First things first: If you have not seen Thursday night’s January 6 committee hearing in full, here it is. Watch that now, save this article for later. It’s not going anywhere.
Given how much political content I consume on a yearly basis, it’s natural for much of it to fade in time. I don’t have enough RAM in my processor to manage it all. Some moments will always linger, though (and here I date myself): Nixon’s bananas farewell address to his staff; Carter in a sweater talking about the energy crisis; Reagan’s eulogy for the Challenger astronauts; Bush Sr.’s “Read my lips” pledge; Wendy Davis’s filibuster; Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Barbara Boxer’s objection to Ohio’s 2004 electors; Clinton’s demand to “Save Social Security first”; the pure fear in George W. Bush’s eyes after he was informed of 9/11; Obama’s 2004 convention speech; Donald Trump at the podium before the January 6 assault; and more. If these moments did not all change history, they made history at least roll over in bed.
A new space has been set aside in my little cathedral of memory. So long as I retain one functioning neuron, I will remember Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi lowering the boom on this entire disgraceful affair with one simple, elegant and altogether damning statement: “Any legal jargon you hear about ‘seditious conspiracy’, ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’, ‘conspiracy to defraud the United States’ boils down to this: January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup.”
Equally impressive was the performance of Rep. Liz Cheney, who labored last night under a unique set of circumstances. Cheney is one of only two Republicans on the commission (the other being Rep. Adam Kinzinger). She resisted the Trump wave within her party and was all but excommunicated for it. If her hopes for reelection in Wyoming come November were slim before, they are ashes now… and that is worth recognizing. We hear the term, “The hill you choose to die on” often enough. Last night, Liz Cheney chose her hill and did not blink.
Under virtually every circumstance imaginable, I am constitutionally incapable of praising a Cheney; that neuron burned out more than 20 years ago. This Cheney’s policy positions are the stuff of my personal nightmares, but in this moment and with so much on the line, she came through like Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations when the Cuban missiles were revealed: “As you hear this, all Americans should keep in mind this fact: On the morning of January 6, President Donald Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power.”
Given the content of her apostasy, Cheney’s finest moment came when she called down the judgment of history itself upon the heads of every Republican who abandoned reason and the country for a taste of Trump’s table scraps: “Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Peter Baker of The New York Times summed up the proceedings succinctly: “In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.”
When I say watch it yourself, I do mean it. There were almost too many astonishing revelations put forth to be recounted by any second party; you have to experience it firsthand, listen to the gasps from the audience when Trump is quoted as saying the insurrectionists seeking to murder Mike Pence had the right idea, and watch as grown men weep in the gallery as they recall their own experiences on that bleak day.
Ivanka Trump believes Bill Barr, who thinks the stolen election narrative is “bullshit.” Rep. Scott Perry went spelunking for a presidential pardon after trying to insert a Trump mole into the Justice Department as part of the larger plot to overturn the election. The scramble to make it seem like Trump was “in charge” after Pence took all the needed actions to regain control of the situation. The fact that Trump was deemed “too dangerous to leave alone” by his aides. The clear connective tissue between militia groups like the Proud Boys and the efforts to overturn the election results… and with every revelation, lined up one after the other, came a sense of genuine horror, again, that such a thing had come to pass.
“What I saw was just a war scene,” recounted former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was beaten unconscious by the mob. “It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw. I never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer — as a law enforcement officer — I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”
Before the hearings are concluded, the commissioners will seek to establish the following:
Trump deliberately spread false information about the election.
Trump sought to install allies at Justice to “support his fake election claims.”
Trump put enormous pressure on Mike Pence to make him try to overturn the election results.
Trump similarly harassed various state election officials and legislators to overthrow the results.
Trump’s legal team “instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archive.”
Trump invited a mob to Washington, D.C., and deliberately turned them loose on the Capitol.
Trump appeared to be enjoying the violence as it was taking place, and took no action to stop it for hours.
… and as Axios pointed out in its email newsletter this morning, “Note the first word of each of those sentences.”
As for Trump himself, well, it was just another evening spent rewriting history in his typical bog-standard fashion: “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he puled on his pet platform. “It represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
That’s nice, Donnybrook. Have fun storming the castle. Hey, at least he didn’t try to blame everyone in the country for January 6 the way House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did before the hearing had even begun. I swear, these two were born for each other.
Was history made last night? Has anything changed? That is for time and Attorney General Merrick Garland to ultimately decide. Some 50 years of grim and disappointing history suggest all this will go down as just another television show, but who knows. Whatever else it was, last night’s hearing was deeply compelling. I slept very poorly after it was over, and I suspect I am not alone in that.
The next hearing is scheduled for Monday morning, 10 am Eastern time.
For much of the spring of 2020, I sat on a pink armchair in my bedroom and desperately tried to support the kids and families at the school where I was employed as a part-time social worker. I was armed with a lot, or very little, depending on your perspective: a phone; a laptop; consistent wi-fi; years of graduate school and work experience; compassion, more or less; and a working knowledge of children and the city in which I lived, more or less.
Many of the families on my caseload spoke of their desperation in the face of new and intensified problems, and the fear, conflict, stress and cloistered chaos that entered their lives in mid-March and then simply remained. Others were unreachable; my calls and emails went unanswered, and teachers reported students who seldom appeared on class Zoom calls, or appeared only as black squares, worryingly silent.
I remember parents crying as I met their pixelated faces with what I hoped was an expression of empathy and support, itself blurry. Sometimes children themselves articulated their difficulties, choppily, as the connection ebbed. These families spoke of food scarcity; constant strife; schoolwork that was never done; paid work that could not be completed; younger siblings who must be supervised; relatives who were sick or dying; children who wept, raged, or cowered, consumed by worry.
Sometimes I could offer solutions to these ills, but often I could not; my own children jangled at the doorknob, and I was forced to say, as I ended the conversation, “I’ll make some calls, and let you know,” or “I’m so sorry; that’s so hard.” It hurt, every time, but there was, ultimately so little I could do. It was an intensification of a sensation I’ve had for years: For every student whose life has been improved by my labors, there are those whose challenges are too deeply entrenched for me to help much at all, given the limited resources attached to my role and the tenuousness of the infrastructure our country has to support families — parents, children — facing addiction, mental illness, medical challenges, undiagnosed learning disabilities, poverty, intergenerational trauma or some combination of all of these factors.
My own school returned to in-person learning a few months later, in September 2020, much to my relief. Some of the problems vanished, seemingly overnight. Some seemed like ripples that died out slowly; some challenges simply stayed. Many other schools remained remote, in some form or another, until fall 2021. (According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 35 percent of 4th and 8th grade students were fully in person in February 2021.)
In May of 2022, I spoke to school social workers, counselors and psychologists across the country. I wanted to know about the shape and texture of their working lives during the pandemic. They told me things that were hard to hear, about fundamental shifts in their work.
“Usually I turn my phone off, but my phone has been really on all the time because I’m worried about this one student,” Marsha Carey, a social worker in a charter high school in a large northeastern city told me, speaking to a dissolution of boundaries that would have been unimaginable to her before the pandemic. “One of my student’s moms died [of COVID-19]…. Sometimes my phone rings at 1, 2 o’clock in the morning, [and I answer because I’m] scared that my student can’t handle it anymore, where she’s suicidal. She doesn’t have a mom anymore, she doesn’t have a dad, her support system is not that great. [I’m] on call 24/7. That’s been very hard. You take it home to your family.”
I have worked in school mental health for nearly 10 years, and throughout most of the pandemic. So much of what these workers told me — many of whom asked that I use only their first names, or share only general geographic information about their schools, given the sensitive nature of their work — resonated with my own experiences. The workers I interviewed for this piece range in focus from elementary to high school, and they come from public, charter and independent schools. But there was a striking sameness to their observations, as they described the effects of the harm wrought by the twin traumas of COVID-19 (by which I count both disease and economic fallout) and extended remote schooling.
School counselors and social workers described schools full of children who were, as a group, experiencing developmental delays: “The 9th grade class as a whole is having all these large-scale social issues that are just usually more common in middle school or elementary school,” Kira, a counselor at an independent high school in a mid-Atlantic suburb told Truthout.
Meanwhile, elementary practitioners told me their children were grappling with developmental struggles typical of preschoolers, and middle school practitioners told me their children were navigating the social, emotional and behavioral terrain of elementary schoolers.
Students struggle simply to be in class after remote learning. Jamie Spiro, a therapist based in a high school in a large city in Washington State, described the current landscape of her adolescent clients. “I have some students who wear a mask but not because of COVID; they have anxiety around showing their faces.… Doing school by Zoom provided an opportunity to have their screens off. Returning, they had a lot of anxiety about their face being shown, and also some students got used to being in a Zoom class and exiting when they wanted. They’re surprised when they can’t just … leave class.”
Teachers were ill-equipped to support these challenges. Zoe, an elementary school social worker from central Wisconsin told Truthout that, “Any time a student experiences anything sort of emotional, the teacher takes the approach of ‘I’m maxed out; can you just fix it?’”
Many people I spoke to were the only counselor or social worker in their school. They all served hundreds of students. As a culture, we have unceremoniously dumped the aftershocks of fear, loss, economic stress, uncertainty and isolation into the laps of thinly stretched professionals.
Like many, I have worked hard in my time as a social worker to manage my own and others’ expectations of my work. I do not “fix” children; I meet children and caregivers where they are, and support them — perhaps through change, perhaps not. I connect them to outside services and supports when they are available; sometimes such resources do not exist, or are geographically, financially or logistically inaccessible. I can go above and beyond on some days but not all. But when the problems become larger, more numerous, more entrenched, what becomes of your carefully constructed limits, your sense of efficacy?
Heather Findley, director of mental health services for Holt Public Schools, a suburban and rural district in Michigan, wondered aloud about the impact of the pandemic on Holt’s students and, as a result, on its mental health staff: “How do you ultimately know that it’s not you not doing your job; it’s everything else that’s going on around it that’s impacting that, and how do you not then take that personally and be like ‘I’m not servicing the way I should be?’”
Breanne, a school counselor in a mid-sized city in Washington State echoed this. “It’s been hard to even just take a day off to take care of yourself because you come back and students are like ‘Where were you,’ and ‘I tried to see you’ and ‘I needed this’ and ‘my family is getting evicted.’… You just feel that sense of responsibility for them but also, you’ve got to take care of yourself because everybody knows you can’t give from an empty tank.”
Breanne is leaving her role to become an assistant principal, and had a keen understanding of the ways in which the challenges of this moment extended beyond the walls of her school.
“We feel like we’re on our own in these situations, and even in our district we’ll talk and be like, ‘Maybe it’s just our population,’” she said. “Then we get to statewide events or national conferences online, and hearing these exact same things…. This isn’t isolated, this isn’t just a me thing; it’s not just my population, this is all over the country.”
And then on the day of my last scheduled interview, a teenager with an AR-15 murdered 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The high school social worker in Chicago with whom I had arranged to speak that evening messaged me in the afternoon. “I’m struggling,” she wrote. She was very sorry, and sent me multiple apologies for canceling.
The day after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who in April slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs in his state — said: “We as a state — we as a society — need to do a better job with mental health. Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period.”
These words require some scrutiny as we try to make sense of what this country’s frontline mental health workers have been tasked with over the past 27 months.
The pandemic followed years of budget cuts to educational institutions and an increasingly frayed infrastructure (if it can even be called that) for addressing youth behavioral health. I absolutely believe in the power of mental health support. Researchers who highlight the value of identifying depressed and potentially violent young men are surely not wrong that the threats these teenagers pose to themselves and others are preventable. But I am increasingly wary of this notion — popular across party lines — that therapy is the tool that will rescue us from pain and dysfunction. (“Counselors not cops!” has become a popular rallying cry in progressive movements to defund the police, and while I agree that counselors are more useful to students than cops, I also have an intimate awareness of the structural barriers that stymie even the best counselors, and the ways that they are often inaccurately presented as a panacea.)
Introducing mental health into a conversation about patriarchal violence and access to militarized weaponry seems to be a dangerous splinter off of a large, long-held confusion: the idea that counselors, therapists and social workers can fix things. We cannot. We cannot fix the harms wrought by a starkly unequal, violent society. We cannot fix the harms wrought by racism and patriarchy. We can only listen, support, connect, and move those willing closer to change, or toward whatever it is that they seek.
I am reminded of another delusion of our culture. For years, this country has traded in the lie that the harms of inequality could be erased by fostering grit and resilience within schools. In the absence of a safety net — of universal health care; consistent poverty relief; access to quality, affordable and consistent mental health care; subsidies for families; or even sufficient programs to combat food insecurity — the school reformers of the ’90s and today have tasked educators with meeting needs, and repairing damage, of preposterous proportions.
Those who wish to avoid the reality that deep, systemic change is needed will push the fallout of the pandemic and the epidemic of gun violence onto the laps of overworked and underpaid school mental health workers. But the current reality crushes even the ambitions of those who are trying to exert change beyond the walls of their counseling rooms.
“There are a lot of instances of racism — student-to-student, teacher-to-student, at this school,” Sara, a school counselor in a Philadelphia charter high school, told me, her words slow and agonized. “Because everyone is at their [wits] end, to try to address those types of issues that need to be addressed, and as the counselor it is my job to do that … that becomes increasingly difficult.”
She, too, is leaving her job, to work in private practice.
We must shout the truth to those in power: They have abandoned this country’s children, and we cannot clean up their mess, however much our failure to do so might break our hearts.
From juggling immense debt to contending with the global pandemic, being a modern college student is undeniably stressful. To make matters worse, there is a growing narrative that cheating in higher education is running rampant. This narrative has widened the divide between faculty and students, inspired stricter policies and created additional challenges for today’s students.
While cheating is never excusable, it should be addressed and punished appropriately and proportionately when it occurs. Unfortunately, due to the belief that cheating is becoming more widespread, many faculty members and administrators at colleges across the country are adopting a draconian approach to police the issue.
For example, the University of Alabama has broadly defined students using unauthorized materials, study aids or computer-related information that have not been approved by the instructor, as cheating. Depending on the professor, this can include useful online study resources like Google, YouTube and Quizlet, and the repercussions for using such tools include suspensions. The vague wording of their academic misconduct policies creates an impossible standard where students are discouraged from using online resources to help them study, even when they need additional help to achieve academic success.
The University of Alabama is not alone. While academic institutions have had honor codes for decades, during the pandemic, when colleges shifted away from physical classrooms and toward virtual learning and online test-taking, fears surrounding increased academic dishonesty in online education grew, and academic institutions began implementing stricter policies.
However, as James Orr, a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity told NPR, “Just because there’s an increase in reports of academic misconduct doesn’t mean that there’s more cheating occurring. In the online environment, I think that faculty across the country are more vigilant in looking for academic misconduct.”
Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped colleges across the country from enacting harsher policies. These policies fail to recognize that third-party materials, study aids and online study resources are used and relied upon by millions of students, particularly non-traditional students, who have limited time and resources. After graduation, employers value resourceful employees who know how to find and use outside resources when necessary. Yet, this new wave of heavy-handed policies inhibits the use of supplemental study aids and forces students to choose between falling behind or risking severe consequences.
Higher education should aim to create an optimal environment for learning, and pitting faculty and students against one another while limiting the resources students can use is detrimental to all. So, it begs the question, why are clashes surrounding cheating becoming so pervasive, and who is benefitting from them?
One industry that has benefited immensely is the global online exam proctoring market. This sector, which was valued at approximately $355 million in 2019, is expected to be worth nearly $1.2 billion by 2027. This growth, in some part, must be attributed to increased demand caused by growing fervor over student cheating.
It’s not surprising that these proctoring companies benefit from the public, especially faculty members, believing that cheating is widespread. After all, the bigger this issue appears, the greater the need for these proctoring companies’ often invasive services. These services range from programs that capture student desktop screens and chat logs to artificial intelligence technologies that detect and analyze keywords spoken by students in real time.
These programs rarely leave room for nuance, and some students found these services went so far as to discriminate against them: Proctoring tools unfairly require test takers to have a reliable computer, fast internet and quiet testing space. Underprivileged students who lack access to these resources are put in a difficult situation because the software can’t grant accommodations for their unique circumstances.
And this is not the only way these proctoring services discriminate and worsen the experience of already disenfranchised students. Students at Miami University in Ohio found that their school’s service, Proctorio, would often accuse students with ADHD of cheating. Proctorio, which is designed to track a student’s gaze and flag students who look away from their screens as suspicious, flagged students with ADHD symptoms as potential cheaters.
Not only that, the facial recognition technology used by many proctoring services registers a preference for lighter skin, which sometimes forces students with darker skin to “shine a light on their faces to be seen,” according to Shea Swauger, a librarian and doctoral student at the University of Colorado. This is one of the many reasons why students at that university started a petition to ban the use of these proctoring services.
But due to the cheating narrative becoming ubiquitous among faculty, proctoring services also gained in popularity, often to the detriment of the very students the universities are supposed to be educating.
College students already face numerous challenges. They should not have to face a hostile learning environment, fear repercussions for using available tools or be forced to use invasive proctoring services that have been found to be discriminatory.
Higher education works best when faculty and students share mutual respect and trust. To return to a place of respect and trust, academic institutions need to take a step back, reassess the current environment and remember that students should indeed be their number one priority.
Another round of Republican primaries has come and gone — this time in California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. There were dozens of state and local races across these states. Many were taken by known incumbents to the surprise of none, but the Trumpist hordes made their presence known as the “Race to Disgrace” continues apace. Trump’s candidates may not have achieved all they sought, but they left footprints all over the map. Note: Many final results are still not in as of this writing.
With the January 6 committee hearings looming this week, a number of the 35 Republicans who voted to approve the January 6 committee and its investigation found themselves under fire because of that support. Mississippi Rep. Michael Guest, who voted for the commission, is currently trailing opponent Michael Cassidy, and neither appears close to achieving the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. In South Dakota, Rep. Rusty Johnson — another Republican supporter of the commission — barely won his race against Taffy Howard, but did not crack 60 percent.
This will continue to be an issue for GOP primary voters as the races go on, but it will not be the only issue. Last month in West Virginia, Rep. David B. McKinley was defeated by Alex Mooney after Mooney attacked McKinley for supporting President Biden’s infrastructure bill. Even the slightest deviation from purity, no matter how small or how necessary, continues to be perilous for Republicans.
Montana got a whole new seat thanks to population growth, and former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is running for it. Most assumed it would be his in a walk, but the race remains too close to call after his opponents spent the campaign highlighting the myriad ethics scandals Zinke was embroiled in at Interior. One of his opponents, Al “Doc” Olszewski, smeared Zinke as a “liberal insider,” which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the current ideological state of the GOP.
It was not all Trumpian nonsense, to be sure. In South Dakota, an attempt to thwart Medicaid expansion was beaten back soundly. As of this morning, expansion was winning by a margin of 67 to 33. If these numbers hold, South Dakota will become the 39th state to expand Medicare.
Where it was Trump, however, it was all Trump… and as of this writing, being on Trump’s shit list did far less damage than some anticipated. Sen. John Thune, who has been despised by Trump ever since Thune said Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election would “go down like a shot dog,” easily crushed his opposition in South Dakota.
“In Iowa, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks ran unopposed,” reportsPolitico. “And in New Jersey, where Trump once sought to encourage a primary challenge to Rep. Chris Smith, the veteran incumbent beat back a challenge from Mike Crispi, a Republican podcast host backed by Roger Stone. (One inspired headline from the state on Tuesday night read in part, ‘Crispi creamed by Smith.’)”
