This article was originally published in The National Observer.
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Assad Assad, the nephew of Omar Abdulmajeed Asad, describes his uncle as a very social and caring man. Omar immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and became a small business owner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He and his wife had seven children and many grandchildren, nephews and nieces. Ten years ago, Omar Asad decided to retire in the village of Jaljulia, in Ramallah, Palestine, where he was originally from.
Asad loved family gatherings and regularly went around to check up on and visit relatives, according to his nephew. He attended a big family gathering on January 11 and was driving back around 2:30 am. At this time, members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — the military force that carries out the occupation of Palestine — were executing an overnight raid in Jaljulia. Night raids are a common practice by IDF soldiers, serving to intimidate Palestinians in their most vulnerable state by invading their safest places while they are sleeping.
As Asad was driving home through his village, he was reportedly pulled out of his car by IDF soldiers who aggressively handled him, handcuffed him with plastic zip ties, gagged his mouth, blindfolded him and forced him to lie on his stomach. Soldiers then dragged him for about 200 meters and beat him to death. His nephew said there were about 40 soldiers just watching this handcuffed elderly man, aged 80, be repeatedly hit by armed soldiers across his entire body. Asad suffered from a subsequent heart attack, and was left to die on the ground, unconscious and handcuffed.
“He was buried with bruises across his entire body,” said Asad’s nephew, Assad. “What kind of threat does an 80-year-old man pose to armed Israeli soldiers? He was barely able to walk and they viciously beat him to death.”
Omar Asad was an American citizen, a fact that has garnered his story much more media attention than it might have otherwise received. However, this fact shouldn’t matter — and in many ways, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of a Palestinian’s national protections as a typically stateless person, Israel exhibits a reckless disregard for Palestinian life. And its strongest ally, the United States, has responded apathetically to the killing of Omar Asad. On January 13, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the department got in touch with Asad’s family to express their condolences, and that it has also “been in touch with Israel to ‘seek clarification’ about ‘this incident.’” Somehow, the United States managed to “two-sides” the beating and killing of an 80-year-old man — a standard feature of any commentary they provide on Israel’s violent actions.
Despite Israel’s existing occupation of Palestine and apartheid system that subjugates Palestinians within its borders and beyond, the United States is considering adding Israel to the Visa Waiver Program. This would mean that U.S. and Israeli citizens traveling between the U.S. and Israel won’t need visas to enter either country. Outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Gilad Erdan claims that Israel will join the program by mid-2022. This move would systematically solidify Israeli apartheid into the U.S. immigration system. Palestinians and Muslims are already subject to severe scrutiny in the United States, leading to many being deported and denied entry at the border merely for their identity as Palestinians.
Omar Asad’s brutal killing illustrates how Palestinian Americans are unprotected by the United States, whose loyalty is to Israel first. Most countries on the visa waiver list maintain a reciprocity requirement, meaning both countries must allow in nearly all citizens of the other. Israel and its U.S. supporters have previously lobbied for an exception that would allow it to deny U.S. citizens entry to Israel under the auspices of “national security.” This would subject U.S. citizens to Israel’s existing apartheid policies at the border — and serve as a blank check for the Israeli government to blacklist, profile and ban entry to U.S. citizens, especially of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim descent.
Meanwhile, Palestinian American and Muslim communities in the U.S. have organized and mobilized to demand action by the U.S. government for Asad’s death. Someone who had community ties in Milwaukee, his family and the Milwaukee’s Islamic community hosted an ‘azaa, or gathering to offer condolences to the family. His daughter, Hala Hamad, told The Washington Post, “We want a thorough investigation from the U.S. government and the U.N. because [Israel] can’t investigate their own crimes.” Ned Price had previously said they were going to reference Israeli investigations into the “incident.”
American Palestine advocacy organizations like American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights regularly ignite campaigns to lobby for condemnation or action against the killing, exile, imprisonment and torture of Palestinians within the homeland, who may be stateless or have varied national privileges. In lobbying for accountability and condemnation of the killing of Omar Asad, a U.S. citizen, it is imperative we demand accountability from the very source of funding for Israel’s war crimes — the United States itself. My organization, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization advocating for legislation supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people. AJP Action has mobilized its constituents through an action alert, which makes it easy for constituents to directly contact their Congress members and demand the U.S. State Department pursue an independent investigation, per the family’s wishes. Around 3,000 emails were sent from constituents to their members of Congress demanding accountability for Omar Asad. Almost 200 tweets were sent, and more than 1,300 supporters engaged in the cause.
Although we have yet to see the fruits of these actions in terms of any solid government action, Rep. Marie Newman (D-Illinois), Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) and Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin) have issued public statements expressing remorse or condemnation of the killing of Asad. (Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), had also expressed condolences on Twitter, but the tweet has since been deleted.)
As AJP Action Advocacy Director Ayah Ziyadeh told Truthout,
It is only January 19, and six Palestinians have been killed this year. We as American constituents demand our tax dollars not fund extrajudicial killings, land theft, home demolitions and other war crimes in Palestine. Omar Asad’s family deserves accountability and justice. We as Palestinian Americans demand an end to the funding of the apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. As an enabler of these unlawful killings and the illegal occupation of Palestine, the U.S. must end its complicity and begin holding Israel accountable for its actions.
The Palestinian American community and the Palestine solidarity movement at large stands with Omar Abdulmajeed Asad and his family, and we commit to working toward their requisite justice and successive peace.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Joe Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve longstanding foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.
Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of 10 critical foreign policy issues:
1. Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the U.S. from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.
Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.
2. Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states. The U.S. bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.
Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.
3. Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.
After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.
Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.
4. Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. After Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.
Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.
A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden has still not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.
5. Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine. Biden took office as the first COVID vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the U.S. and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”
Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a nonprofit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the U.S. and other Western countries have chosen to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the COVID virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the delta and omicron variants.
Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for COVID vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.
6. Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.
Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the U.S. has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.
7. Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantánamo torture victims. Under Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.
In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Twenty years after the U.S. set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.
8. Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the U.S. tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.
Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the U.S. claim to democratic and human rights credentials.
Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Honduras — and maybe Brazil in 2022.
9. Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and to stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to OK a $650 million weapons sale. The U.S. still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
10. Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes. The U.S. is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.
Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.
But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. embassy remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.
Conclusion
Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional, even global, instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.
The U.S. has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.
As a presidential candidate, Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but as president he has instead doubled down on the policies through which the U.S. lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.
Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond, however reluctantly, by adopting more rational ways.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Over the past few weeks, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has swept the U.S., supply chain woes have worsened.
Three things seem to be happening: the first is that so many workers are now out sick that delivery systems to grocery stores and retailers are starting to break down; in other words, the produce has been harvested, but in many instances it’s stuck in warehouses, or on ships, or in food silos because of a shortage of people to speedily deliver goods around this huge country. That, combined with a slew of tough winter storms across the U.S. in recent weeks has, retailers report, snarled truck traffic and caused delivery backups. Related to this, primary products are making it to processing facilities, but those facilities have so many workers out sick that they can’t keep up with demand to make processed foods, such as soups and cereals. The result? Empty shelves in grocery stores. Food chains are reporting they are out of as much as 15 percent of their stock at the moment, significantly higher than is usually the case.
That doesn’t mean Americans are about to go hungry as grocery stores empty out — the food distribution system in the U.S. is more resilient than that, and has an awful lot of redundancies built in — but it does mean food choice options are declining at the moment, and food prices are likely to continue their upward march at an even faster pace. This will, of course, be a burden carried disproportionately by the poor: a large-scale study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2016 found that low-income families in the U.S. spend between 28 and 42 percent of their pre-tax income on food; by contrast, wealthier families spent considerably less than 10 percent of their income on food.
The second thing is that so many retail workers are sick that stores simply don’t have the staffing resources to fully stock their shelves while also catering to their usual numbers of customers. Many, including big-name stores like Walmart, Apple and Macy’s, have responded by reducing their hours and/or cutting back on services. Some grocery stores are reporting that up to 8 percent of their workers are now out sick on any given day as the nationwide Omicron surge nears its peak.
The third contributing factor to the empty shelves being reported around the country is a more fundamental global supply-chain breakdown as the world enters the third year of the pandemic. Countries that had hoped to be far beyond lockdowns by 2022 are back to attempting to control the spread of the virus through the crude instrument of shuttering large parts of their economies and ordering people to work at home where possible. China — whose Sinopharm vaccine, including its booster shot, has been peculiarly outplayed by the Omicron variant — is locking down entire cities still, affecting tens of millions of people. As a result, key parts of the international supply chain, which is disproportionately dependent on Chinese factories, are particularly fragile at the moment. Asia analysts predict that the supply chain could come under unprecedented pressure over coming months if Omicron starts spreading in Asia at the speed that it has already spread through the U.S. and Europe, and if China continues to enforce its “zero-COVID” policy, which relies on locking down whole cities and mandating universal testing if even a single case of the virus is picked up by health authorities. Lock down enough cities simultaneously and it’s inevitable that factories will also have to temporarily cease operations.
“The same capitalist system that moved production out of the U.S. to China to make more profits thereby required long global supply chains to feed production in China and bring the products back to U.S. markets,” Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, tells Truthout. “But long supply chains are more vulnerable to disruption than short ones.”
Because the U.S. and its corporate behemoths have so much bargaining power within the global economy, at least in the short term, that protects the country and its more affluent consumers from the worst impacts of this global squeeze. Prices will go up, but for those who can afford them, most goods continue to be available. In poorer countries, by contrast, real shortages of vital goods, and a lack of money to pay for them, are even more of an everyday reality in 2022 than they were in the recent past.
Global estimates are that in 2020 alone, as a result of the pandemic, as many as 75 million people fell into extreme poverty; and 80 million more became under-nourished because they no longer had access to sufficient supplies of food. The World Bank estimates that in 2020 alone, 97 million people globally saw their income fall below $2 per day. Since then, as the pandemic has dragged on, almost certainly that catastrophic situation has only become worse. If Omicron leads to even more disruptions, poorer countries will find their consumer power curtailed even further.
The exacerbated supply chain woes unleashed by Omicron don’t, of course, play out equally in all locations and across all income groups. The wealthier the countries and individuals, the more options they have available to them — to simply pay more to buy goods that are, at least temporarily, scarce; or, for individuals, to shop around to look for particular goods if one store doesn’t have them. By contrast, poorer countries and individuals get frozen out of tight markets.
In the U.S., the poorer one is, the more one tends to rely only on a small handful of stores. In 2017, the USDA estimated that more than 19 million Americans had only limited access to supermarkets and grocery stores. A disproportionate number of those living in the U.S.’s “food deserts” are people of color. When goods are absent or prices spike in food deserts, poorer consumers — whose incomes aren’t increasing at the same capacity as are prices — often have no choice but to do without.
According to Wolff, fixing these supply chains in a way that protects the poor would involve building up inventories that could be tapped if and when the delivery of goods starts to break down. But companies are reluctant to do that, he says, because it takes a bite out of their short-term profits. Instead, they wait for catastrophes to hit and then, if and when they do — witness the pandemic — the market response leads to increased prices.
“Supply chain disruptions threaten corporate profits,” Wolff says. “Their executives respond by allocating reduced quantities of outputs among those who demand those outputs. In doing so, they tend to raise prices and ship goods to higher-income outlets where consumers are most able to pay those higher prices. They correspondingly ship less to those outlets ‘serving’ lower-income folks less able or willing to pay higher prices.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This past weekend in Arizona, Donald Trump ratcheted up his inadvertent impersonation of Freddy Kreuger — the villain of Nightmare on Elm Street — in a political horror show designed to infiltrate our dreams and then warp our reality.
For the past two years, Trump has flirted with, cajoled and egged on extremist anti-vaxxers. He did so, despite having signed off on his administration’s huge investments in vaccine development, most likely because he saw that political hay could be made from tapping into the anger and frustration that a significant proportion of the American public felt over school and business shutdowns, and, by extension, the suspicion of science and of experts that animated the growing anti-vaccination movement.
Over the last couple of weeks, however, as his political battle against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for control of the GOP has intensified, Trump seems to have realized that DeSantis — who has gone to bat against vaccine mandates, masking in schools and a host of other public health efforts — has outflanked him on anti-vaccine extremism. And so, the disgraced ex-president, never one to let principle or political coherence stand in the way of opportunism, has pivoted, apparently hoping to head DeSantis off at the pass before he picks up enough wind in his rather unpleasant tail to make him become a viable contender for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024.
Trump formerly urged his armed supporters via Twitter to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN! … LIBERATE MINNESOTA! … LIBERATE VIRGINIA” from public health mandates (in his tweets he named states that at the time were all controlled by Democratic governors). Now, however, he seeks to occupy slightly different political terrain: he has intensified his spat with DeSantis by going onto One America News Network to deride the Floridian for not publicly stating whether he has been vaccinated and boosted. Perhaps to the surprise of his interviewer, the ex-president, who once mused aloud about whether the injection of bleach could serve as a counter to COVID, stated that vaccines worked, that he himself had been boosted, and that he viewed as “gutless” conservative politicians who themselves were vaccinated, but who refused to publicly acknowledge their vaccine status for fear of alienating conservative voters. He didn’t mention DeSantis by name, but the object of his derision was clear.
Having come out on the side of vaccinations, however, Trump couldn’t resist adding his own particularly toxic racist bile into the mix.
On January 15, at a political rally in the southwestern Arizona town of Florence — a town that has, for decades, been defined by its large number of state and federal prisons, as well as immigration detention facilities, but which is slated to soon lose one of its two state prisons, and, with it, hundreds of jobs — the demagogic Trump lobbed a racial Molotov cocktail into the vaccination conversation.
New York State has recently issued guidelines for treatment of COVID and for vaccination priorities that suggests providers take medical vulnerability into account when allocating scarce treatments. The guidelines note that some groups have been systemically excluded from medical coverage and from equitable health care efforts over centuries of U.S. history, leading to deeply ingrained health disparities between races. Thus, the guidelines note, Black and Brown Americans are disproportionately likely to die from COVID, and so race becomes one factor among many when deciding how and when to allocate treatment.
Trump ran with this, and twisted these guidelines into something entirely different, into something approximating a deliberate, murderous onslaught against whites approved by Democratic state legislatures.
As the Associated Press reported, Trump told his audience at the grotesquely named “Save America Rally” that, “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating … white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”
The utter falseness of these claims is abundantly apparent: when the New York Times fact-checked the story, it found no evidence that white New Yorkers were being denied either vaccines or therapeutics, and found that white people in the state were vaccinated at a higher rate than were Black residents of New Yorker state. Even the UK’s Daily Mail, a bulwark of conservative opinion-writing noted the myriad falsehoods in Trump’s speech.
The speech was largely ignored by the media, and by the political leadership in D.C., but it oughtn’t to have been. This was racial fearmongering of the most naked sort, the covert dog whistle of racism replaced by the overt bullhorn of fascism.
There should have been a coordinated denunciation of Trump’s attempt to put a lit match to a fuse here. But President Biden, who has spent much of the last few weeks on the attack against Trump, didn’t specifically call him out on this speech. Nor did senior Republicans in Congress. There was not even a perfunctory denunciation from Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy of the sort that McConnell, at least, used to be able to muster following, say, Trump calling the Nazi mob at Charlottesville “very fine people.” Perhaps the GOP leaders — having seen the political mischief they could unleash, particularly in majority-white suburbs, through waging a war against what they’re inaccurately referring to as the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” — are standing by to see whether Trump’s racist bomb-throwing on vaccines and COVID treatments will curry similar suburban favor. There was silence, too, from so-called moderates such as Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins.
Yes, we’re tired of Trump, and yes, it would be a blessed relief if we never had to listen to his vile rhetoric again. But Trump’s out there, and millions of Americans are still taking their cues from him. When he spouts the kind of inflammatory lies that he did in Florence, Arizona, his statements get picked up and amplified by conservative television, radio and internet personalities, and, left unchallenged, his lies are embraced by the consumers of conservative media as their new truths.
As President Biden’s administration flounders in response to the hyper-contagious Omicron variant, and as DeSantis outflanks Trump on the right with his anti-vaccine, anti-public health jeremiads, Trump is attempting to reinvent himself as the visionary proponent of vaccines, the leader who saw earlier than anyone else the need for a warp-speed effort to develop a variety of vaccines as a way to beat back the pandemic. But he is also taking care to energize his white nationalist, conservative base, many of whom are fervently anti-vaccine, as he makes this pivot. And so, he has settled on a compromise: He now is pro-vaccine, but he’s also ever more explicitly positioning himself in George Wallace territory, tapping into racial resentment and spreading lies about whites being deliberately denied life-saving medical interventions.
In so many ways, this country is already a powder keg. Trump thrives amid this chaos. He has always relied on a politics of racial resentment: He made clear his ambitions in the 1980s when he took out newspaper ads urging that the African American and Latino teenagers falsely accused of gang-raping a white jogger in Central Park be executed, and who refused to apologize once those teenagers were exonerated of the crime. This is also the man who opened his presidential campaign with a dramatic accusation that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and “drug dealers”, and the man who attempted to impose a travel ban against Muslims. So it should be no surprise that in 2022 this same man is spreading explosive lies about Democratic politicians supposedly stymying efforts by white people to get vaccines, in an attempt to distract from the oddity of his sudden attempt to get his supporters to embrace the value of vaccinations.
It’s classic Trump-deflection. After a year of the ex-president pandering to anti-vaccine sentiment, he’s now working on a rewrite. As de facto head of the Republican Party, Trump appears to be trying to head into the midterms able to lambast Biden for his mishandling of the Omicron surge, while also finding a baseless way to blame Democrats and their public policy priorities for the large number of white conservatives who remain unvaccinated and who are, on a daily basis, still dying of the disease. It’s a wild attempt to downplay the fact that the low vaccination rates within Trump’s base are actually due to the miasma of misinformation on vaccines that his own allies have aggressively been spreading.
Against such a propagandist, silence doesn’t work. However exhausting the project, he must be called out again and again, and once more again so that his lies are never accepted as the truth.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Over the last two months, it’s become increasingly clear that President Joe Biden’s best days in office might be almost certainly behind him. Though he was never going to be an FDR-type figure, overly credulous press coverage and endorsements notwithstanding, Biden could claim significant victories in his first year in office. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March 2021, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed that November, were massive pieces of legislation that far exceeded Obama’s response to the global financial meltdown during his first year in office.
Now, entering his second year, Biden’s agenda appears to be dead in the water. The much-touted Build Back Better Act, Biden’s signature legislation, has completely stalled out on Capitol Hill. It was initially linked with the infrastructure bill, but Democratic leadership and conservatives in the party were successful in beating down the Congressional Progressive Caucus until they ultimately relented and separated the bills. Ever since the bills were decoupled, Biden’s social spending bill has been dying a slow death at the hands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
In the final days of 2021, Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, sensing impending doom, switched gears. The top priority became voting rights and election reform, although what that meant specifically was anyone’s guess. The White House and congressional leadership began pushing two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Separately, some Senate Democrats began working with Republicans on a bill to amend the Electoral Count Act, which would change the law that Donald Trump attempted to exploit to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The January 6 committee is working on their version of a similar bill.
Schumer, for his part, has been reluctant to move forward with the much narrower Electoral College reform bills, believing that it would undercut any broader voting rights expansion. Last week, Biden gave what was touted as a major speech on voting rights, during which he finally supported a “carve out” for the Senate’s filibuster for voting rights legislation. The following day, he went to Capitol Hill to marshal support for his various efforts.
Both the speech and the trip to negotiate with lawmakers risked being too little, too late. Local Georgia voting rights groups boycotted Biden’s address because they believed voting rights had become a second-tier issue for Biden, rather than a core priority. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote that Biden’s efforts “came in the last days of the battle.” As for his attempt to twist arms in the Senate, Politico characterized it as “doomed for failure.” Even more embarrassingly, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema apparently blindsided the administration with a Senate address reiterating her opposition to a filibuster carve-out just minutes before Biden was set to meet with Democrats to rally support for his voting bills.
