Congressional Republicans may eschew robes and burning crosses, but the party’s overt racism is increasingly on display beneath the Capitol dome. The appalling treatment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court nomination hearings was last week’s example. This week belongs to a noted jurist who was set to have a building named after him until the long claws of bigotry dug in and ripped the posthumous honor away.
When Justice Joseph W. Hatchett sat for the Florida bar exam in 1959, he was not allowed to stay in the hotel where the test was being administered because Jim Crow laws forbade it. A Black man born in Clearwater in 1932, Hatchett graduated from Howard University School of Law and undertook a legal career that included serving as assistant state attorney general, a judge for the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, a judge for the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and a judge on the Florida Supreme Court. He was the first Black person to serve as a Florida Supreme Court judge.
Hatchett retired from the court in 1999 and went into private practice. He passed away last year at age 88, a widely praised and highly admired jurist. “Joe Hatchett is a person who lives and has lived by the ethical precepts which have historically guided the conduct of truly great judges and lawyers of our past and present,” said former American Bar Association (ABA) President Chesterfield Smith when Hatchett was awarded the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “Joe Hatchett to me exemplifies what is best in an American judge, one who is sometimes lonely, but one who never shirks standing alone.”
Last month, Florida’s two Republican senators — joined by all 27 member of Florida’s House contingent — sponsored a bill to name a Tallahassee courthouse after Hatchett. The bill was expected to sail with enormous bipartisan support; naming things is among the easiest and most uncontroversial tasks performed by Congress, often happening on a fast-track basis with no debate or recorded vote. The Hatchett bill was set to join the thousands that had preceded it until GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia stepped into its path.
“Since being sworn in last year, Mr. Clyde has drawn attention for comparing the deadly Capitol attack to a ‘normal tourist visit’ and voting against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who responded that day,” reportsThe New York Times. “He also opposed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime and explicitly outlawed an act that was symbolic of the country’s history of racial violence. Mr. Clyde also voted against recognizing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.”
Clyde’s “problem” with naming a building after Hatchett? A 1999 decision in which then-Judge Hatchett upheld long-established Constitutional protections against prayer in public schools. Like a pollinating bumblebee, Clyde buzzed from colleague’s ear to colleague’s ear brandishing an Associated Pressarticle on that ruling. Republican “yes” votes began flipping to “no,” and before long it was a stampede. Among the stampeders were many who had initially co-sponsored the bill to begin with. Others merely acted when they saw the herd wheel and charge. “Asked what made him vote against a measure that he had co-sponsored,” reports the Times, “Representative Vern Buchanan, Republican of Florida, was brief and blunt: ‘I don’t know,’ he said.” (Later, a spokesman for the congressman said he’d made his decision “because of the judge’s position against prayer at graduation ceremonies.”)
The Hatchett bill required a two-thirds majority to pass in the House. It was defeated with 187 “no” votes, a tally that included 89 percent of House Republicans.
It would be easy to chalk this debacle up to the “tensions” of the moment, to the ongoing fight over the teaching of so-called “critical race theory,” itself a nonsense issue because no such theory is taught in any public school anywhere.
Yet in the aftermath of the disgracefully racist Brown Jackson hearings, one would think Republicans would have sense enough to let the rhetoric cool down, let the bruises that were raised fade, lest the true nature of these endeavors become unavoidably exposed. Instead, what we have here is a doubling down, a dare-you-to-stop-me search for the next extreme act, and the next, and the next. Their racism is overtly on display, and they’re not backing down.
The weaponizing of religion by the GOP’s evangelical base plays no small part in this; everything from Roe v. Wade to LGBTQ justice is passed through the evangelical prism to emerge as a threat against Christianity, which then justifies the most heinous forms of response.
Worse, therefore — and certainly instructive on how mobs can be incited to do horrific things — was the lemming-like quality to this abrupt and cruel reversal. The fact that so many of Clyde’s fellow Republicans feared what would happen if they answered “yes,” feared what would happen if their racist and/or evangelical voter base got wind of their vote, speaks volumes on the state of play within that party.
A few of them didn’t even need fear as a motivator: They saw a clot of Republicans in a stampede and leaped over the cliff to join them, no questions asked.
No questions asked. Our history is rife with moments of gruesome violence and cruelty committed by individuals who fell into the gravity well of mob action. More often than not, members of those mobs would look at the blood on their hands in the aftermath and have no adequate answer to one question: “Why?” In this, Rep. Buchanan’s initial response to why he voted against an uncontroversial bill is instructive.
Others, like Rep. Clyde, knew exactly what they were doing when they successfully wrecked the honoring of a Black man based on the most gossamer of justifications. They need no justification; when they do what they do, those who support them and their racism provide justification enough. They most devoutly believe their bleak star — bereft of light and promising only darkness — is on the rise. It has been for a long while now, but in the overtly racist wake of Donald Trump, they are no longer hiding in hushed corners.
The drums of fascism are beating louder. The catastrophe of war and outpouring of support for the millions of Ukrainians suffering under the brutal attacks by Russia has morphed into increased warmongering from the West. The shock of war has been transformed into a cinematic spectacle used to fan the flames of militarism. The sheer boldness, violence and ruthlessness of Russia’s attack on Ukraine has created a global political crisis accentuated by both a crisis of ideas and a crisis of historical reckoning, at least in the Western mainstream media.
The wider public’s inability to reflect on the underlying causes of the war is due at least in the United States to its long-standing dominant belief in its own exceptionalism, reinforced by a moral righteousness endlessly reproduced in the mainstream media.
Tragic pictures of the agonizing hardships faced by the Ukrainian people too often appear with little or no critical commentary in the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses. Endless images of unfathomable agony by the Ukrainian people dominate the conventional news outlets and other monopolies of information governed by the spectacle of 24/7 coverage, matched almost entirely by a lack of historical analysis. While widespread moral repulsion to the tragedies of the war are understandable, what is not acceptable is the refusal of the mainstream media to reflect on the historical, political and economic conditions leading up to the war.
The U.S. public is being fed continuous nonstop images of technologically sophisticated weapons being used in Ukraine — in effect this appears to function as a sort of advertisement for the weapons industry, coupled with the sensational presentation of gratuitous violence. Within this militarized aesthetic, operating in the service of permanent war, as cultural critic Rustom Bharucha writes, “there is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence.” The corporate media are thus rendering war as riveting, emotional and free from demanding intellectual complexities since it emerges out of an either/or view of good and evil.
Images of violence are replayed in the mainstream media over and over again, making violence not only more visible but also rootless. The sheer monopoly of such images gives them a fascist edge, all the while dissolving politics into a cinematic pathology. Writer and philosopher Susan Sontag’s observation about war coverage, made in a different historical context, is even more relevant today. According to Sontag, the endless images of war and suffering, removed from the context of rigorous historical analysis, represent a contempt for “all that is reflective, critical and pluralistic [and are] linked to forms of rabid masculinity [that] glamorizes death.”
Talking heads in the dominant media landscape churn out cheap binarisms about good and evil, democracy versus authoritarianism. In doing so, they reinforce the mythic narrative that the U.S., a model of liberal innocence, is furthering the global fight for democracy, untainted in its false assertion that fascism is always elsewhere — in this case exclusively in Russia. There is almost no talk about the role of the military-industrial complex, both in its push for war, and how it usually emerges as the only winner. Nor is there any talk about who profits from an embrace of war talk, the spectacularization of war and war itself.
When more critical explanations of the war appear, especially from those criticizing the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which created one set of conditions for the conflict, they are often mocked, ignored, or at worst, accused of being treasonous. In this instance, a rampant militarism collapses the difference between a critical analysis and a justification for Russia’s actions.
As New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz observes, many government spokespersons and pundits who condemn critics of NATO’s role in contributing to the start of the war often fail to distinguish their own “slippage between explanation and justification.” For instance, numerous Democratic lawmakers lambasted the Democratic Socialists of America and accused it of aiding Putin’s war after the socialist organization critiqued NATO’s buildup to the war, despite the fact that it simultaneously condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, calling for an end to “militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict.”
We have seen a similar shutting down of dissent before in the face of catastrophic events, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror.” Yet, the frenetic opposition to dissent today seems more dangerous, especially given the multiple cultural platforms calling for “virtual war, for participating in it, and being manipulated by it, [including] crowd funding urban militias on Twitter, posting videos of captured tanks or ‘army cats’ to Instagram and TikTok.”
The need for community is too often now organized around a bristling war fever feeding on militaristic language in mainstream outlets such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, New Yorker, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. In all cases, rightful moral outrage over the brutality of Russia’s unlawful invasion morphed quickly into a fog-of-war hysteria demanding more military aid, more punitive sanctions and bolstered by the discourse of unchecked jingoism. The call for peace or a diplomatic solution is barely mentioned.
With the war in Ukraine raging, more nuanced analyses along with dissent disappear in the suffocating discourses of hyper-nationalism and the growing bonfire of militarism fueled by what Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, writing in the London Review of Books, calls “an infotainment media [that] works up citizens into a state of paranoid patriotism.” The military-industrial-intellectual-academic complex has reasserted itself in the face of Russia’s violation of international law, accelerating the prospect, if not welcoming, the potential of another looming Cold War, aided greatly by media apparatuses that bask in the comfort of moral certainty and patriotic inanity. In this atmosphere of hyper-war culture, military victories become synonymous with moral victories as language becomes weaponized and matters of ethics no longer inform the urgent call for peace.
In the face of the brutal Russian invasion, the concept of militarization is being amplified and put into service as a call for more upgraded weapons. Talk of war, not peace, dominates the mainstream media landscapes both at home and abroad. Such talk also fuels a global arms industry, oil and gas monopolies, and the weaponization of language itself. Militarism as a tool of unchecked nationalism and patriotism drives the mainstream and right-wing disimagination machines. Both fuel a global war fever through different degrees of misrepresentation and create what intellectual historian Jackson Lears writing in the London Review of Books calls “an atmosphere “poisoned by militarist rants.” He goes further in regarding his critique of the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine, writing in the New York Review of Books:
Yet the US has failed to put a cease-fire and a neutral Ukraine at the forefront of its policy agenda there. Quite the contrary: it has dramatically increased the flow of weapons to Ukraine, which had already been deployed for eight years to suppress the separatist uprising in the Donbas. US policy prolongs the war and creates the likelihood of a protracted insurgency after a Russian victory, which seems probable at this writing. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has refused to address Russia’s fear of NATO encirclement. Sometimes we must conduct diplomacy with nations whose actions we deplore. How does one negotiate with any potential diplomatic partner while ignoring its security concerns? The answer, of course, is that one does not. Without serious American diplomacy, the Ukraine war, too, may well become endless.
The horrific events in Ukraine have mobilized a global response against the brutal acts of violence inflicted on the Ukrainian people, but such massive acts of violence have also taken place in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen without eliciting comparable condemnations or humanitarian aid from the U.S. and Europe. Moreover, while public outrage in the U.S. is warranted in light of the “horrendous crimes by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians—massacre, murder, and rape, among them,” memory fades, and the line between fantasy and historical consciousness disappears, “erasing the brutalizing crimes committed during America’s Global War on Terror.”
U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood; torture; the violations of civil rights; abductions; kidnappings; targeted assassinations; illegal black holes; the scorched bodies of members of a wedding party in Yemen killed by a drone attack; and hundreds of women, children and old men brutally murdered by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam village of My Lai.
In a war culture, memory fades, violence is elevated to its most visible and mediating force, and logic is refigured to feed a totalitarian sensibility. Under such circumstances, as London School of Economics Professor Mary Kaldor has argued, we live at a time in which the relationship between politics and violence is changing. She states: “Rather than politics being pursued through violent means, violence becomes politics. It is not conflict that leads to war but war itself that creates conflict.”
Behind this disproportionate response by the international community and its media platforms lies the ghosts of colonialism and the merging of culture and the undercurrents of white supremacy. For example, the general indifference to comparable acts of war and unspeakable violence can be in part explained by the fact that the Ukrainian victims appearing on the mass media are white Europeans. What is not shown are “Black people being refused at border crossings in favor of white Ukrainians, leaving them stuck at borders for days in brutal conditions [or] Black people being pushed off trains.” The mainstream media celebrate Poland’s welcoming of Ukrainian refugees but are silent about the Polish government boasting about building walls and “creating a ‘fortress’ to keep out refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.”
The war in Ukraine makes clear that racism is not deterred by global boundaries. Empathy in this war only runs skin deep. It is easy for white people in the media to sympathize with people who look just like them. This was made clear when CBS News Senior Correspondent Charlie D’Agata, reporting on the war, stated that it was hard to watch the violence waged against Ukrainians because Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European [country] … one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” In this case, “civilized,” is code for white. D’Agata simply echoed the obvious normalization of racism as is clear in a number of comments that appeared in the mainstream press. The Guardian offered a summary of just a few, which include the following:
The BBC interviewed a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who told the network: ‘It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.’ Rather than question or challenge the comment, the BBC host flatly replied, ‘I understand and respect the emotion.’ On France’s BFM TV, journalist Phillipe Corbé stated this about Ukraine: ‘We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives…. And writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan explained: ‘They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.’
There is more here than a slip of the tongue; there is also the repressed history of white supremacy. As City University of New York Professor Moustafa Bayoumi writing in The Guardian observes, all of these comments point to a deeply ingrained and “pernicious racism that permeates today’s war coverage and seeps into its fabric like a stain that won’t go away. The implication is clear: war is a natural state for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate toward peace.”
Clearly, in the age of Western colonialism, a larger public is taught to take for granted that justice should weigh largely in favor of people whose skin color is the same as those who have the power to define whose lives count and whose do not. These comments are also emblematic of the propaganda machines that have resurfaced with the scourge of racism on their hands, indifferent to the legacy of racism with which they are complicit.
Historical amnesia and a prolonged military conflict combine making it easier to sell war rather than peace, which would demand not only condemnation of Russia but also an exercise in self-scrutiny with a particular focus on the military optic that has been driving U.S. foreign policy since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in the 1950s of the danger of the military-industrial complex.
The Ukrainian war is truly insidious and rouses the deepest sympathies and robust moral outrage, but the calls to punish Russia overlook the equally crucial need to call for peace. In doing so, such actions ignore a crucial history and mode of analysis that make clear that behind this war are long-standing anti-democratic ideologies that have given us massive inequality, disastrous climate change, poverty, racial apartheid and the increasing threat of nuclear war.
War never escapes the tragedies it produces and is almost always an outgrowth of the dreams of the powerful — which always guarantees a world draped in suffering and death. Peace is difficult in an age when culture is organized around the interrelated discourse of militarism and state violence. War has become the only mirror in which alleged democratic capitalist and authoritarian societies recognize themselves. Rather than defined as a crisis, war for authoritarian rulers and the soulless arms industries becomes an opportunity for power and profits, however ill-conceived.
Peace demands a different assertion of collective identity, a different ethical posture and value system that takes seriously Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that human beings must do everything not to “spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear annihilation.” This is not merely a matter of conscience or resistance but of survival itself.
Last month, the national movement to end immigration detention achieved two major campaign victories that invite our attention and signal opportunities ahead. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will no longer incarcerate immigrants at the Etowah County Jail in Alabama and will reduce the use of three other jails in the south.
A couple days later, President Joe Biden released his 2023 budget request to Congress, which calls for a reduction in the capacity of immigration jails by 9,000 beds or 26 percent of the current funded level (34,000 beds). This was the first time in the history of the modern immigrant incarceration system that a president reduced the request to this degree.
For 40 years, the trajectory of immigration jails in the United States has been expansion: more beds, more money. President Biden’s budget request signals that we’ve finally moved the needle in the opposite direction, as a result of years of popular organizing and advocacy by people in detention and communities across the country. It can feel hard to celebrate given the continued harsh realities of immigration enforcement, but we can’t lose sight of our ability to score significant wins like these.
The oppositional narrative to immigration jails often focuses on the harms of detention: the abysmal conditions, the isolation, the harsh treatment. But we must call for the abolition of immigration jails not only because they are an inhumane extension of the larger system of mass incarceration but because they are also key drivers of deportations.
Prior to the pandemic, some 400,000 people were held in U.S. immigration jails annually, some for months or years. Detention bed capacity helps dictate how many people ICE chooses to detain and for how long. This subsequently impacts whether or not people end up targeted for deportation. The drive to expand detention under previous administrations was often in response to increasing deportation programs. Because the system exists to facilitate deportation, cutting its capacity is key to disrupting the immigrant dragnet.
Bed numbers for immigrant incarceration have been a major point of contention in budget negotiations for more than a decade. In 2009, the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, incorporated language into the 2010 budget that required ICE maintain a certain number of jail beds, creating what came to be known as the detention bed quota. After activists and advocates targeted the quota, Congress eventually removed the language during Donald Trump’s administration. However, ICE employed another strategy to expand the immigration jail system by repeatedly overspending its budget and having Congress bail it out, thus increasing capacity each year. Through this strategy, ICE expanded civil immigrant incarceration to its height of 55,000 beds in 2019.
In 2017, a broad set of organizations came together to form the Defund Hate coalition to oppose Trump’s supplemental funding request for the border wall, more ICE and Border Patrol agents, and more detention beds. Through consistent engagement with members of Congress and public exposure of ICE’s underhanded tactics, the coalition popularized the call to defund ICE’s immigration jails. In one notorious example, ICE diverted money for detention beds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency during hurricane season, even as another hurricane was heading to the East Coast.
Since its inception, the coalition has successfully blocked $12 billion in additional funding to DHS. Without the call to defund ICE launched in 2017, we likely wouldn’t be seeing this reduction in immigration jail capacity in the president’s budget request in 2022.
In addition to seeking to defund ICE, calling for closure of specific “detention centers” has been a central strategy of the movement to end immigration jails. Over the last year, organizers and advocates across the country have successfully ended ICE detention at almost a dozen county jails through local-, state- and federal-level campaigns. In this regard, the end of ICE detention at the Etowah County Jail is a significant victory. For 24 years, Etowah has been one of the worst immigrant jails in the U.S., coming to symbolize everything wrong with the system.
Most people in Etowah are transferred from other states and are awaiting appeal on their case. With no outdoor recreation, immigrants would spend months or years in the jail without ever stepping foot outside. The conditions at Etowah were so poor that Barack Obama’s administration tried to stop using it in 2011, but Republican lawmakers from Alabama intervened by threatening to reduce ICE’s budget if the federal government ended the contract. For years, organizers, lawyers, advocates and journalists, alongside those detained, exposed the horrific conditions, filed lawsuits and protested. In 2015, the Shut Down Etowah campaign was launched to end the contract and support those inside. The campaign joined others nationally calling for Communities Not Cages to end contracts at ICE’s existing immigration jails and stop any further expansion.
Many advocates have questioned the call to shut down immigration jails as a strategy for dismantling the system, arguing that if a detention center shuts down in one location, another will simply be built somewhere else. This is why the combination of the calls to shut down facilities and defund ICE is so critical. It’s not just about ending one contract or a series of contracts. Winning local campaigns helps us make the case for ending immigrant incarceration altogether. These campaigns are connected to community and real people whose lives have been upended by the system and help reveal how unnecessary detention is. The call to defund subsequently ensures that we shrink the “detention system” and don’t just keep playing a game of whack-a-mole.
When Biden’s budget request reducing immigration jail capacity was announced, advocates rightly pointed with alarm to the increase in funding for programs (like ankle shackling and other forms of electronic monitoring) that have only widened the net for immigrants under government surveillance. And yet, we must continue to claim victory if immigration jail numbers go down, because for years, both detention and e-carceration models have only increased. This year would have been no different but for the movement to end immigration detention.
The proposed expansion in e-carceration reveals why we must remain steadfast in our call for abolition rather than accede to reforms that further entrench carceral approaches to immigration. Defunding ICE is not only an important strategy to reduce the incarceration of immigrants but also a critical strategy to limit the electronic monitoring of immigrants in deportation proceedings. It remains to be seen if Congress will pass a budget with these lower detention numbers, but calling for an end to both detention and e-carceration is paramount.
The recent backlash to abolition and the call to defund assumes that the demands are too extreme and are hurting the Democrats’ approval ratings. But the demands work — we are shrinking the number of immigration jails. While there are many factors at play that led to this outcome, including exposure under Trump and pandemic border closures leading to lower numbers, it’s clear that the demands for defunding and abolition in the broader discourse on policing and prisons and by the movement to end immigration detention got us here.
We have successfully made the case that immigrant incarceration should not be expanded and in fact must shrink. This is the time to remain bold and defend our wins. The status quo on immigration detention has shifted, and we need to make this a first step on the road to abolition.
In March of 2003, George W. Bush transformed the center of Baghdad into a bowl of fire during the “Shock & Awe” phase of his doomed Iraq invasion. I lay on my back in my living room that day, horrified by the massacre unfolding on the television, a vivid war crime I and millions of others had labored for months to thwart. More people protested that war before it started than any other conflict in all of human history, and yet it came to sorrow nonetheless.
In order to get their war, Bush and his allies within government and the media crafted a complete alternate reality to justify their intentions. Iraq, according to them, was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 48,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which equals 1 million pounds) of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents, 30,000 munitions to deliver these poisons, mobile biological weapons laboratories, uranium from Niger for use in a “robust” nuclear weapons program, and direct connections to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world.
Not one word of this was true. Yet the message was chilling in its precision, the perfect threat to levy against a population still reeling from the shock of September 11. That the president of the United States deliberately used that terrible day against his own people was another accent in the symphony of lies and betrayals that led inexorably to war. Once begun, the war made its own gravy, in the form of easily manipulated “terror alerts” that kept everyone looking over their shoulders. Because of the war, many people expected a wave of retaliatory terrorism attacks to unfold any day.
That wave did not come, at least not here at home, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on smoke and fiction did set part of the precedent for what we are all watching unfold in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, the strongman leader who calls the Russian oligarch billionaire class his base, has also constructed an alternative reality to buttress his desire for an expanded empire. Alleging that Ukraine is dominated by Nazis — a conjuring word for the Russian people the way 9/11 is here — the Russian president has laid claim to the moral high ground within a near-seamless media bubble that has neighbor turning against “disloyal” neighbor and students turning in teachers who speak out against the war. Although of course, neo-Nazis are present in Ukraine as they are in other countries, the particular picture that Putin has painted is patently false.