While none of this can be called definitive, each passing primary Tuesday seems to underscore the sense that bucking the Trump trend is no longer the lethal act it was once perceived to be. While no one is remotely ready to declare Trump “over” — he retains a huge campaign war chest and remains the GOP frontrunner for the ’24 nomination, though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is making a case to be heir-apparent whether Trump likes it or not — it is no longer automatic doom for a Republican candidate to run away from him. This will not stop the pro-Trump candidates from trying, and in a number of places, succeeding.
The failure of some of these pro-Trump candidates is a boon for those who enjoy a good dose of schadenfreude at the former president’s expense. For congressional Democrats, however, those failures represent a serious long-term headache. By now, a multitude of analysts are predicting a red wave in November and a massive Democratic wipeout. One of the only things that may save the Democrats from this fate is if GOP primary voters select a slate of wild-eyed, can’t-win candidates backed by Trump. To date, this has not fully materialized, which leaves Democrats facing a cohort of far stronger opponents.
Still, the seeds of mayhem remain buried deep. If history is any guide, Trump will not long tolerate the good numbers DeSantis has been showing, which makes for one flashpoint. Word out of Mar-a-Lago says Trump is “bored” and may announce his 2024 candidacy as soon as July 4. A number of his advisers are apparently begging him to hold off until the midterms are over, but Trump is Trump, and there are others in his ear whispering, “Now, boss, now.”
If Trump does announce, he will immediately return to the center of conversation, which will have a dynamic effect on many upcoming primary races. He may not be all that he once was within the Republican Party, but even a half-sized bull in a china shop is still going to break some plates.
In the mid-2000s, Moonlight Pulido experienced a bout of hot flashes, emotional ups-and-downs, and other symptoms of menopause that confused her — after all, she was in her 30s and far too young to be experiencing these kinds of hormonal changes. Days before the symptoms set in, she had undergone what she believed to be a procedure to remove cancerous growths on her internal reproductive organs at the hospital at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California, where she was incarcerated. Instead, she had been forcibly sterilized.
Pulido, who now lives in a reentry program home located in Los Angeles, told Truthout that she didn’t even find out what had happened to her until she returned to the hospital for a postoperative dressing change. She asked the nurse what kind of procedure had been done on her. “She was like, ‘Oh, you had a full hysterectomy’,” Pulido said.
“[He] was a doctor and he worked in a prison, so I didn’t feel like I needed to worry about anything,” Pulido said. “So, when it came for surgery time, I didn’t read the paperwork. I just signed it. I didn’t know I was signing up for a full hysterectomy.”
Though the medical abuse that Pulido endured took place over a decade ago, it’s only recently that she’s been offered an apology for what was done to her and allowed reparative action on behalf of the state agencies that facilitated forced sterilizations. At the end of 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-California) signed legislation into law that established a $4.5 million compensation fund for victims of forced sterilizations. Through December 2023, the California Victim Compensation Board will review applications for reparations filed by people who were forcibly sterilized during two periods of time in which state employees were empowered to decide whether thousands of people were worthy of bodily autonomy and the right to reproduce. The first period was between 1909 and 1979, when eugenics sterilization was legal in the state, and the second was during the time period after, including when Pulido was sterilized.
“It is a victory to even get this type of an acknowledgement, but then the implementation falls way short of what we are hoping for,” said Diana Block, a founding member of the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners. “In this case already we can see that there are many, many obstacles to people actually getting the compensation.”
The number of people who ultimately end up applying for funds is dependent on three factors — if grassroots organizations can let people know that there are funds to be had, if people who are currently or formerly incarcerated can gain access to their own medical records, and if the California Victim Compensation Board can respond with haste to let applicants know about the standing of their application.
Now, Pulido has the opportunity to collect up to $25,000 from the state as a means of a formal recognition of what she survived, but she’s still waiting to hear whether her application has been approved. Advocates for compensation fear that the state may act as negligently with the applications as it did toward systemic medical abuse of incarcerated women and others held in state facilities.
A 2013 Center for Investigative Reporting article first broke the story of forced sterilizations taking place in California’s state-run facilities and prisons, finding that at least 148 incarcerated women were subjected to sterilizations. Shortly after the article’s publication, state legislators called for an audit of sterilizations performed in prison health care facilities, which later identified 144 incarcerated women who had undergone bilateral tubal ligation — a procedure that serves no medical purpose but to prevent pregnancy.
Of those 144 patients, at least 39 were not offered informed consent or underwent procedures that were completed without the appropriate physician signatures on consent forms. The audit found that all but one of the 144 tubal ligation procedures lacked the necessary signatures, and cited the failure as “systemic.”
Even still, the government audit acknowledges that this is merely an estimate of how many people treated at prison hospitals were forcibly sterilized, seeing as, “the true number of cases in which Corrections or the Receiver’s Office did not ensure that consent was lawfully obtained prior to sterilization may be higher.” In fact, the audit says that data from the California Correctional Health Care Services Receiver’s Office shows that nearly 800 incarcerated women underwent procedures that “could have resulted in sterilization” in the years between 2005 and 2013.
The total number of potential survivors differs depending on who’s asked. The creators of Belly of the Beast, the 2020 documentary that helped propel the compensation legislation to the governor’s desk and shed light on the fact that sterilizations occurred in California as recently as 2011, identified as many as 1,400 survivors eligible for compensation. The California Victim Compensation Board says that they anticipate 600 people will come forward. According to the board, as of June 1, 62 applications have been filed and four have been approved.
“They [the state] have no record in one place of everyone who has been sterilized,” Block said. So, it’s a matter of people basically self-identifying and applying.” And now, “the clock is ticking.”
Chryl LaMar, a coordinator with the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners (CCWP) who is formerly incarcerated, is helping survivors apply for compensation. She first reaches out through email to let survivors know about the funds and then walks them through the application, which CCWP worked with the California Victim Compensation Board to formulate.
But LaMar says that survivors are “running up against a wall.” Not only are survivors having a difficult time accessing their own medical records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), but in many cases hospitals do not keep records for more than 10 years. It’s the kind of hurdle that can make gaining a small kind of justice for a traumatic event even more cumbersome. “CDCR should be giving ladies their documents inside of the system,” LaMar said.
The California Victim Compensation Board form asks that applicants provide proof of their sterilization or “suspected” sterilization (in the case that there is no official documentation), and in these cases LaMar is having to think creatively about how to demonstrate the medical abuse. She explains that in the case where someone can’t provide the medical records, they can provide a different record indicating that they were discharged from the prison to the hospital overnight, indicating that they underwent a procedure.
Gaining justice for survivors and reckoning with the state’s history of abuse is “not only a reproductive health issue [it’s a] racial justice issue,” said Lorena García Zermeño, the policy and communications coordinator at California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, one of the organizations that fought for the passage of the compensation bill. “It’s a matter of ensuring that our communities are not criminalized and upholding folks’ bodily autonomy.”
Eugenics practices and forced sterilizations have long been weapons wielded against Indigenous, Black and Latinx people, as well as immigrants, low-wealth and disabled people. In 1909, California enacted a eugenics law that allowed doctors working in state-run hospitals, homes and institutions to sterilize anyone classified as mentally ill, feebleminded, epileptic or syphilitic, using what eugenicists believe to be a crude immunization against a so-called predisposition for criminality. Latinx, Black and Indigenous women were disproportionately sterilized due to what scholars have called “deep-seated preoccupations about gender norms and female sexuality.”
During the 20th century about 60,000 recorded sterilizations took place across the U.S., with a third of those occurring in California. Even while the majority of sterilizations in the state took place between 1920 and 1950, the pathologization of mental ability, neuro non-normativity, race and queerness lasted well until 1979, when the state finally outlawed sterilizations for eugenics purposes. After the audit in 2014, the state banned sterilizations in prisons as a means of birth control. In 2016, there were an estimated 831 survivors of eugenics sterilizations with an average age of 87.9. As of 2021, there are only 383 living survivors of eugenics sterilization who would be eligible for reparations, according to Zermeño.
The legacy of eugenics is alive in the systemic failure to uphold the reproductive freedom of incarcerated people, most notably in the belief that low-income people, people of color — specifically Latinx, Indigenous and Black people — and disabled people drain state economies. Pulido says she experienced this firsthand from the doctor who performed an illegal hysterectomy on her: “I’m so sick of you guys coming in and out of the prison,” Pulido said the doctor told her when she returned for a dressing change. “You get pregnant and you end up back in jail and I have to pay for the care of your children through government aid, because you can’t stay home and be decent.” Pulido is Native American.
California conducted more than double the number of sterilizations of states like North Carolina and Virginia, which sterilized a recorded 7,600 and 8,000 people respectively. But California lags far behind those states in reckoning with its history, and it hasn’t sought to offer reparation payments until this year. Zermeño said that when crafting the compensation legislation, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and other organizations modeled the language and expectations after similar programs in North Carolina and Virginia, estimating that 25 percent of the eligible survivors will apply for compensation. Zermeño wants the state to remember that issues of injustice are interconnected, and hopes she can draw people’s attention to the fact that racism and prejudice are baked into all parts of the system, not just those that facilitate the sterilization of people without their consent.
For Pulido, who’s rebuilding her life and community after so many years since her medical trauma, her survival is a testament to her strength. “Even though I went through what I went through, and I was told what I was told by that doctor, I still fought for my freedom,” she said.
The highly anticipated congressional hearings into the January 6, 2021, assault on the United States Capitol are slated to begin this Thursday evening. Member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, Rep. Jamie Raskin, stoked the rising anticipation on Monday by reporting, “The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here. We’re going to be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on January 6.”
It seems, however, that some are worried enough about gathering an audience for the event that they are allowing some heavy bricks to fall early, or perhaps someone is merely not willing, after 17 months, to wait a minute longer. Whatever the reason, the leaks that began on Monday have become a torrent.
“The Georgia email has not been disclosed publicly until now,” reportedCNN on Monday morning. “It was sent by Robert Sinners, [former President Donald] Trump’s election day operations lead in Georgia on December 13, 2020, 18 hours before the group of alternate electors gathered at the Georgia State Capitol, according to multiple sources familiar with it. ‘I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,’ Sinners wrote. ‘Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.’”
This email is in the hands of the January 6 committee; the Justice Department’s investigation into the attack; and the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office, where they have been investigating Trump’s direct effort to have Georgia elected officials “find” more than 11,000 votes after the election was over.
It is altogether ominous on its face; the scheme to send alternate electors to Congress could have badly fouled the election process had it been carried out with a modicum of competence. The same tactic worked all too well in 1876. At a bare minimum, the demand for “complete secrecy” betrays the fact that the actors here knew full well they were operating well outside the parameters of good faith and the law in search of a different election result.
Later on Monday, former Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor dropped a tweet for the ages:
I believe Trump intended to incite an insurrection as a pretext for declaring some form of marshal law. He mused about invoking the Insurrection Act YEARS before Jan 6 — calling it a “magic power” — in convos I witnessed & was briefed on.
Leaving aside the bracing need for someone to sit these folks down and teach them how to spell “martial law,” (paging Marjorie Taylor Greene) is the fact that, if Taylor’s account is accurate, we now have two distinct tracks to follow: 1.) The initial plan behind the mob action was to force then-Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the election results during the certification hearing; 2.) failing that, the vivid violence of the insurrection itself could be used as justification for imposing martial law, which would at least temporarily have imperiled the election results.
Thursday better hurry up, lest all the cats bolt the bag before the show even begins. “The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack will unveil new evidence at Watergate-style public hearings this week showing Donald Trump and top aides acted with corrupt intent to stop Joe Biden’s certification,” reports the Guardian. “As the Justice Department mounts parallel investigations into the Capitol attack, the select committee is hoping that the previously unseen evidence will leave an indelible mark on the American public about the extent to which Trump went in trying to return himself to the Oval Office.”
Not content to let the evidence do the talking on its own, the committee has enlisted the help of James Goldston, former president of ABC News and master documentarian for “Nightline” and “Good Morning America.” According to Axios, “Goldston is busily producing Thursday’s 8 p.m. ET hearing as if it were a blockbuster investigative special. He plans to make it raw enough so that skeptical journalists will find the material fresh, and chew over the disclosures in future coverage. And he wants it to draw the eyeballs of Americans who haven’t followed the ins and outs of the Capitol riot probe.”
The Brookings Institute was kind enough to assemble a highly detailed primer for Thursday’s events. “The report covers key players in the attempt to overturn the election, the known facts regarding their conduct, and the criminal law applicable to their actions,” according to the executive summary. For those who wish to be fully prepared for Thursday, it is an indispensable document.
This moment arrives freighted with extreme tension. On Monday, four members of the hard right militia group Proud Boys — leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and lieutenants Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl — were indicted in federal court on charges of seditious conspiracy: “opposing the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.” According to The Washington Post, “The charges show prosecutors pulling together a wider picture of organization within extremist groups that shared overlapping if not common goals. The investigations have exposed hints of coordination among groups, even as the FBI and Justice Department are expanding their investigations into the political orbit of former president Donald Trump.”
The Proud Boys and groups like it are the fascist fist within Trump’s insurrectionist glove, the implicit promise of extreme violence if the will of the maximum leader is thwarted. How that group, and the others, will react to these indictments remains to be seen. Some have cooperated with investigators, but the others, the ones still free? I assume security at the Thursday hearings will be tight.
Only days ago, a retired judge in Wisconsin named Jack Roemer was found in his home, zip-tied to a chair and shot to death. His assassin, who shot himself but survived, carried a hit list that included Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The killer could very well have been a rogue element, but then again, so was George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer. In a country enduring an upward spiral of political violence, the fear of returning to an age of assassinations is all too present.
Many today are exhausted, dispirited, more than a little afraid and altogether out of patience. The people have been led on snipe hunts leading nowhere since the Iran-Contra hearings and the Great Big Nothing that was the Robert Mueller investigation, combined with a pair of deliberately futile impeachment proceedings, were awfully damned close to the last straw. I have not spoken to a single person who expects anything to come from these hearings. In my capacity as journalist, I am required to keep an open mind… but I, too, share in that collective exhausted despair.
The building thunderclouds are impressive, at least. We shall see if they bring the rain, or just more empty wind.
“Americans have declared an unofficial end to the pandemic,” writes Robert Pearl, M.D. for Forbes. “Most people are no longer willing to mask up, keep their kids out of school or avoid spending time with family and friends…. Americans are moving on from Covid-19, whether or not health-policy experts believe they should.”
All over, you say? 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.
But COVID is over, right? And kids are supposed to be safe from it, right? They always just get a runny nose! Right?
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.
COVID is not behind us. It is right in front of us and all around us, and the most vulnerable among us are paying the freight for our comprehensive, repetitive national failure to act when proper action could have stalled this seemingly eternal calamity.
The sick and the dying are the price we pay because we seem to enjoy the goddamned arguments more than we can tolerate the solutions. Vaccines became the fodder for profiteers who convinced too many people the medicine had microchips in it. Masks, which are little more than simple Band-Aid-level technology, were shunned across swaths of the country until the dead stacked a million bodies high… and even higher than that, if researchers at the City University of New York School of Public Health have it right:
The United States is now in its fourth-biggest Covid surge, according to official case counts – but experts believe the actual current rate is much higher. America is averaging about 94,000 new cases every day, and hospitalizations have been ticking upward since April, though they remain much lower than previous peaks.
But Covid cases could be undercounted by a factor of 30, an early survey of the surge in New York City indicates. “It would appear official case counts are under-estimating the true burden of infection by about 30-fold, which is a huge surprise,” said Denis Nash, an author of the study and a distinguished professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York School of Public Health.
While the study focused on New York, these findings may be true throughout the rest of the country, Nash said. In fact, New Yorkers likely have better access to testing than most of the country, which means undercounting could be even worse elsewhere. “It’s very worrisome. To me, it means that our ability to really understand and get ahead of the virus is undermined,” Nash said.
(Emphasis added)
It is not just COVID now, either; all the other shoes we were also warned about are now dropping after people spent the last two years putting off medically necessary treatments because the hospitals were slammed with COVID patients. That, and the unrelenting mental and emotional pressure millions still feel despite it all being “over,” is creating a whole new crisis of care across the country. “Scores of health systems say they are dealing with record emergency department volume, sicker patients, a compounding mental health crisis, and an ever-beleaguered workforce,” reportsThe Boston Globe.
It’s only June, and the warmer weather has in prior years shown itself to be a decently effective barrier against mass infection… but as the Bard was at pains to warn us, “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” At present, infection rates are ticking up despite the positive weather, in no small part because of what Katelyn Jetelina has dubbed “The Battle of Omicron.” In short, three variants of the virus are grappling for the title of most infectious, and if this crisis persists into the fall, we could witness yet another detonation in infections. Deadlinereports:
Estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [on May 31] indicate that the share of cases tied to Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 increased 79% in the past week. That means, even as the more transmissible BA.2.12.1 Omicron subvariant became officially dominant in the U.S. last week, it’s already being pushed out by newcomers BA.4 and BA.5. The result would seem to be overlapping waves of Omicron.
While BA.2.12.1 gained an advantage by being more transmissible than BA.2 before it, the two newer variants are said to be making inroads at least in part because of their abilities to reinfect…. If true, that means the new variants have a much larger population that they can potentially access via breakthrough infections, where previous variants like BA.2.12.1 produced far fewer breakthrough infections.
As one of many millions who will likely spend the term of my life in a defensive crouch because of COVID, it would be nice to believe the country will finally decide to slay this beast. Our scientific ingenuity combined with deliberate intention cast polio and smallpox onto the garbage heap of history, so why not this?
Well, for openers, there is money to be made and political office to be won by convincing people that all of this is some cruel charade perpetrated by shadowy forces that can somehow be explained by a YouTube video made in Steve Bannon’s basement. Enough people have guzzled the snake oil in the name of party/Trumpian fealty to make any mass effort against COVID an exercise in futility.
So here we sit in the ongoing aftermath of “over,” listening to our children struggle to breathe, watching as seizures render them unresponsive, waiting for an age-appropriate vaccine that will almost certainly turn out to be vulnerable to a variant. This is the new “normal” we’re being asked to swallow, and it is a permanent astonishment.
I used to think we were better than this. I have never been more wrong in my life.
Two years ago, I was afraid of going to the grocery store, lest I encounter COVID-19 lurking by the bananas or swirling around some unmasked dunderhead coughing purposefully beneath a MAGA hat. That fear remains ever-present, alas, but has recently been joined by an aisle-by-aisle sticker shock: This costs how much, now? As the Cambridge band Morphine once warned us, it’s murder out there, murder out there, sharks patrol these waters.
The Republicans, on cue, have fanned out to all points on the compass. Their sole purpose: to blame the Biden administration for the inflation crisis that popped after the COVID stimulus packages saved the country from flying apart at the economic seams, back in the bleak times too many refuse to remember. For the Republicans, this economic crisis has arrived tied in a bright bow, just in time for the downhill run to the midterm elections in November.
I remember: Millions of people were out of work, or couldn’t work, and thanks to the magic of capitalism, most of those millions had been living paycheck to paycheck with no savings to speak of. Without the stimulus bills, and the child credit the GOP let die last summer, well … we think we live in a dystopia now. While it definitely sucks, this right here is a long, luxurious back rub compared to where we’d be without that rescue money. The post-stimulus inflation burst feels like a dirty trick, true, but it’s certainly better than the Scroogy alternative.