Much like Biden’s and Schumer’s approach to the Omicron wave, the White House and congressional leadership appear to be several steps behind on every issue they touch. The administration is reactive, and has been on its back foot for months. Biden’s poll numbers have cratered, which is to be expected to a certain extent, but he and his advisers aren’t doing themselves any favors with their scattershot approach.
Most of the blame for this sorry situation rests squarely at the feet of Senators Manchin and Sinema. Some have said working with Manchin is “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch” due to his constantly shifting negotiating positions. He holds so much power in the closely divided Senate that liberal TV host Chris Hayes has argued the White House should wave the white flag and just ask Manchin to write a Build Back Better bill that he’d sign. “I don’t quite understand why we haven’t gotten to the point where they say, Senator Manchin, write the bill that you will vote for and we will pass it, because that’s the only way out of this,” Hayes told The New York Times’s Ezra Klein. Others have argued for a similar approach to election reform, claiming that fixing the law Trump tried to use to stay in power, the Electoral Count Act, is the best and only option on the table.
Unfortunately, even these inadequate measures may prove to be too large a lift. Manchin, for his part, has already walked away from one version of the spending bill that he had previously endorsed. There’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t do the same again. And any bipartisan election reform legislation that hampers Republican legal claims toward minority rule could stall out in a million different ways. Still, it’s understandable for those on the left to look over these meager offerings and take what few victories may be available. The time for playing hardball may have passed Biden by, and his pressure campaign is likely as much a form of virtue signaling to disaffected liberal voters as it is a real push to get passable legislation.
The broader blame for the predicament the Democrats find themselves in falls on the shoulders of the faction of the party that Biden and Schumer belong to — the same faction as Manchin and Sinema. Decades of divestment from pro-labor policies in favor of neoliberal Clintonian triangulation has resulted in a party at odds with itself. The party is uninterested in, and incapable of, pursuing long-term strategies that require building a bench of progressive candidates and elected officials. Instead, the party’s organs function as an incumbent reelection racket and a jobs guarantee program for wealthy consultants whose only function is to punch to the left.
There’s no reason that the Democrats couldn’t field, support and elect a working-class candidate in West Virginia or Arizona, if that had been a multiyear priority. Rather than spending time and money training and cultivating teachers, working-class activists and union organizers, the Democratic Party has treated those types of candidates as hostile enemies to be vanquished. Instead, they prioritize prosecutors and veterans of a particular, centrist ideological bent. As a result, there will always be a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema — or a Joe Lieberman — willing to tank the party’s entire agenda.
The irony is that after spending his career as a conservative Democrat, Biden’s agenda is being thwarted by his own supposed allies. He ran as a creature of the Senate, who could force Republicans to support some of his most ambitious plans due to his decades in elected office. Now, he can’t even whip support from his own party. If the Democrats hadn’t spent decades doing everything possible to disempower the left and the party’s activist base, Biden might actually be able to advance his legislation. Unfortunately for the millions of people in the United States who stand to benefit from Biden’s stalled plans, that has never been a priority for the modern Democratic Party.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On January 15, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was leaving a planning meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign when he was called back into the room. It was his birthday — his last, it would turn out.
The staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would usually give King a new suit, but this year they wanted to make him laugh.
Xernona Clayton teased, “We know how fond you are of our president Lyndon Johnson,” which got a laugh. Then she pulled out a metal cup engraved: “We are cooperating with Lyndon’s War on Poverty. Drop coins and bills in cup.”
King laughed deeply, but the joke was all too true.
In 1968, the Vietnam War was costing billions while the War on Poverty fell to the side, like spare change in a cup. Today too, our government has said yes to increasing the military budget to $778 billion for next year alone — and no to $1.7 trillion over 10 years for the Build Back Better Act.
So here we are again on King’s birthday, throwing millions of children back into poverty by letting the expanded child tax credits expire, offering no more than change in a cup.
As a Christian ethicist who studies King, I think it’s important to remember that he spent his last months organizing a campaign of the poor to challenge political priorities like these.
He brought together poor people who were already organizing their communities, along with civil rights leaders and faith leaders. The plan was to bring 3,000 poor people of all races to occupy Washington, D.C., and confront the administration and Congress about their failure to address the triple evils of racism, poverty, and war.
Although King was assassinated before the campaign launched, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward in the spirit of King’s words from the year before, when he challenged the idea that coins in a cup were enough.
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” he said at his famous Riverside Church speech in 1967. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Calling for “a true revolution of values,” King also warned: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
His words ring too true today. True compassion is not flinging coins at poverty while spending four times as much on a war budget or watching the wealth of CEOs grow exponentially while workers’ wages lag decades behind.
As in 1968, it will take a campaign of the poor to move us towards the revolution of values we need in these times.
Launched in 2018 on the 50th anniversary of the original, the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has been growing across 40 states, organizing people impacted by systemic injustice and moral leaders to insist that our elected officials listen to our demands, defend our democracy, and pass a moral budget that restructures our poverty-producing system.
Amid a global pandemic and ongoing attacks on democracy and on the poor, we have asserted our right to far more than change in a cup. We are now organizing for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington on June 18, 2022.
Already there are meetings happening in state coordinating committees across the country to plan massive delegations to Washington, D.C., pulling the 140 million poor and low-income people in the nation together across geography, partisan lines, race, and ethnicity. We are coming to demand that our elected officials make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up.
We want to observe King’s birthday the way he did — by building the power of the poor for a radical revolution of values.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the early weeks of the pandemic, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy brilliantly laid out the stakes of one of the coronavirus’s reverberating impacts. According to Roy, COVID-19 profoundly disrupted everyone’s modes of living under global capitalism. “It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a halt,” she wrote. Roy then powerfully asserted that the pandemic was — among other things — “a portal,” or a moment for us to “temporarily, perhaps … make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it [capitalism] or look for a better engine.”
The rebellions against state violence the following summer, prompted by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others, also contributed to the sense that we were on the precipice of a reckoning. Millions of people around the world took to the streets to protest against structural racism in a multitude of ways — marching, direct action, property destruction, and the tearing down of monuments to racism and colonialism.
Meanwhile, however, as scholars such as Kathleen Belew, Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray have noted, many white Americans used the moment to resist any movement toward racial and social justice, through both white power groups and ad hoc counterrevolutionary tactics. This massive backlash manifested in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and in the passage of what historian Timothy Snyder has called new “memory laws” prohibiting the teaching of histories of race and racism, as well as sexuality and gender. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has exacerbated economic inequality as the 400 richest Americans increased their wealth by $4.5 trillion even as inflation cuts into working Americans’ incomes. The U.S. remains devoted to militarism. Antiwar activists Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies found that the U.S. dropped an average of 46 bombs a day over the last two decades. Our fixation on bombing manifested itself in an extremely cynical manner toward the end of the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan when the military lied about killing 10 civilians in a drone strike.
Like today’s racial justice organizers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also wrestled with a national and international reckoning in the last years of his life by questioning the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism and militarism at the base of U.S. society. In his “Beyond Vietnam” sermon delivered in April 1967, King issued a damning condemnation of the war in Vietnam and U.S. militarism. “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,” King said, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” In an interview 10 days before his assassination, King told Rabbi Everett Gendler, “[W]e’ve got to face the fact that America is a racist country. We have got to face the fact that racism still occupies the throne of our nation.” He continued, “I don’t think we will ultimately solve the problem of racial injustice until this is recognized, and until this is worked on.”
In his last Sunday sermon, King articulated an analysis of the reckoning in what might serve as the closest equivalent to Roy’s analysis of the pandemic as a portal. In “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” King told the audience that they were living through a revolutionary moment, in fact, a “triple revolution” — a revolution in computer technology, “a revolution in weaponry” and “a human rights revolution.” After laying out the stakes, King implored Americans to respond to the moment by developing a global perspective when dealing with poverty, racism, colonialism and war. Americans desperately needed to change their priorities. Ultimately, to do this, as King wrote a year before, Americans needed to undergo a “a radical revolution of values” if it hoped to defeat the giant triplets.
And how might Americans take advantage of this potentially revolutionary moment? For King, the answer lay in building a coalition of poor people and workers and engaging in mass civil disobedience. He told the crowd who watched his last Sunday sermon that, “We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign.” And King planned for this coalition to disrupt the normal operations of government until Congress took proper action to eradicate poverty. He speculated in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, “If 100,000 Negroes march in a major city to a strategic location, they will make municipal operations difficult to conduct; they will exceed the capacity of even the most reckless local government to use force against them; and they will repeat this action daily if necessary.” If the triple revolution was a portal for King, the poor people’s campaign would burst through it.
In today’s world, as in King’s, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is not the vehicle for our pursuit “for a better engine.” Right now, under a Biden presidency, we have broken records in the number of coronavirus infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) recent confusing guidelines for work and schooling seem to be more concerned with preventing further disruptions to the economy. The federal government has pulled the plug on the range of economic benefits keeping people out of poverty, such as rent relief, expanded unemployment benefits and the monthly enhanced child tax credit payments. Unequal vaccine distribution on the part of the U.S., global corporations and the rest of the West leaves much of the world at risk of emerging variants. Yet, we continue to live in a moment where the U.S. Congress can pass giant defense budgets in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.
Continuing his crusade against militarism in the weeks before his assassination in 1968, King argued for redistributing resources away from militarism to ending poverty and promoting jobs, health care, education and housing. King also issued a warning about the direction of the U.S. that aptly describes our existential crises of entrenched economic inequality, a deadly pandemic and climate change. He told members of Local 1199 National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees on March 10, 1968, “Something is wrong with the ship of state. It is not moving toward new and more secure shores, but toward old destructive rocks.”
However, the work of grassroots movements continues in our time, as it did in King’s: Since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of activists in cities like Portland, Oregon, and universities such as the University of Southern California have rallied around the demand “Care Not Cops” in an effort to reorient priorities away from criminalization, policing and incarceration, and toward an ethic of care. This ethic of care applies not only to fighting against racist state violence, but also to developing COVID-19 mutual aid efforts. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) continued the trend of workers exercising leverage to secure better COVID-19 protections to improve working and learning conditions for educators and students. Although antiwar organizing and protests have not garnered as much attention, organizations like Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition continue leading antiwar protests against U.S. bombing in the Middle East. Indigenous people and antiwar activists struck a win against U.S. militarism in Hawaii when they successfully forced the Navy to drain the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility at Pearl Harbor where its jet fuel leak in the water supply sickened thousands. O’ahu-based Water Protectors led protests and engaged in community organizing, while established groups like the Sierra Club amplified activists’ calls to shut down the facility.
Despite his recognition that the U.S. might pass through its revolutionary situation into a darker moment, King maintained Americans had a choice. Despite white resistance to civil rights, the Vietnam War and the federal government’s unwillingness to escalate the war against poverty, King told striking Black sanitation workers the night before his assassination, “[W]e, as a people will get to the promised land.”
The path to the promised land for King was through meeting the revolutionary moment by undergoing a revolution of values and a reevaluation of society. And while King did not minimize voting rights, he did not see the ballot box as the only strategy for restructuring a society. He strove to convince Americans, especially all his allies in the civil rights movement, of the importance of building a multiracial coalition of poor and working people and engaging in massive civil disobedience.
We are in a similar moment. Only mass action — combined with the slow work of grassroots power-building — can break through the crisis. To paraphrase Roy and King, we must constantly put our “bodies and souls in motion” in our search for a “better engine,” or a sustainable, and good, life. We cannot confront the portal meekly; we must burst through it.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A year ago, VICE’s Motherboard published an account of the underhanded tactics used by IRI Consultants, the “union avoidance” firm Google hired to prevent its employees from unionizing. The report used leaked files to show how IRI gathered private information on the personalities, work ethics, and motivations of its clients’ employees and then used that data to target individual workers in an effort to sway their votes in union elections.
While the corporate press has lately reported on the upsurge in unionization efforts by workers at Big Tech companies, it has mostly ignored how these companies regularly hire union-busting consultants to thwart those organizing efforts. Project Censored identified Motherboard’s report on Google union-busting as one of the most important but underreported news stories of 2020-2021. There has been no subsequent corporate news coverage of the sensational leaks that Motherboard released last January. The only other coverage of the Motherboard leaks was a January 8, 2021, post on the independent, grassroots labor news site Payday Report, which discussed IRI’s attempts to stop Seattle health care workers from unionizing but did not mention IRI’s work for Google.
Corporate news media’s lack of attention to this story is symptomatic of its refusal to focus on workers, workers’ rights and the labor movement, not to mention the economic realities of social class in the U.S. The perspectives and interests of working people seldom feature in “business” news. The result is a one-sided view of work and workers.
One Missed Story After Another
Every year, Project Censored spotlights stories that were reported by independent outlets such as Truthout, Common Dreams, Labor Notes and Payday Report, but ignored or underreported by CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the rest of the commercial, for-profit news media. A glance at some of labor-related stories from the Project’s recent top 25 “censored” story lists illustrates just how oblivious the corporate media is toward workers and the realities of their working lives.
The Project identified a 2019 International Labor Organization study, which found that low-wage workers face dramatically increased risks of premature death, stress- and fatigue-related illness, burnout and declining mental health as one of its top stories from 2019-2020. The study was covered by alternative news outlets like Common Dreams but completely ignored by the establishment press. That same year, the Project tabbed the actions of the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as another important but overlooked story. The Trump NLRB changed the rules for union certification elections, without advance notice, in ways that disadvantaged workers and made it much easier for employers to decertify legally recognized collective bargaining agents. The story was reported by Truthout, Common Dreams, The Nation and some legal trade publications, but received no attention from the corporate press.
Looking even further back, in 2012, Project Censored spotlighted the legislative attack on the U.S. Postal Service by the Republican majority in Congress as a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the powerful postal workers’ union. Allison Kilkenny wrote about this attack in an article for Truthout, and Matt Taibbi raised the alarm about it in an editorial for Rolling Stone. While the corporate press reported on USPS’s financial woes and the possibility that the postal service would eliminate Saturday deliveries in order to balance its books, very few of these outlets traced those woes to the GOP’s anti-union animus.
Even when the corporate media do cover workers’ demands for better pay and working conditions, this coverage is usually shallow, lacking in context and often tardy. A case in point is the great wildcat strike wave of 2020-2021 unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which Project Censored identified as one of 2020’s top censored stories in this year’s book, State of the Free Press 2022. Almost as soon as the U.S. went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, millions of essential workers — including meatpackers, delivery drivers, nurses, teachers, janitors, warehouse workers and grocery clerks — began staging short strikes and walkouts in the face of dangerous working conditions to demand better pay, protective equipment and health benefits.
Payday Report, a two-person operation based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, consistently tracked this unprecedented burst of militancy in a COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map that has identified some 1,750 strikes since March 2020. A few other alternative news outlets, including The Guardian, also reported on the surge in work stoppages. But the corporate news media mostly ignored the year’s unprecedented wave of labor actions — except for a brief period in August 2020 when big commercial media reported on strikes by professional athletes protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by Wisconsin police. Finally, in October 2021, when thousands of workers at John Deere and Kellogg’s struck for better pay and benefits, the establishment press began breathlessly reporting on “Striketober,” a full year and half after independent news outlets first drew attention to the strike wave.
Workers’ Issues Steadily Disappear From the Mainstream Media
What explains the corporate media’s abysmal coverage of workers, their issues and their movements? After all, however you define and measure it, the working class makes up the majority of the country’s adult population. Why have establishment media written off workers and their concerns as undeserving of serious, sustained attention?
News critics and scholarly media analysts have long noted the lack of corporate news reporting about workers, labor unions and labor issues. In his pioneering 1979 study Deciding What’s News, sociologist Herbert Gans observed that “most news is about affluent people, almost by definition,” and he noted that working-class people who were once covered in the news had by the 1970s “virtually disappeared.” Four decades later, workers are, if anything, even less visible in the news. In his 2019 book, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, Christopher Martin documents how the newspaper industry’s interest in cultivating an increasingly upscale audience led papers to eliminate the “labor beat” — journalists who specialized in reporting on unions and the labor movement — and to frame coverage of labor actions from the perspective of management and middle-class consumers rather than workers. Martin writes that, “across the nation and in nearly every city and town, no consistent beat covers labor or workplace issues. The occasional stories that do appear lack any sense of continuity or content.”
Commercial news outlets’ efforts to attract the high-income audiences coveted by advertisers partly explains why workers have disappeared from the news. University of Illinois professor Nikki Usher, in her book News for the Rich, White and Blue, points to another likely cause: Many journalists now come from professional, upper-class families, have college degrees and live in big cities. Usher notes that 90 percent of journalists have college degrees (versus 25 percent of all U.S. adults). She also observes that the route to most jobs in journalism require unpaid or low-paid internships and cites a study by the Asian American Journalists Association that found that 65 percent of the most desirable internships with prestigious national media outlets are awarded to students attending a handful of elite, highly selective colleges. As a consequence, she concludes, “journalism is increasingly for and by the rich and white.”
To this we could add the fact that corporate media’s coverage has been increasingly shaped by a steady stream of “flak” and “propaganda” from business-affiliated, anti-union think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the State Policy Network and its numerous affiliates, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute.
Make Workers Visible Again
In order to make workers and labor issues more prominent in the news media, news consumers will have to take steps to hold news organizations accountable for ignoring the lives and concerns of the vast majority. Media monitoring and news literacy programs such as Project Censored and the Critical Media Project can do a lot to call out class biases and gaps in corporate news coverage. Supporting genuinely independent news outlets such as Truthout, Labor Notes and Payday Report, which treat workers’ struggles for better pay and working conditions as newsworthy, can also help to amplify workers’ voices throughout the media ecosystem. Sharing these independent outlets’ stories and contributing donations to ensure that they have the funding necessary to continue their work are direct ways to support them.
Finally, we need to pressure news organizations to diversify their newsrooms, including more reporters from low-income, blue-collar class backgrounds and more people from non-elite educational backgrounds. As labor militancy continues to grow, let’s make sure the whole country knows about it.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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It is a sad fact that it requires a major anniversary, two decades on from the arrival of the first prisoners in hoods and orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray prison, for the media and the U.S. public to pay attention to Guantánamo and the 39 men who remain imprisoned there.
The 741 men who have been released have been almost entirely forgotten by the public. The truth is that the U.S. has largely washed its hands of those it tortured and imprisoned without charge or trial for years on end, outsourcing its responsibility to support the reentry of these men to other countries, usually in the Global South, in some cases with fatal consequences.
I work for the only project in the world that is solely dedicated to assisting people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo to rebuild their lives — a project run by the human rights charity Reprieve. Many of the men we’ve assisted have been dropped by the U.S. into a country they’ve never been to before, where they have no contacts or networks and possibly don’t even speak the language.
Our research shows that almost one in three detainees who have been resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status documents. And even those who are granted residency find that rather than receive the support they need, they are stigmatized and kept under surveillance.
Often, host countries don’t allow the family of the former detainee to join him or even visit, after families have already been kept apart for so long. In one of the most heart-breaking cases I’ve worked on, the host country refused visit requests from the former detainee’s mother for five years, and by the time they finally acquiesced, she had died, having not seen her son for more than 20 years.
Deprived of citizenship or residency rights, people who were previously imprisoned in Guantánamo cannot get a job, access health care (including psychological support), education and other vital services. They may not be able to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and if living in a country with checkpoints, can’t pass through them. Without this most basic passport to participation in society, they are effectively confined to the shadows.
The program that I work for, called “Life After Guantánamo,” tries to help survivors of Guantánamo living in these dire circumstances. Founded by Reprieve in 2009, the program has helped 130 men living in 29 countries.
Reprieve has legally represented more than 80 Guantánamo detainees and helped more people secure release from the prison than any other organization. Through the Life After Guantánamo program, we request that governments give people who were formerly held in the prison the tools needed to rebuild their lives, or, failing that, we seek to do so ourselves. With support, many detainees, whether repatriated to their home countries or resettled in host countries, have been able to start that process.
