radiofree.asia

Category: Op-Ed

  • We Must Shut Down Factory Farms to Protect Clean Water and Environmental Justice

    For years, Americans have been served an image of an idyllic family farmer who is responsible for the food that makes its way to our homes. Unfortunately, for the majority of the food we eat, that image is not based in reality. The truth is that food production, especially industrial animal agriculture, is causing an ecological crisis in our waterways that further perpetuates the legacy of environmental racism. And it needs to stop.

    The overwhelming majority of today’s U.S. food systems are dominated by a handful of international corporations. These profit-driven enterprises often employ industrialized methods, such as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, where animals are “produced” in incredibly cramped and unsafe facilities.

    CAFOs are a formidable threat to the health of our nation’s waterways, representing one of the largest unaddressed sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the United States. Their uncontrolled — and mostly unregulated — discharges into waterways lead to harmful algal blooms, which in turn impair drinking water supplies, fisheries and recreational waters across the country. Look no further than Lake Erie, the Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River Basin, North Carolina’s coastal estuaries, and many other inland and coastal waters that are already gravely affected. Aside from the damages done to safe drinking water and human health, it’s also really expensive. Harmful algal blooms alone can negatively impact economies by as much as $4 billion a year.

    Just one of these animal factories can produce as much animal waste as a large city with millions of people. According to a 2013 study, it adds up to 1.1 billion tons of animal waste every year. At many of these facilities, the animal waste is stored in unlined lagoons that inevitably pollute groundwater. In many cases, the excess waste is applied to agricultural fields far beyond what is needed to grow food, resulting in pollution of nearby surface waters and groundwater. Some facilities even go so far as to haphazardly spray the excess waste onto fields, creating a hellish experience for the neighboring communities.

    Picture homes, schools and parks covered in airborne liquified animal waste. Imagine windows shut tight in the middle of the summer because of the overwhelming odors. Consider the countless lives burdened by respiratory diseases. Think of all the rivers and streams poisoned with pathogens.

    It is worth noting that CAFOs are not found everywhere. Instead, they are predominantly located in rural areas, often in communities of color. They are purposefully located here because these frontline communities often lack the political clout to stop them. The CAFOs are constructed quickly, with minimal community input and, once operational, are ostensibly shielded from any kind of transparency, oversight or consequences. For example, in North Carolina, General Statute 106-24.1 shields the state’s agriculture industry by making any information collected or published by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services classified from the public. But it’s not just North Carolina. There are “ag-gag” laws on the books in several states.

    The CAFO crisis is funded by huge corporations, such as Smithfield Foods, and abetted by politicians who choose to look the other way. Like so many of the catastrophes affecting frontline communities and waterways, it’s a nightmare of our government’s own making, which means we also have the power to correct it. We always have a choice, and it’s possible to make the changes we need.

    The most effective way to legislatively confront the CAFO crisis would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use the Clean Water Act to prevent uncontrolled discharges of untreated animal waste into our nation’s water by requiring these facilities to obtain permits that contain real limits. The Clean Water Act has had so many successes during its 50 years, just imagine what could happen if we fully implemented and enforced it. Unfortunately, the EPA has thus far failed to respond to pressure, so environmental groups are suing in order to force the regulator to take action on clean water rules governing factory farms.

    We can also urge our members of Congress to go further and pass real legislation, such as the Farm System Reform Act, which would help rein in the monopolistic practices of the agriculture industry, invest billions in a more resilient food system, and finally start transitioning us away from CAFOs to more regenerative practices by truly independent farmers and ranchers.

    Finally, we can and should encourage the industry to change their ways by pulling our purse strings. As the saying goes, money talks, and these companies must be forced to listen. We don’t always have to purchase food from corporations that are contributing to this CAFO crisis. For those who are able to pay a little bit more at the grocery store, just think of all you can save.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chuck Grassley Is Downplaying His Anti-Abortion Extremism to Win Reelection

    Earlier this month, during a debate with his election opponent, long-serving Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley announced that he would oppose a national 15-week limit on abortions. The question came up after Grassley’s Republican colleague, Lindsey Graham, had proposed just such a ban and introduced legislation to that effect in Congress. In opposing Graham’s bill, Grassley joined 14 other GOP senators who have publicly announced their intention to oppose any such legislation.

    Grassley’s stance, however, doesn’t mean that he — or his GOP colleagues — have suddenly seen the light when it comes to reproductive rights. To be sure, two of the Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, have long supported abortion rights — although Collins’s credibility on the issue was tarnished when she backed Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court, despite his clear desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the others, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have a long history of working to overturn abortion access, both at the state and federal level. All of these other senators, except for Murkowski, were effusive in their support for Kavanaugh. All also voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, the Trump-nominated justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court paved the way for the shredding of abortion rights.

    So, no, these GOP politicians haven’t suddenly moderated on abortion. Rather, this election season, they have seen the opinion polls. By large margins, Americans supported Roe, and by even larger margins they express hostility toward the total bans on abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest, being passed by conservative GOP state legislators now that Roe has been overturned by the Trumpified Supreme Court.

    In September 2021, a poll in Grassley’s home state of Iowa found that 56 percent of voters wanted to keep abortion legal in most or all cases — up from just shy of 50 percent in 2020. In July of this year, shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the national right to abortion, fully 60 percent of Iowans told pollsters they wanted to keep abortion legal — and only a third wanted it to be made illegal. (Six percent weren’t sure where they stood on the issue.)

    Yet, Iowa is moving in lockstep with so many other GOP-led states to make access to abortion all but impossible; prior to the Dobbs decision, legislators passed a fetal heartbeat law, essentially outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Standing in opposition, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are leading the defense of abortion access in the state, with court hearings likely in the weeks leading up to the November election.

    When it comes to his political well-being, Grassley is nothing if not an opportunist. Witness the fact that, despite having a long track record of opposing Trump’s more inflammatory statements, he welcomed the insurrection-inspiring ex-president onto the campaign trail with him last year. As CNN reported, Grassley stood next to Trump on a speaker platform and declared, “I was born at night, but not last night. So if I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person who has 91% of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart. I’m smart enough to accept that endorsement.” In other words, principles be damned, Trump can bring home the bacon.

    It’s the same with abortion. Grassley has never met an anti-abortion law that he didn’t like. Now, though, he’s trying to avoid electoral blowback as voters realize that a right they had long taken for granted has been shredded. The modus operandi? Try not to talk about abortion on the campaign trail, and, when forced to do so, cloak yourself in a mantle of moderation by “vowing to oppose” Graham’s legislation — which was never anything other than a political stunt anyway, given the guarantee that Democrats wouldn’t allow it to pass in the Senate, and that if, somehow, some did, the resulting legislation would be instantly vetoed by President Biden.

    It’s probably a smart strategy — for, while most polls throughout the last several months have shown him comfortably ahead of his Democratic opponent, Mike Franken, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll from early October put Franken only three points behind Grassley.

    Grassley’s shrinking lead could be part of a pattern throughout much of the Midwest that has emerged largely under the radar in the past month, as conservative governors and state legislators enforce zero-tolerance abortion bans in the face of growing public opposition to these measures.

    In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt — who signed into law one of the country’s most draconian anti-abortion bans — initially appeared to be coasting to reelection, with polls in early September giving him a 13-point lead. Today, that lead has dwindled to 1 percent. If Stitt loses, it would be one of the great upsets of this unpredictable electoral season.

    Ohio, which also passed a near-total abortion ban, is another case in point. In that state’s senate race — a race once seen by Democrats as so far out of reach that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made a strategic decision not to sink large amounts of Democratic Party dollars into the contest — Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan are now in a dead heat with only weeks to go until the election.

    In Kansas, where anti-abortion proponents suffered a stinging electoral defeat over the summer, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly — rated by Republicans as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent governor in the country — looks to be holding onto a slim lead in the polls.

    In these final weeks of election campaigning, you can be sure that Grassley will try to talk about anything but abortion. If Mike Franken is smart, he will hammer home the issue at every opportunity he has between now and November 8. Polling shows that abortion access is an issue of critical importance for many Iowans, driving significant numbers of young residents to register to vote. And as this past summer’s referendum in Kansas shows, when abortion access is on the ballot, even in conservative states surprises can happen.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Without Ending Deadly Sanctions on Iran, There Can Be No “Woman, Life, Freedom”

    The death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who passed away in the hospital on September 16, three days after being arrested by the Iranian Guidance Patrol, has sparked massive ongoing protests in Iran. Outraged by the Iranian state’s brutal treatment of women for not observing “proper hijab,” Iranian women in different cities and rural areas have been at the forefront of the street protests, removing their hijabs, and some cutting off their hair publicly as a sign of mourning while resisting police crackdown. A month later, it has been estimated that at least 233 people, 23 of whom were children, have died in the protests.

    The Iranian protests erupted over long-time grievances resulting from the unrealized promises of the post-revolutionary Iranian state, whose anti-imperialist Islamic nationalism aspired to shed economic injustices, inequalities and the political oppression of the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi regime. However, more than four decades later, those promises are yet to be fulfilled. The ever-increasing economic and wealth gap between most of the population and the economic elites; the unequal distribution of resources (and the impoverishment of the provinces where ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Arabs and Baluch people live); and the suppression of dissent have been building for decades. The domestic economic policies in Iran are compounded by sanctions against the country, which hurt the most vulnerable segments of the Iranian population.

    A History of Sanctions

    While the U.S. has consistently imposed sanctions on Iran since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Obama administration imposed the harshest sanctions in the history of U.S. economic warfare on Iran. On July 1, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA) to amend the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA). CISADA added new types of restrictions that devastated the Iranian economy. The new sanctions imposed excruciating economic pressure on the Iranian population — especially the working class — and jeopardized many lives by making life-saving medicine unaffordable. The imposition of CISADA and economic pressure by the U.S. and Europe led Iran to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal) in 2015 — a deal which lifted some of the sanctions (though not all of them). The Trump administration’s reversal of the JCPOA, followed by the imposition of a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions, continues under the Biden presidency. Although the Iran-U.S. negotiations have resumed this year, Israel, the U.S. hawks, and some regime-change opposition forces among the Iranian diaspora have been serious obstacles to the sanctions relief and continue their opposition to the reinstatement of the JCPOA by appropriating the Iranian protests.

    The short-lived relief that the JCPOA afforded the Iranian people notwithstanding, the longstanding sanctions — exacerbated by Trump’s renewed measures — have deeply affected the quality of life in Iran. The Iranian state’s hasty decision to implement “independent development” in an effort to bolster the economy has culminated in home-grown technologies that have had devastating environmental consequences. For example, after Obama imposed penalties for selling petrol to Iran, resulting in a 75 percent decrease in imports, Iran started to refine its own oil. This policy resulted in the production of petrol and diesel that contained 10-800 times more contaminants than the international standard. The subsequent air pollution has increased levels of cancer (especially breast cancer) in Iran, which — exacerbated by the lack of access to life-saving cancer treatments, also due to U.S. sanctions — has subjected the Iranian population to slow death.

    The renewed U.S. sanctions under Trump’s administration further decreased Iranians’ purchasing power and increased inflation at unprecedented rates. Even as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued guidance that humanitarian items (such as medicine) would not face U.S. sanctions, the sanctions on Iranian oil and Iran’s Central Bank significantly minimized the nation’s ability to afford medicine and medical supplies — a reality that resulted in a devastatingly high rate of deaths during the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, even if medicine is exempt from the sanctions on paper, because of the sanctions on the Central Bank, suppliers refrain from selling medical supplies and life-saving medicine to Iran, as financial transactions are subjected to sanctions or capped at a level that render exemptions meaningless. As Human Rights Watch reported in April 2020, “the definition of drugs under US export regulations — which includes prescription and over-the-counter medicines and medical devices — excludes certain vaccines, biological and chemical products, and medical devices — including medical supplies, instruments, equipment, equipped ambulances, institutional washing machines for sterilization, and vehicles carrying medical testing equipment. This means that some of the equipment crucial to fighting the virus, such as decontamination equipment, and full-mask respirators, require a special license.” Although some international aid was allowed due to the pandemic, even humanitarian organizations that have OFAC licenses to operate within Iran struggled with legal battles that withheld their license renewal, which meant a significant delay in the first weeks of the pandemic when relief efforts were crucial.

    Increasing privatization, at odds with the ideals of the early years of the revolution, has combined with the sanctions to deepen economic inequalities and led to increasing discontent and resentment. Corruption, unemployment, the underemployment of the highly educated Iranian population and the austerity measures imposed by the state to remedy the economic crisis resulting from the sanctions, have given rise to massive protests in the past few years. For example, in June and July 2018, the drastic drop in the Iranian currency value as a result of sanctions and the lack of access to clean water in the southern province of Khuzestan resulted in protests in Tehran, Khorramshahr, Abadan and Ahwaz. More recently, in the past few months, teachers and government workers have been protesting low wages and the privatization of education. These protests have consistently been brutally suppressed by the Iranian state in the name of “national security.”

    Sanctions, as many have argued, are war by another name. Over four decades of economic sanctions have made life extremely difficult for the majority of the Iranian population without making any difference in the Iranian state’s repressive policies. In fact, sanctions — along with covert U.S. operations under the guise of “democratization projects” and the pending threat of U.S. military intervention — have actually furthered the securitization of the Iranian state and have given it a convenient excuse to silence any kind of dissent. Any protest — whether it is a response to the rise in gas prices, economic corruption and sanctions profiteering (opportunistic financial transactions and trade by private entities and corrupt government elements to profit from the misfortune of the majority of the population), constriction of social freedoms, catastrophic environmental policies, oppression of ethnic minorities, or labor injustice — is accused of “foreign collusion” and is suppressed brutally.

    Protests Continue Despite Repression

    The opportunistic appropriation of the Iranian protests by some Iranian diasporic opposition groups, as well as U.S. war hawks and the Israeli state, continues to encourage the Iranian state’s crackdown on social media and jeopardize the safety of Iranian people who bravely risk their lives in street protests. The hijacking and appropriation of Iranian protests by regime change enthusiasts are not new. In response to these threats, the Iranian state uses a strategy that is far too familiar for the Iranian people: arrest, torture and force confessions from the dissidents, whom the state accuses of “foreign collusion” and propaganda, and cut off internet access for Iranian citizens during the protests.

    Domestically, post-revolutionary Iran’s anti-imperialist ideals have lost their appeal to some segments of the Iranian population who blame the economic atrocities and rampant inflation on Iran’s geopolitical role in the region, especially its support of political groups in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. This resentment is based on the idea that the state is supporting political groups in the region while ignoring Iranians, and the claim that this support has made Iran isolated from the “West.” As such, the dire economic conditions have pitted Iranian people’s struggle against the struggles of Iran’s Arab and Afghan neighbors.

    “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” which is adopted from the Kurdish slogan “Jin Jian Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), has become a rallying cry of the recent protests — encapsulating politics and life by insisting on “freedom” beyond nationalism. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi doesn’t pit the struggles of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, the U.S., Syria, Lebanon, and other parts of the world against each other, nor does it dismiss those struggles because the Iranian state appropriates them for its own geopolitical agendas. It rejects Islamophobia and orientalist representations of Muslim women and refuses to reduce the movement against compulsory hijab to a binary of religion and secularism. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi does not translate into liberal democracy’s promise of freedom — a freedom that has historically been entangled with private property, racialized and gendered notions of humans, and built upon death, debilitation, enslavement and dispossession. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, or “Woman, Life, Freedom,” crystallizes a politics where “woman” is not an overdetermined biological identity, a symbol of national honor, or a body without subjectivity on which battles over liberation take place. “Woman, Life, Freedom” calls for a future where sanctions do not deplete life and where repression is not justified in the name of national security. Sanctions hurt women who bear the burden of economic devastation, increased violence and state repression. The call for “Woman, Life, Freedom” is not achievable unless there is an end to the deadly sanctions and sanctions profiteering.

    The massive protests in Iran signal that many Iranians — even some who are aligned with or support the state — are fed up with the corruption and repression which are ironically enforced under the guise of “morality.” After 43 years, the Iranian women who refuse the instrumentalization of their bodies as sites of morality/freedom are in the forefront of the movement.

    The shift to “Woman, Life, Freedom” in the recent protests thus represents a powerful questioning of sectarian orientation by moving toward solidarity and a different vision of world-making. “Woman, Life, Freedom” envisions a world that is not bound by nationalism, empty promises of rights or neoliberal competition, but one that strives for a life free of repression, injustice, scarcity and violence.

    If sanctions kill softly in the name of rights and international security, if the Iranian state kills brutally in the name of morality and under the cloak of anti-imperialism, and if U.S. bombs kill shamelessly in the name of liberal democracy, then “Woman, Life, Freedom” strives for a life where death does not speak the last word.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The NFL Can Save Football and Preserve Players’ Health With This One Simple Fix

    The multibillion-dollar National Football League (NFL) is locked in an extremely divisive controversy that can only be solved with a simple, but controversial, sandlot solution — a flag stuck in the back of the quarterback’s pants… and then of all ball carriers and receivers.

    Though the solution may seem silly to those with no interest in or tolerance for professional football, the problem cuts to the core of a significant health and labor issue facing NFL athletes.

    Much of the progress toward understanding the seriousness of the concussion problem has come from the football players’ union, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), and from an organization of former players including retired running back Ken Jenkins.

    “We’ve come a long way since I played,” says Jenkins, who retired in 1987. “You were supposed to be able to shake off a little stinger or dinger or a small concussion or a bell rung. That was expected back then. And, if you didn’t … it was almost like, ‘Well, he’s not tough.’ Now we know that a concussion can cause problems down the road and even lead to death. It has opened our eyes and created a cascade of safety measures to be put in place that have helped our game, especially for the youth coming up.”

    Pioneered by former Colts player John Mackey in the 1970s, the NFLPA struggled long and hard against the billionaire owners who still view “their” players as dispensable employees. Over the decades, led later by former player Gene Upshaw and attorney Ed Garvey, the union faced almost impossible odds, fighting through brutal battles over pay, working conditions, free agency and collusion, and more. Gradually, the union built immense clout through organizing.

    But perhaps the union’s biggest fight has centered on the discovery that many players have been suffering a previously undiagnosed form of brain damage called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). First identified by a Nigerian-born coroner in Pittsburgh, Bennett Omalu, the problem surfaced with the death of former Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs superstar center Mike Webster.

    Webster played from 1974 to 1990, entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a reputation for violent outbursts. Eventually Webster came to live with depression and mental illness, struggling with drug addiction and exhibiting erratic behaviors. At age 50, he died suddenly. According to The Atlantic, while the hospital report said Webster had died at Allegheny General Hospital from a heart attack, he also “suffered from ‘depression secondary to post-concussion syndrome,’ suggesting the syndrome was a contributory factor to his death, thus making it accidental.”

    When Omalu used his personal funds to examine Webster’s brain tissue, he discovered a previously unknown syndrome of cell damage caused by the repeated trauma that is at the core of tackle football. Soon, with NFLPA support, the syndrome was confirmed in other dead and dying retired players.

    Like the tobacco industry denying a connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, or the nuclear power industry whitewashing the dangers of atomic radiation, the NFL and its super-rich owners went into deep denial. They viciously attacked Omalu and his supporters, vehemently denying their immensely profitable sport could cause any lasting harm.

    But the NFLPA took Omalu’s findings into the public mainstream. The union gradually organized retired players and their families — many of who continue to struggle with players’ high rates of depression, domestic violence and suicide. Ultimately, the union sued the NFL on behalf of its stricken veterans and their too-often abused spouses and children. A preliminary 2013 court settlement of $765 million opened the door to a long series of legal battles.

    The union has also battled the league over funding for medical studies. Meanwhile, the 2015 film, Concussion, starring Will Smith and focused on Omalu and his research brought a new level of public attention to the situation. After Junior Seau, another beloved Hall of Famer, committed suicide at 43, medical researchers found that his brain exhibited “cellular changes consistent with CTE.” The findings deeply impacted public opinion.

    The NFL and other major sports leagues have long been criticized by legendary consumer advocate Ralph Nader, among others. Much of his critique has focused on the ability of professional teams’ wealthy owners to gouge the public for huge sums of money to build enormous stadiums that only benefit the rich. But Nader has also skewered contact sports like hockey and football for promoting and marketing the brutal physical contact that results in CTE and other serious injuries.

    In recent years, controversies have erupted over “race-based adjustments in dementia testing that critics said made it difficult for Black retirees to qualify for awards in the $1 billion settlement of concussion claims,” the Associated Press reported. The testing procedures, which the NFL agreed to end in 2021, had caused complex conflicts within the players’ union.

    But the union and the league are continuing to battle over the brain damage issue. It’s been generally assumed that football is the United States’ most popular sport, in large part because its most loyal viewers love the violence itself. Promoted in part by the macho rantings of Donald Trump, who once owned a non-NFL professional football team (and the contract of running back Herschel Walker, the GOP’s far right candidate for Senate from Georgia), harm done to players has been considered “part of the game.”

    The current uproar stems from two seemingly opposite situations — the disturbing concussive damage done to a young Miami Dolphins’ quarterback, and an overly protective penalty called in favor of an aging veteran QB.

    The more serious side of the controversy surrounds Tua Tagovailoa, Miami’s 24-year-old star passer. In successive games Tagovailoa suffered head injuries that may have permanently threatened his health.

    Under intense pressure from the players’ union and public advocates like Nader, the NFL has instituted some protocols to protect its most valuable assets: its star quarterbacks. Rules now in place, about how badly QBs can be hit by defensive players, and when quarterbacks must be substituted out after suffering obvious trauma, have somewhat mitigated risks. But the protocols are deeply flawed and seriously contradictory.

    Tagovailoa was slammed to the ground on September 25, 2022, and experienced a concussion. But the Dolphins claimed he’d suffered a “back injury” and put him back in. Then, on September 29, 2022, he suffered yet another serious hit. According to People: “While lying on the field, Tagovailoa’s raised his hands and arms above him and appeared to be unable to control their movement, and medical assistance was called. Tagovailoa remained motionless on the field for around 10 minutes before being carried out in a stretcher.”