This is not to say the Biden administration is entirely free of culpability. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently appeared with Wolf Blitzer on CNN to talk about the roiled state of the economy, and she dutifully fell upon her sword. “I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” she said. “There have been unanticipated and large shocks that have boosted energy and food prices, and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I … at the time, didn’t fully understand.”
Fair enough. It is a deeply weird economy we’re dealing with right now. “Employers are adding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month,” reportsThe New York Times, “and would hire even more people if they could find them. Consumers are spending, businesses are investing, and wages are rising at their fastest pace in decades.” Yet because of inflation and the more-than-occasional dearth in necessary items (like baby formula, hey thanks, Abbott Labs), a lot of people think the economy is eating itself. Who knows, maybe it is. The old metrics no longer seem to apply.
Russia’s putrid war in Ukraine owns a substantial slice of blame for this mess, to be sure. With one fell swoop, Vladimir Putin’s invasion and the subsequent sanctions against his country kicked the struts out from under the global food and global petroleum networks. Prices for everything from grain to gasoline are spiking, causing hunger and want to increase both here and abroad.
For the lucky ones, there is the existential economic angst of paying five bucks a gallon at the gas station, only to drive to a grocery store selling ground beef for ten bucks a pound. Interesting fact: A quasi-subterranean reason why everything is so damned pricey is because diesel fuel is more expensive than gas by a notable margin. That means running the trucks that carry the food everywhere now brings a back-breaking expense to the transport companies, which they pass along to those who pass it along to those who pass it along to us.
Speaking of passing it along, no discussion of the current inflation crisis would be complete without a bright light shining on corporate price-gouging. CBS Newsreports:
Over the past year, despite the extreme economic upheaval of the pandemic, after-tax corporate profits have soared to record levels as a share of economic output, according to the U.S. Commerce Department…
Some corporate leaders have been blunt about their plans to pass companies’ higher supply-chain prices to consumers. For example, consumer goods giants Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble and Unilever have been able to raise prices without losing sales. Nearly two-thirds of publicly traded companies report fatter profit margins than before the pandemic, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Russia-gas-food, Russia-gas-food… flip on the news networks and you’ll hear about this unholy trinity until your flatscreen cracks, but there has been a hole in the reporting wider than Jupiter, one that the Biden administration has also comprehensively failed to mention enough: COVID.
COVID! Come on, you can say it, the monster is still under the bed, no sense pretending otherwise. COVID fouled global supply lines way back in 2020 and they have not recovered, so that’s nothing new. When we reached that first lull in infections, and then when we reached another one after the spike that inevitably comes when we let down our guard, people went wild with their spending. Steak at a restaurant! Whiskey at a bar! Music at a concert! Stuff! Things! PUT THAT SHIT IN MY FACE, and it felt like life again, because around here, it was.
Increased demand + lowered supply (due to COVID-caused shipping ills) is How To Have Inflation 101, basic stuff. People ran out and giddily cleared the shelves, and not nearly enough ships came in to restock them. Compounding this, COVID has all but shuttered China, which is the manufacturing hub of the world whether we like it or not. Empty factories don’t feed empty ships, which leads to empty stores on the other side of the ocean and people faced with spending way more than they’re used to for basic needs.
This doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon. “After months of rolling lockdowns in scores of Chinese cities that have forced hundreds of millions of people to remain in their homes, it is clear that President Xi Jinping is prepared to pursue his policy of zero-Covid at the expense of all other concerns,” reportsThe Financial Times. “That includes the widespread damage the policy is wreaking on the world’s second-biggest economy and most important manufacturing engine, and the political risks it is creating by further limiting the freedom of 1.4bn people.”
When I step back, I can’t help but be amazed at how much effort is going into keeping COVID out of the inflation conversation, even as it shuts down massive nations like China and still fouls the global supply lines. The Financial Times covers it because they really kind of have to, but the others? It’s all Russia’s fault, no it’s all Biden’s fault, no it was the free money you guys!
It was, is, and will remain COVID, which turned the whole damned planet on its ear, killed a million people here, and is not nearly finished with us. Capitalism, of course, helps not at all. There may very well be a way out of this without confronting an economic cataclysm, but when all is said and done, complaints about the price of gasoline and ground chuck could be remembered as the good old days. We need to be honest with ourselves about why.
As the nation absorbs the horror of yet another massacre of schoolchildren, questions about the police’s response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have become paramount. According to still conflicting reports, police became aware of an active shooter within Robb Elementary School but did not enter the building and engage the attacker for more than 70 minutes. In that span, the gunman was able to kill 19 children and two teachers with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Since the shooting, officials have faced withering criticism over the series of details that they have released about the shooting, only to later say that information was incorrect. Authorities initially said the gunman exchanged fire with a school police officer outside, only to later say this never happened; they also said the shooter was wearing body armor but reversed course on that count as well…
Police have also been pilloried for not pursuing the gunman more quickly while he was inside with children calling 911, pleading for help. McCraw said the school district’s police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, had determined the gunman had “transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” so there was a delay of more than an hour before officials stormed the classroom. “It was the wrong decision,” McCraw said.
The image of police officers refusing to enter the building while tear-gassing and handcuffing parents who were trying to get in has left an indelible mark on the national psyche. Heightening the tension, both the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force are now refusing to cooperate with investigators.
An answer to the question of why the police failed to act may have been inadvertently provided on Sunday night, when the CBS News show “60 Minutes” aired a harrowing report on why mass shooters so often choose this rifle. The reason, according to “60 Minutes,” lies within the ballistics. Rounds fired by the AR-15 travel at three times the speed of sound. According to report, this high-velocity ammunition “is the fear of every American emergency room.”
Using a long gelatin brick rectangle specifically designed to mimic the human body’s soft tissue, 60 Minutes fired one round from a Glock 9mm pistol into the block. The bullet passed through the material in a straight line, and exited intact. A round fired from the AR-15, however, exploded into pieces within the gelatin, and created a massive internal void from the impact.
A parade of first responders spent the report explaining their experiences when they entered a room where a gunman with an AR-15 has been at work. The people are not merely dead, they are smashed into unrecognizable pulp by the sheer force of the rounds that struck them. Bones are not broken upon impact; they are shattered. Internal organs are viciously shredded by multiple buzzsaws released when the tumbling bullet fractures within living tissue. Any shots to the head or face make physical identification nearly impossible; there’s nothing left to identify.
The question of why the Uvalde police refused to enter the building while the shooter was still active may have been answered by that 60 Minutes report: I suspect they knew, better than anyone, what that weapon is capable of, and wanted no part of it. The juxtaposition of their inaction compared to the parents they arrested is stark. The parents wanted to rush in and rescue their children, and some did, because they did not know what they were running toward. Perhaps the cops knew, and therefore froze.
This is not a defense of the Uvalde police. Their actions, and their scrambled story afterward, speak loudly enough on their own. This is the defenestration of the “Good guy with a gun” NRA talking point. There were plenty of state-sanctioned “guys” with guns at Robb Elementary, and still 21 bodies hit the floor. No number of security guards or armed teachers can match that level of violence and damage. If trained law enforcement officers cannot face that situation, it is folly to believe a kindergarten teacher can.
Neither should be expected to, and that’s the rub. Somehow, the AR-15 itself has managed to avoid close scrutiny, even with its status as the most popular rifle in the country. I expect the NRA has been influential in this, as that organization has become nothing more than a front for the gun manufacture industry, and all it is interested in is selling the thing. However this veil of secrecy came to be, the fact remains that the AR-15 is a combat weapon meant for soldiers, and has no business on the civilian streets of the U.S.
Debate over how best to confront this ongoing calamity has ranged from a coordinated student strike when school begins in September, to the argument that the public should see the aftermath of one of these butcher sessions, if only to understand what defenders of the AR-15 are actually talking about. That was the approach chosen by Emmet Till’s mother, who allowed the public and the press to observe the body of her son after he was murdered by a vicious, racist mob.
“In the case of Uvalde,” writes Susie Linfield for The New York Times, “a serious case can be made — indeed, I agree with it — that the nation should see exactly how an assault rifle pulverizes the body of a 10-year-old… A violent society ought, at the very least, to regard its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on ‘ordinary’ crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms.”
The fact that getting rid of AR-15s is not deemed even worth discussing in most political quarters of our country tells us far too much about the militaristic, nihilistic bloodbath nation we have become. They are combat weapons that deliver combat injuries, “civilian” appellations notwithstanding. The Uvalde cops likely quailed at the thought of facing just one of them, and according to CBS, there are 11 million such weapons in mass circulation today. They must go, period, end of file.
It is the professional responsibility of journalists to highlight any conflict or bias that could tilt their objectivity. You see it in The Washington Post whenever there’s a story about Jeff Bezos; somewhere in the body of the piece there is a parenthetical (“he’s my boss, owns this paper”) to inoculate the writer against accusations that they’re trying to get away with something. In that spirit, let me be as plain as I can be: My bias is that I love Gabe Kapler.
My love affair with Kapler began when he was traded to my beloved Red Sox midseason in 2004 to shore up the defense. He hit nearly .300 and led the team in outfield assists thanks to the cannon dangling from his shoulder… and on October 27, on a night the moon turned red, Kapler was one of nine players on the field when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.
If you don’t follow baseball, though, Kapler’s name may have only recently crossed your screen. Today, he’s the San Francisco Giants manager who announced that he will be shunning the national anthem until something is done about the gun carnage in the U.S.
Kapler informed the media of his intentions during a dugout press gaggle on Friday, where he told reporters, “I don’t plan on coming out for the anthem going forward… until I feel better about the direction of our country. That’ll be the step. I don’t expect it to move the needle necessarily. It’s just something that I feel strongly enough about to take that step.”
Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place. On Wednesday, I walked out onto the field, I listened to the announcement as we honored the victims in Uvalde. I bowed my head. I stood for the national anthem. Metallica riffed on City Connect guitars.
My brain said drop to a knee; my body didn’t listen. I wanted to walk back inside; instead I froze. I felt like a coward. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. I didn’t want to take away from the victims or their families. There was a baseball game, a rock band, the lights, the pageantry. I knew that thousands of people were using this game to escape the horrors of the world for just a little bit. I knew that thousands more wouldn’t understand the gesture and would take it as an offense to the military, to veterans, to themselves.
But I am not okay with the state of this country. I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this.
Kapler’s stand wobbled almost immediately, however, when confronted with the monolithic patriotism of Memorial Day. White Sox manager and baseball Ent Tony La Russa had already criticized Kapler’s intentions with the same boilerplate militaristic rah-rah NFL players have been hearing since Colin Kaepernick took a knee. “I would never not stand up for the anthem or the flag,” said La Russa. “Maybe just because I’m older, and I’ve been around veterans more than the average person. You need to understand what the veterans think when they hear the anthem, or they see the flag and the cost they paid and their families paid.”
On Memorial Day, Kapler posted a new blog regarding the day’s game: “Today, I’ll be standing for the anthem. While I believe strongly in the right to protest and the importance of doing so, I also believe strongly in honoring and mourning our country’s service men and women who fought and died for that right.”
Kapler and the Giants are playing Philly tonight; we shall see where he is when the anthem begins. I reserve final judgment on this until then, but I do confess to disappointment. Kapler probably should have looked at the calendar if Memorial Day was a concern. If this was just some long-weekend grandstanding, I will be pretty grossed out… but I hope Kapler will follow through on his word, now that we have passed the most flag-happy day of the year this side of the Fourth of July.
Kapler’s on-again, off-again activism this weekend probably feels like thin gruel to fans of Kaepernick. The former 49ers quarterback hasn’t played a snap since the 2016 season after leading a league-wide protest against police violence, motivated by the murders of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, the shooting of Charles Kinsey, and the acquittal of the officers who killed Freddie Gray.
For all intents and purposes, Kaepernick lost his livelihood because of his peaceful public protests (though the Las Vegas Raiders and Seattle Seahawks are giving him an active look, finally). In this, he shares a special status with Muhammad Ali, who lost the best years of his fighting career when he heroically refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War.
Athletes like Althea Gibson, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Jim Brown, Billie Jean King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Martina Navratilova, Arthur Ashe and others joined Ali in an era of athlete social activism, and all of them paid a price for it. That — and the massive amount of money athletes can earn from corporate sponsorship today, so long as they make no waves (see: Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods) — is much of the reason why modern athlete activism seems so tepid compared to what came before.
It feels like that may be changing, thankfully. Kaepernick has been the most visible athlete to take a costly stand on racial and social issues, but you cannot overlook people like pro soccer player Megan Rapinoe, whose fiery advocacy for equal pay for women’s soccer players recently won the day. Pro basketball player Brittney Griner has been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights, and participated in several anthem protests as well. (Griner is currently incarcerated in Russia after being arrested on remarkably overblown drug charges.) The list does not match the hero’s roll call from the prior generation, but it seems to be growing every day.
This is potentially significant. These athletes are, for the most part, swimming upstream against very strong currents. They face conservative league ownership and the hyper-conservative corporate megastructure (which is also a license to print money) that has grown around professional sports. Much of the public pushback against athlete activism comes from conservative fans, who facetiously lament the poisoning of their leisure time with politics as they shout “Stick to sports!” at any athlete or sports journalist who leaves their lane and swerves left.
The anthem is politics. The military fly-overs are politics. The soldiers in dress uniform carrying flags onto the field before the game are politics… all politics blessed by the game’s powers-that-be. You don’t hear “Stick to sports” in regard to this deeply embedded indoctrinating bombast. Make a statement about police violence, racism, sexism and equal pay, homophobia or the horrors of an unjust war, though, and it gets loud real quick.
“Screaming STICK TO SPORTS is just a cowardly way of voicing, in a highly political manner, that you cannot abide even the mildest of exposure to other political ideas — even just other people — whose very existence you resent,” Drew Magary wrote for Deadspin back in 2019. “You are siding with leaders who prefer their transgressions remain discreet and you are indulging in an easy sop; a way to butter up alt-right mouthbreathers by promising, often insincerely, to keep politics to a minimum, in particular politics that make them uncomfortable. It is an obvious way of demonstrating your conflicting political ideology by being like CAN’T WE ALL JUST ENJOY SOME GOLF?”
Enter Gabe Kapler to the fray… maybe. I’ll be watching tonight to see if he matches action with words when it comes to guns and the anthem. Warriors coach Steve Kerr has his back, as does Celtics coach Ime Udoka. I have his back, too, and I hope he follows through. Big-time sports are a massive social influencer, and we need all the help we can get.
New outcries for gun control have followed the horrible tragedies of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. “Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died,” President Biden declared over the weekend during a university commencement address. As he has said, a badly needed step is gun control — which, it’s clear from evidence in many countries, would sharply reduce gun-related deaths.
But what about “gun control” at the Pentagon?
The concept of curtailing the U.S. military’s arsenal is such a nonstarter that it doesn’t even get mentioned. Yet the annual number of deadly shootings in the United States — 19,384 at last count — is comparable to the average yearly number of civilian deaths directly caused by the Pentagon’s warfare over the last two decades.
From high-tech rifles and automatic weapons to drones, long-range missiles and gravity bombs, the U.S. military’s arsenal has inflicted carnage in numerous countries. How many people have been directly killed by the “War on Terror” violence? An average of 45,000 human beings each year — more than two-fifths of them innocent civilians — since the war began, as documented by the Costs of War project at Brown University.
The mindset of U.S. mass media and mainstream politics has become so militarized that such realities are routinely not accorded a second thought, or any thought at all. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget keeps ballooning year after year, with Biden now proposing $813 billion for fiscal year 2023. Liberals and others frequently denounce how gun manufacturers are making a killing from sales of handguns and semiautomatic rifles in the U.S., while weapons sales to the Pentagon continue to spike upward for corporate war mega-profiteers.
As William Hartung showed in his Profits of War report last fall, “Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors. A large portion of these contracts — one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years — have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.”
What’s more, the U.S. is the world’s leading arms exporter, accounting for 35 percent of total weapons sales — more than Russia and China combined. These U.S. arms exports have huge consequences.
Pointing out that the Saudi-led war and blockade on Yemen “has helped cause the deaths of nearly half a million people,” a letter to Congress from 60 organizations in late April argued that “the United States must cease supplying weapons, spare parts, maintenance services, and logistical support to Saudi Arabia.”
How is it that countless anguished commentators and concerned individuals across the nation can express justified fury at gun marketers and gun-related murders when a mass shooting occurs inside U.S. borders, while remaining silent about the need for meaningful gun control at the Pentagon?
The civilians who have died — and are continuing to die — from use of U.S. military weapons don’t appear on American TV screens. Many lose their lives due to military operations that go unreported by U.S. media, either because mainline journalists don’t bother to cover the story or because those operations are kept secret by the U.S. government. As a practical matter, the actual system treats certain war victims as “unworthy” of notice.
Whatever the causal mix might be — in whatever proportions of conscious or unconscious nationalism, jingoism, chauvinism, racism and flat-out eagerness to believe whatever comforting fairy tale is repeatedly told by media and government officials — the resulting concoction is a dire refusal to acknowledge key realities of U.S. society and foreign policy.
After weeks in which commentators had been predicting United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s removal from office for breaking the U.K.’s own COVID-era public health laws, the impression now is that he has survived — for the time being.
The news that Johnson will not face any further fines after his staff were issued with 126 “Fixed Penalty Notices” for COVID-19 breaches has been widely interpreted as proof of the prime minister’s talent for survival. As one commentator put it, “The [prime minister] has dodged a Partygate reckoning.”
As recently as this January it had seemed that the Conservative government might be doomed. The sense now is that Johnson has escaped, albeit with weakened authority.
In the U.K.’s political system, prime ministers are not directly elected but hold office only indirectly through the support of a majority of their own members of Parliament (MPs). Several of our recent prime ministers, including Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Theresa May, were removed from office not because they had lost an election but because elections were looming and their own MPs expected them to lose.
Prime Minister Johnson’s support remains, from this perspective, very thin. The Conservatives have not led in any poll since December last year; with 148 national polls since then predicting losses for their party at the next general election.
Something then, it follows, will have to change. Either the opposition Labour Party’s lead will shrink and Johnson will be able to convert his weak administration into a durable regime, or Labour’s lead will grow to the point where the prospect of the Conservatives’ defeat at the next election seems so likely that his own MPs topple him. If the opposition’s present poll advantage persists, we could see Johnson’s regime end in a palace coup.
The prime minister appears to believe that his government can boost its popularity with a new plan — announced last month — to deport refugees arriving in Britain for processing overseas. The plan is that refugees will be deported to central Africa, forced to claim asylum there, and if successful, forcibly relocated not to Britain but to Rwanda. Johnson seems to believe that this flagship policy will bolster his support with wavering voters.
The U.K. is not a significant haven for refugees: My country holds 1 percent of the world’s total population and accepts fewer than 0.1 percent of the world’s refugees each year. However, the U.K. is a significant player on the world stage as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
By effectively abandoning the UN Refugee Convention, the U.K. proposes to send a signal to the rest of the world that refugees can be ignored. The Convention was signed in 1951. It was one of a series of international treaties signed with a common intention of protecting the world from a return to fascism. Its abandonment by the U.K. would be a small but ominously significant step in the global drift to authoritarianism.
