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Category: Op-Ed

  • Most of the Democratic Party Is Responsible for the Build Back Better Debacle

    A demonstrator wearing a Joe Manchin mask plays puppet-master to Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden puppets outside the U.S. Capitol

    Democrats are bracing for potentially huge losses in next year’s midterm elections, and many believe the next few months will be the last chance for President Joe Biden to turn the tide back by passing major legislation. His signature bill, the Build Back Better Act, is currently being held up by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who is claiming that rising inflation and the level of federal debt is causing him to rethink his support for the bill. Progressives in the party have been sidelined, and are watching with horror as Manchin dictates the bill’s future.

    “Whatever Congress is considering, we should do it within the limits of what we can afford,” Manchin told CNN on Monday. The West Virginia senator is trying to scale back the expanded child tax credit, calling it a major driver of inflation, according to Axios. Sen Lindsey Graham told “Fox News Sunday” that Manchin had asked him to commission a new report on the bill’s cost over 10 years from the Congressional Budget Office, which Manchin then referred to as “sobering.” On Wednesday afternoon, NBC News reported that the Senate was likely to “shelve” the bill and instead take up voting rights legislation. (Manchin opposes creating a filibuster carve-out for voting rights, so that effort faces a steep climb as well.)

    Biden and Manchin have spoken several times this week, leaving congressional reporters and observers guessing about the future of the bill. Manchin’s influence is so great — or at least perceived to be so great — that some outlets have taken to referring to him as “the shadow president.” To understand why Manchin has all the leverage right now, it’s necessary to examine the bill’s recent history.

    Build Back Worse

    In early November, after months of negotiations, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The Senate had already passed the $1.2 trillion bill in August, and the passage in the House was considered a major political win for President Biden.

    Right-wing Democrats in the party, like Sen. Mark Warner, had blamed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s loss days earlier on House progressives. Warner held the left flank of the party responsible for the infrastructure bill’s delay, which he said depressed voter turnout. Although conservative Senate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had been dragging their feet for weeks, there was some truth to the accusation that progressives were also slowing the bill down.

    The Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, had been holding firm that the infrastructure bill shouldn’t move forward without a complimentary social spending bill. That piece of legislation, known as the Build Back Better bill, at the time clocked in around $3.5 trillion, and included funding for families, health care expansion and climate change mitigation. From the start, the bigger bill was the more controversial one. Sen Bernie Sanders was its primary shaper and defender in the upper chamber, even as Manchin and Sinema did all they could to whittle it down.

    Biden himself had linked the bills together over the summer. The theory was that he could get Senate Republicans to support the more modest infrastructure bill to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and that the bigger bill would pass the chamber along party lines through a budgetary process known as reconciliation. It was an ambitious plan from the outset, one that relied not only on both parties, but also on the various factions within the Democrats.

    For the progressives, the bills needed to stay linked because the belief was that the only way Manchin, Sinema and the rest of the Democrats’ right flank would pass the social spending bill was if their hand was forced by using the infrastructure bill as leverage. Progressives wanted both bills to pass; the so-called moderates preferred just to pass infrastructure. If the bills were decoupled, progressives would have nothing to rely on other than goodwill and promises from the rest of the party that their priorities would become law.

    But the huge gubernatorial loss in Virginia, coupled with a surprisingly close governor’s race in New Jersey and Biden’s cratering poll numbers, spooked the administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Within days, the bills were delinked. House moderates, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, issued a statement pledging their future support for the Build Back Better Act, contingent on the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the cost, known as scoring.

    Jayapal, who had previously stared down the Gottheimer and the White House, relented. After holding the line for months, the Congressional Progressive Caucus had had enough. “We’re going to trust each other,” Jayapal said of the progressives and the centrists.

    But the assurances didn’t satisfy everybody. “I’m a no,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept. “This is bullshit.” Ocasio-Cortez was joined by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, known collectively as “The Squad.”

    “From the beginning, I have been clear that I would not be able to support the infrastructure bill without a vote on the Build Back Better Act,” Omar said in a statement on November 5. “Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first risks leaving behind childcare, paid leave, health care, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”

    The bipartisan infrastructure deal passed, and Biden signed it into law. The original timetable was for Build Back Better to get a vote by mid-November. “I am confident that during the week of November 15, the House will pass the Build Back Better Act,” Biden tweeted. It’s now more than a month later, and although the bill isn’t dead yet, every new headline about rising inflation gives Manchin additional leverage to pare it down.

    From the minute Biden linked the two bills, every observer knew that as long as they traveled together, progressives would have a seat at the table. When the Congressional Progressive Caucus stayed strong and held the line, they garnered good press. Now, progressives are on the sidelines as moderates attempt to strip away money for working parents and reintroduce enormous tax cuts for upper class homeowners by raising the so-called SALT deduction cap.

    Democratic leadership had promised a vote by year’s end, which is looking increasingly unlikely, if a vote happens at all. Punting to January will mean a break in benefits for recipients of the child tax credit, the single most important child anti-poverty program Congress has passed in a generation.

    It would be unfair to place all of the blame for the spending bill’s death spiral at the feet of Jayapal, or even the Congressional Progressive Caucus as a whole. Biden and Pelosi lobbied the caucus relentlessly in the final days before the bills were delinked. Still, as the future of the Build Back Better act appears further in jeopardy with every passing day, it’s fair to ask whether the Congressional Progressive Caucus would have been better served standing united and threatening to kill both bills. Betting on the goodwill and promises of the rest of the party may pay off, but continuing to exercise power would have almost certainly been the better move.

    There’s an underlying asymmetry to the negotiations as well. “Moderate” Democrats in both chambers were willing to let both bills die, where many progressives were hesitant to walk away with nothing. History appears likely to vindicate the six Squad members who knew that letting the infrastructure bill move forward on its own meant the social spending bill was dead in the water.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Melting of Ice Sheets Is Dramatic, But Melting of Permafrost Means Mass Death

    Ice melts on tundra and thawing permafrost in Newtok, Alaska.

    When midnight strikes on New Year’s Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it’ll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery — a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.

    In the previous decades, storm surges will have swept away coastal barriers erected at enormous cost and rising seas will have flooded the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people. Relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world, putting villages, towns, and cities at risk.

    As several hundred million climate-change refugees in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia fill leaky boats or trudge overland in a desperate search for food and shelter, affluent nations worldwide will be trying to shut their borders even tighter, pushing crowds back with tear gas and gunfire. Yet those reluctant host countries, including the United States, won’t faintly be immune from the pain. Every summer, in fact, ever more powerful hurricanes, propelled by climate change, will pummel the East and Gulf Coasts of this country, possibly even forcing the federal government to abandon Miami and New Orleans to the rising tides. Meanwhile, wildfires, already growing in size in 2021, will devastate vast stretches of the West, destroying thousands upon thousands of homes every summer and fall in an ever-expanding fire season.

    And keep in mind that I can write all this now because such future widespread suffering won’t be caused by some unforeseen disaster to come but by an all-too-obvious, painfully predictable imbalance in the basic elements that sustain human life — air, earth, fire, and water. As average world temperatures rise by as much as 2.3° Celsius (4.2° Farenheit) by mid-century, climate change will degrade the quality of life in every country on Earth.

    Climate Change in the 21st Century

    This dismal vision of life circa 2050 comes not from some flight of literary fantasy, but from published environmental science. Indeed, we can all see the troubling signs of global warming around us right now — worsening wildfires, ever more severe ocean storms, and increased coastal flooding.

    While the world is focused on the fiery spectacle of wildfires destroying swaths of Australia, Brazil, California, and Canada, a far more serious threat is developing, only half-attended to, in the planet’s remote polar regions. Not only are the icecaps melting with frightening speed, already raising sea levels worldwide, but the vast Arctic permafrost is fast receding, releasing enormous stores of lethal greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    At that frozen frontier far beyond our ken or consciousness, ecological changes, brewing largely invisibly deep beneath the Arctic tundra, will accelerate global warming in ways sure to inflict untold future misery on all of us. More than any other place or problem, the thawing of the Arctic’s frozen earth, which covers vast parts of the roof of the world, will shape humanity’s fate for the rest of this century — destroying cities, devastating nations, and rupturing the current global order.

    If, as I’ve suggested in my new book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, Washington’s world system is likely to fade by 2030, thanks to a mix of domestic decline and international rivalry, Beijing’s hypernationalist hegemony will, at best, have just a couple of decades of dominance before it, too, suffers the calamitous consequences of unchecked global warming. By 2050, as the seas submerge some of its major cities and heat begins to ravage its agricultural heartland, China will have no choice but to abandon whatever sort of global system it might have constructed. And so, as we peer dimly into the potentially catastrophic decades beyond 2050, the international community will have good reason to forge a new kind of world order unlike any that has come before.

    The Impact of Global Warming at Midcentury

    In assessing the likely course of climate change by 2050, one question is paramount: How quickly will we feel its impact?

    For decades, scientists thought that climate change would arrive at what science writer Eugene Linden called a “stately pace.” In 1975, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences still felt that it would “take centuries for the climate to change in a meaningful way.” As late as 1990, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the Arctic permafrost, which stores both staggering amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, was not yet melting and that the Antarctic ice sheets remained stable. In 1993, however, scientists began studying ice cores extracted from Greenland’s ice cap and found that there had been 25 “rapid climate change events” in the last glacial period thousands of years ago, showing that the “climate could change massively within a decade or two.”

    Driven by a growing scientific consensus about the dangers facing humanity, representatives of 196 states met in 2015 in Paris, where they agreed to commit themselves to a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This, they argued, would be sufficient to avoid the disastrous impacts sure to come at 2.0°C degrees or higher.

    However, the bright hopes of that Paris conference faded quickly. Within three years, the scientific community realized that the cascading effects of global warming reaching 1.5°C above preindustrial levels would be evident not in the distant future of 2100, but perhaps by 2040, impacting most adults alive today.

    The medium-term effects of climate change will only be amplified by the uneven way the planet is warming, with a far heavier impact in the Arctic. According to a Washington Post analysis, by 2018 the world already had “hot spots” that had recorded an average rise of 2.0°C above the preindustrial norm. As the sun strikes tropical latitudes, huge columns of warm air rise and then are pushed toward the poles by greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere, until they drop down to earth at higher latitudes, creating spots with faster-rising temperatures in the Middle East, Western Europe, and, above all, the Arctic.

    In a 2018 IPCC “doomsday report,” its scientists warned that even at just 1.5°C, temperature increases would be unevenly distributed globally and could possibly reach a devastating 4.5°C in the Arctic’s high altitudes, with profound consequences for the entire planet.

    Climate-Change Cataclysm

    Recent scientific research has found that, by 2050, the key drivers of major climate change will be feedback loops at both ends of the temperature spectrum. At the hotter end, in Africa, Australia, and the Amazon, warmer temperatures will spark ever more devastating forest fires, reducing tree cover, and releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. This, in turn (as is already happening), will fuel yet more fires and so create a monstrous self-reinforcing feedback loop that could decimate the great tropical rainforests of this planet.

    The even more serious and uncontrollable driver, however, will be in the planet’s polar regions. There, an Arctic feedback loop is already gaining a self-sustaining momentum that could soon move beyond humanity’s capacity to control it. By midcentury (or before), as ice sheets continue to melt disastrously in Greenland and Antarctica, rising oceans will make extreme sea-level events, like once-in-a-century storm surges and flooding, annual occurrences in many areas. If global warming grows beyond the maximum 2°C target set by the Paris Agreement, depending on what happens to Antarctica’s ice sheets, ocean levels could increase by a staggering 43 inches as this century ends.

    In fact, a “worst-case scenario” by the National Academies of Sciences projects a sea-level rise of as much as 20 inches by 2050 and 78 inches in 2100, with a “catastrophic” loss of 690,000 square miles of land, an expanse four times the size of California, displacing about 2.5% of the world’s population and inundating major cities like New York. Adding to such concerns, a recent study in Nature predicted that, by 2060, rain rather than snow could dominate parts of the Arctic, further accelerating ice loss and raising sea levels significantly. Moving that doomsday ever closer, recent satellite imagery reveals that the ice shelf holding back Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier could “shatter within three to five years,” quickly breaking that Florida-sized frozen mass into hundreds of icebergs and eventually resulting “in several feet of sea level rise” on its own.

    Think of it this way: in the Arctic, ice is drama, but permafrost is death. The spectacle of melting polar ice sheets cascading into ocean waters is dramatic indeed. True mass death, however, lies in the murky, mysterious permafrost. That sloppy stew of decayed matter and frozen water from ice ages past covers 730,000 square miles of the Northern Hemisphere, can reach 2,300 feet below ground, and holds enough potentially releasable carbon and methane to melt the poles and inundate densely populated coastal plains worldwide. In turn, such emissions would only raise Arctic temperatures further, melt more permafrost (and ice), and so on, year after year after year. We’re talking, in other words, about a potentially devastating feedback loop that could increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beyond the planet’s capacity to compensate.

    According to a 2019 report in Nature, the vast zone of frozen earth that covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is a sprawling storehouse for about 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon — twice the amount already in the atmosphere. Current models “assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards,” slowly releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But frozen soil also “physically holds the landscape together” and so its thawing can rip the surface open erratically, exposing ever-larger areas to the sun.

    Around the Arctic Circle, there is already dramatic physical evidence of rapid change. Amid the vast permafrost that covers nearly two-thirds of Russia, one small Siberian town had temperatures that reached a historic 100 degrees Farenheit in June 2020, the highest ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, several peninsulas on the Arctic Sea have experienced methane eruptions that have produced craters up to 100 feet deep. Since rapid thawing releases more methane than gradual melting does and methane has 25 times more heating power than CO2, the “impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate,” suggests that 2019 report in Nature, “could be twice that expected from current models.”

    To add a dangerous wild card to such an already staggering panorama of potential destruction, about 700,000 square miles of Siberia also contain a form of methane-rich permafrost called yedoma, which forms a layer of ice 30 to 260 feet deep. As rising temperatures melt that icy permafrost, expanding lakes (which now cover 30% of Siberia) will serve as even greater conduits for the release of such methane, which will bubble up from their melting bottoms to escape into the atmosphere.

    New World Order?

    Given the clear failure of the current world system to cope with climate change, the international community will, by mid-century, need to find new forms of collaboration to contain the damage. After all, the countries at the recent U.N. climate summit at Glasgow couldn’t even agree to “phase out” coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Instead, in their final “outcome document,” they opted for the phrase “phase down” — capitulating to China, which has no plans to even start reducing its coal combustion until 2025, and India, which recently postponed its goal of achieving net-carbon neutrality until an almost unimaginably distant 2070. Since those two countries account for 37% of all greenhouse gases now being released into the atmosphere, their procrastination courts climate disaster for humanity.

    Who knows what new forms of global governance and cooperation will come into being in the years ahead, but simply to focus on an old one, here’s a possibility: to exercise effective sovereignty over the global commons, perhaps a genuinely reinforced United Nations could reform itself in major ways, including making the Security Council an elective body with no permanent members and ending the great-power prerogative of unilateral vetoes. Such a reformed and potentially more powerful organization could then agree to cede sovereignty over a few narrow yet critical areas of governance to protect the most fundamental of all human rights: survival.

    Just as the Security Council can (at least theoretically) now punish a nation that crosses international borders, so a future U.N. could sanction in potentially meaningful ways a state that continued to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or refused to receive climate-change refugees. To save that human tide, estimated at between 200 million and 1.2 billion people by mid-century, some U.N. high commissioner would need the authority to enforce the mandatory resettlement of at least some of them. Moreover, the current voluntary transfer of climate reconstruction funds from the prosperous temperate zone to the poor tropics would need to become mandatory as well.

    No one can predict with any certainty whether reforms like these and the power to change national behavior that would come with them will arrive in time to cap emissions and slow climate change, or too late (if at all) to do anything but manage a series of increasingly uncontrollable feedback loops. Yet without such change, the current world order will almost certainly collapse into catastrophic global disorder with dire consequences for all of us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Meadows Texts May Be the Watergate Tapes of the 1/6 Inquiry

    Mark Meadows walks across a field

    More than a year into Donald Trump’s increasingly disturbing post-defeat effort to topple the republic in the name of personal vengeance, it is easy to forget what an unmitigated clown show his administration was. Even amid the deliberately inflicted fascist chaos, there were plenty of moments when the White House couldn’t manage the recipe for buttered bread. Mark Meadows is a shining example of that lot.

    “The House on Tuesday voted to hold former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress,” reports The Washington Post, “for defying a subpoena issued by the bipartisan committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob…. Members of the Jan. 6 panel have long said the information they seek from Meadows, a onetime North Carolina congressman, is not protected under any kind of executive privilege as the bipartisan panel investigates the insurrection, what former president Donald Trump did that fateful day and the actions leading up to the riot.”

    A quick refresher for those who may not be fully up on their Meadows lore: The former South Carolina House member rode into office on the Tea Party tidal wave of 2012. He is a founding member of the now-notorious Freedom Caucus, which exists only to denude and destroy the government that caters to it. Meadows is famous for voting against aid for those affected by Hurricane Sandy, helping to bounce John Boehner from the Speaker’s chair for being too liberal, shutting down the government to prevent people with pre-existing medical conditions from getting insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, voting against renewing the Violence Against Women Act because that’s what “God’s country” wanted him to do, and opposing any form of restrictions on gun purchases.

    After becoming chief of staff in 2019, Meadows was almost religiously devoted to whatever deep-fried nonsense fell from Trump’s mouth on any given day. Full in the knowledge that he was the fourth to occupy this office in three years, and that his predecessors had been chopped down and publicly humiliated by the boss before their abrupt departure, Meadows did his obsequious best to walk the line. He lasted 295 days, to the final day of the administration.

    During Meadows’s tenure, the top two issues on Trump’s mind were the fictional stolen election and his insistence on downplaying the menace presented by COVID-19. Meadows has much to answer for due to his actions on the latter: He actively dismissed the effectiveness of masks, and counseled Trump do the same lest he infuriate the GOP base. Meadows was also notoriously hostile to the scientists advising the administration on the pandemic, often attacking or undermining Anthony Fauci for saying anything that might do political harm to the administration.

    It was Meadows’s open devotion to Trump’s “We Wuz Robbed!” election theft quest that has drawn the attention of the select committee. After initially agreeing to cooperate, and after handing over a large tranche of documents, Meadows abruptly reversed course and revoked his cooperation.

    Within the documents he released, however, were transcripts of text message exchanges he had on January 6 with Republican lawmakers who were trapped in the building, and Fox News personalities who feared the riot would negatively affect Trump’s public standing.

    The discovery of these documents led to one of the more dramatic evenings in the near history of the Capitol dome. “As the Jan. 6 committee voted to hold Meadows in contempt Monday night,” reports the Post, “one of its two Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney, read aloud some texts that Meadows had received and sent on Jan. 6. They include Fox News personalities arguing to Meadows that the scenes were hurting what they clearly viewed as a common cause and that Trump wasn’t doing enough to stop them. They also, remarkably, included the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., rebuking his own father for insufficient steps to quell the violence.”

    Recently, Meadows came out with a book intended to shine a positive light on the Trump White House. Because he included the revelation that Trump had tested positive before his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump erupted and called the book “fake news.” To mollify him, Meadows actually appeared before the press and agreed: The book is indeed fake news.

    It has been noted that many of the most titillating bits in the document dump Meadows provided to the committee didn’t make it into the book. Those bits got an airing last night, thanks to Liz Cheney. “What little we know of those private communications is plenty damning enough,” reports The Daily Beast. “On Monday night, as the committee voted to hold Meadows in criminal contempt, Rep. Liz Cheney read aloud text messages to Meadows from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity, and even Trump’s own son Don Jr., in which they all begged to have the president intervene. He did not.”

    Meadows likely knows a hell of a lot more than he’s saying about what really went down on 1/6, and who was behind it. He has been indicted for his failure to cooperate, and faces a steep climb in the courts trying to hide behind Trump’s laughable argument for immunity. Even absent his testimony, the copies of his text messages to and from the entire right-wing mesosphere on that day paint a vivid picture of just how broad and deep the attempted coup was.

    There’s a sniff of Watergate here, if only in the way the players involved chose to record and document their activities and interactions without a care for who might see them someday. Another Trump staffer bollixed the buttered bread. Nothing has changed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Campaigned on Climate. Where’s the Bold Action?

    Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks about climate change and the wildfires on the West Coast at the Delaware Museum of Natural History on September 14, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware.

