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Category: Op-Ed

  • With All Eyes on Ukraine, the Fight Against Climate Change Is Falling Behind

    What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war?

    They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet.

    “Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our Maryland home. I wasn’t certain, I replied hesitantly. (Not exactly the most reassuring answer from a mother to a question I ask myself every day.) We had just left my younger child at home, because she started wheezing when she stepped into that already more than 100-degree July morning.

    A few summers earlier, during a visit to a town about 4,500 miles away near St. Petersburg, Russia, an elderly friend of mine said to me, “When did it become so hot?” Like my daughter, she was breathing hard and continually glancing back toward her doorway.

    Since the 1990s, as an anthropologist of human rights and war, I’ve traveled to Russia. I was then visiting the farm where my friend grew crops to add to the food she purchased with a government stipend she got as a survivor of the Nazis’ siege of her city during World War II. She gestured towards the apples in her orchard and shook her head. Canned each fall, they provided part of her diet, but fewer of them seemed to be growing each year. Would she die of hunger and heat, I wondered, after surviving a war?

    Usually, when I brought up my worries about our warming climate, she would just joke. “We could use a little global warming in Russia,” she would say and gesture at the icicle-laced landscape around her wooden home. I often heard some version of that satirical refrain in cities across Russia where, in winter, the air can grow so cold it stings your lungs.

    On that last visit of mine, however, it was clear that both the frost and the heat were becoming ever more severe and unpredictable. Among acquaintances and activist colleagues alike, I found a growing awareness of environmental issues like deforestation and water pollution. But they were careful in what they said, since Russian nongovernmental organizations regularly faced threats and even politically motivated charges that could force them to close.

    Still, across Russia, I had also seen examples of local authorities listening to such activists and sometimes making small changes like halting logging projects to protect a community’s food supplies or stopping construction that’s polluting local wells. And increasingly, climate change was growing harder even for Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin, to ignore, with Siberia recently all too literally on fire and its melting permafrost creating a “methane time bomb” of greenhouse gases that will help drive heating globally in a potentially disastrous way.

    The Environmental Costs of War

    It seems ironic, though not exactly surprising, that, by invading Ukraine last month, yet another leader who claims to care about humanity’s future started a new war (just what we needed!) on this planet. And that decision has left me haunted by images of climate change at war — the exhaust emanating from the back-to-back traffic of those driving away from Ukrainian cities like Kyiv, as millions of civilians continue to flee the devastating bombardments of the Russian military. Or think of the smoke above the military base in western Ukraine that Russia attacked or the footage of the desperate residents of the besieged port city of Mariupol burning firewood to stay warm.

    In 2011, I helped found Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which took on the task of tracking first the human and financial costs of the American global war on terror and now of armed conflicts like the one currently unfolding in Ukraine. As that Russian invasion continues so disastrously, what should be obvious to all of us is that any war will only further exacerbate another killer on this planet — and that killer, of course, is climate change.

    We started the Costs of War Project exactly because the true casualties and financial costs of armed conflict are notoriously difficult to calculate, given deliberate government obfuscation, not to speak of the chaos of battle. But there’s another cost that’s becoming all too clear, one we need to recognize. Consider the massive amounts of energy expended to fly fighter jets, or fire missiles, or move and supply soldiers, or send a convoy of tanks toward Kyiv. All of that, devastating in itself, now also becomes part of another war entirely, the human war that’s heating this planet and already affecting ever more of its nearly eight billion inhabitants.

    Modern warfare, after all, is disturbingly energy intensive. Consider just a single mission in 2017 when two U.S. B2-B Stealth Bombers flew about 12,000 miles to strike Islamic State targets in Libya. They alone emitted about 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases. Consider this as well: we know that the U.S. military’s greenhouse gas emissions annually are larger than those of countries like Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden. And forget the Russians for a moment: the U.S. still has military operations in more than 85 countries (and counting!).

    Worse yet, fighting a war means diverting energy and resources to killing rather than to sustainable development. Countries involved, even peripherally, in such conflicts are likely to have a far more limited capacity to deal with that other war, the environmental one. Take, for example, Italy and Germany in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Faced with the need to replace natural gas and other fuel delivered from Russia, Italy now has provisional plans to reopen previously shut coal plants; while Germany, faced with an even greater energy crisis without Russian energy supplies, may now delay plans to close its last coal plants until 2030. Both of those are small climate disasters. Obviously, there’s no way of imagining when Ukraine’s cities will be able to deal with climate change again. The now-destroyed Mariupol is a prime example. Once labeled by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development’s Green Cities Program as one of the most “engaged” cities for its efforts to invest in renewable energy and clean up water pollution, it’s now in a desperate struggle for its own survival.

    Similarly, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, since the start of the war between Ukraine’s military and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region in 2014, the main power plant there has had to use reserves of low-grade, high-polluting fuel. The higher-grade kind once supplied by the central government of Ukraine is no longer available. Other impacts of this war and wars like it include clear-cutting forests to house refugees and powering camps with gas generators. Makeshift, hazardous methods of waste disposal like U.S. burn pits on military bases in Iraq were another example of the environmentally destructive methods so often sanctioned under war conditions.

    The U.S. and Its Climate Inaction

    Lately, headlines warning of environmental catastrophe have been thoroughly displaced (to the extent they even existed) by headlines about war. We’re all talking about the possibility of a World War III, but there are far too few conversations about the climate impact of the military buildup already affecting Europe so radically.

    Consider it typical of our moment (and U.N. Secretary General António Guterres the exception) that President Biden essentially skipped climate change in his State of the Union address, even as he drew bipartisan applause for calling on Americans to unite in support of Ukraine. A wildly scaled-down version of his Build Back Better spending bill that might once have channeled $3.5 trillion towards investment in social services and clean energy didn’t even muster sufficient votes in his own party to make it through the Senate. (Thank you, coal magnate Joe Manchin!)

    Yet just two weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, a bipartisan Senate voted 68-31 on a $1.5 trillion government spending bill that authorized $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine. The package includes sending tens of thousands of U.S. troops to NATO countries, paying for the $350 million in weaponry this country has already sent to the Ukrainian military, our intelligence aid to that country, and money to help enforce sanctions against Russia. And it’s clear that the spigot has just been turned on. The Biden administration added another $800 million in weapons and protective gear for Ukraine’s military by week three of the war. Most recently, it committed $1 billion more to assist European countries in accepting Ukrainian refugees, while vowing to admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees to U.S. soil.

    The human costs of war, of course, continue to unfold day by day as parts of Ukraine are destroyed and thousands of people on both sides are killed in the fighting, though estimates of the numbers vary widely. That’s part of the problem. Calculating war’s true costs takes many years, while even before the smoke clears another war, an environmental one whose casualties will, in the long run, be staggering, is gearing up, barely noticed by so many.

    Environmental Carnage, Then and Now

    Climate change is affecting peoples’ health, the natural environment, and our infrastructure everywhere. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, these effects, including intensifying extreme weather, a greater frequency and spread of diseases, severe future water shortages for roughly half the global population annually, and more frequent flooding and droughts, were intensifying even before the latest war began.

    Scientists say that, given the world’s current rate of energy consumption and the temperature change that accompanies it, we should by 2100 expect outcomes of this sort: a five-fold increase in extreme weather events like flooding or wildfires; a leap in the percentage of the global population exposed to deadly heat stress from 48% to 76%; more than a billion coastal inhabitants adversely affected by rising seas and other climate risks by mid-century; and 183 million additional malnourished people by then.

    Somewhere in this flood of bad climate news, however, there may prove to be a strange silver lining: such a range of potential climate crises that pay no attention to borders should ultimately have the potential to connect us to our geopolitical enemies (though this seems even less likely than it did when the Ukraine war began, now that Putin’s climate envoy has resigned in protest). The development of climate diplomacy has never been more urgent, since without collective action aimed at creating a carbon neutral world by 2050, we’ll all lose this fight.

    In 2010, I took a four-day train trip from St. Petersburg, Russia, to the Krasnodar region near Ukraine, for a friend’s wedding. The heat that July was already stifling. Drought had led to wildfires that were sweeping across European Russia, blanketing Moscow in putrid smoke and reportedly resulting in tens of thousands of excess deaths from various causes related to heat, pollution, and the fires themselves.

    Like me, other passengers opened the windows of our sleeper cars for a breeze only to find the air so smoky it covered our faces in soot within minutes. At one point, a group of new Russian army recruits, skinny adolescents with acne cratering their faces, boarded my car. They joked about how the air made them feel like they’d been smoking all day, when they were trying not to so that they could carry out whatever mission lay ahead of them in Russia’s conflict-ridden borderlands. (Putin’s crew was then fighting a counterinsurgency war in nearby Chechnya.) The soldiers scraped together their spare change and insisted on preparing meals for us all to share from goods purchased in outdoor markets where the train made stops.

    During that trip 12 years ago, it already felt as though something was changing in terms of Russia’s relationship to the world. It was becoming harder for journalists to write critically about the government, particularly its military. Luxury restaurants, car dealerships, and cosmetics stores were popping up, yet ordinary Russians were still struggling to make ends meet.

    As that train stopped in small towns, grandmothers and children holding paper trays of homemade chicken cutlets and cucumbers for passengers to buy looked so much more wind-worn and soot-covered than we did. At one stop, a policeman in his fifties, with his wife and two kids, heading home to Chechnya, joined me in my cabin. They’d been on vacation in Crimea, which Ukraine still controlled then. “Did you know that it had once belonged to Russia?” he asked me. It was easier, he added, for his family to go there when he was a kid and Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, but it was beautiful and I should visit. He and his wife took turns wiping their children’s sooty faces with wet washcloths. “My God, when did this heat get so bad?” he asked not exactly me, but the air, the planet.

    And it’s true, I’ve never forgotten the heat that enveloped us all then and my early sense of our shared humanity in the face of a changing climate. Of course, as anyone in the American West who experienced the record fires, heat domes, and megadrought of the last year knows, it’s only been getting worse.

    As different as our all-too-fragile democracy still thankfully is from Russia’s autocracy, what we do have in common is short-sightedness. It causes the political class in both countries to focus on military solutions — remember the disastrous Global War on Terror? — to geopolitical problems with deep historical roots. What if we had marshalled the support of intermediaries like Finland or Israel back when Volodymyr Zelensky first reached out to Putin upon taking office as Ukraine’s president in 2019? What if long ago Washington had declared that Ukraine would never be a candidate for membership in NATO? Perhaps today its president wouldn’t be pleading for a NATO no-fly zone that could take the world to the existential edge of nuclear war.

    What might still make a difference would be nonviolent, diplomatic steps to protect the victims of this war, paving the way for diplomacy to triumph over militarism and sustainable development over destruction. It makes me sick to my stomach that the window to act is closing for the people I love, near and far. Not just the horrific killing and destruction of the moment, but the long-term suffering likely to come from the environmental damage we’re causing should impel us all to call for a major diplomatic push to end the nightmare in Ukraine now. After all, if the world’s great powers don’t pull together soon on climate action, we’re in trouble deep.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Ghost of Enron Haunts Joe Manchin’s Coal Fortune

    If there was every any confusion as to where West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s loyalties lie, the last budget season put paid to that with interest. His seemingly bottomless vigor in dismantling President Biden’s signature infrastructure/climate bills showed the world that he cares not for his party, his beleaguered president, his own people back home who he screwed right through their Carhartt jeans, or the planet whose resources have gifted him wealth, yachts and influence.

    Manchin is almost exclusively about one thing: coal. Given the extreme damage he has done defending his nuggets of filthy gold, there is a grim symmetry to the fact that he founded his fortune on the sale of garbage. “Gob,” it is called, a form of trash coal “that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity,” according to a damning New York Times report on the roots of the senator’s financial success.

    “Gob,” or waste coal, is, according to the Energy Justice Network: “waste coal piles accumulated mostly between 1900 and 1970. The piles look like hills or small mountains that are dark and barren. Hundreds of millions of tons of waste coal and rock litter the landscape in mining states. Waste coal piles leach iron, manganese and aluminum pollution into waterways and cause acid drainage that kills neighboring streams. These piles sometimes even catch fire, releasing toxic pollution into the air. Nationally, waste coal has an average of 60% of the BTU value of normal coals. It can take up to twice as much waste coal to produce the same amount of electricity.”

    In 1987, a younger Joe Manchin helped developers build the Grant Town coal power plant. He then went into business with the plant directly, and has been selling its operators gob coal for decades. Grant Town is Manchin’s only client, and he has guarded its interests zealously over the years, often crossing lines of propriety and even seeming legality as his political star rose to the governor’s office in West Virginia, and then to the Senate.

    More, from the Times report:

    He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians.

    Records show that several energy companies have held ownership stakes in the power plant, major corporations with interests far beyond West Virginia. At various points, those corporations have sought to influence the Senate, including legislation before committees on which Mr. Manchin sat, creating what ethics experts describe as a conflict of interest.

    To add actual insult to actual injury, Manchin’s role in gob coal sales to the Grant Town plant has been screwing over West Virginians for going on 35 years now. Gob coal burns dirty and slow, generating less electricity per pound. This practice “has harmed West Virginians economically, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in excess electricity fees. That’s because gob is a less efficient power source than regular coal,” according to the Times report.

    Upon reading this, an old crypt 20 years buried cracked open within my memory. What does this remind me of?

    They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

    Yeah, grandma Millie, man.

    Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.

    You remember it, and if it’s new to you, you’d better find out; it is a year 2000 transcript of conversation between two Enron employees yukking it up over the energy-gouging practices of that fallen corporate giant. Enron was all set to be the I.G. Farben of the George W. Bush administration until the company abruptly exploded and died in a dizzying avalanche of corruption and price-fixing charges.

    “Enron was the number one career patron for George W. Bush,” Center for Public Integrity director Charles Lewis told ABC News in December of 2001. “There was no company in America closer to George W. Bush than Enron.” Lewis says the company’s goal in backing Bush and other politicians was to encourage further deregulation of the energy industry.”

    “In an earlier conversation from Aug. 5, 2000,” continues ABC News, “two traders, identified as Person 1 and Person 2, gleefully discuss how a wildfire in California has reduced the ability of a transmission line to carry electricity, boosting the value of power in parts of the state and the profits on electricity trades they have made.”

    Person 2: The magical word of the day is ”Burn, Baby, Burn”-

    Person 1: What’s happening?

    Person 2: There’s a fire under the core line it’s been de-rated from 45 to 2,100.

    Person 1: Really?

    Person 2: Yup.

    Together: Burn, baby, burn.

    Person 1: That’s a beautiful saying.

    Thanks to September 11 and the twin-bill wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush and his administration managed to run through the Enron raindrops without getting wet. The company itself was obliterated beneath the crush weight of its own institutional corruption, and the principal author of all that misery — Ken Lay — dropped dead of a heart attack in 2006.

    Screwing over Grandma Millie for cash by the megawatt hour by providing an overpriced and substandard product? Gaming the system through powerful political connections? Total disdain for the customer, along with the rules and regulations? Golly, it sounds like Joe Manchin’s sweet Grant Town gig and Enron have quite a bit in common, lo’ these 35 years hence.

    “What is dead may never die,” read the words of House Greyjoy, “but rises again harder and stronger.”

    Indeed. Thanks, Joe. Enjoy your gob fortune, and tell Ken Lay hi for me when the time comes.

    Rust never sleeps. Neither does greed. Neither does coal. Neither, apparently, does Joe Manchin.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Uprising for Black Lives Drove Cancellation of Joint US-Israeli Police Trainings

    A recently leaked memo from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reveals that the organization has paused its controversial law enforcement trainings of U.S. police with Israeli military and police forces in response to the movement for Black lives. It shows the power of the movement — which resonates years after its biggest mobilizations, and beyond the borders of this country.

    It was not too long — less than two years ago in the summer of 2020 — that people moved by the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, participated in protests across the U.S. Despite the naked white supremacy of the Trump administration, mass protests in the streets drove a conversation about systemic racism and violent policing.

    That wave of Black-led protest achieved so much. It confronted deeply entrenched commitments to policing and prisons, huge local budgets for police departments that were considered untouchable, well-organized police unions, and a White House calling for the deployment of troops to repress the marches and rallies. The revolt shaped an urgent conversation that overcame those obstacles — and it made concrete gains.

    And the wins went beyond the Black community. The Washington NFL and the Cleveland MLB teams removed and replaced racist mascots that caricature Indigenous peoples after facing years of campaigns demanding such action. The list goes on.

    One of the victories that speaks to the ways that the struggle for Black freedom is tied to the freedom of other communities is the suspension of collaboration between U.S. police and Israeli forces.

    Those trainings are extensive. It is not an exaggeration to say that every major urban police department in the country undertakes exchanges with Israel. Many small police departments also participate in these exchanges. The ADL is the lead organization facilitating such exchanges. Coordinating with law enforcement agencies, the ADL acts as a go-between for U.S. police and Israel, and it provides funds to support the trips.

    The results have been disastrous for victims of both U.S. and Israeli police violence. Israeli military and police have shared tactics that they honed while controlling Palestinians living under Israel’s brutal military rule in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem with U.S. police — practices that the whole world saw in the police brutality against the 2020 protests. Israel has also shared its weapons, such as the “skunk truck” — a vehicle that sprays putrid liquid that is hard to wash off onto protesters — which St. Louis police purchased after the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Indeed, in May of last year when Israeli police in East Jerusalem violently cleared Palestinian worshippers from the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan and attacked Palestinian residents of the city targeted by Israel for removal from their homes, their methods looked very familiar to observers here in the U.S.

    Mobilizations asserting that Black lives matter, forced countless people and institutions to answer the question: What side are you on — that of Black people demanding justice, or of police carrying out violence in our communities each day and repressing protests?

    The ADL claims to be a civil rights organization. Yet its central practices include attacking Palestinians and critics of Israel. The ADL has presented itself as an expert on counterterrorism and has advised law enforcement on the hallmark “war on terror” surveillance programs — which have led to serious attacks on civil rights — particularly of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern background. The very police departments with which the ADL collaborates so closely have been at the forefront of attacking the civil rights of Black and Indigenous folks, and other people of color. The conflict between the ADL’s stated mission and its actual practice is clear.

    That tension led to an internal evaluation of the police trainings with Israel: How could the ADL maintain them as more people raised their voices against both racist policing and Israeli violence against Palestinians?

    The ADL’s leaked internal memo shows that it did pause its trainings — quietly — in hopes that no one would notice. However, the fight is not over. While the ADL suspended the training program, it has not ended it. The ADL was compelled to acknowledge how out of step its work is with public momentum in solidarity with the targets of police violence — albeit privately. Ultimately, it is on the public to demand that these programs stop entirely.

    The 2020 uprisings pushed the goal of suspending the police trainings across the finish line, but activists worked for years to do community education and protest to call attention to them. The work of campaigns like Deadly Exchange and organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, BYP 100, and the Movement for Black Lives laid a foundation for challenging the police exchanges that found a new vitality in the swelling of the mobilizations.

    As we demand an end to the programs altogether, we can take a lead from Durham, North Carolina, whose city council outlawed the police exchanges in 2018. Activists there built a multiracial and multifaith coalition that called attention to police trainings with Israel and Israeli brutality against Palestinians in particular, and framed rights for Palestinians in the context of the advancement of human rights more generally. The coalition won a resolution by the city council that “opposes international exchanges with any country in which Durham officers receive military-style training.”

    The work of the movement for Black lives is far from over. Justice must include the fullness of our communities, and it must go beyond our local communities too. Indeed, and our scope for racial justice must extend beyond this country. Events and institutions that may seem far away are, in reality, intimately connected with our communities. There are ties that bind us extending beyond borders: of U.S. military aid and weapons sent to abuse our relatives in Palestine and elsewhere around the world, and of ties between Israeli security forces and U.S. police. Ending police exchanges will help build a world where our ties are of cooperation, solidarity and common pursuits for justice, rather than racism, violence and repression.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ginni Thomas Debacle Is a Warning That Trumpism Lives on in the Halls of Power

    In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the two-headed main character Zaphod Beeblebrox finds himself fed up with a particularly bewildering receptionist who does not appear to be making sense. “Don’t try to out-weird me, lady,” he growls. “I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”

    That pretty much pegs where I’m at today. In a land where Donald Trump was and could again be president, where a huge swath of the populace angrily denounces BandAid-level technology meant to thwart a murderous pandemic, and where a slap at the Oscars merits equal press ink with a civilian massacre in Europe, one must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”

    Enter Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Please place your seat backs and tray tables in their proper positions, prepare for turbulence ahead, and oh God tell my mom I love her.

    Ginni Thomas is not the first politically active spouse in the history of Washington D.C., but she is the first one I’ve come across who does a superlative impression of a mid-sermon Pentecostal minister with a live snake up her nose, preaching the Gospel of Trump.

    According to a February report in The New York Times:

    Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.

    Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

    Justice Thomas’ political leanings are so extremely freighted to the right that he makes the other conservatives on that court look like Che Guevara, and his wife is even farther out beyond the Oort Cloud than he is. Her true time to shine came when she hitched her wagon to Trump’s WE WUZ ROBBED train all the way to the steps of the Capitol Building on January 6 and beyond.

    In the process, Ginni Thomas began keeping some very interesting company. Most noteworthy was Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff, who began exchanging text messages with Thomas in the immediate aftermath of the election. Before getting into the subtext here, it is important to read some of the actual texts in their frothing apocalyptic Christian glory.

    Thomas to Meadows, 11/10/21: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

    Meadows reply, 11/24/21: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

    I but wait what? King of Kings? Was he referring to God or Trump? The fact that the question needs asking definitely meets the Beeblebrox Standard for Weird, and according to The Washington Post, there are at least 29 more just like these. “They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal,” writes David French for The Atlantic, “they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness … represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.”

    The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection would like a word with Thomas about those 29 texts, among other things. “In a series of text exchanges with Meadows,” reports the Post, “Thomas sought to influence Trump’s strategy to overturn the election results and lobbied for lawyer Sidney Powell to be ‘the lead and the face’ of Trump’s legal team. Thomas’s repeated outreach to Meadows came at period when Trump and his allies sought to enlist the Supreme Court to negate the results of the election. The revelations of his wife’s texts have drawn calls from Democrats urging Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election.”

    Recusal would be nice. Resignation in disgrace followed by ejection from public life would seem more appropriate. Modern Republicans have mastered the art of disdaining rules, traditions, laws and moral codes whenever doing so benefits “the cause.” The Thomases, working in tandem both inside and outside the Supreme Court to usurp the rule of law in the name of Jesus or Whatever, have taken the practice to its most extreme point to date.

    Thomas has no place on the high court.

    Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 was the evangelical vote, represented in near-caricature fashion by Ginni Thomas. Trump has been hard at work keeping these voters in the fold, as they represent his most menacing weapons: the evangelical radicals with, paradoxically, Jesus in their eyes and hate in their hearts. Ginni Thomas and her connection to the doings of the highest court serve as tall warning: The Trump virus, like COVID, is everywhere.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Putin Is Attempting to Center Russia as a Hub of the Global Right Wing

    In the current crisis, the left needs a full and thorough understanding of Vladimir Putin and his aspirations for Russia. We have been troubled by some of the statements from the U.S. left concerning the invasion of Ukraine. It seems when confronted with a complex array of contradictions, too many have lost an ability to sort out and grasp the principal contradiction: the Putin regime’s effort to subjugate Ukraine, end its sovereignty and deny its right to exist independently.

    “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917,” Putin said in a televised address in February. “As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents…. And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunization. Do you want decommunization? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine.”

    Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”

    The difficulties among our left, however, are still understandable, given there are other major contradictions in this terrain. NATO’s expansion and press toward Russia’s border is a prominent one. The tension between the U.S. and the European Union regarding military expenditures in their respective budgets is another. Then there is the rise of pro-Putin right-wing populist parties in most European countries, with an echo in the U.S. right wing as well. The EU’s conflict with the Global South, both in military campaigns and refugee crises, also come into play. And in Ukraine, there are also the actual fascists of the Svoboda party and its armed militia — though their influence was sharply reduced by the recent election of Zelenskyy. And in both Russia and Ukraine, there are class and democratic conflicts with corrupt oligarchs among ruling elites.

    Getting clear for the sake of both strategy and tactics will require a deep examination of Putin’s Russia and its political character and direction.

    It is well known that Putin entered Russian elite circles as a KGB officer. Less well known are the circumstances of his rise. House of Trump, House of Putin, by Craig Unger tells the story: As a working-class youth in the old USSR, Putin’s sole ambition was to be an intelligence officer. The KGB told him to go to law school first, where he did well. After his KGB training, he was stationed in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to a mid-level position. When “the wall” came down and the USSR broke up, he was out in the cold. He made his way back to St. Petersburg, driving a cab to survive and hanging out in martial arts gyms, since he was reportedly good at judo. Along with sport and social solidarity, the gym crews also ran a lucrative drug trade, selling heroin from Afghanistan, among other contrabands. Putin used his money and connections politically, getting connected, first, to the city’s mayor, and later, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. At every step, he brought his judo friends with him. They served as a “security” force and were rewarded with escalating levels of corruption in taking over the country’s wealth via trade and buyout deals. They remain with him today as the core oligarchs in his inner circle. It is said that Putin’s political rule is a three-legged stool — his loyal gangsters, the new intelligence operatives and state bureaucrats.

