radiofree.asia

Category: Op-Ed

  • Republicans Are Already Sabotaging Biden’s Fragile Diplomacy With Iran

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy waits to speak during a news conference with fellow House Republicans at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

    The United States and Iran appear to be in the final stages of negotiations to revive a 2015 agreement, known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities in exchange for lessening the country’s diplomatic and economic isolation. Some reports say a deal could be announced in as soon as two weeks.

    There are still several key sticking points that could derail the negotiations. Iran’s government wants assurances that any agreement won’t be ripped up by a future U.S. president, as Donald Trump did with the first deal. Those assurances aren’t likely to be forthcoming, however, as the Senate is all but guaranteed not to ratify any deal as an official treaty. Instead, it would be an executive agreement, like the first deal, which can be undone by future executive actions. Even if the first deal had been ratified as a treaty, it’s possible Trump could have exited the deal without congressional approval. Iran has also reportedly asked that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be removed from a U.S. terrorist watchlist; it’s not clear whether the Biden administration is considering taking that measure.

    Hardliners in both the United States and Iran have long opposed any deal that the other country could agree on. Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who negotiated and ultimately signed the agreement, has been politically marginalized and targeted by opponents of the deal, some of whom have gone so far as to demand he be prosecuted for treason.

    Opposition to diplomacy is prevalent among elected Republicans in the United States as well. More than 150 Republican members of Congress recently signed a letter promising to oppose any deal between the Biden administration and Iran that wasn’t simultaneously ratified as a treaty and approved by two-thirds of the Senate. The Republicans’ letter to Biden states that if he “forge[s] an agreement with the Supreme Leader of Iran without formal Congressional approval, it will be temporary and non-binding and meet the same fate” as the deal negotiated under President Obama.

    Earlier this month, 33 Republican senators sent their own letter with a similar warning. “Any agreement related to Iran’s nuclear program which is not a treaty ratified by the Senate is subject to being reversed, and indeed will likely be torn up, in the opening days of the next Presidential administration, as early as January 2025,” the senators wrote.

    The original 2015 deal gave Congress a 60-day review period to study the agreement, and Republicans in both chambers were ultimately unsuccessful in derailing it legislatively.

    The practical effect of the threats is limited, as least for the time being. “The reality is that the JCPOA has already been reviewed and voted on in Congress,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at Crisis Group, recently told Axios. “All the political posturing notwithstanding, there is practically nothing that Congress can do to stop that from happening.”

    Still, the two letters send an unmistakable message to Iran’s leaders that should a Republican win the presidential election in 2024, any diplomatic agreements made by the Biden administration won’t be honored.

    In an interview in the Financial Times, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian called on Congress to “issue a political statement announcing their support of the agreement and a return to J.C.P.O.A.” He added, “Iran cannot accept as a guarantee the words of a head of state, let alone the United States, due to the withdrawal of Americans from the JCPOA.”

    Joe Cirincione, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute, tweeted that “the biggest remaining obstacle” to a deal was “the lack of US credibility” due to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the first deal.

    Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018, despite his own administration twice certifying that Iran was in compliance with the deal. The U.S. then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran, driving up energy prices and inflicting significant pain on Iranian citizens. The sanctions also severely limited Iranians’ access to medicine and other health care, despite theoretical exemptions for humanitarian aid. “For ordinary people, sanctions mean unemployment, sanctions mean becoming poor, sanctions mean the scarcity of medicine, the rising price of dollar,” Akbar Shamsodini, an Iranian businessman told The Guardian in 2018. The other signatories to the deal — France, Germany, the U.K., China and Russia — were all forced to determine whether or not they would continue to abide by the agreed-upon terms of the deal.

    Iran has long stated that its nuclear program is only for energy production, and is entirely peaceful. Those claims are supported by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which hasn’t found evidence that Iran is making a nuclear weapon. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently reiterated that his country is only developing its nuclear program for peaceful purposes, specifically to ensure their energy independence.

    Opposition to the deal is nearly uniform in the Republican Party. Signatories to the recent letter to Biden included House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, hardcore Trumpists like Louie Gohmert and Jim Jordan, and “never-Trump” conservative Liz Cheney. Indeed, ever since then-President George W. Bush included Iran in the so-called Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address, conservatives have found wide-ranging political utility in manufacturing Iran as the world’s great supervillain.

    For as much ink is spilled about the supposed fractures in the Republican Party, the unanimously hawkish approach to Iran is illuminating. Although Trump engaged in more explicitly anti-Muslim, bigoted rhetoric than his fellow primary candidates in 2016, every Republican presidential hopeful promised to rip up the deal, regardless of Iran’s compliance.

    In many ways, the anti-Iran positions help clarify how little daylight there is between the so-called nationalist wing of the party and the more traditional neoconservative wing. Members of the nationalist wing — as epitomized by Trump, his adviser Steve Bannon, and Congresspeople Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — are more likely to engage in open Islamophobia in staking out their anti-Iran positions. But much of the conservative, anti-Iran rhetoric from the Bush-era onward has relied on racist, Orientalist tropes about Iranians being untrustworthy, sneaky or duplicitous, or else suicidal, irrational and universally consumed by antisemitism. Far too much reporting in the United States has also uncritically advanced the idea that Iran is committed to acquiring nuclear weapons and is on the verge of doing so, regardless of changing conditions in the country.

    Another aspect of the recent House GOP letter deserves attention: The letter highlighted the role Russia is reportedly playing in the negotiations, which have been largely indirect between Iran and the United States. Republicans promised to “investigate any connections” between the Iran talks and the concurrent diplomatic efforts to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. The letter states: “If your dependency on the Russians to revive the JCPOA is weakening our deterrent posture with the Russians in other areas of the world, the American people deserve to know.”

    As Carl Beijer wrote in reaction, Republicans are “suggest[ing] that if Biden manages to make a deal with Iran, it will be because he pulled his punches in Ukraine and thereby gained Russia’s assistance.” Beijer calls this effort “an absolutely monstrous gambit” and argues that, “[t]he GOP is hoping to peel support off Biden’s supporters among people who are anxious about Russia by promoting a narrative where any deal he cuts with Iran implies a backchannel deal with Putin as well. And where any de-escalation in Ukraine implies the same thing.”

    The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress should forcefully push back against this kind of new Cold War reasoning and continue to pursue diplomacy with Iran, making every effort to de-escalate the looming conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Agitating for open conflict only serves the hardliners and war profiteers in the United States and abroad — and endangers countless lives.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bipartisan Bill for Middle East “Peace” Will Enable Dictatorships and Occupation

    From left, Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan hold up documents after participating in the signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 2020.

    A resolution with wide bipartisan support is being pushed through Congress that would codify one of Donald Trump’s controversial foreign policy initiatives — the so-called Abraham Accords which strengthened U.S. support for Arab dictatorships in return for their formal recognition of Israel.

    The Israel Relations Normalization Act has 329 House cosponsors, and 72 cosponsors in the Senate, almost evenly divided between the two parties.

    The bill celebrates and seeks to strengthen Trump’s deal which led Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sudan and Morocco to normalize relations with Israel. None of these countries would have recognized Israel were it not for a series of actions by the United States that essentially amounted to bribery and extortion.

    The bill asserts that the deals brokered by Trump and his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, were “peace agreements.” However, except for a small contingent sent by Morocco partway through the October 1973 conflict between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, none of the signatory countries had ever been at war with Israel. None of these countries were threatening Israel, none of them had the capacity to threaten Israel, and Israel’s distance from these countries range from 750 to 3,200 miles.

    If passed, the bill would require the State Department to “develop and submit to the appropriate congressional committees a strategy on expanding and strengthening the Abraham Accords,” including ways in which the U.S. government intends to “leverage diplomatic lines of effort and resources to encourage normalization.”

    The “normalization” of diplomatic ties in the 2020 agreements Congress seeks to expand and strengthen were part of a quid pro quo: In 2020, the tiny Gulf sheikdoms of Bahrain and the UAE agreed to recognize Israel in return for lucrative arms deal with the United States that Trump threatened to otherwise withhold. Sudan’s government agreed to normalize relations with Israel in return for the United States lifting devastating sanctions on that country. Most controversially, Morocco agreed to recognize Israel in return for the United States becoming virtually the only country to formally recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara, which has been under a brutal Moroccan military occupation since its conquest of the former Spanish colony in 1975.

    Criticisms of the Abraham Accords are effectively banned in these Arab states, each of which have notoriously bad human rights records. Bahrain, with the support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, engaged in a brutal and deadly crackdown against nonviolent pro-democracy activists in 2011 and peaceful dissent continues to be suppressed in that island kingdom. The UAE is also a repressive regime which is particularly abusive to foreign workers which make up the majority of the population, and it has engaged in war crimes in Yemen. Sudan is ruled by a repressive military junta which has violently cracked down on pro-democracy activists after staging a coup this past fall, ousting the country’s civilian-led coalition government. The Moroccan monarchy continues its horrific decades-long occupation of Western Sahara, which Freedom House has ranked as second only to Syria in its suppression of political rights.

    This bill could be seen as part of the decades-long tradition of the U.S. propping up Arab dictatorships suppressing pro-democracy struggles while then justifying its support for the Israeli occupation on the grounds that Israel is “the sole democracy in the Middle East.”

    This legislative initiative perpetuates the myth that the key to Middle East peace is in having autocratic Arab states recognize Israel, not on Israel ending its occupation. There is no mention of the Israeli occupation in the bill, much less a call for it to end. Indeed, by weakening Arab leverage on Israel by recognizing that government prior to Israel recognizing Palestine, it eases pressure on Israel to make the necessary compromises for peace. For nearly 20 years, every Arab country has been on record supporting normalization of relations with Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This bipartisan majority in Congress sponsoring this bill, however, is insisting that Arab recognition be unilateral. This legislation, therefore, appears to be designed to remove this leverage from the Palestinian side, one of the few routes remaining to the millions of Palestinians suffering under the Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank.

    It has long been a priority of successive U.S. administrations and congressional leaders of both parties to push Arab countries to recognize Israel while actively discouraging other countries to recognize Palestine. (Indeed, U.S. law requires cutting off all U.S. aid to any United Nations agency that includes Palestine as a member, which led President Obama to suspend U.S. contributions to UNESCO in 2011 and President Trump to withdraw altogether in 2017, resulting in major cutbacks to efforts to promote peace through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.)

    As a result, despite the pro-peace rhetoric in the bill, the Israel Relations Normalization Act appears to be designed to make peace even more elusive by strengthening the Israeli occupation and weakening nonviolent means of challenging it.

    A recent poll of U.S. Middle East scholars revealed that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed recognized the Abraham Accords has actually had a negative impact on the prospects of peace, with only 6 percent saying it has had a positive impact. The majority of congressional Democrats, however, have joined their Republican colleagues in insisting that this broad consensus of Middle East scholars is wrong, and that Trump was right.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Inflation Talk Belies Deeper Question: Why Was Everything So Cheap Before?

    A shopper places items in a cart at a home improvement store in Bethesda, Maryland, on February 17, 2022.

    Inflation has reached a 40-year high, propelled by the pandemic’s labor and supply chain disruptions, billions in stimulus money and corporate profiteering. In response, politicians and the Federal Reserve are scrambling to figure out how to staunch the rapid rise in consumer prices. And while many obsess on assigning blame, few, if any, are asking the more trenchant question: “Why was everything so damn cheap in the first place?”

    Why have televisions and smartphones and clothing and meat remained so inexpensive for as long as they have? How did corporations profit so obscenely off these ever-cheaper products? And how was it even possible for consumers to gobble up goods from a virtually bottomless pit of plenty when wealth has systematically accumulated in fewer and fewer hands since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980?

    The EconomicPolicyInstitute’sStateofWorkingAmericaDataLibraryand the Economic Policy Institute's Working Economics Blog
    The Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America Data Library and the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog

    Devotees of Milton Friedman will argue that the pit of plenty is an organic outgrowth of an increasingly unfettered and, therefore, increasingly “free” market. The truth is far more complicated. Although the neoliberal project since 1980 has ostensibly been about “free trade” and “free markets,” the U.S. taxpayer has, however unwittingly, directly and indirectly subsidized this consumption-driven system of resource extraction and labor exploitation through a vast infrastructure of defense spending, and through generous handouts to the energy and agricultural industries.

    At the same time, presidents and policy makers chummed the world’s waters for corporate executives who fed like sharks in far-flung pools of low-cost labor and resources. They exploited lax and non-existent regulatory environments as they offshored jobs and pollution to build the profitable supply chains consumers now bemoan as broken.

    Predictably, the mainstream media fixated on these broken supply chains when the bottomless pit of plenty suddenly and shockingly dried up. Empty shelves make for click-bait articles, and understandably so. Yet, few, if any, questioned a globe-spanning system that affords U.S. consumers the unprecedented opportunity to live a disposable lifestyle based on cheap oil, cheap labor and cheap food. This, in turn, depends on quantity over quality. Profit margins depend upon driving down costs and avoiding nettlesome labor and environmental standards. And it all depends upon offsetting stagnant wages, growing inequality and massive consumer debt with the unsustainable promise of more and more for less and less at ever-faster speeds.

    As such, the empty shelves say more about the tenuous nature of the U.S.’s voracious “Empire of Consumption” than they do about the market’s verdict on stimulus checks. The pandemic — with its sudden disruptions to overseas suppliers and its brutal impact on low-wage laborers (many of whom were categorized as “essential workers” and forced to expose themselves to a risk of illness) — has, in effect, pulled back the curtain and exposed the imperial wizard pulling on supply chains that allow less than 5 percent of the world’s population to consume 25 percent of its resources.

    Fistfight at the Golden Corral

    On a recent Friday night in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, diners grazing on the buffet at their local Golden Corral began wielding furniture like weapons, all because of an “alleged steak shortage.” At least, that’s what many news outlets trumpeted with their click-bait headlines. However, a spokesperson for the company assured The Washington Post that the restaurant in question “never ran out of meat,” which is incredibly on-brand. In fact, endless meat is not just the essence of Golden Corral’s brand, but also the essence of the Empire of Consumption. Both are inexorably rooted in the illusion of endless plenty at bargain prices. And those bargain prices, like the growth of fast food over the last 30 years, have been built upon the backs of cheap immigrant labor.

    Not coincidentally, that deep pool of cheap labor was filled by one of the great neoliberal achievements of the last 40 years — the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The “agreement formerly known as NAFTA” was nominally altered in 2020, but the damage was done. In 2017, the Department of Agriculture found that Mexico lost 900,000 farm jobs in the decade after then-President Bill Clinton (who essentially completed the Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal project) finally got NAFTA enacted in 1993.

    A main cause of that not-so-great displacement was a flood of heavily subsidized U.S.-grown corn. It decimated small and subsistence corn farmers in Mexico. As Alejandro Portes of the Social Science Research Council wrote back in 2006, “The response of peasants and workers thus displaced has been clear and consistent: [T]hey have headed north in ever greater absolute numbers.”

    Suddenly set adrift in a newly “globalized” market dominated by U.S. agribusiness, which also began gobbling up American family farms throughout the “farm crisis” of the 1980s, Mexican farmers fled north to work for the very “Big Ag” titans who dislodged them in the first place. These repeatedly scapegoated immigrants flocked to the burgeoning “factory farms” that filled American bellies with brutally raised industrialized meat. The factory farming model depends upon concentrated animal feeding operations, or “CAFOs,” which further decimated small U.S. family farms throughout the ‘90s.

    The growth and profitability of this industrialized farming model relied on absorbing family farms at home and pulling in cheap labor from abroad. Disempowered and dependent upon the whims of their employers, undocumented workers in particular have little choice but to be compliant, despite the risk of death, dismemberment and abuse. The looming threat of deportation exploits many migrant workers for a faster and faster food system that eschews anything other than profit. It’s not coincidental that cheap, meat-dependent fast food went from an occasional treat to a daily staple for millions of Americans during the NAFTA-stoked ‘90s. But fast food and buffet-line steaks weren’t the only thing on the menu.

    Over the years, Golden Corral periodically advertised an “Oceans of Shrimp” promotion. And where does all that shrimp come from? Like Atlantic salmon, tilapia and shellfish, it’s drawn from around the world. In fact, as Mashed recently detailed, “Thailand accounts for the majority of shrimp imported to the United States, and its system is rife with human rights abuses,” with “20-hour workdays,” “child labor and physical abuse,” and with “a large portion of farmed Thai shrimp … handled directly or indirectly by trafficked laborers.” Ecuador and Vietnam also fill Americans’ plates with this food item that was once considered a luxury but now can be consumed in abundance.

    Even the “All-American” beef we’re eating might not be as American as we think. The folks at Farm Aid, which arose out of the aforementioned farm crisis of the ‘80s, recently pointed out that meat marked “Product of the USA” may “have been raised and processed in Brazil or New Zealand.” As CBS News explained, “imported beef products can be labeled ‘Product of the USA’ as long as it’s been minimally processed or repackaged in a U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected facility.” Farm Aid advocates the end of this sleight of hand in favor of more truth in advertising. In the meantime, the Amazon rainforest is being cleared to raise more cows.

    From Fast Food to Faster Fashion

    If you are not familiar with the term “fast fashion,” you’re probably familiar with its purveyors. It often carries designer labels and is sold through major retailers like GAP, Urban Outfitters, H&M and Forever 21. Investopedia defines it as “clothing designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to take advantage of trends,” thus allowing “mainstream consumers to purchase the hot new look or the next big thing at an affordable price.” Fast fashion relies on “cheaper, speedier manufacturing and shipping methods,” which is why it is often made in sweatshops in places such as Bangladesh, where a series of deadly fires exposed the problematic disposability of its workers. Bangladesh’s garment workers often toil 12 hours per day, and sometimes 72 hours straight, according to The World Counts, for $92 per month. And it’s all done to feed the fast fashion fancies of U.S. shoppers.