Yet even detainees with those comparative “success stories” continue to be haunted by the time they spent in U.S. custody. “It feels like I am still there, I just changed for the big Guantánamo,” one former prisoner told me. “When I close my eyes I am back in Guantánamo, so I can’t sleep,” confided another.
I visited one detainee after he’d been resettled who wouldn’t leave his new apartment. Although physically he was a free man, mentally he was still imprisoned. Detained in Guantánamo for 15 years since he was only 18 years old, he had become so institutionalized that he couldn’t cope with freedom. With support, he’s now learned the language of his new home country, formed friendships and is undergoing vocational training.
Many aren’t given that chance. In some cases, men are released from Guantánamo only to be immediately imprisoned again. Twenty-three men were transferred to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), expecting to live as free men, but were detained upon their arrival in horrific conditions when the UAE reneged on assurances given to the U.S. Most of them have been forcibly repatriated to Yemen, despite concerns about their safety. One man, Ravil Mingazov, could be repatriated to Russia where he faces persecution and, as confirmed by the United Nations, a “substantial risk of torture.”
When Senegal deported two former detainees to Libya, they immediately disappeared into militia-run prisons. Although they have since been found and released, they are at risk of being detained again. Former detainees resettled in Kazakhstan and Mauritania died of medical problems because they could not access health care as they had not been afforded basic rights.
Most resettlements were negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency, and once Donald Trump took over, the U.S. appeared to completely disengage from what was happening to them once resettled, giving host countries license to mistreat and abuse them.
President Joe Biden can end the lottery that determines whether people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo are given any chance at life. He can ensure that resettlements and repatriations are done safely, without former detainees being put at risk of imprisonment or persecution, that they are afforded citizenship or rights as residents and that their loved ones are able to join them. These demands should be central to the campaign to close Guantánamo, because Guantánamo can continue to imprison, and even kill, after men escape its four walls.
Disgracefully, the U.S. offers no compensation to these men for the unspeakable horrors they suffered in U.S. custody. The very least the Biden administration can do is ensure that once released from Guantánamo, former prisoners are actually given the opportunity to know freedom.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Tennis player Novak Djokovic’s refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19 — and his subsequent efforts to manipulate Australia’s medical exemption system so as to be allowed a visa to enter the country and compete in the first Grand Slam of the year — is one of the most surreal developments in tennis history.
As of this writing, the stubbornly unvaccinated Djokovic is still in Australia, and still slated to play in the championships starting on Monday. Yet, for days now, he’s been hanging on by a thread. On Friday evening, Australian time, Alex Hawke, the country’s immigration minister, decided, for the second time in nine days, to expel him from the country for breaking quarantine rules while infected with COVID, for misleading immigration authorities about his travels prior to entering the country earlier this month, and for becoming a focal point of anti-vaccine sentiment in the country.
Djokovic’s team is appealing, but he is quickly running out of options. It is more than probable that the world’s best tennis player will, just before the Australian Open begins, be unceremoniously dumped onto a plane and told not to return to Australia for at least three years.
The course of events that have unfolded since Djokovic was first detained by immigration authorities on January 5 is an extraordinary example of self-sabotage from one of the sporting world’s most famous figures, who, in recent years, acquired the media nickname “No-Vax Djokovic” for his controversial opinions regarding vaccines.
But, by accident rather than design, Djokovic’s surreal and self-inflicted drama has also served the important purpose of turning global public attention toward the cruel treatment that Australia routinely metes out to undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the country.
To summarize events to date: Australia — which implemented one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns in an effort to emulate China’s zero-COVID stance — has a policy of only letting vaccinated travelers enter the country. Medical exemptions are allowed, but the criteria for these exemptions is narrow. A couple weeks ago, however, Djokovic, a nine-time winner of the Australian Open, boarded a plane to Australia unvaccinated, having been granted an exemption to allow him in.
After a hullabaloo about this, the country’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, went on a very public warpath against the world’s top tennis player. As a result, when the Serbian player arrived, he was promptly detained by immigration authorities, who noted that the type of visa he had applied for didn’t allow for medical exemptions. After a night of arguing with authorities, Djokovic — who is tied with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal for the most Grand Slam wins of any male player in history, and who was predicted by many to win the Australian Open and break the tie — was unceremoniously carted off to a detention center and locked up in a room with several other detainees.
The hotel-cum-jail that Djokovic ended up in housed several dozen would-be refugees and asylum seekers caught up in Australia’s notoriously harsh immigration detention system. Nine years ago, the current Liberal-National governing coalition got elected on a “stopping the boats” anti-immigration policy, implementing Operation Sovereign Borders to repel boatloads of refugees. Soon afterwards, it began locking up would-be immigrants in off-shore detention sites on the islands of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and only reluctantly let some onto mainland Australian soil when they were too sick to be kept in the island detention fortresses any longer. Once in Australia, they were housed in overcrowded and under-resourced privately run “hotels” for years at a stretch. Some of those with whom Djokovic was detained have been held for up to nine years, since the earliest days of Operation Sovereign Borders.
Djokovic spent the weekend in the Park Hotel detention center, in a suburb of Melbourne. Those incarcerated in the detention center have to ask permission to use the bathroom, and are shackled before being moved from one part of the facility to another. They are provided with such low caloric intake that human rights activists say the food regimen amounts to near-starvation conditions — and what food there is, critics say, is sometimes filled with maggots. Sick people incarcerated at the Park Hotel continue to be provided with deeply substandard medical care despite a series of lawsuits against the agencies responsible for maintaining services in the detention sites. Djokovic’s parents, in a series of broadsides, accused the authorities of torturing him.
On Monday, a judge ordered his release, and, in a scathing rebuke of the government, announced that Djokovic had abided by all the requirements to secure an exemption — including providing proof that he had recently tested positive for COVID — and that he should, therefore, be allowed to stay in the country.
Despite it being late at night, the tennis player, famed for his focus and will to win, immediately headed to the practice courts.
But, in the days since, a barrage of revelations has shattered Djokovic’s reputation and given Australia’s immigration minister, Alex Hawke, an opening to once more seek to deport the sports megastar. The German daily newspaper Der Spiegel published an investigation casting doubt on the authenticity and date of Djokovic’s supposed positive COVID test on December 16. The investigation suggested that the data had been manipulated in order to give Djokovic cover for claiming a medical exemption, open to people recently infected with, and recovered from, COVID that he otherwise would not have had access to. In quick succession, it also turned out that Djokovic had attended several indoor, unmasked events shortly after supposedly testing positive, and that he had also given an interview to a French sports journalist without letting the journalist know that he had an active case of COVID.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Djokovic either conjured up a fake-positive test result to game the Australian immigration system, or he genuinely tested positive and didn’t care enough to abide by basic quarantine restrictions that have been in place the world over for the past two years.
Making matters worse, it then turned out that Djokovic’s immigration forms contained a bald-faced lie. Someone on his team had ticked that he hadn’t traveled anywhere other than Spain in the 14 days prior to boarding a flight from Spain, via Dubai, to Melbourne. In fact, numerous photos soon circulated showing that the tennis superstar had also been in Serbia during this time, where he had attended a series of high-profile ceremonies in his honor. Djokovic put out a perfunctory apology on Instagram, saying his team member had simply made an honest mistake in filling out the form wrong. But the damage was done: Lying on immigration paperwork is grounds both for deportation and also imprisonment.
As I write this, on Friday morning California time, with less than three days left before play begins at the Australian Open, Hawke has once more revoked Djokovic’s visa, and the tennis star, seeded number one in the upcoming championships, has agreed to surrender for further questioning on Saturday morning. Barring another extraordinary twist in the legal saga, Djokovic will be unable to play in the event.
If and when “No-Vax” Djokovic is expelled from Australia, he will have no one to blame but himself. It’s a tennis tragedy with more than an absurdist tinge to it.
Meanwhile, thousands of would-be refugees and asylum seekers continue to be held in appalling conditions in Nauru, in Papua New Guinea and in Australia itself in hotels such as the Park. Their stories are the true stories of injustice, and the conditions they are held in for years at a stretch, as a result of the Australian government’s embrace of harsh anti-immigration measures, are a human rights violation that deserves the world’s attention.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the early days of the pandemic, Democrats excoriated then-President Donald Trump for not doing enough to allow people to stay home from work. “Flatten the curve” was the phrase of the month, and even centrist Democrats found their inner democratic socialist, at least temporarily. At the time, they argued in favor of regular monthly payments to Americans and other pro-labor, pro-working-class programs. Now, the Biden administration struggled even to agree internally on whether the government should send high-quality N95 masks to everyone. (To their limited credit, they ultimately decided it would be a good idea.)
In May 2020, Sen. Kamala Harris, now vice president, joined Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey in calling for monthly $2,000 payments to Americans making under $120,000 a year. Their plan allocated additional money for parents as well. One year later, Senators Ron Wyden and Michael Bennet introduced ambitious legislation that would have modernized unemployment insurance assistance nationwide. Their proposal would have extended the length that people could have received benefits, expanded the pool of beneficiaries to include gig workers who are often excluded from the programs, and increased weekly payments.
Now, that rhetoric is nowhere to be found, even though most public health indicators are worse now than at any other time during the pandemic. Some lawmakers have reportedly been discussing another round of stimulus spending for small business owners of restaurants and gyms, which are particularly vulnerable to COVID-induced economic slowdown. These talks appear to have stalled, however, and it’s worth underlining that the economic aid would go to business owners rather than workers.
From the limited reporting around these talks, the Biden administration appears outright hostile to the idea of renewing direct payments to Americans, rather than routing any forthcoming aid through employers. “[T]he economy is booming, there are millions of open jobs, and we do not believe people should be sitting at home if they are vaccinated and boosted, as most adults are,” a senior Biden official told CNN earlier this month. “So we are not going to write checks to incentivize people to sit at home.” (A recent Change.org petition calling for recurring direct payments has gathered more than 3 million signatures.)
It’s true that in March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion spending bill that included one-time checks of $1,400 to most Americans. At the time, 10 Senate Democrats called on the Biden administration to make direct payments permanent for the duration of the pandemic. The plan also included increasing allotments for food stamps and rental assistance for low-income families. Perhaps most critically, the act reconfigured the child tax credit so that parents received monthly checks of $250 or $300 per child, rather than having to wait until getting their tax returns to get access to that money. The child tax credit, arguably one of the most important anti-poverty programs in a generation, expired in December. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin joined all Senate Republicans in opposing the program’s extension.
Federal unemployment assistance ended in September 2021, as conservatives in both parties argued that the increased payments were incentivizing workers not to seek employment. However, studies showed at the time that states that ended the federal assistance had roughly the same job growth as states that stayed in the program, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. “Economists who have conducted their own analyses of the government data say the rates of job growth in states that ended and states that maintained the benefits are, from a statistical perspective, about the same,” the WSJ reported.
Now, as Biden enters his second year in office, Democrats have made it clear that additional financial support from the government will not be forthcoming, despite surging COVID caseloads due to the emergence of the Omicron variant in December. The United States broke its pandemic hospitalization record this week, as more than 142,000 COVID patients are expected to be hospitalized nationwide. Experts are warning that number could more than double, potentially reaching 300,000 hospitalizations or more by the end of January.
The lack of another round of survival checks or unemployment boosts means that people can’t afford to stay home, even though that would help slow the spread and ease the strain on hospitals and urgent care clinics. Though it’s difficult to get a full picture of how many employers are forcing COVID-positive workers back into the workplace, every day brings new mounting evidence that the practice is becoming increasingly normalized and widespread.
The trend is especially concerning in hospitals, at least some of which appear to be recommending doctors and nurses continue to work regardless of their COVID status. A New Jersey nurse was recently told to come in “despite concerns that she had contracted Covid-19,” according to Politico. The same report also found that “[h]ealth care workers around the country have reported that they are being called in to work even if they suspect they are infectious.” New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines issued in December allow health care providers to return to work after five days, rather than 10, even without testing negative. In Rhode Island, a hospital asked five COVID-positive, asymptomatic staff members to come in to work. Days later, the facility reported it had suffered an outbreak, though a spokesperson said the rise in cases was unrelated.
In what is almost certainly a microcosm of the private sector as a whole, Red Lobster workers have been forced to work while sick, either because of financial necessity or pressure from management, according to the newsletter Popular Information. One employee said he faced “threats” from management after asking to stay home when he developed COVID symptoms. Some teachers in New York City have likewise been forced into the classroom, despite testing positive for COVID. For years, restaurant workers have been expected to work while sick or injured, a trend that hasn’t abated during the pandemic.
For all the talk of “The Great Resignation” — that is, working people quitting their jobs for better-paying employment — the reality is that the working class in the U.S. is still struggling to make ends meet. Early COVID federal assistance programs actually cut poverty in the U.S. and allowed many families to build up savings for the first time. That so-called “excess saving” had evaporated for many families by the end of 2021. One particularly bleak recent study found that 14 percent of survey respondents who worked at supermarket giant Kroger faced homelessness in the past year.
Now, the entire political establishment has arrived at the consensus that little, if any additional help will be forthcoming. Renters in New York State face an expiring eviction moratorium. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki spoke out against the Chicago Teachers Union’s calls for a safer workplace. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky downplayed the risk Omicron poses, saying it was “encouraging news” that people who have died from the variant had at least four comorbidities.
The only urgency we’re seeing at the federal level is the urgency of continuing to sacrifice the working class on the altar of economic growth. For too many policy makers, learning to live with the virus means learning to live with preventable death and suffering. Direct, predictable payments could solve that, but at this point, that’s as hard to imagine as the pandemic ever coming to an end under the prevailing political conditions.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On January 13, 2017, a family including a husband, wife and three small children scurried from building to building in East Mosul, Iraq. They were seeking refuge as a battle between ISIS (also known as Daesh) and U.S.-backed forces swirled around them. The family was huddled in an abandoned school surrounded by other civilians when a U.S.-operated drone struck and destroyed the structure. The father and one of his sons narrowly escaped with their lives. The tragic fate of his wife and other children would not be confirmed until months later when he watched as their bodies were excavated from the rubble.
This account was just one of several described in a recent publication of Pentagon reports documenting the extensive civilian casualties resulting from U.S. drone and air strikes. As the reporting shows, the considerable toll armed drones reap on civilian populations has largely been obfuscated by the U.S. government. What reporting such as this makes clear, however, is that weaponized drones are becoming a serious threat to public health.
The use of weaponized drones for targeted killings is not new and neither is the government’s lack of transparency. The U.S. government has been steadily increasing lethal covert drone operations since 2008, and almost everything we know about the program comes from whistleblowers and leakers. Specifics around the number of civilians killed and the extensiveness of the program are difficult to ascertain, but stories like the one above demonstrate the disregard for human life that results from the use of weaponized drones.
Like all violations of human rights, the public health community, of which I am a part, has an obligation to condemn the use of weaponized drones and demand an end to these targeted killings. If the goal of the public health sector — which includes health care practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers — is, as the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) website states, “to prevent people from getting sick or injured,” then surely lending an authoritative voice in opposition to weaponized drones is more than appropriate.
U.S. citizens bear special responsibility. Unlike other causes of death or disability, weaponized drones are built, maintained and funded by our tax dollars. It is our elected officials who put them in action. Our complicity is unacceptable.
The APHA has made impassioned arguments advocating for the prevention of armed conflict from a public health perspective. However, little has been written specifically with regard to drones. This omission is important when one considers how our political leaders — even those often seen as advocates for “peace” — view the use of weaponized drones. For example, the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning former President Barak Obama saw drone strikes as an alternative to the more uncouth, “stupid wars” that he railed against during his campaign. This perspective resulted in a huge expansion of the program under his administration with well over 500 strikes, including one that explicitly targeted and executed a 16-year-old-boy. Political leaders like Obama see drones as an acceptable “middle ground” that allows for the implementation of U.S. force without, at least ostensibly, the traditional collateral of American casualties or civilian deaths.
Drone strike-related deaths are not the only consequence felt by civilians. One researcher explains how children living in a region such as northern Pakistan — with heavy U.S. drone activity — “become hysterical when they hear the characteristic buzz of a drone,” which often circle overhead 24/7. The psychiatric toll this constant threat of violence takes on children is hard to imagine.
Despite the common refrain from U.S. government officials that weaponized drones offer an extremely “precise” method of targeting, the truth is that civilian casualties of weaponized drone attacks are a common occurrence. The indiscriminate nature of weaponized drone attacks is reminiscent of a much older though equally brutal weapon — landmines. Over the past several decades, human rights organizations, academics and activists have worked tirelessly to show the world that landmines maim and kill civilian populations, and therefore, their use should be banned. The public health community has played a pivotal role in this movement by, for example, conducting research which adds evidentiary support for the movement’s claims. The same tact should be taken with weaponized drones. Public health researchers should work with activists and human rights scholars to form a coalition that demands an end to the use of weaponized drones.
Professional societies such as the APHA could provide guidance highlighting the role of public health in ending the use of weaponized drones. This could take the form of a bold policy statement similar to the one APHA released in 2009 regarding public health’s role in the prevention of armed conflict.
With political leaders from both major U.S. parties seeing drones as a convenient workaround to the traditional pitfalls of American use of force, it is imperative that the public health community remind the world that these weapons have tragic consequences. It is our responsibility to lend our voices, research skills and positions of prominence to stop the use of weaponized drones and end the pain and suffering they cause.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the year since a right-wing mob attacked the Capitol, Donald Trump has persistently attempted to present himself as the victim of wide-ranging conspiracies intended to deprive him of his hold on power. He has also, just as persistently, worked to increase his iron grip on the GOP, triggering primary challenges against any politician from the party who dares to cross him, or even to question his more outlandish claims.
Partly, this is likely about Trump positioning himself for a possible presidential run redux in 2024. Partly, however, it’s about securing the narrative so as to insulate himself from the legal consequences of his dubious business and tax-filing practices over the decades — and from the political consequences that ought to follow from those legal vulnerabilities. A year after Trump reluctantly ceded the White House, there is a growing possibility that he will be indicted for a range of suspected felonies, be it for creative tax filings in New York, for intimidating elections officials in Georgia, or for inciting an insurrection against the lawful government of the United States on the day that Congress was attempting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.
It would have been pretty much impossible to imagine, in the pre-Trump era, that a politician facing as many simultaneous legal investigations as is Trump could remain a viable candidate in the eyes of tens of millions of voters — or even tens of thousands of voters. However, in the polity that Trump and his allies have so devastatingly degraded, so long as those investigations can be portrayed as being part of some deep state “witch hunt” or “hoax,” they become, paradoxically, sources of strength for him. Moreover, resisting those investigations — refusing to abide by subpoenas, ordering subordinates to thumb their noses at investigators — has generated wellsprings of grievance for Trump and his acolytes. In that sense, Trump’s ordering his political henchmen to refuse to cooperate with Congress’s investigation into the events of January 6 is no different than his noncompliance with prosecutorial investigations into his business methods.
Were the GOP grandees and grassroots, or his media enablers at Fox News and elsewhere, to abandon Trump to his legal torments, he’d be dismantled as a viable potential presidential candidate in a New York minute. But, so long as Trump’s supporters continue to parrot his lies about the “stolen” election, and continue to paint the legal investigations as nothing more than extensions of that dastardly plot, he has a chance to remain politically center-stage, the larger-than-life circus ringmaster barking out one-liners to his besotted audience.
And the more the investigations multiply, the more vital it is to Trump’s political fortunes that he can continue to present himself as a victim.
In the short term, Trump looks most vulnerable to a New York indictment. Late last year, he was subpoenaed to give testimony in a civil investigation launched in 2019 by the state attorney general, Letitia James, into whether the Trump business empire repeatedly misstated the value of its assets — inflating them when it was in need of bank loans, and underestimating their value when it came to filing taxes. Then, last week, it was revealed in court that James had also recently subpoenaed Trump’s children, Don Jr. and Ivanka. Their brother, Eric, had already been questioned by James’s investigators more than a year prior.