At the press conference where he announced the Rwanda plan, Prime Minister Johnson suggested that it would face legal challenge from his opponents. “I know that this system will not take effect overnight,” he said. “We have such a formidable army of politically motivated lawyers who for years have made it their business to thwart removals and frustrate the government.”
Competent governments do not spend their time begging hostile lawyers to take them to court; nor do they predict, as Johnson seemed to do, that these lawyers will win. So why was the prime minister seemingly pleading with his opponents to sue him? And what are his opponents thinking, by saying that they will indeed take the scheme to court?
To understand both sides’ thinking, it is useful to look at the 2019 general election and the events which immediately preceded it. On August 28 that year, the government had announced that it was “proroguing” (i.e., suspending) Parliament, seemingly in order to force through a settlement of the country’s long-standing Brexit crisis without a vote. Four weeks later, our Supreme Court ruled that that measure has been unlawful.
This was the greatest constitutional crisis Britain had seen in 300 years, with ministers insisting that, according to the country’s “unwritten” constitution, they could govern so long as they had the queen’s approval. Unlike the U.S., the U.K. does not have a single constitutional document; we do have laws of very great or “constitutional” significance. However, they are dispersed over several different documents and there is no single, agreed, document setting out which of our laws have this unique importance.
By rejecting the doctrine that ministers could govern with the support of the Crown against the wishes of Parliament, the Supreme Court became the savior of the separation of powers in the U.K. political system and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.
But even though the 11 Supreme Court justices ruling unanimously against prorogation, the British public has had other ideas. Just three months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Conservatives increased their seats by 48 votes, converting what had been a narrow minority government into a secure majority one. To make matters worse, a significant portion of the seats newly won by the Conservatives were rustbelt towns which had been taken for granted as Labour seats, representing places such as Redcar, never previously won by the Conservatives, or Leigh in Manchester, last lost by Labour in 1922.
The most common explanation for Johnson’s victory was that working-class voters had been attracted to a populist candidate promising to break all the rules. It is this story which Johnson likes to tell, and in that context, we can see why he is so willing to risk international criticism and play the role of a mid-Atlantic Donald Trump. Why should Johnson care if democracy suffers, so long as he continues to govern?
Johnson seems to see the prospect of a defeat in the courts over the Rwanda scheme as his opportunity to rerun the battles that brought about his victory in 2019. However, for his liberal critics, the context is more favorable now than three years ago. Johnson has been prime minister all this time. It is harder for him to pose as an outsider. Inflation in the U.K. is at 9 percent, the highest it has been in 40 years. Rising food and electricity prices are taking money out of the pockets of key groups of Conservative voters, including those who live on savings and the elderly.
Depressingly, the opposition Labour Party too often presents the issue here as one of competence, as if what is wrong with the proposal of deporting refugees to Rwanda is that the government has gone about this scheme in a shambolic fashion, failing to obtain any guarantees from Rwanda, and at excessive cost. This reflects Labour’s self-presentation as a party with no different politics than the Conservatives — only a much greater belief in the rules.
Yet the Conservatives are turning on refugees at the very moment that more British people are opening their homes to refugees than ever before. Since the start of the war on Ukraine, more than 50,000 people have sought temporary refuge in the U.K. An official website through which British people could register to offer their homes to new arrivals crashed, after people volunteered their assistance at the rate of 10,000 offers an hour.
This instinct of generosity — the belief of ordinary voters that refugees should be welcomed — is the force which could yet topple Johnson.
If I had any remaining faith whatsoever in the reach of the “justice” system as it pertains to the rich and powerful, I’d be halfway convinced Donald Trump and his pals are in impressively deep shit. In the immortal words of Ted “Theodore” Logan, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.”
Back in February, it was revealed that while in office, Donald Trump was in the habit of destroying official documents once he was finished looking at them (or not looking at them, as was usually the case). These papers, most of which were supposed to go to the National Archives at some point, wound up in pieces on the floor, and staffers would try to tape them back together. Other times, the shreds wound up in a toilet, after which I assume no tape salvage was attempted. Former White House aide Omarosa Newman tells a tale of Trump actually eating sensitive documents after meeting with his lawyer, Michael Cohen.
These revelations were greeted with a collective, “Oh, OK” from the people. I mean, come on, try harder, hit me where it hurts. After so many years filled with so many stories of Trump’s gross behavior, a report on him wrecking paperwork barely moves the needle. At this point, I’d be more impressed with a headline like, “Confirmed: Trump Is Mammal — Drinks Water, Breathes Air.” Yeah, right. Fake news.
Then along comes this little tidbit. It seems Trump was not the only member of the administration who made a practice of wrecking the documentary record: “Then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his office after meeting with a House Republican who was working to challenge the 2020 election,” reports Politico, “according to testimony the Jan. 6 select committee has heard from one of his former aides.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under Meadows when he was former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, told the panel investigating the Capitol attack that she saw Meadows incinerate documents after a meeting in his office with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). A person familiar with the testimony described it on condition of anonymity. The Meadows-Perry meeting came in the weeks after Election Day 2020, as Trump and his allies searched for ways to reverse the election results.
It’s unclear whether Hutchinson told the committee which specific papers were burnt, and if federal records laws required the materials’ preservation. Meadows’ destruction of papers is a key focus for the select committee, and the person familiar with the testimony said investigators pressed Hutchinson for details about the issue for more than 90 minutes during a recent deposition.
Not to speak too broadly, but a general rule of thumb I adhere to is, “People in an innocent frame of mind don’t destroy evidence.” Oliver North may be one of the most arrogant skinbags ever to curse the Earth, but even he spent some quality time with Fawn Hall and the shredders when the Iran-Contra roof was about to cave in. You could amend the end of that sentence above to suit the circumstances — “People in an innocent frame of mind don’t light things on fire in the White House” — but it’s all the same laundry in the end.
What did Meadows and Perry talk about that inspired such pyrotechnics from the White House chief of staff? Did the aide know? Did she testify to same?
If this is the kind of stuff the January 6 committee has been dredging up in their investigation, the hearings slated for June are going to need a “Warning: Explosives” sign on the door. Meadows was worried enough about any investigation into the doings on January 6 that he torched those papers before the committee had really gotten started. Between him and Trump, I’m frankly amazed the committee actually got any documents at all. Ten bags of ashes and a middle finger would be more in line with the ethos of that administration.
Another Trump satellite currently enduring The Fear is Rep. Jim “Gym” Jordan of Ohio, who has been slapped with a subpoena to appear before his colleagues and explain his role in the attempted overthrow of the government. While not yet in open defiance of the summons, Jordan has rolled out a list of demands to be met before he appears, like some half-assed bank robber who has taken himself hostage by mistake.
Among his requirements is a demand to see the evidence against him: “Jordan requested that the committee provide him with ‘all documents, videos, or other material … that you potentially anticipate using, introducing, or relying on during questioning,’” reportsThe Washington Post. “Only then could he ‘adequately further respond to [the] subpoena,’ Jordan wrote.”
Cute, that. It’s always nice to see the answers before the test.
The funkiest of the funk, however, comes to us courtesy of a four-judge panel in New York’s appellate division, which upheld Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling that Trump and the Trumplings must provide sworn deposition testimony to New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump’s legal team, in its seemingly eternal quest to bend the notion of incompetence into bold new shapes, took a novel approach toward trying to weasel their clients out of sitting down on the record.
“His lawyers argued that ordering the Trumps to testify violated their constitutional rights because their answers could be used in a parallel criminal investigation,” reports the Associated Press. Ha, ho, um, what now? If that is not the guiltiest line of argument in the history of jurisprudence, it has to be somewhere in the top five. Your Honor, if my client testifies about money laundering, they might ask him about the murders.
The appellate court masticated that ball of cud and spat it out with extreme prejudice. “The existence of a criminal investigation does not preclude civil discovery of related facts, at which a party may exercise the privilege against self-incrimination,” they replied. In other words Donny, sit your arse down and practice saying, “On the advice of counsel, I decline to answer,” over and over and over again. Same goes for the Trumplings. That’s going to play real well on the news.
If this timeline continues to unspool as it has, one of these days we’re going to see a headline that reads, “Trump Tried to Eat Declaration of Independence in Front of Horrified National Archive Tourists; Aides Intervened With Big Mac”… and nobody will blink. We have spent so much time since 2016 repeating the incantation, “This is not normal, this is not normal” to try and stave off the normalization of brazen criminal behavior. Have we failed? Trump is eating the paperwork when not flushing it down toilets, his chief of staff is burning the notes of his meetings with known insurrectionists, and Jordan wants the answers to Jeopardy before the show. Our collective tolerance for mendacity has become intolerably high. Mission accomplished?
Violence is the oxygen of authoritarianism. It is the symbolic and visceral breeding ground of fear, ignorance, greed and cruelty. It flourishes in societies marked by despair, ignorance, lies, hate and cynicism.
Violence — and especially the killing of children such as the mass killing that occurred this week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving at least 19 students dead — can’t be understood in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable and understandable. The ideological and structural conditions that nourish and legitimate it have to be revealed both in their connections to power and in the systemic unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.
Among Democrats, the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to call for more gun regulations and criticize the NRA, gun lobbies and the weapons industry. This is understandable given that the arms industry floods the United States with all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly Republican politicians, and in the case of the NRA has sponsored an amendment banning “any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.”
We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough. The tragic murders of the 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in rural Texas at the hands of a young man who resorted to a horrific act of violence — and the killing of Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist — represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs. All of the latter is amplified by a modern Republican Party that accelerates a gun culture, revels in violence as a form of political opportunism, strips young people of crucial social provisions, and enables a culture of lies that make it difficult to discern the truth from falsehoods, good from evil. New York Times columnist Charles Blow rightly claims that “The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.”
In the current historical moment, the market-driven values of “freedom,” choice and rugged individualism have merged with the concentration of power in the hands of the super-rich and corporations, an unbridled individualism, and a culture of terror and fear. One consequence is that the corruption of politics as big money is used to pay off politicians while using a corporate-controlled media to flood the culture with the notion that individual liberty is synonymous with unfettered gun rights. How else to explain that “Gun rights groups set new records for lobbying in 2021, spending over $15 million, with GOP Sen. Ted Cruz the biggest recipient,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote this week. It is not surprising that Cruz responded to the mass shooting in a Texas elementary school by declaring that one way to solve the problem of school violence was to arm teachers. It is worth noting that, according to Al Jazeera, “Sales of weapons and military services by the world’s 100 biggest arms companies reached a record $531bn in 2020.”
While the power of the NRA, arms dealers such as Lockheed Martin — the largest war industry in the world — and the military-industrial complex to shape politics and a permanent war economy is indisputable, this is only one register of a form of gangster capitalism that believes that market values, which privatize, commodify, and commercialize all social relations, are more important than addressing vital human needs, crucial social problems and the public good. This is a logic that suppresses human rights, views the struggle for social justice as a scourge, and cancels out the future for young people. William Greider in his book Who Will Tell the People, published in 1992, stated that if the U.S. lost its civic faith in the promise of democracy, it “has the potential to deteriorate into a rather brutish place, ruled by naked power and random social aggression.” Greider’s words were not only prescient, they capture the loss of vision and cult of authoritarianism at work in the United States.
Under neoliberalism, democratic life has no vision and no meaningful ideological civic anchors. Neoliberalism strips society of both its collective conscience and democratic communal relations. Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted and power works to produce mass forms of historical and social amnesia largely aimed at degrading society’s critical and moral capacities.
There are more guns in circulation in the U.S. than people in a country of 325 million. The U.S. constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population and owns 25 percent of all guns on the globe. Judd Legum in Popular Information reports that in 2020, “39,695,315 guns were sold to civilians.” He notes further that this is an alarming figure given that “firearm ownership rates appear to be a statistically significant predictor of the distribution of public mass shooters worldwide.” Equally significant but not surprising is the fact that “More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history,” according to NBC News. The Pew Research Center reported, “More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record.” What emerges from these figures and the relentless mass shootings in which young people have become an increasing target is the question of what kind of society has the United States become, and what are the broader economic, political and social forces that produce massive violence and its increasing collapse into authoritarianism?
As horrific as these figures are, the backdrop to the politics and plague of violence in the United States is rarely a subject of debate in the mainstream media. Even as specific policies are debated, what is ignored is a neoliberal economic system that feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity and loneliness. Neoliberal society fuels a criminogenic system that celebrates violence both as a source of pleasure and as an organizing principle of governance.
Neoliberal capitalism has given rise to a carceral state that criminalizes the behavior of young people, while filling the prisons with poor people of color, destroying their families and their futures. This is a system so cold-hearted that it refuses to renew the Child Tax Credit, pushing 3 million children below the poverty line.
The U.S. is the only country in the world where children as young as 13 are sentenced to prison without any chance of parole. Such policies are just one register of the slow and silent state violence waged against young people that works in tandem with the mass violence that is produced by a society in which injustice, poverty, fear and racial cleansing are central modes of governance. The irony here is that the current white supremacist Republican Party now claims it is the party dedicated to protecting children. This claim is ludicrous when tested against a party that bans books, models schools after prisons, demonizes transgender youth, assaults reproductive rights, and consistently puts policies in place that undermine efforts to lift children and their families above the poverty line.
Domestic terrorists now parade as politicians, and white supremacists dominate the Republican Party and revel in a civically depleted culture that has abandoned justice, ethics and hope for the corrupt currencies of wealth, power and self-aggrandizement. Increasingly young people are the targets of a form of gangster capitalism that has written them out of the script of democracy, placed them at the mercy of politicians who are self-proclaimed white Christian nationalists, and abandoned them through institutions that have broken from the social contract. Increasingly, they are stripped of their dignity, hopes, and in too many cases, their lives. This is the death machine of social abandonment and terminal exclusion that creates the conditions for blood to flow in the streets, schools, malls, supermarkets, churches, mosques and synagogues.
Young people are being killed in spaces that are supposed to protect them. In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories, moral indifference, corrupt politicians, a social media that trades in hate, the normalization of mass shootings, and a grotesque public silence in the face of massive inequalities in wealth and power.
In such a context, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Republicans support violence as a tool for resolving political issues. It gets worse. The Washington Posthas reported that, “1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against government can at times be justified.” Violence has become so widespread that it both neutralizes the public’s sense of moral outrage and shatters their bonds of solidarity. As society is increasingly militarized under neoliberalism, violence becomes the solution for everything. This is especially dangerous for those individuals who feel isolated and lonely in a society that atomizes everything. Some of these individuals turn to the internet and social media in search of community, often to be radicalized by white supremacist conspiracy theories, as was the case with the Buffalo shooter.
The culture of violence has intensified since the 1980s and has found a privileged place in the cult of authoritarianism in the United States. It is embraced, legitimated and endorsed by a Republican Party that uses gun violence and mass school shootings as part of a poisonous script designed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues to transform “public schools into death traps as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.”
Gun violence cannot be abstracted from a broader culture of violence and authoritarianism that calls for more gun ownership, more police and more national security. Moreover, both the gun industry and right-wing politicians who benefit from its profits are well aware fear and extremism sell more guns and generate lucrative markets for the merchants of death. The right-wing response to school shootings is as disingenuous as it is morally corrupt. In order to feed the coffers of the surveillance industry and other merchants of death, it calls for turning schools into armed camps, awash with high-tech security systems, more police, and more firearms for teachers while increasingly defining the purpose and meaning of schools through the language of a military culture. Such actions both cultivate a mass consciousness that worships violence even as it bemoans the terrible price it enacts on human life, especially when children become collateral damage in such a culture. The cult of violence in the U.S. is inseparable from cult of authoritarianism and the rise of neoliberal fascism.
In moments like these, we all must remember that justice is partly dependent upon the merging of civic courage, historical understanding, a critical education and robust mass action. There is a long history of resistance in the U.S. that is under siege and is being erased from schools, books and libraries by right-wing Republican politicians and their followers. This is not only an assault on historical consciousness; it’s also an assault on thinking itself, and the very ability to recognize injustice and the tools needed to oppose it. One consequence is that neoliberal authoritarianism now thrives in an ecosystem of historical amnesia and has become an accelerating agent of violence.
Authoritarianism as a death machine thrives by hiding in the language of common sense and the discourses of fear, terror and moral panic. As it becomes more widespread, it is normalized, becoming all the more destructive. Normalization is a form of mystification, and it can be seen in the way in which the larger forces behind mass shootings such as those at Tops supermarket and in the Texas school are often reduced to personal stories of individual grief and narratives limited to the assailants’ lives. As structural conditions are obscured, connecting the dots to a broader culture of violence becomes more difficult.
Hiding behind a rhetoric in which the political collapses into the personal and private troubles are removed from broader systemic considerations, power now functions in the service of a cabal of religious fundamentalists, charlatans of mass ignorance, the financial elite, and the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses that trade in dishonesty, the spectacle of violence, and the demonization and dehumanization of anyone who is not a white Christian. Even worse, the modern Republican Party not only endorses calls for violence by members of its own party, including those made by Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, but it has also become a party that openly views violence as a legitimate way to secure its desired political outcomes — to seize power and destroy democracy. Rather than being alarmed by violence, the Republican Party has created the conditions that suggest it wishes for even more. As Charles Blow observes, trading in fear and paranoia, the Republican Party terrorizes the public by claiming that “criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you. The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.” The only solution is to not only accept the American way of violence and death but to affirm it, be complicit with it, and in doing so legitimate it.
The killing of children turns this invisible scourge of power and its poisonous instruments on its head, if only for a moment, because of the shock of the unimaginable, gesturing at its roots the workings of current political and economic formations that function as a lethal force that turns everything into ashes. Such horrors cry out for connecting the endless threads of violence that mark the brutality waged against women, transgender youth, Black people, Indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, youth of color, disabled people, the environment, and all those considered disposable in this neo-fascist social order.
Against this authoritarian death machine, we all need to mobilize to turn despair into militant hope, critical analysis into action, and individual anger into collective struggles that refuse the seductions of gangster capitalism and its rebranded fascism.
On multiple fronts, youth are already at the forefront of this organizing. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, youth rose up against gun violence in unprecedented ways, creating the March for Our Lives and connecting the issue of school shootings with police violence, racial justice, and other urgent issues.
Youth are also speaking out and rising up in monumental ways regarding the climate crisis, racial justice, immigration justice, war, prisons, and more. Adults would do well to recognize, bolster and amplify these forms of youth activism to help them grow and gain momentum.
History is open, and the signposts of the current moment are waiting for a radical change in consciousness, institutions and action. How much more blood will flow in schools and other places where young people and adults live their lives before a sufficiently powerful mass movement arises to put an end to this capitalist architecture of ideological and institutional violence?
Resistance is the only option, and it has to be educational, structural, bold and disruptive — far removed from the weak call for a revitalized electoral politics or moderate gun reforms. Resistance has to breathe anger, outrage, and mediate a sense of moral righteousness through a mass movement for economic, environmental and social justice.
Frederick Douglass was right when he stated: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
How many more deaths can this country endure, how many more innocent children will be killed before a mass movement arises that can bring this brutal social order to an end?
On May 11, the Department of Interior released a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report, the first official accounting of the hundreds of federally supported institutions that, for generations, worked to culturally assimilate Indigenous children to white American norms.
The report identifies seven institutions from Hawaii as fitting the criteria to be considered boarding schools. This is surprising because neither scholars nor many Native Hawaiians have historically viewed these schools as part of the same system as Indian boarding schools.