    Under Yeltsin, the new Russian Federation was in considerable turmoil. U.S. neoliberal think tanks held sway for a time with a “privatize everything” policy that soon produced the ruling order accurately named a “kleptocracy.” It caused living standards to fall, along with life expectancy. Chechnyan fighters were wreaking havoc. On his way out, Yeltsin put Putin in charge, and to Putin’s credit, he got an economy functioning via central control of Russia’s immense oil and natural gas wealth. He also brutally crushed the revolt in Chechnya. Putin gained a popular majority for himself, if not for the semi-gangster crew around him.

    After the Yeltsin years, the Russian Federation settled into a “Presidential Parliamentary” system, wherein the elected president picks the prime minister and cabinet. He can dismiss both, but parliament can only dismiss the prime minister. This shifts primary power to the executive, and Putin has made much use of it. After being elected as an independent, he oversaw the formation of his United Russia Party, which has always won solid majorities, partly because serious opponents have been jailed or otherwise forbidden to run. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) serves as a sizable but still second-place loyal opposition to United Russia, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) serves as a more secure backup to the otherwise dominant United Russia. The LDP, as many wryly note, is neither liberal nor democratic — nor is it much of a party. Its politics are a mixture of right-wing populism and a monarchism connected with the Russian Orthodox Church.

    Putin, closely aligned with the church, embraces the right-wing populism of the LDP as well. But his “conservative” politics have deeper roots. Some might think that as someone who was both a KGB operative and trained through a USSR law school, Putin might have some underlying fidelity to Marxism. If so, they would be wrong. How so? Note that Putin, as a KGB officer, had intimate knowledge of how the USSR actually worked. Then in the Yeltsin period, he watched the sweeping theft and privatization of vast state resources by the top sectors of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) elites and their criminal hangers-on. If he had any illusions, they quickly evaporated.

    Putin took charge in 2000. A few years later, in 2006, he visited the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in Moscow. He placed flowers on the new graves of three prominent Russians he had reinterred there: Gen. Anton Denikin, philosopher Ivan Ilyin and writer Ivan Shmelev. Many leftists will recognize the name Denikin, a military leader of the counter-revolutionary “whites” who tried to overthrow Lenin and restore reactionary rule. Shmelev is a lesser-known individual to us, but he was a popular Russian writer who joined the “whites.” (“Whites” was the term used during the Russian Civil War to denote the myriad counter-revolutionary forces. The “Reds,” of course, were the Communists.)

    Ivan Ilyin is the most obscure and most important today. Ilyin was a Russian nationalist philosopher in Lenin’s time who turned fascist, even moving his work to Germany under the Nazis in the 1930s. Putin now has his officers studying Ilyin, along with Ilyin’s follower today, Alexander Dugin, a modern Russian fascist and favorite of Steve Bannon, formerly of team Trump. Both Ilyin and Dugin are theorists and advocates of “Eurasianism,” a worldview asserting that dominance of the central land mass “homeland” of both Europe and Asia is the key to world hegemony.

    The point? Far from wanting to be a “new Stalin,” Putin’s dreams are more in tune with wanting to be a new Tsar of the Eurasian ”Third Rome.” The first “Rome,” naturally, was Rome (i.e., the Roman Empire), and the second was Constantinople (i.e., the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church). When that center of the Byzantine Orthodox world fell to Islam, the Orthodox church moved north and eventually settled in the Moscow of the Tsars, thus the “Third Rome” to save the Orthodox church and all Christendom. Today’s Russian Orthodoxy, as well as Putin, see the main challenge to the church in the values of Western liberalism and the corrupting ideas of the Enlightenment, especially notions of equality that extend to the defense of LGBTQ+ people, the right to abortion and related causes. Putin’s jailing of the feminist rock group Pussy Riot is a case in point. A good number of U.S. Christian nationalists also look to this side of Putin as today’s anti-liberal chief defender of Christendom worldwide.

    Putin claimed these departed anti-Lenin and anti-Soviet “whites” were “true proponents of a strong Russian state” despite all the hardships they had to face. He stated, “Their main trait was deep devotion to their homeland, Russia; they were true patriots” and “they were heroes during tragic times.” He also placed red roses on the grave of the prominent Russian monarchist, writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was also laid to rest there.

    “Eurasianism,” as the term suggests, stretches from the Great Wall of China to the coasts of the United Kingdom. To unite “the homeland,” then, requires purging all of Europe, especially the West, from the “Atlanticist” influence of the U.S. and the U.K.

    “Proponents of this idea,” write Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn in Foreign Affairs, “posited that Russia’s Westernizers and Bolsheviks were both wrong: Westernizers for believing that Russia was a (lagging) part of European civilization and calling for democratic development; Bolsheviks for presuming that the whole country needed restructuring through class confrontation and a global revolution of the working class. Rather, Eurasianists stressed, Russia was a unique civilization with its own path and historical mission: To create a different center of power and culture that would be neither European nor Asian, but have traits of both. Eurasianists believed in the eventual downfall of the West and that it was Russia’s time to be the world’s prime exemplar.”

    The task of purging Europe of Atlanticism — its various forms of liberalism, socialism and social democracy — requires Putin allies within each country concerned. Hence over the past decade or so, we have watched Putin’s growing support, both financial and political, for a variety of right-wing populist parties and politicians. The Pew Research Center in 2017 published a study examining the trend of Europeans who favor right-wing populist parties being significantly more likely to express confidence in Putin. “The largest increases in confidence were in Germany and Italy, where 31% of the public in each country expressed confidence in Putin in 2016 compared with 22% of Germans and 17% of Italians in 2012,” the study says. “Notably, the survey was fielded before revelations of Russian hacking in the U.S. presidential election and the subsequent increase in anxiety ahead of European elections.”

    It continues:

    Within these countries, those who hold favorable views of right-wing populist parties — like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Italy’s Northern League — are more likely to express confidence in Putin than those who hold unfavorable views of those parties. Just about half of those who give positive ratings to the AfD and 46% who favor the Northern League say they are confident Putin will do the right thing regarding world affairs.

    In France, those partial to the right-wing National Front (FN) are about twice as likely as those with negative views of the FN to say they are confident in Putin’s leadership (31% vs. 16%). And those who view Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom favorably are nearly three times as likely as the party’s detractors to express confidence in Putin (26% vs. 10%).

    Putin may have miscalculated in his invasion of Ukraine, not only in terms of underestimating Ukrainian resistance, but also in terms of the response by forces on the political right around the globe. Putin seems to have underestimated the force of national identity among those trying to assert national identities and sovereignties of their own that they see challenged. This has traditionally been a difficulty for forces on the far right internationally, i.e., how can one be an internationalist when one is a fervent right-wing nationalist? As Jason Horowitz writes in The New York Times:

    Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party — which received a loan from a Russian bank — declared Russia’s annexation of Crimea was not illegal and visited Mr. Putin in Moscow before the last presidential elections in 2017. While she opposes NATO, Ms. Le Pen denounced Mr. Putin’s military aggression on Friday, saying, “I think that what he has done is completely reprehensible. It changes, in part, the opinion I had of him.”

    Her far-right rival in the presidential campaign, Éric Zemmour, has in the past called the prospect of a French equivalent of Mr. Putin a “dream” and admired the Russian’s efforts to restore “an empire in decline.

    Like many other Putin enthusiasts, Zemmour doubted an invasion was in the cards and blamed the United States for spreading what he called “propaganda.” Horowitz runs through a number of other European countries and their rightist leaders with similar results.

    At least one voice on the U.S. right is standing firm. Pat Buchanan has written a string of columns backing both Putin’s nationalist and religious “traditionalism.” Even with the invasion unfolding, he explains, “Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.” He favorably compares Russia’s takeover of Ukraine to Teddy Roosevelt and Panama. (Roosevelt’s administration orchestrated the secession of Panama from Colombia and blocked Colombian troops from putting down the rebellion.)

    Tucker Carlson on Fox News has been carrying on in a similar vein with more half-baked notions. Carlson, who has been accused of being “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia” during the conflict, asked viewers whether Putin had called him a racist or promoted “racial discrimination” in schools, made fentanyl, attempted “to snuff out Christianity” or eaten dogs. “These are fair questions,” claimed Tucker, “and the answer to all of them is ‘no.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that, so why does permanent Washington hate him so much?”

    So, what does this tell us?

    For much of the left, exclusive opposition to U.S. imperialism is equivalent to being on the “right side” of history. This is frequently articulated in terms of the notion that the priority for the U.S. left must be opposition to U.S. imperialism.

    The problem here is that, first, it ignores that the U.S. is not the sole source of global violence and oppression on this planet and, second, that there have been times when the U.S. left has had to focus elsewhere, e.g., support for the Spanish Republic in 1936 in the face of a fascist uprising and the intervention of Italy and Germany. This reality coexists with the fact that the U.S. had not ceased to be imperialist.

    What our examination should remind us is that Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movement that seeks to “overthrow” the 20th century. In Putin’s specific case, we are looking at a complete repudiation of the founding principles of the USSR, most particularly, the notion of the right to national self-determination. But what is also underway is the positioning of Putin-led Russia as a pole for the global right. Opposition to socialism, for sure, but also opposition to constitutional rule as a whole.

    A mistake made by several anti-imperialists, in the 1930s and early 1940s, was to see in Imperial Japan a savior from Western colonialism and imperialism. It is to the credit of communists such as those of the Viet Minh in Vietnam, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of China that they could see through the alleged anti-imperialism of Japan and recognize that what was being introduced through the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not “co-prosperity” but capitalist domination under Japan and a racial subordination of entire populations.

    We should ponder this history as we reflect on Putin’s obsession with Eurasia and the white supremacist, homophobic, sexist, religious intolerant politics that rest behind that one term.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Prison Pen Pals Chip Away at the Prison-Industrial Complex One Letter at a Time

    On April 4, 2022, the state of Delaware is set to join dozens of prisons in 18 other states in ending physical mail sent inside the prison system. The policy would force loved ones, activists, and others to communicate only via costly digital platforms. Monica Cosby, a formerly incarcerated grandmother and an activist with Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, said on the podcast Beyond Prisons that these policies are “decidedly cruel and intended to harm.” Receiving mail is a critical point of support for people on the inside.

    Since the uprisings of the summer of 2020, more people than ever are interested in working to build a world without police and prisons. Organizations working toward this goal take many forms, including projects that may not be immediately recognizable as abolitionist on their face: pen pal or letter-writing exchanges between people inside and outside prison.

    Ella Rosenberg is a member of the Knox College chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America, a subsection the Democratic Socialists of America that has college chapters and is organizing toward a mass labor movement. She says that her peers are among those becoming more aware of prison abolition, and it made them want to learn more about what was happening in the Hill Correctional Center, a prison located in the same town as their college: Galesburg, Illinois.

    “If we on the outside don’t make the effort to make these connections, then they’re never going to get made, because that’s the point [of the system], is to cut people off,” Rosenberg says. “I think by writing these letters, a little bit, it is breaking down that barrier. And it’s bringing the people in prison back into the community where they live.”

    Rosenberg says this is why she was insistent on writing to the men in the Hill Correctional Center, in particular: “This is the prison in our town. We’re writing to these guys because they’re right here.”

    Rosenberg has been writing to her pen pal, Kevin “AK” Hemingway, for just over a year now. Hemingway told Truthout that when Rosenberg first wrote to him, it was “unexpected that a person like that would reach out,” and that he even wondered if perhaps she wanted to study him. With the benefit of time, however, the two have built a strong, trusting relationship that thrives on their differences. Hemingway says, “She taught me how to be a friend. I didn’t know how to be a friend with a woman.”

    Abolitionists have been exchanging letters as part of their everyday political practice long before 2020. Black and Pink, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the criminal punishment system and liberating LGBTQIA2S+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS, was founded in 2005 with letter-writing as a core component. Black and Pink currently coordinates a national database of approximately 20,000 people looking for incarcerated pen pals.

    Andrea Kszystyniak, who helps run Black and Pink’s pen pal program and edits the organization’s newsletter, believes that for many people on the outside, pen palling can be “a radicalizing engine.” That’s because writers are forced to confront the full humanity and circumstances of the people they write to, and can easily see that prison “isn’t helping this person…. [It’s] a disabling agent, intentionally destroying people’s mental health.”

    Like Rosenberg, Kszystyniak asserts that the prison-industrial complex “tries to completely erase people and systematically strips them from all of their support systems, until they’re completely alone.” After that, a person’s “will to fight will go quickly.”

    Charley, who has been writing to their pen pal for about five months as part of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners Writing Warrior project, compares the work of letter writing to the principles of participatory defense, a community organizing model that engages the families and communities of people facing charges in their legal defense. Charley says that “one of our most powerful resources for how to resist this system is to really pull together communities.” They add that this is an important form of resistance because the prison-industrial complex “just repackages the tactics that white supremacy used to colonize Africa and Turtle Island” and “banks on us giving up on keeping in contact with our loved ones, by painting them as bad people, and by creating situations that make it dangerous for us to keep in contact with them.”

    Additionally, Charley pointed out that letter writing is a powerful action that can be taken by people who might not necessarily be able to protest in the streets. As a disabled person, Charley notes that it’s “a way that folks with chronic illnesses and disabled folks can get involved in abolition in a way that is really high impact.”

    Letter writing cuts into the isolation and brings people closer together through the physical and figurative walls that the prison-industrial complex builds, and in doing so, it helps keep people safer. Imprisoned people who receive no mail or contact from anyone are at risk of being recognized by both corrections officers and other people inside as being vulnerable, because the lack of mail sends a message that no one is coming to advocate for them, says Kszystyniak.

    Prison also works to cut people off from information and to create a totalizing social environment where, without contact or affirmation from people outside, imprisoned people can begin to feel that the maze of regulations — and their irregular and punitive application — is just.

    Reece Graham-Bey, my own pen pal of six years who is now formerly incarcerated, explained it this way: “The longer that you were in prison, the more sense it makes. You have a ready explanation [for the injustice you experience] because you’ve had it explained to you. It’s almost like being in a propaganda camp or a retraining camp.”

    Charley described the importance of simply “reinforcing reality” in letters. For example, another volunteer with the Writing Warriors program, Stephanie Hammerwold, told Truthout that when the COVID-19 vaccine was released, pen pals in the program filled a critical information gap so that people inside could make an informed choice about their health.

    In the case of LGBTQ+ people in prison, letter writing and newsletters can be an essential source of scarce information about queer issues. Similarly, Graham-Bey says information about gender and feminism was extremely rare behind bars, and our letters were an important counterpoint to the misogyny that was rampant, particularly from the guards.

    Information doesn’t just go into the prison, however, but also travels out. Letters are a vehicle for people inside to tell the outside world what the inside of the prison is like, especially when there are abuses or problems in the institution. In response to Truthout’s request for interviews, one person from a California women’s prison responded, “Please let the world know how the prison are taking inmates whom are not [COVID] positive to quarantine units and placing them around other inmates whom are positive for their own self motives.”

    The bonds that are formed in the pen-palling relationships often lead to advocacy. Anna Bauer, another member of the Knox College group, recently put together a phone zap with her pen pal Strawberry Hampton. Bauer says that “our relationship has just come to be something that’s very meaningful and something that I really appreciate. I definitely feel like our letter-writing practice has definitely gone two ways. I’ve been able to kind of act as a conduit with the outside with her.”

    There are plenty of barriers to exchanging letters, however, in whatever format.

    There are the hard-to-follow regulations, and the constant surveillance, costs and delays, particularly associated with the for-profit proprietary messaging systems like ConnectNetwork and JPay. These systems work in a similar way to email, but each “page” of the message costs between $.15 and $.44 to send (without attachments, which are an additional page) and must be approved before it is delivered. Other states have eliminated the possibility of physical mail altogether, like the change set to take place in Delaware.

    Hammerwold refers to these disruptions as a “JPay delay” because they are so regular, and says that her strategy is to let her pen pals know that if it takes her more than two days to respond, they should assume the delay is institutional. “I hate that that happens, because it erodes trust, and it’s something that’s beyond our control,” she says. “I don’t want that person to think I’ve given up.”

    Several people said that messages about the conditions inside prison are often censored. After Strawberry Hampton’s own message to Truthout was blocked, her sister Ebona told Truthout in a phone conversation that the messages that are blocked are ones detailing incidents and especially naming inaction on the part of top officials. Hampton is regularly subjected to racial and heterosexist slurs, has received death threats from corrections officers, and is unable to sign up for classes so she can get “good time” (earned time toward earlier release). This pattern was confirmed as common by other incarcerated people interviewed, as well as by abolitionist organizers on the outside, and several imprisoned people relied on assistance from family members to get in contact or relay information to Truthout for this story because of limitations in the prison’s communication systems.

    Letter writing — and any communication to and from prison — exposes both parties to a certain level of surveillance, given that anyone writing in to a prison has to give their first and last name. However, of course, the risk of retaliation is higher for the inside correspondent. Although some communications about activism, including prison abolition, are allowed into prisons without obstacles (and everyone was unequivocal that pen palling is a net positive), interviewees also cited circumstances in which they faced barriers or retaliation.

    “If you started to write to me about people who support prisoners, people who support prisoner education, people who support abolition, people who support strategies for different visions of justice, the prison goes on high alert in a way that you probably can’t imagine on the streets,” Graham-Bey says. “You know, the surveillance ups, they start doing rounds on you, they start watching you, they start making you feel uncomfortable, they start going through your cell, you know, and they randomly take you to [segregation] for invented infractions.”

    However, activists and loved ones of incarcerated people work daily to overcome these kinds of barriers. “I think it took incredible personal power, to pierce that kind of environment, and to reach into the place where I was at, and I could feel that power, in a sense of a real power, like a real person,” says Graham-Bey.

    Forging relationships with each other through the intimate practice of letter writing allows each writer to represent themselves and be known. In letters, strangers learn to connect in honest, human ways to each other, and to do healing work. Hemingway says that his friendship with Rosenberg was transformative, and that his friends inside “could see a difference in me.”

    Ajani Walden, a staff member with Black and Pink and an outside letter writer, says, “We’re talking about freedom, we’re talking about community care, that is what pen palling is. I care about the person I’m writing [to], the person that’s writing cares about me. I mean, it doesn’t really get any simpler than that, right? Because this is really what we’re supposed to be doing. Caring for other people, communicating, mutually destroying systems.” Walden emphasizes the two-way nature of the relationship, saying, “There’s some times where my pen pal writes me a letter and they literally uplifted my day, you know, and I’m on the outside.”

    Dude Ramirez, an inside member of the Writing Warriors program, wrote to Truthout, saying that having a pen pal “means someone is taking time to care about you and sharing their time with you.” According to Writing Warriors correspondent Araceli Peña, having a pen pal when you are inside “enables you to be able to vent to others and you’re able to talk with someone about anything and just feel completely comfortable. Sometimes a person is just able to share more with someone through paper and yeah, it’s harder to share face to face sometimes.”

    Christopher Naeem Trotter, who is currently serving a de facto life sentence and is Kszystyniak’s pen pal, told Truthout in a letter that, “Without their friendship and support, I probably would had given up on struggling to liberate myself from this belly of the beast, and just accepted that fact that I was going to die inside this belly of the beast which would give these prisoncrats something to celebrate about…. Now every day I am reminded that no matter how dark the days may appear that there is always a ray of light breaking through the crack to shine for you to see that there are still loving and kind people in this world that care about something other than [themselves].”

    Letters and relationships are a source of hope for all of the people involved, and this lays a foundation for strong organizing.

    According to Graham-Bey, it is often transformative for people in prison to know that there are people outside who are engaged in social movements, and who care about what is happening inside the prison from an abolitionist perspective. He says that letters also serve as tangible, written, coherent arguments that can be returned to again and again to support political education inside.

    Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton has written recently that, “The slow and deliberate act of producing, circulating, and consuming letters is a contemplative practice generated from mutual investments of time, as well as emotional and intellectual labor, that has far reaching effects.”

    People inside also benefit from knowing who is on the outside that can support them if they decide to engage in organizing work.

    Meanwhile, abolitionists on the outside are nourished by the analysis of their comrades inside.

    Kszystyniak says that letter writing is a good mechanism for “continued momentum toward abolition,” and highlights that “it’s super important that the folks inside are leading the movement.”

    Trotter agrees, saying, “People on the outside must tune into their voices on paper because there are a lot of different ideas floating in these prisons. Sometime those ideas never get outside the prison gates because they have no one to write…. We need organizers on the outside to start reaching inside to prisoners getting prisoners ideas, learning what they are strategizing, because what happens on the inside affects what happens on the outside.”

    Policies like the one in Delaware eliminating physical mail are another malicious attempt to further isolate and disappear people from our communities. Cosby, reflecting on a time when she received a letter that smelled like her mother, said, “[Physical] letters don’t weigh much but at the same time they weigh everything.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The United States Is Exceptional — Just Not in the Ways Any of Us Should Want

    Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way:

    “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”

    That, in a nutshell, was the postwar version of U.S. exceptionalism and Washington was then planning to manage the world in such a way as to maintain that remarkably grotesque disparity. The only obstacle Kennan saw was poor people demanding a share of the wealth.

    Today, as humanity confronts a looming climate catastrophe, what’s needed is a new political-economic project. Its aim would be to replace such exceptionalism and the hoarding of the earth’s resources with what’s been called “a good life for all within planetary boundaries.”

    Back in 1948, few if any here were thinking about the environmental effects of the over-consumption of available resources. Yet even then, however unknown, this country’s growing wealth had a dark underside: the slow-brewing crisis of climate change. Wealth all too literally meant the intensified extraction of resources and the production of goods. As it happened, fossil fuels (and the greenhouse gases that went with their burning) were essential to every step in the process.

    Today, the situation has shifted — at least a bit. With approximately 4% of the world’s population, the United States still holds about 30% of its wealth, while its commitment to over-consumption and maintaining global dominance remains remarkably unshaken. To grasp that, all you have to do is consider the Biden White House’s recent Indo-Pacific Strategy policy brief, which begins in this telling way: “The United States is an Indo-Pacific power.” Indeed.

    In 2022, the relationship between wealth, emissions, and climate catastrophe has become ever clearer. In the crucial years between 1990 and 2015, the global economy expanded from $47 trillion to $108 trillion. During that same period, global annual greenhouse-gas emissions grew by more than 60%. Mind you, 1990 was the year in which atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) first surpassed what many scientists believed was the level of safety — 350 parts per million, or ppm. Yet in the 32 years since then, more CO2 and other greenhouse gases have been emitted into the atmosphere than in all of history prior to that date, as atmospheric CO2 careened past 400 ppm in 2016 with 420 ppm now fast approaching.

    Inequality and Emissions

    Growing global wealth is closely associated with growing emissions. But the wealth and responsibility for those emissions are not shared equally among the planet’s population. On an individual level, the wealthiest people on Earth consume — and emit — far more than their poorer counterparts. The richest 10% of the world’s population, or about 630 million people, were responsible for more than half of the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions over the last quarter-century. On a national level, rich countries are, of course, home to far more people with high levels of consumption, which means that the larger and wealthier the country, the greater its emissions.

    In terms of per capita income, the United States ranks 13th in the world. But the countries above it on the list are mostly tiny, including some of the Persian Gulf states, Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Switzerland. So, despite their high per-capita emissions, their overall contribution isn’t that big. As the third largest country on this planet, our soaring per-capita emissions have, on the other hand, had a devastating effect.

    With a population of around 330 million, the United States today has less than a quarter of either China’s population of more than 1.4 billion or India’s, which is just under that figure. Four other countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan — fall into the population range of 200 to 300 million, but their per-capita gross domestic products (GDPs) and their per-capita emissions are far below ours. In fact, the total U.S. GDP of more than $19 trillion far exceeds that of any other country, followed by China at $12 trillion and Japan at $5 trillion.

    In sum, the United States is exceptional when it comes to both its size and wealth. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn then that, until 2006, it was also by far the world’s top CO2 emitter. After that, it was surpassed by a fast-developing China (though that country’s per capita emissions remain less than half of ours) and no other country’s greenhouse gas emissions come close to either of those two.

    To fully understand different countries’ responsibility, it’s necessary to go past yearly numbers and look at how much they’ve emitted over time, since the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere don’t disappear at the end of the year. Here again, one country stands out above all the others: the United States, whose cumulative emissions reached 416 billion tons by the end of 2020. China’s, which didn’t start rising rapidly until the 1980s, reached 235 billion tons in that year, while India trailed at 54 billion.

    Having first hit 20 billion tons in 1910, U.S. cumulative emissions have only shot up ever since, while China’s didn’t hit that 20 billion mark until 1979. So the U.S. got a big head start and, cumulatively speaking, is still way ahead when it comes to taking down this planet.

    The U.S. Climate Action Network (USCAN) argues that excessive emitters like the United States have already used up far more than their “fair share” of this planet’s carbon budget and so, in fact, owe a huge carbon debt to the rest of the world to make up for their outsized contribution to the problem of climate change over the past two centuries. Unfortunately, the 2015 Paris Agreement’s voluntary, non-enforceable, and nationally determined limits on emissions functionally let rich countries continue on their damaging ways.

    In fact, nations should be held responsible for repaying their carbon debt. The world’s poorest people, who have contributed practically nothing to the problem, deserve access to a portion of the remaining budget and to the sort of aid that would enable them to develop alternative forms of energy to meet their basic needs.

    Under the fair-share proposal, it’s not enough for the United States just to stop adding emissions. This country needs to repay the climate debt it’s already incurred. USCAN calculates that to pay back its fair share the United States must cut its emissions by 70% by 2030, while contributing the cash equivalent of another 125% of its current emissions every year through technical and financial support to energy-poor nations.

    Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal proposal adopted the concept of the “fair share.” True leadership in the global climate fight, Sanders has argued, means recognizing that “the United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life.”