Trump has sued Attorney General James in federal court to try to get the subpoenas thrown out, and has so far refused to cooperate. He has also continued to resist parting with his tax returns, taking the issue up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an interview with CBS News in December, he lambasted James, and portrayed himself, improbably, as an entirely innocent victim of vendetta politics. “We are such an aggrieved and innocent party. It is a disgrace,” the twice-impeached, coup-plotting ex-president stated.
Beyond the nauseatingly self-pitying tone, there’s a political message: Trump needs his dyed-in-the-wool fan base to stick with him no matter what — remember when he boasted that he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and his voters would continue to support him? — and the best way to solidify that support is to work to illegitimize all those who would investigate him and his family’s business practices. As long as that base holds, the GOP grandees will continue to enable Trump, and continue to pander to his delusional beliefs about stolen elections and all-encompassing conspiracies. And, most importantly, so long as GOP politicians know that Trump can turn his often-violent supporters against anyone he chooses to target, it’s unlikely that more than a handful will resist his wrongdoing or work to block him from ever returning to power — which, in the Trumpian way of understanding, is his best bet, in the long term, for stymying prosecutions against him and his family.
What likely makes the real estate mogul particularly concerned about the civil inquiry in New York, and particularly eager to go on the attack against James, is that it is running parallel to a criminal inquiry, covering much of the same ground, being presided over by the Manhattan district attorney. Back in June, the DA’s office informed Trump’s organization that it was considering criminal charges against it based on valuable perks given to a top executive, perks on which taxes should have been (but apparently weren’t) paid. The three-year-old criminal inquiry has also reportedly explored whether or not the Trump organization illegitimately played around with the valuation of properties both in order to lower tax obligations and also make it easier to secure loans from Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions.
So far, Trump has shown no sign of being willing to cooperate with James’s subpoena. Instead, he responded by suing the New York attorney general. Similarly, Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump have also filed motions to quash their subpoenas.
These legal battles will play out over the coming weeks and months. As they do, expect Trump’s antics to get ever more outrageous, for the ultimate showman knows that his best chance to beat the rap, or raps, isn’t necessarily to present a solid legal defense but, rather, to whip up his crowd into an ever-greater sense of aggrievement at how their Don is being treated.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The cultural battle over how our children are educated is escalating. In its final days, the tight and highly partisan Virginia governor’s race fixated on some parents’ opposition to education about racism. We have seen physical violence at school board meetings over everything from masks to school mascots. One of the biggest conflicts is being carried out at the highest level: the Supreme Court.
At an oral argument in December, the justices asked striking political questions: Does the government have to fund schools that “don’t want to have gay students” or gay teachers? What about schools that teach that “the man is the boss of the woman”? And “Would you say the same thing about a school that teaches critical race theory?”
Those are the stakes of the Carson v. Makin case before the Supreme Court. Technically, the case has a narrow scope: a state tuition assistance program that excludes religiously “sectarian” schools. Backed by conservative legal organizations, parents who want government money to send their children to Christian schools are challenging that exclusion. While the case is focused on religion, the justices recognized their decision’s far greater ramifications — for LGBTQ rights, gender discrimination and real talk about racism — during the oral argument in the case last month. Public opinion figured highly in the court’s debate over these ramifications, as the justices and legal advocates used words like “divisiveness” and “strife” dozens of times.
The oral argument also revealed that, unsurprisingly, the solidly conservative Supreme Court is skeptical of the exclusion of sectarian schools. While many liberal commentators have sounded the alarm about this continued rightward drift, they often miss an important fact: The justices, by putting themselves at the forefront of the national political fight over education, admit that legal institutions are vulnerable to popular pressure and social movements. The power of movements and public opinion set the battlefield for issues often grouped under the category of “culture war” — from masks and vaccines to anti-racist education to LGBTQ rights and gender equality — both in and out of court.
This political vulnerability is a powerful opportunity: By winning over the public to our movements, we stand a better chance of winning in court.
What does this mean for our demands in the educational culture war now playing out in the high court? We can’t fall back on the elitist approach of decrying parents’ demands for more involvement in their kids’ education. That helped lose the Virginia governorship — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was, is, and always will be a losing message. We should support community control of all essential institutions, including education. Conservative parents, backed by the rich and powerful, are behaving outrageously at school board meetings. But we have to respond with people power of our own.
And we certainly shouldn’t rest our case, as some commentators have, on lawyer-splaining “the text of the First Amendment,” which prohibits “establishment of religion” by the government, to our opponents. The “textualist” approach to law, invented by right-wing judges and, unfortunately, often conceded to by their liberal colleagues, pretends that the law exists only as explicitly written. If we accept that, then we have to say goodbye to our rights to privacy, abortion, marriage, gender equality or anything else not explicitly written out in the Constitution. And when the law is ambiguous — what does “speech” mean in the First Amendment? — judges use textualism as a cover to apply their politics and call it the law’s “plain meaning.” Our social movements should bring these politics out in the open, for the public to debate and decide.
Carson and its ilk are dubious legal challenges presented by the religious right. We have to defend LGBTQ and other rights against this encroachment. However, we must advocate for our rights without denying the importance of free exercise of religion (which is also in the text of the First Amendment). We should defend everyone’s right to an education and freedom to practice their religion, be free from others’ beliefs, or avoid religion entirely.
Striking the balance between religious freedom and separation of church and state is a matter of democracy. Even the liberal justices acknowledge that there is some “play in the joints” between these principles and neither is absolute. They note that the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” would allow, for example, a state scholarship program to support religious degrees. The public, not lawyers and judges, should decide whether its tax money should support things of that nature, or, for example, tax exemptions for religious schools and other nonprofits.
The increasingly conservative Supreme Court struck its first blow in today’s school culture war five years ago, with the Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer decision on “a program to use recycled tires to resurface playgrounds.” Liberal justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer joined the 7-2 decision that Missouri could not exclude a religious preschool from that program, which the court downplayed as simply preventing “in all likelihood, a few extra scraped knees.” In dissent, however, justices Sonia Sotomayor and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that the case “is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government — that is, between church and state.” Social movements largely missed this court decision, which was not a cultural flashpoint, and they are now playing catch-up as the court openly enters the educational culture war.
The conservative justices, with some liberal support, are redrawing the battlefield lines to encroach on the separation of church and state, movements for LGBTQ and other rights, anti-racist education and religious groups with less power to “compete for public dollars.” To justify another decision supporting Christian schools last year, the Supreme Court cited its early 20th-century precedent that allowed Native Americans’ treaty funds to be siphoned off for Catholic mission schools. These justices are concerned not with religious freedom across the board, but power for the religious right, which they make out to be the real victim in the culture war.
However, strong social movements can redraw these battlefield lines as well. In 2020, it was conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, of all people, who wrote the Bostock v. Clayton County decision that extended federal civil rights in the workplace to gay and trans people. Gorsuch, a so-called textualist who pretends to see only the words on the paper, justified this expansion of civil rights in part by noting that, “in our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” And in dissent, even conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh had to “acknowledge the important victory achieved today” by the LGBTQ movement.
Now, the Supreme Court is asking whether government money should support education about racism on the one hand, and schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers or promote patriarchy on the other. The justices are inviting politics into the courtroom, and our social movements need to answer. We have to win the public over, and then use that public support to win in court.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This week marks 20 years since the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. It is not yet closed, as I had hoped it would be a decade ago, but this serves as a week of remembrance for all who have suffered in the U.S.’s illegal offshore prison.
As a young lawyer, I first traveled to Guantánamo in 2006 to represent three Uyghurs, including a child, held without charge or trial. I have returned many times in each year since, and represented dozens of other detained men, from Somaliland to Baltimore, in federal courts, military commissions and administrative hearings. I’ve seen about everything there is to see when it comes to challenging unlawful detentions at Guantánamo.
This notorious military installation has changed since the first planeload of men arrived from Afghanistan a generation ago, but the lawlessness from which it originated and the human suffering it has caused endure. As Sen. Dick Durbin remarked recently, Guantánamo is “where due process goes to die.”
My first trip to “the Island” was profoundly disorienting and disturbing. After a rough flight to the naval station on a charter plane so decrepit it had to stop midway from Fort Lauderdale to be serviced at a seemingly abandoned airstrip in the Bahamas, my co-counsel, our interpreter and I were met by a phalanx of U.S. servicemembers with guns and K-9s. Throughout the next few days, we were searched repeatedly, had our client meetings interrupted for no apparent reason except to disrupt our work and were escorted everywhere like wayward children.
This was years after our clients arrived at Guantánamo, but during the height of the “war on terror.” This was the time of shackled men in orange jumpsuits, clients showing up to meetings bearing signs of physical abuse, and denigration of Islam including desecration of the Quran. It was also a time of excessive secrecy. We did not know who was detained at Guantánamo; men were called by internment serial numbers, not their names. We learned who was held, bit by bit, when our clients showed up to meetings with lists of other men in nearby cells who wanted lawyers to challenge their indefinite detention or call their families to say they were alive.
Back then, the U.S. considered all detainees hard-core “terrorists” who would kill if they had the opportunity, and detainee lawyers were not welcome at Guantánamo. We were the enemy.
Fast-forward to 2012, and those narratives had been debunked. Most of the 780 men brought to Guantánamo had been released, including my Uyghur clients, who the government had concluded many years earlier had been captured by mistake. Guantánamo was also no longer exceptional. Indefinite military detention was entrenched. As I wrote then, it had become part of the American landscape. It had achieved a degree of normalcy, which, admittedly, was sometimes difficult to shake for those of us who had been traveling to the prison for so many years. As far as some of the new, younger guards were aware, Guantánamo had always existed. Defense lawyers were no longer uncommon or even necessarily unwelcome at the base. The Supreme Court had since settled the right of the detained men to challenge their detention in court, which, if nothing else, ensured their continued access to lawyers like me.
Although secrecy still predominated (as it does today), particularly surrounding “high-value” detainees like my clients Majid Khan and Guled Duran, who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA detention in September 2006, we now had freer access to the detained men. We litigated their legal cases vigorously and, at least initially, successfully. We also worked closely to resolve detainee cases with the Obama administration, which had ordered the closure of Guantánamo and substantially reduced the detainee population. We traveled the globe to encourage U.S. allies to resettle detained men.
In January 2012, however, when faced with other political challenges, President Obama turned his back on Guantánamo and surrendered closure issues to his political opponents in Congress. Transfers stopped for two years, and he struggled to regain momentum toward closure until a widespread hunger strike at the prison refocused those efforts during his second term. The result was clear: The remaining men who had cheered Obama’s election began to lose hope. I saw their pain in the eyes of my Algerian client, Djamel Ameziane, whose approval for transfer the government had long concealed from the public. But Ameziane was one of the fortunate to leave the prison after transfers resumed in late 2013. Others were not so lucky, and, despite a resurgence of transfers in the final years of the Obama administration, many men were left in limbo when the Trump administration came into office and transfers halted once again.
Today, 39 men remain held indefinitely at Guantánamo, despite the end of the Afghanistan conflict in which many of them were ostensibly apprehended. Twelve are involved in military commission proceedings, including Majid Khan, who will complete his commission sentence in February and then need to be transferred. The remaining 27 are awaiting transfer, some of them already approved unanimously to leave more than a decade ago by the relevant U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Many are convinced they will die at Guantánamo, alone and forgotten, never having seen the inside of a courtroom.
But I was wrong when I wrote about these men a decade ago: They have not lost all hope. The prison that Amnesty International once branded the “gulag of our times” has become their “forever prison.” Yet the human spirit is difficult to crush. The remaining men may be largely resigned to their fate, but most retain at least a glimmer of hope that one day they will be free.
Whether that dream will be realized is now up to President Biden. As with two of his three predecessors in the Oval Office, he says he is committed to closing Guantánamo as a matter of policy. But unlike those predecessors, the Biden administration has not taken substantial steps toward achieving that objective. During his first year in office, Biden has approved several detainees to leave Guantánamo, but transferred only one man home to Morocco, a transfer which was negotiated at the end of the Obama administration. At that rate, Guantánamo may never close. Biden has all the legal authority he needs to increase the pace of transfers; the question, as with each of the last four presidents who have served since Guantánamo opened in 2002, is whether he will use that authority.
For those detainees not yet awaiting transfer, contested military commission cases continue to provide a thin veneer of legal process to maintain the status quo and cover up prior CIA torture of the defendants — abuse that a panel of senior military officers recently denounced as a “stain on the moral fiber of America” and a “source of shame” for the United States. As was clear from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, there is bipartisan consensus that the commissions have failed to achieve accountability for anyone. The only way forward is to negotiate the resolution of those cases. Whether that will happen is up to the Biden administration, which refused to send anyone to the hearing to discuss the issue or Guantánamo closure policy.
For many who don’t follow Guantánamo closely, the prison is ancient history. They assume it was closed by Obama. I wish that were so. Guantánamo never should have been opened, and the truth is that I never imagined 16 years ago devoting most of my legal career to its closure.
Many people ask why I continue after so many years. In their minds, perhaps, pursuing Guantánamo closure is Sisyphean. The answer is simple: Guantánamo still exists, and there are 39 men still detained there without due process of law. I still hope that one day Guantánamo is closed, but until that happens, I will not give up.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On January 5, 2022, one day before the anniversary of the right-wing storming of the U.S. Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz called the event a “violent terrorist attack.” That evening, Tucker Carlson of Fox News excoriated Cruz for his remarks. The following night, Cruz appeared on Carlson’s show to beg for forgiveness. “You called this a ‘terror attack,’ when by no definition of the word was it a terror attack,” Carlson said. “That’s a lie. You told that lie on purpose, and I’m wondering why you did.”
Cruz cowered before Carlson like a schoolboy caught out after curfew. “The way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy, and it was, frankly, dumb,” Cruz said. “I don’t buy that,” Carlson responded. “I do not believe that you used that accidentally. I just don’t.”
The next seven minutes of the interview continued in the same fashion, with Cruz desperately justifying himself over a chyron that at one point read: “What was Cruz thinking?” Carlson’s dominance over Cruz was total. Cruz’s surrender was unconditional. The power dynamics could not have been clearer if a CEO were excoriating a new employee on their first day on the job.
Far from being an outlier, that interview encapsulated the official and unofficial conservative response to the anniversary of January 6. Unlike in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, conservative leaders were not even willing to give lip service to criticizing the events of that day. Taken as a whole, the various conservative responses, or lack thereof, offer the strongest evidence to date that the attempted coup was not likely to be a maligned one-off event but is instead threatening to serve as a mythologized day of glory for the right that could become a template for the future. A review of conservative reactions one year after the January 6 attack also shows that in most spheres there is virtually no distinction between the so-called respectable right and the violent, explicitly racist and insurrectionary fringes.
Carlson is not just a television host, and Cruz isn’t some congressional backbencher. These two, together, represent mainstream conservatism essentially by definition. Carlson’s show ranks as either the most-watched or second-most-watched show on Fox News, averaging over 3 million viewers every evening. Cruz, meanwhile, is the standard bearer for conservatism in the Senate.
These two figures, together, made it clear that finding fault with any aspect of the January 6 attempted coup was unacceptable. Cruz wasn’t saved by his repeated protestations that he was only criticizing the protesters who physically harmed police. Nor was he protected by the fact that he spearheaded the effort inside the Senate to oppose certifying the 2020 presidential election. The party line has been set, not just by the fringes, but by the most influential conservatives in the country.
That’s not to discount the role the far-right flank of elected Republicans have played in generating support for the events of January 6. In another interview on the failed coup anniversary, a former staffer for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (California) accused the House Republican minority leader of taking his cues from the farthest right fringe of his caucus. “His leadership strategy is dictated by the most extreme wings of his party,” Ryan O’Toole, now a staffer for Rep. Liz Cheney, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And so, when Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz put their thumb on the scale, that’s what he responds to.”
Gaetz and Greene, for their parts, spent the year anniversary offering the only semi-official Republican response. The two appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in the morning, and held a press conference in the afternoon. On both occasions, the two offered up baseless conspiracy theories that blamed the FBI for instigating the riot. “We did not want the Republican voice to go unheard, and we did not want today’s historical narrative to be hijacked by those who were the true insurrectionists,” Gaetz said, referring to his conspiracy theory about FBI agents and paid informants.
Though it’s true that Gaetz and Greene represent the far right of the elected Republicans, members of the GOP’s mainstream faction did everything they could to downplay the mob attack on the Capitol. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the GOP’s likely 2024 presidential front-runner if Donald Trump declines to run, used the occasion to attack the media for alleged anti-Trump bias: “Jan. 6 allows them to create narratives that are negative about people that supported Donald Trump,” he stated. Senate mainstay Lindsey Graham tweeted that President Joe Biden was engaged in a “brazen politicization” of January 6, as though there were a way to discuss an attempted coup outside the realm of politics.
A recent review of the January 6 “insurrectionists” also shows that demographically, they comprised the GOP’s traditional voting base, rather than a collection of outsiders. Political science professor Robert A. Pape analyzed the economic records of more than 500 January 6 defendants, and found that “more than half are business owners, including CEOs, or from white-collar occupations, including doctors, lawyers, architects, and accountants,” and only 7 percent were unemployed. Those demographics map with the demographics of Republicans in general, who tend to be wealthier than Democratic voters. When asked to self-describe their economic status, 66 percent of Fox News viewers said they were middle class or wealthier. In other words, the demographic groups that stormed the Capitol have significant overlap with the groups who watched Tucker Carlson discipline Ted Cruz one year later.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nominally anti-January 6, “Never-Trump” wing of the conservative movement also went out of its way to make apologies for the insurrectionists, even while offering mild criticism. “It is now an article of faith on the left that these goons were determined to ‘destroy democracy’,” argued conservative author Jonah Goldberg, writing in Bari Weiss’s newsletter. “But that wasn’t their actual intent. They believed Trump’s story. They believed they were saving democracy from a coup.” He went on to write that their “stupidity” doesn’t “let them off the hook,” and that the central plotters should be held accountable. But ultimately, Goldberg sees the attempted coup, and the Trump administration more broadly, as a deviation from conservatism, rather than a predictable culmination of the movement’s values and priorities.
There were two stalwart conservatives who were embraced by Democrats on the anniversary, both with the last name Cheney. Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyoming) is one of two Republicans to sit on the January 6 committee, and has become something of a hero to the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party. She and her father, former vice president and Iraq War architect Dick Cheney, both attended the official anniversary ceremony. Both were fawned over by Democrats, more than a dozen of whom lined up to shake their hands. “One by one, Democrats put aside their fierce and lasting policy divides with the Cheneys to thank them for condemning the attack and Trump’s continued effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results with his false claims of fraud,” The Washington Post reported.
It is a grim irony that Dick Cheney, a man partially responsible for legally disrupting and ultimately stealing an election in 2000, has been recast as a great and principled defender of democracy by liberals. The Supreme Court’s decision to stop the Florida recount as a result of Bush v. Gore is not only a reminder of the long-hollow promise of U.S. democracy, it also serves as another tool in the toolbox for the next would-be coup plotters. The great danger to future transfers of power in the United States is not to be found only in the absurdity of the January 6 mob attack, or only in the halls of power. The future of the anti-democratic right is in the synthesis of those two factions. One year after the Capitol breach, that fusion appears to be all but complete.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The struggle between the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot over how the city’s public schools should be operating in the face of the current COVID-19 spike has been a case study in neoliberal governance.
One in four COVID tests taken in Chicago are currently coming back positive and the majority of potential exposure locations in Illinois are schools, according to the Illinois Department of Health and to Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, who was appointed by Lightfoot herself.
In response to this spike in school-based COVID-19 transmission, a majority of the members in the Chicago Teachers Union voted in favor of the union taking action by switching from in-person to remote teaching until a list of specific safety demands have been met. The union’s demands included KN95 masks for teachers and students, and mandatory testing for students and staff before returning to the buildings on January 18. Union members voted in favor of this action after looking at the hard data on COVID in Illinois schools and considering the current lack of proper equipment in the classrooms to reduce transmission of COVID. As a result, we started using the school district’s online platforms to connect with our students, just as we did in March 2020.
