Last week, Politico reported on a Trump-commissioned poll that shows Trump out-polling Biden in the five key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. At the same time, a national Rasmussen poll showed Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical rematch by a stomach-churning 13 percent.
If these polls are anywhere near accurate, the country — and the world — faces the all-too-real possibility that, in November 2024, the twice-impeached, coup-plotting, fascist-flirting Donald Trump could be elected as the 47th president of the U.S.
There are many reasons to be suspicious of polls three years out from a presidential election and there are, of course, myriad things that could derail a potential Trump comeback. Trump is currently under investigation in New York and in Georgia, and could, quite plausibly, be indicted or convicted for tax fraud or intimidation of election officials by the time the 2024 primary season rolls around. Public opinion has soured on Biden, but that could potentially be reversed if inflation is brought under control, if the Build Back Better Act passes, and if large numbers of people see significant benefits in their daily lives as a result of its passage. And, perhaps the greatest unknown is whether the pandemic will continue to wreak havoc on the world — in which case incumbents of all political persuasions the world over may well suffer at the hands of ever-more-frustrated electorates — or will, by 2024, be a thing of the past.
It’s also possible that Biden, who will be well into his 80s by the next election, will, despite current plans to run again, announce that he is not seeking reelection, and will step aside to allow for a younger candidate, with less political baggage from a COVID-era presidency, to step up to the plate. And it’s also possible that, if the GOP gains control of Congress next November, they will push policies that are so extreme and so unpopular that national support for the party and its presidential nominee will evaporate.
For all of these reasons and more, head-to-head polling in 2021 about an election not taking place until 2024 is an imprecise science at best. Yet, without stampeding into a panic, we would be foolish to entirely dismiss these polls, and the broader trends they suggest.
In 32 states, including all 11 of the states that are considered to be plausibly swing states, Biden’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since the summer. In a slew of recent polls, Biden’s net disapproval ratings range from a modest 1 percent all the way up to Rasmussen’s 17 percent. That doesn’t mean he can’t win reelection — Bill Clinton’s numbers were similarly dire in 1993, and yet he easily won reelection in 1996, ending his presidency with sky-high approval numbers; and Reagan was also deeply unpopular early in his presidency and won reelection in a landslide — but it does mean that, at the moment, he has a mountain to climb to restore public confidence in his administration.
Having spent the past six months fighting among themselves and failing to pass Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, along with their failure to break the GOP filibuster and pass meaningful federal voting rights protections, the Democrats are intensely vulnerable heading into the 2022 midterms. That danger is compounded by GOP efforts in numerous states to restrict the franchise; by an unprecedented level of gerrymandering in states such as North Carolina, Ohio and Texas that threatens to lock minoritarian GOP rule into place for decades at both the state level and, by gerrymandered congressional districts, increasingly at the federal level; and by the fact that the Republican Party, now entirely committed to Trump’s lies about a stolen election, has dedicated itself to undermining the integrity of the election system in order to secure, no matter the cost to the country’s democratic culture and system of governance, a GOP presidential victory in 2024.
If the GOP, with “Stop the Steal” candidates playing increasingly prominent roles, locks into place their state-level grip on power in 2022 and retakes control of the House of Representatives, the party’s ability to successfully manipulate the 2024 presidential election will have taken a giant leap forward.
Greene’s bill has, of course, a snowball’s chance in hell of passage; but that’s not the point of the stunt. The point is publicity and riling up an already angry, heavily armed base around the wedge issues of race and guns in the U.S. It’s pure Trumpist exhibitionism, and a sign of just how low Trump, his Super PAC and his Congressional allies will be going as the ex-president plots a comeback. Meanwhile, the Democratic base is increasingly unenthused with a presidency seen by many as having not delivered on racial justice and economic promises, on its more ambitious climate change goals, on immigration reform, and, perhaps above all, on protecting the franchise.
The 2024 elections are, of course, still a long way off. But Democrats, already facing powerful headwinds, would do well to get their own house in order, and to prepare as well for the gutter politics, the Trumpian theatrics, quite clearly heading their way in the coming election cycles. We all remember the consequences of the party’s leadership underestimating Trump in 2015 and 2016. It would be an act of supreme political incompetence, and a vast surrender to profoundly anti-democratic forces, were they to make a similar mistake over the coming years.
There is global concern and widespread alarm at the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has called Omicron.
The WHO classified Omicron as a “variant of concern” because it has a wide range of mutations. This suggests vaccines and treatments could be less effective.
Although early days, Omicron appears to be able to reinfect people more easily than other strains.
Australia has followed other countries and regions — including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and the European Union — and banned travellers from nine southern African countries.
Australians seeking to return home from southern Africa will still be able to do so. But they will enter hotel quarantine and be tested. Those who have returned from the nine countries — South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique — in the past 14 days will have to isolate.
But Omicron has already been detected in other regions, including the UK, Germany, Israel, Hong Kong and Belgium. So while a travel ban on southern African countries may slow the spread and buy limited time, it’s unlikely to stop it.
As the Australian government and others act to protect their own citizens, this should be accompanied by additional resources to support countries in southern Africa and elsewhere that take prompt action.
When Was Omicron Detected?
The variant was identified on November 22 in South Africa, from a sample collected from a patient on November 9.
South African virologists took prompt action, conferred with colleagues through the Network of Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, liaised with government, and notified the World Health Organization on November 24.
The behaviour of this new variant is still unclear. Some have claimed the rate of growth of Omicron infections, which reflects its transmissibility, may be even higher than those of the Delta variant. This “growth advantage” is yet to be proven but is concerning.
“Kneejerk” Response vs. WHO Recommendations
African scientists and politicians have been disappointed in what they see as a “kneejerk” response from countries imposing travel bans. They argue the bans will have significant negative effects for the South African economy, which traditionally welcomes global tourists over the summer year-end period.
They note it is still unclear whether the new variant originated in South Africa, even if it was first identified there. As Omicron has already been detected in several other countries, it may already be circulating in regions not included in the travel bans.
Travel bans on countries detecting new variants, and the subsequent economic costs, may also act as a disincentive for countries to reveal variants of concern in future.
The WHO does not generally recommend flight bans or other forms of travel embargoes. Instead, it argues interventions of proven value should be prioritised: vaccination, hand hygiene, physical distancing, well-fitted masks, and good ventilation.
In response to variants of concern, the WHO calls on all countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing, report initial cases or clusters, and undertake investigations to improve understanding of the variant’s behaviour.
