Women prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Wilsonville, Oregon. Photo: Oregon Department of Corrections.

In the aftermath of Roe, women prisoners seeking to terminate pregnancies often had to go to court and seek injunctions forcing jail and prison officials to provide them with access to abortion services. There is a dearth of information about how many pregnant prisoners are in custody at a given time and how many have sought to terminate their pregnancies.

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Starving polar bear on ice melting from climate change. Wikipedia.

Why is it that the US government and Americans tolerate an increasing danger to their lives and the health of the natural world from the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal? The science is straightforward. The burning of fossil fuels is increasing the temperature of the planet. So, the solution is obvious. Stop burning fossil fuels. And yet the entire economy and society are hooked on burning the very substances that are causing local and global harm.

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Image by Sujeeth Potla.

Summer Solstice should be a time for celebration. But for many desperate migrants attempting to enter the United States, it is a time of death. Soaring summer temperatures in the desert of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, which grow hotter and hotter due to human-induced climate change, claim many lives of undocumented migrants funneled into remote crossings riddling the rugged and vast region.

For those who do successfully cross, the network of highways leading into the U.S. interior can prove fatal.

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Image by Jon Tyson.

Most of us know there’s something wrong in the world. Some of us know it’s even worse than what we’re used to. A plague stalks the planet despite efforts to control it—efforts rejected by those whose agenda demands an angry god, a Darwinian approach to their fellow humans, or both. The numbers of migrants and refugees is in the tens of millions. They flee wars, poverty, criminal violence and natural disaster only to find persecution, hatred and violence on their journeys and at their destinations. Fewer and fewer people own more and more of the world’s wealth; a statistic that means the rest of the world’s people have to share what remains. The level of inequality is impossible to fathom for those of us who are not among the world’s richest and irrelevant to those who are. Police forces in rich nations and poor continue to brutalize that part of the population the economic system has no need for. In many nations—especially the United States—those forces murder Black people rates vastly disproportionate to their presence in the population and their power in the society. Lurking behind this all is climate change caused by humanity and its economic enterprise.

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Image by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition.

Hey, how about those “radical Left” Democrats? Have you heard about one of their big ideas on how to buck historical odds and win the mid-term elections this year? They’re counting on the Christian fascist Supreme Court to end women’s half-century constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives. What a gambit! What audacity!

Why have the leading liberal, Democratic Party-affiliated pro-choice groups Planned Parenthood and NARAL surrendered in advance to the death of Roe v. Wade, announcing the rise of a “post-Roe era” without mass resistance in the streets and public squares? Why haven’t they followed the lead of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) by joining in rallies, marches, and direct actions under the banner of “Post-Roe? Hell No!”? Why have they refused to undertake giant popular mobilizations and direct actions on the model of successful abortion rights activism in Latin America? Why don’t they join RU4AR in donning the green bandana, the symbol of women’s and abortion rights protest in Argentina, Mexico, and Columbia?

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon church) works to maintain the public image of a loving-Christian religious group while simultaneously acting as an anti-queer international political organization. If you’re at all familiar with the church, you’re probably aware of their pro-nuclear family / anti-LGBTQIA2s+ politics. What you may not be as aware of is how their current anti-queer beliefs, practices, and policies are tied to 1) their past polygamous practices, as both are rooted in settler-colonial eugenic ideologies, and 2) the World Congress of Families, a known hate group founded and funded by Russian oligarchs.

Polygamy was seen as uncivilized and thus not-white by many in the late 19th century United States. In President Hayes’s 1880 State of the Union, he called out Mormon polygamy proclaiming that “marriage and the family relation are the cornerstone of our American society” and asking Congress to reorganize Utah Territory to allow more “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” in.

Immigration, marriage, and the family were as central to the rhetoric and politics of this Euro-settler-nation then as they are now. Settler-colonialism “destroys to replace” and “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” who become married and reproductive Euro-settler-couples are essential to the “replace” half of this equation.

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Photo: Raja Krishnamoorthi – Congressman, IL-8, Facebook.

Last week, United States Congressperson Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was asked by a reporter, “What are your views on RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Muslim genocide in India?”

RSS is an all-male, far-right Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization that boasts more than one million men under arms and draws its ideological inspiration from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Its political wing is Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong member of RSS.

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Image by Jp Valery.

In 2019, a U.S. airstrike in Syria killed 70 civilians, including women and children. This May, after conducting an “internal” investigation of what occured, the U.S. military concluded it won’t be necessary for any charges to be brought forward, and for anyone involved to face any consequence for what was essentially, a war crime.