    On this subject, however, his voice and others like it sadly remain far outside the all-too-right-wing mainstream. (And if you doubt that, just check Joe Manchin’s recent voting record.)

    Are We Making Progress Thanks to New Technologies?

    In 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on our chances of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade — the goal that the countries involved in the Paris Agreement, including the United States, accepted as their baseline for action. It concluded that, to have a 50% chance of staying below that temperature increase, our future collective emissions couldn’t exceed 480 gigatons (or 480 billion tons). That, in other words, was humanity’s remaining carbon budget.

    Unfortunately, as of 2018, global emissions were exceeding 40 gigatons a year, which meant that even if they were flattened almost immediately (not exactly a likelihood), we would use up that budget in a mere dozen years or so. Worse yet, despite a Covid-induced decline in 2020, global emissions actually rebounded sharply in 2021.

    Most scenarios for emission reductions, including those proposed by the IPCC, rely optimistically on new technologies to enable us to get there without making substantive changes in the global economy or in the excessive consumption of the world’s richest people and countries. Such technological advances, it’s hoped, would allow us to produce as much, or possibly more energy from renewable sources and even possibly begin removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

    Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to support the likelihood of such progress, especially in the time we have left. No matter how much new technology we develop, there seems to be no completely “clean” form of energy. All of them — nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, biomass, and perhaps others still to be developed — rely on massive industrial operations to extract finite resources from the earth; factories to process them; facilities to create, store, and transmit energy; and, in the end, some form of waste (think batteries, solar panels, old electric cars, and so on). Every form of energy will have multiple dangerous environmental impacts. Meanwhile, as the use of alternative forms of energy production increases worldwide, it hasn’t yet reduced fossil-fuel use. Instead, it’s just added to our growing energy consumption.

    It’s true that the world’s wealthiest countries have achieved some gains in decoupling economic growth from rising emissions. But much of this relatively minor decoupling is attributable to a shift from the use of coal to natural gas, along with the outsourcing of particularly dirty industries. Decoupling has, as yet, made no dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and seems unlikely to accelerate or even continue at a meaningful enough pace after these first and easiest steps have been taken. So almost all climate modeling, like that of the IPCC, suggests that new technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will also be needed to counter rising emissions.

    But negative emissions technologies are largely aspirational at this point. Instead of counting on what still to a significant extent remain technological fantasies, while the wealthy continue their profligacy, it’s time to shift our thinking more radically and focus, as I do in my new book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, on how to reduce extraction, production, and consumption in far more socially just ways, so that we can indeed begin to live within our planet’s means. Call it “post-growth” or “degrowth” thinking.

    Make no mistake: we can’t live without energy and we desperately do need to turn to alternatives to fossil fuels. But alternative energies are only going to be truly viable if we can also greatly reduce our energy needs, which means reconfiguring the global economy. If energy is a scarce and precious resource, then ways must be found to prioritize its use to meet the urgent needs of the world’s poor, rather than endlessly expanding the luxuries of the wealthiest among us. And that’s precisely what degrowth thinking is all about: scaling back the mindless pursuit of production, consumption, and profit in favor of “human wellbeing and ecological stability.”

    Abandoning Exceptionalism

    In April 2021, President Biden made a dramatic announcement, setting a new goal for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to reduce them 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. Sounds pretty good, right?

    But given that this country’s CO2 emissions had hit a high of 6.13 billion tons in 2005, that means by 2030 we’d still be emitting three billion tons of CO2 a year. Even if we could reach net-zero by 2050, our country alone would, by then, have used up one quarter of the entire remaining carbon budget for the planet. And right now, given the state of the American political system, there’s neither a genuine plan nor an obvious way to reach Biden’s goal. If we stay on our current path — and don’t count on that if the Republicans take Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024 — we would barely achieve a 30% reduction by 2030.

    At this point, there’s no guarantee we’ll stay on that path, no matter the political party in power. After all, consider just this:

    • In 2010, about half of the new vehicles sold in the United States were cars and half were SUVs or trucks. By 2021, close to 80% were SUVs or trucks.
    • In 2020, more than 900,000 new houses were built in this country, their median size, 2,261 square feet. Most of them had four or more bedrooms and 870,000 had central air conditioning.
    • President Biden’s infrastructure bill, signed in November 2021, included $763 billion for new highways.

    And let’s not even talk about the military-industrial-congressional complex and war. After all, the Department of Defense is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and emitter of CO2 in the world. Between its worldwide bases, promotion of the arms industry, and ongoing global wars, our military alone produces annual emissions greater than those of wealthy countries like Sweden and Denmark.

    Meanwhile, in the run-up to the climate-change meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in the fall of 2021, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry insisted repeatedly that the United States must work to bring China on board. Joe Biden too kept his attention focused on China. And indeed, given its greenhouse gas emissions and still-expanding use of coal, China does have a big role to play. But to the rest of the world, such an insistence on diverting attention from our own role in the climate crisis rings hollow indeed.

    A 2021 study shows that almost all of the world’s remaining coal, not to speak of most of its gas and oil reserves, will need to stay in the ground if global warming is to be kept below 1.5 degrees centigrade. Back in 2018, another study found that even to meet a 2-degree centigrade goal, which it’s now all too clear would be catastrophic in climate-change terms, humanity would have to halt all new fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and immediately start decommissioning fossil-fuel-burning plants. Instead, such new facilities continue to be built in a relentless fashion globally. Unless the United States, which bears by far the greatest responsibility for our climate emergency, is ready to radically change course, how can it demand that others do so?

    But to change course would mean to abandon exceptionalism.

    Degrowth scholars argue that, rather than risking all of our futures on as-yet-unproven technologies in order to cling to economic growth, we should seek social and political solutions that would involve redistributing the planet’s wealth, its scarce resources, and its carbon budget in ways that prioritize basic needs and social wellbeing globally.

    That, however, would require the United States to acknowledge the dark side of its exceptionalism and agree to relinquish it, something that, in March 2022, still seems highly unlikely.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Pandemic Isn’t Over Yet, But Congress Is Willing to Gamble That It Is

    COVID cases are rising throughout Europe and Asia, leading some experts in the United States to wonder whether another wave is around the corner. Caseloads have been low in all 50 states following the Omicron spike in late 2021 and earlier this year, leading to a broad relaxation of mask mandates and a decrease in remote work options throughout the country. Nearly all Republicans in Congress, and many conservative Democrats, are pushing for a repeal of the continuing federal mask mandate on planes and public transportation.

    The spike in cases overseas is being driven by a subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2. Early evidence suggests it may be even more transmissible than the initial variant, which caused record surges around the world. There’s also cause for cautious optimism, however, as it appears that immunity caused by the first variant extends to the new subvariant. Between vaccinations and boosters, and so-called “natural immunity” from a previous infection, the United States may have a wall of protection to prevent caseloads — and, more importantly, hospitalizations and deaths — from spiking in the coming months.

    Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s point person on COVID, said on March 20 that he expected a rise in cases, even if it doesn’t amount to another full-blown wave. Fauci estimated that the new subvariant accounts for about 25 to 30 percent of new cases.

    If the worst is avoided in the United States, it will not be because state and federal officials have taken measures to prepare for the next wave. To the contrary, Congress recently failed to include additional pandemic funding in its annual massive spending bill. The result could be disastrous, especially for poor people and those without insurance. As Republicans, conservative Democrats and even some public health officials insist on putting the pandemic behind us and getting back to “normal,” it’s not at all clear that the country — or the world — is through with COVID.

    Even at the current levels, the push from some to adopt a new normal of living with COVID often ignores the risks to immunocompromised people and those who aren’t eligible for the vaccine. Millions of people who may not fit the CDC’s definition of immunocompromised are living with chronic illness, disabilities, or other health concerns that put them at a heightened risk. If aspects of the pandemic like regular remote work and telehealth become less common, these are the communities most likely to be left behind — even under what some mainstream pundits are considering a best-case scenario.

    And maintaining the current levels of community spread could be elusive. President Joe Biden’s plans at the federal level have largely been hampered by Congress, which has reverted from a brief period where it actually addressed public needs back to an anti-public health posture. Early rounds of pandemic relief were passed with so-called deficit spending, but Republicans began insisting that Democrats find a way to “pay for” the programs — Washington, D.C.-speak for increasing taxes or finding another source of revenue. Biden had initially asked Congress for $22 billion in new pandemic funding, which lawmakers then cut to $15 billion, with Republicans and some conservative Democrats insisting on the spending offsets. The floated compromise was that new revenue would come from states that had already received pandemic funding, prompting a rebellion from a handful of House Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then pulled the new COVID money from the bill, prompting fear from the White House that Congress would fail to pass the needed funding altogether.

    Without the additional spending, numerous federal projects are at risk on a rolling basis over the next several months. The government will soon be forced to cut shipments of monoclonal antibodies by 30 percent as soon as next week. In April, the administration will end a program that reimbursed providers for testing, tracing and treating uninsured patients. As a result, people without insurance are facing a looming catastrophe if they contract COVID or need an additional booster shot. Fears of unknown medical bills could also prevent uninsured people from seeking preemptive care or treatment, potentially further exacerbating community spread.

    The disasters don’t stop there. Support for domestic testing manufacturers will run out by June. A senior administration official told reporters that without more funding, the federal government “will lack the funding needed to accelerate research and development of next-generation vaccines that provide broader and more durable protection, including a vaccine that protects against a range of variants.” The administration had planned to make second booster shots available to the public at large in the fall if experts deemed it scientifically necessary, but that’s at risk now as well.

    Taken together, this means the United States isn’t prepared to deal with future COVID variants, an entirely different pandemic, or even the existing levels of spread currently in the country. Although cases have dramatically dropped off since the height of the Omicron spike, the U.S. is still registering almost 30,000 cases a day on average, and roughly 830 deaths.

    As The Atlantic’s Ed Yong argues, existing U.S. pandemic measures were “already insufficient” to the task at hand. “These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further,” Yong writes. “Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the country’s earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will.” He adds that the United States is now “sprinting” towards the next pandemic.

    Instead of creating the kind of robust, lasting institutions and programs that could respond to the country’s current as well as short-term and long-term needs, Congress is burying its head in the sand. Cutting funding for COVID measures now is the very definition of penny wise, pound foolish. Or, to use a medical aphorism, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Instead of taking this period of relatively low levels of community spread to shore up our collective defenses, Congress is rolling the dice, betting that the worst of the pandemic is behind us.

    This should be a time to reflect on the enormous success that COVID vaccine developments represent: success paid for directly, and backstopped, by public money. If there is a lesson to be taken from March 2020 until now, it’s that the U.S. federal government is actually capable of making people’s lives better if it allocates the necessary resources to do so. In a more just world, the vaccines themselves would be owned by the public and distributed globally, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s in our own collective self-interest to deprive the virus of communities to spread and mutate. That’s not the world we live in, but it would be a mistake not to embrace the successes we’ve seen over the last two years, even if they need to be reframed away from the logic of public-private partnerships.

    The pandemic has shown that public spending at the federal level can produce enormous public benefits. Unfortunately, Congress seems to have reverted back to an austerity-based, deficit hawk mindset. That’s not a surprise, but it does mean that public health in this country is at risk over the next several months, let alone the next several decades.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Senators Use Jackson Hearing to Agitate Their Base Before Election Campaigns

    Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on March 23, 2022.

    Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is inching toward confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice after sailing with strength and grace through days of racist and disrespectful attacks by GOP senators. Conservative Democrat Joe Manchin has now signaled that he will vote to confirm Jackson, showing that the often fractured Democratic senators are uniting to support her confirmation.

    Although Judge Jackson is exceptionally qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, she was subjected to snide, condescending and racist attacks by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing this week. Jackson remained remarkably unflappable in the face of grueling questions and hostile, vicious assaults.

    Jackson is likely to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. It is anticipated that all Democratic and Independent senators as well as Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) will vote to confirm her nomination.

    But many Republican committee members mounted unfounded attacks on Jackson’s record. The GOP senators apparently sought to peel off support for Jackson’s nomination from Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona). They are also pandering to their hard-right base in anticipation of the midterms and even presidential campaigns.

    Some GOP committee members confronted Jackson about critical race theory (CRT), which has become a flashpoint for the Republican Party. CRT is an academic framework that analyzes how systemic racism permeates U.S. society. It identifies racism as more than the result of individual prejudice and bias, examining how racism is entrenched in laws, institutions and policies — from housing and education to employment, health care and policing, all of which reflect racial inequalities. The Republican members tried to show that Jackson’s fidelity to CRT would make her a biased Supreme Court justice.

    The CRT accusations were combined with a concerted GOP effort to paint Jackson as “soft on crime,” particularly with misleading allegations that her sentences of defendants convicted of consuming or distributing child pornography were below the norm. The veiled inference was that because she is motivated by CRT, Jackson would mete out lesser sentences to Black defendants.

    Indeed, in her opening statement, Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) falsely told Jackson, “You have made clear that you believe judges must consider critical race theory when deciding how to sentence criminal defendants. Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate critical race theory into our legal system?”

    But it was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who led the anti-CRT charge against Jackson. He cited language from a children’s book in the library of the private Georgetown Day School (GDS), on whose board of trustees Jackson sits. Cruz singled out Antiracist Baby by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, complaining that it conveys to children that babies are taught to be racist, not born racist, and that they are encouraged to talk about racism and admit if they have been racist. Cruz, who absurdly claimed the elementary school was “overflowing with critical race theory” (a comment that reflects how the GOP is inaccurately slapping the name of this complex theoretical framework onto any basic discussion of race and racism), asked Jackson, “Do you agree … that babies are racist?”

    After a considerable pause, Jackson said she wasn’t familiar with the book, adding that CRT is “an academic theory taught in law schools,” not in elementary schools such as GDS. “I have not reviewed any of those books, any of those ideas,” Jackson said. “They do not come up in my work as a judge, which I am, respectfully, here to address.”

    She added, “I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than their victims, that they are oppressors. I don’t believe in any of that.”

    Right-wing efforts against everything that the GOP deems as CRT have led to book banning around the country. Ironically, after Cruz condemned Antiracist Baby, it rose to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling children’s books on racism and prejudice.

    False Accusations Track Conspiracy Theory Talking Points

    In preparation for Jackson’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) tweeted misleading accusations suggesting that Jackson was lenient in sentencing child pornography defendants because she handed out sentences below those provided for in the federal sentencing guidelines and requested by prosecutors. This attack delighted followers of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon, many of whom believe that Washington and the media are controlled by a Satan-worshipping “cabal of pedophiles.”

    But even the conservative National Review, which opposes Jackson’s confirmation, pointed out that Hawley’s claim “that Judge Jackson is appallingly soft on child-pornography offenders” appears “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”

    When Hawley asked Jackson whether she regretted giving a certain defendant a low sentence, she replied, “What I regret is that in a hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences.”

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) grabbed the baton from Hawley and mounted a vicious attack on Jackson. “Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited,” Graham barked. Using a shotgun approach, he peppered her with rude accusations, continually interrupting her before she could answer. (I counted at least 14 interruptions by Graham during one of his interrogation sessions.)

    Over and over, Jackson patiently tried to explain that the sentencing guidelines were written before the advent of the internet and are therefore outdated, inviting Congress to update them.

    Moreover, she noted, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Booker that the guidelines were no longer mandatory, just advisory. Jackson said she considers the guidelines as well as the positions of the prosecutor, the defense and the probation officer, and the unique circumstances of each case and every defendant she sentences.

    After Jackson answered a question about one of the child pornography sentences she ordered, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) essentially called her a liar, stating, “I don’t find it credible.”

    Three members of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which provides independent nonpartisan evaluations of the professional qualifications of judicial nominees, interviewed 250 lawyers and judges who had direct knowledge of Jackson’s work. They concluded that Jackson demonstrated “the exceptional professional competence expected of a Supreme Court justice and thus merits a well-qualified rating.”

    When Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) asked committee member Jean Veta about the allegations that Jackson’s sentences were too lenient, she replied, “Notably, no judge, defense counsel or prosecutor expressed any concern in this regard and they uniformly rejected any accusations of bias.” In response to Durbin’s question about charges by GOP senators that Jackson gave lenient sentences to child pornography defendants, Ann Claire Williams said, “It never came up in any of the interviews we conducted.”

    Jackson Is Attacked for Her Work as a Public Defender

    If confirmed, Jackson will be the only former public defender ever to serve on the court. Although this will give her a unique perspective and understanding of criminal cases, GOP senators consider it a liability.

    Graham accused Jackson of aiding terrorism for representing Guantánamo Bay detainees when she was a public defender. Apparently unmindful of John Adams’s famous declaration that his representation of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre was his proudest moment, Graham stormed out of the hearing room shrieking that he hoped dangerous Guantánamo detainees died in custody without receiving due process.

    In 2004, the Supreme Court decided in Rasul v. Bush that people indefinitely detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional right to habeas corpus to challenge their detention as enemy combatants.

    In 2005, after she began working as an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., Jackson and some of her colleagues were assigned to represent four Guantánamo detainees who had been designated as “enemy combatants.” They filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus on behalf of their clients. One count alleged the commission of torture, which constitutes a war crime.

    Graham and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) falsely accused Jackson of calling former President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals” in the petitions.

    Jackson explained that lawyers who file habeas corpus petitions are required to name responsible government officials as defendants, which she and her colleagues did. The petitions alleged that the officials ordered or condoned the commission of torture, which constitutes a war crime. Jackson said she was “standing up for the constitutional value of representation.”

    None of the four Guantánamo detainees Jackson represented were ever tried or convicted of a crime. All were ultimately repatriated — three to Afghanistan and one to Saudi Arabia.

    Jackson and Sotomayor Will Be Kindred Spirits

    Jackson’s record exemplifies her progressive bona fides. Although Jackson’s confirmation to the high court will not change its 6-3 right-wing ideological imbalance, she will surely have a considerable impact on the direction of the court. Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, the most progressive member of the court, will likely be kindred spirits. The only women of color, they are also the only justices with experience as trial judges, which is invaluable for an appellate judge.

    The Republicans on the committee distinguished themselves with their bullying racist, sexist dog whistles.

    “I do think it’s a legitimate question to ask — would they be asking these questions if this were not a Black woman?” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), who is also Black, queried.

    “This is just a master class in how Black women have to be patient, have to be fully composed in responding to things that are meant for destruction,” Nadia Brown, professor of women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University, told the Los Angeles Times.

    Irin Carmon, senior correspondent at New York Magazine, tweeted, “Despite the tendentious and misleading questions from Cruz, Jackson couldn’t possibly rage and cry the way now-Justice Kavanaugh did in his confirmation hearing without destroying her career. Even an eyebrow raise could be held against her.”

    Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that in his 48 years in the Senate, he had never seen the depth of disrespect exhibited to Jackson.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Our Governments Have Chosen Capitalism Over Preparing for Next COVID Surge

    British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden arrive for a G7 leaders meeting during a NATO summit at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, on March 24, 2022, in Brussels, Belgium.

    Climate scientists have been warning for years about the menace of “feedback loops.” A feedback loop takes place when the right set of circumstances creates a situation that feeds upon itself, growing stronger with every cycle.

    The not-so-frozen tundra of Siberia serves as perfect current example. Human-caused warming melts the permafrost in the ground, allowing the release of billions of tons of methane from the soil. That methane enters the atmosphere and warms it more, causing more permafrost to melt and release more methane. Round and round we go.

    As we inch toward the thousandth day of COVID-19 in the U.S., another kind of feedback loop has formed itself. Instead of wind and rain, this one is made of people and policy, an extension of capitalism you could see coming a mile off with the right kind of eyes.

    I can even pinpoint the day this COVID feedback loop began to eat itself, and us: March 20, 2020. On that day, the first of what became a flood tide of jowly capitalists went on the cable news networks with the demand that “low-risk,” low-wage workers should go back to work and just let the virus “burn through” their ranks.

    The intervening months have descended into a lethal tug of war between people who believe the science and are willing to take precautions to avoid even more mass death, and the “my freedom” people who are willing to let COVID carry off millions of people rather than subject themselves to the gross tyranny of… masks and reasonable health measures? If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not believed it possible, and would have walked out of any movie daring to peddle such nonsense in a script.

    The script itself, while absurd, is also simplicity itself: Endure a lethal COVID surge, but don’t prepare for the next one — and meanwhile, actively stand down current defenses so people go to work and spend money because, “It’s over!” NOPE, another mass wave of death followed by another wave of too-late restrictions followed by another surge of bleak depression and despair.

    Some of the smoke clears (again), restrictions are lifted (again) in the name of the capitalist imperative (again), enough people are gulled (again) into letting their guard down. NOPE, a vaccine-resistant subvariant emerges from North Korea (theoretically) and lays waste to Southeast Asia in as much time as it takes to play the World Cup. Lather rinse repeat, but this time the culling is largely relegated to people like me — those with underlying medical risk factors — once it reaches these shores, because of course it will, because the last thing we’ll do is restrict air travel…

    Today, they’re calling the next COVID-related challenge a “stress test,” a chance to throw open all the doors and see how well things go with virtually no standard precautions in place. “Whatever happens next, we’re living the reality the CDC’s guidance bargained for,” writes Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic. “The country’s new COVID rules have asked us to sit tight, wait, and watch. We may soon see the country’s true tolerance for disease and death on full display.”

    I’m not certain exactly how or when the decision was made to chart this perilous course. It just sort of… happened, like osmosis. A segment of the population found that ever-present permanent high gear of high dudgeon about masks and perfectly safe shots, capitalism whispered “Yeah what they said” through all the available political and social channels.

    Suddenly, here we are, on the edge of a test we are not prepared to take. There is enough proof of this in the public surveys to give one pause. One February Washington Post/ABC News poll has 58 percent of the people saying controlling the spread of COVID is the top priority. A Yahoo News poll conducted precisely that same week has 51 percent saying returning to normal and “learning to live” with COVID is most important… and if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.

    Polls shmolls, I know, but something is badly out of joint. David Lim of Politico explains what a new COVID surge will find when it comes:

    Covid-19 infections are rebounding in several European countries and Biden officials are monitoring infections in the United Kingdom, where cases have jumped more than 36 percent over the past week. Meanwhile, the number of molecular tests shipped each week by major manufacturers in the United States has fallen by more than 50 percent over the last month.

    Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said that the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes it made last summer when demand for testing plummeted and test manufacturers scaled back production. “It’s like we’ve learned absolutely nothing as a system during this pandemic,” Becker said. “I have no reason to believe that wouldn’t happen again because they don’t have the demand.”

    The concern over the supply of testing comes as the Biden administration warns Congress that if it does not soon provide more than $22 billion in additional funding, the administration will not be able to purchase new supplies of drugs, vaccines, masks and tests. The White House on Tuesday plans to wind down the federal subsidies that guarantee free tests for uninsured people due to lack of funding.

    This, even as the administration is preparing to endorse a second booster shot, meaning a fourth overall shot, to help older Americans fight off the virus. There is precedent for this — polio inoculation requires a four-dose regimen of that vaccine. But hmmm… why would we need another layer of protection if we have this thing in hand?

    Answer: We don’t. This weird passage we’ve entered is the COVID policy version of throwing the parachute out of the plane and then jumping out after it. That big green thing rushing up at you? Yeah, that’s the ground, which currently holds the remains of nearly a million souls lost in this country alone. Meanwhile the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron is raising increasing levels of hell around the world, with no certainty yet as to the severity of an actual infection wave. At present, it makes up more than 55 percent of new cases in New England, and 34.9 percent nationally. If history is any guide at all, that wave is likely coming.

    We weren’t ready before because it was all unprecedented. We aren’t ready now because capitalism’s whisper campaign combined with toxic right-wing politics were potent enough to buckle the knees of even the most stalwart of COVID policy advocates. After all, it’s an election year. In this, the country fails to live up to Uri Freedman’s new benchmark for national strength: The ability to take a punch, get knocked down and then get up again, however many times it takes.

    We are not ready for a new COVID wave, deliberately. I shudder in my soul to imagine the impending fury and fear, the wrath of those who thought they heard something hopeful, only to discover it was God laughing at their plans. The feedback loop continues, and there will be hell to pay.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressives Demand Congress Cut Military Support for War on Yemen

    People search for survivors at a prison destroyed in an airstrike in Saada, Yemen, on January 22, 2022.

    The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in.

    ​​“I am deeply disappointed,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The people of Yemen need the same level of support and solidarity that we’ve seen for the people of Ukraine. The crisis in Europe will dramatically impact Yemenis’ access to food and fuel, making an already dire situation even worse.”

    With Yemen importing more than 35% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, disruption to wheat supplies will cause soaring increases in the price of food.

    “Since the onset of the Ukraine conflict, we have seen the prices of food skyrocket by more than 150 percent,” said Basheer Al Selwi, a spokesperson for the International Commission of the Red Cross in Yemen. “Millions of Yemeni families don’t know how to get their next meal.”

    The ghastly blockade and bombardment of Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is now entering its eighth year. The United Nations estimated last fall that the Yemen death toll would top 377,000 people by the end of 2021.

    The United States continues to supply spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Without this support, the Saudis couldn’t continue their murderous aerial attacks.

    Yet tragically, instead of condemning atrocities committed by the Saudi/UAE invasion, bombing and blockade of Yemen, the United States is cozying up to the leaders of these countries. As sanctions against Russia disrupt global oil sales, the United States is entering talks to become increasingly reliant on Saudi and UAE oil production. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE don’t want to increase their oil production without a U.S. agreement to help them increase their attacks against Yemen.