Omicron must be taken seriously. Its features are worrying, but there are large gaps in our current knowledge. While further analyses are undertaken, the variant should be controlled with testing, tracing, isolation, applying known public health measures, and ongoing surveillance.
What Can Wealthier Countries Do to Help?
Wealthy countries such as Australia should support African nations and others to share early alerts of potentially serious communicable disease threats, and help mitigate these threats.
[…] public health actors only see downsides from drawing attention to an outbreak that has the potential to spread.
The panel recommended creating incentives to reward early response action. This could include support to:
establish research and educational partnerships
strengthen health systems and communicable disease surveillance
greatly improve vaccine availability, distribution, and equity
consider financial compensation, through some form of solidarity fund against pandemic risk.
Boosting Vaccine Coverage Is Key
Vaccines remain the mainstay of protection against the most severe effects of COVID-19.
It’s unclear how effective vaccines will be against Omicron, but some degree of protection is presumed likely. Pfizer has also indicated it could develop an effective vaccine against a new variant such as Omicron within 100 days or so.
COVID’s persistence is partly attributable to patchy immunisation coverage across many parts of the world, notably those least developed. South Africa itself is better off than most countries on the continent, yet only 24% of the adult population are currently fully vaccinated. For the whole of Africa, this drops to only 7.2%.
Greater global support is urgently needed to boost these vaccination rates.
African institutions and leaders, supported by global health and vaccine experts, have argued for mRNA vaccine manufacturing facilities on the African continent. These would prioritise regional populations, overcome supply-chain problems, and respond in real time to emerging disease threats.
Yet developing nations face significant barriers to obtaining intellectual property around COVID-19 vaccine development and production.
While there is still much to learn about the behaviour and impact of Omicron, the global community must demonstrate and commit real support to countries that do the right thing by promptly and transparently sharing information.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party have laid the groundwork for assuming the U.S. presidency regardless of the result of the 2024 election, and if they choose to pursue this plan, most of the conditions they would need to execute it are already in place.
If this sounds outrageous, please read on, keeping in mind that the presidential election is determined by the slates of electors that states send Congress for certification.
Given this oddity in our electoral process, here are some things that a politician would need in order to have a chance of subverting the U.S. presidential election:
Control over half of state legislatures (something that can be achieved through severely partisan gerrymandering and self-serving redistricting)
At least some swing-state legislatures radical enough to either a.) suppress voters sufficiently to achieve their preferred result; b.) replace the Board of Election if it doesn’t arrange for the preferred candidate to win; or c.) send a non-elected slate of electors for certification regardless of the election’s actual result.
Control of the House of Representatives, and preferably both houses of Congress.
The ability to purge moderates who might not go along with the ending of democracy.
Total loyalty from one’s political party and a cult-like allegiance from voters.
A compliant, complacent or cooperative Supreme Court.
Widespread skepticism among voters about the idea that elections are run fairly (a skepticism that can be fed by the constant challenging of legitimate results by the loser of an election).
And here are some additional factors that could further assist a politician bent on stealing an election in this country:
Sufficient voter suppression to make the above plan unnecessary, or at least enough to make results close enough to sow even more doubt about legitimacy of results.
Cynicism and confusion so deep that huge numbers of people don’t believe in facts of any kind.
Roving white nationalist militias that tout voter suppression and spread skepticism about the legitimacy of elections.
A sizable minority of the population that believes deep down that Black people and immigrants are not “real” Americans, and that their votes should not determine the results of elections.
Now, let’s look back at these conditions for how a politician might subvert an election. For Trump and the GOP, most of these boxes are already checked, and most of the others are well underway.
The endless repetition of the Big Lie, the sham audit in Arizona, the new voter suppression laws in 19 states, the demonization of mass media through the “fake news” mantra, the packing of the Supreme Court with Federalist Society-approved right-wing justices, the purging of Rep. Liz Cheney, the encouragement of the Proud Boys… these are sometimes covered as random and disparate strands, rather than part of a plan that makes total sense once you know what the goal is.
Assuming Trump runs for president, he will likely make countless accusations of fraud — echoed by his supporters — between Election Day and December 16, 2024, the date electors in each state meet to formally vote for president and vice president.
On that day legislatures in at least some swing states that Democrats have won could use laws passed in the wake of the 2020 elections to invalidate the results and select a slate of electors for Trump. For example, Senate Bill 202 (the Georgia law famous for prohibiting distribution of water to voters waiting in lines) less famously but more insidiously allows state officials to take over local election boards. In other words, the radical right legislature that passed the law in the first place can easily and legally manipulate the result.
On January 6, 2025, when Congress opens the envelopes, there would either be enough electoral votes for Trump, or enough states with competing slates of electors or other forms of chaos to declare that neither candidate has reached the requisite 270 electoral votes. At that point, the election would be determined by one vote per state. With Republicans having a majority of congressional representatives in a majority of states, and with moderates purged from the party, it’s hard to imagine the states doing anything but selecting Trump. This scenario is plausible even if voter suppression is insufficient to award the popular vote in swing states to Trump. It doesn’t matter how much he loses by if the state legislatures have the power to determine the electoral slate sent to Congress.
What can be done to guard against the possibility that the 2024 election could unfold in this way?
Electoral resistance: The Democrats could mobilize to hold on to a majority of the House of Representatives.
Legislative resistance: The Senate could pass federal voting legislation that would override the worst provisions in the wave of state laws recently passed. In particular, the federal law would have to reverse the takeover provisions that allow the state legislatures to replace or overrule local election boards. This could happen either by suspending the filibuster rule and getting all 50 Democratic Senate votes, or by getting 10 or more Republican senators to support it.
Judicial resistance: President Joe Biden could appoint four or more new Supreme Court justices to block this from happening during the inevitable litigation, and the Senate could confirm them.
State-level resistance: Courageous secretaries of state in swing states could invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution from holding elected office if they have participated in insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. These election officials could — and arguably would be obliged to — refuse to place Trump on the ballot.
These steps might seem extreme and even provocative, but without at least one of them, the U.S. is at serious risk of a democracy-shaking attack on its free and fair elections. And at the moment, all of them seem distant and unlikely.
This is a five-alarm fire, yet right now no elected Democrat is consistently sounding the alarm — not Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not Sen. Bernie Sanders, not Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and definitely not Sen. Joe Manchin. This is DEFCON for democracy, yet the president barely mentions it.
To be sure that democracy will survive in the United States, Democrats must take seriously the possibility of this nightmare scenario and take bold action to prevent it from happening.
