t agree with that, don’t be surprised if you find yourself branded as not just “anti-semitic” but also a bullying extremist.
As of one week before the local government election, the Never Again is Now was holding a Zoom meeting to organise 400 volunteers to get 50,000 leaflets into the hands of voters at next Saturday’s local election.
This may well be just a dress rehearsal for a much bigger effort at the Federal election, where Advance Australia has announced it is planning to target the Greens.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She has worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is not a member of any political party but is a Greens supporter and long-term supporter of peaceful BDS strategies. Republished from Michael West Media with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
With similar Israel divestment motions having been passed at City of Sydney and Canterbury/Bankstown Councils, many had expected the motion to pass in what is supposed to be one of the most progressive areas of Sydney. Wendy Bacon reports on what went wrong.
INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank is tearing apart local councils in Australia, on top of the angst reverberating around state and federal politics.
Inner West Labor Mayor Darcy Byrne has doubled down on his attack on pro-Palestinian activists at the council’s last election meeting before Australia’s local government elections on September 14.
‘Byrne’s attack echoes an astro-turfing campaign supported by rightwing and pro-Israel groups targeting the Greens in inner city electorates.’
With Labor narrowly controlling the council by one vote, the election loomed large over the meeting. It also coincided with a campaign backed by rightwing pro-Israeli groups to eliminate Greens from several inner Sydney councils.
In August, Labor councillors voted down a motion for an audit of whether any Inner West Council (IWC) investments or contracts benefit companies involved in the weapons industry or profit from human rights violations in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The motion that was defeated had also called for an insertion of a general “human rights” provision in council’s investment policy.
With similar motions having been passed at City of Sydney and Canterbury/Bankstown councils, many had expected the motion to pass in what is supposed to be one of the most progressive areas of Sydney.
It could have been a first step towards the Inner West Council joining the worldwide BDS (boycotts, disinvestments and economic sanctions) campaign to pressure Israel to meet its obligations under international law.
MWM sources attest that the ructions at Inner West Council are mirrored elsewhere in local government. This from Randwick in Sydney’s East:
Global to grassroots
Last week, Portland Council in Maine became the fifth United States city to join the campaign this year, while the City of Ixelles in Belgium announced that it had suspended its twinning agreement with the Regional Council of Megiddo in Israel.
When the Inner West motion failed, some Palestinian rights campaigners booed and shouted “shame” at Labor councillors as they sat silently in the chamber. The meeting, which had nearly reached its time limit of five hours, was then adjourned.
Byrne’s alternative motion was debated at last week’s meeting. It restates council’s existing policy and Federal Labor’s current stance that calls for a ceasefire and a two-state solution.
This alternative motion was passed by Labor councillors, with the Greens and two Independents voting against it. Both Independent Councillor Pauline Lockie and Greens Councillor Liz Atkins argued that they were opposing the motion because it did not do or change anything.
The Mayor spent most of his speaking time attacking those involved with protesting at the August meeting. He described their behaviour as “unacceptable, undemocratic and disrespectful”. There is no doubt that the behaviour at the meeting breached the rules of meeting behaviour at some times.
But then Byrne made a much more shocking and unexpected allegation. He said that the “worst element” of the behaviour was that “local Inner West citizens who happened to have a Jewish sounding name, when their names were read out by me because they’d registered . . . to speak, I think all of them were booed and hissed just because their names happened to sound Jewish.”
News Corp propaganda
This claim is deeply disturbing. If true, such behaviour would definitely be anti-semitic and racist. But the question is: did such behaviour actually happen? Or does this allegation feed into Byrne’s misleading narrative that had fuelled false News Corporation reports that protesters stormed the meeting?
In fact, the protesters had been invited to the meeting by the Mayor.
This reporter was present throughout the meeting and did not observe anything similar to what the Mayor alleged had happened.
Later in the meeting, the Mayor repeated the allegation that the “booing and hissing of people” based “on the fact that they had a Jewish sounding name constituted anti-semitism”.
Retiring Independent Councillor Pauline Locker intervened: “Sorry, point of order, That isn’t actually what happened. . . . It wasn’t based on their Jewish name.”
But Bryne insisted, “That’s not a point of order — that is what happened. It is what the record shows occurred as does the media reportage.”
Other councillors also distanced themselves from Byrne’s allegation. Independent Councillor John Stamolis also said that although he could not judge how the Mayor or other Labor councillors felt on the evening, he could not agree with Byrne’s description or that it described what other councillors or members of the public experienced on the evening.
Greens Councillor Liz Atkins said that there were different perceptions of what happened on the night. Her perception was that the “booing and hissing” was in relation to support for the substance of the Greens motion for an audit of investments rather than an attack on people who spoke against it.
She also said that credit should be given to pro- Palestinian activists who themselves encouraged people to listen quietly.
Fake antisemitism claims
Your reporter asked Rosanna Barbero, who also was present throughout the meeting, what she observed. Barbero was the recipient of this year’s Multicultural NSW Human Rights Medal, recognising her lasting and meaningful contribution to human rights in NSW.
She is also a member of the Inner West Multicultural Network that has helped council develop an anti-racism strategy.
“I did not witness any racist comments,” said Barbero.
Barbero confirmed that she was present throughout the meeting and said: “I did not witness any racist comments. The meeting was recorded so the evidence of that is easy to verify.”
So this reporter, in a story for City Hub, took her advice and went to the evidence in the webcast, which provides a public record of what occurred. The soundtrack is clear. A listener can pick up when comments are made by audience members but not necessarily the content of them.
Bryne has alleged speakers against the motion were booed when their “Jewish sounding’ names were announced. Our analysis shows none of the five were booed or abused in any way when their names were announced.
There was, in fact, silence.
Five speakers identified themselves as Jewish. Four spoke against the motion, and one in favour.
Two of the five were heard in complete silence, one with some small applause at the end.
One woman who spoke in favour of the motion and whose grandparents were in the Holocaust was applauded and cheered at the end of her speech.
