Now that we’re entering the home stretch of the presidential campaign, millions of Americans are wondering why we still aren’t hearing the candidates ACTUALLY talk about issues. Both Trump and Harris have a few “proposals,” but they don’t come with any specifics at all. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party […]
One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.
Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.
When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.
It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.
Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.
France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)
These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.
Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.
‘Institutional stability’
When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.
Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:
France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.
Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:
On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”
AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”
Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.
‘Scorched-earth politics’
To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”
The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.” Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”
She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”
However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.
The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who
consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.
The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.
Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.
Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”
Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.
Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.
During both the Republican and Democratic conventions, the issues of inflation and price gouging were at the forefront. But what was missing from the floor speeches was the fact that the 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 […]
The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front) left-wing alliance won the most seats in France’s snap legislative election in early July. It took 182 seats, while president Emmanuel Macron’s ‘centrist’ coalition Ensemble took 168 and far right Rassemblement National (National Rally) won 143. The New Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing leader Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (Unsubmissive France), social democrats, Greens, and communists, were short of the 289 seats needed for a majority.
But they still won the most seats, with other coalitions even further off.
Nonetheless, Macron, as president, has refused to appoint a prime minister from the left-wing coalition. He said “no one won”, in an address to the French public. (In France, the presidential election runs separate and is not until 2027. The president traditionally has more power over foreign policy and the prime minister domestic).
Macron ushering a “return to the royal veto” against the public
Melenchon and the left are challenging Macron’s position. The leader pointed out that Macron appointed a prime minister from his coalition following the 2022 legislative elections, where, like the New Popular Front in 2024, the centrist coalition had won the most seats, but still short of a majority.
The New Popular Front further said in a statement:
The New Popular Front is without contest the first force in the new National Assembly. Were the president to persist in refusing to recognize the results of [the] election, this would be a betrayal of the spirit of the constitution.
This result must now be extended by defeating Macron’s power grab. He wants to keep the power that the French voters took away from him. There can be no question of accepting this kind of return to the royal veto against a vote by the electorate. There can be no question of allowing the return of unscrupulous combinations and secret plots to impose themselves through a coalition different to the one chosen by the popular vote! What is unacceptable must not be accepted. And this must be translated into concrete action, until the president respects the decision made through universal suffrage.
Still, Macron has refused to appoint the New Popular Front’s joint candidate, Lucie Castets, as prime minister That’s despite Melenchon offering to support Castets without any Unsubmissive France ministers, even though Unsubmissive France won the most seats in the alliance. This aims to leave Macron’s position looking increasingly authoritarian.
Macron cannot call another snap election until June 2025. He has held talks with the National Rally of Marine Le Pen. The far-right party have said they will vote no confidence against any prime minister from the left-wing coalition.
When it comes to policies, the New Popular Front pledged to scrap Macron’s raising of the retirement age and increase the minimum wage. It also pledged to introduce price caps on essential food and electricity and invest in public services and green energy.
America’s Lawyer E112: The Party conventions are now in the rearview mirror, but the corporate shadow that hung over both the Democrats and Republicans can’t be ignored. We’ll explain why both events were little more than a big love fest for corporations. One of the biggest corporate bankruptcy judges in the country was caught having […]
But armed rebel groups and members of the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG – made up of former civilian leaders – are opposed to the vote, which they say would be a sham, allowing the military to legitimize its control over the country.
Ever since the coup, the country has been wracked by a civil war, with ethnic armies and rebel groups gaining the upper hand over the past year, pushing the military back on its heels.
On Tuesday, the NUG said it would try to speed up its offensive against the military to gain even more territory – where they would boycott elections – and double international outreach efforts.
Why does the junta want to hold elections?
Facing a series of battlefield defeats and troop surrenders, military leaders are searching for an exit strategy to a civil war that will drag on and that increasingly appears they will not win. Holding elections may be a bid by the junta to create a sense of normalcy and political stability in the country.
The military leaders probably are hoping to legitimize their control of Myanmar’s government by manipulating the electoral process to ensure that their preferred candidates win, experts say. Doing so would allow them to retain power under the guise of a democratic system.
Junta’s election commission and political parties held a meeting in Naypyidaw, Aug. 24, 2024 to prepare for elections. (Myanmar Military)
The junta is also hoping that plans to hold an election will ease international pressure and sanctions, and even give the regime international recognition by showing a commitment to the democratic process – regardless of whether the polls are manipulated.
Why are Myanmar’s armed opposition groups so opposed to such an election?
Junta opponents say a history of election fraud under military rule – and the junta’s crackdown on any form of dissent – means it is highly unlikely any such election will be free and fair. It would be illegitimate and aimed at securing power for the junta, rather than ushering in a democratic transition, they say.
These doubts are bolstered by the junta’s exclusionary electoral process that would deny many groups a stake in the country’s future.
Instead, the rebel groups say they will ratchet up their attacks on junta positions to increase their territory and block elections in areas under their control.
Furthermore, the armed opposition says the junta is using the election as a distraction from the ongoing civil war and its human rights abuses. Many groups say they will focus on resisting the junta militarily while advocating for democratic reforms without a ballot.
“The military council has planned to hold a fake election as their last resort next year,” NUG Prime Minister Mahn Win Khaing Than said Tuesday. “Some countries will support the elections, encouraging the junta to continue the plan by all possible means. With thorough consideration, we need to speed up our offensives and political measures.”
Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Joshua Lipes and RFA Burmese.
In an op-ed, President Biden called for sweeping reforms for the Supreme Court, including term limits and a code of ethics. Also, Donald Trump thought he picked a winner when he selected Senator JD Vance as his running mate, but Republicans disagree with his choice. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a […]
New voting rules in key battleground states could impact the 2024 election results. In Georgia, Democrats are suing to halt a set of Trump-backed election rules which Democrats say could be used to block certification of election results if they win in November. “It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins…
Janine Jackson interviewed North Central College‘s Steve Macek about “dark money” campaign contributions for the August 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.
“Dark money,” as it’s called, has become, in practical terms, business as usual, but it still represents the opposite of that transparency, that ability for even the unpowerful to know what’s happening, to know what’s affecting the rules that govern our lives. A press corps concerned with defending democracy, and not merely narrating the nightmare of crisis, would be talking about that every day, in every way.
Our guest has written about the gap between what we need and what we get, in terms of media. Steve Macek is professor and chair of communication and media studies, at North Central College in Illinois, a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and co-editor and contributor to, most recently, Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, out this year from Peter Lang. He joins us now by phone from Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, Steve Macek.
Steve Macek: Thanks for having me, Janine. I’m a big fan of the show.
JJ: Well, thank you. Let’s start with some definition. Dark money doesn’t mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don’t like, or from groups I don’t like. In your June piece for the Progressive, you spell out what it is, and where it can come from, and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money.
SM: Sure. So dark money, and Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it “funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes, such as elections.” Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections.
Not all of that “independent expenditure” on elections is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I’m sure your listeners are really familiar with, are Super PACs, or, what they’re more technically known as, IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions, and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.
There’s this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a “social welfare nonprofit,” who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors, but they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend 49.999% of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education, or research that might, in turn, guide the creation of political ads and so on.
JJ: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it’s not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate. That doesn’t have to be involved at all.
SM: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they’re working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate.
But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressivearticle: This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022, and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border, or over woke culture-war themes, but they’re spending $40+ million on ads, according to one estimate.
What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization, because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors.
It has been running this year, in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads, and putting up billboards, for example, attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general, very snarky anti-“woke” ads saying, basically, Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.
JJ: Right. Well, I think “rich people influence policy,” it’s almost like “dog bites man” at this point, right? Yeah, it’s bad, but that’s how the system works, and I think it’s important to lift up: If it didn’t matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn’t be trying to obscure it.
And the thing you’re writing about, these are down-ballot issues, where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, or any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that’s scrambled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know to connect these financial dots.
SM: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down-ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money, and these dark money organizations, is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school boards or, as I discussed in the article, state attorney generals races.
There is this organization, it was founded in 2014, called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym, and they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic state attorney generals candidates in the 2022 elections.
Now, they are a PAC of a kind, they’re a 527, so they have the same legal status as a Super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is a group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million.
Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal courts. His organization, this fund that he controls, gave $17 million to RAGA.
And we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who’s funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country.
That’s alarming because, of course, some of these right-wing billionaires and corporations have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position. Because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws, or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly state attorney general in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.
JJ: And I think, from the point of view of the public, filtered through the point of view of the press, if you heard there’s this one macher, or this one rich person, and they’re pulling the strings and they’ve bought this judge, and they’ve paid for this policy and these ads, that would be one thing. But to have it filtered through a number of groups that are kind of opaque and you don’t really know, a minority point of view can be presented as a sort of groundswell of grassroots support.
SM: Exactly. It can create this sort of astroturfing effect where, “Oh, there are all these ads being run. It must be that there are lots of people who are really concerned or really opposed to this particular candidate,” when, in fact, it could be a single billionaire who is routing money for a number of different shells and front groups in an effort to influence the outcome of an election.
So I think attorney generals races are one kind of down-ballot race where we’ve seen a lot of dark money spent. School board elections are another, and this is something that has been really evident in the past couple of years, where various different Super PACs and other dark money groups have spent millions of dollars, that are affiliated with advocates for charter schools, and advocates for school vouchers have been spending money trying to elect school board members that are pro-voucher and pro–charter school.
In 2023, City Fund, which is a national pro–charter school group, bankrolled in part by billionaire Reed Hastings, donated $1.75 million from its affiliated PAC to a 501(c)(4), Denver Families for Public Schools, to try to elect three “friendly” pro–charter school candidates for the city school board, and all three of the candidates won.