Growing up in North Texas, farming to me meant fields of single crops stretching as far as the eye could see. Like many Americans, I’d come to assume that trees had no place in that vista. In fact, most of us probably assume a trade-off between forests and food.
Now that the climate crisis calls for vastly more trees, it’s time to take in the good news that trees and crops can do well together.
In fact, from Burma, to India, to the Philippines and countless other places, this is not news at all. Farmers have long known that crops and trees don’t compete — they complement each other. South and Southeast Asia have been credited as the “cradle” of agroforestry.
In this practice, Africa offers inspiring lessons today.
The African Sahel, a strip of 10 countries south of the Sahara, was for decades linked in my heart to great suffering due to its recurring famine. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, drought combined with the legacy of colonialism caused many to die of starvation. Niger — one of the world’s poorest countries — was hit particularly hard.
However, once crops were able to grow again in the mid-1990s due to improved rainfall, farmers began reviving their traditional, pre-colonial practice of growing trees and crops in the same fields, also called agroforestry.
You see, with the right mix, trees and crops help each other thrive.
In Niger, through farmer-to-farmer learning, more and more families came to see that tree stumps — along with tree roots and seeds in the soil — could all be nurtured, sprout and become trees. Farmers also embraced the traditional practice of growing legumes like cowpeas and peanuts that fix nitrogen — so they need not turn to chemical fertilizer, which can be costly and environmentally damaging.
Ultimately, their work protected and regenerated perhaps as many as 200 million trees, all of which sequester carbon, improve soil fertility and significantly increase crop yields, experts on the ground have explained to me. They also offer fruit, fodder and firewood, and their foliage reduces soil temperature, helping retain soil moisture.
To underscore farmers’ role as the leaders in this process, these practices are called “farmer-managed natural regeneration.”
So effective were these practices that by 2009, Niger generated food security for 2.5 million people — then about 17 percent of the population. No one knows for sure how widespread these practices are in sub-Saharan Africa today, but Gray Tappan of the U.S. Geological Survey offered me an extrapolation from what is known: On-farm trees may have spread to more than half-a-million square miles in the region.
That’s more twice the size of Texas! Amazing.
And what does this big shift to agroforestry feel like? To help me understand, agronomist Tony Rinaudo shared a comment from a child in Ghana: “We eat fruits any time we want to, and if our parents have not prepared food, we can just go to the bush.”
West Africa’s revitalization of integrating crops and trees has echoes here in the U.S.
One is in the spread of alley cropping — a twist on agroforestry. Since 2013, the Savanna Institute in Wisconsin — inspired by native ecosystems — has been working with farmers to spread this practice to Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In alley cropping, widely spaced “alleys” of trees thrive among companion crops that also help store carbon. The practice increases each acre’s total yield by at least 40 percent.
Plus, alley cropping helps farmers by sequestering carbon, diversifying their income sources, preventing soil erosion and providing wildlife habitat, Jacob Grace of the Savanna Institute explains.
Almost a quarter of “all Midwestern farmland would be more profitable with rows of trees in it, compared to corn and soybean monocultures,” Grace writes.
Beyond the Midwest, another contributor to agroforestry’s reach is Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. It offers immersion learning for those of Black, Indigenous and Latinx heritage in regenerative farming — including Afro-Indigenous agroforestry.
Agroforestry — from Africa to our Midwest and beyond — holds the technical potential to sequester a significant percentage of total global emissions.
These leaders, and so many more, build on millennia of experience integrating trees and crops. So, let’s spread the word that trees and crops are natural allies whose relationship we can nurture for the benefit of all.
Note: This article features topics discussed in the 50th anniversary edition of the author’s book, Diet for a Small Planet, released September 2021. This version features a brand-new opening chapter, simple rules for a healthy diet, and updated recipes by some of the country’s leading plant- and planet-centered chefs. You can join in the Democracy Movement at www.democracymovement.us.
Many Americans are noticing the rising price of goods from sour cream to carburetors as politicians sound the alarm on an inflation crisis.
You may be wondering what single force would cause the cost of a dairy product to go up at the same time as the cost of a car part. The truth is that not all inflation is the same. Each sector has its own issues.
And none of it is solved by less government funding for our safety net, as some politicians have proposed.
Some of it is what we can call pandemic inflation. Because our economy bounced back quicker after the COVID-19 shutdowns than anyone predicted — thanks largely to investments from the American Rescue Plan — people have more spending money and demand has risen faster than our underinvested supply chain could handle.
This rising demand accounts for price flares in auto manufacturing and lumber, for example. At the same time, you’ll notice prices that had plummeted during the shutdowns returning to pre-pandemic levels. Think: plane tickets.
Meanwhile, recent price spikes on other goods that families depend on — like diapers, meat, and dairy — can be linked to corporate greed. Decades of corporations monopolizing industries and cutting out competition has given them the power to artificially inflate the prices of these necessitiesunder the guise of “inflation.”
Big business is simply milking this opportunity to claim that they need to raise their prices while theyuse those profitsto engage in stock buybacks — which benefit shareholders and CEOs, not small farmers or the grocers who stock the shelves.
This is hard on consumers as well as small and family-owned businesses who depend onbigger conglomerateslikeAmazonfor supplies and market access. With bigger chains hiking up prices, many smaller businesses are going under.
But the price pressures that hurt families the most are not caused by the pandemic — and in fact have been rising for decades.
By far the biggest ticket items on struggling families’ budgets arerent and child care. The housing crisis is so bad that no person earning minimum wage full-time can afford rentin any U.S. state. And the cost of child care costs more than college tuitionin 30 states.
The Build Back Better Act being debated in Congress right now would help address our housing supply crisis by building new affordable units with a $150 billion investment. The law would also reduce out of pocket child care costs for families, increase labor participation, and raise the wages of care workers.
More local policies like rent control, which advocates won recently inSt. Paul, Minnesota, could also help regulate prices.
A few conservative lawmakers have used inflation as an excuse not to pass these programs. But they have it exactly backwards.
The best thing we can do to offset the pain of inflation — whatever its cause — and for the overall health of our economy, is to raise the standard of living for all of us. That means lowering the poverty rate, raising wages, and reaching full employment.
For too long we’ve supported an economy that depends on low-paid jobs, dangerous work, and big businesses monopolizing power. That makes all of us suffer. Slowing down our economy to boost profits for corporations won’t eliminate the need for families to purchase the products they depend on or fix our supply chain issues.
We need to build a system that supports a healthy economy for everyone, and the Build Back Better Act would be a down payment on a future clean bill of health.
