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Category: Op-Ed

  • State “Solutions” Don’t Address Root Causes of Teaching Crisis

    As students return to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies — an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.

    Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.

    How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor’s degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida’s Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from the Philippines.

    These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.

    A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That’s the widest gap ever — despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages, reaching 32 percent in Arizona, for example.

    Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.

    When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. An overwhelming 91 percent pointed to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising salaries as a means to address burnout.

    Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience — beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They’re also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don’t lose ground to inflation.

    “These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes just to make ends meet,” said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union.

    In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. went on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.

    The educators’ union in Columbus, Ohio demands a simple, public “commitment to modern schools”: not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row.

    Read one picketer’s sign: “You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!”

    Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.

    In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.

    The Columbus teachers union soon came to a “conceptual agreement” with the city’s schools, ending their strike. Let’s hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dangerous Mountain Valley Pipeline Has No Place in Manchin’s Deal With Democrats

    Thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) conditioning his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act on a backroom permitting reform deal that would complete the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), this highly contentious fracked gas pipeline has become a household name.

    The attention is not good news for the MVP.

    While the MVP has long been a scourge to rural Appalachian communities in Virginia and West Virginia, with Manchin’s help, the MVP has morphed into a full-blown national scandal.

    Before Congress considers any legislation addressing the MVP, it is vital to understand why this pipeline is a terrible idea.

    Firstly, the MVP is not just another pipeline.

    At 42 inches in diameter and 303 miles long, the MVP is among the largest methane gas pipelines in the U.S. However, what sets the MVP apart is the unprecedented level of risk associated with the pipeline’s route. Over 200 miles of the MVP crosses areas that have experienced landslides in the past and are highly susceptible to future landslides, including over 75 miles of steep mountain slopes.

    No other gas transmission pipeline in the U.S. has ever attempted to cross so many miles of such unforgiving terrain.

    According to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, from 2001-2020, landslides were one of the most frequent causes of “significant incidents” involving gas transmission pipelines in Appalachia. The MVP has already been impacted by multiple landslide events during construction, including one where “the installed pipe shifted … in at least three locations.”

    When a high-volume, high-pressure gas pipeline like the MVP ruptures, the common industry assumption is that there is at least an 80 percent chance of an explosion. Landslides have caused no fewer than five major gas pipeline explosions in Appalachia in just the past four years. Thankfully, gas has never flowed through the MVP — the blast zone is nearly a half-mile wide.

    Secondly, the MVP cannot rightly be considered a critical infrastructure project.

    If it were, then it stands to reason the developers would have selected the route that would give the MVP the greatest chance of success. Not the shortest, and presumably cheapest, route between its beginning and endpoint. Appalachia is crisscrossed by many major gas pipelines — including pipelines considerably longer than the MVP — yet none come close to crossing as many steep, landslide-prone slopes.

    There is no guarantee that the MVP, if completed, will be able to provide the safe and reliable supply of gas touted by its developers. Furthermore, given the increase in heat waves and wildfires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Appalachia and worldwide droughts being driven by climate-busting fossil fuels, bringing any additional methane gas out of the ground is inherently unsafe.

    Furthermore, the U.S. already has more than enough gas to provide households and industry with an ample and affordable supply, and demand is expected to decrease over time. However, the amount of gas exported by the U.S. has increased exponentially since 2015 — and driven up prices domestically. Following a recent explosion at a gas export terminal in Texas that took the facility offline, the price of methane in the U.S. immediately dropped.

    Lastly, facilitating the construction of the MVP through congressional action would mean overriding decades of bedrock regulatory and judicial processes.

    Since construction began on the MVP back in 2018, the project has lost virtually every permit needed to build the pipeline. This includes permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cross streams and wetlands; permits from the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to cross national forests; and permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to disturb habitats supporting endangered species. The permits from the latter three agencies have now been tossed out twice by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

    While many of the legal challenges have been brought by environmental interest groups, this has no bearing on the fact that the courts found grave deficiencies in the permits issued to MVP. Compelling compliance with the law is hardly a radical judicial act, regardless of who brings the case to court.

    As a result of its problematic route and design, the MVP is now more than $3 billion over budget and four years behind schedule.

    Rather than attempting to fix the project’s flaws, however, the developers continue to hold out hope that the rules do not apply to the MVP. Indeed, the project developers are among the top donors to Manchin and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York), the chief architects of the backroom deal.

    Congress must not overrule the very safeguards put in place to protect the public against harm from proposed energy infrastructure projects. Especially not for a project as dangerous and unprecedented as the MVP.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Our Voting Rights Are at Stake in Upcoming Supreme Court Ruling

    Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court will once again rule on whether multiracial democracy has a future in the United States.

    The highest court is expected to rule on Moore v. Harper by June 2023, and the stakes of the case couldn’t be higher. If it goes the wrong way, this case could unleash widespread purges of voters from voting rolls, dramatic restrictions to popular early voting hours and locations, discriminatory barriers to voting access, and fewer protections against voter intimidation.

    How we got here begins with North Carolina’s last redistricting case to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, when the justices themselves laid out a path for voters to pick their leaders — not the other way around.

    Its ruling in that case, Rucho v. Common Cause, arose after North Carolina’s lawmakers put politics over people and rigged our voting maps so that, in the Old North State, Republicans would always come up winners.

    I was one of the lawyers from North Carolina who argued the Rucho case in front of the court. We were joined by voters in Maryland who faced the same kind of manipulations from Democratic lawmakers.

    In the majority 5-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts told us that partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with democratic principles” but that federal courts weren’t the place to bring lawsuits about partisan gerrymandering because it was a “political question” better left to the states. The chief justice told voters they could take challenges to unfair voting maps to state courts, tasked with protecting fundamental rights under state constitutions.

    So, when North Carolina lawmakers in 2021 unfortunately once again carved up our state’s maps for partisan gain — disenfranchising primarily Black voters to give Republicans an advantage in coming elections — we asked state courts to intervene.

    In response, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued a historic ruling, declaring partisan gerrymandering illegal in our state. The landmark ruling favored voters and the responsive districts they deserve and served as vindication for the hundreds of thousands of advocates who marched, testified and used their voices to demand fair maps.

    Unwilling to relent, now these same North Carolina lawmakers are making a desperate bid to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking a majority of justices to betray the promise of Rucho and tie the hands of those who would seek reform on the state level.

    In this current case, Moore v. Harper, my organization, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, represents the nonpartisan advocates at Common Cause, in what many are calling one of the most consequential voting rights case since Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

    In Moore, North Carolina lawmakers, led by Speaker of the House Tim Moore, are relying on a fringe legal idea espoused by a handful of politicians called the “independent state legislature theory.” Using an illogical and ahistorical reading of the U.S. Constitution — already dismissed by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 — state politicians claim they shouldn’t be subject to the checks and balances we all expect from 3 co-equal branches of state government. Instead, they demand unchecked power to draw Congressional maps and run federal elections.

    Should five of the justices side with the lawmakers’ scheme, Moore would create a chaotic election system, pitting state and local elections against new federal election rules. Legislators would be free to violate voters’ rights, and state courts couldn’t stop them.

    Specifically, this case could give state lawmakers justification to restrict our votes, draw rigged maps, and cast doubt on our election results — all in the name of partisan gain.

    It’s clear that a bad result in Moore could disproportionately harm Black, Native, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Latinx voters, but they aren’t the only ones at risk here — Americans of all races and political leanings would feel the repercussions of such an extreme outcome. Voters seeking fair representation through the checks and balances of state courts would suffer in Republican and Democratic states alike.

    An extreme outcome in Moore is a lose-lose situation for Americans and it would only make it more difficult for voters to turn public sentiment into public policy. From abortion access and Medicaid expansion to closing the digital divide and expanding disaster relief and recovery, Moore would mean voters would have even less input on the issues driving us to the polls.

    Those who oppose the threats to election integrity and democracy posed by Moore have joined together in a national campaign led by Southern Coalition for Social Justice and Common Cause to engage our communities, tell our stories, and organize hundreds of thousands of new advocates through town halls, rallies and voter registration. Over the next few months, we’ll educate the public about this full-throated attack on multiracial democracy from a few rogue legislators — felt everywhere from church basements to busy boardrooms to the neighborhood ballot box this November.

    Over the last decade, North Carolinians have defeated continuous attempts to rig election districts, delegitimize our courts and disenfranchise Black voters. Not only did we beat back efforts to gerrymander our congressional districts as recently as 2019, but our people stopped plots to gerrymander judicial districts, pack our courts for partisan gain and pass racist barriers to voting access, like photo voter ID requirements. As in those cases, in Moore, we have a strong case to make with history, legal precedent and common sense on our side.

    As the date of Supreme Court’s momentous ruling on Moore approaches, let’s all work together to signal to our elected leaders that people, not politicians, are worth the fight for multiracial democracy. That means having Congress pass comprehensive voting rights reform, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, so we can build an inclusive democracy where everyone in the U.S. can thrive, participate and have their voices heard.

  • The Inflation Reduction Act Is a Disappointing Act of Federal Greenwashing

    Congressional Democrats were very proud of themselves for passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill that includes $370 billion for climate and energy initiatives, in addition to much-needed subsidies on prescription drug costs and Medicare benefits. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who worked with the intractable Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said the bill “will put the country on track to meet the climate goals we need to preserve for our planet for our children and for our grandchildren.”

    It’s tempting to believe him: Many environmental advocates are reporting that the IRA, while imperfect, is a good start. We desperately need climate legislation and could use a win to stay optimistic about our future. Besides, there are aspects of the bill to celebrate, like funding to address air pollution and a tax on coal to support miners with Black Lung Disease.

    But unfortunately, in order to win Manchin’s approval the Inflation Reduction Act was turned into a profit-fest for fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil, and the parts of the bill that do invest in clean energy and greenhouse gas reductions are largely premised on false solutions. We cannot call something that does such grave harm a success, especially when the harm will fall hardest on disadvantaged communities. The Inflation Reduction Act is a disappointing act of federal greenwashing.

    Despite all of the research reporting that the first step to reducing emissions is to halt new fossil fuel development, the IRA includes multiple provisions to increase fossil fuel production. Three canceled oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico were revived by the bill, and to ensure “energy security,” the federal government is required to lease 62 million acres of public lands and waters to oil and gas developers before offering any solar and wind leases.

    The bill also ensures that the fossil fuel industry will rake in $3.23 billion in subsidies for Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCS) technologies. CCS is mostly a smoke-and-mirrors trick: The technology isn’t really there yet, and it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Ninety percent of CCS projects are used for enhanced oil recovery, a process in which captured carbon is stored underground, where it can be extracted again as oil. The entire idea of CCS is to slow the transition away from fossil fuels and continue the cycle of extraction.

    The Inflation Reduction Act approaches clean energy with the same extractive and profiteering model beloved by the fossil fuel industry. With the discounts provided in the bill, extractive industries will move onto yet more Indigenous lands and into the backyards of other disadvantaged communities to set up poisonous projects like mines and nuclear power plants.

    The Indigenous Environmental Network has called the Inflation Reduction Act a trojan horse for frontline communities: While it includes a myriad of grants for disadvantaged communities, recipients are forced to compete for eligibility with one another and well-funded industries and NGOs.

    Indigenous human rights lawyer and Water Protector Tara Houska responded to the bill by saying, “It doesn’t really work to throw money at us if we don’t have habitable places to live. If our communities are underwater or if our air is poisoned and we have pipelines and mines and all the things that are destroying our lands actively, how are some investments in block grants supposed to help us?”

    We cannot get out of the climate crisis using the same model that got us into this mess. Rewards for industries that prioritize their own profit and have no accountability to the local communities that their projects exist in are not the solution. We need to invest in community. If President Biden and Congressional Democrats truly wanted to help frontline communities, they could have invested in public transportation instead of privatized electric vehicles, supported community participation in the design and articulation of energy projects, supported community-owned renewables, and given communities experiencing environment injustice the legal right to recovery.

    Money created the Inflation Reduction Act. Both Schumer and Manchin have received major donations from the pipeline company that benefits from their deal: NextEra Energy. And, at the end of the day, this bill was designed to reduce inflation — not save the planet.

    We cannot allow the federal government to greenwash this economic package and call it progress. The Inflation Reduction Act will create countless sacrifice zones in the name of “green” energy, already visible in places like Thacker Pass in Nevada. President Biden says that progress requires compromise, but his version of a compromise involves sacrificing disadvantaged communities. You cannot call that a “start” on climate.

  • Canada continues to fuel environmental racism by letting it fuel us

    The post Canada continues to fuel environmental racism by letting it fuel us appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • The Lessons of the Kansas Primary Go Far Beyond Abortion Rights

    In 1922, the newspaper editor William Allen White wrote, “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.” On August 2, voters in Kansas proved him right, going to the polls for the first referendum on abortion since the fall of Roe v. Wade. The result was an emphatic rejection of a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislators to severely restrict access to abortion or ban the procedure outright. Pollsters were left scrambling as people across the country expressed surprise: How could this have happened in a state like Kansas?

    A few things about the Kansas vote stand out. First, the polls, which reported higher support for the anti-abortion amendment, were simply wrong in predicting that it would pass in the majority-red state. Second, turnout was historically high for a primary, with over 900,000 Kansans voting, rivaling numbers seen only in the state’s general elections. The reason for this is clear: A majority of Kansas voters were energized to act in response to the brazen and authoritarian nature of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. Third, the voters that rejected the amendment were politically and geographically diverse, refuting commonly held and wrong-headed assumptions about the priorities of ordinary Kansans. Democrats and Republicans alike came out in support of the right to abortion, as well as a significant number of Independents; they voted not just in big cities like Kansas City and Wichita, but in poorer, rural and traditionally Republican counties, including 14 that went for Donald Trump in 2020. Finally, organizers built a powerful and expansive coalition that was able to reach into nearly every pocket of the state, not limiting the outreach to any one demographic of people and engaging women’s rights activists, doctors, faith leaders, and more.

    The vote in Kansas is a desperately welcome rejoinder to the reactionary majority that has been smuggled into the Supreme Court over the past few decades. It is also a vital reminder that beneath the too-often superficial and media-friendly narratives we are fed about our politically divided country, there is a sea of people willing to stand together on abortion and much more. That this happened in middle America is especially resonant, as Kansan writer Sarah Smarsh keenly observed. “In a state where registered Republicans far outnumber Democrats, the results reveal that conservative politicians bent on controlling women and pregnant people with draconian abortion bans are out of step with their electorates, a majority of whom are capable of nuance often concealed by our two-party system,” she said. “This is not news to many red-state moderates and progressives, who live with excruciating awareness of the gulf between their decent communities and the far-right extremists gerrymandering, voter-suppressing and dark-moneying their way into state and local office.”

    Indeed, what Kansas has to teach us goes far beyond abortion. Just as a majority of Americans think abortion should be legal, people across party and region favor policies that expand rights and access to the essential building blocks of a dignified life. For example, in recent years, 72 percent of Americans have said they prefer a government-run health care plan, and more than 70 percent support raising the minimum wage, including 62 percent of Republicans. This is also true in Kansas, where 78 percent of residents support expanding Medicaid despite the state government’s refusal to do so. This and related issues are of especially grave concern in a state where 34 percent of people are poor or low-income, with hundreds of thousands more hovering above the buckling ground of economic precarity.

    When we look at referendums like the one in Kansas, we should see more than just a singular act of defiance — we should recognize the rumblings of a sleeping giant of popular opinion being awakened into political action. In the 2020 elections, over 850,000 eligible voters in Kansas had household incomes of less than $50,000. More than 60 percent of this segment of “poor and low-income voters,” across a range of household sizes, participated in that year’s presidential election. And while the vast majority of them were white (over 500,000), this percentage also included Black, Asian, Latinx and Indigenous voters.

    In Kansas, we are witnessing what is possible when our electorate is mobilized around issues of real and pressing concern for everyday people. There is a lesson here for all of us; the kind of voting coalitions that can be forged in defense of reproductive rights are the very same that could unite people around a transformative vision for the nation, on everything from climate to housing to labor. In fact, in a time of inflation, looming recession and sharply felt inequality, the majority of Americans are hurting and hungry for change. They are also prepared to fight for it, as long as the stakes are clear and genuine solutions are offered — in other words, as long as there is something to fight for.

    This also means that we must be willing to fight for the support of people outside of our comfort zones and the brittle taxonomy of our two-party system. We must look past conventional political wisdom and electoral maps and toward a nation that is not so easily divided into “red state” and “blue state,” but instead brimming with states ready to be organized along more expansive lines. There is much to learn from Kansas and the organizers who reached deep into their state to build a diverse voting bloc strong enough to beat back a disciplined movement of Christian nationalists, shocking the nation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Assassination of al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri Was Illegal

    President Joe Biden’s assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan was illegal under both U.S. and international law. After the CIA drone strike killed Zawahiri on August 2, Biden declared, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” What we should fear instead is the dangerous precedent set by Biden’s unlawful extrajudicial execution.

    In addition to being illegal, the killing of Zawahiri also occurred in a moment when the United Nations had already determined that people in the U.S. had little to fear from him. As a United Nations report released in July concluded, “Al Qaeda is not viewed as posing an immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan because it lacks an external operational capability and does not currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment.”

    Just as former president Barack Obama stated that “Justice has been done” after he assassinated Osama bin Laden, Biden said, “Now justice has been delivered” when he announced the assassination of Zawahiri.

    Retaliation, however, does not constitute justice.

    Targeted, or political, assassinations are extrajudicial executions. They are deliberate and unlawful killings meted out by order of, or with acquiescence of, a government. Extrajudicial executions are implemented outside a judicial framework.

    The fact that Zawahiri did not pose an imminent threat is precisely why his assassination was illegal.

    Zawahiri’s Assassination Violated International Law

    Extrajudicial executions are prohibited by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the United States has ratified, making it part of U.S. law under the Constitution’s supremacy clause. Article 6 of the ICCPR states, “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” In its interpretation of Article 6, The UN Human Rights Committee opined that all human beings are entitled to the protection of the right to life “without distinction of any kind, including for persons suspected or convicted of even the most serious crimes.”

    “Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” tweeted Agnès Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. “Intentionally lethal or potentially lethal force can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat to life.” In order to be lawful, the United States would need to demonstrate that the target “constituted an imminent threat to others,” Callamard said.

    Moreover, willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. A targeted killing is lawful only when deemed necessary to protect life, and no other means (including apprehension or nonlethal incapacitation) is available to protect life.

    Zawahiri’s Assassination Violated U.S. Law

    The drone strike that killed Zawahiri also violated the War Powers Resolution, which lists three situations in which the president can introduce U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities:

    First, pursuant to a congressional declaration of war, which has not occurred since World War II. Second, in “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” (Zawahiri’s presence in Afghanistan more than 20 years after the September 11, 2001, attacks did not constitute a “national emergency.”) Third, when there is “specific statutory authorization,” such as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).