    Millions of years of evolution have graced birds with a wealth of healthy instincts. They have mastered the art of flight, and many species fly thousands of miles when the seasons change, unerringly returning time and again to a distant refuge where the weather is calm. More than anything, though, birds know better than to shit in their own nest. This is an instinct the president of the United States has yet to develop, and the whole wide world may come to pay a brutal price for it.

    November’s COP 26 international environmental summit in Glasgow was an unsurprising disappointment on pretty much every level: A bunch of world leaders beholden to the global energy industry came together in the rain to pretend they were making process on the existential threat hovering over us all, but the act wore thin in a hurry. An environmental summit whose participants cannot summon the will to admit that burning coal is bad for the air and water is an environmental summit that should have stayed in bed.

    Adding insult to injury, the Biden administration held a massive lease sale for oil and gas drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico scant days after the conclusion of the summit. Some 80 million acres of sea floor — which could contain more than a billion barrels of oil and more than four trillion cubic feet of natural gas — were up for grabs. According to an analysis by The Center for American Progress, “[T]he offshore lease sale alone has the potential to emit 723 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over its lifetime, equivalent to operating more than 70 percent of the United States’ coal-fired power plants for a year.”

    As if this were not bad enough, there is the timeline. The companies that bought leases to drill in the Gulf — Exxon and BP stand tall in the crowd — will need years to install the infrastructure required to get to the oil and gas. This means the actual extraction and burning of these fossil fuels will not even begin until around 2030, a year many climate scientists have set as a hard deadline for reversing course on our ecological dissolution.

    The whole thing felt like a deliberate finger in the eye of the environmental movement by the Biden administration, but the president and his people begged for understanding: The courts are making us do this, they claimed. We paused all new leasing a year ago but got slapped by an injunction that required us to do the auction. It is out of our hands.

    “We’re required to comply with the injunction,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in November as all this was unfolding. “It’s a legal case and legal process, but it’s important for advocates and other people out there who are following this to understand that it’s not aligned with our view, the president’s policies, or the executive order that he signed.”

    And if my cat had wheels, she’d be a wagon. The Guardian reports:

    The Biden administration admitted that a court decision did not compel it to lease vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, shortly before claiming it was legally obliged to do so when announcing the sell-off, the Guardian can reveal.

    The president’s administration insisted it was obliged to hold the lease sale due to a court ruling in favor of a dozen states that sued to lift a blanket pause placed on new drilling permits by Biden. But a memo filed by the US Department of Justice before the lease sale acknowledges that this judgement does not force the government to auction off drilling rights to the gulf.

    “The administration has been misleading on this, to put it mildly. It’s very disappointing,” said Thomas Meyer, national organizing manager of Food and Water Watch. “They didn’t have to hold this sale and they didn’t have to hold it on this timeline. We know this will exacerbate the climate crisis, it undermines US credibility abroad and it contradicts a campaign promise by Biden.”

    The urgent need to address anthropogenic climate disruption becomes more evident by the day. A massive Antarctic ice shelf called Thwaites is maybe five years away from shattering, according to newly released data. “Total collapse of Thwaites could result in several feet of sea level rise, reports The Washington Post, “endangering millions of people in coastal areas.”

    A historically hot summer in the Pacific Northwest is responsible for the heat-related deaths of as many as a billion sea creatures. Many other species have also been impacted, including humans. These so-called “heat domes” have been followed by long stretches of warm, dry weather that has eviscerated the snow pack in the western mountains. Without enough snowfall, drought and fire are all but guaranteed to follow.

    Only days ago, tornadoes tore through nine states, including Kentucky, in the middle of the night, causing unimaginable damage and sparking a debate as to the relationship of the climate crisis to the monster storm. A variety of factors are involved in the formation of tornadoes, making it difficult to pinpoint causality. Yet the sheer size of the storm, combined with the timing — tornadoes of any size in December are extremely rare — make it hard to claim that climate had nothing to do with it.

    President Biden campaigned hard on salvaging the climate fight before it is too late. While he is no Donald Trump, Biden has been revealed in this oil lease fiasco as yet another lying politician willing to eat dirt for the fossil fuel industry. Trump would have done these things and then claimed he didn’t, but would’ve said that even if he had done them, which he didn’t, they were the right things to do. Biden just does them, and moves on down the line.

    The president has broken the First Rule of Birds. The trouble is, this nest belongs to all of us, and we are well and truly screwed without it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Let’s Abandon False Dichotomy of “Offensive vs. Defensive” Support for Yemen War

    A Yemeni man inspects a house that was destroyed in an air strike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition, on February 5, 2021, in Sana'a, Yemen.

    On the evening of December 7, 2021, the Senate shot down a resolution to block the sale of a package of air-to-air missiles and missile rail launchers to Saudi Arabia. In the weeks leading up to the vote, bombs rained down on the city of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. This November, civilian casualties in Yemen were at a 16-month high. Bombing rates from the Saudi coalition were 41 percent higher than the monthly average during this year. Ten months have passed since President Biden ended “offensive” support to the Saudi coalition that has been waging war on Yemen since 2015. Biden pledged to find a political solution to the conflict, but the situation on the ground has only gotten worse.

    The sale of the package of weapons was announced by the White House in November for $650 million in air-to-air missiles — primarily produced by Raytheon Technologies. The administration insisted that these weapons were not to be used inside Yemen but to protect the Saudi people from retaliatory attacks in Saudi territory by its adversaries in Yemen, i.e., the Houthis. Congress then had 30 days to contest the sale. The biggest debate in the Senate centered on whether the weapons were “offensive” or “defensive” in nature.

    The Biden administration, in a statement released hours before the Senate vote on the resolution to stop the sale, argued that the sale was for “defensive” support to Saudi Arabia and the weapons being sold could not be used offensively. Senators who voted in support of the sale echoed the same rhetoric. However, that characterization is ridiculous when discussing the Saudi-led war on Yemen because Saudi Arabia is aggressively violating another nation’s sovereignty by waging war on Yemen in the first place.

    The nature of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen is entirely offensive. Support of any kind for the war by the United States sends a signal of impunity to the Saudi government. It says that even if Saudi Arabia is bombing, blockading and starving another independent country, the U.S. will be there to lend a hand.

    The Senate largely failed to examine this particular sale in the broader context of Saudi Arabia imposing a land, air and sea blockade on the entire country of Yemen. Since 2015, Yemenis have not had full and proper access to their land crossings, their sea ports or their airports. The blockade has been a consistent strategy of the Saudi coalition since the beginning. This act of collective punishment has starved thousands of Yemenis and will have impacts on the population for generations to come. The blockade has also exacerbated the pandemic. Hospitals treating COVID19 patients risk losing power due to fuel shortages caused by the blockade and patients who need to leave the country for treatment are not able to. It is an act of war. Why would the United States be lending any support to a country starving millions of people, no matter how the support is labeled?

    Saudi Arabia has tried to beat the Houthis for six years and has failed, despite being backed and armed by the United States, the most militarized nation on Earth. Now the Saudi government is using its blockade of Yemen as a bargaining chip in peace talks. The weapons that are a part of this new sale give Saudi Arabia the ability to prolong and enforce their air blockade — a crucial part of Saudi Arabia’s war strategy. The White House can say Saudi Arabia will only be able to use the weapons in defense of its population, but the United States is handing over weapons capable of shooting down other aircraft when Saudi Arabia maintains that it will control the airspace in Yemen.

    It has been almost a year since President Biden ended “offensive” support for the war in Yemen and promised to find a lasting political solution. After the announcement, Yemen advocates in the United States and around the world were wondering what ending “offensive support” really means. Ten months after the announcement, the situation on the ground has only gotten worse. Worst-case estimates say that a Yemeni child is starving to death every 75 seconds. The Saudi government and the Houthis are nowhere close to a peace agreement because the blockade continues to be used as a political tool by Saudi leaders and because the U.S. continues to support Saudi Arabia, simply now calling the support “defensive.” It is clear that President Biden’s strategy of ending “offensive” support for the war is disingenuous. Creating this false dichotomy between offensive and defensive has only left wiggle room for the Saudi military to continue its brutal assault on the people of Yemen. It’s time that members of Congress and activists who are serious about ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen abandon that rhetoric completely.

    Across political parties, 64 percent of likely voters oppose the newest sale, even though it has been defined as “defensive.” Members of Congress across party lines opposed the deal. The dichotomy is breaking down, and peace activists should welcome it. If the “defensive vs. offensive” rhetoric continues to be embraced, the Biden administration and Congress will only continue to postpone the day when Saudi Arabia realizes the futility of its intervention and leaves the Yemeni people to determine their own future.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s “Democracy Summit” Prioritized US Hegemony Over Democratic Ideals

    President Joe Biden takes the stage to deliver closing remarks for the White House's virtual Summit For Democracy in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on December 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    For stark evidence that we live in a world where political hypocrisy reigns supreme, one need look no further than Biden’s recent Democracy Summit.

    The United States — which was rated for the fifth consecutive year as a “flawed democracy” by a “leader in business intelligence” — sought to project itself at last week’s summit as a leader in the fight to preserve global democracy, despite its long and dark history of overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing military dictatorships, and in spite of its ongoing support for any regime, however autocratic, that supports the interests and the objectives of the U.S. empire.

    As if this wasn’t hypocritical or farcical enough, many of the countries invited to take part in the summit are governed by leaders with little concern for democratic norms, such as India’s Narendra Modi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. These are authoritarian-led nations, but they enjoy robust economic and political relations with the United States.

    China and Russia were not invited. Neither was Turkey because of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s extensive military deals with Russia.

    The summit brought together leaders from government and the private sector, all of whom seem to have accepted the fact that democracy is under strain in today’s world, but there was no acknowledgement of the factors responsible for the weakening of democratic governance and the resurgence of authoritarianism. What one heard were pledges to strengthen democratic accountability, expand economic opportunities and protect human rights. In other words, the same blah, blah, blah, delivered by leaders at COP26.

    In sum, the Summit for Democracy was not about defending democracy; rather, it was a geopolitical gambit to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. As such, the question as to why democracy is undergoing an alarming decline across the world was simply left hanging in the air.

    What really accounts for the spread of authoritarianism over the last few decades? And how does it differ from the forms of political authoritarianism that were prevalent during the Cold War era?

    Today’s authoritarianism (often called “authoritarian populism”) is a complex phenomenon, with unique economic, cultural, political and social dimensions. Thus, while the ideological location of “authoritarian populism” is to be found on the far right of the political spectrum, there are important differences with regard to policymaking between regimes such as Victor Orbán’s in Hungary and Donald Trump’s during his four-year reign.

    Different political contexts also play a key role in the resurgence of authoritarianism. Thus, while the rise of the new radical right in Europe is directly linked to the decline of the left on the continent, in Latin America, by contrast, the radical right has grown in a period of sharp electoral gains by the left.

    Nonetheless, what bonds authoritarian leaders in today’s world is their affinity for forms of political behavior that result in repressive measures, undermine all forms of collective decision-making — and indeed of the democratic process itself — and lead to the formation of autocratic regimes. In addition, all of the above leaders employ a rhetoric that can be loosely defined as xenophobic, if not outright racist, while seeking at the same time to gain popular support by using an ideology of extreme nationalism and emphasizing “law and order” as the basis for their political legitimacy.

    Yet, we also need to understand how today’s authoritarian regimes are different from those in the past. They are run by leaders who enjoy considerable support among the citizens of their respective countries. The new generation of authoritarian leaders rose to power not through coups d’état but by elections and with vows to transform the existing socio-political order. They offered quick and easy solutions to social and economic problems, and managed to build a strong level of support among working class and nonurban populations, while at the same time enhancing the links of the state with the dominant capitalist classes in the domestic economy.

    Take, for instance, the case of Orbán in Hungary, who was not invited to Biden’s Democracy Summit, as his policies make him a pariah within the European Union.

    On the economic front, Orbán developed a set of unorthodox but populist programs that came to be known as “Orbánomics.” Briefly, “Orbánomics” combine policies of increased wages, low interest rates, high value-added taxes, initially high taxes in sectors of the economy controlled by foreign capital with the aim to drive foreign players away so the industries would pass into the hands of the domestic capitalist class (corporate tax in Hungary is now among the lowest in all of Europe, but value-added taxes remain the highest in the world), and an extensive workfare program for unemployed Hungarians. It’s an economic program that can easily appeal to the average citizens, especially when compared to what they had experienced in the early years of the transition to post-communism where the ideology of the free market ran amok.

    Of course, the developments on the political front do not go unnoticed either by average Hungarians. Orbán has been remaking the Hungarian state in his own image since he took charge of the country in 2010. He filled the judiciary with members of his own party, rewrote the constitution, installed party apparatchiks into key agencies and institutions, introduced a school curriculum built around national identity and Christian cultural values, launched a war on the media and actually placed hundreds of independent media outlets into the hands of his cronies, and created an immense security apparatus at the border in order to keep away immigrants and refugees. Pro-Orbán newspapers and magazines are in the habit of even publishing the names of people considered to be enemies of the Hungarian state.

    Hungary is clearly not a democracy, yet Orbán’s authoritarian politics has more supporters than one cares to acknowledge. For many citizens, Orbán’s regime is the protector of Hungary’s national interests and identity from the globalizing impacts of a ruthless capitalist economic system. Different political forces inside Hungary have forged an alliance to challenge him ahead of next year’s elections, but it would not be a shock if Orbán continues in office after April 2022. As part of his strategy to entice voters to stay loyal to his party, he has launched a massive public spending campaign which includes, among other things, a huge tax rebate for families and an extra month’s worth of pensions. He is also trying to create national hysteria by accusing the EU and the U.S. of planning election interference.

    Viktor Orbán is a textbook case of how “authoritarian populism” works in today’s world where the economics of global neoliberalism have left nation-states at the mercy of powerful market forces, eroded social institutions and deprived people of their national patrimony.

    Orbán’s regime is not neoliberal per se. In actuality, Orbán’s politics constitute a reaction to neoliberal intensifications via the creation of a post-neoliberal regime which, “merges authoritarianism, racist and patriarchal nationalism, clientelism, and partial neoliberalization,” according to author and professor Dorit Geva. His regime is a far right alternative to global neoliberalism.

    No doubt, this is what Trump tried to emulate from the moment he emerged on the political scene, but obviously without any interest in adopting the full package of Orbán’s “economic nationalism.”

    Indeed, the spread of “authoritarian populism” is intimately connected to the intensifications of the neoliberal project in almost every case study that one wishes to examine, no matter the geographical location. In Central and Eastern Europe, where either illiberal programs or outright authoritarian rule extend from Hungary and Poland to Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, drastic neoliberal measures were introduced with complete disregard for the national patrimony and community well-being. Austerity, privatization, deregulation, the degrading of labor, the marketization of social relations, and the transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, all of which constitute the economic and political aims of the neoliberal project, created massive inequalities and pushed a large portion of the population at the margins of society. These developments, combined with a growing feeling of alienation in their own country due to the dominance of foreign economic influence, made many an easy target for right-wing populists, especially in light of the decline of the parties of the traditional left. As far as immigration goes, as documented by researchers Anthony Edo and Yvonne Giesing, there is “no mechanical link between the rise of immigration and that of extreme right-wing parties.” The key driver behind the rise of authoritarian populism is neoliberalism and its economic, social and cultural consequences.

    Indeed, we see a similar trend in most countries of the European Union today, including France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Authoritarian or illiberal parties are gaining ground virtually everywhere in the Western world as the destructive consequences of neoliberalism become ever more pronounced and the left continues to lose ground.

    Interestingly enough, in Latin America, on the other hand, the resurgence of the extreme right takes place in a period when average voters are electing and reelecting leftist governments. The aim there on the part of extreme right-wing parties is clear and straightforward: defend neoliberal capitalism by preventing socialists and radical leftist parties from making further inroads and turning the tide against change.

    In both cases, however, it is the intensification of the contradictions of the global neoliberal project that is propelling the shift toward illiberal democracy and authoritarian populism. Neoliberalism is deeply inimical to democracy. It is actually drawn toward authoritarian politics because, as Noam Chomsky notes, it undermines democratic governance at the national and international level through the “transferring [of] policy-making to private tyrannies that are completely unaccountable to the public.”

    The implementation of the neoliberal project is thus anything but a politically neutral process. It requires the full utilization of both the repressive and the ideological apparatuses of the state in order to secure, maintain and reproduce its hegemony in class divided societies. The use of state repression and propaganda have been absolutely critical to the success of global neoliberalism. As such, authoritarianism is just a symptom of neoliberalism — a fact that neither Biden nor any of the invitees to his Democracy Summit dared to acknowledge.

    What the future has in store for democracy is of course impossible to predict, although authoritarianism is likely to stay with us for as long as neoliberalism remains alive. It is of some consolation, however, that “authoritarian populism” no longer has a global leader. The defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election was a major, if only temporary, blow to global authoritarianism. This is because Trump not only practiced authoritarian politics himself, but warmly embraced scores of authoritarian leaders during his four years in office, thereby granting immense political legitimacy to the growing trend toward illiberal democracy. This was indeed a most interesting and rather unique development in the annals of U.S. politics in that, unlike most of his predecessors in the White House, who always sided with dictators and authoritarian rulers willing to cater to U.S. interests, Trump displayed support and admiration for authoritarian leaders (Putin and Erdoğan, in particular) who could be considered anything but allies of the United States.

    Yet, it is quite conceivable that Trump may return to the White House if he decides to run in 2024. The Democrats appear incapable or unwilling to safeguard what is left of democracy in the U.S. Their failure so far to pass a voting rights bill is quite discouraging, while the wave of mobilization at grassroots levels among Republicans seeking offices to supervise elections is a bad omen of things to come. The Democratic Party’s failure to advance an economic and social agenda that curtails the worst excesses of capitalism may create grounds for the further advancement of authoritarianism.

    The weakening of democracy and the spread of authoritarian politics in many parts of the world is intrinsically linked to the contradictions of the global neoliberal project. For the progressive forces, therefore, restoring democracy entails putting an end to the neoliberal nightmare that has plagued the world for the past 40 years. Without undoing neoliberalism, and all other things being equal, the slide further and further toward authoritarianism is a distinct possibility.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Right Is Now Weaponizing Recall Elections at Every Level of Government

    A poster of Bernie Sanders urging voters to stop the recall attempt against Kshama Sawant

    Election recall efforts have recently become firmly entrenched in the political playbooks of the right. In Nevada, Republicans began recall campaigns against three state senators in 2017. This year, in Colorado alone, 10 Democratic state legislators are now facing recall efforts. Across the country, progressive legislators, governors and municipal officials are staring down conservative efforts to remove them.

    There was a moment this fall that — in a calmer political moment — could have served as a breaking point for the right-wing use of recall campaigns to target progressive elected officials. In mid-September, California voters overwhelmingly rejected a recall effort against Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a rational political climate, that defeat of the campaign to evict the most high-profile liberal governor in the U.S. could have given pause to the notion that conservatives can relitigate elections that they have lost fair and square.

    But the U.S. isn’t in a rational or a calm moment. Since November 2020, Donald Trump has relentlessly pushed his conspiracy theory that the presidential election was stolen from him, and, as he locks down control over the GOP, he has used fealty to this conspiracy theory as a litmus test for candidates up and down the ballot. These days, fed a relentless diet of far right conspiracy theories from Fox News and other conservative journalistic outlets, from social media feeds, and from political leaders, two-thirds of GOP voters believe that President Joe Biden stole what was rightfully a Trump victory.

    The results are increasingly toxic to the democratic political process, and they aren’t limited to the presidential election.

    Trump’s baseline argument, now adhered to by a growing part of the GOP, is essentially that anytime a Republican candidate loses, or a progressive Democrat wins, it is the result of fraud and malfeasance. As a result, Republicans are looking to any and every method to undermine election results mid-stream. These tactics range from trying to stop results being certified; to reimagining state laws so as to criminalize the actions of nonpartisan election officials and make it easier for partisan figures to take over the running of election counts; to running “Stop-the-Steal” candidates as a way to gain control over election oversight positions. Increasingly, conservatives are pushing recall elections in the hope they can motivate their base to come out in high numbers to vote to oust candidates whom they know they can’t beat during a regular, high-turnout, high-interest election.

    In California, progressive-leaning district attorneys in both San Francisco and Los Angeles are facing well-funded efforts to recall them in 2022. School board members in San Francisco are also facing recall, as is Los Angeles council member Mike Bonin. In the far north of the state, Republican Shasta County Supervisor Leonard Moty is being targeted from the right by groups who believe he isn’t conservative enough, and are therefore working to recall him. Two other members of the five-member county board are also facing recalls for abiding by Governor Newsom’s pandemic public health orders.