Hawaii’s inclusion in the report is complicated in a number of ways. For one, it raises long-standing debates over federal recognition of Native Hawaiians, who have a different, less established legal and political status than federally recognized Native American tribes with tribal governments.
Many Native Hawaiians do not see the Department of Interior as having appropriate jurisdiction over Hawaiian affairs; many believe in pushing for a full restoration of independence from the United States. The report also noticeably makes some significant errors in reference to Hawaii — such as designating one school as located at “Kawailou.” There is no such place as “Kawailou.” This is likely a misrecognition of an actual place, Kawailoa. Further, it is unclear to what extent, or who, among the Hawaiian community, was consulted in the writing of the report.
Despite such issues, the report might be an occasion for Native Hawaiians and the public more broadly to learn more and grapple together with the legacies of the institutionalization of Hawaiian children in the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. This history in Hawaii bears both striking similarities as well as significant differences from Native American contexts.
I know this because I am a Native Hawaiian historian who, for the last several years, has been trying to find out everything I can about the histories of the government-run Kawailoa Training School for Girls and the Waialeʻe Training School for Boys, both of which are named as boarding schools in this new report, with the former being listed in the report as the “Industrial and Reformatory School for Girls (Maunawili, Koʻolaupoko)” and the latter being listed in the report as “Industrial and Reformatory School (Waialee, Waialua).”
I came to this research because my tūtū (grandma), Lilia Awo, worked as a housemother at the girls’ school later in its history, from roughly the 1960s. From family stories of her experiences there, and after coming across an interview of a young girl who was a ward at Kawailoa in the 1930s, I really wanted to know what the origins of these “schools” were and what role they played in repressing Hawaiian culture and dispossessing Hawaiians from their land.
My research, involving records at the Hawaii State Archives as well as both English-language and Hawaiian-language newspapers, is ongoing. What I have found so far is a complex history that dates back to the Hawaiian Kingdom. The first reformatory opened in 1865, according to the archives. The reformatory was at first seen as a progressive measure to keep youth who had committed petty crimes such as theft or truancy from going to prison, where it was assumed they would form relationships with adult criminals and go further down a bad path.
Though still an independent country at this point, the Hawaiian Kingdom was under pressure to prove it was a “civilized” equal to Western countries. Many white settlers advised the monarchy, to their own advantage, as white-owned sugar plantations boomed. A cadre of these sugar plantation owners overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, instituting their own government. The U.S. federal government did not originally sanction the overthrow. But in 1898, the U.S. annexed Hawaii, and officially made it a U.S. territory in 1900.
As the federal report notes, the territorial government deepened colonial efforts to dispossess Native Hawaiians of their land and culture. In 1903, the reformatory moved to Waialeʻe on the rural North Shore of Oʻahu from its first location in the outskirts of Honolulu. Boys continued to be sentenced to what was now called the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys, for crimes like stealing or skipping school, according to my research in the Hawaii State Archives. Not incidentally, this location was closer to sugar and pineapple plantations, where the boys kept at the school were often sent to work, effectively uncompensated, as part of their “training.”
Around this same time, a separate correctional institution for girls also opened. Girls were usually sentenced for perceived sexual transgressions, called “waywardness” or “immorality.” This stark, gendered difference in the way young women were criminalized is intimately tied to Hawaii’s colonization. Pre-colonial ideas about gender in Hawaii emphasized balance and complementarity, not patriarchy, legal marriage and female domesticity.
The girls’ school also eventually moved to the country in 1929, at Maunawili on the windward side of Oʻahu, where girls did agricultural and domestic work to support the running of the school. The aim was generally to make the girls into maids or laundry workers, according to my research in the state archives. Such training is identical to the roles many Native American young women were forced into at boarding schools as well.
Throughout the history of these government-run institutions, Native Hawaiians made up the majority of the population. But they were not the only ones there. Hawaii’s immigrant communities, brought in to provide more labor for the sugar plantations, were also represented in smaller percentages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Puerto Rican and Portuguese immigrants, among others.
The multiethnic character of these places are one reason, I suspect, why they generally have not been understood as of a piece with Indian boarding schools, which were largely solely populated by Native Americans (though usually from many different tribes in an attempt to dilute tribal affiliation and kinship ties). So too the fact that the government-run institutions took in only children convicted of crimes, rather than targeting Native Hawaiian children wholesale, puts them more closely in the vein of other industrial and training schools that operated in the continental U.S. and targeted “delinquent” children of many races.
However, as the federal report notes, alongside the training schools in Hawaii were also schools like Kamehameha Schools (a still-operating, now private school for Native Hawaiian children founded by the will of a princess of the Hawaiian Kingdom) and missionary-run schools which implemented similar programs of assimilation.
While many Kamehameha Schools alumni have been publicly debating their alma mater’s inclusion in the federal report, I hope the related but also distinct histories of the training schools are not overlooked. These institutions forcibly separated children from their families for years, even decades, at a time. In this, they were much more similar to Indian boarding schools than Kamehameha Schools.
The era when Hawaii was a U.S. territory (1900-1959) has often been conventionally portrayed as benign, with little resistance on the part of Native Hawaiians who supposedly uniformly celebrated Hawaii becoming a state in 1959. Yet further attention to these institutions paints a markedly different picture of this time. Given the ease with which a family might lose their child for years due to a petty violation of the law, or for girls, even the mere suggestion that they improperly “associated with boys,” the presence of these “schools” were likely a powerful damper on more widespread resistance to U.S. colonialism in the territorial period.
Undoubtedly, there are intergenerational impacts caused by this history that we have yet to process. So many family ties broken, so many cultural understandings of ourselves destroyed. Native Hawaiians remain disproportionately incarcerated today. As our people begin to process this history and this report, we clearly have a lot to learn from, and much to mutually support, including Native American, Alaskan Native and Indigenous communities in Canada who have been directly reckoning with this history for a longer time.
While I do not pretend to have any answers as to how to heal from these legacies, which must be a collective process, I hope my ongoing research into these institutions, including an oral history project in the planning stages, might contribute to this effort. For whatever we call them, and I am increasingly convinced that “boarding school” is much too gentle a word for them, I hope the inclusion of Hawaii in this report can bring greater awareness to both the damage these institutions wrought and the Hawaiian people’s resilience.
More recently, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared as a speaker at a white nationalist event, the “America First Political Action Conference.” She has also denounced the governor, fellow Republican Brad Little, as being a sellout for permitting localities to impose mask mandates during the pandemic. At one point in 2021, she used a period when the governor was traveling to put an executive order in place to ban such mandates. (Governor Little reversed that order when he returned.)
Giddings soundly lost to Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke, the epitome of “establishment” in the state’s politics. In the primary for the secretary of state’s position, a moderate county clerk, Phil McGrane, beat out two opponents who denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s November 2020 election victory.
Since Trump won more than 63 percent of the vote in Idaho in the 2020 presidential election, it would not be surprising if candidates either running with his backing or buying into his signature grievances around stolen elections and politicians he denounces as being “Republican in name only” (RINOs) would do well in the primaries. Instead, they have been resoundingly defeated.
It hasn’t gotten much attention in the national press, but a battle has begun in Idaho between moderate Republicans and the wreckers of the right who want to just blow it all to kingdom come. In 2022, notwithstanding the lurch rightward of much of the GOP throughout the country, the old guard in Idaho seems to have at least temporarily emerged on top.
The GOP establishment knows that, while candidates such as McGeachin are skilled at throwing red meat to their base, they are less adept at pivoting to the middle come the general election. McGeachin’s taped address to the white nationalist America First Political Action conference earlier this year may not have phased Trump, but it surely spooked mainstream Republicans in Idaho.
It’s true that, in many states, Trump’s ongoing death-grip on the GOP remains as tight as ever. Certainly, for example, his intervention was effective in pushing J.D. Vance over the finish line in the Ohio primary contest for the party’s Senate candidate. It was also a key factor in moving Mehmet Oz into the lead in the Pennsylvania primary (although as of May 26, that race, in which Oz maintains a tiny margin over Dave McCormick, remains uncalled, with a recount looking likely).
Yet, below the radar, in many states what remains of the pre-Trumpian “establishment” within the GOP seems to be mobilizing in support of candidates who aren’t entirely in thrall to Trump, to his outrageous claims about fraudulent elections, and to his allies within the militia and white nationalist movements.
The primaries’ loss by Trump-aligned candidates in Idaho mirrors failings by the twice-impeached ex-president’s chosen gubernatorial candidates in Nebraska, in Georgia, and, in all likelihood, in Maryland later in primary season.
If Trump’s star begins to wane in the GOP, as, surely, it eventually will, what happened in Idaho in the spring of 2022 will likely come to be seen as a turning point. That Trump’s backing so spectacularly failed to lift McGeachin’s candidacy shows that even the grand puppet master himself is, at the end of the day, limited in his powers of manipulation.
When a prison closes, mainstream reporting often obscures the truth from public view. This has certainly been the case for the planned closure of California Correctional Center (CCC) in Susanville. Articles tend to focus on what’s going on in the minds of local people who have sued the state to stop the prison from closing at the end of June. It seems that some Susanville residents believe that propping up their economy through the caging of human beings — like the two of us, who are incarcerated in CCC — is justifiable.
Many of the free residents of Susanville feel victimized, stories in The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle tell us. They think that prison closure is “punishment” by Gov. Gavin Newsom for their conservative politics. In reality, when a prison closes, the town where it sits has a chance at redemption. Redemption is the opposite of punishment. Let us be clear: the people who are being punished are those of us locked inside CCC’s cages. In 2015, the Office of the Inspector General released a special report detailing a “culture of racism” in Susanville’s rural prisons that fosters terrible abuse.
We, the incarcerated residents of Susanville, filed three petitions in 2021 citing various examples of harm inflicted upon us by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), making the need for CCC’s expedited closure urgent and imperative. Our petitions describe unconscionable abuses of authority; unconstitutional living conditions; deliberate indifference to COVID-19; and Susanville’s violation of our rights, by using us as product and property for the benefit of its own economic growth.
Susanville — often referred to by residents as “the village” — doesn’t get to keep profiting from prisons just because its inhabitants fear the loss of their most recent state-sponsored economy, one of many in the town’s history. We see and understand prison closure as the best route to a safe, just and sustainable future for us all.
We are disturbed by the reports of business owners’ hand-wringing, like people who fear Susanville hotels will close if there are no visiting families of incarcerated people to exploit. It’s understandable that free residents would be concerned about potential job loss, but it’s wrong that business special interest groups are funding the push to keep the prison open. If Susanville’s free residents cannot sustain their town without depending on a system that criminalizes and cages human beings, they ought to be rethinking how their economy is organized, and work to make some big changes. We refuse to believe that the only way to “sustain” an economy is to cage and torture human beings.
Meanwhile, despite the lawsuit stalling the prison closure process, CCC is operating as though it’s already shutting down. As we write, there are no functional rehabilitative programs. Newer prison guards, known as cadets, are refusing to work at CCC and at least 30 guards transferred out in March. Intentional and manufactured staff shortages are to blame for many of the extremely poor conditions. Staff retaliation persists in the form of false write-ups, often resulting in years being added to people’s sentences.
On the surface, “staff shortages” are no great loss — correctional officers operating a racist prison enforce rules inconsistently while thinking they are above the law. But it does mean that we have been left to suffer the conditions of an understaffed, nonoperational prison at its worst, with no planned releases connected to CCC’s closure.
Rather than reading more stories about the woes of the town’s free residents, it’s well past time that Governor Newsom and all Californians hear from us, the imprisoned population of Susanville. Our abuse continues and could escalate the longer this closure is stalled. That’s why we are asking anyone reading this to support CCC’s expedited closure.
Some think certain prisons could be prioritized for closure over others, and that’s true — but we must recognize there is no “wrong” prison to close, and the more that are quickly shut down, the better. Governor Newsom could also be smarter about implementing prison closures by articulating a substantive plan for closing more prisons that emphasizes the importance of community investment. Resources must be allocated to address the lack of equality in today’s economy, especially for Black and formerly incarcerated populations. We need to create jobs that heal all our struggling communities and invest in the people who need the most support. That is what real public safety looks like.
Closing CCC, a six-decade-old facility requiring $503 million in repairs, will save Californians at least $173 million in staffing costs per year. We can put some of that money back into the town of Susanville, creating much-needed jobs to fight fires and take care of the local environment. But this prison must close and we all need to move on.
Moreover, once Susanville is closed, there is much more to do. The California Rehabilitation Center — a dilapidated prison in Norco, Riverside County — would be a strong choice to close in tandem with CCC. The Newsom administration’s own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office calculated that closing five adult prisons in California would save $1.5 billion per year by 2025.
Coalitions like Californians United for a Responsible Budget and many others have called for reductions to the state’s $18.6 billion corrections budget and advocated for more spending to be directed toward services, infrastructure and good jobs. We are asking for more people in Susanville and across the state and country to join in solidarity with us in our search for justice. Swiftly closing CCC will bring us one step closer to a stronger, safer California.
On April 20, 1999, two students entered Columbine High School in Colorado dressed and armed for war. When they were finished, 12 fellow students and 1 teacher were dead, and scores more were injured. While not the first actual mass shooting in a U.S. school, the Columbine massacre is widely viewed as the beginning of an age of in-school gun violence that has accelerated in accumulated horror with each passing year.
Nine days after Columbine, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual convention just a few miles down the road in Denver. Greeted by crowds of gun control advocates, NRA president and former actor Charlton Heston declared, “We cannot, we must not let tragedy lay waste to the most rare, hard-won right in history.”
It is presumed Heston meant gun ownership when he described “the most rare, hard-won right in history,” and not “life,” another right codified in the same founding documents. Bog-standard NRA logic, this sentiment led to the assembly and deployment of an arsenal of pro-gun talking points, along with the ever-present offering of “thoughts and prayers” once the bodies stop dropping.
One year later, Heston once again addressed the NRA convention, this time in Charlotte. Raising an old flintlock rifle over his head, the actor bellowed, “From my cold, dead hands!” The line became his catch phrase until his retirement in 2003.
The Columbine killers did not carry flintlock rifles into that school. Between them, they brought a Hi-Point model 995 carbine rifle, a double-barrel Savage 311-D sawed-off shotgun, a sawed-off pump-action Savage-Springfield 67H shotgun, and a TEC-DC9 9-mm semi-automatic handgun. Had these weapons existed in the age of the flintlock, it is likely the Second Amendment would have been written in far less ambiguous language.
Thirteen years later, eleven days before Christmas, another gunman walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and opened fire with a Bushmaster XM-15 E2s rifle and a Glock 20SF handgun, after murdering his mother in her home with a Savage Mark II rifle.
When it was over, the shooter was dead by his own hand, along with 20 children and 6 school staffers. Almost all of the dead children were 6 years old. Several proved difficult to identify in the aftermath because their faces had been blown off. Most were found huddled in a bathroom, where they had sought refuge with their teachers. In the aftermath, a push to enact new gun control laws was met with fierce opposition by the NRA, and was defeated in the Senate four months after the massacre despite enjoying massive public support.
In February of this year, Sandy Hook families were awarded $73 million in damages by a civil court against Remington, the maker of the Bushmaster rifle used in the shooting. “It was the largest payout so far in a mass-shooting-related case against a gun manufacturer,” according to The New York Times. The courts also held conspiracy theorist Alex Jones liable for spreading the gruesome fiction that the shooting was staged and the dead were all actors.
Six years after Sandy Hook, a gunman entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. When he was finished, 17 students lay dead with another 14 injured. The attack inspired a massive wave of activism on the part of young people, more than 311,000 of whom have now personally witnessed acts of gun violence in their schools since Columbine. Among the most vocal activists were survivors of the Parkland shooting, who fanned out across the country demanding change. No change was forthcoming.
Ten years after Sandy Hook, only yesterday, a gunman battered his way into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Before he was shot by responding police officers, 19 students and 2 teachers were dead. His motive and the weapons he used have not been made clear yet, but it is known that he purchased the weapons for himself legally on his 18th birthday.
The Uvalde horror comes hard on the heels of another bloodbath, this time at a grocery store in a predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo eight days ago. The shooter, an avowed white supremacist, killed 10 people before being detained by police. The act has been labeled as “domestic terrorism.”
On Friday, the NRA will hold its annual convention in Houston. Former President Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are scheduled as featured speakers. “According to the NRA, the Secret Service is taking control of the hall during Trump’s speech and is prohibiting attendees from having firearms, firearms accessories and knives,” reportsNPR. “Ammunition, laser pointers, pepper spray, toy guns, backpacks and other items also won’t be allowed. The Secret Service will search attendees with magnetometers before they enter the hall, the NRA said.”
Around 35 people in the U.S. are murdered with a gun every day. There have been more than 550 school shootings in the U.S. since Columbine. There are more guns than people in the U.S., and by a significant margin. Every time one of these slaughters take place, gun prices soar as the NRA and other gun groups warn gun advocates the government is coming for their weapons. Nothing, to date, could be further from the truth, and gun sales have never been better. State after state — most conspicuously Texas — has passed laws making it easier for people to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
“The F.B.I. released alarming data showing a rapidly escalating pattern of public shootings in the United States on Monday, one day before the massacre in Uvalde, Texas,” reports the Times. “The bureau identified 61 ‘active shooter’ attacks in 2021 that killed 103 people and injured 130 others. That was the highest annual total since 2017 when 143 people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded, numbers inflated by the sniper attack on the Las Vegas Strip in October of that year.”
Democrats have fast-tracked gun control legislation in response to the events in Uvalde, and votes could be held as early as Thursday. The effort, however, is almost certainly doomed. The bills will need 60 votes to pass cloture, and while Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is “horrified and heartbroken” over the violence at yet another elementary school, he enjoys an “A+” rating from the NRA. There will almost certainly be no meaningful Republican support for the proposed legislation, again.
Entropy. Degradation. Disorder. Collapse.
It is everywhere we look now. Gun violence, climate calamity, a wobbly health care “system” laid bare by a preventable pandemic, a vast and widening gulf between the have’s and the have-not’s, the ongoing daily violence of institutionalized racism, sexism and homophobia: We are surrounded and subsumed by terrible situations that are nearly all growing worse.
There are solutions to all these ailments, but one of the main mechanisms for achieving most of those solutions — the United States Congress — is itself a victim of entropy and deeply corrupted disorder. While Republicans carry the larger burden of blame for 23 years of inaction on school massacres, Democrats have their own moral stains to contend with.
Ineffective messaging and fear of the fight has marked much of their effort over these long and bloody years, four Democrats voted with Republicans to kill the gun control bill after Sandy Hook, and Democrat Joe Manchin still refuses to surrender the filibuster even if it means the defeat of this latest round of legislation. “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity,” he told reporters on Tuesday. That, as they say, is that.
Entropy. Degradation. Disorder. Collapse. Not with a bang, but with the whimper of a third-grader before the bang from a gun barrel in their classroom. No help coming, no recourse in the law. Thoughts and prayers. As far as collapsing empires go, this one is going about it in as filthy a fashion as history has ever seen.
An old saying advises that if you sit by the river long enough, you will eventually see the body of your enemy go floating by. The counsel here is patience, of course, something Donald Trump has rarely evidenced in his long, sordid career as Angry Man on Television. He seems to spend an awful lot of time by that rhetorical river, though; his enemies keep bobbing past him like strange fish, and not a one of them ever goes past unremarked upon.