    Despite the obvious trauma, Tagovailoa was allowed to play the next week and was hit yet again in ways too devastating to ignore. Commentators have voiced outrage that the life and future health of a player in his twenties could be so cavalierly risked for a mere ball game.

    Ironically, when Tagovailoa was made to sit out the next game, his replacement — Teddy Bridgewater — was himself on the very first play hit too hard to continue. Miami’s third-string passer then led the team — which had been streaking — to an abysmal defeat.

    The futures of Tagovailoa, Bridgewater and the Dolphins themselves are now all up in the air. The angry, divisive and often confusing debate about when concussed QBs should play and when they should be pulled has no clear resolution.

    But the flip side of the debate reared its ugly hammered head in a marquee game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Atlanta Falcons when legendary Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady was sacked. The hit was routine and showed no signs of excess within the league’s protocols. Brady appeared uninjured.

    But as one of the NFL’s all-time leading passers, Brady had license to jump up and down with theatrical complaints. The referees granted him a very dubious penalty, which probably decided the game in the Bucs’ favor.

    In response, one of U.S. sports’ most popular commentators, Stephen A. Smith, made what could be a definitive suggestion. While expressing his outrage at Brady’s antics, he argued that a flag should be stuck in the back of the quarterback’s pants… and then of all ball carriers and pass receivers. Instead of letting these key players get smashed and thrown to the ground by massive pass rushers, the flag could merely be pulled, ending the play. The extreme violence and tangible damage suffered in this pivotal part of any football game would thus be avoided.

    The suggestion to use flags in professional football may have been first discussed in public as a “serious cultural issue” 10 days prior by four former players on this writer’s weekly Green Grassroots Emergency Protection Zoom call and Progressive Radio Network’s “Solartopia” radio show.

    “He [Tagovailoa] had a concussion from four days earlier and they let him play,” said former player Dan Sheehan. “It was just bizarre.”

    The suggestion to use a cloth strip to be pulled and thrown to the ground is a throwback to “flag football,” the sandlot version of the sport played by millions of amateurs in parks throughout the country. In this more pacific version of the game, there’s no tackling. Each play ends with the ball carrier’s flag — rather than the players themselves — being thrown to the ground.

    Such a version of the game is of course viewed as “wimpy” by Trumpian fans, most of whom have never played the sport

    themselves, but who pay the big bucks to see hired gladiators (most of them Black) smashing each other’s brains to oblivion on the field.

    For all the focus on rules surrounding quarterbacks, the essence of the game at all positions remains embedded in its violence, with the expectation of injury being virtually universal.

    In the long run, going to flags — and not just for quarterbacks — may be the game’s only hope.

    While European “football” — what people in the U.S. know as soccer — has grown exponentially, tackle football in the U.S. is tanking among young people. A new study suggests that half of adults in the U.S. disagree with the idea that tackle football is an “appropriate sport for kids to play.” Fearing injuries, lawsuits and a spreading revulsion against violence, high schools and colleges around the country are dropping the sport altogether.

    As early as 2003, a major orthopedic study showed as many as 350,000 high school football players were being injured every year. And while the NFL gorges on high ratings and gargantuan profits, it cannot continue without a constant flow of young players.

    For the league, a good quarterback is vital to the game’s allure. Tagovailoa has a multimillion-dollar four-year contract. The Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes recently signed a long-term deal for a half-billion dollars.

    As we have seen in Miami, a team led by a mediocre quarterback is barely worth watching, even for the game’s most devoted fans. The quality of the NFL’s “product” is degraded every time a star QB is forced to sit out a game.

    In the short term, protecting the quarterback, runners and pass catchers with a flag protocol rather than murky, hard-to-define concussive protocols should be — forgive the pun — a no-brainer.

    The violence lovers will whine that the sport is going “wimpy.” But in the long term, the whole game must be overhauled and made less brutal. The grotesque parade of seriously harmed young stars being carted off the field is not sustainable. For the NFL, there can be no greater threat than the wise decision of young athletes to choose other sports.

    Will making professional football less violent affect American culture? Realistically, it’s hard to think otherwise.

    Football is the nation’s premier spectator sport, watched weekly by tens of millions. The Super Bowl is the most watched annual sporting event in the world.

    A packed weekend of often horrifying blood sport can do the American psyche no good. Taming it down to the beautiful nonviolent ballet it really should be could constitute a great leap forward for the nation’s cultural mindset, and for the health of its athletes.

    We won’t know for sure until we try. But common sense should tell us that when it comes to tackle football, flags are the better option.

    Please write me directly via solartopia@gmail.com to help make it happen.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ketanji Brown Jackson Cleverly Turned the Right’s Own Judicial Theory Against It

    During the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Merrill v. Milligan, a case that could deal a severe blow to the Voting Rights Act, Ketanji Brown Jackson powerfully rebutted right-wing attacks on voting rights by using her own “originalist” analysis of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to explain why congressional district maps cannot constitutionally be drawn in a “race-neutral” way.

    Liberal judges are not generally adherents to originalism – a judicial approach that insists that constitutional provisions must be interpreted based on the popular meaning they had at the time they were drafted, and that has generally been used by conservatives to justify right-wing positions such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But in her defense of voting rights, Jackson brilliantly turned the tables on the right by crafting her own originalist argument to defend taking race into account when drawing district maps.

    “The framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, in a race conscious way,” Jackson said, responding to Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour’s claim that maps must be created in a “race-neutral” manner.

    At issue in Merrill is Alabama’s GOP-created district map, which includes only one Black-majority district out of seven districts, despite the fact that Black people comprise 27 percent of the population. LaCour was in effect arguing that a successful challenge to a district map requires proof of discriminatory intent. But Congress has clearly said that a map violates the Voting Rights Act if its effects are discriminatory, regardless of the intent of the mapmakers.

    The state of Alabama is arguing that the consideration of race in drawing maps violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, claiming that it discriminates against white people.

    “I don’t think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” Jackson said, schooling LaCour on the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment.

    Jackson noted “they were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freedmen during the reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.” She said that “the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”

    The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment prohibits states from denying equal protection of the law. And the 15th Amendment forbids abridgment of the right to vote on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

    Citing the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that drafted the 14th Amendment, Jackson quoted Republican Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. When he introduced the amendment, Stevens said that “unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated freedmen.” (Stevens could have been talking about Alabama.)

    “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy,” Jackson observed, noting that the drafters of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 “specifically stated that citizens would have the same civil rights as enjoyed by white citizens. That’s the point of that Act, to make sure that the other citizens, the black citizens, would have the same as the white citizens.”

    Since the framers were concerned “that the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have a constitutional foundation, that’s when the Fourteenth Amendment came into play,” Jackson said. It provided “a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.” That, Jackson told LaCour, “was doing what the Section 2 is doing here.”

    Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race,” which occurs when minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Section 2 was enacted to enforce the 15th Amendment.

    In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in City of Mobile v. Bolden that in order to obtain relief under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the plaintiff had to prove that the abridgement of voting rights was intentionally discriminatory.

    Two years later, however, Congress amended Section 2 to specify that a voting procedure which has the effect of abridging the right to vote due to race, color, language or minority status is illegal, regardless of whether the plaintiff could prove discriminatory intent. The discriminatory effect can be proved by considering the “totality of the circumstances.”

    In January, a three judge-panel of the federal district court (including two Trump-appointees) concluded that Alabama’s map likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and ordered the state to create a second Black majority or plurality district.

    But a 5-4 conservative majority of the Supreme Court halted the district court ruling and allowed the discriminatory map to be used in the 2022 midterm elections. The high court heard oral arguments in Merrill on October 4.

    Even the right-wingers on the court appeared hesitant to adopt LaCour’s invitation to require discriminatory intent, which Congress has clearly rejected. But don’t be surprised if they find a narrower ground on which to uphold Alabama’s racist map.

    They might rule that the new majority-Black district could not be “reasonably compact” to satisfy the test set forth in the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Thornburg v. Gingles. It says that in order to successfully challenge redistricting maps that illegally dilute the voting power of a minority group, the plaintiff must show that the group is sufficiently large and compact to constitute a majority.

    Brett Kavanaugh cited Alabama’s argument that the “district is too sprawling to be reasonably compact or reasonably configured.” Samuel Alito characterized that argument as “basic” and “least far-reaching.”

    Such a ruling would present significant hurdles to future challenges to redistricting maps which claim that they dilute the collective voting power of Black people.

  • Building Feminist Jails Ignores a Larger Problem

    Recently, mainstream white feminists have called on politicians to fund construction of the Women’s Center for Justice, a “feminist jail” in Harlem, New York. The goal is to build a new, progressive alternative that would provide “better” treatment for women and nonbinary people. But across the U.S., anti-carceral activists and communities in favor of total liberation and abolition are expressing outrage — and rightfully so. Proponents of this “feminist jail” are allying themselves with the existing prison and law-and-order system, which continues to inflict extraordinary harm on criminalized Black, poor, migrant, queer, gender-oppressed and disabled communities. This moment presents a vital opportunity to call out feminist politics and actions that strengthen and expand the legitimacy of the prison system

    We can trace two philosophically different approaches to the imprisonment of women and nonbinary people throughout the history of prisons. For example, reformist thinkers and activists chose to “reform” individual women within prisons. Reformists who were white and middle-class organized to improve prison conditions within the existing prison structure. On the other hand, abolitionist thinkers and activists did not want simply to improve material conditions so that incarcerated women would have more rights, safety and access to opportunities — instead, they wanted to bring an end to a legal regime rooted in racism, economic subjugation and gender oppression.

    The trend for building alternative women’s centers can be traced back to as early as 1910 in Greenwich Village, New York — the epicenter of radicalism and nonconformity, but also civil unrest and rising crime caused by economic constraints. In the mid-2000s, there was a resurgence of interest in California to fund the construction of alternative prisons to address women’s pathways into crime and imprisonment. Then, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and progressive reform advocates pushed for alternative prisons framed as gender responsive facilities with specialized programming designed to meet the unique needs and challenges of incarcerated women. Advocates claimed that a gender responsive model would provide a therapeutic and healing environment with opportunities for building essential skills — all designed to address personal issues such as abuse, violence, family relationships, drug use and mental illness, and socioeconomic conditions.

    While feminist-centered programming initiatives can provide much-needed services and improve material conditions for those who are currently incarcerated, the argument for building feminist-centered jails and prisons fails to account for the intersections of race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, citizenship and class, and how these social identities converge so that Black women and other women and nonbinary people of color get caught up in the dragnet of incarceration in the first place.

    A reformist approach to women’s incarceration places the responsibility of reform on the individual, not the institution.

    In these spaces, the explanations for the root causes of women’s pathways into the carceral state (e.g., drug and alcohol use, sex work, violence, socioeconomic status etc.) are framed as an individual failing, requiring women to turn inward and take full responsibility rather than contextualize their incarceration as manifestations of racial and economic inequality. In this way, reform is imposed as the responsibility of the individual. Jails and prisons promoting a “feminist” model are not designed to address the roots of women’s incarceration or the problems they face in these institutions within the broader context of social injustice, because this would undermine the goals of incarceration, which are to punish and maintain a permanent prison class.

    Frontline activists against incarceration have mobilized to reject the prison system in all its forms. Survived and Punished, a group which advocates for incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse, has campaigned against the movement to build the Women’s Center for Justice in Harlem. In a social media campaign under the hashtag #NoNewWomensJailNYC! the group stated, “We vehemently oppose efforts to brand the expansion of the PIC [prison-industrial complex] as ‘feminist’ or ‘humanitarian.’”

    The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, which advocates for prison abolition, is leading community efforts to pass a jail and prison construction moratorium in Massachusetts. In a Twitter statement, Andrea James, a formerly incarcerated activist and the executive director of The National Council, wrote: “Let’s invest in something proactive for a change with that $50M the state wanted to spend on a new women’s prison.” MCI-Framingham is the state’s only women’s prison, dating back to 1877. Its conditions are dilapidated beyond repair, giving the state an opportunity to build a modern prison to replace it. However, prison abolition activists advocate for decarceration and prime social investments in communities most harmed by the carceral state. While the push for a new women’s prison is not being framed as a feminist prison, the vision for a smaller, modern facility that provides opportunities for people to “heal from trauma and other modern contemporary attributes” dovetails with the goals and aims of progressive feminist reformers.

    On the west coast, organizers of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots statewide abolitionist organization, are currently mobilizing to kick off its Close CA Women’s Prison campaign.

    We must not fall into the trap of endorsing “alternatives” that reproduce violence. Feminist organizations such as the nonprofit Women’s Community Justice and its “progressive” advocates have merely repackaged the mobilizing efforts of grassroots movements to create political urgency for their campaign: #BeyondRosies. This campaign aims to garner sympathy and shock over the violence and abuse that people incarcerated in New York City’s women’s prison experience at the hands of male prison guards. But its proposed solution — building a separate institution for women run by carceral feminists — is no better. No true solution can involve building more carceral institutions.

    While mainstream, privileged white feminists work to advance their cause within the existing political structure of a carceral system, activists working towards abolition and justice, equity and community power seek total liberation. Violence cannot be separated from women’s incarceration, because carceral institutions, regardless of their model, are inherently harmful.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Joe Manchin Impoverished 4 Million Children When He Killed Child Tax Credit

    Imagine wanting to tell your story, racing to the microphone, only to find that there is a proverbial sea separating you from it; you can see the microphone, but you cannot access it. You do not have the required credentials to stand before it. You watch people on the other side and quickly realize they have power and social mobility. Hell, their entire experience is constructed in a way that they can operate without acknowledging or seeing you. They have the political, financial and social capital to do so. Relatedly, they also have the means to tell their story; they never pray to be heard because they know they will be heard.

    You, on the other hand, have none of that. You do not have a big name. You do not have a big bank account. Every title you hold — woman, mother, person of color, person living in poverty — is devalued. This is the plight of working-class families (especially mothers), early childhood education workers and anti-poverty advocates. Political leaders, on the other hand, have the luxury of engaging you and your community only when it benefits them, such as for photo ops or election season.

    It is painful to watch leaders who are disconnected from the struggle of working families control not only the microphone but the platform. They control the narrative about those who struggle. But even worse, they easily disregard those whose only offense is being unable to make ends meet.

    What I’m describing is not an intro to a fictitious work. Some, like me, come from places such as West Virginia, where Sen. Joe Manchin is provided opportunity after opportunity to share his austere viewpoint, even though he consistently conveys contempt for the poor.

    Political leaders like Manchin often view poverty as a character defect rather than a problem created by policy. For example, Manchin killed the extension of the Child Tax Credit which would have lifted scores of children out of poverty. Refusing to extend the credit meant an estimated 4 million children — 50,000 in his own state — returned to poverty. Manchin’s gripe: The measure didn’t have strict work requirements. But such requirements are punitive and inflexible for mothers without access to child care, caregivers of children with disabilities, grandparents, parents in schools, and others with unique circumstances. There are no carveouts that address the nuances of life.

    What is more, millions of children fell back into poverty, yet their advocates and caregivers never had an opportunity to express how this felt. They watched persons with power disregard the needs of the poor and lacked an opportunity to offer a rebuttal. This is because the majority of working people — including early childhood education workers — cannot capture the attention of those in power.

    Last year, a group of women from West Virginia and I as part of Team for West Virginia Children and Rattle The Windows took 500 teddy bears to Washington, D.C. to symbolize the 50,000 West Virginia kids who would go back into poverty once the Child Tax Credit expired. Working with national partners, we learned how to obtain a permit, where to position ourselves physically so that the teddy bears would be seen by elected leaders, and how to engage congressional offices. If we didn’t have funding for the trip, or a firm to help us, we would not have known the mechanics of effectively engaging elected leaders. The truth is that most Americans wouldn’t even know where to start if they wanted to plan an action at the nation’s capital. Access to our policy makers is blocked by gatekeepers and rules that most of us are not privy to. It is almost impossible for us to capture the attention of people elected to represent us. Advocates are often told to wait until our elected leaders are in district, but there is nothing that guarantees policy makers will meet with us even if they have an office down the street. Additionally, having a meeting scheduled is no guarantee elected leaders will show up, show up on time or be willing to interact with us in good faith.

    It is painful to watch people like policy makers — people who are never searching for a microphone, platform or audience — disregard us, yet be offered one opportunity after another to make their case. The mainstream media cover their every move, their every objection and their every illogical rationale for making life harder for marginalized communities. They are given ample opportunity to explain their opposition to policies that would improve life for poor and working-class folk. Working people do not stand a chance in a nation that pardons the rich, despises the poor, and caters to those with power.

    We are experiencing a child care crisis in this country. Early childhood education has been underfunded for years. This has meant that centers are unable to retain staff, child care workers themselves are being paid poverty wages, and families in need of child care are going without, making it ridiculously impossible for families to participate in the workforce. The persistent challenge in early childhood education has meant that children are not getting what they need, and parents are unable to meet the demands of their families due to systemic barriers. And with rising inflation and rising housing costs, families are more squeezed than ever. When will the working poor be asked to weigh in on policies that impact their ability to be self-sustaining? When will our lived experience warrant a press pass? I do not know the answer, but I know that children and families will continue to suffer until they are seen as part of the solution rather than the problem.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rush to Mine Electric Vehicle Battery Elements Threatens People and Ecosystems

    Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won’t get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet. Worse yet, the coming global race to electrify the personal vehicle is likely to exacerbate ecological degradation, geopolitical tensions, and military conflict.

    The batteries that power electric vehicles are likely to be the source of much international competition and the heart of the problem lies in two of the metallic elements used to make their electrodes: cobalt and lithium. Most deposits of those metals lie outside the borders of the United States and will leave manufacturers here (and elsewhere) relying heavily on foreign supplies to electrify road travel on the scale now being envisioned.

    Adventurers and Opportunists

    In the battery business, the Democratic Republic of Congo is referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of cobalt.” For two decades, its cobalt — 80% of the world’s known reserves — has been highly prized for its role in mobile-phone manufacturing. Such cobalt mining has already taken a terrible human and ecological toll.

    Now, the pressure to increase Congo’s cobalt output is intensifying on a staggering scale. Whereas a phone contains just thousandths of a gram of cobalt, an electric vehicle battery has pounds of the metal, and a quarter-billion such batteries will have to be manufactured to fully electrify the American passenger car fleet as it now exists.

    Not surprisingly, the investment world is now converging on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. In a remarkable series of articles late last year, the New York Times reported on how the cobalt rush in that country has been caught up “in a familiar cycle of exploitation, greed, and gamesmanship that often puts narrow national aspirations above all else.” The most intense rivalry is between China, which has, in recent years, been buying up cobalt-mining operations in Congo at a rapid clip, and the United States, now playing catch-up. Those two nations, wrote the Times, “have entered a new ‘Great Game’ of sorts,” a reference to the nineteenth-century confrontation between the Russian and British Empires over Afghanistan.

    Fifteen of 19 cobalt mines in Congo are now under Chinese control. In and around those mines, the health and the safety of workers have been severely compromised, while local residents have been displaced from their homes. People sneaking into the area to collect leftover lumps of cobalt to sell are being shot at. The killing of one man by the Congolese military (at the urging of Chinese mine owners) spurred an uprising in his village, during which a protester was also shot and killed.

    The Times further reported, “Troops with AK-47s were posted outside the mine this year, along with security guards hired from a company founded by Erik Prince.” Prince is notorious for having been the founder and boss of the mercenary contractor Blackwater, which committed atrocities during America’s “forever wars” of the 2000s. Among other mayhem, Blackwater mercenaries fired upon unarmed civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan and were convicted of the killings and woundings that resulted. From 2014 to 2021, he was the chair of a China-based company, Frontier Services Group, that provided Blackwater-style services to mining companies in Congo.

    Prince has joined what the Times calls “a wave of adventurers and opportunists who have filled a vacuum created by the departure of major American mining companies, and by the reluctance of other traditional Western firms to do business in a country with a reputation for labor abuses and bribery.”

    Neo-Conquistadors

    Forbes reported recently that 384 additional mines may be needed worldwide by 2035 to keep battery factories supplied with cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Even were there to be a rapid acceleration of the recycling of metals from old batteries, 336 new mines would still be needed. A battery-industry CEO told the magazine:

    “If you just look at Tesla’s ambition to produce 20 million electric vehicles a year in 2030, that alone will require close to two times the present global annual supply [of those minerals] and that’s before you include VW, Ford, GM, and the Chinese.”

    Currently, the bulk of the world’s lithium production occurs in Australia, Chile, and China, while there are vast unexploited reserves in the southern part of Bolivia where it joins Chile and Argentina in what’s come to be known as the “lithium triangle.” China owns lithium mines outright throughout that triangle and in Australia, and two-thirds of the world’s lithium processing is done in Chinese-owned facilities.

    Lithium extraction and processing is not exactly a green business. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, for instance, where lithium mining requires vast evaporation ponds, a half million gallons of water are needed for every metric ton of lithium extracted. The process accounts for 65% of the total amount of water used in that region and causes extensive soil and water contamination, as well as air pollution.

    While evidently uninterested in Mother Nature, Tesla’s electric car tycoon Elon Musk is intensely interested in vertically integrating lithium mining with electric battery and vehicle production on the Chinese model. Accordingly, he’s been trying for years to get his hands on Bolivia’s pristine lithium reserves. Until ousted in a 2020 coup, that country’s president Evo Morales stood in Musk’s way, pledging to “industrialize with dignity and sovereignty.”

    When a Twitter user accused Musk of being complicit in the coup, the Tesla tycoon responded, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (He later deleted the tweet.) As Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano observed at the time, “Musk’s admission, however intemperate, is at least honest… Earlier this year, Musk and his company revealed that they wanted to build a Tesla factory in Brazil, which would be supplied by lithium from Bolivia; when we wrote about that we called our report ‘Elon Musk Is Acting Like a Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium.’”