    In 2001, Congress adopted an AUMF that authorized the president to use military force against individuals, groups and countries that had contributed to the 9/11 attacks “in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

    Zawahiri was one of a small circle of people widely believed to have planned the 2001 hijacking of four airplanes, three of which were flown into the Pentagon and World Trade Center buildings. But since he did not pose “an immediate international threat” before the U.S. targeted him for assassination, he should have been arrested and brought to justice in accordance with the law.

    The attack against Zawahiri violated Obama’s targeting rules, which required that the target pose a “continuing imminent threat.” Although Donald Trump relaxed Obama’s rules, Biden is conducting a secret review to establish his own standards for targeting killing.

    Biden Continues to Launch Illegal Drone Strikes

    In spite of the Biden administration’s claim that no civilians were killed during the strike on Zawahiri, there has been no independent evidence to support that assertion.

    The assassination of Zawahiri came nearly a year after Biden launched an illegal strike as he withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Ten civilians were killed in that attack. The U.S. Central Command admitted the strike was “a tragic mistake” after an extensive New York Times investigation put a lie to the prior U.S. declaration that it was a “righteous strike.”

    Biden declared that although he was withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, he would mount “over-the-horizon” attacks from outside the country even without troops on the ground. We can expect the Biden administration to conduct future illegal drone strikes that kill civilians.

    The 2001 AUMF has been used to justify U.S. military actions in 85 countries. Congress must repeal it and replace it with a new AUMF specifically requiring that any use of force comply with U.S. obligations under international law.

    In addition, Congress should revisit the War Powers Resolution and explicitly limit the president’s authority to use force to that which is necessary to repel a sudden or imminent attack.

    Finally, the United States must end its “global war on terror” once and for all. Drone strikes terrorize and kill countless civilians and make us more vulnerable to terrorism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Secret Service Text Cover-Up Keeps Getting Bigger

    The growing super-scandal surrounding text messages from 1/6 that were deleted by the Secret Service, Homeland Security and now the Department of Defense leaves one grasping for adjectives that fit the moment. Journalist Seth Abramson was unequivocal on Tuesday — “Biggest Cover-up in American History” — and I am hard-pressed to dispute him.

    “So now we have missing Secret Service texts that could establish contacts between Donald Trump and the domestic terrorists of Stop the Steal, missing DHS texts that would reveal secret lobbying by Trump’s ‘legal team,’ and possibly missing Pentagon texts about *martial law*,” Abramson wrote on Twitter. “The *practical* question, now: do Americans have a moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6? Has the USSS, DOD or DHS left us with any choice but to assume the deleted texts would be incriminating?”

    A moral right? At this juncture, can people reasonably do anything other than expect the worst?

    No, the trick here isn’t convincing people that a pack of Trump-tied insurrectionists scrubbed evidence of their crimes from government devices. The trick is getting people to overcome the amazing gravitational pull of “too much already!” and summon the will to act, to make Congress act, to decide that this seemingly eternal Trumpian farce be halted and broken once and for all. This far, no farther.

    It was bad enough when the Secret Service announced it had deliberately deleted all texts from the day before and day of the insurrection. When pressed, they managed to come up with one (1) text message related to the inquiry. The situation screamed “cover-up!” and carried genuinely ominous overtones of potential Secret Service involvement in Donald Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election by way of riot.

    On July 29, it was reported that Homeland Security watchdogs knew of the deletions in December, and began in February the process of recovering them, only to have that process abruptly terminated by Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari. “Cuffari, a former adviser to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), has been in his post since July 2019 after being nominated by Trump,” reports The Washington Post. A separate Post report details accusations leveled against Cuffari in 2003, when he “was accused of misleading federal investigators and running ‘afoul’ of ethics regulations while he was in charge of a Justice Department inspector general field office in Tucson.”

    On August 1, “Two influential House Democrats called on Monday for two officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog to testify to Congress about the agency’s handling of missing Secret Service text messages from the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, accusing their office of engaging in a cover-up,” according to The New York Times. Joseph Cuffari is one of the two officials so called.

    Not shady enough yet? Try this on for size, courtesy of CNN:

    The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings.

    The acknowledgment that the phones from the Pentagon officials had been wiped was first revealed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit American Oversight brought against the Defense Department and the Army. The watchdog group is seeking January 6 records from former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials — having filed initial FOIA requests just a few days after the Capitol attack.

    At least the Watergate burglars had the sense to pull their stunt in the dead of night. These clowns are out there in broad daylight trashing crucial evidence pertaining to an attempted coup, and have done so within the walls of the Secret Service, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

    Not only is this cover-up massive, it is altogether audacious, brazen, almost arrogant… and why not? This is Washington D.C., right? Nobody ever gets into actual trouble here, unless you took a bus from out of town to participate in the Capitol riot. Then, you’re probably busted. The ones who summoned you there and turned you loose? A few deleted texts later and they’re enjoying a steak at the Capitol Hill Club, irony definitely intended.

    Consider all this when you hear Trump and his people promote their plans for “Schedule F”: the deliberate replacement of merit-based government employees with people loyal to Trump. Feed this into any “what could happen?” algorithm and smoke will belch from the computer vents.

    “Schedule F involves nothing less than the obliteration of vast swaths of the federal workforce,” I wrote last week, “who would reportedly be replaced by employees loyal to Trump and his madding MAGA horde. It is the realization of Steve Bannon’s war on the administrative state, combined with Trump’s apparently bottomless need to inflict chaotic pain in the name of revenge, and would damage the function of the federal government for generations.”

    Those deleted texts must be recovered. I have to believe there is a way. “Nothing is ever really deleted” is what they’ve been telling us for years now.

    Nothing except, perhaps, the truth.

  • Unions Can Do Plenty to Help Defend Abortion Access

    The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health on June 24 overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent, erasing the constitutional right to an abortion.

    Already for years, large parts of the U.S. have severely restricted abortion — especially hurting those least likely to have resources to travel for care, including poor, Black, indigenous, undocumented, and disabled people.

    The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country, and Black women are three times more likely to die from childbirth-related causes than white women.

    Many unions issued public statements condemning the Dobbs decision. A few turned out to protest. And we can expect many to emphasize voting for Democrats this fall.

    What more can unions do?

    There is a no clear pathway to winning national abortion and reproductive health access. It will surely be a long struggle, involving many organizations and strategies.

    But there are specific interventions the labor movement can make, beyond turning out voters and joining rallies.

    Bargain Over Benefits

    Here’s an immediate one: workers can demand to bargain over changes in benefits, which might now include abortion access.

    A committee at the NewsGuild of New York has developed a bargaining framework for the questions this raises, including ensuring that your health insurance covers abortion, bargaining for travel funds to cover an abortion out of state if it is prohibited where you live, protecting your personal information, guaranteeing additional leave for travel, and securing non-discrimination language on the basis of gender and pregnancy.

    The NewsGuild committee suggests that members look at current contract language where unions could demand to bargain over impacts, based on changes to their health coverage.

    If your plan used to cover health care that is now prohibited in your state, that is a substantial change in your insurance, and your employer should have to work with the union to find alternatives. Perhaps employers could cover the difference in cost for an out-of-network, out-of-state provider, provide additional time off, and pay for the travel and associated costs.

    Defend Members in Court

    Unions can use their legal departments or hire lawyers to defend members who get sued or prosecuted for allegedly performing, getting, or helping someone get an abortion.

    In the course of their jobs, this could involve health care workers, including mental health providers; people who deliver abortion medications, like postal workers or UPS drivers; and others. Unions should defend them just as they would defend members in other work-related disciplinary proceedings.

    Last year Texas criminalized abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (about when fetal cardiac activity can be detected). The law allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe was involved in an abortion, including anyone who reimbursed travel or medical costs. Oklahoma has followed suit, and a similar law is pending in Idaho.

    These laws will likely be argued in courts for months or years to determine exactly where and for what the states have jurisdiction to prosecute.

    Some union contracts provide legal services to support members in housing, family, and civil courts. If a member were accused outside of work of obtaining or aiding and abetting an abortion, the member legal services could be expanded to cover this as well.

    And unions should support workers in defying the laws. Abortion access was originally won through sustained, public civil disobedience.

    “Most of the physicians I know and have been talking to are not interested in holding back,” says Paul Prater, chair of the Illinois Nurses Association political action committee. “They are going to provide the care people need and will deal with consequences after.”

    Defend Medical Workers

    The risk is particularly dire for health care workers. While they can only be privately sued in the states mentioned above, in other states workers can be criminally prosecuted for providing abortion care.

    In these states, if a pregnant person comes into a hospital for care and the appropriate treatment is to terminate the pregnancy, that is now a crime if there is still fetal cardiac activity or the person’s life is not immediately endangered.

    Health care workers will be facing this dilemma routinely. For instance, about 2 percent of pregnancies are ectopic, where the fertilized egg has implanted somewhere outside the uterus, dooming the pregnancy and endangering the pregnant person; termination is the treatment.

    In order to avoid potential legal problems, health care facilities are now avoiding or delaying these treatments, sometimes waiting on clearance from hospital lawyers. A 2022 study of two Texas hospitals found at least two dozen cases where a procedure was delayed longer than doctors wanted to, in one case until the patient required a hysterectomy.

    In some states, if a health care provider suspects the pregnant person had an abortion, they are expected to report it to law enforcement. This reporting has already led to the prosecution of many people suspected of intentionally harming their fetuses, sometimes despite little evidence.

    Women of color are more likely to be charged for suspected abortions. Union-led education on racial disparities could help workers not to stereotype their patients.

    Protect Medical Judgment

    All these laws will have a profound impact on health care workers. Not coincidentally, the states with such laws are also the states with the lowest union density — though there are exceptions, like union-dense Ohio, where abortion is illegal after six weeks, and Montana, with little union presence but no abortion restrictions.

    The new risks could inspire more doctors and nurses to unionize.

    What else should health care unions consider doing? They can demand to bargain, since the scope of work has changed for health care workers—they could face liability for using their medical judgment. Unions could bargain for employers to provide liability coverage against civil litigation, if possible, and to defend accused workers.

    Unions should also bargain for clear policies about the treatment of pregnant people and who determines what is medically necessary when.

    The laws are largely untested and have huge amounts of gray area, and health care professionals get little say in their employers’ interpretation. One Missouri hospital administration denied patients the contraceptive “morning-after pill” after the Dobbs decision, then reversed its decision within a day.

    Union legal teams can do their own legal research, to educate members on what is clear and what is still contested. For instance, what would be the process for determining that a pregnant person’s life is at risk if a termination is not performed? Who would make that call, on what grounds, and how can they be protected in that decision?

    Health care unions have fought hard to protect nurses’ and physicians’ judgment in patient care, and unions should bargain to push for the broadest possible reading of these policies.

    Embrace Abortion Workers

    There has been a recent flood of unionizations in the “repro” movement, including at Planned Parenthood North Central States region (the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota) and other states (SEIU); Preterm Clinic, the independent abortion provider in Ohio (SEIU); Feminist Majority Foundation (Nonprofit Professional Employees Union); and about two dozen others, according to Reprojobs.

    Reprojobs, a website that began as a jobs posting site for repro workers, now features articles and networks to support repro workers unionizing, including a column called “Ask a Union Organizer.”

    For abortion providers, many of their organizing issues echo those of other health care workers: low pay, critical staffing shortages, and frustration over management’s handling of Covid. They also face threats of violence from anti-abortion protestors.

    Facing an uncertain future as parts of their jobs are criminalized state by state, workers are unionizing also partly to win some level of control in budgets and layoffs.

    Workers at the at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research center, won their election to unionize with OPEIU Local 153 on July 14. Less than an hour after the results were announced, one organizing committee leader was fired without cause; the union continues to fight for reinstatement. Planned Parenthood affiliates in Austin and Miami have also come under fire for laying off active members of union organizing committees.

    Thishi Gangoda, on the organizing committee at the Preterm Union in Cleveland, Ohio, says workers there unionized because “abortion is health care and abortion workers are health care workers. We deserve power to decide our workplace conditions.”

    Abortion after six weeks of pregnancy is now illegal in Ohio. Preterm is still open for some reproductive care, early abortions, and counseling to other states, but many workers have left for lack of work, or burned out by the stress of the last several months.

    Labor can recognize these workers as siblings in our movement, and organize more of them. We can back their fights for strong contracts that will allow them to continue working in politically charged, changing, and occasionally violent workplaces.

    Organize Catholic Hospitals

    Compounding the impact of the overturn of Roe, Catholic hospital chains are continuing to gobble up health care facilities around the country, posing a particular risk to access to reproductive care.

    “Catholic hospitals in Illinois have never provided this care,” said Prater. “Companies like Ascension and Aurora Advocate have bought up several facilities and imposed their values on hospitals, sometimes the only ones available in a community.”

    These institutions may refuse to provide even legal reproductive care, along with contraceptives and gender-affirming health care for trans people.

    In 2020, four of the largest 10 hospital systems were owned by Catholic-affiliated corporations. These institutions already control 40 percent of hospital beds in some parts of the U.S., and they’ve been growing rapidly through mergers and acquisitions.

    For Prater, the punchline is: unions must organize these health care workers, to defend themselves and their patients.

    Meanwhile, where abortion access remains, workloads will snowball. Border states like Illinois will see a huge influx of abortions from surrounding states.

    With staffing levels at a crisis point already, health care unions must fight for wages and conditions that can make these nursing and caregiving jobs sustainable and attractive, and union protections for workers to provide appropriate health care.

    Talk About It

    One more thing that all unions can do is break their silence on reproductive rights. Unions may be cautious about taking a stance on a divisive issue, especially in open shop states and sectors.

    But how divisive is it, really? We know the majority of the country supports the right for people to make decisions about their own bodies.

    Members can engage in these conversations in good faith — particularly around issues of health, autonomy, and the ability to use your professional judgment at work.

  • Carbon Capture Won’t Work, But It Will Funnel Billions to Corporations

    Carbon capture is having a moment, and it’s not hard to see why: As Texas Monthly reports, “According to estimates, the worldwide carbon-capture market is expected to grow from about $2 billion this year to about $7 billion in 2028.”

    Last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law devotes billions to advancing the technology, and atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached their highest levels in human history. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which limits the federal government’s power to reduce climate pollution, is making techno-fixes all the more appealing, and California’s own climate plan appears poised to lean on carbon capture to reduce emissions in accord with the state’s net zero goal.

    There’s just one problem: There is no real evidence that carbon capture can or will do what its optimistic name suggests.

    The popular image of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) – promoted by the fossil fuel industry, politicians and techno-futurists alike — is a power plant equipped with devices that can grab the spewing pollution before it reaches the atmosphere. From there it can be sent somewhere to be safely stored, or perhaps even repurposed.

    But despite billions of dollars and decades of effort invested, no such facilities exist on any meaningful scale.

    The most high-profile CCS projects in the country have been multibillion-dollar failures. Even the world’s largest carbon direct air capture facility that’s currently under construction is expected to remove only 0.0001 percent of the CO2 emitted globally per year.

    So why does carbon capture maintain its trendy status as a bipartisan climate fix? For Democrats frustrated by their inability to pass more meaningful climate legislation, carbon capture has the allure of doing, well, something. And for many voters, it has an intuitive rhetorical appeal: Who wouldn’t want to “capture” carbon pollution?

    For the fossil fuel industry, the appeal of CCS is more complicated — and dangerous. Carbon capture is designed to make us feel relieved about the world-saving technology just around the corner. It sells an easy solution: We can keep the fossil fuel status quo and erase emissions with a new quick-fix. And in fact, it looks as though the status quo will become increasingly worse for the climate. As Michael T. Klare points out, “world oil production is hovering at around 100 million barrels daily and is projected to reach 109 million barrels by 2030, 117 million by 2040, and a jaw-dropping 126 million by 2050.”

    However, even if the theoretical vision of carbon capture were to somehow be realized, it would do nothing to alleviate a host of other grave problems associated with fossil fuels. Carbon capture would not reduce the other forms of deadly air pollution created by fossil fuel plants, or the water contamination caused by fracking, or the toxic waste created by drilling.

    So, what is enabling this foolish CCS trend? Massive subsidies from the federal government. An IRS tax credit program known as 45Q has provided a per-ton credit to companies based on how much carbon dioxide they capture. In total, 10 companies have claimed about a billion dollars over a decade. But a damning 2020 report from the Treasury Department found that almost $900 million in capture credits did not even meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s monitoring and verification guidelines; it remains unclear how much actual pollution is being captured.

    Instead of reining in the program, the 45Q program was expanded in 2020. And last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law dedicates roughly $12 billion to promoting various forms of carbon capture.

    Those funding streams, combined with a desire on the part of companies to promote “climate-friendly” fossil fuels, are driving more CCS projects into the spotlight. Most of these plans are merely theoretical. For example, there are press releases touting carbon capture technology attached to new infrastructure like fracked gas export facilities, but there is precious little evidence to suggest these will ever exist.

    Meanwhile, some projects that are further along, like the massive carbon pipelines being pitched across several Midwestern states, are attracting serious pushback. Farmers and other landowners are resistant to handing over precious land to pipeline companies, while experts are raising questions about the scientific and technical feasibility of the projects — not to mention the public safety concerns.

    While carbon capture has been marked by a series of failures, there are a handful of successful capture facilities in operation. But it’s important to know what “success” looks like: These projects overwhelmingly use the captured carbon in a process known as “enhanced oil recovery,” a fanciful term for pumping more oil out of existing wells. Extracting and burning more oil is not a victory for the climate.

    On the one hand, carbon capture has been a colossal, expensive failure. But by another measure it’s been a resounding, frightening success. Fossil fuel companies have managed to persuade the federal government to waste billions on false schemes that do nothing to solve the climate crisis. This is terrible news for the planet, and it will only continue to worsen until lawmakers pull the plug on these illusions and get serious about stopping pollution at the source.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Should Grant Clemency to Drone Warfare Whistleblower Daniel Hale

    One year ago this July, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stood in front of Judge Liam O’Grady at his sentencing and explained himself. After a lengthy investigation and prosecution, it was finally the day when Hale would find out if he would spend years in prison for doing something he felt morally obligated to do: Tell the truth about the United States’ drone program.

    While working as a drone analyst in the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan, he witnessed attacks waged against innocent civilians that, to this day, still haunt him. Those experiences eventually led him to blow the whistle on the drone program. Judge O’Grady said Hale wasn’t being punished for telling the truth, but for stealing government documents that disclose that truth. For that, Hale was subjected to a lengthy investigation and prosecution where he was charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was passed over 100 years ago to deal with spies but has been used to prosecute antiwar dissidents and whistleblowers.