    International customs and brokerage firm AFC International tracks the fashion supply chains that link U.S. consumers, and profit-hungry corporations, to the world. Clothing tops the list of products imported to the U.S., with footwear, furniture, appliances and cars following in that order. Of course, China, thanks in part to its brutalized Uyghur workforce, is the leading source of imported clothing, accounting for “36.49 percent of U.S. apparel imports” and “84.95 percent” of imported footwear. Thanks to Nike, Vietnam is the runner-up in both imported footwear “with 6.46 percent of the U.S. import market,” and apparel with “10.4 percent of total U.S. imports.”

    Not all these countries allow their workers to be as disposable as those in Bangladesh. But the clothing they produce is no less disposable. That disposability is more of a feature than a bug. Rapid turnover translates into more buying and more profits. The race to keep up also means less long-term planning and tons of excess inventory. Sadly, 59,000 tons of the unwanted byproduct is dumped annually in a Chilean desert. And that’s just one of the dumping grounds for excess clothing. Ghana, too, is a final destination for the fashion that comes in and out of the U.S. market with alarming speed.

    It’s a model also reflected by the landfilling churn of “fast furniture.” Design Excellence describes it as “furniture that is made quickly and meant to last for a short period of time [and] is meant to be on trend and break quickly so that you can toss it and purchase the next trendy piece of furniture.” And we are tossing it by the ton. According to Environmental Protection Agency statistics, the annual amount of discarded “furniture and furnishings” has nearly doubled since 1990, when 6.8 million tons went to the landfill. Since 2015, over 12 million tons has been discarded each year.

    Prime Movers

    “There’s more to Prime. A truckload more.” That’s the tagline you’ll see emblazoned on the back of many Amazon trucks. But is “a truckload more” what we actually need? Apparently not, because the pandemic-stoked surge in online purchases has generated a surge in returns.

    CNBC reported that “retail returns jumped to an average of 16.6% in 2021 versus 10.6% a year ago,” with a staggering $761 billion in merchandise sent back to stores and warehouses. As the conversion rate optimization company Invesp notes, “at least 30% of all packages ordered online are returned as compared to 8.89% in brick and mortar stores.” That matches the data reported by The Atlantic in a piece detailing the terminus of many of those returns, which is yet again the landfill. If you add the massive amount of oil and gas it takes to ship these items, which are often petroleum-based plastic products, the environmental and climate impacts of this back-and-forth is staggering.

    The one thing all of these supply chains have in common is oil. It’s omnipresent, from the oil it takes to extract and ship more oil and other resources, to the oil it takes to make the plastics and petrochemicals that become a plethora of plastic products, to the oil it takes to run the factory farms and the manufacturing plants that pump out the goods that, thanks to oil-based shipping, eventually make it to our homes and businesses. It’s even making it into our bodies through petroleum-based microplastics.

    Oil is the cornerstone of post-WWII foreign and defense policy, and U.S. taxpayers essentially subsidize the unabated flow of oil by funding a globe-spanning empire. Much like the old adage about “all roads leading to Rome,” the U.S.-built Empire of Consumption depends on all supply chains leading to home. With the rise of online shopping, that’s now quite literally true for most Americans. With the click of a button, a vast, oil-slicked supply chain delivers products directly to our doorsteps.

    That is, before a shocking amount of those “easy as one-click” orders end up in landfills, right next to the 108 billion pounds of food the U.S. discards every year. This ever-faster churn is how the Empire of Consumption fills the bottomless pit of plenty. It’s also how neoliberal economics relies upon cheap labor and plasticized disposability to perpetuate the illusion of never-ending growth.

    That illusion, which depends upon a cocktail of cheaper and cheaper products and more and more debt to give Americans the false sense of an increasing standard of living, was broken by the pandemic’s disruption.

    That disruption is a Don’t Look Up-style warning about the unsustainability of a global system that acts like a conveyor belt feeding a heretofore bottomless pit of consumer desires… desires that are, in turn, crucial to justifying the continuation of an insatiable empire that denudes the planet, alters the climate and exploits labor around the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Attacks Don’t Change the Law, But They Still Endanger Trans Youth

    On February 22, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Planning Services to investigate parents as child abusers if they support their trans children in accessing care they want and need.

    On February 18, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a non-binding opinion calling gender-affirming care for trans young people “child abuse.”

    On February 22, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Planning Services to investigate parents as child abusers if they support their trans children in accessing care they want and need. He also claimed that teachers, doctors and nurses, as well as members of the general public, could face criminal penalties if they do not report parents and providers who support trans youth.

    The Danger to Families

    Legally, neither the governor nor the attorney general have the power to define — or redefine — child abuse. And providing trans young people with health care they want and need — and that doctors have provided for roughly a century — is absolutely not child abuse. The law has not changed. Trans health care remains legal in all 50 states.

    But what people think the law says matters. Once someone reports suspected abuse or neglect and the state insinuates itself into a family, it can be difficult to get it out again. The fear of state surveillance is real for all families with trans children. But the danger is amplified for those in Texas already vulnerable to child removal and the family policing system. Black, Indigenous, Latinx, poor, and disabled families, as well as parents who are trans, survivors of intimate partner violence, or dealing with drug addiction, are much more likely to have their children removed than other families. They are also less likely to have the resources to leave their home state to seek a safer climate for their families if they choose.

    For families in this position, there is no clear safe option.

    Parents of trans youth in Texas are now afraid of bringing their children to the doctor or to school, because if they do, teachers, doctors and nurses — who may be afraid of being criminalized themselves, even if the actual risk is very low — could report them as child abusers. But not taking the child to the doctor or to school can also result in the child’s removal from their home.

    If a doctor recommends their child start puberty blockers — a safe, reversible intervention that has saved trans lives for years — and the parent moves forward with the treatment, they might be accused of child abuse. If the agency then decides to act on the governor’s word rather than the law, the agency could remove the child until the parents can fight it in court. Meanwhile, being removed from their homes puts children at greater risk for actual abuse: Trans kids are often abused in foster care systems. In this context, knowing that you should win in court is thin comfort.

    If the parent doesn’t move forward with gender-affirming care, that doesn’t make their child safe either — their child’s health may deteriorate. And not following a doctor’s advice on medically necessary care for a child can sometimes lead to accusations of medical neglect and child removal anyway. So far, no reported cases involve child removal for failure to treat gender dysphoria, and it seems unlikely to happen given how much providers tend to emphasize consent of both parents and patients in this context. Still, there is no safe option.

    For those already entangled in the family policing system, these catch-22s might not come as any surprise. To get or keep custody of your kids, you might be told you have to get and keep a job — while also being told you must never leave your child unsupervised. (The system, of course, will not pay for child care.) If you are unhoused, you might be told you have to get appropriate living quarters for you and your child. (The system, of course, will not pay for housing.) If you have been abused, you might be told you have to stop “exposing” your child to domestic violence, as if you could control the actions of your ex. You might be told not to get arrested, when you have no home and it’s a crime to sleep outside, or when the police pick you up every time you leave your house just because you’re Black, trans, femme and walking down the street.

    Where These Attacks Come From

    The Texas attorney general and governor’s actions, as well as those of others attacking trans people, seem hypocritical only if you believe their propaganda. Supposedly champions of “parental rights” and “small government,” they want the government to kidnap trans children if their parents choose to love and support them. Supposedly concerned about the risks of unproven treatment on young people, especially treatment that impacts fertility, they have chosen to try to outlaw care that young people understand and want, that no one gets before puberty, and that has proven long-term benefits and little risk, including to fertility. Yet they continue to support intersex genital surgeries performed on infants and children so young they cannot possibly understand or want the intervention, and even though most of these surgeries lack proven long-term benefits and pose significant risks, including to fertility.

    But it’s never been about parental rights or health concerns to Paxton, Abbott, or the many others like them. It’s only ever been about power. This quest for power takes the form of trying to advance political careers at the expense of those they don’t think will be able to do anything about it. It also takes the form of trying to create a world order — half remembered and half imagined — where people like them have even more control than they do already, and everyone else either knows their place or has been rendered extinct.

    While unprecedented in its specifics, this extreme attack on trans young people, their families and their providers is of a piece with other efforts to impose or maintain that world order. It is a part of the web of criminalization and family policing woven into the fabric of government and society around the country, including in “progressive” states. It is a part of the more than a hundred anti-trans bills that have been introduced this legislative session and the several that passed last legislative session, some of them seeking to criminalize the care that many trans young people’s lives depend on, and almost all attacking trans young people specifically. Those bills themselves are not alone, but part of a package of extreme measures seeking not only to eradicate or contain trans life but also (further) criminalize abortion, homelessness, and Black protest; decriminalize white-perpetrated murder of Black Lives Matter protesters; inculcate schoolchildren in white supremacist values; and suppress the vote of Black, Indigenous, disabled, homeless, trans and non-English speaking folks. It is also a part of a much larger attack on trans life, which shows up in myriad ways, whether it’s the latest hot take on whether trans people ought to exist on the pages of a major newspaper or the harassment that drove the only clinic for trans young people in Texas to close last year.

    How to Take Action

    Unfortunately, most larger LGBT organizations are poorly equipped to respond to this emergency. That’s for two reasons.

    First, for decades, mainstream LGBT organizations have excluded trans leadership. While many now work on trans issues, get funding earmarked for trans communities and no longer refuse to hire trans people, they have by and large kept their boards and executive-level staff cisgender, and they continue to respond with more urgency and resources to threats that target cis LGBQ people. You cannot beat a tidal wave of anti-trans hate while sidelining trans leadership and offering up mealy-mouthed messaging on tolerance cooked up by and for cis people.

    Second, for decades, instead of building coalitions with those fighting criminalization and child removal, many of these groups have cozied up to prosecutors under the guise of opposing hate crimes and engaged with family policing systems only by championing the right of same-sex couples to foster and adopt children the system has removed from their families. You can’t beat the intensification and expansion of the family policing system without backing the leadership of the mostly Black women who have been fighting this system for years, much less while backing the other side.

    Thankfully, though, large LGBT groups are far from the only resources we have. These coordinated attacks on trans lives demand that we deepen connections among those working for reproductive justice, racial justice, trans liberation and decriminalization. Cis parents of trans young people — and trans young people themselves — would also do well to deepen their connections with trans adults and elders, many of whom have deep experience navigating unsafe environments and severe barriers to care. Additionally, as we fight hard for trans young people to be able to get the care they want and need, we should also be fighting hard for intersex and disabled children to be free from unwanted medical interventions.

    We should all be watching for guidance and calls to action from local trans-led groups in Texas and following their lead. We should also be giving them money if we have it. I recommend going to the Trans Justice Funding Project and checking out their recent grantee list — it’s a treasure trove of information about small, trans-led organizations doing important work, organized by state or territory.

    It’s also important not to spread misinformation, and to correct it when you hear it. Remember, what people believe the law says matters. And trans health care is absolutely legal. No parent or provider breaks the law by supporting a trans young person’s access to care, in Texas or anywhere else in the country (a court has stopped the Arkansas trans health ban from going into effect thus far). No teacher or social worker breaks the law by not reporting a supportive family. If anyone does face consequences for not denying trans young people care or not trying to get them removed from their homes, we need to be all in to support and defend them.

    More generally, trans people need cis people to do the work of educating other cis people on trans issues, and speaking up when they say or do something harmful to trans people, in every context where it happens.

    Everyone should be watching the legislative session, and responding to attacks on trans communities — as well as attacks on Black and Indigenous people, cis and trans women, immigrants, pregnant people and those who can become pregnant, and others — by responding to and boosting calls to action from local folks from the affected communities. When considering whether to show up to rallies, contact elected officials, testify at a hearing, give money or otherwise get involved, consider what you would do if your life — or the life of your child — was on the line.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • If You Stayed Up All Night Worrying About Nuclear War, You’re Not Alone

    A Russian nuclear submarine prepares to launch a 3M-54 Kalibr cruise missile as part of the strategic deterrence force drills in the Black Sea, on February 19, 2022.

    For the first time in many long years, I was up most of the night worrying about nuclear war. It was odd to slip back into that fear like an old coat, a little tight in the shoulders because I’m a bit broader in the beam than I was 30+ years ago, but it still fits, because of course it does.

    As Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine was underway yesterday, he leveled a threat against the wider world that left nothing to the imagination: “To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me.”

    Meanwhile, Joe Biden shot back that he would “hold Russia accountable.” The details of the plans behind that statement remain murky.

    At present, Russia controls more than 6,000 nuclear weapons, the largest arsenal on Earth. The US controls approximately 5,600 nuclear weapons. As was the case years ago, that many nuclear weapons possess the power to scourge all life from Earth many, many times over.

    Ukraine, by comparison, has zero. They were left with 3,000 nukes after the fall of the Soviet Union, but voluntarily gave up that arsenal in 1994, in exchange for various protection decrees from the U.S., Great Britain and the Russian Federation. Watching the images of Kyiv on the news, taking in the panicked traffic, the civilian casualties and the occasional hollow “BOOM” in the background, one must wonder how Ukraine feels about that 1994 agreement and the now-hollow “protections” it was offered. Russian forces are attacking Ukraine from three directions simultaneously, and it is becoming ever-clearer that the US and NATO’s militarism-driven responses — military threats and economic warfare — are not preventing Russia’s advances.

    “As Russian forces advanced on Ukraine by land, sea and air, more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in fighting on Thursday morning, said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky,” reports The New York Times. “At least 18 military officials were killed in an attack outside the Black Sea port city of Odessa, where amphibious commandos from the Russian Navy came ashore, according to Sergey Nazarov, an aide to Odessa’s mayor.”

    It’s been a strange, almost surreal experience to watch all this unfold. For the last 31 years, it has usually been my country putting hundreds of thousands of troops in harm’s way with dubious intentions in mind. So odd, now, to see another country do it right there in broad daylight, and on the basis of completely manufactured evidence, too. (Of course, Russia has also taken some of these actions in the past three decades, but the U.S.’s actions have dominated my own radar.) Putin’s latest maneuvers strike pretty close to home. Perhaps Putin will release a “comedy” video of him looking for Ukraine’s reason to exist under his desk. It’s been done, Vlad.

    The outcome here is as clear as a bowl of blood, but it is the nukes that keep grabbing my attention. The cruel geometry of nuclear brinksmanship says that Putin’s decision to rattle his nuclear sword makes nuclear war more likely, just as the Soviet placement of ballistic missiles in Cuba 50 years ago this October (history rhymes again!) made nuclear war more likely then. It is, in the parlance of the Cold War, a massively destabilizing move. And escalating rhetoric and actions from the U.S. and NATO are making things much, much worse.

    Beyond the bombs are more than a dozen active nuclear power plants in Ukraine that could come under fire if and when this attack expands. The Russian invasion has also broached the highly radioactive Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the infamous reactor catastrophe, “touching off a battle that risked damaging the cement-encased nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986,” reports the Times. “‘National Guard troops responsible for protecting the storage unit for dangerous radioactive waste are putting up fierce resistance,’ said Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister. Should an artillery shell hit the storage unit, Mr. Herashchenko said, ‘radioactive dust could cover the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union.’”

    It is hard to know what to think. This conflict has put mass deployment of disinformation center stage, testing the savvy of even the keenest news observers. There are wheels within wheels within wheels here, and the U.S. has been anything but a passive observer of Ukrainian politics over the last couple of decades.

    Propaganda-happy advocates for both sides have staked their claim on the moral high ground in the sternest of terms. Here, for one example, is Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic describing Ukraine as every inch the American war we should be fighting immediately: “In the centuries-long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line — and our front line too.”

    One can almost hear the author humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic as she penned those lines, but for the fact that “pluralist oligarchy” — what Ukraine actually is instead of a democracy — doesn’t rhyme very well with anything.

    Meanwhile, many denizens of the U.S. right appear unsure of what tack to take. For example, Republicans were virulently anti-Soviet/anti-Russia 25 years before I was born, yet with the party and its media megaphones under the fetid sway of a strongman-loving ideologue like Donald Trump, all of a sudden, for some of them, Putin is the hero.

    The war is not yet a day old, and these raggedy-ass tea leaves are barely good for brewing, much less prognosticating. All I know for sure is this: I was eight years old when I first learned what nuclear war was, and could be. The knowledge scarred me for life, and introduced me to the miasma of fear that marked every day of my experience of the Cold War until the Berlin Wall came down on my 18th birthday. I, like many others, allowed the fact of the nuclear threat to fade from immediate consciousness after those heady days. This was beyond foolish: The weapons remained, the threat never went away, and now it’s back in the spotlight — just in time for my daughter to turn eight years old.

    We’ve been doing the plague year 1919 since 2020. The specter of 1914 and a European conflagration has been on the doorstep since Putin decided to roll the tanks and the U.S. decided to respond with escalation. Now, this morning, it’s 1962, with a U.S. president in his second year and a nuclear threat dropping out of the clear blue sky. I fear this will take longer than 13 days to resolve. I fear a great many things. Again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • DeSantis Is Cracking Down on Immigration to Appeal to GOP Voters Ahead of 2024

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a news conference at the Florida Department of Health office in Viera, Florida, on September 1, 2021.

    As the 2024 presidential campaign season comes into view, Republican hopefuls have been jockeying to position themselves on the hard-right edge of U.S. politics.

    Their jockeying is not surprising, given how successful far right politicians like Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as well as strategists such as Steve Bannon, have been at riling up Republican primary voters.

    Nowhere has this pivot rightward been more apparent than in Florida.