    Bolivia continues to seek to exploit its lithium resources while keeping them under national control. Without sufficient wealth and technical resources, however, its government has been obliged to solicit foreign capital, having narrowed the field of candidate companies to six — one American, one Russian, and four Chinese. By year’s end, it’s expected to select one or more of them to form a partnership with its state-owned firm, Yacimientos de Litios Bolivianos. No matter who gets the contract, friction among the three suitor nations could potentially kick off a Western Hemispheric version of the Great Game.

    And whatever you do, don’t forget that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a lithium-rich land with centuries of bitter experience in hosting great powers, is another potential arena for rivalry and conflict. In fact, Soviet invaders first identified that country’s lithium resources four decades ago. During the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in this century, geologists confirmed the existence of large deposits, and the Pentagon promptly labeled the country — you guessed it — a potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” According to the Asia-Pacific-based magazine The Diplomat, the lithium rush is now on there and “countries like China, Russia, and Iran have already revealed their intentions to develop ‘friendly relations’ with the Taliban,” as they compete for the chance to flaunt their generosity and “help” that country exploit its resources.

    Don’t Look Down

    The greatest potential for conflict over battery metals may not, in fact, be in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. It may not be on any continent at all. The most severe and potentially most destructive future battleground may lie far out in international waters, where polymetallic nodules — dense mineral lumps, often compared to potatoes in their size and shape — lie strewn in huge numbers across vast regions of the deep-ocean floor. They contain a host of metallic elements, including not only lithium and cobalt but also copper, another metal required in large amounts for battery manufacturing. According to a United Nations report, a single nodule field, the 1.7 million-square-mile Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean southeast of the Hawaiian Islands, contains more cobalt than all terrestrial resources combined.

    A U.N. agency, the International Seabed Authority, issues exploration licenses to mining companies sponsored by national governments and intends to start authorizing nodule extraction in the CCZ as soon as next year. Mining methods for polymetallic nodules have not yet been fully developed or used on a large scale, but the metal hunters are advertising the process as being far less destructive than the terrestrial mining of cobalt and lithium. One can get the impression that it will be so gentle as not even to be mining as we’ve known it, but something more like running a vacuum cleaner along the seafloor.

    Don’t believe it for a second. In just a small portion of the CCZ, scientists have identified more than 1,000 animal species and they suspect that at least another thousand are also living there, along with 100,000 microbial species. Virtually all of the creatures in the path of mining operations will, of course, be killed, and anything living on the surface of those nodules removed from the ecosystem. The nodule-harvesting machines, as large as wheat combines, will stir up towering clouds of sediment likely to drift for thousands of miles before finally settling onto, burying, and so killing yet more sea life.

    To recap: In America, the Saudi Arabia of green greed, we now covet a couple of metals critically important to the electric-vehicle industry, cobalt and lithium, the reserves of which are concentrated in only a small number of nations. However, the ores can also be sucked straight off the seabed in humongous quantities in places far outside the jurisdiction of any nation. Environmentally, geopolitically, militarily, what could possibly go wrong?

    Plenty, of course. Writing for the Center for International Maritime Security last year, U.S. Coast Guard Surface Warfare Officer Lieutenant Kyle Cregge argued that the Coast Guard and Navy should have a high-profile presence in seabed mining areas. He stressed that the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act “claimed the right of the U.S. to mine the seabed in international waters, and specifically identifies the Coast Guard as responsible for enforcement.”

    He did acknowledge that patrolling areas where deep-sea mining occurs could create some dicey situations. As he put it, “The Coast Guard will face the same problem the U.S. Navy does with its freedom of navigation operations in places like the South China Sea.” But by potentially putting their vessels in harm’s way, he wrote, “the services seek to reinforce the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as reflecting customary international law.” (Forget the fact that the U.S. has never signed onto the Law of the Sea treaty!) Cregge then predicted that, “[a]mong the most challenging in a future seabed competition would be China and Russia, states that have already used lawfare in the South China Sea and Arctic regions respectively to pursue their territorial gains.”

    To make matters worse, seafloor mining might not only spark military conflict but also become an integral part of warfighting itself. Manabrata Guha, a researcher in war theory at the University of New South Wales, told Australia’s ABC television that data, including topographic or thermal maps of the seabed, obtained through exploration of the seafloor by mining operations projects, could be of great value to a nation’s armed forces. According to ABC,

    “Just 9 percent of the ocean floor is mapped in high resolution, compared to about 99 percent of the surface of Mars — a blind spot that affects both deep sea miners and military planners. This is all worth keeping in mind, because while the Pacific Ocean is set to be the sea with the most mining potential, it is also home to this century’s most consequential geopolitical tension: the rise of China, and the U.S.’s response to it.”

    The resource-rich South China Sea in particular, notes ABC, has long been a potential flashpoint between China and America. As Guha speculated, U.S. use of deep-sea data in the region “could be expanded beyond its battle-centric focus to also include attacks on civilian infrastructure, finance, and cultural systems.” He added, “The undersea domain provides another vector, another potential ‘hole’ that the Americans would look to penetrate,” thanks to the fact, as he pointed out, that the U.S. is 20 to 30 years ahead of China in undersea-mapping technology.

    “You want to pick and choose where you hurt the adversary to such an extent that their whole system collapses,” he said. “That’s the idea of multi-domain warfare… the idea is to bring about systemic collapse.”

    The Burden of the Big-Ass Truck

    Systemic collapse? Really? Instead of devising technologies to take down other societies, in this increasingly heated moment, shouldn’t we be focusing on how to avoid our own systemic collapse?

    A national fleet of battery-powered cars is unlikely to prove sustainable and could have catastrophic consequences globally. It’s time to consider an overhaul of the whole transportation system to move it away from a fixation on personal vehicles and toward walking, pedaling, and a truly effective nationwide public transportation system (as well as very local ones), which could indeed be run on electricity, while perhaps helping to avoid future disastrous resource wars.

    Such a transformation, even were it to occur, would, of course, take a long time. During that period, electric vehicles will continue to be manufactured in quantity. So, for now, to reduce their impact on humanity and the Earth, America should aim to produce fewer and far smaller vehicles than are currently planned. After all, electrified versions of the big-ass trucks and SUVs of the present moment will also require bigger, heavier batteries (like the one in the F-150 Lightning pickup truck, which weighs 1,800 pounds and is the size of two mattresses). They will, of course, contain proportionally larger quantities of cobalt, lithium, and copper.

    The true burden of a massive battery in an electric car or truck will be borne not just by the vehicle’s suspension system, but by the people and ecosystems unlucky enough to be in or near the global supply chain that will produce it. And those people may be among the first of millions to be imperiled by a new wave of geopolitical and military conflicts in what should be thought of as the world’s green sacrifice zones.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Good jobs, not gambles, are what Canada’s workers deserve

    The post Good jobs, not gambles, are what Canada’s workers deserve appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Racism, Lies and Hypocrisy Are Now Seen as Electable Qualities in GOP Candidates

    There is, these days, no shortage of blathering and entirely dangerous statements being made, and precedents being set, by Trump and his acolytes, and by the cowed political leaders of the Trumpified GOP.

    But, even in an era of debased politics, we are seeing some entirely extraordinary events.

    Late last month, Trump took to his Truth Social site to attack Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. So far, so normal. Except on September 30, his rant took an extra sinister turn, even by his diabolic standards. In casting his vote in the Senate (on unspecified measures) in a way the ex-president opposed, McConnell had, Trump wrote, shown that he has a “DEATH WISH.” Moreover, in an explicitly racist, albeit incoherent, attack against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao — one of Trump’s own ex-cabinet members — Trump ranted that the Republican leader in the Senate must “immediately seek help and advise [sic] from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!”

    Now, put to one side for the minute that this line makes absolutely no sense, and just consider the raw racial animus of this statement. It was the sort of bone-headed racist diatribe that, in a bygone television era, Archie Bunker might have launched. Perhaps more of the moment, it represented the sort of racist bile that has driven up violent anti-Asian hate crimes around the country since the COVID pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020.

    So, how did the GOP leadership respond to Trump whipping up his mob to attack McConnell and Chao?

    McConnell and his office responded with a series of no comments, which is pretty much a cowardly par for the course for a man who enabled Trump’s escalating fanaticism throughout his four-year presidency, who said that he held Trump “morally responsible” for the January 6 insurrection but then turned around and marshaled his Senators to vote “not guilty” in Trump’s impeachment trial — thus ensuring that he has remained a loud, and menacing, presence hanging over the GOP to this day.

    Most GOP senators simply headed for the hills and declined to get involved in this latest intra-party brouhaha.

    And the ones who did make statements were so milquetoast in their observations that they would have maintained more dignity by staying silent. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) mustered up enough courage, when asked about the “death wish” comment to say, simply, “What I want to make sure is what I can do. I can try my best to bring people together.” As for Trump’s racist attack on Chao, Scott noted, “The president likes to give people nicknames.”

    It just so happens that the nicknames the Trump-troll likes to give are saturated in the nastiest, most toxic, most inflammatory of racist marinades.

    Coherence and moral dignity are in perilously short supply in today’s retrograde version of the GOP. Take, for example, the allegations, published by the Daily Beast, that in 2009 Herschel Walker — at the time a football star, now the GOP’s bumbling, ban-abortion-in-all-circumstances-including-rape-and-incest, fringe candidate for U.S. Senator in Georgia — paid for a girlfriend to get an abortion.

    Walker, who has also been dogged by allegations that he held a gun to his ex-wife’s head during a fight, at first denied the allegations in their entirety and threatened to sue for defamation. But, of course, he didn’t. Because it’s one thing denying something on conservative talk radio; it’s another denying it after swearing an oath, in a court of law, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And given that his political campaign apparently knew of the abortion issue months ago, it’s unlikely many of his own crew would have been willing to head to court with him.

    Instead, Walker has issued a series of increasingly incoherent pronouncements on the event, including one saying that, hypothetically, had his ex-girlfriend had an abortion and had he paid for it, there would be “nothing to be ashamed of.” Which is actually, of course, true… except, according to previous statements made by Walker, abortion is equivalent to murder, and anyone who has, or facilitates, an abortion is guilty of a crime that ought to result in years behind bars.

    As documented by the Daily Beast and other publications, Walker has a long and dishonorable track record of half-truths, misstatements and downright fabrications, including pretending to be a trained FBI agent (he never was one), claiming to have founded a veterans support program, and lying to his own campaign staff about how many children he has had and the fact that he has been taken to court over child support claims.

    In more normal political times, the GOP would have dropped Walker like a hot potato months ago. But these aren’t normal times. Trump backs Walker, and that’s good enough for the Trumpian base; and because it’s good enough for the Trumpies, who terrify the Mitch McConnells of the world through their ability to bring fire and fury to all who stand in their way, it’s good enough for the broader party.

    Instead of denouncing Walker, GOP bigwigs continue to make excuses. My personal favorite came out of ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mouth mid-week. “I think he is the most important Senate candidate in the country because he’ll do more to change the Senate just by the sheer presence, by his confidence, by his deep commitment to Christ. You know, he’s been through a long, tough period. He suffered a lot of concussions coming out of football.” In other words, don’t hold Walker accountable, blame the game of football for his blatant lies and dangerous ideas, and then elect him despite it all because he has God on his side.

    In the wake of these cascading scandals, other candidates might have chosen to quit the political arena and cite a need to spend more time with their families. But that path would be rather awkward for Walker, since at least some of his close relatives have, in recent days, publicly denounced him.

    And so, despite all the scandals, Walker is headed into the November election still a viable candidate aiming to take down Senator Warnock. And in similar fashion, despite all the egregious evidence against him, Trump continues to terrify his Grand Old Party into a degraded submission.

    Back in 2016, Trump boasted that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose the backing of his supporters. Now, six years later, Trump is whipping up a violent mob against Mitch McConnell, in much the same way as he whipped up the hangmen of January 6 against his own vice president, and the entire GOP leadership, including McConnell himself, simply have no comment.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Nuclear War Could Threaten to Erupt

    Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.

    But hold on! As it happens, Ukraine isn’t the only place on the planet where a nuclear conflagration could erupt in the near future. Sad to say, around the island of Taiwan — where U.S. and Chinese forces are engaging in ever more provocative military maneuvers — there is also an increasing risk that such moves by both sides could lead to nuclear escalation.

    While neither American nor Chinese officials have explicitly threatened to use such weaponry, both sides have highlighted possible extreme outcomes there. When Joe Biden last spoke with Xi Jinping by telephone on July 29th, the Chinese president warned him against allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit the island (which she nonetheless did, four days later) or offering any further encouragement to “Taiwan independence forces” there. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” he assured the American president, an ambiguous warning to be sure, but one that nevertheless left open the possible use of nuclear weapons.

    As if to underscore that point, on September 4th, the day after Pelosi met with senior Taiwanese officials in Taipei, China fired 11 Dongfeng-15 (DF-15) ballistic missiles into the waters around that island. Many Western observers believe that the barrage was meant as a demonstration of Beijing’s ability to attack any U.S. naval vessels that might come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion of the island. And the DF-15, with a range of 600 miles, is believed capable of delivering not only a conventional payload, but also a nuclear one.

    In the days that followed, China also sent nuclear-capable H-6 heavy bombers across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a previously respected informal boundary between China and that island. Worse yet, state-owned media displayed images of Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) hypersonic ballistic missiles, also believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons, being moved into positions off Taiwan.

    Washington has not overtly deployed nuclear-capable weaponry in such a brazen fashion near Chinese territory, but it certainly has sent aircraft carriers and guided-missile warships into the area, signaling its ability to launch attacks on the mainland should a war break out. While Pelosi was in Taiwan, for example, the Navy deployed the carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its flotilla of escort vessels in nearby waters. Military officials in both countries are all too aware that should such ships ever attack Chinese territory, those DF-15s and DF-17s would be let loose against them — and, if armed with nuclear warheads, would likely provoke a U.S. nuclear response.

    The implicit message on both sides: a nuclear war might be possible. And although — unlike with Putin’s comments — the American media hasn’t highlighted the way Taiwan might trigger such a conflagration, the potential is all too ominously there.

    “One China” and “Strategic Ambiguity”

    In reality, there’s nothing new about the risk of nuclear war over Taiwan. In both the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954-1955 and 1958, the United States threatened to attack a then-nonnuclear China with such weaponry if it didn’t stop shelling the Taiwanese-controlled islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu), located off that country’s coast. At the time, Washington had no formal relations with the communist regime on the mainland and recognized the Republic of China (ROC) — as Taiwan calls itself — as the government of all China. In the end, however, U.S. leaders found it advantageous to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in place of the ROC and the risk of a nuclear conflict declined precipitously — until recently.

    Credit the new, increasingly perilous situation to Washington’s changing views of Taiwan’s strategic value to America’s dominant position in the Pacific as it faces the challenge of China’s emergence as a great power. When the U.S. officially recognized the PRC in 1978, it severed its formal diplomatic and military relationship with the ROC, while “acknowledg[ing] the Chinese position that there is but one China and [that] Taiwan is part of China.” That stance — what came to be known as the “One China” policy — has, in fact, underwritten peaceful relations between the two countries (and Taiwan’s autonomy) ever since, by allowing Chinese leaders to believe that the island would, in time, join the mainland.

    Taiwan’s safety and autonomy has also been preserved over the years by another key feature of U.S. policy, known as “strategic ambiguity.” It originated with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, a measure passed in the wake of the U.S. decision to recognize the PRC as the legal government of all China. Under the act, still in effect, the U.S. is empowered to supply Taiwan with “defensive” arms, while maintaining only semi-official ties with its leadership. It also says that Washington would view any Chinese attempt to alter Taiwan’s status through violent means as a matter “of grave concern,” but without explicitly stating that the U.S. will come to Taiwan’s aid if that were to occur. Such official ambiguity helped keep the peace, in part by offering Taiwan’s leadership no guarantee that Washington would back them if they declared independence and China invaded, while giving the leaders of the People’s Republic no assurance that Washington would remain on the sidelines if they did.

    Since 1980, both Democratic and Republican administrations have relied on such strategic ambiguity and the One China policy to guide their peaceful relations with the PRC. Over the years, there have been periods of spiking tensions between Washington and Beijing, with Taiwan’s status a persistent irritant, but never a fundamental breach in relations. And that — consider the irony, if you will — has allowed Taiwan to develop into a modern, prosperous quasi-state, while escaping involvement in a major-power confrontation (in part because it just didn’t figure prominently enough in U.S. strategic thinking).

    From 1980 to 2001, America’s top foreign-policy officials were largely focused on defeating the Soviet Union, dealing with the end of the Cold War, and expanding global trade opportunities. Then, from September 11, 2001, to 2018, their attention was diverted to the Global War on Terror. In the early years of the Trump administration, however, senior military officials began switching their focus from the War on Terror to what they termed “great-power competition,” arguing that facing off against “near-peer” adversaries, namely China and Russia, should be the dominant theme in military planning. And only then did Taiwan acquire a different significance.

    The Pentagon’s new strategic outlook was first spelled out in the National Defense Strategy of February 2018 in this way: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia. (And yes, the emphasis was in the original.) China, in particular, was identified as a vital threat to Washington’s continued global dominance. “As China continues its economic and military ascendance,” the document asserted, “it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

    An ominous “new Cold War” era had begun.

    Taiwan’s Strategic Significance Rises

    To prevent China from achieving that most feared of all results, “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony,” Pentagon leaders devised a multipronged strategy, combining an enhanced U.S. military presence in the region with beefed-up, ever more militarized ties with America’s allies there. As that 2018 National Defense Strategy put it, “We will strengthen our alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains.” Initially, that “networked security architecture” was only to involve long-term allies like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Soon enough, however, Taiwan came to be viewed as a crucial part of such an architecture.

    To grasp what this meant, imagine a map of the Western Pacific. In seeking to “contain” China, Washington was relying on a chain of island and peninsular allies stretching from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and Australia. Japan’s southernmost islands, including Okinawa — the site of major American military bases (and a vigorous local anti-base movement) — do reach all the way into the Philippine Sea. Still, there remains a wide gap between them and Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island. Smack in the middle of that gap lies… yep, you guessed it, Taiwan.

    In the view of the top American military and foreign policy officials, for the United States to successfully prevent China from becoming a major regional power, it would have to bottle up that country’s naval forces within what they began calling “the first island chain” — the string of nations stretching from Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia. For China to thrive, as they saw it, that nation’s navy would have to be able to send its ships past that line of islands and reach deep into the Pacific. You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that solidifying U.S. defenses along that very chain became a top Pentagon priority — and, in that context, Taiwan has, ominously enough, come to be viewed as a crucial piece in the strategic puzzle.

    Last December, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner summed up the Pentagon’s new way of thinking about the island’s geopolitical role when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last December. “Taiwan,” he said, “is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

    This new perception of Taiwan’s “critical” significance has led senior policymakers in Washington to reconsider the basics, including their commitment to a One China policy and to strategic ambiguity. While still claiming that One China remains White House policy, President Biden has repeatedly insisted all too unambiguously that the U.S. has an obligation to defend Taiwan if attacked. When asked recently on Sixty Minutes whether “U.S. forces…would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” Biden said, without hesitation, “Yes.” The administration has also upgraded its diplomatic ties with the island and promised it billions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers and other forms of military assistance. In essence, such moves constitute a de facto abandonment of “One China” and its replacement with a “one China, one Taiwan” policy.

    Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities have reacted to such comments and the moves accompanying them with increasing apprehension and anger. As seen from Beijing, they represent the full-scale repudiation of multiple statements acknowledging Taiwan’s indivisible ties to the mainland, as well as a potential military threat of the first order should that island become a formal U.S. ally. For President Xi and his associates, this is simply intolerable.

    “The repeated attempts by the Taiwan authorities to look for U.S. support for their independence agenda as well as the intention of some Americans to use Taiwan to contain China” are deeply troubling, President Xi told Biden during their telephone call in November 2021. “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burned.”

    Since then, Chinese officials have steadily escalated their rhetoric, threatening war in ever more explicit terms. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence,” Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., typically told NPR in January 2022, “it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in military conflict.”

    To demonstrate its seriousness, China has begun conducting regular air and naval exercises in the air- and sea-space surrounding Taiwan. Such maneuvers usually involve the deployment of five or six warships and a dozen or more warplanes, as well as ever greater displays of firepower, clearly with the intention of intimidating the Taiwanese leadership. On August 5th, for example, the Chinese deployed 13 warships and 68 warplanes in areas around Taiwan and two days later, 14 ships and 66 planes.

    Each time, the Taiwanese scramble their own aircraft and deploy coastal defense vessels in response. Accordingly, as China’s maneuvers grow in size and frequency, the risk of an accidental or unintended clash becomes ever more likely. The increasingly frequent deployment of U.S. warships to nearby waters only adds to this explosive mix. Every time an American naval vessel is sent through the Taiwan Strait — something that occurs almost once a month now — China scrambles its own air and sea defenses, producing a comparable risk of unintended violence.

    This was true, for example, when the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through that strait on August 28th. According to Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, China’s military “conducted security tracking and monitoring of the U.S. warships’ passage during their whole course and had all movements of the U.S. warships under control.”

    No Barriers to Escalation?

    If it weren’t for the seemingly never-ending war in Ukraine, the dangers of all of this might be far more apparent and deemed far more newsworthy. Unfortunately, at this point, there are no indications that either Beijing or Washington is prepared to scale back its provocative military maneuvers around Taiwan. That means an accidental or unintended clash could occur at any time, possibly triggering a full-scale conflict.

    Imagine, then, what a decision by Taiwan to declare full independence or by the Biden administration to abandon the One China policy could mean. China would undoubtedly respond aggressively, perhaps with a naval blockade of the island or even a full-scale invasion. Given the increasingly evident lack of interest among the key parties in compromise, a violent outcome appears ever more likely.