    Further up the Pacific Coast, in Seattle, council member Kshama Sawant, a revolutionary socialist who has been in the national spotlight for years for her unapologetically radical stances, faced a recall effort earlier this month and appears to have escaped recall with razor-thin margins in the polls. Her campaign is referring to the results as an “apparent victory,” and the Recall Sawant campaign has admitted that the recall push “will likely fall short of removing Sawant from office.”

    Sawant had been accused by billionaire-funded opponents of using a couple thousand dollars of city resources to promote a Tax Amazon initiative. (She settled with the city’s ethics commission earlier this year by paying a small fine); of opening City Hall up to racial justice protesters on contravention of COVID-19 public health restrictions. (She acknowledges opening City Hall but denies she violated local ordinances in so doing); and of leading protesters to the mayor’s house, despite the mayor’s address being confidential. (She acknowledges that she took part in the march but denies that she was leading it). Sawant has not been charged in criminal court with any crimes, and her supporters argue that she has been targeted for recall not because she has erred ethically, but because she has long been a voice for Seattle’s marginalized populations.

    On the other side of the continent, in Virginia, three progressive DAs and a state senator are all caught up in recall campaigns against them.

    In the country as a whole, Ballotpedia is now tracking recall efforts against more than 200 school board members, an all-time high.

    Around all of these recalls is the swirl of national political debates about hot-button issues such as racial justice, public health responses to the COVID pandemic, the removal of Confederate monuments, and education policy.

    George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, the high-profile DAs of LA and San Francisco, are facing a right-wing backlash for reorienting their offices away from decades of racist tough-on-crime priorities and toward more emphasis on rehabilitation, social services and accountability for rogue police officers.

    In San Francisco, school board members are facing a backlash for educational priorities that include renaming schools during the pandemic, instead of pushing measures to permit schools to reopen sooner, and for restructuring the school system away from gifted programs and magnet institutions. In LA, Bonin, who represents Venice Beach and the surrounding coastal communities, is under attack for not demolishing vast homeless encampments and driving unhoused people from the picturesque tourist hub. In Virginia, State Senator Louise Lucas, a Black woman, is facing a recall effort pushed by local conservatives after she participated in protests against a local statue memorializing the Confederacy, shortly after the murder of George Floyd.

    One doesn’t have to agree with all — or even any — of the specific policies pushed by the political figures who are facing recalls to see how dangerous the weaponized recall process now is. If this tactic continues to prove effective, ultimately, anyone with a political grudge and a wellspring of financial resources will come to see recalls as a legitimate way to keep opponents off balance and unable to focus on their policy agendas.

    The right’s weaponization of the recall has twisted it into a go-to anti-democratic mechanism for political targeting. Democracies are structured with the expectation that voters who don’t like a politician and the priorities they push will vote them out of office next time there is a scheduled election. But the right is seeking to subvert this system by trying to oust politicians when elections aren’t scheduled, seeking to take advantage of arcane recall processes originally intended to pull the plug on politicians convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors.

    Normalizing recalls makes good governance all but impossible. It means that officials, rather than focusing on public policy, always have to focus on insulating themselves from the wrath of a billionaire-funded recall-mob. It means that politicians have to always assume they could face a career-destroying election a few months down the road. Lastly, it means that political parties and well-funded interest groups, with the means to secure enough signatures to get a recall effort qualified for the ballot, can always seek a do-over of elections that they have lost but the results of which they refuse to accept.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gender-Affirming Health Care Saved My Life. Everyone Should Have Access to It.

    Chase Strangio speaks at a podium

    Almost every day of 2021 I have woken up to news of gratuitous attacks on trans bodies. From the slew of anti-trans bills that dominated state legislatures, to almost daily reports of how each year outpaces the last in reported murders of trans people, to J.K. Rowling’s latest hurtful ruminations on the existence of trans people — every day there are reminders of how we are situated precariously both discursively and materially. Our joy and our pain are too often weaponized, and increasingly the public debates and interpersonal attacks are leading to the institutionalization of dangerous anti-trans policies.

    A frequent topic of public debate among those who hate us but do not know us is whether our health care is legitimate. Somehow care that has saved so many of us has become contested and increasingly out of reach.

    Though cast as experimental and harmful, gender-affirming care is life-saving.

    In August 2009, I flew from Boston to San Francisco to have surgery that saved my life. I was 26 years old, in law school, and wanting to build a career as an advocate for trans people. But at the time, I could barely get dressed or look in the mirror without feeling overcome with feelings of shame and disgust.

    I had spent my whole life disembodied and fragmented. I finally came out as trans in 2008 and began to integrate the disparate parts of myself. This was years before Laverne Cox would grace the cover of TIME Magazine, and my main public reference of trans existence had been the scripted version of Brandon Teena’s life and death in Boys Don’t Cry. In popular culture, trans-ness was a joke or a death sentence. For me, it was liberation.

    At the time I had top surgery, it was not covered by insurance, and there were very few surgeons who would and could perform the surgery. But the trans community had built resources to share information with each other. We took care of each other when neither government nor society would. With the support of my community, I took out extra student loans, Priceline-d a hotel, and embarked on the journey that would allow me to live the life that I have for the past 12 years.

    Waking up from top surgery and experiencing my body differently was one of the most memorable and joyful moments of my life. From there other moments followed: wearing a T-shirt without a binder for the first time, going to the beach, looking in the mirror. When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating. It is survival.

    I vowed to spend the rest of my life working to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility that I had been afforded through this medical care.

    Now, 12 years later, as a lawyer and deputy director for trans justice at the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, I am litigating cases to ensure that others have the ability to access the very care that saved my life. At least one state, Arkansas, has already passed a law banning all gender-affirming care (including puberty-delaying medication, hormones and top surgery) for minors. Thankfully, we successfully blocked this law in court, but the case is on appeal and more laws like this are coming.

    There is a well-funded and growing movement claiming that gender-affirming health care is experimental, that it is harmful, and that it should be banned. Every day in state legislatures, on social media, in public discourse, we are told that we have been “mutilated” and “irreversibly damaged.” What we know to be true about ourselves is called a “delusion” from which we need saving. Protesters gather outside of hospitals and clinics holding photos of our bodies to characterize our liberation as damnation.

    Yet my personal experience of this care being life-saving is echoed in decades of data. When trans people are able to access the gender-affirming health care that we need, our mental health improves dramatically. Science, medicine and the testimonial experiences of thousands of trans people over decades all show this care to be safe and effective.

    Much of the current debate over care for trans people has centered on banning care for transgender youth. Again, the discourse is grounded in fear and misinformation rather than the reality of how this care works. Transgender minors are only able to access care with the consent of their parents and the support of their medical and mental health providers.

    The majority of care prescribed to minors is nonsurgical, and no medical care is provided at all prior to puberty. When care is provided, sometimes in the form of medication to delay puberty or gender-affirming hormones to initiate puberty consistent with gender identity, it is done to alleviate severe symptoms of distress.

    The idea that kids are being pushed to be trans by their parents or doctors is counterfactual. By the time a young person is prescribed care, they have often gone through years of internal and family struggle. Finding affirming doctors is difficult — and sometimes, impossible — in many places, and in many other places there are long waiting lists before care is available. The care is often financially out of reach for families and not covered by insurance. We have a crisis of systemic discrimination facing our youth — not a crisis of lax facilitation of unnecessary treatment.

    I wake up every day feeling at home in my body. I would give anything to have experienced more years at home inside myself. I cannot imagine the pain and anguish that I and so many others could have been spared had we been able to access care like puberty blockers when we were younger.

    In litigating against bans on care for transgender people, I am daily immersed in claims that being trans is inherently harmful, and that we should stop our youth from heading down a path to a miserable future. There is nothing harmful about being trans and no way to stop us from being who we are. But proponents of bans on our care, those who mock and debate our existence, are trying to ensure that we will continue to struggle in a world that hates us. They look at our joy and liberation, and it represents something terrifying — the idea that our bodies, our souls, our lives are more nuanced and complex than the binary narratives we have been sold. They can continue to try to strip us of our rights and of our health care, but we will continue to exist, to support each other and to thrive. We carry the physical and emotional scars of our journeys, but when we are on a path toward self-determination, all of those scars are liberatory.

    Gender-affirming health care saved my life, and I will never stop fighting back against those who are seeking to take it away from our community.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Saudi Arabia Arms Sale Is One of Biden’s Many Militaristic Actions in First Year

    President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room on the continuing situation in Afghanistan and the developments of Hurricane Henri at the White House on August 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Given the brutish approach of his predecessor, many expected President Joe Biden to shift away from the worst practices in U.S. foreign policy and at the border in the previous four years. Indeed, in the first weeks of his presidency, the Biden administration signaled changes. In Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first press briefing, the State Department announced that it was reviewing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — which have led the catastrophic war on Yemen with essential U.S. partnership.

    A week later, Biden declared in his first foreign policy address as president that “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”

    Regarding its practices at the border, Biden administration officials promised a shift away from Trump’s practices of separating families and caging children, calling them a “moral failing.” He said that the new White House would “deal with immigration comprehensively, fairly, and humanely.”

    As 2021 comes to a close, however, we are seeing the latter part of a trajectory that settles into familiar, disastrous militarism.

    The U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $650 million worth of missiles and providing $500 million worth of maintenance for U.S.-made aircraft, training and other support for its military operations.

    These arrangements come as Saudi Arabia is escalating its devastating bombing in Yemen. In November, Saudi forces carried out the largest number of air strikes since Trump’s last year in office.

    These bookends — Biden’s early announcement of an end to U.S. support for the war in Yemen and his subsequent robust material support of that war — capture the set of practices that the Biden White House is settling into, not only in Yemen, but also in the realm of war and imperialism more broadly.

    Consider the White House’s approval of a $23 billion weapons sale to the U.A.E., which provides the Emirates with attack drones and F-35 fighter jets. The arrangement was negotiated under the Trump administration as the prize for the U.A.E.’s role in leading the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and itself, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, despite Israel’s deepening violence against Palestinians.

    The Biden administration embraced the normalization agreements, along with Trump’s other actions meant to consolidate U.S. support and extend legitimacy to Israel in a time when Palestinian protest presents a steady challenge to Israeli apartheid, and global Palestine solidarity campaigns have gained more traction than ever.

    Trump fulfilled longstanding wishes of the Israeli right wing, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, declaring the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank — which are considered unambiguously illegal according to international law — and endorsing the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The crudeness with which Trump performed these acts — framing them nakedly as pandering to right-wing evangelical Christian voters, and declaring himself the “King of Israel” — may contrast with Biden’s rhetoric. Yet when it comes to concrete action, Biden has accepted and continued along his predecessor’s path.

    This continuity is also painfully evident regarding Biden’s actions toward migrants — many of whom have been displaced due to U.S. imperialist policies. For example, in the face of severe social, political and economic crises in Central America — which are driven by decades of Washington-directed economic policies and brutal repression carried out by U.S.-armed regimes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — Kamala Harris, in Guatemala City on her first overseas tour as vice president, presented the U.S.’s policy in succinct cruelty: “Do not come.”

    Once they approach or enter the country, migrants face a complex of forces that remains in place to detain, incarcerate, and deport migrants and prevent their entry into the United States.

    Biden has maintained the use of Title 42 — a statute that allows the federal government special powers in public health emergencies — to deny migrants, including asylum seekers, access at the U.S.-Mexico border, in violation of international law. Biden is thus continuing Trump’s use of the measure, which was invoked when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Public health professionals and scholars have argued that the measure cannot be justified in the name of public health and have called upon the administration to end it.

    Biden has also reopened some of the most notorious detention sites highlighted in the Trump era, including Florida’s Homestead Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. The numbers of people in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have swelled to 22,000 under Biden — marking a 56 percent increase since the day the new president took office.

    Biden’s most dramatic and revealing act at the border this year was his handling of the arrival of thousands of primarily Haitian asylum seekers at Del Rio, Texas, in September. From Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping the Black migrants, to their confinement in squalid conditions on riverbanks and under a bridge, the U.S. government and its police forces engaged in racist violence, treating the Haitians as a criminal threat to be contained, rather than vulnerable people with the right to seek refuge and asylum. Biden deported the group of thousands to Haiti in an operation that revealed the logistical capacity at his disposal — which could, of course, instead be used to welcome people and support their survival.

    Finally, the Biden administration has resumed Trump’s infamous “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border to apply in Mexico and wait there while their applications are processed. The policy goes against U.S. law, which guarantees people the right to apply for asylum inside the U.S. — regardless of how they entered. Biden initially opposed the program, suspending it in February. In the face of rulings by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, however, the White House negotiated a new version of the policy with the Mexican government, and has begun to administer it. The program — which made tens of thousands of asylum seekers vulnerable to kidnapping, assault and other hazards in Mexico under Trump — is now Biden’s.

    Biden did follow through on his promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But even that long overdue and necessary move for a war that was unjust from its first day was done with such careless disregard for the lives of Afghans that it sparked a new and escalating humanitarian crisis. U.S. forces even killed several Afghans — including seven children in a single family — in the chaotic withdrawal of ground troops. While State Department officials failed Afghans made suddenly vulnerable by the haphazard withdrawal — with no plan to evacuate the many who sought exit — the Pentagon secured its ability to continue carrying out air missions in Afghanistan through its bases in the region and by positioning an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea weeks in advance.

    At the moment, Afghanistan faces mass hunger and an economic catastrophe as billions of dollars belonging to the Afghan Central Bank sit in the United States, frozen by order of the Biden administration.

    Yet, amid these blatant continuations of state violence, grassroots pressure has clearly made an impact on U.S. policy.

    Biden’s rhetorical vows to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, for example, empty as they were, were responses in significant part to a years-long, consistent and vocal challenge of U.S. support for the war. This has been led by Yemeni activists in the U.S., journalists, and UN and other aid workers in Yemen calling attention to the catastrophic humanitarian crisis there and the U.S.’s central role. Activism has continued with Biden in the White House, including a hunger strike earlier this year led by activists in the Yemeni Liberation Movement.

    Similarly, 2021 saw an increasingly critical and widespread challenge to U.S. support for Israel, especially during its horrific attack on Gaza and repression of Palestinians in Jerusalem during Ramadan this May. The ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s could no longer reconcile its progressive brand with doing business in Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and announced the end of its operations there. And though it ultimately passed, congressional approval for an additional $1 billion to Israel to replenish its missiles after the attack was more controversial and faced more direct opposition than any funding proposal for Israel in U.S. history.

    These formidable challenges to U.S. support for Israeli apartheid stemmed from many years of Palestine-solidarity organizing, as well as a more widespread anti-racist consciousness in the U.S. driven by years of Black-led resistance to police violence and other forms of racism.

    On the subject of popular resistance, it is important to remember that the greatest moments of setback for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda came when people mobilized en masse. This happened in response to the anti-Muslim travel ban, when thousands took to airports to express solidarity with those targeted — and then again in rallies across the country in response to the separation of families and cruel detention of children at the border. These moments of protest disrupted those policies, albeit temporarily.

    As we enter a new year, we are challenged to build movements with capacity expansive enough to build and sustain solidarity with those targeted and displaced by U.S. policies. Mass mobilization is necessary to stop the violence that the U.S. carries out and supports around the world and at its borders.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Diversity-Driven Hiring Practices Must Include People With Criminal Convictions

    Employers who care about diversity and racial equity should embrace candidates impacted by the criminal legal system.

    In the United States, access to opportunities is the key to securing social and economic success. But, for many people impacted by the criminal legal system, the opportunities necessary for building a thriving life, family and community are out of reach.

    For perspective, let’s start with a bit of history. With the passage of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action laws, workplaces in the mid-1960s began instituting diversity trainings to help educate employees on working in an integrated space. These laws, a product of the civil rights movement, created the conditions to promote representation and grow employment opportunities among Black Americans.

    Fast forward to the summer of 2020, and a similar response to conversations around racism can be seen again in corporate America’s reaction to Black Lives Matter protests. Enter the buzzworthy industry phrase that has since been echoed by every organization, agency and corporation across the United States: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). While focusing on improving hiring practices and creating a better work environment for Black and Brown people, DEI efforts still fail to consider the impacts of the criminal legal system on those very communities.

    It’s no secret that the criminal legal system disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities. Black people account for 40 percent of incarcerated people in the United States, but only represent 13 percent of the total U.S. population. Even after ending their contact with the system, people with criminal convictions face barriers and collateral consequences that hinder them from finding employment, finding affordable housing and attending college.

    I’ve worked in corporate America for many years while serving on the Board of College & Community Fellowship (CCF), an organization that works with women and families most harmed by the criminal legal system to increase access to opportunity and help mitigate systemic barriers to higher education, employment and equitable access to resources. Through my work with CCF, I’ve seen the true potential, dedication and value of people with criminal convictions in the workforce. People directly impacted by the criminal legal system understand the unique barriers they face to gaining employment. That’s why they are willing to work harder and go above and beyond expectations when afforded the opportunity.

    The stories of CCF alumni prove this time and time again. When afforded the opportunity to build a career and support themselves and their families, they consistently thrive. However, many struggle with finding employment after earning their degrees simply because of their criminal convictions.

    For example, Victoria Roberts, currently working as the director of Human Trafficking Programs at Safe Center Long Island, was hired as the Nassau County reentry coordinator and HUB facility presenter for Department of Criminal Justice Services in 2014. In this role, she worked closely with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Officers, visited state facilities often, and ensured resources and support for people coming home to Nassau County. She also had both a social service and parole office where the parole officers she worked with said she would make an amazing parole officer and encouraged her to register for the exam.

    It was only when she read the requirements on the registration page that she learned she would not qualify because of her felony conviction. “I can supervise parole officers but I can’t work as a parole officer,” she said. Instead, she worked toward a Licensed Master of Social Work and applied for a limited permit to practice. Again, she faced difficulties about her felony conviction as her application lay in limbo for months while she lost out on opportunities to work, support herself and support others.

    “We weren’t all perfect in any way — but because we face stereotypes from media and other sources, employers don’t get to know the people behind the felony convictions.”

    Today, Victoria continues to work with people coming home from prison, referring them to job opportunities, providing essential resources and helping them reintegrate into our ever-changing world. “When I refer justice-involved people to job opportunities around the community, employers always ask me, ‘Do you have any more of them?’” She said she works so hard with this community because she truly believes, “If we change this generation every generation following will be changed.”

    And this isn’t only a problem in government; it exists across industries, even as corporations make concerted efforts to diversify their hiring processes. The fact is that many employers and hiring managers are unclear about their institution’s policies or perspective on hiring those with criminal convictions. Additionally, they are ​unaware of what resources are available for hiring and working with this underserved population.

    Increased employment opportunities for people with those directly impacted by the criminal legal system will improve access to opportunities and social mobility for entire communities, especially marginalized communities that are most directly impacted by the criminal legal system. Investing in opportunities for people with criminal legal histories is a measure of dedication to diversity and racial equity. Organizations, governments, and corporations have the opportunity to widen their hiring pool and engage a largely untapped demographic that is highly trained and ready to work.

    Nevertheless, employers who tout their racial equity campaigns still may have not included those with criminal convictions in their recruitment. One in three people in the United States have a criminal record. Whether they are minor records such as misdemeanors and arrests without conviction, or more serious records such as felony convictions, contact with the criminal legal system creates barriers to opportunity that last a lifetime. By excluding this huge section of the population from their workplaces, employers miss out on a highly qualified workforce and limit the efficacy of their diversity and racial equity initiatives.

    Simply put, hiring and working with this population is not controversial. To date, 37 states and the District of Columbia have codified policies that prevent employers from asking about criminal history on job applications.

    But it’s not just up to lawmakers. If employers are truly interested in racial equity and diversity hiring practices, then they should actively include those directly impacted by the criminal legal system in their recruitment hiring practices. It’s a direct reflection of their dedication to diversity and racial equity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel’s Hard-Line Position Is Sabotaging US-Iran Negotiations

    U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley (left) participates in an enhanced honor cordon to welcome Israeli Chief of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister Benny Gantz (second from the left) at the Pentagon on June 21, 2021n in Arlington, Virginia. Gantz was in Washington for talks with officials at the Pentagon.

    After a five-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the United States and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook isn’t good.