With the war in Ukraine now several weeks underway, images of atrocity have flooded the networks and been splashed across front pages. U.S. officials and press pundits speak with unchecked outrage at the horrors being visited upon Ukraine’s civilian population. Of course, Putin’s horrific actions deserve all our condemnation. Remembering that day almost 20 years ago, when another aggressive invasion and occupation was underway, I am also left with an ugly and unavoidable question.
Will the pundits and officials currently condemning Putin’s unspeakable violence also condemn the U.S.’s unspeakable violence? The international community did not roundly sanction or otherwise punish the U.S. after Bush led us into that charnel house based on a tapestry of poorly weaved lies. Right down to the idea bubble that prevents people from reading and seeing the truth, Russia and the U.S. are both deeply guilty when it comes to wars of choice, and thus are both morally repugnant.
“In the wake of so-called Shock and Awe (i.e. the mass bombing of a city full of civilians), and alongside Abu Ghraib (mass torture of people being held, without trial, by an occupying force), Fallujah was the apex of brutality by the waning US empire,” journalist Dahr Jamail, who reported for Truthout for many years, told me in a recent email. “I know because I was there before, during, and after the sieges of that city.”
Jamail continued:
The corporate press is aghast at the atrocities they are witnessing across Ukraine, and rightly so. The intentional targeting of civilians, collective punishment, bombing civilian targets like apartments and train stations and hospitals: all war crimes.
Finding burned bodies with their hands tied, cluster bombs, and encircling cities and intentionally starving the people within them and cutting them off from medical help — war crimes the corporate press, and presidents of the EU and US and other countries are right to call as such.
But where was this same outrage about US war crimes in Iraq? Having reported from that country off and on for a decade, I can say unequivocally that the Russians have done nothing worse in Ukraine than the US military did in Iraq.
The Guardianreports: “The mayor of the Ukrainian town of Bucha, near Kyiv, said that authorities had so far found 403 bodies of people they believed were killed by Russian forces during their occupation of the area, but that the number was growing.”
Dahr Jamail: “As horrible as the [total number of] dead civilians in Bucha, Ukraine is, that is at most one-tenth of the number killed in Fallujah. The numbers of dead civilians in Ukraine pale in comparison to the more than 1,000,000 Iraqis that died due to the savage US occupation of that country, that continued into the Obama presidency. Where were the cries in the corporate media then for trying Bush and Obama for war crimes? The silence was deafening.”
BBCreports: “The US and Britain say they are looking into reports that chemical weapons have been used by Russian forces attacking the Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Ukraine’s Azov regiment said three soldiers were injured by ‘a poisonous substance’ in an attack on Monday. However, no evidence has been presented to confirm the use of chemical weapons.”
Dahr Jamail on the Fallujah siege: “During the November siege of that year, the US military used massive amounts of white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon, the use of which in an area where there could be civilians, is a violation of international law. The US military itself stated there were at least 30,000 civilians in Fallujah during that siege. I personally interviewed soldiers who were told to shoot anything that moved. This is the institution of war crimes as policy.”
It is the duty of every moral person to raise their voice against the bloodbath being perpetrated by Vladimir Putin against the people of Ukraine. Some 21 years ago, the same held true of George W. Bush and his long atrocity in Iraq. Bush proved in 2003 that you can get away with a hell of a lot if you’re a global economic powerhouse bristling with nuclear weapons.
There are no heroes among the powerful invaders. As we rightly condemn Putin’s grave atrocities, we must also remember U.S. war crimes and vow to oppose future ones.
Every April, as income-tax returns come due, I think about the day 30 years ago when I opened my rented mailbox and saw a business card resting inside. Its first line read, innocently enough, “United States Treasury.” It was the second line — “Internal Revenue Service” — that took my breath away. That card belonged to an IRS revenue agent and scrawled across it in blue ink was the message: “Call me.”
I’d used that mailbox as my address on the last tax return I’d filed, eight years earlier. Presumably, the agent thought she’d be visiting my home when she appeared at the place where I rented a mailbox, which, as I would discover, was the agency’s usual first step in running down errant taxpayers. Hands shaking, I put a quarter in a pay phone and called my partner. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her.
Resisting War Taxes
I knew that the IRS wasn’t visiting me as part of an audit of my returns, since I hadn’t filed any for eight years. My partner and I were both informal tax resisters — she, ever since joining the pacifist Catholic Worker organization; and I, ever since I’d returned from Nicaragua in 1984. I’d spent six months traveling that country’s war zones as a volunteer with Witness for Peace. My work involved recording the testimony of people who had survived attacks by the “Contras,” the counterrevolutionary forces opposing the leftist Sandinista government then in power (after a popular uprising deposed the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza). At the time, the Contras were being illegally supported by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
With training and guidance from the CIA, they were using a military strategy based on terrorizing civilians in the Nicaraguan countryside. Their targets included newly built schools, clinics, roads, and phone lines — anything the revolutionary government had, in fact, achieved — along with the campesinos (the families of subsistence farmers) who used such things. Contra attacks very often involved torture: flaying people alive, severing body parts, cutting open the wombs of pregnant women. Nor were such acts mere aberrations. They were strategic choices made by a force backed and directed by the United States.
When I got back to the United States, I simply couldn’t imagine paying taxes to subsidize the murder of people in another country, some of whom I knew personally. I continued working, first as a bookkeeper, then at a feminist bookstore, and eventually at a foundation. But with each new employer, on my W-4 form I would claim that I expected to owe no taxes that year, so the IRS wouldn’t take money out of my paycheck. And I stopped filing tax returns.
Not paying taxes for unjust wars has a long history in this country. It goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay them to support the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). His act of resistance landed him in jail for a night and led him to write On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, dooming generations of high-school students to reading the ruminations of a somewhat self-satisfied tax resister. Almost a century later, labor leader and pacifist A.J. Muste revived Thoreau’s tradition, once even filing a copy of the Duty ofCivil Disobedience in place of his Form 1040. After supporting textile factory workers in their famous 1919 strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and some 20 years later helping form and run the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (where my mother once worked as a labor organizer), Muste eventually came to serve on the board of the War Resisters League (WRL).
For almost a century now, WRL, along with the even older Fellowship of Reconciliation and other peace groups, have promoted antiwar tax resistance as a nonviolent means of confronting this country’s militarism. In recent years, both organizations have expanded their work beyond opposing imperial adventures overseas to stand against racist, militarized policing at home as well.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Each year, the WRL publishes a “pie chart” poster that explains “where your income tax money really goes.” In most years, more than half of it is allocated to what’s euphemistically called “defense.” This year’s poster, distinctly an outlier, indicates that pandemic-related spending boosted the non-military portion of the budget above the 50% mark for the first time in decades. Still, at $768 billion, we now have the largest Pentagon budget in history (and it’s soon to grow larger yet). That’s a nice reward for a military whose main achievements in this century are losing major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But doesn’t the war in Ukraine justify all those billions? Not if you consider that none of the billions spent in previous years stopped Russia from invading. As Lindsay Koshgarian argues at Newsweek, “Colossal military spending didn’t prevent the Russian invasion, and more money won’t stop it. The U.S. alone already spends 12 times more on its military than Russia. When combined with Europe’s biggest military spenders, the U.S. and its allies on the continent outspend Russia by at least 15 to 1. If more military spending were the answer, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Defense” spending could, however, just as accurately be described as welfare for military contractors, because that’s where so much of the money eventually ends up. The top five weapons-making companies in 2021 were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technology, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics. Together, they reaped $198 billion in taxpayer funds last year alone. In 2020, the top 100 contractors took in $551 billion. Of course, we undoubtedly got some lovely toys for our money, but I’ve always found it difficult to live in — or eat — a drone. They’re certainly useful, however, for murdering a U.S. citizen in Yemen or so many civilians elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and Africa.
The Pentagon threatens the world with more than the direct violence of war. It’s also a significant factor driving climate change. The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. If it were a country, the Pentagon would rank 55th among the world’s carbon emitters.
While the military budget increases yearly, federal spending that actually promotes human welfare has fallen over the last decade. In fact, such spending for the program most Americans think of when they hear the word “welfare” — Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or TANF — hasn’t changed much since 1996, the year the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (so-called welfare reform) took effect. In 1997, federal expenditures for TANF totaled about $16.6 billion. That figure has remained largely unchanged. However, according to the Congressional Research Service, since the program began, such expenditures have actually dropped 40% in value, thanks to inflation.
Unlike military outlays, spending for the actual welfare of Americans doesn’t increase over time. In fact, as a result of the austerity imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that “by 2021 non-defense funding (excluding veterans’ health care) was about 9% lower than it had been 11 years earlier after adjusting for inflation and population growth.” Note that Congress passed that austerity measure a mere three years after the subprime lending crisis exploded, initiating the Great Recession, whose reverberations still ring in our ears.
This isn’t necessarily how taxpayers want their money spent. In one recent poll, a majority of them, given the choice, said they would prioritize education, social insurance, and health care. A third would rather that their money not be spent on war at all. And almost 40% believed that the federal government simply doesn’t spend enough on social-welfare programs.
Death May Be Coming for Us All, But Taxes Are for the Little People
Pollsters don’t include corporations like Amazon, FedEx, and Nike in their surveys of taxpayers. Perhaps the reason is that those corporate behemoths often don’t pay a dollar in income tax. In 2020, in fact, 55 top U.S. companies paid no corporate income taxes whatsoever. Nor would the survey takers have polled billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Carl Icahn, all of whom also manage the neat trick of not paying any income tax at all some years.
In 2021, using “a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years,” ProPublica published a report on how much the rich really pay in taxes. The data show that, between 2014 and 2018, the richest Americans paid a measly “true tax” rate of 3.4% on the growth of their wealth over that period. The average American — you — typically pays 14% of his or her income each year in federal income tax. As ProPublica explains:
“America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.”
So, if the rich avoid paying taxes by holding onto their assets instead of selling them, where do they get the money to live like the billionaires they are? The answer isn’t complicated: they borrow it. Using their wealth as collateral, they typically borrow millions of dollars to live on, using the interest on those loans to offset any income they might actually receive in a given year and so reducing their taxes even more.
While they do avoid paying taxes, I’m pretty sure those plutocrats aren’t tax resisters. They’re not using such dodges to avoid paying for U.S. military interventions around the world, which was why I stopped paying taxes for almost a decade. Through the Reagan administration and the first Bush presidency, with the Savings and Loan debacle and the first Gulf War, there was little the U.S. government was doing that I wanted to support.
These days, however, having lived through the “greed is good” decade, having watched a particularly bizarre version of American individualism reach its pinnacle in the presidency of billionaire Donald Trump, I think about taxes a bit differently. I still don’t want to pay for the organized global version of murder that is war, American-style, but I’ve also come to see that taxes are an important form of communal solidarity. Our taxes allow us, though the government, to do things together we can’t do as individuals — like generating electricity or making sure our food is clean and safe. In a more truly democratic society, people like me might feel better about paying taxes, since we’d be deciding more collectively how to spend our common wealth for the common good. We might even buy fewer drones.
Until that day comes, there are still many ways, as the War Resisters League makes clear, to resist paying war taxes, should you choose to do so. I eventually started filing my returns again and paid off eight years of taxes, penalties, and interest. It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.
“Too Distraught”
The method I chose was, as I’ve said, not to file my tax returns, which, if your employer doesn’t withhold any taxes and send them to the feds, denies the federal government tax revenue from you. Mind you, for most of those years I wasn’t making much money. We’re talking about hundreds of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost tax revenue. Over those years, I got just the occasional plaintive query from the IRS about whether I’d forgotten my taxes. But during the mid-1980s, the IRS upgraded its computers, improving its ability to capture income reported by employers and so enabling it to recreate the returns a taxpayer should have filed, but didn’t. And so, in 1992 an IRS agent visited my mailbox.
Only a month earlier, a friend, my partner, and I had bought a house together. So, when I saw that “Call me,” on the agent’s business card, I was terrified that my act of conscience was going to lose us our life savings. Trembling, I called the revenue agent and set up an appointment at the San Francisco federal building, a place I only knew as the site of many antiwar demonstrations I’d attended.
I remember the agent meeting us at the entrance to a room filled with work cubicles. I took a look at her and my gaydar went off. “Oh, my goodness,” I thought, “she’s a lesbian!” Maybe that would help somehow — not that I imagined for a second that my partner and I were going to get the “family discount” we sometimes received from LGBT cashiers.
The three of us settled into her cubicle. She told me that I would have to file returns from 1986 to 1991 (the IRS computers, it turned out, couldn’t reach back further than that) and also pay the missing taxes, penalties, and interest on all of it. With an only partially feigned quaver in my voice, I asked, “Are you going to take our house away?”
She raised herself from her chair just enough to scan the roomful of cubicles around us, then sat down again. Silently, she shook her head. Well, it may not have been the family discount, but it was good enough for me.
Then she asked why I hadn’t filed my taxes and, having already decided I was going to pay up, I didn’t explain anything about those Nicaraguan families our government had maimed or murdered. I didn’t say why I’d been unwilling or what I thought it meant to pay for this country’s wars in Central America or preparations for more wars to come. “I just kept putting it off,” I said, which was true enough, if not the whole truth.
Somehow, she bought that and asked me one final question, “By the way, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an accountant,” I replied.
Her eyebrows flew up and she shook her head, but that was that.
Why did I give up so easily? There were a few reasons. The Contra war in Nicaragua had ended after the Sandinistas lost the national elections in 1990. Nicaraguans weren’t stupid. They grasped that, as long as the Sandinistas were in power, the U.S. would continue to embargo their exports and arm and train the Contras. And I’d made some changes in my own life. After decades of using part-time paid work to support my full-time activism, I’d taken a “grown-up” job to help pay my ailing and impoverished mother’s rent, once I convinced her to move from subsidized housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. And, of course, I’d just made a fundamental investment of my own in the status quo. I’d bought a house. Even had I been willing to lose it, I couldn’t ask my co-owners to suffer for my conscience.
But in the end, I also found I just didn’t have the courage to defy the government of the world’s most powerful country.
As it happened, I wasn’t the only person in the Bay Area to get a visit from a revenue agent that year. The IRS, it turned out, was running a pilot program to see whether they could capture more unpaid taxes by diverting funds from auditing to directly pursuing non-filers like me. Several resisters I knew were caught in their net, including my friend T.J.
An agent came to T.J.’s house and sat at his kitchen table. Unlike “my” agent, T.J.’s not only asked him why he hadn’t filed his returns, but read from a list of possible reasons: “Did you have a drug or alcohol problem? Were you ill? Did you have trouble filling out the forms?”
“Don’t you have any political reasons on your list?” T.J. asked.
The agent looked doubtful. “Political? Well, there’s ‘too distraught.’”
“That’s it,” said T.J. “Put down ‘too distraught.’”
T.J. died years ago, but I remember him every tax season when I again have to reckon with just how deeply implicated all of us are in this country’s military death machine, whether we pay income taxes or not. Still, so many of us keep on keeping on, knowing we must never become too distraught to find new ways to oppose military aggression anywhere in the world, including, of course, Ukraine, while affirming life as best we can.
This year’s annual Gridiron Dinner at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C. dealt a blow that few were suspecting, which itself is telling about the moment we find ourselves in. A few attendees took home doggy bags from the meal, everyone took home a story to tell, and 72 of them — more than 10 percent of the audience and climbing — took home COVID-19.
The names of the afflicted looks like a speaker’s list for commencement addresses in May. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack were all infected. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California and Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser likewise brought home an uninvited guest from the elite event.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock of Georgia did not attend the dinner, but both announced they were infected in the last week. What happened at the Gridiron clearly did not stay at the Gridiron, but thankfully, the vaccines and boosters appear to have done what they are supposed to: All the reported cases so far have been on the milder end, and nobody has been hospitalized yet. Contrast that with two Octobers ago, when Donald Trump became seriously ill after becoming infected at another glitzy D.C. gathering.
President Biden did not attend the dinner, and at present appears to be free of any secondary infection due to subsequent interaction with attendees.
Which brings us to the next big item on the D.C. social calendar: the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “The White House Correspondents Association will require those attending its annual dinner to be vaccinated against the coronavirus,” reportsAxios. “The association was already requiring attendees to provide proof of a same-day negative COVID test. It is now also encouraging guests to get a second booster shot if they are eligible as soon as this week for ‘maximum protection.’”
Welcome, all and sundry, to the “Learning to Live With It” stage of the process. In one sense, you could take the Gridiron outbreak as a success story, a triumph of science even. Not even a year free from a ruthless, lethal explosion in COVID cases, 67 people got infected at a major event and not one of them died or was hospitalized. That is the hoped-for impact of the vaccines — not to make people bulletproof, but to keep the symptoms manageable — and in this case, like Hodor, they had one job and they did it.
Additionally, it’s probable that most of the Gridiron attendees were not only vaxxed to the max, but were not afflicted with conditions that would make them very acutely vulnerable to infection. The test sample we have here includes only those who are comfortable making a run at “Learning to Live With It.”
There are at least 7 million immunocompromised people in this country — many of whom would likely not have gone to that dinner, or to any event like it, for all the whiskey in Ireland. Add to that group people like me, who have prior health issues that make us ripe bait for COVID no matter how well-vaccinated we are, plus the elderly, and children under five (who aren’t yet able to be vaccinated), and you wind up with a substantial portion of the population with its nose pressed against the glass as other people take the risk, get infected, and live to fight another day.
If the moment is any indication, “Learning to Live With It” involves COVID sliding to the back of most people’s minds until a big story like the Gridiron outbreak jerks it to the fore again (New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has championed a return to normal in his city, has also been infected, is fully vaccinated, has minor symptoms and is quarantining). It is hard to complain about that — for the love of God, people need a break after the last two years — but harder again to miss the peril involved.
More than 31,000 people were infected yesterday, a slight uptick from two weeks ago — and that number is likely low, given the number of people who are testing at home and not reporting their cases. The BA.2 subvariant is now the dominant strain of COVID in the U.S., and scientists are watching like hawks to see if it has the muscle to create another massive surge. If it does, “Learning to Live With It” will have to downshift hard back into “Duck, Cover and Mask.”
Getting people to comply with that after another small breath of fresh air may come to be one of the biggest challenges we have faced so far.
There are times when I want to scream out: “F*** this entire indifferent, hypocritical and violent world!”
My desire to scream comes from a place of deep outrage, sickness, anger and frustration as I tarry with the suffering to which I try to bear witness. To bear witness means to carry the weight, the load, of a truth. And there are times when the weight of certain truths feels so heavy that my outrage succumbs to despair, a place where I feel disempowered, incapable of doing anything because the social injustices are just too pervasive, too vast, too intractable and too complex to address with any substantial results. So, we must face the weight of such social evils and be prepared to also face the ways in which we are complicit with them, especially when we are often indifferent.
As scholar of theology Elisabeth T. Vasko writes, “We are not very good at sitting with pain. We tend to engage in a politics of distraction, to shy away from making the really hard decisions (after all, isn’t there an app for that?).” It is hard to sit with pain, to tarry with what is really being asked of us by those who suffer.
How in the hell do we go on when we face such horrid realities, such as the lynching of Black bodies, the killing of George Floyd, the killing of Breonna Taylor, the death of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, the killing of innocent Palestinian children, the brutal murder of Black transgender women, the killing of civilians in Yemen, and the inhumane treatment of those imprisoned?
The fact that I get to write about these things is not lost on me. This relates to the relative privilege that I possess because I can sit and write. I must write, as this is a form of protest for me, of speaking some truth to forms of injustice. However, the aporia, the internal contradiction, is still jarring.
In the face of so much suffering, perhaps the privilege of writing ought to be forfeited. Think about it this way: At a demonstration against the Vietnam War, Abraham Joshua Heschel was asked by a journalist why he came to protest. Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, relates that her father said he was there because he could not pray. One can only imagine the confused look on the face of the journalist who asked for clarification.
“Whenever I open the prayerbook, I see before me images of children burning from napalm,” Heschel replied.
This is what it means to tarry with the suffering of others. It means to hear their cries, to listen to their lament, and to be driven outside of our sites of comfort (temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, homes, classrooms, universities, colleges, boardrooms, ourselves) and refuse to take refuge until the last one of us is free from the pain, hurt and violence of injustice.
Martin Luther King Jr. was correct when he said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Capturing the entwinement of our human existence, Judith Butler writes, “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am.”
When one dares to look at the world in this way, one is called upon to do something more than pray, something more than donate money, something more than remain abreast of the latest breaking news with its accompanying images of human suffering. Perhaps “the more” doesn’t have a grammar yet to express it, perhaps we are still too attached to how we feel concern about them, even if that feeling of concern is truly about them. There is distance, after all, in the relation of “feeling concern for or about.”
Perhaps the goal is to abandon our safety altogether vis-a-vis those who suffer. We will need to think critically, though, about how the process of abandoning our safety — who does it, when and where — can be distributed in ways that doesn’t require more from those who are always already in situations of structural violence.
I also want to bring attention to those moments of feeling concern where one might come to the difficult realization regarding the extent to which one’s kindness, concern and sympathy can obfuscate the degree of one’s own complicity.
For example, I said to my partner as she and I watched images on the news, “We get to watch the news of these horrible images coming out of Ukraine in our home as over 4 million Ukrainians are forced to leave their homes.” We imagined what it would be like for the two of us, along with our youngest sons, to flee our house, seeing it blown-up, torn to bits, and our precious memories of home overshadowed by the violence of war, military invasion, totalitarian chaos.
Yet, looking at those images, as writer and philosopher Susan Sontag powerfully reminds us, “is one more mystification of our real relations to power.” Sontag continues, “So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”
So many in this country, and around the world, I would argue, miss (or even willfully ignore) this connection, and thereby fail to interrogate their own complicity. Sontag wants us to see not just how our wealth is linked to “the destitution of others,” but how what we do and don’t do within our own situation of relative privilege is “linked to their suffering.” Being aware of this keeps me honest, angry and haunted.