    Since the 2020 election, Florida’s position on a range of issues — from abortion to the minimum wage — has only gotten more uncompromising. On abortion, legislators are currently contemplating a Mississippi-modeled 15-week ban. And in response to the grassroots push for a minimum wage, legislators are debating whether to bar cities from being able to create their own local living wage requirements that are higher than the statewide minimum. GOP state senators are also crafting legislation designed to massively dilute an initiative, passed with more than 60 percent support in 2020, that puts the state on a path to reach a $15 per hour minimum wage by 2026. Meanwhile, pandering to Trump’s big lie about the last election having been stolen from him, the Florida Senate is debating a bill to create a special police force devoted exclusively to rooting out purported voter fraud.

    In recent months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators in the Sunshine State have begun vying with Texas to see which of the two red states can come up with the hardest-right policies, especially when it comes to immigration. Abbott, who is running for reelection later this year, has championed a Texas law encouraging undocumented immigrants to be arrested and prosecuted for trespassing, and has, over the past year, sent thousands of his state’s National Guard troops to the border.

    Back in June 2019, DeSantis signed into law SB 168, which mandated that local law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities through enforcing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer requests, and which banned local authorities from declaring their cities to be “sanctuary cities” in the face of then-President Trump’s onslaught against immigrant communities.

    Critics compared it to the notorious SB 1070, passed in Arizona in 2010, which unleashed sheriff’s deputies and police against undocumented immigrants and led to a huge upsurge both in deportations from the state and in undocumented immigrants relocating to other, less harsh, locales.

    Late last year, the Florida Department of Children and Families announced new rules aimed at cracking down on organizations such as shelters and churches that offer assistance to children who have crossed the border to the U.S. unaccompanied by adults. The department threatened not to renew the licenses or the funding of these organizations, in the hopes of forcing them to turn away the youthful would-be asylees.

    More recently, Florida Republicans have advanced a bill, HB 1355, which ostensibly cracks down on companies that provide transportation to migrants who enter the country without documentation, prohibiting the state and municipalities from doing business with these companies. The bill, which was introduced by State Rep. John Snyder, is reportedly also a priority for DeSantis.

    HB 1355 is worded in such a catch-all manner that it would target churches, food pantries and any other nonprofits that try to offer humanitarian assistance to migrants. As a result, the bill has no buy-in from Democrats. It is being aggressively pushed by DeSantis seemingly as a way to shore up his right flank against rival candidates such as Donald Trump, or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as he prepares for a possible presidential bid.

    On Thursday of last week, the House State Affairs Committee passed the bill — which, in addition to clamping down on those who offer assistance to undocumented immigrants and would-be-asylees, also requires local law enforcement agencies to enter into so-called 287(g) agreements with ICE — making it all but certain that it will soon be the law of the land in Florida.

    Snyder denies that his bill targets undocumented children, but it’s worded in a way that puts the burden of proof for a person’s immigration status on that individual, including children. The ACLU reacted furiously, putting out a statement asserting:

    The most concerning provision of this bill is that it shamelessly targets children and asylum seekers by banning private businesses and organizations from providing transportation to immigrants in Florida. This would lead to private entities requiring proof of immigration status from every child or adult who intends to utilize their transportation service, would open the door to unlawful interrogations, and would exacerbate racial profiling and discrimination.

    This is the exact sort of discrimination that law enforcement agencies such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s department in Maricopa County, Arizona, perfected after SB 1070 was passed, leading to numerous lawsuits and an increasingly fraught and polarized political environment in the state. This eventually culminated in Arpaio being driven from power by a newly organized, immigrant-led coalition.

    DeSantis, however, doesn’t seem to fear political blowback. At the moment, he is riding high in the polls in Florida, looks likely to win reelection in November, and has rapidly emerged as one of the only serious contenders who could block Trump from securing the GOP nomination in 2024 — although at the moment, he still remains far behind Trump in terms of his appeal to GOP primary voters.

    The governor is proving adept at exploiting the sorts of wedge issues that most rile up the GOP base. His nativist policies will almost certainly end up harming young, vulnerable would-be asylees, without in any way addressing the huge, complex problems that lead so many young people to seek asylum in the first place. But despite this — or maybe because of it — he has enjoyed wild popularity among Republicans after pushing these policies. DeSantis is polling eight points ahead of his likely Democratic rival, one-time Gov. Charlie Crist, in the upcoming election. In fact, DeSantis’s positioning of Florida as a perceived counterpoint to the Biden administration and its immigration policies have helped him carve out a position as a standard-bearer for conservatives over the coming election cycles. I doubt he will relinquish that position any time soon.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Push to Expand NATO Could Cost Countless Lives. It’s Time to Stop It.

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hold a news conference at NATO headquarters, after their meeting on Russia's military intervention in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, in Brussels, Belgium.

    Nearly 60 years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio in a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

    I’ve learned to hate the Russians
    All through my whole life
    If another war comes
    It’s them we must fight
    To hate them and fear them
    To run and to hide
    And accept it all bravely
    With God on my side

    In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn. Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war, meanwhile, easily become faraway abstractions.

    “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

    During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are too easy to ingest and internalize.

    On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

    The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones especially, this would be deemed “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

    Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe.

    “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

    As Sachs noted, “Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging “no NATO expansion” is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

    Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

    A new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies, is desperately needed. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

    The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.” But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

    A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

    “One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

    By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening. As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.” If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

    So let’s leave the last words here at this solemn time to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists: “Masters of War.”

    Let me ask you one question
    Is your money that good?
    Will it buy you forgiveness
    Do you think that it could?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This Year’s CPAC Promises to Be a Festival of Trump Worship

    People walk by a portrait of President Donald Trump that was completed by artist Julian Raven at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on March 1, 2019, in National Harbor, Maryland.

    It’s the art that makes it real for me. The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — which starts tomorrow, you lucky ducks! — has made a point in recent years of openly displaying various artworks devoted to the 45th president of the United States. Here is Donald Trump astride a lion, astride a tank surrounded by cash fluttering through the air, astride a Great White shark in the sky, astride a velociraptor while emptying the clip on a machine pistol with a bazooka strapped to his back, and he’s always in the same blue suit. By the way, the velociraptor is carrying an American flag. By the pole. In its little velociraptor hands.

    You can do precisely two things with the CPAC confab: Ignore it or endure it. I don’t come to work to ignore things, so endure it I shall, with deep gratitude for the art. You really have to see it to understand what I’m on about. The imagery itself could curdle milk, and the colors! Lurid enough to put Pennywise the Clown off his lunch. Ever see an evil clown monster gag? Yeah, like that.

    I am grateful for it, because more than anything else within the absurd clockwork of CPAC, the art tells me exactly where I am and precisely who I am dealing with. Any gathering of minds that can create these canvas nightmares is a gathering to be wary of. It goes beyond cultish to a level of obeisant worship that beggars modern political context. Looking at it, the old rallying cry from Firesign Theater starts clanging in my head (“What is reality?”), and I am grounded again, once again certain that whatever this is, it ain’t reality.

    If they show it on TV or the web, tune in to watch the attendees as they check it all out. Don’t look at the paintings, look at them, and you’ll probably see what I saw last year. Some awed tears — my initial reaction, too, but for separate reasons — and hushed voices, flush faces, eyes unfocused like dusty marbles, and smiles. Lots of smiles. I assume someone had to laugh at some point, but if they did, it wasn’t where these folks could hear it.

    Taking place in Orlando, Florida, this year — Orlando: home to near-nonexistent COVID safety measures and destination for children worldwide! — CPAC isn’t where the snake oil salesmen gather to compare notes. It’s where they milk the snakes. Rep. Matt Gaetz, currently under federal investigation for various sex crimes, will be a featured speaker, as will Tulsi Gabbard for reasons passing understanding.

    The honored speakers list is a murderer’s row of people who would motivate you to eat your own liver before getting stuck on an elevator with them.

    Terrible people will labor in broad daylight to steal or disrupt the next presidential election. At least some of the attendees will be reminiscing with each other about how they sacked the Capitol building last year. Count on these people getting together at some point; the whole feel of this event is that of a deep breath before the leap. On Saturday night, Trump himself will come swooping in, and the whole Godawful thing will reach a crescendo that would leave Dante digging in search of the level he somehow missed.

    Because they are Republicans, there must be high drama. CPAC is Trump territory, suffused with Trump’s people looking for a slice of that gigantic Trump fundraising hoard. There are cracks developing in the seemingly invincible veneer of Trump ’24, however; Trump is in open conflict with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over the fate of the party, and right there under the CPAC roof and in his own state, lead Trump rival Gov. Ron DeSantis will be making the scene in Technicolor.

    DeSantis has only been granted a 20-minute speaking slot on Friday afternoon, a scheduling slight that is difficult to miss. Trump has been badmouthing DeSantis for weeks, while DeSantis has tiptoed around the man he would possibly replace on the 2024 Republican presidential ticket. If Trump uses his speaking time to re-hash the election he lost, and if he can’t help but to flip a few daggers at the current main challenger to his throne, it will be a spicy show for all. There is a lot of tension loose within the GOP, and CPAC has always been like a leaky keg of old dynamite. This year, that’s truer than ever.

    And, like as not, somewhere in this year’s CPAC art gallery will be a portrait of Trump astride a bright red, snarling, furiously American Mack truck boiling the streets of Ottawa with smoke-swaddled tires. This painting exists, I know it in my bones. Artwork in adulation of authoritarianism is as old as pigment and sculpture, and highly effective before the proper audience.

    That audience will be at CPAC this year, rubbing its fascist woes together in contemplation of abolishing democracy in the name of Supply-Side Jesus. Let the million lithographs bloom.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mask Mandates Lift While Uncertainty About New Subvariant BA.2 Hangs in the Air

    A respiratory therapist checks on a COVID-19 patient in the ICU at Rush University Medial Center on January 31, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois.

    As the world crouches in anticipation of whatever fresh hell is preparing to jump from the Russia/Ukraine border, some seem to have forgotten that COVID-19 is not yet over. There have been more than 28,000 COVID deaths in the U.S. over the last two weeks, and more than 1.2 million new infections over that same span. The fact that this represents significant progress in the fight against the virus only underscores the horror of the body count. Were this pandemic a shooting war, those numbers would be bluntly unendurable.

    In November 2021, still early on in the pandemic, Atlantic writer Uri Friedman wrote a penetrating article about the concept of national strength within the context of the crisis. For generations, he explained, the measurement of national strength came down to a number of distinct categories: Military power, economic health, food security and more recently cybersecurity, all are ways we have historically judged our national standing. To this, Friedman proffered an additional metric, one aptly suited for the times: national resiliency.

    “And the new era ushered in by COVID-19 has done so as well,” writes Friedman, “revealing the salience of ‘resilient power’: a country’s capacity to absorb systemic shocks, adapt to these disruptions, and quickly bounce back from them. As the scholar Stephen Flynn once told me, the aim of resilience is to design systems not just so they can endure shocks, but also so they can ‘fail gracefully and recover nicely’…. And right now, it’s a measure of power where the United States is clearly falling short.”

    That was written 16 months ago, and every day of that ghastly run of months has seen this country, in one way or another, fail Friedman’s resiliency test. A segment of the population has abandoned all pretense of care for neighbors and family, and embraced a confounding new anti-mask/anti-vaccine movement that vexes logic to dust. Among many of the rest, a boiling sense of exhausted resentment runs free, dangerously so. After two long, patient years, even the most formidable COVID warriors are flying on the vapor left in their gas tank.

    Plus, of course, there is the klaxon scream of capitalism ordering all and sundry to walk over the bones of nearly a million dead and get back to work. The economy is more important than the people who constitute and sustain it, you see? No workers outweigh the value, nay authority, of the places they work. If the wealthiest among us are not making money every minute of the day, the fundamental pillagers’ philosophy that undergirds our national mythology goes unfulfilled. Perish the thought.

    If I sound as if I am laying judgment, I’m not. Well, mostly. I’m deep in the soup along with the worst of them/us, and I can easily see this “revolution” against science and common sense has its roots in fear, uncertainty and a sense of deep betrayal. Seeking solace and guidance from the loudest tough-guy voice in the room makes similar sense: Flocking to strength when threatened is as old as the birds in the sky.

    Yet all the empathy and understanding in the world cannot wash away the glaring fact that, as a country, we have failed the resiliency test in grotesque fashion. COVID did not break America; it has kicked America, hard, in all the broken places, and watched as so much came tumbling down.

    Three of the major cruise line companies — Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian — will be downgrading their on-board mask mandates to “recommended but not required.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is about to lift all mask mandates in England. Here at home, masks have become a dwindling sight as people try to transition — tentatively yet inexorably — back into what they remember to be a “normal life.”

    This isn’t entirely without reason, either. Two years is a long time to ask anyone to live in a box. While the country has fallen badly short on total vaccination, the vaccines have done a stellar job of knocking back the mortality rate, even in the face of variants like Delta and Omicron. Indeed, new data strongly suggests that if you get the two shots and the booster, you may not have to get any new shots for months, if not years. At this moment, people are generally safer than they have been since early last summer.

    And that’s the rub, isn’t it? What happened last summer and fall: Delta, and then Omicron, and a hot ticket straight back to where we started. That’s when the exhaustion and inchoate rage really began to manifest itself, the moment when our national resilience — our ability to take a punch — went a big wobbly one … and we are still wobbling, like a boxer with a bump on his head and ball bearings in his ankles, asleep in our shoes.

    For millions of immunocompromised people — those fighting cancer or dealing with MS, for example — this national shrug is as infuriating as it is potentially lethal. “People with weakened immune systems or other high-risk conditions argue that now is the time, as the omicron surge subsides, to double down on policies that protect vulnerable Americans like them,” reports Victoria Knight for KHN. “‘The pandemic isn’t over,’ said Matthew Cortland, a senior fellow working on disability and health care for Data for Progress, who is chronically ill and immunocompromised. ‘There is no reason to believe that another variant won’t emerge.’”

    … and, as if on cue, another new subvariant is on the rise, this one a child of Omicron called — until they, perhaps, give it its own Greek letter — BA.2. NPR explains:

    As the omicron surge continues to decline in the U.S., infectious disease experts are keeping a close eye on an even more contagious version of the variant that could once again foil the nation’s hopes of getting back to normal. The virus, known as BA.2, is a strain of the highly contagious omicron variant that appears to spread even more easily — about 30% more easily.

    BA.2 has now been found from coast to coast and accounts for an estimated 3.9% all new infections nationally, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It appears to be doubling fast. “If it doubles again to 8%, that means we’re into the exponential growth phase and we may be staring at another wave of COVID-19 coming in the U.S.,” says Samuel Scarpino, the manager director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation. “And that’s of course the one we’re really worried about. We’re all on the edge of our seats,” he says.

    Maybe BA.2 will come to be a menace, and maybe it will sink back into the COVID waters like other mutations of its kind. The point is this: You can unmask on your cruise or party like Boris, you can simply hope for the best like all those Democratic governors who couldn’t wait to lift COVID protections during an election year, you can pretend immunocompromised people are not your problem as you la-la-la-la-la your way past this particular graveyard.

    In the end, the graveyard wins. So, for now, does COVID. If BA.2 comes to nothing, it still serves as a vivid warning that the variants can come at any time and from any direction. If it gets serious, we will all get to test our resilience again. Maybe, the fourth time around, we might get it right.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Redistricting Tactics Threaten to Suppress Black Representation in Louisiana

    Black voters at polling place

    The Louisiana Senate recently continued the state’s long history of racial oppression by voting down Sen. Cleo Fields’s congressional redistricting map. What’s more, the Louisiana House voted down Rep. Randal Gaines’s congressional redistricting map. Gaines is a veteran and civil rights attorney who represents one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Ida (river parishes), and Fields is an attorney and former congressman. Gaines’s and Fields’s proposals included two majority-minority districts (electoral districts where the majority of the constituents are people of color) giving them an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice — something Black voters in the state advocated for. Since the Black population has grown in Louisiana, an additional seat representing this shift is warranted, just and fair.

    But in Louisiana, as in other parts of the country, map drawers are refusing to create new electoral opportunities for communities of color. What’s more, they are actively dismantling Black voting power by carving up Black communities in some states or packing Black communities into fewer districts in other states. These manipulative tactics make it harder for Black voters to elect candidates of choice, regardless of turnout or Black population growth.

    We’ve seen this play out time and again in Louisiana, where Black voters have not always been treated equitably. My organization, the Power Coalition for Equity & Justice, understood this history and participated in a statewide roadshow allowing legislators and voters to directly engage around redistricting. Throughout the roadshow, which ran from October 20, 2021, through January 20, 2022, voters shared extensive testimony on the importance of representation.

    Across the state, countless voters expressed the need for legislators to add an additional majority-minority district given that 33 percent of the state’s population is Black. Louisiana has six congressional districts; one-third of six is two. Rather than surrendering to the will of the people or the logic of population growth, legislators continue machinations that will silence voters.

    State Sen. Sharon Hewitt suggested she was actually protecting Black voters by not creating a second majority-minority district because she didn’t think a 51 or 52 percent majority-Black district would turn out to vote, meaning they wouldn’t be able to elect a candidate of choice. But many Black voters would take 51 or 52 percent any day over not having a committed and representative voice. No legislator should be able to unilaterally decide what voters need; voters should have more influence.

    In the absence of a process that levels the playing field by allowing voters to select who represents them, legislators have outsized influence. For instance, our current congressional House delegation sits on several powerful committees. As the second-poorest state in the country, Louisianians are not benefiting or growing from this representation. In fact, our delegation recently voted against the president’s infrastructure bill, with the exception of Congressman Troy Carter, who currently holds the only majority-Black seat. Their resistance could have blocked a wonderful opportunity to invest in crumbling infrastructure. This is a risk we cannot continue to take.