    Less than a week into negotiations, Britain, France, and Germany accused Iran of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises” achieved during the first round of negotiations before Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was sworn into office. While such actions by Iran certainly aren’t helping the negotiations succeed, there is another country — one that is not even a party to the agreement that was ripped up in 2018 by then president Donald Trump — whose hard-line position is creating obstacles to successful negotiations: Israel.

    On Sunday, amid reports that the talks might collapse, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called on the countries meeting in Vienna to “take a strong line” against Iran. According to Channel 12 news in Israel, Israeli officials are urging the United States to take military action against Iran, either by striking Iran directly or by hitting an Iranian base in Yemen. Regardless of the negotiations’ outcome, Israel says that it reserves the right to take military action against Iran.

    Israeli threats aren’t just bluster. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, caused significant damage to Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, shortly after Joe Biden won the presidential election, Israeli operatives used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. Had Iran retaliated proportionately, the United States might have backed up Israel, with the conflict spiraling into a full-blown US–Middle East war.

    In April 2021, as diplomatic efforts were underway between the Biden administration and Iran, sabotage attributed to Israel caused a blackout at Natanz. Iran described the action as “nuclear terrorism.”

    Ironically described as Iran’s Build Back Better plan, after each of Israel’s nuclear facility sabotage actions, Iranians have quickly gotten their facilities back online and even installed newer machines to more rapidly enrich uranium. As a result, American officials recently warned their Israeli counterparts that the attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are counterproductive. But Israel replied that it has no intention of letting up.

    As the clock runs out to reseal the JCPOA, Israel is sending its top-level officials out to make its case. Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid was in London and Paris last week asking them not to support US intentions to return to the deal. This week, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea are in Washington for meetings with US defense secretary Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA officials. According to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Barnea brought “updated intelligence on Tehran’s efforts” to become a nuclear country.

    Along with verbal appeals, Israel is preparing militarily. They have allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran. Throughout October and November, they held large-scale military exercises in preparation for strikes against Iran and this spring they plan to hold one of their largest strike simulation drills ever, using dozens of aircraft, including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet.

    The United States is also readying for the possibility of violence. A week prior to the negotiations resuming in Vienna, the US’s top commander in the Middle East, General Kenneth McKenzie, announced that his forces were on standby for potential military actions should the negotiations collapse. It was reported Wednesday that Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz’s meeting with Lloyd Austin would include discussing possible joint US-Israeli military drills simulating the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

    Stakes are high for the talks to succeed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed this month that Iran is now enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity at its underground facility at Fordo, a site where the JCPOA forbids enrichment. According to the IAEA, since Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, Iran has furthered its uranium enrichment to 60 percent purity (compared with 3.67 percent under the deal), steadily moving closer to the 90 percent needed for a nuclear weapon. In September, the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report stating that, under the “worst-case breakout estimate,” within a month Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

    The US exit from the JCPOA has not only led to the nightmarish prospect of another Middle East country becoming a nuclear state (Israel reportedly has between eighty and four hundred nuclear weapons), but it has already inflicted enormous damage on the Iranian people. The “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign — originally Trump’s but now under Joe Biden’s ownership — has plagued Iranians with runaway inflation; skyrocketing food, rent, and medicine prices; and a crippled health care sector.

    Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, US sanctions were preventing Iran from importing necessary medicines to treat such illnesses as leukemia and epilepsy. In January 2021, the United Nations released a report stating that US sanctions on Iran were contributing to an “inadequate and opaque” response to COVID-19. With more than a hundred thirty thousand officially registered deaths so far, Iran has the highest number of recorded coronavirus deaths in the Middle East. Officials say that real numbers are likely even higher.

    If the United States and Iran are not able to reach an agreement, the worst-case scenario will be a new US–Middle East war. Reflecting on the abject failures and destruction wrecked by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a war with Iran would be catastrophic. One would think that Israel, which receives $3.8 billion annually from the United States, would feel obligated not to drag the United States and their own people into such a disaster. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Though teetering on the brink of collapse, talks resumed again this week. Iran, now under a hard-line government that US sanctions helped bring into power, has shown that it isn’t going to be an acquiescent negotiator, and Israel is hell-bent on sabotaging the talks. This means it’s going to take bold diplomacy and a willingness to compromise from the Biden administration to get the deal resealed. Let’s hope Biden and his negotiators have the will and courage to do that.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Revenge Against Georgia Republicans Could End Up Boosting Stacey Abrams

    Sen. David Perdue gestures as he speaks next to President Donald Trump during a rally to support Republican Senate candidates at Valdosta Regional Airport in Valdosta, Georgia, on December 5, 2020.

    Earlier this week, Donald Trump unleashed a civil war within the Republican Party in Georgia.

    The war was a long time coming. Last year, Trump tried to pressure officials to change Georgia’s presidential election result. Remember the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the cornered and defeated Trump urged his interlocutor to “find” just enough votes to allow him to claim victory?

    Raffensperger, a Republican, not only refused to find the necessary number of votes, but he also recorded the conversation and let the world’s media know about it. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — whose campaign against Stacey Abrams two years earlier was about as Trumpian as one could get — also refused Trump’s appeals not to sign off on the Georgia results. There were, apparently, anti-democratic lines that, in 2020, even a deeply opportunistic and hyper-conservative politician such as Kemp couldn’t cross.

    Now Trump is attempting to orchestrate revenge from Mar-a-Lago. Partly, he seems to be doing so as a matter of strategy, to attempt to gain control over all levels of the GOP in as many states as possible heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle. That effort to take over the entire machinery of a political party and bend it to the will of a single individual is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Partly, however, this seems to be Trump’s unrestrained schoolyard bully persona lashing out at — and seeking ways to humiliate — anyone who stands in his way or refuses to fully, unquestioningly, embrace his conspiratorial understanding of the world.

    In March, he endorsed a “Stop-the-Steal”-believing primary challenger to Raffensperger. It was, pure and simple, payback for Raffensperger showing some integrity and spine last autumn and winter by not throwing his weight behind Trump’s vacuous claims of election fraud.

    Soon afterwards, as part of a nationwide effort to buck nonpartisan or bipartisan control over the elections process, GOP legislators in Georgia, moving in lockstep with the ex-president, voted to make it easier to take down local elections officials whose work they dislike. In practice, what that means is that, in the future, were a GOP candidate — for instance, one Donald J. Trump — to refuse to accept an election loss, the candidate would have a strong chance of bringing legislators along for the ride who would be willing and now able to subvert election monitoring systems for their candidate’s own partisan advantage.

    Now, as the midterm elections near, Trump, the puppeteer, has begun pulling even more strings, making his minions dance and jerk at his every command. Seeking to destroy Kemp’s governorship, former Sen. David Purdue has jumped into the ring as a primary challenger to the governor. Remember, Purdue was part of that sorry duo of defeated senators whose unwavering and fanatical fealty to Trump cost the GOP both Georgia Senate seats, and, thus, control of the U.S. Senate. Immediately after Purdue’s announcement, Trump endorsed him, calling him a “conservative fighter.”

    Purdue may indeed be conservative — certainly he is reactionary — but let’s be clear: That’s not why Trump is supporting him. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about Trump’s vision of “loyalty.” The ex-president, wounded to the quick by what he saw as Kemp’s personal betrayal in late 2020, is seeking vengeance, and he doesn’t care who he takes down in this quest to ensure that, politically speaking, the governor is soon sleeping with the fishes.

    Now, personally, I don’t have a dog in the Kemp-Purdue fight. They are, to my mind, each as unpleasant as the other. In 2018, Kemp ran a nasty, ugly campaign, filled with racist messaging, against Abrams; aired a bizarre pro-gun ad in which he was seen practically fondling a semiautomatic rifle; and used and abused his position as secretary of state to back massive purges of the voter rolls. In one particularly extraordinary purge alone, roughly half a million people had their names removed from the voter rolls. If Purdue — who consistently had one of the most right-wing voting records in the Senate, and who ran campaign ads that falsely claimed Democratic rival Jon Ossoff had been endorsed by the American Communist Party — wants to get down and dirty against Kemp, that’s fine with me.

    What makes it all a hell of a lot more interesting, however, is that Abrams has also announced she is running, once more, to be governor. Abrams lost to Kemp in 2018 by 1.4 percent, a result impacted at least in part by the scale of voter disenfranchisement that Georgia had unleashed in the run-up to that election. Since then, Abrams has created two organizations to encourage voter participation, including, most recently Fair Fight Action. The result has been a huge upsurge in voter participation, not only in presidential votes, but in down-ballot elections as well. Roughly 1 million more Georgians voted in the 2020 presidential elections than was the case four years earlier. And even in the 2020 Senate runoff elections, 260,000 more Georgians cast votes than voted in the 2016 presidential election.

    Despite Georgia’s accelerated efforts to suppress the vote, Abrams’s group will, at the very least, act as a counterweight to this in the next election cycle. In fact, there’s no red state in the country where progressives are better positioned to defeat efforts to ensure continued conservative dominance achieved via voter suppression. And there’s arguably no progressive candidate in a key swing state more able to ride this wave of newfound voter engagement than is Abrams.

    The Purdue-Kemp fissure, and Trump’s stirring of the GOP rage-pot, could end up boosting Abrams, even if the Democratic Party nationally takes a beating. After all, if Kemp and Purdue spend the next six months sparring against each other in a war of attrition, as seems likely, Abrams could end up the last candidate still in the ring.

    An Abrams victory would be huge nationally, making it that much harder for a Trumpified GOP to overturn election results in 2024. It would be a sweet irony indeed if the twice-impeached ex-president’s sparking of a GOP civil war in Georgia cost the party a key governorship, and if Raffensberger — who, regardless of whether he is successfully primaried, will still be secretary of state in November 2022 — is, to the horror of Donald Trump, once more tasked with the job of certifying a Democratic win.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Big Oil Rigs the System to Keep Winning

    Climate activists demonstrate outside the gates of the Mossmorran petrochemical refinery near Cowdenbeath, Scotland, to protest against flaring and pollution at the plant on August 1, 2021.

    Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this in part by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.

    Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?

    The John D. Rockefeller Myth

    Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell’s reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell’s findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.

    David had slayed Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s owner, lost. The good guys won—or so it seemed.

    In fact, Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting—massively—from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil’s 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn’t compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire.

    Say It Ain’t So, Dr. Seuss!

    One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market “Flit,” a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren’t told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.

    When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was as ubiquitous as “Got Milk?” is today.

    At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn’t appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn’t come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters—strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books—energetically extolled Flit’s alleged benefits.

    Geisel later said the experience “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.” The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun. Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren’t about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate “advertorials” appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America.”

    Controlling Climate Science

    Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies’ own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by lying about the danger of their products, blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today’s climate emergency.

    Less well-known is how oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change.

    The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public, and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil’s scientific participation gave them an insider’s view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.

    The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos, and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that?

    The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry’s internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy, and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons, and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It’s been effective.

    The industry’s scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry’s extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring.

    Don’t Call It Methane, It’s “Natural” Gas

    Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane— which marketing experts cleverly labeled “natural gas”—as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a “clean” fuel that’s needed to bridge the transition from today’s carbon economy to tomorrow’s renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP’s plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the company and other oil majors frequently invoke “low carbon” instead of “no carbon.”

    Except that methane gas isn’t clean. It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.

    As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed “natural gas” as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry’s ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysis by the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can’t meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can’t solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise.

    There’s little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar, and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab, and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers. But the oil and gas industry doesn’t need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: win today, fight again tomorrow.

    A Spider’s Web of Pipelines

    Here’s a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades of future fossil fuel dependency.

    FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop.

    Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners’ properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett—are almost certain to rule in the industry’s favor.

    Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump’s arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about “flooding the zone” at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider’s web.

    Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas “infrastructure” as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century.

    In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.

    Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly—regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future, it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Democracy Summit Is a PR Stunt. We Need Real International Democracy.

    President Joe Biden speaks to representatives of more than 100 countries during a virtual "Democracy Summit" at the White House in Washington D.C., on December 9, 2021.

    President Joe Biden’s ill-conceived virtual “Summit for Democracy” on December 9-10 is really a public relations extravaganza that’s likely to backfire on the United States, because democracy is not a commodity, nor is it a Kalashnikov to be aimed at geopolitical rivals. President Biden is using an obsolete playbook, and his advisers should have told him that the stunt will convince only those who already believe in the myth of U.S. democracy. It will not gain the U.S. any new friends.

    According to the U.S. Department of State website, the Biden administration has proclaimed that renewing democracy in the U.S. and around the world is essential to meeting the challenges of our time. That sounds good, but what does it mean concretely? We can agree with President Biden in recognizing that, “No democracy is perfect, and no democracy is ever final. Every gain made, every barrier broken, is the result of determined, unceasing work,” but we should start with the reconstruction of our own democracy before pretending to dictate to other states how they should practice it.

    Biden will host not one but two Summits for Democracy, with the participation (and targeted exclusion) of leaders from government, civil society and the private sector. The announced goal is “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” The summit is supposed to launch a “year of action” in preparation for a follow-up summit in 2022.

    There is a certain symbolism to the chosen dates. Seventy-three years ago on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention. December 9 is also International Anti-Corruption Day. Seventy-three years ago on December 10, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    It is interesting to see who is invited and who isn’t. According to the State Department website, 110 countries were invited, among them notorious “democracies” such as: Brazil, known for its undemocratic land-grabbing and ongoing destruction of its Indigenous population under Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump-like autocrat; Colombia, where paramilitaries continue to kill Indigenous and social leaders with impunity; India, guilty of ongoing genocide in Kashmir and highly undemocratic traditions throughout the territory; Indonesia, that continues to deny self-determination to West-Papuans; Israel, whose apartheid policies against Palestinians have been condemned worldwide by human rights advocates; Spain, guilty of jailing human rights defenders and Catalan advocates of free speech and self-determination. It is particularly amusing that the U.S. invited the undemocratic, unpopular and auto-proclaimed “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, while the UN-recognized government is excluded.

    What credibility can Biden’s summit have when it excludes millions of people from participation? Biden’s team opted for what the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calls a “big-tent approach,” which inevitably means catering to geopolitical allies, favoritism, double standards, inexplicable distinctions, and accepting the adverse diplomatic pushback by those nations and peoples excluded.

    Further, what exactly does Biden understand under the word “democracy”? Just periodic elections? Is it not more important to test the reality, whether the elections offer real choices? Whether they can bring about change in domestic and international policies? Whether the electorate has a meaningful opportunity to influence the selection of candidates? Whether the populations are proactively informed by governments and regularly consulted on their needs? Whether there is real correlation between the will of the people and the governmental policies that affect them?

    It is the participation by all stakeholders that makes democracy work. Similarly, it is the participation of all states that would give legitimacy to the summit. It is a misnomer, an oxymoron, to pretend that this exclusionary event can be considered democratic.

    A true “democracy summit” can and should be convened by the UN and be all-inclusive, based on multilateralism and sovereign equality. In the light of repeated North Atlantic Treaty Organization provocations against Belarus, China and Russia, what the international community urgently needs is cool heads and detente. No one needs a divisive summit launched by a host who systematically ignores decisions of the UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council, and frustrates action in the UN Security Council by vetoing more than 80 resolutions, mostly to shield Israel from criticism or sanctions.

    A truly inclusive summit took place at the UN in 2005 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Charter. The UN World Summit ended with its “outcome document” unanimously adopted as General Assembly Resolution 60/1, which reaffirms “that democracy is a universal value based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives.” Most importantly, contrary to the U.S. claim to hold a patent on democracy, the international community agreed that, “while democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy, that it does not belong to any country or region,” and reaffirmed the necessity of due respect for the sovereignty of states and the right of self-determination of peoples.

    A Democracy Fund at the UN was established in 2005. Here is where the U.S. could make a significant contribution, rather than going outside the UN system and proposing an “exclusive club” of “good guys” to confront the “bad guys.” This is an obsolete Cold War mentality.

    International democracy means ensuring equitable participation by all and respecting the sovereign equality of states and their right to see things differently than we do. Domestic democracy means respecting a plurality of views, which entails access to information, not homologated corporate news and social control through censorship by government and its echo chambers.

    When will the U.S., United Kingdom and European Union understand that “democracy” means people power, pro-actively consulting the public, conducting referendums, achieving social justice?

    “Value-based” diplomacy as supposedly practiced by the U.S., U.K. and EU would have some validity if it were truly based on values such as peace and human rights, if it were objective and not arbitrary, if it would not apply double standards. Alas, it is a scam.

    Biden’s “America Is Back” reminds us unpleasantly of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” — both slogans suggesting that the U.S. persists in its imperial arrogance and will continue ordering people around.

    This counterproductive “summit” will be forgotten by most as soon as it has ended. History will judge it as a PR stunt — a phony exercise in self-praise and a provocation against other cultures, including the Chinese, Hungarian and Russian.

    It is easy to make the U.S. respected again. It suffices to practice the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which then-President of the UN Commission on Human Rights Eleanor Roosevelt advanced so successfully in 1948.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As More Info Emerges on Omicron, Trump’s Old COVID Lies Continue to Kill People

    A group of protesters gather in Times Square in Manhattan to show their opposition to COVID-19 vaccines on December 5, 2021, in New York City.

    On October 27, 2020, then-President Donald Trump stood before a mostly maskless assemblage of adoring fans and declared the nation was “rounding the turn” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the 40th time he had made this claim in the last 57 days, and it was no more true then than it is now. The average daily infection rate at that time stood around 85,000 new cases per day. Today? Over 121,000 cases a day, with a daily death toll back above 1,200.

    A lot of Trump’s people at that time fully believed his negligently homicidal claims about that corner, and many of them still do. Not as many now, of course; some have come to embrace the science, but tens of thousands of Trump supporters have been killed by this thing, by Trump’s flippant dismissal of it all. Because of this, there will in all likelihood never be a corner to turn. “Endemic” is the hot word among COVID epidemiologists these days, which is science-speak for “pretty much forever.”

    “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President [Joe] Biden,” reports NPR. “The trend was robust, even when controlling for age, which is the primary demographic risk of COVID-19 mortality. The data also reveal a major contributing factor to the death rate difference: The higher the vote share for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate.”

    Now comes the ominously titled Omicron variant, kissing cousin to the Delta variant that is presently kicking ass all over the country. Omicron has been confirmed in 66 countries all over the world and in 22 U.S. states. COVID experts are laying themselves out trying to answer a number of pressing questions: How transmissible is Omicron? Are the symptoms worse than Delta? Will the vaccines still work?

    “A sobering portrait of the omicron variant is emerging from the first burst of laboratory studies on the coronavirus’s latest incarnation, showing that the mutated virus can slip past a shield of protection provided by the standard two-shot vaccine regimen,” reports The Washington Post. “But the studies, including one released Wednesday by Pfizer and its vaccine partner BioNTech, point to a potential path for slowing omicron’s march: Booster shots could help control the variant by raising virus-fighting antibodies high enough to block the pathogen.”

    This is but one of the studies that are taking place, as yet to be peer-reviewed and rigorously confirmed. There are also suggestions that the symptoms of Omicron could be “mild” in comparison to those of Delta or the original strain. “More than 40 people in the U.S. have been found to be infected with the omicron variant so far,” reports the Associated Press, “and more than three-quarters of them had been vaccinated, the chief of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] said Wednesday. But she said nearly all of them were only mildly ill.”

    We can speculate all we wish about the possible need for boosters amid a “mild”-symptomed, fifth wave of infections, but we won’t have solid data about Omicron until all the testing has been completed and reviewed. Even then, the variant’s long-term effects will remain unknown. One thing appears reasonably certain, however: This new wave, in whatever iteration, will likely exercise the peak of its lethality within the ranks of those who believed Trump’s tall tales about “rounding the turn.”

    “If Trump had a single care for the people who make him possible,” I wrote back in June, “he would embark on a vaccination campaign in all the states he carried in 2020, but he will not do this unless forced to. He will squat in his Bedminster lair plotting revenge, even as those he owes his power to die preventable deaths every day.”

    It did not have to be this way, but here we are. Perhaps, after another winter of illness, suffering and doubt, at least some of those who embraced Trump’s denial of science will find their way out of that fog. I stand in dread of the body count to come between then and now, if “then” ever comes at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mark Meadows Expected to Join Other Trumpists Charged With Contempt of Congress

    Mark Meadows watches Donald Trump speak into a microphone

    Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is on the verge of joining a growing list of former Trump officials being charged with contempt of Congress, according to multiple reports. Given Meadows’s refusal to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the 1/6 Capitol attack, the committee has confirmed that he will soon join former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark in being the first people indicted during this query.