It’s inspiring to see members in revolt against two-tier at the farm equipment makerJohn Deere, the hospital chainKaiser Permanente, the cereal makerKellogg’s, and the parcel giantUPS.
Two-tier isn’t just an unfair idea — it’s also a union-killer.
In case your employer hasn’t acquainted you with this repugnant policy, a two-tier system means that everyone hired after today has it worse than everyone hired before today — whether it’s lower pay, weaker benefits, no pension, or unlimited forced overtime.
Typically it’s sold as an alternative to taking concessions for yourself; you agree to pass them on to the “unborn.”
Unborn Nonplussed
For the bottom tier, it’s obvious why this arrangement sucks. We all talk aboutencouraging the next generation of union activists, but an effective way to alienate younger workers is to sell them out before they’re even hired.
UPS delivery drivers hired since 2018 are “furious,” said Eugene Braswell, a longtime UPS driver from New York City who has talked with many whilecampaigning for the Teamsters United slate.
“They all came in with the understanding they were going to be driving at UPS, not a second-class citizen,” he said. “When you’re talking to the young ones, they say, ‘I don’t have any of these rights, so why do I pay union dues? It seems the union only takes care of the 300s [the regular package car drivers]. They don’t care about us.’
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow when you’re telling them, ‘We voted against the contract.’ We did our part — we voted it down, we didn’t want it. It was the ultimate betrayal from Hoffa.”
Two-tier isn’t such a great deal for those in the top tier either. You’re inviting in a cheaper replacement to do your same job, alongside you, for less. Hmm, where could this lead? You might as well paint a target on your own back.
No Time Like the Present
Two-tier (or three-tier, or more) is already entrenched at many major union employers, like the Postal Service, Big 3 automakers, and higher education faculties everywhere (hello, adjuncts!).
It’s the fallout of a concessionary era — employers squeezing every ounce of leveragefrom recessions and threats to fly off to greener pastures. Unions largely failed to mount solid resistance.
But with organizing, it’s possible to overturn two-tier even once it has a foothold.
We reported in 2016 how workers at a truck factory in Kendallville, Indiana,got two-tier deleted from their contract. They didn’t even have to go on strike to do it — but they did have to show they werereadyto strike, going so far as to haul burn barrels to work, just in case.
Thecurrent labor shortagemakes now an auspicious moment to launch or ratchet up campaigns against these divisions. Employers are struggling with hiring and retention. Even they may be noticing the downsides of treating new hires like dirt.
The Kids Are OK
If allowing two-tier is a surefire way to sour younger workers on the union, fighting to abolish the tiers is a great way to engage them, as Braswell discovered.
“I thought it would be hard to get them involved [in the Teamsters United campaign],” he said. “But I found when we were talking about the contract and trying to vote these people out, a lot of them said, ‘My ballot is already in.’
“This is step one of the plan. Step two is to have them at the negotiating table and make sure they do it.”
Jonah Furman contributed reporting to this article.
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As COVID-19 has ravaged the U.S., many progressive health care activists and organizations such as National Nurses United have illustrated how the pandemic has only made worse what was already intolerable about our for-profit medical system, and continued to demand universal, publicly financed, single-payer health care. Some on the anti-vax right have instead used the “preexisting conditions” of our health care system to discredit the people and measures which are trying to stop the pandemic, often disingenuously coopting progressive arguments in the process.
The profit-driven nature of our health care system and the pain that it causes the U.S. people have not just galvanized some in support of single-payer, but unfortunately have also helped to seed the ground for the mistrust that cynical political actors have cultivated to make people hostile to public health measures. The following are examples of said cynical political actors doing just that:
Former President Donald Trump has claimed on more than one occasion that doctors and hospitals are part of a conspiracy to enrich themselves by saying patients died of COVID when they actually didn’t.
Conservative activist Candace Owens tweeted: “‘The Covid vaccine saves lives, which is why the government is making it free!’ K. So explain to me why insulin and asthma inhalers cost so much money. If the vaccines are really about the government trying to save your life — why do life-saving medicines cost so much?”
One of the central talking points of the anti-vax movement has been that Big Pharma was involved in inventing or manipulating the pandemic in order to push vaccines to enrich itself.
All of these claims are false, but they appear to some to have validity because they rest at least tangentially on facts: Hospitals and health insurance are too expensive. We are constantly bombarded with horror stories about the ridiculous expenses of medical care: $54,000 for a COVID test, $16,000 for having a baby, $1,000 for an ambulance, and those examples are all just from insured people. Tens of millions have no insurance, and GoFundMe has become the indispensable website for the insured and uninsured alike. Then there is the genre of allegedly heartwarming news stories of people overcoming dystopian reality, like the girl selling lemonade to pay for brain surgery or the high school robotics team constructing a special wheelchair for a little boy when insurance wouldn’t pay for it. As if to put a fine point on the absurdity, just recently a story made the rounds of someone who sat in a local emergency room for hours and left without any treatment, then received a bill for $700.
Adding to this ongoing scam, pharmaceutical companies do their share to bilk patients for their medications. From pharma bros and Sen. Joe Manchin’s daughter jacking up prices on their company’s respective drugs, to something as common as insulin being much more costly in the U.S. than elsewhere, Big Pharma plays a significant role in why our health care system is as expensive and dysfunctional as it is. Its attempts to reap as much profit as possible from the COVID vaccine program, even at the expense of leaving much of the world unvaccinated, do not recommend it, either.
In the face of all this, the government has hung the sick, and ultimately all of us, out to dry. Consider the absurdity of Trump and President Joe Biden, both opponents of single-payer health care, in last year’s campaign endorsing free treatment and vaccines for COVID, while ignoring the financial plight of people suffering from every other disease, ailment and injury, and denouncing efforts to guarantee those people coverage as unworkable and socialistic. As the rest of the developed world has figured out how to provide health care to all their citizens, we still maintain a system in which an estimated 45,000 people die every year from lack of health care, and in which, one study found, 500,000 people cite medical bills as either a primary or contributing cause of bankruptcy annually.
Why? Because hospital, health insurance and pharma corporations each have corrupt, symbiotic relationships with our legislators and regulators which run counter to the general welfare. This has become especially clear as the reconciliation “Build Back Better” bill has been sliced and diced by Senators Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and a select number of House Democrats, all of whom think it’s a bridge too far to make sure seniors can afford their prescriptions, eyeglasses and the teeth in their heads. Follow the money and one finds that this is not primarily an issue of dearly held ideological differences but rather rank corruption and influence-peddling. Sinema has received oodles of cash from the health care and pharma industries, Manchin was a beneficiary of his daughter’s company’s largesse, and Democratic representatives who voted against drug pricing reform have been funded by Big Pharma.