In due time, the rest of the world shall condemn the U.S., bring up sanctions. Major companies shall flee our borders, of course. The colors of flags of countries like Iraq, countries we’ve nearly helped destroy, will be emblazoned on billboards along New Jersey Turnpike and online as you purchase another box of masks from Amazon.

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This interview with world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky has two goals. The primary goal is to understand America’s role in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century, the Syrian civil war. While there has been a lot of commentary on the Syrian civil war, there is confusion about the exact nature of the American involvement in it. First, while the facts suggest that America’s role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal compared to that of others like the Assad government and its backers, primarily Iran and Russia, this goes against a belief held by sections of the anti-war left that America’s role was prominent. Second, there was a sharp difference between American involvement in the Syrian civil war and American involvement in the Kurdish regions of north-east Syria. While the former was through a combination of inaction and a CIA-sponsored covert operation with no direct involvement of the military, the latter was based on policies that came out of the Pentagon and involved the US military directly, primarily to fight ISIS. In fact, there is reporting to suggest that the two operations, when they co-existed, caused some confusion on the ground as well. While the CIA was offering support to rebel groups fighting Assad, the Pentagon offered to support groups only on the condition that they would fight ISIS and not Assad. Third, even focusing specifically on the Syrian civil war, the topic of this interview, American policy changed with time, depending on the circumstances of the war. Hence, there was no single policy. As such, even though the American role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal as noted above, examining it is of some interest.

A second and more minor goal of this interview is as follows. There has been some controversy over Noam Chomsky’s views on Syria. Since Chomsky has not had much to say about Syria, the controversy is befuddling. It appears to be based on quoting bits and pieces of interviews out of context, rather than an examination of his core arguments. As such, this interview is an attempt to capture Chomsky’s core views of American involvement in the Syrian civil war. His views are necessarily brief owing to the relatively marginal nature of US involvement. Yet, this interviewer found them to be interesting and original. People who criticize his views can at least examine his views in their entirety and decide for themselves the exact nature of their disagreement. Those who read it with an open mind might even be surprised to discover areas of agreement.

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The gap between what needs to be done to save the Earth from the environmental disaster of unchecked global warming and what is actually being done continues to widen. Yet another exemplar of this gap is the funding practices of the world’s biggest banks. Capitalists not concerning themselves with small things like the future ability […]

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As Russian forces were closing in on a bunker on April 21 in the heavily bombed and surrounded Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, preparing on an assault on the “fortress-like” underground bunker where an estimated 2000 remaining Ukrainian troops are said to be holed up, Russian President Vladimir Putin reversed his order and told Russian troops to surround the hard-pressed Ukrainians until, out of ammunition, food, and water, they came out voluntarily.

Reporting on this decision, the New York Times, in an update to a story on the city’s final battle, claimed Putin had made the decision to avoid his troops having to fight their way through tunnels taking inevitably heavy casualties. What the Times didn’t mention was Putin’s saying that he also did not want to have fought in the bunker (or clearly, to hit it with a bunker-busting bomb, which could have been done long ago) because of hundreds of civilians said by Ukrainian sources to be “hiding” there. Russia views them as captives being used by the mostly Azov Battalion forces as hostages (itself, if true, a war crime).

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What about whataboutism? This new and misleading term now appearing in social media posts usually about the war between Russia and Ukraine is an attempt to deny the role history plays in current events. In essence, those who use this term to dismiss critiques of the war they disagree with are promoting an ahistorical approach that pretends that in the discussion of the war history began with the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. When one takes this approach, they can pretend that nazism is not a factor in the Ukrainian government, that NATO was not created to provide a military force to enhance Washington’s post World War Two push for market hegemony, and that it is not the US military that is the most murderous since the end of World War Two. Furthermore, the use of this term is quite often effective in shutting down any attempt by those opposed to the war to explain the whys and wherefores of their opposition.

Denying history has its uses. In Israel, the denial of history gives the rulers in Tel Aviv the rationale to steal land from those who have possessed it for centuries. Likewise, the Israeli denial of Palestinian history provides its military and its settlers a rationale for their brutality and arrogance. In the United States, the denial of history can take a variety of forms. It can be as openly racist as a politician like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banning books discussing the history of slavery in the US; it can also be as brutal as a white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he dies or another white cop shooting a Black man in the back of the head after tackling him during an unwarranted traffic stop. Denying history in the United States can also mean putting a Black man or woman in a position of power while at the same time rejecting legislation that could begin to resolve the economic inequality experienced especially by non-white people that is the legacy of a white supremacist past. In Britain, denying history is what gives people the idea that Winston Churchill was a great man of war and peace and not the racist mass murderer history proves he was.

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