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have children who went through the public system here in Naperville, I didn’t pay very close attention to who was running in those races, or who was backing those people. I just would read about it a couple days before the election. Most people don’t pay very close attention, unless they’re employees of the school district, or have children currently in school. They’re not paying that close attention to the school board elections. And so this influx of dark money could very well have tipped those races in the favor of the pro–charter school.
JJ: And name that group again, because it didn’t say “charter schools.”
SM: So the charter school group was City Fund, and it donated money to Denver Families for Public Schools….
JJ: : For “public schools….”
SM: Right, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Yes, and it’s got this Orwellian name, because it’s Denver Families for Public Schools. But what they wanted to do was, of course, create more charter schools.
JJ: It’s deep, and it’s confusing because it’s designed to be confusing, and it’s opaque because, you know….
And then, OK, so here come media. And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the US press corps as kind of like an old movie, with press cards in their hat band, or Woodward and Bernstein connecting dots, holding the powerful to account, and the chips are just falling where they may.
And you make the point in the Progressive piece that there have been excellent corporate news media exposés of the influence of dark money, connecting those dots. But you write that news media have “missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered.” What are you getting at there?
SM: I absolutely believe that. So it is true, as I say, that there have been some excellent reports about dark money. Here in Chicago, we had this reclusive billionaire industrialist, Barre Seide, who made what most people say is the largest political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo, again, a conservative judicial activist.
The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for $1.6 billion. It’s hard for the corporate media to ignore a political contribution of $1.6 billion. That’s a $1.6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court, is going to be able to use—he’s a very right-wing, conservative Catholic—to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported.
And, in fact, there have been some really excellent follow-up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo–affiliated organizations have influenced judicial appointments and have influenced judicial elections. So you have to give credit where credit’s due.
But the problem is that there are so many other cases where dark money is in play. Whether or not you can say it’s determining the outcome of elections or not is another story. But where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.
Steve Macek: “Outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.”
Think about the last month of this current presidential election. There hasn’t been much discussion about the influence of dark money. And yet OpenSecrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year, and might surpass the $660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections. So they’re projecting that could be as much as a billion dollars. We haven’t heard very much about this.
I don’t think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but it certainly can make a difference in congressional races and attorney generals races, school board races, city council races, that’s where it can make a huge difference.
And I do know that OpenSecrets, among others, have done research, and they found that there were cases where, over a hundred different congressional races, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates. Which is a scandal, that outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.
JJ: And it’s disheartening, the idea that, while you’re swimming in it, it’s too big of an issue to even lift out.
SM: And I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.
JJ: That’s exactly where I was going to lead you, for a final question, just because we know that reporters will say, well, they can’t cover what isn’t happening. But it is happening, that legal and community and policy pushback on this influence is happening. And so, finally, what should we know about that?
SM: State-level Republican lawmakers, and state legislatures across the country, are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that I spoke about, that spend money on politics. So they’re trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have introduced federal legislation that would do the same thing.
Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this, are based on a model bill that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Koch network of right-wing foundations, millionaires and billionaires. And they meet every year to develop model right-wing, libertarian legislation, that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country.
And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, have all adopted some version of this ALEC legislation that criminalizes disclosing donors to nonprofits that engage in political activity.
And in Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voter’s Right to Know Act, Proposition 211, that would basically reverse the ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors. It would require PACs spending at least $50,000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who have given more than $5,000—a direct reversal of the ALEC-inspired law.
Conservative dark money group spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost. And then they spent a lot of money challenging the new law, Proposition 211, in court. And it has gone to trial, I think, three times, and been defeated each time.
Now, the initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered to some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.
JJ: So, not to hammer it too hard home, but there are legal efforts, policy efforts around the country, to bring more transparency, to explode this idea of dark money, to connect the dots, and more media coverage of them would actually have an amplifying effect on that very transparency.
SM: Absolutely right. You would think that media organizations, whether they’re corporate or independent media, would have a vested interest in seeing more transparency in election spending. That would benefit their own reporting, and the reporters. And yet they really haven’t done a great job of covering it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois, and a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program. The piece we’re talking about, “Dark Money Uncovered,” can be found at TheProgressive.org. Steve Macek, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
BREAKING: Kamala Harris received the endorsement for president from over 200 Republicans who had worked for former President George W. Bush the late Sen. John McCain, or Sen. Mitt Romney. This exclusive information was shared in an open letter that was obtained by USA TODAY on… pic.twitter.com/I0tzwcOEf5
As reported in the The New York Times, some of the more well known signatories had also signed a letter endorsing President Biden in 2020. These include a chief of staff, a legislative director, and a deputy campaign manager for John McCain, former Senator. Others work for organisations which oppose former president Trump, including The Bulwark and the Lincoln Project.
This support perhaps shows how far the party has swerved under Trump’s leadership – given how persistent the opposition is from within his own party.
More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in an open letter Monday obtained exclusively by USA TODAY.
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 26, 2024
Trump losing support is a win for Harris
Last month, high profile Republicans including Mitt Romney and former president Bush missed the Republican nominating convention. Meanwhile, during the Democratic National Convention last week the Harris-Walz campaign went to great lengths to give voice to Republicans who are opposed to Trump. This included giving speaking slots to former Trump staffers who no longer support him. Even Trump’s former vice president refused to endorse him. However, as people on X have pointed out, he isn’t the only one:
“In fact nearly all former members of his own administration have refused to endorse him (40/44 cabinet members, and even his former VP)” https://t.co/tctUUEc5dT
Reminder that there is zero continuity between the current Republican ticket and its 2012 or 2008 version. While all former Democratic presidents (and presidential candidates) have endorsed Harris (who is strictly in the continuity of Biden and Obama), no former Republican… https://t.co/Omriv3eiAJ
As the Canary previously reported, the Trump-backed project 2025 would put American democracy in grave danger. Not to mention the welfare of millions of American people.
In the letter, they state:
At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.
However, high profile Republican endorsements for Harris show that while another Trump presidency might be a disaster, her administration doesn’t offer America much better. Notably, it doesn’t just show how far to the right Trump has slid. It also shows that Harris and the Democrats have shifted to the right too:
So basically some of the most heinous evil people on earth?? How is that a good thing https://t.co/0RO2wSWdGX
Whilst Trump has shifted his party so far to the right that even his own party are alarmed, it’s hardly surprising that Republicans who backed war criminal Bush have endorsed both Biden and Kamala. As we have seen in recent weeks, both are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
By the time Mtangulizi Sanyika got to Houston in September 2005, he and his wife were tired of moving. Sanyika, a lifelong resident of New Orleans and a professor at a historically Black college in the city, had spent weeks jumping from town to town after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Simultaneously, he waited for information about his mother and sister, who had been stranded in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital with no power and little food. Eight people died at the hospital while waiting to be evacuated, but Sanyika’s mother and sister made it out, and the family reunited in Houston, where some of their cousins lived.
Within a few months, Sanyika and his wife had set up in an apartment provided almost for free by the administration of Houston mayor Bill White, a Democrat, and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The Texas city staged an unprecedented resettlement effort after more than 200,000 displaced people arrived post-Katrina, many of them crowded into the Astrodome sports stadium. White’s evacuee rehousing program earned Houston nationwide praise, and it was so successful that tens of thousands of displaced storm victims chose to stay in the city for good.
Sanyika and his wife were two of those people. They had a deep connection to New Orleans, but had no idea how long they would have to wait for their hometown to recover. When they started looking for apartments in Houston, however, Sanyika encountered a surprising stigma: When he told potential landlords that he was living in an apartment paid for with Katrina recovery money, they shied away from renting to him. Only once he and his wife stopped mentioning the recovery money did they manage to secure an apartment in a new development on the southwest side of the city, later purchasing a house just down the road.
Mtangulizi Sanyika, a retired professor from Texas Southern University, at his home in New Orleans in 2015. Sanyika established a group for Katrina evacuees who settled in Houston.
Marie D. De Jesus / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
“A lot of property owners had basically an aversion to that,” said Sanyika. “Once we dropped FEMA aid, then the market opened up in a different kind of way.”
By then, Sanyika had founded an organization, the New Orleans Association of Houston, to keep tabs on all the storm survivors in the city, and he was hearing similar stories of discrimination. Job applicants couldn’t get calls back if they had a 504 area code, and Sanyika said students faced harassment at school from teachers and peers who believed they were criminals and gang members. Local papers fanned this sentiment with thousands of lines of text about evacuees committing crimes, blaming them for a spike in the city’s murder rate.
Faced with this publicity crisis and a looming re-election campaign, the welcoming Houston government changed course and stepped up policing in the areas where evacuees were living, arresting numerous evacuees and pushing more back to New Orleans. The tenor of this response was always racial: New Orleans’s population was more than two-thirds black when Katrina hit, compared to less than a quarter in Houston, and many Houstonians projectedracialprejudices onto the arriving evacuees.
“The dynamics of race and ethnicity and apprehension toward immigrants drove largely antagonistic beliefs about the mostly poor, mostly black new arrivals,” wrote the authors of a study that analyzed Houston’s response to Katrina.
Local ire about the Katrina evacuees faded as time went on and they merged into the city’s social fabric. Sanyika said he rarely heard about outright discrimination in later years, at least among the members of his organization. But the difficulties of the Katrina diaspora in Houston represent a profound warning for the future of climate displacement: Despite the city’s excellent resettlement process, and despite the fact that the evacuees didn’t make life harder for most native Houstonians, the city’s longtime residents still soured on them, confronting them with the same attitudes that international migrants often face upon arriving in the United States.