The desire to scream is a manifestation that I have not become numb regarding those who suffer.
Daily, I agonize (and must do so) over my own children’s lives when faced with the hard reality that over 100 children have been killed and more wounded since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But you see, it isn’t just about my children; it is about all children and how so many of their precious lives are not deemed precious and grievable.
According to reports, an estimated 1,000 civilians have died in Ukraine. Of course, these numbers will no doubt rise as the rubble is literally cleared. The extent of the horror is yet to be told. And as the trauma holds captive the psyche and the body, the personal horrors will continue to unfold. There are reports of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women and then murdering them. At such moments as these, the words pour out of me: “F*** this entire indifferent, hypocritical and violent world.”
When I heard and read that Vladimir Putin had put Russian nuclear forces on high alert, I found it hard to sleep because I thought about the possibility of nuclear weapons being dropped on the Ukrainian people or dropped over U.S. cities. And we mustn’t forget about those bombs that would be dropped over Russian cities which would instantly kill tens of thousands of innocent people.
There was the flood of terrifying realities that came to mind, such as the blinding flash of light of a nuclear explosion, the peeling of human skin, thermal burns, severe bloody diarrhea, the death of tens of thousands of people instantaneously, and the loss of my children, and your children — those who are innocent and just want to live. And this also includes exposure to eventual radioactive fallout, and the violent devastation of our planet’s ecosystems.
After hearing about the news of the high alert, I didn’t get the sense that anything had changed. People were going about their daily routines as if there had not been a threat of ending the world as we know it. I’m not saying that there should have been mass panic, but what the hell? I’m not an alarmist, but rather I am someone who, as Rabbi Heschel says, “feels fiercely.” He also says that “what we need is restlessness, a constant awareness of the monstrosity of injustice.” Well, I’m restless when I think about the monstrosity of nuclear annihilation.
Around our “dinner table,” which is certainly a perk of class privilege, I could tell that my sons had a sense of fear that was repressed and covered over by lightly joking about “WWIII.”
How else can children face and talk about such a global nightmare? I am outraged by the fact that we exist within a world where such destructive weapons exist, where a small miscalculation — because of ideological differences, mistrust, hatred, the breaching of “sacred” geopolitical boundaries and manufactured airspaces — could mean the end of us all.
Within this context, talk of nuclear war games is absurd. How do you calculate the risk of losing millions of lives and saving others? In a nuclear war, zero-sum scenarios are useless. We all lose. We’re talking mutually assured destruction. Even if some survive, we lose.
Bear in mind that Donald Trump, when asked directly in 2016, refused to take the use of nuclear weapons off the table. Who thinks and talks like this? Well, those who have fantasies of complete mastery.
According to Julietta Singh, mastery “also turns inward to become a form of self-maiming, one that involves the denial of the master’s own dependency on other bodies.” That is partly the trick and yet the tragedy of mastery — to deny one’s own sense of being interdependent. In this way, one is “untouchable,” living a life filled with pretentiousness and self-deception, where one believes in their historical destiny, their inherent “genius,” to lead the world into a “new age,” one where dissenters are murdered, where truths are lies and lies are truths, and where those most loyal must be prepared to sacrifice their friends, their families and their ethical compasses for a mess of pottage. We’ve seen this before where the obdurate desire for maintaining mastery has led to forms of enslavement, colonial domination and the death of millions.
As we are now 100 seconds to midnight, where “midnight” is that moment where humanity ends as we know it because of some catastrophic moment due to a nuclear war or a devasting climate event, the danger of that form of mastery should give us pause. Think about it: just 100 seconds.
It is at times like these that I watch my sons with greater loving care. I allow myself to feel the air within my lungs. I remain mindful of the trees and nonhuman animal life around me. During such moments, I feel a sudden response of outrage, teetering on despair. Again, the images resurface, and I cannot get them out of my head: the skin peels off, tens of thousands dying within an instant. The smell of burned and burning flesh, death and dying are in the air.
I imagine the devastating nuclear winter caused by the firestorms that would lead to the sunlight being blocked. I hear the voices screaming in my head, and the heaviness of dread and gloom. I imagine witnessing the burned flesh of others. This is the stuff of science fiction only, yes? Read the words of witnesses within Nagasaki, Japan, after “we” dropped a weapon of mass destruction:
There were no air raid alarms on the morning of August 9, 1945. We had been hiding out in the local bomb shelter for several days, but one by one, people started to head home. My siblings and I played in front of the bomb shelter entrance, waiting to be picked up by our grandfather.
Then, at 11:02 am, the sky turned bright white. My siblings and I were knocked off our feet and violently slammed back into the bomb shelter. We had no idea what had happened.
As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling into the bomb shelter en masse. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable.
Have we not learned from this great horror? For some (many?), there seems to be no limit to their tolerance for existential devastation, unethical ineptitude and imperial lust. Once Putin (yet again) invaded Ukraine, my outrage for the cowardice of totalitarians was reanimated with a fierceness. You see, I absolutely despise bullies and their underlings. As Putin’s “special military operation” was revealed as a military invasion, and war was being waged, Trump loyalist Sean Hannity suggested that Putin should be assassinated. What, for Hannity, should we do with aspiring authoritarians within the U.S.? One senses the contradiction and problematic slippery slope implications of Hannity’s reasoning.
And then there was Tucker Carlson (a junior partner of Trump’s white nationalist worldview) who made light of Putin’s intentions and despotic character by saying, among other things, that Putin never called him a racist, that he never threatened to get him fired for disagreeing with him or attempted to teach his children to embrace racial discrimination.
Unabashedly ridiculous and feeding the echo chamber of conversative white reactionary grievances, Carlson would have white Americans believe that because I teach about white privilege, white supremacy, anti-Blackness and the systemic racist structure of the U.S., I am to be feared, loathed and hated more than a murderous tyrant who silences (some for good) his rivals.
Other right-wing conservatives who supported Trump lambasted Putin’s lies about “denazification.” Come on? Talk about the putrid smell of mendacity. To castigate Putin as a vicious totalitarian who lies to his people, and yet to embrace Trump, the aspirant dictator of the Republican Party, smacks of muddled thinking and hypocrisy. Trump lied and continues to lie about voter fraud regarding the 2020 election. In fact, it has been said that Trump, over the four years of his presidency, made 30,573 false and misleading claims.
Putin’s “denazification” justification is equivalent to Trump’s “Big Lie” and there are gullible followers who accept the lies of both men out of fear. And the lies of both have led to the death of human beings, though thus far, Putin’s lies have apparently taken a greater existential toll.
The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was a direct attack on the legitimate exercise of democratic voting rights, was the manifestation of Trump’s lie and those who helped to perpetuate it. That lie led to neofascist and white supremacist violence, disinformation and the pitiful collapse of critical thought. Unable to distinguish truth from lies, those (predominantly white) individuals attacked “our” fragile democracy with threats, violence, urine and feces. The attempted coup led to the death of five people and resulted in the injury of more than 140 police officers. And let’s not forget the pipe bombs that were found near the Capitol or those who came armed.
What I find so extraordinary is the fact that so many white people, in this case, were furious based upon a lie. Their anger and fury were predicated on vacuous claims. Storming the Capitol wasn’t a show of strength or courage; it was a show of fanaticism driven by a sense of white entitlement, and the fear that they, white people, will lose their “sacred” place of hegemony within the U.S. polity. All of that also sickens me. Those individuals are not just a threat to democracy, but I see them as a personal existential threat to me.
It is not hard for me to imagine that Trump, who may become the 47th president of the U.S., is more than able and willing to unleash so much divisiveness, so many lies, and to encourage so much white nationalist loyalty, that we might find ourselves armed in the streets of this nation fighting, like those in Ukrainian cities, to secure our freedoms and rights (even as they are tenuous for so many already).
The distressing and frightening part of this is that I can imagine this without feeling delusional, without laughing — no tongue in cheek. The questions that we may one day face are: Do I take up arms against my neighbors because of their political party affiliation? Do I turn them over to the thought police because I overheard one of them say something about systemic racism or critical race theory? Do I help ban (and perhaps burn) “dangerous” historical books on the reality of white supremacy? Do I call the department of heteronormative homeland security because someone said “gay”? Do I follow (in lockstep) the orders of a pathological liar, and subordinate my freedom and my conscience to his will?
Does this sound dystopic or perhaps apocalyptic? If there is any doubt, keep in mind that Trump basks in messianic grandeur. After all, he has referred to himself as “the chosen one” and adopted the moniker “King of Israel.” We should keep in mind that Adolf Hitler was apparently a staunch “Christian.” Needless to say (or perhaps not), this is not Christian theology, but a form of anti-theology turned into a weapon of white supremacist hatred.
I began this article with the desire to scream. It is a desire to lament. But it is not just about me; it can’t be. Vasko argues, “Through lamentation, voice is given to pain.” It is a foregrounding and rendering explicit “the anguish and passionate protest of those who have suffered injustice.”
The desire to scream is a manifestation that I have not become numb regarding those who suffer. As philosopher Alison Bailey writes, “Anesthesia is part of the master’s tool kit.” To forget, like political and historical anesthesia, helps to maintain the status quo, helps to “assure” us that there is nothing to see, nothing to witness, nothing to bear — no suffering and no injustice. As philosopher Alexis Shotwell reminds us, “Political forgetting names an epistemology — a way of knowing — and an ontology — a way of being.” Hence, my desire to scream is insurgent, an act of refusal, reminding me that there are new ways of knowing and new ways of being.
And yet, the despair continues to haunt. Rabbi Heschel writes, “We have relinquished our role as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we forget.” I have not forgotten and will fight to my last breath not to forget. So, let’s scream together: F*** this entire indifferent, hypocritical and violent world!
Madison, Wisconsin, was recently ranked in one online list as “the best place to live in America.” This kind of accolade begs the question: How are such rankings decided? Who is it the best place for? Everyone? Or just some?
To those of us who look at metrics like diversity, safety and justice, this is a confounding ranking given the rise in violence against Black people in the city, and the fact that in 2020, the state of Wisconsin was rated last in the country for racial equality. Of course, many factors go into studies like these, and such rankings can be easily disputed, but one thing has become clear: Our city and state are not a place where Black people feel safe.
In our city, a queer Black woman survivor is currently being criminalized for an act of self-defense after a group of men stalked and attacked her. Is this “the best place to live in America”?
For years, 24-year-old Kenyairra Gadson suffered abuse, harassment and intimidation from a man in her community. Her gender and sexual orientation made her a vulnerable target, and her abuser often taunted her with homophobic slurs. The abuse even included an incident in which he shot at her.
On Halloween of 2018, the man along with a group of friends followed her as she attempted to get away from them. Once she made it to her friend’s car, they began their attack. Gadson shot one of the men in an attempt to protect herself, and was ultimately imprisoned for two years for first-degree reckless homicide.
The United States is in the midst of a national conversation about crime and safety. This conversation often focuses on the role of police and the criminal legal system. But who do these institutions really serve?
In 2015, 19-year-old Tony Robinson was murdered by police officer Matthew Kenny in Madison. Robinson’s grandmother fought hard to compel the city to take action, and petitioned the court seeking justice for her beloved grandson. But to this day, the officer that killed Robinson was never charged. The government’s treatment of a police officer who killed an innocent young man compared to its treatment of a survivor of violence, who was criminalized for defending herself, is a revealing contradiction. This helps us understand who the criminal legal system serves, and who it abandons.
In September of last year, 59-year-old Doyle Jay Reifert killed his roommate, Brian Swan. District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who sought 50 years imprisonment for Kenyairra Gadson, released Reifert without any charges, asserting that Wisconsin’s self-defense statute — which is similar to “stand your ground” laws and commonly known as the “castle doctrine” — could apply to the case. No judge. No jury.
The criminal legal system in Madison has declared a woman who was clearly acting in self-defense to be a murderer, while letting men like Kenny and Reifert walk free.
In Madison, who is allowed to be a victim and who is always seen as a perpetrator? Despite courts saying that they aim to protect survivors, their actions have made one thing very clear: Their definition of a victim or survivor doesn’t include Black women.
Gadson’s story is tragic, but not unique. Many survivors of violence face double persecution: first at the hands of their abuser, and then at the hands of the legal system which criminalizes them instead of protecting them from harm. The fact that Gadson faces incarceration should tell us everything we need to know about our system and who it is designed to protect.
First, it shows us that a system that would imprison Black women for defending themselves was never built to protect them, and that it is not up to that task. It also tells us that instead of locking survivors away, we need to be talking about how we can prevent them from experiencing this kind of violence in the first place. We know that we will only be safe when we create the conditions for our safety. We need people in office, and on our courts, who understand how this system works, who it works for and who it systematically excludes. We need our community to understand these issues, and to organize, speak out and hold our elected officials accountable for their role in abandoning Black survivors of violence, like they have abandoned Kenyairra Gadson.
After eight years of a powerful citywide call for justice, it’s time for Madison’s courts to finally be accountable to the social movement led by Black communities.
Black queer women deserve to live free from violence, and we have the right to defend ourselves from harm.
We have the right to exist, and to be safe walking down the street with our friends after a night out.
We have the right to exist in our homes, in the streets, and anywhere and everywhere we go.
We will not rest till we make it so.
If you are interested in supporting Kenyairra Gadson, find out how to take action here.
The growing movement to ban books, install surveillance cameras in classrooms, and delimit the boundaries of acceptable language and ideas in schools across the United States aims to limit the intellectual autonomy of teachers, suppress critical thought and outlaw dissent, offering a glimpse of a future of fascist miseducation.
Many of the efforts to ban books in local school districts are either astroturfed — seemingly grassroots movements that are in fact funded by wealthy organizations — or knee-jerk reactions to the increasingly fascist politics of the far right, an authoritarian slide steered by the sensationalism and fearmongering of conservative media. Fascism, as political theorists have taught us, desperately needs a spectacle laden with emotional appeals, generating fear, distraction, paranoid conspiracy and xenophobic senses of encroaching threat.
Yet, at the same time, the fascist politics pursued through the current assault on education has no future, only nostalgia for uncomplicated pasts of unity and purity that never existed. Advocates of book banning and other repressive education legislation are acting out fantasies of control over those who are unable to reckon with the overlapping crises of the era, the prospect of progressive change, or even the notion of a future that is better than the present. Their politics are strictly reactionary, evincing a desire for the stability of inequality, hierarchy, and oppression as a world promised to them by centuries of theft and violence slips through their fingers.
However, to say that fascist miseducation has no future is not to claim it could not ultimately come to pass. The groundwork for fascist miseducation is being laid ideologically, and through what Yale Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley calls “fascism’s legal phase.” And though the foundations for meaningful, critical education have been weakened by decades of privatization, the inability to offer a positive vision of the future indicates a significant vulnerability at the heart of the far right’s fascist politics.
Among the immediate threats in the movement to ban books that foster critical thought concerning various histories of oppression, and progressive achievements concerning matters of class, race, gender and sexuality, is the repressive assault on the capacity of educators to function as intellectuals. Almost universal among historical analyses of fascist politics is the well-documented lesson that fascism first targets intellectuals and the left. There is no reason to discern the current movement to ban books and instill fear in teachers, already precarious in the wake of decades of neoliberal austerity and union-busting, as anything other than the leading edge of a growing fascist political movement. The aim of this movement is to neutralize education, and to purge schools of critical educators, who are among the few public workers whose job is to inspire curiosity, expose youth to the art of social criticism and cultivate a collective spirit of dissent in the face of injustice. Fascism has no need for intellectuals, only ideologues and enforcers.
For those who perceive the truth that critical thinking is intrinsic to freedom, the banning of books, lists of which grow by the day, along with the outlawing of specific words and ideas, and the repression of teachers’ autonomy, is obviously distressing, a dangerous turn not without its own long history in U.S. schools. These acts threaten an already threadbare social fabric, auguring a future of fascist miseducation, in which the act of teaching itself — but not ideological enforcement, the very fear projected by the right — becomes an increasingly dangerous endeavor.
The fascist arm of the right wing, which has in recent decades sought to abandon public education to austerity and privatization (though not without the compliance of many liberals), now returns with a vengeance, aiming to control schools through draconian legislation, neo-McCarthyist surveillance and authoritarian imposition of fear. In this grim portrait of the future of education, those left in positions of authority in schools will be lathered up for fascist collaboration, ready and willing to evade all intellectual or moral responsibility to become agents of miseducation.
The conditions are ripe for fascist miseducation in the U.S., where public educators have been slowly stripped of an intellectual role since the Reagan administration, deskilled and depoliticized by high-stakes testing, curricular standardization, corporate profiteering and the instrumentalization of teacher education programs, which increasingly avoid exposing aspiring educators to pedagogical approaches that foster inquiry, curiosity and empathy in students, favoring instead reductive approaches to socially decontextualized fads that do not question or challenge established systems of domination. Education, in this neoliberal formulation, constitutes a “dead zone of the imagination,” where the flourishing of ideas is a threat, not the aim.
The conservative movement to ban books has the potential to be effective because the neoliberal approach to educational reform has been so successful in reframing public education as a private good to be consumed, and subsequently transformed into “human capital,” which supposedly allows individuals to seek their own success in capitalism’s supposedly meritocratic but empirically unequal and alienating labor markets. Within the prevailing ideology of this reform movement, schooling must be reconstructed in the image of a marketplace, an atomized realm of consumer choice (for individuals and families but not for society as a collective body) that is evacuated of egalitarian political, social or cultural purpose.
Of course, the economization of schooling has historical roots that pre-date neoliberalism’s rise, but in the face of resurgent fascist politics, its neoliberal articulation has proven largely compatible with the advance of and entrenchment of white supremacy, ethnonationalism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. When parents view themselves strictly as proxy consumers of education for their children, and legislatures, the state and school administrators, in turn, tolerate such views, public education’s democratic potential is thwarted, falling to individualism that is designed to preclude the ability to comprehend the social, environmental and political forces that produce social conditions, an analytic ineptitude that paves the way for fascist politics to spread.
In opposition to conservative calls to depoliticize education, it is crucial to recognize that education is inherently political, a mode of cultural activity through which different visions of society and the future are imagined, explored, subjected to moral scrutiny and challenged. The perceived value of depoliticizing education, for most conservatives but for many liberals too, lies in the supposed necessity of its neutrality and the idealization of objective facts that are devoid of moral or political referents. Nevertheless, it is imperative to understand that reckoning with the assertion that education is fundamentally political does not threaten the objectivity or critical faculties of interpretation that should inhere within scientific and humanistic inquiry alike. Conversely, the denial of education’s political character neutralizes its ability to foster critical thought, or to generate new ideas, cultural and aesthetic forms, and visions of alternative futures.
It is only by recognizing education’s inherently political nature that societies can imbue it with democratic force and, in turn, cultivate the agency of populations to act transformatively. In the withering paradigm of fascist miseducation, history is eviscerated through the pernicious imposition of social amnesia, what public intellectual and McMaster University Professor Henry A. Giroux calls organized forgetting. This is a process by which the prospect of the future is foreclosed by destroying the capacity of reason and the suppression of knowledge concerning the origins of social problems that produce suffering. The society that fascist miseducation renders is snatched out of history, incarcerated in a prison house of tradition where hierarchy and authority prevail, and opposition to dominant ideas is met with violence. Cast in this light, fascism truly has no future.
It is indicative of the perverse psychology of fascist consciousness that its advocates rail against the supposed authoritarianism lurking behind the idea that freedom is an indelibly collective concept that must be held across difference rather than imposed via exclusion. Within the schema of fascist politics driving the book-banning efforts, it is not merely the abstract threat of ideas but the concrete threat of thinking itself — conceived as critical engagement with the ideas of others, especially those that challenge established forms of power, tradition, authority and hierarchy — that must be neutralized. The good society, in fascist consciousness, is one populated exclusively by a unified, undifferentiated people inoculated against critical thought, marching destructively backward toward a mythic past that never was. Within fascist politics there is only the prospect of achieving and maintaining stasis, foreclosing the prospect of the future.
While there is some hope to be found in the notion that fascist miseducation’s repressive tactics bear the seeds of its undoing, the immediate and long-term violence it portends must not be underestimated. Book banning, educational surveillance and the pursuit of historical erasure, are together the leading edge of a concerted push toward fascist miseducation, riding a wave of momentum that has gained speed over decades of the privatizing assault on public education.
Collective resistance to the rising tide of fascist miseducation must reckon with the insidious ideological support right-wing fascist politics have garnered from the economized language of neoliberalism. When conservatives declare “parental choice” regarding what their kids study in school, they lay unjust claim to the right to strip education of its role in social, cultural and democratic life. Choice, cast economically as the ability and decision to acquire not only commodities, but what were previously public services as well, parades as a quintessential marker of freedom, veiling the fact that consumer choice in the privatized realm of public goods and institutions becomes an elemental force in producing inequality and curtailing democracy.
In this neoliberal logic, when individuals make “educational choices,” such as refusing to allow their kids to be exposed to curricula that interrogate the sources of inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, or ecological crisis, their decisions are presumed to be beyond reproach because they are perceived (falsely) as democratic acts. Similarly, when a reactionary groundswell in any given municipality, school district or state issues calls to ban specific books, regardless of their relevance or humanistic value, the merging of neoliberal ideas with populist rationality accords dangerous legitimacy to what are, in fact, fascist acts of erasure. In the relative absence of faculties of interpretation or a shared language of critique, social and cultural analysis are left adrift. Here fascist politics can advance swiftly, but they are also able to plants seeds that may prove difficult to uproot once they begin to grow.
Fascism’s absence of a vision of the future offers a compelling reason to resist it immediately because any society without viable visions of the future is doomed. Key to resistance efforts is recognizing that education has a unique relationship to the future, the importance of which is augmented by the looming threats facing the left, marginalized groups and humanity itself as a planetary community. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt grasped this notion with the concept of natality, which she defined in The Human Condition as the “central category of political thought.” For Arendt, natality signals humanity’s inherent capacity to create novelty in the world through conscious action that could yield futures free of domination.
Education is fundamental to developing the potential that inheres within natality, but the fascist miseducation pursued currently by the far right aims instead to snuff out its relationship to natality, offering instead only dystopian repetition as we careen toward destruction and collapse.