    It is clear that any maps with an additional district will never make it out of committee. State leaders will certainly try to amend on the floor, much like they did on the Senate side, when State Senator Fields made a powerful and compelling plea for his colleagues to do the right thing.

    The next step is for a map with only one majority-minority district to go before Gov. John Bel Edwards, who can and should veto the map. Edwards should unite with the people of color in his state, particularly since Black voters helped propel him into office. For his part, Governor Edwards said he would veto unfair maps.

    He would be in good company. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas vetoed the racially discriminatory maps put forth by legislatures in their states. Their vetoes were overturned, but their willingness to support the people of their state will be reflected in the history books. Moreover, several residents from three Kansas counties sued to block the state’s newly passed congressional maps, which conservatives in the state passed in early February.

    Louisiana has the second-largest Black population in the country, second only to Mississippi. If the governors of Kansas and Kentucky, who have much smaller Black populations, can stand for equity and fairness, Governor Edwards can certainly do the same.

    There can be no protection without representation.

    Much of what has happened during our redistricting process seems to be heading toward litigation. I hope Louisiana’s leaders remember that we experienced a 4.8 percent drop in the white population, and demographic trends show that it will continue to decrease. My question is: When our population shifts to a white minority, will legislators think it is fair, given the decisions they have made to continue to racially gerrymander and silence the voices of voters of color? I hope Louisiana’s leaders consider that people of color represent more than 40 percent of the population, and with the current maps being considered, only receive less than 25 percent of the representation. In what scenario would anyone take less than they deserve?

    The truth is that immigration is driving population shifts in the United States. And most of the people immigrating to this country are people of color, including Black immigrants. Legislators cannot hold communities of color hostage by continually drawing district lines that ignore population growth.

    As we think about redistricting, we should ground it in the broader fight for freedom. As Davante Lewis, director of public affairs and outreach for the Louisiana Budget Project, noted in his testimony before the House Governmental Affairs Committee, Black people have endured decades of trauma. Legislators can help ensure progress by drawing fair maps and allowing voters of color to elect candidates of their choice. To gaslight voters by downplaying their population growth is a continuation of their traumatic history.

    All people deserve elected officials who will advocate for them. Legislators should not be able to cherry-pick their voters. But unless and until we have an equitable process, legislators will continue to thwart the will of the people, especially when the people are Black, people of color, or persons living in poverty.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Fatal Overdoses Top 100,000 Annually While NY Injection Sites See Zero Deaths

    Sam Rivera, executive director of OnPoint NYC, hugs a worker at the newly formed nonprofit that operates a overdose prevention center in the Harlem borough of New York City, on February 8, 2022.

    Jess Tilley works on the front lines of the U.S.’s overdose crisis. She runs a mobile syringe exchange in Northampton, Massachusetts, delivering clean needles to intravenous drug users. It’s a job that routinely brings her into situations of life or death. Tilley has responded to many overdoses over the years, and while she has never failed to resuscitate someone, every such encounter is intensely stressful. The work takes a mental toll.

    It also frustrates her. “There is a better way to do this,” she says. “We know what would lower the number of overdose deaths: We want supervised injection.”

    Finally, the country has begun a conversation about harm reduction interventions, including supervised injection facilities (also known as overdose prevention sites) where people can use drugs in the presence of medical professionals. The debate has come thanks to decades of advocacy by activists — many of them drug users — and has been tragically forced on the nation by an incredible number of overdose deaths.

    When, in a few months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases fatal overdose numbers for 2021, it is all but certain that for the first time, the national total will surpass 100,000 deaths. That compares to an annual average of less than 14,000 through the 1990s.

    The U.S.’s overdose crisis now kills about double the number of people each year than AIDS did during the very worst years of that crisis.

    Another round figure, much smaller than 100,000 but equally significant, comes from efforts to reduce drug deaths. That number is zero. Last November, New York City opened the country’s first sanctioned supervised injection facilities — one in Harlem and the second in Upper Manhattan — where people bring drugs like heroin and cocaine to use them under the watchful care of program staff. During their first two months of operation, there were 5,849 injections, staff reversed 123 potentially fatal overdoses, and the number of deaths was zero.

    Supervised injection facilities are not a silver bullet for the overdose crisis. They won’t bring it to an end. But they will save a lot of lives, and possibly reverse a trend of increasing deaths that has continued almost without interruption for more than four decades now (save for just one year, 2018).

    A debate about supervised injection is long overdue in the U.S. Canada established its first site in 2003 and many have operated in Europe for decades. Finally, it looks like a conversation that the U.S. is ready to have.

    In addition to New York, no fewer than 10 other states are engaged in various levels of consideration. Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington State once looked like they could have established programs several years ago. Those efforts have suffered legal setbacks or stalled amid tough local opposition. But discussions continue. California was within inches of allowing supervised injection until former Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill just before leaving office in 2018. Now legislators are making a promising second attempt. In other states, such as Illinois, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, conversations about the idea are moving quickly, and in Connecticut, Maine and Oregon, movements advocating for sites are younger but gaining momentum.

    The idea can feel counterintuitive, and hesitancy should be acknowledged and met with education. There is a small mountain of academic research that shows that supervised injection facilities reduce overdose deaths, improve health outcomes, facilitate pathways to treatment and do not encourage drug use.

    Beyond the data, supervised consumption keeps people safe in less measurable ways. Using drugs in hiding leaves people more vulnerable to violence and abuse, including at the hands of police. At a supervised injection site, people can use drugs in a sterile environment and take time to carefully measure them out, test them for purity with equipment supplied by the facility, and inject or smoke them under the watchful care of staff, who are ready to respond in the event of an overdose.

    Moral or ideological objections to supervised consumption are understandable, but they fall apart when we acknowledge the implications for people’s actual lives. At a supervised injection site, users have better control over what they put into their bodies. They have autonomy, and are treated with respect.

    The need for supervised injection facilities is urgent, and not only to reduce overdose deaths. Drug users are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Calls to Reform the CIA Are Misplaced. It Shouldn’t Exist at All.

    People stand on the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency on March 20, 2001

    The CIA recently declassified parts of a letter written by two U.S. senators that revealed the existence of a previously unknown bulk spying program that collects and stores Americans’ data. The letter, written by Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, calls for the CIA to reveal the details of the program. It was sent to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in April 2021. Much of the letter remains classified, and neither the senators nor the CIA have provided any specifics about what the underlying spying program entails.

    “Among the many details the public deserves to know are the nature of the CIA’s relationship with its sources and the legal framework for the collection; the kinds of records collected [redacted] the amount of Americans’ records maintained; and the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination, and queries (including US person queries) of the records,” the senators wrote. The mention of the CIA’s “relationship with its sources” is likely a reference to the telecommunication companies providing the data, a reminder of the symbiotic roles private companies play in national security surveillance.

    The existence of the CIA’s program was first disclosed to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2021, according to Wyden and Heinrich. They became aware of the bulk collection from a report issued by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency whose members have access to classified information. That review, known as “Deep Dive II,” remains classified, but the CIA partially declassified a set of recommendations issued by the board. That document revealed that when CIA analysts enter a search term, or query, into the program, a “pop-up box will appear to remind the analysts” that they need to provide a foreign intelligence justification for the search. Analysts are not required to document that justification; the oversight board recommended requiring it.

    Although Wyden and Heinrich, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said they were only informed about the bulk spying program in March 2021, a CIA official told The New York Times that Congress had already been told about the data collection. That official suggested that the new information in Deep Dive II had to do with the “repository and analysis tools for storing and querying that data after its collection.”

    If the CIA is lying to Congress, or misleading members through wordplay and hiding behind technicalities, it would not be the first time in recent memory an intelligence official had done so. In 2013, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Senator Wyden in an open hearing about bulk surveillance of U.S. persons. Wyden asked if the National Security Agency (NSA) collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper responded “no,” later adding “not wittingly.”

    Clapper’s obfuscation was a key motivation for Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, to leak documents to journalists exposing multiple mass surveillance programs. Following the Snowden disclosures, Clapper referred to his own earlier testimony as “clearly erroneous.”

    There have been other episodes of tension, in some cases outright hostility, between intelligence agencies and their congressional watchdogs. At the end of Obama’s second term in office, the Senate Intelligence Committee assembled the most exhaustive accounting to date of the CIA’s role in the post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation program. Commonly referred to as “The Torture Report,” the document was designed to expose the CIA’s lies about the efficacy and necessity of torture. In the days immediately before the report was to be released, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose office was the primary author of the report, revealed that the CIA had spied on her staff. Then-CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the allegations, but later admitted the CIA had inappropriately surveilled Senate staffers while they were using a CIA network to conduct their research. The report remains classified, other than an executive summary that was released to the public with heavy redactions.

    Although little is known about the newly disclosed CIA bulk spying program, Wyden and Heinrich wrote in their letter that its legal foundation is Executive Order (EO) 12333. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, serves as the authority that governs most covert foreign intelligence activities carried out by the U.S. government. It purportedly bans the assassinations and covert action “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media,” but the order gives wide latitude for overseas physical and electronic surveillance. Executive orders are issued by presidents, and by definition have not been passed by Congress. Although the intelligence committees in both chambers are supposed to have broad oversight over the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community, programs and activities governed by EO 12333 generally have more autonomy than those controlled by statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bulk spying may have something to do with collecting “financial data” as it relates to ISIS, as suggested by a different, partially declassified PCLOB report. If it does, it would suggest a familiar pattern in the “war on terror,” namely, intelligence agencies claiming that countering the threat of terrorism requires mass surveillance with no congressional or judicial oversight.

    Elizabeth Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, reacted to the newly disclosed surveillance program by summarizing the distinctions between the two types of legal authorities. “You might be asking, didn’t Congress end bulk collection? The short answer is no,” she tweeted. “In 2015, Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting bulk collection when the government is acting under [FISA], but FISA only applies to certain types of surveillance that target U.S. persons or happen inside the United States. When the collection happens overseas or falls into one of FISA’s statutory gaps, it takes place under Executive Order (EO) 12333.”

    Goitein added that “most foreign intelligence surveillance actually takes place under EO 12333, not FISA. That means it is subject to no statutory constraints whatsoever, and there is no judicial review or oversight.” When it comes to what prevents the CIA from using this bulk surveillance repository to search for U.S. persons’ data, Goitein writes, “Let’s be honest: nothing.”

    The Snowden disclosures partially reveal the nearly limitless authority that intelligence agencies have claimed under EO 12333. The NSA program MYSTIC, revealed based on Snowden’s leaked documents, was “capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place,” The Washington Post reported in 2014. The Intercept reported two months later that a MYSTIC sub-program called SOMALGET had targeted the Bahamas, without the country’s government’s knowledge or approval. Both MYSTIC and SOMALGET operated under EO 12333.

    Despite the well-documented abuses the CIA carried out under the auspices of the war on terror, and during the Cold War before that, there is very little political will at the moment to abolish the agency. However, the idea has been broached over the decades. In a 1974 speech, then-Senate candidate Bernie Sanders called the CIA “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” In 1991 and 1995, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced legislation to abolish the CIA and move some of its authorities to the State Department. Presidents Truman and Kennedy each expressed their reservations about the CIA’s authority, as did Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

    The recent disclosures from Senators Wyden and Heinrich are a reminder that the CIA sees itself as an institution beyond the reach and control of Congress, and U.S. and international law. The agency can’t be trusted, and has repeatedly shown that it can’t be reformed. It may be well past time to resume questioning whether it should exist at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Starbucks Workers Turned the Tables On Union Busters

    Starbucks logo in the window of a store

    A national wave of organizing has hit Starbucks’ company-run stores in the last three months. The author is among hundreds of Starbucks workers who have filed for elections with the National Labor Relations Board in almost 100 locations since early December when workers in Buffalo won the first union at a company-run location in the United States in decades.

    Let me set the stage for you: A single cheese pizza cut into sixteenths, a small group of chairs awkwardly arranged to a circle, and corporate level managers trying to chat baristas up like we were best friends.

    Our store had closed at noon that Tuesday, so that the company could hold four consecutive “store meetings,” each with a group of around six employees. A few weeks before, five workers had to go into isolation due to Covid and the store had barely modified operating hours—but for these meetings we could shut down for almost the entire day.

    These were Starbucks’ “listening sessions,” or corporate union-busting meetings workers hoping to unionize their store are forced to participate in. But we at the Hopewell store were prepared.

    We came prepared

    Starbucks is spending millions upon millions of dollars to hire a huge law firm to train its managers to become experts in union-busting. You’d think they’d be better at it. Every store that files goes through the same basic steps of union-busting. The upside of this is that Starbucks workers can see what’s coming, and get creative.

    Our store prepared for the meeting not only by communicating with each other, but also by holding a Zoom meeting with baristas from other cities who’d already gone through the same experience. They walked us through what to expect and what kinds of things had worked best for them in throwing the union-busters off their game.

    So when we sat down for our meetings with our Store Manager, District Manager, and Regional Manager, we did so in solidarity.

    Our manager started off the meeting. This woman had spent a good part of the last election cycle talking about her left-leaning politics. She leads the Starbucks “Womens’ Alliance Network,” a group designed to empower female Starbucks employees. She started our meeting by looking us all in the eyes and saying, “I don’t think you need a union.”

    Going off script

    Over the next few hours they tried various tactics to try to sow doubt among us. They tried one of the arguments they’ve used frequently, which is that with a union we won’t be able to have baristas from other stores cover shifts at our store. In response, two people pointed to a New Jersey law that specifies that non-union workers can work in union settings.

    Our Regional Manager kindly thought of those workers and wondered, “How would that affect their experience? How would they feel working in an environment where their salary is different?” One worker responded, “Well, I’d think that would just spark interest in them unionizing their store too.”

    Clearly these managers were operating from a basic script; when we veered away from it, they unskillfully tried to return to it.

    In the middle of our discussion which had turned into all the positive things our union could help us achieve, our Regional Manager tried to redirect by telling us she was “worried about all the pros and cons she was hearing.” I asked, “I think I missed the cons, what were those again?” She looked annoyed, half-heartedly tried to bring up a previously addressed point, then got quiet.

    Long list of questions

    Our one-hour session finished on a wonderful note. One worker who doesn’t often feel comfortable enough to speak up in front of managers said, “Since we all decided to do this, we all have more confidence and there’s a lot of hope in the store. We don’t even feel like a team, we feel like a family. I come in and now I’m happy to be here.” All of us agreed with her, and we were all in tears—while the three managers looked on and truly had no idea what to do or say.

    When we all discussed our meetings later that day, we found just about every one had gone similarly. Each group of workers had different tactics, but the union-busting managers were thrown off again and again.

    The final group had two workers who had decided to prepare lists of questions that spanned multiple sheets of paper. They doubled the length of their meeting to two hours; over and over exasperated managers tried to end their long, unsuccessful day.

    I’m certain the goal of the day for these managers was to have us all questioning everything we’ve been working for. Instead, I’m confident they ended their day confused and unsure of where to go next. Perhaps they should have prepared a little more, like we did.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Promised to Center Racial Justice. He Can Start by Canceling Student Debt.

    From left, Rep. Jim Clyburn, President Joe Biden and Interim South Carolina State University President Alexander Conyers arrive for the university's graduation ceremony in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on December 17, 2021.

    It has been said that if the U.S. catches a cold, the Black community catches the flu. Historically in the United States, communities of color feel the negative impacts of policy decisions disproportionately, and the student debt crisis is no exception. Nearly 45 million Americans owe on federal student loans.

    According to researcher Melanie Hanson of the Education Data Initiative, Black borrowers are more likely to default on student loans and have higher monthly payments. Four years after graduation, half of them owe on average 12.5 percent more than they originally borrowed. This means that despite having a college education, Black graduates will be more likely to struggle to make ends meet — perpetuating the cycle of poverty we were led to believe college education would free us from. Black borrowers also have lower familial wealth and post-college income, making debt harder to pay off and contributing to a higher debt-to-income ratio.

    Canceling student debt broadly would not only stimulate the U.S. economy from the ground up, but would also offer a pathway to economic and social justice for a demographic that has been historically marginalized and denied access to the things most commonly associated with “the American Dream.”

    In the wake of massive worldwide protests calling for justice in all facets of life following the murder of George Floyd, conversations about undoing systemic harm became common. Knowing that the presidency could only be won with the support of Black, Brown and millennial voters, then-candidate Joe Biden made promises that he would address many of these injustices. Some of his promises have been thwarted on Capitol Hill. But canceling student debt is an action that President Biden can take under broad authority granted to the executive branch by the Higher Education Act of 1965. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been loudly and publicly calling on Biden to use this authority to cancel up to $50,000 in federal college debt for each individual carrying that much debt.

    By one estimate, a cancellation of student debt would result in an increase in Black wealth of nearly 40 percent. This — coupled with other equity-driven policies surrounding consumer debt, mortgage financing and credit reporting — would significantly level the playing field for Black borrowers.

    However, if student debt loan repayments resume in May as planned without massive debt cancellation, it will cost borrowers $85 billion annually, and borrowers of color would be disproportionately impacted.

    The #WithoutStudentDebtCampaign, being hosted by RootsAction.org along with a growing coalition of other groups, will encourage borrowers to envision what life would be like if President Biden took this bold step for racial and economic justice — and to organize for making that possibility a reality.

    For more information and to join the movement visit Progressive Hub.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The US Owes Afghanistan Reparations, Not Starvation

    A man carries his daughter as people queue to enter the passport office at a checkpoint in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 19, 2021.

    During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

    But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

    When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

    They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

    Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

    After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

    These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

    ***

    Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

    “Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”

    Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”

    The Congressmembers added, “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.”

    For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

    After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

    The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

    “After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”

    Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

    Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Prison, We Celebrated the First Step Act. We Realized It Falls Far Short.