    However such a conflict erupts, it may prove difficult to contain the fighting at a “conventional” level. After all, both sides are wary of another war of attrition like the one unfolding in Ukraine and have instead shaped their military forces for rapid, firepower-intensive combat aimed at securing a decisive victory quickly. For Beijing, this could mean firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at U.S. ships and air bases in the region with the aim of eliminating any American capacity to attack its territory. For Washington, it might mean launching missiles at China’s key ports, air bases, radar stations, and command centers. In either case, the results could prove catastrophic. For the U.S., the loss of its carriers and other warships; for China, the loss of its very capacity to make war. Would leaders of the losing side accept such a situation without resorting to nuclear weapons? No one can say for sure, but the temptation to escalate would undoubtedly be great.

    Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no U.S.-China negotiations under way to resolve the Taiwan question, to prevent unintended clashes in the Taiwan Strait, or to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. In fact, China quite publicly cut off all discussion of bilateral issues, ranging from military affairs to climate change, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. So, it’s essential, despite the present focus on escalation risks in Ukraine, to recognize that avoiding a war over Taiwan is no less important — especially given the danger that such a conflict could prove of even greater destructiveness. That’s why it’s so critical that Washington and Beijing put aside their differences long enough to initiate talks focused on preventing such a catastrophe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Stop running from the problem: prevent breast cancer by reducing toxic chemicals

    The post Stop running from the problem: prevent breast cancer by reducing toxic chemicals appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Congress Can Help Prevent Health Coverage Disruptions and Lock in Recent Gains

    The uninsured rate is at a record low, according to the latest Census data. One major reason: the temporary prohibition on terminating Medicaid coverage for most enrollees during the federally declared public health emergency (PHE). But this “continuous coverage” requirement will phase out when the PHE ends, likely next year. As Congress begins work on end-of-year legislation, policies that protect and bolster health coverage, particularly for low-income people, should be a top priority.

    Medicaid’s continuous coverage provision has helped keep people, including millions of children, insured despite the economic and social disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The continuous coverage requirement helped prevent the churn on and off Medicaid coverage that often happens as people’s income fluctuates, or if they can’t meet paperwork requirements that are often part of eligibility checks. Churn harms Medicaid enrollees, disrupting their access to medications and other needed care, and it’s also administratively burdensome for states, providers, and health plans. Research also shows that paperwork requirements and other administrative burdens often mean that people lose coverage and do not reenroll in Medicaid or other programs they might be eligible for.

    Congress should learn important lessons from the last two years and enact policies to help minimize coverage disruptions when the continuous coverage requirement ends. Doing so now could help stem widely anticipated coverage losses and secure widespread coverage for the future, giving more people access to life-saving health care and financial protection. Enacting policies to help retain record low uninsured levels is also key to advancing health equity; the uninsured rate fell to a record low among Black people in 2021. Policymakers should prioritize approaches to maintain these gains.

    Congress should include the following policies in year-end legislation to minimize coverage disruptions and loss of coverage, and to help lock in coverage gains:

    • Extend postpartum coverage to 12 months. Recognizing the importance of uninterrupted coverage after giving birth, the American Rescue Plan gave states the option to extend postpartum coverage for 12 months after childbirth, rather than the 60 days otherwise required by law. To date, 33 states and the District of Columbia have taken up the option or have announced plans to do so. But the American Rescue Plan coverage option is available only through March 2027.

      To help reduce the maternal and infant mortality crisis, Congress should permanently increase mandatory pregnancy coverage from 60 days to one year postpartum. Doing so could eliminate the risk of coverage disruptions in all states, but it’s particularly important in the 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid, as postpartum people with very low incomes often lose Medicaid coverage 60 days after giving birth in non-expansion states. Requiring a full year of postpartum coverage in all states could help address maternal health equity; postpartum coverage is especially important for Black people, who are somewhat likelier to experience life-threatening pregnancy complications in the late postpartum period (between six weeks and one year after childbirth) than white people.

    • Require continuous eligibility for children. Even before the PHE continuous coverage requirement, states had the option to provide “continuous eligibility” to children, meaning that children remain eligible for Medicaid (or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP) for a 12-month period regardless of changes in their family’s income. As of January 2022, some 32 states (including D.C.) provided 12 months of continuous eligibility for children under 19 in Medicaid and/or CHIP.

      Providing continuous coverage for children increases the share of children accessing preventive care, and reduces the shares experiencing gaps in coverage and with unmet medical needs, research shows. It also reduces administrative burden and administrative costs for states. The evidence is strong, and Congress should require all states to implement continuous eligibility for children. Doing so would help advance health equity by promoting continuity of coverage for children from families with low incomes, who experience disproportionate rates of health disparities.

    • Introduce at least a state plan option for continuous eligibility for adults. Continuous 12-month eligibility can help prevent coverage losses among adults, too, and could further help children since adult enrollment is positively correlated with children’s enrollment. At a minimum, Congress should permit — if not require — states to provide 12 months continuous eligibility to adults without seeking federal approval through a Section 1115 demonstration, or waiver. As of earlier this year, four states had used Section 1115 demonstration projects to authorize continuous eligibility for adults. Last week, two more states — Massachusetts and Oregon — received approval to provide continuous eligibility to some or all adults (along with groundbreaking continuous eligibility for kids through age 5 in Oregon). Even if Congress doesn’t require it, more states would adopt this important policy if Congress gives states a permanent state plan option to adopt continuous coverage for adults.
    • Provide additional funding for Puerto Rico and the other U.S. Territories. Without congressional action this year, more than 1 million residents in Puerto Rico who rely on Medicaid for their health care could face deep cuts to eligibility, benefits, and already low provider payments. As in the states, the uninsured rate in Puerto Rico dropped between 2019 and 2021, from 7.8 percent to 5.7 percent. At least some of this drop is due to the continuous coverage requirement and to increased Medicaid funding provided during the last several years. Given the unique funding challenges in the territories, providing Puerto Rico and other territories with the funding they need to avoid cutting eligibility is critical to maintaining coverage; that’s particularly true for Puerto Rico to help prevent people from losing coverage as residents recover from the destruction and dislocation caused by Hurricane Fiona.

      Congress can help maintain recent health coverage gains through enacting policies including postpartum coverage, continuous eligibility, and funding for Puerto Rico and the territories. As policymakers negotiate the year-end spending bill, they should also consider other policies — such as a permanent reauthorization of CHIP and inclusion of the proposed Medicaid Reentry Act — that also could help people with low incomes gain, retain, or access the coverage they need.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • I’ve Protested for Women’s Rights in Iran Since 1979: This Movement Is Different

      The violence continues in Iran against unarmed demonstrators, inspired by young women who have challenged the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Among them and on our screens around the world, a new banner in the struggle for democracy in Iran has been raised along with the rallying cry: “Women, Life, Freedom.” These words signify all that the Islamic Republic denies and fears: respect for women, the sanctity of life over martyrdom, and the right to personal and civil freedoms. We would do well to pay attention and to support the movement that is beginning to create a groundswell of hope.

      From my home here in the U.S., social media has provided a lifeline to family and friends in Iran these past few weeks. Ironically, there have been times when we have more information here about what is happening there than they do, because of the government’s sweeping internet blackouts. The internet has been flooded with hundreds of thousands of postings about the uprising in Iran after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, died in custody at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. Posts on #MahsaAmini (one of dozens of hashtags) chronicled the steady stream of young women following suit and burning their scarves in protest, men and more women joining them and together confronting security forces face to face for weeks now.

      Free internet access and open lines of communication have been essential to the movement’s success, and remain so especially for the safety of the protesters. It’s unclear whether the Biden administration’s easing of sanctions to allow Elon Musk’s Starlink service — a satellite internet network operated by SpaceX — to operate in Iran will make a real difference. (Regardless, the international community must demand that the Iranian government stop interfering with internet access.)

      Watching events unfold over social media, I recognized right away that these new women-led protests are different. In the past, we saw individual women defying the authorities by going out in public without their scarves and often being beaten, arrested or ending up in prison. I also thought back to 1979, when I joined thousands of women in Tehran on a chilly day in March celebrating International Women’s Day and protesting new mandatory veiling requirements. Remembering how terrified we were of club-wielding, black-shirted men supporting the government that came after us, I was in awe of these young women today — demanding justice for Mahsa and continuing the struggle that began 43 years ago. Most of them were not even born in 1979! I am elated by their growing numbers and by the many men who are also coming to their support.

      On September 21 of this year, hundreds gathered in front of the UN to protest Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s address to the General Assembly. It was a reunion of sorts with old-timers from the anti-imperialist, anti-Shah student movement of the 1970s and protests against the Islamic Republic in the dark post-revolution years. I met an old friend there who told me that she had just run into the Iranian delegation shopping at Costco, loading up on everything from TVs to diapers. The next day, a video appeared with their purchases being loaded onto a large truck in front of the Millennium Hilton Hotel headed to the airport. This is another small example of official privileges that government personnel have at a time when people in Iran cannot afford fruit and meat, let alone televisions. Stories like this reminded me of the extravagances of the Shah’s family.

      Today, the protest has a very different energy than in previous demonstrations: defiant, colorful, hopeful and loud — much like protests going on in Iran. In New York, one sees the old right and left groups, and some like the monarchists and mujahedin with close ties to the U.S. government. The current women’s movement inside Iran, however, has yet to align itself with any party or political alternative. While outside forces may hope to influence the movement, there is no evidence that they have been successful, despite claims by the Iranian government to the contrary. What the new movement lacks — a single charismatic leader, central organization and a set ideology — may also work to insure its continued independence.

      Once again, I find myself glued to social media, anxious about the future. Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei and President Raisi threatened early on to put a “decisive” end to the uprising, but protests have continued. (Keep in mind that President Raisi was one of the “hanging judges” that sent political prisoners to their deaths in 1988.) The government disputes its responsibility for many of the deaths, including that of Nika Shakarami, a 17-year-old who disappeared during the protests after telling a friend that she was being chased by security forces.

      As the Iranian leadership pushes back, trying to empty the streets and force women to cover their hair once again in public, it is also detaining journalists and human rights activists, and openly threatening artists and public figures who speak out. Confirmations of arrests and detentions are difficult especially given the government’s efforts to close off communications to the outside world. There are reports of at least 1,200 arrested, but that number seems far too low given the breadth and length of the protests. Most worrisome, security forces are mobilizing the Iranian leadership’s hardline supporters to come to the streets.

      We know this is only the beginning; that is why, to prevent further bloodshed, we must keep the spotlight on the uprising, especially on the attempts to crush it. What more can be done?

      U.S. policy makers, both Democratic and Republican, support new sanctions against Iran. However, time and again, history shows sanctions are anything but nonviolent to the most vulnerable people in the countries targeted by them. Moreover, the Iranian government has used the sanctions as an excuse to cover up widespread corruption and mismanagement and an unprecedented looting of the country’s riches by clerics and the Revolutionary Guards. It is ordinary people who have paid the price of the sanctions, especially during the pandemic. Opposing sanctions goes hand in hand with defending the recent democracy movement.

      The uprising is happening now, and the Iranian government has shown no restraint in trying to stop it. To counter this, there must be no excuse for inaction by those who stand for women’s rights and human rights in the U.S. and around the world. Feminists should not abandon young women who bravely refuse to be told what to wear and demand control over their lives in Iran or anywhere else in the world. That is what solidarity — feminist solidarity — is all about. Keep the news of the struggle in Iran alive. Make it a priority. Raise your voice in support of women’s rights and against U.S. sanctions.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Let’s Build Leftist Academic Solidarities to Rebuff Far Right Attacks

      The onslaught of five decades of relentless neoliberal reforms directed at public universities has aligned those institutions with the profiteering agendas of global capital while simultaneously shrinking dramatically the space for academics to fulfill their public roles as intellectuals. Paradoxically, as the global zeitgeist of neoliberal knowledge production has orchestrated the transformation of universities as propagandists for the free market, rife with entrepreneurship hubs and incubators for settler colonial/neo-capitalist experiments, the global right has organized systematic campaigns targeting academics engaged in public conversations on the raced, classed and gendered roots of neocolonial/capitalist knowledge.

      The rise of the far right, mainstreamed through the hegemony of populist authoritarianisms globally, draws upon and in turn, unleashes, coordinated attacks on academics carrying out justice-based scholarship. Orchestrated digitally and mainstreamed through media platforms, these attacks are materialized through brick-and-mortar political-economic infrastructures that bring the disinformation/hate campaign to the university.

      One tweet interrogating the hegemonic flows of colonial/capitalist power can turn you into the target of a digital disinformation campaign, as right-wing networks of anonymous internet users, funded by powerful political and economic groups, attack your life and livelihood. A white paper or policy brief in the public domain can turn your life upside down, making you the target of viral disinformation campaigns coordinated by far right hate groups, political parties and commercial funders overnight. You wake up to fake websites attacking you, digital attacks releasing your private information, and your mailbox full of threats of physical and sexual violence, including death threats. These digital infrastructures of disinformation and hate targeting academics are often run anonymously and are globally networked.

      Within this climate of growing disinformation campaigns targeting academics, the power and control over the university held by risk managers and media professionals has turned public scholarship into the site of surveillance and management, replete with authoritarian techniques of control and erasure. Risk and reputation form the two key ingredients that fuel the corporate university, continually calibrating its managerial strategies while responding to the populist climate that is built on the premise of undermining knowledge.

      An academic under attack from the far right can quickly find themselves alone, needing to respond to multiple requests for information from university technocrats, and struggling to just keep up with the disinformation. In many instances, the support from the university turns into facile prescriptions of self-help. In other instances, the university washes its hands of its duty to care for the academic under attack. In yet other instances, the university gives in to the demands of the far right, launching investigations, issuing disciplinary actions and even firing the academic being targeted.

      How then can spaces for justice-based scholarship be secured, sustained and propagated across the neoliberal corporate university? How can universities be transformed into fulfilling their public roles as spaces for raising critical and inconvenient questions that interrogate power?

      To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo, academics must turn within to find courage. However, this courage is rooted in the wider collective, necessitating that academics go public in securing support for justice-based public scholarship.

      Friendships Beyond the Walls

      Seeing academic work as collective work is at the heart of building and sustaining spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship within the context of ongoing neoliberal transformations of university life. Building infrastructures of care that offer embodied support and nourishment as collective resources is vital to securing the lives and livelihoods of academics that become the targets of attacks by the far right. This infrastructure offers joy, kindness and security that are vital to offering comfort amid the targeted attacks by the various streams of the far right, nourishing us with strength and courage.

      The enclosure of neoliberal universities by the individualizing logics of competition has disconnected academic life from public spaces of resistance. Corporate universities have increasingly become walled off, rife with ever-expanding building projects that separate them from the wider communities in which they are located. The managerial turn works precisely to detach the academic from the community.

      To safeguard justice-based public scholarship therefore is to reject these enclosures, turning to friendships beyond the parochial confines of the university.

      Solidarity emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their everyday practices of questioning structures, offering insights into strategies for sustenance, and offering guidance on ways to raise uncomfortable questions in spite of the threats mobilized by powerful forces. The everyday struggles of survival that activists negotiate offer immensely valuable pedagogies for survival within the toxic climates of corporate universities that have been re-organized to serve the power of the free market. Moreover, these activist networks come together amidst crises to plan strategies of resistance that challenge the campaigns mobilized by the far right, building frameworks for sustaining the strategies of resistance.

      In my own public scholarship, I have drawn on friendships with activists in learning strategies of resistance and sustenance. From late-night conversations to strategic planning over weekends, infrastructures of activist organizing are vital in offering ongoing resources for challenging the forces that seek to silence us. When I have been targeted with a wide array of threats, including organized campaigns by powerful political and economic forces, my capacity to speak has been sustained by strategies of resisting repression such as petitions organized by academics and activist networks, letter writing campaigns, researching the attack strategies and writing about them in white papers and policy briefs, tracking the disinformation and reporting it, raising complaints about the harassing organizations and media, and engaging in media advocacy. When I have been targeted by disinformation campaigns, working alongside activists has been vital to building strategies for resistance, rendering these strategies public, sharing the strategies with academic and activist collectives, resisting the disinformation and hate on the platforms both individually and as collectives, and holding universities to account.

      Community Struggles

      Justice-based scholarship is sustained in the dignity, struggles and organizing of communities at the global margins.

      That we must look beyond the university and into the generative capacities of community life in order to return our universities to our public roles is one of the most salient learnings for justice-based scholarship. Turning to the theories of decolonization — such as Kaupapa Māori theory, for instance — teaches us the power of theory emergent from within struggles and collective organizing. The rhythms of community life offer anchors for organizing knowledge, situated amid practices of occupying land, growing food and sharing resources. Justice emerges from the struggles of those who have been marginalized, laying claims to knowledge amid the violence of erasures.

      Repression of voices at the margins is one of the most insidious strategies for sustaining and perpetuating inequalities. For those at the margins who have been systematically denied access to resources and erased from spaces of participation, turning to courage is an everyday act that challenges the silencing strategies catalyzed by those with economic and political power. Voicing out how the repression works and identifying the sources of the repression dismantles the silences that are circulated by colonial/capitalist power.

      From Indigenous struggles against ongoing expansion of neoliberal extractivism, to feminist struggles among landless women farmers against the neoliberal attacks on food systems, to the various intersecting anti-racist struggles, to the struggles against exploitation among low-wage migrant workers, those who are speaking from the margins are manifesting enormous courage. It is this collective courage held in communities at the margins that forms the bedrock of justice-based scholarship. It works as a reminder that for structural transformations to take place, radical imaginations must be voiced.

      Academics with the freedom, privilege and resources to raise these questions must intervene into the structures of power and control that constitute the corporate university. Critical interventions into the public sphere are fundamentally necessary when we place ourselves in academia as seeking to address social justice in our scholarship.

      Struggles to Transform Our Universities

      Most importantly, unless the neoliberal university is transformed, there is little hope for securing the spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship.

      Our everyday organizing therefore should turn to methods of collectivization that challenge the individualizing logic of the market-driven university.

      The attack on academic freedom internally by professional-managerial technocrats who have no understanding of the academic mission of the university must be challenged and dismantled through collectivization.

      The anti-intellectualism of shallow cost-effectiveness calculations must be thoroughly challenged. When technocrats seek to impose constraints on academic freedom and limit it, processes should be built for holding them to account, including measuring their performances on their understanding of (and advocacy for) academic freedom, and demanding their roles be circumscribed. Technocrats must be held accountable to elected academic bodies such as senates and academic boards, having to create annual academic freedom reports and be measured on the basis of these reports.

      We should be asking questions that interrogate the staffing of managerial positions in areas such as risk management, audit, governance, media, reputation management and data management. We should interrogate the ways in which data are gathered and decisions are made. The power held by technocrats must be the site of our agitations within universities, with our unions organized to question technocracy in decision-making processes that directly impede academic freedom. In a neoliberal climate where senseless managerialism has shaped the broader approach to risk management in universities, sustaining justice-based scholarship calls for disrupting the power of technocracy through collectivization.

      Academics doing justice-based scholarship should join unions in spaces where unions exist, and should organize to build unions in spaces where they don’t exist. Moreover, unions should be continually educated and engaged in the conversations on academic freedom.

      Dismantling the technocracy that inundates the neoliberal university forms the basis of reorganizing university leadership in the affective registers of care. I have personally witnessed the ways in which the wider affective network of support offered by academic leaders at my university has sustained my public interventions. When academic leaders embody care, they create the infrastructures for raising claims to justice. This translates into steadfast assurances of support and sustenance even as the university negotiates threats that are directed at it because of the public scholarship of academics.

      In sum, collectives and communities are the essential ingredients of scholarship seeking to make an impact on the unequal terrains of power and control that constitute injustices globally, nationally and locally. This recognition is vital in de-centering the individualized model of scholarship that prevails in the academe, and in turning toward the role of academia in working alongside struggles in seeking justice, working collectively and collaboratively to transform neocolonial neoliberal structures.

    • US Is Overcome With Debt and Death. Let’s Fight Inequality to Stop This Crisis.

      When the Biden administration announced its debt relief plan in late August, the timing was fitting. According to the Hebrew calendar, this last year, which ended on September 25, was the Shemitah year, a year where debts are forgiven. In the Bible, canceling debt is just one among a set of jubilee laws, which includes freeing the enslaved, feeding the poor, paying fair wages, and conserving and protecting overworked land. As a biblical scholar and pastor, I am often struck by the moral logic that undergirds these laws. Indeed, many ancient societies understood jubilee to be not only a compassionate response to unequal economic conditions, but a necessary step to keep themselves from buckling under the weight of inequality. In their eyes, debt and wider injustice was the cause of two forms of death: the economic and spiritual death of a society, and individual, avoidable death among their people.

      In the U.S. debt has reached new heights, including $1.6 trillion in student debt, up 100 percent since 2010. Nearly half of these student debt borrowers owe less than $20,000, so the White House’s announcement that to cancel $10,000 for people earning less than $125,000 (up to $250,000 for a household) and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients is significant. It amounts to the cancellation of up to 20 million loans. But responses to the new measure have been divided — many have celebrated it and called for more, while others have raised alarm about whether we can afford it as a nation and challenged it.

      In fact, since the time of the announcement, six Republican-led states are in the process of suing the administration, claiming that President Biden overstepped executive powers with the debt relief program. In response, the Biden administration has scaled back eligibility requirements, eliminating borrowers whose federal loans were owned by private banks and subject to the lawsuits. NPR describes the impact of such a reversal: “People who took out Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans, the mainstay of the federal student loan program until 2010, may no longer be eligible for forgiveness.”

      The justification to gut the loan forgiveness program follows the same tired arguments about who “deserves” to have their debt canceled, pitting struggling people against each other. A particularly divisive statement on this came from Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who claimed, “It’s patently unfair to saddle hard-working Americans with the loan debt of those who chose to go to college.”