Thus, the moment to resist fascism always precedes its emergence. As the radical historian Daniel Guérin explained long ago, the moment any society “allows the fascist wave to sweep over it, a long period of slavery and impotence begins — a long period during which socialist, even democratic, ideas are not merely erased from the base of public monuments and libraries, but, what is more serious, are rooted out of human brains.” This is no less true of fascism’s efforts to miseducate an entire generation in its quest to establish totalitarian rule, the potential fallout of which is difficult to calculate in both the short and long term.
The task ahead is surely one of radical opposition to the enforcement of fascist miseducation, but it must be also apprehended as a struggle to imagine and enact an alternative future. This task requires sustained, collective engagement with history, culture, politics and power. Against the dystopian cynicism behind the ardent pursuit of fascist miseducation, the left must maintain an unwavering commitment to fostering critical thought, further integrating that capacity into institutional and movement struggles, as well as modes of counter-education.
To borrow from German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s utopian classic The Principle of Hope, the creation of something new can “begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being…. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his [sic], without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been.”
Protecting education’s role in fostering critical thinking and democratic capacities must be at the heart of efforts to counter the far right’s slide toward fascist politics and to articulate liberated visions of the future if we are to have any future at all.
Between plague, disruptive invasions, economic consternation and the ceaseless bilge tide of right-wing social warfare, it’s been hard of late for an attempted coup by the former president of the United States against the government of the United States to make a dent in the 24-hour news cycle. I’m not sure what to make of that, but it may have something to do with the fact that the last major investigation into presidential malfeasance that actually changed anything was first gaveled to order when I was three years old.
The Watergate hearings are the gold standard by which all since have been judged, and have been judged almost universally to be lacking. The Church Committee hearings? The CIA, NSA and FBI are stronger and more ubiquitous now than William Colby could have imagined in his wildest dreams.
Iran/Contra? The most significant figures were pardoned, Oliver North got a TV show on Fox News, and Ronald Reagan remains a living saint in the minds of most Republicans.
The September 11 Commission? Don’t make me laugh. George W. Bush tried to name Henry Kissinger as chair, and that’s all you need to know about the chance that non-event stood of accomplishing anything of merit.
Five decades worth of whitewash has been splashed over the doings of the worst people in government, said washings coming by way of “committees” which always seem to declare in the end that — in the words of Hunter S. Thompson — everyone is guilty, so no one is to blame. Either that, or they’ve been overturned tubs for blowhards to stand on and crow about the onerous burdens borne by white Christian capitalists in this strange and shabby place.
My faith in the investigative powers of government, when faced off against various centralized money powers that would just as soon stay out of the spotlight, thank you very much, is dialed down to pretty much nil. So you will forgive me if I am not salivating over the labors being put forth by the January 6 select congressional committee, the New York attorney general, or the Manhattan district attorney. Only one of the three — New York Attorney General Letitia James — appears to be making palpable progress, likely because she does not have Merrick Garland flopped across her path like a heat-stroking bison.
Ah yes, U.S. Attorney General Garland, that perfectly named inert decorative object. Once, his name was a conjuring word encapsulating the serial misdeeds of Mitch McConnell. Now, denied a seat on the high court, Garland has become perhaps the most frustrating person in the District of Columbia.
The January 6 committee has been stacking damning evidence outside his door for months now with little to show for it. Aside from catching COVID, the only newsworthy act Garland has done to date is to prevent an entirely different congressional committee from fully investigating the boxes of classified material that somehow waddled from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when Donald Trump finally left office:
House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., is alleging that the Department of Justice is “obstructing” the panel’s investigation into former President Donald Trump by blocking the National Archives from handing over relevant documents.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday, Maloney said the DOJ is “preventing” the National Archives from cooperating with the committee’s request for documents and information, “including an inventory of 15 boxes of documents recovered from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.”
The committee is conducting the investigation, Maloney said, because it has jurisdiction over the Presidential Records Act and is trying to determine the full scope of Trump’s potential violations of that law.
It was announced late yesterday that the Department of Justice would (finally) open its own investigation into those missing boxes of classified materials. “The investigation into the handling of the presidential documents,” reportsTruthout’s Chris Walker, “is still in its early stages.” Of course it is.
Speaking of the virus, the number of people growing entirely fed up with AG Nope Lump is exploding exponentially, and now includes United States District Judge David O. Carter. Trump attorney John Eastman — he of the now-infamous how-to-overthrow-the-election memo — has been laboring mightily to keep a cache of emails exchanged from January 4 to January 7, 2021 between the core planners of the Capitol assault out of the 1/6 committee’s hands. Upon granting that committee access to the documents, Judge Carter went on at length to underscore how there are obvious crimes here. Between the lines of his decision: What the Almighty hell is taking so long up at Main Justice?
“This may have been the first time members of President Trump’s team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action,” wrote Carter in his decision. “In another email thread, Dr. Eastman’s colleagues discuss whether to publish a piece supporting his plan, and they touch on state lawsuits only to criticize how they are being handled by the Trump campaign. In a different email thread, Dr. Eastman and a colleague consider how to use a state court ruling to justify Vice President Pence enacting the plan. In another email, a colleague focuses on the ‘plan of action’ after the January 6 attacks.”
See Marjorie Cohn of Truthout’sdetailed breakdown of the Carter ruling for a fulsome understanding of how rare and significant it is for a judge to swing the lumber like this.
Such a lugubrious case of the slows on the part of Garland’s office is apparently having a trickle-down effect on the Manhattan district attorney. District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. made some ink a few weeks back when two of his top prosecutors investigating potential illegal activities by Trump and his organization abruptly resigned. Attorneys Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz walked after Bragg allegedly informed them he was not prepared to move forward with criminal charges.
The Pomerantz resignation letter pulls no punches in this regard: “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.”
Bragg has promised he is not downplaying the Trump investigation, and now says he intends to continue his inquiry until all avenues have been covered. Pomerantz and his cohort of prosecutors are not so sanguine. “I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” he wrote in his resignation letter. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of future endeavors, never mind present ones.
In the ever-expanding cosmos of Trump investigations, only AG James appears to remain on track toward something worthy of the effort. This is probably due to the fact that her focus is civil law and not criminal — nowhere near Garland’s sphere of influence — but hitting Trump in the wallet is no small thing, especially to Trump.
“New York’s attorney general asked a state judge Thursday to issue an order of contempt against former President Donald Trump,” reportsCBS News, “claiming he has failed to comply with a previous ruling requiring him to turn over documents by March 31 as part of an investigation into his company’s financial practices. The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James also requested that Trump be fined $10,000 a day until he complies with the ruling.”
With each passing day, another brick of screaming evidence gets dropped at the doorstep of Merrick Garland. The latest — a true doozy of a Watergate flashback — deals with a nearly eight-hour hole in Trump’s official call log on the day of the insurrection. He was seen on the phone constantly during this period, because he was apparently grabbing phones from aides and friends to keep his conversations off the public record.
“Trump did not grab phones at random,” contends David Frum of The Atlantic. “He thought tactically about which phone to use.” Why? Maybe the attorney general can help someone actually ask Trump et al. on the record.
Even now, more than a year after the attack, Trump and his people are unable to conjure even a half-believable explanation for what went down that day. “I thought it was a shame,” Trump toldThe Washington Post on Wednesday, “and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge.”
Yes, the dreaded “Nancy’s Fault” explanation, bane of justice-seekers everywhere. There’s no way a prosecutor armed with the full might of the Justice Department can overcome such an all-encompassing defense.
Please.
There is a great, big ticking clock here. Except for AG James’s investigation, most of this goes up in smoke next January if the Democrats lose control of the House.
Then again, that may be the point of the exercise, as it seems to have been for all those committee “investigations” of yore. This is Washington, remember? Everyone is guilty, so no one is to blame. Turn out the lights when you leave.
Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don’t blame me, blame Vladimir Putin. After all, I didn’t decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed. If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, I evaded Ukraine.
All of us are, in some fashion, now living inside the shockwaves from the Russian president’s grotesque invasion and from a war taking place close to the heart of Europe. I was not quite one year old in May 1945 when World War II in Europe ended, along with years of carnage unparalleled on this planet. Millions of Russians, six million Jews, god knows how many French, British, Germans, Ukrainians, and… well, the list just goes on and on… died and how many more were wounded or displaced from their homes and lives. Given Adolf Hitler’s Germany, we’re talking about nothing short of a hell on Earth. That was Europe from the late 1930s until 1945.
In the more-than-three-quarters of a century since then, with the exception of the brief Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, a civil war (with outside intervention) in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, as well as warring in marginal places like Chechnya, Europe has been the definition of peaceful. Hence, the shock of it all. Believe me, it wouldn’t have been faintly the same if Vladimir Putin had invaded Kazakhstan or Afghanistan or… well, you get the idea. In fact, in 1979, when the leaders of the Soviet Union did indeed send the Red Army into Afghanistan and again, just over two decades later, when George W. Bush and crew ordered the U.S. military to invade the same country, there were far too few cries of alarm, assumedly because it hadn’t happened in the heart of Europe and who the hell cared (other, of course, than the Afghans in the path of those two armies).
Now, the Vlad has once again turned part of Europe into a war-torn nightmare, a genuine hell on earth of fire and destruction. He’s blasted out significant parts of major cities, sent more than four million Ukrainians fleeing the country as refugees, and uprooted at least 6.5 million more in that land. Consider it a signal measure of the horror of the moment that more than half of all Ukrainian children have, in some fashion, been displaced. Since that country became the focus of staggering media attention here (in coverage terms, it’s as if every day were the day after the 9/11 attacks), since it became more or less the only story on Earth, little surprise that it also came to seem like a horror, a crime, of an essentially unparalleled sort, an intrusion beyond all measure. The shock has been staggering. You just don’t do that, right?
The Heartland of War, Historically Speaking
Strangely enough, though, the Russian president’s gross act fits all too horribly into a far larger and longer history of Europe and this planet. After all, until 1945, rather than being a citadel of global peace, order, and European-Union-style cooperation, that continent was regularly a hell of war, conflict, and slaughter.
You could, of course, go back to at least 460 BC, when the 15-year Peloponnesian War between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta began in an era that has long been considered the “dawn of civilization.” From then on through Roman imperial times, war, or rather wars galore, lay at the heart of that developing civilization.
Once you get to the later history of Europe, whether you’re talking about Vikings raiding England or English kings like Henry V fighting it out in France (read your Shakespeare!) in what came to be known as the Hundred Years’ War; whether you’re thinking about the Thirty Years’ War in medieval Europe in which millions are believed to have perished; the bloody Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, including that self-proclaimed French emperor’s invasion of Russia; or, of course, World War I, an early-twentieth-century slaughterhouse, stretching from France again deep into Russia, not to speak of civil conflicts like the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, you’re talking about a genuine heartland of global conflict. (And keep in mind that Ukraine was all too often involved.)
In the years since World War II, especially here in the United States, we’ve grown far too used to a world in which wars (often ours) take place in distant lands, thousands of miles from the heart of true power and civilization (as we like to think of it) on this planet. In the 1950s with the Korean War, as well as in the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, war, fought by the U.S. and its allies was a significantly Asian phenomenon. In the 1980s and 1990s, the crucial locations were South Asia and the Middle East. In this century, once again, they were in South Asia, the Greater Middle East, and also Africa.
And of course, in the history of this planet, so many of the wars fought “elsewhere” ever since the Middle Ages were sparked by European imperial powers, as well as that inheritor of the European mantle of empire, the United States. Looked at in the largest historical framework possible, you might even say that, in some fashion, modern war as we’ve known it was pioneered in Europe.
Worse yet, as soon as the Europeans were able to travel anywhere else, what’s come to be known all too inoffensively as “the age of discovery” began. With their wooden sailing ships loaded with cannons and troops, they essentially pursued wars around the world in the grimmest fashion possible, while attempting to dominate much of the planet via what came to be known as colonialism. From the genocidal destruction of native peoples in North America (a legacy the United States inherited in the “New World” from its colonial mentors in the “Old World”) to the Opium Wars in China, from the Sepoy Mutiny in India to the repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Europeans functionally exported extreme violence of many kinds globally in a way that would undoubtedly have impressed the ancient Greeks and Romans.
From the Portuguese and Spanish empires of the 16th century to the English and French empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the more recent American empire (though never referred to that way here) and the Russian one as well, the world was, in those years, flooded with a kind of violence with which Vladimir Putin would undoubtedly have been comfortable indeed. In fact, from the Peloponnesian War on, it’s been quite a Ukrainian-style story, a veritable European (and American) feast of death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.
The Afterlife of War
In 2022, however, simply claiming that war in Ukraine or anywhere else is just the same old thing would be deceptive indeed. After all, we’re on a planet that neither the Greeks, the Romans, Henry V, Napoleon, or Hitler could ever have imagined. And for that, you can thank, at least in part, that runaway child of Europe, the United States, while recalling one specific day in history: August 6th, 1945. That, of course, was the day a single bomb from a B-29 Superfortress bomber transformed the Japanese city of Hiroshima into rubble, while obliterating 70,000 or more of its inhabitants.
In the decades since, the very idea of war has, sadly enough, been transformed into something potentially all-too-new, whether in Europe or anywhere else, as long as it involves any of the planet’s nine nuclear powers. Since 1945, as nuclear weapons spread across the planet, we’ve threatened to export everyday war of the sort humanity has known for so long to heaven, hell, and beyond. In some sense, we may already be living in the afterlife of war, though most of the time we don’t know it. Don’t think it’s something odd or a strange accident that, when things began to go unexpectedly poorly for them, the Vlad’s crew promptly started threatening to use nuclear weapons if the Russians, instead of conquering Ukraine, were pushed into some desperately uncomfortable corner. As the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, put it recently,
“We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons… [including] when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardized the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”
And keep in mind that Russia today has an estimated 4,477 nuclear warheads, more than 1,500 of them deployed, including new “tactical” nukes, each of which might have “only” perhaps one-third the power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima and so might be considered battlefield weaponry, though of an unimaginably devastating and dangerous sort. And mind you, Vladimir Putin publicly oversaw the testing of four nuclear-capable ballistic missiles just before he launched his present war. Point made, so to speak. Such threats mean nothing less than that, whether we care to realize it or not, we’re now in a strange and threatening new world of war, given that even a nuclear exchange between regional powers like India and Pakistan could create a nuclear winter on this planet, potentially starving a billion or more of us to death.
Honestly, if you think about it, could you even imagine a stranger or more dangerous world? Consider it an irony of the first order, for instance, that the U.S. has spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon (and so becoming the 10th country to do so), but not — not for a day, not for an hour, not for a minute — on keeping this country from producing ever more of them.
Take, for instance, the new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD, that the Pentagon is planning to build to replace our current crop of land-based nukes at an estimated price tag of $264 billion (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). And that, in turn, is just a modest part of its full-scale, three-decade-long “modernization” program for its nuclear “triad” of land, sea, and air-based weapons that could, in the end, cost $2 trillion in taxpayer funds to ensure that this country would be capable of destroying not only this planet but more like it.
And just to put that in context: in a country that can’t find a red cent to invest in so many things Americans truly need, the one thing that both parties in Congress and the president (whoever he may be) can agree on is that ever more staggering sums should be spent on a military that’s fought a series of undeclared wars around the planet in this century in a remarkably unsuccessful fashion, bringing hell and high water to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, just as Vladimir Putin so recently did to Ukraine.
So, don’t just think of the Russian president as some aberrant oddball or autocratic madman who appeared magically at the disastrous edge of history, forcing his way into our peaceful lives. Unfortunately, he’s a figure who should be familiar indeed to us, given our European past. Shakespeare would have had a ball with the Vlad. And while he’s brought hell on Earth to Europe, given the way his top officials have raised the issue of nuclear weaponry, we should imagine ourselves in both an all-too-familiar and an all-too-new world.
Historically speaking, Europe should be thought of as the heartland of the history of war, but today, sadly enough, it should also potentially be considered a springboard into eternity for all of us.
Unions almost never win in NLRB elections with bargaining units of that size. And they never, ever win at Amazon. Just a couple of years ago, the ALU victory against Amazon in a traditional NLRB election — or a victory by any other union — would have seemed unimaginable. Now, organizing at Amazon or other anti-union corporate behemoths seems much more possible, especially if workers and unions can make the most of the opportunity provided by the incredible result and expand organizing to Amazon warehouses throughout the country as well as to other low-wage sectors.
So, what are the lessons for the labor movement from this astonishing victory?
But the agreement provided expanded access for “worker-organizers,” who were allowed to stay around the workplace after their shifts had finished and talk union with their co-workers. Professional union organizers don’t have a legal right of access to the workplace — and are often ejected or arrested if they enter — but employee-organizers do have that right. And, according to insider accounts, they made the most of it to talk to workers. The ALU campaign — and the amazing Starbucks Workers United campaign — had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that when workers are allowed to talk to each other about unions, absent management interference, they choose to organize.
2. Amazon isn’t invincible, but it is relentless. Amazon prides itself in being an innovative company full of smart people who learn from their mistakes. The company made some basic mistakes during its anti-union campaign at Staten Island — and its external anti-union consultants probably became more of a liability than an asset — but we shouldn’t expect it to make the same mistakes at future union organizing campaigns. Moreover, it will probably double down on its anti-union efforts at other facilities so it doesn’t lose control of the situation, as has happened at Starbucks, with more than 170 stores having now filed for NLRB elections.
Going forward, pro-union Amazon workers need greater protection from the NLRB, probably in the form of 10(j) injunctions, which would allow workers to obtain temporary, immediate relief in cases of unfair labor practices still under litigation, and corporate-wide remedies for unfair labor practices, which would allow the NLRB to proceed to tougher sanctions more quickly and make clear that Amazon’s anti-union campaign is nationwide, centralized and coordinated.
4. We can all learn from the Amazon Labor Union. Traditional unions shouldn’t be defensive about the victory of the upstart ALU. Several veteran organizers and lawyers offered pro bono support to the ALU campaign, but those who did nothing, or who viewed the campaign as chaotic or unprofessional, should welcome the victory — which will help the entire labor movement — and be open to learning from its success.
5. Replication of the ALU campaign most likely isn’t the way forward because there’s only one first time. Maybe there are dozens of budding Smalls in Amazon facilities across the country. But trying to replicate the amazing campaign of the ALU probably isn’t the best way to go because any future Smalls will be operating in an environment not only different from, but altered by, the achievement of the original. Rather, we should learn from the strengths of the ALU campaign, and each future campaign must be innovative and nonconventional in new and different ways, and geared toward local workers and issues: Amazon now knows what to expect from an ALU-style campaign and will be better prepared.
One thing the ALU got right was to throw out the organizer playbook (“Never file for a NLRB election with only 30 percent authorization cards”), and instead to go with what it instinctively found was working. The percent of authorization cards initially filed by a union is not of critical importance at Amazon: Incredibly high rates of worker churn — up to 150 percent per annum in some warehouses — makes it virtually impossible to get the 70-80 percent cards that the organizing gurus recommend. At Amazon, however, that doesn’t really matter: Even if you collected that number of cards, up to half of those workers might no longer be employed at the warehouse, and thus no longer eligible to vote by the time of the union election.
There is no “secret sauce,” no “how-to” manual for winning union elections at Amazon — not even William Z. Foster’s 1919 pamphlet on organizing the steel industry — but there are many potential innovative and unconventional routes to success. But the national labor movement needs to figure out what it can do to encourage and facilitate the kind of worker-led “self-organization” we’ve seen be so successful at Amazon and Starbucks.
The ALU victory at Staten Island should provide inspiration and an energy boost to the entire labor movement. Its campaign might not be easily replicated at other Amazon facilities, and replication is not a good way to think about the future. But the success of the intrepid ALU organizers has taught us a more important lesson: Amazon is not invincible. If you can win a union campaign at Amazon, you can probably win one anywhere
Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t speaking rhetorically when he urged the U.S. to “undergo a radical revolution of values.” In fact, he spoke quite plainly when he declared that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-five years later, our nation’s triple evils that King so famously promulgated — racism, poverty and militarism — manifest in President Joe Biden’s most significant value statement: his budget.
Widely considered a wish list, a spending package is a reflection of a president’s policy priorities — who gets what, when and why. “My dad has an expression,” Biden quipped as he introduced his 2023 budget. “He said, ‘don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.’”
The Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young echoed the same. “Budgets are value statements. They’re about the kind of country we want to be and the type of future we want to leave our kids.”
But a close look at Biden’s latest proposed budget makes clear the only future our children will inherit is one with a bloated military budget, racist policing, widespread indebtedness and an uninhabitable planet.
Consider violent policing and surveillance: Despite a sensible and growing call by organizers around the country to defund police by redirecting resources from militarized, anti-Black police departments to programs like free transit, health care infrastructure or wellness resources, Biden is doubling down on his not-so-data-driven “tough on crime” approach — sending the police even more federal money than before. Biden’s 2023 budget would allocate at least $30 billion in new police spending — a gut punch to the millions of voices around the country that have decried the enormous spending on police departments, especially since the police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd.
Under the false guise of “security,” Biden claimed the answer is “not to defund our police departments” but “to fund our police and give them all the tools they need.” Los Angeles County and New York City, the highest-funded law enforcement jurisdictions, show exactly what happens when you give police more money: they spend it doing more of what they have always done. They buy more military equipment, they do more surveillance, they arrest and brutalize more people.
A mountain of evidence dating back decades shows efforts to “community police” or increase police accountability and transparency with materials like body cameras are simply not ways to reduce crime. In fact, more police resources have never meant better outcomes. In 2001, research from 200 empirical studies of policing and crime rates found increased policing to be among the weakest links to reducing crime and improving life. The strongest predictors of crime were resource deprivation, poverty and family disruption. And further, what reduced crime with much greater efficacy than increased policing was increased solidarity, shared goals and common projects in a neighborhood. Studies have similarly shown a dramatic correlation between crime reduction and increased access to health care.