    Human rights groups have decried the Saudi/UAE-led coalition for bombing roadways, fisheries, sewage and sanitation facilities, weddings, funerals and even a children’s school bus. In a recent attack, the Saudis killed sixty African migrants held in a detention center in Saada.

    The Saudi blockade of Yemen has choked off essential imports needed for daily life, forcing the Yemeni people to depend on relief groups for survival.

    There is another way. U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Peter De Fazio of Oregon, both Democrats, are now seeking cosponsors for the Yemen War Powers Resolution. It demands that Congress cut military support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition’s war against Yemen.

    On March 12, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including seven Yemenis — two of them prisoners of war and five of them accused of criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen.

    Just two days after the mass execution, the Gulf Corporation Council, including many of the coalition partners attacking Yemen, announced Saudi willingness to host peace talks in their own capital city of Riyadh, requiring Yemen’s Ansar Allah leaders (informally known as Houthis) to risk execution by Saudi Arabia in order to discuss the war.

    The Saudis have long insisted on a deeply flawed U.N. resolution which calls on the Houthi fighters to disarm but never even mentions the U.S. backed Saudi/UAE coalition as being among the warring parties. The Houthis say they will come to the negotiating table but cannot rely on the Saudis as mediators. This seems reasonable, given Saudi Arabia’s vengeful treatment of Yemenis.

    The people of the United States have the right to insist that U.S. foreign policy be predicated on respect for human rights, equitable sharing of resources and an earnest commitment to end all wars. We should urge Congress to use the leverage it has for preventing continued aerial bombardment of Yemen and sponsor Jayapal’s and De Fazio’s forthcoming resolution.

    We can also summon the humility and courage to acknowledge U.S. attacks against Yemeni civilians, make reparations and repair the dreadful systems undergirding our unbridled militarism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disillusioned With Dems and GOP, Independents Now Largest Voter Group in the US

    A person exits after casting their ballot at the Moody Community Center in Houston, Texas, on February 24, 2022.

    Winding 336 miles through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties, the Central Arizona Project supplies water from the Colorado River to 80 percent of the state’s population and 40 percent of its farmlands. A drought has prompted the U.S. Department of Interior to implement a Tier-1 shortage for the first time, which will cut 18 percent of Arizona’s water supply from the Colorado River. But during Arizona’s legislative session thus far, bills to address the water shortage have been overshadowed by the 140 bills aimed at preventing so-called election fraud.

    Arizona residents like Perri Benemelis, a white 61-year-old water policy analyst, are tired of “election fraud” talk, and many are turning away from the Republican and Democratic parties and registering or identifying as independents.

    Benemelis cited proposals for a desalination project in Mexico and the monitoring of groundwater pumping in Mojave County as ways to address the water shortage, but is doubtful it will gain ground in the state legislature.

    “Considering the focus on election law probably means we’re not going to see a lot of substantive legislation addressing water availability,” Benemelis said. “We [Arizonans] keep chasing this fantasy that there was fraud in the last election that needs to be addressed. And because of this obsession by our Republican legislature, substantive issues — important issues to the citizens of the state of Arizona — are being largely ignored.”

    Independents now make up the largest voter group in the country. As of mid-January, 46 percent of those surveyed by a Gallup poll reported they identify as independents, 28 percent identify as Democrats and 24 percent as Republicans. According to 2018 figures, Independents are most likely to be younger, male and white, but more recent data show their numbers growing among other demographic groups. This group is deciding election outcomes — or at least making election results less predictable. Independent voters, pivotal in swing states including Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, favored Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.

    Since April 2021, President Biden’s approval rating among independents declined from 68 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent NBC poll. And if the early Texas primaries are any indication for other upcoming primaries later this year, twice the number of Texan independents came out to vote for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott than Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke. Republican primary turnout exceeded the Democratic primary turnout by nearly 74 percent, far greater than the 45 percent difference in the 2018 midterm elections. Most independents polled are opposed to efforts to remove books from schools and a total abortion ban.

    What this means is that while most independents are opposed to culture war politics and extreme political views, which prompted their abandonment of Trump in 2020, the disillusionment with the Biden administration among independents may result in low voter turnout rates for Democratic candidates. Independents could unwillingly propel Republicans towards a congressional majority this year and in 2024 if the Democratic Party does not capture the energy of this growing group of voters.

    For the first time in Maricopa County, registered independents and third-party voters, at 35 percent of the total number of registered voters, exceeded the number of registered Republicans and Democrats. Statewide, independents and third-party voters make up 34.2 percent, just behind Republicans but ahead of Democrats, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s voter registration report. The Open Primaries Education Fund, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reform of the primary election system, projects this trend to continue and for independents and third-party voters to reach 43 percent of the state voting population by 2036.

    Projected numbers of Arizona voters by party registration from 2020-2036
    Projected numbers of Arizona voters by party registration from 2020-2036

    Hugh McNichol is one of many veterans who identify themselves as independent. According to a March 2020 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America member survey, 41 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans identify as an independent or third-party voter, 36 percent as Republican and 22 percent as Democrat.

    McNichol, who is a 39-year-old white man, resides in Lansing, Michigan, where he owned his own mechanic shop before being hired as a mechanic by Tesla. Prior to this, McNichol served as a mechanic in the U.S. Army for eight years and was stationed in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. McNichol says he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2020, because they didn’t support the Iraq War.

    “Veterans are realizing that neither one of the major parties have our best interests at heart,” McNichol told Truthout. “The vast majority of people in our country don’t care about what’s going over there…. But the politicians who sent us over there, they should be obligated to us, they should be obligated to those people there too. And I don’t feel like they held up their promises in either case.”

    McNichol started to observe that promises to build infrastructure in Iraq turned into profits for private contractors, particularly for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which received $39.5 billion in war-related contracts. Dick Cheney was the chairman and CEO of former KBR parent company Halliburton until he became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001.

    “While I was there, I started hearing things like KBR gets $100 for a bag of laundry, KBR gets $100 for a plate of food, $6 for a can of soda, all these inflated expenses. And they weren’t keeping their promises of getting the infrastructure back up and running,” McNichol said.

    Like McNichol, some veterans of the Afghanistan War report they feel as if they broke a promise to Afghans when U.S. troops withdrew from the country. Meanwhile, when McNichol returned home, he found the Department of Veterans Affairs inundated and unprepared to help returning soldiers.

    McNichol worries about the lack of affordable housing and pollution in Lansing’s water sources. For years, the city has given tax cuts and subsidies to General Motors (GM), which polluted Lansing’s groundwater with dioxane, an industrial chemical that GM uses to clean oil off car parts. The pollution was discovered after the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust was established by the federal government to take over the GM sites following the company’s bankruptcy in 2009. Earlier this year, GM announced it would invest $7 billion in manufacturing sites across Michigan. In Lansing, GM would partner with LG Energy Solution to spend $2.6 billion to build a new battery cell plant in Lansing and offer 1,700 new jobs to the area.

    However, McNichol is wary about the long-term impact. “These toxins from the GM plans are still not cleaned up. They have no plans. The politicians in Lansing don’t care. They just want GM to come back again,” McNichol said.

    Independent voters Truthout interviewed described a “rigged electoral system.” Despite the growing numbers of independents and third-party voters from diverse demographic and ideological groups, these voters face hurdles at the ballot box. Twenty-three U.S. states — including the battleground states of Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — have closed presidential primaries. Fifteen states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have closed congressional and state primaries. Thirty states — including Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — require voters to declare a party affiliation upon registration. Those registered as independents are thus excluded from the two major parties’ closed primary elections, which, according to data from Ballotpedia, determines 35 percent of state legislative elections. In 11 states, more than half of all state legislative seats did not have major party competition in 2020. Registering with the two major parties often dictates the drawing of electoral districts, and poll workers are often only chosen from voters who register with the two major parties.

    Advocacy groups such as Independent Voting and Open Primaries Education Fund want to see voter registration without party affiliation, nonpartisan primary elections and a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to ensure nonpartisan election operations. According to the National League of Cities, 73 percent of the largest cities in the country already hold nonpartisan municipal elections.

    “Independents began to see that the control of the electoral process by the two parties was fused with the larger economic and social circumstances in the country,” said Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org. “They began to feel that this was a country being run by a set of insiders, that the insiders had control over the political apparatus, and that unless and until we could change and transform the political apparatus, we weren’t going to be able to address issues of economic instability.”

    Beyond open primaries, those interviewed support electoral reform measures, such as independent redistricting and having the top two or top four winners from primary elections compete in general elections. California, Washington State, Alaska, Nebraska and Louisiana already have such a system. Others support ranked choice voting, already adopted in 23 jurisdictions.

    In Florida, for all the mainstream media talk of Latinos shifting their loyalties to the Republican Party after Trump made gains among Latino voters in Arizona, Texas and Florida in 2020, the data on independents present a less certain picture. According to the Florida Department of State’s October 2020 voter registration records, 36.5 percent of Latinos in the state registered as a third-party member or unaffiliated, behind Democrats and well ahead of Republicans. Data from earlier this year show independents now make up 28.7 percent of all registered voters statewide. If this trend continues, the state’s independent and third-party voters will exceed Republicans and Democrats by 2035.

    Jose Torres, who is 65 years old, identifies as Hispanic, and lives in Jacksonville, Florida, begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Andrew Gillum for governor in 2018 and Biden for president in 2020. Torres describes himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. He identifies as an independent and advocates for open primary elections in Florida because he is tired of having to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”

    “The Democrats have taken Hispanic voters for granted for 20 years. We are not monolithic,” Torres told Truthout.

    Torres says that Republicans were able to use anti-communist rhetoric to make gains among Cubans in South Florida. Even though he doesn’t buy into this rhetoric, Torres says that the Democratic Party has also failed to address issues of concern to him: high prescription drug prices, stagnant state minimum wages and climate change, citing rising sea levels that threaten to immerse parts of Miami two feet underwater within the next 40 years.

    Projected numbers of Florida voters by party registration from 2020-2035
    Projected numbers of Florida voters by party registration from 2020-2035

    Young first-generation Latino-American voters have even less affiliation to either of the major parties. According to the Open Primaries Education Fund report, 60 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are under the age of 35 and over 50 percent of Latino millennials are independents.

    Dariel Cruz Rodriguez, currently a 17-year-old senior at Colonial High School in Orlando, Florida, will vote for the first time this year. Rodriguez identifies as an independent. He said he will probably vote for Democrats this year, because of the state’s Republican-dominated legislature’s efforts to restrict voting rights, but he is also frustrated with the Democrats and the Biden administration.

    “I supported Joe Biden, mainly because I wanted to get the other guy out. But Biden made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, and failed to follow through with a lot of them, especially on student loan forgiveness, which is really important to me and a lot of my other classmates,” Rodriguez told Truthout.

    Besides student loan forgiveness, Rodriguez wants to see the government address climate change and improve public transit. He also opposes Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which recently passed the State House Legislature.

    “Politicians are using Florida’s children and students as playing cards in the state legislature,” Rodriguez said.

    Originally from the city of Ludowici in southern Georgia, Ron Dumas, a 23-year-old Black man, is currently finishing up his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. He is majoring in ethics because, as he states, “I care about what is right.”

    Dumas describes his hometown in Georgia as lacking in educational opportunities and job mobility: “I always say that there’s just a gas station and a high school in Ludowici.” Ludowici, with a population of 2,442, according to 2020 census figures, is 56 percent white and 36 percent African American, and votes largely conservative. Dumas says the Democrats “abandoned the community when they believed they couldn’t compete for the vote.”

    Dumas’s mom is a medical assistant and his stepfather a veteran and truck driver. He recalls being 9 years old when his mom allowed him to stay up late to watch Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony. It was the first time his parents had ever voted — his mom told him she didn’t vote in 2004 because “it would not have mattered.”

    Dumas voted for the first time in 2020, supporting Bernie Sanders in the primaries. He noted that there was less excitement among his peers when Biden had become the Democratic nominee.

    Dumas’s and Rodriguez’s sentiments echo the findings of a September 2020 survey conducted by Politico among Gen Z voters. Almost half of the Gen Z respondents reported they voted more against Trump, rather than for Biden. Forty-two percent of the poll’s Gen Z respondents identify as independent, 39 percent as Democrats and 20 percent as Republican.

    “There is a consensus that people are tired of polarization and tired of the sort of politics where you’re always voting against something and never for something,” Dumas said. He wants to see Biden follow through with his promises on voting rights legislation, affordable health care, affordable child care, affordable housing and passing the Build Back Better plan.

    While on the campaign trail, Biden ignited backlash and had to apologize to Black voters when he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me, or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” But more than a quarter of Black voters registered as independent and may be looking for an alternative to both major parties. Since last April, the president’s approval rating has declined from 83 percent to 64 percent among Black voters.

    Like Dumas, Jarrell Corley, a 35-year-old Black man, emphasizes that Black voters are not a monolith and that there are more than two sides to an issue.

    Corley identifies as an independent because he says he is tired of seeing nothing change for the Black community under Republican or Democratic administrations. He voted for Clinton in 2016, but did not vote in the 2020 presidential election, saying, “There was no point in voting. I didn’t have a dog in the fight.”

    Corley is originally from Chicago. He cites that in most urban centers with large Black populations, local governments are dominated by the Democrats, but conditions, including displacement and police brutality, are getting worse.

    “The only reason Black people don’t feel comfortable voting for Republicans is because the Democrats are a mouthpiece for the issues of Black people. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything is getting done,” Corley told Truthout. “If you look into all these major cities run by Democrats, what’s going on? Gentrification. They’re displacing poor, marginalized groups of people for new high economic development. So you may talk about progress and police brutality and all these issues, but what are you really doing? It’s all a facade. Using Black tragedy as a means to galvanize power.”

    At the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, Sam Clayton, a 21-year-old white student, studies horticulture. Clayton is nonbinary, using they/them pronouns, and is the treasurer of the campus’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. Clayton recently led the UW-Madison local chapter to work with other organizations to stop a city attempt to shut down homeless encampments in Madison’s Reindahl Park and instead helped push the city to use federal COVID relief money to construct shelters there instead.

    Clayton said they voted for Biden in 2020 out of “duress” and with “no excitement,” and has not seen any improvement in their material conditions.

    Millennials were reported to be the first generation to do worse economically than their parents, a trend that has continued for Gen Z as housing and college costs soar. Clayton describes how their parents paid off college expenses and bought their first home by the time they were in their 20s. “It’s generally hard for young people to imagine a good future. And the Democrats don’t inspire much confidence in anything other than the status quo,” Clayton said. “The Democrats rely on this assumption that because they’re using progressive language, that’ll translate into youth voters. But more and more people that I talk to, even folks who are not politically inclined, don’t like what’s going on. The phrase ‘settled’ encompasses how people feel about voting for Democrats.”

    While Politico reported that young voters are less likely than registered voters of all other age groups to consider voting impactful, they are just as likely to believe they can affect politics and political affairs. Young voters are more likely to support protests than older voters. Millennial and Gen Z voters interviewed for this article expressed a distrust of the government to address the country’s problems, and believe they must rely on their communities instead.

    Clayton is worried about rising temperatures, housing prices, utility bills and student loans. As a nonbinary person, they do not feel they would be safe under a Republican administration, but believes that the Democrats may lose in 2022 and even in 2024 because young people are not relying on the electoral system to affect change.

    “I think the Democrats have done a very good job of turning young people off from voting because they haven’t done much for us,” said Clayton. “But there is an increase in people’s political militancy and political agitation in terms of protesting, not necessarily just at the ballot box.”

    In Pennsylvania, which holds closed presidential, congressional and state primaries, several bills to open up primary elections have stalled in the state government. According to January 2022 voter registration data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, 14.8 percent of voters registered as unaffiliated or “other.”

    Third-party or independent candidates lack access to voter rolls and funding that the two major parties have. Furthermore, they often face legal challenges from the two parties who fear a third-party candidate will draw voters away from them or “spoil” their race.

    Matt Nemeth, a 27-year-old white man and chair of the Green Party Allegheny chapter in Pennsylvania, regrets his vote for Clinton in 2016 and expresses frustration with the argument that their members are “spoiling” the vote, as both Clinton and Trump “serve private interests.”

    Nemeth’s parents voted for Trump twice because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to Pennsylvania. Nemeth, on the other hand, says that manufacturing jobs should not come at the cost of corporate accountability and clean air, a promise he believes that both Democrats and Republicans have not delivered on.

    Last year, U.S. Steel canceled plans for a $1.5 billion upgrade to bring three plants in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley up to health department regulations. The regulations were implemented after two fires erupted, releasing benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air and causing asthma-related emergency visits among residents. While the plants currently remain idle, U.S. Steel is challenging the Allegheny Health Department’s regulations.

    “Both parties made promises that they don’t want to keep or can’t keep, and then every four years, we switch to another party, and the cycle repeats,” Nemeth told Truthout.

    If the voices of this growing group of independents and third-party voters are excluded or unheeded, it could spell further volatility in our elections in the coming years.

    In Chattanooga, Tennessee, independent Amber Hysell, a 37-year-old white woman, is making another bid for a seat in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Hysell is a working mom still paying off student loans for a college accounting degree she was unable to finish when her financial aid ran out with only two classes left to take. For much of her adult life, she worked graveyard shifts in service and retail jobs so that she could have time to spend with her child during the day.

    Fed up with issues of concern to her being overlooked — wealth inequality, child care, health care, underfunded schools and affordable housing — Hysell decided to run for Congress. When she was courted by the Hamilton County Democrats in 2020, she was given a Democratic strategy book from the 1970s.

    “The way they described how a campaign is supposed to work, it made me feel like they didn’t realize they were in Tennessee, that they were just incredibly out of touch with the problems in this district and in this state. It really did not seem to me to have an actual plan or the actual desire to win down here,” Hysell told Truthout.

    As an independent, Hysell doesn’t automatically get access to voter contact information or funding sources as candidates from the two major parties do. But when asked why she was bothering to run when there were so many hurdles, Hysell replies: “Life is going to be difficult for the next generation. We’re not addressing climate change. We’re not addressing inequality in any meaningful way. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin and neither one of them is paying the bills. They have created a system that blockades anyone who doesn’t fall on one side or the other. And the best thing that I can do for my kid is do whatever I can to change that outcome.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UK Wants to Incarcerate Asylum Seekers “Offshore” on Abandoned Oil Rigs

    A group of people thought to be migrants are guided up the beach after being brought in to Dungeness, Kent, onboard a lifeboat following an incident in the English Channel on March 24, 2022.

    Eighteen months ago, reports started to surface that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in the U.K. was planning to detain would-be asylum seekers in places as far away as the South Atlantic. Some sites, such as Ascension Island, are 4,000 miles from Britain.

    Johnson’s plan was actually a spinoff of a never-implemented idea put forward by the Labour government back in 2003 to “offshore” the country’s asylum process to “regional protection zones” in the vicinity of the conflicts and collapsing economies that were sending hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to the U.K. and other European countries. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his colleagues backed off of that idea after it received tremendous pushback from social justice and immigrant rights organizers, who averred that it would place large and unfair financial burdens on poor countries that had the geographic misfortune to be located on the periphery of war zones.

    Since those initial reports — with asylum seekers finding ever-more creative ways to cross over to England from the continent, either via boats or, in some instances, being smuggled through the Channel Tunnel — Home Secretary Priti Patel has increasingly looked to penalize asylum seekers, to render their actions criminal and to deny them the right to a fair hearing in the U.K. The British government is mirroring U.S. government actions taken during the Trump administration against would-be asylees attempting to traverse the southern border into the U.S., such as the Orwellian-named Migrant Protection Protocols.

    This past summer, Patel unveiled plans, contained in legislation called the Nationality and Borders Bill, to criminalize asylum seekers entering the country without the correct paperwork and to make it easier to deport them. The plans also sought to house asylum seekers in offshore facilities such as abandoned oil rigs, or on Ascension Island off the coast of southern Africa, while their cases slowly wend through the court system. This sort of offshore detention — a practice long utilized in Australia, and currently being proposed in Denmark — is one that immigrants’ rights groups view with deep suspicion. If implemented, it would also give the British home secretary unprecedented powers to revoke the citizenship of certain U.K. citizens deemed politically undesirable, a move that picked up steam in the wake of a number of high-profile cases of U.K. citizens operating within the ranks of ISIS.

    So desperate is Johnson’s government to deliver on its electoral promise to anti-immigrant voters of curtailing immigration that it has reportedly turned to a range of countries, from Norway to Rwanda to Albania to host its detention facilities. All, apparently, have turned down the U.K.’s overtures, leaving the remote Ascension Island, with its once-a-week flight to South Africa, as choice number one. If this tough-on-asylum proposal becomes law, it could end up costing the U.K. a fortune: A similar offshoring policy in Australia ultimately cost the Australians roughly 2 million pounds per person per year held at these remote detention sites, and helped shred the country’s human rights record in the process. In addition to the immorality of such a measure, as a deterrent system this sort of off-shoring policy is shockingly expensive to implement.

    Since the bill was first proposed, opposition parties, combined with a number of rebels from within Conservative ranks, have fought a rearguard action to try to prevent it being enacted into law.

    Now, with war raging once again on the European continent and displacing millions of people, and with tens of thousands of British families having signed up for a government program to host Ukrainian refugees in their homes, one might imagine that Prime Minister Johnson and Home Secretary Patel would use the moment as cover to back off of the more inflammatory of their anti-immigrant proposals.

    To the contrary, they have doubled down. Earlier this month, the government repeatedly made it clear that it was sticking by this bill, and sent the legislation over to parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, to be debated, amended and voted upon. But members of the House of Lords weren’t happy about the legislation, and in a series of hearings successfully defeated or amended many of its more contentious, more anti-democratic, provisions.

    Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the bill is dead. The House of Lords is, these days, more of an advisory chamber than an institution with veto powers over legislation. And, at this point, it’s looking as if Johnson’s government intends to try to steamroll the legislation through Parliament later this month, when members of Parliament once more debate the merits of the proposals.

    Yet, Johnson is, after months of political scandals, a wounded leader, and his hold on the Conservative Party is nowhere near as total as it was last year. In recent days, more than two dozen of his members of Parliament have indicated their discomfort with key parts of the legislation, including the part which refuses to grant asylum seekers temporary work permits while they are waiting for their cases to be heard.

    The war in Ukraine is rapidly shifting the dynamics around refugees and asylees. For years, a growing number of countries in Europe, pushed by electorates increasingly wary of large-scale migration, locked down against poor (mainly non-white) migrants seeking asylum. But Ukrainians, forced to flee suddenly before a staggeringly violent Russian onslaught, aren’t seeking asylum, a process that can take years of legal hearings to complete; rather they are heading west as refugees — into refugee camps in countries bordering Ukraine, and then westward into other countries in Europe. And, unlike with the victims of other conflicts in previous years, aid agencies in Europe are watching, somewhat amazed, as governments welcome these displaced Ukrainians with open arms. This treatment is far cry from how European countries’ response to the civil war in Syria — a year after a mass migration into Europe in 2015, one country after another began locking its borders down against the refugees — and the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

    In contrast, Ukrainians are being met with work permits, with free public transit passes and so on, despite the fact that these same European governments have steadily been turning away refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other non-European conflict zones in recent years after a populist backlash against the liberal entry policies of 2015.

    After a slow start denounced by opposition politicians as “shameful,” Britain has begun easing its rules-of-entry to allow for large numbers of Ukrainians to be temporarily resettled in the U.K. As a result, somewhere in the region of 200,000 Ukrainians could end up living in the country over the coming months and years — a number roughly equal to the number of EU nationals who left the U.K. in 2020 as Brexit’s provisions began to kick in, and one that might go a long way to fill the labor shortage in key sectors of the economy that Britain has repeatedly experienced post-Brexit.

    Some relief workers and experts argue that this is a moment for Europe to fundamentally rethink its obligations to those fleeing persecution and violence, finally bringing the continent more in line with the spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    But, at least in the short term, that seems an unlikely outcome. In Britain, the political tradeoff is, perhaps, most obvious. The home secretary, with Prime Minister Johnson’s backing, is continuing to push the noxious Nationality and Borders Bill in the same month that the government has been forced, by public opinion as much as by internal party dissent, to roll out a much larger welcome mat for Ukrainians than it had initially intended.

    The U.K. is rightly responding with generosity to the victims of Russia’s violence in Ukraine. But, unless the Conservative parliamentary rebels pick up more followers in the coming weeks, it will soon be going down an even nastier road than before in its responses to other displaced, traumatized people fleeing non-European conflicts, non-European economic collapse and non-European zones of despair.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanctions Against Wealthy Russians Are Largely Symbolic and Won’t End the War

    People in Russia visit local bank branch

    Every day that passes in Russia’s war on Ukraine, another mall or theater or maternity hospital is vaporized. Cities are under siege. Each day inches closer to a breaking strain, a point that — once crossed — risks a plunge into global nuclear confrontation.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are deploying economic sanctions, hoping they will convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters that it is time to go home. By any metric, the sanctions that have been levied against Russia, Putin and the ruling oligarchs are massive. Nations, banks, businesses, whole currencies have been denied them across the board, and more are still in the offing if this thing grinds on.

    Before an emergency NATO summit in Brussels today, President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce a new round of sanctions, along with a tightening of the current ones. Meanwhile, a bipartisan clutch of senators is working with the Treasury Department to lock down more than $130 billion in Russian gold reserves.

    There are three main perils to levying such ruinous sanctions, two that are well known and a third hardly discussed. The first is the danger of Putin deciding the economic damage being done to his country amounts to an existential threat, which then motivates him to menace the world with his nuclear arsenal to make them stop. A NATO move to further stymie Russia’s petroleum industry could elicit such a response, which is why the issue is being handled like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.