All of this is true, and it’s a sad, infuriating mess, but it does not mean doctors and hospitals are inventing COVID cases. It doesn’t mean vaccines are a scam, and it doesn’t mean the pandemic is either fake or engineered.
The bad faith arguments which the right concocts on these subjects have no need of being coherent. When Trump accuses the doctors and hospitals of inventing COVID cases for money, he doesn’t suggest nationalizing health care like Britain’s National Health Service. When Owens asks why medications are so expensive, she doesn’t endorse Medicare for All. When the anti-vaxxers complain about Big Pharma’s ill-gotten gains, they aren’t out there supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders’s plan to let Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices for seniors. Each of these three potential policy solutions is instead met by these factions with the same standard chorus of “Socialism! Tyranny!”
However false the claims are, however fake the concern, the right has no doubt been effective in how they use the faults of the health care system to attack doctors and civil servants who are charged with protecting the health of the public.
Right-wing ideologues and politicos, though they are some of the main defenders of for-profit health care and beneficiaries of its lucre, are still astute enough to recognize that the system they hail is highly dysfunctional and hurts a lot of people — physically, emotionally and financially. They recognize that the profit motive of the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries creates perverse incentives to maximize private gain at the expense of the public good. They recognize that this situation persists precisely because these industries have incredible control over government health care policy.
They recognize all these problems, but they won’t identify any of them as such to the public, nor do anything to solve them. They merely expose edges of this reality to their followers as it suits their purposes — in this case, to make political hay out of saying the government and Big Pharma are trying to oppress and/or kill you. In so doing, they encourage selfish and self-destructive behavior during a pandemic and let loose a deluge of anger and violence against local, state and federal health officials, doctors, teachers, school boards, store clerks, food service workers and flight attendants.
There are many factors involved in creating this dynamic, but one is no doubt the rapacious nature of our economy as a whole, and of the health care system in particular, which brutalizes the public. This status quo of societal and political indifference to sickness and bankruptcy reinforces the kind of Thomas Hobbesian mentality that the right is trying to instill — “the war of all against all” — as they seek to shred not only the patchwork social safety net, but also just basic norms of civil society, such as taking minimal precautions to protect others. As long as we make health care a commodity rather than a right, the cynical, dishonest arguments that are currently trying to discredit public health officials and measures will only endure: “They didn’t care about you then, what makes you think they care about you now?”
Whereas the right is attempting to scapegoat public health officials for the problems caused by a for-profit system, they are not the ones with the power to make insulin or chemo free at the point of service, like vaccines. It is the politicians who are the ones who need to either be convinced, replaced or circumvented. How do we do this? In some respects, it seems like this issue, as with so many others, is perpetually in the doldrums. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is frozen by legalized bribery and prevented from addressing actual problems in a substantive way. Therefore, the fact that polling shows a majority favor a single-payer system is inconsequential to most of our representatives in an allegedly representative democracy.
Moreover, simply the structure of government in the United States is a unique impediment. Because a party has to control both houses of Congress as well as the presidency at the same time in order to get most things done, most things don’t get done. Even when Democrats do hold this trifecta, there seems to always be a catch. This time it’s Manchin and Sinema, last time it was then-Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.
To demonstrate the degree to which our system bogs down progress, whereas President Harry Truman started pushing for single-payer at roughly the same time as the United Kingdom, they have had the National Health Service since the late 1940s, but here we are. President Lyndon Johnson was only able to get Medicare and Medicaid through because an inordinate number of liberals were elected to Congress in his 1964 landslide.
Since the advent of Reaganism and the capitulation of the Democratic Party to neoliberalism and privatization, some strides have been made, although they have tended to be more market-based. To wit, both President Barack Obama and Biden ran on the public option, and neither produced it.
This invariably gets into the status of the Democratic Party: Is it the only way to get to the goal, or is it hopelessly compromised by vested interests? That discussion is at least as old as former Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and there are valid points all around, but one thing that is certainly necessary is a greater focus on primaries and removing the Democrats who are the most captured by corporate power. If enough who oppose single-payer are removed, others will begin to accept it.
The numbers are there. A significant majority of Democrats favor a Medicare for All system, the exit polling from the 2020 Democratic primaries demonstrates this. But because Biden beat Sanders, the corporate media and establishment party functionaries spun that as the voters agreeing more with Biden’s policy views rather than their impression of his “electability.”
Often it seems that the party is more intent on strangling any social democratic policies than it is on opposing the rise of fascism, but in carrying out the former, they lay the groundwork for the latter. The dynamic described in this article is only one example of such: The precarity to which we expose so many people and the suffering they endure is hastening the rise of authoritarianism. Time was when Democrats understood this, as with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implementing the New Deal in part as a bulwark against it.
If change at the federal level is a remote possibility, a state-by-state approach is another route. Canada did not adopt universal health care all at once, it started in Saskatchewan after decades of activism on the part of agrarian and labor groups. Creating local and state organizations around single-payer and associated issues is a critical piece of building power and momentum. Doing so around preexisting union, faith and other networks could be especially impactful. As much as voting in the right people is necessary, ultimately there also need to be groups and spaces outside the partisan framework which are issue-oriented and not subservient to a party’s immediate electoral fortunes.
Ballot measures are an especially potent example of this. On issues from raising the minimum wage, to legalizing marijuana, to expanding Medicaid, voters in a wide range of states, including deep red states, have voted for significant progressive change through ballot measures. Organizers in the states that have yet to expand Medicaid are working on this for the 2022 and 2024 elections. This isn’t single-payer, but defending and extending existing public health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid is critical in and of itself and to realizing that eventual goal. Find out what activism is going on in your neighborhood, state or region, and plug in or create the spark yourself.
Much of the work of convincing people on the policy substance has already been done; it is largely a question of translating belief into action. Let’s use progressive arguments for progressive ends.
As the COVID pandemic upended the economy in the spring and summer of 2020, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and became ever more vulnerable to hunger. In consequence, the country’s network of food banks saw a sudden spike in usage.
Since then, that dizzying increase has leveled off or fallen somewhat in many places, but that doesn’t mean the country’s no longer suffering an epidemic of food insecurity. To the contrary: Large food banks around the country are still reporting far higher levels of need — and of food distribution to attempt to meet that need — than was the case prior to COVID.