One man was interrupted by several comments from the gallery when he said the motion was based on “propaganda and disinformation” and would lead to a lack of social cohesion. He related experiences of anti-semitism when he was at school in the Inner West 14 years ago.
At the conclusion of his speech, there were some boos.
One man who had not successfully registered was added to the speakers list by the Mayor. Some people in the public gallery objected to this decision. The Mayor adjourned the meeting for three minutes and the speaker was then heard in silence.
The speakers in favour of the motion, most of whom had Palestinian backgrounds and relatives who had suffered expulsion from their homelands, concentrated on the war crimes against Palestinians and the importance of BDS motions. There were no personal attacks on speakers against the motion.
In response to a Jewish speaker who had argued that the solution was peace initiatives, one Palestinian speaker said that he wanted “liberation”, not “peace”.
Weaponising accusations of anti-semitism to shut down debate
Independent Inner West Councillor Pauline Lockie warned other councillors this week about the need to be careful about weaponising accusations of race and anti-semitism to shut down debates. Like Barbero, Lockie has played a leadership role in developing anti-racism strategies for the Inner West.
There are three serious concerns about Byrne’s allegations. The first concern is that they are not verified by the public record. This raises questions about the Mayor’s judgement and credibility.
The second is that making unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism for the tactical purposes of winning a political argument demeans the seriousness and tragedy of anti-semitism.
Thirdly, there is a concern that spreading unsubstantiated allegations of anti-semitism could cause harm by spreading fear and anxiety in the Jewish community.
Controversial Christian minister
The most provocative speaker on the evening was not one of those who identified themselves as Jewish. It was Reverend Mark Leach, who introduced himself as an Anglican minister from Balmain. When he said that no one could reasonably apply the word “genocide” to what was occurring in Gaza, several people called out his comments.
Given the ICJ finding that a plausible genocide is occurring in Gaza, this was not surprising.
Darcy Byrne then stopped the meeting and gave Reverend Leach a small amount of further time to speak. Later in his speech, Reverend Leach described the motion itself as “deeply racist” because it held Israel accountable above all other states.
Boos for Leach
In fact, the motion would have added a general human rights provision to the investment policy which would have applied to any country. Reverend Leach was booed at the conclusion of his speech.
One speaker later said that she could not understand how this Christian minister would not accept that the word “genocide” could be used. This was not an anti-semitic or racist comment.
Throughout the debate, Byrne avoided the issue that the motion only called for an audit.
He also used his position of chair to directly question councillors. The following exchange occurred with Councillor Liz Atkins:
Mayor: Councilor Atkins, can I put to you a question? I have received advice that councillor officers are unaware of any investment from council that is complicit in the Israeli military operations in Gaza and the Palestinian territories. Are you aware of any?
Atkins: No. That’s why the motion asked for an audit of our investments and procurements.
Mayor: I’ll put one further question to you. The organisers of the protest outside the chamber and the subsequent overrunning of the council chamber asserted in their promotion of the event that the council was complicit in genocide. Is that your view?
Atkins: I don’t know. Until we do an audit, Mayor . . . Can I just take exception with the point of view that they “overran” the meeting? You invited them all in, and not one of them tried to get past a simple rope barrier.
Byrne says it’s immoral to support a one-party state
During the debate, Byrne surprisingly described support for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestinians as “immoral”. He described support for “one state” as meaning you either supported the wiping out of the Palestinians or the Israelis.
In fact, there is a long history of citizens, scholars and other commentators who have argued that one secular state of equal citizens is the only viable solution.
Many, including the Australian government, do not agree. Nevertheless, the award-winning journalist and expert on the Middle East, Antony Loewenstein, argued that position in The Sydney Morning Herald in November 2023.
Mayor in tune with Better Council Inc campaign
All of this debate is happening in the context of the hotly contested election campaign. The Mayor is understandably preoccupied with the impending poll. Rather than debating the issues, he finished the debate by launching an attack on the Greens, which sounded more like an election speech than a speech in reply in support of his motion.
Byrne said: “Some councillors are unwilling to condemn what was overt anti-Semitism”.
This is a heavy accusation. All councillors are strongly opposed to anti-semitism. The record does not show any overt anti-semitism.
Byrne went on: “But the more troubling thing is that there’s a large number of candidates running at this election who, if elected, will be making foreign affairs and this particular issue one of the central concerns of this council.
“This will result in a distraction with services going backwards and rates going up.”
In fact, the record shows that the Greens are just as focused on local issues as any other councillors. Even at last week’s meeting, Councillor Liz Atkins brought forward a motion about controversial moves to install a temporary cafe at Camperdown Park that would privatise public space and for which there had been no consultation.
Labor v Greens
Byrne’s message pitting concern about broader issues against local concerns is in tune with the messaging of a recently formed group called Better Council Inc. that is targeting the Greens throughout the Inner West and in Randwick and Waverley.
Placards saying “Put the Greens last”, “Keep the Greens Garbage out of Council” featuring a number of Greens candidates have gone up across Sydney. Some claim that the Greens are fixated on Gaza and ignore local issues.
Better Inc.’s material is authorised by Sophie Calland. She is a recently graduated computer engineer who told the Daily Telegraph that “she was a Labor member and that Better Council involves people from across the political aisle — even some former Greens.”
She described the group as a “grassroots group of young professionals” who wanted local government officials to focus on local issues.
“We believe local councils should concentrate on essential community services like waste management, local infrastructure, and the environment. That’s what councils are there for — looking after the needs of their immediate communities.”
On Saturday, Randwick Greens Councillor Kym Chapple was at a pre-poll booth at which a Better Council Inc. campaigner was handing out material specifically recommending that voters put her last.
Chapple tweeted that the Better councilwoman didn’t actually know that she was a councillor or any of the local issues in which she had been involved.
“That does not look like a local grassroots campaign. It’s an attempt to intimidate people who support a free Palestine. Anyway, it feels gross to have someone say to put you last because they care about the environment and local issues when that’s literally what you have done for three years.”