    The second is the bitter harm done to the Russian people, who are largely innocent of Putin’s crime beyond some being duped into supporting it by his state media. Putin does not seem to care if Russians starve in the darkness he has brought down upon them; his yacht-hiding pals on speed-dial with 12 numbers to the left of the decimal on their bank accounts are his primary, secondary and tertiary concern.

    The wrenching effect of those sanctions must therefore be our concern, for they are deeply concerning. Are they having the desired effect? Are they putting pressure on Putin’s allies, or are they merely damaging broad swaths of the Russian population? “The experience of U.S. sanctions’ impacts around the world is important,” writes Khury Petersen-Smith for Truthout, “especially because Washington and other Western capitals hold up sanctions as an alternative to war. We should understand them instead, however, as a weapon of war. Their devastating impact results in widespread suffering that may be quieter or less visible to most in the U.S. than an invasion or airstrikes are, but that is no less deadly.”

    On paper, at least, Putin’s pals are taking it in the chops. The truth, however, brings us to the third peril: the fiction of economic hardship, which is playing out among Russia’s wealthy elite even now.

    “Let us first recall that the freezing of assets held by Putin and his relatives is already part of the arsenal of sanctions that have been tried for several years,” explains economist and author Thomas Piketty. “The problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people, and can be circumvented by using nominees, especially as nothing has been done to systematically measure and cross-reference the real estate and financial portfolios held by each of them.”

    It always seems to come back to real estate, to land. Once upon a time, land ownership granted one the right to vote. Later, real estate became the preferred playground for money laundering. Now, in the age of the kleptocratic oligarch, land serves to hide assets while allowing the asset-holder to dodge international sanctions levied against their home country.

    These sanctions are supposed to be cramping the style of Putin’s oligarchs to such a degree that they gather the will to drag him back from the abyss … but this tactic will only succeed if the oligarchs — and Putin, himself a billionaire many times over — are the ones who are truly impacted.

    This is not happening; ordinary people are suffering in their place, and that suffering only promises to grow. The solution, according to Piketty, is to deploy sanctions that are far more specifically targeted than those currently in use. It would be the difference between using a scalpel and using a broadsword.

    “To bring the Russian state to heel, we must focus sanctions on the thin social layer of multimillionaires upon which the regime relies: a group much larger than a few dozen people, but much narrower than the Russian population in general,” argues Piketty. “To give you an idea, one could target the people who hold over €10m ($11m) in real estate and financial assets, or about 20,000 people, according to the latest available data. This represents 0.02% of the Russian adult population (currently 110 million)…. To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a ‘global financial registry’ or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries.”

    Unfortunately, such measures will be exceedingly difficult to impose, and for one reason: Russia’s billionaires are sustained and protected by the same financial system that sustains and protects Western and Chinese billionaires. The latter group will not willingly abandon these self-serving rules of capitalism, even if it means allowing Putin and his allies to remain largely untouched amid the suffering of the people.

    Do these Western wealthy elites support Putin and his war? Perhaps, but not nearly as much as they support the mechanisms of capitalism that build their fortunes. If those mechanisms are dismantled in order to punish the Russians, they will no longer serve the billionaire class as a whole, and that is not to be tolerated, no matter how high the bodies pile up. “So why has no progress still not been made in this direction?” asks Piketty. “For one simple reason: western wealthy people fear that such transparency will ultimately harm them.”

    Wealth must be extracted, wealth must be protected: These are the only two laws that really matter to that sub-segment of the global populace. As Jacob Broom was once noted to say, “Control the coinage and the courts; let the rabble have the rest.”

    That all this plays out beneath the shroud of war is the cruelest of ironies, for what is war but capitalism at its most robust, the most lucrative of all human endeavors? Every war lines the pockets of those who peddle the weapons, and among the peddlers in this war are more than a few of Putin’s friends. Try to imagine convincing the Carlyle Group to make George W. Bush back down from his Iraq invasion. Never in hell would that happen; the money was too good.

    At the barest minimum, we need to do better than the current sanctions, and we need to do so now. Piketty offers a blueprint for that endeavor, but there are surely others to consider as well. We need to knock down the financial barricades that separate the billionaires from even the notion of justice. More than that, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the shameful use of mass sanctions and collective punishment. Every day that passes inches us closer to Armageddon, and not even an oligarch can survive a nuke. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A New Cold War Won’t Help the People of Ukraine or Anyone Else

    Kyiv residents sit in tent set up after building is hit with shrapnel

    The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”

    “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”

    For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”

    Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”

    Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.

    But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.

    The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.

    Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.

    The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.

    Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.

    Unlike ordinary people around the world, foreign policy elites are not thinking primarily about the immediate needs of the Ukrainian people. If they were, the U.S. would be doing more to aid peace talks, cancel Ukraine’s onerous debt repayments to global banks and stop the denial of entry to Ukrainian refugees at the U.S. border.

    Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.

    Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.

    Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.

    To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.

    People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.

    For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”

    Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.

    More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.

    That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disability Doesn’t Make Us Less Worthy of Life. COVID Policy Assumes It Does.

    Six disabled people of color smile and pose in front of a concrete wall. Five people stand in the back, with the Black woman in the center holding up a chalkboard sign reading 'disabled and here.' A South Asian person in a wheelchair sits in front.

    When I was 7 years old, my father put me to bed each night with a fluffy bunny puppet and a lesson on human finitude. With the bunny’s glassy blue eyes fixed on me, his voice pitched high and cartoonish, my dad would ask me big questions. What if you’re the only person in the world, and we’re all just figments of your imagination? How would you ever really know that’s not true? That’s called solipsism. Or, another time: We fear the time after we die, but why don’t we fear the vast time of non-existence before we were born? Or the room above our heads, where we finish in space?

    Long after my father left the room, I would lie awake in both terror and wonder, contemplating the places of my non-existence. Although my father was a professor of philosophy when I was born, his own early childhood had been spent hiding from Nazis in various Christian foster homes and orphanages in Belgium. It wasn’t just that he didn’t believe in sheltering children from hard truths (which he didn’t); a soft landing in life had never even crossed his mind.

    Four decades later, I still spend much of my time thinking about death. I am a chronically ill rabbi who has spent the past 15 years offering spiritual care to people who are ill, dying or bereaved. But fears of mortality don’t keep me awake at night anymore; in fact, as a chronically ill person, it’s a relief for me to hang out with dying people. With the dying, I don’t have to explain that bodies can’t always be fixed. At a bedside, both my clients and I can finally rest. Until recently, I worked in institutional settings like hospitals and nursing homes, and a different question has kept me up at night: Who gets to live, and who is left to die in this country?

    Even before the pandemic, this question bothered me, but since March 2020 the inequities in health care have been written starkly in death statistics (with disabled people, elders, and/or people of color being hit the hardest). White House Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci said last month that the “full-blown pandemic” is nearly over, and we will be transitioning to a phase when individuals will make their “own decisions” about risk. As a high-risk immunocompromised person, that sounds to me like code for no longer trying to protect high-risk lives. Already, as mask mandates lift and quarantine times are shortened, the chronically sick, disabled and elderly bear increased risk. We’re stuck at home, often not even able to make it to necessary medical appointments, as public society becomes too dangerous for us.

    Rabbi Elliot Kukla, a white non-binary person, stands in front of a green background holding a wooden cane.
    Rabbi Elliot Kukla, a white nonbinary person, stands in front of a green background holding a wooden cane.

    My dad, who once put me to bed with a bunny puppet, now lives in a large, public nursing home that has been hit hard by COVID. Each surge has whipped through his hallway, taking residents and staff with it. My father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease 25 years ago, when he was not much older than I am now. In 2022, he rarely speaks, and he is often confused about whether he is dreaming or awake. As it is for many elders with cognitive disabilities, people often talk about my dad in the past tense, as if he’s already dead. He is not alone in this; I hear relatives of my clients with dementia talk about their parents and grandparents in the past tense all the time, as if by becoming disabled they are as good as dead. He was a doctor, they say. She was a great mother.

    I have served on numerous palliative care teams, and have consulted on many end-of-life ethics cases in some of the most progressive urban hospitals in the country. In almost every one of those cases, I hear physicians and other health care providers uncritically assume that disability is a clear indication of a diminished quality of life, and that the more disabled a patient is, the more likely they are to want to die.

    These assumptions translate into high-stakes care decisions, particularly when a patient’s disabilities impair their capacity to speak or communicate their wishes. But numerous studies show that disabled people consistently rate our own quality of life as the same or even better than able-bodied people do, and that our happiness level does not correlate with our degree of disability. This finding holds true across a wide variety of disabilities, including catastrophic injury and illness.

    At the same time, a recent study found that 82 percent of physicians assumed that disabled people see ourselves as either a “little” or “a lot worse off” than our able-bodied peers. This profound misunderstanding of the subjective experience of disability — coupled with unwillingness to listen to disabled activists trying to signal-boost the message that our lives don’t suck — is particularly pernicious in life-threatening situations.

    I once had a client with ALS who lived for decades beyond her prognosis. She had movement only in her chin, but she used that chin to write poetry while traveling across California with her ventilator and care team. She was also extremely expensive for her insurance company: Every month or two, she would end up in the ICU for a ventilator issue or a UTI, and pretty much every time she was there, someone on staff would ask her if she wanted to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order to limit how many life-saving actions doctors would take in an emergency. Every single time, she said no. As her rabbi, I was sometimes asked by someone on her hospital care team to try to talk her into it, as if it was a spiritual flaw that she wanted to live as long as possible, given how disabled she was.

    Though my client with ALS was deeply inspiring, disabled people shouldn’t have to be “heroic” or “inspiring” to deserve to live.

    My father’s flawed and captivating personality has remained surprisingly consistent throughout his long illness: He was always a brilliant, hilarious, emotionally distant person, with moments of a terrifying, violent temper, and all of that is essentially unchanged. On a rare day when he is speaking, I ask him what it’s been like as an intensely private person, to live in an institution, in a shared room, depending on overworked staff for feeding and toileting. He answers slowly: Every… indignity… imaginable. When I ask if he’s ready to die, he is quick to shake his head no. He has been clear about this throughout his long illness, even when he is clear about almost nothing else, and yet his response is still met with surprise and disbelief by some of the health care providers who care for him.

    Even when I ask him if he gets bored, he answers clearly: No. He spends most of his time now sitting in a chair, gazing peacefully at a wall or his own hands, curled into himself like a fiddlehead fern, in the way of creatures at the beginning and end of their life cycles. He used to be a fiercely ambitious academic of the “publish or perish” variety, as well as a world traveler, an esoteric spiritual seeker, an activist and a psychedelic journeyer. When I was a child, he was constantly in pursuit of solitude, often locking himself in the bathroom for hours to write academic papers in peace. Now, he genuinely enjoys daily visits with my mother, and chocolate milkshakes. He finally has the time to fully contemplate the unknowable space over his head, and perhaps begin to make friends with it.

    In the pandemic, more and more people have come to see disabled lives as inherently less worth living. From the earliest days of March 2020, the public health message was that “you” didn’t need to panic about COVID; only elders and disabled people would die. Implicit in this message were the twin unquestioned assumptions that disabled people weren’t the ones reading the news, and that we would be no great loss. This early stage gave way in April 2020 to medical rationing policies popping up in hospitals across the country, excluding disabled people and elders from lifesaving care, even before there were emergency shortages. Disability advocacy groups fought in the courts to overturn these largely illegal policies, but laws can’t legislate the ableist thinking of individual medical providers. For example, in June 2020, Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old disabled Black father, died of COVID. His widow, Melissa, recorded his doctor saying that treating him would be futile because he would never have a good quality of life as a disabled person anyway.

    Meanwhile, lockdown protesters have been explicit about the disposability of elders and disabled people. On May 6, 2020, conservative stay-at-home mom Bethany Mandel tweeted: “You can call me a grandma killer. I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.” Thousands of people cheerfully thumbs-upped this statement and retweeted it.

    When disabled and elder deaths are treated so flippantly, it begins to sound a lot like eugenics (the view that only some kinds of people are “fit” to thrive and reproduce; in other words, only some people are people). Eugenics rose in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, and went out of fashion because the Nazi belief in a eugenically purified race led to the Holocaust. Ableism has always been at the heart of eugenics; Hitler called disabled people “useless eaters,” and he murdered us first. In the ableist eugenic mind, inferior races are “unwell.” In this worldview, Black and Indigenous people are seen as inherently less intelligent, while queer, transgender and nonbinary people are labelled as mentally ill and perverted. Meanwhile, people with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric disabilities are seen as inherently less worthy of living.

    In recent months, as COVID variants sweep the globe, the message that disabled people are unworthy of salvage has once again become mainstream. The view that we should just get over COVID restrictions and accept that everyone will get the virus tacitly assumes that some of us will die, and that these deaths will overwhelmingly be disabled people. On January 8, 2022, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky made these biases explicit during an interview about the Omicron variant on “Good Morning America” when she said that she was “really encouraged” that only “unwell” people were dying of Omicron.

    When aging brings cognitive disabilities, my clients’ family members often say, “I feel like my person died already,” when what they mean is that it’s intensely painful for us to sit with dementia and their loved one’s loss of memory. There is a very human egoism in this. Our parents and grandparents had full lives without memory of us before we were born; now, as they come to the end of life, we may again become irrelevant. People with cognitive disabilities are still people, even without memory or awareness of us. When my child was born, it became vibrantly clear to me that profound intimate relationships can exist with someone who lacks long-term memory and language. This is obvious to most new parents interacting with newborns, and yet many of us struggle to relate with genuine intimacy to elders with dementia. It’s much easier for most of us to be present at the beginnings of memory and language than to grieve these losses. So much of how we relate to each other is limited by our aversion to loss.

    As a country, we have not even begun to grieve the losses of the last few years; we have lost so much, and we don’t know yet what will be restored. As we look with hope toward a world a little less dominated by endemic COVID, as opposed to pandemic COVID, we must be honest about the fact that risk will not subside at the same rate for everyone, and name what we are willing to lose and what we need to hold on to fiercely.

    I fear that we’re moving toward a reality where it’s increasingly risky for many elders, sick and disabled people to leave their homes, with the able-bodied creating a strange new kind of public society without us, while online access to public spaces like college campuses and religious services wanes. This is tragically ironic in its carelessness. Disability justice activist and writer, Alice Wong, coined the phrase the “future is disabled” and the disabled author, Leah Lakshmi Piepenza-Samarsinha, has a book forthcoming by that title. This phrase speaks to a very tangible reality. Already, more than half of this country has a chronic illness, and almost one in four Americans is disabled. As the population ages and we face more disabling conditions, like long COVID and environmental illness, it seems likely that the majority of the population will be sick and/or disabled in the near future.

    The mainstream world does not yet grasp just how much would be lost if public spaces became even less accessible due to endemic COVID. Just as (largely) able-bodied medical authorities vastly underestimate the happiness level of disabled individuals, able-bodied society, as a whole, underestimates the creativity, joy, innovation and connectivity of disabled culture. On a warming planet, as life gets more tenuous, disabled communities have some of the knowledge, experience and innovations needed for everyone’s future. My chronically ill life has taught me how to slow down, give and receive care, sit with uncertainty and love unconditionally. These skills are particularly valuable for life on this chronically ill planet.

    There are times when it seems like my father will never speak again, and then there are moments when his trademark speaking style is clear and sharp. I ask him what he thinks of the certified nurses’ assistants who literally wipe his ass for him, and he says slowly, I am not familiar enough with them to comment. Some might hear this as a sign of memory loss or snobbery, but if you know my father, this is merely the endurance of his personality. He uses his exceptional brain to evaluate philosophical ideas, not personalities. This makes him both painfully aloof and surprisingly non-judgmental. Even before he got sick, had we asked him what he thought about just about anyone (including academic colleagues of over 40 years), he would have answered with a similar turn of phrase.

    When I was 7, I had a pink bunny quilt (to match my pink-clad bunny puppet), which was my favorite thing in the world. My father would sit on the edge of it, with the bunny puppet on his hand. It’s possible, he said one night in his bunny voice, that there is another universe somewhere, where there is another dad putting his youngest child to bed with a bunny puppet, and they look just like us. Perhaps there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of parallel universes. Afterward, I lay awake for hours, bright glittering universes spinning around me in the dark. In each and every possible world, my father is there.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A ban on thermal coal can make this world a safer place

    The post A ban on thermal coal can make this world a safer place appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Dark Money “Women’s Groups” Are Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose ERA

    A marcher holds a sign that says ERA NOW during the Woman's March in the borough of Manhattan in New York on January 18, 2020.

    March 22 marks 50 years since Congress voted to send the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would outlaw sex discrimination, to the states for ratification.

    By 1977, the ERA appeared to be a done deal with bipartisan support and 35 of the necessary 38 state ratifications to amend the Constitution. Then the anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly mobilized right-wing women to oppose the ERA, playing a major role in stalling the amendment.

    Schlafly passed away in 2016, but her anti-feminist legacy very much lives on through “Eagle Forum” and other women’s groups funded by dark money — funding sources whose donors are kept secret from the public but are used for significant expenditures intended to influence elections, judicial nominations, ballot measures, and legislation. The ability to traffic in dark money gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.

    Today, Eagle Forum and right-wing women’s groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) continue to oppose the ERA as well as the Equality Act, a bill that would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

    Some of Schlafly’s arguments, such as “the career most women want is marriage, home, husband, and children,” as she said in 1982, are not likely to resonate with most women in 2022. Instead, today’s right-wing women’s groups have adopted a new tactic: using attacks on transgender people — the GOP’s new boogeyman — to try to undermine support for the ERA and the Equality Act.

    The Origins of the Anti-Feminist Women’s Groups Fighting the ERA

    One of the most influential anti-feminist campaigners of the late 20th century was Beverly LaHaye, the wife of far right evangelical minister Tim LaHaye. LaHaye claims she was so disturbed by a 1978 Barbara Walters TV interview with renowned feminist Betty Friedan on the Equal Rights Amendment that she jumped off of her living room couch into action (in reality, however, this founding legend is not based in fact, because Walters demonstrably did not interview Friedan in 1978). LaHaye then called an emergency meeting of Christian women in San Diego to counter what she called “the feminists’ anti-God, anti-family rhetoric.”

    That same year, Schlafly, who was an early member of the extremist John Birch Society and also opposed racial integration and gay rights, was already in the final push of a six-year battle against the ERA. Her STOP ERA group, which was renamed “Eagle Forum” in 1975 (and was briefly called “Eagle Trust Fund” when the group was founded in 1967), framed the ERA as an attack on a Biblical notion of gender roles and contended that the amendment would undermine benefits for housewives. With the Vietnam War as a political backdrop, Schlafly argued that passing the ERA would allow the U.S. government to draft women. Her members took homemade baked goods to state legislators, telling them that a vote for the ERA was a vote against “Mom and apple pie.”

    Back in Southern California, LaHaye’s outreach was branded as Concerned Women for America (CWA), which set up “prayer/action chapters” across the country to block the ERA through lawsuits, TV ads and even daily fasting for the amendment’s defeat.

    In the years since their founding, both CWA and Eagle Forum have swelled into larger interest groups funded by dark money.

    Between 2010 and 2013, CWA and its sister 501(c)(4) organization Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee received about $11.3 million from groups linked to the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, including Freedom Partners, Center to Protect Patient Rights and TC4 Trust.

    Many of the donors to Eagle Forum and its related “Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund” (EFELDF) are unknown, but we do know that they have received tens of thousands over the years from the Bradley Foundation and Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, which are both massive foundations with deep connections to the far right. (Both foundations have also funded groups that undermined public faith in the 2020 presidential election results.)

    Eagle Forum and EFELDF tax documents show that they brought in a combined revenue of more than $1.5 million in 2019 and almost $3 million during the midterm election year in 2018.

    CWA and Eagle Forum have been joined in their anti-ERA efforts by another, newer right-wing women’s group that is similarly blocking policies that would benefit women: the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and its sister group, Independent Women’s Voice (IWV). IWF was founded in the 1990s as “Women for Clarence Thomas” to defend the now-Supreme Court associate justice during his confirmation hearings from Anita Hill’s testimony that he had made gross sexual overtures toward her as her boss (accusations that he denied).

    IWF has used its “independent” label to conceal its right-wing mission. IWF President Heather Higgins told donors that “being branded as neutral, but having people who know know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.”

    “Independent” branding aside, IWF and IWV are palpably far to the right and continue to back anti-women policies and politicians. In fact, IWV ran robocalls aiding candidates like Todd Akin, after he claimed rape could not lead to pregnancy, and Richard Mourdock after he said that rape victims who became pregnant “carried a gift from God.” They also championed Betsy DeVos’s changes to university Title IX provisions, which “gave perpetrators of sexual assault a blueprint to block damning evidence against them.”

    IWF also has longstanding ties to right-wing dark money, with links to the Koch family fortune and the Bradley Foundation. In 2014, the Bradley Foundation funded IWF to develop messaging kits aimed at countering popular, pro-women policies. According to the most recent IRS filings of IWF and IWV, they received more than $4.75 million from their funders. IWF’s funding has only increased in recent years, and so have their secret funders, which include donors whose identities are hidden by DonorsTrust as well as funding that has passed through Leonard Leo’s dark money network.

    The Equal Rights Amendment Is Back, But So Are Its Dark Money Detractors

    Recently, feminist activists and politicians have reinvigorated the fight for the widely popular ERA and have seen plenty of pushback. In 2020, nine days before Virginia became the 38th and final state needed to ratify the ERA, the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) preemptively blocked the amendment, declaring that the certification deadline had expired, although the time frame was not included in the actual amendment’s text.

    Eagle Forum, CWA and IWF jointly signed on to a letter urging House representatives to vote against a ratification extension. As Schlafly did in the 1970s, they argued that the ERA would nullify laws and benefits for women.

    But the groups also incorporated a new, anti-trans discourse into their attack on the amendment, arguing that it would “bar laws from taking into account the biological differences between men and women.” They assert that this could “place women and girls in harm’s way” by supposedly doing away with separate locker rooms, bathrooms and women’s prisons.

    But most campaigns for bathroom access for transgender people — and all current state laws on the subject — do not focus on eliminating gender-separated bathrooms. Rather, they tend to encourage allowing single-stall bathrooms to be usable by all genders and on ensuring trans people can use the facilities that align with their gender.

    In addition to misrepresenting the actual goals and outcomes of campaigns for all-gender bathroom access, this characterization of the amendment relies on unfounded bigotry to position transgender people as dangerous people, ignoring that there has been no increase in public safety incidents in the 21 states and more than 300 cities with LGBTQ+ protections. The inflaming of such fears led to the widely condemned “bathroom bill” legislation in North Carolina.

    Following the OLC opinion, Illinois, Nevada and Virginia filed suit against the U.S. archivist (head of the National Archives and Records Administration) for failure to publish and certify the ERA as a constitutional amendment. Eagle Forum filed an amicus brief opposing the three states. When this case was dismissed, a similar suit followed and IWF’s Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC) submitted an amicus brief in opposition.

    Shortly after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin took office, Virginia’s new Attorney General Jason Miyares pulled the state out of the lawsuit, a move IWF and CWA applauded although the Youngkin administration acted against the will of the majority of Virginians.

    The fight for the ERA is not over. IWLC filed another amicus brief against the ratifying states in the still-pending case Illinois and Nevada v. Ferriero, which again relies heavily on attacks on transgender people.

    Mapping This New Tactic: Transphobia

    In some ways, attacks on the LGBTQ+ community have always been part of anti-ERA campaigning. Starting in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies warned that the courts could interpret the ERA’s “sex” discrimination language to include “sexual orientation” and usher in same-sex marriage.

    Having largely lost the legal and cultural battle against gay rights in the intervening decades, anti-ERA groups today are riding the recent wave of transphobia. Last year saw record highs in anti-trans violence and rhetoric. It was the worst year for legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ people in recent history.

    Contemporary anti-ERA groups have again seized upon “sex” discrimination, but this time they lament that the transgender community could be protected under the amendment. In a 2019 newsletter CWA used explicitly anti-trans language to articulate this shift: “Unlike in the 1970s … the ERA would be used to impose the most radical consequences of the new ‘gender revolution’, which allows men to declare themselves women and vice versa.”

    Eagle Forum’s 2021 action campaign, “ERA ERAses Women,” urged members to call their representatives and oppose the elimination of the ERA’s ratification deadline because they were “concerned” the amendment would “expand [rights] on the basis of sex to gender-nonconforming and transgender women and girls, and nonbinary people.”

    The new anti-trans strategy extends beyond these groups’ own echo chambers and into court documents and congressional committees. For example, IWF’s most recent ERA amicus brief argues that legal protections for transgender people should invalidate states’ ratifications of the amendment, seemingly contending that states that voted for equality in the past might find that the ERA today offers too much equality in 2022.

    IWF’s Senior Policy Analyst Inez Stepman paraded this argument before Congress last October when, as a minority witness for the House Committee’s ERA hearing, she claimed that the ERA would jeopardize women’s physical safety, pointing to the alleged violence cisgender women experience at the hands of transgender women in prisons.

    However, the majority of transgender people who are imprisoned are placed in facilities based on the sex assigned to them at birth, and transgender women who are incarcerated with men experience high rates of extreme violence. Research also shows that transgender people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people.