(Even so, we must be careful in any discussion of the effects on “crime” rates from policing or anything else. As Alec Karakatsanis has effectively argued, the definition of crime itself often goes unexamined in these discussions, and is framed in such a way as to tilt the scale toward police and enforcement. If we could instead quantify harm independent of “crime,” we would likely see an even stronger case against more police and for “programs of social uplift,” to borrow a phrase from Dr. King.)
Organizers have been abundantly clear on this for decades, arguing that shoveling money into a violent, repressive, racist system is never going to make it less violent, repressive or racist — and that goes for the military, too.
President Biden proposed a defense spending bill of a whopping $813 billion — a 4 percent increase — totaling more than the defense budgets of the next 11 countries combined. Instead of tackling the climate crisis, Biden has prioritized beefing up the military-industrial complex and funding the Pentagon, the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels. Far from being a simple defense force, the U.S. military exists to allow the commission of extreme violence in any corner of the globe at a moment’s notice. That neither represents the values to which we aspire, nor meaningfully benefits anyone in the United States — outside of perhaps a handful of powerful corporations with multinational holdings.
If President Biden wanted a budget that reflected a genuine interest in meeting communities’ material needs, creating safety and improving the lives of working people, he would prioritize funding programs of social uplift. Crucially, this would include — but not be limited to — education.
President Biden proposed funding universal preschool, but there’s no reason to stop there. Education is a lifelong endeavor and something we all have a right to. There’s no reason education must start at age 5 and end promptly at 18. If we want an informed, engaged people, a country where inquiry and discovery are valued, we must direct resources toward education at all levels. That means pre-school, elementary, high school and all of higher education. And that means canceling student debt, which never should have existed if we had done things right from the start.
Education is only one piece of the puzzle. If we want folks to have a stake in their lives, in their communities, we can and should do even more. To “build a better America,” as Biden claims he wants to do, he should fund paid leave and child care before preschool. We could fund health care and wipe clean the moral stain of medical debt from our collective conscience. We could actually increase unemployment benefits, fund job-training programs, increase cash assistance, fund art and community centers, add parks and nature preserves, and on and on.
A budget is a reflection of values. By increasing money to police and the military, the president’s budget reflects the values of violence, brutality, racism and hopelessness. In Dr. King’s words, we are lying on our spiritual deathbed — but fortunately we have a cure. Grassroots organizations like CODEPINK are working tirelessly to cut the Pentagon budget, end militarism and “redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.”
Community organizers around the country are producing incredible policy-specific projects like #8toAbolition — laying the groundwork needed to “reduce the scale, scope, power, authority, and legitimacy of criminalizing institutions.” The Poor People’s Campaign and the Debt Collective are united in their call for an end to systemic poverty and a national jubilee to wipe clean the slate of American household debts. We can reconfigure this significant value statement toward education and empowerment, toward community and hopefulness. This would require little more than the resolve in the White House to show some love in public, and to prioritize justice.
The images coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, are harrowing, almost surreal.
A quiet residential street filled with smashed and burned war machines, one appearing to have almost melted into the pavement beside a street sign pointing the way to the supermarket.
Civilians searching desperately for missing loved ones with no idea where or how to begin. In the chaos of this charnel house, anyone could be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere.
A Russian tank turret lies in an open field strewn with smaller debris, the tank it belonged to nowhere in sight, a testament to the unspeakable violence that had been visited upon this town.
A brightly colored schoolyard playground smashed and shredded by artillery shrapnel.
And the bodies, many face down in the street with hands bound, others evidenced only by feet sticking out of hastily prepared mass graves.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy places the civilian death toll in Bucha at more than 300 people. Many of the dead were tortured first. Some of the carnage came as Russian forces retreated from the region around Kyiv in an attempt to reset and restart their shambolic invasion. Spokesmen for Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied the accusations, calling them a “hoax” and claiming the killings took place after Russian forces left town, but an analysis of satellite imagery shows that many of the dead had been lying in the streets for weeks.
The worst, apparently, may be yet to come. Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, spoke on Ukraine’s national television network on Monday. “Venediktova said the number of victims in Borodyanka, around 23km west of Bucha, would be higher than anywhere else,” reports the Guardian, “but did not provide further details.”
“We can speak of Kyiv region because yesterday we got access to these territories and are currently working in Irpin, Bucha, Vorzel,” said Venediktova. “In fact, the worst situation with civilian victims is in Borodyanka. I think we will speak of Borodyanka separately.”
The bulk of photographs revealed to date were taken by press photographers who braved the war to capture those truths. They needed you and I to know what had happened there, and like any good journalist laboring under duress, they got the job done.
Joseph Galloway, widely considered the “dean” of war correspondents by his peers until his death in 2021, first confronted combat in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in 1965. He described the experience to NPR’s Terry Gross:
Men next to me fell over with a bullet in the head. I was lying down as close to the ground as I could get, seemed like the right thing to do.
When I felt the toe of a combat boot in my ribs, and I sort of turned my head and tilted up and looked, and it was the battalion sergeant major, a man 6’3″ tall, a big bear of a guy. And he bent over at the waist and sort of yelled down at me so I could just hear him. And what he said shocked me. He said, sonny, you can’t take no pictures laying down there on the ground.
And I thought about that for a minute. And I realized he’s right. I can’t do my job down here. And the other thing that crossed my mind is I think we’re probably all going to be killed. And if that’s the case, I’d just as soon take mine standing up anyway. So I got up and went about my business.
Bucha has joined a long list of places where horrors have been visited upon the innocent, only to be exposed by the journalist’s pen or the photographer’s eye. My Lai, Srebrenica, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Rwanda, the Disappeared of Argentina. The difference between those tragedies and Bucha is the accelerated speed of the story of its plight going global.
“Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994,” reports Patrick Wintour for the Guardian, “saying he did not ‘fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror’. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.”
This time, it was different. The work of those journalists in the war zone of Ukraine rattled the world this week. Hopefully they will remind us all of the brutal human impact of war, beyond its politics.
To be sure, war photography can be used for ill — to whip up nationalism, xenophobia and militarism. But, given the right context, it can bring humanity back into the picture, and illuminate the deep and harrowing human toll of mass violence.
As fishing vessels scour the oceans for fewer and fewer fish, the trail of each one can be tracked via satellite. Each ship crosses and recrosses the paths left by others until the seas of the world start to resemble the fishing nets they play host to. Within this tangled web, the paths of two vessels caught the attention of the investigative team at my organization, the Environmental Justice Foundation — their strange, parallel movements didn’t look right.
This chance observation, unremarkable to most, was the start of a year-long investigation to expose the Israr fleet — three vessels illegally fishing for tuna, damaging our already over-exploited ocean ecosystems, threatening the food security and livelihoods of coastal communities, and using every means possible to evade detection. These vessels, and others like them, fish illegally and often indiscriminately, outcompeting local fishers and putting at risk the food security and livelihoods of over 100 million people who rely on small-scale fishing.
The operator controlling this fleet knew how to work the system. They knew the chronic lack of transparency, communication and accountability across the global fishing sector could be used to their advantage to keep the fleet’s illegal and destructive activities off the radar.
They are by no means the first to notice and exploit this weakness — the systemic lack of transparency across global fisheries is one of the most significant enablers of illegal fishing around the world. Crucial information on vessel ownership, records of illegal activity and fishing authorization are not publicly available, forcing authorities to make uninformed decisions on which vessels are allowed to fish their waters. The lack of data flow hinders collaboration between NGOs, governments and regional fishing authorities working to apprehend illicit operators and makes it far too easy for illegal fishing to thrive. It also creates a lawless environment ripe for human rights abuses to flourish, with no oversight and no escape.
There is a proverbial playbook of tried-and-tested tactics that exploit the flaws in the system. The owner of the Israr fleet knew them all.
Practiced Deception
Israr 1 and 2, taken by a crew member onboard Israr 3Environmental Justice Foundation
All fishing vessels are required to sail under the flag of a nation, and, in theory, abide by the laws of that state. The Israr fleet not only went “stateless” for a time, illegally sailing under no flag, the sailors repeatedly changed their flags. Swapping flags may not be illegal, but it is used by illegal operators to create confusion around who is responsible for monitoring and sanctioning the vessel, or to adopt a flag of a state they know simply can’t or won’t monitor their operations and enforce laws and regulations. Under cover of this uncertainty, they can continue their criminal activity uninterrupted, damaging our oceans and decimating fish populations.
To add to this confusion, the owners changed the names of the vessels, with crew switching digital ID codes mid-voyage and physically painting over the name on the side of each vessel with bright white paint. This tactic is only effective because of our disjointed system. Universal vessel identification systems do not apply to all fishing vessels, not all nations have national vessels identification schemes for non-eligible vessels, and many of these registries are not publicly available to check vessels committing illegal acts against. There is currently no truly universal, openly available system of vessel identification — a unique number or code, a so-called unique vessel identifier (UVI) — that stays with each vessel from shipyard to scrapyard, regardless of name or flag changes. Without such records, it is almost impossible to uncover the illegal history of a vessel, and to hold the owners and operators accountable.
The Israr fleet also engaged in trans-shipment, meeting other vessels at sea to transfer catch, supplies or crew. While this can occur legally, it has become a characteristic tactic of illegal operators trying to cover their tracks. It allows them to “launder” fish caught illegally and perpetuate the abuse and enslavement of crew by enabling vessels to stay away from port for months or even years.
For example, migrant workers in Korea’s distant water fishing fleet reported being forced to work 18-hour days; a quarter of the crew we spoke to had experienced physical abuse and over 60 percent had witnessed verbal abuse. Almost all had their passports confiscated by their captain and several months’ wages deducted at the start of contracts to discourage them from escaping these abusive environments. These vessels regularly remained at sea for over a year, and in some cases over 18 months, without calling at port.
A Lucky Observation
It took over a year of investigation to build a case against the Israr fleet, but it paid off. In December 2021, the fleet was blacklisted by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, a significant blow to this illicit network. If properly implemented, this will prevent the fleet from selling any of the fish they catch.
We cheered this small victory the Environmental Justice Foundation — one less fleet abusing the system and damaging our oceans. But what about the next vessel, and the one after that?
The Israr fleet was caught by chance by an observant, determined NGO. Up against global illegal fishing operations catching 26 million tonnes of fish each year, this approach will barely scratch the surface. We cannot afford to continue in this hit-or-miss manner.
Systemic Change
We need a system that works for us, not for them — a system built on transparency. By opening data flow between nations and bringing vessel license lists, history of offenses and full ownership details into the public realm, we can start to protect our ocean from these damaging fleets and hold the owners of these vessels accountable.
This systemic change is needed on an international level. In the Israr investigation alone, we worked with fishing authorities in Belize, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Brazil, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S., France and Oman, all tuna regional fisheries management organizations, the European Commission, INTERPOL and crew members in Mauritius. This is the level of international data-sharing and collaboration we need to achieve.
This may sound daunting, but bringing fisheries out of the shadows does not require new, sophisticated technology, or unrealistic expense. It can be achieved by any country through a combination of public data-sharing, enforcement of sustainable fisheries laws, and the use of existing technology to understand, map and disclose supply chains.
If we fail to enact this change, millions of people will suffer, especially coastal communities that rely on thriving fisheries to survive. We are already seeing the consequences of apathy in Ghana, where the fundamental human rights of Ghanaian fishing communities are being threatened by the government’s failure to tackle overfishing and illegal fishing by industrial trawlers. Over half the 215 small-scale fishers, processors and traders we spoke to reported going without sufficient food over the past year, and over 70 percent reported a deterioration in their living conditions over the past five years. The vast majority of industrial trawlers in Ghana, although operating under the Ghanaian flag, are controlled and financed by distant water fishing companies based in China.
Illegal fishing is pushing ocean ecosystems toward total collapse and stripping millions of people of their food security and livelihoods. It is cause for international shame that the chronic lack of transparency can still be used get away with these crimes. Only through international collaboration can we bring fishing out of the shadows and return our oceans to their rightful glory.
This is a momentous reversal of one of the Trump era’s most destructive anti-immigrant policies, coming on the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement nearly three weeks earlier that it was ending the summary-deportation policy for unaccompanied children. But it was a decision that ought to have come 15 months earlier.
For more than two years, asylum seekers attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border have been summarily deported under a public health rule known as Title 42, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) invoked in response to the pandemic. This allowed a bypassing of traditional court processes, and a de facto shutting down of the land border to those hoping to claim asylum after crossing into the U.S.
It was, for Donald Trump’s anti-immigration henchman Stephen Miller, the culmination of years of lobbying to use Title 42 as a catch-all regulation that would allow the administration to essentially shut down the southern border and deny sanctuary to pretty much anybody claiming asylum in the country. After putting the activation of Title 42 on a “wish list” of anti-immigration policies in 2017 shortly after Trump was inaugurated, Miller had, in the intervening years, repeatedly attempted to get the CDC to invoke the rule in response to mumps and flu outbreaks. Knowing that this was politically motivated rather than driven by sound public health principles, the CDC balked.
When COVID hit, Miller saw his opportunity. He lobbied hard for the CDC to lock down the border. Then, when the agency’s top scientists continued to resist, realizing that doing so would have no meaningful impact on the course of the pandemic given the prevalence of community spread within the U.S. itself, Vice President Mike Pence, who had been put in charge of the administration’s pandemic response, ordered its director to invoke Title 42, hurting huge numbers of vulnerable migrants. To his eternal shame, then-CDC Director Robert Redfield complied with this order and mandated that his staff begin implementing it.
The rule was a byword for cruelty in the last 10 months of the Trump administration — on par with the Muslim travel ban; the public charge rule that made it all but impossible for immigrants hoping to gain permanent residency to access any public services; Trump’s determination to build a border wall; and the obsessive efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Immigrants’ rights advocates hoped that, in the first days of the Biden presidency, the new administration would stop using Title 42 in this way.
Instead, faced with a massive increase in the numbers crossing the southern border every day, and a groundswell of political dissatisfaction regarding its handling of the border “crisis,” the Biden administration found it politically expedient to keep the rule in place. In August of last year, in another ghastly example of politics usurping science at the agency, CDC Director Rachel Walensky inked her signature on an extension of the order.
In the two years since it was first triggered, somewhere in the region of 1.5 million deportations under its mandate have taken place. (Since many border crossers are deported multiple times in a given year, the number of individuals deported under Title 42 is likely far lower than this.)
The results have been morally catastrophic. Last month, Human Rights First released a report detailing that since Title 42 was activated in March 2020, more than 10,000 would-be migrants expelled into Mexico under its guise, had suffered kidnapping, rape, torture, and other violent forms of attack.
In September 2021, many of the country’s top epidemiologists signed a letter to the administration decrying the “scientifically baseless and politically motivated” expulsion policy. That same month, a slew of leading public health experts wrote a similar letter to Walensky, as well as to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccerra, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The letter pointed out that a large majority of the countries that had implemented entry restrictions to try to control their COVID outbreaks had also carved out exceptions to let in asylum seekers. The U.S. was, in this regard, a harsh outlier.
The Biden administration, which from the get-go has claimed that its response to the pandemic is strictly science-driven, shut down the criticisms coming its way from leading scientists, and instead doubled down on this Trump-era anti-immigration tool. The administration’s fear was that ending the policy would result in a dash to the border by desperate migrants who finally saw an opportunity to get a toehold in the United States. And so, with polling showing that a growing number of Americans were angry at Biden and the Democrats for their priorities around immigration, and specifically for presiding over a huge increase in the numbers of people trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico each day, Biden’s team decided to double down in support of Title 42.
This decision to continue implementing Title 42 was politically expedient but morally squalid. Over the past few months, it has attracted increasing criticism from progressives within Congress and among the grassroots, as well as from some officials within the State Department — one of whom, Harold Koh, sent in a scathing resignation letter in October in which he decried the ongoing “illegal” and “inhumane” use of Title 42.
Now, in the spring of 2022, with thousands of desperate would-be asylees (including a growing number of Ukrainians) being turned back daily after trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico to claim asylum, the Biden administration has finally announced that it is changing course. It’s a long overdue shift back to a more decent treatment of asylum seekers. What a shame it took 15 months, and the war in Ukraine, for the Biden administration to finally locate its moral compass on the issue.
Of all the things I expected to say at this point in 2022, “it’s great to be a Republican right now” was nowhere among them. If you had told me a year ago that the post-Trump GOP would be anything other than a shattered shambles today, I would have belly-laughed like Jabba the Hutt and then questioned your fitness as a political observer… yet here we are, so who’s the smart guy? Not me.
Despite all that has taken place since 2016 — Donald Trump’s crashing mismanagement of COVID, the economic and social upheaval caused by the pandemic, the loss of one million lives, the sacking of the Capitol Building by a mob of Trump voters wielding Confederate flags, and the disgraceful deportment of the former president as he licks his wounds beneath an indifferent Florida sky — the Republican Party is somehow presently occupying all manner of political catbird seats. If the pattern holds, it may come to be the best trick anyone has seen since “Lazarus, come forth.”
At present, President Biden’s approval rating hovers down in the depths where only Trump and George W. Bush have visited. This, despite the lowest jobless numbers since time out of mind, a shallowing of COVID infection rates across the board, as well as the president’s not-as-bad-as-it-could-be handling of an impossible situation in Ukraine.
Also, and not for nothing, it’s quieter now. That sense of waking up every day trapped inside someone else’s screaming headache has been dispersed with such vigor that pundits are able to spend time snarking about Biden’s “gaffes” after four years of televised Trumpy mayhem. I am no pollster, but you would think that new calm would be worth a ten-point bump all by itself, right.
2021 and 2022 were both caused, in no small measure, by the daily calamity of Trump in 2020, yet he currently squats on a campaign war chest bursting with $110 million. This is more than any other PAC, super PAC or party-affiliated committees. Trump’s hoard towers over the sums collected by would-be challengers to the throne.
Aside from fees paid to lawyers representing defendants in the Capitol attack investigation, “Trump has done little to spend his largesse around the party,” according to Politico. This strongly suggests Trump wants that money for himself when he makes another run for the White House in 2024.
A series of election-night debacles stripped the polish from the polling industry’s veneer over the last several cycles, leaving it a feeble stick to lean on. For whatever they are worth, virtually all of them are howling Democratic doom in the upcoming midterms. At present, the GOP stands to regain control of both the House and Senate, setting up a downhill run to 2024 and quite possibly the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Incredible? Yes. Impossible? No such thing anymore.
For me, it all comes back to COVID and Trump’s generally ruinous, self-serving handling of the crisis. How can his party be in such a strong position with so many grievous wounds still open and bleeding? The answer may be found in another pair of public surveys, as CNN reports:
A recent Gallup poll gives us good insight. Just 3 percent of Americans said the coronavirus or diseases are the top problem facing the country. That’s less than half the previous low for this answer (8 percent), which occurred in mid-2021 when case rates were also falling. Two years ago (April 2020), a record 45 percent said the coronavirus was the top problem in the country. It’s not surprising that we’re nowhere near that level anymore. Still, I had to take a step back when I saw that 3 percent.
The Gallup poll isn’t the only one to show that the significance of the pandemic in the minds of Americans has fallen dramatically. A recent NBC News poll also found that just 3 percent said the coronavirus was the most important issue facing the country. The public is not alone in caring less about the pandemic than ever before. Cable news had fewer mentions of “covid” in March (less than 2,700) than in any month since the beginning of the pandemic. At its peak, there were over 17,000 monthly mentions of “covid” on cable news.
(Emphasis added)
Wow, y’all. That was fast … fast, and, I suppose, entirely predictable. After two long years, it is easy enough to figure that the COVID grind has people desperate to care about something, anything else. “What’s that, you say? Food and fuel prices are over the moon, and it’s World War III in Europe? Huzzah, something else to think about, finally!”
Gallows humor aside, there is a reason why “it’s the economy, stupid” is considered political holy writ by both parties. Given the chance to vote their wallet or some larger concept, a majority of voters will infallibly vote “wallet.”
Therein, however, lies the Gordian knot of the matter. None of the country’s current bread-and-butter concerns about rising inflation and wobbly international supply chains will be properly addressed until COVID-19 is properly addressed and dealt with both here and around the world. You’ll have to see Mr. Putin about the gas prices, but even those were heaving upward before the Ukraine invasion thanks to the aforementioned supply line problems.
… and no matter what the lowering numbers of the moment may preach, COVID is not finished with us. “On March 22 the World Health Organization announced that the Omicron subvariant BA.2 had become the dominant form of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, worldwide,” reportsScientific American. “BA.2 shares many genetic similarities with its close relative BA.1, which fueled a global resurgence in COVID infections in recent months. But BA.2 is between 30 percent and 50 percent more contagious than BA.1.”
In other words: Here it comes again, just like all the others did, and we remain woefully unprepared again. The woeful state of our preparedness could actually be described as an incredible act of self-sabotage. Congress recently stripped $15 billion in COVID prep funds from the latest spending package. At this moment, the absence of those funds is requiring states to either restrict or shut down their COVID defenses just as B.A.2 is really beginning to stretch its legs.
I don’t know how you fix such irresponsible systemic indifference, especially when the political climate of the moment (3 percent?!) confers no urgency to address it. Like as not, and if history is any guide, B.A.2 or something like it will carve a swath through the country, and we will all find ourselves in a drearily familiar place: right back where we started. And if Republicans continue to gain momentum, we can bet that our sorry level of pandemic preparedness will plunge even further into the depths of abandonment.
In Western military circles, it’s common to refer to the “balance of forces” — the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army — with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment — would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven’t exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow’s surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation — the “correlation of forces” — originally developed in the former Soviet Union.
That notion differs from the “balance of forces” by placing greater weight on intangible factors. It stipulates that the weaker of two belligerents, measured in conventional terms, can still prevail over the stronger if its military possesses higher morale, stronger support at home, and the backing of important allies. Such a calculation, if conducted in early February, would have concluded that Ukraine’s prospects were nowhere near as bad as either Russian or Western analysts generally assumed, while Russia’s were far worse. And that should remind us of just how crucial an understanding of the correlation of forces is in such situations, if gross miscalculations and tragedies are to be avoided.