    Prisoner in orange jumpsuits walks away from open prison cell bars, all casting long shadows ahead

    When the U.S. Department of Justice published a rule finally spelling out how the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) would implement the First Step Act of 2018, the headlines trumpeted that thousands of people in federal prisons were now eligible for release. The news spread quickly among the 153, 053 Americans incarcerated in federal prisons, first sparking hope and jubilation, then quickly followed by disappointment and confusion.

    I know, because I live behind bars in one of the U.S.’s 122 federal prisons. And while I am among the fortunate ones who will (hopefully) be released early to the community where my four kids and numerous nephews, nieces and cousins live, the anticipation is bittersweet. I look around and see so many other good men who deserve a second chance, yet are denied because the First Step Act (FSA) was written to specifically exclude them. So, while it’s good news that the BOP stopped its foot-dragging and is finally moving to enforce this critical aspect of the act, what we really need is a second look at the law itself.

    Passed by Congress during the administration of former President Donald Trump, at first glance, the FSA did seem to address some of the “tough-on-crime” prison and sentencing laws that ballooned the federal prison population and earned the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world. To name just a few of the benefits of the act: It eased the harsh sentences required for individuals convicted of drug crimes, made it easier for prisoners to petition for compassionate release, and required the Federal Bureau of Prisons to offer rehabilitation programs and link them to an opportunity for early release and other privileges.

    However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. And the details, along with the BOP’s reluctant, fitful and arbitrary implementation, have turned the FSA into, at best, a measure of relief for a select few. At its worst, the First Step Act is a mechanism for further reinforcing the discriminatory nature of the U.S. criminal legal system.

    A long list of individuals is excluded from the FSA’s offer of release to home confinement or community halfway houses in recognition of their participation in rehabilitation-related activities and a low risk-assessment score. According to the independent review committee mandated by the FSA itself, more than half of the BOP population is disqualified from participating, even though no significant differences in recidivism risk have been documented between those who are eligible and those who aren’t.

    Thus, for example, anyone convicted — often decades previously — of virtually any type of act classified as violent, or who is charged with being an “organizer, leader, manager or supervisor of others” when distributing three of the most common street drugs in use today (fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamines) is ineligible. They aren’t even given a chance to demonstrate that they ready to return to their children or parents. Forty-five percent of people held in federal prisons are incarcerated for drug-related offenses, and as a Black man who is one of them, I can attest to the lax meaning of the “leader” accusation. All it takes is for one other person to claim that you “directed” them to carry some drugs or make a call to get stuck with a charge of being a leader. (Very often, people make these claims as part of a bid to reduce their own penalties.)

    I qualify for FSA earned-time credits simply because I was charged with conspiracy to sell cocaine (based solely on the claim of a cooperating witness), instead of one of the other three drugs. Yet one of my friends, who was just 18 when he was sent to federal prison as a first-time “offender,” is shut out, simply because his charges involved methamphetamines and a gun. On what rational basis am I granted the chance to demonstrate rehabilitation and he is not?

    Even those of us who win this “lottery” are struggling to figure out how to meet the act’s other requirements. Earned-time credits are received in return for completing approved rehabilitation programs or “productive activities.” But the availability of approved courses varies widely from institution to institution, and due to COVID and staffing shortages, the waiting lists for what is on offer are long. I just asked about education and was told by staff the only courses available are GED and ESL classes. As for jobs, the only FSA-eligible positions at my institution are offered by UNICOR, a for-profit arm of the government that manufactures items for sale, from uniforms to license plates. Yet other prison jobs — duties like janitorial work and food services, which keep the prisons themselves running (and for which workers are paid abysmally low wages) — don’t qualify for earned-time credit.

    So, yes, the fact that the Bureau of Prisons finally did what it should have done more than two years ago is good news for those of us who fit into one of the act’s arbitrary categories and manage to jump through the other hoops. But for too many others, it is an excruciatingly small first step. Now, Congress needs to listen to the independent review committee — and to incarcerated people and advocates around the country — and implement broader and more meaningful measures to release people from prison.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Is Effectively Stealing Billions From a Nation Ravaged by a US-Initiated War

    People hold placards as they march during a protest against the recent remarks by President Joe Biden to freeze Afghanistan's assets, in Kabul on February 15, 2022.

    President Joe Biden recently declared a national emergency in the name of addressing the dual threats of the massive humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan, as well as “the potential for a deepening economic collapse in Afghanistan.” He was right to do so.

    In sharp contrast, his decision to unilaterally assert the U.S.’s authority to redistribute $7.1 billion of Afghanistan’s frozen funds as it sees fit was dead wrong. In declaring the national emergency, the president laid out his administration’s vision for Afghanistan’s funds should U.S. courts voice their approval: that half be made available, pending litigation, to the families of 9/11 victims who have claims against the Taliban for its role in harboring al-Qaeda. The remaining $3.5 billion would go towards humanitarian efforts.

    Setting aside the moral and political problems inherent in the U.S. effectively stealing billions of dollars from a nation ravaged by a U.S.-initiated war and the resulting humanitarian and economic devastation, the president’s failure to make any of these funds immediately available to the people of Afghanistan in their hour of need is unforgivable. In abdicating responsibility to the courts, which may take months to decide how these frozen funds can be redistributed, the Biden administration is threatening the well-being of millions of Afghans, while also undermining the ability of civil society organizations to respond to the crisis. This is in direct opposition to the “beacon of human rights” the U.S. claims to be.

    To say that Afghanistan is in urgent need is to understate the severity of the situation. Over 24 million Afghans, nearly 60 percent of the population, need humanitarian aid. Some 23 million face acute food insecurity, meaning their lives are in immediate danger, and over 1 million children are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition. While Afghanistan has faced humanitarian challenges for years as a result of conflict, U.S. occupation and natural disasters, the current situation is markedly worse, in no small part due to U.S. policies towards Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

    When the Taliban took control of the country last August, the Biden administration froze $7.1 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign reserves held in the U.S. — money that belongs to the Afghan people — and that prior to the takeover, the Central Bank of Afghanistan (Da Afghanistan Bank) had been using to maintain economic stability.

    The resulting liquidity crisis has led to massive inflation, alongside depreciation of the Afghani, whose value the Central Bank can no longer stabilize by selling off its foreign reserves. Many banks in Afghanistan have dramatically limited the amount of money account holders can withdraw, while others have closed entirely. Businesses, no longer able to pay their employees, have shuttered, leading to rampant unemployment. The price of food has risen, while the value of the Afghani has plummeted, leading to mass starvation.

    As a further result of freezing these funds and of U.S. sanctions that have led risk-averse banks to severely limit access to financial services in Afghanistan, local and international aid groups and other civil society organizations in Afghanistan are struggling to pay their staff and provide services to the millions of Afghans in need.

    Kate Phillips-Barrasso, director of humanitarian policy at InterAction, a network of humanitarian aid organizations, recently explained that financial service providers “just don’t want to get involved. There’s a lot of risk aversion. Financial institutions say that even with explicit permission, it still reeks of effort and risk, and it’s better to just not provide the service.” As a result, aid organizations are turning to informal cash transfer networks, which entail greater risk and higher fees. Some have also turned to cryptocurrency as another means of getting funds into the country, despite challenges arising from limited use of cryptocurrency among much of the population. While these workarounds have offered some relief, limited access to cash and financial services is still plaguing the humanitarian aid sector as a direct result of U.S. policy.

    The Biden administration must urgently reconsider and correct its policies towards Afghanistan, and towards Afghanistan’s foreign reserves in particular. Shah Mehrabi, a member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s Central Bank and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, has called on the administration to “allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan limited, monitored, and conditional access to $150m per month from Afghanistan’s foreign reserves,” citing the Central Bank’s “independen[ce] from the Afghan government,” and the U.S.’s ability to monitor how the funds are dispersed. Some form of a phased release of the frozen funds has widespread support, including from members of the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and prominent international aid groups, human rights groups, and women’s human rights and peace groups.

    Beyond releasing the frozen funds, the Biden administration must also lift sanctions on Afghanistan, which have done almost nothing to incentivize the Taliban to change its policies. Instead, sanctions have unleashed a chilling effect on national and international banking in Afghanistan by shutting down access to financial services, causing dire repercussions to Afghan lives and preventing civil society groups from addressing the crisis. While the U.S. Treasury Department has issued piecemeal general licenses aimed at enabling civil society organizations to continue their work in Afghanistan, these necessary but insufficient steps have failed to address the financial access issues caused by sanctions, let alone the liquidity crisis caused by freezing Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.

    There is room for honest debate about precisely how, not if, these frozen funds should be returned to the people of Afghanistan, and which, if any, sanctions should remain in place — however, there is no room, or time, to cling to a status quo that is starving Afghanistan’s people and its economy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Canada Truck Protest, Once Small, Now Has a Fascist Life of Its Own

    Supporters and truckers front the Parliament Hill during a protest in downtown of Ottawa, Canada, on February 12, 2022.

    Mike Lindell, the now-infamous “MyPillow” guy who has been peddling false tales of Trump’s electoral victory for a year now, tried to cross the Canadian border on Tuesday night in a truck laden with 10,000 pillows (and 10,000 Bibles), meant for the “Freedom Convoy” protesters in Ottawa. He was stopped butt-cold at the gate and sent home. Undeterred, Lindell has promised to drop those pillows (though presumably not the Bibles?) onto the protest from a helicopter. There’s an old WKRP in Cincinnati episode along these lines; it did not end well for the cargo.

    This is what I’m talking about. How do you look at this and do anything but facepalm your nose out the back of your neck? Resist the temptation, because it has the potential to get dangerous on a large scale, and that soon. The Nazis have shown up with their flags and iron crosses, the Confederates (in Canada? Paging Clement Vanlandingham) and the Trumpy QAnon-ers with their threatening signs have all come out to play. Not much good follows this sort of turnout.

    The ones who started the show, who parked their trucks over the specific issue of Canada’s new border-cross vaccine mandate, certainly had every right to do it. And the action has been wildly successful if measured by size and media attention paid… but somewhere in there, the whole thing went from having a shred of potential (if factually wrongheaded and scientifically dangerous) dignity and turned into the party scene at the end of Weird Science. Scratch the surface, and another sloppy human monument to overt white supremacy is revealed.

    The Ottawa protest began small — most Canadians, and specifically most Canadian truckers, do not support the truckers who began this action. It was bound to end quietly and with little media fanfare, until all sorts of American money began pouring into the organizer’s GoFundMe accounts, they were the new heroes of Fox News, and suddenly their ranks were swelled with the same Trump-bound, right-wing all-stars who have made U.S. politics such a rich pageant of late.

    With increased size came increased attention, followed by more size, and more attention again… and somewhere in there, the moment stopped being a Canadian protest about vaccine mandates and expanded into what swaths of Americans will be doing on Saturday night 10 years from now if Trump wins again in ‘24 (h/t HST).

    Many of the “Freedom Convoy” joiners are loud, belligerent or actively hostile, not only to pandemic safety strictures but to the Canadian locals who are suddenly up to their eyeballs in characters who make the Capitol insurrection’s “QAnon Shaman” look like Epicurus of Samos. This, again, appears to be an imported phenomenon.

    “The Ottawa protests have made clear that extreme elements supporting fascism and white nationalism are attracted to the movement,” writes Henry Giroux for Truthout, “and visible in the appearance of neo-Nazi and Confederate flags and an abundance of QAnon logos emblazoned on trucks, signs and stickers. Moreover, some sources are suggesting that a significant amount of funding, over $8 million as of February 7, may have come from right-wing sources in the United States. Some of the highest individual donations have come from American billionaires. Funding from the states has so alarmed members of the New Democratic Party that they have called it ‘an attack on Canada’s democracy’ and have asked the U.S. ambassador ‘to testify before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.’”

    There was a moment some days ago when I felt somewhat sorry for the original convoy organizers, but that sentiment had the half-life of a bedfart. For one thing, while the main focus of their protest has been subsumed by a bilge tide of right-wing noise stamped “Made in the U.S.A.,” they still appear to be enjoying the hell out of themselves right now.

    They are happily giving very official-looking press conferences designed to increase the hostility of the gathering and make a violent public crunch with law enforcement all but inevitable. “As the authorities threaten to arrest people blocking the streets of the capital,” reports The New York Times, “protest organizers on Wednesday appealed to supporters to pour into Ottawa and make their gatherings too large for the police to disperse.”

    Worst of all, I am mortally certain variations of this thing will be the Hot Item on right-wing calendars by March. I’m fairly shocked we’re not already seeing Trump trucks at intersections all across the country.

    In Canada, it was about vaccine mandates. Here, if it does come, similar actions would certainly seem to be another tactical maneuver toward a second insurrection; a practice run, if you will, under the cover of “We Hate Everything” protest cacophony.

    What better way to bog down a federal response to a second coup attempt than to clog the intersections of vital areas with Peterbilts and Macks? Park it, cut the engine, throw the keys in the river and walk away. It’s just that simple.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas’s Power Woes Are Just the Latest Reminder of the Danger of Privatization

    Workers install a new row of Bitcoin mining machines at the Whinstone U.S. Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9, 2021.

    Texas dodged a bullet earlier this month when its statewide power grid, operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), held up during a drop in temperatures. But that’s not because state leaders, particularly Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, learned anything from last year’s horrific storm.

    As Truthout’s Candice Bernd reported last week, not only did 70,000 Texans still experience power and utility services outages during the recent cold snap, but fracked gas production also saw its biggest dip in production since the February 2021 grid failure, revealing the industry’s continued vulnerability to extreme weather.

    Last year, Winter Storm Uri blanketed the entire state with freezing temperatures and snow for several days, causing record energy demand. This forced ERCOT to tell energy providers to cut power as they tried to avoid a total collapse of the energy system. Nearly 5 million people lost power and at least 246 died as a result of the storm.

    The latest freeze was a more typical Texas cold front. Local power outages were caused mainly by downed power lines due to trees and ice. Still, Abbott is claiming that the system is more reliable and resilient than it’s ever been.

    Experts disagree. “The thing about [this month’s freeze] is, we passed the test, but it was also a really easy test, and we didn’t pass it with perfect scores,” Michael Webber, Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources at the University of Texas, told Truthout’s Bernd. “There’s a lot of people who had problems with their power, and there was still the gas production drop, so I think we shouldn’t take away too much false confidence that we’re all good now.”

    Texas’s energy system is controlled by a complex mix of public and private actors, including the nonprofit ERCOT, oil and gas companies, the Texas Railroad Commission, and others. The details don’t matter as much as what makes the state’s system unique: It’s independent; not connected to the country’s two other national grids, the Western Interconnection and the Eastern Interconnection; and not subject to federal oversight.

    This has allowed it to become one of the country’s most marketized systems, according to Johanna Bozuwa, director of the Climate and Community Project. It’s heavily deregulated, designed to allow for intense competition in the retail sale of electricity. As one portfolio manager at a financial firm put it, it’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices.”

    Bozuwa wrote in the aftermath of last year’s storm, “There is no requirement for [energy] companies to make long-term investments into the health and safety of Texas’s grid or build in energy redundancies in case one source of energy fails.”

    And therein lies the problem. Texans are at risk every winter because they don’t really control their state’s energy system. It’s as simple as that.

    As I explain in The Privatization of Everything, a new book I coauthored with Allen Mikaelian, privatization is more than just outsourcing public services like trash collection to private contractors (though that in itself often leads to poor outcomes for everyone but the contractor). Privatization is ultimately a transfer of power over our own destiny, as individuals and as a nation, to unelected, unaccountable, and inscrutable corporations and their executives.

    What Chicago did during the Great Recession is a glaring example. Out of financial desperation, the city took an offer from private investors, including the Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley and a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund, to lease out its downtown parking meters for 75 years. In return, the investors paid a lump sum of $1.16 billion. Yet, the city soon realized that it had leased the meters at least $1 billion under their actual value. Worst of all, the contract forces Chicago to pay the investors if the city makes changes that lower parking revenue, such as replacing parking spaces with bike or dedicated bus lanes. According to Chicago-area transportation planners interviewed by sociologist Stephanie Farmer, this is tying their hands in efforts to build environmentally sustainable modes of transportation — and will continue to do so for 60 more years.

    Another example: When the pandemic hit, some universities that had hired corporations to finance, build and manage dormitories learned the hard way about the inflexibility of the contracts they had signed. Corvias, a multinational financial firm, sent letters to both Wayne State University and University System of Georgia, warning them about restricting the number of students allowed in dorms to limit the spread of the virus. The letters stated that the universities did not have the “unilateral right” to institute a policy that would limit the number of students or reduce housing fees due to a shortened semester.

    In other words, privatization embeds private interests into the public things that matter most, like the schools that teach us and our children, the public transportation we rely on to get around, and the energy that powers our homes and businesses. These private interests have different goals than the public. Social responsibility and preventing negative externalities are priorities only when they improve profits.

    That’s why we must insist that, in a democratic society, we get to decide that some things should be free of private interests. We, together, get to decide that some things — like water, housing, electricity — are equally available to all. We get to decide to make certain things public things.

    Until Texas takes public control of its power system, the risk of being knocked out by another heavyweight punch is all but guaranteed to remain. Unfortunately, its leaders seem to be headed in the opposite direction. Governor Abbott has been aggressively luring cryptocurrency-mining companies to the state, arguing that they will somehow encourage energy providers to build more capacity.

    Yet, crypto mining is an extremely energy intensive industry. As The New Yorker reported, “Crypto-mining facilities in Texas already consume enough electricity to power several cities. By 2023, it is estimated that ERCOT will account for twenty per cent of the global bitcoin network, and, by the end of that year, the state’s crypto-mining facilities’ power demands may have increased by as much as fivefold.”