She then tweeted a long list of her local campaign successes.
Never Again is Now astroturf campaign
In fact, the actual work of distributing the leaflets is being done by a group spearheaded by none other than Reverend Mark Leach, who spoke at the Inner West Council meeting. Leach is one of the coordinators of the pro-Israel right-wing Christian group Never Again is Now.
The group is organising rallies around Australia to campaign against anti-semitism.
Reverend Mark Leach works closely with his daughter Freya Leach, who stood for the Liberal Party for the seat of Balmain in the 2023 state election and is associated with the rightwing Menzies Institute. Mark Leach describes himself as “working to renew the mind and heart of our culture against the backdrop of the radical left, Jihadist Islam and rising authoritarianism.
Leach’s own Twitter account shows that he embraces a range of rightwing causes. He is anti-trans, supports anti-immigration campaigners in the UK and has posted a jolly video of himself with Warren Mundine at a pro-Israeli rally in Melbourne.
Mundine was a No campaign spokesperson for the rightwing group Advance Australia during the Voice referendum.
Leach supports the Christian Lobby and is very critical of Christians who are campaigning for peace.
Anti-semitism exists. The problem is that Reverend Leach’s version of anti-semitism is what international law and human rights bodies regard as protesting against genocidal war crimes.
For #NeverAgainisNow, these atrocities are excusable for a state that is pursuing its right of “self-defence”. And if you don’t agree with that, don’t be surprised if you find yourself branded as not just “anti-semitic” but also a bullying extremist.
As of one week before the local government election, the Never Again is Now was holding a Zoom meeting to organise 400 volunteers to get 50,000 leaflets into the hands of voters at next Saturday’s local election.
This may well be just a dress rehearsal for a much bigger effort at the Federal election, where Advance Australia has announced it is planning to target the Greens.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She has worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is not a member of any political party but is a Greens supporter and long-term supporter of peaceful BDS strategies. Republished from Michael West Media with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has published its annual directory of the statutory elections for the year ahead, this time the English local council elections scheduled to be held on Thursday 1 May 2025. These contests will be the first big electoral test of the Keir Starmer Labour Party government and its ‘tough choices’ Austerity 2.0 agenda – and the TUSC is already taking the government to task.
The dire financial situation facing councils and the vital local public services that they provide made it onto the pre-election ‘shit-list’ prepared by Starmer’s advisors of the early problems that an incoming government would have to deal with.
One immediate issue was whether or not the chancellor Rachel Reeves would continue the government support for councils’ Household Support Fund (HSF) schemes which was due to expire at the end of September before 30 October’s budget. She had identified this spending as part of the so-called ‘black hole’ commitments that had to go.
At an annual cost of around £1 billion, the HSF has been used to fund holiday food vouchers for pupils on free school meals, support food banks, and provide local welfare crisis grants for furniture needs and other emergencies.
Sensing another pensioners’ heating allowance-style furore, Reeves has been forced to extend HSF funding beyond September for another six months. The pressure will now be on for local councillors to declare that they will refuse to implement HSF cuts whatever future funding decision is made in October or April and pass the bill back to the government.
The threat to the already inadequate Housing Support Fund it is only one of the multiple crises facing council-provided local public services.
The Local Government Association and the County Councils Network have called for an urgent injection of £2.2 billion to stop special educational needs and disability (SEND) services in mainstream schools from being overwhelmed.
While the Labour government has abandoned the plan for a lifetime cap on people’s social care costs – relieving an immediate cash crunch for councils but delivering a huge blow to many care recipients – the sector is on its knees. Last year 28,655 old people died waiting for care they never received, with councils unable to hire enough care workers with the pay and conditions on offer. This summer over 130,000 care jobs were unfilled – it would cost £4 billion to align pay for care workers with two or more years’ experience to the equivalent rate in the NHS.
Meanwhile the RAC has recorded the poor condition of roads, 98% of which are maintained by councils, as the greatest concern of motorists – ahead even of the cost of insurance or fuel – with an estimated £16bn backlog of repairs. And in another area of council responsibility – the annual flood-prevention drainage levy – costs have risen 30% in the past two years.
All these services, and many more, are provided by those councils with elections next year. A continued austerity squeeze on them – maybe as Reeves allows council tax to rise in the October budget or ‘redistributes’ local government funding from the so-called ‘Tory shires’? – will generate protest and opposition at the ballot box next May. But where will it go?
The dominant party in the councils with elections in May 2025 are the Tories, who had over 1,380 councillors elected in 2021. Labour then won 335 seats, almost the same number as the Liberal Democrats on 313. But these councils are not alien ‘Tory territory’, covering as they do important working class communities who will be looking for an alternative to all the mainstream parties. An anti-cuts, anti-austerity election stand is vital and TUSC will work with others to ensure that one is mounted.
One factor though that will be different to both the 2024 local elections and the general election is the weight of workers and others from a Muslim background who will be able to vote in May 2025. In the 92 parliamentary constituencies where a tenth or more of the population identify as Muslim, Labour’s vote fell from 2.41 million in 2019 to 1.58 million in July, a drop of 34%. Alongside Jeremy Corbyn, four independent MPs were elected in these seats.
Other anti-war Independents and Workers Party candidates also polled significantly higher where they stood in these constituencies than in other seats they contested: an average 16.6% share for anti-war Independents compared to their 2.4% vote in other seats, and 6.7% for the Workers Party compared to their average 1.5% score elsewhere. But only six of the 92 parliamentary constituencies are in local authorities with elections next year. The rest won’t have a chance to vote in May 2025.
Over 170 independent or ‘local residents party’ candidates were elected in the 2021 council contests – but they were not of the same character as the 2024 anti-war independents. A working class, socialist alternative is necessary.
TUSC has stood before in next May’s election cycle and this year fielded 91 candidates in those district councils which will have county council elections in 2025 (out of the 274 candidates we stood in total). We are involved in discussions on an all-Britain level with some of the 2024 independents who are organising in the Collective network and the Workers Party has been sending observers to the TUSC steering committee meetings since 2022.