The Concept in Practice Before Ukraine
The notion of the correlation of forces has a long history in military and strategic thinking. Something like it, for example, can be found in the epilogue to Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. Writing about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy observed that wars are won not by the superior generalship of charismatic leaders but through the fighting spirit of common soldiers taking up arms against a loathsome enemy.
Such a perspective would later be incorporated into the military doctrine of the Russian Bolsheviks, who sought to calculate not only troop and equipment strength, but also the degree of class consciousness and support from the masses on each side of any potential conflict. Following the 1917 revolution in the midst of World War I, Russian leader Vladimir Lenin argued, for example, against a continuing war with Germany because the correlation of forces wasn’t yet right for the waging of “revolutionary war” against the capitalist states (as urged by his compatriot Leon Trotsky). “Summing up the arguments in favor of an immediate revolutionary war,” Lenin said, “it must be concluded that such a policy would perhaps respond to the needs of mankind to strive for the beautiful, the spectacular, and the striking, but that it would be totally disregarding the objective correlation of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution already begun.”
For Bolsheviks of his era, the correlation of forces was a “scientific” concept, based on an assessment of both material factors (numbers of troops and guns on each side) and qualitative factors (the degree of class consciousness involved). In 1918, for example, Lenin observed that “the poor peasantry in Russia… is not in a position immediately and at the present moment to begin a serious revolutionary war. To ignore this objective correlation of class forces on the present question would be a fatal blunder.” Hence, in March 1918, the Russians made a separate peace with the German-led Central Powers, ceding much territory to them and ending their country’s role in the world war.
As the Bolshevik Party became an institutionalized dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, the correlation-of-forces concept grew into an article of faith based on a belief in the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras of the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders regularly claimed that world capitalism was in irreversible decline and the socialist camp, augmented by revolutionary regimes in the “Third World,” was destined to achieve global supremacy.
Such optimism prevailed until the late 1970s, when the socialist tide in the Third World began to recede. Most significant in this regard was a revolt against the communist government in Afghanistan. When the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party in Kabul came under attack by Islamic insurgents, or mujahideen, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the country. Despite sending ever larger troop contingents there and employing heavy firepower against the mujahideen and their local supporters, the Red Army was finally forced to limp home in defeat in 1989, only to see the Soviet Union itself implode not long after.
For U.S. strategists, the Soviet decision to intervene and, despite endless losses, persevere was proof that the Russian leaders had ignored the correlation of forces, a vulnerability to be exploited by Washington. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, it became U.S. policy to arm and assist anticommunist insurgents globally with the aim of toppling pro-Soviet regimes — a strategy sometimes called the Reagan Doctrine. Huge quantities of munitions were given to the mujahideen and rebels like the Contras in Nicaragua, usually via secret channels set up by the Central Intelligence Agency. While not always successful, these efforts generally bedeviled the Soviet leadership. As Secretary of State George Shultz wrote gleefully in 1985, while the U.S. defeat in Vietnam had led the Soviets to believe “that what they called the global ‘correlation of forces’ was shifting in their favor,” now, thanks to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere, “we have reason to be confident that ‘the correlation of forces’ is shifting back in our favor.”
And yes, the Soviet failure in Afghanistan did indeed reflect an inability to properly weigh the correlation of all the factors involved — the degree to which the mujahideen’s morale outmatched that of the Soviets, the relative support for war among the Soviet and Afghan populations, and the role of outside help provided by the CIA. But the lessons hardly ended there. Washington never considered the implications of arming Arab volunteers under the command of Osama bin Laden or allowing him to create an international jihadist enterprise, “the base” (al-Qaeda), which later turned on the U.S., leading to the 9/11 terror attacks and a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” that consumed trillions of dollars and debilitated the U.S. military without eliminating the threat of terrorism. American leaders also failed to calculate the correlation of forces when undertaking their own war in Afghanistan, ignoring the factors that led to the Soviet defeat, and so suffering the very same fate 32 years later.
Putin’s Ukraine Miscalculations
Much has already been said about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations regarding Ukraine. They all began, however, with his failure to properly assess the correlation of forces involved in the conflict to come and that, eerily enough, resulted from Putin’s misreading of the meaning of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
Like many in Washington — especially in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party — Putin and his close advisers viewed the sudden American withdrawal as a conspicuous sign of U.S. weakness and, in particular, of disarray within the Western alliance. American power was in full retreat, they believed, and the NATO powers irrevocably divided. “Today, we are witnessing the collapse of America’s foreign policy,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma. Other senior officials echoed his view.
This left Putin and his inner circle convinced that Russia could act with relative impunity in Ukraine, a radical misreading of the global situation. In fact, along with top U.S. military leaders, the Biden White House was eager to exit Afghanistan. They wanted to focus instead on what were seen as far more important priorities, especially the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances in Asia and Europe to better contain China and Russia. “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars,” the administration affirmed in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of May 2021. Instead, the U.S. would position itself “to deter our adversaries and defend our interests… [and] our presence will be most robust in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.”
As a result, Moscow has faced the exact opposite of what Putin’s advisers undoubtedly anticipated: not a weak, divided West, but a newly energized U.S.-NATO alliance determined to assist Ukrainian forces with vital (if limited) arms supplies, while isolating Russia in the world arena. More troops are now being deployed to Poland and other “front-line” states facing Russia, putting its long-term security at even greater risk. And perhaps most damaging to Moscow’s geopolitical calculations, Germany has discarded its pacifist stance, fully embracing NATO and approving an enormous increase in military spending.
But Putin’s greatest miscalculations came with respect to the comparative fighting capabilities of his military forces and Ukraine’s. He and his advisers evidently believed that they were sending the monstrous Red Army of Soviet days into Ukraine, not the far weaker Russian military of 2022. Even more egregious, they seem to have believed that Ukrainian soldiers would either welcome the Russian invaders with open arms or put up only token resistance before surrendering. Credit this delusion, at least in part, to the Russian president’s unyielding belief that the Ukrainians were really Russians at heart and so would naturally welcome their own “liberation.”
We know this, first of all, because many of the troops sent into Ukraine — given only enough food, fuel, and ammunition for a few days of combat — were not prepared to fight a protracted conflict. Unsurprisingly, they have suffered from strikingly low morale. The opposite has been true of the Ukrainian forces who, after all, are defending their homes and their country, and have been able to exploit enemy weaknesses such as long and sluggish supply trains to inflict heavy losses.
We also know that Putin’s top intelligence officials fed him inaccurate information about the political and military situation in Ukraine, contributing to his belief that the defending forces would surrender after just a few days of combat. He subsequently arrested some of those officials, including Sergey Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB (the successor to the KGB). Although they were charged with the embezzlement of state funds, the real reason for their arrest, claims Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist, was providing the Russian president with “unreliable, incomplete, and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine.”
As Russia’s leaders are rediscovering, just two decades after the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, a failure to properly assess the correlation of forces when engaging in battle with supposedly weaker foes on their home turf can lead to disastrous outcomes.
China’s Faulty Assessments
Historically speaking, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has been careful indeed to gauge the correlation of forces when facing foreign adversaries. They provided considerable military assistance, for example, to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but not so much as to be viewed by Washington as an active belligerent requiring counterattack. Similarly, despite their claims to the island of Taiwan, they have so far avoided any direct move to seize it by force and risk a full-scale encounter with potentially superior U.S. forces.
Based on this record, it’s surprising that, so far as we know, the Chinese leadership failed to generate an accurate assessment of either Putin’s plans for Ukraine or the likelihood of an intense struggle for control of that country. China’s leaders have, in fact, long enjoyed cordial relations with their Ukrainian counterparts and their intelligence services surely provided Beijing with reliable information on that country’s combat capabilities. So, it’s striking that they were caught so off-guard by the invasion and fierce Ukrainian resistance.
Likewise, they should have been able to draw the same conclusions as their Western counterparts from satellite data showing the massive Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Yet when presented with intelligence by the Biden administration evidently indicating that Putin intended to launch a full-scale invasion, the top leaders simply regurgitated Moscow’s assertions that this was pure propaganda. As a result, China didn’t even evacuate thousands of its own nationals from Ukraine when the U.S. and other Western nations did so, leaving them in place as the war broke out. And even then, the Chinese claimed Russia was only conducting a minor police operation in that country’s Donbas region, making them appear out of touch with on-the-ground realities.
China also seems to have seriously underestimated the ferocity of the U.S. and European reaction to the Russian assault. Although no one truly knows what occurred in high-level policy discussions among them, it’s likely that they, too, had misread the meaning of the American exit from Afghanistan and, like the Russians, assumed it indicated Washington’s retreat from global engagement. “If the U.S. cannot even secure a victory in a rivalry with small countries, how much better could it do in a major power game with China?” asked the state-owned Global Times in August 2021. “The Taliban’s stunningly swift takeover of Afghanistan has shown the world that U.S. competence in dominating major power games is crumbling.”
This miscalculation — so evident in Washington’s muscular response to the Russian invasion and its military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region — has put China’s leaders in an awkward position, as the Biden administration steps up pressure on Beijing to deny material aid to Russia and not allow the use of Chinese banks as conduits for Russian firms seeking to evade Western sanctions. During a teleconference on March 18th, President Biden reportedly warned President Xi Jinping of “the implications and consequences” for China if it “provides material support to Russia.” Presumably, this could involve the imposition of “secondary sanctions” on Chinese firms accused of acting as agents for Russian companies or agencies. The fact that Biden felt able to issue such ultimatums to the Chinese leader reflects a potentially dangerous new-found sense of political clout in Washington based on Russia’s apparent defenselessness in the face of Western-imposed sanctions.
Avoiding U.S. Overreach
Today, the global correlation of forces looks positive indeed for the United States and that, in a strange sense, should worry us all. Its major allies have rallied to its side in response to Russian aggression or, on the other side of the planet, fears of China’s rise. And the outlook for Washington’s principal adversaries seems less than auspicious. Even if Vladimir Putin were to emerge from the present war with a larger slice of Ukrainian territory, he will certainly be presiding over a distinctly diminished Russia. Already a shaky petro-state before the invasion began, it is now largely cut off from the Western world and condemned to perpetual backwardness.
With Russia already diminished, China may experience a similar fate, having placed such high expectations on a major partnership with a faltering country. Under such circumstances, it will be tempting for the Biden administration to further exploit this unique moment by seeking even greater advantage over its rivals by, for instance, supporting “regime change” in Moscow or the further encirclement of China. President Biden’s March 26th comment about Putin — “this man cannot remain in power” — certainly suggested a hankering for just such a future. (The White House did later attempt to walk his words back, claiming that he only meant Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors.”) As for China, recent all-too-ominous comments by senior Pentagon officials to the effect that Taiwan is “critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific” suggest an inclination to abandon America’s “one China” policy and formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state, bringing it under U.S. military protection.
In the coming months, we can expect far more discussion about the merits of such moves. Washington pundits and politicians, still dreaming of the U.S. as the unparalleled power on planet Earth, will undoubtedly be arguing that this moment is the very one when the U.S. could truly smite its adversaries. Such overreach — involving fresh adventures that would exceed American capacities and lead to new disasters — is a genuine danger.
Seeking regime change in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) is certain to alienate many foreign governments now supportive of Washington’s leadership. Likewise, a precipitous move to pull Taiwan into America’s military orbit could trigger a U.S.-China war neither side wants, with catastrophic consequences. The correlation of forces may now seem to be in America’s favor, but if there’s one thing to be learned from the present moment, it’s just how fickle such calculations can prove to be and how easily the global situation can turn against us if we behave capriciously.
Imagine, then, a world in which all three “great” powers have misconstrued the correlation of forces they may encounter. As top Russian officials continue to speak of the use of nuclear weapons, anyone should be anxious about a future of ultimate overreach that will correlate with nothing good whatsoever.
Several gunshot bangs pierced the sky. Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian protester with live ammunition. Chants and cheers from Israeli settlers from Modi’in Illit rang out through the air as they stood upon a mound of dirt overlooking the Israeli apartheid wall. Israeli soldiers fired multiple rounds of tear gas into the crowds. As protesters scattered to evade the gas and live fire, young volunteer Palestinian paramedics darted through the tear gas to quickly grab and attend to the injured. That five minutes of Palestinian nonviolent resistance on April 1, 2022, captured the essence of Land Day: Despite facing the heavy hand of the Israeli military, Palestinian protesters and international solidarity activists refused to leave their land.
It’s been 46 years since Land Day, a day when Palestinians organized en masse against the Israeli government’s program of colonization and Indigenous erasure. On March 30, 1976, Palestinians took to their ancestral lands as an act of sumud, of steadfastness, organizing a general strike and protest marches in response to the Israeli government’s decision to confiscate another 20,000 dunams (about 5,000 acres) of Palestinian land in the Galilee. The Israeli state had already taken some 75,000 dunums from the Indigenous communities the previous decade.
In the Palestinian village of Bil’in, our community honors Land Day and our own family members who resisted Israel’s attempt to take our lands — Bassem Abu Rahma, Islam Bornat and Jawaher Abu Rahma — who were all murdered by Israeli forces.
Land Day has always been a point of national unity, bringing together Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line to resist Israeli colonization. Back in 1976, when the first Land Day occurred, Palestinians understood full well that the land grab by the Israeli government served several purposes. First, the intent was to expand the Jewish-only settlement of Carmiel in the north as a tactic to limit the natural growth of Palestinian towns. Israel’s planning regime has always operated on the premise that by taking away the lands of the surrounding Palestinian villages, the communities would have nowhere left to build — that those families would eventually leave for a life outside of historic Palestine.
Today, it is easy to see this tactic play out over and over again, whether in the expansions of the Har Homa, Gilo and Efrat settlements that sealed in and cut off Bethlehem, or in the building up of the settlements in the Jordan Valley to push Palestinians into ethnic enclaves. For our community of Bil’in, a community of fewer than 3,000 people, Israel has used myriad colonial tactics to take over our land to expand the Modi’in and surrounding outposts. Secondly, taking the land not only restricted the geographical area, but it also transferred material wealth from the local communities to the settlers that came from abroad. This took away millions and millions of dollars of generational wealth that would have otherwise been passed down from generation to generation.
So for the communities of northern Palestine calling for mass mobilization to preserve their lands — Sakhnin, Arrabeh, Deir Hanna, and others — their future was paramount. Like Palestinians have been doing for generations, they took to the streets knowing that they would face the heavy-handed violence of the Israeli state — and that some would likely pay for their resistance to colonial violence with their lives.
As Palestinians made this call to resist, leaders within the Israeli government and significant figures of the Israeli public made demands to “crush” our resolve. On March 28, 1976, the Israeli Minister of Police Shlomo Hillel declared that officers were “ready to break the Arab villages.” Israeli newspapers attempted to delegitimize the resistance, called it “a Moscow-led operation to destroy the state.” Others branded it as a violent, racist movement. Then-Minister of Education Zevulun Hammer described Palestinians “as being a cancer unto the land” — land that had always belonged to Palestinians. With Israel’s general public calling for open violence against these Palestinian communities, days before the protest was even to be held, Israel sent a heavy military presence to the villages, including armored cars. Every Palestinian knew that attending the protest was risking their lives. Not only were they facing physical assaults from the Israeli forces, they were also facing the financial risk of consequences by their Israeli employers for standing up for their own basic human rights.
In Bil’in, we have continued this tradition of steadfast resistance to colonization. Starting in 2005, residents of the community have organized weekly protests against the construction of the apartheid wall and Israeli land theft, literally putting our bodies on the line to defend our lands and illustrate the depth to which we are dedicated to Palestinian rights and self-determination. We have continued on despite the massive personal losses we have endured, including the deaths of our friends and family members, as a result of the violence we face in taking this public stand against Israeli settler-colonialism. We know that without being willing to risk sacrifices of time, energy, resources, and even our bodies and lives, we will not be able to protect — let alone decolonize — an inch of our land.
We have initiated the Campaign to Defund Racism in honor of this tradition, and in light of the vital need to address the structures that allow Israeli settlement to continue. This campaign seeks to stop the exploitation of U.S. charitable status to fund the Israeli settler movement. The campaign addresses the financing of Israeli settler-colonialism, and responds to the decades-long battle to protect our lands and resources from the Galilee to Sheikh Jarrah to Bil’in to the Naqab. As settler organizations coordinate the theft of church properties in Jerusalem and build pressure on the state to displace Naqab Bedouins, we need our allies to take a proactive approach to change the laws in their communities to support our struggle on the ground.
These settler organizations — the Israel Land Fund, Ateret Cohanim, Regavim, and others — are the organizations that use hundreds of millions of dollars to shape Israel’s program of Indigenous displacement. Look at Regavim, which is using U.S. charitable dollars to evict the community of Khan Ahmar. Ateret Cohanim is taking over the Petra Hotel at the Jaffa Gate. Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the Israeli Land Fund, Arieh King, targets the families of Sheikh Jarrah.
The Palestinians who are most at risk are calling on U.S. attorneys general to enforce the policies guiding charitable funding, cutting off the material resources of the settler organizations that are systematically and discriminatorily targeting our families for displacement. As Palestinians continue to sacrifice their livelihoods and risk their lives to protest and challenge Israel’s system of apartheid and settler colonialism, we are calling on people of conscience in the United States to stand in solidarity with vulnerable Palestinian communities. U.S. residents can join us in calling on their local representatives and elected officials, demanding that they take action to ensure that U.S. charitable donations are not financing ethnic cleansing and forced displacement.
At the nexus of multiple injustices in the United States lies a particular cruelty visited upon working parents and their very young children: the crisis of child care. This point of failure involves poverty, neoliberal deprivation, patriarchal family structures, racial inequality and more, sited at the intersection of several of capitalism’s most glaring inequities. For many, options for child care are lacking, and the patchwork private system that does exist is deplorably expensive and of disturbingly low quality. These deficiencies introduce multiplying financial, logistical and emotional stressors into the lives of working-class parents, particularly women and people of color, along with grave outcomes for child development — and the social world writ large.
The cause is the state’s effective abdication of this critical societal function to private enterprise. As is so often the case, the venerated free market has utterly failed to adequately provide for public needs, and the hindering of public support has proven inimical to human thriving. The COVID-19 pandemic engraved those existing fissures more deeply — yet the execrable conditions in the child care sector long predate the pandemic. They are the product of a neoliberal capitalism that has dispensed with social welfare in service of profit and free-market idolatry. Yet there are advocates and committed organizers who have a vision of a more humane and just world — and who, despite towering obstacles, have set out on their tireless work of bringing it to fruition.
A Costly Necessity
Child care is an ineluctable social need, and has become only more so because of systematic inequality and impoverishment; many adults have had no choice but to take on additional jobs. Among mothers of young children in the United States, nearly two-thirds participate in the workforce. Correspondingly, 8.4 million children under the age of 5 need child care — while only 5.9 million slots exist.
Research has confirmed the benefits of quality care in those deeply formative years. Interventions in early childhood have an outsize effect on well-being: improvements in cognitive and language skills, socialization, and emotional functioning dovetail with the relief of strain that child care offers for workers, particularly working women. Yet the inverse is also true: Nonexistent, inattentive — or worse, abusive — child care resonates throughout lives, and across generational time spans. It is critical that children be attended to with empathy and provided learning enrichment, entering them into a virtuous cycle that catalyzes later thriving.
Yet there is nothing virtuous about the status quo of child care in the U.S. The stresses it places upon new working-class parents are multifarious and punishing. Priming the difficult circumstances, the Family Medical Leave Act offers only limited paid time off for pregnancy and early-life care, and even that is subject to stringent constraints. (The U.S. stands utterly alone among developed nations — in fact, among nearly all other nations — in failing to guarantee paid time off for parental leave.) When whatever time off they are allotted has ended, new parents must then arrange care for their pre-K children. In doing so, they are forced to navigate a poorly regulated, competitive and flagrantly expensive network of private daycare options.
The average cost of child care represents 17.1 percent of the national median household income — and double that for low-income families, at an untenable 35 percent of earnings. This expense, which can effectively amount to a second rent, is simply out of reach for innumerable families. In another stark illustration of the outlay: “In most states, putting a baby in a licensed child-care facility costs more than in-state college tuition,” reports Bloomberg. Federal funding to alleviate these extortionate costs is marginal: Of the already-limited number of children who were even eligible for assistance in 2015, only 15 percent received any subsidy. (Comparably limited state funding means that preschool costs are often little different.) Other wealthy capitalist countries devote an average of $14,000 of annual public spending per child. (Norway spends nearly $30,000; Hungary, a little over $7,000.) The U.S. spends, startlingly, a mere $500. The depth of U.S. coffers seems matched only by the extent of its parsimony when it comes to working people.
Unaffordable, Unavailable or Unsanctioned
The strain on parents is redoubled by the difficulty of locating any care at all, affordable or not: A vastly inadequate supply has created “child care deserts.” A 2016 survey of states (comprising 40 percent of the population) from the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that existing supply could serve only a quarter of toddlers and infants. For the latter, it’s worse, as CAP points out: “Licensed child care is more than three times as scarce for children ages 0 to 2 than it is for those ages 3 to 5.”
Oftentimes, options simply do not exist. But parents who lack for alternatives — many of them women of color — have then faced stigma, censure and even incarceration for leaving children while at work or in job interviews. The jeers of the public that such stories have drawn arise from a kneejerk impulse to condemn the individual, in ignorance of the structural factors and outright impossible situations to which low-income parents have been condemned by these realities.
Yet the catastrophic failures of child care extend further still. In an article for The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn documents the staggering abuses and tragedies that the laissez-faire approach has produced. The limited programs that are both available and affordable are often unlicensed and unregulated. Daycares of “abysmally” low quality predominate. “A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ — only 10 percent provided high-quality care,” writes Cohn. Yet “just thirty-nine states in the wealthiest country in the world even have a program that rates the quality of day-care centers.”
This dearth of oversight facilitates negligence, which can lead, in the grimmest cases, to the single worst imaginable occurrence for any parent. Staffing issues, facilities in poor condition, poorly trained workers, inattention to health and safety — all of these factors result in ghastly statistics. “The death rate of children enrolled in home-based day care — which is far more likely to be unlicensed than a center-based program — is twelve times that of center-based care,” Cohn writes. The horror of harm to even a single child notwithstanding, poor oversight and a reliance on self-reporting means that the true numbers, of injuries and even deaths, are unclear.