    But Daniel Hale is no spy. He is a person who could not live with himself if he did not tell the U.S. people what was being done in their name. Thanks to him, we had proof that the drone program wasn’t as targeted as we were being told. The prosecution accused Hale of leaking the information that was included in “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept. They included Pentagon documents that confirmed that in one drone operation in Afghanistan, 90 percent of the people killed were not the intended target.

    Hale said to Judge O’Grady:

    I am here today to answer for the crime of stealing papers, for which I expect to spend some portion of my life in prison. But what I am really here for is having stolen something that was never mine to take: precious human life, for which I was well-compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended things weren’t happening that were.… Please, I beg you, forgive me, your honor, for taking papers as opposed to the lives of others. I could not, God so help me, have done otherwise.

    That day, Hale was facing 10 years in prison. His friends and family sat in the courtroom holding their breath, waiting to hear how long it would be until they would see him again. Judge O’Grady handed down a sentence of 45 months. Days later, Hale was moved from Alexandria, Virginia, to Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, where he would spend his 33rd birthday. A year later, he is spending the rest of his sentence in the federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

    A particular story was talked about often in the lead up to Hale’s sentencing. When he was in Afghanistan, he saw the U.S. carry out a drone strike on a car that was allegedly being driven by a target. The missile hit the back of the vehicle, and later Hale saw a woman get out of the passenger side and pull two things out of the car before they drove off again. He found out later that the woman had pulled her daughters out of the car. They had been hit by the drone strike. They were 5 and 3 years old.

    Had the strike gone as planned and the target been killed, his wife and children would be considered “collateral damage.” In this case, the “target” drove off while leaving two little girls behind. The ongoing 20-year-long “war on terror” made collateral damage feel so normal to so many back in the U.S. Hale is in prison for showing the world that these stories are not few and far between, but instead are a regular feature of U.S. drone warfare.

    Over years of investigation and prosecution, the U.S. government was never able to prove Hale’s leaks ever harmed anyone: He is not truly in prison for espionage, but for embarrassing the U.S. government for its undemocratic and brutal practices.

    On a few occasions since the sentencing, I have opened up my mailbox in Chicago to letters from the U.S. federal prison in Marion, Illinois, just a few hours south of me — letters from Daniel Hale. I also talk to his friends about what we’ve heard from him to try and piece together what his life may look like. Every conversation begins with: “How is Daniel doing and is he feeling okay? Who has gone to see him in visitation? Who has he written to?” In Marion, Hale is held in a Communications Management Unit that was first designed to deal with people suspected of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

    Communications are heavily monitored. It took Hale six months to get approval to write to me. While no prison sentence would be justifiable, the fact that he is incarcerated in a unit that effectively limits his interaction with the outside world can only be described as cruel and unusual. Hale is a highly sociable person who had plans to write about his experiences and continue deepening relationships with like-minded people. It is near impossible for him to do so in a unit known as “Little Guantánamo.”

    The Drone Papers containing the information that Hale leaked were released during the Barack Obama presidency, and no one came for him. It wasn’t until the beginning of Donald Trump’s assault on whistleblowers that Hale started to face the consequences for his honesty, and what he felt was his duty to humanity. President Joe Biden has an opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump by granting Hale clemency. His revelations harmed no one, and instead helped scores of U.S. Muslims get removed from undemocratic and illegal terrorist watchlists by giving the Council on American Islamic Relations the information that they needed to sue the U.S. government. Any president who values democracy should see that Hale poses no threat to society and grant his release immediately.

    Hale is a powerful writer, and there is a lot to take from his letter to Judge O’Grady and his sentencing statement. However, he hates when his story takes center stage. He blew the whistle on the drone program not because he wanted to go through years of an espionage investigation and spend years of his life behind bars. He did it because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t tell the world the truth.

    In October 2012, a young boy named Zubair was injured along with his sister in a drone attack in Pakistan. Zubair went in front of Congress and said, “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” That has been the reality of the U.S. drone program. That grief has our country’s name written all over it, and it’s up to us to dramatically change that legacy and free the people who dared to tell us the truth at great personal risk.

  • In the Face of Israel’s Violence, Being a Good Parent Means Fighting Colonialism

    What does it mean to be a parent in the face of colonial violence? Parents all over the world are united in their tireless efforts to protect their children from harm and surround them with the conditions they need to thrive. But parents who live in a society structured by settler-colonialism are repeatedly robbed of their capacity to protect their children.

    Amid Israeli brutality, land grabbing, detention, torture and the dehumanization of Palestinians, parents (mothers especially) are forced to conceive of the work of parenting as indistinguishable from a broader struggle to defend Palestinian lands, families and communities. Through grassroots collective initiatives like labor strikes and boycotts of Israeli goods, to mobilization of the masses in the streets, to the podium in leadership positions — as scholars and activists in the classrooms, and as protectors and anchors in their homes — mothers creatively and radically organize around the barriers of the colonialist, racist and sexist Zionist project.

    As a mother and human rights defender in the occupied West Bank, I (Manal Tamimi, one of the coauthors of this article) have been arrested three times by Israeli soldiers. The first arrest occurred in January 2010 when I was protesting in my village. The next occurred in December 2017 in front of Ofer Prison in the West Bank as I protested for the freedom of my niece Ahed Tamimi. The third arrest occurred on International Women’s Day in 2016, when Israeli soldiers raided my home at 3 a.m., accusing me of incitement on social media. And in April 2015 I barely survived an assassination attempt by an Israeli sniper. I had received a threatening message on Twitter that day saying my blood would be spilled in the streets. Then, as I participated in a protest in my village, an Israeli sniper shot at me and hit me in the leg.

    But the horror I experienced in those moments pales in comparison to the time when my mother and I watched my son shackled in an Israeli military court — part of the two-tier legal system of apartheid Palestinians face. Broken and bruised after 25 days of interrogation and torture, my traumatized son could not even recognize his own grandmother. He told us that the torture tactics committed by the Israeli Security Agency had involved its officers threatening to rape his mother (me) if he didn’t provide the statement that Israeli authorities were looking for. In the short period of time it took us to compose this piece, my son, Osama, and my nephew, Waleed, were viciously attacked by Israeli occupying forces with live ammunition that pierced their legs and arms.

    In their brief time on this Earth, the glow of youth has abandoned Osama, Waleed, and many other Palestinian youth who have witnessed and survived the merciless edge of Israel’s state violence. This violence works through Israel’s laws and maintains structural racism via the militarized colonization of Palestinian land and the Palestinian people. The “legality” of it all is rarely challenged by Western governments, but frequently abetted by them.

    With no external protection for their children — certainly not from President Joe Biden — and no accountability for the crimes Israel commits, Palestinian mothers have had to devise programs that no parent should ever contemplate. They began organizing workshops facilitated by former political prisoners, lawyers and psychologists and aimed at teaching children as young as 10 years old how to survive the many types of psychological abuse and physical violence utilized by the occupying forces during arrest, interrogation and detention.

    The workshops were created as an initiative led by Nabi Saleh families starting in 2013 after the Israeli army began to intentionally and aggressively arrest children in Nabi Saleh as a form of collective punishment and as a way to incriminate adults by pressuring and instilling fear in minors to provide statements.

    The workshops are akin to “the talk” that Black parents in the United States are forced to have with their children regarding how to interact with racially charged law enforcement that systematically, intentionally and violently targets them.

    Exposure to state-sponsored Israeli violence results in profound psychological distress. Palestinian children and their parents are traumatized by the severe losses and disruptions in their lives. They often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. To ease the psychological suffering of their children, parents in Tamimi’s village, Nabi Saleh, also collaborated with trauma counselors from The Palestine Institute at An-Najah University and the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture. The trauma counselors have sought to help children struggling with high forms of stress and anxiety process their experiences and provide them with stress managing strategies to cope with the violence perpetrated against them and their families.

    With the prevalence of video technology, parents’ efforts to help their children survive settler-colonialism includes training Palestinian children on how to use their cellphone cameras to document the egregious acts committed by the racist state and its apartheid policies in the occupied West Bank. My (Manal Tamimi’s) niece, Janna Jihad, the inimitable teenage Palestinian journalist, uses her phone as a tool to broadcast the Israeli army’s oppressive and often deadly treatment of Palestinians.

    Similarly, viral phone videos are used to film U.S. police brutality against Black people: Two years ago, teenager Darnella Frazier captured the final, agonizing moments of George Floyd’s life. Without the bravery of children like Jenna and Darnella who secure the footage in risky situations, people around the globe would have a narrower view of how a militarized occupation has devastated the lives of millions of Palestinians, and disrupts every aspect of daily life for people of color in the U.S. Without video, these cases would simply disappear or never register properly in the first place.

    While some tenets of parenting are universal, the tragic reality is that there’s an additional layer for Palestinian parents and parents of color living in the U.S. who are actively dismantling the systems of white supremacy and colonization.

    While Palestinians have always tended to their crops, and cultivated their orange groves and olive trees, Palestinian mothers accelerated their home gardening during the first intifada as a means to boycott Israeli products, resist occupation and raise awareness of Israel’s oppressive actions. In the city of Beit Sahour, Palestinian families refused to pay taxes to Israel in order to slow the economy fueling the annexation of their land. When education itself became criminalized during the first intifada, and Israeli officials closed schools and universities indefinitely, parents carved out innovative paths by developing underground education programs, a mind-saving movement.

    Despite the shootings and brutal beatings that were encouraged by then-Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who ordered Israeli forces to “break the bones” of Palestinian protesters, mothers were also massively represented in the streets directly confronting belligerent Israeli soldiers.

    Moreover, we would be remiss not to recognize the mothers in Gaza, one of the most difficult places on Earth to mother and be mothered. For the past 15 years, they have been held captive by a devastating land siege and naval blockade which leaves mothers with insufficient resources to meet the basic needs of their loved ones — food insecurity, clean water and limited access to health care and medical supplies. Yet, in the face of this deadly blockade and heavy-handed military operations, we witness mothers and community caretakers like Rouzan al-Najjar, the paramedic, who was deliberately shot at and killed while providing life-saving emergency medical assistance during the Great March of Return in 2018. We took notice of Al-Najjar’s mother who amid her grief donned a medic’s vest and joined the protests to complete her daughter’s mission of attending to the injured.

    These indispensable and essential acts of mothering carry immense power and form effective political strategies for resisting settler-colonial occupation. They build on a proud history of putting economic and international pressure on Israel to negotiate and recognize freedom and equal rights for Palestinians.

    Palestinian mothers continue on the front lines despite the failures of the Oslo Accords. These negotiation efforts were largely determined by Israel’s political ambitions of complete and total domination rather than freedom for Palestinians. In those negotiations, for all their shortcomings, Palestinians refused to relinquish their right of return or rights to self-determination and independence.

    Today, Israel insists on advancing its political ambitions by escalating its repression and assault on parenting with an aggressive removal campaign in East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah. While raising their children in the most oppressive conditions, parents confront the expansionist project and displacement of their families in the courts and on the streets. Their deliberate actions are a symbol of our people’s insistence on complete liberation, and 74 years later, they continue to resist settler-colonialism in both visible and invisible ways — they resist as matriarchs, community organizers, scholars, artists, writers, and more.

    Consequently, when we talk about justice for Palestine we must reinforce and uphold that the liberation of Palestine is a feminist and reproductive justice issue by acknowledging Israel’s assault on Palestinian women and children. Despite the devastating toll occupation has on the physical and emotional health of parents, they continue to engage in the struggle for the right of return, self-determination and an end to apartheid Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine. This cannot be accomplished without the political interventions, sacrifices, wisdom and leadership of Palestinian mothers.

    The assault on Palestinians and their ancestral lands with U.S. weaponry continues unabated. It is inconceivable that members of Congress like Jan Schakowsky refuse to do the bare minimum and sign the Palestinian Children and Families Act (House Resolution 2590). With the stroke of a pen, U.S. lawmakers can fundamentally change this country’s relationship to the apartheid state. If passed, this life-affirming bill could protect and save the lives of children like Ahmad Manasra, who remains captive in solitary confinement despite his deteriorating mental health condition, his symptoms likely exacerbated by the abuse perpetrated against him by Israeli prison authorities.

    Palestinians’ lives are being stolen and kidnapped. They are under constant threat of being expelled from their homes and lands in areas like Masafer Yatta and Sheikh Jarrah, and journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh are deliberately targeted for exposing the atrocities committed by the racist state. The U.S. government is complicit by not standing up to these abuses even when U.S. citizens are fatally killed by Israeli forces — as was also the case this year with Palestinian American grandfather Omar Assad.

    Despite the spectacle of inhumanity, Palestinians refuse to submit to Israel’s escalation in violence. They will not sit idly by as U.S. lawmakers debate — or ignore — the merits of HR 2590. Instead, they respond to Zionism and apartheid with popular resistance.

    Living under Israeli colonization and in the face of enormous human rights violations necessitates resistance and direct-action campaigns by exiles, refugees and those living under Israeli occupation. Palestinian parents, particularly mothers, are rising to this challenge. President Joe Biden’s recent trip to the region, however, makes clear that not only will his administration not help such efforts, it will directly stand in the way of Palestinian liberation. In this, Biden and his predecessor are united. The disastrous consequences will be borne by Palestinian young people and the parents who seek both to protect them and to advance their liberation.

  • Merrick Garland’s January 6 Investigation Appears to Be Zeroing In on Trump

    During a Sunday interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, Attorney General Merrick Garland did his best impression of Sam, the hyper-patriotic all-business eagle from The Muppet Show. “We pursue justice without fear or favor,” said Garland. “We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for events surrounding January 6, or any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable. That’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

    Garland certainly sounded like a man Donald Trump should be concerned about, and yet the interview yielded a near-universal “meh” from those who have been following the investigations into the Capitol attack. Nothing Garland said on Sunday was sufficient to disabuse anyone of the notion that the 1/6 House Select Committee appears to be running laps around a somnambulant Justice Department.

    Recent reports that Justice was surprised by revelations brought forth by the House investigation did little to bolster confidence. Garland’s stout proclamations on Sunday, to borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln, fell on the audience like a wet blanket.

    What a difference a few days make. In what I overwhelmingly suspect was no accident of timing, both The New York Times and Washington Post just delivered blazing new reports on the state of the Justice Department’s 1/6 investigation.

    The Times: “Federal prosecutors have directly asked witnesses in recent days about former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in efforts to reverse his election loss, a person familiar with the testimony said on Tuesday, suggesting that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation has moved into a more aggressive and politically fraught phase.”

    The Post: “The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won.”

    Not to be outdone, ABC News dropped a significant brick of its own: “Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top adviser to then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, has recently cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation into the events of Jan. 6, according to sources familiar with the matter. The Justice Department reached out to her following her testimony a month ago before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the sources said.”

    According to the Times and Post, Justice Department investigators appear to be focusing intently on dual avenues of inquiry: (1) that Trump and his people may have committed seditious conspiracy and conspiracy by formulating an attack on Congress; (2) that Trump and his people may have committed fraud in pursuit of their “fake electors” scheme to send illegitimate elector slates to Vice President Pence on Jan. 6. Pressuring the Justice Department to claim the election was tainted could also amount to fraud. Hutchinson’s involvement in the investigation is also significant, as she was by far the most compelling witness before the House Select Committee.

    These reports also serve to underscore the recent testimony of Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel. Both were present at the Jan. 4 meeting where Trump leaned hard into Pence to try to convince him to jump on board with the fake electors scam. Pence’s ultimate refusal to do so two days later stands as a fulcrum moment in U.S. history.

    A separate Times report shined a bright light on the absurdity – and brazen illegality — of the electors scheme, using the emails of the perpetrators to do so. “Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack,” reads the report, “including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as ‘fake.’”

    Never-Trumper Republican lawyer George Conway noted on Twitter, “If you had asked me to hypothesize, for illustrative purposes, a set of emails that prosecutors would find helpful in proving a fake-elector fraud conspiracy, I would not have come up with anything nearly as incriminating as the emails that the Times just reported on today.”

    So there’s all that, which is a whole lot. Nobody at Justice has come out and directly said Trump is under criminal investigation, and the question of whether Garland will do anything before the 2022 elections remains open, but the attorney general and his pals in the news just dropped a big “ssshhhh” on everyone who’s been worried they’ve just been playing Solitaire up at the Kennedy Building this whole time. This is an entirely different game, and it might just be for keeps.

  • New York Post Announces COVID Is Over. It’s Still Running Rampant.

    Good news, everyone! The COVID-19/Omicron/BA.5 pandemic is apparently all over! Done! Gone! How do I know this? Because the editorial board of the Murdoch-owned fa-chrissakes New York Post says so. Why? Because President Biden is still alive. “Biden’s mild COVID case is proof the pandemic is over, and everyone should stop pretending otherwise,” reads the headline. All that’s missing is a “So there!” at the end.

    I’m just going to splash this on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up… but isn’t it at least possible the president of the United States is recovering so well in part because he’s, well, the president of the United States? With immediate access to the best health care and COVID treatments on the planet? That certainly sounds reasonable, even as an unreasonable number of people do not have such health care opportunities. And the New York Post doesn’t even begin to consider the fact that scores of people exist who have health conditions that render them severely immunocompromised and much more vulnerable to severe COVID than Biden.

    “We wish the president a rapid recovery,” announces the opening of the editorial. “So far, it looks like his case is high-profile evidence that the pandemic is completely over — that Americans’ anti-coronavirus efforts should focus exclusively on getting jabs to those who need them and treating cases as they pop up. That means absolutely no mandates — not for mass masking and so on, and not even for vaccination (except perhaps for special cases such as those who care for the elderly).”

    Ah, the masks, ye gods and little fishes, the bedeviled masks. Never in human history has such an amalgam of wanna-be tough guys been so thoroughly undone by Band-Aid-level technology. Do the folks on the Post ed. board understand that one of the reasons this nightmare has dragged on for so long is because Donald Trump – aided and abetted by conservative news outlets owned by Mr. Murdoch – went out of their way to shit-talk the use of masks because Trump thought they made him look weak?

    Increased infection rates caused by this unconscionable behavior ran headlong into the rise of international variants that dominate the pandemic today, variants now virulent enough to get around the masks. The daily infection rates still tally in the thousands. That’s not “over” by even the most wildly irresponsible metric. It’s a perfect circle.

    Trump has been yelling about Jesus a lot lately, and the Fox News empire has long fashioned itself a Christian-friendly organization… but their line on masking is yet another example of their hypocrisy. A major reason to mask was to protect others from you in case you have COVID and don’t know it. Put another way, wearing a mask was a small sacrifice you made to help your neighbor. Unless I read the book wrong, that is pretty much the bone-marrow definition of what Christianity is supposed to be about. The hypocrisy is boggling.