It also demonstrated that climate disasters can be a political liability for communities that receive disaster victims, just as much as for the communities that suffer the disasters themselves.
Bill White was less than two years into his first term as Houston’s mayor when Katrina broke the levees in New Orleans as a Category 3 storm. He later said he supersized Houston’s hurricane response out of compassion for the storm victims, reflecting that “you should treat your neighbors the way you’d want to be treated.” As the city’s Astrodome filled with evacuees, who arrived by the busload after New Orleans vacated its own infamous stadium, FEMA offered to help White secure thousands of temporary trailers and hotel rooms for them. But he and his administration declined, instead asking them to reimburse the city for long-term housing in apartments.
“We knew it was going to be a while before they could go back,” White told Grist. “The Red Cross-style shelters that [FEMA was] set up to do, that obviously wouldn’t work for an event of this magnitude.”
Hilda Crain, of New Orleans, stands in her new apartment at the Primrose Casa Bella Senior Apartments September 5, 2005 in Houston, Texas. Crain evacuated from New Orleans to the Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina.
Dave Einsel / Getty Images
Wary of federal bureaucracy, White set up a bespoke housing voucher program with aid from the private sector, cajoling hundreds of apartment landlords across the city to donate units to the cause. Nonprofits and faith organizations such as the Catholic Charities volunteered to help evacuees with case work as they applied for disaster assistance or sought temporary jobs. White had no guarantee from FEMA that the agency would reimburse him, but he promised the landlords that he would convince the feds to pony up, and in time he did. This tremendous act earned the city national praise. Even the local newspaper in its cross-state rival, Dallas, named Houston the “Texan of the Year” in 2005.
But despite White’s efforts, the city’s goodwill was not unlimited. Because large landlords could choose which apartment complexes to house evacuees in, most ended up clustered in older buildings, many of them in worse-off parts of the city, said Sanyika. The majority didn’t yet have jobs or cars, let alone any familiarity with Houston geography. As city politicians tell it, these conditions led to flare-ups of the old gang conflicts that had divided New Orleans’s largest public housing complexes.
“As it relates to murders, there’s a definite Katrina effect,” Captain Dale Brown, a high-ranking officer in the Houston Police Department, told the Houston Chronicle in 2006. The police would later claim that they tied 60 murders that took place in 2006 to Katrina evacuees.
Bill White, who served as mayor of Houston after Hurricane Katrina, at his home in 2010. White helped resettle thousands of storm evacuees from New Orleans.
Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle
But studies have since cast doubt on the idea that evacuees were to blame for the short-lived crime spike in Houston. The city saw almost 400 murders in 2006, a 13 percent rise from the previous year, but violent crime in the city had already been rising for years, and many types of crime, such as assault and burglary, never rose even after the evacuees arrived. Moreover, other cities like San Antonio that took in evacuees didn’t see similar trends.
A 2010 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice, led by the law enforcement expert Sean Varano, found that the displacement of Louisianans into nearby major cities — including Houston, San Antonio, and Phoenix — caused “only modest effects” on crime. Varano and his colleagues theorized that the city’s police department might have played up the impact of Katrina to direct attention away from the fact that the department had been dealing with staffing shortages caused by a wave of officer retirements.
Tanya Settles, a political science expert and government communications consultant who has studied Houston’s response to Katrina evacuees, said that the city’s concern over crime was a classic moral panic, with a response far out of proportion to the facts.
“There was a political interest in trying to make sure that [the evacuees] left,” she said.
These details didn’t seem to matter at the time. The very popular White administration started to take flak for the perceived crime wave, with reporters crowding press conferences and residents showing up at meetings to yell at council members. The complaints about crime also amplified other concerns about whether the city could handle the influx of evacuees: The Houston school district had to enroll 4,700 new students and hire almost 200 new teachers after Katrina. One study found that the arrival of evacuees reduced local wages by around 2 percent as evacuees and locals competed for jobs. According to an annual public opinion survey conducted by the Kinder Institute at Rice University, the percentage of Houstonians who thought accepting Katrina evacuees was a bad thing rose from 47 percent to 70 percent between 2005 and 2008.
“The evacuees had a large footprint, but they were assimilated into a very, very large metropolitan area, so for most people there wasn’t a sense of being overwhelmed by strangers,” said Stephen Klineberg, the Rice University sociologist who ran the study. “But the crime thing was kind of a surrogate for all these anxieties, about, ‘why are these people coming here?’”
A message board for Hurricane Katrina evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. The arena hosted More than 16,000 storm victims arrived at the arena in September 2005, having evacuated New Orleans. Stan Honda / AFP via Getty Images
Michael Moore, who served as White’s chief of staff, says that a deluge of media coverage distorted residents’ views about the effect evacuees were having on Houston, which he maintains was minimal.
“There were probably 10 bad stories to every good story,” said Moore. “There were a lot of tough press conferences and community meetings where we said we were getting a handle on it, but there’s nothing you can do that really can alleviate people’s fears until that number goes down.”
Even so, White changed tack — at the time, Houston mayors served two-year terms, so he was up for reelection in 2007. He instructed his police chief to crack down on crime among evacuees. Cops stepped up enforcement of low-level offenses like drug possession and conducted random traffic stops around apartment complexes housing Katrina victims.
“I said repeatedly at the time that we had a special housing program for law-abiding citizens, which was the vouchers,” White recalled. “We also had a program for those who violated our criminal laws. And it was called the jail.” (The Houston Police Department has said it never tracked how many Katrina evacuees it arrested.) Later on, when the federal government tried to extend housing aid for Katrina survivors in Houston, White pushed back, saying it was time for evacuees to either support themselves or leave the city.
By the four-year anniversary of the hurricane, the supposed crime spike had faded and murder rates had declined. It’s almost impossible to be certain about the causal relationship: Maybe the evacuees who were committing the crimes moved back to New Orleans, Maybe many of them ended up in jail, or crime rates ticked back down the way they often do. Or maybe residents ceased to worry about evacuees after the news media moved past the issue. Most Houstonians had never directly encountered the evacuees anyway, so it didn’t take long for them to forget about the problems the displaced community had supposedly caused. When White ran for re-election in 2007, he won handily.
Even so, there is some evidence that the experience may have left scars on Houston’s psyche. The last time researchers at the Kinder Institute asked a question about evacuees in their Houston survey, in 2009, 57 percent of respondents said the evacuees had been a bad thing for the city, down from an earlier peak, but still much higher than just after the storm. Even more concerning, the share of residents who said that ethnic diversity made the city stronger dropped from 69 percent to 60 percent. Even 10 years later, many Katrina evacuees reported having trouble getting jobs when they called potential employers with a New Orleans area code. One study concluded that native Houstonians perceived the evacuees the same way they did immigrants from other countries, treating them as unauthorized interlopers, and indeed some angry residents at the time referred to evacuees as “Katrina illegal immigrants.”
The arc of events in Houston raise concerns for future displacement crises, which are being made more frequent by climate change and intensifying extreme weather. The ambition and execution of the city’s humanitarian effort after Katrina won national praise, but it also led to local criticism, stoked in part by the media, which later resulted in an aggressive police crackdown on a largely Black community, followed by years of marginalization and social pressure.
“It seems like the perception of the city’s efforts to rehouse the evacuees was colored by people’s perception of the people themselves,” said Settles.
It seems unlikely that Houston would be as generous to evacuees if another Katrina happened tomorrow. Even though the city still has a liberal mayor, White’s rehousing response relied to a great extent on help from the state government, which has veered even farther to the right since the storm. Settles points out that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who as a first-term attorney general during Katrina tried to stoke panic about sex offenders being among the New Orleans evacuees, has now garnered national attention for bussing immigrants to liberal cities like New York and Chicago.
For another thing, Houston itself has been battered by several climate disasters in the years since Katrina. Hurricane Rita hit Houston later the same year; Hurricane Ike three years after that. After back-to-back years with disastrous floods, Hurricane Harvey dropped 50 inches of rain on the city in 2017, displacing former Mayor White and thousands of other residents. Then the city lost power for days in 2022 when its electricity grid froze during Winter Storm Uri. It lost it again this year when Hurricane Beryl downed hundreds of electricity poles.
Flooded homes in Houston, Texas are seen from above following Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University who also studied crime among the city’s Katrina evacuee population, says he doubts Houston would welcome evacuees again, in part because keeping Houstonians safe from climate change has become hard enough.
“If that happened again, I’m not certain that the city and the county would be reaching out,” he said. “It’s because of the experience of helping Katrina evacuees, but also the context of, we’re suffering too, and we’re having trouble providing basic services ourselves.”
Indeed, many places once considered resilient to climate disasters, from Vermont to Colorado to the Pacific Northwest, have suffered devastating impacts from floods, fires, and extreme heat, and have languished for years while waiting for federal funding to rebuild.
For Sanyika’s part, the last decade of climate disasters in Houston hasn’t made him want to leave. His home is relatively new, and built well out of a flood zone, away from major rivers and bayous. Plus, he looks around the country and sees disasters everywhere. At 81, he doubts that he could get any safer by moving inland or farther north.
“You have to ask the question, is there some place where you will not be at risk, and there’s just no place you can go,” he said, “so we didn’t have any problem with just staying here. But we didn’t expect the weather events to be as bad as they were.”
It seems more and more, elderly lawmakers suffer very serious age-related health emergencies, requiring hospitalization. But in spite of their poor health, they continue running for reelection because they refuse to give up their power and access. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any […]
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. There’s no doubt that his campaign is faltering, and if he can’t change course, he could be in for a rude awakening in November. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. […]
Don’t ask what business the US had in backing a candidate in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election. Certainly that was not a question that the corporate press ever asked.