Caregiver Exploitation
Daycare staff, for their part, contend with low salaries, punishing hours and dismal job conditions. “To the extent that child care is affordable for parents at all, this is only because the child care workforce effectively subsidizes child care costs with low worker wages,” CAP notes.
The pandemic, as it tends to do, has exacerbated all of these failures. Child care was immensely fragile even before COVID-19, but its ruptures have deepened the availability and staffing crises, with many daycares shuttering and workers abandoning the profession. A 2020 survey from the National Association for the Education of Young Children found that the majority of daycares had incurred substantial new operational costs. An estimated 86 percent are serving fewer children than they did before the pandemic — a reflection of closures, reduced resources, and parental job losses. Some federal grants and subsidies have been disbursed to prop up the industry, but these are, on balance, insufficient. (During the pandemic’s first year, child care workers were also denied vaccine priority despite their putative “essential” status.)
Of working parents, two out of three were forced to revise their child care arrangements because of the pandemic. These conditions have been mitigated to some extent as the world adapts to COVID, but the system’s fragility in a crisis is telling. While the convergence of COVID and child care was “a global fiasco,” subsidies and social supports of many kinds in Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and across Europe meant that those countries weathered it far better. Meanwhile, job loss among women was worse in the neoliberal strongholds of the U.S. and U.K. Without drastic reform, some of the pandemic-inflicted damage to U.S. child care could be permanent. Again, the lack of a resilient publicly funded system — and a blanket aversion to redistributive policy — is to blame.
First Steps Toward Universality
Many envision how these harsh conditions might be different — how we might design policy that assigns human life and thriving intrinsic value, especially the well-being of children. Historical antecedents in the U.S. do exist; as Meagan Day writes in Jacobin, the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971 would have created universal daycare programs, development centers and preschools as a means of addressing poverty, as well as neglect and abuse. But that better future was foreclosed when the bill was vetoed by then-President Richard Nixon, pleasing his fundamentalist constituents.
Organizers in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have set their sights on rekindling the concept. In fact, there’s already a contemporary success to point to: Measure 26-214 in Oregon’s Multnomah County, developed by Portland DSA and a local coalition and passed in 2020, will institute a fully universal preschool program, funded by a tax on high incomes. The victory hinted at the popularity of the idea, and provided a model that organizers are eager to replicate — and significantly expand.
“We’re looking to make child care — inclusive of infant care, preschool and before and after-school programs — a public good,” said organizer the co-chair of the DSA-LA Childcare for All campaign and a onetime child care worker herself. (Farzana declined to provide her full last name due to fear of workplace reprisals.) DSA Los Angeles recently passed a resolution to make pursuit of universal child care a chapter priority. The first Childcare for All canvassing campaigns are just getting underway in the city.
Organizers in Columbus, Ohio’s DSA chapter have also officially began developing their own campaign to mitigate the woeful realities of child care in their city. Rita Hallaveld is a campaign steward in Columbus DSA’s Child Care Priority Campaign. “In Franklin County,” she said, “there are not enough child care center slots to cover all infants and toddlers. In Columbus, a single mother of two making $15 an hour spends over half her income on child care, without enough to cover rent, food, etc.” Hallaveld said that the Columbus DSA organizers “hope to really engage residents and highlight all the ways that child care is a common good to help get everyone on board.”
In Los Angeles, organizers’ efforts have already earned positive responses. While their goals are sweeping, they are popular ones, “easily understood and widely felt,” Farzana W. told Truthout. “So far, the response from the public has been quite supportive. The need for reliable, quality child care is something that’s intuitively understood by many, partly due to its immediate relevance to people’s lives.” She echoed deep concerns about availability, cost, quality and staff wages.
The two campaigns are only just taking their first steps. Hallaveld described the initial phase of intensive policy planning in the Columbus DSA working group, which is analyzing funding sources and tax structures. Such ambitious measures will require strong alliances, and Columbus organizers are hoping to build “a diverse grassroots coalition made up of parents, child care educators, and residents in our area,” Hallaveld commented. “We want the voices that are most impacted to be a part of this process from the beginning. Child care providers are disproportionately women of color, so we want to center their voices throughout the process … Eventually we hope to put the measure on the ballot, so we’ll be doing a lot of work to engage voters.”
In the near term, Farzana W. also pointed to coalition building, along with continued canvassing and outreach, community surveys, research and policy planning, activating parent and care staff organizers and agitating around the demands, all while assessing and refining their methods.
While both campaigns remain nascent at this stage, if the success of the pre-K ballot measure in Portland indicates anything, it’s that deeply committed advocates can realize long-shot ambitions. Organizers see those ambitions as part of a holistic vision of a socialism that meets people’s real needs: “We want to change the reputation of the left in Los Angeles,” said Farzana W., “from one that’s insulated, online and foreign to one that’s approachable, reliable, homegrown and advancing demands that people care deeply about.”
A publicly funded universal system would mean an early chance for intervention in improving well-being, resonant with multiple social needs. It is logical for socialists to take up efforts to confront this moral crisis: a crisis of injustice and inequality that punishes the most vulnerable. As Farzana W. reiterates, “We want to remove the profit motive from the child care industry [and] reestablish the public good as the core of left politics.”
Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.
These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?
Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.
Sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, for instance, has used the West’s “wealth defense industry” to shift formal ownership of major chunks of his $18.4-billion personal fortune beyond the reach of sanction orders. Tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, notes Transparency International UK’s Steve Goodrich, “have long been a destination of choice for Kremlin cronies and kleptocrats.”
“Complex networks of secretive shell companies in these jurisdictions,” Goodrich adds, “means the UK government is attempting to enforce these sanctions with one arm tied behind its back.”
Minimal U.S. disclosure requirements, Global Financial Integrity policy director Lakshmi Kumar points out, are also easing the way for sanction-skirting Russian oligarchs. Billionaire-friendly legal fine print, she toldBloomberg earlier this week, is letting tainted money “rebrand itself, essentially.”
The United States, agrees Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, “has become one of the easiest places in the world for corrupt kleptocrats around the world to hide money.”
“The difficulties of applying sanctions in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” sums up the Tax Justice Network’s Alex Cobham, “have highlighted the abject failure of current standards of financial transparency.”
The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile upever granderfortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,”saysPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.
The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” theNew York Timesjustreported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.
But the damage the wealth defense industry has wreaked upon the Western world — indeed the whole planet — goes beyond undermining the sanction squeeze on Russia’s oligarchs. These defenders of grand private fortune appear to have placed somewhere between $5 trillion and $8 trillion worldwide beyond the reach of tax collectors. Tax havens, as Annette Alstadsaeter of Norway’s Centre for Tax Researchtoldthe Washington Post last fall, have become “a contagion.”
And no nation has done more to spread this contagion than the United States. Anonymous American companies, one World Bank survey hasfound, played key roles in 85 percent of the over 150 cases of grand corruption that World Bank analysts examined.
New variants of this contagion typically originate in the United States as well. South Dakota has had a particularly consequential impact. At the end of the 20th century, the state’s political high command worked hand-in-glove with wealth defense industry lawyers and lobbyists to turned the “trust” from a tool for circumventing inheritance rulesinto a global“go-to vehicle for tax avoidance.” By 2010, deep pocketshad amassed$57 billion in South Dakota trusts. By 2020, that total had hit $367 billion.
The evolution of the trust instrument, notes Columbia Law School’s Katharina Pistor,illustrateshow today’s national legal systems “have become items on an international menu of options.” The super rich choose from this menu “the laws by which they wish to be governed.”
“The privileged few can decide how much to pay in taxes and which regulations to endure,” she continues. “And if legal obstacles cannot be overcome quite that easily, lawyers from leading global law firms will draft legislation to make a country compliant with the ‘best practices’ of global finance.”
We can’t literally see our wealth defenders at work. But we can feel their impact. Average-income people in rich countries,noteinequality researchers Joseph Stiglitz, Todd Tucker, and Gabriel Zucman, “now pay far higher taxes than major corporations.” These corporations and the rich who run them are basically enjoying a “free-ride on the rest of society,” and their tax avoidance “means less investment in infrastructure, education, and research.”
What can we do? We can fight back, and, at the global level, some reformers — like the University of Virginia Law School’s Ruth Mason — are even feeling optimistic about the struggles ahead.
For much of the last century, Masonnotes, a small club of rich nations working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, set international tax policy. The system they created rested on bilateral tax treaties designed to make sure that corporations doing business outside their home nation wouldn’t be taxed twice on the same income, once by their home country and once by their host.
In the resulting global tax order, nations “set their tax rates independently from each other,” and Mason’s research details how major corporations like Apple became adept at gaming the system. They moved “valuable intellectual property to low-tax jurisdictions,” then charged their related corporate entities in high-tax jurisdictions “artificially high licensing fees,” a maneuver that gained their entities in high-tax jurisdictions large tax deductions and their fee-charging entities a bargain-basement tax rate on their fee income.
In tax dork circles, tax-avoidance games like these go by the acronym of BEPS, short for “domestic tax base erosion and profit shifting.” The tricks of the BEPS trade, the OECD nowestimates, cost governments worldwide as much as a quarter-trillion dollars annually in lost revenue.
Policymakers in the 20th century, Mason notes, either saw corporate tax avoidance as “unproblematic” or “regarded the costs of curbing it as too high.” But that hands-off mindset, Mason argues, “ended abruptly with the 2008 financial crisis.” The resulting job losses and budget shortfalls led to a “new intolerance of corporate tax dodging” as one legislative hearing after anothermade widely publicastounding examples of corporate tax arrogance. One hearing in the UK disclosed that Amazon, source of the one of the world’s largest personal fortunes, had paid a miniscule £1 million in tax the previous year on £4 billion in sales. A U.S. Senate hearing revealed that Apple had subsidiaries that “filed full tax returns nowhere on earth.”
Amid the resulting furor, the major nations that make up the G20 realized they “needed to do something — or at least appear to do something — about corporate tax avoidance.” They delegated that task to the OECD, and that led to a “BEPS Project” that has had, Mason believes, a “profound effect” on international tax norms and institutions. The BEPS effort, she explains, has shifted the global tax discourse from preventing “double taxation” to ensuring “full taxation,” a phrasing that encompasses closing tax loopholes and preventing abusive tax planning.
Other tax reformers have a distinctly less sanguine take on evolving international tax norms. Yes,notetax scholars Stiglitz, Tucker, and Zucman, the global tax deal that emerged from the BEPS negotiations does move a fair-tax agenda forward, by, for instance, making it harder for multinationals “to exploit tax havens by establishing a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent on corporate profits.” But this tax rate remains “much lower than what working-class and middle-class people typically pay in high-income countries” — and “far lower” than the 40 to 50 percent rate that U.S. corporations faced “for all but four years from 1942 to 1987.”
Other critics see in the G20-backed effort an absence of the political will necessary to truly take on global oligarchic power. Many of these criticsare pushingfor a United Nations convention on tax issues, an idea the Tax Justice Network feels “is developing what may prove to be an unstoppable momentum.” Earlier this month, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and Eurodad, a network of 60 civil society organizations from 29 European countries, released a draft of what a UN tax convention could be.
“Repeated efforts to stop international tax dodging,” notes the draft author Tove Maria Ryding, “have resulted in only sticky plaster solutions, additional complexities, and rules that continue to be biased in favor of the rich.”
The groups behind the new UN convention draft, sheadds, hope the proposals in it “will help to kickstart a discussion about the fundamental reforms that we really need.”
That discussion has also begun within the United States. Early last year, before the Biden inauguration, Congress overturned a Trump veto and enacted legislation that, theAmerican Prospectapplauds, “requires the owners of all financial assets to disclose their true identity to regulatory agencies and the IRS.” The Biden Justice Department, meanwhile, haslauncheda new kleptocracy task force, focused on Russian oligarchs, that could serve as a model for broader anti-oligarch offensives.
But much more remans to be done. One example: The ENABLERS Act now pending before Congress targets a hole in the already existing Bank Secrecy Act that lets agents for oligarchs park their ill-gotten gains almost wherever in the United States they please.
“If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate, and accounting firms to look the other way,”saysRep. Tom Malinowski, the bill’s lead sponsor, “that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through.”
Advocates for a bold pushback against the wealth defense industry are calling for much more ambitious steps as well, from outlawing abusive trusts to investing big-time in tax enforcement — and substantially hiking overall tax rates on our most awesomely affluent.
State and local governments are also getting involved. In Vermont, New Jersey, and other states — and in cities like Los Angeles and San Jose — activists arepushing beyondnew disclosure rules and demanding extra taxes on mansions and penalties on the secretive deep pockets who spend mega-millions buying up condos as investments and then let them sit vacant, moves that distort the housing market at the expense of ordinary households.
The Ukraine war could end up activating still more advocacy against oligarchy. But the conventional political wisdom is already fixating on the notion that the defense industry will prove to be the war’s biggest long-term winner. Mainstream pundits are predicting big increases in military spending throughout the Western world.
If that outcome turns out to be the Ukraine war’s most lasting legacy, oligarchy — worldwide — will have triumphed.
As state legislators finalize their budgets for the year ahead, they should pursue tax and budget policies that align with three principles for an antiracist, equitable state response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To set states up for long-term success and a stronger recovery, lawmakers should:
Target aid to those most in need due to the pandemic and economic crises.
Advance short- and long-term antiracist and equitable policies to dismantle racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequities that non-dominant groups and identities experience.
Strengthen state revenue systems to sustain transformative, long-term investments in Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities and those with large numbers of immigrants.
As of December 2021, states and U.S. Territories have $80 billion remaining in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (FRF), which were provided under the American Rescue Plan. States should consider the three principles when deciding how to spend their remaining federal pandemic aid to uplift communities experiencing challenges exacerbated by the pandemic and to address racism, poverty, and other injustices. States also have flexibility in determining how to appropriate this aid. How they choose to spend these dollars can advance equitable, antiracist policies to build economic recovery and long-term opportunities for all families and communities.
For example, states and territories (as well as cities and counties, which also received FRF) can use the funds to:
Provide housing assistance.FRF can extend rental assistance programs originally funded through other sources such as the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. These programs help people avoid evictions by providing short-term assistance to cover the costs of housing and utilities. They can also provide targeted support to people who face additional barriers to housing, and therefore a greater risk of homelessness, such as those leaving jail or prison, people with substance use disorders, people with mental health conditions, and immigrants and their families. In places with limited housing supply, FRF can help develop and preserve affordable homes.
Expand food assistance. Black and Latinx households, especially those with children, are more likely to experience food hardship. FRF can provide food benefits and meal programs to those who need help now but whom existing programs don’t reach. States that plan well can use their own funds to extend these supports to advance long-term racial, ethnic, and economic equity.
Invest in K-12 extended learning and tutoring. Students of color and students from low-income families face barriers to educational opportunities due to historical discrimination. During the pandemic, many of these students lost months of learning, setting them back even more. States can use FRF to supplement initiatives to provide extended learning time and tutoring to help students recover the learning they missed and to strengthen K-12 education for children of color and those from low-income households.
To work toward the three principles, some states have directed their FRF to communities most affected by the pandemic by using aid to establish programs that promote workforce development, human services, public health, education, and more:
Illinois invested $4.2 million for grants and administrative expenses associated with legal assistance to migrant persons.
New Jersey appropriated $100 million for a Child Care Revitalization Fund to improve facilities, support employees, and provide workforce development programming. Job losses during the health and economic crisis have been concentrated in lower-paid industries such as child care, where women and people of color — including immigrants — are overrepresented. Targeting professional support to child care providers is important for early childhood development, families, and local economies.
Nevada spent $4 million to establish the Nevada First-Gen Network, a statewide program to assist students in grade 6 or higher who are prospective first-generation college students and have been negatively affected by the pandemic.
States have also used FRF to address racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequities and barriers by investing in policies and programs that provide targeted support to people with lower incomes and underrepresented groups:
Montana invested $2 million in its Individuals with Disabilities Employment Engagement Program to support individuals with disabilities to obtain and advance in employment, extending the capacity of existing workforce programs to reach more people.
New York City spent $3.7 million on community-driven strategies to promote mental health services in parts of the city — often with large numbers of Black, Latinx, Asian, and/or other people of color — that have historically lacked access to these services.
WashingtonState allocated $45 million for a new program that addresses food insecurity and supports local farmers and food businesses. It procures local food, focusing on underrepresented farmers and ranchers including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, to distribute to hunger relief organizations that serve communities of color and other marginalized communities.
States will need to invest more in historically excluded communities over the long term to overcome racial and ethnic inequities. This will require more revenue, which should be raised in ways that further advance equity. White supremacy and structural racism created — and perpetuate — disparities in power, resources, and opportunities, where the wealthiest 10 percent of white households hold nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Further, the upside-down nature of most state tax systems allows those with the most income to pay the least as a share of their income. Some states have begun to update their systems by raising new revenues to finance investments that broaden opportunity and promote equity. For example:
Washington, D.C. scaled back an ineffective tax incentive for technology companies and used the savings for a range of critical programs such as homelessness services and health care for people who are undocumented. D.C. also implemented a tax increase on high-income residents to fund permanent housing for residents experiencing homelessness, raise salaries for workers in early childhood education, and increase financial assistance for workers with low earnings through D.C.’s earned income tax credit.
New York adopted higher income taxes for millionaires. Income tax rates increased from 8.82 percent to 9.65 percent for households making over $1 million, to 10.3 percent for those making between $5 million and $25 million, and to 10.9 percent for those making over $25 million. With this new revenue, New York plans to invest in education and create a recovery grant program to assist small businesses affected by the pandemic.
New Mexico enacted a tax increase on health insurers that is projected to raise about $110 million annually to fund Affordable Care Act marketplace subsidies. New Mexico also adopted a new statewide refundable Child Tax Credit that will provide families up to $175 per child to help address child poverty and food insecurity.
The Biden administration’s decision to admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, announced last week in the wake of the president’s European tour, is a huge step in the rebuilding of the U.S.’s once-vaunted refugee program after years in which the Trump administration all but neutralized it. However, the program must expand further if the U.S. plans to attempt to accommodate the steep increase in refugees that the coming year will likely bring.
At the urging of Stephen Miller, Trump’s mastermind of all things nasty when it came to making life miserable for immigrants, Donald Trump drastically reduced the numbers of refugees admitted yearly. By the time he signed off on his final presidential finding on the issue in the fall of 2020, he had set a refugee cap of 15,000 per year. It was a shockingly low number, barely one-sixth of the number admitted in Barack Obama’s final year in office, and a mere fraction of the 231,000 admitted in 1980; and — since refugee resettlement agencies receive much of their funding based on the numbers they are expected to resettle — it led to an evisceration of the U.S.’s resettlement programs.
The horrendous notion of massively constricting the numbers admitted was made even worse by a series of travel bans, largely targeting Muslim-majority countries, that made it nearly impossible for refugees from Yemen, Syria, Sudan, and several other countries experiencing widespread violence to enter the United States. In other words, the U.S. actively shut out refugees from places where the need was greatest.
Trump was determined to batten down the hatches against what he — and the far right in Europe — viewed as a tsunami of refuge seekers: In 2015-16, the period immediately before Trump’s election, more than 5 million asylum seekers and refugees from conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa headed to Europe to try to escape bloodshed and economic collapse. Trump slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel for making a “very catastrophic mistake” in liberalizing Germany’s asylum policies, and said that more migrants were going to Europe as a result. And Trump determined that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to go down the same road.
Biden came into office promising to increase the refugee cap to 125,000. He then ran into a buzzsaw of criticism when, already attacked from the right for being “weak” on immigration because of the surging number of asylum seekers crossing the southern border, he appeared to walk back this pledge in early 2021. Faced with a revolt from within Democratic ranks at this campaign promise betrayal, he reversed course again, initially raising the cap to 62,500, and then, in fall 2021, finally increasing it again, to the long-promised 125,000.
Yet, with the Afghanistan and now Ukraine crises upending the lives of millions, even that aspirational number may prove inadequate to meet the vast refugee resettlement challenges of the moment.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the country’s rapid collapse back into brutal Taliban rule, the U.S. airlifted more than 130,000 people out of Afghanistan; by the late autumn, officials were estimating that about 50,000 had already arrived, or would soon do so, in the United States. Now, barely seven months later, Russia’s assault on Ukraine has unleashed the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, with nearly 4 million refugees having crossed over to other countries, and millions more internally displaced in Ukraine in barely a month of fighting.
That the U.S. is opening its doors to large numbers of refugees, some of whom will be granted permanent residency under the refugee resettlement program, many of whom will be given temporary status under the “humanitarian parole” program once they arrive, is a huge step in the right direction for U.S. refugee policy.
But, for many aid agency workers, the unthawing of the refugee resettlement program is coming at far too slow a pace. Most Afghans were admitted under the humanitarian parole program rather than the refugee resettlement program, meaning that they aren’t on a pathway to permanent residency, and it looks like most Ukrainians will be admitted this way as well. For while the refugee cap was, indeed, raised to 125,000, that’s more a long-term goal than a reflection of on-the-ground realities. Indeed, so far this year, according to State Department data, a mere sliver of that total number, only about 8,000 refugees, has actually been admitted. The processing of refugees continues to be bogged down by staffing shortages and a denuded infrastructure — the legacy of Trump’s four years of unrelenting hostility to refugee resettlement.
The Ukrainian catastrophe, coming so fast on the heels of Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban, has shown just how vital — and also how fragile — refugee resettlement infrastructure is. U.S. efforts to isolate the Taliban, through freezing Afghanistan’s central bank assets, as Biden has done, have had ripple effects on civilians, further plunging the state into economic crisis and further fueling the exodus of desperate, hungry people.
In an era of massive population upheavals, due to wars, climate change, disease and the rise of brutal narco-states in parts of the world, wealthy democracies have a particular obligation to shoulder their share of the weight in resettling those displaced. President Biden is on the right track, both in raising the refugee cap and in announcing that large number of Ukrainians will be eligible for entry into the U.S. Now, he needs to find ways to increase the numbers admitted via the traditional refugee resettlement program route, and to rapidly channel funding into programs that have too often in recent years been forced to make destructive cuts.