    It’s clear that Texas’s “free market”-obsessed leaders are irrationally and destructively doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

    But there is hope — for energy democracy and stopping our climate crisis. Communities across the country are waking up to the dangers of privatized power and organizing to take control of their energy systems. Coalitions like We Power DC, Public Power NY and Our Power Maine are fighting for clean, affordable and equitable energy for all. The United Mine Workers of America recently broke with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin after the senator opposed climate legislation providing a path for coal workers into the renewable sector. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò recently wrote, “The climate crisis is already here, and its impacts are accelerating. Our choice is in how to confront it, and whom to put in the driver’s seat.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • From Banning Books to Burning Them, the Right Is Threatening Education

    A person holds open a copy of the graphic novel, "Maus"

    If you walk into my apartment with the right kind of eyes, the first thing you’ll notice is the books. Shelved walls of them, floor to ceiling, organized by topic until the esoteric nature of the collection has a study on artificial intelligence wedged in next to a history of the internet, because the subjects are kissing cousins and I only have so much space.

    My grandfather’s beloved John Toland collection is up there, along with his life-long study of the Kennedy clan. Every war, and every president, is represented, with special emphasis on all things Vietnam, for my father. Hunter Thompson has a shelf, as does Charles Bukowski. There are Langston Hughes poetry anthologies and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and the collected lyrics of Robert Hunter.

    Dotting the shelves are trinkets I call treasure — an old pair of my daughter’s ballet shoes, tiny and precious beside a snapshot of my mother. A compass, an earring that belonged to a girl I used to belong to long ago, a pocket-sized Constitution and Bill of Rights serving as doormat to the comedy section (too soon?), all little pieces of my passage through time like garnets sifted from sand. It is a shrine to my tiny life, and the meaning of life is books.

    In my bedroom, a small bookcase with a few specific titles — Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States next to Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned next to a signed copy of Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. Over by the door? A stack of books waiting to be translated into the big collection; this might take years, because it means I’ll either have to donate books to make space, which I don’t want, or put in more shelves, for which there is no space. In the corner? Another stack, neatly made with a candle on top as if to say, “I am not a mess. I am decoration.” And it’s true.

    The Japanese have a word for this sweet, gentle, intellectual form of hoarding: tsundoku. Roughly translated, it is the act of “letting reading materials pile up without reading them.” Broadly speaking, tsundoku is the recognition that the mere presence of books brings great happiness, and more than that, an excited sense of hope: Maybe someday I will have time to read all this, and oh, what wonders will I learn then?

    “It turns out that the smell of old books is due to the organic materials in books (like cellulose from wood pulp) reacting with light, heat and water, and over time releasing volatile organic compounds or VOCs,” explains McGill University’s Ada Mcvean. “What VOCs are released depends on how the book was made and stored, but common scents are toluene or ethylbenzene, which smell sweet, benzaldehyde or furfural, which smell almond-like, or vanillin, which smells like — you guessed it — vanilla.”

    The cathedral silence of books in a library, the smell of wise age bound in old leather, is being replaced with the sound of furious screaming and the burning of pages. In towns across the country, the Trump-bound conservative movement has latched on to a fiction built around false ideas about critical race theory — which isn’t being taught anywhere in the public schools — that is inspiring a purge of books that might make white children deal with their nation’s past, or help them deal with their own future as an LGBTQ+ person of great and everlasting value. Parents and school board members are being targeted, harassed and threatened by a right wing bent on exploiting already-simmering angst over children and schools in the age of COVID.

    “Authoritarianism and education now inform each other as the Republican Party in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision and support for curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism and a brutal policy of racial exclusion,” writes Henry A. Giroux for Truthout. “Republican legislators now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican state legislators have put policies into place that erase and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge and the curriculum.”

    There are few acts more ferociously ugly than the burning of a book, yet the trend has been growing right along with the swelling right-wing rage being primed by Trump and his people. The very idea that fire can murder an idea is insulting, and more than a little frightening: Given enough will, and enough fire, enough books can be destroyed to make their existence void. It has happened before, in the great library conflagrations of the Dark Ages after Rome fell. Only the concerted efforts of monks in their Irish monasteries — copying texts, copying texts, always copying texts — saved the literature and philosophy of classical Western society from itself.

    A lot of the noise is happening on television, in the spaces where people like Ted Cruz operate… but the action is at the school board meeting, the town hall meeting, the very local gatherings were most of the governing of this country takes place. This isn’t happening in some far-off conference room in Washington, D.C.; this is down the block.

    The book banners and burners hit the process like a wave of shock troops, overwhelming the normally staid procedures and scaring the hell out of everyone. It is time to push back.

    This could be happening in your town. If it is, go to town meetings in numbers too large to ignore and bring a countervailing sense of order and fairness to the proceedings. Make sure your children have access to the books being burned and banned, and explain to them how an ugly act can itself spread very much like fire itself. It must be confronted and doused before the damage becomes too extreme.

    When you burn a book, you do me harm. When you ban a book, you harm us all and look foolish in the process. This must be stopped, and we must be the ones to stop it. Bullies are exactly as strong as you allow them to be. Push back hard enough, and they tend to wilt and scatter. I read that in a book once, and tried it out for real. It worked.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Lies About Ukraine Conflict Are Standing in the Way of a Peaceful Resolution

    U.S. soldiers disembark from a C-17 Globemaster cargo plane on the tarmac of Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport, south eastern Poland, on February 16, 2022. The soldiers are part of a deployment of several thousand sent to bolster NATO's eastern flank in response to tensions with Russia.

    The Ukraine-Russia conflict has escalated to a very dangerous point The possibility that it can turn into an armed conflict, or even a war, has increased significantly and is real. But the Russian invasion, which was basically announced by the U.S. and British governments and media for February 16, has not happened, and Russia declared the partial withdrawal of its forces. Such war is hardly inevitable and can be avoided. However, the peaceful resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine is greatly complicated by the dominant narratives of the Ukraine conflict.

    The narratives that are propagated by the Western governments and the mainstream media concerning the origin and the nature of the Ukraine conflict are truly Orwellian. They state that the pro-Russian government in Ukraine was ousted as result of peaceful mass Euromaidan protests in February 2014 and that President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine because he ordered the massacre of the peaceful Maidan protesters by government forces. These protests took place on the main square in Kyiv, which is called Maidan, and they were directed against the Yanukovych government and his decision to suspend signing the EU association and free trade agreement. According to these narratives, Russia then annexed Crimea by using pure military force and launched a war with Ukraine in Donbas. These narratives assert that Ukraine is a sovereign democratic state which has a right to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the future and that Russia plans to invade Ukraine within days or weeks.

    Various evidence presented in studies by Western scholars who have researched the Ukraine conflict shows that these narratives are false. This mass killing of the Maidan movement’s own supporters — perpetrated by the oligarchic and far right elements of the Maidan alliance — made it possible for Maidan leaders to falsely blame the pro-Russian Yanukovych government and its police and security forces for the killing and then seize power in Ukraine. Western governments backed this undemocratic overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government.

    The absolute majority of wounded Maidan protesters testified at the Maidan massacre trial and investigation in Ukraine that they and other protesters were massacred by snipers from the Hotel Ukraina and other buildings, which were seized by the Maidan opposition alliance, or that they witnessed such snipers there. Synchronized videos show that specific times and directions of the shooting of the majority of specific protesters did not coincide with specific times and directions of shooting by Berkut anti-riot police officers who were charged in Ukraine with their massacre. The investigation and the media revealed no evidence of any order by Yanukovych or his ministers and commanders to massacre the Maidan protesters. In contrast, 14 self-admitted members of the Maidan sniper units confessed that they themselves or other Maidan snipers massacred the police or protesters, and that this mass killing was done under the orders of Maidan leaders and former leaders of the pro-Western government of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Several Maidan leaders and activists testified about specific involvement of Maidan leaders in this mass killing.

    Moreover, two leaders of Ukraine’s far right Svoboda party stated that a representative of an unnamed Western government told them and other Maidan leaders a few weeks before the massacre that Western governments would turn on the Yanukovych government after casualties among protesters reached 100. The killed Maidan protesters were immediately called the “Heavenly Hundred” and Western governments blamed Yanukovych and his forces, and recognized the new Maidan government.

    In return, Russia escalated the conflict by annexing Crimea, where the majority of the population is ethnically Russian. Russia used a covert military intervention in this region. But public opinion polls showed that the absolute majority of Crimeans before and after the annexation supported joining Russia.

    A poll conducted shortly before the start of the war in Donbas showed that most of its residents supported separatism, ranging from autonomy within Ukraine to independence or joining Russia. The majority of scholars who researched this conflict classify the war in Donbas as a civil war with direct Russian military interventions in support of pro-Russian separatists in August 2014 and January-February 2015. It is revealing that satellite photos and videos of deployment of Russian troops, and Western intelligence reports about such deployment currently near Ukraine, in Belarus and Transnistria now confirm that there are no Russian military units in Donbas, whereas there are currently many Russian military units stationed in Crimea.

    An actual Russian-Ukrainian war would be devastating for Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin might use the current large military buildup near Ukraine either to try to force a peace deal on his preferred terms or to resort to some kind of military option. Such options might sooner or later include recognition of independence of separatist republics in Donbas and deployment of Russian military forces there, a limited armed conflict or even a full-scale war.

    But there is still a possibility for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. Recent visits by French and German leaders to Russia and Ukraine represent such efforts. A peaceful conflict resolution can be done via an international agreement that offers Ukraine European Union membership prospects provided that it fulfills accession criteria (such as democracy) in exchange for neutral status and resolving the conflict in Donbas based on the Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements, which were signed in the Belarus capital, specify a ceasefire and granting a special status within Ukraine and self-government to the separatist-controlled part of Donbas after the elections there. But such peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict requires recognizing that its dominant narratives and its origins are false.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • There Are Currently 19 Legal Actions Against Donald Trump

    Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally on July 3, 2021, in Sarasota, Florida.

    Donald Trump has been fired by his own accounting firm, Mazars USA, which went on to disavow all of its own Trump-related work product as comprehensively unreliable. This astonishing turn of events came to light after New York Attorney General Letitia James filed documents with the court pertaining to her ongoing civil investigation into the former president’s business dealings. Among them was Mazars’s letter informing Trump that the last decade of his financial life just became a bonfire for Jesus.

    There is so much to enjoy with this story, it is difficult to pick where to begin. I know! Let’s do the “Time Warp” again. The Trump family fortune was amassed over decades by lying about the actual worth of various real estate holdings, and then using that false info to fraudulently obtain massive loans so the Trump family could bathe in gold while buying more property with other people’s money. All the while, and multiple bankruptcies later, virtually no taxes were paid. As Humphrey Bogart said of The Maltese Falcon’s sham treasure, “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

    …and then along comes 2011, and President Obama trolls Donald Trump straight into the sun at the Correspondents’ Dinner, and the racist wrath of Ol’ Thin Skin Donny was loosed upon the land. Five precious pandemic-free years later, President-elect Trump declared victory before a flabbergasted nation that had just elevated a poison-minded con man to the office where the nuke buttons go boom-boom for real.

    Why did Donald Trump run for president? Was Obama’s rag-out session so thoroughly unrecoverable that Trump thought he could survive five years — campaign and administration — under the biggest, well-lit microscope on Earth, just for the chance to get even? Did not one lawyer sit him down and explain the kind of exposure he was signing up for? “No one cared about his tax returns before the campaign,” I wrote way back in 2018, “his lawyers weren’t coughing up file cabinets filled with all the dirty deeds done dirt cheap over the years, and it didn’t cost people 500 grand in legal fees to be his friend.”

    Whatever the reasons, Trump did it, and here we are. The bricks started dropping about a year into his administration, the first being the aforementioned report on how the family fortune was deceitfully obtained and maintained. The following May and as a result of multiple investigations, Deutsche Bank — a thoroughly shady operation that was the last large lender in the world willing to loan money to Trump — rolled on the former president in a walloping act of legal self-defense.

    The white whale of Trump-era journalism — his unexpurgated tax documents — was boated and boiled down to oil at the end of September 2020, about a week before Trump caught COVID, smack dab in the final stretch of his reelection campaign. The documents revealed a desperate man tap-dancing on the edge of calamity. More than a billion dollars in debt, with half of that coming due within the next few years, “Trump is only a few short years away from being subsumed by a tidal wave of red ink that will wash him out of most of his properties and leave him stranded on the beach like some strange orange whale,” I wrote at the time.

    More than a year has passed since Trump and his Island of Misfit Toys administration left town. At present, there are no less than 19 open civil and criminal investigations into his business dealings and activities while in office, including what kind of hand he may have had in the sacking of the Capitol. Most of us are still numb to Large and Horrible Trump Things, because the endless deluge of them remains too fresh in mind… but gnaw on that bone until you find the marrow: 19 ongoing investigations more than a year after he left! I’ve never, ever seen the like.

    I said at the outset that this was a story to be enjoyed, and I stand by that… but truly, there is no joy in Mudville. Donald Trump is, at present, the most powerful politician of either party in the country. He fundraises like a blue whale eats, huge mouthfuls and baleen bursting with krill. Millions upon millions of voters have, disturbingly, found something within him that feels like home, and they cling to him with a ferocity that beggars modern comparison.

    He can take the most irrational, racist super-Nazi in your town, slap a suit on their back and drop a check in their pocket, and voila! Your state has a new Republican front-runner for that Senate seat, or school board, or election commission, thanks to Trump’s base. It is happening all over the country, and shows no signs of slowing.

    Most daunting of all, Donald Trump was the president of the United States for four years, and stands a better than even chance of winning the office again in 2024. Some 74 million people voted for him last November, and with the ongoing pandemic serving as a millstone around President Biden’s neck, he may get even more with a second try.

    The only thing potentially standing in Trump’s way is the kaleidoscope of investigations that appears to be beginning to engulf him. It’s cheerful to think one of these may be the medicine needed to blow his nascent campaign train off the rails once and for all, but he will still long be with us if he doesn’t run, all the while counting 74 million reasons why P.S. Barnum was right.

    Meanwhile, terrifyingly, Trumpism has gained a full life even apart from Donald Trump, and it’s still going strong. Regardless of Trump’s fate, the particular amalgam of white supremacy, truth denial and capitalist cruelty that his presidency nurtured will no doubt remain with us for years to come.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Russian Invasion of Ukraine Could Destabilize Russia’s Political Order

    Members of Ukaraine's State Border Guard Service stand at the border crossing between Ukraine and Belarus on February 13, 2022, in Vilcha, Ukraine.

    The U.S. and U.K. officials and media have long been warning against the “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the prospects of such an invasion are, it also raises an important question about the character of the Russian political regime and how the invasion may change it.

    Let us hypothetically assume, as many have, that Russia can defeat the Ukrainian army and occupy a large part of Ukraine (especially the southeastern and central regions). The question is what to do with this part of Ukraine. The problem is not the unlikely massive Ukrainian guerrilla war against the Russian army. The problem is that the Russian state, such as it is now, has little to offer Ukrainians as well as to the world.

    Whatever one thinks is lying behind the current escalation — resurgent Russian imperialism exploiting a window of opportunity, Ukraine’s alleged attempts to solve the Donbass question by force, the expansion of NATO, attempts to undermine the Nord Stream 2 (a gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia), domestic politics in the U.S. and U.K., or any combination of the above — Russia is currently doing very little to convince us that the media campaign about the “imminent invasion” has no real grounds, aside from simply saying so.

    Installing a pro-Russian government in Ukraine would certainly solve some of these issues for Russia. However, we should not assume that Russia is ready to bear the costs of a military invasion (some of them discussed below), or that the ongoing escalation is a part of such an attempt. Yet we can recognize that Russia seems interested in promoting the belief that it is capable of launching an invasion, regardless of what it actually plans to do within the strategy of its coercive diplomacy.

    Why Guerrilla War in Ukraine Seems Unlikely

    According to a recent poll, 33 percent of Ukrainians are ready for armed resistance in the event of Russian intervention in their city, while another 22 percent are in favor of nonviolent resistance. Yet both figures should be viewed with skepticism.

    First, other polls show that there are not so many Ukrainians who are ready to sacrifice their quality of life to prevent the Russian invasion. For example, at the end of November, only 33 percent of citizens supported the imposition of martial law in response to a possible Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s borders, while 58 percent opposed it.

    Second, the results of such polls only show citizens’ professed intentions, but do not predict their actual behavior. Many people tend to give answers that are socially expected from patriots and “real men” (“of course, I’ll fight, I’m not a sissy!”). For example, according to a poll conducted in April 2014, 21 percent of residents of the southeastern regions (more pro-Russian than the western regions) answered that they are ready for armed resistance in the event of an invasion by Russian troops in southeastern Ukraine. Yet only a very small part of these several million people went into battle when the war in Donbass began shortly afterward.

    The Anglosphere media publications currently depicting Ukrainians (including women and children) as prepared to fight the Russian army poorly represent the reality of most Ukrainians. Only a small number of people would really fight. These would be the remnants of the army and police, some of the veterans and volunteers who have already fought in Donbass, and right-wing radicals (such as the notorious Azov movement). Their resistance to the Russian troops would, of course, not be as strong as in Afghanistan, but not as weak as in separatist Donbass since 2014. However, the resistance would be enough to make the established political regime in pro-Russian Ukraine one of the most repressive in the entire former USSR.

    What Would Happen in Pro-Russian Ukraine?

    Add to this the low legitimacy of a hypothetical pro-Russian government among the Ukrainian population. Since the government will immediately fall under Western sanctions, it will have to be formed from people who do not have much property in the West. There is not much choice in the Ukrainian political elite. Therefore, the new government would consist of some old officials dismissed during the Euromaidan revolution (some left for Russia but many remained in Ukraine) and representatives of marginal political parties. The list of a possible pro-Russian government published recently by the U.K. Foreign Office hardly represents any serious plan but it shows which problems Russia would meet in forming a loyal government in Ukraine.