In Washington, D.C. for example, the big food banks are reporting an increase in usage of more than 60 percent compared to 2019. Put simply, as Thanksgiving rolls around again, millions of Americans are struggling to feed their families the bare minimum on a daily basis. If they are able to have a big spread, it will likely be only thanks to food charities and their volunteers and donors.
Looked at one way, these numbers, and the resilience of SNAP in the face of long-standing conservative antipathy to the program, are success stories: Tens of millions of Americans do not have enough economic security to easily feed themselves and their families, but thankfully the country does not have an epidemic of starvation. Instead, its charitable networks have gone into overdrive — and a food distribution mechanism has been fine-tuned to keep hunger at bay for the vast majority of recipients. At the same time, SNAP has become the de facto success story of an otherwise withered social safety net.
Looked at another way, however, and these numbers are a devastating indictment of the current U.S. economic model: In the world’s richest country, with more billionaires than anywhere else on Earth, a large percentage of the population lacks the ability to set aside the financial resources to be able to easily feed themselves and their children. Instead, they have to fall back either on charity or on government assistance. Many people who rely on food aid have jobs — just not jobs that pay enough of a living wage to allow them to buy food for their families.
In the South, in particular, where in few places does the local minimum wage exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour (less than half what it is in cities and states that moved toward the $15 per hour “living wage” in recent years), the scandal of food insecurity for the working poor remains omnipresent.
This is a crisis — magnified, though by no means created, by the pandemic — not of food-production failures but of skyrocketing inequality. There is, clearly, no shortage of food in the U.S., but there is a shortage of disposable income among a growing percentage of people at the bottom of the economy. We have, as a society, become inured to the stunning realities of families experiencing shortages of food amid a broader glut of staples.
Given that low-income Americans are also being particularly hard hit by surges in prices for housing, fuel, and a range of consumer goods such as used cars, the inflationary trends within the food industry threaten to render their economic tightrope walk even more dangerous.
The line of cars in the lot behind the hospital last Saturday was as straight as a rank of Marine Corps cadets. After a fashion, the line turned left into a little foursquare tent city bustling with masked nurses packing potent needles. This was very big stuff: I was there for my Pfizer booster, but of far more importance was the 8-year-old girl bouncing around in the passenger seat beside me.
My daughter was there to get her first COVID vaccination, and her elation was tempered only by her atavistic terror of needles proffered by white lab coats. After this, I kept telling her, after this and then a second one, and then two more weeks, she would finally be able to face this monster on some sort of equal footing. Nearly two years of fear, hers and mine for her, was about to meet some active resistance that involved more than masks and staying away from people.
She watched as I took my shot — it really is a nothing needle, especially compared to the annual flu shot, which felt this year like they administered it with a hollowed-out aluminum baseball bat — and then she got hers with barely a wince, and in a back room of my mind I heard old Levon Helm singing Dylan at the top of his nicotine lungs: “Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb…”
“It’s not over,” I told her, after we had a little celebratory dance party during the obligatory 15-minute wait before departing. COVID will probably never be over, not after Trump and his pals messed it all up so badly (How she scowls at the mention of the detested name!), so we still have to be careful… but these shots we’re getting are a really big deal, and they will absolutely help us all keep safe. As she listened, a grim light that had been in her eyes since the month before her sixth birthday winked out, she smiled down at the new Band-Aid on her bicep, and the moment for me was joy.
Miles to go before we sleep, which makes this another perilous winter crossing, because it seems like too many people are just done with all this COVID crap. I’m not talking about the Trump followers who refuse to take the shot because they absurdly believe that Bill Gates put tentacled microchips into the serum so Satan could track their glow. Those folks are on their own little boat ride over the falls, and there appears to be nothing anyone can do for them except wave.
I mean the folks who have spent the last two years swaddled in vigilance, who put their trust in science and had it rewarded with these vaccines, only to have the effectiveness of the vaccines thwarted as the Delta variant emerged and as case rates rose among dead-enders who see tyranny in a swatch of cloth. A recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans believe their lives have returned to “normal.” Of those surveyed, only 15 percent said their lives had “never stopped being normal,” so that 74 percent includes a great many people who should probably know better, but are just exhausted.
Whatever is passing for “normal” these days is about to take yet another hard turn as the cold descends, if history and current infection rates are any indication. The daily number of new infections stands just below 95,000 cases, a 25 percent increase over the last 14 days. The daily hospitalization rate is above 50,000 cases, a 9 percent increase. There are still more than 1,000 COVID deaths a day.
“The latest U.S. Covid-19 wave is taking its toll on some states’ intensive-care units,” reportsBloomberg, “with several parts of the country seeing outbreaks that are as bad as ever. In 15 states, patients with confirmed or suspected Covid are taking up more ICU beds than a year earlier, according to Department of Health and Human Services data. Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan have 41 percent, 37 percent and 34 percent of ICU beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, respectively, the data show.”
Here in New England, where the winter cold tends to get a head start, COVID has been flexing ominously. The seven-day average of new cases in Connecticut is up a whopping 117 percent, and is up 83 percent in Massachusetts. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed an emergency declaration this week ordering some hospitals to delay non-essential procedures, due to staffing shortages caused by this latest COVID surge.
And still the country remains only 59 percent vaccinated, even as all available data show how remarkably effective the vaccines are at protecting people from the worst elements of COVID.
“In Minnesota, which publishes detailed COVID data, the death rate for fully vaccinated people under 50 during the Delta surge this year was 0.0 per 100,000 — meaning, so few people died that the rate rounds to zero,” reportsThe New York Times. “Washington State is another place that publishes statistics by age and vaccination status. In its most recent report, Washington did not even include a death rate for fully vaccinated residents under 65. It was too low to be meaningful.”
President Biden’s poll numbers have been taking a slow but steady beating ever since he declared COVID all but over this past summer, only to have the Delta variant run up his suit leg and take a dump on his tie. His administration is pushing hard to enact strict workplace mandates for vaccinations, more than 90 percent of all federal workers and military service members have received at least one dose, and the administration has purchased 10 million pills of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s potentially game-changing new anti-COVID medication, with more surely to come if the meds work as advertised. Administration experts continue to bang the drum for mass vaccinations and booster shots.
For all that, Biden’s approval rate still suffers, in part because he came into office on the promise that he would stamp this pestilence out. Due to a number of factors, that has not yet happened, and another grueling winter looms. “Joe Biden has now been president for around half of the duration of the pandemic,” writes Janan Ganesh of The Financial Times. “He was elected in large part to contain it. His failure to do so is the central fact of his presidency.”