The latest body in the drink is Mike Pence, former vice president and target of deliberate violence by the madding Trump crowd that sacked the Capitol on January 6. Trump spent that fateful morning hanging a pork chop around Pence’s neck before shoving him into shark tank:
Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong…. I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do.”
… and in the intervening months, Trump has veered from offering Pence backhanded praise to accusing him of outright disloyalty for continuing to claim he had no right to do as he’d been ordered to and overturn the election. Pence’s retelling of that day’s tale paints him as a beleaguered hero. In fact, he spent that morning trying everything he could to justify doing as Trump asked. Only the stern intervention of former Vice President Dan Quayle (of all people) kept the country from veering off into post-constitutional mayhem.
Over all those months, Pence has quietly noodled himself into a position that could allow him to run for president in 2024, if he somehow managed to convince himself he had a chance of winning while Trump remained on the planet. Trump, you see, has Pence’s number, and he has it cold: Pence was on his way toward becoming just another forgotten Indiana governor when Trump tapped him to serve as a body shield for evangelical voters. Trump’s many sins fly around him vividly like a flock of Tippi Hedron’s birds, and the only way he could court that vote was by pulling Pence onto the bandwagon. It worked, and now Trump gets to say he “made” Pence. He’s not wrong.
Jump to Monday, the eve of the all-important Georgia primary where the Kemp v. Purdue contest has become a showcase for internal GOP strife. The Trump wing of the party has fallen in behind Perdue at the behest of Trump, while the slowly growing “Make The Bad Man Stop” wing has piled in behind Kemp. Unless something drastic happens, Kemp looks prepared to win in a walk with Pence at his side, and this is not sitting well with the former president.
Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich became the vent in Trump’s spleen, reminding reporters that Pence was “set to lose a governor’s race in 2016 before he was plucked up and his political career was salvaged. Now, desperate to chase his lost relevance, Pence is parachuting into races, hoping someone is paying attention. The reality is, President Trump is already 82-3 with his endorsements, and there’s nothing stopping him from saving America in 2022 and beyond.”
Here was bog-standard Trumpian tough talk, to be sure, but the potentially ominous overtones of today’s vote in Georgia cannot be sidestepped, even by someone as adept at self-gaslighting as Trump.
“A strong win by Mr. Kemp would be the most promising signal to date that many Republican voters, at least in Georgia, are ready to move on — not from Mr. Trump per se, but from his toxic fixation on 2020,” reportsThe New York Times. “It could also provide a hopeful model for other results-oriented Republican governors, evidence that they can thrive even without bowing to the former president’s anti-democratic obsessions. And if Mr. Trump plays things wrong, he could wind up damaging his own political fortunes as well.”
Pence was a little white-haired lab mouse the entire time he stood in Trump’s shadow during the administration, and his overall demeanor has not changed much since. If he does run, it will likely be because Trump somehow damaged himself beyond repair, or if further evidence arises to suggest the base is ready to move on. For the moment, neither avenue appears convincingly open.
Me? I think Pence’s emergence this week makes it all the more likely that Trump will run for president again in 2024. Never mind the money to be made, or the legal cover to be found. His ego demands nothing less. If candidates like Pence and Ron DeSantis do choose to challenge him, Trump may label them traitors and betrayers, and will run to spite them. If no challenging candidates step forward, if Trump clears the field, he may well deliver a “See I Told You!” speech before relaunching his campaign.
That’s about all the clarity we can muster at this juncture. The GOP is in weird flux today, and Georgia will not be the end of it. If you’re looking for Trump, he’ll be down by that river waiting for familiar faces to float by. He knows they’re coming; they always do.
The 2022 Republican midterm primary season rolls on, and like a chipmunk stuck in the waffle of a truck tire, Donald Trump rolls with it. The former president’s days since his defeat two Novembers ago have been tinged with a seething taste for vengeance: He has spent most of his time handing out his endorsement to any and all GOP office-seekers who might knock off those who refused to back his play when he tried to overthrow the government. Now, with the midterm primaries underway, those tickets are coming due.
Trump had a decent go of it last week; a number of his horses finished in first place across the country, firming up the impression that he is in command of the party, and that his touch remains Midas-like with the base. Not everything came up sunshine and roses, however, and mixed in with the victories were more than a few humiliating defeats.
Madison Cawthorn, the Trump-endorsed North Carolina Rep. with a seemingly bright future on the Hot 100 Fascists tour, transformed into a one-man Animal House toga party seemingly overnight, losing his primary so decisively that he didn’t even qualify for a run-off. In bellwether Pennsylvania, Trump’s Senate pick — TV celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — appears to be losing an exceedingly close count to his opponent, David McCormick. By Saturday evening, Trump was flipping out on his new social media platform — “ARE WE A THIRD WORLD NATION??? Are we becoming Venezuela (YES!).” — and on Sunday, he all but ordered Oz to declare victory and call it a day.
Trump has had a week to let the swelling go down from those setbacks. But Georgia Republicans are holding their primary tomorrow, and nowhere in the nation has Trump so firmly staked his kingmaker reputation than in the Peach Tree State. Why? Because for Trump, Georgia has become The House of the Rising Sun: “It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy / and God, I know, I’m one…”
Flash back to the glorious mayhem of November 2021: Joe Biden wins Georgia by about 12,000 votes, making him the first Democrat to win that state since God was a baby. Forever labeled “The Republican president who lost bright-red Georgia,” Trump’s uncontained fury spun up several new octaves. His cries that the elections were rigged became so motivating to the GOP base that a lot of them stayed home in protest.
This provided enough of a margin for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s improbable dual victories that flipped control of the Senate away from the Republicans for the first time in years. With the House and White House likewise captured, Trump had just presided over the worst election rout since 1994, and boy howdy, did he blame Georgia for it.
Trump’s ire was specifically directed at Gov. Brian Kemp, a right-wing conservative straight out of central casting who nonetheless refused to push Trump’s stolen election narrative. Trump actively recruited David Perdue, who was still recombobulating himself after his runoff defeat at the hands of Jon Ossoff. After a long, hard sell by Trump, offset by friends and advisers who warned him to stay away, Perdue agreed to run against Kemp for governor.
… and unless something truly seismic happens, come Tuesday night, Perdue is looking at a margin of defeat wide enough to sail the Sixth Fleet through. “Mr. Perdue is staring down an epic defeat at the hands of Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican whom Mr. Trump has blamed for his 2020 loss more than any other person,” reportsThe New York Times. “The Perdue campaign is ending the race low on cash, with no ads on television and a candidate described even by his supporters as lackluster and distracted.”
Trump has put some deliberate daylight between himself and the rapidly dissolving Perdue, going so far as to cancel an event meant to support his campaign, but everybody and their dog down in Georgia knows exactly what this means: total, abject humiliation for the former president. If it happens like it seems it will, this one will leave a big, broad mark.
A whole new world of trouble may be opening up for Trump, if Georgia becomes a trend instead of an outlier. After so many long years of servile obeisance, it appears at least some Republicans have decided it’s better to die on their feet. The Washington Postreports:
The RGA [Republican Governors Association] invested some $5 million in Georgia, according to a person familiar with the group’s outlays, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details. A parade of Republican governors and luminaries have lined up to protect Kemp. And former vice president Mike Pence, who once served as governor of Indiana, will appear with Kemp on Monday — setting the stage for Pence’s most direct confrontation yet against Trump in the midterms.
“This is just not the best use of our money. We would much rather use it just in races against Democrats,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is the co-chair of a 2022 fundraising arm for the RGA and described the November meeting in Phoenix to The Post. “But it was made necessary because Donald Trump decided on the vendetta tour this year and so we need to make sure we protect these folks who are the objects of his vengeance.”
Pence at a Kemp rally, eh? I’d pay some long green to be in the room with Trump when he sees that number.
Still, all the schadenfreude in the world to be derived from watching Trump squirm doesn’t change the fact that Kemp continues to be horrible, and the enemies of our enemies are — as ever — not necessarily our friends.
Case in point, again from the Post: “In this year’s legislative session, Kemp has signed laws appealing to conservative voters on a variety of issues, including measures that permit the carrying of a firearm without a license, add restrictions on the teaching of race, history, gender and sexuality in classrooms, and ‘the toughest abortion bill in the country,’ in the governor’s words. The bill bans an abortion after a doctor can detect what they call ‘a fetal heartbeat in the womb,’ usually at about six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant.”
It’s nice to see Trump stepping on rakes in public, but if you’re a Democrat in Georgia, you probably wanted Perdue to pull this one out. Kemp is awful, Perdue is awful, they’re all awful … and waiting in the general election wings is Stacey Abrams, who would have likely found Perdue to be an easier opponent than Kemp.
For now, at least, that’s all in the wind. Always, always push back against Trump and his acolytes, but never forget that the only thing separating people like Trump from people like Kemp is Trump’s towering ego, and Kemp’s unwillingness to tell one lie. Not much daylight between.
With more than a million lives lost in the United States in the two decades since the drug overdose crisis began and more than 103,500 in 2021 alone, some would have us believe that we are at a crossroads — where we either double down on prohibition or institute a purely profit-driven commercial infrastructure that treats drugs like other products.
But this thinking affirms a false binary between drug-related mass criminalization and a commercial free-for-all, when in fact, there are many more options available. We don’t have to sacrifice our communities to overdose and incarceration in the name of public safety.
It’s also fiscally irresponsible, with the Drug Enforcement Administration budget alone costing U.S. tax payers upwards of $3 billion a year and growing, and overdose now costing the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion a year, according to the government itself.
So, it makes sense that some are calling for the legal regulation of illicit drugs. But not all regulation is created equal, and the U.S. has a mixed track record on regulating substances effectively. Alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs and, now marijuana, are each distinct case studies on the promises and perils of regulation from which we must learn.
To be sure, Big Pharma’s illegal and fraudulent marketing of prescription opioids is a cautionary tale, one that reminds us that profit over people is bound to result in harmful consequences. The Food and Drug Administration, which should have been a check against these harms, allowed pharmaceutical companies to make claims about reduced abuse potential, which proved to be false.
But in our collective quest to point the finger at a single villain, we’ve ignored the role of drug prohibition and criminalization in compounding and contributing to this crisis. Indeed, death rates skyrocketed when prescription opioids were restricted, and people turned to unregulated opioids in the illegal market, which was eventually saturated with fentanyl. Though, as long as fentanyl and other drugs remain illegal, people will never know with any certainty what they are taking or its potency. Many will also continue to use alone and in the shadows to avoid law enforcement contact, making them more likely to die of an overdose.
The failure of our government to safely regulate prescription opioids should force us to ask questions, but it should not deter us from pursuing other forms of legal regulation. There is a spectrum of what regulation can look like, including state-run systems; compassion clubs, which provide a safe, judgement free space where people can access drugs that have already been tested to ensure they are not contaminated with harmful adulterants; and nonprofits that provide access to a safer, regulated supply of drugs absent of commercial or profit incentive. No one is suggesting this will be easy, but it is time to confront our fears and have an honest conversation about options in the middle.
Examples we have seen in other countries, such as Switzerland and Canada, include heroin maintenance programs, which provide people dependent on opioids with pharmaceutical-grade heroin or hydromorphone. Decades of research support their efficacy. In Canada, a “Compassion Club Model” was approved by the city of Vancouver and piloted in 2020. According to the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, two organizations, The Drug User Liberation Front and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, “obtained street drugs (e.g., crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine) from darknet (online) markets, tested the contents of the drugs, and returned the drugs to the street market in sealed packaging with clearly labeled contents. No deaths have occurred as a result.”
But better regulation models alone are not enough. Education has largely been missing because of an unrealistic and unwavering commitment to abstinence-only ideologies. This, along with an increasingly adulterated drug supply, has left people in the dark. With any regulation model, it is critical we couple it with evidence-based drug education, harm reduction and public awareness, so that people can better navigate the risks and keep themselves and others safe by understanding how drugs and addiction work.
In Baltimore, for example, Bmore POWER (Peers Offering Wellness Education and Resources) launched “Go Slow,” a public awareness campaign that could be seen in mass transit, online and on social media throughout the city, outlining six practical tips people could use to prevent overdose deaths, including: 1.) carry Naloxone, 2.) go slow, 3.) never use alone, 4.) if you must use alone, have someone check on you, 5.) talk to friends and family about what to do if you overdose and 6.) test for fentanyl. Equipping people with this understanding and these basic skills could go much further to prevent overdose deaths than a regulated supply alone.
There are even licensing models that have been proposed, similar to what we have seen with medicinal marijuana, that could go even further in ensuring people have access to a safer supply and the proper understanding and skills to moderate their drug use in a way that mitigates risk. These models would generally involve some sort of training and oversight in order for a customer to obtain a license to purchase drugs and could involve some sort of monitoring and connection or referral to the health care system.
Success — in any of these models — would also mean people are no longer criminalized for drug possession, and their drug use no longer prevents them from accessing the services and support they need to thrive. Further, success would mean U.S. interdiction efforts no longer dictate foreign policy at the expense of extensive economic and human rights tolls abroad.
But in order to achieve those goals, regulation must be coupled with infrastructure that includes health and harm reduction services, voluntary treatment, fact-based education and supportive services. Moreover, we firmly believe it must restrict, if not eliminate, commercial interests.
We don’t have all the answers, but we know it’s time to ask the hard questions.
The conversation about prohibiting and/or regulating drugs is not easy, but we owe it to ourselves to have it truthfully and rigorously, with people who use drugs at the table. We have made mistakes that have cost us as a society. We’ve buried our loved ones in caskets and alive in cages, we stepped over them while they were suffering on the street, and we’ve failed to invest in vulnerable communities. We lost our loved ones because of policy choices we made and because of conversations we were too afraid to start.
The climate emergency is almost universally seen by nations of the world as a threat to future survival. But approaches to mitigate it that are promoted by policy makers in the Global North focus on so-called “net-zero” emissions based on dubious carbon trading schemes to maintain current lifestyles and business as usual.
But, in the Global South, popular environmentalism relates to the struggle to achieve fair ecological distribution, to defend community access to natural resources, and to protect people’s livelihoods — all of which are threatened not only by climate change but unequal burdens placed on the Global South by so-called “nature-based solutions.” This has been seen quite dramatically in programs such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) that has led to displacement of Native cultures in order to convert or commodify ecosystems into assets to be traded as carbon offsets for carbon-emitting industries.
Moreover, green policies that promote “renewable energy” technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric batteries threaten to do even more harm to ecosystems in extraction areas by destroying biodiversity, contaminating water, and causing social and environmental damage to local Indigenous communities.
As underscored in the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures above preindustrial levels is imminent and temperature increases could even exceed this level. As the planet moves toward this daunting benchmark, renewable energy technology is being heralded as crucial in efforts to rapidly decarbonize global energy systems. Moreover, the concept of shifting to renewable energies with a full transition to wind, water and solar energy by 2050 is presented by technology companies as both technically and economically feasible with few downsides.
The transition to a low-carbon world, however, threatens to replicate the ecological destruction of the fossil fuel extraction system on the ecosystems of the extractive areas. As such, climate change mitigation based on renewable energy transition has become complicit in condoning ecological degradation and perpetuating violent conflicts, as well as unjust patterns of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, militarization and structural violence. In this sense, climate mitigation consequences are not distributed equally, nor are they experienced by a uniform set of actors. In fact, they threaten to exacerbate the climate debt to the Global South.
The most recent UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, COP26, delivered the Glasgow Climate Pact, in which 153 countries committed to securing near-global net zero emissions. The proposal includes a mitigation plan to accelerate the switch to electric vehicles, in which more than 30 countries, six major vehicle manufacturers and major cities set out their determination for all new car and van sales to reach zero emissions by 2040 globally, and by 2035 in leading markets.
The electrification of cars for decarbonization and the Paris Agreement and Glasgow Climate Pact requirements are examples of the same colonialist-extractivist business as usual and involve many environmental consequences while failing to cut carbon emissions at their source.
First, electric vehicles have a substantial carbon footprint because they require batteries made of lithium, a non-renewable resource stored in prehistoric water on Indigenous land. The process for mining lithium requires taking a large amount of water from vulnerable ecosystems, which disrupts their fragile natural balance.
Second, reducing emissions also depends on how electric vehicles are used post-production, because charging electric vehicles relies upon local electrical grids. Where electrical grids run on coal, electric vehicles may increase carbon dioxide emissions, which adds another layer to energy demand. The electrification of cars, as proposed by European and American policies, also reproduces the current model of individual car use and does not relieve congestion in crowded cities.
Lithium-ion batteries were launched in the 1990s and were gradually introduced in consumer electronics. The internal chemistry of lithium — light, conductive and energy-dense — allows it to recharge electricity quickly and efficiently. Lithium-ion batteries turn out to be many times more energy efficient than a nickel-metal hybrid equivalent, and these appealing properties have positioned lithium as a commodity that is central to the future decarbonization of the energy, electronics and automobile industries.
Lithium demand for the manufacture of rechargeable batteries has doubled in less than 10 years, and it is projected to increase fivefold by 2025. These predictions were made before the COP26, a process that is directly related to carbon-mitigation policies.
Sustainable, contemporary, responsible, reflexive and adapted to the 21st century, lithium is frequently framed as an environmentally benign resource that differs significantly from more impactful extractive resources, such as ores and fossil fuels. However, many of the extractive concessions awarded to lithium companies overlap with ancestral Indigenous territories, communal lands and protected ecological areas. The extraction of lithium in these areas has also been associated with multiple ecological risks that involve waste generation, landscape change, contamination of surface salts and water bodies, and impacts on flora and fauna.
Lithium extraction from mineral and brine deposits has been shown to deplete local water sources.
In Chile, lithium is extracted from underground brine found in the Atacama Salt Flat, one of the driest places on Earth. Lithium mining in the Atacama Desert impacts biodiversity, depletes water and displaces Indigenous communities in the extraction areas — communities that have been marginalized and criminalized by the government for no reason other than their occupation of this resource-rich land.
Chile has one of the most significant reservoirs of lithium in the world, and due to the characteristics of the reserves, lithium is relatively cheap to obtain. However, in contrast to what occurs with oil and coal, a small number of countries have the largest reserves and production of lithium, and these countries are concentrated in the southern hemisphere.
In the Atacama Desert, lithium is obtained from salty water drawn from the depths of the land. Then extracted using a chemical process. For the first step, companies drain more than 63 billion liters (16.6 billion gallons) of salty water per year. For the second part of the process, companies use and contaminate freshwater. Although mining companies argue that the water pumped from the underground of the desert is not used for human consumption, a rich variety of microorganisms that grow there nourish local species. Furthermore, the amounts of water extracted from the Atacama Desert exceed what the groundwater can generate sustainably.
A single electric vehicle battery requires 63 kilograms of lithium carbonate. Each ton of lithium carbonate, or the equivalent for 14 electric vehicles, requires the evaporation of 2 million liters of water — the equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The central impact of lithium extraction in Chile relates to water use because the process involves the extraction of significant volumes of water from below the salt flats that cannot be sustainably replenished at the same rate that the water is pumped out. Brine extraction from the underground of the salt flats reduces the availability of freshwater in other areas of the salt flat for plants, animals and human consumption.
Due to the lack of water, Indigenous communities who inhabit the area have had to reduce their agricultural and pastoral activities — growing corn, quinoa and potatoes, and raising small-scale Andean livestock like guanacos, lamas and alpacas — while new generations have chosen to work in the mines or migrate to the cities to obtain a livelihood. Moreover, the increasing evaporation in the area and the higher land and lagoon temperatures have provoked “local climate change” that has directly affected the fragile biodiversity around the salt flats, reducing animal populations and plant survival. The pressure to extract lithium from the salt flats will continue if rudimentary evaporation technology remains one of the cheapest technologies.