Of course, the US should never have been meddling in Venezuelan elections in the first place. But given the machinations of the hemisphere’s hegemon, it is instructive to examine why and who Washington backed.
Insurrectionary rather than democratic strategy
It came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition called the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election fraudulent when they lost. They had announced that intention before the election.
Cries of fraud have been the far-right’s practice in nearly every one of the 31 national contests since the Bolivarian Revolution began a quarter of a century ago, except for the two contests lost by the Chavistas, the movement founded by Hugo Chávez and carried on by his successor Nicolás Maduro.
That is because this far-right opposition, funded and largely directed by Washington, pursues an insurrectionary strategy, rather than a democratic one. Neither they nor the US have recognized the legitimacy of the Venezuelan government since Maduro was first elected in 2013.
The US-backed opposition boycotted the 2018 election in anticipation of what appeared to them as an imminent governmental collapse under US assault. But in 2024, they were compelled to contend in the presidential contest. Conditions had changed with the successes by the Maduro administration in turning around the country’s economic freefall, largely precipitated by US unilateral coercive measures. In addition, Washington had failed to diplomatically isolate Venezuela by such stunts as recognizing the self-proclaimed “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó.
US picks its candidate
The reentry of the US-backed opposition into the electoral arena was not based on democratic participation that recognized the constitution or the institutions of the Venezuelan state. The US-backed opposition’s “primary” was not conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE, as had previous ones. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds, a CIA-cutout.
Washington’s prechosen candidate, Maria Corina Machado, won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates in the primary called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do that because Súmate was her personal organization.
Ms. Machado was despised by much of the other opposition. A faux populist, she is a member of one of the richest families in Venezuela, went to Yale, and lived in Florida. While the populace suffered under US unilateral coercive measures, she championed them and even called for military intervention. Internationally, Machado has strong ties with the international far-right, notably Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Washington backed Machado knowing full well that in 2015 she had been barred from running for office. Back then, while she was a member of the National Assembly, she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign country in order to testify against her own country. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.
For the US, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. The State Department could claim that its candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Washington’s intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.
Disbarred, Machado then personally chose her surrogate, Edmundo González. The former diplomat from the 1980s was completely unknown and with no electoral experience. The infirm surrogate literally had to be propped up by Machado at campaign rallies, although most of the time he convalesced in Caracas while she barnstormed the country.
An alternative strategy
Contrary to the nonsense in the corporate press of a “unified opposition,” the non-Chavista elements have been anything but unified. Had they been, they may have made the most of the 48% of the electorate that did not support Maduro according to the count by the CNE.
The assertion by Machado/González that they had won the 2024 election by a margin of 70% lacks credibility. That seven out of ten Venezuelans supported them was not proven in the streets. Machado called her followers out on the 3rd and again on the 17th, but the turnout was smaller than even her pre-election rallies. Meanwhile pro-Maduro rallies dwarfed the opposition’s. This was an indication of the high level of organization and popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution.
Still, in retrospect, the US could have tried to galvanize support for an alternative project. There were politically moderate state governors and legislators, who might have unified the fractious opposition. Instead, the US, anticipating a Maduro victory, obstinately clung to the disqualified Machado with her surrogate González.
The Machado/González platform was not a popular one, calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency. A far more attractive and winning platform would have been to retain the social benefits of Chavismo with the promise of relief from US unilateral coercive measures.
In backing someone as unattractive, unknown, and unpopular as González, the US showed its disinterest in a good faith engagement in the democratic electoral process.
The real obstacle to free and fair elections in Venezuela
That brings us to the heart of the matter. Truly free and fair elections in Venezuela were impossible – not due to the supposed conspiracies of the ruling Chavistas – but because of conditions imposed by Washington by their hybrid war against Venezuela.
The 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on Caracas by Washington – euphemistically called sanctions – are no less deadly than bombs, causing over 100,000 casualties. This form of collective punishment is illegal under the charters of the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) and even US law.
In short, the Venezuelan people went to the polls on July 28 with a gun aimed at their heads. If they voted for Maduro, the coercive measures would likely continue and even be intensified. This fundamental reality was ignored by the Western press and other critics.
The narrative on Venezuela has been shifted by Washington and echoed in the corporate press. The paramount interference of US’s coercive measures was ignored, while attention was shifted to the intricacies of Venezuelan electoral law. The larger picture got lost in the statistical weeds. This shifted narrative is designed to place the burden of proof on the sovereign government to prove its legitimacy.
Solutions are being proffered by outside actors calling for new elections in Venezuela and establishment of a “transitional government.” However, there are no constitutional mechanisms for doing that in Venezuela. Nor are there any such mechanisms in most countries, including the US. More importantly, this is a gross violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. Even the far-right opposition in Venezuela rejected these as unacceptable.
The CNE has by law 30 days after the election to release the official results. Meanwhile in response to the accusations of fraud, the Maduro administration turned the matter over to the Venezuelan constitutional institution designed to adjudicate such matters, which is the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ).
On August 22, the TSJ affirmed the CNE’s count, confirming Maduro’s victory. A Hinterlaces poll found that 60% of Venezuelans trust the CNE’s results.
President Maduro commented: “Venezuela has the sovereignty of an independent country with a constitution, it has institutions, and the conflicts in Venezuela of any kind are solved among Venezuelans, with their institutions, with their law and with their constitution.” The US responded with a call for a regime-change “transition.”
Insistence on its rightto defend national sovereignty in the face of continued US imperial aggression will make for tumultuous times ahead for Venezuela.
According to multiple new reports, President Biden is still fuming behind the scenes about his friends in the Democratic Party pushing him out. His anger is mostly directed at Nancy Pelosi, but he’s also angry with Obama and several others who he feels betrayed him. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a […]
On 16 August 2024, the Organisation of American States (OAS), whose 1948 formation as a Cold War institution was instigated by the United States, voted on a resolution regarding the Venezuelan presidential elections. The nub of the resolution proposed by the US called upon Venezuela’s election authority, the National Electoral Council (CNE), to publish all the election details as soon as possible (including the actas, or voting records, at the local polling station level). This resolution asks the CNE to go against Venezuela’s Organic Law on Electoral Processes (Ley Orgánica de Procesos Electorales or LOPE): since the law does not call for the publication of these materials, doing so would be a violation of public law. What the law does indicate is that the CNE must announce the results within 48 hours (article 146) and publish them within 30 days (article 155) and that the data from polling places (such as the actas) should be published in a tabular form (article 150).
It is pure irony that the resolution was voted upon in the Simón Bolívar room at the OAS headquarters in Washington, DC. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) liberated Venezuela and neighbouring territories from the Spanish Empire and sought to bring about a process of integration that would strengthen the region’s sovereignty. That is why the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela pays tribute to his legacy in its name. When Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, he centred Bolívar in the country’s political life, seeking to further this legacy through initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) that would continue the journey to establish sovereignty in the country and region. In 1829, Bolívar wrote, ‘The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague [Latin] America with misery in the name of liberty’. This misery, in our time, is exemplified by the US attempt to suffocate Latin American countries through military coups or sanctions. In recent years, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been at the epicentre of this ‘plague’. The OAS resolution is part of that suffocation.
José Chávez Morado (Mexico), Carnival in Huejotzingo, 1939
Bolivia, Honduras, Mexico, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines did not come to the vote (nor did Cuba, as it was expelled by the OAS in 1962, leading Castro to dub the organisation the ‘Ministry of Colonies of the United States’, or Nicaragua, which left the OAS in 2023). Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) described why his country decided not to appear at the OAS meeting and why it disagrees with the US-proposed resolution, quoting from article 89, section X of the Mexican Constitution (1917), which states that the president of Mexico must adhere to the principles of ‘non-intervention; peaceful settlement of disputes; [and] prohibiting the threat or use of force in international relations’. To that end, AMLO said that Mexico will wait for the ‘competent authority of the country’ to settle any disagreement. In Venezuela’s case, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice is the relevant authority, though this has not stopped the opposition from rejecting its legitimacy. This opposition, which we have characterised as the far right of a special type, is committed to using any resource – including US military intervention – to overthrow the Bolivarian process. AMLO’s reasonable position is along the grain of the United Nations Charter (1945).
Many countries with apparently centre-left or left governments joined the US in voting for this OAS resolution. Among them are Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Chile, even though it has a president who admires Salvador Allende (killed in a US-imposed coup in 1973), has displayed a foreign policy orientation on many issues (including both Venezuela and Ukraine) that aligns with the US State Department. Since 2016, at the invitation of the Chilean government, the country welcomed nearly half a million Venezuelan migrants, many of whom are undocumented and now face the threat of expulsion from an increasingly hostile environment in Chile. It is almost as if the country’s president, Gabriel Boric, wants to see the situation in Venezuela change so that he can order the return of Venezuelans to their home country. This cynical attitude towards Chile’s enthusiasm for US policy on Venezuela, however, does not explain the situation of Brazil and Colombia.
Pablo Kalaka (Chile), Untitled, 2022, sourced from Lendemains solidaires no. 2.