    Meadows first declared his resistance to the committee scant hours before the Bannon indictment several weeks ago, and for a time it appeared as if the former chief of staff might negotiate his way into cooperation … but then his book came out. An altogether glowing portrait of the Trump years, as befitting one of the more vigorous lickspittles within Trump’s sphere, the book contained one nugget of actual news that had the press buzzing for days: Trump had tested positive days before his first debate with Joe Biden, but barreled forward with all his public plans, including meetings with the families of fallen soldiers.

    Trump’s entirely predictable reaction was volcanic; he tore into Meadows, denounced all forms of disloyalty, and concluded that the whole thing was “fake news”… and then, the funny part happened. Desperate to appease his master, Meadows himself went on live television and rubbished his own book. When asked by Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt about his book getting slapped with the dreaded label, Meadows replied, “Well, the president’s right, it’s fake news.”

    Profiles in courage, baby. Give that man a participation trophy and a sugar-free lollipop.

    Should they ever be called to testify, Meadows and Clark could be key witnesses explaining Trump’s precise strategy (or lack thereof) on the day of the attack. The operation had two tiers: Vice President Pence had to follow through on the plan to disavow enough Biden Electoral College votes to throw the race to Trump, and Clark had to get the Department of Justice to publicly state there had been criminal disruptions of the vote nationwide, further investigation is warranted, and in the meantime whatever Congress says goes.

    The plot may well have worked, but Pence at the last minute refused to follow through on his end despite alleged pressure from Meadows and others, and multiple officials at Justice repeatedly showed Clark the door, to the great fury of Trump. As much as Meadows and Clark can explain what was supposed to happen, their insights on what actually happened, as they happened, would be of immense value.

    Another witness for the committee has popped up, one who can explain what 1/6 was like for those trapped in the building when the attack took place, and his inclusion likely has eyebrows wandering all over the foreheads down at Mar-a-Lago. Mike Pence has agreed to allow his former chief of staff, Marc Short, to co-operate with the committee.

    “Short remains one of Pence’s closest advisers and is a firsthand witness to many critical events the committee is examining,” reports CNN, “including what happened to Pence at the Capitol on January 6 and how former President Donald Trump pressured the former vice president not to certify the presidential election that day. Short’s assistance signals a greater openness among Pence’s inner circle. One source told CNN the committee is getting ‘significant cooperation with Team Pence,’ even if the committee has not openly discussed that. Another source told CNN that Short’s help is an example of the ‘momentum’ the investigation is enjoying behind the scenes.”

    This is potentially fascinating, and not just because we might hear Short explain what it felt like to watch a violent mob of Trump voters chanting for the death of Trump’s own vice president, his immediate boss. Trump himself can only perceive Pence’s co-operation as another betrayal, and a direct threat to himself.

    There is also the matter of Pence popping up in places like New Hampshire and Iowa, just like any self-respecting possible presidential contender for 2024. Trump, not yet a declared candidate but leaning hard into fundraising for that endeavor, is already grinding his teeth over the popularity in conservative circles of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

    If Pence joins DeSantis on the list of people Trump suspects could challenge him next year, we could soon see a massive MY PARTY MY PARTY tantrum from the former president, even if he decides not to run. In the immortal words of Highlander, so long as Trump is in the picture, there can be only one.

    Meanwhile, Meadows should expect to get some important paperwork soon. The work of the committee grinds on.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Where Are the Damn PCR Tests Already? It’s Been 21 Months!

    A student is administered a test by a Wild Health nurse during a COVID-19 testing day at Brandeis Elementary School on August 17, 2021, in Louisville, Kentucky.

    When I look back on the prior two years — if I’m around to look back — I’m going to remember these last few days as the moment I met peak frustration and bade it come sit a spell. I’m used to blaming Donald Trump when I achieve this level of aggravation, but the Biden administration a year after Trump’s departure has some serious explaining to do.

    I’ve been a good soldier all throughout the long slog of COVID, got my shot times three, got my daughter vaxxed, wore my mask and social distanced, stayed away from people when possible, and home-schooled my daughter when needed. Twice, once in late spring and again in early fall of this year, both times with COVID on the low bound, I had to get my daughter PCR tested so she could return to school. She was showing symptoms, and only a negative PCR test with its nifty jab up the nose was acceptable proof of health.

    Both times, in a hospital parking lot and then at a Convenient MD storefront, she got the tests and results within hours. Based on this experience and what I’d been reading in the news, I assumed the issue of insufficient testing was taken care of, at least on the supply side and at least in my immediate region. I’d found available tests on the same day, twice, a few blocks from my house. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how we beat this thing.

    That is not how it is here anymore, and in too many places around the country.

    Classroom close contact early last week with a kid who has COVID put my daughter on the watch list; the incubation period meant no PCR test until the weekend. The school could, and did, perform antigen tests on the kids, but they are not nearly as accurate. “More of a snapshot,” the nurse told me. Every health professional I consulted recommended “stay the course,” keep her in school, masked and distanced — her teacher is a remorseless autocrat about this, thank God — and so we watched and waited.

    As the weekend arrived, so did symptoms for both of us — but only some of them: cough, runny nose, sore throat, fatigue. We both retained our sense of taste and smell, never came close to popping a fever, and in any other year this was just a nasty little cold… but in 2021, until you get a negative test, you’re a potential one-person superspreader event with symptoms like those.

    Recalling the ease with which I got my daughter tested earlier this year, I began calling around on Sunday for available testing sites. My first stop was her pediatrician’s office, which I discovered was closed on the weekends because kids in New Hampshire never get sick on Sundays or something. CVS and Walgreen’s offered tests, but to book one (book one?), I had to go through a third-party internet-and-telephone process that used overseas phone banks to answer questions. The main hospital’s test signup process was also run by a third party, and was equally Byzantine to encompass.

    After all that, the best I could do was a 4:45 pm appointment in Nashua the following Thursday. Meanwhile, my daughter and I were showing enough symptoms to be worried, but as the day wore on and the kid’s cold medication did its work, her symptoms slowly subsided. By Monday morning she was as bright as a new penny, no symptoms, and the school’s antigen test declared her negative. Away she went.

    All’s well that ends well, but this is all far from over. A day is going to come, and probably soon, when I will need to get her tested, and as matters stand now, that is going to involve driving hours across the state days from now to get test results that will take even longer. It is the worst possible setup, and with the Omicron variant on the rise, will make it almost impossible to keep a fourth COVID wave from subsuming yet another winter.

    Anyone with an honest ear recalls how this started: Then-President Trump practically burned the entire infrastructure of testing to the ground 21 months ago, because testing caused more cases in his addled orange mind, and more cases was bad politics for him. I remember the moment, weeks into the pandemic, when the screams for “more testing” finally subsided, because they just weren’t coming thanks to Trump. For the most part, they never did.

    Joe Biden pounded into office on a solemn promise to do better, and in a variety of key areas he has most assuredly performed on a level commensurate with the challenges before him. The staggering lack of easily available testing, however, remains a glaring national crisis that, from the sound of things, doesn’t seem to have much of a share of the administration’s attention.

    Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom are all running races around us when it comes to testing, almost entirely because they have made these tests incredibly easy to get. When asked on Monday by a reporter why we were lagging behind, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki rolled out a laundry list of Biden policies — mostly making sick people deal with the bureaucracy colossus of the private insurance industry to get tests and treatment — which did not sit well with the assembled.

    When the reporter pressed the secretary about that process being too complex — “Why not just make them free … and have them available everywhere?” — Psaki replied with one of the shabbier takes of her tenure: “Should we just send one to every American? Then what happens if you, if every American, has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”

    Ah, yes, the “How much does it cost?” question, always asked when politicians have the chance to help people, but never invoked when cruise missiles light up the sky somewhere over the horizon. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter costs $1.5 trillion and rising, and it doesn’t work, and few people ask the question.

    Should we send one to everyone? YES, and be damned to the cost. If we can fund those Top Gun paperweights, we can bloody well get swabs in the noses of sick people for no better reason than our own enlightened self-interest. Psaki’s answer could have been drafted on the desk of an insurance CEO.

    It is amazing to me that we are still wrestling with this dilemma that should never have been a dilemma to begin with. Frontline health workers are no longer wearing garbage bags into ICU rooms as protection like they did at the beginning, and the vaccines have changed the game substantially… but here comes Omicron to change the game again, perhaps dramatically. If we don’t know how many of us are really sick, we cannot begin to solve this crisis, and we get that data through testing.

    “It remains incomprehensibly inconvenient for ordinary people to figure out whether they have Covid-19,” reports New Republic writer Natalie Shure. If this dearth of testing is allowed to endure and Omicron blots out the sun for another run of months, Biden will rue that day last summer when he gave us all that happy talk about the “Summer of Freedom” before us. It was a chimera aggravated by glaring snafus like this.

    If I know anything at all about voters, it is that they remember being vocally let down by a president — “Read my lips, no new taxes!” followed later by “Hey, new taxes!” — pretty much better than they remember anything else. The Republicans will happily remind them along the way, and another bleak COVID crossing could be followed by a dance with the devil in the pale moonlight of election night, November 2022.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Criminalization of Testosterone Endangers Gender Variant People

    Police lights flashing red on a police car

    On a Saturday night two years ago, Stann Fransisco was driving back home to New Mexico after visiting their parents in Connecticut. Crossing through Texas, they were just reaching the small, well-lit town of Stratford when they knew they were too tired to keep driving safely, so they pulled off the highway to rest their eyes for a bit. As they hopped into the back seat to join their service dog, they suddenly saw flashing police lights. Officers approached the car.

    “One officer said, ‘It smells like you’ve been having a party in here. Is that right?’” Fransisco, a white nonbinary person in their 30s, told Filter. “He said, ‘Well, if you haven’t been having a party, you won’t mind if we check your car.’”

    Moving quickly, the officers violently handcuffed Fransisco, took their keys and called animal control to confiscate their dog. Then they searched the car.

    “One yelled, ‘Show me your track marks, you fucking junkie! We found your needles and drugs,’” Fransisco said. The cop held up their prescription bottle of testosterone. “I said, ‘Those aren’t drugs, that’s my medication. I’m trans.’”

    “The second it went out of my mouth, I think ‘Oh, fuck’ … I’m sitting there in a sundress and they see male hormones after they’ve been waiting to get me alone because they think I’m a girl.”

    Fransisco was jailed overnight, with two cisgender women who’d also been detained for drug use, but was fortunate enough to have friends and family able to help release them the next day on a $2,500 bond.

    Fransisco does not inject drugs, nor do they use any psychoactive substances besides weed. But their experience — of someone outside the gender binary being harassed by police and accused of drug use because they inject hormones — is a common one.

    It is also why syringe service programs (SSP) often keep 21 to 25-gauge needles in stock even though they’re too large for almost anyone injecting drugs to request — they’re for gender variant participants who need them for hormone injection. Whether or not these participants also use drugs, SSP are often the safest way for them to access syringes — a marker of how, in police harassment and disenfranchisement from lifesaving, humanizing medical care, gender variant people and drug users often share a common struggle.

    Testosterone and Transgender Health Care

    Testosterone is an anabolic-androgenic steroid, meaning it’s composed of synthetic variations of the sex hormone testosterone. “Anabolic” refers to muscle building; “androgenic” to increased male sex characteristics.

    Transmasculine and gender variant people have used synthetic testosterone for nearly a century. The first documented prescription to a trans man was obtained by Michael Dillion in 1939. In the mid-20th century, it started becoming popular among certain professional athletes, like weightlifters. By the 1980s, it was being used by young cisgender men looking to bulk up.

    In 1990, the Anabolic Steroids Control Act classified testosterone as a federally controlled Schedule III substance. This puts it in the same category as buprenorphine and ketamine. Lawmakers intended for this to curb steroid “abuse” among young cisgender men. But its deeper impact has been to criminalize health care for trans men, intersex people, nonbinary people and other gender variant people on testosterone replacement therapy, in a cisheteronormative society that already disenfranchises them from care. (Estrogen is not a federally scheduled substance, but people on estrogen replacement therapy still face health care barriers due to transmisogyny.)

    The contemporary US approach to transgender health care is two-fold. Originally, the only route available to people seeking transgender care was what’s colloquially referred to as the “gatekeep model” — a mental health evaluation or referral required on the basis that trans people are mentally ill or “confused.” This model still applies to anyone under 18.

    In the 2000s, an alternative began gaining traction: the informed consent model, which permits access to gender-affirming care, including surgeries and hormone treatments, without a mental health professional’s authorization. Those under 18 years old require consent of a parent or guardian. While still flawed, this model facilitates greater patient autonomy.

    But “unless you go to Planned Parenthood, it’s difficult to access a provider who does informed consent-based prescriptions, especially without insurance,” ​​TJ Burton, a transmasculine health care clinic coordinator in Kansas City, told Filter. “Even after I went to PP and got prescribed on informed consent, it’s still a time consuming and costly process.” Often that process involves lab fees — which aren’t always covered by insurance even for those who have coverage — and inflexible time windows in which people can refill their prescriptions.

    Pharmacies, like all other health care settings, typically aren’t well versed in serving LGBTQ people. Many gender variant people, including myself, have experienced discrimination and hostility at the hands of pharmacists.

    “Criminalization has made it easy for pharmacists to deny my [testosterone] prescription, which has happened to me many times,” Artemis McGettigan, a trans student in Dearborn, Michigan, told Filter. “[Pharmacists] have told me in the past that ‘It’s corporate policy, they’re not allowed to fill that type of prescription … but I knew that was false because other CVS locations, for example, were able to fill it.” A CVS media representative told Filter that its policies “do not prohibit our pharmacies from filling testosterone prescriptions.”

    Surveillance and Control

    Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMP) are electronic databases through which medical professionals and law enforcement can track someone’s prescription history. Initially designed to combat “diversion” of controlled substances with potential for addiction, they are often used to monitor testosterone prescriptions and the people who receive them. Many in the trans and gender variant community, especially those who aren’t fully public about their gender identity, fear being listed on PDMP — they could be outed by anyone with access to the database.

    L. Lanzillotta, a Virginia-based trans man and Filter contributor, recalled meeting with a psychiatrist who didn’t know he was trans and to whom he had no plans to out himself. But that decision was made for him as soon as the psychiatrist pulled up what he strongly suspects was the state’s PDMP.

    “She knew I was on testosterone after checking something on her computer, even though I hadn’t said anything,” Lanzillotta told Filter. “Naturally, she quickly deduced why.”

    While not everyone on testosterone is transgender, it’s certainly a clue, especially for those who still have a female gender marker on legal documents. Such surveillance costs gender variant autonomy, outing people without their consent.

    In July, Phillip Cooper*, a trans man from Santa Fe, New Mexico, was required to sign a patient agreement form regarding controlled substances. “[I] was told it’s a clinic policy for all controlled substances,” he told Filter. “I’ve been getting T from this clinic for almost two years now and this had never been asked of me before.”

    Cooper does not use any state-banned drugs, so he was taken aback. “To be clear, the thing I found intrusive wasn’t having to sign the form. It was being required to undergo a drug screening [and] submit a urine sample as though using testosterone, which doesn’t get you high and isn’t addictive, and is only a controlled substance because of sports doping, made me more likely to be using illegal drugs!” He added, “It’s nothing to do with monitoring safe T levels, which has to be done via blood test.”

    Gender variant people, along with those of any marginalized identities, experience disproportionate rates of substance use disorder. This isn’t a moral failure — of an individual or a community — but rather a systemic one. It’s a symptom of the trauma associated with living in an ostracizing, capitalist society rooted in (among other things) the gender binary, patriarchy and colonial gender roles.

    “It was humiliating and infuriating,” Cooper said of being presumed to use illicit drugs on the basis of his gender identity. “I don’t think either the clinic or my provider was being deliberately transphobic — rather, T being a controlled substance, and the policy being inflexible, led to a transphobic result.”

    Ending This Injustice

    There are a few ways testosterone criminalization could be abolished. It could be federally rescheduled to IV or V category. It could be descheduled from the CSA entirely, though it would still be subject to some type of government regulation.

    If rescheduled, T could be accessed similarly to other over-the-counter medications — like birth control, which is also a fundamental human right. Descheduling would allow trans and gender variant people greater access and agency, but would likely be perceived as too “radical” by much of our transphobic society, which already micromanages our everyday lives even down to the bathrooms we’re permitted to use.

    And while descheduling would mean gender variant people are less likely to be criminalized for accessing T, it still wouldn’t solve the larger problem: that we do not receive equitable health care.

    The use of testosterone without medical supervision, including regular blood level monitoring, can potentially lead to health complications (such as high blood pressure or overproduction of red blood cells) that are otherwise easily avoided — and among people already unlikely to have access to decent care. Transgender care in the US is gatekept even for gender variant people who have societal privileges like whiteness or wealth.

    Descheduling wouldn’t fix health care, but it would remove barriers for gender variant people already receiving care, and theoretically protect them from experiences like what Fransisco endured in 2019. And criminalizing testosterone isn’t any more effective at curbing recreational use by cis men than criminalizing psychoactive drugs is at reducing their use, either.

    “In my opinion, any medication you’re put on should be monitored by a doctor, but that gets into how crappy our healthcare is in the US,” Burton said. “I would imagine there are bigger fish to fry [since] testosterone doesn’t get you high. It doesn’t have any immediate gratification effects. It just seems silly, for lack of a better term, to classify this the way we do. It’s an unnecessary, gate-keepy thing to do, especially when the majority of patients I see scheduling HRT are elderly and need it or are trans and need it.”

    Any non-cisgender person faces discrimination and overall antagonism from the medical industrial complex. We are frequently mistreated by providers, experiencing verbal harassment; misgendering; denial of hormone therapy; denial of treatment unrelated to gender; and having to educate providers about our identity and needs. People of additional marginalized identities and experiences — like race, disability, mental illness, higher weight or drug use — face compounding barriers to care.

    Gender variant people should be more than acknowledged in drug policy reform; we should be prioritized.

    *Name changed at source’s request.

    This article was originally published by Filter, an online magazine covering drug use, drug policy and human rights through a harm reduction lens. Follow Filter on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up for our daily or weekly email newsletters here.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Prison Officials Punished Me With Solitary — Against Their Own Rules

    People march with roses and signs reading "END SOLITARY NOW" during a vigil

    My experience as a trans woman forced to live in a men’s prison in Washington State is barbaric and dehumanizing. Imagine living in an environment where you are surrounded by men and never seem to fit in. Trans women are a particularly vulnerable population who are at higher risk of physical and sexual violence, as well as suicide. Being placed in segregation for an extended period of time is another thing altogether; it is torturous.

    In 2015, international standards were changed: The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) declared more than 15 days of segregation to be a human rights violation.

    Washington State prison officials have been working on restrictive housing reforms for years. Leadership appears to be making a good faith effort to follow the science by making research-informed decisions. Evidence shows that use of segregation causes serious physical and mental harm to prisoners. This includes increased risk of self-harm and suicide. Segregation may also be harmful to staff working there. Studies show that disciplinary segregation doesn’t work to change behavior. Some studies even suggest it could increase misconduct.

    As part of recent reforms, the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) announced the elimination of disciplinary segregation in September 2021. This means that the DOC no longer places prisoners in segregation for the express purpose of punishment. Some media outlets inaccurately reported that the DOC ended the use of segregation altogether, prompting the DOC to respond by issuing a press release stating, “The department continues to utilize segregation for non-disciplinary purposes such as investigations, safety, protective custody, and classifications.”

    All of the prisoners I talked to agree with me that disciplinary segregation is the least harmful brand of segregation used. This means that its elimination feels like insignificant incremental change. The two types of segregation that prisoners agree are more harmful — administrative segregation and max custody — are still used.

    Administrative segregation is a designation used by prison officials for reasons such as investigations, safety and security concerns, and reclassification and transfer to another facility. Administrative segregation time is measured in days, but may last for several months.

    Max custody is a long-term classification designation that lasts several months or even years before prisoners have the opportunity to be housed in the general population.

    Whatever time spent in segregation or the language used to describe it, the practices are eerily similar and all occur in the same place: the Intensive Management Unit (IMU), where prisoners occupy austere and indestructible cells which appear to be prepared for violence. The prisoners are forced to spend at least 22 hours a day in their cells with very few, if any allowables.

    Whenever transported from the cell, prisoners are placed in metal restraints or shackles and are escorted by two or more guards. Individualized decisions are not made for restraints except in cases where even greater security measures and more guards are used.