    “Even as many of our policymakers have focused on deaths,” writes Kevin Kavanagh, MD for Infection Control Today, “long COVID-19 is continuing to take a toll on society by impacting multiple organ systems. Long COVID-19 has been found to occur in 30% of patients treated for COVID-19, and up to 70% have symptoms of brain fog, memory, or other cognitive problems. It also can have a profound impact on the heart and other organs. Also, long COVID-19 is responsible for approximately doubling COVID-19 deaths with 8.39 per 1000 additional deaths occurring after the acute infection.”

    And after hearing this, we are supposed to accept that COVID is “over”?

    “Hospitals across the country are grappling with widespread staffing shortages, complicating preparations for a potential Covid-19 surge as the BA.5 subvariant drives up cases, hospital admissions and deaths,” reports Krista Mahr for Politico. “The current wave, in which the new number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has risen more than 40 percent in the last month, is also putting fresh stress on facilities as federal funding for the pandemic response is running out, leaving some with less flexibility to hire more staff if they need to…. ‘There is growing concern that this money has run out,’ said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety policy at the American Hospital Association. ‘It’s not really getting sufficient attention.’”

    Over?

    “All over, you say?” I wrote back in June. “Someone forgot to tell that to the preschool-aged son of my dear friend and colleague, a 4-year-old who presented with a viciously spiked fever over the weekend. As with nearly 4 million children in the U.S., my colleague’s child is susceptible to seizures if his temperature rises too high. When the seizure set in this time, he became unresponsive and had to be rushed to the emergency room, which fortunately had room for him. As the medical staff worked to reduce his fever, the diagnosis arrived: COVID-19…. You really can’t peddle the ‘all this is behind us’ bullshit to my colleague with her son in the emergency room this weekend, or to my other coworker whose toddler contracted the virus in February and who had to sit up all night listening as their child labored to breathe.”

    And then there’s this, the inconvenient weevil in the porridge: Me, and the millions like me who deal with medical issues that leave us permanently open to being flayed by the virus. For me, it’s bad lungs, a gift from a prior bout of pneumonia. Many others are immunocompromised for a variety of reasons – cancer, heart disease, various disorders – and our lives get a little bit worse, a little bit smaller, a little bit more terrifying, every time a large media microphone coughs out another “reason” for people to let down their guard and act like this is over for everyone.

    “This pandemic is done,” proclaims the conclusion of the Post editorial, “and it’s not coming back. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And anyone still pushing fear (status-seeking ‘experts,’ power-seeking pols, etc.) is almost certainly working an agenda that has nothing to do with your best interests.”

    Nice of them to end this with such a rich vein of bullshit. “Working an agenda that has nothing to do with your best interests,” you say? I think I know what that’s like. That’s like working an anti-mask agenda to try and get a terrible Republican president re-elected. That’s like working a viciously capitalist agenda to hurl unprotected workers into harm’s way so the owners and bosses can start making money again.

    That’s the same crap we’ve been hearing from the same self-serving nonsense vectors almost since this whole thing began. It is wrong and dangerous all day long.

  • ICE Is Using Data From LexisNexis to Skirt Sanctuary Laws and Deport Immigrants

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has found an insidious new way to work around the hard-fought “sanctuary” protections that hundreds of counties across the United States have adopted to prevent local law enforcement agencies from sharing data with its agents: a dizzying, privatized surveillance apparatus constructed by the database corporation LexisNexis.

    ICE now has a specialized LexisNexis subscription that allows it to obtain private and public data without a warrant, without subpoenas and without requests to local police departments or sheriff’s offices.

    For the bargain basement price of around $4.4 million a year, ICE agents buy access to vast reams of commercial and public data — 1.5 billion bankruptcy records, 77 million business contacts, 330 million unique cell phone numbers, 11.3 billion name and address combinations, 6.6 billion vehicle registrations and 6.5 billion property records, according to its website.

    Through its partnership with LexisNexis, ICE now has access to “Accurint,” a research-and-locate tool tailored for government and law enforcement. This portal is being used by ICE agents in a bid to skirt sanctuary ordinances across the country.

    Accurint’s “jail booking search” (part of the Accurint Virtual Crime Center) returns a nondescript webpage: A mugshot and a dossier of personal information — name, address, weight, height, citizenship status, Social Security number, employer, and more.

    It’s not sleek (the site mostly contains simple black-and-white text fields), but the lackluster interface hides a pernicious, possibly illegal surveillance tool.

    The scale of surveillance here is astounding. Accurint is a product of LexisNexis, one of the world’s largest commercial data brokers, which boasts access to more than “84 billion public records from over 10,000 disparate sources” — think driver’s licenses, court records, cell phone subscriptions, cable or electricity bills, arrest data, property records, and more — for its customers.

    As part of a contract worth up to $22.1 million signed with LexisNexis in 2021, thousands of ICE agents can, with a few keystrokes, access real-time jail booking data, including incarceration status and release date, on millions of people across the country. The site is updated as often as every 15 minutes.

    A Sprawling Surveillance Apparatus Created by LexisNexis

    Accurint is just a small part of a sprawling surveillance apparatus that gives ICE agents access to one of the world’s largest troves of personal information: A vast database containing info on hundreds of millions of people that was handed over to ICE as part of the same LexisNexis contract. The data — which includes names, addresses, phone information, utility bills, arrest and release data, and so much more — is simply bought and sold, available to ICE as part of a tidy subscription package.

    LexisNexis says it has 283 million active “LexIDs” in its database — its term for individual dossiers of personal information — meaning many tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people are in its databases. And it’s not only the initial targets swept up in this digital dragnet: A single search can return information on multiple people, as noted by the company itself. LexisNexis says its database can “find connections” between the initial targets and “relatives and business associates.”

    If you’re a target of surveillance by ICE, your friends, your family, your colleagues and your associates could all be surveilled as well — pulled into a massive, digital trawling effort by immigration enforcement that goes back to the Obama era and has involved multiple data broker contractors.

    LexisNexis signed this contract the same month as ICE’s previous data broker of choice, Thomson Reuters, saw its own ICE contract for these services expire. Since then, Thomson Reuters has come under increasing government and shareholder pressure. In December of last year, Sen. Ron Wyden successfully pushed for access to utility information to be cut from Thomson Reuters, and has continued pushing for the Consumer Protection Bureau to take further actions against data brokers. In April this year, Thomson Reuters announced it would review its ICE contracts for potential human rights violations, possibly ending its work with ICE, in response to shareholder pressure generated as part of our #NoTechforICE campaign.

    In documents unearthed via Freedom of Information Act requests, the immigration justice groups Mijente and Just Futures Law showed that ICE agents searched LexisNexis more than 1.2 million times over just seven months (between March 2021 and September 2021) — and that hundreds of thousands of searches were conducted by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the division of ICE responsible for deportations.

    Worse, this data is now being used as a backdoor to skirt sanctuary ordinances across the country — ICE is now often able to access the data it seeks through this privatized database even in cities and states that have hard-fought laws to prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE agents on deportations.

    These sanctuary protections, a legacy of years-long immigration organizing that became particularly urgent under Trump, are being purposefully undermined by ICE.

    In a government contracting document shared by Mijente and Just Futures Law, ICE’s stated rationale for contracting with LexisNexis was the “increase in the number of law enforcement agencies and state or local governments” that limited data sharing with ICE as part of sanctuary ordinances.

    In hundreds of jurisdictions where laws prevent local law enforcement from helping ICE with its deportations by informing agents when someone is released from jail, for instance, the agency can simply buy this data directly from third parties like LexisNexis. ICE no longer has to rely on local police officers or sheriff’s deputies to tell them when certain people are being released from jail, when they have a parole hearing, or when they’ll next be at the courthouse. ICE has this data directly and can send its agents to pick people up, arrest them and ultimately deport them.

    Avenues for Resistance

    But cities and counties are fighting back. In Chicagoland on Wednesday, Cook County Commissioner Alma E. Anaya is holding a public hearing investigating whether the county’s contract with LexisNexis and ICE’s contracts with data brokers may violate the county’s sanctuary ordinance. The ICE Chicago field office conducted more than 13,000 searches in the seven-month period covered by our FOIAs — the most of any city in the country except San Diego.

    The hearing — the first time that a legislator will investigate ICE’s use of data brokers to skirt sanctuary protections — was prompted by the #NoTechforICE campaign’s recent research report detailing how LexisNexis is used by ICE in Colorado to skirt the state’s sanctuary laws. The report’s findings suggested that ICE is engaging in this practice across the country.

    Advocates with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) have been organizing in their state, too. Our joint report with CIRC uncovered massive conflicts of interest whereby the very same law enforcement officials tasked with upholding the state’s various sanctuary ordinances also sat on the board of LexisNexis, the company contracted to skirt them. Since then, the group has been meeting with sheriffs and pushing Colorado legislators to update the state’s sanctuary policies to prevent the kind of workarounds that ICE is exploiting in Illinois.

    And the librarian and legal communities are fighting back too. LexisNexis and its largest competitors, like Thomson Reuters, are used widely by the research, legal and journalism community: academics, librarians, lawyers, journalists, and others all scour LexisNexis databases to find sources, case files, news articles, and more.

    These same communities have been calling out the companies on their ICE contracts: In just the last month, librarians and advocates have protested outside the American Librarian Association’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., and the American Association of Law Libraries annual conference in Denver, demanding that LexisNexis cut its contracts with ICE. More than 2,500 librarians, law students, scholars and legal professionals have signed Mijente’s petition urging LexisNexis to stop working with ICE, part of the #NoTechforICE campaign we at Mijente have been leading since 2018.

    That campaign has pulled together students, tech workers, abolitionists, academics, librarians, lawyers, shareholders, and a variety of others who oppose ICE and Silicon Valley’s collaboration with deportation forces, targeting the contracts that Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril have with ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP). We have mobilized hundreds-strong protests outside tech company headquarters, organized shareholder resolutions at leading tech companies, published in-depth research reports, and once brought a cage to Burning Man in a bid to stop the anti-immigrant work done at these tech firms.

    This surveillance, powered by LexisNexis, is a danger to all immigrant communities. Regardless of who occupies the White House, ICE has a mandate to detain and deport every undocumented person in this country, a mandate it follows under Democrats and Republicans alike. And these surveillance contracts are signed for years at a time, outlasting the policies of any one administration.

    In 2024, the presidential administration may well change. If it does, its immigration agents will have a turnkey-ready surveillance system to target millions of people across the country.

    ICE’s attempts to find a data workaround to sanctuary city laws is a natural consequence of this single-minded focus on deportations — regardless of the surveillance required and regardless of the legal protections in place.

    Sanctuary cities and counties, librarians and lawyers, and even the workers at these data broker companies themselves must resist as one and organize against these contracts. It’s the only way we can ensure a surveillance-free future for immigrants in this country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Outgoing Boris Johnson Government Passes Anti-Union Law Amid Looming Strike Wave

    The spring and summer of 2022 have been seasons of discontent in the United Kingdom. Not only was Prime Minister Boris Johnson toppled after a cascade of all-too-public scandals eroded confidence in his government, but the economy has also been hit by a slew of major industrial actions.

    A series of rolling strikes have brought the country’s rail network and London’s underground rail system to a standstill on several days over the past months, with the prospect of more strikes through August. Ten thousand underground system workers struck over efforts by Transport for London, the body that oversees the city’s transport, to cut more than 500 jobs and to “review” the pensions package negotiated by the unions. Railway workers are striking over pay: The union claims railway companies froze pay several years ago, and in the current round of negotiations they are proposing small increases that don’t even begin to match the near-10 percent inflation the U.K. economy is currently experiencing. They are also striking over efforts by owners to cut the number of maintenance crews on the lines.

    Strikes aren’t limited to the transit sector. Pay increases in most industries are failing to come close to cost of living increases: The Office of National Statistics reports that this year real wages have declined by 2.8 percent, the largest such decline since records on this began being kept 21 years ago. As a result, unions have gotten more assertive. Moreover, while the public’s support for striking workers is uneven, sympathies have shifted towards the unions in recent months, and large numbers of Brits polled do support strike actions — if not across the board, then by workers in particular industries, such as firefighters, nurses and doctors.

    The National Health Service, Britain’s beleaguered publicly funded health care system, is facing the threat of strikes, but not only by nurses. Doctors are dismayed by a new contract that would force them to offer primary care appointments to patients on evenings and weekends, presumably as a way to clear backlogs in access to care built up during the pandemic.

    Firefighters are also threatening to walk off the job, as are teachers, civil servants, postal workers, telecommunications engineers and even some lawyers. Arguably not since the late 1970s have so many sectors of the U.K. economy faced industrial action simultaneously.

    The Conservative government is as hostile to trade union rights as the GOP in the United States, viewing these strikes as something akin to an existential threat. The U.K. transport secretary has attempted to discredit the striking railway workers by claiming they are being led by “Marxists.”

    Nearly 40 years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used the miners’ strike as a way to break the most militant of Britain’s unions and usher in neoliberalism. Today, the government has rushed through legislation essentially greenlighting the hiring of scab workers, via temp agencies, to fill labor shortfalls created by workers going on strike.

    Seven years ago, the Conservative Party tried to enact a similar reform. But the change ran into a barrage of criticism from the Regulatory Policy Committee, a governmental watchdog agency that looks at the credibility of proposed legislation, which concluded that the benefits to employers would actually be negligible, not least because of the difficulty of finding large numbers of skilled temp workers to stand in at short notice for strikers. Ultimately, because of the committee’s findings, and its damning conclusion that the proposal wouldn’t actually save employers any money, the law change wasn’t enacted.

    Now, with the country mired in industrial strife, and with the government in shambles, the outgoing Johnson and his colleagues have decided that the time is right to resurrect this scab-labor charter.

    The law, which kicked in on July 21, allows businesses to rapidly access pools of temporary workers from employment agencies to, in the words of the government press release on the change, “plug essential positions.” This undoes nearly 50 years of labor law in the U.K., since unions pressured a beleaguered Conservative government in 1973 to ban the practice of temp hires being used as strikebreakers; since then, it has been against the law in the U.K. for employment agencies from farming out workers to break strikes. The law was updated in 2003, but essentially remained as it had been since the 1970s.

    The new legislation, which was rushed through parliament in the last weeks of the session, after members of parliament dispatched Johnson but before they went on their summer recess, also quadruples the penalties that courts can assess against unions deemed to be involved in illegal strikes, raising the fine from £250,000 to £1 million.

    The language of the law change is unambiguous in its anti-union ambitions. It states that:

    The Government is committed to ensuring strikes only happen as the result of a clear, democratic decision and commits to tackling the disproportionate impact of strikes on important public services. In addition, there are sectors in which industrial action has a wider impact on members of the public that is disproportionate and unfair. Strikes can prevent people from getting to work and prevent businesses from managing their workforces effectively.

    In other words, if a strike is actually effective, and thus inconveniences people — which is literally the aim of such actions — it becomes illegitimate and ought to be broken.

    The bill continued that, “Once this instrument comes into force, employment businesses will be permitted to supply temporary workers (agency workers) to employers facing industrial action. The workers supplied by employment businesses will be permitted to perform the work normally carried out by those workers taking part in industrial action.”

    This is a fiercely anti-union position, and in response UNISON, the largest union in the country, has already announced that it plans to take the government to court to try to block the new law from taking effect. Yet, despite the ominous timbre of the new law, it’s not at all clear that, ultimately, it will end up being anything much more than right-wing, populist symbolism.

    Like the U.S., Britain is facing huge labor shortages (there are more than 1.3 million job vacancies at the moment), a crisis that has been worsened by Brexit having led to hundreds of thousands of workers from the continent leaving the U.K. and returning to European Union countries. Given this, the idea that temp agencies could quickly provide thousands of skilled firefighters, teachers, nurses or train drivers at short notice is little more than a fiction. But it’s a convenient fantasy for a Conservative Party mired in a messy leadership contest in which the candidates have vied with each other to prove their hardline, Thatcherite credentials. The party and its standard-bearers are desperate to prove to the Conservatives’ political base that it is only they who are able to get “tough” on workers whose strike actions are causing inconveniences to Brits right at the start of the summer holiday season.

    This isn’t a serious industrial policy, nor is it even an effective anti-union policy. Rather, it’s the floundering and the posturing of a party increasingly at the mercy of events beyond its control. It won’t end Britain’s summer of discontent. It probably won’t make much of a difference to the Conservative Party’s downward spiral in public opinion polls. It certainly won’t solve the underlying problem that soaring inflation is rapidly corroding the real wages of workers in the U.K., thus triggering a huge upswing in the number of strikes. But it might allow the new leaders of the party to at least pretend that they’re wielding a sharp sword against political and economic menaces that, seemingly, are now lurking around every corner.

    Meanwhile, Britain’s unions are embracing more militant strike tactics than they have since the Thatcher years, and much of the public is supporting them despite the inconveniences that result. Far from weakening Britain’s union movement, the new laws regarding temp workers seem likely to harden union stances and trigger even more strike action over the coming months.

  • If Trump Wins in 2024, Christian Nationalism Could Reign Supreme in Government

    In the Movie Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, evil Emperor Palpatine transmits a message to all stormtrooper commanders: “Execute Order 66.” Immediately, the troopers begin slaughtering Jedi wherever they find them, and the massacre spans the galaxy. Only a few escape, Yoda being one, and when it is all over, the Jedi have essentially ceased to exist.

    A similar idea appears to have been rattling around in the gumball machine that is Donald Trump’s mind since the second half of his tenure. It is an executive order they call “Schedule F,” which Trump first signed in October of 2020 after his team compiled it in secret. President Biden rescinded the order shortly after taking office, but Trump has made it clear that Schedule F would be central to his first 100 days in office if he wins in 2024.

    Schedule F involves nothing less than the obliteration of vast swaths of the federal workforce, who would reportedly be replaced by employees loyal to Trump and his madding MAGA horde. It is the realization of Steve Bannon’s war on the administrative state, combined with Trump’s apparently bottomless need to inflict chaotic pain in the name of revenge, and would damage the function of the federal government for generations.

    There is always a certain amount of employee turnover from one administration to the next; some 4,000 jobs are considered “political,” or are part of the spoils system victorious politicians and parties use to reward loyalty. Recall in March 2017, when Trump ordered then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire 46 United States attorneys. This was an abrupt move, but not unprecedented; my own father was a U.S. attorney in Alabama, a Clinton appointee, and he got broomed out when George W. Bush took office in 2001. More recently, “The Biden administration will begin removing all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys appointed during the Trump administration, with two exceptions,” NBC News reported in February 2021.

    This is not that, as Axios’s Jonathan Swan has meticulously explained:

    Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say….