TUSC said:
A united, anti-war, anti-austerity election stand must be possible – local discussions and planning should begin now.
Individuals seeking to become a TUSC candidate are expected to support the basic socialist anti-austerity core policies of our coalition for the relevant election. The current core policies platform for local council candidates can be seen here.
In the context of a new Labour government the TUSC all-Britain steering committee will be reviewing the local elections core policy platform at its autumn meetings. All suggestions for what an updating of the platform should include are welcome and should be sent to the TUSC national election agent, Clive Heemskerk, at cliveheemskerk@socialistparty.org.uk, by Friday 11 October.
Featured image via TUSC
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
It is both apt and ironic that the anniversary of 9/11, which paved the way for the government to overthrow the Constitution, occurs the week before the anniversary of the day the U.S. Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787.
All sides are still waging war on our constitutional freedoms, and “we the people” remain the biggest losers.
This year’s presidential election is no exception.
As Bruce Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, warns in a recent article in the Baltimore Sun, “In November, the American people will have a choice between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. But they will not have a choice between an Empire and a Republic.”
In other words, the candidates on this year’s ballot do not represent a substantive choice between freedom and tyranny so much as they constitute a cosmetic choice: the packaging may vary widely, but the contents remain the same.
No matter who wins, the bureaucratic minions of the Security/Military Industrial Complex and its Police State/Deep State partners will retain their stranglehold on power.
Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris have the greatest of track records when it comes to actually respecting the rights enshrined in the Constitution, despite the rhetoric being trotted out by both sides lately regarding their so-called devotion to the rule of law.
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly called for parts of the Constitution to be terminated, while both Harris and Trump seem to view the First Amendment’s assurance of the right to free speech, political expression and protest as dangerous when used to challenge the government’s power.
This flies in the face of everything America’s founders fought to safeguard.
Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
In the 23 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well.
The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.
In fact, since 9/11, we’ve been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched.
We’re also being subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation’s airports. We can’t even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list.
In this way, “we the people” continue to be terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
If there is any sense to be made from a recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
So what’s the solution?
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”
In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.
From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and break the government.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Cities across France erupted in protest after Emmanuel Macron appointed a right-wing prime minister from the party that came fourth in July’s election, on just 7% of seats, after months of deadlock. That’s despite left-wing alliance, Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front), coming first with 32% of seats.
France, today
160,000 march in Paris and 300,000 in cities around the country against Macron’s coup – his deal with the Far Right to appoint Michel Barnier as PM.
Barnier’s right wing party came 4th in the election.
Polls show 52% back impeaching Macron. #MarcheDestitution pic.twitter.com/Xo1tzrT6xM
— Steve Howell (@FromSteveHowell) September 7, 2024
On top of that, Macron made far right Rassemblement National (National Rally) party and Marine Le Pen kingmakers in the deal. In order to survive a no-confidence vote, prime minister appointee Michel Barnier must keep the support of the far right. In fact, Macron extended Le Pen a veto over who he appointed.
Protests took place in France’s capital, as well as cities including Nantes, Nice, Marseille and Strasbourg. Demonstrators in Paris held placards condemning Macron’s “stolen election” and “power grab”. One 23 year old protestor, Leo, pointed out:
We voted for Macron to block Le Pen – but actually we had a choice between Le Pen and Le Pen
Macron’s deal is shocking stuff for the demonstrators and many in France who didn’t just vote for the left-wing alliance, but also voted for Macron’s centrist Ensemble in order to keep the far right out. After National Rally took the first round in the election, New Popular Front stood aside for Macron’s party in seats where it clearly might split the vote in favour of the National Rally candidate. And Macron has long stood on a platform of keeping the far right out.
Now far-right Le Pen holds the power of leverage over Barnier.
Leo also said:
Normally the prime minister comes from the majority party. But Macron didn’t give a damn, he just did what he wanted.
New Popular Front won 182 seats, while Barnier’s Les Républicains (The Republicans) won just 39.
The views of protestors appear to reflect the majority of France. One poll found that 74% of French people believe Macron had disregarded the result of the election and that 55% believe he had stolen the election.
When it comes to Palestine, leader from the New Popular Front Jean-Luc Mélenchon does not mince his words:
Mélenchon, leader of the coalition New Popular Front who won the legislative elections in France, drops some truth bombs. This sounds like the real left here, not the fake one like in the US & UK: pic.twitter.com/Z6MgpjGwZ5
— Robin Monotti (@robinmonotti) July 8, 2024
Following the election, Mélenchon reiterated a pledge to recognise the state of Palestine “as quickly as possible”.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
By James Wright
This post was originally published on Canary.
A new analysis has found that just 50 individuals and corporations have poured more than one and a half billion dollars into political races this year – with hundreds of millions flowing to BOTH major parties. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. […]
The post Megadonors Pile On In Final Stretch Of Election appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
We are down to the final two months before the presidential election, and the race is still up for grabs. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are planning a mad dash to the finish line, but the real race only comes down to just a handful of swing states. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript […]
The post Swing State Polls Create False Sense Of Security In 2024 appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
After legal fights, counter-campaigns, and bureaucratic wrangling all year long, as things stand today, abortion questions in 10 states are heading to ballots in November. After abortion rights were upended federally in June 2022, Kansas voters got a chance to weigh in on a ballot measure that was something of a test balloon just a couple of months later. Defying expectations, nearly 60%
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
America’s Lawyer E113: In less than 9 weeks, this presidential election cycle will be over, but we are about to be overloaded by both candidates as they sprint towards the finish line. Saudi Arabia is refusing to pay their bills for weapons that the US has sold them, and in spite of not getting paid, […]
The post Texas Judges Gone Crazy For Big Oil appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
During both the Republican and Democratic conventions, companies and people responsible for the pain you’re feeling were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for private boxes at these conventions to suck up to lawmakers. Plus, the Trump campaign was hacked recently, and reports suggest that Iran could be responsible. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript […]
The post Corporate America Cashes In At Conventions & Foreign Governments Actively Hacking Campaigns appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
It’s been four years since Hurricane Laura slammed into southwest Louisiana just shy of Category 5 status. It was the fiercest storm the state had seen in a century, driving more than 10 feet of storm surge onto land. Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta, a Category 2, carved a near-identical gash through the Bayou State, seeming to sense the path of least resistance Laura left behind. That winter, a deadly freeze gripped the ravaged region. Pipes burst and pavement froze into deadly ice slicks as temperatures dropped into the teens. A few months later, spring floods dropped a foot and a half of rain on Lake Charles, the city that had already endured, at that point, three epochal disasters. One journalist dubbed it the “most unfortunate city in the United States.”