    Right-wing women’s groups like IWF have used anti-trans attacks to oppose the Equality Act as well. At a virtual “rally” against the legislation hosted by Family Policy Alliance (a right-wing Christian group with an established anti-LGBTQ+ record and history of sponsoring anti-transgender state legislation), IWF’s Stepman called the Equality Act “the most dangerous piece of legislation we’ve seen come out of Congress” because it would allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports and access women’s shelters.

    None of Us Is Equal Until We Are All Equal

    The fear-mongering about expanded transgender rights — grounded in the baseless claim that transgender women somehow represent a threat to cisgender women — is simply the latest in a history of attacks on the ERA based on the sexist notion that women are in need of protection and not equality.

    For these anti-feminist groups, this “protection” is worth any cost, even if it means blocking legislation that would benefit all women, like the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which these same groups have also opposed on the grounds that it would include trans women. (IWF has opposed VAWA since its creation, though the group recently made a political pivot to support a right-wing version.)

    Similarly, right-wing women’s groups have gone after other benefits that the ERA could extend to people across the gender spectrum, such as access to safe and legal abortion and even efforts to close the gender pay gap.

    Attacks on transgender people also invite increased policing of all people’s bodies, everywhere from the Olympic Games to public bathrooms.

    Transgender activists have long warned of this: that undermining transgender people’s rights would also harm cisgender women, or, in other words, that cis and trans women’s liberation struggles are intertwined.

    Trans-inclusive gender equality legislation like the ERA and the Equality Act would be a formidable step in the direction of that shared liberation.

    When Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, it made history not only for reaching the ERA ratification threshold, but also because Delegate Danica Roem, the first openly transgender state legislator in U.S. history, was at the helm.

    Roem and attorney Kate Kelly wrote, “The ERA isn’t about who we’re against; it’s an affirmative statement about who we’re for — everybody. This is about making our United States of America a more inclusive country, one where you’re protected because of who you are, not despite it.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Amid Russia’s War, Some US Hawks Are Calling for Trillion-Dollar Military Budget

    U.S. Army vehicles stand on the grounds of the Grafenwoehr military training area in Bavaria, Vilseck, on February 9, 2022.

    A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world.

    Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it’s important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, the Biden administration’s proposed Pentagon budget (as well as related work like nuclear-warhead development at the Department of Energy) was already guaranteed to soar even higher than that, perhaps to $800 billion or more for 2023.

    Here’s the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that’s anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis.

    Some supporters of higher Pentagon spending have, in fact, been promoting figures as awe inspiring as they are absurd. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, is advocating a trillion-dollar military budget, while Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council called for the United States to prepare to win simultaneous wars against Russia and China. He even suggested that Congress “could go so far as to double its defense spending” without straining our resources. That would translate into a proposed annual defense budget of perhaps $1.6 trillion. Neither of those astronomical figures is likely to be implemented soon, but that they’re being talked about at all is indicative of where the Washington debate on Pentagon spending is heading in the wake of the Ukraine disaster.

    Ex-government officials are pressing for similarly staggering military budgets. As former Reagan-era State Department official and Iran-Contra operative Elliott Abrams argued in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled “The New Cold War”: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] will need to be spent on defense.” Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that “we need a larger, more advanced military in every branch, taking full advantage of new technologies to fight in new ways.” No matter that the U.S. already outspends China by a three-to-one margin and Russia by 10-to-one.

    Truth be told, current levels of Pentagon spending could easily accommodate even a robust program of arming Ukraine as well as a shift of yet more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe. However, as hawkish voices exploit the Russian invasion to justify higher military budgets, don’t expect that sort of information to get much traction. At least for now, cries for more are going to drown out realistic views on the subject.

    Beyond the danger of breaking the budget and siphoning off resources urgently needed to address pressing challenges like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice, a new Cold War could have devastating consequences. Under such a rubric, the U.S. would undoubtedly launch yet more military initiatives, while embracing unsavory allies in the name of fending off Russian and Chinese influence.

    The first Cold War, of course, reached far beyond Europe, as Washington promoted right-wing authoritarian regimes and insurgencies globally at the cost of millions of lives. Such brutal military misadventures included Washington’s role in coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the war in Vietnam; and support for repressive governments and proxy forces in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America, and Indonesia. All of those were justified by exaggerated — even at times fabricated — charges of Soviet involvement in such countries and the supposed need to defend “the free world,” a Cold War term President Biden all-too-ominously revived in his recent State of the Union address (assumedly, yet another sign of things to come).

    Indeed, his framing of the current global struggle as one between “democracies and autocracies” has a distinctly Cold War ring to it and, like the term “free world,” it’s riddled with contradictions. After all, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines, all too many autocracies and repressive regimes already receive ample amounts of U.S. weaponry and military training — no matter that they continue to pursue reckless wars or systematically violate the human rights of their own people. Washington’s support is always premised on the role such regimes supposedly play in fighting against or containing the threats of the moment, whether Iran, China, Russia, or some other country.

    Count on one thing: the heightened rhetoric about Russia and China seeking to undermine American influence will only reinforce Washington’s support for repressive regimes. The consequences of that could, in turn, prove to be potentially disastrous.

    Before Washington embarks on a new Cold War, it’s time to remind ourselves of the global consequences of the last one.

    Cold War I: The Coups

    Dwight D. Eisenhower is often praised as the president who ended the Korean War and spoke out against the military-industrial complex. However, he also sowed the seeds of instability and repression globally by overseeing the launching of coups against nations allegedly moving towards communism or even simply building closer relations with the Soviet Union.

    In 1953, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA instigated a coup that led to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeqh. In a now-declassified document, the CIA cited the Cold War and the risks of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression” as rationales for their actions. The coup installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, initiating 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for the 1979 Iranian revolution that would bring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

    In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz. His “crime”: attempting to redistribute to poor peasants some of the lands owned by major landlords, including the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Arbenz’s internal reforms were falsely labeled communism-in-the-making and a case of Soviet influence creeping into the Western Hemisphere. Of course, no one in the Eisenhower administration made mention of the close ties between the United Fruit Company and both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Such U.S. intervention in Guatemala would prove devastating with the four decades that followed consumed by a brutal civil war in which up to 200,000 people died.

    In 1973, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger followed Eisenhower’s playbook by fomenting a coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, installing the vicious dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. That coup was accomplished in part through economic warfare — “making the economy scream,” as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it — and partly thanks to CIA-backed bribes and assassinations meant to bolster right-wing factions there. Kissinger would justify the coup, which led to the torture, imprisonment, and death of tens of thousands of Chileans, this way: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

    Vietnam and Its Legacy

    The most devastating Cold War example of a war justified on anti-communist grounds was certainly the disastrous U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It would lead to the deployment there of more than half a million American troops, the dropping of a greater tonnage of bombs than the U.S. used in World War II, the defoliation of large parts of the Vietnamese countryside, the massacre of villagers in My Lai and numerous other villages, the deaths of 58,000 U.S. troops and up to 2 million Vietnamese civilians — all while Washington systematically lied to the American public about the war’s “progress.”

    U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in earnest during the administrations of Presidents Harry Truman and Eisenhower, when Washington bankrolled the French colonial effort there to subdue an independence movement. After a catastrophic French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. took over the fight, first with covert operations and then counterinsurgency efforts championed by the administration of John F. Kennedy. Finally, under President Lyndon Johnson Washington launched an all-out invasion and bombing campaign.

    In addition to being an international crime writ large, in what became a Cold War tradition for Washington, the conflict in Vietnam would prove to be profoundly anti-democratic. There’s no question that independence leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the nationwide election called for by the 1954 Geneva Accords that followed the French defeat. Instead, the Eisenhower administration, gripped by what was then called the “domino theory” — the idea that the victory of communism anywhere would lead other countries to fall like so many dominos to the influence of the Soviet Union — sustained an undemocratic right-wing regime in South Vietnam.

    That distant war would, in fact, spark a growing antiwar movement in this country and lead to what became known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a public resistance to military intervention globally. While that meant an ever greater reliance on the CIA, it also helped keep the U.S. out of full-scale boots-on-the-ground conflicts until the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Instead, the post-Vietnam “way of war” would be marked by a series of U.S.-backed proxy conflicts abroad and the widespread arming of repressive regimes.

    The defeat in Vietnam helped spawn what was called the Nixon Doctrine, which eschewed large-scale intervention in favor of the arming of American surrogates like the Shah of Iran and the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Those two autocrats typically repressed their own citizens, while trying to extinguish people’s movements in their regions. In the case of Indonesia, Suharto oversaw a brutal war in East Timor, greenlighted and supported financially and with weaponry by the Nixon administration.

    “Freedom Fighters”

    Once Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981, his administration began to push support for groups he infamously called “freedom fighters.” Those ranged from extremist mujahideen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan to Jonas Savimbi’s forces in Angola to the Nicaraguan Contras. The U.S. funding and arming of such groups would have devastating consequences in those countries, setting the stage for the rise of a new generation of corrupt regimes, while arming and training individuals who would become members of al-Qaeda.

    The Contras were an armed right-wing rebel movement cobbled together, funded, and supplied by the CIA. Americas Watch accused them of rape, torture, and the execution of civilians. In 1984, Congress prohibited the Reagan administration from funding them, thanks to the Boland amendment (named for Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Boland). In response, administration officials sought a work-around. In the end, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Marine and member of the National Security Council, would devise a scheme to supply arms to Iran, while funneling excess profits from the sales of that weaponry to the Contras. The episode became known as the Iran-Contra scandal and demonstrated the lengths to which zealous Cold Warriors would go to support even the worst actors as long as they were on the “right side” (in every sense) of the Cold War struggle.

    Chief among this country’s blunders of that previous Cold War era was its response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a policy that still haunts America today. Concerns about that invasion led the administration of President Jimmy Carter to step up weapons transfers through a covert arms pipeline to a loose network of oppositional fighters known as the mujahideen. President Reagan doubled down on such support, even meeting with the leaders of mujahideen groups in the Oval Office in 1983. That relationship would, of course, backfire disastrously as Afghanistan descended into a civil war after the Soviet Union withdrew. Some of those Reagan had praised as “freedom fighters” helped form al-Qaeda and later the Taliban. The U.S. by no means created the mujahideen in Afghanistan, but it does bear genuine responsibility for everything that followed in that country.

    As the Biden administration moves to operationalize its policy of democracy versus autocracy, it should take a close look at the Cold War policy of attempting to expand the boundaries of the “free world.” A study by political scientists Alexander Downes and Jonathon Monten found that, of 28 cases of American regime change, only three would prove successful in building a lasting democracy. Instead, most of the Cold War policies outlined above, even though carried out under the rubric of promoting “freedom” in “the free world,” would undermine democracy in a disastrous fashion.

    A New Cold War?

    Cold War II, if it comes to pass, is unlikely to simply follow the pattern of Cold War I either in Europe or other parts of the world. Still, the damage done by the “good versus evil” worldview that animated Washington’s policies during the Cold War years should be a cautionary tale. The risk is high that the emerging era could be marked by persistent U.S. intervention or interference in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the name of staving off Russian and Chinese influence in a world where Washington’s disastrous war on terrorism has never quite ended.

    The United States already has more than 200,000 troops stationed abroad, 750 military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, and continuing counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. The end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the dramatic scaling back of American operations in Iraq and Syria should have marked the beginning of a sharp reduction in the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere. Washington’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now stand in the way of just such a much-needed military retrenchment.

    The “us versus them” rhetoric and global military maneuvering likely to play out in the years to come threaten to divert attention and resources from the biggest risks to humanity, including the existential threat posed by climate change. It also may divert attention from a country — ours — that is threatening to come apart at the seams. To choose this moment to launch a new Cold War should be considered folly of the first order, not to speak of an inability to learn from history.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Unease About Possible New COVID Surge Grows With Rise of BA.2 Variant

    A person walks past a COVID-19 testing location in Arlington, Virginia, on March 16, 2022.

    Looking at the headlines this morning, you’d think COVID was all over. Sure, The New York Times tells us almost 30,000 new infections and more than a thousand deaths were recorded yesterday, but they do that every day now. The infection number is 33 percent lower than last week’s, a number with dual meanings: Be cheered by the decrease, and be shaken by how high the number is anyway, how high it’s been and for how long.

    In truth, the only thing that’s really “over” with COVID is the wall-to-wall news coverage. It’s not over for the millions suffering from the multifaceted “long COVID,” which can linger for months in a variety of debilitating forms. It’s not over for the millions more whose health conditions force them to live in fear of the virus even after vaccination.

    Kick over a few media rocks, and the “stealth variant” BA.2 comes crawling out into the daylight.

    NBC’s local New York City channel 4, on Saturday: “Rising COVID infections associated with the so-called “stealth” omicron variant BA.2 are fueling fresh leeriness about the state of the pandemic in New York City and America, just as life as we now know it is starting to return to normal. According to the CDC, that variant accounts for 39% of COVID circulating in New York and New Jersey right now. By comparison, it’s responsible for about a quarter of new infections nationally. Its prevalence has doubled in just the last week or so.”

    USA Today, also this weekend: “A new COVID variant is spreading across Pennsylvania, data released last week shows. In the past month, the BA.2 variant has gone from 3% of cases sequenced to more than 20%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

    Both articles are at pains to explain that we don’t yet know enough about BA.2 to adequately assess its menace at this time, but they go on to suggest it’s probably nothing to worry about right now. As with Delta and Omicron, no new precautions are being instituted; indeed, mask mandates and other protections are disappearing all across the country. Yet even after the twin debacle brought by those variants, the news seems resolutely determined to hold to a positive outlook as we watch the approach of this newest one, the first true test of the “living with the virus” method that capitalism has craved for two years now.

    No lesser light than COVID expert Anthony Fauci popped up this weekend to join in the assurances, according to the Times:

    Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on the pandemic, predicted on Sunday an “uptick” in coronavirus infections similar to the current increase in Europe, despite the current decline in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the United States…. While anticipating a new rise, Dr. Fauci said that at this time he does not expect a surge. Still, the BA.2 subvariant has been shown to be a more contagious version of the Omicron variant, though it, too, causes less-severe illness in most people. Epidemiologists have said the current lull in U.S. cases mirrors the dip that Europe enjoyed before many officials in the region relaxed restrictions like indoor masking.

    If Fauci proclaimed water to be wet, a segment of the population would drown in the local bog trying to prove him wrong. This is a fact of modern politics — the vast temptations of conspiratorial fictions over the long grind of scientific truth. Fauci has offered a level voice and a steady hand, for the most part, which is nothing short of remarkable given how often Donald Trump lit Fauci’s podium on fire with his cascading failure of an approach to the pandemic.

    Not everyone who believes in Fauci is fully accepting of his prediction that the variant will merely cause an “uptick” instead of a “surge,” however. Benjamin Mueller of the New York Times reports that “scientists and health officials are bracing for another swell in the pandemic and, with it, the first major test of the country’s strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact,” adding:

    The clearest warnings that the brief period of quiet may soon be over have come, as they often have in the past two years, from Western Europe. In a number of countries, including Britain, France and Germany, case numbers are climbing as an even more contagious subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2, takes hold. In interviews, 10 epidemiologists and infectious disease experts said that many of the ingredients were in place for the same to happen in the United States, though it was unclear if or when a wave might hit or how severe it might be.

    If/when BA.2 or another variant like it attacks with full force and causes yet another devastating round of deaths and economic hardships, our current “live with it” posture has left us thoroughly unprepared, again. This is particularly true after Congress cut $1.6 billion in COVID funding, to catastrophic effect:

    Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it won’t be able to support domestic testing manufacturers.

    It can’t buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise.

    If such variants arise, they’ll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government won’t have enough for everyone.

    Republicans believe they have gained the upper hand in the rhetorical fight surrounding COVID, particularly in regard to money allocated to fight the disease. To their minds, the country’s “So over it, you guys” mood is worth hanging their overall COVID strategy on.

    We shall see, one way or the other, and that soon. “I think we’ve learned at this point to not underestimate what kind of sort of evolutionary leaps this virus can make,” University of Utah virologist Stephen Goldstein told Grid. “We should be pretty humble about making predictions about what’s next.”

    That cuts both ways, doesn’t it. Like a hot knife. Keep your eyes open, and don’t toss those masks just yet.

  • Putin Has Sacrificed Russia’s Economy for This War on Ukraine’s People

    Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a concert marking the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, on March 18, 2022, in Moscow, Russia.

    The Russian army, having failed since invading Ukraine to take a single major city, has turned to besieging and bombing civilians, and to terrorizing opponents in the areas it controls.

    This ruthless, anti-popular character of the Russian war is the key to understanding what motivated the Kremlin to launch it in the first place, turning upside down its relationship with Western powers, and Russia’s own future, for decades to come.

    In Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, and other occupied towns in southeastern Ukraine, Russian troops have faced crowds of thousands calling on them to go home. Mayors who refuse to cooperate with the Russian army have reportedly been kidnapped. Along with other Ukrainian activists, they have been taken to Luhansk — one of the two eastern Ukrainian “people’s republics” established with Russian support in 2014 — and reportedly prosecuted there. The “republics,” unrecognized even by Russia until last month, suppress dissent with abductions and arbitrary detention free of meaningful judicial constraint.

    The war looks very different to the one Russian President Vladimir Putin described on the day of the invasion. The Russian army would “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine, but there were no plans to occupy or to impose anything by force, he said. Occupation has since become a central focus.

    Putin called on the Ukrainian army to switch sides: not only has it not done so, it has also proven to be an unexpectedly tough opponent. Russian soldiers expected to be greeted with open arms and flowers — but have apparently been shocked at the level of resistance. Even an attempt to set up a puppet “people’s republic” in Kherson, alongside those in Donetsk and Luhansk, failed. While Ukraine’s government has seen working people’s rights as expendable in wartime, the Kremlin’s war against those people is one of annihilation: It has already murdered hundreds of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians it claimed to protect, and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.

    Putin’s statements are laced with the nationalist ideology with which the Kremlin justifies the invasion. Alongside his false claims that Ukraine is governed by a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” responsible for “genocide,” Putin has made a case that Ukraine could only have “true sovereignty” in unity with Russia, that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” and that Ukrainian nationhood was an invention by the Poles and/or Austro-Hungarians.

    This view of Russia’s oldest colony is analogous, perhaps, to a British head of state claiming that Irish nationhood is fictitious. And here Putin speaks not only for himself and his closest colleagues, but for the most aggressive militarist elements in the state, and a range of extreme Russian nationalists and fascists.

    Since Putin took office 22 years ago, this militarism and nationalism has been married to an economic program that allowed Russian businesses to profit from integration with world markets — although this was integration as a subordinate power, a supplier of oil, gas, minerals and metals to world markets. While Western nations are dependent on Russian oil, gas and precious metals, in particular, Russia is dependent on the export revenues.

    By going to war, and provoking a barrage of economic sanctions, Putin has not only condemned Ukrainians to death, destruction and exile, but has also wrecked the Russian economy’s prospects. So even business groups such as Lukoil, the largest privately owned oil company in Russia, and EN+, the vast aluminium business, have voiced alarm at the war.

    The Kremlin has prioritized military adventure and associated political aims over the medium-term and perhaps long-term economic interests of Russian capital.

    To understand this reckless gamble, it helps to recall its motivation in 2014, when, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in Kyiv, Russia decided to annex Crimea and give military backing to the armed gangs who established the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics.”

    First, there was the pressure of nationalism and militarism. While Russia’s economic reformers despaired at the damage done by the Crimea annexation and the resulting sanctions, Putin could not be seen by hardliners in the military and security services to be the president who had failed to undermine the Ukrainian state when he had the chance. Second, there was a fear within the Kremlin of the social movement that had removed Yanukovych. However confused and politically heterogenous the movement was, it embraced a huge swath of the Ukrainian population. The Kremlin has long related to active civil society and mass popular action as a threat to be contained by force. In recent times, it has responded to it in both Belarus (2020) and Kazakhstan (this year) by sending in troops. Third, there was concern that such social movements might find their echo in Russia, and this was an opportunity to use flag-waving as a means of social control.

    Between 2014 and 2021, the war in eastern Ukraine — between Russian forces and the “republics” on one side, and Ukraine on the other — claimed 14,000 lives. The living nightmare inside the “republics” strikes a contrast with Kremlin narratives of “liberation.” Independent media, civil society activity and trade unionism have been crushed. Arbitrary law is enforced by torture and forced labor in prisons. Half the prewar population has fled and the economy of the area, once Ukraine’s industrial heartland, has been trashed.

    While the U.S. and European imperial powers marshal economic and military power together, Russian imperialism uses its military power to substitute for its weakness economically. The use of troops to support the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus against social unrest in 2020 was a step toward this year’s war in Ukraine. Recognition on February 21 of the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics,” previously treated by Russia legally as areas of Ukraine, was the final trigger.

    Since 2014, Putin has claimed that Russia’s military activity is necessitated not only by an (exaggerated) specter of Nazism in Ukraine — as though Russia doesn’t have a thriving fascist movement itself — but also by the threat to Russia posed by NATO expansion. While this narrative is politically attractive to those in Western nations who see imperialism as a unipolar phenomenon centered in the U.S., it is problematic in two ways.

    Politically, it diverts attention from the Kremlin’s responsibility for this war of aggression, which it has waged not so much against the Ukrainian state as against its civilian population. Analytically, it one-sidedly attributes the war’s causes to the U.S. military complex, rather than situating it in the broader crisis of 21st century capitalism. It is this crisis that dashed the 1990s hopes of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and many social democrats, that Russia would be integrated as a democratic European partner. Moreover, it is this same crisis that favored the rapacious form of capitalism on which Kremlin authoritarianism rests, and that produced the social unrest of the 2010s in both Russia and Ukraine that formed the backdrop for the initial outbreak of war in 2014.

    The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 remade economic relationships in the first place. The implosion of the autarchic, state-directed economy — and the worst-ever peacetime slump that followed in both Russia and Ukraine in the early 1990s — presented Western capital with huge opportunities to access, above all, raw material supplies and consumer markets.

    With the Russian state at its weakest, Western capital rarely sought direct ownership of oil, gas and minerals, but facilitated their transfer to emergent domestic business groups. Capital flight from both Russia and Ukraine, mostly to offshore tax havens, ran at tens of billions per year in the 1990s. In both countries, working people’s living standards were devastated by hyperinflation and the social crisis ruined health. Life expectancy in Russia, which was on par with life expectancy in developed countries in the 1960s, was 15 to 19 years lower for men and 7 to 12 years lower for women in the 1990s. Russia’s grain harvest fell by half between 1993 and 1998.

    As Russian imperial power in Soviet form disappeared from eastern Europe, NATO indeed expanded — first to the Baltic states and then to the seven countries that acceded in 2004. The causality was as much east European as Western imperialist. While, to American eyes, the U.S.’s ever-longer reach is striking, this process looked different to some east Europeans. With the exception of NATO’s bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, many had historical memories of military attacks not from the U.S. but from Russia — and in the Baltics’ case, of being forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union under a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler.

    In Russia, when Putin took over in 2000, he reestablished strong Russian state power, first with the murderous second war in Chechnya and then with a clampdown on the business groups, who from then on had to pay more tax. This model of skillful statecraft and state-business partnership, supported by the commodity price boom of 2001-08, underpinned the new Russian imperialism with the state’s finances back on a strong foundation of oil dollars, government centralized and business leaders’ wings clipped by arrests and confiscations, Putin could go to the Munich summit in 2008 and rail against the idea of a “unipolar world.”

    The western powers responded not with NATO expansion (in the 18 years since 2004, four small Balkan countries have been admitted), but, at first, by treating Russia as a potentially dangerous but necessary partner.

    For all their disavowals of “spheres of influence,” Western powers not only ignored Russia’s multiple war crimes in Chechnya, but acquiesced in the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and, most significantly, Russia’s bloody intervention in support of the Assad dictatorship in Syria since 2015. This tolerance for Russia as a gendarme was the other side of the coin of the Western powers’ own military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and their support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

    The tolerance only went so far. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 resulted in Western sanctions that constricted the flow of finance to Russian companies, but left the exports of oil, gas and metals untouched. Perhaps the simultaneous Russian intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk could have been hidden under the veil of hypocrisy with which the western powers cover Saudi crimes in Yemen or Turkish crimes in Kurdistan. But the seizure of a piece of territory in Europe, in blatant breach of the 1994 Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, provoked a response.

    The uneasy balance between the west and Russia, disrupted in 2014, has been finally blown apart by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the far-reaching Western response.

    The well-publicized (and in the U.K.’s case, incomplete) sanctions on Russian business leaders are only part of it. The sanctions on the Russian central bank are more damaging, as they prevent the Kremlin from getting its hands on its own money and make default almost inevitable. Also significant is the withdrawal from Russia of major Western oil companies — BP, Shell, Equinor and ExxonMobil — which have written off billions of dollars. (The oil service companies Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes have not followed.)

    The 180-degree turn in German policy, implied by supplying Ukraine with arms and freezing Russia’s treasured Nord Stream II gas pipeline project, is significant. European energy policy is now being rewritten to reduce dependence on imports from Russia, and that in turn opens up assumptions about climate policy in a manner that could be positive or negative, long term.

    It appears that, in the true centers of Western decision making, Russia has been cut loose. It is threatened with a future as an impoverished wasteland, largely dependent on China.

    In the long term, labor and social movements in Europe and beyond face a radically changed world. In the short term, all our efforts should be directed at supporting Ukrainian people — both those who are resisting the invasion, and the millions who have fled across the border — and the antiwar movement in Russia.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • To Treat All Refugees Like Human Beings, Europe Must Confront Its Racism

    People take part in a 'Refugees Welcome' protest in demand of the withdrawal of the bill that criminalizes entering the country illegally to seek asylum, outside the parliament building in London, United Kingdom, on January 27, 2022.