Last night, on January 10, members of the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates voted to suspend the remote-learning action, and the union’s rank-and-file members will take a vote this week on the current agreement with the Board of Education regarding a return to in-person learning after a week of working remotely from home.
The union delegates voted to suspend the remote-learning action and hold a rank-and-file vote on next steps after the city reportedly made concessions in relation to the teachers’ demand for expanded testing, metrics for when schools need to go remote based on student absences or staff issues, funding for PPE and contact tracing protocols.
Throughout this process, the mainstream media and political elites in Chicago have responded to teachers’ concerns by claiming that the actions of Chicago’s school workers are flippant and greedy. Yet in reality, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her appointed Board of Education have been blocking students from accessing safe instruction during a time when COVID cases are surging and schools have been shown to be major vectors for transmission.
The statistics on COVID-19 exposure in Illinois schools are not propaganda. They are real data that should lead to immediate action to keep Chicago’s students and their families safe from the current surge in COVID-19 cases.
Instead of working with the teachers and staff to ameliorate the threat of COVID, the Chicago Board of Education, appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, locked students out of their online platforms, forcing schools to essentially close while Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union negotiated on the current proposed agreement for in-person learning.
What has been happening in the city of Chicago is not a strike. The Chicago Teachers Union has been asking for the online tools they need to hold classes virtually until CPS takes action to ensure the safety of our students, or until the current surge in cases subsides.
One major impact of the surge is staffing shortages. The Chicago Teachers Union is pushing the district to hire more staff to ensure proper guidelines for COVID safety.
However, throughout this struggle Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her hand-picked Board of Education have once again shown that they’re not willing to negotiate for what’s best for students and staff. In her short tenure as mayor, Lightfoot forced the longest teachers strike in more than 20 years, over her reluctance to fully staff schools with nurses, counselors and social workers.
This current struggle did not start with the Omicron surge. It started as soon as Mayor Lightfoot took the helm of the third largest city in the nation, and with it, the third largest school district. In 1995, the Illinois General Assembly put its full trust in the mayor of Chicago to appoint the Board of Education and have total purview over the schools, power that suburban and rural mayors don’t have. It was during the Republican takeover of the state capital when the newly invigorated Illinois GOP saw potential in Democratic Mayor Richard Daley to shrink crucial spending, break the union and privatize large swaths of the district. He appointed Paul Vallas, a municipal hatchet-man who was not a licensed superintendent, to be the new “CEO” of schools. This allowed Daley to hatch his plan “Renaissance 2010,” a program that would push the union out of the majority of Chicago’s schools with the full support of the business and finance communities in Chicago and across the nation. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has shown through the 2019 contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union that she favors cuts to student services, much like Daley.
Lightfoot, much like her predecessor Rahm Emanuel, fought tooth-and-nail to hold onto this power as communities made it clear that they wanted a school board that was elected and accountable to their needs, more like the suburban districts that are now implementing remote learning to protect their students and teachers.
There is hope on the horizon, with a law that will go into effect in 2024 that will phase in an elected school board for Chicago. However, how many more students and staff will be exposed to COVID in the next two years?
Without this kind of accountability baked into the system, teachers, clinicians and school paraprofessionals have taken the lead and created a list of demands for a safer return to in-person learning. When you have a leadership vacuum in city hall, working people will take on leadership and that is what has been happening in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union’s action was a case of workers taking action for their own safety and the safety of Chicago’s children and their families.
Mayor Lightfoot could have made the decision not to lock out teachers, keeping students away from daily instruction, but to instead trust in the wisdom of teachers and staff, who make decisions daily to keep themselves and students safe.
Mayor Lightfoot is not an educator, nor a leader. She’s a corporate lawyer who wants to win her will at any cost. Either she doesn’t look at the data, or she defies it in her pursuit of forcing her charges back to the schools — doing as she says. Meanwhile, her Board of Education meets remotely.
The current struggle is a symptom of the larger problem of neoliberal school reform — a virus whose only vaccine is democracy.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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U.S. politics these days is all too often an Alice-through-the-looking-glass absurdity.
Over the last few weeks, at least five GOP-led states — Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee — embraced rule changes to their unemployment benefits systems to allow workers who were fired for refusing to abide by their employers’ vaccine requirements to claim unemployment. Many other GOP-led states are likely to follow suit. This despite the fact that workers who choose to leave their jobs, or who are fired for cause — because, for example, they break company rules, such as failing a drug test or refusing to abide by non-disclosure agreements — aren’t usually eligible for unemployment benefits.
Hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to describe this particular policy shift, which panders to the conspiratorial, anti-vaxxer wing of the Republican Party.
First off, what conceivable good comes of shaping public policy in a way designed to incentivize behavior that puts numerous other people at risk and threatens to overwhelm hospital systems from coast to coast?
An Associated Press analysis of COVID deaths in May of last year found that between 98 and 99 percent of these deaths were of people who weren’t vaccinated. More recently, as the Omicron variant has led to a vast wave of infections, states such as New York have detailed how hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated are 14 times higher than for those who have been fully vaccinated. In Republican counties and states, especially in the South, with higher numbers unvaccinated, hospitals have been swamped, leading to a fall-off in available beds and services for people with other ailments and diseases. Many of those states are the same ones that have needlessly undermined the health of their populations by refusing federal Affordable Care Act funds to expand Medicaid and that have, in consequence, a large percentage of their population already struggling to access even basic health care.
The Republican Party has perfected the art of political gymnastics, of doing 180-degree policy turns on a dime simply for short-term partisan advantage; it is a party that touts itself as upholding “law and order” while embracing the coup-plotting antics of Donald Trump and his murderous paramilitary henchmen; it is a party that refused to consider a Democratic nominee for the Supreme Court a year before the presidential election in 2016, but which rammed through Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg just days before the 2020 election closed. However, even within this context, there’s something particularly bizarre about its handing out of welfare benefits specifically to the unvaccinated.
After all, this is the very same GOP that has been pillaging and plundering the safety net and social welfare programs for years — cutting benefits to the poor in order to free up money to provide tax cuts to the rich. It is the same GOP whose leaders have, over the decades, railed against “welfare queens.” It is the same GOP whose leaders have, in recent years, accused immigrants of draining benefit funds from the public system.
This is also the same GOP that has ended pandemic-era expanded unemployment and other benefits programs for the general public, saying that such benefits are discouraging workers from returning to the labor market. So, thanks to the GOP at the state level and its congressional representatives in D.C., if you choose not to work because your employer hasn’t put COVID protections in place and you’re fearful that you might bring home a deadly disease and infect an immunocompromised or elderly relative, you no longer qualify for unemployment. Similarly, if you’re a parent with young children, and your kids are repeatedly sent home from school because their classmates have contracted COVID, or you have preschoolers at home and can’t find an affordable, safe daycare center, and you choose to stop working so as to care for your children, well, thanks to the GOP, you also don’t qualify for unemployment.
It’s also the same GOP that successfully pushed to prevent the renewal of pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, thus leaving millions of economically marginal households on the precipice of eviction and homelessness as moratoriums around the country wind down in early 2022.
Philosophically, the GOP’s embrace of a select group of unvaccinated workers to qualify for more expansive benefits if they resist employer mandates flies in the face of decades of political and legal posturing by conservatives in favor of expanding the rights of employers at the cost of protections for employees.
Why now suddenly have a road to Damascus moment and realize the value of workers’ rights, but only vis-à-vis the unvaccinated? For, to be crystal clear, this is a party that doesn’t believe in workers’ rights. It is the same GOP that believes employers should have the right to fire at-will workers who try to organize into trade unions, or who otherwise express political beliefs contrary to those of company owners, and whose hand-picked conservative justices on the Supreme Court have recently ruled that union organizers do not have right of entry to go onto employers’ property to try to organize workers. It is the same GOP that embraces the Orwellian-named “right to work” movement, which hamstrings union organizing in one GOP-led state after the next, and makes it nearly impossible for low-wage workers to organize successfully to push for a living wage, for pension and health benefits or paid family leave.
For years, the GOP has criticized social benefits programs as encouraging sloth. GOP legislators have attempted — though failed — to slash food stamp benefits over the past decade. They have championed welfare-to-work policies that include making Medicaid recipients work for their health benefits (though, to be fair, both parties have drunk from this noxious trough at times — it was Bill Clinton, a Democratic president, who oversaw the gutting of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and its replacement with the far less munificent, more punitive, Temporary Aid to Needy Families). The GOP under Trump pushed the peculiarly sadistic public charge rules, designed to exclude millions of documented immigrants and their children from all parts of the social safety net, including access to emergency housing and health care assistance. This triggered a lengthy series of court cases, until, ultimately, the Biden administration rescinded the Trump-era regulatory changes.
Now, all of a sudden, the GOP has discovered the value of social programs — but only to protect its most extreme, most vaccine-resistant and most dangerous political wing. With more than 1,500 people a day currently dying in the U.S. of a disease most could be protected from simply by getting vaccinated, there’s nothing noble about encouraging anti-vaxxers to double down on their behavior. And, in a less extreme, less irrationalist political moment, it’s hard to imagine that one of the country’s two main political parties would want to so solidly align itself with such a destructive cultural and political movement. But this isn’t a calm moment; instead, it’s one increasingly defined by irrationality, rage and political gamesmanship.
In Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat talks of the day becoming the night and the sky becoming the sea. And in Through the Looking Glass, when Alice tries to convince the queen that, “One can’t believe impossible things,” the contrarian monarch responds by saying, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
That, I’m afraid, is where things stand in the U.S. today. The GOP panders to the fantasies of a faction, and, in doing so, it shreds notions of scientific truth and also locks into place the most counterproductive social policies imaginable.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.
Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That’s an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years. This endless bombardment has not only been deadly and devastating for its victims but is broadly recognized as seriously undermining international peace and security and diminishing America’s standing in the world.
The U.S. government and political establishment have been remarkably successful at keeping the American public in the dark about the horrific consequences of these long-term campaigns of mass destruction, allowing them to maintain the illusion of U.S. militarism as a force for good in the world in their domestic political rhetoric.
Now, even in the face of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, they are doubling down on their success at selling this counterfactual narrative to the American public to reignite their old Cold War with Russia and China, dramatically and predictably increasing the risk of nuclear war.
The new Airpower Summary data reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178 under Biden) since February 2020.
The good news is that U.S. bombing of those three countries has significantly decreased from the over 12,000 bombs and missiles it dropped on them in 2019. In fact, since the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Afghanistan in August, the U.S. military has officially conducted no air strikes there, and only dropped 13 bombs or missiles on Iraq and Syria — although this does not preclude additional unreported strikes by forces under CIA command or control.
Trump and Biden both deserve credit for recognizing that endless bombing and occupation could not deliver victory in Afghanistan. The speed with which the U.S.-installed government fell to the Taliban once the U.S. withdrawal was under way confirmed that 20 years of hostile military occupation, aerial bombardment and support for corrupt governments ultimately served only to drive the war-weary people of Afghanistan back to Taliban rule.
Biden’s callous decision to follow 20 years of colonial occupation and aerial bombardment in Afghanistan with the same kind of brutal economic siege warfare the United States has inflicted on Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela can only further discredit America in the eyes of the world.
There has been no accountability for these 20 years of senseless destruction. Even with the publication of Airpower Summaries, the ugly reality of U.S. bombing wars and the mass casualties they inflict remain largely hidden from the American people.
How many of the 3,246 attacks documented in the Airpower Summary since February 2020 were you aware of before reading this article? You probably heard about the drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians in Kabul in August 2021. But what about the other 3,245 bombs and missiles? Whom did they kill or maim, and whose homes did they destroy?
The December 2021 New York Times exposé of the consequences of U.S. airstrikes, the result of a five-year investigation, was stunning not only for the high civilian casualties and military lies it exposed, but also because it revealed just how little investigative reporting the U.S. media have done on these two decades of war.
In America’s industrialized, remote-control air wars, even the U.S. military personnel most directly and intimately involved are shielded from human contact with the people whose lives they are destroying, while for most of the American public, it is as if these hundreds of thousands of deadly explosions never even happened.
The lack of public awareness of U.S. airstrikes is not the result of a lack of concern for the mass destruction our government commits in our names. In the rare cases we find out about, like the murderous drone strike in Kabul in August, the public wants to know what happened and strongly supports U.S. accountability for civilian deaths.
So public ignorance of 99% of U.S. air strikes and their consequences is not the result of public apathy, but of deliberate decisions by the U.S. military, politicians of both parties and corporate media to keep the public in the dark. The largely unremarked 21-month-long suppression of monthly Airpower Summaries is only the latest example of this.
Now that the new Airpower Summary has filled in the previously hidden figures for 2020-21, here is the most complete data available on 20 years of deadly and destructive U.S. and allied air strikes.
Numbers of bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the United States and its allies since 2001. Chart by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies Grand Total = 337,055 bombs and missiles.
**Other Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia.
These figures are based on U.S. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project’s count of bombs and missiles dropped on Yemen (through September 2021); the New America Foundation’s database of foreign air strikes in Libya and other sources.
There are several categories of air strikes that are not included in this table, meaning that the true numbers of weapons unleashed are certainly higher. These include:
Helicopter strikes: Military Times published a February 2017 article titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly air strikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of air strikes not included in Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported air strikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many missiles were fired in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.
“Counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the world: The U.S. formed a military coalition with 11 West African countries in 2005, and has built a drone base in Niger, but we have not found any systematic accounting of U.S. and allied air strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or elsewhere.
The failure of the U.S. government, politicians and corporate media to inform and educate the American public about the systematic mass destruction wreaked by our country’s armed forces has allowed this carnage to continue largely unremarked and unchecked for 20 years.
It has also left us precariously vulnerable to the revival of an anachronistic, Manichean Cold War narrative that risks even greater catastrophe. In this topsy-turvy, “through the looking glass” narrative, the country that is actually bombing cities to rubble and waging wars that kill millions of people presents itself as a well-intentioned force for good in the world. Then it paints countries like China, Russia and Iran, which have strengthened their defenses largely in order to deter the U.S. from attacking them, as threats to the American people and to world peace.
The high-level talks beginning this week in Geneva between the U.S. and Russia are a critical opportunity, maybe even a last chance, to rein in the escalation of the current Cold War before this breakdown in East-West relations becomes irreversible or devolves into military conflict.
If we are to emerge from this morass of militarism and avoid the risk of an apocalyptic war with Russia or China, the U.S. public must challenge the counterfactual Cold War narrative that U.S. military and civilian leaders are peddling to justify their ever-increasing investments in nuclear weapons and the U.S. war machine.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Diversion programs are presented as exit ramps to incarceration, offering alternatives to life behind bars and providing resources to individuals who would have otherwise been arrested and sentenced to prison.
When an individual commits a crime, they are arrested as an entry point into the criminal legal system and transitioned through a traditional court trial and sentencing. Through diversion, individuals avoid this process altogether or partially by instead receiving treatment or rehabilitation programming designed to address what led them to commit the crime. But what happens when those diversion programs intended to help end up doing more harm than good?
The Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit organization that exposes the broader harms of mass criminalization, brings this question to the forefront, informing us that not all diversion programs are created equal. For Black and Brown youth who face the brunt of arrests, incarceration and criminalization, diversion programs can be good, but not when they center the institution of policing to carry them out.
An example of this is Philadelphia’s police school diversion program, piloted in 2014 to combat the rise of youth arrests in schools and provide them with community-based resources. The program, in partnership between the Philadelphia Police Department and the School District of Philadelphia, at first appears to be a successful program. The Philadelphia Inquirer boasted that the program was a “promising reform,” and that its founder, former Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, “broke the school-to-prison pipeline.” After all, the program decreased youth arrests across the school district in a moment where youth arrests and incarceration rates have fallen throughout the U.S.
Entry into the program begins when a school-based incident occurs. The school has a choice to then make an independent disciplinary decision but will generally inform the school safety office or a Philadelphia police officer. The officer assesses whether that child can or should be diverted. If the child has no prior school record and the officer deems the crime to be “low-risk” or “non-serious,” they may offer diversion. Otherwise, they are arrested.
For youths who are diverted from arrest, they are visited by a social worker and followed up with voluntary community-based services such as mentoring, academic support or victim-offender conferencing. Throughout this process, diverted youth and the services recommended to them are tracked and documented by the Philadelphia Police Department, widening the scope of information these officers have of the youths.
While this appears to be an effective and promising reform, its involvement with police draws major concerns which have been voiced by the community. For instance, one Philadelphia student, Alison Fortenberry, voiced that these police officers view her and other youths not as students, but as criminals, thus purporting the narrative of criminality. Alison is not alone here. Her concern joins the chorus of several other students organizing within the Philly Student Union, a youth-centered organization focused on demanding high quality education, who have been pushing for schools to disband police entirely.
The reality of this program is that it is predicated on the notion that police can be repackaged with a “softer” approach to school safety. It relies on rebranding Philadelphia police as “safety officers” who opt to wear more casual clothes with no badge, but as we should expect, still police. It negates the important details that police are traumatic, and increases the likelihood that Black and Brown youth are criminalized.
Sure, fewer youths are arrested and more are provided with community-based services through the program, but the stigma of criminalization that follows them and the strengthening of the prison-industrial complex does not go away — police reinforce that. It goes away by removing police from the equation altogether.
We cannot allow ourselves to be duped by police-led youth diversion programs, believing their effectiveness on the premise of being reforms to combat youth arrests and incarceration. These reforms inevitably fall short for real long-term change and further construct an illusion that police should be present in our everyday lives, such as the schools youths occupy. Even if these are what appear to be promising efforts of diversionary reform, policing has one goal: to police.
To understand why police-led youth diversion programs should be avoided, we must turn to policing and its impact inside the schoolhouse gate.
Firstly, there are a few things to know about police: They lie; incite racist, sexist, transphobic, heterosexist and ableist violence and harm; and often make situations much worse. The institution of policing and police themselves are inherently violent and racist entities — history informs us of that. But how has this taken shape in schools?
Think about some of the headlines that have taken space on the news and newspapers recently, sparking debates in the U.S. about police overreach and the harm caused by them in schools. From 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr., who was shot and killed by police inside a school bathroom stall, to a 4-year-old girl in Virginia with ADHD who allegedly threw a block at another student and was later handcuffed, transported to a squad car and taken to the sheriff’s office, police officers have had a substantial role in school violence and punishment towards youths.
These are but a couple of many examples occurring against the backdrop of how police presence in schools has changed the educational landscape for the worse. Instead of protecting youth, police in schools appear more often to be guarding the school like a prison. Entrances to the school that were once welcoming and inviting instead have metal detectors and are monitored by stationed patrol cars.
Taken altogether, police presence in schools does not make the experiences of youths better and leads to worse outcomes for them, particularly Black and Brown youth.
What does this mean for police-led youth diversion programs? On the surface, they may appear to be a strategy to combat youth arrests and incarceration. However, the effect of keeping police in schools and positioning them to lead diversionary programs is that they have exacerbated the violence of policing and harm against marginalized communities. Moreover, police-led youth diversion programs do not help combat the prison-industrial complex.
Police-led youth diversion programs strengthen the building of carceral capacity — what political scientist Heather Schoenfeld describes as the dramatic increase in the state capacity to punish through new bureaucratic structures, new frontline and administrative positions, new staff training and new protocols across the criminal legal system.
By strengthening police power — allowing them to be the first responders to school incidents and determining who is diverted — reformers for police-led youth diversion programs inevitably build capacity for the prison-industrial complex.
Supporters of these diversion programs might argue that things have gotten better while working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Children get to stay in school and they avoiding an arrest and incarceration. But given what we know about the impact of policing and police presence in schools, do these programs constitute progress?
Progress is recognizing the harm that police have done throughout history. It is making a conscious choice to position other entities, such as counselors in youth diversionary reform. It is also making a proactive shift to providing communities with what they need — housing, health care, quality education — so instances that would have otherwise involved police are not needed.
Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law remind us that innovation in itself is no guarantee of progress. If we are to consider how we make progress in ending mass incarceration among youth and adults, we must critically think about how we stop creating new diversionary policies out of mechanisms of the prison-industrial complex.
While the focus here has been on police-led youth diversion programs, in any measure of reform — be it youth-diversion reform or reform to combat drug addiction among adults — we must ask ourselves whether the proposed diversion program will divest power from carceral institutions. Ask yourself if the diversion program is aligned with doing away with carceral capacity rather than expanding it. A police-led diversion program, be it for youth or adults, is not the answer.
We cannot settle for simply the appearance of slight improvements, some of which may actually expand the realm of policing and the prison-industrial complex. Instead, we must aim for progress — for fundamental transformation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Despite the fact that we are in the midst of an unprecedented and deadly pandemic with no signs of abating, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court appears unlikely to stop the carnage. The reactionary “justices” seem more inclined to shield corporate profits and red states’ rights than to protect the health and safety of the people.
Scientists have achieved near unanimity that vaccines and masking are effective in preventing COVID infections. Nevertheless, the high court is being asked to block Biden administration rules that would mandate vaccines and/or masking and testing. On January 7, the court heard arguments in two sets of cases that will have widespread impact on the health of millions of people in the United States.
The high court is not considering whether to strike down the mandates but rather whether to stop them from going into effect while the lower courts consider their constitutionality, which could take several months. Meanwhile, untold numbers of people are getting sick and dying.
Stephen Breyer noted that the day before the arguments, there were three-quarters of a million new COVID cases. “Can you ask us to say it’s in the public interest in this situation to stop this vaccination rule? … To me, I would find that unbelievable,” Breyer remarked to Scott Keller, attorney for the business associations challenging Biden’s vaccine-or-mask mandate.
Six Right-Wingers Poised to Stop Rule Protecting Workers
The first set of cases the court heard are subsumed under the name National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA. Twenty-six business associations and attorneys general from 27 (mostly red) states are suing to stop the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from mandating that companies with more than 100 employees require their workers to get vaccinated or wear masks and submit to weekly COVID tests. As Sonia Sotomayor noted, this is not a vaccine mandate, since it presents a choice between vaccines and masking/testing. OSHA estimated that 40 percent of employers would opt for the mask-and-test policy.
Attorney Keller argued that the vaccine-or-mask mandate was “not a necessary, indispensable use of OSHA’s extraordinary emergency power.” Elena Kagan retorted, “It’s an extraordinary use of emergency power occurring in an extraordinary circumstance, a circumstance that this country has never faced before.”
Keller predicted that leaving the mandate in effect would cause “a massive economic shift” leading to “billions upon billions of non-recoverable costs” for businesses. He said Congress should have clearly given OSHA the authority to promulgate rules to combat COVID.
Pursuant to its authority under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, OSHA issued an “emergency temporary standard” to protect workers from viruses that pose “a grave danger.”
OSHA predicts that the rule would affect 84 million workers and would cause approximately 22 million people to get vaccinated. Estimates project that its implementation would prevent 250,000 people from being hospitalized. There is an exception for workers with religious objections and those who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs or work substantially outdoors.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court, “Workers are getting sick and dying every day because of their exposure to the virus at work. OSHA amassed substantial evidence of widespread workplace outbreaks across industries.” She said unvaccinated workers have a 1-in-14 chance of being hospitalized and a 1-in-200 chance of dying.
During argument, all six right-wing members of the court seemed inclined to side with the corporations and the red states. Conservatives suggested that OSHA exceeded its authority under the statute and the vaccine and/or masking requirements are more properly within the purview of Congress or the states (even though it was Congress that enacted the statute giving OSHA such power). They thought the rule was too broad as COVID is not a distinctly “occupational” danger.
By contrast, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer clearly favored protecting workers from the public health crisis caused by COVID. Kagan said, “I would think that workplace risk is about the greatest, least controllable risk with respect to COVID that any person has.” She added, “You have to be there. You have to be there for eight hours a day. You have to be there in the exact environment that the workplace is set up with. And you have to be there with a bunch of people you don’t know and who might be completely irresponsible.”
Kagan queried, “Why isn’t this necessary to abate a grave risk? This is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died. It is by far the greatest public health danger that this country has faced in the last century. More and more people are dying every day. More and more people are getting sick every day.” Kagan noted that nearly a million people have died from COVID. “We know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” she stated, “and to prevent dangerous illness and death is for people to get vaccinated. That is by far the best. The second best is to wear masks.”
Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that unvaccinated people have a much higher risk of death than those who are fully vaccinated.
Sotomayor noted that some states are forbidding employers from requiring vaccines and certain states are stopping employers from requiring their employees to wear masks.
Breyer made clear he would allow the mandates to continue during the litigation, citing statistics for high rates of infections and deaths from COVID.
Chief Justice John Roberts said Congress did not specifically give OSHA power to impose a vaccine or test mandate and that OSHA had never before mandated vaccines.
Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — notorious opponents of deference to agencies that protect people — said the OSHA statute didn’t clearly authorize the agency to impose the mandate, considering the economic ramifications.
Gorsuch, the only member of the court present during arguments without a mask, said “the flu kills people every year,” and OSHA doesn’t regulate in that area. He erroneously stated that the flu killed hundreds of thousands of people annually. In fact, the flu kills between 12,000 and 52,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC.
Samuel Alito, who, like all of his colleagues on the court, is fully vaccinated, pointed out that there are “risks [of … adverse consequences” from the vaccines. “Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unusual following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination,” the CDC says, however. “The benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks.”
Alito derisively described OSHA’s interpretation as “squeezing an elephant into a mousehole,” strongly indicating he would refuse to allow the protective rule to go into effect.
Amy Coney Barrett thought that OSHA should have adopted a more targeted rule, saying this rule was too broad as it covered both dental employees and landscapers.
Clarence Thomas was not convinced that the mandate was “necessary.”
Right-Wing Majority May Well Halt Rule Protecting Medicare and Medicaid Patients
The second bloc of cases the court considered is Biden v. Missouri and Becerra v. Louisiana. They involve the fate of a directive promulgated by the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which requires vaccinations for more than 17 million health care workers in facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid. The rule contains an exemption for medical and religious reasons.
In these cases, a right-wing majority of the court may well strike down the mandate which would affect nearly half the country. But the votes are not as predictable as they are in the OSHA case.
Lawyers for the states challenging the rule argued that requiring vaccinations would cause health workers to resign from their jobs. “Rural America will face an imminent crisis,” stated Jesus Osete, Missouri’s deputy attorney general.
But Kagan responded that HHS had considered that eventuality before issuing the mandate. “I don’t know very much about the rural market,” Kagan acknowledged. “But the secretary” of Health and Human Services, “that’s his job.” Kagan added that many workers would feel safer coming to work if their coworkers were vaccinated. She noted that some people aren’t going to the hospital for mammograms and colonoscopies for fear of contracting COVID.
“The one thing you can’t do is to kill your patients. So you have to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients,” Kagan said. She called the elderly on Medicare and the poor who receive Medicaid “the most vulnerable patients there are,” adding, “Poverty has a great deal to do with medical outcome.”
Sotomayor noted that this rule was promulgated under the Spending Clause, affording the government wide latitude to impose conditions on the monies it disburses. Roberts appeared persuaded by this argument.
In a likely attempt to appear fair and balanced to protect the legitimacy of the Roberts Court, the chief justice seemed prepared to uphold the Medicare-Medicaid health care mandate. He maintained that it is closely related to COVID’s threat to health so it could be justified in an emergency.
Gorsuch appeared unmoved in his intention to strike down the mandate aimed at protecting Medicare and Medicaid patients. He echoed the states’ argument that the regulation “effectively controls the employment of individuals at these healthcare facilities in a way that Congress specifically prohibited.” Gorsuch characterized this use of money “as a weapon to control these things,” and suggested that it “should be left to the states to regulate.”
Kavanaugh also leaned toward blocking the rule, although he wondered aloud why “the people who are regulated are not here complaining about the regulation, — the hospitals and healthcare organizations. A very unusual situation. They, in fact, overwhelmingly appear to support the … regulation.”
Barrett objected that this was an “omnibus” rule covering ambulatory surgical centers as well as skilled nursing facilities. But she may have been swayed by the argument that Congress explicitly made provisions that the courts found objectionable severable, so those sections could be struck down without dooming the entire mandate. As Sotomayor pointed out, “the vast majority of the regulations across all facilities relate to health and safety.”
Thomas expressed worry about whether the vaccine “could have significant health consequences” and was troubled that the rule could preempt the issue in some states. Alito was concerned about prior notice to the states about the mandate.
Although Thomas and Alito seemed unsympathetic to the mandate, they questioned whether the states of Missouri and Louisiana had “standing” to sue on behalf of their citizens.
The Supreme Court Should Not Play Politics With Our Health
It is essential that the Biden administration’s mandates become operable to protect millions of people in the United States from illness and death. The response to the pandemic has fallen largely along political lines, so we cannot rely on the states to safeguard their residents.
Seven of the 10 states that have the highest number of deaths per 100,000 residents as a result of COVID are led by Republican governors.
Unvaccinated people tend to focus on their personal choice and not on the good of the whole. “But the point is that it’s not the risk to the individual that’s at question; it’s that risk plus the risk to others,” Sotomayor noted. “When you remain unmasked or unvaccinated, you put yourself at risk, but you put others” at risk as well.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A year ago, it seemed possible that the country might get its first truly positive immigration reform since the 1986 “Reagan amnesty.”
The incoming Biden administration was proposing legislation that would allow most of the country’s 10 to 11 million undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status. The outlines were subsequently included in the Build Back Better bill, but the Democrats had to pare the reform back in order to win approval from the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, under the arcane Senate reconciliation process. The Democrats’ most recent proposal was just a limited parole for some 6.5 million immigrants, and even that concession wasn’t enough for MacDonough. She nixed the plan on December 16.
This latest setback for immigration reform came little more than a week after the Biden administration restarted one of Donald Trump’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico.” President Biden terminated the program in January but bowed to an August federal court order to restore it. MPP forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to stay in dangerous areas of northern Mexico; human rights organizations reported more than 1,500 crimes against these asylum seekers under Trump.
Meanwhile, the White House has continued another Trump policy on its own — the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of would-be migrants under Title 42 of the U.S. health code. And on December 16, the administration withdrew from negotiations to settle lawsuits brought by migrant families separated under the Trump administration. The move seemed to be a response to unhinged criticism from right-wing politicians and media.
2021 didn’t bring anything like the progress many immigrants and their allies were hoping for. But sustained grassroots organizing could turn the situation around in 2022.
Collective Action
The failure to win reform this year certainly isn’t the fault of the immigrant rights movement. Through steady organizing and mass actions like the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” protests, immigrant activists have built up popular support to the point where a majority of likely voters now support a legalization for most of the undocumented. It’s unlikely that the Biden administration would have included a progressive immigration proposal in its agenda without the years of activism by immigrants themselves.
Democratic centrists definitely deserve their share of the blame. But even an actually progressive Democratic Party would have faced major obstacles in the current state of the U.S. political system, with its anachronistic electoral procedures, a Congress bound by obscure rules and traditions, a judicial system packed with reactionary judges and a political class corrupted by barely disguised bribes from the superrich.
Under these conditions, even moderate and popular demands can’t be won through elections alone, whether they concern global issues like climate change or specifically U.S. issues like gun-control measures. The country faces an impasse that can only be addressed through a strong social movement, one as broad and militant as the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Progressive politicians themselves acknowledge this. In a joint interview with Noam Chomsky on the Laura Flanders Show in October, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) emphasized the need to “reengage our capacities outside our electoral system, whether it’s withholding labor or other sorts of grassroots actions.” She noted that “there is a point of collective action that becomes too difficult for the ruling class to ignore, because it then starts to threaten their legitimacy.”
An Injury to One
There’s already a wide area of agreement among progressives which can serve as a minimum program for such a movement. One example is Bernie Sanders’s list of priorities in what he calls the “fight for economic, racial, social and environmental justice for all.” The political class tends to dismiss Sanders’s proposals as too radical, and yet the Vermont senator remains one of the nation’s most popular politicians, far more popular than right-wingers like former President Trump.
While undocumented immigrants only represent 3 percent of the U.S. population, they are far more important to U.S. society than their numbers indicate. Undocumented workers make up about 4.6 percent of the country’s labor force and account for more than 20 percent of the employees in many low-wage construction and service jobs. Some 5.5 million undocumented workers are employed in sectors the U.S. government has designated as “essential.” The undocumented also play a major role in their communities. About 16.7 million U.S. residents, nearly half of them citizens, have at least one undocumented family member living with them; in New York City alone, some 1 million people — 12 percent of the city’s total population — live with one or more undocumented immigrants.
Lack of legal status is harmful for the undocumented themselves and their families, but many others are also impacted. The lack of labor protections reduces wages for unauthorized workers — by some 11.5 percent, according to one estimate — but it also creates a drag on wages for other workers in the same occupations. Denying the undocumented affordable health care endangers the rest of the population; the pandemic has been a powerful reminder that viruses and bacteria don’t check immigration status as they spread from person to person. And the constant threat of deportation creates emotional and psychological stress not just for the immigrants and those close to them, but also for the communities that rely on their labor, on the small businesses they run, on their help in health care and home care, and on other services they provide.
These secondary effects of keeping millions of people out of legal status constitute a perfect illustration of the old Wobbly slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Countering the Xenophobia
The greatest injury lies in the rulers’ use of anti-immigrant fervor to keep working people, both recent arrivals and those born here, from uniting in their own interests.
Throughout U.S. history, working people have been held down by their own prejudices, including xenophobia. It has plagued the country since colonial times, and it operates in tandem with racism. Most immigrants in recent decades have been people of color, including Black people, who suffer from even worse treatment than other migrants. But with immigrants, racists don’t need to disguise their racism with code words and dog whistles: popular discourse already vilifies immigrants as “aliens” and “illegals.” Thus, Fox News host Tucker Carlson only gets a slap on the wrist when he rants that immigration “makes our country poorer and dirtier.” Donald Trump feels free to call the presence of immigrants an “invasion,” clearing the way for a fellow bigot to gun down 22 “invaders” as they tried to shop in a Texas Walmart.
Right-wing politicians and media understand the power of this rhetoric. They knew what they were doing when they spent most of 2021 promoting a fictional “border crisis” to distract their audience from the year’s actual crises: the ongoing pandemic, climate-related disasters and Trump’s bungled self-coup.
Prospects for a progressive mass movement remain good, despite the setbacks in recent months. The potential was visible when millions of people took to the streets in the 2020 Black Lives Matters demonstrations, the largest series of protests in the country’s history. But movement-building requires the hard work of educating and organizing, and this can’t be done without directly countering xenophobia, without recognizing that immigrants and their rights are an integral part of the struggle.
Immigrant rights groups will continue to focus on legalization. “New year, same opportunity to deliver citizenship to millions of undocumented folks,” United We Dream, a large youth-based advocacy organization, tweeted on January 1. But immigrant activists also “understand that our progressive visions are interconnected,” the group’s Greisa Martínez Rosas noted in a January 6 press release.
A January 5 op-ed by Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a low-wage and immigrant worker center in Wisconsin, presented a similar perspective. Neumann-Ortiz outlined a strategy that combines grassroots electoral work with workplace organizing, utilizing both “strategic alliances” and “the power of the strike.” She emphasized the importance of linking “the immigrant rights movement with climate justice, labor and anti-poverty movements. More solidarity is needed to advance a bold progressive national agenda.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the lead-up to recent climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, some were calling COP26 the “Finance COP.” This was, in part, because Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, had been working tirelessly to secure new climate commitments from financial institutions across the globe.
Carney finally had his big moment in Glasgow when he announced that over 450 of the world’s largest financial institutions — including banks, insurers, pension funds and asset managers — had joined the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. “The architecture of the global financial system has been transformed to deliver net zero,” stated Carney as he unveiled the news.
There were, however, two key words missing from the financial sector’s big moment. Not once in the 1,349-word press release proclaiming the financial industry’s new-found dedication to climate action did the words “fossil fuels” appear. To say that this is problematic is an understatement.
One study calculated that 71 percent of all of history’s greenhouse gas emissions come from just 100 fossil fuel companies. Not only that, but fossil fuel corporations have spent 40 years funding climate denial and waging war against even incremental proposals for climate action.
To tackle the climate crisis without confronting fossil fuels is like trying to put out a fire without doing anything to stop the people pouring gasoline on the flames. But that appears to be the approach that the financial sector is taking. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Wall Street.
In the five years after the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, just six U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — have loaned a little shy of $1.2 trillion to the fossil fuel industry. To give that some context, consider that $1.2 trillion is more than double the current share market value of ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP combined.
In spite of their deep ties with the fossil fuel industry, every major U.S. bank has signed on to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero and committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Yet none of them have committed to ending their support of the industries that are most driving the climate crisis. Indeed, they seem intent on doing the opposite. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon recently vowed to continue providing finance to the oil and gas industry; Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has expressed similar sentiments.
A few months before the start of COP26, JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest funder of fossil fuels, became the first major U.S. bank to set 2030 climate targets. Unfortunately, rather than actually reducing the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with its lending, Chase chose to reuse a convoluted accounting trick often used by Big Oil known as “carbon intensity,” pledging that by 2030, it will achieve a 15 percent reduction in the “carbon intensity” of the oil and gas firms it finances.
Here’s how Chase’s carbon intensity commitments work: Imagine you are the CEO of an oil firm. Your company owns 1,000 oil wells. You receive a $10 billion loan from Chase. You use that loan to buy 400 additional oil wells and 400 windmills. This means you are digging up and burning more oil than ever before; your overall contributions to climate change have gone up significantly. But because you are now also profiting from wind power, the “carbon intensity” of your company has gone down — an accounting trick that allows your oil company to expand oil production and banks like Chase to meet their greenwashed climate targets.
During COP26, Morgan Stanley became the second U.S. bank to release 2030 climate targets, announcing a plan to slash emissions in the energy, auto and manufacturing sectors. Unfortunately, Morgan Stanley’s targets are only a half-step better than Chase’s.
The press release announcing Morgan Stanley’s 2030 targets claims that the company’s targets are based on the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero by 2050 pathway. However, a key part of the IEA’s recommendations was that “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway.” Unsurprisingly, a promise from Morgan Stanley, the world’s largest funder of new LNG terminals, to immediately end support for the expansion of the oil and gas industry was not forthcoming.
Given the collective failures of Carney, Chase and Morgan Stanley, it’s understandable that many activists denounced COP26 as nothing more than a “greenwashing festival.” This failure also makes it clear that we need the federal government to regulate financial institutions that are unwilling to do what’s necessary to curtail catastrophic climate change.
There have been some small first steps toward reigning in Wall Street’s ability to wreck our climate. In May 2021, President Biden issued the first-ever Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk, directing federal regulators to analyze and mitigate the risk that climate change poses to the economy.
In response, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the federal government’s most powerful financial regulator, released a report outlining what the climate crisis should mean for the financial sector. Unfortunately, although FSOC affirmed that U.S. financial regulators do, in fact, have the authority and obligation to address the climate crisis, it failed in several key regards. Most importantly, the report didn’t even mention that U.S. banks are actively driving the climate crisis by financing the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry.
Of greater hope is the Fossil Free Finance Act. Introduced by Representatives Mondaire Jones, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley last fall, the Fossil Free Finance Act would prohibit the funding of new fossil fuel projects by 2022 and the funding of all fossil fuel projects by 2030. It is legislation that meets the scale and urgency of the climate challenge — which is, of course, exactly what is required.
Yet so far, only 22 Members of Congress have signed on to co-sponsor the Fossil Free Finance Act. If our elected officials are at all serious about addressing the climate crisis, that number must grow dramatically in 2022.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In June 2020, when schools across the U.S. remained closed due to the pandemic, Bettina Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive, noted how much became possible when the system was forced to prioritize the lives of students, teachers and families. Laptops were distributed and internet access was provided. High-stakes, standardized tests were canceled. In many cases, grades were removed. She quoted a letter from a superintendent in Georgia who told teachers, “We want compassion over compliance.”