    They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

    These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

    There are certainly arguments to be made in favor of streamlining the massive federal government bureaucracy, notwithstanding Ronald Reagan’s poisoned rhetoric about government being the problem; that line of his has been a plague upon the land since he dropped it, but the idea of increased efficiency is not terrible on its face.

    Like so much else in the Republican policy universe, Schedule F is bad news cloaked in a deceptively simple concept. This is not about improving government. It is about transforming government into an engine of Trump’s wrath, and would come into play if he returns to the White House just when the GOP is pushing the idea that state legislatures should decide who wins elections. Currently, the Republican Party controls some 30 state legislatures, and Trump still controls the Republican Party.

    Besides Trump himself, who would stand to benefit most from such a massive governmental power grab? The answer lies out in the hustings, all the places where loyalty to Trump is not only the coin of the realm, but an actual religious obligation. Insider reports:

    According to Christianity Today, Christian nationalism is “the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way.” Christian nationalists believe the US is and should remain a “Christian nation.” They also believe in freedom of religion, but that Christianity should have a “privileged position in the public square,” the outlet reported.

    A CNN report published Sunday asserts an even darker side to the ideology, claiming Christian nationalists use theology to justify sexism and racism as a means to attain an ideal White Christian America. The report said such ideas were becoming increasingly common in churches around the nation. After Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried crosses or invoked theology to justify their actions, some argued the insurrection also represented a “Christian revolt.”

    Donald Trump has mastered the art of speaking to the core beliefs of this growing segment of extremist Christianity. “We will not break, we will not yield, we will never give in, we will never give up, we will never, ever, ever back down,” he told a worshipful crowd of young conservatives in Tampa on Saturday. “As long as we are confident and united, the tyrants we are fighting do not stand a chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God, and God alone.”

    “As young conservatives met inside the Tampa Convention Center,” reports ABC News, “a small group of Nazi supporters showed up outside, holding up racist imagery and shouting racial epithets at passersby. The group held up a red Nazi swastika flag, one with the SS logo on it, a Florida state flag, and other signs, including anti-semitic images on posters.”

    Those clowns should stop showboating and get their resumes in order. If Trump wins in 2024, there could be big government job opportunities for people who believe Jesus signed the Declaration of Independence and the swastika is a Christian symbol. The rest of us, I imagine, will be headed for the hills just like Yoda.

  • We Can’t Build Real Power by Defending Democrats. We Must Organize From Below.

    The United States Constitution is failing: Its anti-democratic structures are creating a crisis of legitimacy and an inability to address a cascade of social crises. This is a problem endemic to liberal democracies, as the contradictions between political democracy on the one hand, and the tyranny of capital and ruling class control of politics on the other become heightened.

    Part of the crisis we face is the disjuncture between the sense of horror and urgency from the events of the last months and the gross inaction from politicians, particularly Democrats. Less than two weeks after a white supremacist attack on Black shoppers in Buffalo, New York, another gunman murdered children and their teachers in a school in Uvalde, Texas.

    In the same month as these mass murders, a leaked Supreme Court decision from an abortion case in Mississippi threatened to undo 50 years of legal precedent and end the right to abortion. As June drew to a close, what many had once considered an impossibility happened as Roe v. Wade was officially overturned. The decision was all the more jarring for its disregard of the health of millions who can become pregnant and the basic right to decide one’s own future.

    In the same week that Roe was overturned in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, shocking testimony at the January 6 congressional hearings described former President Donald Trump’s attempts to join the insurrection at the Capitol and confirmed that he knew that his supporters were armed and calling for the death of the vice president.

    All this is against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; at least six natural disasters in the last month from floods, to droughts and heat waves driven by climate change; inflation stemming from the war in Ukraine and out-of-control corporate profits; an economy teetering on the edge of recession; an urban crisis in housing prices and homelessness, and others.

    Meanwhile, the party in power is doing nothing substantial to address this onslaught. Repeated inaction on the key issues of our times has led to a congressional approval rating of just 16 percent as of June. The Supreme Court is likewise suffering a credibility crisis on a scale unseen since its 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which reversed decades of precedent around Black citizenship.

    This problem is structural; the Constitution was designed to limit democratic participation from the average person. The fundamentally anti-democratic political structures of the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court have given outsized influence to rural conservative voters and the rich. It’s not just a bug; it’s baked into the design of the U.S. political system. Because of anti-democratic measures like the filibuster, even with Democratic control of both houses of Congress, the majority party has been unable to act. On top of this, the Supreme Court has now been captured by a far right movement unconcerned with broad social legitimacy and the niceties of democratic procedure.

    At the presidential level, Joe Biden’s dithering in the face of historic circumstances is leading to a crisis of legitimacy not just for his administration, but for the very structure of constitutional governance. With these mounting failures, U.S. political discourse is increasingly shaped by the recognition of intractable contradictions at the heart of our Constitution.

    Left Strategies

    For activists and organizers of the left, we need to take stock of this moment if we hope to survive the coming decades and move history in a more humane direction. While the crisis of legitimacy is growing, there is currently no mass organized force from the left that is addressing all of these concerns. Some continue to argue for a U.S. social democracy to be achieved through the very political structures that are failing all around us. Still other longtime voices on the left cling to a strategy of backing the Democrats.

    At present, the most vocal and visible groups that point to these political failures and offer a “revolutionary” alternative, if odious for its inhumanity, are on the far right. The January 6 insurrection and the degree to which Trump continues to hold legitimacy speaks to the deep desire for a radical break with democracy on the right.

    It is notable that the far right is turning away from seeing itself as extensions of the state and defenders of the established order to being in conflict with the “deep state” and liberal elites. In addition to January 6 itself, far right militia membership grew after the Capitol insurrection and groups like the Proud Boys have infiltrated the Republican Party in Miami, Florida. Recently, the far right attacked public libraries and led violent marches in liberal bastions like Boston and Philadelphia.

    On the other hand, the left lacks the organized structures and political articulation to counter the growth of the right in U.S. politics. Further, we lack the ability to articulate an alternative to the current direction when so many on the left conflate ideas of pragmatism and political power with defense of a decaying political order.

    In the short term, the prospects for change in a positive direction are grim, but it doesn’t have to be this way. With even a little organization, coordination and consistency from the sections of the left that adhere to a vision of radical social change, the possibility of pushing history in a liberatory direction remains.

    Democrats Flounder

    While most feel the aforementioned crises acutely, political leaders remain aloof from the concerns of regular people. In the face of the unprecedented attacks on the government from the far right, the violence against schoolchildren and Black shoppers, the climate crisis and the reversal of Roe, the Biden administration and Democrats have articulated no political strategy other than more calls to fundraise and vote.

    For example, in a recent feature on California Sen. Dianne Feinstein published by The Cut, the senator asked the periodical’s readers to trust her on the ability of establishment Democrats to act decisively. Meanwhile, establishment Democrats repeatedly appeals for the unquestioning trust of their constituents, while behind the scenes they continue to block meaningful reform. Famously, former President Barack Obama’s only intervention in the 2020 Democratic primary elections was to block Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from gaining the party’s presidential nomination.

    More recently, Vice President Kamala Harris responded “Do what?” when a CNN reporter pressed her about voter demands to act boldly in the face of mounting crises. Now a whopping 64 percent of Democratic voters oppose a second term for President Biden. Even Republicans have been shocked at the Democrats’ inability to take meaningful action.

    If this weren’t bad enough, some voices on the left continue to call for popular movements to support the Democrats, even in the face of the party’s historical failures to act. They offer “lesser evil” arguments and a strategy of “building a left pole” (aka “popular front”) that never emerges — all while our historical trajectory slides toward fascism and climate catastrophe.

    Other voices continue to double down on this strategy, but with an emphasis on more progressive candidates. Some think a winning strategy is for the left to support a Sanders candidacy in 2024, a strategy that has been tried and failed twice. There have been some victories — figures like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are notable — but nothing approaching the urgency of change needed given the scale of the crises that we face.

    Hope Comes From Below

    The need for a radical mass movement from the left to challenge and transform the crises is more necessary than ever. Even a modicum of organized left presence has the potential to change this dynamic very quickly. For instance, by organizing mass demonstrations for abortion rights or blockades of fossil fuel infrastructure, unions, student groups, and social organizations could increase the cost on elites for these political failures and press for the urgency of change. It is possible to build these kinds of transformative movements. But so long as those taking the mantle of left strategists direct us to the Democrats and support for a crumbling system, we will continue to be mired in this political and historical morass.

    There are other possible strategies and sources of inspiration. We can learn from movements around the world that push in more positive, hopeful and humane future directions. In Chile, for example, disruptive street-focused social protests and the organizations that made them happen are involved in creating a new constitution in that country. Feminist movements transformed into a mass uprising against neoliberalism and state violence, forcing the country in new directions and away from the legacies of its U.S.-supported dictatorship toward a greater democratic (though still capitalist) order.

    In Colombia, a nationwide general strike in 2021 against proposed neoliberal reforms shut down the country, halted the proposals and forced government ministers to resign. The changes from President Iván Duque Márquez would have increased consumer taxes, passing the cost of social programs onto the poor, and privatized parts of the nation’s health care system, all at the height of the COVID crisis there. When protesters were met with brutal police violence, including sexual assaults, students, labor unions and Indigenous movements came together to form a national strike committee. Over the month of May and into that summer through a national strike and ongoing resistance, they forced the government to back down and change course in the national crisis.

    In the U.S., we have seen similar victories even against very difficult odds. In West Virginia in 2018, a teacher strike sparked a movement. Gov. Jim Justice initially offered only 1 percent raises for teachers statewide, and threatened their health care funding. Even though the strike was illegal, teachers organized face to face and over social media platforms to shut down every school district in the state. After some negotiations, unions tried to get teachers back to work. They refused, holding out another whole week for a 5 percent raise that they ultimately won. This sparked a nationwide teacher strike wave in 2018, a midterm election year, which changed the dynamics of the election and contributed to a minor blue wave in congressional representation. Teachers in Republican controlled states like West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and North Carolina struck to demand better pay, better working conditions and improvements in public education for their students.

    We can contribute to these gains. By focusing on mass action in the streets, neighborhoods and workplaces, on disruptive social protests that put the hurt on the ruling class and their two parties, and on building the types of organizations that can foster and sustain popular power from the bottom for the long haul, we can move in more positive directions very quickly. It is important to remember that so long as capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and imperialism are the basis of the social order, we won’t see fundamental change. Instead, revolutionary struggle against these structures, and the legal system that protects them, is necessary.

    But this type of change will require a reckoning with our failed strategies and a recognition that we live in a political system that is breaking under the weight of its contradictions. The constitutional order of the 18th century was built specifically to limit popular democracy and preserve the power of the wealthy slave-holding class. We are reaping the bitter fruit of that system now in 2022.

    It would be wrong to say we face a crisis on the scale of the Civil War; our crisis is different, but it is no less acute. So long as our strategies assume the legitimacy of our current order, we will continue our slow slide to fascism, climate crisis and social chaos. To change the course of history, we must break with these traditions, build a movement rooted in popular power from below that can end these structures that oppress us and create a future worth fighting for.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Roads Are Literally Melting in Europe During Unprecedented Heat Wave

    My personal experience of this week’s “heat apocalypse” in Europe involved discovering large globs of hot, sticky tar stuck to my leg after I trod in melted asphalt on a mountain road in France on Sunday afternoon: The road that I was walking on had literally begun to melt.

    I was standing on the melted road because the heat was so extreme that my car’s engine had overheated, and my kids and I ended up stranded on top of a steep mountain pass in the Pyrenees until a tow truck finally came to tow us down the mountain to a nearby town. Around the continent, roadside assistance agencies predicted spikes in the number of car breakdowns as the thermometer readings headed north.

    Meanwhile, others across Europe were facing much more frightening emergencies as fires engulfed swathes of forest in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and France, and as the extreme heat triggered housefires and wildfires in and around London. Europe is finally waking to the ghastly realities of the climate crisis and the rampant fires that come with it.

    After days of record-breaking temperatures, calamitous forest fires and mounting numbers of deaths associated with the heat, French President Emmanuel Macron called this week for the creation of a European-wide fire-fighting air fleet.

    Touring the Gironde, a picturesque region in southwestern France hammered by the fires, Macron pledged a “major national project” of reconstruction and called for new rules and prevention plans designed to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

    Europe’s leaders have realized that the continent has got to play catch-up to shore up its infrastructure, and to protect its fire-vulnerable lands from wildfires.

    European countries currently spend only 0.4 percent of their budgets on firefighting services. The German federal government has repeatedly refused to invest in fire-fighting aircraft, apparently believing the country is unlikely to face the sorts of megafires that routinely consume vast tracts of land in the U.S. and Australia.

    France does have one of Europe’s best-equipped firefighting fleets, but it tops out at 22 planes. In addition to the national fleets, such as the one France has, the entire EU currently has a dozen firefighting planes that are pooled for use across national boundaries during fire emergencies. Clearly, that’s not adequate to the needs of this climate change moment. By contrast, California, which has been on the frontline of climate change-fueled fires for years, has more than 60 firefighting aircraft.

    California, which has, over the past decade, had to adjust to the new realities of fighting vast fires every year, now spends more than 1 percent of its state budget on the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The state is, at least, fortunate in having vast financial resources at its disposal. Many of its neighbors aren’t so lucky; in one western U.S. state after the next, extreme fires have strained state budgets in recent years.

    Now, as heat waves become more common and more ferocious in Europe, the continent’s governments (both in national capitals and in Brussels, headquarters of the EU) will also have to adjust upward the amounts they invest in fire prevention services, as well as in firefighting equipment and personnel. It will, inevitably, put a strain on state budgets, and will do so just at the moment when the continent is teetering on the edge of recession and is being battered by stubbornly high inflation.

    Taken as a whole, Europe has been caught remarkably unprepared by July’s heat wave. Thousands of people, most of them elderly, died last week as the blast of hot air moved slowly northward from the Mediterranean.

    The human dislocation that the heat caused has also threatened to magnify Europe’s already stark economic woes — its currency in decline against the dollar, inflation running at above 9 percent, its loss of stable supplies of Russian gas and oil. If Europe does fall into a severe recession later this year, no single factor will be to blame; but the hit to the region’s economy brought on by a string of debilitating heat waves will certainly be one of the causes contributing to the malaise.

    Heat is something of a relative concept. In California or Texas, in Arizona or Oklahoma, summer temperatures a few degrees north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) would barely raise eyebrows. Even higher temperatures, such as the 120°F sometimes reached in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Tucson, don’t tend to do quite the same damage that soaring temperatures inflict in Europe. In the American West, populations are accustomed to such temperatures; and houses, public transport systems, office buildings, entertainment centers, malls and so on are designed to include air conditioning. By contrast, in Europe, most buildings, both public and private, do not have air conditioning; many transit systems are similarly lacking; and populations are woefully unfamiliar with how to navigate extremely hot weather.

    Moreover, electricity prices have soared so quickly in Europe this past year that even those with air conditioning have had to think twice before using their systems. Electricity wholesale prices rose more than 400 percent in Spain and Portugal from the winter of 2021 through early 2022, and by more than 300 percent in Greece and France. While not all of that has been passed onto consumers, much has; in the 12 months leading up to March of this year, home energy prices around the EU increased by 41 percent. Since then, as gas and oil prices have soared, they have gone up still higher. Faced with shortages of Russian natural gas, the EU has announced a rationing plan to try to cut usage by 15 percent over the coming months. Vastly increased reliance on air conditioning simply isn’t possible in Europe at the moment, given current energy supply and price conditions.

    When the heat soared to around 104°F in London on Tuesday, the agency responsible for managing London’s complex public transport system was forced to urge people not to use its un-air conditioned buses and trains. Faced with lack of staff coming into work, many businesses shuttered. In Scotland, the government appealed to the public to cut down on alcohol consumption so as to avoid inebriated people becoming dehydrated in the unusual heat. By Tuesday evening, the London fire brigade was experiencing its busiest day since World War II, as more than 40 properties burned and numerous parks and heaths blazed in the fierce heat.

    At Luton airport, just outside of London, outbound flights were canceled and incoming flights had to be diverted after a runway buckled in the heat. Railway tracks around the country also started to fail. Put simply, the U.K.’s infrastructure simply isn’t built to withstand triple-digit temperatures.

    For years, European leaders have been at the forefront of global efforts to create meaningful climate change agreements. Yet, despite the strong rhetoric, when push came to shove last week, the continent’s preparedness for extreme weather events was shown to be inadequate. In the U.S., activists are pressuring President Biden to declare a climate emergency. In Europe, where the populace is far more in favor of strong actions to tackle climate change than are Americans, leaders have long realized this is an emergency. Yet the crisis is worsening seemingly by the day. This past week is a preview of just how bad things can get. It’s far past time to tackle this catastrophe with the focus and urgency it so clearly merits.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Fortress Mentality” Among US Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle of Militarism

    Mainstream media and politics routinely assume that the United States is a well-meaning global giant, striving to keep dangerous adversaries at bay. So, it was just another day at the imperial office on July 19 when FBI Director Christopher Wray declared: “The Russians are trying to get us to tear ourselves apart. The Chinese are trying to manage our decline, and the Iranians are trying to get us to go away.”

    Such statements harmonize with the prevailing soundscape. The standard script asserts that the United States is powerful and besieged — mighty but always menaced — the world’s leading light yet beset by hostile nations and other sinister forces aiming to undermine the USA’s rightful dominance of the globe.

    A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge “defense” budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas. But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.

    In recent decades, U.S. military power has faced new challenges to retain unipolar leverage over the planet in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. (Heavy is Uncle Sam’s head that wears the crown.) Along with the fresh challenges came incentives to update the political lexicon for rationalizing red-white-and-blue militarism.

    Ever since Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the motto its bigtime national debut in February 1998 on NBC’s “Today Show”, efforts to portray the U.S. as an “indispensable nation” became familiar rhetoric — or at least a renewed conceptual frame — for U.S. interventionism. “If we have to use force,” she said, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

    In 2022, such verbiage would easily fit onto teleprompters at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The appeal of such words has never waned among mass media and officials in Washington, as the United States simultaneously touts itself as the main virtuous star on the world stage and a country simply trying to protect itself from malevolence.

    Consider FBI Director Wray’s rhetoric about official enemies:

    “The Russians are trying to get us to tear ourselves apart.”

    This theme remains an establishment favorite. It dodges the grim realities of U.S. society — completely unrelated to Russia — such as longstanding and ongoing conflicts due to racism, misogyny, income inequality, corporate power, oligarchy, and other structural injustices. The right-wing menace to human decency and democracy in the United States is homegrown, as the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol made chillingly clear.