    I was a minimum-custody classified trans woman preparing to be released in May 2022, who was being housed in a higher-security men’s unit due to prison consolidation efforts. I don’t bother anyone. I am a vulnerable trans woman in this environment who mostly keeps to herself. When not in the cell by myself, I am usually in the big yard in the company of another trans woman.

    One day, a staff member accused me of telling others in the yard that they don’t need to wear a mask. The man claimed access to my body, ordering me to stand as guards were instructed to restrain and transport me.

    I don’t have the right to refuse orders. Any hesitation to submit may result in greater punishment. Staff may even use violent force if they feel it is necessary. I can’t describe how scary that feels for a trans woman on her own with no idea what strangers in uniforms are thinking.

    I was placed in administrative segregation for the “safety and security” of the institution.

    As a part of DOC efforts to reform restrictive housing, or segregation, it formed a partnership with the Vera Institute of Justice for the initiative “Safe Prisons, Safe Communities: From Isolation to Dignity and Wellness Behind Bars.” Impacts of the partnership include a 57 percent reduction of staff assaults and a 45 percent reduction in prisoner self-harm and suicide, according to the Vera Institute report. Progress includes updates to policy limiting what administrative segregation can be used for, as well as length of time it is used. Administrative segregation can now only be used for those who “pose a significant threat.” One goal of the partnership is to eliminate the use of administrative segregation for “particularly vulnerable populations.” Particularly vulnerable populations are commonly defined as those with serious mental illness, trans identified, or pregnant women.

    While in administrative segregation, I received an infraction for engaging in or inciting a group demonstration. I had a hearing. Even though none of the officers present for the incident provided a witness statement to support the claims against me, which is highly unusual, I was found guilty. According to attorney Danny Waxwing, who later listened to the audio of the hearing, there was no evidence. It was one man’s unsupported word against mine.

    For argument’s sake, let’s say the claims against me are true. You’ve got a nonviolent incident that amounts to a woman talking. There was no demonstration or harmful incident. I have tried to communicate with several staff members to explain that I have no previous infractions for not masking, am fully vaccinated and support masking. I’m not a significant threat. The high-level staff who placed me in administrative segregation have not responded to my pro-social attempts to communicate.

    Recent DOC administrative segregation reforms limit its use to no longer than 30 days. Prisoners may remain in administrative segregation if it is necessary to transfer them to a more secure facility. This “classification” process can take much longer than 30 days.

    I was classified minimum-custody while in a men’s medium-security unit. That means I was a low-security-level prisoner housed in a unit for those considered more dangerous prisoners. Now, even though I still qualify for minimum custody after the infraction, staff used administrative authority to demote me to medium custody, choosing to classify me as a more dangerous prisoner, which ironically makes me the appropriate custody level to return to the unit I was housed in. Even so, I remained in administrative segregation and was not allowed to return to the general population.

    I am not a “significant threat” and it is not necessary to transfer me to a more secure facility. As I sat writing this story, I had been in segregation for more than 30 days. It was 71 days before I finally transferred into a population at another prison.

    While in the IMU, a trans woman housed two cells away told me she had been there since April 2021. After over six months in administrative segregation, her mental and emotional condition appeared to be deteriorating. She admitted to me that she sometimes wears a headband around her eyes so officers can’t tell she is crying. Her attempts to conceal her crying remind me of my own strategy to bite down on my pillow as I sob so others don’t hear me.

    It is called “safety” or “classification” and not “discipline,” but the use of segregation for extended periods of time is a violation of international standards amounting to torture, according to the UN Nelson Mandela rules.

    A DOC document titled “Elimination of Disciplinary Segregation Frequently Asked Questions” stresses that administrative segregation is not to be used as de facto disciplinary segregation. It is for individuals who pose a significant risk and that, “If people commit non-violent infractions, or even if they commit a more serious infraction but have calmed down and no longer pose a threat, they should not be sent to [administrative segregation].” According to this document, I should not be in segregation, yet I was.

    According to the Vera Institute initiative, long-term goals include ending restrictive housing of more than 15 days, which would get Washington State prisons within international standards. They want to end restrictive housing entirely at women’s prisons while implementing gender-responsive reforms.

    In place of segregation, the DOC wants to use “meaningful sanctions” that are more effective at discouraging negative behavior, with an emphasis on limiting what may be harmful, such as sanctions that restrict contact with family, including visits or phone calls. Contact with family and increased community bonds reduce risk of recidivism, so taking away these things could actually work against safety objectives. The DOC also expresses a desire to increase incentives and privileges, which is shown to be more effective at changing behavior than sanctions.

    All of these policy changes and goals sound good, but my objective experience shows that prison officials don’t always carry out policy reforms the way they are intended. As a trans woman in a men’s prison, I don’t get a gender-responsive approach. Even though I am a vulnerable, nonviolent person, I am seen as too dangerous to be in the general prison population.

    Speaking of “meaningful sanctions,” I was sanctioned for 30 days of loss of yard time at my hearing. Since the incident happened in the yard, which I frequent, that is a textbook example of a “meaningful sanction.” The punishment involves loss of valued yard privileges as a result of negative behavior that occurred in the yard. That didn’t happen. Instead, I was kept in administrative segregation for 71 days and transferred to another prison.

    I am being released in May after more than 18 years in prison for a domestic violence-related crime. Being in administrative segregation impacts my health, disrupts my ability for release planning, and raises my risk of recidivism by reducing access to phone calls and visits, working against safety.

    Besides the austerity and lack of judgement prison officials used in my case, it seems incredibly obtuse and short-sighted to do this to a well-educated journalist. I can conduct my own ethnography and amplify my voice.

    A simple conversation could have resolved this issue. Since I can’t get that, I’ll try an exposé. I call it long-distance communication on speaker phone. I’m bringing others into the conversation and putting administrative bullies on blast.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Unapologetic Support for Abortion Rights Must Be a Pillar of the Left

    A bunch of people take abortion pills on the steps of the United States Supreme Court

    This week the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the case that will determine the fate of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and more broadly, the fate of Roe v. Wade. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, or the “Pink House,” due to its color, is the only abortion clinic left standing in Mississippi. Commentators have widely predicted that the Dobbs decision, which is expected to be announced in June or July, will ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade — the 1973 case that legalized abortion in the United States up to at least fetal viability, around 23 to 24 weeks — or revising it to leave abortion laws up to states to decide. On Wednesday, both anti-choice and pro-abortion demonstrators from across the country congregated in the nation’s capital, including members of the Pinkhouse Defenders, Shout Your Abortion, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Thank God For Abortion, Abortion Access Front, Plan C and NYC for Abortion Rights.

    The contours of the abortion hearings and abortion struggle today have shifted dramatically in the nearly 50 years since Roe. The right has appropriated the tactics and the language of the left and of the civil rights movement, casting embryos as a vulnerable class of human beings at the mercy of the murderous “abortion-industrial complex” and pregnant people as its dupes. Clinic invasions — which have resurfaced after the lull following the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act — are cast as “civil disobedience.” Perhaps most laughably, the argument advanced by Mississippi’s attorney general during hearings is that, since women in Mississippi can have thriving careers as well as raise families, abortion rights are no longer necessary. As of writing this, Mississippi has some of the weakest worker protections and family provisions — as well as some of the highest childbirth and infant mortality rates — in the country, with deep racial disparities.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently said about Dobbs: “The sponsors of this bill, the House bill, in Mississippi, said we’re doing it because we have new justices.… Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” The crisis of legitimacy of the state that Sotomayor is pointing to is evident. The economic crises, austerity, growth of the far right, climate change and COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the conditions that sparked recent uprisings for Black lives against police and prisons, have all shown that the capitalist state doesn’t care about our lives or if we die.

    The anti-abortion movement has been very successful in capitalizing on the failures of neoliberalism, the “pro-choice” nonprofit complex, and Roe itself, which does not specifically guarantee abortion as a right, but defends a “right to privacy” that anti-abortion laws supposedly contravene. The fight against abortion is a pillar of the far right, and it is impossible to understand the growth of one without the other. The dispensation of liberal facades of the state and its institutions, such as the Supreme Court and the electoral system, is becoming ever more integral to the right, and it is because the courts are not neutral. But we are the ones who must transcend them. After all, Roe was won under Richard Nixon, with four Democrats and three Republicans in the majority, and one Democrat and one Republican dissenting. What made the difference? The abortion and women’s health movements, supported by physicians, and the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements, which came out of the civil rights movement.

    Until the left takes up the fight for abortion as essential for the freedom and dignity of working people everywhere, basic bodily autonomy will remain a privilege of the rich and white. Moreover, the left will continue to miss a profound opportunity to wage a truly multiracial and liberatory fight that brings together women, LGBTQ people and the working class.

    What’s left of Roe is being ripped to shreds before our eyes. It is only a question of time before we see a total or near-total national ban on abortion, based on a decision made by a handful of lifetime unelected people who dictate the laws in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, built on stolen land and slavery. We are devastated, angry, terrified about the future of abortion and reproductive health care in this country. But we must be ready. We won’t stop having abortions, whether through pills or defending clinics. Abortion is ours forever. Our antidotes are solidarity, hope and the knowledge that we are on the right side of history. It connects us to millions of feminists around the world. It is a call to action.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • January 6 Shows Why Corporate Political Spending Is Bad for Democracy

    Trump supporters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    For a fleeting moment, corporate America looked like it would stop subsidizing efforts to undermine democracy. On January 6, insurrectionists instigated by former President Donald Trump and several high-ranking Republicans stormed the Capitol, and eight senators and 139 representatives refused to certify President Joe Biden’s victory. In response, companies made lofty promises to never again support politicians who tried to overthrow U.S. democracy. But most of the companies that made these promises are now back to enabling politicians who still unapologetically support the attempted coup. (Mostly “indirectly” via loopholes in our campaign finance system.)

    But we take away the wrong message if we think of this as a failure of corporations to live up to their civic responsibility. Corporations have no structural interest in a functioning democracy; they’re interested in a government that responds primarily to their needs, and their need is to amass as much wealth as possible.

    Corporations are nothing more than a legal vehicle to encourage investment. Investors in corporations receive liability protection — if the corporation goes belly-up, they lose their investment, but they are not liable for the corporation’s debts — and in return they give up control over the day-to-day management of their investment. As machines to encourage investment, corporations are an unparalleled success.

    However, the dangers of letting wealth-accumulation machines engage in politics was so obvious that they were banned from doing so from 1907 until 2010. That year, the Supreme Court abandoned any common-sense understanding of corporations’ proper role in our democracy. In its notorious Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, the court enabled corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money from their own treasuries to influence elections.

    But what do corporations “say” with political spending? Unsurprisingly, corporations advocate for policies that allow them to amass more wealth, adding to the already lopsided “wealth primary” in this country. This ensures that — with few exceptions — only elected officials who have accepted money from corporate interests can run viable campaigns. This creates a government that is usually more responsive to corporate interests than the public interest.

    Given this, why would anyone expect corporations to stand up for democracy? So long as the political system is not so chaotic that it affects their bottom line — and there is evidence that the next coup will be in courts, not in the streets — corporations have no interest in a legal system that is responsive to the general public. At best, they are agnostic toward an authoritarian regime. At worst, they might welcome it as a more robust protector of their property than democracy.

    To save our democracy, we can’t rely on corporations — we need to understand that they are standing in the way. Not because they are evil, but because they are acting exactly how they were constructed to act: to amass as much wealth as possible. Corporate political spending isn’t part of the solution; it’s part of the problem.

    We need to respond by limiting corporate influence on the political process. In the short term, that means supporting innovative legislation that works within current Supreme Court precedent by banning political spending by corporations under substantial foreign ownership, and limiting contributions to super PACs. In the longer term, we must reform the Supreme Court and amend the Constitution to reverse the disastrous Citizens United decision.

    Forty-three years ago, Supreme Court Justice Byron White dissented in the first Supreme Court case to grant corporations the right to spend their treasury funds to directly influence the political process in a case that foreshadowed Citizens United. He warned that the decision threatened to allow corporate interests, who “control vast amounts of economic power” to “dominate not only the economy, but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.” The First Amendment, he argued, did not force the public to allow “its own creation to consume it.”

    The January 6 insurrection and the craven corporate response reminds us that we must reclaim the promise of a true democracy in our country, responsive not to corporate slush funds but to the people of the U.S.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I Survived Death Row, But I’ll Never Escape It

    Oklahoma State Penitentiary, where Bigler Jobe "Bud" Stouffer II is being held, is pictured in a photo taken on October 19, 2008. Stouffer is scheduled for execution by the state next week.

    Oklahoma plans to take the life of Bigler Jobe “Bud” Stouffer II next week, and four more lives in coming months. Executions are also planned in Texas and Alabama. Like many people, I’m physically repulsed by the thought of the government killing — murdering — anyone. But an impending execution affects me more than most. I survived 13 grueling years on death row in Illinois. During that time, I witnessed 12 people — sons, fathers, brothers — executed at the hands of the state. Each of us were told our lives were beyond repair, that the world was a better place without us in it.

    In 2003, then-Gov. George Ryan issued a blanket commutation to everyone on death row in Illinois. I escaped the death penalty — my sentence was commuted to life without parole. But the nightmares, the trauma and the despair will always haunt me.

    Next week’s planned killing in Oklahoma is the latest in a long history of executions carried out in the name of “justice.” But the death penalty is far from just. Capital punishment is a racist relic that violates our most basic civil liberties and exists in stark opposition to the purported fundamental values of our nation. It’s time for this barbaric practice to end.

    I cannot describe the horror I felt during each execution, while I was on death row. Twelve separate times, I watched correctional officers stolidly and indifferently march a condemned man to his death. Each execution I witnessed marked the death of a friend — a friend with whom I prayed, shared my fears, and supported as we weathered abuse from cruel and callous prison guards.

    My death sentence didn’t end when I walked off death row. Like some 200,000 people nationwide, I was condemned to death by incarceration, or a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 abolished the death penalty because its application was arbitrary and discriminatory. But it allowed the practice to resume four years later, after states adopted new rules intended make the death penalty “fairer.” Yet, like many criminal legal reforms, those changes did little to fix a system rife with inequity. A 2020 report found that more than 40 percent of people awaiting execution in the U.S. were Black, like me, despite the fact that Black people only make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population. The report also found prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white.

    Proponents of state-sanctioned killing argue it is reserved for the worst of the worst. In reality, those condemned to die are often the most vulnerable members of our communities — roughly one-fifth of people on death row have severe mental illnesses. When the state sought to end my life, I was 19 years old, illiterate and living with mental illness. Although I was still just a child, I had survived years of neglect, physical and emotional abuse, and sex trafficking. Homeless and starving, drugs and alcohol became my only escape. Delusional and desperate, I killed a man for money he didn’t have.

    Like all people on death row, I needed a zealous advocate to fight for me at every step of the way. Yet lawyers charged with representing vulnerable people facing death at the hands of the state are rarely up for the task. Far too often, the most serious cases are handled by appointed attorneys who are plainly ineffective. Many are overworked, underpaid and unprepared to navigate the labyrinthine process from conviction through final appeal.

    Perhaps the most glaring evidence in opposition to the death penalty is the frailty of human judgement. Given the stakes — a human life — there is no room for error, factual or moral. But error is everywhere: Since executions were reinstated in the 1970s, 185 people sentenced to death have been exonerated.

    Even worse is the near certainty that a person condemned to die will continue to develop, to grow, to mature long after their death sentence has been handed down. During the 13 years I spent on death row, and in the 17 years I spent serving a natural life sentence after that, I learned to read, went to college and found religion. I started one of the most successful programs within Illinois prisons, one run entirely by incarcerated people. I lived and, despite the inherent oppression of our prison system, I thrived.

    My humanity was considered “irrelevant” by the state when I was on death row, my existence reduced to my worst act. The complex life experiences leading up to that act — abuse, trauma, addiction, poverty — were brushed over and ignored.

    I survived death row, but I still have not made sense of this country’s hypocrisy. We kill people to emphasize that killing is wrong. We value personal growth and responsibility but make no space in our legal system to recognize transformation.

    We kill in the name of justice. A racist system that ends the lives of vulnerable people, no matter who they become, is anything but.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With Omicron in US, GOP Hard-Liners Are Still Trying to Thwart Vaccine Mandates

    Sen. Ron Johnson speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill, September 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The current federal spending agreement that funds many operations of government is set to expire at midnight on Friday. Absent a new deal, or at least a vote to kick the can down the road a bit, much of the federal government will shut down, again. M*A*S*H didn’t get this many reruns.

    The last one ran 35 days, from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, and happened because then-President Donald Trump wanted to staple funding for his draconian border wall to the government funding appropriations bill. Democrats balked, and Trump ultimately backed down. Immediately after the shutdown ended, Trump declared a “state of emergency” during a spectacularly ludicrous Rose Garden aria, and proceeded to plunder Army funds to continue wall construction. Those were the days, right?

    Nearly three years later, and the circus is back in town. This time, it’s a clot of 15 Senate Republicans that includes Roger Marshall, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Ted “Green Eggs And” Cruz driving the bus to wherever the hell they think this is all going to wind up. The beef this time? President Biden’s vaccine mandates, which have already been stalled by a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana, and so technically don’t really exist.

    This fight has been growling low within congressional GOP circles since early November, and has burst open as the deadline looms. The House Freedom Caucus, a.k.a. Donald Trump’s sweat towel, is all for taking the shutdown deadline hostage, but lacks the numbers to pull it off in that chamber. The Senate, however, is another matter. With the 50-50 split, any GOP senator can locate their Inner Manchin and bollix the deal.

    “We’re opposed to the mandate,” Johnson told reporters yesterday. “We don’t want the federal government to be able to fund them in any way shape or form.” Cruz offered a concurrent opinion: “I think we should use the leverage we have to fight against what are illegal, unconstitutional and abusive mandates from a president and an administration that knows they are violating the law.”

    A deal was reached on Thursday morning between House and Senate leadership on a stopgap spending measure that will punt a shutdown to February 18. The House appears prepared to pass this stopgap by the close of business today, but the anti-mandate faction in the Senate seems ready to play this out to the end. This, to say the least, has many Senate Republicans in a state of distress.

    Burgess Everett, Politico’s co-congressional bureau chief, was covering a GOP Senate lunch on Wednesday where the mandate/shutdown strategy was discussed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was present, but offered no support for the plan. “Mitch did not say a word,” reported Burgess. “He ate his chicken. He ate 2 pieces.”

    “I just don’t quite understand the strategy or the play of leverage for a mandate that’s been stayed by 10 courts,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told Politico. “I don’t think shutdowns benefit people, like some folks think they do,” opined Sen. John Cornyn. “I’m pleased that we have finally reached an agreement on the continuing resolution,” added Sen. Richard Shelby.

    Cramer, Cornyn and Shelby are not what you’d call wobbly pseudo-conservatives, and when you include Mitch and his mouthful of mute chicken, what we have here is the table-setting for a good old-fashioned GOP intra-party rhubarb just as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has entered the chat.

    “If there is a shutdown, it will be a Republican, anti-vaccine shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer said from the floor of the chamber. Thumper of a line there, Chuck; your speechwriter should get a free bowl of soup for conjuring such stirring rhetoric in this time of crisis. Others, fortunately, were more eloquent in their disdain. Jake Johnson of Common Dreams reports:

    Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who represents more federal employees than any other member of the House, said in a statement late Wednesday afternoon that “Republicans’ plan to shut down the government on purpose to sabotage our pandemic response is extraordinarily cynical and dangerous.”

    “Vaccines are keeping Americans alive, and they represent the best possible tool we have to fight this pandemic,” said Beyer. “Countering vaccination efforts at what may prove one of the most critical moments of the pandemic, with the discovery of a concerning new variant, could have disastrous consequences for the American people and the recovering U.S. economy.”

    The Virginia Democrat went on to warn that a shutdown would “inflict unnecessary hardship and fear on the families of millions of federal workers and contractors” and “demonstrate to our allies and our adversaries that our government can be stopped from functioning by a handful of ideologues who only care about appeasing the most radical elements in their political base.”

    “Anti-science Republicans are demanding a choice between a return to the unchecked spread of Covid we had under the previous administration and the bungled, self-destructive governance that led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history,” Beyer continued. “Neither of these alternatives is acceptable — Republicans must do their jobs and allow a vote on legislation to avert a shutdown.”

    That, Mr. Schumer, is how you do that.