At a meeting this July, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, the administrative and legislative body that oversees Lake Charles and the rest of Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish (pronounced cal-kuh-shoo), seemed eager to shake that reputation. Hundreds of millions of federal disaster aid dollars have poured into the parish, much of them aimed at Lake Charles. The number of tarps covering rooftops — the blue dots that came to define the region after the back-to-back storms — has dwindled. The parish’s income is now exceeding expenses thanks in part to an uptick in sales tax revenue — a sign of economic recovery.
The sentiment was codified in an assessment, presented at the July meeting, called the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. It noted that “there is excitement among our leaders to make great strides in areas that do not involve hurricane recovery.” Minutes later, the jurors approved the use of the parish courthouse grounds for a food and music festival that its organizer promised would be the “go-to festival for the month of November for the state and the region.” The jurors were buoyant. Calcasieu Parish, and Lake Charles, was finally on the up-and-up.
But while Lake Charles makes progress recovering from the storms’ physical and economic damages, the city is still grappling with another legacy the storms left behind — one that’s quietly undermining its long-term recovery.
Officials estimate that Lake Charles permanently lost close to 7 percent of its population, more than 5,000 people, in the wake of the storms, though city planners note that the real number is likely even higher. Between 2019 and 2020, the Lake Charles area lost a higher share of its population than any other city in the U.S., a pattern of out-migration sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and severely exacerbated by Laura and Delta.
People left for bigger urban areas like Houston and New Orleans, where housing could be found. Some had been relative newcomers to Lake Charles who had rented apartments and houses; roughly half of the city’s affordable housing stock was damaged. Others were from families who had called Lake Charles home for generations. Those who remained did so for one of two reasons: They could afford to stay, or they couldn’t afford to leave.
But Louisiana doesn’t have a uniform or an effective way of tracking and compensating for that movement — no state in the country does. And that has long-lasting political implications for both the people who leave and those who stay. When a city loses people, it doesn’t just lose some of the social fabric that imbues a place with feeling. Where people end up dictates district lines, congressional representation, and how state and federal resources are distributed.
Lake Charles is now gaining back some of the population it lost, but the influx isn’t following historical patterns: Many of the people who have moved in or returned home are settling into wealthier and, overall, whiter parts of Lake Charles — areas that recovered more quickly from the devastation. Meanwhile, in some of the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods in northern Lake Charles, the recovery process has been painfully slow.
A few of the many abandoned and condemned homes in Lake Charles. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
The U.S. relies on the decennial census to take stock of exactly how many people live where. Come hell or high water, its once-in-a-decade population assessment dictates how district lines are drawn. But in Lake Charles, the timing of the first two storms, which hit as the census was closing down its field offices, immediately invalidated information painstakingly gathered by census officers. Census officials were still trying to track down people displaced by Laura when Delta hit. The city now stands as an example of what happens when the census fails to capture the population-level impacts of natural disasters. How can cities account for storms that hollow out a generation of working-class families?
Lake Charles is one of many cities across the country being forced to confront these questions. Up until now, however, the invisible population trend lines being etched into the city have been a lot easier to ignore than scarred rooftops and abandoned buildings.
Edward Gallien Jr., 67, lives with his pit bull, Red, on Pear Street in northern Lake Charles. His house is less than 4 miles away from the county government office where the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury meets, but Gallien hasn’t experienced the recovery the jurors are keen to celebrate. His roof is caving in, frayed scraps of a blue plastic tarp barely covering the sagging asphalt shingles. Smashed windows let in putrid-hot summer air and mosquitos breed in the fast-food containers idling in the sink.
Other houses on his street bear a tell-tale red tag, meaning they’ve been abandoned and marked for demolition by the city. Gallien, who inherited his property from his parents, is still holding out hope that help will come so he can rebuild. He informally inherited his house, a practice permitted under Louisiana state law that can make it exceedingly difficult for property owners to claim federal relief dollars after a disaster hits.
“I’m not giving up,” he said. “I ain’t got nowhere else to go.”
Gallien’s house, severely damaged by Hurricane Laura, is one of the most visible reminders of the legacy of hurricane recovery in Lake Charles. Pictures of homes like his were in every post-hurricane story written about the city. The fact that dilapidated houses still exist haunts city and parish officials, but they’re quickly explained away as relics of a bleaker time. The federal hurricane relief money dried up, parish officials note; the city is moving as fast as it can, Lake Charles city councilmembers say. There’s plenty of blame to go around, too: The city says the parish government should be footing the bill; the parish thinks the opposite.
“It’s not quite recovered to where we need to be,” a parish spokesperson told Grist, a sentiment echoed by many other local representatives. “But it’s a lot closer than it was.”
Driving around Lake Charles, for-rent and for-sale signs dot hundreds of front yards, subtle evidence that the storms’ impacts linger on. Stalled-out apartment complexes, funded by hurricane relief aid and federal infrastructure funds, sit half built. “Coming soon!” signs adorn new buildings that locals say have been “coming soon” for the better part of a year. The tallest skyscraper in Lake Charles, the Capital One Tower on Lakeshore Drive, badly damaged by the hurricanes, is set to be demolished this week.