The above quotation greets readers on the home page of a new Zinn Education Project report on state education standards on Reconstruction — and how this crucial history is taught, and mistaught, across the country.
Reconstruction refers to the period following the Civil War until around 1877 when a radical movement for Black power and wealth redistribution swept the country. The consequences of Reconstruction’s unfinished revolution surround us, permeate our experience of daily life, provide crucial lessons for understanding our world today and suggest important methods for uprooting systemic racism. And for that very reason, guardians of the status quo have long sought to hide Reconstruction’s unprecedented advancements for Black people from students in a concerted effort to deny them the anti-racist lessons this history affords.
With the current assault on education, the attack on truthful teaching about Reconstruction has dramatically intensified. Some 41 states have introduced legislation or pursued other measures that inhibit conversations about race and seek to mandate that educators conceal the history of structural racism in the U.S. Fifteen states have actually imposed these restrictions.
“Systematic racism should not be taught to our children,” State Sen. Michael McLendon argued during the Mississippi legislature debate on the anti-critical race theory bill, which he introduced. Quite evidently, he doesn’t mind perpetuating systemic racism by sponsoring racist bills, he just has a problem with students learning about it. Upon signing this bill into law, Gov. Tate Reeves claimed that teaching about systemic racism serves only to “humiliate” students. Historian Stephen West pointed out the irony and familiarity of this language, which was used during Reconstruction by congressional Klan supporters “causelessly humiliated” by strides toward racial justice.
From Alabama to Arizona, from Missouri to North Carolina, educators around the country have told the Zinn Education Project they fear these laws will further restrict Reconstruction education, which was already woefully neglected and distorted. Lee R. White is a high school social studies teacher in Winthrop, Iowa, one of the states that ban teaching about racism, sexism, and other so-called “divisive concepts.” White says that “the political climate of the conservatives pushing back against teaching anything negative about our history” threatens to seriously interfere with the teaching of Reconstruction. Denny McCabe, a retired Iowa educator, noted that these efforts could create a “chilling effect on current teachers who need to teach about white supremacy and racism in order to do justice to the topic.”
Our report, “Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction” — the first comprehensive study of all state standards on Reconstruction — found that states’ established education standards overwhelmingly ignore the role of white supremacy in ending Reconstruction, reproduce a racist and false framing of Reconstruction, and obscure the contributions of Black people to Reconstruction’s achievements. Only Massachusetts’ standards mention white supremacy and its direct link to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the passage of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, and the defeat of Reconstruction. Georgia’s “Standards of Excellence” instruct teachers to “Compare and contrast the goals and outcomes of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan [KKK].” (The Freedmen’s Bureau was a government agency founded to help provide freed people with the shelter, clothing, supplies and education they needed after the civil war; the KKK is a terrorist organization. Asking students to compare the two creates a dangerous false moral equivalence.) Zinn Education Project curriculum writer Ursula Wolfe-Rocca describes some of the other problems with state Reconstruction standards:
In many states, Reconstruction only appears on a list of topics or themes teachers should address for a particular time span; in Maine, Reconstruction doesn’t even merit that much space. Maine’s standards define the period 1844–1877 as “Regional tensions and the Civil War.” Connecticut too leaves out Reconstruction in its list of themes like Westward Expansion, Industrialization, and the Rise of Organized Labor.
Why are the lessons of Reconstruction under attack or hidden from students? Because the right-wing attack on voting rights, the attack on critical race theory and the escalation of open white supremacy are all aided by what Professor Henry A. Giroux calls the “violence of organized forgetting.” Giroux describes the violence of organized forgetting as an effort by elites to hide vital lessons of the past that could empower social movements such as “the historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance [which] have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.”
Given the severity of this intellectual violence, we must defend ourselves with what I will call the “healing of organized remembering” — collective efforts, in schools, but also in social movements, to recover vital historical lessons about challenges to injustice that have been concealed. Retrieving the legacy of Reconstruction is one of the most important undertakings towards this healing.
Reconstruction was an era of mass social movements and unprecedented advancement for racial justice. With the system of slavery just recently abolished, more than 1,500 Black Americans were elected to office, many in majority-Black districts whose people could vote for the first time. In the 1860s and 1870s, 16 Black Americans served in Congress, about half of whom were formerly enslaved. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — known as the Reconstruction Amendments — were added to the Constitution, and, respectively, abolished slavery (with the shameful exception to those who are imprisoned for a crime), extended citizenship rights to Black people and granted Black men the right to vote. The exhilarating foment during this original era of Black Power are captured by the report’s description of Reconstruction:
Black people organized to fulfill freedom’s promise. They struggled to set the terms of their own labor, advocated for state-funded public education, access to land, the right to vote, and the right to serve on juries. They participated in state constitutional and political conventions, built churches and mutual aid organizations, and ran for and held political office at every possible level of government.
Yet the forces of white supremacy led a brutal counterrevolution that ultimately defeated Reconstruction. One of the primary strategies to dismantle Reconstruction was the war on Black education — just as today’s GOP attack on what it calls critical race theory is a centerpiece of its strategy for reelection and reversing the gains of the uprising for Black lives. Black people understood that there was no true emancipation without education, and after the Civil War, they set about building the first public school system in the South. Consequently, white supremacists were threatened by the hundreds of schools built by Black people. Historian Adam Fairclough explains, “The root of the issue was the same as ever: white control over Black labor. Planters and landlords worried that education diminished their supply of cheap labor by drawing Blacks from the country to the city, away from tenancy, sharecropping, and day labor.” Fairclough quotes one white resident of North Carolina saying, “To give him any education at all takes him out of the field and he is not worth anything to the farmer.” This sentiment was behind the Klan and other terrorists burning down well over 600 Black schools between 1864 and 1876.
The attack on truthful education today must be understood in this historical context. Black education and anti-racist instruction have always posed a threat to an American social order built on a foundation of structural racism. The irony is the attack on critical race theory in education confirms one of the central claims of the theory: that any advancements for racial justice will be met with a white supremacist backlash. This was the case when Black people started the Reconstruction revolution, and it’s the case today in the wake of the 2020 uprising for Black lives, described by The Washington Post as the broadest protest in U.S. history.
A concerted effort has been made throughout history to distort, sequester and deny the strides toward a multiracial democracy that Black people made during this incredible period. And yet, racial justice organizers, Black scholars and social movements have always kept alive the true legacy of Reconstruction. In his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois debunked the white supremacist “Lost Cause” narrative that advanced the pseudohistory of a noble Confederacy defending itself from northern aggression. Black leaders often referred to the civil rights movement as the Second Reconstruction and Martin Luther King Jr. very much understood the importance of the first one, saying,
White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high. The Reconstruction [era] was a period in which Black men had a small measure of freedom of action … far from being the tragic era white historians described, it was the only period in which democracy existed in the South.”
Today, educators, students and parents are building a movement to teach truthfully about structural racism and raising their voices against the violence perpetrated on students’ intellectual development when Reconstruction is erased in school. Over 8,000 educators have signed the Zinn Education Project’s pledge to teach the truth about structural racism and oppression. In an open letter aimed at school administrations around the country, over 200 scholars of U.S. history urge “school districts to devote more time and resources to the teaching of the Reconstruction era in upper elementary, middle, and high school U.S. history and civics courses.”
The task that remains for those of us interested in making Black lives matter to the institutions and political structures of our society is to complete — and extend — the efforts that were undertaken during Reconstruction. As Ann Arbor middle school teacher Rachel Toon said, “Reconstruction is the single most important era for students to understand. Everything that is happening in their world today can be traced back to the way Reconstruction happened — and how it was thwarted.”
A favorite quote from Stanley Kunitz, two-time poet laureate of the United States, hangs on a wall in my classroom: “Poets,” he writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.”
Poets, yes, by all means, and teachers and students too, along with citizens and community members, researchers and artists, residents of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy — everyone, yes, and with a special duty and burden for teachers.
I’ve taught for more than 50 years, and my students today are all studying to become teachers themselves. They’re an idealistic bunch: They all want to do meaningful work, they all want to do good, and mostly they want to unleash the dreams of youth and change the world — step by step, one student at a time.
The idealism Kunitz describes is a vision most of my students aspire to — not a submissive naïveté nor the willful abandonment of reality, but rather a kind of leaning toward an ideal, embarking on the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights and understandings, and that complex, fugitive concept called “truth.” Of course, they fall short — falling short is guaranteed, for enlightenment is always partial, and the truth, in any finished sense, always elusive — but that in no way diminishes the significance of their labor.
This immense journey asks these teachers to reject dogma, orthodoxy and superstition; to unstick themselves from a fantasized past when everything was settled and putatively perfect; and to dismiss the idea that the present moment is in any sense a point of arrival with nothing much up ahead. It encourages them to disregard notions of a fixed, preordained future with every conflict resolved, every synthesis achieved, every mystery explained. It urges them to get busy in projects of repair and renewal, posing new questions, struggling with unique problems. They feel — mostly — up to the challenge.
But, of course, this is not an easy time to become a teacher: The perennial problems of too few resources and too little support are now joined by a weaponized opposition to curiosity and inquiry itself. When Texas State Representative Matt Krause released a list of 850 books and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. When the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, aTennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences,” including Harry Potter and Twilight, were fed to the flames. When Florida passed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary made its bigoted subtext explicit, calling it an “anti-grooming” law.
As governors and senators join thetroglodyte chorus, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning authors like Art Spiegelman is in itself, the main targets are my idealistic students and English teachers anywhere in the country.
The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policy. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: You need no one’s permission to interrogate the world.
We’re reading The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht in my class now, and the drama, the tensions and the contradictions feel eerily contemporary. Galileo’s breath-taking discoveries about the movement of the planets and the stars ignite in him the desire to pursue a particularly radical idealism: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares boldly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.” Galileo seems at first unstoppable: “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, they are embarked on a great voyage — like us, who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.”
Here Galileo ups the ante, questioning Church orthodoxy and challenging the establishment in the realm of its own authority. For the Church, the great voyage is a sanctioned and planned journey, the steps mapped out with precision and certainty, and with all the support we will ever need in the institution of the Church itself.
Clearly more than theories of astronomy are at stake. The findings of his research, surely, but also the joy, the excitement, the reckless hope, all mark Galileo as a radical visionary — he wanted to open people’s minds and change the world.
Galileo’s struggle is punctuated with joy and grief, hope and despair, pain and torment and pressure, but when he finally capitulates and denounces what he knows to be true, when he is received back “into the ranks of the faithful” by the Church, he is exiled from humanity — by his own words. In the end, he is confronted by a former student, one of his crestfallen disciples: “Many on all sides followed you with their eyes and ears,” he says, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching — in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”
The liberty of teaching and the right to think at all is a right that is in deep dispute in our schools now, and in the larger society.
Since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened in its “war on terror” iteration in 2002, there has been a tendency among liberal critics to hold it in stark relief to the “normal” civilian legal system. The cruelty and illegitimacy of Guantánamo Bay was contrasted against the inherent perceived legitimacy of U.S. courts and prisons. For as long as the detention center and the various tribunals have been around, it’s been common to hear arguments against them from human rights NGOs based on the efficacy and security of the civilian apparatus — the success rate of terrorism prosecutions, or the fact that no prisoner has ever escaped from a supermax prison.
There is no question that U.S. interrogators carried out unspeakable torture at Guantánamo Bay, that officials held prisoners incommunicado and without having been convicted of a crime, and operated for years with almost no oversight or visibility from outside watchdog groups. However, all of those elements are present to one degree or another in the normal incarceration regime in the United States, a point police and prison abolitionists have been making for the duration of the war on terror.
There has always been a fear that the abuses of Guantánamo Bay will migrate into the rest of the U.S. legal system. The reality is that many of them — including torture, indefinite pretrial detention and lack of oversight — have been there all along.
Ongoing plea negotiations in the 9/11 trial at Guantánamo Bay underscore just how outdated the conventional paradigm is. The five defendants in the trial are now in talks with prosecutors to bring the capital punishment case to close, but, according to The New York Times, one of the key requirements from the defendants in the prior round of negotiations in 2017 was that they be able to serve their sentences at Guantánamo, “where they are able to eat and pray in groups.” They were reportedly adamant that they didn’t want to be sent to the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where, as the Times writes, “federal inmates are held in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day.” In the current round of negotiations, the Timesreports that the five defendants want “guarantees that, even after their convictions, they would be able to eat and pray communally,” though they aren’t “pressing for a particular venue.” The ongoing fear that they could wind up back in extreme isolation, whether they’re held in military or civilian custody, reveals the baseline cruelty that permeates all U.S. prisons and detention facilities.
For prison abolitionists, the news that the five defendants are concerned about how they would be treated if transferred to a stateside prison is not surprising at all. “Finding that prisoners would reject transfer to a U.S. federal prison in Colorado in favor of remaining where they are in Guantánamo isn’t shocking. While we understand how egregiously torturous conditions at Guantánamo are, all prisons are deadly,” Woods Ervin, media director at Critical Resistance, an international prison abolitionist organization, told Truthout in an emailed statement. “We shouldn’t imagine that other prisons are ‘more gentle,’ especially under conditions of solitary confinement. Prisoners often push to remain under conditions where they can maintain their communities, collective practices, and shared fights for their freedom. The issue here is about prisoners making a collective, self-determined choice over the conditions they’re surviving under.” The conditions at the Florence supermax are horrific, even by U.S. standards. Incarcerated people describe cells made entirely of concrete, including the bed, where prisoners are kept isolated for 23 hours a day. Recreational time is an hour in a small cage. People there go for weeks, if not longer, without seeing the sky, or a highway, or any reminder at all of the outside world. It’s not hard to understand why the 9/11 defendants would want to condition any negotiation on avoiding that kind of treatment, either in a federal prison or post-conviction at Guantanamo Bay.
James Connell, an attorney for co-defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, confirmed the existence of the plea negotiations, which were first reported by The New York Times, in a statement posted to his defense team’s official Twitter account. “Negotiated agreements are part of all criminal cases, and negotiations have taken place throughout the case,” Connell said in the statement. “This process is not unusual: the vast majority of capital cases in the United States are resolved by plea.”
Alka Pradhan, a human rights lawyer who also represents al-Baluchi, said that the negotiations “represent one path to ending military commissions, stopping indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay, and providing justice.” Military commissions are the novel legal apparatus in effect at Guantánamo Bay that combines military and civilian law. Connell and Pradhan declined to comment for this article.
The 9/11 trial at Guantánamo Bay is arguably in its most precarious state since the current iteration of the case began in 2012, when the five co-defendants were arraigned before a military judge. That judge, Col. James Pohl, is long gone, having retired before the case could advance beyond pretrial motions. Three judges have succeeded him, and an additional candidate had to recuse himself after being assigned the case but before he could sit on the bench.
The complications don’t stop there. The former chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, has also left the case, following clashes with the Biden administration about the applicability of international law at Guantánamo. Martins also served as the de facto chief spokesperson for the military commission system, which has been beleaguered by complications since Congress first created it in 2006, and updated in 2009. For nearly a decade, the defense and prosecution have argued about the rules of that system — from the mechanics of compelling witnesses to a remote military base on occupied, foreign soil, to the applicability of the Bill of Rights in the proceedings. The admissibility of evidence derived from torture has been central to the hearings, and remains unresolved.
The COVID pandemic also essentially shut down the entire trial for 500 days.
There are still 38 men held at Guantánamo Bay, 10 of whom have been charged in the military commissions system. Of the remaining prisoners, 19 have been cleared for transfer to a third-party country if security conditions are met. Seven have not been charged with a crime, but also aren’t cleared for transfer — this group is often referred to as “forever prisoners.” Two have been convicted, including Majid Khan, who also took a plea. Khan was tortured in the same CIA program as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the 9/11 “mastermind.” Last year, a military jury — known as a panel — urged leniency in sentencing Khan, who was the first victim of CIA torture to describe his treatment in a courtroom. The top sentencing official, known as the Convening Authority, approved a 10-year sentence and applied time served, meaning his term was finished on March 1 of this year. That doesn’t mean he’s free to go, however. The U.S. government reserves the right to continue to detain Guantánamo prisoners even after their time is served if a suitable third-party country hasn’t been identified. Khan’s lawyers are now calling for him to be transferred without delay.
The response from the military panel to Khan’s treatment underlines the complications of bringing the 9/11 case to trial. Each of the defendants in that case was tortured by the CIA, including waterboarding, rape and sexual threats, and repeated physical and psychological abuse. Recently disclosed legal filings revealed that Ammar al-Baluchi was used as a training tool: His torture was “on-the-job practice” for other interrogators. If the Khan case is any indicator, that kind of treatment would heavily mitigate against a death penalty sentence, even in a case as notorious as the 9/11 trial.
For as much reasonable worry as there is about Guantánamo Bay policies seeping into the civilian system, at least some of the torture enacted at Guantánamo in the early days of the war on terror was exported from U.S. prisons. Charles Graner, one of the few U.S. army soldiers held accountable for torture committed at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, “cut his teeth as first a guard / lieutenant at Pennsylvania’s max-security state prison, SCI-Greene,” Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, told Truthout in an emailed statement. “It was here that Graner routinely abused prisoners who were ‘in the hole’ (solitary confinement), just before he was activated for the reserves and sent to Iraq. I was on a unit (confined in solitary) with him [Graner].”
“This is just one example of how the U.S.’s domestic torture within its solitary confinement units [is] exported as part of its so-called war on terror,” Saleem Holbrook added.
Much of the abuse and torture the U.S. government has carried out in the wars it has waged since 2001 have been forgotten, ignored or justified. The image rehabilitation attempts of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others responsible for creating the torture and kidnapping programs are proof of that. But much of the abuse that happens inside prison walls is ignored as well, made deliberately invisible to perpetuate an unjust system of social control. The ongoing plea negotiations in the 9/11 case are the most recent example of how blurred the lines between these systems are, and that it’s never clear that the damaging influence only travels one way. Those seeking to find justice by closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay should also ask whether justice is possible so long as any prison exists in the United States.
Three weeks ago, congressional Democrats dumped $15.6 billion in funding for COVID pandemic aid from the $1.5 trillion federal spending bill. When it happened, my knees wobbled. It is one thing to speak sunshine and roses about the current state of the crisis in an election year; it is quite another to close out funding to maintain the level of success we have achieved. If this were a ground war, it would be tantamount to sending the army home just as the enemy’s gates were coming into view.
Upon consideration, I could grudgingly see the logic of it … the Washington D.C. logic, anyway. Congressional Republicans were prepared to fight to the death over “new spending,” and a tussle like that regarding COVID money, in what had already been an agonizingly protracted budget fight, could have doomed the entire bill. That would have ended humanitarian funding for Ukraine, a number of climate protections, funding for child care and public education, as well as money to keep the federal government open and funded through September.
Fine, I thought at the time, cut the funding, whatever. As soon as the ink is dry on this budget bill, however, you congressfolk better get yourselves back to the drawing board and get this COVID funding nailed down. We are not nearly out of the woods yet, new variants are on the march, and our defenses will wither away before yet another onslaught. This, I thought three weeks ago, was common sense, enlightened self-interest. I watched, and I waited.
Three weeks later, and nothing on that front has happened. This fight for our very lives has been marred from the beginning by deliberate delusion and rampaging ignorance on the part of both government and the public sector. This latest fiasco, after everything we have learned and endured, absolutely takes the cake.
Dr. Vivek Murthy is the U.S. surgeon general. Dr. David Kessler is the chief science officer for the U.S. Covid-19 Response Team. The pair teamed up to pen a plea in the pages of The New York Times:
The federal government is running out of funds to provide Americans, especially those who are uninsured, with Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. Our efforts to sustain other critical elements of the public health response, from Covid-19 surveillance to the global vaccination campaign, are also now at risk. If the funding does not materialize, we will find ourselves in a far weaker position, struggling to keep up with a constantly evolving virus that will continue to threaten our health, our economy and our peace of mind.
Now, for the first time, we cannot order enough vaccines to provide boosters for all Americans if a fourth dose is deemed necessary in the fall. If we need variant-specific vaccines, we will not have the funds to secure them, deliver them or administer them. Last week, we were forced to cut our shipments of lifesaving monoclonal antibodies to states by 35 percent — and we anticipate running out of monoclonal antibodies later this spring. We will not be able to continue making home tests available, and the critical surveillance efforts that help us anticipate new waves and variants will be compromised.
A number of states, including Colorado and Minnesota, have begun scaling back or closing down COVID testing and vaccination sites. Test and vaccine manufacturers are cutting back on production. This is taking place just as the numbers of people getting vaccinated has all but fallen off the table. The FDA has announced authorization for at-risk people 50 and over to get a second booster shot, but is doing next to nothing to promote the booster’s availability or effectiveness.
“Some U.S. health care providers are informing uninsured people they can no longer be tested for the virus free of charge and will have to pay for the service,” reports the Times. “[A] a fund established to reimburse doctors for care for uninsured Covid patients was no longer accepting claims for testing and treatment ‘due to lack of sufficient funds.’” As one front-line medical professional noted on Twitter, “The rationing of COVID-care by ability to pay begins.”
And hovering over all that, this: The B.A.2 subvariant is out there, growing stronger by the day as it spreads its influence throughout the population. After B.A.2 will almost certainly come another variant, and another, because this thing is not nearly over. In point of fact, it may never be completely over. Cutting that COVID funding from the budget with no intention of replacing it is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun.
Back to work, Congress. You giddily authorized $768 billion for spending on war. $15 billion to hold the line on COVID barely registers on the budgetary Richter Scale. Get this done, now.
:quality(100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thesummit/K7VPNA5F3NCMNPPT6JYPS7FEKM.jpg){kind=link}
:quality(100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thesummit/25V5GHWV5ZGX5COE6KV53RNSTI.jpg){kind=link}
:quality(100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thesummit/YXP4YKDBUFA3BFTGO2CO44VKTQ.jpg){kind=link}
:quality(100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thesummit/WEUEVXXPLBGUZOOP4DTLOTLB6A.jpg){kind=link}