    A government shutdown over COVID protections as a new and potentially destructive variant rises strikes me as an incredibly weird way to derail what can only be described as white-hot Republican political momentum, yet here we are with less than 36 hours to go. The lights go out at midnight on Friday. I hope Mitch brought some leftovers home from that Wednesday lunch. The Capitol mess may be closed for a while.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Redistricting Threatens Decades of Black Voters’ Hard-Fought Victories

    Activists take part in a voting rights protest in front of the White House on November 17, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    While building back the nation’s infrastructure remains the focus inside the Capital Beltway, congressional inaction on voting rights has the biggest potential to tear down years of progress for Black people in this country.

    Even though communities of color in cities and rural towns across the United States are organizing to fulfill the promise of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) during the 2021 redistricting cycle, the loss of the VRA’s Section 5 voting protections threatens decades of hard-fought victories for fair representation and equitable resources.

    Voting rights advocates as far north as Wisconsin, and in Southern states like Georgia, Texas and Florida, are sounding the alarm: Without immediate federal action to restore the VRA, even our smallest towns aren’t safe from anti-democratic, racist redistricting that could have devastating impacts on people who simply want their voices heard.

    Recently, in North Carolina, the Republican state legislature approved new maps for the U.S. House that could give white Republicans control of 11 out of 14 of the state’s districts. The erosion of Black votes and representation remains a major concern on the local level, where redistricting often receives less attention and scrutiny.

    North Carolina’s Lee County, currently at the center of a decades-long gerrymandering debate, is just the latest consequence of the 2013 Shelby County decision gutting what’s known as the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act: Last month, Lee County’s commissioners manipulated the county’s only Black voting district and threatened to roll back Black voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

    The VRA’s preclearance provision, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing changes affecting voting without preapproval, would have prevented such manipulation by protecting districts that allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidates.

    One of 10 southern counties named for the slaveholding Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the county has long elected its commissioners in an at-large system — where all the county’s voters can vote for each candidate — which all but guaranteed electoral victories for white majorities.

    With the full protection of the VRA, the Lee County NAACP filed suit in 1989, alleging the at-large system denied Black residents a genuine opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. As a result of the VRA lawsuit, the board increased its size and changed its method of election from completely at-large to a hybrid system with a majority of single-member districts. Moreover, the county commissioners explicitly acknowledged in their 1989 resolution Lee County’s “desir[e] to increase the opportunity for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice.”

    Instead, Lee County’s Republican commissioners rammed through a voting map dramatically decreasing the Black population and shoring up the white population in District 1, the county’s only opportunity district for communities of color. District 1 is currently represented by Commissioner Robert Reives, Sr., the county’s only Black elected commissioner. Lee County exploited the population growth of communities of color by choosing to focus on bolstering the political power of declining white populations.

    This is part of a perverse trend mirrored by states drawing new state and congressional district lines across the South, as well as the rest of the nation. In fact, GOP legislatures will finalize redistricting in 20 states covering 187 congressional districts, compared to Democrats who control the process in eight states with 75 districts.

    Certain commissioners not only ignored warnings against drawing maps for partisan gain, but they also denied the public any chance to comment on changes to districts for communities of color by refusing to hold public hearings that would ensure Lee County residents could ask questions, provide alternatives or hold elected officials accountable.

    Without the VRA’s federal preclearance provisions, discriminatory redistricting plans like those in Lee County cannot be stopped.

    Black voters in Lee County, North Carolina, are not alone in their struggle. In nearby Fayetteville, ousted white politicians, unhappy with a majority-Black city council built from VRA-protected districts, are waging their own dangerous campaign to change election methods in the state’s sixth-largest city, designed to upend majority-minority districts and return the city to a racist at-large system. Pair this trend with local “prison gerrymandering” efforts that purposefully shift political power away from cities where more Black people live to smaller, majority-white prison towns where predominantly Black people are incarcerated, and once again voters of color everywhere from Mobile, Alabama, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are paying the political price.

    These efforts to erode local Black voting power are the real-life consequences of congressional inaction. Places like Lee County, Fayetteville and Milwaukee not only risk losing the representation they deserve, but also the resources for housing, jobs, public health and environmental protections they need.

    In 1965, Congress made a promise to hundreds of communities like those in Lee County. In 2021, it’s time they ensured that decades of struggle and sacrifice were not in vain.

    Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to strengthen the VRA and restore its core protections, and also pass the Freedom to Vote Act as soon as possible. Robust voting rights protections are the only bulwark against racist redistricting that we’ve witnessed across the South and the latest wave of anti-voter legislation happening now across the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Vaccine Mandates Are Working. Democrats Should Act Boldly on Other Issues Too.

    President Joe Biden speaks during an event on COVID-19 response and the vaccination program at the South Court Auditorium of Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The emergence of the new Omicron strain of COVID-19 is alarming, even if the exact danger it poses is still unclear. This development should serve as a reminder of what’s been clear from the beginning of the pandemic — that the only way to suppress the virus’s spread is to have a truly global vaccination effort. The most obvious way to increase global vaccine access is for the World Trade Organization to adopt India and South Africa’s proposal to waive intellectual property rights of the giant pharmaceutical companies that are claiming a monopoly on vaccine development. The Biden administration has opposed the waiver but now has begun to signal at least tepid support.

    Last Sunday, President Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci had warned that it was only a matter of time before the Omicron strain appeared in the U.S. He was proven right on Wednesday when California reported the first known case in a traveler from South Africa.

    As the Delta surge showed over the summer of 2021, the vast swaths of the United States where vaccine rates are low are incredibly vulnerable to each new variant. After an initially impressive vaccine rollout, the U.S.’s vaccination rate has dropped off considerably. As of late October, the United States had the lowest vaccination rates of G7 countries.

    If there is one spot of good news here, it’s that the Biden administration has embraced strong vaccination mandates, and the early data suggest that they’re working. In September, Biden issued an executive order requiring all federal workers to get the shot with exceptions in limited circumstances. As of November 23, 92 percent of the 3.5 million federal workers had gotten at least one shot, according to a White House fact sheet.

    As part of that executive order, Biden also required all employees of companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated, obtain a waiver, or face weekly testing by early January. That order was challenged by at least 27 states in various districts and was subsequently blocked by a federal appeals court. A federal judge also blocked a Biden order mandating that health care workers get the vaccine, after 10 states sued.

    Still, the company 3M (the largest producer of N95 masks in the U.S.) mandated that its employees get vaccinated in response to Biden’s executive order on federal workers. More broadly, Biden’s appeal to corporate behemoths to adopt vaccine mandates has seen some key success, as Procter & Gamble, Tyson Foods, and several airlines have required their workers to get the shot.

    Although national hard data is difficult to pin down, anecdotally, at least many vaccine-hesitant people have preferred to get the vaccine rather than face the prospect of losing their jobs. State and municipal mandates have been incredibly successful as well. In New York State, a mandate for health care workers saw the number of people covered jump about 10 percent — from 82 to 92 percent — in the week before the requirement took hold. Even cops, who are part of one of the most reactionary and anti-vaccine professions in the country, have largely acquiesced to the requirement, even as their police associations have challenged the mandates in court.

    The response from the right to the mandates — either those issued by Biden or by Democratic-controlled cities and states — has been predictable. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Biden’s federal mandates were something out of “communist China or North Korea.” A Fox News weekend host said they were the “beginning of a communist-style social credit system.” Right-wing website Red State referred to Biden’s speech as “dictatorial,” and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said it was an example of the “authoritarianism” of the “administrative state.” After the conservative television station Newsmax announced it would enforce its own mandate, host Steve Cortes tweeted that he would not comply with “any organization’s attempt to enforce Biden’s capricious & unscientific Medical Apartheid mandate.”

    In the months since Biden issued his federal mandate, the reactionary backlash hasn’t subsided, exactly, but conservatives have found other boogiemen to chase. Most notably, they rallied in a panic against in-school discussions of racism and oppression (which they inaccurately describe as “critical race theory”) in the Virginia gubernatorial race. Republicans have attacked Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan as a reckless expansion of the welfare state. Rep. Lauren Boebert called Rep. Ilhan Omar a terrorist, then refused to publicly apologize. In short, conservatives are doing what they always do, and what they would have done had Biden not issued his executive orders on vaccine requirements.

    The clear lesson for Democrats here is that cowering in anticipation of a backlash is morally indefensible in addition to being political malpractice. The constant media refrain in the run-up to the Virginia election was that the Democrats hadn’t done enough with their power, or, in Beltway-speak, they didn’t have “wins” to bring home. Poll after poll shows that Biden’s political future relies on increasing vaccination rates, stemming future waves and inching the country closer to an end-state where COVID is more like the seasonal flu and less like a life-altering pandemic.

    Biden, and Democrats more broadly, will obviously get zero help from conservatives in this endeavor. Not only have the vast majority of Republican-controlled states resisted mask and vaccine mandates, but the GOP response to the Omicron variant has been even more mired in lies and conspiracy theories. Texas Republican and former Trump White House physician Ronny Jackson suggested the new variant had been invented by Democrats to justify mail-in voting in next year’s midterms. Similarly, Fox News hosts Will Cain and Pete Hegseth half-joked that the Biden administration would invent new variants “every two years” for their political benefit.

    In retrospect, it’s now clear that Biden waited far too long to initiate federal vaccine mandates, almost entirely because his administration was afraid of the backlash they might generate. According to vaccine expert Peter Hotez, 150,000 people in the United States have died of COVID since June, when vaccines became widely available for Americans over 18. At least some of those people could have been saved — in some cases, in spite of their own instincts — had Biden pressed for large-scale mandates earlier.

    There’s a rough analogy to be made here to another subject Democrats have waffled on for years for fear of sparking a backlash, specifically health care costs. There’s no question that much of the Democratic Party’s opposition to single-payer health care — or even a public option — is due to a genuine commitment to a privatized market, both ideologically and for the material benefit they get from health care sector lobbying. But the way that that commitment is often sold to liberal voters is that moving to a single-payer system would result in cries of authoritarianism and Stalinism from the right. As the left flank of the party has said for years, conservatives will accuse liberals of being socialists no matter what they do, so why not enact good policies and deal with the inevitable backlash when it comes.

    More broadly, Democrats have imposed strict limits on themselves so as not to trigger blowback from Republicans for exercising their power when they have it. This manifests in all sorts of ways — from the Obama administration settling on a stimulus that some advisers knew was too small at the outset of the great recession, to the continuing reluctance from the party’s conservative wing to abolish the filibuster (even as a limited carve-out for voting rights). The Biden administration has been dragging its feet on negotiating lower drug costs, preferring to leave it to Congress despite the fact that there is executive action Biden could take in the meantime. Activists have also argued that Biden has the legal authority to cancel student debt without going through Congress, an action the administration seems to have placed in a state of permanent review. Some experts believe Biden has the statutory authority to make college essentially free by forgiving “loans equal to average public-college tuition on a rolling basis for two- and four-year public colleges.”

    Every single one of these actions — not to mention any legislation Biden signs into law with only Democratic support — will generate massive backlash from conservatives. But so did federal, state and municipal vaccine mandates. Both morally and politically, the danger Democrats face is doing too little, losing power and being called authoritarians anyway.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • My Daughter Was Exposed to COVID. Thank Goodness She Was Vaccinated.

    A girl recieves the covid vaccine

    The fear arrived in late February 2020, and has remained, in one form or another, ever since. Remained? It puts its feet up on the coffee table and hogs the comforter so I can’t sleep. The mask, the distancing, the hand sanitizer, the bellowing silence of isolation, the lengthening list of restaurants and bars I loved that are gone now and forever, and the sickened, and the dead. Always the dead. Almost a thousand again today, with 86,000 new infections. It must be Wednesday.

    I’ve been quietly waiting to get sick for 20 months now. Waiting to get sick feels like that moment when you slip on a patch of ice and hover for one elastic second on the edge of balance before crashing down in a flailing heap. I have been deeply fortunate, though; I’ve never experienced a healthier passage of time. The masks thwarted cold and flu season last year but good, and I haven’t had so much as a sniffle. There has always been the waiting, though. For me to get sick, or a family member. God help me, my sunshine daydream daughter, all of eight years old.

    The phone rang just before 2:00pm yesterday, and on the screen appeared the name of her school. The elevator in my stomach rumbled down into the basement as I answered. It was the nurse. No, your daughter is fine, but we’re calling everyone because two students in her class have tested positive for COVID, which means she was in “close contact.”

    To nick a line from Chuck Palahniuk, we have lost cabin pressure. The call is coming from inside the house. Pick your perky phrase, but here was the moment. I had finally fallen on the ice. Not me. My little girl. I had prepared for this eventuality a thousand times in my mind like some 1950s Cold War dad making his family do nuclear war drills in his homemade bomb shelter, but in that second, I went blank with panic. An outside observer might have thought I had spiders crawling around under the skin of my face. Corpse white, no breath … dear God, what do I do now?

    And then, as if nothing had happened, the phone call continued. Your daughter is showing no symptoms, the nurse told me, she feels fine, and the rapid test we gave her came back negative. It’s the antigen test and not the PCR test, so it’s only a snapshot of the moment, but we can test her as often as you like. Best thing to do now is keep her masked and watch for symptoms, but the fact that she’s been vaccinated once is the best possible news.

    That’s right, I thought as my brain reactivated itself like a rebooted modem, the tests. Wait, the shots! We all have our vaccine shots, and I have the strangely simplistic cards to prove it! Getting them took less than three total hours of our lives, and on that suddenly different afternoon, they were the three most golden hours I had ever known.

    The whole wide world needs to know what that feels like, needs that astonishment of relief, like the first summer breeze in April, and not just because vaccinating almost everyone will go a long way toward thwarting new variants. Everyone needs to feel that sense of safety — or at least to have the easy option of feeling that safety presented to them — because sharing it is the human thing to do.

    Of course, because capitalism, this is not presently the case. Truthout’s Mike Ludwig explains:

    As debate over a proposal to temporarily waive intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines and treatments continues to stall at the World Trade Organization (WTO), members that remain opposed — including the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Union — are increasingly being accused of violating human rights on an international scale.

    Calls for the WTO to approve the so-called TRIPS waiver for vaccine patents and manufacturing technology are reaching a fever pitch with the emergence of the Omicron variant that was first identified in South Africa. Omicron has prompted travel bans across the world and inflamed tensions over massive global disparities in vaccine access, which experts and advocates have warned for months would allow the virus to mutate and spread outward from lower-income countries where vaccines remain out of reach for most people.

    Yet Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies are not sharing “recipes” for COVID vaccines with a South African biotech firm and a World Health Organization (WHO) effort to transfer the technology necessary for making mRNA vaccines to African nations, where only about 1 in 10 people have received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the United States and Europe, monopolies on the crucial technology and know-how needed to make vaccines largely remains controlled by private pharmaceutical companies that received billions of dollars from wealthy governments to develop vaccines — and are now pulling in billions in global profit.

    Way, way down at the core of my progressive beliefs is a box labeled “Enlightened Self-Interest.” I do not hew to progressive causes and advocate for progressive policies solely because I am a gleaming ball of happy light. Sometimes, and actually more often than not, I do it because helping others rise out of the morass of hate, fear, capitalism and greed actually helps me, too.

    Example: I want every child to get a zillion-dollar education for free not just because I love books and learning, but because education is the wooden stake to the vampire of ignorance, and the less ignorance there is, the better my life — all our lives — will be. This is enlightened self-interest. Make no mistake, buddy-roo: I’m in this for me and my kid first. Come along for the ride, and watch as we all get well.

    The sheer velocity with which these corporate drug-peddlers flee their own enlightened self-interest is a wonder to behold. If Moderna and Pfizer stopped chasing a buck around the block and used their already-galactic financial resources to crush this thing globally, they’d win near-universal praise. In fact, keep it simpler for all the Ivy League MBAs who thought this way of operating makes long-term sense: Who’s going to buy your shit if everyone is dead or in hiding?

    Ironically enough, this breed of capitalism only makes sense if you analyze it from the point of view of a virus: Invade a host, burn down its resources, find another host, make some occasional changes here and there to open new markets, until there are no more markets because you burned them all down, and then you die. COVID would get this thinking immediately if it had a brain, and there’s the rub. These massive corporate drug companies are practicing nothing less than vaccine apartheid, another crime against humanity — all of humanity — for profit. Enlightened self-interest can take a number.

    It’s time for the WTO to approve the TRIPS waiver for vaccine patents — to do the human thing, for the betterment of us all.

    Everyone needs to feel what I do today. I’m still afraid, because COVID is a monster and the variants are coming, but I slipped on the ice and didn’t fall. After almost two years of this slow-grinding hell, everyone deserves to know what it’s like to be able to worry just a little bit less.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Black and Palestinian Unity Is Powerful. Jamaal Bowman Should Support BDS.

    Jamaal Bowman's face is seen juxtaposed against Palestinian protesters in a photo collage

    If U.S. Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) truly believes that Palestinians deserve “self-determination” and that the “occupation must end,” then he must review some of his most recent votes in Congress and other decisions regarding the question of Palestine, which are throwing into question his progressive bona fides.

    Bowman recently went on a congressional delegation to Israel with the liberal Zionist lobby group J Street, where he met with the ultra-right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He voted in favor of U.S. taxpayers funding Israel’s Iron Dome military system to the tune of $1 billion and is a fierce opponent of the Palestinian civil society’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is modeled after the nonviolent component of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa.

    These actions have sparked outrage within some chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as well as within its BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group, which is formally calling on the DSA’s National Political Committee to expel him from its ranks. They insist that Bowman is violating the group’s political platform on Palestine.

    Regardless of which way the DSA’s deliberations on Bowman might go, he has thus far shown himself to be another progressive congressperson who betrays those values in regards to Palestine. In doing so, he is eschewing the principled stances taken by prominent Black- and Palestinian-led organizations such as the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network.

    For decades in this country, Black liberation movement organizers and their Palestinian counterparts have committed themselves to joint struggle and unity. Despite government repression, constant surveillance, and other attempts to thwart their organizing and activism, these organizers continue to work together to expose and eradicate racism, sexism, white supremacy and colonialism, here and abroad. With words and actions, numerous Black institutions, activists, artists, academics and writers have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the liberation of Palestine.

    After the police-perpetrated killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Palestinians from all over the U.S. descended on Ferguson and joined the massive Movement for Black Lives protests. The Palestinians were there in solidarity, of course, but also because they understood that the struggle against police crimes here holds many parallels with — and is entwined with — the struggle against Israeli military crimes against their people in Palestine.

    But Black-Palestinian unity began long before Ferguson. The relationship dates back to the 1960s when the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and anti-racist Black Panther Party and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) condemned Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine. And in 1973, Black union workers in Michigan’s auto plants supported their mostly Arab immigrant co-workers who walked off the job and demanded that the United Auto Workers divest from Israeli state bonds.

    These principles of joint struggle are also reflected in the relationship between the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. Both organizations realize that Black-Palestinian unity is based on the understanding that Palestinian resistance against Israel and the Black liberation struggle here at home are both blows to U.S. imperialism. It is a dialectical relationship, meaning that it is interconnected, interrelated and determined by each other, for we are battling the same enemy.

    The Arab World has been devastated by direct U.S. intervention and occupation in Iraq and other countries, as well as U.S. support of the colonization and occupation of Palestine. The same imperial force that attacks Arabs overseas has militarized the police in Black communities here. Ultimately, Black people and Palestinians/Arabs are subjected to similar surveillance, repression and criminalization.

    The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Black community that it represents has stood in unity with Palestinians for years, participating in fighting the Muslim Ban, defending Arabs and Muslims from post 9-11 targeting and repression, demanding that legislators support bills that promote Palestinian rights, and promoting justice for Rasmea Odeh. Meanwhile, the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network is a member of the Steering Committee of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and has mobilized hundreds of Palestinians to support police accountability through the Civilian Police Accountability Council; justice for police torture survivors who were wrongfully convicted; and support for families of Black women and men injured, tortured and/or killed by the Chicago police. With great intention and care, these groups unite based on a shared vision for a just society that is free from white supremacy, racism, settler colonialism and patriarchy.

    Conversely, by meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, voting for the Iron Dome and attacking BDS, Bowman is extending support to the racist, apartheid-enforcing state of Israel instead of using his position in Congress to mitigate the existing harmful and violent conditions that devastate the everyday lives of Palestinians living under an apartheid regime. He should instead take his directives from Black people and their institutions on the ground, which are clear on how the partisan work of legislators in D.C. often serves as a barrier and reproduces the inequalities Black and Palestinian people experience in the U.S. and abroad.