    The reactions to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine emphasize the exceptionality of this event, its disruptiveness and its potentially massive global implications. World War II is a frequent reference point. Not since then, the understanding seems to be, has Europe seen anything like this. In the Western press in particular, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is frequently compared to Winston Churchill, as the face and voice of the democratic powers resisting the onslaught of a merciless, totalitarian machine

    This article is not concerned with the accuracy of the comparisons to World War II but with their affective context. And here, another WW II reference seems useful: Aimé Césaire’s 1950 dictum that what Europe’s “very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois” could not forgive Hitler for “is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n******’ of Africa.”

    Media comments during the first days of the war disturbingly indicated that a similar sentiment is at play now. Ukrainian refugees were described as “people who look like us” and “prosperous, middle-class people” and “blond and blue-eyed.” One media commentator remarked, “They look like any European family that you would live next door to.” Others have described Ukrainians as “not from developing countries” or as “Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” The focus often seemed to be not the crime itself, but “the crime against the white man.” (Of course, in each of these cases, refugees of color fleeing Ukraine are erased.)

    White journalists could not seem to suppress their horror at people who looked like them, “civilized Europeans,” being subjected to a kind of suffering that they deem unremarkable when experienced by Black and Brown peoples for whom chaos and violence is apparently understood to be a quasi-natural form of being. These white journalists’ comments made two things very clear: Europeanness is still identified with whiteness and Christianity, and the “we” that the statements evoke is equally so.

    Those who are not white, Christian or European are expected to share this perspective, accepting the prioritization of white refugees and admiring the armed resistance of Ukrainians without drawing parallels to other struggles against imperial powers. We are expected to take on the white gaze and not bring up Palestine, Somalia or Afghanistan (or else be accused of whataboutism). Even as Russian war crimes in Syria are regularly mentioned when Ukraine’s potential fate is debated, the German minister of the interior spoke for many when she declared: “This is a completely different situation than 2015. These are war refugees and Europe for the first time speaks with one voice. That also means that the borders have to be open.”

    The starkness of the double standard is hard to overlook and has received some attention. Nonetheless, there is a marked hesitancy to draw the obvious conclusions: Is this about racism? Impossible to say, further inquiry would be necessary, but there is no time for that now. Let’s just leave it at asking for more tolerance toward everyone. This inability or at least unwillingness to name racism as what it is aligns with Europe’s longstanding claims to “colorblindness.” While the continent invented race and has ongoingly used it as a primary tool for the implementation of new political orders (within the continent itself and abroad), many Europeans continue to believe that race matters everywhere but there. The effects of this denial are evident in a persistent crisis narrative that frames Europe as an island of stability and prosperity, surrounded by chaotic regions: A Middle East claimed to be succumbing to radical Islam, a supposedly permanently underdeveloped and war-torn Africa and an eternally aggressive Russian empire threatening the continent’s east. Within this narrative, the crises originating in these regions are portrayed as reaching an unsuspecting and unprepared Europe, which needs to find imminent solutions for problems originating elsewhere, generously providing help in response to issues it is not to blame for. The current war is treated as another unexpected crisis, impossible to foresee. (Notwithstanding that it began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea).

    This story is convenient, but it ignores Europe’s culpability not only for allowing the situation to escalate to this point, but also for creating many of the conflict’s sources through the ongoing neocolonial structures of a racial capitalism favoring Europe’s economic interests. The narrative is convincing not because it is true, but because it builds on a larger hegemonic story: that of Europe as the origin and natural home of human rights, democracy and equality. The two most powerful nations within the European Union (EU) — Germany and France — over the last years each saw government plans to erase the word “race” from their constitutions’ protected categories. This was meant as a symbolic gesture both affirming that biological races do not exist and that Europe does not have an issue with structural racism. However, many of the responses to the war in Ukraine have made plain the obvious reality that race — as a social construct or political concept — is clearly still relevant in continental Europe.

    The quick and unified EU reaction to the Russian invasion proves that it is logistically and politically possible to accommodate a huge and fast-growing number of refugees without disruptions, without closing the borders, without mass anti-immigrant protests or hundreds of arson attacks on refugee centers — as long as the refugees do not challenge the existing racial order, which requires Europe to maintain its whiteness, if not in reality than at least in ideology. The continent’s current generosity is no sign of hope for those thousands stranded at its borders who have the wrong color, religion or place of birth.

    On the contrary, the current development shows that Europe ruthlessly chooses who to help. There seems widespread agreement that “we cannot take care of the whole world, but we need to take care of our own.” And people of color are not deemed part of that community of one’s own — notwithstanding colonial narratives that claimed more connections between French and Algerians than French and Ukrainians, and notwithstanding that it is no farther from Tunis to Rome than from Kyiv to Warsaw.

    The consensus following 2015 in mainstream political and media discourses, including a significant part of the left, was that fear and anger about the presence of refugees was understandable and justified, and that addressing these concerns should take precedence over the needs of the refugees themselves. This has since happened through the widespread implementation of illegal pushbacks. Rather than allowing them to apply for asylum once they entered Europe, refugees are pushed back out, into Belarus or onto the Mediterranean and back to Libya. This practice happens with direct and indirect support of the EU and costs the lives of dozens of (non-white, non-European) people every day. And it continues unabated. While many Europeans rushed to the Ukrainian border to help transport people to Poland and Germany, they would be committing a criminal offense should they pick up someone fleeing from Afghanistan instead. In 2022, the mainstream consensus that the accommodation of fleeing Ukrainians is central to the very defense of freedom and democracy led to the first-time application of an EU law established in 2001, after the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which allows for the unbureaucratic support of refugees.

    This sends a clear message to those refugees for whose fate Europe does not feel responsible — even though it often bears much of the blame for their plight: There is nothing you can do to receive the same treatment. This also sends a clear message to Europeans of and certainly does not give you the right to treat people who look like you preferentially when crisis strikes. That right belongs to real Europeans.

    This distinction has life-and-death consequences at Europe’s borders: the evocation of shared values that allows for the accommodation of millions of Ukrainian refugees because they are assumed to be white, Christian and “civilized” also confirms the incompatibility of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees — or even that of a few thousand African, South Asian and Middle Eastern students fleeing Ukraine. Without the immediate, tireless efforts of Black organizations, which built an extensive support network within days, many people of color fleeing Ukraine would not have made it safely to Europe (or would have been deported right away).

    At this point, it is not enough to wonder if Europe might not be as colorblind as it claims. That this is the case has been proven again and again, most recently when Black refugees were kept off buses and trains and Roma were refused passage into the EU when fleeing Ukraine. Open borders are maintained by conducting so-called random controls, which — as many reports confirm — systematically target people of color, who then are pressured into applying for asylum. This application in most cases has virtually no chance of succeeding and is not necessary to be granted a temporary right to stay (three months for those with student visa), but it allows for the applicants’ incarceration and speedy deportation. Pointing this out is far from whataboutism. In times of crisis, there is a routine demand to focus on the essential and put other questions on hold. But in times of crisis, racism and inequality have the most impact, we saw it during the pandemic and we are seeing it now.

    Global crises cannot be kept out of Europe anymore — in 2008, the financial collapse of Greece challenged the continent’s stability, the refugee crisis of 2015 showed how quickly European nations could return to closing their internal borders, 2020 brought Brexit and the pandemic and now, in 2022, Europe faces what many see as its biggest challenge since the end of World War II. The increasing global instability has its root in a model of prosperity at the expense of non-Europeans that is not sustainable anymore, even for Europe. Nonetheless, the continent offers nothing but the same old answers. Much has been made of the Russian attack as a wake-up call, forcing Europe — and in particular its economic and political powerhouse, Germany — away from appeasement toward the will to defend democracy with force if necessary.

    In truth, the current conflict is, in part, a product of this model and may well further enshrine it: Europe escalates its militarization. (Defense spending had already been growing faster in Europe than anywhere else, and while Germany just doubled its military budget, it already had the 7th largest globally.) Stock prices of defense companies are soaring while investments in renewable energy continue to lag. And ironically, their proximity to Ukraine and willingness to accommodate millions of refugees has stabilized the position of the authoritarian and virulently anti-immigrant regimes of Hungary and Poland within the European Union.

    Meanwhile, NATO has left Afghanistan in chaos, the European Commission has blocked even a temporary suspension of COVID vaccine patents, and the war on Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia will have a devastating impact on nations like Egypt, Bangladesh and Yemen. None of this sounds much like heeding a wakeup call. If rising numbers of desperate refugees from the Global South encounter a heavily fortified Europe unwilling to prioritize global stability and sustainability over endless wealth accumulation, it does not take much to imagine how our common future will play out — unless there is a drastic shift away from a shared imaginary whiteness as ticket for survival and toward Europe taking responsibility for shared histories.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • When Biden Says “Fund the Police,” It Should Spur Our Efforts to Defund Them

    A participant holding a Defund Police sign at the protest.

    In his latest State of the Union address, President Joe Biden tried to kill movements to defund the police, saying: “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”

    In one of the few moments of genuine bipartisanship, Biden earned a standing ovation from Democrats and Republicans for his declaration. He also garnered praise and encouragement from many Democratic observers. While some progressive lawmakers like Cori Bush criticized Biden’s statement, Douglas E. Schoen, former adviser to President Bill Clinton, claimed Biden’s remarks about policing represented a “high point” in the president’s domestic policy discussion.

    The 2020 uprisings achieved an astonishing feat by launching the demand to defund police into mainstream discourse through protests and in the media. In addition to setting the terms for public debate around state violence and politicizing and radicalizing more Americans, the racial justice protests also led to other material outcomes. More than 160 statues came down as state violence pushed more people to reconsider the U.S.’s racist history. School boards and education officials in several major cities, including Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle and Oakland moved to kick police out of schools. The movement also enjoyed electoral wins. Residents of Austin, Texas, and a coalition of the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter, the Travis County Democratic Party, and the county’s employees’ union defeated a proposition that would have expanded the city’s police force in November 2021 while Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George defeated a moderate incumbent to win a seat on the city council in Washington, D.C. by running on a defund platform.

    However, some cities did not respond by cutting police budgets in any significant nor lasting way. In fact, Baltimore and Los Angeles Mayors Brandon Scott and Eric Garcetti sought to increase police funding in 2021; Scott proposed a budget that added $28 million to Baltimore’s half-billion-dollar plan. And after paying Black Lives Matter activists lip service amid the 2020 uprisings with his support of redistributing $150 million from the Los Angeles Police Department, Garcetti called for a 3 percent increase in policing. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, did not cut police funding in his first proposed budget, and left the option open for increases after shifting police forces “from the desks to the streets.” Ultimately, Republicans and many Democrats have used “defund” in the same way as they responded to the emergence of “Black Lives Matter” — by trying to weaponize it in an attempt to suppress and discipline radical protests against racism and state violence, and to bolster police power.

    Few people who’ve actually followed President Biden’s actions believe he actually supports an agenda that would confront violent policing. One need not only look to his history of support for past legislation, which contributed to the militarization of law enforcement and mass incarceration, but also to his current reformist policies. The assumptions undergirding Biden’s approach to public safety run diametrically opposite to that of Black Lives Matter — Biden’s focus is on flawed strategies for “addressing” violent crime through an expansion of policing, rather than on curtailing police power and creating the conditions to address the root causes of violence.

    Biden’s approach relies on expanding federal police forces and giving law enforcement more power in states and localities. In its 2021 plan to address gun violence, the Biden administration called for increased funding to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and the creation of “strike forces” led by “designated United States Attorneys” working with state and local police to attempt to combat interstate gun trafficking in cities such as Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

    Moreover, the Biden administration allows localities to use American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to expand policing. States and cities are allowed to use a portion of the $350 billion distributed through the COVID relief plan to hire more police and to acquire more equipment if they can demonstrate an increase in violence due to the pandemic. Mayors Sylvester Turner of Houston, Texas; LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans, Louisiana; Paige Cognetti of Scranton, Pennsylvania; Jim Hovland of Edina, Minnesota; and Hardie Davis, Jr. of Augusta, Georgia, all remarked about their use of ARP funds to retain officers and purchase police cars in a series of videos for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

    In addition to supporting more funding for police generally, strengthening the ATF and encouraging municipalities to allocate pandemic rescue funds to policing, the Biden administration is also calling for more investment in what it considers a peaceful approach to public safety: community violence intervention (CVI) programs, which seeks to take a localized approach to preventing violence. These programs often focus on a collaborative approach between police, community leaders and social workers to achieve this end. Initially, this pledge appears to be a step in a more nonviolent direction. The Biden administration reported that CVI programs “have been shown to reduce violence by as much as 60%.” Allowing municipalities to rely on ARP education funds, as well as financial resources from various foundations and the Microsoft Corporation, the Biden administration supported CVI programs in 15 cities, including many of the hot spots in the 2020 uprisings, such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia.

    However, when one examines the program of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which is one of the Biden administration’s inspirations for adopting CVI, one notices that such a program is not ultimately a nonviolent one. The threat of zero tolerance and police violence lurks behind the carrot of “group violence interruption” (GVI), defined as: a “four-step, problem-oriented policing strategy” that seeks to identify a particular group responsible for disorder and use a combination of non-violent means (i.e., communication with suspected group and access to social services) and violent methods to mitigate harm.

    According to the program:

    Law enforcement representatives then deliver a message, in the most respectful terms possible, that if the community’s plea is ignored, then swift and sure legal action will be taken against any group responsible for a new act of lethal violence. This process is repeated until the intervention population understands that, at the request of the community, future shootings will bring strong law enforcement attention on any responsible groups. This creates a powerful “focused deterrence” effect that has been shown to rapidly reduce violent behavior.

    The Giffords Law Center’s GVI program is, in practice, a traditional anti-gang initiative dressed up as liberal “community policing.” The report states that gun violence is often perpetrated by a group of individuals and the program is designed to neutralize this minority without referring “to those at the highest risk of shooting or being shot with pejorative terms such as gang members, thugs, or predators.” Like other police reforms such as New York’s ban on chokeholds or Seattle police relying on deescalation training, law enforcement-driven violence “interruption” hardly looks to be a panacea to address either community or police-perpetrated violence.

    Now, of course, no person should live in fear of violence. And while it is necessary to have nuanced conversations about violence in the U.S., it is important to remember that the police contribute to gun violence in this country. According to the Washington Post, police set a record for fatal shootings in 2021 since they started recording incidents in 2015.

    We need to continue organizing and advocating for an abolitionist approach to community safety. An anti-racist, anti-capitalist and feminist strategy to addressing violence and other forms of criminalized behavior would seek to dig deeper to pull out the roots of violence. Rather than only reacting to violent behaviors, an abolitionist approach would advocate for policies that transforms urban spaces, utilize participatory forms of economic development, advocate for a guaranteed income as an economic floor for everyone, while also devoting more resources to mental and emotional health.

    When considering defunding the police, the question we should continue to raise to critics is: What would it mean to live in a nonviolent society? Or a society where more community-based democratic forms of justice prevail? Many Americans love to cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy when they want to discipline anti-racist protesters, but few really seek to take the notion of living in nonviolence seriously. Instead, Democrats, Republicans and police would rather attack a demand or a slogan because they do not want Americans raising fundamental questions about police authority and justice. We are not only supposed to accept police as a way of life, we are also expected to celebrate it. As the old neoliberal slogan goes, “There is no alternative.”

    Yet one of the points of the defund campaign is to encourage us to use our imaginations to explore better alternatives. Organizations such as the Detroit Justice Center have undertaken this type of comprehensive approach to abolition. The organization facilitates political education around participatory budgeting and engaging in strategies from working to divest from incarceration to advocating for investing in community-based restorative justice centers, modernizing public schools. Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization have also launched a political education project, “One Million Experiments,” that offers tools and examples of imaginative approaches to community care and disrupting violence and preventing harm.

    Moreover, it is also important to remember that defunding police is not an ideology itself. It is a strategy — to raise questions about what kind of society we deserve and to organize toward building communities around more grassroots approaches to urban and economic development, public safety and justice. Defund is part of a broader path toward police abolition. Or as abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has reminded us, “defund is the floor.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New York GOP Throws Its Weight Behind Trumpist Lee Zeldin in Governor’s Race

    The New York State Republican Party has overwhelmingly thrown its weight behind Long Island’s Lee Zeldin as its preferred candidate in the race for governor. Over the past few years, Zeldin has walked closely in lockstep with the Trumpite line, right down to refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election result. What does his anointment as GOP favorite in the Empire State say for whether or not the GOP can make inroads in blue states over the coming months?

    The party’s primary, in which seven candidates have already announced they are competing, isn’t until June 28, which means that Congressman Zeldin — who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, who opposed the creation of a committee to investigate the January 6 insurgency, and who signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out the Electoral College votes cast by Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — will likely spend the next 15 weeks tacking hard to the right to appeal to his party’s primary voters. Zeldin has come out in favor of doubling down on U.S. fossil fuel production; opposes vaccine and mask mandates; has promised to roll back tax increases levied on wealthy New Yorkers; has pushed a “tough-on-crime” agenda that, among other things, would increase the length of time for which prisoners can be sent to solitary confinement; and has followed Glenn Youngkin’s lead in attacking public school curricula.

    But he will, in this, have to walk a fine line. For, while following Donald Trump down the anti-democratic road he is carving out is popular with base voters, it’s politically toxic among the electorate as a whole in blue states such as New York.

    A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released at the end of last year found that a whopping 71 percent of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. But, nationally, two-thirds of voters accept his win as being valid, and fully 44 percent hold Donald Trump personally responsible for inciting the January 6 insurrection.

    While support for Trump and his nefarious theories about a stolen election may play well with GOP voters, repeating the Big Lie is unlikely to prove to be a vote-winning strategy in the general election: In New York, nearly 61 percent of the 8.61 million people who voted in 2020 cast ballots for Biden.

    For Zeldin and his fellow GOP would-be-nominees, this all must be intensely frustrating. After all, the New York GOP has, over the past few months, gotten increasingly confident that it can ride voter angst on the economy, on rising crime rates, on education policy. Last month, a GOP-commissioned poll by Triton Polling Research — much-hyped by the conservative New York Post — concluded that New York’s electorate was seething about the status quo, and in particular was resentful of Democratic policy reforms such as the limiting of cash bail. And the Democrats were caught up in an intraparty clash last year, in which the state’s attorney general, Leticia James investigated, and ultimately brought down, Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a sexual harassment scandal.

    Yet the Triton poll showed that, even though voters were starting to align with many of the talking points being pushed by the Republican Party, Donald Trump himself remained so unpopular and polarizing a figure in New York that it was limiting the party’s chances to make electoral inroads in the state. Indeed, in New York at the time of the last election, in November 2020, slightly under a quarter of registered voters declared themselves to be Republican, compared to more than half who identify as Democrats.

    It’s a stark turnaround from the years surrounding the turn of the century, when Republicans were highly competitive in the state. From 1981-1999, one of New York’s two senators was the deeply conservative Al D’Amato. In 1994, Republican George Pataki won the governorship. Pushing tax cuts, welfare “reform” and job creation, and running on a technocratic, moderate platform, he was reelected twice, both times by large margins.

    Yet, in the 15 years since Pataki’s last term ended, the state has turned more and more blue — and, at the same time, the GOP has swung further to the right, culminating in its current Trumpist incarnation.

    In 2006, Eliot Spitzer won the governorship by a landslide. When Spitzer’s term was cut short by a sex scandal, he was succeeded, briefly, by Lt. Gov. David Paterson. After that came the Cuomo regnum. In 2010, 2014 and 2018, Andrew Cuomo won a troika of victories. His third term was cut short by a cascading series of sexual harassment allegations. Now, Kathy Hochul is the governor. Assuming she survives a possible primary challenge by Cuomo — who is deep into a campaign to rehabilitate himself politically — she will be far-and-away the odds-on favorite to win the general election, in a state where both houses of the legislature now have Democratic supermajorities.

    If Zeldin emerges as the GOP nominee, the party will be fielding a candidate who has largely voted in lockstep with Trumpian positions in recent years on everything from opposing investments in clean energy research and providing disaster relief funds for Puerto Rico to opposing repeal of a cap in deductions for state and local taxes that was locked into place by Congress in 2017.

    Zeldin opposed the impeachment inquiries into Trump’s actions with Ukraine and his role in the attempted coup of January 6. He opposed establishing baseline humanitarian standards for those being held in detention by Customs and Border Patrol. He opposed funding the federal government unless the spending bill included money for Trump’s border wall. And the list goes on.

    For a state with New York’s broadly liberal political priorities, that’s an awful lot of hostages to fortune. Sure, the electorate is in an ugly and angry mood; but that doesn’t mean New Yorkers are about to turn around and embrace a dyed-in-the-wool apologist for Donald Trump.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Supporting a No-Fly Zone Are Putting Us at Risk of Nuclear War

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wears a Ukrainian flag before the State of the Union address by President Joe Biden during a joint session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol’s House Chamber on March 1, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

    As Vladimir Putin’s wretched war against Ukraine grinds on with no definitive end in sight, Republicans have found a way to once again be disruptive and destructive at the worst possible juncture. After voting against $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine last week, dozens of GOP senators have demanded the U.S. send more weapons.

    “‘We should send more lethal aid to Ukraine which I voted against last week’ is making my brain melt,” tweeted Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz.

    Among the more belligerent Republicans — and more than a few Democrats who should damn well know better by now — the idea of establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine has become a rallying cry.

    Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the stage for this with an impassioned plea for such help to Congress on Wednesday.

    As Noam Chomsky explained in Truthout last week, a no-fly zone is not simply a rule or guideline: “A no-fly zone means that the U.S. Air Force would not only be attacking Russian planes but would also be bombing Russian ground installations that provide anti-aircraft support for Russian forces, with whatever ‘collateral damage’ ensues. Is it really difficult to comprehend what follows?”

    Noah Y. Kim of Mother Jones breaks it down:

    A no-fly zone is essentially a commitment to ensure that no enemy aircraft can enter a designated area. In order to make good on this pledge, the U.S. and NATO would have to patrol the skies above Ukraine with thousands of flights and shoot down any Russian planes that violated the banned airspace. Given that Putin has already ignored America’s warnings not to invade Ukraine and not to target Ukrainian civilians, it’s exceptionally unlikely that he would suddenly heed threats to stop sending planes into Ukraine. And destroying Russian aircraft would trigger all-out war between Russia and the West.

    Plus, a no-fly zone could end up provoking a war even before American planes entered Ukrainian airspace. According to the Atlantic Council’s Damir Marusic, America would most likely build up to a no-fly zone by destroying the Russian military’s substantial anti-aircraft batteries in Belarus and Russia so that American pilots could fly without the constant threat of being shot down. Violating Russia’s sovereignty and bombing Russian military bases outside of Ukraine would also result in direct conflict.

    To boil it down, implementing a no-fly zone would amount to a declaration of war with Russia. There’s virtually no other way to slice it.

    Of course, this simple fact won’t preclude Republican wreckers from trying to shove President Biden into a shooting war to make him look weak in an election year, just as hundreds of thousands of deaths did not preclude them from deranging COVID policy to score points with their benighted base.

    One might ask, what’s the big deal? Much media coverage has depicted Russia’s vaunted military might as turning out to be a lot of shadows and noise. Russian forces are bogging down all over Ukraine, losing vital supply lines, and its troops — a great many of whom are young conscripts — are beginning to cotton to the notion that something is out of joint. In short, this mighty power is looking awfully shaky out where the metal meets the meat. Let’s go kick Putin’s ass, right? ‘MURICA-STYLE BABY!

    Reality, as ever, intrudes. Most of the damage being done by Russia to Ukraine’s civilian population has come by way of artillery barrages fired from within Russian and Belarusian territory. To be “successful,” U.S. warplanes would not only have to attack two sovereign countries within their borders in order to disable the batteries, but would also have to take out any and all surface-to-air missile defense emplacements in order to keep the skies safe for their jets. There is nothing “limited” about any aspect of this scenario.

    …and the problem with no limits is where you might find yourself without them. I give you, for your edification, Anthony Faiola of The Washington Post and the most terrifying paragraph I have read in years:

    The advent of tactical nuclear weapons — a term generally applied to lower-yield devices designed for battlefield use, which can have a fraction of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb — reduced their lethality, limiting the extent of absolute destruction and deadly radiation fields. That’s also made their use less unthinkable, raising the specter that the Russians could opt to use a smaller device without leveling an entire city. Detonate a one kiloton weapon on one side of Kyiv’s Zhuliany airport, for instance, and Russian President Vladimir Putin sends a next-level message with a fireball, shock waves and deadly radiation. But the blast radius wouldn’t reach the end of the runway.

    Leaving aside the potential doomsday scenario emerging from a U.S./Russia shooting war, there is the fact that a no-fly zone or other aggressive NATO action would play directly into Putin’s hands. He knows his war is not going as planned. This propaganda coup would help him consolidate support back home as he intensifies his misleading cries of victimhood.

    Of course, watching Putin’s monstrous attacks on civilians makes most folks want to do something, by God, and soon. However, responding with support for escalating military action would pivot this conflict into a cascading confrontation between nuclear powers that could easily spin out of control. Responding, instead, with support for the courageous antiwar activists who are organizing against Russia’s invasion from within Russia, Ukraine and across the globe, is a far better course of action.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Minneapolis Teachers Strike to Bring Power Back to the Community

    Minneapolis school teachers hold placards during the strike in front of the Justice Page Middle school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 8, 2022.