      In reality, the debate between the “deserving” and “undeserving” is a sleight of hand that is useful for the rich and powerful. It obscures the structural nature of debt and its role in hyper-charging inequality. Today, nearly 40 percent of the country lives in poverty or is one $400 emergency away from economic ruin, and personal debt that now totals nearly $16 trillion is in no small part to blame. After all, canceling debt and putting more money into the pockets of everyday people who will spend it on things like food and household items is both moral policy making and good economics. So, when narratives about scarcity, affordability and deservingness are invoked to thwart the cancellation of debt, we should approach them with a healthy dose of skepticism.

      Over the last few weeks, politicians have been clamoring about scarcity, complaining that we can’t afford to cancel even a modest amount of debt and spending time and resources undoing the progress the administration made. But how can that be the case when the Pentagon has received increases in funding every year over the last decade (to a record $782 billion for 2022 — more than it even requested) and the Federal Reserve bailed out Wall Street in the early days of the pandemic for nearly as much as it would cost to cancel all student debt?

      Moreover, Biden’s student loan plan is small compared to other debt that has been canceled in the last five years with very little opposition, including $659 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans that mostly went to wealthy business owners during the pandemic and $1.7 trillion in taxes owed by wealthy corporations under the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Scarcity itself is a myth, seeming only to exist as an insurmountable problem when the needs of the poor are under consideration.

      Rather, it is not debt cancellation that the nation can’t afford — it is widening inequality that is too costly. The Bible is a good reference on this. Deuteronomy 15 talks about canceling loans obtained for survival for the sake of a healthy society, and we need only look at the median income of people with college degrees versus those without to see that student loans are indeed about survival. The biblical tradition of debt relief is the centerpiece of God’s call to abolish poverty, and debt cancellation is understood as necessary when poverty proliferates amid plenty and survival becomes a question of wide concern.

      Our elected officials would do well to take heed of the lessons of the book they so often like to reference. Rather than attacking debt relief, they could build on the advances made on student debt to enact a fuller slate of jubilee policies that uplift everyone near the bottom. When it comes to education, this could include wider debt cancellation, but also other structural changes like free, quality and diverse education from pre-K through university. There is no reason to pit loan cancellation against reforms that make education truly available to everyone. After all, if we value young people today and the nation’s future, we need both.

      But instead of pursuing the divine mandate of jubilee, we are witnessing a society overcome with debt and death. The most recent numbers are dire to the extreme: Alongside growing debt, U.S. life expectancy has stagnated for two decades and in 2015, it actually began to drop in a way unseen in modern history. The country’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this trend and revealed systemic failure in our health care system — by comparison, our peer countries experienced only one-third as much of a decline in life expectancy and then saw an increase as they adopted more effective COVID-19 responses.

      According to a 2022 report produced by the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Rev. Dr. William Barber), poor and low-income U.S. counties experienced death rates that were twice as high as richer ones, and at different phases of the pandemic, their death rates were up to five times higher. This occurred in part because of the lack of health care for tens of millions across the country. In the worst public health crisis in a century, Congress did not expand Medicaid, leaving millions of people in the states that suffered the steepest decline in health outcomes without access to affordable health care. In fact, at the same time that overall health and life expectancy was on the decline, health care company profits were on the rise.

      Connected to the issue of our lowered life expectancy is the growing crisis of what some call “deaths of despair” — from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism. Traveling around the country, I have met with the families of small farmers whose suicide rates are rising because they are up to their ears in commercial debt. I have also met the friends and spouses of some of the 20 veterans who commit suicide every day, more than those killed as active duty servicepeople on the front lines of our most recent wars. But the framework of “deaths of despair” is often misleading. Even in the case of suicides and overdoses, a large part of what is driving these deaths is outright and egregious neglect and injustice.

      Aaron Scott, co-founder of Chaplains on the Harbor, an organization committed to serving poor people on the rural coast of Washington State, has buried dozens of poor and homeless members who died from overdose and suicide. He also had to bury his grandpa after he took his own life. Scott recently explained to me, “When I think of my grandpa’s suicide, as much as he was personally experiencing despair, the reason he died is because he couldn’t access the mental health care my grandma was trying to get him connected to. I’ve seen a number of blatant medical neglect deaths that conservative county coroners refuse to label as medical neglect because of the poverty and IV drug use history of the deceased — so these get recorded as drug-related deaths even though the hospital simply refused care.”

      In New York City, where I live, and where life expectancy dropped by three years in 2020, there is a mass grave of poor people on Hart Island, in the middle of the Long Island Sound. There are countless other “potter’s fields” (also known as “pauper’s graves”) across the country, and yet few know the true brutality of these graveyards for the poor. More than 1 million people have been buried on Hart Island since the Civil War, including thousands of victims of epidemics like the flu of 1918, AIDS and COVID-19. These people are buried in unidentified graves, with 150 adults or 1,000 infants in a plot. And although some may have been called home when it was their time, so many continue to prematurely die because they live in a society that neglects even their most basic needs. Now, dignity is denied to them not only in life, but in death itself.

      Indeed, the United States has become far too comfortable with poverty and death, and the consequence, unfortunately, is more of both. But if the news of our declining life expectancy is a wake-up call of the most elemental nature, recent action on student debt (if it isn’t completely undone) is a small glimpse into what it could look like for everyone to have the right to live. That is what jubilee has always been about — preserving life and creating a more just and balanced society. Nothing less is required of us if we want the same today.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Don’t Let Ron DeSantis Use Hurricane Ian to Cover Up His Right-Wing Agenda

      In the wake of Hurricane Ian, we are seeing a lot of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the media. We shouldn’t be confused: He is running for reelection and aspires to run for president. Anything he does in the aftermath of this disaster should be viewed as performative gamesmanship. Based on what we’ve seen, it is safe to say that his administration is about power and control. There is no reason to believe the devastating storms of this season will somehow lead to better treatment of the vulnerable. He has demonstrated a vindictiveness and cruelty that is more suited for a movie villain than a duly elected leader in a democracy.

      In April 2022, MSNBC columnist Michael Cohen wrote of DeSantis, “Over the past several weeks in Florida, DeSantis has shown what a politician unmoored from fundamental democratic principles — and intent on waging political warfare — can achieve.” Cohen expressed those sentiments after DeSantis tossed out congressional lines that a bipartisan committee developed and drew his own. Advocates like me argued that DeSantis’s lines would make it harder for Black people to elect candidates of their choice.

      But there have been a host of moments that have highlighted DeSantis’s true nature. For instance, he took steps — such as failing to mandate COVID-19 vaccines — that undermined the health and safety of children and education during a hellish pandemic. Most recently, his character was on display when he rounded up unsuspecting immigrants with promises of housing and jobs, and instead shipped them to a community in Massachusetts that was neither prepared to welcome them nor aware they were coming.

      DeSantis has also revealed his true colors through his treatment of persons with felony convictions. After Floridians voted for a ballot initiative to enable returning citizens and people with felonies to vote, DeSantis immediately found a way to make it harder for returning citizens to exercise that right. Later, he and his acolytes began arresting said individuals when they attempted to participate in our nation’s democracy by registering to vote. Leading up to the August 9 primary, DeSantis’s election officials arrested 20 people for allegedly being ineligible to vote. After the Florida Rights Restoration’s constitutional amendment expanded access to the ballot for persons with felonies, many people who had been incarcerated believed that they’d have a true shot at participating in our nation’s democracy. The threat of being prosecuted for voting as a returning citizen will have a chilling effect on participation in future elections.

      In a word, DeSantis has gone to great lengths to make life harder for people who do not look like him and people who do not vote like him. But at this moment, I am especially troubled that he and other Florida Republicans voted against or opposed disaster relief (some as recently as September 2022) even though the climate crisis is causing weather emergencies to occur with increased frequency and coastal communities like ours are especially vulnerable. And the trauma outlasts a news cycle. In Florida, the disasters have become deadlier and costlier, leading, in part, to increased housing costs, a dearth of affordable housing and rising homelessness. Being an elected leader means one must be a planner; DeSantis not only didn’t prepare but also appears to resent people who attempt to do so.

      For those reasons and more, we should not be confused about who DeSantis is. He’s shown us time and time again. If he didn’t care about the most vulnerable in good times, why do we expect him to change now? Don’t let the plentiful media appearances fool you. There is no need to suggest that the storm is a make-or-break moment for this administration. It is already broken.

      No one should be complicit in helping DeSantis overhaul his image. The same people who were vulnerable before Hurricane Ian — marginalized communities including people of color, people living in poverty, people with prior criminal records, women and children — remain vulnerable today. There is no other way to say it.

      While I believe in redemption, no one is above accountability. Leaders who go out of their way to make others suffer should not get a pass. DeSantis should be evaluated with the same measure of grace he has given to others — and that is very little. But most importantly, we should not be fooled: He has shown us repeatedly who he is’

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Absence of Universal Health Care Can Be Traced to State Repression of Socialists

      Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives. Whatever Trump did, that act has a sorry track record in both its own time and ours when it has been used, including by his administration, to silence the leakers of government information. And because my latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.

      But let me start with a personal event closer to the present. While visiting Denmark recently, I developed an infection in my hand and wanted to see a doctor. The hotel in the provincial city where I was staying directed me to a local hospital. I was quickly shown into a consulting room, where a nurse questioned me and told me to wait. Only a few minutes passed before a physician entered the room, examined me, and said, yes, indeed, I did need an antibiotic. He promptly swiveled in his chair, opened a cabinet behind him, took out a bottle of pills, handed it to me, and told me to take two a day for 10 days. When I thanked him and asked where I should go to pay for the consultation and the medicine, he responded simply, “We have no facilities for that.”

      No facilities for that.

      It’s a phrase that comes back to me every time I’m reminded how, in the world’s richest nation, we still don’t have full national health insurance. And that’s far from the only thing we’re missing. In a multitude of ways, we’re known for having a far weaker social safety net than many other wealthy countries and behind that lies a history in which the Espionage Act played a crucial role.

      A Danish friend who visited with me recently was appalled to find hundreds of homeless people living in tent encampments in Berkeley and Oakland, California. And mind you, this is a progressive, prosperous state. The poor are even more likely to fall through the cracks (or chasms) in many other states.

      Visitors from abroad are similarly astonished to discover that American families regularly pay astronomical college tuitions out of their own pockets. And it’s not only well-off European countries that do better in providing for their citizenry. The average Costa Rican, with one-sixth the annual per capita income of his or her North American counterpart, will live two years longer, thanks largely to that country’s comprehensive national health care system.

      Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare — from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare — as an ominous step down the road to socialism.

      This is nonsense, of course, since the classic definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, an agenda item not on any imaginable American political horizon. In another sense, though, the charge is historically accurate because, both here and abroad, significant advances in health and welfare have often been spearheaded by socialist parties.

      The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflank the German socialists, who had long been advocating similar measures. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.

      And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”

      Back then — however surprising it may seem today — the American Socialist Party was indeed part of our political reality and, in 1904, it had come out in favor of compulsory national health insurance. A dozen years after that, New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London introduced a bill strikingly similar to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act of more than a century later. In 1911, another socialist congressman, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that wouldn’t be realized for another quarter of a century with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.

      Socialism was never as strong a movement in the United States as in so many other countries. Still, once it was at least a force to be reckoned with. Socialists became mayors of cities as disparate as Milwaukee, Pasadena, Schenectady, and Toledo. Party members held more than 175 state and local offices in Oklahoma alone. People commonly point to 1912 as the party’s high-water mark. That year, its candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, won 6% of the popular vote, even running ahead of the Republican candidate in several states.

      Still, the true peak of American socialism’s popularity came a few years later. The charismatic Debs decided not to run again in 1916, mistakenly accepting President Woodrow Wilson’s implied promise to keep the United States out of the First World War — something most Socialists cared about passionately. In April 1917, Wilson infuriated them by bringing the country into what had been, until then, primarily a European conflict, while cracking down fiercely on dissidents who opposed his decision. That fall, however, the Socialists made impressive gains in municipal elections, winning more than 20% of the vote in 14 of the country’s larger cities — more than 30% in several of them — and 10 seats in the New York State Assembly.

      During that campaign, Wilson was particularly dismayed by the party’s popularity in New York City, where Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit was running for mayor. The president asked his conservative Texan attorney general, Thomas Gregory, what could be done about Hillquit’s “outrageous utterances” against the war. Gregory responded that he feared prosecuting Hillquit “would enable him to pose as a martyr and would be likely to increase his voting strength. I am having my representatives in New York City watch the situation rather carefully, and if a point is reached where he can be proceeded against it will give me a great deal of pleasure.” Hillquit lost, but did get 22% of the vote.

      Jubilant Socialists knew that if they did equally well in the 1918 midterm elections, their national vote total could for the first time rise into the millions. For Wilson, whose Democrats controlled the House of Representatives by the narrowest of margins, the possibility of Socialists gaining the balance of power there was horrifying. And so, already at war in Europe, his administration in effect declared war on the Socialists at home as well, using as its primary tool Wilson’s sweeping criminalization of dissent, the new 1917 Espionage Act. The toll would be devastating.

      The Government’s Axe Falls

      Already the party’s most popular woman, the fiery Kansas-born orator Kate Richards O’Hare — known as Red Kate for her politics and her mass of red hair — had been sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Still free on appeal, O’Hare, who knew the hardships of farm life firsthand and had run for both the House and the Senate, continued to draw audiences in the thousands when she spoke in the prairie states. Before long, however, her appeal was denied and she was sent to the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary, where she found herself in the adjoining cell to anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman. The two would become lifelong friends.

      In 1918, the government went after Debs. The pretext was a speech he had given from a park bandstand in Canton, Ohio, following a state convention of his beleaguered party. “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” he told the crowd. “But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.”

      That was more than enough. Two weeks later, he was indicted and swiftly brought before a federal judge who just happened to be the former law firm partner of President Wilson’s secretary of war. At that trial, Debs spoke words that would long be quoted:

      “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

      Spectators gasped as the judge pronounced sentence on the four-time presidential candidate: a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. In the 1920 election, he would still be in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he received more than 900,000 votes for president.

      The government didn’t merely prosecute luminaries like O’Hare and Debs however. It also went after rank-and-file party members, not to mention the former Socialist candidates for governor in Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota, as well as state Socialist Party secretaries from at least four states and a former Socialist candidate for Congress from Oklahoma. Almost all of them would be sentenced under the Espionage Act for opposing the war or the draft.

      Not faintly content with this, the Wilson administration would attack the Socialists on many other fronts as well. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. A few dailies, which did not need the Post Office to reach their readers, survived, but for most of them such a banning was a death blow.

      The government weakened the socialist movement in many less formal ways as well. For instance, Burleson’s post office simply stopped delivering letters to and from the party’s Chicago headquarters and some of its state and local offices. The staff of a socialist paper in Milwaukee typically noticed that they were failing to receive business correspondence. Even their mail subscriptions to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune were no longer arriving. Soon advertising income began to dry up. In the midst of this, Oscar Ameringer, a writer for the paper, called on a longtime supporter, a baker who had suddenly stopped buying ads. According to Ameringer, the man “slumped down in a chair, covered his eyes and, with tears streaming through his fingers, sobbed, ‘My God, I can’t help it…They told me if I didn’t take my advertising out they would refuse me… flour, sugar and coal.’”

      Also taking their cues from the administration in that wartime assault were local politicians and vigilantes who attacked socialist speakers or denied them meeting halls. After progressives and labor union members staged an antiwar march on the Boston Common, for example, vigilantes raided the nearby Socialist Party office, smashed its doors and windows, and threw furniture, papers, and the suitcase of a traveling activist out the shattered windows onto a bonfire.

      In January 1918, the mayor of Mitchell, South Dakota, ordered the party’s state convention broken up and all delegates expelled from town. One party leader was seized “on the streets by five unknown men and hustled into an automobile in which he was driven five miles from town,” a local newspaper reported. “There he was set out upon the prairie and… told to proceed afoot to his home in Parkston [an 18-mile walk] and warned not to return.”

      The Big “What if?” Question

      The Socialists were far from alone in suffering the wave of repression that swept the country in Wilson’s second term. Other targets included the labor movement, the country’s two small rival Communist parties, and thousands of radicals who had never become American citizens and were targeted for deportation. But among all the victims, no organization was more influential than the Socialist Party. And it never recovered.

      When Debs took to the road again after finally being released from prison in 1921, he was often, at the last minute, denied venues he had booked. In Cleveland, the City Club canceled its invitation; in Los Angeles, the only place he could speak was at the city zoo. Still, he had an easier time than the socialist writer Upton Sinclair who, when he began giving a speech in San Pedro, California, in 1923, was arrested while reading the First Amendment aloud.

      By the time Debs died in 1926, the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors, and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials had closed most of its offices and was left with less than 10,000 members nationwide. Kate Richards O’Hare wrote to her friend Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the United States in 1919, that she felt herself a “sort of political orphan now with no place to lay my head.”

      Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression. Until then, Republican and Democratic legislators had voted for early-twentieth-century reform measures like child labor laws and the income tax in part to stave off demands from the Socialist Party for bigger changes.

      If that party had remained intact instead of being so ruthlessly crushed, what more might they have voted for? This remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in American history. If the Socialist Party hadn’t been so damaged, might it at least have pushed the mainstream ones into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and national health insurance systems that people today take for granted in countries like Canada or Denmark? Without the Espionage Act, might Donald Trump have been left to rot at Mar-a-Lago in a world in which so much might have been different?

      The last time you tried to pay a medical bill, might you, in fact, have been told, “We have no facilities for that”?

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Fears of a Housing Crash Threaten Life Savings of Tens of Millions in the US

      In the late summer of 2021, mortgage rates fell to near-all-time lows, even as the rate of inflation picked up. A borrower with good credit could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for 30 years at under 2.9 percent, despite the fact that the rate of inflation had already ticked up to above 5 percent.

      Fourteen months later, that same 30-year mortgage is going for not far shy of 6.5 percent, with analysts predicting it could hit 7 percent within weeks. The average mortgage in the U.S. is just over $400,000. Thus, a hike in mortgage rates of 4 percent in the span of 15 months means that the average family with a new house will have to come up with $16,000 more in interest payments in late 2023 than they would have, had they locked in place a mortgage a year earlier.

      And, because where the Federal Reserve goes, the rest of the world follows, interest rates are also soaring globally. Many international observers are worried. Indeed, in a report released earlier this week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) warned that rapidly tightening monetary conditions could impose a worse cost on the global economy than did either the 2008 crash or the COVID pandemic. Not surprisingly, it suggested that low-income families would bear the brunt of this downturn. UNCTAD called on the Fed to hit the pause button on interest rate hikes.

      Inflation creates a climate uncertain for businesses, and when combined with the low unemployment levels currently seen in the U.S., it leads to wage increases that eventually have the potential to recalibrate the economy in organized workers’ favor. Since the Fed is determined to re-establish certainty for businesses and to rein in inflation at all costs, it is unlikely to heed UNCTAD’s warnings, and is likely to plow ahead with its regimen of rate increases.

      In the U.S. — and, by extension, much of the rest of the world — two things are happening to the housing market in response to these hikes: the number of homes being bought and sold (and consequently the number of mortgages being taken out) is falling, and housing prices are starting to decline as purchasers feel more pinched by the cost of borrowing. Both will disproportionately hit lower-income families and new homeowners looking to move up the housing ladder.

      For seven consecutive months now the number of home sales has declined. This means fewer people are currently able to enter the world of homeownership. It also means that it’s becoming harder for those who already own homes to sell in order to move either to a different city or into better or bigger accommodations in the cities they already live in.

      And, while average home prices were still rising modestly into the early summer, in many high-cost cities, a fall-off in prices has now begun. Indeed, some studies have shown that in more than three-quarters of cities, home prices over the past month have retreated from their COVID-era highs. In Seattle, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose and Las Vegas, Redfin data suggest double-digit drops in what homes are selling for as the Fed’s interest rate hikes ricochet through the broader economy.

      Moody’s Analytics now predicts that over the next two years, housing prices will fall in just over half of the 414 major markets that it surveys. In the majority of these markets, especially in cities in the Sunbelt and in the West, it finds that home prices are overvalued by at least 25 percent, meaning that homeowners who bought in the last few years when interest rates were at rock-bottom levels and home prices were soaring are facing huge risks in getting stuck underwater as their real estate investments go south just at the same time as mortgage rates soar.

      What makes this more infuriating is that this was an avoidable tragedy. Homeowners don’t make decisions in a vacuum; they buy and sell at least in part because of a financial environment determined by the monetary decisions of the Federal Reserve and the policy decisions of the U.S. government. The housing market was overheated in the last few years by a conscious effort to make money as cheap as possible for as long as possible; now, that housing bubble is being rapidly punctured by a panicked response to inflation by central bankers applying the lessons of the past several inflationary cycles to a pandemic- and war-impacted environment that looks nothing like the recent past. The interest rate hikes embraced by central banks essentially punish home buyers for the failure of expert economists to correctly game out inflationary pressures in the era of COVID and of Russian expansionist military adventures. Whether that punishment will even work, by the Fed’s own terms, and reduce inflation is very much an open question.

      The Federal Reserve has gone on an interest-rate-raising spree in recent months as it belatedly attempts to put the inflation genie back in the bottle. There is, in this, an irony. The talking heads and maestros of finance — the experts whose every word markets hang on — spent months trying to calm rattled markets and investors by promising that inflation was transitory, that the fundamentals of the global economy were fine, and that once COVID-related supply chain glitches got sorted out, the world’s major economies would rapidly revert back to inflation in the desired 2 percent range.

      They were, of course, hideously wrong. In hindsight, they ought to have gently raised interest rates and tapped the breaks on the housing market before the inflationary spiral took hold, instead of waiting until it was a crisis of such urgency that the massive and rapid interest rate hikes came to be seen as the only tool left in the Fed’s anti-inflation toolkit. But, of course, hindsight is everything. In the moment, their analysis of inflation in 2021 and early 2022 was ultimately as misguided as analyses made 15 years ago by those who waved off the increasingly urgent signs that the housing market was about to crash and pull down key pillars that propped up the global financial system.