Tasha Guidry, a community organizer and life coach who grew up in Lake Charles and currently lives in the central part of the city, pointed out a new apartment complex on a recent drive from the northern end of the city to its southernmost tip. A handful of cars sat in their respective parking spots in the complex; the rest were empty. “I don’t know how they figure people are coming back here,” she said. “There’s nothing to come back to.”
The United States Census collects demographic, economic, and geographic data about U.S. residents every 10 years, and conducts a community survey update every five years. The census conducted its latest survey in 2020, and was still collecting data when Laura and Delta hit Calcasieu Parish. The survey had already been marred both by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and statements made by former president Donald Trump about the aim of the census, which experts believe further dampened collection efforts.
Louisiana ended up having one of the lowest self-response rates to the census in the country, and Calcasieu Parish had one of the highest rates of incomplete surveys.
Every state in the country uses census data to assess the distribution and racial and economic equity of its populations. Once the latest numbers are published, states have a certain amount of time to rejigger their districts in order to remain compliant with federal voting rights regulations — meaning the census plays an integral role in determining how communities are represented in government. The data and redistricting determines how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives, how political districts are drawn, and where trillions of dollars for federal programs are distributed.
In the wake of the hurricanes, the 2020 census triggered a massive redistricting effort in Lake Charles — the school board, the city council, and Calcasieu Parish itself. “We’ve been redistricted to hell,” Guidry said, noting the sheer volume of redistricting processes triggered by the census within Lake Charles and the parish.
The flow of people out of Lake Charles to other cities in Louisiana or Texas further deepened long-standing racial and economic divides, both at the parish and city levels. “The majority of homeowners were able to come back and rebuild,” said Mike Smith, a member of the Calcaiseu Parish Police Jury who represents District 2, encompassing north Lake Charles. But many renters didn’t come back — at least not immediately. And when they did, they couldn’t find places to live in their old neighborhoods. “Our biggest concern now is housing,” Smith said. Roughly half of the city’s residents lived in rented houses before the storm.
The census didn’t capture these trends, and, in many cases, neither do the new district maps.
On the city council, Craig Marks, a Democrat who represents District F in the southern portion of Lake Charles, says he has observed a mini, hyper-localized migration taking place: Hundreds of renters have left the worst-damaged neighborhoods and moved into new areas of Lake Charles, including into his own.
Marks’ District F went from being 51 percent people of color to roughly 66 percent after the latest census round. The shift is significant because for more than a decade, there have been three majority white districts in Lake Charles and three minority ones, with Marks’ district comprising the seventh, a swing seat. “You would pretty much always have a white person in the fourth seat, so the majority would always be 4-3 white,” said Marks, “and that affects how the city is run.” Minority populations, Black people specifically, have been severely underrepresented, often by design, in the Louisiana state Legislature — Louisiana’s parishes and city councils, also prone to gerrymandering, mirror this inequity.
But what looks like progress in Marks’ district might not end up being as good as it seems. Marks estimates that roughly a third of his constituents are relatively new renters, and some portion of them either don’t vote or haven’t updated their addresses, voting instead in the districts they lived in before Laura and Delta. “The numbers can be deceptive,” he said. Marks is up for reelection next year, and he doesn’t yet know what the long-term impact of population displacement in his district will be. “It makes it harder now, because you’re trying to get people on your team who really don’t have a vested interest in your district,” he said. “When they get straight, they’re going to be in other districts where their homes originally were.”
What Marks is contending with in Lake Charles is a microcosm of larger disaster-driven trends unfolding across the rest of the U.S., particularly in regions prone to large-scale disruptions like hurricanes and wildfires that displace thousands of people in one fell swoop. Each disaster creates ripples of movement in and out. When multiple cataclysmic disasters strike one region in quick succession, climate change-driven phenomena called “compounding events,” they create overlapping ripples of displacement, making the movement that much harder to track. If it was tracked in real time, local officials would see disturbing trends.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, New Orleans knocked down much of its affordable housing, damaged during the hurricane, deeming it a safety hazard. The new buildings that went up were more expensive, and the new construction very quickly gentrified neighborhoods, forcing even more people out in a second, extended wave of displacement. “New Orleans absolutely became a city that was whiter and wealthier than it was beforehand,” said Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political science at Northeastern University. But it was difficult to capture those changes as they were happening, Aldrich said, because the initial population shifts occurred so quickly and because many of the people who left the city were renters.
“There’s no way the census, every 10 years, will be able to manage keeping up with the rapid population shifts that are already happening,” Aldrich, who switched his research focus to disasters and resilience when his own home was destroyed by Katrina, said.
After big hurricanes, cities have every incentive to apply for federal relief money and spend it on fixing what’s visibly broken. But calculating population loss, and adjusting district lines to compensate for it, is far less common. States, districts, and cities can conduct their own analyses to determine whether their population makeup has changed, but such analyses are expensive and time-consuming. Following a disaster, local officials have to decide how to allocate whatever limited resources they have, and conducting door-knocking campaigns or tracking mail-forwarding notices to follow displaced people is low on the list of priorities.
In 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau started incorporating disaster displacement into its weekly “household pulse” surveys — the agency’s smaller, near-real-time assessments of major issues facing the population. There is no law requiring cities and states to use this data to assess population loss. “We collect these data for governments to use in a way that best serves their needs,” a Census spokesperson told Grist.
There’s a financial and political incentive for districts not to update their population numbers following a major disaster, especially if officials in those districts suspect they may have lost many of their residents. The more population you have, the more money you get from your state and the federal government. “If you’re a local administrator and you know the next census is going to record a drop in population, meaning you’re going to lose resources, that’s the last thing you want to accelerate,” said Aldrich. “You want to leave that number hanging until the last possible moment to hold on to whatever federal and state funds that are coming because of the old numbers.”