Our latest dossier, To Confront Rising Neofascism, the Latin American Left Must Rediscover Itself, analyses the current political landscape on the continent, beginning by interrogating the assumption that there has been a second ‘pink tide’ or cycle of progressive governments in Latin America. The first cycle, which was inaugurated with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and came to an end following the 2008 financial crisis and US counter-offensive against the continent, ‘frontally challenged US imperialism by advancing Latin American integration and geopolitical sovereignty’, while the second cycle, defined by a more centre-left orientation, ‘seems more fragile’. This fragility is emblematic of the situation in both Brazil and Colombia, where the governments of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and Gustavo Petro, respectively, have not been able to exercise their full control over the permanent bureaucracies in the foreign ministries. Neither the foreign minister of Brazil (Mauro Vieira) nor Colombia (Luis Gilberto Murillo) are men of the left or even of the centre left, and both have close ties to the US as former ambassadors to the country. It bears reflection that there are still over ten US military bases in Colombia, though this is not sufficient reason for the fragility of this second cycle.
In the dossier, we offer seven explanations for this fragility:
the worldwide financial and environmental crises, which have created divisions between countries in the region about which path to follow;
the US reassertion of control over the region, which it had lost during the first progressive wave, in particular to challenge what the US sees as China’s entry into Latin American markets. This includes the region’s natural and labour resources;
the increasing uberisation of labour markets, which has created far more precarity for the working class and negatively impacted its capacity for mass organisation. This has resulted in a significant rolling back of workers’ rights and weakened working-class power;
the reconfiguration of social reproduction, which has become centred around public disinvestment in social welfare policies, thereby placing the responsibility for care in the private sphere and primarily overburdening women;
the US’s increased military power in the region as its main instrument of domination in response to its declining economic power;
the fact that the region’s governments have been unable to take advantage of China’s economic influence and the opportunities it presents to drive a sovereign agenda and that China, which has emerged as Latin America’s primary trading partner, has not sought to directly challenge the US agenda to secure hegemony over the continent;
divisions between progressive governments, which, alongside the ascension of neofascism in the Americas, impede the growth of a progressive regional agenda, including policies for continental integration akin to those proposed during the first progressive wave.
These factors, and others, have weakened the assertiveness of these governments and their ability to enact the shared Bolivarian dream of hemispheric sovereignty and partnership.
Antonia Caro (Colombia), Colombia, 1977.
One additional, but crucial, point is that the balance of class forces in societies such as Brazil and Colombia are not in favour of genuinely anti-imperialist politics. Celebrated electoral occasions, such as the victories of Lula and Petro in 2022, are not built on a broad base of organised working-class support that then forces society to advance a genuinely transformative agenda for the people. The coalitions that triumphed included centre-right forces that continue to wield social power and prevent these leaders, regardless of their own impeccable credentials, from exercising a free hand in governance. The weakness of these governments is one of the elements that allows for the growth of the far right of a special type.
As we argue in the dossier, ‘The difficulty of building a political project of the left that can overcome the day-to-day problems of working-class existence has unmoored many of these progressive electoral projects from mass needs’. The working classes, trapped in precarious occupations, need massive productive investments (driven by the state), premised on the exercise of sovereignty over each country and the region as a whole. The fact that a number of countries in the region have aligned with the US to diminish Venezuela’s sovereignty shows that these fragile electoral projects possess little capacity to defend sovereignty.
Daniel Lezama (Mexico), El sueño del 16 de septiembre (The Dream of September 16th), 2001.
In her poem ‘Quo Vadis’, the Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa reflects on the problematic nature of pledging allegiance to the US government’s agenda. Las balas que vuelan no tienen convicciones (‘flying bullets have no convictions’), she writes. These ‘progressive’ governments have no conviction regarding regime change operations or destabilisation efforts in other countries in the region. Much should be expected of them, but at the same time too much disappointment is unwarranted.
America’s Lawyer E111: Meta is once again in trouble after it was revealed that they are allowing ads for illicit drugs on both Facebook and Instagram, and now lawmakers want answers about how this was allowed to happen. President Biden gave a moving speech to the Democratic Convention this week, but reports say that he […]
Following months of increasingly obvious hints, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will drop his longshot Independent presidential bid and endorse former U.S. President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee, according to a Wednesday report from NBC News. The network cited “two sources familiar with the plan,” including one who said the Kennedy and Trump campaigns are working out the details of a joint…
On Tuesday, several anti-queer and anti-transgender candidates backed by Governor Ron DeSantis lost their school board races in Florida. The defeats included suburban districts like Sarasota, an early focal point of DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ+ culture wars, and Pinellas County, a swing district that supported Donald Trump in 2016. Many of these candidates were associated with Moms For Liberty and…
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Louisiana experienced a parade of devastating hurricanes. On August 27, Hurricane Laura hit the state’s southwest coast as a Category 4 storm, bringing winds up to 150 miles per hour, extreme rainfall, and a 10-foot storm surge. Hurricane Delta hit the same region six weeks later as a Category 2. Hurricane Zeta then hit the southeast part of the state a week before the election. The storms made voting a chaotic and difficult process: polling locations damaged, thousands displaced from their state, all the necessary paperwork and IDs lost to floodwaters.
It is an experience that many Americans have found themselves in, or will in the future, as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. According to recent polling from the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 Americans said their community experienced an extreme weather event in the past 12 months, including flooding, drought, extreme heat, rising sea levels, or major wildfires.
The aftermath of a disaster can be terrifying and traumatic, and many victims struggle to secure basic necessities such as food and shelter, or to fill out paperwork for disaster aid and insurance. Finding accurate information about where and how to vote is even harder — so hard, in fact, that many people who have experienced disasters don’t bother to vote at all.
With experts forecasting a historically active hurricane season and a rash of wildfires breaking out across the West, it’s more important than ever to be prepared for disruptions to the voting process in what stands to be a pivotal election year.
The guide below aims to help you navigate early voting, absentee voting, and election day, the rules of which vary widely across the U.S. (Still not registered to vote? You still have time: Find your state’s voter registration rules here.)
A sign indicating a change in a polling location in Leonia, New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy in 2012. James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images
In-person voting
If a disaster strikes, the governor can extend voting deadlines, allow ballots to be forwarded to a new address, allow local officials to change or add new polling places, or postpone municipal elections. Those rules are different depending on the state, and in the wake of a disaster that information may be hard to find.
The U.S. Vote Foundation has a tool to access your county election office’s contact information. These range by state; they’re typically county clerks, supervisors, auditors, boards of elections, or election commissions. You can try to contact these offices, but it’s not guaranteed they’ll be able to answer the questions. You can also ask voting rights groups in your area and watch local news for any changes or updates.
In the wake of a disaster, first confirm where you should be voting. Has your polling place been damaged or moved? If multiple locations are combined or election day volunteers are scarce post-disaster, be prepared to stand in long lines to vote. If you’re waiting in the heat, make sure to wear comfortable shoes and appropriate clothing (21 states prohibit campaign apparel, so keep that in mind), and bring water. Here are some other resources on heat waves.
Was your car damaged in a disaster? Need a ride to the polls? Some ride share services and public transit systems offer free rides on Election Day. Here’s more information.
Early voting
Most states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands offer some form of early voting, which is voting in-person before the election anywhere from a few days to over a month early, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. However, the hours, locations, and timing differ for each. Three states — Alabama, Mississippi ,and New Hampshire — do not allow early in-person voting.
Early in-person voting is a useful option if you’d like to avoid lines on election day or will be out of town. It’s also an option for people who live in a region of the country prone to natural disasters or have been recently hit by one. In-person voting on election day, which comes at the tail end of “danger season,” may not be a possibility or a priority. Go here to see the specific rules around early voting in your state.
Francisco Salomon Mendoza of La Puente, California seals his mail-in ballot at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on March 4. Christina House / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Absentee ballots
Absentee voting is often called “mail-in voting” or “by-mail voting.” Every state offers this, but some require you to meet certain conditions, like having a valid excuse for why you can’t make it to the polls on election day. Absentee voting can be a particularly useful tool for people who have been recently displaced by extreme weather, or are at risk of being so. It also safeguards voters who live in the hottest parts of the country, where heat can make waiting in long lines dangerous.
The League of Women Voters explains absentee voting rules by state here. If you reside in a county that gets a federal disaster declaration after a disaster hits, there may be changes to these processes that can offer you more time and flexibility.
Since it’s the height of hurricane season, we’ve included the registration and absentee ballot request deadlines for hurricane-prone states below:
Florida: Registration deadline is October 7. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 12 days before the election, no later than 5 p.m. (more here).
Alabama: Registration deadline is 15 days before the election. If voting by mail, request a ballot five days before the election if you’re applying in person, or seven days before if you’re mailing your request (more here).
Mississippi: Mississippi does not have online registration. The deadline is October 7, 30 days before election day. The last day to request an absentee ballot is five days before election day (more here).
North Carolina: Voter registration deadline is5 p.m. Friday, October 11, 2024. You must request an absentee ballot no later than a week before the election (more here).
South Carolina: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You must request an absentee ballot no later than 5:00 p.m. on the 11th day prior to the election (more here).
Louisiana: Online registration deadline is 20 days before election on October 15; in-person or mail is 30 days on October 7.Read the absentee ballot requirements here.
Georgia: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You can request an absentee ballot 11 weeks before the election, and it must be returned two Fridays before (more here).
Texas: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 11 days before the election (more here).
An election official in Lee County, Florida, sets up signs directing voters to a polling station in Fort Myers after Governor Ron DeSantis expanded early voting access following Hurricane Ian in 2022. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Voter ID laws
Each state has a different voter ID law. Some require photo identification, others require a document such as a utility bill, bank statement, or paycheck; some require a signature. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a breakdown of these rules here.