    This month, while the horrific and unjustified Russian war in Ukraine has continued, the United States has persisted with massive shipments of weapons to the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, official interest in genuine diplomacy has been somewhere between scant and nonexistent. One of the few stirrings toward rationality from Capitol Hill came early this month when Rep. Ro Khanna told The Washington Post: “People don’t want to see a resigned attitude that this is just going to go on as long as it’s going to go on. What is the plan on the diplomatic front?” Several weeks later, the Biden administration is still indicating no interest in any such plan.

    “The Chinese are trying to manage our decline.”

    Leaders in Washington don’t want the sun to set on the U.S. empire, but China and many other nations have other ideas. This week, news of Nancy Pelosi’s intention to visit Taiwan in August was greeted with cheers from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which wrote that she deserved “kudos” for planning “what would be the first trip to the island democracy by a House Speaker in 25 years.”

    At midweek, President Biden expressed concern about the planned trip, saying: “I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now. But I don’t know what the status of it is.” However, his team’s overall approach is confrontational, risking a potentially catastrophic war with nuclear-armed China. Despite dire warnings from many analysts, the U.S. geopolitical stance toward China is reflexively and dangerously zero-sum.

    “The Iranians are trying to get us to go away.”

    Iran’s government adhered to the nuclear deal enacted in 2015, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But the Trump administration pulled out of the pact. Rather than swiftly move to rejoin it, the Biden administration has dithered and thrown roadblocks.

    Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Antony Blinken disingenuously announced: “We are imposing sanctions on Iranian petroleum and petrochemical producers, transporters, and front companies. Absent a commitment from Iran to return to the JCPOA, an outcome we continue to pursue, we will keep using our authorities to target Iran’s exports of energy products.”

    In response, Quincy Institute Executive Vice President Trita Parsi tweeted: “Biden is continuing and embracing Trump’s max pressure policy, while expecting a different result. All of this could have been avoided if Biden just returned to the JCPOA via Exe order” — with an executive order, as he did to reverse President Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.

    What continues — with countless instances of repetition compulsion — is the proclaimed vision of the United States of America leading the charge against the world’s badness. Beneath the veneer of goodness, however, systematic hypocrisy and opportunistic cruelty persist on a massive scale.

    A case in point is Biden’s recent journey to the Middle East: The presidential trip’s prominent features included fist-bumping with a Saudi monarch whose government has caused a quarter-million deaths and vast misery with its war on Yemen, and voicing fervent support for the Israeli government as it continues to impose apartheid on the Palestinian people.

    Leaders of the U.S. government never tire of reasserting their commitment to human rights and democracy. At the same time, they insist that an inexhaustible supply of adversaries is bent on harming the United States, which must not run away from forceful engagement with the world. But the actual U.S. agenda is to run the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Thursday Hearing Showcased Trump’s 187 Minutes of Deliberate Inaction on Jan. 6

    I am not going to go so far as to say I was let down by Thursday night’s prime-time hearing of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, because I wasn’t. Not really; there was enough red meat on that bone to give a whole pack of dogs a nice healthy snack. If the eighth hearing in the series did not entirely live up to the pre-game hype I reported on yesterday, maybe that’s because the previous seven had been so damned good. Last night felt a bit like a victory lap, an underscoring of that which has already been told.

    Repetition, they say, is good for memory. Let’s hope so.

    Speaking of memory, you will recall the infamous photo of GOP Rep. Josh Hawley saluting the rioters as he made his way to the Capitol on Jan. 6. “We spoke with a Capitol Police officer who was out there at that time,” noted committee member Rep. Elaine Luria during the hearing. “She told us that Senator Hawley’s gesture riled up the crowd, and it bothered her greatly because he was doing it in a safe space, protected by the officers and the barriers.” That image was deftly contrasted with video of Hawley hauling ass out of the building and away from the violence later that same day. Monty Python leaps unavoidably to mind: “Brave Sir Robin ran away…”

    “187 minutes” was the overarching theme of the evening. For that grueling span, every warm body with a voice pressed Trump to put a stop to the violence, which he could have done with a 60-second walk to the running cameras in the press room. Not to go tumbling down the basement stairs of bar-napkin metaphysics, but not making a decision is making a decision. Beyond asking for a list of senators to pester about overthrowing the results — Rudy Giuliani was doing the same thing — Trump did nothing to quell the riot, and he could have. He apparently did not want it to stop.

    Then there were the outtakes, the clips of video filmed the day after the attack, when Trump tried to fill three short minutes with pieties and scolding… but just couldn’t bring himself to put a bad word on the “patriots” who had spent the day before trying to salvage his election loss at the butt end of a length of pipe. The video shows a man who looks like he just bit into a very old lemon while trying to pass a kidney stone, and the transcript… well, here:

    I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday…. (weird hand gesture, cut) To those who broke the law, you will pay. You do not represent our movement, you do not represent our country, and if you broke the law.… can’t say that, I’m not, I already said “you will pay” (another weird hand gesture, cut)…. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defied the seat (slaps podium) it’s “defiled,” right? I can’t see it very well. I’ll do this, I’m gonna do this, let’s go (cut)…. But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results. I don’t want to say the election’s over, I just want to say “Congress has certified the results” without saying the election’s over, OK? Let me see, go to the paragraph before (cut, messes with sport coat) … OK? I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday…. ‘yesterday’ is a hard word for me. Take the word ‘yesterday’ out, cuz it doesn’t work with ‘the heinous attack on our country,’ say ‘on our country,’ wanna say that? (cut) My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote (violent gesture, grimace, cut)…. My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote (pained expression, slaps podium, cut, fade).

    “I don’t want to say the election’s over,” Trump puled. Well, it’s been 18 months. Why start now? Or then? Or ever? Please also note: The passage above accounts for three minutes of what was in full an hour-long ordeal. Make the bad man stop.

    For me, the most damning point in the hearing came when those testifying explained how the demeanor of the crowd changed after Trump’s mid-afternoon tweet that Pence had let him down. The mob had been violent and angry already, but word from Trump that Pence had screwed them all led to a detonation of wrath from the rioters that had some in Pence’s security detail radioing in farewell messages to their families. Were these the same Secret Service agents who tried to get Pence into the car he wanted nothing to do with? More testimony is clearly needed.

    And that’s the good news: The committee is going to take the month of August to rake up all the as-yet-unexamined leaves they’ve shaken from the trees, and begin the hearings again in September. This will not be a joyful noise for Republicans running in the November midterms, but as Finley Peter Dunne once said, politics ain’t beanbag.

    It’s always fascinating to see Democrats remember they actually have muscles, too.

    Memo to AG Garland: The case has been made. Thursday night was about making that clear.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Allies in Congress Are About to Be Humiliated in Prime Time

    Early reports suggest tonight’s reportedly final 8 pm House Select Committee hearing on the January 6 Capitol attack will be quite the stemwinder. According to The Washington Post, one core element of the evening will involve showing outtakes of a video Donald Trump tried to make the day after the attack. The video was intended to calm the waters, but as the Post has it, “Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.”

    You just knew Dr. Strangelove trying to suppress a Nazi salute was going to be in this somewhere.

    It gets deeper. We all recall how heated everyone was in the immediate aftermath of the attack. No lesser lights than Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and even notorious lickspittle Lindsey Graham publicly washed their hands of Trump. In that climate, according to a CNN report, Trump was pushed to make that video because “his own cabinet might be preparing to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.”

    Chicken-fried Trump is not the only item on the menu, as Rolling Stone reports:

    The Jan. 6 committee plans to use its Thursday-night hearing to call out insurrection-friendly lawmakers who cowered during the Capitol attack but have since downplayed the insurrection’s severity, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s planning.

    “They have plans to paint a really striking picture of how some of Trump’s greatest enablers of his coup plot were — no matter what they’re saying today — quaking in their boots and doing everything shy of crying out for their moms,” one source tells Rolling Stone. “If any of [these lawmakers] were capable of shame, they would be humiliated.”

    In other words, tonight’s festivities will apparently be a nationally broadcast humble pie, and everyone in Trump’s corner has to take a bite. This hearing also comes just after the prosecution rested its case against Trump ally Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress. Only two witnesses were called. The defense attempted to “flood the zone with shit,” in the immortal words of Mr. Bannon, but was soundly smacked down by Judge Carl J. Nichols. “I do not intend for this to become a political case,” the judge warned the defense, “a political circus, a forum for partisan politics.” Thus was Bannon deprived use of the most well-worn club in his bag.

    All good things must come to an end. So it is with tonight’s apparently final event. These hearings, without fail, have been a showcase for what government can accomplish if it chooses to get out of its own way and let the facts do the talking. Though the panel is predominantly comprised of Democrats, with two notable GOP expats in the mix, almost every witness has been Republican, and their testimony has been ruinous for Trump and the prior administration. If the tatters of this democracy are eventually salvaged, a large portion of the credit will rightly go to this group of lawmakers, led by Bennie Thompson of the Delta and Liz Cheney of the range.

    “I believe this is the most important thing I’ve ever done professionally,” Cheney recently told The New York Times, “and maybe the most important thing I ever do.” No argument from me on that score; before the insurrection, “important” to Cheney involved going on Fox News to defend torture, support Donald Trump 93 percent of the time, and denounce Democrats as antisemitic jihadist baby-killing socialists. She was Matt Gaetz’s favorite Republican. As Adam Serwer said in The Atlantic last year, “Cheney now finds herself on the wrong side of a line she spent much of her political career enforcing.”

    As distasteful as it may have been for progressives and other mammals to tolerate Cheney on the committee, her presence lent credence to hearings which could otherwise have been dismissed as a partisan sideshow.

    Make no mistake: These were all incredibly vital moments in the life of this republic. The committee needed to prove beyond doubt that Trump was responsible for the violent chaos visited upon us all, that every opportunity he had to settle things down — before, during and after that fateful day — he instead deliberately used to make everything worse. That case has been made, and will apparently be underscored with emphasis tonight.

    Put another way, if Democrats had been allowed to run the Trump impeachments the way they ran these hearings (looking at you, Nancy Pelosi), the odds of his removal would have significantly increased, especially after the second riot-inspired proceeding. This committee has no such power, so it falls to Attorney General Merrick Garland to pick up the battle standard and charge the high ground. Garland’s recent missive to the agency warning everyone to be nice to politicians leaves me thinking nothing will happen with this before November, except perhaps to motivate Trump to jump in early.

    And whatever to all that. The Justice Department has been a damn nightmare factory for as long as I can recall, so why should tonight be any different? Still, the testimony was worth it, because all of us deserved to know the truth.

    I’ll see you tonight. Be sure to bring a crying towel for all the congressional Trumpers who are about to be humiliated in prime time. Let the million flowers bloom.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Mexico’s Megafires Are a Hint of the Climate Nightmare Ahead

    Firefighters don’t normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, “It’s like Beowulf: it’s not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them, perhaps enabling new flames to erupt behind you with no escape possible. The lesson is a good one and can be taken further. If tinder-dry forests and high winds are the mother of the thing we fear, then climate change is the grandmother.

    The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire blazed across 534 square miles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies. Although the fire was the largest in New Mexico’s history, it had competition even as it burned. This spring, the Black Fire, a megafire of nearly equal size, devoured forests in the southern part of the state. The combined area of the two fires is roughly equal to that of Rhode Island, the American standard for landscape disasters on a colossal scale.

    Records amassed by the Forest Service indicate that, at the fire’s peak, 27,562 people were evacuated from their homes. Four hundred and thirty-three of those homes were destroyed and more damaged, while an even greater number of barns, garages, sheds, and other outbuildings were also lost. The unquantified property damage, including destroyed power lines, water systems, and other infrastructure, will surely exceed the nearly billion dollars in damages arising from the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which torched more than 200 residential structures in the city of Los Alamos. Meanwhile, the heartbreak resulting not just from destroyed homes but lost landscapes — arenas of work, play, and spiritual renewal, home in the broadest sense — is immeasurable.

    The Hermits Peak fire began April 6th with the escape of a prescribed fire ignited by the U.S. Forest Service in the mountains immediately west of Las Vegas, New Mexico. A few days later and not far away, a second, “sleeper” fire, which the Forest Service had originally ignited in January to burn waste wood from a forest-thinning operation, sprang back to life. It had smoldered undetected through successive snowfalls and the coldest weather of the year. This was the Calf Canyon fire. Driven by unprecedented winds, the two fires soon merged into a single cauldron of flame, which stormed through settled valleys and wild forests alike, sometimes consuming 30,000 acres a day.

    The blaze marks a turning point in the lives of all who experienced the fire. It also marks a transformative change in the ecological character of the region and in the turbulent history of the alternately inept and valiant federal agency that both started and fought it.

    The Turning of a Climate Tide

    Two and a half decades ago, a long-running wet spell came to an end in the Southwest. Reservoirs were full, rivers were meeting water needs, and skiers and irrigators alike gazed with satisfaction on deep mountain snowpacks. The region’s forests were stable, if overgrown.

    Then came a dry winter and, on April 26, 1996, an unextinguished campfire in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains flared into a major conflagration that came to be known as the Dome Fire. I vividly remember the startling whiteness of its mushroom-shaped smoke plume surging into the sky, a sight all the more unnerving because the fire was burning within rifle shot of Los Alamos National Lab, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

    It engulfed much of Bandelier National Monument and stunned observers in two ways. The first surprise was that it erupted so early in the year, before fire season should properly have begun. The second was that it grew to what was then considered immense size: 16,516 acres. How times have changed.

    The outbreak of the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires, weeks earlier than the Dome, shows yet again that fire season is much longer than it used to be. The size of the burned area speaks for itself. A day when the combined fire consumed only as much land as the Dome did in its entirety sometimes felt like a good day.

    Meanwhile, the news on water here in the Southwest is hardly less worrisome. Arizona’s Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, was full in 2000. Today, it’s at 27% of capacity, as is its younger and slightly smaller sibling, Lake Powell, which is also on the Colorado River. Plummeting water levels jeopardize the capacity of both lakes to produce hydroelectricity, which bodes ill for the region’s electrical grid.

    On the Rio Grande in New Mexico, Elephant Butte reservoir, the state’s largest, is down to 10% of capacity and New Mexico’s inability to meet its water delivery obligations to Texas reveals the absurdity of interstate water compacts based on outdated assumptions about streamflow.

    Then came the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires, both sparked by Forest Service land treatments intended, ironically enough, to reduce the risk of rampant wildfire. Both projects were executed in accordance with the existing management rulebook, but the rules are rooted in a past more stable than the bone-dry, wind-fickle, and imperious present.

    Chief Forester Randy Moore, who ordered a review of all actions relating to the prescribed fire that exploded into the Hermits Peak disaster, captured the essence of his agency’s failure this way: “Climate change is leading to conditions on the ground we have never encountered… Fires are outpacing our models, and… we need to better understand how megadrought and climate change are affecting our actions.”

    To say that macro conditions have rendered the Forest Service’s procedures obsolete should not obscure the issue of human fallibility. The chief’s review uncovered a host of minor bungles (80 pages worth, in fact) that cumulatively unleashed the catastrophe. The bottom line: setting prescriptive fires is inherently dangerous, and the extremes of heat, dryness, and wind brought on by climate change leave only a razor-thin margin for error.

    Being behind the curve of change this time around has been a replay of the agency’s formerly nearsighted view of fire itself. The Forest Service was born in fire. It was a young, struggling agency until the heroics of fighting the “Big Blowup” of 1910 in the northern Rockies established its identity in the national consciousness. PR campaigns exploiting the anti-fire icon of Smokey Bear helped complete its branding.

    The agency’s fierce stance against fire in all forms crystallized its identity and mission, while also blinding it to important ecological realities. Many forest systems require periodic doses of “light fire” that burns along the ground consuming underbrush, seedlings, and saplings. In its absence, the forest becomes overcrowded, choked with fuel, and vulnerable to a potentially disastrous “crown fire” that storms through the treetops, killing the entire stand. The ponderosa and “mixed conifer” forests that dominated a large part of the area consumed by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire were overstocked in exactly that way. The Forest Service rightly deserves criticism for more than a century of all-out fire suppression, which led to unnaturally dense, fuel-heavy forests.

    But that’s just one part of the story. Climate change is writing the rest.

    The Fire Service

    The Southwest is now in the midst of its second-worst drought in the last 1,200 years. Less publicized is the news that, were it not for greenhouse-gas pollution, the current dry spell would be rather ordinary. Nor is the forecast encouraging: given the warming of the regional climate, by perhaps 2050, coniferous forests in the Southwest — the majestic stands of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, Englemann spruce, and subalpine fir that clothe the region’s blue mountains — will be, if not extinct, then rare indeed.

    Fire, insects, drought, and outright heat, all driven by rising temperatures, will deliver a flurry of blows to doom the forests. However, it is (if, under the circumstances, I can even use the term) cold comfort to realize that, along the way, the ecological impact of the Forest Service’s misconceived ideology of all-out fire suppression will be — and already is being — erased by the implacable dynamics of a changing climate.

    Having recognized its error on fire and having also been weaned by endless litigation from its post-World War II subservience to the timber industry, the Forest Service has attempted to recast itself as the nation’s premier steward of our wild lands. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, unleashed by the Forest Service itself, appears to have brought that process of reinvention to an inglorious conclusion.

    But all is not lost, for the Forest Service is actually two agencies, and only one of them has failed. The portion of the Forest Service committed to day-to-day custodianship of the national forest system may be underfunded, uninspired, and (despite many outstanding individuals in its workforce) poorly led, but its fire-fighting sibling is thriving. Some people call this portion of the agency the Fire Service.

    In an era of global warming, fire-fighting is a growth industry and the Fire Service has managed to outfit itself accordingly. It sports the organizational coherence and high morale of a crack military outfit, while possessing equipment and funding to match its mission. Its infantry consists of fire crews recruited across the West that rotate in and out of action like combat troops.

    The “armor” of the Fire Service consists of bulldozers, pumper trucks, masticators (that grind trees to pulp), feller-bunchers (that cut and stack trees), and other heavy equipment that clear fire lines scores of miles long. For air support, it commands not just spotter planes, slurry bombers (which douse fires with retardant), and bucket-wielding helicopters, but drones and state-of-the-art “Super Scoopers” that can skim the surface of a lake to fill their capacious cargo tanks with thousands of gallons of water. Then they head for the burning edge of the fire and, assisted by infrared guidance systems, drop their loads where the heat is fiercest.

    Like any modern military unit, the Fire Service also uses satellite imagery, advanced communications, and specialists in logistics and intelligence (who predict fire behavior). Against the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, it deployed more than 3,000 personnel around a 648-mile fire periphery. For a time, the nation’s entire fleet of eight Super Scoopers was based at the Santa Fe airport.