Now, Love concluded, “We have to say that we’re not going back. The managing of inequalities, we’re not going back.”
However, with US schools having finished their first semester of full-time, in-person education — and now returning in the midst of a new surge of COVID infections — it’s clear that this is precisely what’s being asked of teachers, as well as their students and families. Throughout the height of the pandemic, there were fears of a mass exodus of teachers. But, almost improbably, most teachers stayed. However, as schools have attempted to “return to normal,” many teachers and other educators are reaching a breaking point.
According to the Labor Department, 30,000 teachers resigned in September 2021 alone, and since January 2021, the educational services industry has seen the largest increase in the number of workers quitting. While this shortage should be a wake-up call to school boards, districts and local administrators, instead it has only led to an intensification of the pressures on educators.
Through the height of the pandemic, teachers worked in unbearable conditions. However, there was the belief that these challenges were temporary. Even more, there was the hope that the pandemic might change our priorities — that we would prioritize the social and emotional needs of students and meet them where they were academically. And that, with an infusion of stimulus dollars, there might finally be money for counselors, smaller class sizes, support staff, supplies and other vital needs.
Instead, educators returned to find that those in charge have doubled down on more of what already wasn’t working. More demands for data and documentation. More testing. More responsibilities on teachers’ shoulders. These demands are being made in a context in which student needs are greater than they’ve ever been, and resources are stretched thin. On top of this, educators are still on the front lines of a pandemic whose continued existence many seem to deny. It is this gap, between the expectation that things would be different and the reality of increased demands alongside a push for “normalcy,” that is driving educators to the breaking point.
Impact of Staffing Shortages
Across the country, there is a severe shortage not only of teachers, but of substitutes, bus drivers, paraprofessionals and other support staff who any teacher would recognize as critical to the functioning of a school. In many places, these shortages are forcing districts to close temporarily or to restructure their schedule.
However, the primary responsibility for making up the gap has fallen on teachers’ shoulders. In a survey of school administrators, two-thirds said that they were responding to shortages by asking current employees to take on more responsibilities. Teachers are taking on lunch duty, hall monitoring, after-school supervision and even cleaning. The most pressing problem, though, is that teachers are being forced to give up their precious prep periods to cover other classes.
With students coming back to school with a wider range of needs than ever before, teachers need even more time to prepare thoughtful, differentiated lessons and to assess students individually. When teachers must use their prep periods to cover an absent teacher or, worse, an unfilled position, they must choose between taking more work home or giving less than they know their students need.
This is why teachers in Portland, Oregon, are demanding scheduling changes to make up for lost prep time and the increased planning needs they are facing. Seventy percent of Portland teachers described stress levels as high or severe and more than 1,000 said they are thinking of leaving. However, the district is resisting teachers’ demands.
“Learning Loss,” Testing and the Demand for More Data
Teachers are feeling the loss of time particularly acutely as they are being asked to make up for “learning loss” and are expected to keep up with pre-pandemic, grade-level curriculum. Instead of adjusting expectations to support students to progress from wherever they are, teachers are expected to bridge the gap between existing expectations and students’ current skills.
The attempt to measure learning loss means that teachers are being asked to collect and document even more data. In addition to the looming pressure of the statewide exams that the Biden administration mandated be reintroduced in Spring 2022, and which are tied to teacher ratings in many states, districts have added even more baseline assessments. For example, New York City is spending $36 million on a set of tests given three times during the year to all students to identify “learning loss.”
These assessments steal precious instructional time, take a toll on students, and add more paperwork to teachers’ responsibilities as they are asked to document and analyze the resulting data. While this might yield some useful insights, many teachers feel that they are better able to assess their students’ development and needs than a standardized test is.
The focus on test preparation also takes away from other aspects of the curriculum that students need as they transition back to in-person learning, such as hands-on engagement, project-based learning and small group work. All of these require skills, particularly cooperative social skills, that students were less likely to practice during remote learning.
Many schools are doubling widely tested core subjects like math and English/ language arts. This means that students can end up spending more than half of a school day on these subjects alone. Electives like music and art are being cut in favor of tutoring blocks and remedial reading programs.
Are the Kids All Right?
Meanwhile, students are returning to school having experienced unprecedented levels of trauma in the span of less than two years. As of July 2021, more than 140,000 children had lost a primary caregiver and, if the trend holds, that number will have risen to more than 200,000 by December 2021. Students have had to watch, and even care for, family members as they fall ill. Many older students stepped in as breadwinners for their families when parents were laid off or too sick to work. And even students who did not suffer these deprivations often felt isolated and lonely.
Students have struggled to adjust to the demands of in-person schooling and teachers have often struggled to support them. The demands to catch-up and return to normal leave little room for the compassion, flexibility and social-emotional support that students so desperately need. Teachers, who are stretched to the breaking point themselves, risk developing compassion fatigue as students in need disrupt their classes or avoid engagement.
School districts have given lip service to the importance of social-emotional health, but there has been little of substance either in terms of material support or changed approaches. Federal funding has not led to an infusion of counselors and social workers. In New York City, the school district rolled out an $18 million, 45-question social-emotional “screener” that teachers were asked to fill out. The screener converted the answers to a single score that tracked whether students were “on target,” “advanced” or “in need.” Many teachers pointed out that they were given just a few minutes to fill out a questionnaire on students they barely knew while they had no way of getting support for students they already knew were in need.
A consistent problem with the approaches to social-emotional health is that they have rarely addressed the role that schools themselves play in contributing to students’ well-being. The assumption is that school is inherently a safer, better place for young people. However, the pandemic revealed the many ways that schools can be repressive places, especially for students of color who find themselves on the receiving end of racial bias. But rather than taking time to adjust expectations and shift school cultures, teachers are expected to impose the same disciplinary norms that alienate so many students. This puts teachers — especially teachers of color — in an impossible situation and makes it harder to develop the relationships that are even more vital right now.
Micromanaged, Disrespected and in the Line of Fire
Amid all these constraints and the extraordinary efforts being asked of them, teachers continue to find themselves micromanaged. They are expected to turn in lengthy, often daily, lesson plans that are aligned to state standards for evaluation. Districts adopt new curricula that teachers are forced to learn and implement — and just as often then abandon them. Extended hours are used for professional development sessions that teachers have little role in choosing and often find disconnected from the issues they are facing in their classrooms.
A study by Education Week reported that 42 percent of U.S. teachers polled say their administrators have done nothing to alleviate their stress and 20 percent say that when administrators do try to help, they miss the mark. Yoga, mindfulness sessions and wear jeans to work days fall far short of the things educators desperately need: time to plan; time to walk away from work and be with friends and family; adequate compensation; health and safety protections; and flexibility and trust. Teachers want more autonomy and to have their expertise and professional judgment valued.
Even when teachers do have administrators who support them, and there are many, they have faced a hostile political climate in which they find themselves on the front line facing parental and community outrage. At school board meetings across the country, enraged parents and community members (many not even parents) have shouted down teachers and local leaders over everything from mask mandates to curriculum.
In 2021, the movement of parents demanding that schools reopen for in-person learning converged with a backlash against culturally responsive curriculum and teaching about the history of racism in this country. Twenty-two states have introduced legislation, and five states have passed bills, banning the teaching of so-called critical race theory. In reality, these bills take aim at any curriculum that teaches about the oppression of various groups. Several teachers have already lost their jobs as a result of these campaigns and many more feel threatened and unsupported.
And There’s Still a Pandemic
One of the most Orwellian aspects of the 2021-22 school year is the way the ongoing pandemic has been systematically denied. Teachers are not only dealing with all the challenges outlined thus far, but they are doing so with inadequate health and safety protections. Nine states have banned mask mandates and only 16 have them. The rest are a patchwork. And even where masks are required, any teacher will tell you that getting kids to wear them consistently and properly is an uphill battle. Meanwhile, ventilation systems in schools haven’t been updated in decades — particularly schools serving high concentrations of low-income students.
Many districts do not perform regular or adequate testing of students and staff. In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, only 10 percent of unvaccinated students who opt in are tested on a weekly basis. Quarantine rules are confusing and disruptive. Whereas there were centralized plans for remote instruction during the 2020-21 school year, now districts are acting as if this is the rare exception rather than the regular occurrence it is. This makes it nearly impossible for teachers to plan.
As this article was being written, the Omicron variant was creating a new surge of cases, throwing schools into chaos again and potentially putting educators, students and families at risk. At this point, it is clear that COVID will continue to shape teaching conditions for the foreseeable future. There is no “after” in which these untenable conditions are resolved. Instead, the future of public schools is being shaped by what’s happening now. Whether teachers flee the profession in large numbers or decide to fight for an alternate vision for themselves and their students will play a large role in determining the outcome.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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It happened on the yellow bus. I was 9, in 5th grade, and the only Black girl riding to North Side Elementary School. As far as I know, I was the only Black person — child or adult — in the whole school. I felt alone, utterly alone, as a brown-haired, freckle-faced white boy laughed, pointed, and called me the N-word, over and over and over again. I will never forget his white, freckled face contorted in a menacing smile. He was laughing at me.
I was locked in place, trapped in his hate. I suppose my face was distraught. Slowly, my friends, white friends on the bus, told him to leave me alone. He moved on, but I never did.
In all the hand-wringing agitation against discussion of racism and systemic oppression in schools, what the right-wing has intentionally and inaccurately mislabeled Critical Race Theory (CRT), the emphasis is on white children: what they feel and how they feel, when the truth of American racism is taught to them. No one focuses on Black children: what they feel and how they feel, when the truth of American racism is experienced by them.
Black children experience racism long before white children learn about race. Our national conversation about when and how schools teach the history of racism in America must focus on the victims of racist systems, policies, and people. BIPOC children all across this nation experience personal, real, felt harm because of racism. They suffer. Given this fact, why are so many conversations about school curricula focused on the feelings of those who will never experience the torture of racism at all?
Maxe Hinds is a junior at George Washington University. An International Affairs major with a double minor in Dance and French, Hinds attended the International School of Brooklyn (ISB) from 1st to 8th grade. “ISB was an international baccalaureate school,” Hinds explains, “which meant that I was in a French language immersion program for 8 years. Because of that, I became fluent in French at a very young age.” After she graduated from ISB, Hinds attended one of the highest ranked independent day schools in the country, The Dalton School, where she graduated in 2019.
Tragically, none of the privileges associated with her background and education created a safe space for Hinds, and, she says, “every single year that I was at Dalton, at least one racially motivated incident occurred.” When she was just a sophomore, “about 10 screenshots were sent around the school of this one White student using racial slurs. Every single screenshot contained the N-word and one photo in particular was of him impersonating the KKK.”
Because racism persists as a vile system of exclusion and degradation — and because our children are rarely given the tools to begin to learn how to successfully dismantle it — institutions like Dalton don’t have the systems to effectively manage racism, even when it surfaces in such an explicit, unambiguous way.
Hinds says, “The student was not expelled. He was simply ‘asked to leave’ and ended up at a very good school somewhere in the UK. There was no record of this indicated on his transcript since it wasn’t an official expulsion.”
Without some form of accountability, there is no real lesson learned, and learning lessons is the whole point of school. More importantly, Black children bear the weight of white adults’ decisions. “I felt violated after this incident,” Hinds says, “and did not feel like Dalton made any efforts to protect their Black students.”
Dalton is not an outlier. Racism is inescapable in schools because racism is inescapable in society. This racism impacts every K-12 school around the country, public and private, even schools where adults believe that everyone gets along. A 2019 Southern Poverty Law Center questionnaire found that, while two-thirds of educators who responded said they “witnessed a hate or bias incident in fall 2018,” fewer than 5 percent of those witnessed attacks were reported in the news.
Hinds first experienced a micro-aggression when she was 4 or 5, and a white girl, she says, “kept pointing out how much darker my skin was in comparison to hers. Though this obviously wasn’t a racist encounter, it made me feel ‘different’ or ‘other’ at such a young age.” Hinds reflects that she “can’t even recall a distinct moment when I first experienced racism. In one way or another, it has always been a part of my everyday experience.”
Children’s experiences with racism physically harm them. In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatricians published a policy statement that declared, “Racism is a social determinant of health that has a profound impact on the health status of children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families.”
Racism is entrenched in American schools because too many Americans hijack any attempt to eradicate it. When grown-ups refuse to learn how policies, systems, and laws have been constructed to subjugate Black people and other people of color through time, kids in school have no chance at being free of them.
Educators are trying to do the work, despite the polarizing tensions of the CRT debate. Indeed, African American educators have been doing the work of supporting Black children since long before the debate even started. Patricia Hogan Williams is head of the nation’s largest private Christian school with a predominantly African American population, the Imani School in Houston, Texas. Established in 1988, Imani students “have won five national speech awards, three national science fairs, two science fairs sponsored by NASA, and many state awards in math, art, engineering.” A feeder for Houston’s top high schools, Imani produces results with sound pedagogy and emotional support.
“Racism is insidious,” Williams insists. “It is transmitted by words spoken and sometimes most clearly by words not spoken. The choice of textbooks, the pictures on the walls, the songs that are sung, the history that is taught or not taught, these are parts of the ‘hidden curriculum’ that tell a student that you belong or that you are not worthy. I have a sign in the teachers’ workroom that says, ‘No malice is required to destroy a child.’ The subtle ways a teacher speaks, the way she responds when a student gives the wrong answer, these are things that often go unnoticed, and certainly not reported, but the impact is real, and it is lasting.”
Though Williams and her husband raised their three sons in Houston, she grew up in a small Texas town where, she says, “racism was like air. It was all around, all the time. There were signs on the water fountains in the courthouse and anywhere else there was a water fountain or restroom that said ‘Colored’ or ‘Whites only.’ Boys were always told not to look at white women on the street.”
Educators across racial lines want to teach this truth in validating ways. Shannon Macaulay is a white 9th and 12th grade English teacher at Meadowbrook High School in Chesterfield, Virginia. She says that Meadowbrook has 92.8 percent BIPOC, mostly African American and Latinx, enrollment. Macaulay runs the yearbook and journalism programs in a classroom that reflects the school’s racial demographics.
“I absolutely do not agree that learning about racism and America’s racist history will harm white children,” she says. “I read statements about white children being told that they are bad because of our history of slavery and racism and I really wonder where that is happening or if it’s a fear that’s being pushed.”
According to filmmaker Michele Stephenson, the CRT debate is being pushed as part of a broader movement against facts. Co-Founder of the Brooklyn-based film company Rada Studio, Stephenson and her husband worked with education experts to produce their feature film, American Promise, and book, Promises Kept.
“The anti-truth movement is the new face of white supremacy,” Stephenson says. “CRT is a new buzz word on an old trope and effort to maintain white power.”
Macaulay says, “anything that addresses cultural relevance, equity, or allowing voices other than white voices to enter the discussion is being labeled CRT without truly understanding what those things are. I wonder why so many white parents are afraid of opening the discussion to all voices and all members of our communities. We are better together, and I have a hard time understanding a point of view that doesn’t get that.”
Because of exclusion and inequality in America’s schools, BIPOC have had to organize to best educate our children in both de jure and de facto segregated schools. We have done so with limited public dollars, locked in the domestic terror of white hate and physical violence against our children, for hundreds of years.
“So white parents need to get over it,” Stephenson says. “We have no choice but to face our common history, address the discomfort and work on building a community that goes beyond individual harm. What is rarely taught in schools alongside Black American experiences is the long tradition of white abolitionist thinking and actions — others who stood in solidarity and took risks to make this country a better place. Why can’t we teach that? We would deprive our white students of those role models if we listened to the anti-truth movement advocates today. History is messy, complicated, and has been told from the perspective of the conqueror since the European settlers arrived here. Time for that to change and to understand that we all become better citizens when we know the truth about our history and commit to making this world a better place.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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There is a hill in Dover, England, that winds down from the main road through housing estates, past schools and to the town center and port. On the hill, somewhere just before Christ Church secondary school, is a section of road characterized by mini-roundabouts, each of them painted with the slightly fading white and red of the St. George cross.
At the bottom of the hill, inside Dover’s shipping port, a red line on the floor designates the bicycle check-in route. The line weaves between trucking lanes and the port reception building, and approaches the small passport control booth, where five or six armed border officers are busy eating their breakfast.
The officer at the window checks passports, assesses would-be travelers, and asks the necessary questions. The French city of Calais is a short ferry ride (just 21 miles) across the English Channel. It’s the most popular landing point for British tourists traveling to the continent by boat, but for those planning to spend a night in the area, serious warnings are issued: There are migrants operating in the Calais area. Travelers must be “aware of this, and very careful.”
Dunkirk
It’s Tuesday afternoon in Dunkirk, France, and a large van has pulled off the motorway, slowed down to a crawl, and turned a hard left onto the narrow farm service road. The van chugs on for another 100 meters, then pulls into a dusty gravel parking lot, where a number of organizations have gathered to offer services to the refugees who live nearby.
The services on offer today will include food bags for four people, hot drinks, basic medical attention, hairdressing facilities, phone charging, and games such as Dominoes and Connect 4.
The scene itself is not an oddity in Calais or Dunkirk. Look out the window of a passing car, and you might just see it. A small collection of vehicles, with plastic-gloved volunteers distributing basic goods to 80 or so refugees out the back.
There are an estimated 2,000 refugees living like this in the Calais/Dunkirk region. The nationalities and cultures represented are numerous: Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, Eritrean and Kurdish. Officially, these tent and tarpaulin settlements — often situated in forests, under bridges or on fallow farmland — are illegal. But recognized by the state or not, it’s here that the refugee communities are sleeping and gaining access to basic provisions.
It’s 2 pm when the van pulls in, and the volunteers climb out. Two of them usher the vehicle into position and others place cones down to encourage spacing. A coordinator jumps out, unlocks the rear door and wrenches it back.
While the bags begin to be handed down and distribution gathers pace, a huddle of people has formed to one side. This is a familiar practice, some of the community always choosing to wait apart from the others. Today the group consists of two women, a man with a crutch and a lone 10-year-old boy. Servicing this separate group is always a balancing act. Today the weather is good, and there’s plenty of food to go around, but these are desperate living conditions, and there can be complex internal relationships and hierarchies at play.
After waiting some time, the two women receive a food bag, and the man with the crutch drifts away with another group. But 15 minutes later, when the last bag is distributed and the van door slams shut, the boy is left protesting on his own. His family is asleep at the camps, he says, and he needs the bag to take back and share with them. The story sounds believable enough, but true or not, there is an important precedent in place, and a four-person bag cannot be handed to a single individual.
Off to the left of the car park scene, a fold-out camping table has been set up along the edges of the trees. Crouched down behind the table, an Afghan refugee and an international volunteer are filling up cups of water from two large tanks, lining them up on the tabletop above.
“What will happen here in the winter?” the refugee says. “I think it’s getting too cold.”
The volunteer looks up at him, “You stay here for longer?” she says. The man shakes his head.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“And this winter?” the volunteer asks. “What is your plan for this winter?”
The man laughs, turning his palms over to face the sky.
“My plan?” he repeats, grinning and shaking his head. “Yes, what is my plan?”
The man is dehydrated, the skin on his cheeks folding like tissue paper as he smiles. Today the scene in front of them is ordered and calm, but over the next month, there will be regular nightly raids by the French police, looking to leverage the seasonal change to push the refugees from the coastal region. Zooming out further still, we see a chaotic political climate, growing international tensions over border control and the threat of hostile policy changes in 2022.
“Hospital”
There is a large hospital that serves the Calais area. Between the hospital building and the distant motorway fly-over, there is a system of roundabouts, fishing lakes and scrub-land, and it’s here, hidden behind the first line of bushes, that we find the largest settlement of refugees in the region. This site, named “Hospital,” is home to a highly transitory, mixed-nationality community. Distributions here are busy. The atmosphere is usually controlled and calm, but living conditions like this must be treated with respect. There are countless unseen factors that can break the balance of stability.