If your ID gets destroyed in a flood, fire, or tornado, your state may be able to exempt you from showing an ID at the polls. For instance, after Hurricane Harvey, Texas residents who lost their ID to floodwaters could vote without one once they filled out an affidavit stating that the voter didn’t have identification because of a natural disaster. Your state may also waive the fees associated with getting a new ID.
The best way to find this information out is to contact your county clerk or other election official, or contact a voting rights group in your area.
Know your rights
Just as there are strict rules in states around how people can cast ballots, there are also many others that dictate what happens outside of polling places. In most states, you can accept water and food from groups around election sites, but there is misinformation around whether or not it is legal. After the 2020 election, Georgia passed a law prohibiting this within a certain buffer zone. A judge struck down part of that law: there is no longer a ban on handing things to votes with 25 feet of them standing in line, but it’s still illegal to do so within 150 feet of the building where ballots are being cast.
Call or text 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to report voter intimidation to the Election Protection Coalition. You can also find more information on voter rights from the ACLU.
Did we miss something? Please let us know by emailing community@grist.org.
No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or South, a tornado; in the West, wildfires; and as we’ve seen in recent years, anywhere can experience heat waves or flash flooding.
Living through a disaster and its aftermath can be both traumatic and chaotic, from the immediate losses of life and belongings to conflicting information around where to access aid. The weeks and months after may be even more difficult, as the attention on your community is gone but civic services and events have stalled or changed drastically.
Grist compiled this resource guide to help you stay prepared and informed. It looks at everything from how to find the most accurate forecasts to signing up for emergency alerts to the roles that different agencies play in disaster aid.
An aerial view shows flooding in Merced, California following a “bomb cyclone” in January 2023.
Josh Edelson / AFP
Where to find the facts on disasters
These days, many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is accurate. Here’s where to find the facts on extreme weather and the most reliable places to check for emergency alerts and updates.
Your local emergency manager: Your city or county will have an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating between different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those via your local website (Note: Some cities have multiple languages available, but most emergency alerts are only in English.) Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates as well.
Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly.
Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Apple Weather, and Google will have information on major storms, but that may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground.
National Weather Service: This agency, also known as NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your zip code on weather.gov and customize your homepage. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on its maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders, as NWS may not have as much information ahead of time.
Cal Fire firefighters livestream images and data from efforts to control and contain the Park Fire on July 29 near Chico, California.
David McNew/Getty Images
These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available. Try to gather as much as you can ahead of time in case shelves are empty when a storm is on the way.
Some of the most important things to have:
Water (one gallon per person per day for several days)
Food (at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food) and a can opener
Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list below)
Battery-powered or hand crank radio, batteries, flashlight
First aid kit
Masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags
Wrench or pliers
Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
Diapers, wipes, and food or formula for babies and children
Food and medicines for any household pets
Don’t forget: Documents
One of the most important things to have in your emergency kit is documents you may need to prove your residence, demonstrate extent of damage, and vote. FEMA often requires you to provide these documents in order to receive financial assistance after a disaster.
Government issued ID, such as a drivers’ license for for each member of your household
Proof of citizenship or legal residency for each member of your household (passport, green card, etc.)
Social Security card for each member of your household
Documentation of your medical needs, such as medications or special equipment including oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.
Health insurance card
Car title and registration documents
Pre-disaster photos of the inside and outside of your house and belongings
Copy of your homeowners’ or renters’ insurance policy
For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and flood insurance policy, if applicable
For renters: a copy of your lease
Financial documents such as a checkbook or voided check
You can find more details about why you may need these documents here.
A volunteer assesses the remains of a charred apartment complex in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaiʻi in 2023. Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images
Disaster aid 101
It can be hard to know who to lean on or trust when it comes to natural disasters. Where do official evacuation orders come from, for example, or who do you call if you need to be rescued? And where can you get money to help pay for emergency housing or to rebuild your home or community. Here’s a breakdown of the government officials and agencies in charge of delivering aid before, during, and after a disaster:
Emergency management agencies: Almost all cities and counties have local emergency management departments, which are part of the local government. Sometimes they’re agencies all their own, but in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. These departments are the first line of defense during a weather disaster. They’re responsible for communicating with the public about incoming disasters, managing rescue and response efforts during an extreme weather event, and coordinating between different agencies. Many emergency management agencies, however, have a small staff and are under-resourced.
Much of the work that emergency managers do happens before a disaster: They develop response plans that lay out evacuation routes and communication procedures, and they also delegate responsibility to different government agencies like the police, fire, and public health departments. Most counties and cities publish these plans online.
In most cases, they are the most trustworthy resource in the days just before and just after a hurricane or other big weather event. They’ll send out alerts and warnings, coordinate evacuation efforts, and direct survivors and victims to resources and shelter.
You can find your state emergency management agency here. There isn’t a comprehensive list by county or city, but if you search your location online you’ll likely find a website, a page on the county or city website, or a Facebook page that posts updates.
Law enforcement: County sheriffs and city police departments are often the largest and best-staffed agencies in a given community, so they play a key role during disasters. Sheriff’s departments often enforce mandatory evacuation orders, going door-to-door to ensure that people vacate an area. They manage traffic flow during evacuations and help conduct search and rescue operations.
Law enforcement agencies may restrict access to disaster areas for the first few days after a flood or fire. In most states, city and county governments also have the power to issue curfew orders, and law enforcement officers can enforce these curfews with fines or even arrests. In some rural counties, the sheriff’s department may serve as the emergency management department.
Lexington Firefighters’ swift water teams rescue people stranded by extreme rain in Lost Creek, Kentucky in 2022.
Michael Swensen/Getty Images
Governor: State governors control several key aspects of disaster response. They have the power to declare a state of emergency, which allows them to deploy rescue and repair workers, distribute financial assistance to local governments, and activate the state National Guard. The governor has a key role in the immediate response to a disaster, but a smaller role in distributing aid and assistance to individual disaster victims.
In almost all U.S. states, and all hurricane-prone states along the Gulf of Mexico, the governor also has the power to announce mandatory evacuation orders. The penalty for not following these orders differs, but is most often a cash fine. (Though states seldom enforce these penalties.) The state government also decides whether to implement other transportation procedures such as contraflow, where officials reverse traffic flow on one side of a highway to allow larger amounts of people to evacuate.
HUD: The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, also spends billions of dollars to help communities recover after disasters, building new housing and public buildings such as schools — but this money takes much longer to arrive. Unlike FEMA, HUD must wait for Congress to approve its post-disaster work, and then it must dole out grants to states for specific projects. In some cases, such as the aftermaths of Hurricane Laura in Louisiana or Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, it took years for projects to get off the ground. States and local governments, not individual people, apply for money from HUD, but the agency can direct you to FEMA or housing counselors.
A homeowner hangs a sign that reads “FEMA please help make Mexico Beach great again” on a house damaged by Hurricane Michael in Florida in 2018.
Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
FEMA
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is the federal government’s main disaster response agency. It provides assistance to states and local governments during large events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
FEMA is almost never the first resource on the ground after a disaster strikes. In order for the agency to send resources to a disaster area, the state’s governor must first request a disaster declaration from the president, and the president must approve it. For large disasters such as Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, this typically happens fast. For smaller disasters, like severe rain or flooding events, it can take weeks or even months for the president to grant a declaration and activate the agency. FEMA has historically not responded to heat waves.
FEMA is broken into regional offices and offers specific contacts and information for each of those, as well as for tribal nations. You can find your FEMA region here.
FEMA has two primary roles after a federally declared disaster:
Contributing to community rebuilding costs: The agency helps states and local governments pay for the cost of removing debris and rebuilding public infrastructure. During only the most extreme events, the agency also deploys its own teams of firefighters and rescue workers to help locate missing people, clear roadways, and restore public services. For the most part, states and local law enforcement conduct on-the-ground recovery work. (Read more about FEMA’s responsibilities and programs here.)
Individual financial assistance: FEMA gives outfinancial assistanceto individual people who have lost their homes and belongings. This assistance can take several forms. FEMA gives out pre-loaded debit cards to help people buy food and fuel in the first days after a disaster, and may also provide cash payments for home repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover. The agency also provides up to 18 months of housing assistance for people who lose their homes in a disaster, and sometimes houses disaster survivors in its own manufactured housing units or “FEMA trailers.” FEMA also sometimes covers funeral and grieving expenses as well as medical and dental treatment.
In the aftermath of a disaster, FEMA offers survivors:
A one-time payment of $750 for emergency needs
Temporary housing assistance equivalent to 14 nights’ stay in a hotel in your area
Up to 18 months of rental assistance
Payments for lost property that isn’t covered by your homeowner’s insurance
And other forms of assistance, depending on your needs and losses
If you are a U.S. citizen or meet certain qualifications as a non-citizen and live in a federal disaster declaration area, you are eligible for financial assistance. Regardless of citizenship or immigration status, if you are affected by a disaster you may be eligible for crisis counseling, disaster legal services, disaster case management, medical care, shelter, food, and water.
FEMA representatives take information from people displaced by Hurricane Ian in Estero, Florida in 2022.
Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images
FEMA also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides insurance coverage of up to $350,000 for home flood damage. The agency recommends that everyone who lives in a flood zone purchase this coverage — and most mortgage lenders require it for borrowers in flood zones — though many homes outside the zones are also vulnerable. You must begin paying for flood insurance at least 30 days before a disaster in order to be eligible for a payout. You can check if your home is in a flood zone by using this FEMA website.
How to get FEMA aid: The easiest way to apply for individual assistance from FEMA is to fill out the application form ondisasterassistance.gov. This is easiest to do from a personal computer over Wi-Fi, but you can do it from a smartphone with cellular data if necessary. This website does not become active until the president issues a disaster declaration.