      In 2006 through 2008, as the housing market grew increasingly volatile, policy makers and those controlling monetary policy ignored the problem until it was too late to make only mild interventions and modest tweaks. When vast numbers of people started to default on their mortgages, and lenders began to suffer a liquidity crisis, it took trillions of dollars of coordinated international interventions to keep the world’s financial system from entirely seizing up and to stop the major industrial economies from sliding into a depression.

      Now, in 2022, a similarly inept response by experts who should have known better threatens to crash the housing market in which tens of millions of American families have invested their life savings, following the encouragement of policy makers who kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade.

      The political repercussions from the crash of 2008 are still playing out today; it’s hard to imagine Trump’s ascendancy absent the aftereffects of the crash: the collapse in confidence in government agencies and elected officials, the distrust of self-proclaimed experts, the immiseration of millions of families, and the rage triggered by banks being bailed out while homeowners and ordinary workers were largely left to fend for themselves.

      Today, the Fed is stampeding toward a regimen of ever-escalating rates. It is essentially declaring that large increases in unemployment are acceptable — possibly even desirable so as to curb worker power — as a way to rein in an economy it let overheat for years. As a result, the potential exists for a 2008-style sudden and calamitous failure of the housing market, a contraction in employment, and an unleashing of vast political furies in the wake of this.

      Sometimes, as UNCTAD seems to have concluded, the medicine is worse than the ailment. In putting both the stability of the U.S. housing market and the employment of large numbers of Americans at risk with a rigid anti-inflation regimen that doesn’t take into account the very particular reasons for rising prices in 2022, the Fed risks fueling growing immiseration, and, in consequence, increased levels of societal upheaval. For months now, the Federal Reserve has talked up its ability to create a “soft landing” for the overheated economy. Now, in dramatically raising the costs of borrowing over the past few months, it has essentially accepted the necessity of a “hard landing” that triggers misery for millions of existing homeowners and puts the ability to purchase a home further out of reach for growing numbers of would-be first-time home buyers. That’s not sound economic policy making; rather, it’s decision-making via panic.

      Yes, the Fed’s interest rate-raising frenzy of 2022 may ultimately curb inflation, but the collateral damage this time around, in terms of housing access and unemployment, could rival that of 2008. It could, if things really head south, be as unpleasant as the early 1980s, when monetary policy makers in Reagan’s U.S. and Thatcher’s U.K. sent interest rates and unemployment skyrocketing, in their efforts both to break the power of organized workers and also to tamp down inflation. That’s hardly the mark of a well-thought-out and humane monetary policy.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • As Iraq War Vote Anniversary Nears, Don’t Forget Who Was Responsible

      As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fateful congressional vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq, many are questioning what would have happened had Congress refused to go along. There was widespread public opposition to going to war at the time. The Catholic Church and every mainline Protestant denomination came out against the war, as did virtually every major labor union and other left-of-center organization that took a stand. The vast majority of the U.S. Middle East scholars opposed an invasion, being aware of the likely disastrous consequences. The vast majority of the world’s nations, including most of the United States’s closest allies, were also in opposition to the war.

      Unlike the near-unanimous vote (save for Rep. Barbara Lee) the previous year authorizing military force in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war resolution was far more controversial. A sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion, which came to a vote on October 10, 2002. The Republicans then controlled the House, however, and it passed easily.

      This left the determination as to whether the United States would go to war up to the Democratic-controlled Senate the following day. To the astonishment of many, several leading Democratic senators crossed the aisle to support the war authorization, including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Assistant Majority Leader Harry Reid and Foreign Relations Committee Chair Joe Biden, as well as such prominent senators as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, John Edwards and Dianne Feinstein.

      All this was well-known at the time. Since then, however, a number of these Democrats, particularly those with presidential ambitions, have lied about their votes — and much of the mainstream media have allowed them to get away with it.

      The primary excuse they have subsequently put forward has been that the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution,” as it was formally known, was not actually an authorization for use of military force against Iraq. Instead, these Democrats claim they did not actually support George W. Bush’s decision to invade in March 2003 but simply wanted to provide the administration with leverage to pressure Iraq to allow a return of UN inspectors, which President Clinton had ordered removed in 1998 prior to a four-day bombing campaign, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had, quite predictably, not yet allowed to return.

      Despite wording in the congressional resolution providing Bush with an open-ended authority to invade, John Kerry claimed in 2013 that he “opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq.” While running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton insisted that she voted for the resolution simply because “we needed to put inspectors in, that was the underlying reason why I at least voted to give President Bush the authority,” and that she did not want to “wage a preemptive war.” Similarly, during his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden insisted he supported Bush’s war resolution not because he actually wanted to invade Iraq, but because “he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” and further claiming that, “Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.”

      In reality, at the time of the vote on the war resolution, the Iraqi government had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors and were negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission on the details which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have likely been resolved earlier had the Bush administration not repeatedly postponed the UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language that would have allowed the United States to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.) In addition, all three of these senators voted against the substitute amendment by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, they voted for the Republican-sponsored resolution to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing, regardless of whether inspectors returned.

      More critically, when Bush launched the March 2003 invasion a full four months after large-scale weapons inspections had begun with no signs of any proscribed weapons or weapons facilities, Clinton, Biden and Kerry still argued that the invasion was necessary and lawful.

      Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, “I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.” He added, “Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.”

      Soon after the launch of the invasion, despite the fact that four months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs or sophisticated delivery systems he claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted that “there was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.”

      Similarly, despite Saddam Hussein being in full compliance with the UN Security Council, Senator Clinton insisted that Hussein nevertheless needed to resign as president, leave Iraq and allow U.S. troops to occupy the country. ​“The president gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war,” Clinton said in a statement, ​“and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly.”

      When Hussein refused to resign and the Bush administration launched the invasion, all three of them voted in favor of a resolution calling for ​“unequivocal support” for Bush’s ​“firm leadership and decisive action” as ​“part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.” They insisted that Iraq was somehow still ​“in material breach of the relevant United Nations resolutions” and, despite the fact that weapons inspectors had found no evidence of any remaining weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), they insisted the invasion was necessary to ​“neutralize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

      Even when the three future Democratic presidential nominees acknowledged that Iraq had in fact disarmed from its proscribed weapons programs prior to the invasion, they still insisted that invading the oil-rich country was the right thing to do.

      Many months after the absence of WMDs was confirmed, Clinton declared in a speech at George Washington University that her support for the authorization was still ​“the right vote” and one that ​“I stand by.” Similarly, in an interview on “Larry King Live” in April 2004, when asked about her vote despite the absence of WMDs or al-Qaeda ties she had insisted that Iraq had, she acknowledged, ​“I don’t regret giving the president authority.”

      While running for president, Kerry — when asked whether he would support the war “knowing what we know now” about the absence of “weapons of mass destruction” — replied: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.”

      In another interview regarding the invasion, Kerry insisted: “I’m glad we did. There’s no ambivalence.” As late as October 2004, Kerry argued that “Congress was right to give the president the authority to use force to hold Saddam Hussein accountable.”

      Similarly, not long after the Bush administration conceded that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” to be found, Biden told CNN, “I, for one, thought we should have gone in Iraq,” adding his disappointment that other Democrats weren’t as supportive. A couple of weeks later, on “Fox News Sunday,” even while acknowledging that Iraq didn’t actually have the weapons, weapons systems and weapons programs he claimed, Biden insisted, “I do think it was a just war.”

      At a hearing in July 2003, Biden categorically stated, “I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again.” Days later, in the face of growing outrage by fellow Democrats about being misled into what was already becoming a bloody counterinsurgency struggle, Biden argued, “In my view, anyone who can’t acknowledge that the world is better off without [Saddam Hussein] is out of touch. … Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later.”

      Despite Bush’s case for the war now unarguably based on falsehoods, Biden insisted that Bush had made a good case for invading and said, “I commend the president.” More than a year later, as the death toll mounted, Biden insisted, in regard to his support for the invasion, “I still believe my vote was just.”

      The violent legacy of the Iraq invasion will be with us for many decades to come. As a result, it is important to recognize the responsibility not just of the architects of the war within the Bush administration, but also of the congressional lawmakers from both parties who made it possible. The invasion was not simply a “mistake,” but an effective rejection of the United Nations Charter and the post-World War II international legal system. There were many months leading up to the passage of the war resolution during which scholars, peace activists, former UN inspectors, strategic analysts, and many others informed these senators that such an invasion would be illegal, unnecessary and have disastrous consequences. They knew.

      Despite being among the right-wing minority of congressional Democrats who supported Bush’s war, all three of these senators were nominated by their party as their presidential candidate. Kerry and Clinton both lost very close elections in part because of their support for the war. These two later became secretaries of state, ironically under Barack Obama, an outspoken opponent of the war. Joe Biden became president, only to decide he supports the UN Charter’s prohibition against aggressive war after all — as long as the aggressor is an adversarial nation like Russia.

      That the more progressive of the two major U.S. parties would be so forgiving of candidates who supported an illegal, unnecessary and predictably disastrous war and then also lied about it is a sad reflection of the state of U.S. politics. The vast majority of Americans now recognize the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Yet we can be surprisingly forgiving of those who supported such a calamity, or even forget that they did so.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • This CDC Scientist Couldn’t Access Monkeypox Treatment. Why?

      On a Monday morning in mid-July, William L. Jeffries IV decided it was time to call a colleague for help. Jeffries is a senior health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he researches the ways that racism and homophobia impact health in the United States. Jeffries, who describes himself as a same-gender-loving Black man, sees the work as a way to serve his people and, by extension, God.

      This call, however, was a personal one. He was sitting on his bed in pain, and he was angry.

      Jeffries was angry for the hundreds of people, mainly gay and bisexual men, who were infected with monkeypox. He was angry that the burden was falling particularly hard on Black and Latino communities. He was angry that the federal government had been saying for eight weeks that it had the tools necessary to deal with the growing outbreak yet people were still struggling to find care.

      And he was angry because he himself now had monkeypox and couldn’t find anyone to diagnose or treat him.

      Jeffries told his colleague, who was helping to lead the CDC’s monkeypox response, about his ordeal. He knew then that he was a victim of the very failures of the American public health system that he studies.

      “I myself am a trained disease detective. I have led outbreak investigations for HIV and syphilis. I am a published scientist. And I know a lot about public health and infectious disease transmission,” Jeffries said. “I emphasize my training and my experience because if I had to go to three different places before I got diagnosed, imagine what the average gay man has to do?”

      By the end of September, more than three-quarters of people diagnosed with monkeypox in Georgia were Black, and Georgia had the second-highest rate of cases among all U.S. states, trailing New York. As the outbreak has spread, the federal government has been forced to reckon with the disease’s disproportionate burden on Black communities around the country. Black people make up more than half of monkeypox cases nationally, even as they represent less than 14% of the U.S. population. More than 26,000 people have been infected nationwide.

      CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently acknowledged that she and other top public health officials anticipated these inequities; decades of tracking HIV and other infectious diseases made them predictable. Public health officials, who lost the trust of many Americans in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, had a chance to show that they had learned from their mistakes when monkeypox hit. Yet what happened to Jeffries and others in Georgia in the early months of the outbreak shows how federal officials, who suspected that communities of color would get monkeypox at higher rates, failed to intervene in ways that could have prevented — or at least lessened — that suffering.

      “A lot of people got hurt,” said Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer for the Board of Health in Fulton County, which covers 90% of Atlanta. He too is angry about the first months of the federal response. “You can debate what the right thing to do would have been, but doing nothing is not on that list. And that’s kind of what was done.”

      A dozen infectious disease experts told ProPublica that the likely trajectory of the virus in the U.S. was obvious once reports surfaced in May saying that monkeypox had found its way into communities of gay and bisexual men in Europe. They knew then that while it would most likely spread first among wealthier, whiter communities, Black and Latino men would soon bear the brunt of the disease. They knew this because it is the path that many infectious diseases have traveled before.

      The reasons why are not a mystery either. Among other things, Black people are less likely than white people to have a regular doctor, less likely to have insurance coverage and more likely to have HIV, diabetes and other diseases that generally put people at greater risk for new infections. White people are more likely to have benefits that can lessen the effects of illness, such as jobs that allow them to take paid sick leave and wealth that can buy them better care.

      Federal and state officials nevertheless failed to make testing readily available, slow-walked the rollout of vaccines and didn’t make it clear during the first two months of the outbreak that people of color, like Jeffries, were at elevated risk for harm. Those missteps amplified long-standing health inequities.

      “Any time you fumble the response to an epidemic it will cut through the weakest seams in your society,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and former CDC official.

      When Jeffries was 9 or 10 years old, his father shared with him a book from 1928 called “Leaders of the Colored Race in Alabama.” Inside was a photo of his great-grandfather and namesake, Dr. William L. Jeffries. Jeffries was blown away that in the early 20th century, a Black man could achieve the level of education — a doctorate in divinity — required to earn him the title of doctor. He said as much to his father, who responded that Jeffries could be a doctor, too. From that moment on, he knew he would follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps. “I had to be Dr. Somebody,” Jeffries said. “That was just part of my destiny.”

      He was interested in the health of communities, and so in 2004 he moved away from his home in Polk County, Florida, for the first time and entered a doctoral program in sociology at the University of Florida. In his first year, he remembers a professor explaining how the CDC responds to infectious disease outbreaks. The professor described disease investigators as the “cream of the crop.” For Jeffries, this was an epiphany: “Immediately, I just knew that was what I was supposed to be.”

      Four years later, with a Ph.D. in hand and a Dr. in front of his name, Jeffries entered the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. There, he trained to be a disease investigator like the ones his professor had told him about. It was the only job he applied for. Jeffries has been with the CDC ever since.

      Now 42, Jeffries is a senior health scientist in the Office of Health Equity in the Division of HIV Prevention. He investigates the factors that place vulnerable populations at risk for HIV and other diseases. On average, gay and bisexual Black men have fewer sexual partners than their white counterparts and are more likely to use condoms, and yet Black men have six times the rate of HIV. White people get earlier and better access to new treatments and prevention. Many Southern states have not expanded Medicaid to offer insurance coverage for all impoverished adults, leaving people there less likely to have a doctor and worse off when they do get sick.

      “God has had me be here to fight for the oppressed and to be a voice for those who, in many instances in our society, do not have a voice that can be heard by people in positions of power,” Jeffries said. “And my voice is what I use to serve those who Jesus called the least of these among us.”

      Jeffries understands that he is in important ways one and the same with the people he researches, and he knows what that means for his vulnerability to disease. So when reports of monkeypox began surfacing, he kept an eye on it. He understood himself to be at risk and wanted to get vaccinated because he knew that, unlike with HIV, condoms do not prevent transmission of monkeypox. He also knew the vaccine wasn’t available in Atlanta yet. At the same time, the risk seemed distant. Government officials said there were only a couple dozen cases in metro Atlanta — a city of over 6 million people — and they made it sound like they had the situation under control.

      Jeffries knows when he got monkeypox. It was during a sexual encounter in the early hours of Saturday, July 9. Later that same day, Fulton County Board of Health staff finally held its first monkeypox vaccine clinic.

      By Sunday night, Jeffries felt some itching and irritation. A couple days after that, he had a fever, chills and sores around his anus. So on Friday, he went to an LGBTQ-friendly health clinic, told staff that he thought he might have monkeypox and asked for a test and vaccine. They had neither.

      Instead, he said they tested him for a range of sexually transmitted diseases and treated him for a suspected case of chlamydia, though results later showed he didn’t have any of those diseases. Jeffries was surprised that in Atlanta, where there were already more than two dozen known monkeypox cases, the clinic couldn’t test him for it. More than eight weeks had passed since the first case was diagnosed in the U.S., and testing was supposed to be widely available.

      Frustrated, he went home and isolated from other people. The pain kept growing worse, so late on a Saturday night he sought comfort in an epsom-salt bath and lingered in the warm water until just after midnight. As he was getting out, he noticed a lesion on his chest, close to his left shoulder. Confused, he reached for an itch on his back and felt another bump. He looked down and there was another lower on his torso. They were spreading so fast.

      The next morning, Jeffries lay in his bed, uncomfortable and exhausted, and prayed. He knew it was time to go to the emergency room.

      He thought his best bet would be a hospital attached to a university, as they tend to have more up-to-date knowledge and connections to public health departments. And he knew just the place: Emory University’s renowned teaching hospital on Clifton Road, a stone’s throw from CDC headquarters. “Atlanta is this hub for Black, gay and bisexual men, and the CDC is right here. Surely, these factors would converge to lead you to have vaccine and treatment available,” Jeffries recalled thinking.

      But at Emory it was more of the same. The ER doctor, Jeffries said, knew nothing about monkeypox. Jeffries said he brought a list of the two vaccines and four possible treatments, pulled from the CDC website, but the doctor didn’t know about any of them and, regardless, said they were not available at Emory.

      The ER doctor, Jeffries said, swabbed one of his lesions to test it for the monkeypox virus. Jeffries couldn’t understand why the hospital didn’t send in an infectious disease specialist. The hospital, he said, sent him home with prescriptions for ibuprofen and a steroid foam.

      And so, the following morning, in severe pain, he called a trusted CDC colleague, Dr. John Brooks. Brooks usually serves as the chief medical officer for HIV prevention but is currently helping to lead the nation’s monkeypox response. Jeffries was desperate to find treatment and thought Brooks could help. He also wanted Brooks to know just how bad the situation was. “I knew that gay and bisexual men in Fulton County, irrespective of their race, were going to be placed at harm because of the overall ignorance, the blundering and the lack of resources,” Jeffries said.

      When Jeffries made that call, the U.S. was nearly nine weeks into the monkeypox outbreak. Officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services assured the public that they were responding in full force and had all the necessary tools — a test, a treatment and a vaccine. But they showed little urgency to use them.

      Take the vaccine. Concerned that terrorists may use smallpox as a weapon to attack the U.S., federal officials invested nearly $2 billion in the development and manufacturing of the Jynneos vaccine to safeguard against that threat. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved that vaccine for use against both smallpox and monkeypox, which are in the same family of viruses, and health officials keep doses in the Strategic National Stockpile.

      But they had a very limited supply when cases first appeared in the U.S. in mid-May. In the preceding years, as hundreds of thousands of doses expired, they waited to order more, holding out for a different preparation of the vaccine with a longer shelf life, as The New York Times previously reported. The 372,000 doses that were ready in vials were mostly in Denmark.

      In late May, officials at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the arm of the federal government that develops and procures drugs and vaccines to safeguard against pandemics and other hazards, placed orders for 72,000 doses. “We are prepared with both the vaccines and antivirals needed to protect the American people,” Dawn O’Connell, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, wrote in a blog post on May 24.

      Three weeks later, O’Connell wrote that those 72,000 vaccine doses were in the federal government’s “immediate inventory.” Two more weeks passed, and HHS announced it would make 56,000 doses “available immediately.”

      By then, it was the end of June, and Atlanta hadn’t held a single vaccine drive.

      That wasn’t for lack of trying. With cases climbing in June and Georgians waiting for their first allotment of vaccines, Holland, the chief clinical officer for Fulton County’s Board of Health, made an official request for ACAM2000, an older vaccine made to ward off smallpox. It’s been available by the millions since 2008, when it was added to the Strategic National Stockpile, before the newer Jynneos vaccine existed. But the older vaccine can cause side effects, making it unsafe to use for many people, including those who are pregnant, have HIV, have weakened immune systems or have various skin conditions.

      Federal officials said states could order ACAM2000, but they didn’t exactly endorse it. Holland said Georgia officials turned down his request. He understands the concerns and respects the decision not to use ACAM2000. But he’s frustrated that in the first months, it felt like the answer to every effort at prevention was just “no.”

      In a written statement, Nancy Nydam, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Health, referenced the many potential side effects of ACAM2000 and noted that no other jurisdiction has used that vaccine during the monkeypox outbreak.

      When Fulton County finally received its long-awaited shipment of vaccines in July, it included enough for just 200 people. More dribbled in over the weeks that followed.

      By comparison, Canadian officials began vaccinating at-risk people in early June. In Montreal alone, officials vaccinated more than 15,300 people through the end of July, according to data provided to ProPublica by the city’s health department. A friend of Jeffries’ was able to get vaccinated at an outdoor walk-up clinic in Montreal’s Gay Village neighborhood on Aug. 1 while he was in the city for the International AIDS Conference. The health workers didn’t care that he wasn’t Canadian.

      “We know we live in a global village. We thought making no barriers was the most effective strategy,” said Dr. Genevieve Bergeron of the Montreal public health department.

      Georgia currently has more than two and a half times the number of monkeypox cases per capita as Quebec, the province where Montreal is located.

      “The thing that is most galling to me is that this was predictable,” said Greg Millett, a former CDC researcher and current vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. Around the time Jeffries was infected and Atlanta held its first vaccine clinic, there were about 700 known cases in the U.S., nearly all among gay and bisexual men, and the cases were growing exponentially. And yet, Millett said, the U.S. was dragging its feet. To Millett, it’s hard not to see homophobia and racism as an underlying reason. “If this was another population, would they have moved this slowly?”

      Within an hour of calling his colleague on July 18, Jeffries got a same-day appointment with Dr. Kimberly Workowski, an infectious diseases specialist at Emory University. She also helps write the treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted diseases at the CDC. In an Emory exam room, Workowski donned protective equipment — goggles, gloves, masks and gowns — to examine Jeffries.

      The lesions definitely looked like monkeypox, Workowski told him. She gave him an hourlong work-up, checking his body and talking through his symptoms. He’d had bad experiences with the medical system before, like the time he went in for routine testing and a doctor told him he shouldn’t have sex with other men because that’s how you get sexually transmitted diseases. So he didn’t take it for granted that she was treating him with dignity.

      Jeffries said she told him that in the ER, they only swabbed one lesion when they were supposed to swab two or three and that regardless, the sample could not be located. Jeffries was aghast. Workowski counted his lesions and swabbed several of them for a new test, which would ultimately come back as positive.