In six months, Lake Charles will hold its first mayoral and city council elections since Laura hit in 2020. Marks isn’t sure how he will fare. He doesn’t even know how many people he has in his district. What he does know, however, is that more change is coming. When Laura hit and floodwater inundated Lake Charles, it demonstrated exactly which parts of the city were built on high and low ground. North Lake Charles, despite trailing the rest of the city in recovery, sits on some of the highest real estate around, while the southern edge of the city, a former swamp, dealt with more flooding during Laura, Delta, and the extreme rains the following spring. “Ironically, the poor part of the city is the higher part of the city,” Marks said. He forecasts another intercity migration soon. “I would predict that in the next 20 years, you’re going to see a drastic change in the makeup of Lake Charles.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can the US census keep up with climate-driven displacement? on Sep 3, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy. The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it. I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe. Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s Cape Cod in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand. Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment. It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his cards and conceded the current pot to Donald Trump – what he euphemistically called suspending his campaign for the presidency – he let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him. His trust in Trump is naïve in the extreme. With the issue that Kennedy has made central to his work in recent years – Covid and the “vaccines” – Trump is in the opposite camp.
The investigative journalist Whitney Webb has said:
The inevitable embrace of the Trump campaign by RFK Jr. will see one of the Covid-era’s most prominent (+ promoted) skeptics embrace the man whose administration established the early Covid policies and Military-run Op Warp Speed. What a world and what a disappointment.
Furthermore, Trump’s campaign is backed by a host of people – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Trump’s vice-president sidekick, JD Vance, among others – who are big promoters and investors in mRNA and DNA vaccine technology. Thiel and Lonsdale are cofounders of Palantir, a company that collects American’s health data while it also works with the CIA.
Mirages?
And the independent journalist Vaness Beeley, while being equally scathing of the Democratic Party’s masters of war, has said the following of this odd coupling:
With Trump and Kennedy you have a combination that is 100 times more likely to lead us to Armageddon and idiots are saying Trump supplied less weapons to Israel. Of course he did because he was destroying Syria through unilateral collective punishment economic sanctions, assassinating Resistance leadership and paving the way for greater Israel, Clean Break through Abraham Accords and Jerusalem, giving Golan to Zionist occupation. He didn’t NEED to start wars, he certainly didn’t end them, he increased the hybrid war strategy to pave the way for the final solution and Kennedy is fully on board, whatever his title. It’s astonishing to watch people whitewash the Trump role in the empowerment of the Zionist entity which has led to the genocide we are witnessing. There is no one or the other (Trump or Harris) they work as a tag team, oligarchs and deep dark state create the road map. We are already in WW3 and Trump will go to war with Iran, effectively with Russia and China. Why continue supporting a putrid corpse of a US political system? And, by the way, Kennedy support base is not anti-Zionist. They are generally apathetic and prepared to excuse Kennedy’s criminal genocide denial and defence of Zionist apartheid and ethnosupremacism because “America first”. Genocide is the Red line that Trump and Kennedy will erase and normalisation of genocide is a clandestine policy of this partnership. We are already in WW3. Trump will not end any wars, he never has. Iran and China are in his crosshair.
This too is true, and it runs counter to RFK, Jr.’s pledge to end all foreign wars. One may have noticed that in his speech suspending his campaign Kennedy said that he disagreed with Trump on certain matters, but he did not conveniently mention that they were in accord with each other and the Democrats in supporting the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and its push for war with Iran and therefore Iran’s ally Russia. That sounds like one big foreign war to this observer.
While the mainstream media relish ripping Kennedy, they rarely if ever mention his unequivocal support for Israel, for to do so would bind them to him (and Biden/ Harris, and Trump/Vance) in being full-fledged supporters of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Indeed, there is one taboo that the mainstream corporate media, mouthpieces for the warfare state, assiduously maintain: it is to never report the truth about the power Israel maintains over U.S. Mideast policy through its Israel lobby, and their own complicity in Israel propaganda. Politicians of both parties are venal reprobates who parade with American flags on their chests as they betray their country. They can only be described as traitors, as the current Biden/Harris administration’s full-fledged proud military backing for Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians substantiates. The recent Democratic Convention was a Hollywood spectacle directed by an American version of Nazi Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl, replete with shouts for the destruction of Russia as well as the Palestinians. (The Biden-Harris administration has just approved its 100th arms shipment to Israel since October 7, 2023.) That they are pushing the world toward nuclear war didn’t disturb them in the least, as they sang and laughed and acted out for a fan base deluded by mirages and auditory delusions produced Tinseltown style.
So American voters are offered a choice of a political alliance of an odd couple in Kennedy and Trump, along with Vance, and a conventional one in Harris and Walz, based on the fallacious assumption that a choice is being offered between the war parties whose raisons d’être are to wage foreign wars for the teetering American empire. Hovering over and behind this pathetic travesty lies the controlling power of the national security state and its corporate media propaganda for these endless wars and corrupt politicians. Only a skeptically acute mental knife, constantly sharpened, can cut through the propaganda campaign aimed, not at a foreign audience, but at the American people by its own government. Mind control is the name of its game.
What would Thoreau, a man who didn’t vote and refused to his pay poll tax to support war and slavery, think of these strange alliances hiding behind glittering mirages? Though written more than 150 years ago, his words are more than apropos today:
Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘all aboard’ when the smoke blows away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over – and it will be called, and will be, ‘a melancholy accident.’
He made it very clear that one should not lend oneself to the wrongs which one condemns, such as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or the US/NATO war against Russia through Ukraine that is leading toward nuclear war. By voting for the so-called “lesser of two evils,” one is voting for evil and lending oneself to the wrongs one condemns. It is blatant hypocrisy and a vote for the warfare state.
As synchronicity would have it, down the winding road a short walk from where we are staying, sits tiny Rock Harbor in Orleans where a fleet of fishing boats are docked on Cape Cod Bay. Directly across the road rises a massive tower and huge stone basilica that is part of the compound for The Church of the Transfiguration. It describes itself simply as the Community of Jesus and across its front is a long large sign in red, white, and blue emblazoned with a star and the word JOY.