    The initially passive population would likely meet with ever more repression, and additional difficulties due to the Western sanctions. Add here the new government with little legitimacy. The main resistance to the pro-Russian government would most likely not be armed, but unarmed. Its base would be the middle class in the big cities, whose situation would likely deteriorate most steeply.

    At the same time, Ukraine would fall now into the same political space as Russia and Belarus and would actually strengthen internal opposition to the governments of those countries (instead of alienating, as happened during the earlier violent and nationalist Euromaidan protests). By occupying Ukraine, Russia would increase the risk of destabilization from within and weaken itself. The polls suggest that a large-scale war with Ukraine would not be popular among Russians.

    It is not clear which social group would benefit from the occupation and on whom the pro-Russian government could rely. Russia’s ability to offset the impact of sanctions and repression by improving the living standards of the tens of millions of Ukrainians is very limited. Although wages and pensions are being increased in annexed Crimea and Russia is investing heavily in the peninsula, its general economic situation is still comparable to the poorest regions of Russia. The mobilization and radical redistribution of resources that would be necessary to ensure any semblance of social legitimacy in hypothetical pro-Russian Ukraine would be incompatible with the patronage capitalism of post-Soviet Russia.

    Some U.S. government officials are concerned that Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union. They generally ignore that such a restoration would require far more than military expansion — it would require a radical transformation of contemporary Russia.

    Passive Revolution?

    Some left-wing authors have tried to explain the post-Soviet transformation as a case of passive revolution. This term was made famous by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci used it for various processes, but foremost for the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy in the 19th century from a patchwork of small states and territories under the foreign dynasties’ control. As we know, it did not take place as a popular revolution under the hegemony of the progressive bourgeoisie, but through the military and diplomatic actions of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. Could it be that Putin is now performing a “function of Piedmont” in the post-Soviet space, using military power to compensate for the political weakness of the patronage bourgeoisie and the left movement whose members dreamed of reuniting the Soviet Union?

    There are fundamental differences. In Italy, passive revolution produced a stronger, modern and independent state. A transition to bourgeois order and a nation-state took place. The revolutionary transformations were carried out “from above” to prevent the Jacobin revolutionary threat to the feudal aristocracy “from below” (as during the French Revolution).

    The problem is that there is no post-Soviet passive revolution, in the sense of forced modernization under threat of a new “Jacobin” social revolution. The post-Soviet transformations are an ongoing crisis that actually began long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. These transformations actually signal stagnation and de-modernization instead of modernization. No post-Soviet maidan revolutions threatened the post-Soviet ruling class of patronage capitalists; they merely helped one faction of that class to replace another faction.

    “Civilizational” Identity Politics

    The problem with Russia today is not that it is supposedly restoring the “Soviet Empire.” The problem is that Russia is trying to conduct a Great Power foreign policy but is no longer the Soviet Union.

    Today’s Russia does not offer anything like the universal progressive project that once attracted Third World countries and mass movements to its side, even when fewer and fewer people believed in the Soviet Union itself, and whose modernization successes still evoke massive nostalgia even in countries where it was imposed by force (as in Eastern Europe). Now Russia compensates for a lack of “soft power” appeal with the “hard power” of coercive diplomacy.

    This is related to the notorious Russian “whataboutism.” When one has difficulty articulating advantages one has over their opponent, one tends to rely on the normalization of negative characteristics and actions to which one supposedly has the same “right” as everyone else in the club. For example, justifying Crimea annexation because, earlier, NATO bombed Yugoslavia and recognized Kosovo independence. This is a symptom and consequence of the still unresolved post-Soviet crisis of hegemony — incapacity of the ruling class for leadership in pursuing common interests with subaltern classes and other nations. For a truly hegemonic rule, it is not enough to say that “they are no better than us”. It is crucially important to convince that “we are indeed better than they are.”

    After the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva, which followed the Russian-Ukrainian escalation in the spring of 2021, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov published an article criticizing the selective application of “international rules” by Western powers. According to Lavrov, the “rules” are arbitrary and established by a small circle of nations. They are not based on international law and are not deliberated in established platforms such as the United Nations. Lavrov formulates this criticism in the language of “democracy.” He argued that the West is sensitive to violations of “internal” democracy but does not want an “external,” international democracy that would recognize the right of Russia and other non-Western powers to their own sovereignty and national ideology. The West does not recognize the reality of the multipolar world, he wrote. The recent joint statement signed by Putin and Xi Jinping begins with essentially the same argument.

    What Lavrov claims here, however, is not democracy but a kind of “civilizational” identity politics. The demand for recognition of the multipolar world — in contrast to the world under Western hegemony — isn’t grounded in any positive project for the good of humankind, which Russia would represent better. Instead, Lavrov simply calls for the right of the self-assigned representatives appealing to civilizational identities to be accepted and treated as equals on the international level based exclusively on their distinct identity claims.

    What Can Russia Offer to Ukraine and the World?

    Last summer, Putin published the famous article on Ukrainian-Russian history and relations where he claimed that Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people.” In Russian and Ukrainian languages, the word “people” means both a culturally distinct ethnic group as well as a political nation. This article has been often interpreted as Putin’s refusal to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty and justifying the invasion threat. However, this is a misleading and simplistic interpretation. Putin suggests that the desirable relations between Russia and Ukraine could be as between Germany and Austria. In Putin’s vision, Ukraine and Russia could be two states for “the same people,” allowing different versions of regional cultural identities to be expressed and to peacefully coexist, albeit separately due to complicated historical developments.

    However, this is not the only possible model of two states for “one and the same people” and perhaps not even the most obvious one for Putin himself, considering how long he worked in East Germany. Remarkably, he does not articulate the relationship between Russia and Ukraine as something like that between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which also offered two states for the divided German people but with fundamentally different models (and where an analog of the lost GDR would not necessarily be Russia). In Putin’s narrative, Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people” artificially divided by foreign powers. He says “A,” but he does not say “B”: “Our state is better than yours for the same people. We offer a better model and let the strongest survive.” Putin does not say this, not because he recognizes Ukraine’s sovereignty, but because he cannot offer a fundamentally better model for Ukraine than Ukraine’s predatory oligarchic elite and nationalist civil society.

    Many accuse Russia of revising the international order. In reality, Russian revanchism is not revisionist, but a conservative defense of the status quo: an attempt to hold on to Great Power status. Here lie the limits of the international appeal of current Russian rhetoric. The world needs change and solutions to major global problems rather than the conservation of the status quo.

    In a much-discussed speech at the Valdai Club last year, Putin articulated his vision as “healthy conservatism,” with his primary concern being to prevent “us from regressing and sinking into chaos.” However, when asked about universal values, not only for Russian “civilization” but for all humanity, he remained very brief and unspecific.

    An attempt to take over Ukraine would present the Russian ruling class with the choice of either taking the high risk of destabilizing its rule or radically revising its foundations. So far, there are no signs that they are now ready for the second scenario. Yet, however this crisis ends — short of escalating toward nuclear world war — it will increase the tensions between Russia’s Great Power claims and its backward political and social order.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mitch McConnell Is Now at Odds With Trump. That Doesn’t Mean Mitch Is Good.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol Building on December 16, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The corporate news media has spent the last three decades ensorcelled by the indefatigable “Dems in Disarray” trope. Calling it out as a trope is actually so commonplace now — because the practice itself is so commonplace — that it has almost become a trope itself. I feel bad for the journalists stapled to that beat right now, because the real show is down the hall. Mitch McConnell, that banality of evil made flesh, has been revealed to be running a massive behind-the-scenes effort to displace Trump (himself a boorish evil made flesh, and thus irony is made flesh) from the Republican Party. If history holds, the two old curs will soon be at each other’s throats right out there in the campaign-year spotlight.

    You have to wonder what it must be like to be McConnell these days. The minority leader for a year now, McConnell’s power and influence seem only to have grown in the intervening time. He had help in this, or course; the months-long policy debate within House Democratic circles devoured the summer and fall. McConnell appeared to have little else to do in that stretch except shore up his caucus, offer the occasional honeyed remark for Trump, and wait to see what emerged from the House. Every 16 hours or so, he’d send out another press release, like a grim bell tolling in the night: “We still say ‘no’ to everything… We still say ‘no’ to everything… We still sa– hey, is this thing on?” Tap, tap, tap.

    Of course, McConnell had plenty to do. He made it clear that any legislation seeking to repair the Voting Rights Act was doomed. He played chicken with the debt limit and the government funding deadline. He also made sure Joe Manchin knew that at least one person — Mitch — appreciated the West Virginia senator’s infinite enmity and impatience for President Biden’s domestic agenda.

    “Something is broken in the Senate,” Peter Nicholas wrote for The Atlantic at the peak of that long summer. “McConnell’s sustained commitment to stopping Democratic priorities, whatever the cost, has deepened the dysfunction that makes many Republican voters doubt the efficacy of government in the first place. In most democracies, a stubborn minority party cannot stop the majority from debating the nation’s worst problems, much less solving them. McConnell is one reason the United States remains an exception.”

    Beneath the surface of seemingly still Republican waters during that time, however, lurked a riptide that threatened to suck McConnell’s political boat far out to sea. From his bespattered perch at Mar-a-Lago, the self-styled once-and-future-king Trump continued to ply his ragged wares, surrounded by a motley constellation of legal hacks, politicians seeking his precious endorsement, misfit media types who see Satan in a vaccine syringe, and former White House staffers who have nowhere else to go because nobody is hiring anyone from that White House. Would you? If so, count the forks.

    The drumbeat emanating from this seething coalition grows louder by the day: “Trump won the election… crime of the century… say it… say it and join us… say it or we will bury you.” Over the summer, most Republicans were content to either support Trump’s mayhem campaign and keep their seat safe, or just kept quiet and hoped the eye of Sauron did not fall upon them demanding a reckoning and an operatic oath of fidelity. They are incredibly powerful within the party, that Trumpy bunch. They believe their time is at hand.

    So it must have come as a natural shock to see the New York Times headline pop on Sunday morning: “Inside McConnell’s Campaign to Take Back the Senate and Thwart Trump.”

    If McConnell hoped to keep his anti-Trump activities under wraps, the Times put paid to that with a meaty thud. “As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him,” reads the Times report. “The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.”

    You have to hand it to McConnell; he does a mean Iago. Pulling off a stunt like this is like trying to arrange a massive surprise party where your worst enemy gets fired when they walk through the door. Sure, Mitch clapped back at Trump and the Republican National Committee over their description of the January 6 Capitol attack as “legitimate political discourse,” but he wasn’t straying terribly far with that; he called it a “a violent insurrection” on Monday, which is pretty much what he said the day it happened (though he’s been inconsistent in his condemnation, at other times). All the other days, however, the days where he carried gallons of post-election water for Trump while publicly avoiding any pointed critiques of the former president… that, as it turns out, was Mitch waiting in the tall grass.

    At the end of things, it is robustly important to remember that the labors of McConnell in this endeavor are in like kind with those of David Frum, Colin Powell, and the other “Never Trump” Republicans who squeezed out a few good anti-Trump commercials back when there was a market for such tedious things. They are not your friend, any more than McConnell is. These people agree with virtually every policy idea the Trump administration had to offer, because all the Trump administration had to offer was road-bald radials from 1981, GOP policy down the line. They are fine with that, Mitch especially. They don’t like Trump because they think he’s “bad for the brand.”

    According to the Times article, McConnell’s efforts to recruit a murderer’s row of Trump-resistant congressional candidates is meeting with limited success. There is daylight, but not quite enough for establishment Republicans to get excited about. What may be exciting is the trend that will not quit: Trump refuses to talk about anything other than the election (and he never stops talking), and implicit with his endorsement is the promise that his chosen candidates will follow suit.

    The base will lap it up as usual, but even the rosiest forecasts show that number to be dwindling as voters focus more and more on issues like the pandemic and the economy. The GOP may be bereft of policy ideas, but an increasing number of them know a dead socket when they see one. More to the point, they are all too familiar with the results when the base chooses their favorite sons and daughters to run in tight races. “Privately, [McConnell] has declared he won’t let unelectable ‘goofballs’ win Republican primaries,” reads the Times report.

    Them’s fightin’ words, Mitch… but gadzooks, who do you root for in that brawl? The insurgent racists and sideways conspiracists who pepper the Trumpian horde in their quest to be the face of the party? Or the establishment Republicans like McConnell, desperate in their senescence, who have lost control of the party’s base even as they once created it. The prodigal son has come home.

    Now who’s in disarray again?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I’m Craving the Sweetness of Ancestral Love on Valentine’s Day

    Alexis Pauline Gumbs sits with her father in Edison, New Jersey, in 1986.

    My father raised me to love Assata Shakur, to critique every institution and to love apple pie. Yes. The man who raised me on Black Panthers for Beginners, Pan-Africanism for Beginners, Malcolm X for Beginners and the protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez also had a lifetime love affair with the symbolic pastry of American traditionalism.

    The story is that my father so loved apple pie as a little boy that my grandmother got sick of him asking her to make it and taught him to slice, spice and sugar the apples, add lemon juice and butter and put it in a store-bought crust himself. Over the years, he perfected his cinnamon-to-nutmeg ratio, his McIntosh apple selection standards so deliciously that at every extended family function, people asked after and waited for his pies. The demand grew so great that, of course, he had to bring on unpaid workers. How American.

    My sister and I didn’t feel exploited, though, when he enlisted our help. We loved the apple-laden wooden table. The big metal mixing bowl, the juice of the stirred apples, brown with spice, tart with lemon. Rigorous taste-testers, we stole samples out of that bowl at every stage of the process. Between holidays, we would do a quick weekday version. Dad would buy all-natural sugar free apple sauce and we would add cinnamon, nutmeg and so much sugar that it ended up sweeter than anything they sold in the store. When I moved into my dorm room for college, my mother and aunties helped me set up and decorate. And my father brought his own nurturing offering: a giant case of organic instant oatmeal from the health food store, cinnamon apple flavored, of course. Perfect for a girl who could barely cook. Just add boiling water to the fill-line in the sturdy paper cup, and go.

    These days, I still start the day with oatmeal. Every morning when I shake cinnamon and nutmeg into simmering coconut milk before I add the oats, the kitchen air brings me back to that sweet man who nurtured my militant critique. When I miss him the most, I add apples on top. On holidays, on my father’s birthday, or the anniversary of the day he passed away, my sister will invite her daughters into the sacred ceremony: a mostly homemade apple pie.

    Do you have a story like this? I could write this tribute to my father all over again with pancakes, his other specialty. On my father’s first birthday after he passed, we went to his favorite diner and ordered what he would order, the Belgian waffle. When I can’t see his smile, when I can’t hear his voice, when he’s not there to celebrate a new victory with me, edible sweetness seems like the available proxy for how I want to feel.

    My father died because he lacked access to health care. And so, recently I got a new doctor who taught me how to read the lab reports they get when they test your blood at a physical check-up. Guess what? There is a lot of sugar in my blood. Not quite diabetic, not quite pre-diabetic, but if there was a pre-pre-diabetic … I would be in that range. And now I am thinking about the emotional work sugar does in my life — the place-holding work that a sweet treat does for me when I can’t experience the comfort of a hug from a loved one.

    “Give me some sugar,” the elder women say, and I gratefully give them a kiss on the cheek. But now, because of the pandemic, I don’t even remember the last time I kissed an elder. We are missing so much sweetness. But this year, like every year, the Valentine’s Day industry is churning out its own version of sweetness, conveniently available for same-day delivery.

    I have been as complicit as anyone in this Valentine’s Day conspiracy. When I was in high school, my mom would gift me my favorite chocolates on Valentine’s Day morning — the ones with messages inside the foil wrappers — and I would share them with my friends at school, giggling as if the love messages were our fortunes. In college, I would buy bags of individually wrapped “fun-sized” candy bars and hand them out to strangers on and around the campus, savoring the sweetness of people’s surprised smiles. Sweetness should be portable, shareable, well-packaged. It should be available and easy, right?

    But remember how I told you my dad raised me to critique everything? My father would remind us that on a capitalist planet, sweetness is war. Just like everything else. North American corporations ignore Indigenous land rights to tap maple syrup. The United States sent the contras to terrorize Central America to control the fruit industry. The extractive practices of corporate honey producers are part of a pollinator crisis that threatens the entire food supply. The Dutch East India company committed a whole genocide against the Bandanese to get a monopoly on nutmeg. And sugarcane itself?

    The first plantation that used the forced labor of Africans kidnapped into chattel slavery was a sugarcane plantation in a place called Boca de Nigua on the island of Ay-ti (the Indigenous Taíno word for the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Dictator Rafael Trujillo established the batey system to exploit Haitian workers under conditions too similar to plantation histories. According to the Batey Foundation, this system creates an underclass with “no public services, no legal protections, and no economic opportunities.”

    In the early 20th century, when Dominican sugar workers rose up, led by Mamá Tingó, plantation owners sent scouts to the small islands of the Caribbean and recruited the poorest of the poor, including starving children, to do the work instead of improving the conditions. They carried these replacement workers to Santo Domingo in the airless hold of a ship.

    My grandfather was one of those starving children.

    He told me about being sick in the boat the whole way over. He almost died from overwork and a wound from a bull on a Dominican sugar plantation at the age of 11. If two other workers — a husband and wife he had never met — had not decided to save his life, I would not be writing this. We would not exist. The decision of two exploited adult workers to brew herbs for a child, to provide him shelter and safety, to value his life in a context of expendability, is that sweetness, or the safety underneath what we call sweetness. The possibility of generosity, dignity, life-saving care. That couple became my grandfather’s health care system under impossible conditions.