      A spokesperson for Emory Healthcare did not answer questions about Jeffries’ care. (Jeffries signed a privacy waiver to allow Emory to discuss the care he received in the emergency room on July 17.) In a written statement, the spokesperson said Emory Healthcare remains “steadfast in providing excellent and equitable health care to all of our patients.” Emory’s emergency departments follow a standard protocol for suspected monkeypox infections that “includes triage, testing and if necessary, referral to a specialist,” she wrote. “If needed, patients will be admitted to the hospital.”

      The day after Jeffries saw Workowski, her office called to tell him that an experimental antiviral drug known as TPOXX was ready for him to pick up.

      Once he started on the medicine, the lesions quickly stopped growing and spreading. But the sores and inflammation in the lining of his rectum were causing the worst pain he’s ever experienced, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Five days after his first trip to the emergency room, he drove himself to a different Emory ER, this one in Midtown, which quickly admitted him. He spent the next four days in the hospital on a cocktail of medications that finally dulled his pain.

      He was in isolation but felt less alone than he had in days. The doctor leading his care put her hand on him while they talked and asked how he was doing. Staff chatted with him about his life outside of monkeypox. He knew the hospital was busy, but no one ever seemed rushed. “They took the time to talk to me and make me feel OK,” he said.

      At that point, physicians wishing to give TPOXX to patients had to fill out over 100 pages of paperwork. The medication was initially developed by the federal government, and the U.S. holds more than 1.7 million doses in its stockpile. The treatment has been approved for monkeypox in Europe, but it is available only as an experimental drug in the U.S. In August, the CDC slimmed down its paperwork, but even today, it can take more than an hour to fill it out and TPOXX has been hard to get.

      Through the end of June, HHS officials had sent out enough medicine to treat 300 people nationally. From around the time of Jeffries’ hospitalization in late July through the end of August, physicians in Georgia handed out just over 600 courses of the treatment, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Georgia Department of Public Health. That would have been enough to cover just half of the people diagnosed during that time.

      The Georgia Department of Public Health did not provide data on the race and ethnicity of TPOXX recipients. But nationally, as of Sept. 28, white people make up 28% of cases and have received 34% of the courses of treatment, according to preliminary data released by the CDC. The share that went to white people during the early months of the outbreak was even higher, according to CDC research.

      Jeffries feels certain he could have avoided the worst of his pain and his time in the hospital if he had received treatment sooner.

      When Jeffries got out of the hospital, he called friends and colleagues. Georgia — especially its Black and queer communities — needed more resources. He wanted people to know how bad it was and that things shouldn’t be this way.

      He phoned Justin Smith, his friend who was able to get vaccinated at the AIDS conference in Montreal. The director of the Campaign to End AIDS at a group of HIV clinics in the Atlanta area, Smith had helped organize a virtual town hall with other activists.

      There, Joshua O’Neal, the sexual health program director for the Fulton County Board of Health, told attendees that it was OK to be angry about the government’s response so far, that he sure was. O’Neal shared alarming statistics: Cases of monkeypox in Fulton County had nearly doubled in the three days before the event, and more than half of the people there with monkeypox also had HIV. Of the people with both viruses, 80% were Black. “It is our responsibility to ensure that those folks are the ones we’re reaching out to,” he told the group.

      O’Neal acknowledged that the scant appointments for the first two vaccine clinics were gone within minutes and that most who got them were white. Going forward, he vowed to partner with community organizations to get them out more equitably.

      On Aug. 4, 10 days after Jeffries got out of the hospital, the Biden administration declared a public health emergency. When that happened, as Margo Snipe reported for Capital B, a nonprofit news site for Black communities, officials made no mention of the growing racial and ethnic disparities.

      Jeffries was encouraged, though, that the White House appointed Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the head of the CDC HIV division where Jeffries works, to a top position on its monkeypox response team. Jeffries knows him and says he strongly believes that Daskalakis is committed to getting the disparities in check. The White House declined to make Daskalakis available for an interview and suggested ProPublica contact the CDC instead.

      The CDC declined to make Walensky, its director, available for an interview. Walensky’s deputy press secretary referred a reporter to Walensky’s comments at a White House briefing on Sept. 15. “It is critical that education, vaccinations, testing and treatment are equally accessible to all populations, but especially those most affected” by the monkeypox outbreak, Walensky said. “CDC remains committed to collaborating with jurisdictions to reduce health disparities.”

      A different CDC spokesperson, Kevin Griffis, followed up and said that the agency appointed an equity officer to its response team in May and did outreach to LGBTQ groups in the weeks that followed. On its website in early June, the CDC first published guidance for ways to avoid getting monkeypox and has been updating it ever since. “This was an issue that Dr. Walensky and Dr. Daskalakis both talked about really as part of essentially every discussion that would be had about the outbreak: ensuring that we were doing everything we can to reach diverse populations,” Griffis said.

      By early September, the spread of new cases began slowing in much of the U.S. Experts largely credit that decline to behavior change among queer men. In an August survey, gay and bisexual men reported changing their sexual practices to protect themselves. It’s too soon to say whether vaccine drives, which were ramped up at the end of August, are playing a role, experts say. In an effort to understand potential treatments, federal officials began recruiting monkeypox patients for a clinical trial of TPOXX. And O’Connell, of HHS, told a Senate committee on Sept. 14 that she had made more than 1.1 million vials of Jynneos vaccine available to health departments.

      The Fulton County Board of Health made good on its promise and partnered with various community organizations to get the word out to the Black community. As of Sept. 15, more than half of the first doses of the vaccine have gone to Black people, according to a county report. Nydam, the Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson, wrote that the state worked with federal officials to give out more than 4,000 doses at Atlanta’s Black Pride festival on Labor Day weekend.

      “High demand and limited vaccine supply created access challenges for vaccines in general during the early weeks of the response, but the partnerships with community-based organizations greatly helped us with addressing health disparities in our vaccine roll out,” Nydam wrote.

      Still, Congress has not designated any money for the monkeypox response. The vaccine and TPOXX are provided for free, but Fulton County has had to use its STD budget to run its vaccine clinics. “We’re spending our entire STD budget for the year and hoping that at some point the federal government will reimburse us,” Holland said. That’s money that also needs to be used for the simultaneous epidemics of HIV and syphilis, both of which disproportionately harm Black men and women.

      While the spread of monkeypox is slowing, Black Americans represent a growing share of the overall cases — from 37% on Aug. 28 to 51% of all cases just three weeks later, according to the most recent data available.

      Jeffries is still dealing with complications from monkeypox. But his bigger concern, one he shares with many in the HIV prevention community, is that Black LGBTQ people will be left dealing with monkeypox infections even if it largely disappears from the rest of the population. That’s another pattern they have seen many times before.

      Thinking about what should have been done differently in those early months, it’s clear to Jeffries that everything the federal government has done since August should have happened much sooner. That could have prevented a lot of harm.

      But his work also tells him that stopping these predictable patterns altogether will require dealing with the racism, homophobia and economic inequality at the root of so many health disparities. Lately he’s been thinking about a lesson his grandfather taught him when he was young.

      Jeffries’ grandfather worked 12 hours a day, six days a week in Florida’s citrus groves, and he was still poor. He kept a garden to feed the family, and he sometimes took Jeffries with him to teach him how to farm. One day Jeffries was pulling at the weeds, snapping them off at the top. His grandfather stopped him.

      “That ain’t how you do it, baby,” his grandfather told him. “You’ve got to get it by the root. Because if you don’t get it by the root, it’ll grow back.”

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Patagonia’s Greenwashing Ignores Workers and Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis

      Among companies claiming the mantle of most responsible corporate citizen, the outdoor clothing chain Patagonia has always seemed a nose ahead. It hasn’t hurt that it’s tough imagining the ecocidal antichrist wearing a fleece vest and technical climbing pants as it pillages the earth. But Patagonia has also had the enduring myths of its founder, Yvon Chouinard, to ride on; how could we not believe the good intentions of a guy who supposedly once lived off of canned cat food just so he could read Thoreau and climb all day and night in Yosemite using gear he made himself?

      Recently, Patagonia added to that mythos by outdoing itself. On September 14, the company announced that it would soon be giving away not just a certain percentage of its earnings to help protect the planet, but pretty much all of them. The entirety of the company’s stock will be transferred to trusts and nonprofits devoted to “fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature.” Corporate dividends will keep the business going while otherwise being directed toward environmental initiatives. “Compassionate capitalism” at work.

      Cue neoliberal talking heads on both sides of the aisle waxing effusive about this new ceiling for market-based goodwill. To be sure, it’s an impressive relinquishment of private wealth for the supposed greater good. And among companies engaged in this type of thing, Patagonia surely is a cut above. But we do ourselves and our predicament no favors by pretending as though a capitalist enterprise giving away its profits is really going to help solve an existential problem that was caused, and continues to be worsened, by the profit motive itself.

      The basics bear repeating: There is no form of capitalism — “compassionate” or otherwise, profit relinquishing or otherwise — that isn’t structurally incentivized to exploit and exhaust the capacities of both workers and the planet, and all while leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. It doesn’t matter if the product is SmartWool or smart phones: Capitalism is at heart an economy of “unpaid costs,” to quote the economist Karl William Kapp. Corporate profits — whether used to plant lilies or gild them — can only come from taking more than is given, and without replenishment or repair.

      But isn’t Patagonia an exception? Isn’t it committed, as we read in painstaking detail on its website, to minimizing its expropriation of nature through all manner of recycled and “sustainably sourced materials”? In degree, maybe not. In kind, definitely not. Even the most ethically minded for-profit companies participate in an economy of market share and competition that, directly or indirectly, encourages this race to the exploitative bottom. Regardless of what Patagonia is doing with its profits, it still has to remain competitive in order to make them. And that, as capitalism requires, means continuing to bleed land and labor dry.

      It’s also important to remember that Patagonia isn’t exactly small. The company has over 70 stores, keeps offices in seven countries, and at one time had contracts with 100 factories, all in support of one of the most polluting industries on the planet. The fact that it bends over backwards to excuse itself, for instance, in a 30-paragraph statement explaining how it’s trying — really trying! — to minimize the impact of microplastics pollution, changes nothing. It’s all talk after a point. Whatever Patagonia’s efforts are toward sustainability, they pale in comparison to the impact it makes on land and labor due to its size.

      It should be no surprise that, despite the implicit mea culpa of its recent divestment, the company tries to downplay all of this. Seemingly everywhere on its website, it mitigates the sense of its corporate largess by using the classic leveling device of capitalist greenwashing: the carbon footprint — a concept invented by oil giant BP nearly 20 years ago precisely to deflect attention away from the disproportionately large ecological responsibilities held by corporations. But the carbon footprint device also allows Patagonia to frame its ecological responsibilities in relation to individual consumers as though those responsibilities existed on the same plane — as though the solution required of the company was merely reducing rather than changing its structural relationship to what was being reduced. Yet the sentimental “all in this together” manipulation runs thick: “If we have any hope of a thriving planet — much less a business,” they write, “it is going to take all of us doing what we can.”

      Then there’s the company’s use of the classic and equally manipulative Malthusian rhetoric of planetary limits: “Despite its immensity,” the company’s hands wring, “the Earth’s resources are not infinite, and it’s clear we’ve exceeded its limits.” The implication, both here and with the carbon footprint concept, is once again that we’re all equally culpable. Yet limits like these are political constructs, and those who invoke them in this way do so to conceal their inequitable contributions toward reaching them. There is no real “we” here, in other words. There are profit-driven corporations whose productive forces unleash immense creative-destructive power, and then there is the rest of us. The excessive consumption of millionaires and billionaires aside, if a limit has been exceeded anywhere, it is overwhelmingly because of corporations.

      But the company’s most frustrating greenwashing is maybe its most subtle. In a statement on the recent decision, Patagonia writes that “instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.” Notice the sneaky substitution: The company is no longer “extracting value from nature” but simply “using the wealth Patagonia creates.” It’s a classic mystification concealing the fact that you can’t have one (corporate wealth) without the other (extracting value from nature). Using profits generated via capitalism to protect the planet will always be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

      And quite literally. Because human beings are, of course, the other form of nature that capitalism — Patagonia included — exploits for value. In yet another long statement on its website, this one recounting its decades-long attempts to ensure more ethical labor practices, we learn about the company’s relationship with the Fair Labor Association, NAFTA’s role in tanking the American textile industry, and other matters. But by paragraph 16 in this substantial read, things still haven’t progressed very far: “The next big task,” the company writes after all of that, “will be to secure a living wage for all workers making Patagonia goods.”

      A living wage. The next big task. In paragraph 16. As if this shouldn’t have been in the first sentence.

      There is nothing about a living wage for Patagonia’s workers, of course, in the company’s recent bleeding-heart statement about its decision to give away its profits. We read about the planet multiple times, but not so much about people. Lest critics insist that one always implies the other, we should consider the fact that what the company sells in its stores is in part an ideology that insists otherwise. Patagonia is in many ways a technology company: It sells clothing that mediates our relationship with nature, allowing us to experience it more easily as something benign and conquered that exists for human consumption, not as something with which human survival is inextricably bound. This privileged, bourgeois conception of nature — nature as something “out there” to explore and enjoy, separate from human well-being — is bought for the price of a Patagonia sweater; it’s a class-inflected framework that insulates more privileged people — both literally and figuratively — from experiencing nature as involving and implicating human suffering.

      But compare this, for instance, with how Patagonia’s garment workers in the Global South might experience nature. If they’re being deprived of a living wage, they are markedly more vulnerable to floods and fires, heat waves and droughts, all worsened by climate change. Nature for them isn’t so much pretty vistas to enjoy and consume as something that could further immiserate or kill them. That makes low wages every bit as much a cause of climate disasters as pollution from plastic plants pumping out raw materials for performance socks. And yet those wages probably won’t be going up much any time soon. After all, they’re a precondition of the fat dividends that will supposedly now be going to such great, green things. Greenwashing, built as always on the backs of the poor.

      With its recent news, which will no doubt be a huge boost to sales, Patagonia is banking on all of us forgetting this. It is hoping that the ideology of nature it sells, underwritten by capitalism’s own incentives to hide its conditions of production, will prevail, and that the only thing its customers will think about when buying a new base layer is the wilderness they’ll possibly be saving, not the workers who will continue to be exploited just so the sham ethics of green capitalism can have another day in the sun.

      We must resist this. How? Not by refusing to shop at Patagonia. That kind of consumer politics accomplishes nothing. Instead, we must remember in our movements, in our policy, and in the voting booth that it is capitalism’s mandate of endless accumulation that is killing our ecosystem, not what is or isn’t done with the resulting profits.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Grassroots Groups in Mississippi Are Pushing for Representation in Local Office

      Nashville, Tennessee — The modern Civil Rights Movement began when Rosa Parks refused to ride in the back of the bus which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955; in 1957 the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School in Arkansas; the 1960 Woolworth lunch counter boycott started in Greensboro, North Carolina, and spread to other places like Nashville, Tennessee; after their bus was bombed in Alabama, 13 Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi in May, 1961.

      “Mississippi has historically been almost a predictor of what happens in other parts of the country,” said Amir Badat, Voting Special Counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. He is a native of Meridian, Mississippi.

      Badat said during the Reconstruction Period, the Mississippi Plan and later, the state’s 1890 constitution, were used by other states to suppress Black civic participation and Black progress across the country.

      “And we’re seeing the same things happening today. Look at the fight that we’re having with abortion. The Dobbs case that the Supreme Court used to overrule Roe v. Wade, came out of Mississippi,” he said.

      During the 1950s and 1960s, Black people organized in different places all over the South for freedom and equality. Those local campaigns led to the national March on Washington in August, 1963.

      Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of 250,000 people on August 28. It wasn’t a particularly hot day but it was muggy and the packed crowd increased the temperature in front of the memorial. People were soaking their feet in the Reflecting Pool to cool off. Much of the “I Have a Dream” part of King’s historic address was extemporaneous. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

      That much is history. What is also true: Mississippi has never elected a Black person to statewide office to this day.

      How Jim Crow Ruled Mississippi

      Until 2020 Mississippi had a two-part process for statewide elections. Candidates for eight offices­ — governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, auditor, insurance commissioner, and agriculture commissioner — had to win both the popular vote and the electoral vote by getting the most votes in a majority of the 122 House districts.

      Mississippi was the only state in the country that chose state officials this way. According to Emily Pettus of the Associated Press, “If no candidate won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, the race was decided by the state House. Because representatives were not obligated to vote as their districts did, an election could be decided by deal-making or even by the whim of a lawmaker who disagreed with the majority of voters in his or her own district.”

      Gerrymandered election districts which packed Blacks into fewer districts guaranteed some electoral victories for Black candidates but reduced Black political power overall because Black voters were diluted in majority white districts. Pettus said that Black candidates needed a higher share of the statewide vote to win a majority of House districts.

      That has never happened for any of those eight statewide offices in Mississippi.

      In 2019, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder filed a federal lawsuit for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The NAACP, One Voice, and Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute joined the lawsuit. Their complaint was that the Mississippi method for electing officials violated the “one man one vote” principle of the Voting Rights Act.

      U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III gave the legislature a chance to remedy the situation by putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot. It passed with 78% of the vote in the 2020 general election. Beginning November 2023, the Mississippi House will have no role in deciding the winner in statewide state-level elections. If there is no clear winner, run-off elections will be held.

      Gerrymandered Congressional and State Electoral Maps in Mississippi

      While a Black candidate may win a statewide office in 2023 for the first time, the Republican Party controls the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.

      In 2021 the legislature put together a redistricting committee dominated by Republicans who proposed maps to the full legislature.

      “That committee met three times in public for a total of 45 minutes. They convened the committee, appointed its members, adopted criteria, and adopted maps. So almost all of the work that went into producing these maps happened behind closed doors without the involvement of Mississippi’s Black legislators,” Badat said.

      Those maps gerrymandered all four of Mississippi’s congressional districts. Congressman Bennie Thompson (D, District 2) will have an easier time winning in November because more Black voters have been included in District 2.

      But those voters will no longer be in District 3 and that decreases the chances of it becoming a minority-majority district even though Blacks make up 38 percent of the state’s population, the largest percentage of African Americans in any state.

      Thompson, who chairs the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, will likely be the only Black congressman from Mississippi again. And that means 58 percent of the population that is white will likely have three white Congressmen and 38 percent of the population that is Black will have Thompson.

      Mississippi’s state legislative maps were also unfair. According to the 2020 Census, although the percentage of the Black population increased in Mississippi, it did not gain Black majority districts in the state legislative maps. Badat said that although both maps have been adopted, legal challenges have been filed and the fight for fair representation will continue to be fought in the courts.

      Mississippi’s Redistricting Battles Shift to Grassroots

      Meanwhile, activists are pushing for fair representation on school boards, city councils, and county boards across the South.

      “We do see some victories in Mississippi. We know that when we fight we win. And we started based on the premise that when we get people active and we make sure they have the tools and skills to participate, they can effectively impact social policy,” said Nsombi Lambright-Haynes.

      She is Executive Director of One Voice, a statewide leadership development and policy advocacy organization. She said that voting rights is at the core of any kind of social justice work in Mississippi but they are also involved with education, criminal justice, and environmental issues.

      Activists successfully changed the Mississippi state flag in 2021 that now shows a magnolia flower instead of a confederate cross.

      “Harrison County has been one of those places where citizens have continued to stay engaged,” said Lambright-Haynes. It is in the southernmost part of the state along the Gulf Coast and includes Gulfport, the state’s second largest city.

      “The school district said there was not going to be an open process. It was really a fight about transparency and making sure community folks understood,” Lambright-Haynes said.

      People let the Harrison County school district know they wanted to be involved in the process and the district changed its mind and opened it up to the public. In addition, Gulfport’s minority population had increased in the 2020 Census and activists worked to get a third minority member on the city council.

      The 2010 census showed that in Clinton, a Jackson suburb, the number of voting age Blacks had increased significantly. The NAACP submitted an alternative map based on those numbers, the map was adopted, and the result was the election of first Black city alderman since 1985.

      With such small victories to sustain them, Lambright-Haynes said that their work never stops and the key to success is to keep people engaged.

      This article first appeared in the Tennessee Tribune.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Retailers must join the battle on toxic products

      The post Retailers must join the battle on toxic products appeared first on Environmental Defence.

      This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

    • ‘Wolves in green clothing’: Toronto voters have the power to confront fake environmental NIMBYism

      The post ‘Wolves in green clothing’: Toronto voters have the power to confront fake environmental NIMBYism appeared first on Environmental Defence.

      This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

    • Reading William Rivers Pitt Was Like Traveling. I’ll Miss the Journey.

      William Rivers Pitt was a wordsmith extraordinaire. However, he wasn’t a pundit or predictable analyst. Will’s mighty writing was more prophetic than commonplace, more storytelling than think piece.

      I knew Will as an editor and colleague for many years at Truthout, I considered him a friend for even longer, and I always learned something from his columns. Yes, there was his regular use of words and expressions I had to look up, but that is because he was a lover of words and the American vernacular.

      Whether he was railing against the Trump administration, condemning corporate greed or opining about baseball, what made his columns most distinctive was his narrative style. You didn’t always know where Will was going with his informed commentary, but you knew his point by the time you finished, and it stuck with you. Reading one of his columns was a journey: a powerful and challenging experience. His columns were full of soul and thoughtfulness that was cogent and vibrant.

      Will was a robust writer, and at times, an oracle. His process was different than many political analysts: He would begin his work by selecting a subject, and then he would take a deep dive into himself and his relationship to the subject, and by extension, the relationship of his readers to that subject and its place in the world. The result was a powerful voice that acknowledged the obstacles facing us as advocates of social justice, while at the same time urging fierce resistance despite those obstacles.

      To Will, resistance was the only option in the face of the peril we confront at this historical juncture.