    You Don’t Need a Weatherman

    The trouble with low-altitude air support is that bad weather can keep planes, choppers, and even drones on the ground. In fire-fighting parlance, it’s a “red-flag day” when the weather service issues a red-flag warning (RFW) signaling that winds are strong enough to produce explosive fire behavior. Such a warning also leaves the Fire Service’s air fleet grounded.

    In April and May, in the area of our recent fires, more than half the days — 32, to be exact — warranted red flags, a record since such warnings were first counted in 2006. That included nine straight days of RFWs — April 9th to 17th — when the fire-fighting air force was largely grounded and the flames raged.

    I remember those blustery days. I live in a village on the west side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The fire was on the east side. Most afternoons, I climbed a ridge to watch its immense smoke plumes boil into the sky. A fire volatilizes the water in the trees and other vegetation it combusts, dry though they may be. The vapor ascends the smoke column, crystallizing to ice as it reaches the frosty altitudes where jetliners fly. There, it condenses into blinding white cottony clouds that dwarf the mountains below them. A terrible sight to behold, those pyrocumulus clouds embody the energy released when our oxygen planet flaunts its power.

    Wind may be the most neglected subject in the science of climate change. Nevertheless, it appears that the strength and distribution of wind phenomena may be changing. For example, derechos — massive, dust-filled weather fronts of violent wind — are now materializing in places where they were once little known. In their vehemence and duration, the gales that drove the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire seem to have been no less unusual.

    Making People Whole

    In multiethnic New Mexico, history and culture color every calamity. The vast majority of the people evacuated from the path of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire were Hispanic, most of them descendants of families that settled the region prior to its conquest by the United States in the war against Mexico of 1846 to 1848.

    The Forest Service arrived relatively late on the scene as the colonizing arm of an Anglo-Protestant government centered 2,000 miles away. It assumed control of mountain expanses that had previously functioned as a de facto commons vital to local farmers and ranchers. Some of the commons were de jure as well, consisting of Spanish and Mexican land grants that were spirited away from their rightful heirs by unscrupulous land speculators, most of them Anglo.

    The Forest Service may not have wrenched those lands from the people who owned them, but because many such lands were later incorporated into national forests, the agency inherited the animosity that such dispossession engendered. Restrictions the Forest Service subsequently imposed on grazing, logging, and other uses of the land only added to those bad feelings.

    The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon catastrophe has understandably rekindled old resentments. Many of those who lost their homes or other property lacked insurance. (A typical house had been in the family for generations, was never mortgaged, and relied on wood stoves for heat.) Compensation, if it materializes, will have to come from Congress or, failing that, a class-action lawsuit which would grind on for years.

    So far, the federal government has provided funding for emergency supplies, shelters, and public safety, but nothing to reimburse individuals for lost property. The four Democrats in New Mexico’s congressional delegation — a fifth member is Republican — have jointly introduced legislation to help the fire’s victims, but its prospects are, at best, unclear and expectations are low since, to state the obvious, the willingness of the Senate to conduct the people’s business is ever more in doubt.

    Given that this country has so far done little to protect its citizens from the dangers of climate change, the damage and suffering in northern New Mexico will now show whether it is willing to take the next step and care for the victims of that growing nightmare.

    If the Thunder Don’t Getcha…

    We prayed for rain to stop the fire and ease the record-breaking dryness. When the rain finally came, it filled us with dread as much as gratitude. Severe burns produce “hydrophobic” soils, which absorb a downpour no better than a parking lot. The resulting floods can be orders of magnitude greater than normal runoff. In addition, sometimes the detritus of the fire — downed trees, mud, ash, and unmoored boulders — mixes into a “debris flow,” a sort of gooey, fast-moving landslide.

    Thousands of people living below the fire’s charred slopes now worry for their safety. Already, following a recent cloudburst, the village of Rociada (which means “dew-laden”) was inundated by a flow of hail and ash two feet deep. Like their neighbors throughout the burned area, its residents are likely to be living behind sandbags for years. Many others beyond the fire’s periphery, including the 13,000 residents of Las Vegas, New Mexico, depend on water drawn from valleys now choked with ash. The taste of the fire, both literally and metaphorically, will be with us indefinitely.

    And thanks to climate change, there will be plenty more fire. Our dawning new age, shaped by human-wrought conditions, has been called the Anthropocene, but historian Steve Pyne offers yet another name: the Pyrocene, the epoch of fire. This year, it was New Mexico’s turn to burn. Last year, an entire Greek island combusted, along with swaths of Italy, Turkey and large chunks of the Pacific Northwest and California. Fires in Siberia, meanwhile, consumed more forest than all the other areas combined. When it comes to ever more powerful fires, we New Mexicans are hardly alone.

    On my side of the mountains, the county sheriff ordered us to prepare to evacuate. Fortunately, the flames halted a few miles away. We never had to leave. But packing our “go” bags and securing our houses now seems to have been a useful dress rehearsal. The drought and winds will be back. A bolt of lightning, a fool with a cigarette, a downed power line, or… goodness knows… the ham-fisted Forest Service will eventually provide the necessary spark, and then our oxygen planet, warmer and drier than ever, will strut its stuff again.

    My neighbors and I know that this time we were lucky. We also know our luck can’t last forever. We may have dodged a bullet, but climate change has unlimited ammo.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Secret Service Has Managed to Locate Only One Coup-Related Text Message

    To recap: The Secret Service was ordered to preserve all text messages sent by agents on the day before, and the day of the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Procuring these messages became all the more pressing when serious questions were raised about agents’ behavior toward former Vice President Mike Pence. To wit: Did those agents try to whisk him away from the building to thwart his certification of the election? Were there agents involved in the coup attempt? These texts may also serve to verify former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that Donald Trump, when informed he could not join the rioting mob at the Capitol, flipped out and attacked members of his detail.

    The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack dropped a subpoena on the Secret Service last week, and the agency promised an answer by yesterday. Yesterday came, and yesterday went, and when all was said and done, the Secret Service had only managed to locate one single text message. The rest, they claim, are permanently gone and completely unrecoverable.

    “Many of its agents’ cellphone texts were permanently purged starting in mid-January 2021 and Secret Service officials said it was the result of an agencywide reset of staff telephones and replacement that it began planning months earlier,” reports The Washington Post. “Secret Service agents, many of whom protect the president, vice president and other senior government leaders, were instructed to upload any old text messages involving government business to an internal agency drive before the reset, the senior official said, but many agents appear not to have done so.”

    This, to put it mildly, stinks to high heaven. In a bland and Trumpless world, this defiance of a document protective order and a congressional subpoena would be grounds for mass firings and other serious consequences. It has been widely reported that members of Trump’s Secret Service detail were as much a part of his partisan political operation as his own kids, making the disappearance of these texts from the day Trump allegedly attempted treason all the more disturbing.

    The technical explanations being proffered by the Secret Service likewise fail the smell test. Arick Wierson, former deputy commissioner in New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, explains:

    My role as a deputy commissioner put me in countless meetings every time there was a major software upgrade, platform transition, device migration or any other major change in the technology that city employees used. It included everyone from rank-and-file police officers to the mayor himself…. Without getting into the nerdy details of IT data management, suffice to say that no major technology device transfer could possibly happen without there being not one but several levels of backed-up data and redundancy.

    And keep in mind, in the public sector, particularly because of FOIL and FOIA laws, IT professionals are not the only ones involved in major technology overhaul decisions. In the city of New York, when one agency is upgrading tech from one device to another, lawyers — representatives from each agency’s Office of General Counsel — help ensure that all applicable data is being safely preserved. A lot of people have eyes on any major technology overhaul, especially one where data is in the mix.

    And this makes Tuesday’s news that the Secret Service has turned over thousands of documents to the January 6 committee, but has not yet recovered the missing texts, all the more alarming. If the deleted data was the result of some bizarro act of benign negligence, that data should have been easy to recoup by forensic IT specialists. The Secret Services insists it is still trying to find those missing messages.

    Yeah, and if my uncle had wheels, he’d be a wagon. The questions do not stop there. Were the agents on-scene using private texting or other platforms to communicate? Is there a connection between these missing texts and the fact that Director James M. Murray is abruptly ending his 27-year Secret Service career to go work for Snapchat?

    “Failure to preserve and produce these messages may be illegal,” NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted on Tuesday. “Prompt investigation is now essential. Vital for Americans to know immediately whether United States Secret Service has been dangerously compromised. With crucial evidence now reported to have been destroyed, the potential physical danger to President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris from actions (or lapses) of U.S. Secret Service on January 6 (and the period around that date) must now be investigated immediately.”

    Hopefully, at this point, some of these agents are getting nervous — that particular kind of nervous that comes with having done something that will likely come back to bite you, and soon.

    I know a bit about this. It can be safely said that I did not cover myself in academic glory during my first semester at college. I was there for the party, not the studies, and I got my head kicked sideways. I happened to be home when my awful grades arrived in the mail, and in a spasm of ill-conceived panic, I gave them the ol’ pocket veto treatment, hoping my mother would somehow forget that my school measured achievement with an alphabetical system that got sent home twice a year like clockwork.

    Of course, I was eventually busted, and I’m pretty sure I’m still grounded lo these 30 years later… but what I remember most about the whole shameful affair was the week I spent with a boulder in my stomach, like there was a bag of hot cats in my chest trying to get out. The grades lingered in a crumpled ball in that pocket; you are, they whispered, an asshole. The walls closed in. It was almost a relief when I got caught. No, strike that, it was a relief. I no longer had to pretend I hadn’t done such a thing — twice, if you count the grades themselves — and endeavored going forward to remember who I was supposed to be, instead of who I became in that moment of weakness and fear.

    Remembering all this today, I am wondering how many Secret Service agents are walking around with their own bag of cats roiling their chests, clutching a sweaty cellphone in their pocket, wishing the proffered excuses for all those missing text messages didn’t sound like the hairball coughed up by Rose Mary Woods to explain the recording gap in the Nixon Watergate tapes. Maybe — hopefully — they’re wishing they hadn’t tried to erase history with the news media, a clutch of watchdogs and a congressional committee breathing down their necks.

    Of course, maybe none of them are wishing any such thing, and are still clinging desperately to their ill-conceived loyalty to their then-leader. Regardless, it only gets hotter from here.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Time for Congress to End US Involvement in the Saudi-Led War on Yemen

    U.S. critics are still buzzing with outrage about President Biden’s recent chummy fist bump and meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, accusing Biden of betraying his promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” after the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    But it’s not just Khashoggi’s blood that’s on the Saudi crown prince’s hands. With U.S. support, Saudi Arabia has waged a horrific war and blockade on Yemen since 2015. We now have an opportunity to put a stop to our country’s participation in this senseless war that has taken the lives of nearly 400,000 civilians in Yemen.

    As a Vietnam War veteran, I saw firsthand that the cost of war is horrendous, and those who suffer the most are those caught in the crossfire. That is why I am urging members of Congress to join Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Patrick Leahy, and more than 100 members of the House in co-sponsoring the Yemen War Powers Resolution to end the U.S.’s support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

    We can’t wait to act. Although the warring parties negotiated an extension of a recent truce, Saudi Arabia could resume its deadly bombing campaign and blockade of Yemen when the ceasefire expires at the end of July. Given this crucial point in peace negotiations, it’s critically important for the U.S. to act swiftly. We must pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution now.

    By signing onto the Yemen War Powers Resolution, members will add to the momentum gaining now in Congress to end U.S. support for the devastating war and build pressure on the Saudi-led coalition to extend the ceasefire and peace talks.

    From my time in Vietnam as a medic, I have seen and dealt with the heartbreaking, deadly impacts that war has on the people of a country under attack. These victims of war are not just statistics or collateral damage, these are human beings deserving of our help and sympathy. The war in Yemen has led to a full-blown humanitarian crisis about which the United Nations has expressed grave alarm. Beyond the 400,000 Yemenis who have been killed as result of the war, approximately 16 million Yemenis are at risk of acute malnutrition, and millions more are on the verge of famine.

    And given the global spike in wheat prices caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.N. is warning that without immediate action, the situation is “about to get much worse” before it gets better.

    The ceasefire has allowed humanitarian organizations to reach previously inaccessible populations. A return to fighting would likely curtail the life-saving actions of aid organizations, as well as private-sector supply chains, exacerbating hunger and death.

    Congress never authorized U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on Yemen. Yet, the U.S. continues to provide critical support for the Saudi military’s offensive capabilities in this war, including through logistics, intelligence sharing, and providing spare parts and maintenance that the Saudi Air Force needs to continue bombing.

    Saudi Arabia is using the support provided by the U.S. to wage a years-long attack on the people of Yemen. It is time to end the suffering and dying caused by these endless wars. Congress must pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution and end U.S. complicity in the deaths of Yemeni civilians.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Time for Public Power. New York State Could Lead the Way.

    The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in West Virginia v. EPA dismantles one of the last regulatory tools remaining to cut carbon emissions on a federal scale in the U.S. With the failure of the Democrats to pass significant legislation and the specter of looming defeats in midterm elections, it’s now up to progressive cities and states to take the lead in fighting the climate crisis.

    We got close to breaking ground on such an alternative state-level strategy this year in New York. In May, the State Senate passed the Build Public Renewables Act. The bill mandates the state’s New Deal-era public power provider — the New York Power Authority (NYPA) — to generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030. It also sets up a process that would allow the New York Power Authority to build and own renewables while shutting down polluting infrastructure. Although it is the largest publicly owned utility in the country, with a track record of providing the most affordable energy in the state, the New York Power Authority cannot legally own or build new utility-scale renewable generation projects at present because the state limits the public power utility to owning only six large utility-scale projects of 25 megawatts or more. This is because renewable energy developers wanted to limit competition from the New York Power Authority. The Build Public Renewables Act would remove this restriction and unleash the New York Power Authority’s game-changing power.

    The Build Public Renewables Act had enough votes to pass in the Assembly and move to the governor’s desk to be signed, but Speaker Carl Heastie refused to bring the bill to a vote. Stung by criticism of this undemocratic move and over the tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations he has taken from fossil fuel interests, Speaker Heastie has called a special hearing on the Build Public Renewables Act for late July. The Public Power NY campaign is calling for Heastie and Gov. Kathy Hochul to call a special session so that the Build Public Renewables Act can be passed.

    Three years ago, when the Public Power NY campaign began work, things looked a lot more hopeful on the federal level. Presidential hopefuls like Jay Inslee centered his plan for a clean energy economy on community-owned and community-led renewables while Bernie Sanders’s climate plan called for 100 percent public power. Sanders wanted to reach this goal quickly and efficiently by using public funding and infrastructure rather than leaving the transition up to corporate investors, who have failed the public miserably.

    Joe Biden decided to bundle most of the elements of his promised Green New Deal into the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better proposal, which was killed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) in late 2021. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the surge in gas prices, the Biden administration released a million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve this spring, and, instead of cutting fossil fuels, is now scrambling to persuade countries like Saudi Arabia to ramp up production.

    States like New York can blaze a different trail. We desperately need an ambitious plan like the Build Public Renewables Act if New York is to follow through on the nation-leading climate legislation it has already passed. With a Democratic super majority, New York state lawmakers passed a Climate Act in 2019 that committed the state to generating 70 percent of its power from zero emissions sources by 2030, with the goal of 100 percent clean power to be reached by 2040. But lawmakers have passed no significant climate legislation since 2019.

    If they refuse to mandate that the state build the infrastructure to reach the Climate Act’s goals, political leaders’ promises threaten to become nothing but hot air. New York is stuck at only 6 percent wind and solar energy. The state currently gets about 20 percent of its electricity from hydroelectric facilities run by the New York Power Authority. But with the shutting down of the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant, which provided 25 percent of New York City’s energy until 2021, the state may become more rather than less dependent on fossil fuels.

    New York needs to expand its wind and solar tenfold over the next seven years to meet state law. The New York Power Authority is uniquely situated to meet this challenge. The agency has shown that it can do projects cheaper, faster and more efficiently than the private sector. It has an incredibly high bond rating (meaning that NYPA is seen as highly credit-worthy and can borrow at low interest), which would let it raise money to fund projects. It would not have to raise utility bills for customers like investor-owned utilities currently do to build this new green infrastructure.

    The for-profit utility ConEd has just requested rate hikes to fund $1.4 billion in new fossil fuel infrastructure. If approved by state regulators, this would mean a 10 percent jump in electric bills and a 15 percent increase for gas, punishingly steep rate hikes during a time when ordinary people are struggling with record inflation. Approximately 32 percent of Con Ed customers are currently in arrears, so clearly this system is not working.

    With the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act, the New York Power Authority would be permitted to build utility-scale solar generation and offshore wind, transmission lines, electric vehicle chargers and energy storage facilities. Private renewable energy companies have criticized the plan for cutting into free market competition, but the Build Public Renewables Act mandates that the public power utility build out renewables only when and if the private sector fails to build out clean energy at the pace required by law. The bill also requires New York Power Authority projects to pay a prevailing wage and to use project labor agreements, which would help to challenge the poor pay and precarious conditions that characterize the private renewables industry today.

    New York’s decision to unleash clean public power will be an example to other regions in the U.S. For example, despite decades of warnings from climate scientists about the need to stop burning fossil fuels, Mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania and Maryland get just 7 percent of their electricity from clean wind and solar.

    In 2018, Washington, D.C. passed one of the most ambitious clean energy laws in the country, with the goal of reaching 100 percent clean energy by 2032. But the investor-owned, monopoly utility Pepco has demonstrated a clear lack of ambition to meet the city’s clean energy goals. Like New York’s for-profit utilities, Pepco is failing D.C. residents, according to the energy activist group We Power DC. The utility had only 5.42 percent clean energy in its power mix, according to its 2018 energy source report — far below the 16.5 percent clean energy that it needs to meet the Clean Energy DC Act.

    Worse still, Pepco is raising the rates that it charges D.C. residents for power, a rate increase that the city Office of the People’s Council called “excessive” and “unprecedented.” We Power DC’s public power pledge calls for a publicly owned utility that is just, accessible and sourced from 100 percent clean energy.

    The situation is similar in other regions of the country. New England, for example, still gets nearly 50 percent of its power from fossil gas. Only 5 percent of its electricity comes from clean wind and solar. Why are progressive states in New England endangering their citizens by failing to clean up their energy supply? The dominant electrical and fossil gas distribution companies in Massachusetts and across much of New England are investor-owned utilities like Eversource Energy and National Grid. A recent report by a team of climate scientists at Brown University found that the entities spending the most on lobbying against climate action in the Massachusetts state legislature were private energy corporations like Eversource and National Grid. Expecting these profit-driven corporations to shutter their polluting facilities and invest in a rapid transition to clean energy is like hoping the foxes will take good care of the hen house.