It is a Friday. Distribution would usually take place at Hospital on Saturday afternoons, but other organizations and community liaisons have reported disturbing news: The previous night, the police went into the settlement with tear gas, dismantled and destroyed the tents and possessions, loaded many of the inhabitants onto buses, and transported them away from the area. According to the coordinator, the exact relocation point of the refugees in question is now unknown. If the raid had been planned, it is possible that they would have been dropped at a police station in Arras (the region’s capital). Often however, the intention of relocations like this is simply to scatter, driving the inhabitants far enough away from the hospital to deter them from returning on foot.
As the volunteers gather for their lunchtime briefing, heavy rain reverberates off the warehouse roof. There has been a change of plan. For those refugees who avoided transportation from the Hospital settlement, or have managed to make their way back in the early hours, there will be a great need for basic provisions.
At 7:30 pm, the van pulls into the Hospital site, loaded with 150 tarps and 150 blankets. The refugees are aware that they are coming, and have formed a line to collect the goods. They look tired and stretched in the closing light. After a baseline level of poor health, now their only possessions have been taken away from them, and many have faced long journeys on foot to get back to this location.
The coordinator pulls on the handbrake and turns to brief the volunteers. The current position of the line is not going to work; it will need to be moved about a hundred meters across the car lot.
While the van repositions itself, the volunteers try to communicate the message calmly. At first the rearrangement looks achievable, with the majority of community members working to maintain order. But as the van parks and the rear door opens, the line begins to march and bunch up, and a few people from the rear make a break for a better position.
“We have enough for everyone,” the volunteers repeat. But they have said things like this before, and however hard they try to enforce fairness at distribution, the back of the van will always be closed at some point.
As the refugees form up again, a few men argue for position. A distribution like this would usually be a place for smiles and a few cheeky jokes. But tonight, the community appears glassy-eyed and exhausted. They take the items, thank the distribution team in hushed tones, and make their way back behind the scrub.
Old Lidl
The following evening, at the Hospital distribution site, new signs have been erected. This area serviced the largest number of refugees in the region, but now it’s clearly prohibited to distribute here. For the volunteer coordinators, the signage changes are nothing new. Just another temporary measure, brought in by a policing network structured around short-term measures. A 15-minute walk away from Hospital is another well-used refugee site, and reports suggest that the community has moved there.
This location used to be home to a Lidl supermarket, but now the building has been demolished, leaving an empty parking lot beside a dusty farming field. When the distribution van comes through at 2 pm, the road between Hospital and the old supermarket is a steady stream of people. The van pulls across a set of train tracks and into the lot. Across the dirt field, perhaps 200 meters away, there is a dense tree line with a string of tarpaulins running along its edge. Despite the great desire for tents, blankets, tarps and jackets, the organizations are unable to be reactive, and today’s drop will be the pre-arranged food bags.
Forty minutes into the distribution, a heavy rain shower comes in. The charging boards are covered with plastic tarps and everyone hurries beneath the cover of the largest trees.
A group of boys in their early teens are gathering at the rear of the parking lot. Two of them walk off into the distance, heading toward the shadow of an industrial site on the horizon. The others kick at the dust at their feet, and watch them intently.
Toward the end of the distribution, one of the boys approaches the van, asking for shelter and winter clothing.
“The police, they come at night and take everything warm,” he says, pointing a finger toward the road. “From the Hospital, we come here, and last night they follow us. They are OK sometimes. But sometimes they shoot gas or abuse … sometimes very bad abuse.” The boy steps back and mimics someone hitting the ground with a club repeatedly.
After a short time, the rain stops and the organizations collect the trash and prepare to leave. It’s early evening when they climb up into the van and take their seats.
The key is placed in the ignition, when a member of the refugee community approaches the passenger-side window. The coordinators greet this man by name.
There is an emergency situation unfolding. The man points off toward the tree line. Last night someone was seriously injured and needs urgent medical attention. There is a protocol for emergencies like this, and the volunteer coordinator steps out of the van to address the situation.
Ten minutes later, as the coordinator advocates for the injured man, two French riot police transporters arrive with eight officers inside. The officers approach the volunteers, requesting IDs and insurance documents for the vehicles. One of the volunteers isn’t carrying ID, and is threatened with detainment and a large fine.
But as police retreat to discuss the matter between themselves, the atmosphere seems to have calmed. The leading officer approaches the coordinator, speaking to him authoritatively. This time the organization will be allowed to leave, he says, but next time the maximum fines will be issued.
Passing Blame
Following the dismantling of the Hospital settlement, police continued to increase their hostile activities, and Human Rights Watch issued a report warning of the “daily harassment and humiliation” faced by the refugee groups.
The autumn season had seen a great surge of refugee sea crossings, and with many found dead in the English Channel, and media coverage growing, both United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly blamed the French government.
In July 2021, Patel had promised a fresh £54 million for increased fencing and police presence in Calais, but now, following the rise of crossings, there are open threats to withhold the money, and French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin declared that “not one euro” has yet been paid.
As the weeks roll on, the pressure on the refugees continues to mount. In late November, 27 people were found drowned in the channel in a single day, and while U.K. Home Secretary Patel targets the French government for allowing these crossings, her counterpart, Gérald Darmanin, fires back, citing the U.K.’s illegal labor market as the main incentive for the refugee migration. It’s an international blame game that shows little understanding of the complex motivations of the refugee groups, or the shared responsibility that the U.K. and France have for managing the situation. But for Patel and the U.K. government, there is a longer-term focus here at play.
Toward the summer of 2022, the U.K. government hopes to pass the “Nationality and Borders Bill,” a complete overhaul of the policy in respect to refugee and asylum seeker treatment. A legal review of the legislation, led by eminent human rights lawyer Raza Husain, has found the document in breach of multiple articles across the European Convention for Human Rights and the United Nations Refugee Convention. Husain’s report depicts the bill as a destructive rollback of previous legislation, reversing “a number of important decisions of the UK courts, including at the House of Lords and court of appeal level.”
If the proposed legislation does pass, refugees trying to make the crossing will be met with criminalization at the U.K. border, subsequent detainment at purpose-built offshore facilities, and the possibility of relocation back to “safe third countries” if their asylum application to the U.K. should be rejected (safe being a complex and subjective concept).
“What’s clear from these proposals is that Priti Patel’s anti refugee bill is cruel, inhumane and deeply flawed,” concludes British human rights organization Freedom From Torture, and the effect of the new policy “will actually just lead to a greater number of vulnerable people living in limbo, in constant fear of removal to persecution and enduring unbearable hardship and exclusion.”
But the proposed policy changes wouldn’t stop there. Along with its hard line on asylum application, the bill includes the highly controversial Clause 9, which would allow the government to strip individuals of their British citizenship without any prior warning, if the action to do so was deemed necessary by the secretary of state as within “public interest” or “the interest of national security.” The inclusion of Clause 9 has sparked a massive reaction from the British public, especially among ethnically marginalized groups, and an online petition calling for a review of Clause 9 has now been signed by over 300,000 people. “We believe these provisions should be removed,” the petition’s organizers state. They are “unacceptable, and inconsistent with international human rights obligations.”
For critics, these sweeping policy changes look like a power grab from the British government, an attempt to establish a higher level of centralized control, with particular long-term consequences for asylum seekers, protesters, and those non-white British communities who are more likely to have their citizenship threatened and be disproportionately criminalized by increased stop and search powers. Whatever the outcomes of policy change in 2022, we can be sure this year will be a stormy one for politics in the U.K.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“America will always do the right thing,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once wryly observed, “but only after they have tried everything else.” While I like a good hot take as much as the next fellow, there are enough holes in this one to qualify it as a form of cheese.
For one thing, America does not always do the right thing, unless the “right thing” is meant as the “right-wing thing,” in which case the quip is both accurate and wrong simultaneously. In truth, America tends to do the right thing only after tripping over it in the dark. Of course we will try everything else first, if there’s money in it. And in many cases, we will never do the right (i.e. just and honorable) thing — or haven’t yet.
But Churchill meant it as a compliment and we will take it as such, on a day when the president himself lived up to the humor in the barb: Joe Biden has tried everything else short of open confrontation to deal with the ongoing national security crisis known as Donald Trump since taking office, to no avail. Today, on the anniversary of the afternoon Trump and his people tried to topple democracy itself, President Biden found his mettle and delivered the most important, and perhaps the best, speech of his entire political career.
“The big lie being told by the former president and many Republicans who fear his wrath is that the insurrection in this country actually took place on Election Day, November 3, 2020,” said Biden this morning alongside Vice President Kamala Harris. “Is that what you thought when you voted that day? They want you to see Election Day as the day of insurrection and the riot that took place here on January 6th as a true expression of the will of the people. Can you think of a more twisted way to look at this country, to look at America? I cannot.”
History will peer back at this passage of time with nearly incapacitating bewilderment. These Trump supporters, these “patriots” with their tactical sunglasses, these conspiracy sleuths and YouTube scholars, these people in their gaudiest Donald shirts, have been led to believe they are the saviors of this white plunder factory of a nation, because their hero lost the election and he’s worried he won’t be able to steal from them quite so brazenly anymore. Every fact they get wrong is further proof they are correct. They are the perfection of cognitive dissonance — and they are a symptom of a larger problem that goes far beyond Trump himself.
“While Republicans assault voting rights and the integrity of our elections, what fuels their advances is the rise of a gullible sector of the public ready to follow their leaders wherever they go,” writes Rebecca Solnit for The New York Times. “What’s often described as a weakness of the Democratic Party — the existence of a variety of views and positions, freely debated or even fought over, and a restless, questioning electorate — is a strength of democracy. The Republicans remain committed to punishing and casting out dissenters — such as Representative Liz Cheney, who has been ostracized since she recognized the criminality of Jan. 6 — only further inhibiting open debate and, these days, inconvenient facts.”
Grounded in white supremacy-driven dogma, they believe they are saving the country. That belief is what the country most desperately needs to be saved from, and soon, before the rolling pebbles become an avalanche and that old bloody band called “History” starts rhyming all over again.
“At least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s false claims are running for statewide positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections,” reports The Washington Post. “The list includes 69 candidates for governor in 30 states, as well as 55 candidates for the U.S. Senate, 13 candidates for state attorney general and 18 candidates for secretary of state in places where that person is the state’s top election official.”
Yes, the GOP officeholders who still can’t bring themselves to say Trump lost the election out loud are working overtime to try and do it again. I’d wager some long green that not one federal-level Republican politician actually believes the election was stolen. Many of them know a grift when they see one, and this is one of the more masterful grifts ever spun. Plenty of them are in on it, sometimes gleefully, while the rest have chosen to either follow the herd mentality or get out of town altogether.
A majority of the country believes we are in trouble because of this elongated farce. Military generals are specifically concerned about where all this winds up in 2024, and are asking people to stop listening to those trying to sell pillows stuffed with lies.
Yet we are far down the wrong road now, and coming back will be a tricky deal. Even if some of Trump’s supporters can be convinced that they have been taken for a ride down Pickpocket Lane, that doesn’t diminish the forces — such as fascism, white supremacy and capitalism — that are undergirding Trumpism. We must acknowledge that even if the 1/6 commission succeeds in its important work, that work is only a beginning.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.
It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 and got it.” Badly enough, it turned out, to mess up her entry into high school. She says little more about it.
Still, I was shocked. In all the years when my father and his sister were alive and, from time to time, talked about the past, never had they (or my mother, for that matter) mentioned the disastrous “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-1920. I hadn’t the slightest idea that anyone in my family had been affected by it. In fact, until I read John Barry’s 2005 book, The Great Influenza, I hadn’t even known that a pandemic devastated America (and the rest of the world) early in the last century — in a fashion remarkably similar to, but even worse than, Covid-19 (at least so far) before essentially being tossed out of history and the memory books of most families.
That should stun anyone. After all, at that time, an estimated one-fifth of the world’s population, possibly 50 million people, reportedly died of the waves of that dreaded disease, often in horrific ways, and, even in this country, were sometimes buried in mass graves. Meanwhile, some of the controversies we’ve experienced recently over, for instance, masking went on in a similarly bitter fashion then, before that global disaster was chucked away and forgotten. Almost no one I know whose parents lived through that nightmare had heard anything about it while growing up.
Ducking and Covering
My aunt’s brief comment was, however, a reminder to me that we’ve long inhabited a perilous world and that, in certain ways, it’s only grown more so as the decades have passed. It also left me thinking about how, as with that deathly flu of the World War I era, we often forget (or at least conveniently set aside) such horrors.
After all, in my childhood and youth, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this country began building a staggering nuclear arsenal and would soon be followed on that path by the Soviet Union. We’re talking about weaponry that could have destroyed this planet many times over and, in those tense Cold War years, it sometimes felt as if such a fate might indeed be ours. I can still remember hearing President John F. Kennedy on the radio as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 began — I was a freshman in college — and thinking that everyone I knew on the East Coast, myself included, would soon be toast (and we almost were!).
To put that potential fate in perspective, keep in mind that, only two years earlier, the U.S. military had developed a Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China. In it, a first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons would be “delivered” to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities. If all went “well,” those would have ceased to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured — and, given what wasn’t known about the effects of radiation then, not to speak of the “nuclear winter” such an attack would have created on this planet, that was undoubtedly a grotesque underestimate.
When you think about it now (if you ever do), that plan and — to steal Jonathan Schell’s famed phrase — the fate of the earth that went with it should still stun you. After all, until August 6, 1945, Armageddon had been left to the gods. In my youth, however, the possibility of a human-caused, world-ending calamity was hard to forget — and not just because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In school, we took part in nuclear drills (“ducking and covering” under our desks), just as we did fire drills, just as today most schools conduct active-shooter drills, fearing the possibility of a mass killing on the premises. Similarly, while out walking, you would from time to time pass the symbol for a nuclear shelter, while the media regularly reported on people arguing about whether, in the case of a nuclear alert, to let their neighbors into their private backyard shelters or arm themselves to keep them out.
Even before the Cold War ended, however, the thought that we could all be blasted off this planet faded into the distant background, while the weaponry itself spread around the world. Just ask yourself: In these pandemic days, how often do you think about the fact that we’re always just a trigger finger or two away from nuclear annihilation? And that’s especially true now that we know that even a regional nuclear war between, say, India and Pakistan could create a nuclear-winter scenario in which billions of us might end up starving to death.
And yet, even as this country plans to invest almost $2 trillion in what’s called the “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal, except for news about a potential future Iranian bomb (but never Israel’s actual nukes), such weapons are seldom on anyone’s mind. At least for now, the end of the world, nuclear-style, is essentially forgotten history.
That Good-Old Nation-Building Urge
Right now, of course, the exhausting terror on all our minds is the updated version of that 1918 pandemic. And another terror has come with it: the nightmare of today’s anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, anti-social distancing, anti-whatever-crosses-your-mind version of the Republican Party, so extreme that its mask-less followers will even boo former President Donald Trump for suggesting they get vaccinated.
The question is: What do most of the leaders of the Republican Party actually represent? What terror do they embody? In a sense, the answer’s anything but complicated. In an all-too-literal way, they’re murderers. Given the urge of Republican governors and other legislators, national and local, to cancel vaccination mandates, stop school-masking, and the like, they’ve functionally become serial killers, the disease equivalents of our endless rounds of mass shooters. But putting all that aside for a moment, what else do they represent?
Let me try to answer that question in an indirect way by starting not with the terror they now represent but with America’s “Global War on Terror.” It was, of course, launched by President George W. Bush and his top officials in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Like their neocon supporters, they were convinced that, with the Soviet Union relegated to the history books, the world was rightfully theirs to shape however they wished. The United States was often referred to then as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and they felt it was about time that it acted accordingly. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested to his aides in the ruins of the Pentagon on 9/11, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”
He was, of course, referring not simply to al-Qaeda, whose hijackers had just taken out the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, but to the autocratic ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with that terror group. In other words, to those then in power in Washington, that murderous assault offered the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how, in a world of midgets, the globe’s military and economic giant should act.
It was a moment, as the phrase then went, for “nation building” at the point of a sword (or a drone) and President Bush (who had once been against such efforts) and his top officials came out for them in a major way. As he put it later, the invasion of Afghanistan was “the ultimate nation-building mission,” as would be the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later.
Of course, we now know all too well that the most powerful country on the planet, through its armed might and its uniquely well-funded military, would prove incapable of building anything, no less a new set of national institutions in far-off lands that would be subservient to this country. In great power terms, left alone on Planet Earth, the United States would prove to be the ultimate (un)builder of nations, a dismantler of the first order globally. Compared to Saddam’s Iraq, that country is today a chaotic mess; while Afghanistan, a poor but reasonably stable and decent place (even home to the “hippy trail“) before the Soviets and Americans fought it out there in the 1980s and the U.S. invaded in 2001 is now an almost unimaginable catastrophe zone.
The Republican Party Unbuilds America
Perhaps the strangest thing of all, though, was this: somehow, that powerful, all-American, twenty-first-century urge not to build but unbuild nations seems to have migrated home from our global war on (or, if you prefer, for) terror. As a result, while anything but an Iraq or Afghanistan, the United States has nonetheless begun to resemble a nation in the process of being unbuilt.
I haven’t the slightest doubt that you know what I mean. Think of it this way: thank god the party of Donald Trump was never called the Democratic Party, since it’s now in the process of “lawfully” (law by striking law) doing its best to dismantle the American democratic system as we’ve known it and, as far as that party’s concerned, the process has evidently only begun.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump would never have made it to the White House, nor would that process be so advanced if, under previous presidents, this country hadn’t put its taxpayer dollars to work dismantling the political and social systems of distant lands in such a striking fashion. Without the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the ongoing war against ISIS, al-Shabaab, and other proliferating terror outfits, without the siphoning off of our money into an ever-expanding military-industrial complex and the radical growth of inequality in this country, a former bankruptee and con man would never have found himself in the Oval Office. It would have been similarly inconceivable that, more than five years later, “as many as 60% of Republican voters [would] continue to believe his lies” in an essentially religious fashion.
In a sense, in November 2016, Donald Trump was elected to unbuild a country already beginning to come apart at the seams. In other words, he shouldn’t have been the shock that he was. A presidential version of autocracy had been growing here before he came near the White House, or how would his predecessors have been able to fight those wars abroad without the slightest input from Congress?
And now, of course, this nation is indeed being unbuilt big time by Republicans with the help of that former president and failed coupster. They already have a stranglehold on all too many states with the possibility of taking back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.
And let’s not forget the obvious. Amid a devastating pandemic and nation-unbuilding on an unnerving scale here at home, there’s another kind of unbuilding going on that couldn’t be more dangerous. After all, we’re living on a planet that is itself being unbuilt in striking ways. In the Christmas season just past, for instance, news about the extremes of weather globally — from a devastating typhoon in the Philippines to staggering flooding in parts of Brazil to the possible melting of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica — has been dramatic, to say the least.
Similarly, in this country in the last weeks of 2021, the word “record” was attached to weather events ranging from tornados of an unprecedented sort to winter heat waves to blizzards and drenching rains to — in Alaska of all places — soaring temperatures. And so it goes, as we face an unprecedented climate emergency with those Republicans and that “moderate” Democrat Joe Manchin all too ready not just to unbuild a nation but a world, aided and abetted by the worst criminals in history. And no, in this case, I’m not thinking of Donald Trump and crew, bad as they may be, but of the CEOs of the fossil-fuel companies.
So, here’s what I wonder: Assuming Armageddon doesn’t truly arrive, leaving us all in the dust (or water or fire), if you someday tell your grandchildren about this world of ours and what we’ve lived through, will the Pandemic of 2020-?? and the Climate Crisis of 1900-21?? be forgotten? Many decades from now, might such nightmares be relegated to the scribbled notes found in some ancient relative’s account of his or her life?
As 2022 begins, I can only hope so, which, in itself, couldn’t be a sadder summary of our times.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