    On a Black Feminist Delegation to the Dominican Republic organized by Ana-Maurine Lara, I went to that first sugar plantation at Boca de Nigua. As I stood there, a black bull walked slowly out of a grove of trees, stepping on the remnants of sugar stalks. This wise animal may have been doing his own ancestral work, but as I looked into his eyes, the story of my grandfather came back to me and a message clear as these printed words: Do not eat any sugar for a full year, starting today.

    And so, I did it. A year-long cleanse from the sugar cane economy in my blood. Every time someone offered me a sweet treat or asked me why I was eating differently, I had to tell a story as old as the origins of slavery, as close as my own blood. I told hundreds of people that year about how slavery started on a sugar plantation, but how it was also the site of the first rebellion of enslaved Africans in the Americas. I shared what Black feminist anthropologist Fatima Portorreal told me about how a woman from the Congo named Ana Maria led a historic revolt there, establishing the first Black communal government in the Americas. I told people how the Haitian revolutionaries so revered that site that they came to announce the end of slavery right there, on the spot where I stood. I learned something about my capacity that year. About how if you can find the beginning of something, you can find the end. I learned the feeling if not the name of something I want more than sweetness.

    That cleanse was years ago, and I am still in the process of defining what exactly it is that I crave, with my mouth, with my hands, in my heart. But I know this much — I want to see the end of slavery in my lifetime. I want a love that can save your impossible life and mine. I want all our ancestors with us in their full dignity. I want solidarity and care through whatever comes. And I suddenly remember that before he taught me to sugar the apples, my father showed me the proper way to hold a knife.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Will the federal government get it right on the oil and gas emissions cap?

    The post Will the federal government get it right on the oil and gas emissions cap? appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • “Dry” Month Campaigns May Reinforce Harmful Stereotypes About Substance Use

    Treating abstinence as a moral victory reinforces stigmatizing and negative stereotypes about alcohol and drug use.

    Campaigns that challenge people to abstain from alcohol for one month — often in support of a good cause — have emerged across the globe over the past decade. Dry January officially launched in 2013 with a public health campaign by British charity Alcohol Change.

    Other “month of abstinence” campaigns have included Dry July, Sober September, Sober October and “Dry February” — a few examples of campaigns from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and beyond. Dry campaigns have gained traction with people increasingly taking a time out from drinking alcohol for one month.

    Early research suggests alcohol use has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among individuals who have mental health challenges. The pandemic may be contributing to the greater interest in dry month campaigns. Market research surveys have found an estimated one in five people participated in Dry January in 2022.

    On the surface, “dry” months are great — individuals set a personal goal to abstain from drinking, are publicly encouraged to achieve it and raise funds for a charity. It can be seen as supportive and positive, and many individuals tout the health benefits they experience as a result.

    Substance Use Is Complex

    As a substance use researcher and therapist, I certainly do not dispute the potential benefits of avoiding alcohol for a month to meet personal health goals. I also appreciate the peer support received by individuals doing these challenges.

    So, why was I so bothered as I listened to someone sharing the life-changing benefits of her four-week sobriety stint on the radio? Why am I irked when people express relief when their four weeks of Dry February are over, and they can get back to “wine time?”

    I’m troubled because while dry drinking campaigns benefit many, they do not help the individuals that I have worked with over the years. These attitudes and campaigns do not contribute to a more nuanced discussion about substance use. Instead, they perpetuate the idea that quitting drinking for a month is a choice, and an easy and positive one at that.

    Dry February and other associated campaigns are not intended for individuals struggling with the systemic inequalities, such as poverty, illness and racism, that lead to substance use issues. You will also note that these campaigns are only about alcohol — a socially acceptable substance.

    How would these campaigns be perceived if they were focused on other drugs? Dry campaigns support a harm reduction strategy — not drinking for a month for health benefits with no expectation of ongoing abstinence. However, they continue to separate alcohol as more socially acceptable than other drugs. This negatively affects people who use drugs.

    These attitudes marginalize other substances and only normalize alcohol use, which contributes to the ongoing War on Drugs and deadly drug supply. Further, these campaigns praise people for not drinking, which plays into the harmful idea that drinking (and using other drugs) is bad or subversive and should be controlled.

    Stigma and Inequality

    Arguably, these campaigns are directed at predominantly white, educated, middle class individuals who have the luxury of taking a time out from drinking, and the privilege of doing so without the risk of social stigma.

    In one 2020 study comparing individuals who participated in a Dry January with the general population, those who participated in Dry January, were more likely to be younger, women, had a higher income, had completed university education and had “significantly better self-rated physical health.”

    Celebrating predominantly middle/upper-class, educated women for publicly choosing to quit drinking for one month is potentially harmful. It perpetuates an all or nothing moralistic attitude towards substance use. It reinforces the myth that quitting substance use is a choice that anyone can (and should) make.

    Dry month campaigns are not directed at my clients who attend therapy for substance use issues. They do not see themselves as welcome participants in these campaigns. Their substance use or sobriety isn’t trendy, or worthy of a hashtag. It’s messy, it’s personal and it is often much more complicated than deciding to “just quit.” For them, drinking can be a needed self-medication tool, an endless obstacle, or an enjoyable friend.

    Policy and Privilege

    I continue to appreciate many aspects of dry month campaigns, including raising money for charity and bringing discussions of substance use into the limelight. At the same time, these months are worthy of more critical reflection.

    Substance use is complex. People often struggle with their use for reasons directly related to social inequalities, trauma, unsafe supply and poverty. Treating a four-week vacation from alcohol as a moral victory reinforces stigmatizing and negative stereotypes about people who use alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol and other drugs are not inherently bad; the policies we have made around them are what cause harm.

    In the midst of Dry February, my hope for dry campaigns would be that they offer not solely a chance to examine and limit one’s own drinking, but an opportunity to broaden the discussion around how privilege and policy impact one’s relationship with alcohol and other drugs.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Defeating Vaccine Apartheid Will Require Unions That Fight Global Inequality

    A medical worker prepares a dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Algiers, Algeria, on January 17, 2022.

    My grandmother, Ila Bose, passed away in October after several days in the hospital. The exact trajectory leading to her death is not known — she had pneumonia towards the end — but my mother (also a physician) suspects she may have had lingering effects from a previous Covid case.

    As horrible as it is to say this, our family were the lucky ones. My grandmother was well-off compared with most people in India, and while she faced adversities throughout her life, access to medical care was not among them. She even received two doses of one of India’s vaccines.

    The country’s large vaccine industry is being depended upon to meet the minimal goals of COVAX, the international public-private partnership that is meant to initially vaccinate up to 20 percent of the populations of Global South countries.

    This initiative, doomed from the start, has failed poor countries. The African Union reports that only 11 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated in all of Africa; only 16 percent have received any shot at all. Even so, these countries don’t have vaccines to spare: 64 percent of the vaccine supply has been used up.

    Can you imagine looking at these numbers if your loved ones lived in Africa? This is vaccine apartheid: the deep-seated inequality of global vaccine distribution along national lines that reflect racial and economic divisions.

    The COVAX plan was orchestrated by U.S. billionaire Bill Gates, who has somehow parlayed a career at Microsoft into becoming an influential figure in global public health.

    It Hurts U.S. Too

    The emergence of the omicron variant reveals how vaccine apartheid directly affects those of us in wealthy countries too. It has created petri dishes where the coronavirus can further evolve and then spread in all countries, rich and poor.

    Or to put it another way: an injury to one is an injury to all. Unless we come together to stop what is a global problem, we will not reach a solution for any of us.

    Labor has a crucial role to play. Our status as workers gives us power, and it also gives us a basis for solidarity across borders.

    National Nurses United has made a good start — joining 27 sister unions worldwide to bring a petition against vaccine apartheid to the United Nations. That union helped push the Biden administration into supporting a relaxation of intellectual property rules at the World Trade Organization, which would make vaccines more widely available in the long run.

    The Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a labor-backed nonprofit in the U.K., has been raising funds to assist the blockaded Cuban government to acquire raw materials, medicines for treatment, and syringes and vials. This doesn’t just benefit Cuba — the five vaccines developed there could offer the Global South an alternative source for vaccines besides the ones developed by rich countries.

    A Shared Future

    For those of us in richer countries, building union support for a fight against vaccine apartheid can be part of developing a broader common sense in our unions about how global inequality hurts us all.

    To the virus, we are all hosts. To our bosses, we are expendable for profits and can be turned against each other. For example, the accounting industry has used the opportunity of the pandemic to dramatically increase offshoring while laying off workers in the U.S.

    When the omicron wave began, the Biden administration immediately banned travelers from several southern African countries — while still allowing them from countries like the U.K. and Israel that also had omicron cases.

    These sorts of divisive moves are unacceptable if we are going to have a shared future on the planet. We can say instead that we will live as one.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Most Mega-Corporations’ Net-Zero Pledges Are Hollow, Report Finds

    German and Shell officials shovel sand at the start of construction of a CO2-neutral bio-liquid natural gas (bio-LNG) plant on the Shell refinery site on February 9, 2022, in Cologne, Germany.

    In the wake of COP26, a lot of ink has been spilled on how mega-corporations, under pressure from consumers and environmentally aware shareholders, are stepping up to the plate with promises to go entirely carbon neutral within a few years or decades.

    Yet, a shocking new study of 25 mega-corporations, released this month by the NewClimate Institute and Climate Market Watch, finds that much of this is smoke and mirrors. In fact, the researchers conclude, in reality, the emissions-reduction strategies for these companies, with a cumulative revenue of over $3 trillion and a greenhouse gas footprint equaling 5 percent of the world’s total, add up to only a 40 percent reduction rather than the 100 percent rollback implied by “net zero.” As worryingly, by 2030 the reductions would only amount to 23 percent as compared to 2019.

    Moreover, many of the pledges involve somewhat nebulous “offsets,” an accounting trick that allows a company to plant trees or implement other carbon-sequestration strategies in lieu of reducing emissions. Yet, as the authors of the report point out, to get anywhere near net zero, companies can’t play an either/or game: Instead, they have to both implement offsets and also, at the same time, reduce emissions.

    Behemoths like Amazon, Google, Ikea and Walmart all were rated in the report as showing “low integrity” when it came to their net-zero pledges. Others, including Nestlé, Unilever and the BMW Group, were awarded a “very low integrity” moniker for their publicly stated efforts.

    In some instances, these low grades were due to manifest failings; in others, the companies simply weren’t providing enough data to adequately analyze their goals. In the introduction to the report, the authors wrote that, “it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated greenwashing.”

    But what is clear from the report is that the unsubstantiated greenwashing side of the equation is, unfortunately, all too common. Companies seem far more concerned with appearing to be implementing major eco-efforts than with actually fundamentally, and urgently, working to roll back the climate change crisis.

    One of the practices companies use to make their efforts appear better than they in fact are is comparing current and future emissions levels to abnormally high baseline years, so that what in reality are regular annual emissions instead appear to be declining emissions. The GHG [Greenhouse Gas] Protocol defines three main kinds of emissions. Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from a company’s property; scope 2 are indirect emissions from the purchase of electricity, heating, steam production and so on; and scope 3 are all the other emissions associated with a company’s activities, such as the distribution of a company’s product, the packaging of goods, business travel, the emissions associated with the garbage produced at the end of a product’s life, and so on.

    Scope 3, in particular, has proven to be an area that large companies can manipulate data on to make themselves look better on the environment than they in fact are. “For example,” the authors write on page 20 of their 127-page report, “CVS Health’s scope 3 emissions are 70-80% higher in 2019 than in 2017, 2018 and 2020, without a clear explanation, potentially undermining the meaningfulness of the company’s target for a 47% reduction in scope 3 emissions by 2030 compared to 2019.” It’s a similar strategy to the tax-dodge that the Trump Organization is accused of, whereby the company allegedly inflated the values of its properties when trying to get loans, and then deflated the values when paying property taxes.

    In that same section, the authors note that Unilever is claiming emissions reductions for its soaps and detergents operations based on taking credit for more energy-efficient water-heating systems for customers who wash hands with the company’s soap, and the use of more renewable electricity-generation sources for running the washing machines that use the company’s detergent.

    At least 7 of the 25 companies the research focused on were so selective in what emissions they considered that the report concluded they could be hiding up to 98 percent of their actual emissions footprint, making their public promises little more than nonsense. Other companies camouflaged “upstream” and “downstream” emissions — upstream emissions being connected with the production of goods, and downstream emissions being associated with the consumption of those goods — including energy sales and the daily operations of their stores, from easy identification. In some instances, they only mentioned them in their report footnotes — and this despite the fact that the vast majority of their carbon emissions come from these sources. Still others sold off carbon-intensive branches of their operations to subsidiaries, and then reported declining emissions, even though, in reality, they had simply shuffled the emissions from one set of operations to another.

    The malfeasance continues from one realm to the next. In many instances, apparently, the pledge to reach net zero is accompanied by no specific emissions reduction targets on a year-on-year basis, rendering the pledge little more than feel-good waffling. “12 of the companies with (net-)zero emission targets have made no specific commitment for the reduction of their own emissions in the net zero target year,” the authors write. These included Amazon, which the authors lambasted for pledging to get to net zero but not actually putting forward “any specific [greenhouse gas] emission reduction target.” A similar lack of specificity accompanied BMW’s net-zero pledge.

    Pledging to get to net zero is the easy part. Actually getting there, and reshaping supply chains to ensure that at all points of the production and distribution process greenhouse gasses are actually significantly reduced, is the difficult part. The world’s largest corporations are perfecting the art of green spin. But, as this report shows, with catastrophic climate change now a looming reality, it’s past time for them to go beyond the spin and actually ensure that their public commitments are met over the coming years.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Inflation Crisis Is Being Resolved on Backs of Workers. It Doesn’t Have to Be.

    Workers at Jon Donaire desserts factory in Santa Fe Springs, California, picket in front of the company on January 10, 2022.

    On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its latest report on inflation, and the news is not good for working people. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — which measures the cost of consumer products — inflation for all goods, including food and energy, rose again in January, this time by 0.6 percent. This latest increase brings the yearly rate of inflation up to a whopping 7.5 percent, a figure not seen since the early 1980s when out-of-control inflation and a stagnant economy amounted to an all out economic war on U.S. workers. While wages for this same period have also gone up somewhat, rising between 4 and 4.4 percent, this is still far less than the current rate of inflation, and makes up for only a fraction of the value that workers’ wages have lost over the last several decades of neoliberal austerity.

    Though unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention, these latest figures exceeded the expectations of most bourgeois analysts who have been claiming for months that the current rate of inflation is a transitory phenomenon caused in large part by the pandemic, increased oil prices, increased demand, and weakened and overstressed global supply chains. While these factors have certainly contributed to rising costs, they are by no means the end of the story. In fact, large corporations have unsurprisingly used the inflation crisis to jack up the prices of many basic goods, even those unaffected by supply chain disruptions, far beyond what is needed to cover increased production costs, making record profits off the backs of workers and consumers in the process.

    As economist Matt Stoller explained in December, increased profit seeking of major firms in the meatpacking, auto, and retail industries, among many others, is leading to a generalized increase in prices across the economy and could account for as much as 3 percent of the current yearly inflation rate. And indeed, corporate profit margins, despite inflation and the ups and downs of the pandemic, have soared over the last year, to levels not seen since 1950, far exceeding what they were earning before the pandemic. From Exxon Mobil, to Tyson, AstraZeneca, Amazon, and Starbucks, corporations are making a killing even as working people across the world struggle to maintain the value of their already low wages. While bourgeois economists like Stoller believe this problem can be controlled through anti-monopoly legislation or taxes on excess profits, such rapacious profit seeking and increasing exploitation of working people is endemic to capitalist production and can’t be legislated away.

    Despite this corporate windfall, however, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1.5 percent, and other indexes declined sharply on news of the report, largely over fears of a quicker and more virulent response by the Federal Reserve to the crisis. It appears that a full point increase in interest rates could come as early as this March, and many analysts are predicting that the Fed may raise interest rates by as much as 1.75 percent by the end of the year. Interest rates are currently near zero. While on the surface, interest rate hikes may seem to be of little concern for most working people who have few, if any, investments, they are designed to “cool the economy” by simultaneously discouraging spending and encouraging savings, and this can have serious consequences for working people. As we [Left Voice] explained last month:

    Higher interest rates have a real effect on workers. They make it more expensive to spend money, and reduce disposable income. For the most marginalized people in society, they can render basic needs less accessible. And historically, higher interest rates have also kept U.S. companies from expanding employment.

    And of course, interest rate hikes have historically been used as a cudgel to punish working people and undercut the power of unions. In the 1980s, for instance, the Reagan administration and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volker oversaw a policy of increasing interest rates that led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and an unemployment rate above 10 percent.

    Furthermore, increasing interest rates will almost certainly lead to further austerity, as cities and states face increasing borrowing costs to maintain or fund new investments in education, infrastructure, public housing, and services for the poor or homeless, many of whom are still suffering from the negative economic and health effects of the pandemic.

    The ongoing inflation crisis, the cost of which is being passed entirely onto the working class, is just another example of the failure of a system that prioritizes chaotic production in the service of profit over a planned economy built around human need. For the ruling class, there is no solution to the crisis that does not involve further pain for working people, but this does not mean there is nothing to fight for. Using the methods of class struggle, strikes, and mass demonstrations, we can unite the working class to demand a bigger share of the value we produce, to resist austerity, to fight for automatic wage and benefit increases, and to demand a freeze on the price of vital goods and necessities paid for by the profits of the corporations that oversee their production. It is only in such struggles that we can discover and build our true strength as a class, one capable of directly vying for power and control over the productive forces of society.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.