Some important things to know:
FEMA will require you to create an account on the secure website Login.gov. Use this account to submit your aid application.
You can track the status of your aid application and receive notifications if FEMA needs more documents from you.
If FEMA denies your application for aid, you can appeal, but the process is lengthy.
Visiting a FEMA site in your area after a disaster: FEMA disaster recovery centers are facilities and mobile units where you can find information about the agency’s programs as well as other state and local resources. FEMA representatives can help you navigate the aid application process or direct you to nonprofits, shelters, or state and local resources. Visit this website to locate a recovery center in your area or text DRC and a ZIP Code to 43362. Example: DRC 01234.
A woman looks over her apartment in Fort Myers, Florida, after Hurricane Ian inundated it with floodwaters in 2022.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
What to expect after a disaster
Disasters affect people in many different ways, and it’s normal to grieve your losses — personal, professional, community — in your own time. Here are a few resources if you need mental health support after experiencing an extreme weather event.
The National Center for PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, on what to expect after experiencing a disaster.
The American Red Cross has disaster mental health volunteers they often dispatch to areas hit by a disaster.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, has a fact sheet on managing stress after a disaster. The agency has a Disaster Distress Helpline that provides 24/7 crisis counseling and support. Call or text: 1-800-985-5990
After a disaster is an especially vulnerable time. Beware of scams and make sure to know your rights.
Be wary of solicitors who arrive at your home after a disaster claiming to represent FEMA or another agency. FEMA will never ask you for money. The safest way to apply for aid is through FEMA’s official website: disasterassistance.gov.
Be cautious about hiring contractors or construction workers in the days after a disaster. Many cities require permits for rebuilding work, and it’s common for scammers to pose as contractors after a disaster.
Renters can often face evictions after a disaster, so familiarize yourself with tenant rights in your state.
Residents of Paradise, California visit the town’s planning department to file permitting applications to re-build homes and other structures after the devastating 2018 Camp Fire.
Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Image
What to keep in mind before, during, and after a disaster
The most important thing to consider during a disaster is your own, your family’s, and your community’s safety. The National Weather Service has a guide for hurricanes and floods; FEMA has a guide for wildfires; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a guide for extreme heat safety.
A few potentially life-saving things to remember:
Never wade in floodwaters. They often contain harmful runoff from sewer systems and can cause serious illness and health issues.
If it’s safe to do so, turn off electricity at the main breaker or fuse box in your home or business before a hurricane to prevent electric shock.
If you lose power, never operate a generator inside your home. Generators emit carbon monoxide, a colorless and odorless gas that can be fatal if inhaled.
Did we miss something? Please let us know by emailing community@grist.org.
The Trump campaign was hacked recently, and reports suggest that Iran could be responsible. Our cyber security infrastructure appears incredibly weak, and our leaders aren’t doing much at all to fix the problems. 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: The […]
The Democratic convention will kick off next week, and political analysts are begging the Democrats to NOT overload the event with celebrities. The party needs to prove that they are normal people, and parading a bunch of millionaire Hollywood celebrities on stage is going to send the opposite message. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript […]
If Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kuzinski were the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties, which one would you vote for?
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both have more blood on their hands than either of these serial killers, and they promise to kill many more. Both of them supported the latest $20 billion to Israel, to keep the project to eradicate the people of Gaza on schedule. Voting for them means giving them permission and encouragement to keep the rivers of blood flowing, so I won’t do it. I might vote for Jill Stein or the Libertarian candidate, but I’m inclined not to play the game. It’s a personal choice — a symbolic one, you might contend.
But so is yours, if you are voting for a major party candidate. Did you select either of them to be a candidate? Can you think of a better one? Of course you can. In fact, every one of you is probably a better candidate yourself. That’s why your vote is symbolic. You don’t win either way. And either way, your vote says to the party or candidate, “Your support for genocide is not going to keep me from voting for you.”
What can we do about it? As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That was a century ago, and it is more true today — with Citizens United solidifying corporate and special interest (e.g. AIPAC) control of our elections and our electeds — than it was then. Our only influence in government is with issues that have little interest for the powerful, such as women’s reproductive rights, other than to be used by the powerful to manipulate and deceive us into thinking that our vote makes a difference.
As individuals, we must take responsibility for our participation in this rigged game. Are we willing to vote for one mass murderer over another just for the opportunity to play? Daddy, what did you do during the Great Genocide?
Collectively, a voter strike might be in order. Vote None of the Above! Perhaps we need a new movement that defies the system rather than participating in it. Picket the polling stations and tell people not to vote, that doing so sends the message that they support genocide.
I have no illusions how difficult it is to create a mass movement, especially one that seeks to wrest control from those who rule us. But genocide puts special obligations upon us. Individually, at the very least, our integrity is at stake. Are you actually going to participate — and be complicit — in genocide? We all have choices. Let your conscience decide. Make yourself and your descendants proud of you.
On average, politicians in the United States are older than those serving in every other country on the planet. In other words, we’ve got a real big problem with aging politicians – and the voters who keep sending them back to Washington. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
America’s Lawyer E110: Donald Trump’s campaign was recently hacked, and now cyber security experts are warning that even more hacks could happen before the election. A federal judge recently ruled that Google was operating an illegal monopoly – and the punishment could include breaking up the tech giant into smaller pieces. And the Democratic convention […]
Our current leaders are hypnotized by war. They lack the vision and resourcefulness to consider negotiation and cooperation. Peace is not in their thoughts. ‘Peace’ is not in their vocabulary. They are addicted to war. They are obsessed with war.
The lesson we must take from this is this: Talking to them, trying to change their minds, trying to alter their policies and methods, is a complete waste of time. It’s like yelling at storm clouds and telling them to stop raining. It’s like telling a bumble bee it should get a pilot license. It’s like talking to a wall and expecting a reply.
Which means, there is only one sensible, rational, effective course of action …
Current U.S. leadership, at all levels — we’re probably looking at 99% of those now in positions of power — must be replaced.
This is the only possible way to stop U.S. aggression and wanton promotion of chaos and violence in the world.
This must be the entire focus of peace activism going forward. We have no choice in the matter. The record is clear — an unblemished record of total failure to stop, or even slow down, the war machine.
Make no mistake about it! Replacing these misfits, psychopaths, sociopaths, and enemies of peace now in power, will not be easy.
But it can — and must — be done!
Our survival as a nation, perhaps the survival of the entire human race is at stake!
Here’s what it will take.
The two major parties will not give us the choices we need to make. Both the Republicans and Democrats are in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. And to bolster their commitment to this vast money laundering enterprise, where hundreds of billions of dollars end up in the coffers of giant defense companies and ultimately into the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy, both major parties are fanatically committed to making the U.S. an empire.
If we want peace, we will have to elect peace candidates. And to elect peace candidates, we must on our own initiative put peace candidates on the ballot.
Identifying and choosing alternatives to the pro-war establishment candidates will not be complicated. At least for now, here’s the litmus test, consisting of three questions to be put to prospective candidates:
If a candidate answers ‘yes’ to all three, he or she deserves our full support and our vote. We then do everything it takes to get this person on the ballot. There are three ways to get them on the ballot:
First option is to use primaries. That is, run them in the next primary against one of the major party candidates.
Second option is to run the candidates as “third party”, e.g. as a Green or Libertarian or other minor party candidate.
Whatever strategy we adopt certainly will require some serious dedication and hard work. We’ll have to organize locally and talk to voters face-to-face, we’ll have to marshal all of the power of social media, we’ll have to badger local media for news coverage. We’ll have to organized rallies and bake sales, visit churches, convalescent homes, community clubs and organizations.
But recognize: this is democracy at its best! It is citizens, locally, community-by-community, working together to signal their priorities, put their values before the public, and introduce real choice at the polls.
Once peace candidates are on the ballot, then it’s up to the voting public. If we the people want to end the wars, reverse the rampant militarization of our society, if we truly want peace, then …
WE ONLY VOTE FOR PEACE CANDIDATES!
It’s that simple.
This is how we “fire” the warmongers who now populate the halls of Congress and other seats of power.
This is how we stop the squandering of our national wealth, the theft of our money!
In the quarter century of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, initiated by the election of Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor Nicolás Maduro, 31 national elections have been held. Invariably, the US-backed opposition claimed fraud in all but the two contests that they won. Equally unvaryingly has been the corporate press’s supporting and indeed embellishing of the claims of fraud as described below.
Blackmailing the Venezuelan electorate
The moment that Venezuela’s election authority (CNE in its Spanish initials) reported that incumbent Maduro had prevailed in the July 28 presidential contest over his nearest challenger, Edmundo González, howls of fraud were to be heard throughout the world’s corporate press. Just a few hours after the CNE announcement, CNNreported that the vote “was marked by accusations of fraud and counting irregularities.”
The next day, CNNprovided a backgrounder on “what you need to know” about the election. Leading off was the risible description “of a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions.” Such a misrepresentation is indicative of a press that confounds the “Washington consensus” for the will of the Venezuelan people.
In fact, there were nine candidates on the ballot besides Maduro; all of them were opposition. They were not unified and for good reason. In its meddling into the internal affairs of Venezuela, Washington has backed the far right in the opposition spectrum.
The US-backed González ran on a platform of radically reorienting Venezuela’s foreign policy from support of the Palestinians to unconditional approval of the current campaign of genocide by Israel and the US. Domestically, he stood for an extreme neoliberal program of privatizing practically everything – schools, transportation, national oil company, housing, hospitals, food assistance. These were not stands that could possibly unify the opposition and certainly were not stands that would appeal to the vast majority of Venezuelans.