      Some days, he was so furious at recent news that his commentary was like a boiling cauldron. However, Will’s writing was much more than that molten lava. It was a call to arms to act on behalf of the common good.

      I always thought of reading Will’s columns as being like a roller coaster: Step in and pull the restraining bar back, then surrender yourself to the sinuous path ahead and trust the ride. With Will, you finished the commentary both wiser and with a desire to fight against injustice with all your might.

      There are thousands of progressive writers in independent media, but anyone who read Will regularly knew there was no one like him. Will was our Thor.

      We’ve worked with Will’s family to create this fundraiser in the hopes of raising some money to support his 9-year-old daughter Lola’s needs, including her future education. All funds raised will go directly to a trust for Lola. Please give what you can.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Schools Should Ban Corporal Punishment — and Teach Restorative Justice Instead

      For years, young people — especially young people of color, those with disabilities and those identifying as LGBTQIA+ — have been subjected to over-policing, unfair surveillance, and punitive and exclusionary discipline in schools. That has pushed some of them out of the classroom and into the criminal legal system in what has become known as the school-to-prison pipeline. Now, as Missouri reinstates corporal punishment, joining 19 other states in making it legal for adults to hit children in schools, young people face increased risk of being exposed to violence at home and at school.

      We know that because of the U.S.’s legacy of slavery, racism and sexism, certain students — especially Black and Brown children — are disproportionately impacted by corporal punishment and physical violence. Black and Brown children are more likely to be physically assaulted by police in schools and are also more likely to experience corporal punishment inside their homes. We also know that in Southern states that allow it, children with disabilities are 50 percent more likely to be corporally punished. For many parents and teachers, hitting has long been the norm. But that doesn’t make it right.

      The U.S. was built upon an ideology designed to subordinate Black and Indigenous people. Throughout our history, laws and policies maintained a racial hierarchy, ensuring enslaved people were not educated, and erasing Black and Indigenous cultures. Historically, state-sanctioned violence — through the use of lynching, whippings, paddling and hog-tying — was an important tool for maintaining control over and disciplining of Black and Brown children in schools.

      By instituting corporal punishment, school districts are exposing children — sometimes as young as 4 years old — to violence. This violence causes long-term damage to the young people who are hit, and it possibly impacts young people who hear or witness their peers being hit (because they are powerless to stop it and because they fear it could happen to them), and the entire school community.

      After years of working in community as an educator, a village mom and an advocate, I am disappointed that this issue not only persists, but is coming up again in places that had previously turned away from hitting. I had hoped that attitudes and norms would have changed around hitting children. The data are clear that hitting does not lead to positive results. We wouldn’t tell a child to work out their problems with another child by hitting them, so it shouldn’t be acceptable for an adult to resolve issues with children by hitting or spanking them. What is more, children who are hit — whether in the home or at school — go into “fight or flight mode,” making it harder for them to learn. Children cannot learn in an environment that is violent and unpredictable.

      It also bears noting that hitting has been conflated with discipline. Discipline is a teaching tool. Somewhere along the way it became synonymous with physical punishment. But physical punishment puts children in a state of fear. No one can learn meaningful lessons about right and wrong when they are afraid; in fact, they may pick up harmful information about how to respond to conflict when the adults around them model violence.

      Further, spanking hurts the relationship between children and adults, or between the person being hit and the person inflicting harm. It also can cause mental health challenges later in life, according to the American Psychological Association. Stacey Patton, a journalist and longtime advocate for parenting that does not reinforce archaic slavery-era discipline practices, has argued that hitting children grooms them for the criminal legal system, sexual abuse, mental health challenges, and a host of other issues.

      The evidence is clear. The U.S. must have a serious movement to create and embrace children’s conventional rights. But the U.S. has not ratified a position statement around those rights. If we embraced such rights as the norm, we would set a standard for how our nation treats and interacts with children. Although there is federal legislation aimed at stemming the tide of corporal punishment by offering grants for alternatives such as restorative justice, peace circles, dispute resolution etc., there isn’t a national position statement around the dangers of hitting children. We should however be supporting the work of people like Stacey Patton and also supporting organization’s like mine, the Nollie Jenkins Family Center, Inc.

      Hitting children teaches them that “might makes right.” To put it another way, when policies and practices permit adults to hit children, our society is sending the message: “Because I’m bigger or have more power than you, I can hit you and get away with it.” If we send that message in childhood, we will find it harder to tell the domestic violence victim that they do not have to endure abuse that can kill them physically and psychologically. No school district should want to teach young people that people who are bigger than them are entitled to abuse and control them. Instead, schools should teach children and adults alike that conflict is natural and that they can resolve it peaceably.

      The question school districts should be asking is: “What tools should we give young people, and what tools do adults need?” We must first embrace painless parenting and painless teaching. For persons who want alternatives to corporal punishment, restorative justice is a great option. Restorative justice looks at how to learn from and make amends for mistakes. It also creates a safe environment for the entire school community and teaches communication skills that will aid young people throughout their lives.

      We need a different vision for our children and schools. That vision must include safe spaces for young people. Additionally, the vision for our children’s well-being must include — indeed, start with — what young people want and what the research says is good for them. Children don’t want to be hit. They don’t want to live in fear of being hit. They want other models. We can and should offer it to them.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to “Move On” From COVID

      I have this book coming out. It’s about the disabled future, about how most of the world will be disabled soon, and how disabled people kept each other and other people alive during COVID. I have tour dates. They’re all online. Because COVID. Because COVID is still here. Because every week, 90 percent of the country is in high or substantial uncontrolled community transmission — the whole country is blood red on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) map. Because 400-500 people a day are still dying of COVID in the U.S., and long COVID is the third-most common neurological disorder. For all of these reasons, having in-person events would feel like inviting my disabled fan base to a slaughterhouse. I have every booster that exists, and I’m still immunocompromised and not hopping on 19 planes in a row.

      Yet every time I post, people — radical people, “movement” people — say, “Oh see you in L.A./Atlanta/Chicago!” And I have to say, “All events are virtual. Remember that? Virtual events? The accessible kind, with CART (real time captioning, making events accessible to people with a variety of disabilities and neurodivergence) and American Sign Language (ASL)? How did you forget so quickly?”

      I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it “The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true.

      By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened. The CDC switching its easiest-to-find map from the accurate community transmission map to one that shows the whole country in (fake) happy low-risk green. Biden saying offhandedly that “the pandemic is over” even as thousands of people die every week and groups like Long COVID Justice and #MEAction organize — from bed and in die ins in front of the White House — demanding that the U.S. declare long COVID a public health emergency. The state is acting like a bad boyfriend, a gaslighting partner telling you that nothing you remember is real. That’s not new, but the intensity level has reached a new high.

      It shouldn’t surprise me. Of course, the state hates disabled people, even now that there are so many more of us. Of course, federal, state and local governments for the most part don’t want to pay for guaranteed income or disability payments or paid care work or accommodations. They want us to die slowly so they can save money.

      The powers that be also badly want us to forget that there was a moment — a long, two-year moment — when people felt that everything could be different, that revolutionary change was possible. Many disabled people noted that the pandemic made for a “cripping of the world” — where for perhaps the first time in a while, the world, gripped by a global pandemic, dwelled in disabled reality. Remember how, for a minute, so many forms of access disabled people had long fought for were here because abled people needed them? Remember virtual work, pandemic pay for frontline workers, online school, online events with captioning and ASL, teaching people how to freaking wash their hands and stay home when they were sick, the ability to reschedule an appointment or a plane ticket when you got sick and not get yelled at or charged a fee, and immunocompromised shopping hours? These waves of access, mixed with mass resistance in the streets and at home against anti-Black, white supremacist violence, made for a powerful-ass two years. If that kind of mass access, resistance and mutual aid could happen, revolutionary change could happen too. The state wants us to forget that.

      The thing is, though, it’s not just the state. It’s been wild watching people who are ostensibly leftist say, We’re following the CDC guidelines, and drop masking, rapid testing and other safety requirements. Two years or more of rioting in the streets and suddenly, we’re doing what the government says we should do? One minute, we were masking; the next minute, you do you. One minute some abled people are experimenting with “WE keep US safe,” the next minute, every club in 2022 was like, “Masks encouraged but not required. You do you!”

      By wild, I mean painful. By painful, I mean heartbreaking. By heartbreaking, I mean every disabled person I know is in a state of grief and shock since April, when many mask mandates in airlines, public transport and public life were abruptly dropped by federal and state governments in the U.S., as everyone else abandons solidarity to “move on.” One minute, a lot of people were masking during Omicron; the next minute, everyone was back to breathing on each other on the bus — and we weren’t safe anymore. We increasingly feel pushed out of public life, as events and spaces from urgent cares to ERs to conferences say, “Oh, we’re not doing virtual anymore.” We’re talking about it, but it feels like no one else is. And many of us feel incredibly alone in our grief, and in the disorientation of feeling like we’re the only ones stubbornly remembering.

      Maybe I was naive. I thought many people, while hating the pandemic, liked some of the access features it brought it. I still think that. I also think that most people at heart must care about others and want us all to stay alive. But internalized ableism is real. A lot of people have had a brush with what it’s like to live a disabled life these last two years, and a lot of them want to forget it as quickly as possible. They’d rather expose themselves to all kinds of harm than continue to be disabled like us — mask, discuss risk, stay home, pass public policies for the safety of all. Unfortunately, this puts us all, but especially us, at risk. So many abled people — including abled members of the left; including abled queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color on the left — want to forget disability.

      Sometimes forgetting is the only way people can find to survive. In the face of few to no mass public rituals or acknowledgment for the millions of people who died from COVID, combined with almost zero collective survival public health strategies, I understand that denial is many people’s only accessible survival strategy. What we face is completely overwhelming and brain-bending.

      I wish I could pretend everything was fine, too, sometimes. But I lost a lot of people and I can’t forget their deaths, or what we all went through — and continue to go through. And I also have somehow made it through 2.5 years of pandemic as an immunocompromised disabled person without getting COVID, and I want to keep that winning streak.

      People like to say survivors of sexual violence make up false memories. But it’s far more common for people who perpetuate abuse to make up a false reality where they did nothing wrong. It’s easier that way. They don’t ever have to face it. There’s a similar logic with The Great Forgetting. If the powers that be tell us nothing happened and nothing is happening forcefully enough, they can make it true. We will always have been at war with Eastasia.

      I believe many people’s denial does not just stem from ableism, but also from the huge un-composted mass of collective grief we find ourselves in. There has been no mass public mourning, no Vietnam Veterans Memorial for everyone we lost to COVID. Millions of people are dead, and we have mourned privately; some of us haven’t been able to mourn in ways we need to — funerals, ceremonies — at all. Most of us have had to go back to work and suck it up, holding all our dead in our hearts. The beat goes on. We’re supposed to go shopping.

      However, in the words of June Jordan, “We always have choices. And capitulation is only one of them.” And in the words of South African freedom struggle activists, as quoted by bell hooks, “Our struggle is a struggle of memory against forgetting.”

      We, as disabled revolutionaries, are disabled memory keepers. And our refusal to forget, both our dead and the work of our survival, is part of our revolutionary work. We live in a world that always wants us dead, and wants to erase that we existed after they kill us. As disabled revolutionaries — particularly disabled, sick, Deaf, neurodivergent BIPOC — our refusal to forget our dead, our losses and our survival is an act of resistance.

      And I know we will keep remembering — through speaking out stories, shouting out our dead, archiving our work, making accessible gatherings and protests and homes and communities no matter what.

      But I also call on the abled left to not abandon us. We need each other to stay alive. You may be us, or may become us quite quickly. We are you. We are all each other’s beloved community. Disabled Korean organizer and writer Mia Mingus recently wrote, “Why doesn’t ‘We keep us safe’ apply to COVID and monkeypox?” It does. The last two and a half years — and our lives before and after this moment — prove to us that we are all we have to keep each other alive, cared for, loved and home.

      I call on the not-primarily disabled Left to make good, lifegiving, disabled wisdom choices, to continue to insist on access that the past two years proved possible. You have the power to insist on masking, community safety strategies for COVID and virtually accessible events, and to invest in community care. There must be support for disabled activists continuing to do lifesaving disabled activism, mutual aid and survival work who are exhausted and need and deserve support.

      Some troll on my Twitter the other day said, “No one’s gaslighting you- you can mask all you want.”

      Many people are gaslighting all of us. And I want so much more than to be told, “Oh, if you don’t feel safe/ it’s not accessible, just stay home!” I want to live in the full world, like every disabled person. I want to be able to leave my apartment without fearing death, go to a party, have casual sex. I want to live in the world, not my safe immuno-bubble, for the rest of my life.

      More than that, I want to finish what we started. I want us not to abandon the revolutionary dream some of us touched and made in 2020-2021 — of a world where community care, mutual aid for collective survival and a refusal to obey are not just possible, they make up the bones of the new world.

      Many, many disabled people feel what a coalition of Chicago disability justice organizers wrote in their “Letter to the Chicago Party Scene” in April 2022:

      We don’t want to return to normal. We want to dream and imagine a less ableist future where we listen to each other and take care of each other. We want to build spaces that work for everyone, and we want this for ourselves and for our future generations of queers…. We want to move slower and with intention. More people are becoming disabled every day, and we need Disability Justice dreams to hold us and guide us.

      Join us. We can still make that other world that is possible, but only if we all do the work. Let’s not abandon the dream. Let’s make it happen.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Protests Against Compulsory Hijab Sweep Iran, With Spotlight on Bodily Autonomy

      The current popular protests in Iran against the compulsory hijab and state violence are being led by young women and capturing the attention of the world. Masses of women have come out throughout the country to burn their hijabs. They are chanting, “Our hijab will be the noose around your neck,” and have called for an end to the Iranian regime, specifying that they want “neither monarchy, nor clergy.” Young women are leading the protests, joined by young men and people of all ages, including some women who wear the hijab but believe that it has to be a matter of choice, not compulsory. For many Iranian women, the struggle against the compulsory hijab is both about the right to bodily autonomy and about the struggle against gender violence, which cannot be separated from state violence.

      The protests were ignited in response to the police murder of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman whose family asserts she was arrested and beaten for her “improper hijab.” Within a few days, localized protests transformed into nationwide protests.

      The last time Iran saw large protests centered on women’s rights was after the 1979 Revolution, when several hundred thousand women came out on March 8, International Women’s Day, to oppose the imposition of the mandatory hijab and the takeover of the revolution by Islamic fundamentalist forces. At that time, the women’s protests were silenced by fundamentalists and even by most leftist forces. The fundamentalist forces used brute force and most leftists told women that demanding women’s rights would “divert” the revolution from its opposition to U.S. imperialism.

      Now however, the mood in the country is very different. After 43 years of suffering under an authoritarian capitalist and religious fundamentalist regime, historical objective and subjective dynamics have also led to the rise of a young generation that is mostly literate, includes many more women university students, and is aware of world developments and struggles. Most young women refuse to be silenced. Iranian feminist writer Narges Imani has argued that there is something truly new taking place: “None of the protests of the past few years have been so intertwined with the demand for the emancipation of the body.”

      Iranian feminist attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh has connected the Iranian women’s struggle against the compulsory hijab and gender violence to the struggle of U.S. women for abortion and reproductive rights. She was one of the first to issue a statement of solidarity with U.S. women after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 24 took away women’s federal right to abortion. She wrote:

      In these difficult times, when the women’s movement in the United States is facing assault and the right to abortion has been radically restricted, I wish to stand by you and declare my support from our corner of the world.… After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, new laws that drastically stripped women and girls of their rights were part of an insidious larger effort to limit civil liberties for everyone. As someone who lived through (and campaigned against) this loss of freedom and democracy, I can offer a warning: It will not end with this Supreme Court decision on abortion. Women in Iran continue to face laws that restrict rights over our bodies, and even over the ability to think for ourselves.

      In the most immediate way, the experiences of Iranian women since the transformation of the 1979 Revolution into an authoritarian theocracy can offer important lessons for women in the U.S. If we in the U.S. do not dissent en masse in opposition to authoritarianism, and in defense of abortion and reproductive rights, we will lose many more of our rights and could see the coming to power of more religious fundamentalist, misogynist and openly racist officials.

      Iranian women can also learn much from the experiences of U.S. women. They can learn from the ways in which Black feminist organizations such as Sister Song have brought together the struggles for reproductive justice and against class, racial, gender exploitation, gender violence, state violence and mass incarceration in the U.S. Black women in the U.S. experience these forms of injustice in an intertwined way, and activists have highlighted and organized in ways that recognize these intersectionalities.

      Thus, Black feminist intersectionality (a term coined by feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw) defines self-determination as a struggle challenging the intertwining of capitalist commodification of women’s bodies, racism and patriarchy. Poet/writer/activist Audre Lorde; writer-activists Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement; as well as Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, have all demanded social transformation both at the structural and the personal level. Black feminist abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba and Romarilyn Ralston call for addressing the intertwining of gender violence and state violence, urging us to reject carceral solutions and instead work to build a society in which injustices and root causes of violence are addressed, and conditions are created for the flourishing of all.

      Iranian feminists have also engaged significantly in anti-prison activism. For example, feminist activist and writer Narges Mohammadihas been imprisoned for years for her campaign against the death penalty, and has published a two-volume collection of interviews on solitary confinement while in prison. She opposes Iran’s carceral system, which has nearly 200,000 prisoners, and she especially opposes solitary confinement as a global form of torture which has severely damaging effects.

      If the struggles of women in Iran and in the U.S. come together and promote dialogue on what we have in common and what we can learn from each other, women in both countries will be empowered to confront — and perhaps reverse — the growing authoritarianism that is suffocating us all.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • “The Wind Knows Your Name”: Dahr Jamail on William Rivers Pitt

      The title of William Rivers Pitt’s unpublished book about the pandemic is: Please Take This, Because I Love You and I Might Die. A COVID Diary. He sent me the manuscript not too long ago so I could read it, and give him input on where it might make the most sense to have it published.

      With the pandemic, as he was consistently able to do, Will saw what was coming, knew the consequences could well be catastrophic, and behaved accordingly. Each of those things is a true gift. The ability (and willingness) to see what was coming before most people, knowing in his heart what the consequences could mean, and then taking appropriate actions to prepare. In the case of COVID-19, Will was being especially careful in order to protect his aging mother who has lung issues, his young daughter Lola, and perhaps with subconscious foreshadowing of his own death, he was making preparations for what was to come.

      Will’s unpublished book is dedicated to Lola.

      Iraq

      I met Will during the early years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The propaganda leading up to the invasion, which of course ignored a dozen years of U.S.-imposed sanctions that strangled the country and killed at least half a million children, had deeply impacted us both. Will had already written a book (War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know) that completely disassembled the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, upon which the entire justification for the illegal invasion and occupation was predicated. He had done what he could. Yet he was not going to stop taking the Bush administration to task. In fact, Will was just getting warmed up.

      We met in Boston a couple of years into the occupation. Will was already one of my heroes, one of the few voices of reason, sanity and truth in the media in the U.S. I was reading his valiant, noble, fiery words toward that end for years, and he had been reading my articles from Iraq about the widespread death and destruction then unfolding — death and destruction he had done all he could to prevent, a deep and lasting friendship was born on the spot, one that would also yield a coauthored book published by this website, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why it is Happening, and Who is Responsible.

      While I kept making my trips in and out of Iraq over the next years, Will continued writing his salvos of truth about what the Bush and then Obama administrations were doing in Iraq, covering the domestic political situation, and writing about it as fiercely and steadfastly as though his life depended on it. The many times I became dispirited while on the front lines of the brutal occupation, I would read Will’s latest column about whatever the Bush administration was doing to justify their ongoing atrocities in Iraq, and my fire to continue my work would be fed yet again.

      Truly one of the most important public intellectuals, writers and commentators of our time, in losing Will, we’ve lost a voice that is irreplaceable, and I’ve lost one of my heroes.

      Roads

      Late this August, Will and I were exchanging emails about his unpublished book. I wrote him this:

      I’m only part way through your book. Two months ago I lost my long-time climbing partner of 25 years in a rock fall accident…we were roped up…his body was literally hanging off me…so I’ve been in a deep grieving process this summer, otherwise I’d have already torn through your book.

      Thanks for being out there carrying the torch brother.
      Love,
      Dahr

      To which Will replied:

      WHAT THE FUCK

      Oh Jesus Dahr, I am so sorry.

      I believe the inchoate universe puts its stamp on some people now and again, and it is woe to that person. The stamp means you are to suffer: To suffer from outside forces, and to suffer from an internal need to put that suffering into some context, to explain it, or to make some use of it if nothing else. It is a wailing of the soul, that stamp. The Buddhists call them Bodhisattvas, those who cross the precipice of enlightenment but come back for others, to guide them rather than pass over themselves. It is an altogether agonizing fate, for it brings wisdom, and wisdom is the most terrible thing of all.

      Fuck my book. Stay on the mountain. The wind knows your name.

      While I thought he’d gone too far with the Bodhisattva bit, I wrote him back and thanked him, from my heart, for his gracious words of comfort. These words of his, like everything he wrote, came from his heart, his soul, his own experience. Will was, by his own definition, a Bodhisattva, here to guide all of us with his wisdom, and his seeing.

      “We stand today upon the fulcrum of history, a crossroads at midnight with a blood moon rising,” Will wrote in February 2019. “Down one road lies fire, flood, famine, failure and the final triumph of greed. What awaits down the other road is unknown, terra incognita, a mystery to be solved one gentle step at a time…. The road we have been on is littered with bones and sorrow. The road we must take is strange, and new, and dangerous, and difficult. There are no promises, other than it will be — by dint of our collective will — better than the way that is failing before our eyes. This crossroads is freedom distilled, and the time to choose is now.”

      Will is now on the road each of us inevitably shall take. He showed us how to live a noble life. He made a living speaking truth to power. He did these things for all of us, and he did them because they were his to do. He did them because he could.

      Most importantly, he did them because he knew with all his heart they were the right things to do.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.