A Lizzo song came on the radio as my daughter and I pulled out of the hospital parking lot in search of some food, and changes were made to the lyrics on the fly: “We don’t want you anymore,” my daughter sang, “so march that COVID out the door!” For a moment, her laughter in the Saturday morning sunlight blew all of it — Trump, Biden, COVID, anti-vaxxers, the living and the dead, the whole stinking mess and every second of time lost to it — far out to sea. It came back as soon as I saw how crowded the breakfast joint was, and we decided to eat at home.
Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Alex Jones walked into a bar… there’s a joke somewhere in there, but I’m damned if I can put a finger on it. I will say this much: If Bannon, Stone and Jones walked into a plot to overthrow a national presidential election, said plot is even further out into the ether than anyone ever suspected. Paging Mr. Trump: Your table is ready. Our special today is gall with wormwood, tossed on a bed of what the hell were you up to with these strange people?
If the “U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” has its way, we may actually come to know the answer to that question. According to The New York Times, the committee “issued five new subpoenas on Monday, targeting allies of former President Donald J. Trump who helped draw crowds to Washington before the riot, including the political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.”
Bannon, the former Trump adviser and Breitbart founder, was served subpoenas by the committee several weeks ago. He blew them off with an arrogant wave, ultimately finding himself charged with contempt and under arrest. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also ignored the subpoenas he was served, doing so just before Bannon was indicted. Dozens of other subpoenas have been issued in the course of the investigation.
It’s OK if you have to take a second with this; I certainly did. Granted, Bannon sprays overhyped nihilist gibberish like the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, but at least he actually worked in the Trump White House for a few seconds. Stone is a Batman villain caricature, certainly on the inside with Trump after having been granted clemency for his role in the Russia election scandal, but a walking joke nonetheless. And Jones, well… he is shortly to be rendered pantless before the world now that a judge has turned the aggrieved families of Sandy Hook victims loose on him.
“The Select Committee is seeking information about the rallies and subsequent march to the Capitol that escalated into a violent mob attacking the Capitol and threatening our democracy,” Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said after the newest subpoenas were revealed. “We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress.”
There is little doubt the pair will have a story to tell, if they actually decide to testify. Vanity Fair reports:
Jones … has publicly said that he helped organize one of the rallies January 6, where Trump called on supporters to “fight much harder” on his behalf. Jones also spoke at a rally the day before in Freedom Plaza, promoting Trump’s election lies that Democrats “have tried to steal this election in front of everyone” and promising to battle against “tyranny.” “I don’t know how this is all going to end,” the InfoWars host said on the eve of the insurrection, “but if they want to fight, they better believe they’ve got one.”
In their letter to Jones, the January 6 committee acknowledged that he was “recorded telling people not to be violent” during his appearance at that day’s rally. But he also repeatedly raised the temperature in the lead-up to the riot, warning his crowd that they are “under attack” and that they need to “get on a war-footing.” “We declare 1776 against the new world order,” Jones said ahead of the insurrection.
Stone … was one of the biggest proponents of the former president’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, and made appearances at rallies in Washington, D.C., ahead of the January 6 march. He is also said to have used members of the Oath Keepers extremist group as bodyguards while in Washington. Stone on Monday denied having “advance knowledge of the events that took place at the Capitol on that day.”
Plenty of smoke, perhaps some fire, and maybe not enough time. Bannon, Stone and Jones are notorious publicity hogs who will almost certainly do everything they can to delay their testimony (while turning a buck off of their “victimhood”). If they can hold the committee at arm’s length long enough, and if the Republicans retake majority control of the House next year, the select committee will be rolled up like a carpet and stuffed into storage.
Still, take that moment. Say you’re a president staring defeat in the face. You refuse to accept it. Who do you call? Those guys!
Why not, right? It makes as much sense as buying Greenland, or injecting yourself with bleach.
One year ago today, Donald Trump was three weeks into his ongoing I’m Not Crying You’re Crying post-defeat revenge tour, and the Republican herd was nervous. They knew this predator all too well. Trump feasted on the flesh of friend and foe with equal delight, he hardly seemed to sleep, and with dreaded irrelevance staring him dead in the face (along with the possibility of poverty and prison), he was more motivated than ever before.
“Trump’s attacks on Govs. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Mike DeWine Ohio — both of whom are up for reelection in 2022 — has led to broader concerns within the party that he will use his post-presidency to exact revenge on perceived enemies and insert himself into races in ways that are not helpful,” reportedPolitico on November 22, 2020. “Trump’s intrusions into Georgia and Ohio provide an early test case for how he might use his stranglehold on the conservative base to control the party long after he leaves the White House. Never mind that Trump will no longer be in power: Cross him, and you will pay.”
A year later, the GOP appears for all intents and purposes to be riding high. The rise of the COVID-19 Delta variant staggered the country’s economic and social recovery from the pandemic, and the populace seems to be taking their exhaustion and frustration out on the party in power. A messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and a revolt by conservative Democrats against President Biden’s domestic agenda opened the floodgates for the “news” media’s favorite trope: Dems in Disarray.
A broad spectrum of polling data has Republicans leading the Democrats in the upcoming 2022 midterms, and recent victories in Virginia’s statewide elections — where Biden won by 10 points a year ago — further suggest the GOP is enjoying significant political momentum as we head into the holiday season.
Republicans should be wreathed in smiles; every time a party has been so positioned a year before the midterms, that party has gained seats come voting time. Why then are furrowed brows clouding their festive spirit?
“As the country’s Republican governors met this week, there was an unmistakable air of celebration in the conference rooms and cocktail parties marking their annual postelection conference,” reportsThe New York Times. “Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin of Virginia was swarmed with well-wishers and favor seekers who believed his victory in a liberal-leaning state offered the party a road map for next year’s midterm elections. Out of earshot of the reporters and donors congregating amid the palm trees and cactuses of the Arizona Biltmore resort, however, a more sober, less triumphant and all-too-familiar conversation was taking place among the governors: What could be done about Donald J. Trump?”
A year after Republicans fretted over Trump’s attacks on Kemp and DeWine, the former president has upped his efforts by an order of magnitude. Trump-inspired laws intended to thwart voters of color have been passed in more than a dozen states, and Trump loyalists are being installed in state offices all over the country, obtaining positions that could allow them to determine the outcome of the 2024 election regardless of what the voters say.