The populations of the Atacama salt flat are in areas distant from the most important urban centers, and they constitute mostly small towns, communities or ayllus of between 50 to 500 inhabitants (except along strategic commercial routes).
This region has been home to human settlements for millennia, including for the Lickan Antay (Atacameños), Kolla, Quechua and Aymara peoples. These communities have traditionally relied on agriculture, livestock rearing and small-scale commerce.
The presence of mining companies further impacts these local communities. These impacts include the loss of their livelihoods, the extinction of plants for medicinal use and internal conflicts regarding how to spend the royalties that the communities receive from the mining companies. Additional problems include theft, drug addiction and alcoholism among community members. Mining tempts young members to work in the mines for a salary and to abandon their farming traditions or to migrate to the cities for better opportunities. Mining companies also affect the local economy by providing jobs to people from other regions.
Lithium consumption is expected to significantly increase in the years ahead, motivated by green electromobility policies and everything related to the storage of renewable energy needed for decarbonization. This increase in demand will have extreme repercussions in the extraction zones, such as in Chile, where the mining companies request increases in the daily limits of brine extraction. The same happens in Argentina and Bolivia because the three countries are located in the “Lithium Triangle.” Demand may also call for the appearance of new lithium extractive projects, such as in Nevada, the United States or Mexico.
As long as the colonialist policies of resource extraction stay in place, countries in the Global South that pollute the least and do not have electric vehicles will suffer the most. With an increase in lithium demand, the negative impacts of lithium consumption will worsen: Their lands are destroyed, and their water is contaminated. It is essential to learn the lesson from all the colonialist mining projects that have taken place in non-industrialized countries to work for policies that promote solid local policies to protect their land.
There is a need to rethink solutions that move us away from fossil fuels and address climate change. Radical approaches are required, including drastically divesting from capitalist, colonialist life. Changing the mobility matrix away from single occupant vehicles and challenging the paradigm of progress requires real transformation, not a mere shifting in focus within the colonialist-extractive model.
The mainstream media — television, print and digital — routinely cycle through the litany of crises gripping the world. One week they’ll tell us about the latest climate disaster. The next, the focus may shift to the war in Ukraine. A few days later, COVID-19’s latest variant might be trending. The hot topic of the day is picked up, described in isolation and then discarded.
What we never hear is the fact that these crises are, in fact, connected. They are symptoms of a global economic system that is not only driving up resource use and pollution; it is squeezing people financially, undermining democracy, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of unaccountable global corporations, and exacerbating conflict and violence.
In addition, recent events have highlighted how vulnerable we are because of our dependence on the global economy. Long-distance supply chains are failing around the world, and the cost of living is skyrocketing as a result.
This is clearest when it comes to our most basic need of all: food. At the grocery store, Americans are paying 10 percent more for food than a year ago, while the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that global food prices hit record highs in March. In the United Kingdom, the price of chicken is set to soon match the price of beef.
Why? Largely because economic globalization — which, in short, involves using public monies and government regulations to favor exports over self-reliance — has ensured that we source our food from ever farther away, via ever longer, more complicated supply chains.
That means that when China shuts down in response to COVID, it affects the whole world. When Russia invades Ukraine, global supplies of grains, vegetable oil and chicken feed are jeopardized. When energy prices rise, so do food prices, because industrial agriculture for export is built on fossil fuel-based fertilizers and fuel-guzzling transport. When synthetic fertilizer production facilities shut down because the price of fracked gas is too high, chemical-dependent farmers’ yields fall.
And when fears grow, they snowball: Countries across the globe have halted food exports for fears of food insecurity.
This would not be nearly so big a problem if the entire globe hadn’t been made so dependent on global trade for basic needs. Consider the fact that global trade volume is now roughly 40 times greater than it was in 1950. As governments — at the behest of global corporations — continue to subsidize and regulate in favor of global trade, people’s lives and livelihoods are at the mercy of middlemen operating transnationally.
Thanks to globalization, food produced regionally or nationally is more likely to be exported than to feed the local population: They’ll eat food imported from elsewhere. The situation is now so absurd that countries regularly import and export nearly identical quantities of identical products. In 2019, for example, the United States imported 1.53 million tons of beef, even as it exported 1.51 million tons. In 2020, Germany was the world’s top importer of butter ($851 million), and also the fourth-largest exporter of butter ($653 million). That year, France both imported and exported about $1 billion worth of beef. These are not outliers but typical examples of “redundant” trade in the global economy.
The list of actual and potential hiccups along these fragile supply chains is virtually endless. Those we have experienced recently include pandemic lockdowns, a blockage in the Suez Canal, and avian flu outbreaks. Last week, the Royal Bank of Canada reported that one-fifth of the global container ship fleet is currently stuck in congestion.
These are but harbingers of worse to come. The global food system itself — based as it is on chemical-intensive industrial monocultures for export — has decimated seed and livestock diversity, and is rapidly eroding topsoil and depleting fertility in our most important food bowls. Add to all this the fact that this food system is responsible for up to 57 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and widespread food system collapse is very possibly imminent.
Can we assume that these and other real-world effects will finally lead to a rethinking of “comparative advantage” — a cornerstone of the modern economy? The 1817 theory — an article of faith among supporters of “free trade” and globalization — asserts that if countries specialize in what they produce best and trade for every other need, all countries will be better off.
The theory of comparative advantage may have been plausible 200 years ago, but globe-spanning supply lines make no sense in our increasingly fragile world. During the pandemic, most countries would have been far better off had they relied more on local production, rather than on specialized production for global trade.
Unfortunately, political leaders on both left and right have ignorantly continued to promote economic globalization despite its mounting costs. Their policies have enabled multinational corporations and banks to accumulate immense wealth: By 2000, more than half of the largest economies in the world were corporations. Their wealth enables them to distort the democratic process through campaign donations and vast lobbying efforts, and to spend billions of dollars shaping public opinion through advertising, data mining and media ownership. Trade agreements even allow transnational corporations to sue governments if environmentally or socially conscious laws or regulations get in the way of corporate profits. In short, globalization has reshaped society in the interest of unaccountable, internationally mobile corporations.
For many rather obvious reasons, this is a bad idea. For example, it is the main reason why governments have continuously failed to act on the climate crisis. It is why profit-driven media have become ever more polarizing and incendiary. It is why local businesses are being driven to bankruptcy by global giants, and why communities are being broken apart and amalgamated into ever-bigger, more anonymous, more resource-intensive megacities. It is why billionaires continue to get richer and richer, even as the majority of the world’s people must run ever harder and faster just to stay in place. As the resources needed to fuel this globalized system become more scarce, conflict both within and between countries is seen to rise.
The fact that these seemingly disparate issues are connected by their shared roots in the globalizing economic system is, perhaps counterintuitively, a reason for hope: By focusing on that root cause, we can more easily take steps that address all of those problems simultaneously.
And although we haven’t heard much about it in the media, initiatives across the world are proving the multiple benefits of shifting away from dependence on global corporations toward place-based, community businesses. These projects can be seen on every continent and constitute a movement toward what can best be described as “localization.”
Ordinary people are responding to the specter of food insecurity by boosting localized production of food and other basic needs. At the onset of the COVID pandemic, small farmers from Melbourne, Australia, to Mexico City were able to ramp up production in a matter of weeks to meet a doubling of demand, proving that local farms and businesses are not only much more resilient in the face of global crises but also far more responsive to the needs of their communities. We have heard from a number of sources that these farmers didn’t raise their prices, even though they ended up working harder and employing more people.
Similarly, people are organizing into informal community networks to help each other deal with the havoc of COVID lockdowns and — increasingly — climate shocks. In many cases, these informal groups have proven to be much more effective than centralized bureaucracies. They also galvanize community solidarity and lift people’s spirits in ways that simply cannot be achieved by large-scale organizations.
Because they’re happening under the radar, no figures will do justice to the proliferation of such informal groups. But it is telling that, in the U.K., more than 4,000 mutual aid groups emerged in 2020 alone.
Community mutual aid networks represent but one facet of a much broader movement for localization. Although sorely underrepresented in the mainstream media, concern for climate change, corporate rule and mental health are giving rise to a plethora of localizing responses.
A local food movement is growing on every continent. While the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. has quadrupled over the last 20 years, organizations fighting for local food sovereignty are among the largest social movements in the world, representing more than 200 million small farmers.
Local food systems — which are based on small-scale, biodiverse production — not only dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions but actually regenerate the land. Studies by the Rodale Institute suggest that shifting to such techniques on all cultivated and pastureland would enable us to rebuild soils and sequester over 100 percent of current CO2 emissions. This doesn’t mean a reduction in production: Small farms produce up to five times more food per acre than industrial monocultures.
What’s more, reorganizing our economies around local interdependence instead of global dependence would significantly increase community prosperity. A 2021 U.K. study, for example, reveals that local food outlets create three times as many jobs for the same amount of food sold as supermarket chains.
The benefits of localization apply to more than just the food system. A case study on independent versus chain bookstores found that money spent locally left three times as much money in the local economy as money spent at a chain store — resulting in three times the job impacts, three times the income effects, and three times the tax proceeds to local government. Another study showed that every square foot of retail space occupied by a local business generates 70 percent more local economic impact than a chain store.
Meanwhile, regional government support for local, craft-based economies in some parts of rural India has increased earnings by more than 60 percent for hundreds of thousands of people, while slowing the widespread and damaging trend of hyper-urbanization.
Stronger local economies are important not only for the financial and employment benefits they provide, but also for the closer contact with nature and with community they offer. In a Norwegian study, the simple act of community gardening was shown to be more than twice as effective in treating depression as chemical antidepressants. Participants in such programs have overcome devastating mental illnesses and have described their experiences movingly (“as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom”).
By understanding the root causes of our global crises, we can begin to identify systemic solutions. What’s more, we can also see that these solutions are already being pioneered by ordinary people all across the globe, acting with little if any government support but on goodwill and common sense.
This June, under the banner of “World Localization Day,” numerous projects and networks working toward economic localization are coming together to make their global movement known. The campaign demonstrates that localization is not about isolationism — in fact, cross-cultural collaboration is an integral part of the movement. World Localization Day is also an attempt to break the corporate stranglehold on information: While the mainstream media excels at highlighting the disparate symptoms of systemic breakdown, it fails to connect the dots between these symptoms, nor does it identify the plethora of real-life systemic alternatives.
The next time the daily news makes you painfully aware of the many crises we face, remind yourself that we don’t have to fight each problem on its own. We can instead expose their root causes and work together to withdraw dependence on the global system while reweaving local interdependence. We can join the movement to solve multiple crises at once.
A slew of surveys came out last week, all trying to lay a finger on the pulse of top U.S. concerns. According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, inflation tops the list by a wide margin regardless of party affiliation. A Pew Research poll mirrors these results: Inflation is the largest concern by a mile. An Axios examination of the topics most searched for on the internet find the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, Elon Musk and Joe Biden commanding the top three spots.
Respondents to the Pew survey put COVID-19 dead last on their list of concerns. COVID was the ninth item noted as concerning by FiveThirtyEight. COVID was also last on the Axios list. These numbers varied according to political affiliation — 59 percent of Republicans told Axios they believe the pandemic is already over — but the gist is impossible to miss.
In every meaningful way, those who have sought to downplay or dismiss the severity and threat of the COVID pandemic have achieved the rhetorical high ground, despite the fact that we are still mired in the same disease that first hit us in February 2020. It has not gone away and returned; it never left, and swells every few months whenever we decide to let our guard down because capitalism must be fed.
These priorities were mirrored in Congress on Thursday, where the Senate failed to muster 60 votes for cloture on a $48 billion bipartisan aid package aimed at helping restaurants, small business, gyms and music venues that are still struggling with the pandemic (because the goddamn pandemic isn’t over). Only five Republicans voted in favor of the bill. This came on the heels of lightning-fast bipartisan approval for $40 billion in military aid to Ukraine. It’s too bad we can’t just bomb or shoot the virus; we always have enough money for war, and the “right people” would get paid again.
Facts: 175,000 people have died from COVID in 2022. The spectacular collapse of what was already a shabby testing regimen makes it nearly impossible to tell where we stand with the virus at present, but even with inferior data collection, we are marking more than 100,000 new infections per day. “Federal health officials warned on Wednesday that a third of Americans live in areas where the threat of Covid-19 is now so high that they should consider wearing a mask in indoor public settings,” reportsThe New York Times. “They cited new data showing a substantial jump in both the spread of the coronavirus and hospitalizations over the past week.”
According to Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine and Executive VP of Scripps Research, the truth of the matter is far more grim:
The real number of cases is likely at least 500,000 per day, far greater than any of the US prior waves except Omicron. The bunk that cases are not important is preposterous. They are infections that beget more cases, they beget Long Covid, they beget sickness, hospitalizations and deaths. They are also the underpinning of new variants.
Meanwhile, the CDC propagates delusional thinking that community levels are very low (as my friend Peter Hotez called the “field of greens”) while the real and important data convey that transmission is very high throughout most of the country. Not only does this further beget cases by instilling false confidence, but it is conveniently feeding the myth that the pandemic is over — precisely what everyone wants to believe.
To recap, we have a highly unfavorable picture of: (1) accelerated evolution of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new variants; (3) progressively higher transmissibility and infectiousness; (4) substantially less protection from transmission by vaccines and boosters; (5) some reduction on vaccine/booster protection against hospitalization and death; (6) high vulnerability from infection-acquired immunity only; and (7) likelihood of more noxious new variants in the months ahead.
Why, then, does an increasing segment of the population, goaded on by a complicit media and some wildly irresponsible state and federal government agencies, seem to believe we’ve put this thing in the rear-view mirror? It can be argued that a significant portion of the population has capitulated to right-wing demagoguery on the issue, and are telling pollsters they believe it’s all over in order to signal whose “team” they are on. This brings political partisanship to the far fringes of sense, but it is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored out of hand.
Just as likely is the idea that the population, after more than two years of dealing with COVID, is simply stunned and depressed to the point of willful ignorance.
“In just two years, COVID has become the third most common cause of death in the U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of grief in the U.S.,” writes Ed Yong for The Atlantic. “Each American who has died of COVID has left an average of nine close relatives bereaved, creating a community of grievers larger than the population of all but 11 states. Under normal circumstances, 10 percent of bereaved people would be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense, incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors.”
Deeper than all, though, is a bleaker motivation at work. The vaccines have served the relatively healthy bulk of the population admirably, for the most part, and even those who endured “breakthrough” infections were able to weather the onslaught. This is altogether positive, but it also sets millions of people with more acute health issues into a separate, isolated place, and that isolation only grows every time someone announces the worst of the virus is over except for those who aren’t “well.”
“If someone’s death fits with population-wide trends — if they were older, chronically ill, or unvaccinated — their loss is explicable, and therefore dismissible,” Yong continues for The Atlantic. “At the other extreme, [young children] whose deaths don’t fit with population-wide trends are also dismissed as statistical outliers who inconveniently complicate accepted notions of safety.”
Put plainly, those within the population whose medical condition puts them at greater risk of COVID infection and death — I am one such — are an inconvenient pothole in the road to “All Is Well!” The hard push to rose-color the grim data stumbles over people like us. And there are millions of us; you know some of us if you are not one of us yourself. If you are one of us, you have surely noticed the brittle positive narrative as it passes you by like a highballing freight train, even as you endure the same levels of peril and fear that introduced themselves for a long stay three Februarys ago.
“White House Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci said last month that the ‘full-blown pandemic’ is nearly over, and we will be transitioning to a phase when individuals will make their ‘own decisions’ about risk,” wrote Elliot Kukla for Truthout in March. “As a high-risk immunocompromised person, that sounds to me like code for no longer trying to protect high-risk lives. Already, as mask mandates lift and quarantine times are shortened, the chronically sick, disabled and elderly bear increased risk. We’re stuck at home, often not even able to make it to necessary medical appointments, as public society becomes too dangerous for us.”
Not to be the bearer of bad tidings, but here is the science: It is within the bodies of the immunocompromised, along with the sufferers of “long COVID” and other inconvenient groups, that new variants have tended to find their birthing bed. The longer we are sick, the more likely it is that a new vaccine-resistant variant could emerge from one of us. It has already happened multiple times, and will happen again with increasing ferocity until the science that saved us becomes the science desperately playing catch-up in a whole new abattoir.
Our well-being, in the long and short term, is your well-being, too. Recognizing this is what they call “enlightened self-interest,” and it can be a powerful tool for good.
There are ways out of this just waiting for us to pursue. Congress abandoning funding for testing and new remedies is not one of them, nor is ignoring the ongoing plight of those who were sick before this detestable plague arrived. We cannot wish COVID away, but if we close our eyes to those who were already unwell before the pandemic and who live today in towering peril, history will remember this as the era when the so-called “greatest nation on Earth” got sicker and sicker even as it allowed hundreds of thousands of people to die because they were inconvenient to the advertising.
Incarcerated for most of the last 10 years, renowned Egyptian activist, voice of the Arab Spring revolutions and political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah began a hunger strike on April 2. He is 40 years old. With the most recent charge of spreading “fake news” — a phrase borrowed from former President Donald Trump — Egyptian authorities extended his sentence by five more years.
Abd El-Fattah’s activism began in the early 2000s. With his partner Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan, he spearheaded the blogging movement in Egypt, elevating the communication format to a powerful tool for campaigns demanding freedom of speech, democracy and an end to torture.
In 2006, Egyptian bloggers, with Abd El-Fattah, took their activism to the streets and organized a national protest in solidarity with judges who were prosecuted by former President Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorial regime for advocating judicial independence. Trained as a software developer, he provided technological support, including hosting the work of many activist bloggers and protecting them from targeting by the regime’s security apparatus. Abd El-Fattah was briefly detained.
During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Abd El-Fattah labored on the front lines of Tahrir Square. After the ousting of President Mubarak, Abd El-Fattah launched two initiatives, “Tweet Nadwa” and “Let us write our Constitution,” to continue the mobilizations for the revolution and ensure the realization of its demands for freedom.
All along, Abd El-Fattah was organizing youth to continue mobilizing while ensuring their voices were heard and taken seriously in process like the writing of the new constitution. He is especially known for resisting government plans to cover up the “Maspero massacre” of Coptic Christian demonstrators of October 2011 when the military killed 24 protesters, injured more than 200 and sought to bury their bodies without forensic examinations. The Egyptian regime detained Abd El-Fattah on October 30, 2011, after he, with his activist comrades, documented this massacre and in response to his role as a leading voice of the revolution, especially his resistance against military tribunals for Egyptian civilians.
After her visitation on May 1, 2022, Abd El-Fattah’s sister Mona Abd El-Fattah posted on Twitter that he is physically deteriorating and banned from communicating with anyone. He told her that he may not ever see her again. On May 18, she wrote, “We need to make sure he is well and cared for and not terrorized and assaulted more.” To be sure, Abd El-Fattah’s life is at risk. Yet we also need to recognize how the Egyptian regime uses him, as one of the most outspoken revolutionaries, to repress all Egyptian society.