    When the Build Public Renewables Act becomes law, it will offer tremendous inspiration to campaigns like We Power DC and Maine Public Power. It would also provide an alternative to the increasingly crisis-ridden private utility system, as exemplified in Texas. A decades-long push in the Lone Star state to deregulate the energy system led to a deadly power crash in the winter of 2021. Private companies in search of short-term profits cut all the backup capacity out of the system in Texas, leaving it vulnerable to cataclysmic failure as soon as abnormally cold weather arrived. Hundreds of people died. Just over a year later, the Texas energy grid is again in crisis, with six power plants crashing in the midst of a particularly scorching heat wave.

    Public power would take the profit motive that leads to such crises out of the energy system, directing revenue to building out clean power rather than lining the pockets of shareholders and lobbying against climate legislation. Public power would allow us to build the infrastructure we need for the increasingly perilous environment we inhabit. Constructing and maintaining a clean energy system will provide thousands of secure, well-paying jobs.

    Energy should be a public good, reliable and accessible to all, regardless of one’s ability to pay. It’s time to take power out of the hands of polluting, for-profit corporations. To decarbonize rapidly, we need to democratize our energy systems. It’s time for public power.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Attack on Abortion Is an Attack on Democracy Itself

    When I was the age that my daughter is now, my favorite sweatshirt had the words “Choice, Choice, Choice, Choice” in rainbow letters across its front. My mom got me that sweatshirt at a 1989 rally in response to Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade. And though many adults in the Wisconsin neighborhood where I grew up thought that message inappropriate for a 13 year old, I wore it proudly. Even then, I understood that it spoke not just to a person’s right to an abortion, but also to the respect and dignity that should be afforded every human being.

    Since then, it has become increasingly clear that our society does not confer rights and dignity on we the people — as seen in the slashing of school food programs, the denial of Medicaid expansion in states that need it most, attacks on Black, Brown, and Native bodies by the police and border patrol, as well as the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to put fossil-fuel companies ahead of the rest of us, guns above kids, and deny sovereignty to indigenous people and tribes, while failing to protect our voting rights and ending the constitutional right to abortion.

    For millions of us, the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion means that life in America has just grown distinctly more dangerous. The seismic aftershocks of that ruling are already being felt across the country: 22 states have laws or constitutional amendments on the books now poised to severely limit access to abortion or ban it outright. Even before the Supremes issued their decision, states with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal-mortality and infant-mortality rates. Now, experts are predicting at least a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths across the country.

    As is always the case with public-health crises in America — the only industrialized country without some form of universal healthcare — it’s the poor who will suffer the most. Survey data shows that nearly 50% of women who seek abortions live under the federal poverty line, while many more hover precariously above it. In states that limit or ban abortion, poor women and others will now face an immediate threat of heightened health complications, as well as the long-term damage associated with abortion restrictions.

    Indeed, data collected by economists in the decades after Roe v. Wade indicates that the greater the limits on abortion, the more poverty for parents and the less education for their children. Worse yet, the 13 states that had trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the event of a Roe reversal were already among the poorest in the country. Now, poor people in poor states will be on the punishing spear tip of our post-Roe world.

    While the Supreme Court’s grim decision means more pain and hardship for women, transgender, and gender non-conforming people, it signals even more: the validation of a half-century-old strategy by Christian nationalists to remake the very fabric of this nation. For the businessmen, pastors, and politicians who laid the foundations for the Dobbs ruling, this was never just about abortion.

    The multi-decade campaign to reverse Roe v. Wade has always been about building a political movement to seize and wield political power. For decades, it’s championed a vision of “family values” grounded in the nuclear family and a version of community life meant to tightly control sex and sexuality, while sanctioning attacks on women and LGBTQIA people. Thanks to its militant and disciplined fight to bring down Roe, this Christian nationalist movement has positioned itself to advance a full-spectrum extremist agenda that is not only patriarchal and sexist, but racist, anti-poor, and anti-democratic. Consider the Dobbs decision the crown jewel in a power-building strategy years in the making. Consider it as well the coronation of a movement ready to flex its power in ever larger, more violent, and more audacious ways.

    In that context, bear in mind that, in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the Dobbs decision gives the Supreme Court legal precedent to strike down other previously settled landmark civil rights jurisprudence, including Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (protection of same-sex relationships), and Obergefell v. Hodges (protection of same-sex marriage). Whether or not these fundamental protections ultimately fall, the Supreme Court majority’s justification for Dobbs certainly raises the possibility that any due-process rights not guaranteed by and included in the Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 could be called into question.

    The Christian nationalist movement long ago identified control of the Supreme Court as decisive for its agenda of rolling back all the twentieth-century progressive reforms from the New Deal of the 1930s through the Great Society of the 1960s. Less than a week after the Dobbs decision, in fact, that court overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 ruling that set a precedent when it came to the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by polluting industries. May Boeve, head of the environmental group 350.org, put it this way:

    “Overturning Roe v. Wade means the Supreme Court isn’t just coming for abortion — they’re coming for the right to privacy and other legal precedents that Roe rests on, even the United States government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis.”

    To fully grasp the meaning of this moment, it’s important to recognize just how inextricably the assault on abortion is connected to a larger urge: to assault democracy itself, including the rights of citizens to vote and to have decent healthcare and housing, a public-school education, living wages, and a clean environment. And it’s no less important to grasp just how a movement of Christian nationalists used the issue of abortion to begin rolling back the hard-won gains of the Second Reconstruction era of the 1950s and 1960s and achieve political power that found its clearest and most extreme expression in the Trump years and has no interest in turning back now.

    Abortion and the Architecture of a Movement

    Throughout American history, a current of anti-abortion sentiment, especially on religious grounds, has been apparent. Some traditional Roman Catholics, for instance, long resisted the advance of abortion rights, including a church-led dissent during the Great Depression, when economic disaster doubled the number of abortions (then still illegal in every state). Some rank-and-file evangelicals were also against it in the pre-Roe years, their opposition baked into a theological and moral understanding of life and death that ran deeper than politics.

    Before all this, however, abortion was legal in this country. As a scholar of the subject has explained, in the 1800s, “Protestant clergy were notably resistant to denouncing abortion — they feared losing congregants if they came out against the common practice.” In fact, the Victorian-era campaign to make abortion illegal was driven as much by physicians and the American Medical Association, then intent on exerting its professional power over midwives (mainly women who regularly and safely carried out abortions), as by the Catholic Church.

    Moreover, even in the middle decades of the twentieth century, anti-abortionism was not a consensus position in evangelical Protestantism. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, evangelicalism’s most significant denomination, took moderate positions on abortion in the 1950s and 1960s, while leading Baptist pastors and theologians rarely preached or wrote on the issue. In fact, a 1970 poll by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that “70% of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64% supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity, and 71% in cases of rape.”

    So what changed for those who became the power-brokers of a more extremist America? For one thing, the fight for the right to abortion in the years leading up to Roe was deeply intertwined with an upsurge of progressive gender, racial, and class politics. At the time, the Black freedom struggle was breaking the iron grip of Jim Crow in the South, as well as segregation and discrimination across the country; new movements of women and LGBTQ people were fighting for expanded legal protection, while challenging the bounds of repressive gender and sexual norms; the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam had catalyzed a robust antiwar movement; organized labor retained a tenuous but important seat at the economic bargaining table; and new movements of the poor were forcing Washington to turn once again to the issues of poverty and economic inequality.

    For a group of reactionary clergy and well-funded right-wing political activists, the essence of what it was to be American seemed under attack. Well-known figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, who would found the Moral Majority (alongside Jerry Falwell, Sr.), began decrying the supposed rising threat of communism and the dissolution of American capitalism, as well as what they saw as the rupture of the nuclear family and of white Christian community life through forced desegregation. (Note that Jerry Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until six years after the Roe decision.)

    Such leaders would form the core of what came to be called the “New Right.” They began working closely with influential Christian pastors and the apostles of neoliberal economics to build a new political movement that could “take back the country.” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, often cites this Paul Weyrich quote about the movement’s goals:

    “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo. We want change — we are the forces of change.”

    Indeed, what united these reactionaries above all else was their opposition to desegregation. Later, they would conveniently change their origin story from overt racism to a more palatable anti-abortion, anti-choice struggle. As historian Randall Balmer put it: “Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”

    Many of the movement’s leaders first converged around their fear that segregated Christian schools would be stripped of public vouchers. As Balmer points out, however, they soon recognized that championing racial segregation was not a winning strategy when it came to building a movement with a mass base. So they looked elsewhere. What they discovered was that, in the wake of the Roe decision, a dislike of legalized abortion had unsettled some Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. In other words, these operatives didn’t actually manufacture a growing evangelical hostility to abortion, but they did harness and encourage it as a political vehicle for radical change.

    Looking back in the wake of the recent Dobbs decision obliterating Roe v. Wade, Katherine Stewart put it this way:

    “Abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age — the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation — the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.”

    What this movement and its allies also discovered was that they could build and exert tremendous power through a long-term political strategy that initially focused on Southern elections and then their ability to take over the courts, including most recently the Supreme Court. Abortion became just one potent weapon in an arsenal whose impact we’re feeling in a devastating fashion today.

    A Fusion Movement From Below?

    As Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has pointed out, check out a map of the states in this country that have banned abortion and you’ll find that you’re dealing with the same legislators and courts denying voting rights, refusing to raise municipal minimum wages, and failing to protect immigrants, LGBTQIA people, and the planet itself. As the Economic Policy Institute described the situation after Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion on abortion hit the news in May:

    “It is no coincidence that the states that will ban abortion first are also largely the states with the lowest minimum wages, states less likely to have expanded Medicaid, states more likely to be anti-union ‘Right-to-Work’ states, and states with higher-than-average incarceration rates… Environments in which abortion is legal and accessible have lower rates of teen first births and marriages. Abortion legalization has also been associated with reduced maternal mortality for Black women. The ability to delay having a child has been found to translate to significantly increased wages and labor earnings, especially among Black women, as well as increased likelihood of educational attainment.”

    Indeed, the right to abortion should be considered a bellwether issue when judging the health of American democracy, one that guarantees equal protection under the law for everyone. Fortunately, the most recent Supreme Court rulings, including Dobbs, are being met with growing resistance and organizing. Just weeks ago, thousands upon thousands of us came together on Pennsylvania Avenue for a Mass Poor People and Low Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. On the very day of the Dobbs decision and ever since, protests against that ruling, including acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, have been growing.

    In a similar fashion, striking numbers of us have begun mobilizing against gun violence and the climate crisis. At this moment as well, we seem to be witnessing the rise of a new labor movement with workers already organizing at Starbucks, Dollar General stores, and Walmart, among other places. The Christian nationalist movement relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy and single-issue organizing. A pro-democracy and justice movement must resist that approach.

    As a Christian theologian and pastor myself, I’ve been deeply disturbed by the growth of the Christian nationalist movement. We would do well, however, to heed their focus and fury. Its leaders were very clear about how necessary it was, if they were ever to gain real power in this country, to build a national political movement. In response, the 140 million poor and low-wealth Americans, pro-choice and pro-earth activists, and those of us concerned about the future of our democracy must do the same, building a moral movement from below. And such a movement must not be afraid of power, but ready to fight for it. Only then can we truly begin to reconstruct this country from the bottom up.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The human health impacts of pesticides are not ‘acceptable risks.’ Here’s how we can fix pesticide management

    The post The human health impacts of pesticides are not ‘acceptable risks.’ Here’s how we can fix pesticide management appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • The Coup Allegations Against the Secret Service Are Astonishing

    “I made my peace with the Secret Service early in ’72,” journalist Hunter Thompson recounted to High Times magazine in a 1977 interview, “when I went to a party in the Biltmore Hotel here in New York after McGovern’s primary victory, and there were about ten agents in a room. Three of them were obviously passing a joint around. The look on their faces when I walked in there, all of them turning to look when I walked in, it was a wonderful moment of confrontation.”

    The idea of Secret Service agents existing as patriotically robotic steely-eyed bullet eaters — despite the best efforts of the movie industry — was exploded a while ago. “Another way to put it,” reports The Atlantic, “is that the Secret Service has been a rolling disaster, with almost too many breaches to keep track of.”

    Most of these blunders have involved grossly inappropriate behavior abroad, drunken foolishness at home, a consistent failure of leadership, and more than a few disturbing breaches in White House security. As bad as it has been, if there is even a whisper of truth to the new accusations being leveled against the Secret Service, the entire agency should be razed to the ground and salted with quicklime.

    It began with a report by The Intercept detailing how the service “erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021,” the day before and the day of the insurrection attack on the Capitol. This erasure was part of a planned equipment upgrade, according to agency officials, but took place after oversight officials had ordered that all communications from those days be preserved. The House Select Committee on the January 6 attack has issued a subpoena for all deleted texts.

    After the deletion of these texts was revealed, a number of disturbing pieces began falling into place. On the day of the attack, as former Vice President Mike Pence was being led away from the violence, his Secret Service detail tried to get him into a limo. “I’m not getting in the car,” Pence replied; he knew that if he left the building, the process of certifying the election would falter, and Pence suspected such an end was the ultimate goal.

    “[Pence] uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.” committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin said at a recent Georgetown appearance. “He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do.” For its part, the Secret Service has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

    The two men in charge of Donald Trump’s public appearances, like the rally held that day, were present and former senior Secret Service agents. Their allegiance to Trump was absolute; in fact, President Biden was required to take on a whole new security detail when he took office, as the one that had served Trump before him had become entirely politicized.

    This train of evidence — incomplete as it presently stands — leads to some truly bleak possibilities. The worst of them would have the Secret Service in cahoots with Trump’s efforts to thwart Pence’s duties that day by removing him from the scene. In this scenario, when the plot failed, text message evidence of the plotters in action was deliberately deleted, with the explanation for why jumping around like a frog on a hot plate.

    Even if none of this proves true, the agency still tried to obliterate evidence needed by the Select Committee, evidence it had been directly ordered to preserve. The best of all possible outcomes still makes this perhaps the most gruesome scandal in Secret Service history.

    What may prove to be the final hearing of the Select Committee will take place at 8 pm on Thursday night. Part of the anticipated program is a minute-by-minute breakdown of Trump’s actions — and specifically, his inactions — over the hours the violence unfolded at the Capitol. Raskin has this Secret Service story in his teeth, however, so don’t be surprised if these allegations receive the airing they deeply deserve.

    The essential nature of the story of January 6 is as straightforward as it is grim: The more we look into it, the worse the story gets. What began with a president apparently not caring about a violent attack on democracy has metastasized into a deep plot driven by that president to deliberately crash the presidential election and deliver him, tyrant-like, back into power. Now, we are faced with the distinct possibility that the government’s own watchers on the walls may have been at least peripherally involved in the coup attempt.

    Dog only knows what Thursday night will bring.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Students Like Me Can Target School Boards to Get Police Out of Schools

    Schools have never been havens from the threat of policing. But recent narratives created by politicians and police departments falsify school violence as astronomically high and inaccurately suggest more police on campus as the only remedy, even as campaigns have pushed over the past two years to remove police from schools. The narratives cite anecdotal reports of violence in schools following students’ return to physical classrooms after the quarantine but fail to contextualize the violence or its causes and rarely mention that crime levels in schools are far below levels in the 1990s and 2000s. Instead of assuming more police are necessary, decision makers should be consulting students and educators — especially those of us in heavily policed schools — about solutions.

    I saw my friend slammed on a cop car in middle school. In high school, I witnessed students get pepper-sprayed by police in common areas between classes. When I was a freshman, there were one or two police officers on campus; today, four or five officers with security dogs patrol us. Their presence creates an intense atmosphere in which students wonder what caused the school to hire them.

    Arrested Learning, a national survey published in April 2021, asked students what makes them feel safe when physically attending school. Eighty-four percent referenced their friends; 63 percent answered teachers; 16 percent said police. Additionally, one-third of respondents felt police targeted them because of their identities.

    Students need investments in programs and resources that help us focus while learning, not more police. The real question: How can students voice their concerns and pressure school districts to make these changes? Local organizing around school board elections has proven the answer.

    Currently, school boards play a key role in deciding whether schools have a police presence. We’ve seen police officer associations fund pro-police school board candidates in Nassau and Suffolk counties in New York. In El Paso, Texas, the El Paso Municipal Police Officers Association and Sheriff’s Officers Association helped elect a former police officer.

    School boards rank among the best avenues to challenging on-campus police presence. Yet a 2020 National School Boards Association report revealed “discouragingly low” school board election turnout numbers (between 5 to 10 percent). That year in my home district (the fifth-largest school in the U.S. — Clark County, Nevada), only 33 percent of the electorate participated in school board elections; the winning margin was just 4,500 votes.

    Students can impact the presence of police in their schools by organizing through school boards effectively. The Center for Popular Democracy Action’s new toolkit analyzes how school boards affect students’ lives and how to use them to challenge injustices like school policing.

    School boards wield immense power. Far right conservatives and police interests understand this, but they aren’t alone. Community activists have challenged racist and classist policies through public school boards for decades. Recently, effective organizing examples have played out in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where actions by Leaders Igniting Transformation led the Milwaukee Board of School Directors to unanimously pass a resolution ending their contract with Milwaukee’s police department.

    As a fellow at Make the Road Nevada, my classmates and I pressured our school board to create a student section at meetings to ensure a dedicated platform for elevating our voices. We’re pushing hard to remove police from our schools, add more counselors and support candidates who back our priorities. It isn’t easy, but we’ve won some victories, including helping elect our endorsed candidate to the school board this summer, and keep building a solid foundation to win more.

    Nationally, students have spent the past two years dealing with a pandemic that has compounded the existing troubles in our private lives. We need more social workers, counselors and teachers who care about us in order to get through such a turbulent period. My high school had a social worker before Las Vegas began its COVID lockdown. Post-lockdown, I haven’t seen them around, and it appears additional police officers took their place. That’s a tradeoff that has benefited no one but the police.

    Make the Road Nevada Action also helped create “Youth Mandate for Education and Liberation: A Mandate to Guide Us From Crisis to Liberation,” which details how police and security in schools don’t make students feel safe and instead, often lead to harmful interactions. It also shows that students overwhelmingly prefer that school districts focus on providing more student resources and support over police and security. In the Youth Mandate, youth groups within the Center for Popular Democracy Network demanded that schools divest from police to fund services and education programs that prioritize restorative practices over harsh discipline.

    Here’s the root problem with the police: They can’t prevent violence but can only respond to it, often with more violence. Our schools should foster creativity, healing, and joy — and work to prevent harm. That’s impossible with hardline disciplinary actions and on-campus police militarization. We need resources that focus on students and position us to succeed. Obtaining those resources requires students, parents and everyone who cares about our well-being to organize around school boards.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.