    It’s been frigid cold and over 4,000 Minneapolis educators are out on the picket lines striking for a second week. Smaller class sizes, improved health care, more mental health supports, competitive pay for teachers along with increased pay for educational support professionals are central to our demands. Still, spirits are up. We know our cause is just. Our demands are not only what educators and students deserve, they are 100% possible. The powers that be say there is not enough money, yet our state recently touts a 9.3 billion dollar surplus. Educators in St. Paul were set to go on strike at the same time, yet at the last minute came to an impressive deal with the district. This victory lets us know victory is possible in Minneapolis. Indeed, the solidarity between districts and educator union chapters serves as a pathway forward for the labor movement. Possibilities for even bigger demands in future struggles are possible now more than ever before.

    Minnesota has one of the worst student to counselor ratios in the country with the national student to counselor ratio being 430:1 and Minnesota being above 600:1. Our Educational Support Professionals (ESPS) are central to the functioning of our schools, yet are paid as low as $24,000 a year. A large percentage of our ESPs are educators of color. We are demanding $35,000 a year to start. We are also demanding protections against layoffs for educators of color and increased supports for new BIPOC educators. Covid-19 is also a factor, as we demand spread mitigation, and support for educators and students sick from COVID.

    In the absence of leadership from the top, it’s fallen on us to bring attention to the impacts of underfunding on our schools. In 2018, the St. Paul Federation of Educators partnered with community researchers on a report titled “Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools’ Decreased Funding.” The research found that from 2003 to 2018, real per-pupil funding decreased by $3,049 in Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and by $1,610 in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS). MPS and SPPS serve over half of Minnesota’s Black students as well as a plurality of our Latinx and Asian students, while serving less than 1% of White students. Funding in all other Minnesota districts, which serve 99% of White students across the state, decreased only $770 per student.

    This racialized divestment from our students has caused them to lose access to programs that students in wealthy, majority-White districts take for granted: music, art, tech ed, and college counseling. It’s caused poverty wages and stagnant benefits which drive new educators out of the field before they are able to hone their craft. Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Police Department budget has ballooned to include thousands of dollars in bonuses paid for by our students’ parents, while Saint Paul tries to overturn rent control measures passed by referendum. In both cities, sustainable schools have been a low priority for elected officials except when a photo op is needed.

    As our community schools reel from budget cuts, MN’s well-heeled nonprofit sector hoards money and pours it into grants and financing charter and private schools that offer even worse compensation and no elected voice for parents. Administrators and school board members have consistently failed to challenge corporate tax rates and partner with educators to demand equitable state funding. The complacency of our elected and appointed leaders has brought us to the point where educators have to take the power back to the community by striking.

    If Covid-19 has shown us anything, it is how vital public schools and their staff are for capitalism and society as a whole to function. Without the underpaid labor and love of our dedicated ESPs and licensed staff, no other work is possible. As this school year began, as we demanded safety on the job and health protections against the virus, the praise educators received in 2020 has turned to disdain. Educators leaving the profession and a shortage of new educators has led to hundreds of open positions across both cities, and schools were forced to resume standardized testing as if nothing had changed. Administrators talked about test scores instead of student wellness. School board members dismissed parents whose schools were threatened with closure and consolidation as “the loudest voices in the room.” The lessons of the pandemic were buried under business as usual.

    MFT’s current strike and SPFE’s 2020 strike are centered on fundamental truths: that business as usual was insufficient, that students are not commodities to be traded, and that educators’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. Dignified wages and schools full of mental health supports and small classes are the bare minimum that we need to build a better world for our students and help our communities thrive.

    While our demands certainly fall under bargaining for the collective good, we believe we as educators need to demand even bigger and radical demands that address the needs of our communities in the age of an empire in decline and climate breakdown.

    We want and need fully funded community schools and our communities will accept nothing less. After school programs, daily community dinners, and partnerships with community organizations have been visioned and maintained by the labor of our ESPs and licensed educators. SPFE has a nation-leading home visit program that builds close ties between educators and families across zip codes and language. We’ve pushed for restorative justice practices in our schools that offer healing alternatives to suspension, and community-building among students. We have fought to keep these community-centered initiatives in our contract and build power in Minneapolis for the same goals.

    In Minneapolis and St. Paul, working class and BIPOC families are finding it increasingly difficult to stay in the Twin Cities due to rising living costs driven by gentrification. Fighting for anti-gentrifying measures such as rent control like the Chicago Teachers Union has done, should be a key focus of Twin Cities educators. If our students lack stable housing, it is unrealistic to expect students to show up to the classroom with the brain space necessary to learn.

    Starting in 2019, students across the globe started Fridays for Future going on strike for climate action. Twin Cities students joined the thousands of youth across the U.S. active in the struggle. We as educators should join them in demanding climate action, a transformative Green New Deal, and an eco-socialist economy. Schools should become climate center hubs where community members learn to nurture soil, grow food, protect water, and organize for community power. We need to prepare for coming environmental disasters by learning the skills necessary to withstand compounding crises. Lastly, we should center learning that allows community members of all ages to dream, to create, and to thrive. In short, we need to be preparing our communities and youth for the world that will be and can be.

    The time is now to build the schools Twin Cities students deserve and for districts to respect the communities that raise them outside of our walls. The aftermath of the George Floyd uprising laid bare the rot and inadequacy in Minneapolis as it invested in policing over prevention, in cops rather than in our schools. These years have seen our members and neighbors get attuned to how powerful our solidarity across race, across language, and across the river can be. With this solidarity and defiance, we can build thriving community schools that will raise our future generations.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Calling Ukraine “Relatively Civilized” Invokes a Racist Ranking of Europeanness

    Ukrainian displaced civilians wait in the train station as they flee from the war in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 15, 2022.

    CBS senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata’s contrast of Ukraine, which he described as “relatively civilized, relatively European,” with Iraq and Afghanistan, where “conflict has been raging for decades,” went viral and offended millions around the globe. This dangerous comment was a sobering reminder of the persisting racism, Islamophobia and colonial mentalities still propagated by mainstream media. While people from the Middle East expressed their shock and disappointment at being labeled uncivilized, I want to focus on the “relatively” part of “relatively civilized, relatively European” and illustrate the danger — historical and lingering — in concrete, regional, Eastern European terms. Bulgaria provides an illuminating example of a country with inhumane policies for acceptance as “fully” European by a xenophobic, Islamophobic Western Europe.

    Since the end of the nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule in 1878, a central component of building what we recognize today as modern Bulgaria was coming to terms with being “relatively civilized, relatively European.” According to Bulgarian intellectuals at the time of founding and socialism later (1944-1989), the Ottoman Empire had interrupted Bulgarian “natural” European cultural development. Thus, cleansing all vestiges of Islam and the Ottoman Empire was vital in affirming Bulgarian national identity as a European country with modern European potential. These ideas led to horrific consequences for the tangible, living vestiges of the Ottoman Empire: my Turkish community.

    Bulgarian national identity construction during socialism was based on the “Turkish yoke.” Historians and media framed the former Ottoman rulers in classic orientalist terms: Muslim, backward and barbaric. Hostile stereotypes were reproduced in many Bulgarian television productions about the history of Bulgarian plight under Ottoman domination. Additionally, the television productions were harnessed to legitimize a forced assimilation campaign that targeted Muslim communities, including my own. Every Turkish and Muslim person in Bulgaria was forced to change their mostly Arabic-origin name to a Bulgarian one. My mother still has the proof of her name-change document, which she had to present at work to be given her salary. Practicing Islam and associated clothing (veils, shalwar) were banned, speaking Turkish was illegal and Prime Minister Todor Zhivkov declared, “There are no Turks in Bulgaria” after the name-changing campaign was complete. In the late 20th century. In Europe.

    Following my father’s escape to Turkey and a lengthy ordeal with the government, my mother managed to get my brother and I out of Bulgaria shortly before the largest act of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II, when 360,000 Turks were expelled from Bulgaria in 1989. Following Bulgaria’s transition to democracy later that year, ethnic minority rights were promised and restored, and many expellees returned. However, as elsewhere, despite a democratically elected government and European Union (EU) membership, ethnic minority rights leave much to be desired in Bulgaria, demonstrating how empty terms such as “European” are. For example, Bulgarian authorities’ “failure to tackle entrenched prejudice against asylum seekers, migrants, Muslims and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is fuelling further violence and discrimination,” Amnesty International notes, leading to a “climate of fear.”

    Recently, at the prospect of an onslaught of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian attack on Ukraine, Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov — much like Charlie D’Agata — stated that no European country is afraid of the Ukrainian refugees, because Ukrainians are “intelligent,” “educated” and “European,” in contrast to the prior (Syrian) refugee waves of “people with unclear pasts, who could have been terrorists.” This empathy toward Ukrainian refugees is indeed a stark contrast to Bulgarian policies and practices toward Syrian refugees. During the Syrian refugee waves, instead of protecting Syrian refugees, Bulgaria fortified its borders to keep Syrian refugees out of the country. Though overt xenophobia is ostensibly against EU values, a xenophobic, Islamophobic climate reverberated throughout Bulgarian public discourse and, as we witness again, it is ongoing. Indeed, this xenophobic climate is pervasive in the EU more broadly.

    Statements such as “relatively civilized, relatively European” only fuel xenophobia and racism in countries described as such, because elites aspire to full Europeanness, at all costs. In our effort to combat xenophobia, racism and Islamophobia, we must remember that terms such as “civilized” and “European” are nothing but a colonial fantasy peddled as human rights and justice for all.

    Edward Said asserted that orientalism says more about “our” world than the Orient itself. The reactions to Ukrainian refugees and characterizing countries in Europe as “relatively civilized” does indeed continue to remind us that the scope, institutions and influence of orientalism are still with us, as they were when Said wrote Orientalism in the 1970s. Yet, I have witnessed the power of the media in toppling elite discourses and promoting intercultural understanding and remain hopeful for the future. Despite the Herculean effort by Bulgarian elites to instill animosity toward Turks and Turkey, Turkish TV series are adored by Bulgarians and have been running on primetime television for more than a decade in Bulgaria. Bulgarian viewers, at first surprised that the Turks in the TV series did not look like the Turks in Bulgarian productions, increasingly recognized the cultural proximity between the two countries and saw Turks for what they are: human beings.

    As a former refugee, I can attest: Refugees are in fact human beings — human beings seeking refuge from danger. Who would want to leave their place of birth, comfort and community for an entirely new life, unless they didn’t absolutely have to? A Syrian refugee living in Istanbul told me a few years ago that he wished that people would understand that war could happen anywhere. “Today it’s us. Tomorrow it might be you,” he said. This crystallized for Europeans with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, expressed with shock and open arms to Ukrainian refugees. This support for “relatively European” refugees is most admirable and welcome. Now, let’s extend this humanity to all refugees and remember that tomorrow it might be us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin Just Delivered Another Blow on Climate. He’s a Threat to Humanity.

    Joe Manchin

    Once again, the name Joe Manchin is on the lips of every person who gives a fig for salvaging the ongoing, deepening climate crisis. Once again, a senator with monstrous conflicts of interest regarding his own coal fortune has thrown soot and ash into the gears of progress. It seems entirely apparent that the man has no intention of letting any meaningful climate legislation see the light of day. It’s time to make it clear that his blockading actions are, in many ways, equivalent to murder. We must say as much, and call out the perpetrator: Manchin, Manchin, Manchin.

    This week, Manchin delivered a crushing one-two punch that should at least serve to end any doubts regarding his intentions. Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s eminently qualified nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, has removed herself from consideration after Manchin announced he would not vote to confirm her. He accounted for his decision by saying Raskin’s climate beliefs have been “politicized,” which is Manchin-speak for “She thinks climate change is a threat to humanity and may act on that belief in her official capacity.” Can’t have that.

    In a seething letter to Biden withdrawing herself from consideration, Raskin wrote, “It was — and is — my considered view that the perils of climate change must be added to the list of serious risks that the Federal Reserve considers as it works to ensure the stability and resiliency of our economy and financial system.” Every Senate Republican was set to vote against her final nomination, so Biden needed the entire Senate Democratic Caucus to hold the line. All of them did, except Manchin, and the absence of his support was a death knell for Raskin’s nomination.

    Manchin, Manchin, Manchin.

    All of this, and the senator’s merciless work was still only half done. This time, however, he abandoned all pretense and went fully into nonsense mode. At an energy conference late last week, amid a surging interest in electric-powered cars thanks to the spike in gas prices, he coughed up a nugget of balderdash so dense it had its own gravity.

    “I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin told the assembled. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas — I remember those days. I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China…. I’ve read history, and I remember Henry Ford inventing the Model-T, but I sure as hell don’t remember the US government building filling stations. The market did that.”

    Ah bah wha huh? The supply chain doesn’t affect internal combustion cars and the batteries they also need? The market did what, now? I think he meant to say “President Eisenhower and his massive plan to construct a transcontinental federal highway system did that.” Absent that wildly successful government program, the filling stations Manchin credits the market for creating would be squatting in the creosote bushes somewhere outside Barstow, on the edge of the desert. It doesn’t have to make sense. It is a one-word sign Manchin is holding up to the White House, a masterpiece of simplicity: “NOPE.”

    It has been wisely said that one may know a person by the company they keep. In the case of Manchin, that “conference” where he garblewarbled through his disdain for clean-running cars is telling. The annual event he spoke at was called CERAWeek, sponsored by S&P Global. The conference’s mission statement reads, “Now in its 40th year, CERAWeek is widely considered to be the most prestigious annual gathering of CEOs and Ministers from global energy and utilities, as well as automotive, manufacturing, policy and financial communities, along with a growing presence of tech.”

    Among the speakers who joined Manchin on the CERAWeek stage were CEOs and other high-ranking officials from Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, PG&E, ConocoPhillips, the Carlyle Group, Edison, Shell, Chevron, several US senators and Executive Cabinet members, oh, right, and the secretary-general of OPEC. That audience lapped up what he was peddling like cats into the cream.

    Those are his people. Not you, not me, and certainly not Earth herself. There is no longer even the meanest shadow of a chance he can be persuaded to relent on his anti-climate crusade; at CERAWeek, Manchin was newly bathed in the blood of the lamb (oil, that is), and promptly hit the kill switch on one of Biden’s climate-concerned nominees. There is no mystery to it any longer, if there ever was to begin with.

    Manchin, Manchin, Manchin.

    Joe Manchin, with the help of inscrutable vandals like Kyrsten Sinema, spent all of last year laboring to dismember President Biden’s two signature pieces of legislation: the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. Both had substantial funding for climate action until Manchin got hold of them. He didn’t like the cost, no, it’s the deficit, no, it’s not bipartisan enough, no, no, no, no and furthermore no.

    Over and over, the Congressional Progressive Caucus attempted to come up with novel ways to appease his “concerns,” only to have him move the goal posts once again. In the end, the infrastructure bill passed with only a fraction of its climate policies intact, and the Build Back Better Act hovers half-baked in congressional rewrite purgatory — although signs are afoot that it may soon reemerge with a new name.

    Now, the Raskin nomination is smashed, and by equating electric cars to the gas lines of the 1970s, Manchin has made it abundantly clear that none of this climate shit is getting past him while he’s the goalie.

    It’s time to set sights on the goalie.

    Make him and his fathomless intransigence a top political issue. Staple it to his forehead every time a California town burns to the ground or a Missouri town becomes so much detritus flowing downriver on the latest Mississippi River flood tide. When the farms fail and the peaks of the Sierras are bare of snow, say the name again and again: Manchin, Manchin, goddamn Manchin.

    The senator from West Virginia must have his reckoning.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Movement to Defend Pensions Sparked an Educator Uprising in Puerto Rico

    Teachers protest for a better salary in Puerto Rico

    Throughout the month of February, educators in Puerto Rico have taught us a lesson in dignity, demonstrating once again how to stand up for your rights as workers and win.

    It all started the first week of the month, when activists called for educators to call out sick with the “#TeacherFlu” to protest their low wages, poor working conditions and the decimation of their pensions. This was the latest in a series of actions that defied both the right-wing government in Puerto Rico, and the politicians, bankers and bureaucrats in the United States who collaborate to impose austerity and misery.

    This educator-led struggle in Puerto Rico holds lessons for how to challenge the powerful and monied interests that rule our lives. Their actions prove that there is no shortcut to building power at the grassroots, school by school, neighborhood by neighborhood.

    The Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR), one of the leading teacher unions of the country, has — along with its allies — built a strong network of anti-austerity and anti-colonial opposition. This network was built through day-to-day and week-to-week struggles and was ready to spring into action when the conditions were ripe nationally for widespread discussion and agitation around the issue of just wages and pensions. A flexible and responsive union leadership sensed the growing discontent and seized on the opportunity to take action and call for nationally coordinated strike action.

    Just as the #TeacherFlu sickout started to spread from school to school across the country, a tragic accident further coalesced the movement.

    On February 1, public school teacher Pablo Mas Oquendo died when he fell asleep at the wheel as he drove home to change between his night shift as a security guard and his day job as a teacher. Mas Oquendo held two part-time jobs in addition to teaching full time in order to make ends meet. His tragic death propelled the terrible working conditions, poverty wages and inadequate pensions of educators into the public spotlight. A memorial on February 1, 2022, at Mas Oquendo’s Francisco Oller High School to mourn his death turned into a protest, further elevating the movement and gathering public sympathy behind the teachers.

    Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, a wildly unpopular right-wing politician elected to power with only 32 percent of the vote in November 2020, has only added fuel to the fire. During the first week of actions, Pierluisi revealed his paternalistic attitude toward workers, proclaiming that the actions “would not be repeated” and that public sector workers “don’t have to” work in their chosen line of work.

    His words only strengthened the resolve of those organizing in defense of public education. Edwin Morales Laboy, vice president of the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR), responded to Pierluisi on primetime news, saying, “You also don’t have to be governor,” advancing a call for the governor’s resignation. The FMPR is a leading union of educators in the country that has collaboratively built a strong network of anti-austerity and anti-colonial worker-led opposition. Additionally, spokespeople of the Frente Amplio en Defensa de la Educación Pública (FADEP), which is a coalition of educator unions, appeared on a number of primetime news outlets, further spreading the demands and challenging the rhetoric of anti-public worker sentiment so often parroted in the media.

    When it comes to education, many people in Puerto Rico have lost faith their government, as it has closed hundreds of schools, still hasn’t repaired schools damaged by hurricanes and earthquakes, has failed to provide communities with earthquake-resistant school buildings or adequate ventilation during the pandemic, and continues to abuse the very people who educate and care for our children. In the face of continuous attacks, educators have grown tired of being mistreated, and their resolve to fight for their rights has only grown stronger.

    The protests were creative and contagious, spreading quickly from school to school in the form of a rolling “sickout,” spirited pickets in front of schools, cacerolazos (popular forms of protest in which people bang pots and pans), vigils mourning the death of public education, marches through towns and in public plazas, and work stoppages involving other public sector workers. The educators’ demands gained so much momentum that local politicians were forced to pledge their support to the movement. Calls for the legislature to delay a $10.8 million payment to Wall Street on Puerto Rico’s illegitimate debt were successful. This was a meaningful win in a situation where politicians are trying to justify the pension cuts as “necessary” in the name of balancing the budget in light of the debt payments.

    What started out as a spirited defense of public worker pensions grew into the largest work stoppage of educators in the last 10 years in Puerto Rico, with 90 percent of educators calling in sick, and more than 45,000 educators, other public sector workers and entire school communities marching on the capital on February 9.

    For years politicians have claimed that there are no funds available to pay for salary increases or the retirement of Puerto Rican educators. The crushing debt that Washington has imposed through the dictatorial Financial Oversight and Management Board — known in Puerto Rico as “la junta” — has been used again and again as an excuse to legitimize the privatization and decimation of public sector pensions and to indefinitely postpone raises for educators and other public sector workers.

    But after two intense weeks of sustained struggle, educators who haven’t had a single raise in 14 years and whose base salary was $1,750 a month, won a $1,000 per month raise — showing that, just as activists have been saying, the money has been there all along. Educators have shown that when there’s a political will, there’s a way — bringing to life the words of Eugenio María de Hostos, the Puerto Rican educator and independentista: “There is no victory without struggle, and no struggle without sacrifice.”

    But if the government of Puerto Rico believes it has appeased the educators with a $1,000-a-month raise, bureaucrats are in for a rude awakening. If anything, the salary victory has only made educators more aware of their social power to bring about change. One of the slogans of the movement encompasses the power that educational workers are leveraging as they withhold their labor: “Sin maestros y maestras el país se paraliza” (Without educators, the country shuts down). In the weeks to come, educators will continue to hold politicians accountable. They have not forgotten what pushed them into the streets in the first place: defending their right to a dignified retirement.

    But educators in Puerto Rico are up against a formidable challenge and need solidarity from union siblings internationally. Not only are they in negotiation with their employers in the government and the Department of Education, but they are also fighting the Fiscal Control Board, which has ruled with an iron fist since 2016, using its authority to overturn Puerto Rican autonomy.

    Educators are in motion against the whole weight of the Wall Street vultures, who will have Puerto Rican workers pay for the illegal and illegitimate debt that they did not create. Educators — who are already disproportionately women, performing so much labor to help reproduce and maintain life — are now also carrying the weight of stopping la junta’s plan to balance the budget on the backs of all workers.

    The FMPR, along with other unions from FADEP, have been called in to the capital to negotiate educators’ retirement, but so far, there are no substantial concessions on the part of the government. Despite the salary increase, the issues that educators have been fighting for over the years are still on the table, and the government, under pressure from la junta, has shown little sign of backing off.

    The current plan would raise the retirement age from 55 to 63 and cut and freeze pensions, leaving educators with a member-funded 401k — which, without employer contributions, is little more than a savings account. There are rumors that the government might agree to contribute to member 401ks, but public educators reject the privatization of their pensions.

    All of this is happening while the Puerto Rican government decides whether or not it will approve the release of the first payments as a part of the Fiscal Control Board’s Debt Adjustment Plan (DAP). The plan, which will push the burden onto those who have already paid the price of the economic crisis, is scheduled to go into full effect on March 15 of this year. If the government can continue to hold up the DAP payments, the FADEP will move forward with a lawsuit in defense of their pensions, which they have filed in the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Over the next several weeks, the FMPR, along with allies in other public sector unions, will continue to lobby the Pierluisi government to deny the payments to la junta. Instead of being turned over to the Wall Street vultures, these millions of dollars should be spent investing in the future that Puerto Ricans deserve. Workers in Puerto Rico are making history — in the capitol, in the courts, and, most importantly, in the school buildings, workplaces and in the streets.

    Paul Figueroa contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Sewer Data and Surges Abroad Should Remind Us the Pandemic Isn’t Over

    A person is transferred onto a bus outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong on March 10, 2022, as the government announced the hospital will be used only for COVID-19 patients.

    The method of testing wastewater to detect virus levels within a whole population has been around since the days of polio, but it took a March 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 in Austria to turn the technique into a mainstay in the pandemic fight. In the U.S., where the last president fled even the idea of mass COVID testing for fear of harming his reelection campaign, wastewater testing has become one of the best and only ways to track viral trends among broad swaths of the population.

    That’s the good news. The bad news? The numbers are inching up, again. “A wastewater network that monitors for Covid-19 trends is warning that cases are once again rising in many parts of the U.S., according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data,” reports Bloomberg News. “More than a third of the CDC’s wastewater sample sites across the U.S. showed rising Covid-19 trends in the period ending March 1 to March 10, though reported cases have stayed near a recent low.”

    This brings to bear a number of disturbing possibilities. Scientists have been watching the BA.2 subvariant with growing levels of concern; it is already making a strong showing in China and parts of Europe. It is entirely possible BA.2 is already present here in the U.S., and is at least partially responsible for the rise in cases across the country. If so, the damage done by Delta and Omicron will be instructive in the weeks and months to come.

    It has been wisely said, however, that one should not think of zebras upon hearing hoofbeats. Occam’s Razor suggests an exhausted nation is shedding its personal COVID protections on the gossamer promise that a corner has been turned. Mask mandates are all but gone except in a few key and continually contentious arenas, such as school districts and commercial airlines. Thus, the current rise in cases could be due to a segment of the populace letting down its defenses because the TV said, “Everything’s cool now, y’all, come on out and be capitalists again.”

    The news may tell you we’re returning to “normalcy,” but 8,000 dead a week tells a different story; if this uptick continues, it runs the risk of taxing our already-battered health care infrastructure if/when BA.2 does come knocking.

    The new COVID outbreak in China, on the other hand, has the potential to rattle the entire world. The Chinese government has instituted a full-scale lockdown in several regions, which is directly impacting tech giants like Foxconn, Tencent and Huawei. Any significant disruption could further undermine the global supply chain, and risks exacerbating growing inflationary pressures. Foxconn, whose client list includes Apple, informed CNN upon query that the “date of factory resumption is to be advised by the local government.”

    Meanwhile, Russia’s bloody war in Ukraine is having a ruinous effect on another global supply chain, this one involving food. “At least 50 countries depend on Russia and Ukraine for 30 percent or more of their wheat supply,” reports the Guardian, “and many developing countries in northern Africa, Asia and the near east are among the most reliant. Poor countries are bearing the brunt of the price increases. Many of the poorest countries were already struggling financially, with some facing debt crises, amid the pandemic.”

    War, famine, pestilence… three horsemen of the apocalypse as devised by John of Patmos. The fourth? “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

    I’ve never been the praying type, so let’s keep it simple and bring it all back to the wastewater: We’re in deep shit, friends.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.