And it’s not just Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Before el-Sisi, every autocratic leader including United States-backed President Mubarak (in power for 30 years), followed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and President Mohamed Morsi, all detained Abd El-Fattah. These same rulers have incarcerated more than 65,000 political prisoners, many of whose cases were never tried in court.
Egyptian rulers made Abd El-Fattah’s family, all leading voices in the struggle against torture and for democracy and human rights, symbols of what could happen to anyone who attempts to challenge them. His other sister, Sanaa Seif, was arrested and incarcerated three times between 2014 and 2021 and beaten several times. The authoritarian regime was also behind the beatings of Abd El-Fattah’s mother Laila Souief and his sister Mona when they were protesting for his release. Abd El-Fattah’s father Ahmed Seif, recognized as the leading light of Egyptian human rights, was arrested for providing protesters with legal support during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 before he passed away in 2014.
The U.S. is complicit. Since President Jimmy Carter’s administration, the U.S. has provided billions in simultaneous military aid to Egypt and Israel resulting from the Camp David Accords. The human rights situation for Egyptians and occupied Palestinians has only deteriorated since then.
Indeed, the U.S. supports dictators across the globe whose policies align with U.S. imperialism. In the name of combatting “communism” and “terrorism,” the U.S. also provides direct funding to sponsor coups against democratically elected regimes (i.e. Venezuela, 2002-03) while the CIA has orchestrated military coups in places like Iran (1953) and Chile (1973).
Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid per year while the U.S. fails to hold Egypt accountable for upholding basic human rights, particularly after the fall of Mubarak. In the context of the Arab Spring, the U.S. backed the authoritarian Mubarak regime up until the very last minute before coordinating with the military to oust Mubarak in order to ensure a contained and limited transfer of power while maintaining U.S. interests in the region.
The U.S. supported all regimes that came after Mubarak, as well as the military coup of 2013, which ousted the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi. Beyond military aid, the U.S. administration continued sending tear gas, repression and surveillance technology to Egypt despite U.S. government and media rhetoric that celebrated Egyptian people’s revolution for democracy and calls from international human rights groups against such support.
To the U.S., Egypt is a “strategic ally” and host of U.S. naval medical research. The Egyptian government provides the U.S. with expedited naval access through the Suez Canal, and the U.S. government continuously expresses its admiration for Egypt’s role in what global superpowers call the “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians, and what Palestinians experience as the normalization of Israeli colonization.
Across the Arab region, the Arab Gulf countries, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have played one of the most critical roles in supporting the counterrevolution in response to the Arab Spring revolutions and their aftermath in Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain and more recently, Sudan. They fuel and fund religious sectarianism and support conservative and autocratic regimes spreading repression and fear. The U.S. also stood back and watched as Saudi Arabia supported jihadis in Syria, who formed the core of what is now known as ISIS, only because the U.S. perceived Assad’s as a rogue regime.
Despite the U.S. intelligence finding that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, the U.S. continued to praise the crown prince for apparently promoting reforms related to free speech and women’s rights. All the while, the Saudi state continues to arrest journalists and feminists for striving for change.
Now, the life of Abd El-Fattah, one of the most iconic figures of the Arab Spring revolutions that were celebrated across the globe in 2011, is at risk. It is no surprise that Trump named el-Sisi his favorite dictator. It is also no surprise that cautious President Joe Biden prefers the status quo with el-Sisi rather than addressing fundamental injustices in places like Egypt, colonized Palestine and Saudi Arabia.
As leftists mourn the passing of former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin and continue the struggle to free journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, we should not forget other political prisoners whose incarceration and repression is enabled by U.S. aid.
Egyptian revolutionaries inspired many U.S. social movements and helped us prepare for the Trump era. They taught us how to maintain hope in the face of state repression. Abd El-Fattah also supported our movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.
Many of us paid federal taxes last month that contributed to Abd El-Fattah’s imprisonment. Dollars misspent in our name do very real harm, including to inspiring individuals like Abd El-Fattah who is allowed to see his young son far too infrequently — and not at all now.
Pressure on our elected officials is imperative as is grassroots movement building. More political prisoners could be freed if social movements in the U.S. and Egypt joined forces. We could stand together against how the U.S. supports political repression in Egypt. We could highlight how that support helps to strengthen systems that criminalize Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color here. We could also grow our solidarity out of the vast connections between U.S. foreign military aid and enormous expenditures on the U.S. military and the rates of impoverishment we see at home.
To be sure, U.S. support for violent repression abroad should inspire resistance by U.S. taxpayers. Yet our society is generally numb to the impact of U.S. policy internationally.
More public debate about how U.S. support of dictators and global human rights abuses takes dollars out of our communities here could make a difference. The U.S. prison-industrial complex, for example, has been strengthened by maintaining and legitimizing mass incarceration abroad. When Egypt is one of the top recipients of U.S. aid, Egypt’s incarceration of activists and public intellectuals like Abd El-Fattah has a ripple effect in our own communities. Militarist, carceral global politics means feeding chickens that will come home to roost.
The pandemic of the past two years has isolated us from one another, but simultaneously shown just how interconnected we all are. The injustice of Abd El-Fattah’s incarceration may seem very removed from the disproportionate incarceration of Black communities in Chicago by a corrupt police force, but they flow from the abuse of power that starts in Washington and spreads across borders, transnationally.
On May 2, we organized an event featuring Abd El-Fattah’s sister Sanaa Seif in Chicago. She was speaking with journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous and advocating for Abd El-Fattah’s release while reading from Abd El-Fattah’s new book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.
At the event, we were reminded that even now, Abd El-Fattah continues to gift us wisdom about what it means to maintain hope beyond despair and when or how to face defeat. We also noticed how the Chicago-based organizations that supported Seif and Abdel Kouddous’s visit — including the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, Love & Protect, the United States Palestinian Community Network, MAMAS and the Dissenters — helped foster what Abdel Kouddous called “radical friendship” from Chicago to Egypt. During the discussion, the audience seemed to come to a shared sentiment: Hold on. Our friend is incarcerated by the regime the U.S. is funding.
Seif then reminded us that the struggle to #freeAlaa is not merely political. It is about his life and his death.
We hope everyone living in the U.S. committed to freedom, human rights and justice will support the struggle to free Abd El-Fattah and all Egyptian political prisoners. We also hope more people will organize to oppose the cruel impacts of U.S.-backed dictatorships on all people struggling to survive and thrive globally and right here in our own backyard.
On one level, this is so cartoonish as to be instantly dismissible. Of course a profit-and-power-oriented superpower like the United States would never simply remove all of its diplomatic personnel from an entire continent — one that contains 54 countries, 1.4 billion people, and vast natural resources over which trade partners across the globe are jockeying for access. These off-the-cuff statements were, according to this line of reasoning, simply Trump being Trump and blowing off steam about a part of the world that he never showed any desire to understand.
In reality, such a proposal wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing muster with the State Department, the Department of Defense, the national security agencies, Congress, not to mention the great resource-extraction companies — all of which are at least partly motivated by crass logics of self-interest, and all of whom would instantly see the harm such an unprecedented move would entail. These institutions would never tolerate an act of diplomatic vandalism that would massively weaken the U.S. state and U.S. companies in relation to geopolitical competitors.
But Trump’s uncontrolled speaking-from-the-id remarks are worth noting because they tell a larger truth about his narrow, bigoted, worldview and the degree of his racist disrespect for anyone in the world who is not both white and wealthy. And, as such, they give more than a glimpse of how utterly bizarre, inept, cruel and dangerous a Trump administration-redux would be for the world.
Yet Trump’s disinterest in the world beyond the U.S.’s borders seems far more engrained than that of other post-World War II presidents, even others who, like Trump, were extremely limited in their travel itineraries. In fact, according to the Atlantic, Trump traveled abroad far less often and far less extensively than did almost all of his post-war predecessors. When he was abroad, he frequently picked fights with other international leaders, at NATO summits, G7 meetings, and other international gatherings, and made clear his desire to be somewhere else. Most of his trips lasted one or at most two days — enough time to have a state dinner and engage in some photo ops, but not enough time to even begin to have meaningful exchanges with people in the country he was ostensibly visiting.
Contrast that with Eisenhower’s 11-nation “Flight to Peace” tour in December 1959; or with Barack Obama visiting 58 countries in his eight years in office. Twenty-one of those were in his first year as president. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Trump doing the sort of traveling that these two presidents did. Obama, for example, visited South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, and several other countries in Africa, and made a point to talk to ordinary people in ordinary places for as long as he possibly could. That doesn’t mean all of the policies that Obama directed at Africa were progressive — witness the ongoing military and drone actions in Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere, and the foreign policy failures that triggered a resurrection of the slave trade in Libya — but it does show a president willing to at least listen to, and hopefully learn from, people from different walks of life living far from Washington, D.C.
From the get-go, Trump made clear that he viewed much of the world — and especially non-white, poorer parts of the world — with contempt. His notorious “travel bans,” designed to prevent Muslims from entering the country, disproportionately impacted African countries, although they did also target a handful of Middle Eastern and Asian countries. By the time Trump left office, the ban impacted a total of 13 countries; of these, seven were in Africa. Libya, Somalia and Chad were on the original list released in 2017, and then Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan and Tanzania were added in in 2021.
The 2021 revision was a largely symbolic addition at that point, given that global travel and migration in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic had largely ground to a standstill anyway; but it was clearly intended to show that Trump, who was on record as favoring migration into the U.S. from predominantly white countries such as Norway, and opposing migration from the southern hemisphere, was intent on further tightening the U.S.’s borders, over the long term, against immigration from countries he had previously deemed to be “shitholes.” That comment, in early 2018, prompted global outrage and led the African Union to demand an apology — one that was, it goes without saying, not forthcoming.
Esper ought to have gone public with his allegations about Trump wanting to walk the U.S.’s diplomatic presence off of the African continent years ago, while he was still in office. At this point, it’s a bit late in the day to have a Road to Damascus moment and suddenly proclaim, in an effort to hype one’s book, one’s alarm about the degree to which Trump’s racism made him an “irrationalist” poised to sabotage the geopolitical power of his own nation.
But that doesn’t make the allegations any less shocking. It’s simply terrifying that this man, who holds a cult-leader-like death grip over the modern Republican Party, could quite conceivably return to power in the next election, emboldened even further to implement his fever-dreams of racial hate.
Tuesday’s big GOP primary day has come and gone, and one terrifying threat to the republic has been replaced by another. Madison Cawthorn, the GQ model and pocket Nazi for North Carolina’s 11th district, was narrowly defeated in the primary by Chuck Edwards, a three-term GOP state senator, largely thanks to the efforts of conservative Sen. Thom Tillis, who had endured more than enough of Cawthorn’s disturbing antics. To this, we owe Tillis a nod of thanks; Cawthorn was going places, and none of them were good.
Exit Cawthorn, enter Doug Mastriano — the far right election denier who just won the Republican nomination in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race — and God help us all.
If you had shaken me awake on Tuesday morning and asked me who the most terrifying U.S. politician is, I may have surprised you by not replying, “Donald Trump.” The once and future orange pain in my ass is high on the list, to be sure, but there has always been something about Cawthorn’s slick delivery that has chilled me to the bone in a way Trump’s buffoonery never did. One always has the sense Trump knows he’s deploying a shtick, but with Cawthorn you realize that he means every word he says, and he hasn’t told you half of what he really thinks.
For a time there, Cawthorn gave every sense of being the GOP’s Chosen One. Elected in 2020 at age 25, he immediately became one of Trump’s favorites (“a terrific young man … He’s going to be one of the greats”). He got a prime speaker’s slot at the 2020 Republican convention and spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the sacking of the Capitol. Cawthorn’s gun-wielding racism lined up perfectly with a GOP base that has grown more fractious and violent by the day, and his embrace of Trump’s election lies made him bulletproof for a time in a caucus already burdened by the nonsense of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
There will always be a place in U.S. politics for handsome young men with no shame. Cawthorn and his highly toxic masculinity were rapidly gaining momentum. “It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that this is the future of the Republican Party,” New York Magazine writer Talia Lavin said following the 2020 election, “and the main of what it has to offer.”
Well, the man may be gone now to Fox or Newsmax or shooting reverse mortgage commercials with Tom Selleck in between ads for Aspercreme, but everything about him the bulk of Republican voters once liked still remain the top-tier values of that bloc… and into the void steps Doug Mastriano, who won the GOP nomination for Pennsylvania governor last night by almost 25 points.
Cawthorn cracked under the pressure of being the future of the party, but Mastriano is perfectly happy to be the present… and his present is raw Christian nationalism where elections don’t matter if his party has the muscle to overthrow the outcome. As much as any other Trump sycophant, Mastriano has labored to be seen as if he has moved mountains trying to change the results of the 2020 presidential election… yet all he has really done is showboat for the press. His own Pennsylvania Republican Party ejected him from an audit of the 2020 vote because, according to state Senate President Jake Corman, Mastriano was “only ever interested in politics and showmanship and not actually getting things done.”
Some other lowlights of the Mastriano phenomenon, courtesy of Popular Information:
In April 2022, Mastriano spoke at a far-right Christian conference, “Patriots Arise for God and Country,” which was organized by “Francine and Allen Fodsick, self-described prophets who have long promoted QAnon.” At the outset of the event, organizers played a video “claiming the world is experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and a ‘global satanic blood cult.’”
Mastriano’s position on abortion reflects his Christian nationalist worldview. Christian nationalism, the New Yorker reports, is rooted in “the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation.” During his time as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan he “developed a dim view of Islam.” He has frequently “spread Islamophobic memes online,” including “a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony.”
After retiring from the military and successfully running for office in 2019, Mastriano “began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.” Members of the New Apostolic Reformation believe “that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders.”
Cawthorn and Mastriano arrived on the political scene at roughly the same time. What separates them appears to be Cawthorn’s aversion to work; Mastriano, by comparison, has hardly rested over the last two years, and is now an election away from assuming control over one of the most politically influential states in the union. Tuesday’s results represent further proof that the Republican Party has transformed into a metaphoric King Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster: Cut off one head, and another pops snarling into its place.
This latest threat to end the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision comes as yet another blow to women in general — and Black and poor women in particular, as well as trans and nonbinary abortion seekers. The recent leaked draft opinion indicating the conservative court plans to overturn Roe occurs in the context of a larger right-wing backlash that is gendered and racialized. It would be politically dangerous and sorely misguided to view Roe in isolation. Black feminist politics insist that we do the opposite.
Black women have been the canaries in the coal mine on so many fronts. Low-income people — disproportionately women of color, and even more disproportionately Black women — in large numbers have experienced restricted access to abortion since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, which prevented the use of federal Medicaid funds for this important health procedure. The erosion of access and attacks on clinics in the south has further made it hard for some of the most vulnerable women to get abortions.
As Black feminists, we understand that not only is abortion a racial justice issue, but so is the right to have and parent children free of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence, free of heteropatriarchal and transphobic mandates, and free of the economic burdens caused by low wages, lack of affordable housing and child care, and lack of access to high-quality schools. Understanding that these are not separate struggles is what we mean by intersectionality.
Bodily sovereignty should be a basic right, but Black women in the Americas have never had that right. During slavery, Black women were told our bodies were not our own, a message enforced by the state and private interests through a violent regime of terror. Even today, Black women are more likely to be raped, brutalized and killed with impunity. To force unwanted pregnancies on anyone is a dystopic outrage. To do so while systematically denying access to essential resources to adequately raise and care for our children is beyond outrageous. But this is where we are.
It is important that we see this attack on Roe in a larger political context of growing carcerality and control of our lives, and growing repression and violence toward marginalized and historically oppressed communities. The idea that punishment is the intervention of choice of this state is reflected in our system of mass targeted incarceration. The fact that pregnant patients and health care providers will be criminalized, prosecuted and jailed for making a decision that should be wholly personal is consistent with a prison-industrial complex that has always had the patriarchal ethos of domination and violence at its core.
Under racial capitalism, class is always a key variable. If Roe is indeed overturned, poor people with unwanted pregnancies will suffer the most. Rich people with unwanted pregnancies will have a harder time but will be able to use privilege and money to get abortions when needed, as many did before Roe. For those without cars, bus fare or the ability to take even a day off work without a financial hit, the decision is excruciating and the choices almost nil. This is the “afterlife of slavery,” to quote writer and academic Saidiya Hartman. It is an extension of the heinous racist and misogynous practices begun centuries ago.
Social justice activist and scholar Dorothy Roberts’s new book, Torn Apart, outlines how Black families are devalued and violated by some of the same forces that profess to be so concerned about the sanctity of the fetus. These same passionate advocates are less concerned about the sanctity of the lives of Black children, who are brutalized and criminalized in large numbers.
Our response to the threat to overturn Roe has to be swift and broad-based. It is happening already but needs to grow. Reproductive justice groups, and Black reproductive justice groups in particular, have taken bold initiatives to thwart this attack, even though it comes as no surprise. We have to stand up, speak out and fight back with every fiber of our beings, but we also have to do so while contextualizing this fight among the many interrelated fights for justice and survival.
Many groups, including both organized ones and spontaneously formed ones, have taken to the streets and shown up on the steps of the Supreme Court, and at the doorsteps of anti-Roe Supreme Court justices. In Los Angeles, California, a militant protest led to arrests after protesters expressed their rage at this pending decision and refused to be silenced or pushed off the streets.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris also have to be pressured. It is Black women voters who were the decisive force that elected this administration. To allow the reversal of Roe without every ounce of executive power being exerted to prevent such an outcome would be a betrayal.
This is above all a political struggle — which includes legislative efforts to codify Roe into law, the first attempt at which has failed. It is a struggle in the streets, through protests and direct-action tactics. But it is also an ideological struggle in our communities.
This struggle is in the streets and the courts but also in our communities and families. In the Black community there is an ongoing debate that is advanced by a vocal minority of primarily male preachers who contend that abortion destroys Black life. This skewed and offensive framing cannot go unchallenged. It is not a view that is widely shared, even though it is frequently amplified. Janette Robinson Flint of Black Women for Wellness reports that 78 percent of Black women oppose the reversal of Roe, and 85 percent of Black women say they would support someone they love to have an abortion. Notably progressive faith leaders like Rev. Raphael Warnock have defended the principle of reproductive justice, despite pressure to do otherwise.
The bottom line is that we have to support groups like SisterSong, Black Women’s Health Imperative, the Women’s March, Black Women’s Blueprint, Black Feminist Future, and others. Groups that do not exclusively work on gender and reproductive justice are also mobilizing responses. The Movement for Black Lives coalition’s Table to Abolish Patriarchal Violence is engaged in ongoing work to combat all forms of gender and sexual violence through political education, narrative strategies, direct action and leadership training.
The reality is that Black liberation is about claiming, fighting for and defending Black humanity and freedom, including bodily autonomy, which has been so consistently stripped from us; from our ancestors during enslavement, and our caged and incarcerated family today. Forced pregnancy is the flip side of forced sterilization endured by Black and Puerto Rican women in despicably experimental projects that were an extension of the racist, sexist and pseudoscientific eugenics movement in the 20th century. The notion that the state should control pregnant people’s bodies has to be rejected unequivocally by all of us.
As hard as we fight this attack and others, we may (and some say, will likely) lose this round. But no victory is ever complete, and neither is any defeat, if resistance is mustered. Mutual aid, community-based care, collective financing of health procedures wherever they can be safely performed, coupled with continued electoral strategies, movement building work, and struggles with one another for a holistic transformative vision, has to be our response in this moment. Forward ever. Backward never.