    If Bowman truly wants to uphold progressive values, and if he cares about protecting Palestinian national rights, including self-determination, then he should listen to the people in his district and to the Black liberation movement. He should support BDS, disavow the apartheid regime of Israel, and vote against U.S. aid to the racist state.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Build Back Better Is Gutted, Defense Act Is Deemed a “Must-Pass” Bill

    An F-35 fighter jet flies over a US flag

    The drinking water in Flint, Michigan. The ashes of Paradise, California. A tub of petroleum that once was the Gulf of Mexico. Rising seas, and storms that eat cities. Black people murdered by cops, protesters gunned down by teenagers with war weapons, and children shot by children in the ersatz safety of their own homes and schools. A lethal pandemic close to completing its second year, fueled by a vapid anti-science movement with the vocal blessing of a disgraced former president.

    Ponder all of this, and so much more besides, and I’ll bet my left shoe your absolute last thought would be, “You know what? This country really needs 91 new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and a pair of new Virginia-class nuclear submarines.” What the hell, it’s only $9.3 billion we’re talking about. Never mind the fact that the F-35 keeps falling out of the sky, and the subs would be of better use studying North Atlantic right whale depopulation off the coast of Cape Cod.

    Here we are, though, on the verge of authorizing the spending of $740 billion for items just like that. The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2022, which authorizes the military budget and establishes defense policy, runs close to 70 fine-printed pages, and reads like a Christmas list compiled by the most terrifying child who ever lived. This is only the stuff we’re selling to ourselves, mind you; our list of global arms sales would fell a forest for the paper.

    On top of the F-35s and the submarines, there are two Arleigh Burke class destroyers ($3.7 billion), 11 CH-53K King Stallion helicopters ($1.5 billion), 17 F-15EX fighters ($1.8 billion), 92 M1 Abrams tank upgrades ($1.4 billion), $4.8 billion for the Columbia class submarine program, and a nifty $4.9 billion for Space Force “system development and demonstration” and “advanced component and development prototype R and D funding for technologies including space situational awareness, domain control, advanced communications, and related technologies and systems.” SPACE FORCE!!

    Good luck getting all that down the chimney, Santa.

    NDAAs notoriously establish dangerous military policy, as well as paving the way for sky-high defense spending (which gets locked in through subsequent defense appropriations bills). The NDAA of 2001, the post 9/11 document that allows the U.S. to basically kill and invade everything, everywhere, at any time, forever. It was the gateway to torture, total surveillance and two decades of war in Afghanistan. The 2003 NDAA was basically a “Yeah, what that said” document, with specific language added that gave us two decades of war in Iraq. There has been some noise about repealing these two NDAAs but yeah, no, Forever War is still Forever War for the time being.

    Amazingly enough, this year’s NDAA contains one potentially useful policy. The new authorization’s focus on “Combatting Sexual Assault in the Military” at least acknowledges the crisis of sexual violence in the armed forces. The new policy initiatives “[m]oves the decision to prosecute a serious crime out of the chain of command and to trained military prosecutors.” This is analogous to bringing in an outside prosecutor to handle officer-involved shootings, so local DAs don’t have to investigate or indict their own cops. That being said, the fact remains that no change in prosecution policy can eradicate the sexual violence that is an intrinsic part of U.S. militarism and imperialism.

    At present, Congress is debating the 2022 NDAA along with President Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, debt limit legislation, and funding to keep the federal government operating. The deadlines are piling up, and the pressure on Democratic lawmakers is intense. It is worth noting, however, that between the BBB Act and the NDAA, only the NDAA gets labeled as “must-pass” by the corporate news media.

    “Must-pass”? The term makes it sound as if the preposterous might of the U.S. military will melt like a microwaved Peep if the bill isn’t signed before Congress blows town for the holidays. Between the nukes and the Navy SEALS, I think we have the “extreme violence in all directions simultaneously” capacity well handled. Makes you wonder if there’s money involved, some old system of graft, plunder and revolving doors that manages to scratch its own back while eating its cake, too. Maybe someone should look into that or something.

    The Build Back Better Act doesn’t get the “must-pass” treatment, of course — yet another testament to the perverse priorities of the people running the show. Parents need affordable day care, Medicare recipients need help with their hearing, families need paid family leave, and the climate needs 10,000 times the help included in the bill, but it’s a beginning. If the environment is poisoned for all living things, who’s going to fly (crash) all those shiny F-35s? Didn’t think of that one, did ya, Mr. Manchin?

    Passage of the NDAA is an annual festival of performative bipartisanship — the bills always sail by massive margins — but this year is a little different. With Democrats “in control” of both the House and Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has gone full guerrilla in his attempts to thwart Biden’s agenda. This year’s NDAA has fallen victim to this tactic, with McConnell rubbishing its road to passage in order to jam the Democrats with so many deadlines looming. There is actual concern the bill might not be on the president’s desk by the New Year.

    This would suit McConnell just fine; in his vision of a perfect world, the BBB Act fails with Manchin’s help, the NDAA does not get done before 2022, the federal government shuts down, and the debt ceiling is breached. He can then gleefully blame Democrats while waiting for the midterms like a cat who hears the can opener cranking in the kitchen. In the meantime, the ocean is coming, and the kids got nowhere to go. “Must-pass,” indeed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Our Fast Supply Chain Put Workers’ Lives at Risk. Let’s Not Bring It Back.

    Longshore workers walk off the job in solidarity with teamsters to picket and disrupt traffic to one of the Port of Los Angeles's seven terminals in San Pedro on April 14, 2021.

    In mid-October, President Biden announced that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, joining the nearby Port of Long Beach, which had been doing so since September. The move followed weeks of White House negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as well as shippers like UPS and FedEx, and major retailers like Walmart and Target.

    The purpose of expanding port hours, according to the New York Times, was “to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.” Reading this, you might be forgiven for imagining that an array of crucial items like medicines or their ingredients or face masks and other personal protective equipment had been languishing in shipping containers anchored off the West Coast. You might also be forgiven for imagining that workers, too lazy for the moment at hand, had chosen a good night’s sleep over the vital business of unloading such goods from boats lined up in their dozens offshore onto trucks, and getting them into the hands of the Americans desperately in need of them. Reading further, however, you’d learn that those “critical goods” are actually things like “exercise bikes, laptops, toys, [and] patio furniture.”

    Fair enough. After all, as my city, San Francisco, enters what’s likely to be yet another almost rainless winter on a planet in ever more trouble, I can imagine my desire for patio furniture rising to a critical level. So, I’m relieved to know that dock workers will now be laboring through the night at the command of the president of the United States to guarantee that my needs are met. To be sure, shortages of at least somewhat more important items are indeed rising, including disposable diapers and the aluminum necessary for packaging some pharmaceuticals. Still, a major focus in the media has been on the specter of “slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.”

    Providing “critical” yard furnishings is not the only reason the administration needs to unkink the supply chain. It’s also considered an anti-inflation measure (if an ineffective one). At the end of October, the Consumer Price Index had jumped 6.2% over the same period in 2020, the highest inflation rate in three decades. Such a rise is often described as the result of too much money chasing too few goods. One explanation for the current rise in prices is that, during the worst months of the pandemic, many Americans actually saved money, which they’re now eager to spend. When the things people want to buy are in short supply — perhaps even stuck on container ships off Long Beach and Los Angeles — the price of those that are available naturally rises.

    Republicans have christened the current jump in the consumer price index as “Bidenflation,” although the administration actually bears little responsibility for the situation. But Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats know one thing: if it looks like they’re doing nothing to bring prices down, there will be hell to pay at the polls in 2022 and so it’s the night shift for dock workers and others in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and possibly other American ports.

    However, running West Coast ports 24/7 won’t solve the supply-chain problem, not when there aren’t enough truckers to carry that critical patio furniture to Home Depot. The shortage of such drivers arises because there’s more demand than ever before, and because many truckers have simply quit the industry. As the New York Times reports, “Long hours and uncomfortable working conditions are leading to a shortage of truck drivers, which has compounded shipping delays in the United States.”

    Rethinking (Shift) Work

    Truckers aren’t the only workers who have been rethinking their occupations since the coronavirus pandemic pressed the global pause button. The number of employees quitting their jobs hit 4.4 million this September, about 3% of the U.S. workforce. Resignations were highest in industries like hospitality and medicine, where employees are most at risk of Covid-19 exposure.

    For the first time in many decades, workers are in the driver’s seat. They can command higher wages and demand better working conditions. And that’s exactly what they’re doing at workplaces ranging from agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere to breakfast-cereal makers Kellogg and Nabisco. I’ve even been witnessing it in my personal labor niche, part-time university faculty members (of which I’m one). So allow me to pause here for a shout-out to the 6,500 part-time professors in the University of California system: Thank you! Your threat of a two-day strike won a new contract with a 30% pay raise over the next five years!

    This brings me to Biden’s October announcement about those ports going 24/7. In addition to demanding higher pay, better conditions, and an end to two-tier compensation systems (in which laborers hired later don’t get the pay and benefits available to those already on the job), workers are now in a position to reexamine and, in many cases, reject the shift-work system itself. And they have good reason to do so.

    So, what is shift work? It’s a system that allows a business to run continuously, ceaselessly turning out and/or transporting widgets year after year. Workers typically labor in eight-hour shifts: 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 a.m., or the like. In times of labor shortages, they can even be forced to work double shifts, 16 hours in total. Businesses love shift work because it reduces time (and money) lost to powering machinery up and down. And if time is money, then more time worked means more profit for corporations. In many industries, shift work is good for business. But for workers, it’s often another story.

    The Graveyard Shift

    Each shift in a 24-hour schedule has its own name. The day shift is the obvious one. The swing shift takes you from the day shift to the all-night, or graveyard, shift. According to folk etymology, that shift got its name because, once upon a time, cemetery workers were supposed to stay up all night listening for bells rung by unfortunates who awakened to discover they’d been buried alive. While it’s true that some coffins in England were once fitted with such bells, the term was more likely a reference to the eerie quiet of the world outside the workplace during the hours when most people are asleep.

    I can personally attest to the strangeness of life on the graveyard shift. I once worked in an ice cream cone factory. Day and night, noisy, smoky machines resembling small Ferris wheels carried metal molds around and around, while jets of flame cooked the cones inside them. After a rotation, each mold would tip, releasing four cones onto a conveyor belt, rows of which would then approach my station relentlessly. I’d scoop up a stack of 25, twirl them around in a quick check for holes, and place them in a tall box.

    Almost simultaneously, I’d make cardboard dividers, scoop up three more of those stacks and seal them, well-divided, in that box, which I then inserted in an even larger cardboard carton and rushed to a giant mechanical stapler. There, I pressed it against a switch, and — boom-ba-da-boom — six large staples would seal it shut, leaving me just enough time to put that carton atop a pallet of them before racing back to my machine, as new columns of just-baked cones piled up, threatening to overwhelm my worktable.

    The only time you stopped scooping and boxing was when a relief worker arrived, so you could have a brief break or gobble down your lunch. You rarely talked to your fellow-workers, because there was only one “relief” packer, so only one person at a time could be on break. Health regulations made it illegal to drink water on the line and management was too cheap to buy screens for the windows, which remained shut, even when it was more than 100 degrees outside.

    They didn’t like me very much at the Maryland Pacific Cone Company, maybe because I wanted to know why the high school boys who swept the floors made more than the women who, since the end of World War II, had been climbing three rickety flights of stairs to stand by those machines. In any case, management there started messing with my shifts, assigning me to all three in the same week. As you might imagine, I wasn’t sleeping a whole lot and would occasionally resort to those “little white pills” immortalized in the truckers’ song “Six Days on the Road.”

    But I’ll never forget one graveyard shift when an angel named Rosie saved my job and my sanity. It was probably three in the morning. I’d been standing under fluorescent lights, scooping, twirling, and boxing for hours when the universe suddenly stood still. I realized at that moment that I’d never done anything else since the beginning of time but put ice cream cones in boxes and would never stop doing so until the end of time.

    If time lost its meaning then, dimensions still turned out to matter a lot, because the cones I was working on that night were bigger than I was used to. Soon I was falling behind, while a huge mound of 40-ounce Eat-It-Alls covered my table and began to spill onto the floor. I stared at them, frozen, until I suddenly became aware that someone was standing at my elbow, gently pushing me out of the way.

    Rosie, who had been in that plant since the end of World War II, said quietly, “Let me do this. You take my line.” In less than a minute, she had it all under control, while I spent the rest of the night at her machine, with cones of a size I could handle.

    I have never been so glad to see the dawn.

    The Deadly Reality of the Graveyard Shift

    So, when the president of the United States negotiated to get dock workers in Los Angeles to work all night, I felt a twinge of horror. There’s another all-too-literal reason to call it the “graveyard” shift. It turns out that working when you should be in bed is dangerous. Not only do more accidents occur when the human body expects to be asleep, but the long-term effects of night work can be devastating. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports, the many adverse effects of night work include:

    “type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, metabolic disorders, and sleep disorders. Night shift workers might also have an increased risk for reproductive issues, such as irregular menstrual cycles, miscarriage, and preterm birth. Digestive problems and some psychological issues, such as stress and depression, are more common among night shift workers. The fatigue associated with nightshift can lead to injuries, vehicle crashes, and industrial disasters.”

    Some studies have shown that such shift work can also lead to decreased bone-mineral density and so to osteoporosis. There is, in fact, a catchall term for all these problems: shift-work disorder.

    In addition, studies directly link the graveyard shift to an increased incidence of several kinds of cancer, including breast and prostate cancer. Why would disrupted sleep rhythms cause cancer? Because such disruptions affect the release of the hormone melatonin. Most of the body’s cells contain little “molecular clocks” that respond to daily alternations of light and darkness. When the light dims at night, the pineal gland releases melatonin, which promotes sleep. In fact, many people take it in pill form as a “natural” sleep aid. Under normal circumstances, such a melatonin release continues until the body encounters light again in the morning.

    When this daily (circadian) rhythm is disrupted, however, so is the regular production of melatonin, which turns out to have another important biological function. According to NIOSH, it “can also stop tumor growth and protect against the spread of cancer cells.” Unfortunately, if your job requires you to stay up all night, it won’t do this as effectively.

    There’s a section on the NIOSH website that asks, “What can night shift workers do to stay healthy?” The answers are not particularly satisfying. They include regular checkups and seeing your doctor if you have any of a variety of symptoms, including “severe fatigue or sleepiness when you need to be awake, trouble with sleep, stomach or intestinal disturbances, irritability or bad mood, poor performance (frequent mistakes, injuries, vehicle crashes, near misses, etc.), unexplained weight gain or loss.”

    Unfortunately, even if you have access to healthcare, your doctor can’t write you a prescription to cure shift-work disorder. The cure is to stop working when your body should be asleep.

    An End to Shift Work?

    Your doctor can’t solve your shift work issue because, ultimately, it’s not an individual problem. It’s an economic and an ethical one.

    There will always be some work that must be performed while most people are sleeping, including healthcare, security, and emergency services, among others. But most shift work gets done not because life depends upon it, but because we’ve been taught to expect our patio furniture on demand. As long as advertising and the grow-or-die logic of capitalism keep stoking the desire for objects we don’t really need, may not even really want, and will sooner or later toss on a garbage pile in this or some other country, truckers and warehouse workers will keep damaging their health.

    Perhaps the pandemic, with its kinky supply chain, has given us an opportunity to rethink which goods are so “critical” that we’re willing to let other people risk their lives to provide them for us. Unfortunately, such a global rethink hasn’t yet touched Joe Biden and his administration as they confront an ongoing pandemic, supply-chain problems, a rise in inflation, and — oh yes! — an existential climate crisis that gets worse with every plastic widget produced, packed, and shipped.

    It’s time for Biden — and the rest of us — to take a breath and think this through. There are good reasons that so many people are walking away from underpaid, life-threatening work. Many of them are reconsidering the nature of work itself and its place in their lives, no matter what the president or anyone else might wish.

    And that’s a paradigm shift we all could learn to live with.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Capitalism Must Not Dictate Our Response to Omicron Variant

    A woman in a mask and cold weather clothes walks past mall sineage

    If you did yourself a weary solid and set the news aside for the long holiday weekend, like as not you’ve spent a portion of today doomscrolling through reports on the newest COVID-19 variant to rear its ugly head.

    Omicron. The World Health Organization (WHO) just had to pick the scariest sounding name, didn’t they. It seems like they tried to name this thing after one of the Decepticons. It is also the name of the planet where Dr. Noonian Soong created the androids Data and Lore, in case any of you Star Trek TNG fans were wondering where you’d heard it before.

    But enough frivolity. This is deadly serious: Top COVID expert Anthony Fauci warns that the Omicron variant could fuel an impending fifth wave of the virus. We’re all veterans of this virus now, and we’re all exhausted, but unless our luck and our policies change, we are potentially facing an even gloomier winter than some of us predicted before Omicron reared its head.

    What we know, which isn’t much at this point: Omicron, first discovered by South African scientists, carries what some researchers called a “horrific” number of variations from the original COVID, was labeled a “variant of concern” by the WHO on Friday. It has been found in South Africa, Botswana, Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Britain, Scotland and Canada.

    What we don’t know: The large number of mutations in Omicron could make it more easily transmissible than previous iterations, and because of those mutations, “there could be future surges of Covid-19, which could have severe consequences,” according to a Friday WHO report. Some reports suggest the symptoms of Omicron are milder than some other variants’ symptoms, but the sample data for this hypothesis came from a younger-than-usual group of infected people and could be skewed.

    Scientists are racing to determine if Omicron’s mutations can enable it to evade immunity protections present in those who have previously been infected. They are also laboring to determine if the current slate of vaccines and boosters will still be effective against the new variant. These answers should be coming in the next week or two, but Pfizer and Moderna have undertaken a crash program to reformulate their vaccines in order to specifically target Omicron just in case.

    Is Omicron already present in the U.S.? No cases have been detected yet, but the fact that it has appeared in Canada strongly suggests the variant is already among us. “We have not detected it yet,” Fauci told Weekend TODAY, “but when you have a virus that is showing this degree of transmissibility and you’re already having travel-related cases that they’ve noted in Israel and Belgium and other places, when you have a virus like this, it almost invariably is ultimately going to go essentially all over.”

    The speed with which governments have reacted to the appearance of Omicron speaks to the potential peril of this variant, and to the degree to which the world is weary of getting outmaneuvered by the virus. Much of this immediacy is spurred by the fact that many places around the world, including the U.S., are already dealing with a new surge in COVID cases. A sudden onslaught of Omicron infections would be immediately devastating.

    Travel restrictions have been hastily put in place for whatever good they will do — “By the time we have enough information to institute a travel ban, the cat’s already out of the bag, so to speak,” warns University of Washington professor and researcher Nicole A. Errett — and the Biden administration has been at top voice saying now is an excellent time to get the shots if you haven’t already.

    However, not everyone is on board with the idea that unity and haste must be the watchwords of the moment. Republicans in several states are seeking to financially reward people who quit or lose their jobs because they refuse to get vaccinated, and they wouldn’t be Republicans without yet another preposterous conspiracy theory: Ronny Jackson, current Texas GOP Representative and former Trump White House physician, is calling Omicron the “Midterm Election variant,” alleging the mutation is actually a Democratic plot to upend the 2022 elections, “but we’re not going to let them!” They are nothing if not consistent, and are persistent to a double fault.

    As we gaze once again into a maw of fear and uncertainty, I have one humble request for the powers-that-be: Let’s not listen to capitalism so much this time, yeah?

    We’ve tried it their way for going on two years now, and all we have is close to a million people dead to show for it. The very corporations clamoring to rush people back into infected work spaces are the ones funding Republicans who rally their people to resist the vaccines. They have no interest in public health. Their goal is private wealth, and as far as they are concerned, wealth must be extracted at all costs.

    From the beginning, there have been a number of scientifically sound tactics to thwart this damnable thing. They were ignored during the last year of Trump’s tenure, and remain well behind where they should be under Biden.

    Those tactics are right in front of us, here and now: testing regimens involving several tests over time, more intensive and widespread testing and tracing, and a re-re-emphasis on masking and vaccinations. These measures must be accompanied by restrictions and/or lockdowns when they are needed, not when they are financially convenient for the powerful.

    Science needs to drive the bus this time — science, and a genuinely effective push to vaccinate the entire world, cost be damned — and let the engine of greed idle for a while. There will still be billionaires once we get past Omicron. The question before us is whether we care enough about everyone else. We should know better by now. Let’s find out if we do.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.