Since I first saw this anomalous place a few of years ago, it struck me as more than strange and out of place, a ritzy “religious” enclave to a capitalist God. I wondered how it was financed. Intuition told me it was something more than a community of 275 members who claim to be an ecumenical Christian community in the Benedictine monastic tradition, but I didn’t take time to investigate. From the little that I did learn, I was reminded of the American Orthodox Catholic Church in the Little Italy section of the northern Bronx. As Peter Levenda has reported in his trilogy, Sinister Forces, this church was a front for U.S. intelligence agencies in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. He says,
As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad. It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s. Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.
It was not until earlier this year when I was contemplating and mourning the self-immolation of Adam Bushnell, the US airman who burnt himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, that I thought again of The Church of the Transfiguration. Bushnell, who was once a member of this church, left these words:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
His powerful words and tragic death moved me deeply. I thought of Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian and a Catholic Worker who in 1965 immolated himself in front of the United Nations building in New York City protesting the U.S. war against Vietnam, while the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Spellman of New York supported the war with the vigor of John Wayne in The Green Berets. Ruthless jingoism then and now, the lust for killing “others,” such as Vietnamese and Palestinians over the decades. Worthless people to the War Party. And two young men whose consciences drove them to extreme acts of protest.
Yesterday I remembered what I read in The New York Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation in February about Adam Bushnell and The Church of the Transfiguration. These reports assert that the church is a cult and that Bushnell grew up here in the Rock Harbor community where his parents still live. The reports claim that members are mind-controlled and abused, and they are raised to strictly obey and follow some secret agenda. The church says it stands with Israel, which is what Bushnell emphatically came to reject, for he stood with the Palestinians, even literally standing as he courageously took his life in flames. Like all cults, money doesn’t seem a problem for this strange community. One thinks also of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple and its strange intelligence connections. As John Judge has documented in “The Black Hole of Guyana”:
The connection of intelligence agencies to cults is nothing new. A simple but revealing example is the Unification Church, tied to both the Korean CIA (i.e., American CIA in Korea), and the international fascist network known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The Moonies hosted WACL’s first international conference.[217] What distinguished Jonestown was both the level of control and the openly sinister involvement. It was imperative that they cover their tracks.[218]
The sky and ocean here on Cape Cod are very restless and constantly changing, even as people come here to rest, to be still for a while. The movement of the waves and clouds, the shore birds flitting and floating before and above one, the constant breaking of the waves on the shore, and the long looks far out to where the ocean seems to disappear, create dreamy minds, if one allows it. I am no exception, and this place no doubt increases my tendency to mental vagabonding. Yet I am one with Thoreau when he says, “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough.” For I began with mirages and will drift back to them. They come in many forms, but all contain the sense of being deluded. This is the lesson of Plato’s Cave and Eastern philosophy’s idea of maya, among many ancient warnings. “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,” Thoreau said truly. Yet when we turn to the realm of politics in our times, as we must when vacations cease, we are forced back to contemplate the insidious nature of the scoundrel politicians and leaders of all sorts who capture so many minds with lies and mirages of false hope on the horizon.
Most people don’t like to see the summer end, but another Fall is approaching. A different reality beckons.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Jas Athwal, the Labour Party MP for Ilford South, is also a landlord. He’s renting out 15 flats that tenants are saying have slum conditions of mould and ant infestations.
An example of the ‘quality Labour candidates’ Keir Starmer has been going for, no doubt. But there are huge questions about how Labour selected him as a candidate and its use of the online Anonyvoter system.
Sam Tarry, a trade unionist who helped set up Momentum, lost the selection process in favour of Jas Athwal in October 2022.
Starmer had previously removed Tarry as shadow transport minister for joining striking rail workers on a picket line.
Earlier in 2024, the Telegraph revealed that, in the selection process, Tarry won 57% of in-person votes but just 35% of Anonyvoter ballots. Athwal, meanwhile, won 43% of in-person votes, but 65% of Anonyvoter ballots, plus a small number of postal votes.
The results chime with other possible irregularities in Labour’s use of the Anonyvoter ballots. In one selection, a ‘centrist’ candidate won 10% of the in-person vote, but 62% of the Anonyvoter ballots.
And, for the Croydon East selection process, police cyber-crime specialists are investigating allegations of electoral fraud and tampering of membership lists. Labour used Anonyvoter here too.
Independent tellers aren’t reviewing the Anonyvoter process, meaning there’s no outside observation of the online system. By contrast, in-person votes are opened and counted in front of campaign teams.
A left-wing Labour source told the Telegraph:
It is a black box. There aren’t really checks and balances. There is an easy way of doing this, which is independent tellers. But those suggestions have been rebuffed. The only check and balance we have is the supposed integrity of the regional staff
Another concern is the software’s generation of codes to enable members’ voting could be open to electoral fraud through the generation of additional codes.
Lawyers acting on behalf of Tarry have addressed Labour:
Mr Tarry believes there is evidence of voter fraud pertaining to the use of the Anonyvoter system, and specifically, that votes were improperly generated using Anonyvoter in a manner that was unfavourable to our client and favourable to his opponent.
Another former Labour MP, Beth Winter, has also been exchanging legal letters with the party over alleged Anonyvoter misuse. Both Winter and Tarry were members of the Socialist Campaign Group when they were in parliament.
Winter faced Gerald Jones in the selection process. She won 56% of postal votes but 47% of Anonyvoter ballots. Jones won 43% of postal votes but 53% of Anonyvoter ballots. There were no in-person votes.
Lawyers acting for Winter sent letters to Labour officials before and after the June 2023 selection. One sent before the selection reads:
As you are aware from previous trigger ballots and selections, there is serious disquiet among some parliamentarians and party members that online processes have produced and will continue to produce undemocratic results which lack fairness and transparency
Four Labour-affiliated unions have also expressed “grave doubts” about the online Anonyvoter system in a letter to the party’s general secretary, David Evans. Could it be that Jas Athwal got in off the back of this?
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube and Redbridge Council – YouTube
By James Wright
This post was originally published on Canary.