So why would the US choose a completely unknown and inexperienced candidate running on an unpopular platform when they could have given the nod to a moderate opposition politician with far more political backing and experience? This is the elephant-in-the-room that CNN and the rest of the corporate press ignore.
Left out of the media barrage against the government of Venezuela has been reporting on the context of the 930 unilateral coercive measures that Washington has levied on Venezuela with the explicit intention to asphyxiate the economy and cause the people to abandon the Bolivarian Revolution. The US banked on blackmailing Venezuela to vote out Maduro or continue to suffer what are euphemistically called “sanctions.”
Battle of the bean counters
Now that the election is over, followed by the predictable accusations of fraud, the corporate media has intensified its campaign to delegitimize the results. In particular, we analyze a CNN article that reports “after Venezuela’s contested presidential vote, experts say government results are a ‘statistical improbability.’”
CNN casts doubt on the results of the Venezuelan presidential election based in part on a post published by the Quantitative Methods in Social Science program at Columbia University. The post cites the official results published by the CNE showing the votes for each candidate followed by their percentage of the total rounded to a single decimal place.
Then the post notes that using the original percentages (51.2, 44.2, and 4.5) to compute the votes for candidates results in fractional vote counts that do not match the original vote totals published by the CNE:
Of course, the counts don’t match but that is an artifact of the misuse of statistics by the post. For example, let’s apply the same method to the official results of the 2020 US presidential election, published by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC):
Biden 81,268,924 51.31%
Trump 74,216,154 46.86%
Total 158,383,403 100.00%
If you multiply the percentage given for Biden 51.31% times the total number of votes, (158,383,403), the result is 81,266,524, which is different from the total reported by the FEC above (81,268,924). Perhaps CNN has uncovered and should be reporting on statistically significant evidence of fraud that was committed by the FEC in the 2020 presidential election?
Nevertheless, the post concludes, referring to the discrepancy that they created: “If it is not evidence of fraud by itself I do not know what is.” Then the posts wildly speculates: “Anyhow, the image of the Chavista bosses fabricating the results with a napkin and their phone calculators seems to be as plausible as amusing.” The post continues: “That seems fishy… Can it be, that instead of calculating the percentages from the number of votes, someone decided the percentages and then calculated the number of votes?”
So there you have it. The “Chavista bosses,” starting from their desired fabricated percentage results, computed candidate totals (using phone calculators on a napkin!), only to be exposed because their clumsily computed fabricated totals do not match their fabricated percentages!
But what CNN is really doing is statistical arm waving. The supposed discrepancy that CNN exposes is nothing more than their misuse of statistics.
The CNN article then goes on to provide additional dramatic and equally sketchy evidence for fraud, citing Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University who “ran a mathematical simulation with a probability model.” Gelman apparently concluded that “there is about a 1 in 100 million chance that this particular pattern will occur by chance.”
Are they correct? The short answer is that CNN is trying to baffle us.
There is a simple response that provides an easy (and highly probable) explanation of the results published by the Venezuelan CNE: the percentages were computed by dividing the reported vote totals for each candidate by the total number of votes cast, and then the result was rounded to one decimal place.
This is the normal and standard practice. Voting percentages in elections aren’t usually published and displayed to seven decimal places.
If the starting point is the observed vote totals, the percentages can be computed and then rounded to one decimal place as shown in the CNE report. This is nothing more than a simple case of rounding numbers for the purpose of displaying them in a readable form.
Professor Gelman’s “dramatic” simulation only shows that rounding can have a significant impact on decimal calculations; not any evidence of fraud.
In technical jargon, rounding X/N and then multiplying the result times N almost never equals N, unless N is a multiple of X. If you randomly generate a million numbers and divide them each by their sum, it is extremely unlikely that any of the numbers is a factor of the sum. It says nothing about whether the proportion X/N is fabricated or not.
In lay terms, Gelman is misleading readers by misapplying statistical modeling.
Misuse of statistics
The starting point for the post cited by CNN is the assumption that there are “strong allegations of fraud in the recent Venezuelan elections.” The goal of exposing an imagined scenario of “Chavista bosses fabricating the results” as well as other political comments present in the post (comparing, for example, the supposed fraud in Venezuela to the US election deniers and January 6th), indicates that this “expert analysis” providing “strong evidence of fraud” had political motivations. There may be other aspects of the election pointing to fraud, but none of the above does so.
By falsely generating suspicions of fraud in the election, CNN heightens the risk of violence, extra-constitutional resolution of the crisis, and support for outside interference in the electoral process. If you are looking for trustworthy, unbiased reporting and analysis of the Venezuelan election, stay away from CNN
There are 115 candidates contesting for 44 parliamentary seats — 97 males and 18 females. The 45th seat is nominated by the Banaban community, majority of who live on the island of Rabi in Fiji.
A local resident in the capital Tarawa, Robert Karoro, told RNZ Pacific via email last night the election was an “important moment” for people of Micronesian nation.
But he said the polls in his country were different compared to other democracies in the world “because of the nature and culture of the people of Kiribati”.
“People of Kiribati are very respectful and respecting each other as candidates is common practice here.”
Candidates unopposed
He said three islands currently have already confirmed their MPs because the candidates stood unopposed.
The ruling Tobwaan Kiribati Party (TKP) is in the lead as three out of the four candidates from the three islands are from the incumbent government.
He said the outcome of the election “will be determined by those casting their votes and electing the leaders for the next four years”.
As for parties, Karoro said voters will have a clearer picture after the first round of voting concludes this evening.
The capital South Tarawa (TUC), which is part of Tarawa, has 23 candidates — the highest ever so far, he added.
The voting will close at 6pm.
Election candidate Kairao Bauea, a former journalist, campaigning in Kiribati’s biggest electorate and capital, South Tarawa, yesterday. Image: BenarNews/Rimon Rimon
‘Women have power’ A former Kiribati journalist is one of the 18 women candidates vying of a seat in Maneaba ni Maungatabu (Parliament).
Kairao Bauea is making her political debut standing for Kiribati’s largest electorate, South Tarawa, BenarNews reports.
Bauea, 47, is advocating for a greater role for women in politics and believes she is ready to step up to a bigger household beyond her home — the parliament of Kiribati.
“Women have power, perhaps not ‘manpower’, but the power to change things for the better,” she was quoted as saying according to the BenarNews report.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
There is minimal information available online about the polls, with the most official election information shared via the Ministry of Culture’s Facebook page in late July, which was the candidate lists.
There will be 114 candidates — one less than the previous election — contesting for the first round of voting, with a second on Monday next week.
After that parties will put up their candidates for president, one of whom is likely to be Taneti Maamau, the man who has held the title of Beretitenti, or President, for the past eight years.
“On the evening of the first round of voting (on Wednesday evening) the provisional results are shared on local radio in taetae ni Kiribati,” New Zealand’s High Commissioner in Tarawa, André van der Walt, said.
Results on local radio
“We anticipate the counts for larger constituencies such as in South Tarawa would only be concluded by morning on Thursday.
“The second round of voting will take place on Monday 19 August with results released on local radio overnight. We anticipate the final results will be known on Tuesday 20 August.”
The popular vote for the Beretitenti is expected in September or October.
Significant issues
RNZ Pacific’s correspondent in Kiribati, Rimon Rimon, said there were some significant issues that would influence voters this election, such as the soaring cost of living and suggestions the government was struggling to meet its bills.
Kava has been a campaign commodity for candidates on the Kiribati campaign trail, says RNZ correspondent Rimon Rimon. Image: RNZ/Jamie Tahana
Campaigning, which has been going on for months, has “become more intense”, Rimon said, adding that “the incumbent candidates seeking re-election [are] really going out”.
He said some people affiliated to political parties were also using kava as a “campaign tool” hoping to win votes.
“A lot of people are saying that they are seeing some of the candidates giving out kava, which is quite a popular commodity here, even though the time for giving out things have already stopped, according to the laws.
“We’re seeing a lot of these. People are giving away kava, not the candidates, but some people tend to know that person giving out the kava belongs to a certain candidate or is a supporter of that candidate.
“Kava has been a commodity used by candidates to really get people around to sit around and talk about ideas that they want to share.”
He added campaigning “goes right to the 11th hour” because “any last-minute effort is very useful”.
Some of the bigger issues confronting whichever government comes to power will be the cost of a copra subsidy that has been deemed wildly extravagant by international financial agencies, along with an unemployment benefit, paid monthly.
They will also find a judicial system turned on its head after the outgoing government removed five expatriate judges on spurious grounds. This left the country without higher courts for months, leading to a huge backlog in cases.
There is also the increasingly stronger link with China which has now led to reports of Chinese police on patrol in parts of Kiribati.
‘Quite draconian’ According to Rimon, a lot of the poeple on the ground want “something new” because Maamau’s government “have taken quite a tough approach on how they introduce a lot of their policies and decisions”
“Some of their policies are quite draconian, especially with media and all news information. I hear a lot of people saying we should have something new,” he said.
But then of course, the other half of the population, or people that I’ve been speaking to, especially in South Tarawa, are quite happy with the government’s performance and would like to see another four years of their reign in government.”
Pacific political watchers say there has been growing competition across the region between Australia, the US and China.
“Each Pacific island country is trying to navigate those waters in their own unique way and try and make the most out of it for themselves,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Pacific analyst Blake Johnson told RNZ Pacific.
“And Kiribati does seem to be doing that a little differently to some of the others, in terms of just the transparency.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.
(@cmclymer) 
(@SophieRainForum) 
(@greencheekconur) 