His attacks against fellow Republicans — those who voted to impeach him, those who voted in favor of Biden’s infrastructure bill, and those who have not kissed his ring with sufficiently slobbering velocity — find themselves in primary fights with Trump-approved QAnon candidates who have as much business in government as a hammerhead shark has in a public pool.
Trump does not even require an election-sized grudge to release the hounds of personal vengeance. He is currently trying to oust Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey because he inaccurately blames her for a cancelled rally this summer. “Ivey, a longtime statewide official, has served as governor since 2017 and has been a reliable Trump supporter,” reportsInsider. “In May 2018, the governor signed a letter advocating for the then-president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomatic efforts with North and South Korea.” NOT GOOD ENOUGH, off with her head.
Trump’s scattershot shredding of his own party’s incumbents, along with his tendency to endorse candidates who (putting it mildly) don’t stand up to scrutiny, is not sitting well with the old guard. “It’s outrageous, unacceptable and bad for the party,” raged Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who went on to unambiguously denounce what he refers to as “Trump cancel culture.”
Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, said on Sunday that the actions of Trump and his congressional allies were “ruining America.” Chris Christie, former Republican governor of New Jersey, recently told his GOP allies that they needed to “renounce the conspiracy theories and truth deniers” who have been the headwinds filling Trump’s sails. Small revolutions such as these, according to The Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas, may seem to indicate Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party is beginning to slip.
Don’t hold your breath. Donald Trump feeds off the spotlight like plants feed off sunlight, and if he feels he is even one lumen short of his due, he will grind whatever grist is necessary to take it back. At present, more and more of that spotlight is being redirected to Florida’s Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, and Trump is growing more furious by the day. DeSantis, a seeming frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination if Trump chooses not to run in 2024, was championed by the former president only a year ago. Now, Trump is demanding that DeSantis swear off any thoughts of a presidential bid.
“Trump’s gripes are so frequent because he is planting them in hopes that they’ll get back to DeSantis,” reportsPolitico. “Trump has told his advisers that DeSantis privately assured him that he won’t run if Trump does, but that’s not enough for the former president — he wants DeSantis to say it in public.” Why? If you listen to Trump, it’s because DeSantis has not been properly loyal to him, the former president who (according to that former president) made DeSantis what he is.
The Democrats have reeled from crisis to crisis this summer and fall, suffering more than a few self-inflicted wounds along the way, and the media echo chamber has done them no favors. Republicans appear set to make tall gains next year at both the state and federal levels, thanks in no small part to a gerrymandering effort that would make Huey Long barf into his hat.
Yet they have The Fear, and its name is Donald. The once and wannabe-future president has an enormous campaign horde, and millions of people follow his every word as if his proclamations and denunciations were being carved onto stone tablets. Trump has the power to upend elections, and a number of the people he hates are current Republican incumbents.
The Democrats may be in disarray, but the GOP is facing nothing less than an existential crisis over the next two election seasons. Any long-term plans with Trump involved promise to be a clinic on chaos.
The outcome at COP26 doesn’t bode well for the future of the planet, but then again, no one remotely aware of the history of international climate talks should have expected anything but a failure at Glasgow.
As a matter of fact, given what we already know about the science of climate change (fossil fuels are the primary culprits behind global warming), and, in light of our experience with the catastrophic effects of global warming (heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, habitat loss and species extinction), COP26 must be regarded as a “monumental failure.”
Indeed, it is quite shocking to see reports and commentaries from certain quarters trying to convince the public that COP26 represents a step forward in the fight against the climate crisis.
Why? Because for the first time in nearly three decades the world “coal” was used in a COP climate agreement? Or because of the pledge to end deforestation by 2030? Or could it be because world leaders agreed to end “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels?
Hypocrisy reigned supreme at COP26 in Glasgow. Leaving aside the presence of the fossil fuel industry with a bigger delegation than any country, most world leaders were there to defend their national economic interests rather than the sustainability of the planet.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden. He argued that “there is no more time to hang back or sit on the fence,” and then sought to convince everyone present that the U.S. will “lead by example” in the fight against global warming. How? By leasing over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies for oil and gas extraction immediately after his rhetorical posture at COP26.
And let’s not forget his urgent plea to OPEC just a few months ago to increase oil production.
Countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, to name just a few, worked hard during the negotiations to weaken as much as possible the final COP26 pact.
Of course, wealthy nations, which are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, bear the vast majority of the blame for climate impasse.
Their failure to honor a pledge of $100 billion in climate financing a year to poor nations, which are hit hardest by the consequences of global warming, speaks volumes of their commitment to the transformation of a sustainable and just future. So does their position on the issue of financing for “losses and damages” at COP26, which was deliberately couched in very vague terms and was left to be addressed in future climate talks.
But that’s what international climate diplomacy amounts to in the end: governments fighting for a climate agenda that won’t harm the specific interests and needs of their own ruling classes. This is exactly the reason why world leaders have been kicking the can down the road for nearly three decades now when it comes to taking drastic measures to combat global warming.
The truth of the matter is that whatever progress has been made so far in our fight against the climate crisis has been greatly due to activism on the part of individuals and a wide array of organizations such as community groups, labor unions, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous groups. Youth voices on the climate crisis have been, of course, most instrumental in raising public consciousness and building momentum for the formation of a global climate movement, which is our only hope left towards securing the goal of sustainability for all life on Earth.
The irony is that actually no sober and rational thinking human being could possibly have any illusions about the challenge humanity faces in the 21st century. It requires an indubitably high level of ignorance, in conjunction with a heavy dose of misanthropy, to pass over the fact that the world is faced with a titanic struggle over how to save the planet.
Moreover, there is no mystery about how humanity can avoid a possible collapse of civilized order as we have known it. A global Green New Deal is our only hope to save the planet from the disastrous effects of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Decarbonization in conjunction with natural climate solutions such as reforestation are key to making sure that humanity doesn’t get trapped in a conundrum the “the gates of hell are locked on the inside.”
There is no other choice at the present juncture. It is still not clear to what degree technology can be part of the solution at some point in the future, and we surely have no luxury in waiting to find out whether emerging technologies can solve the climate crisis.
Also, let’s have no illusions about the global Green New Deal project. This is not some sort of a utopian dream, as its opponents seem to suggest. The research, for instance, conducted by economists at the renowned Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst shows with unquestionable clarity that the implementation of the Green New Deal project will not only spare us from the worsening effects of global warming, but will also ensure sustainable development and a just transition.
But, perhaps more important, there are already scores of organizations in places all over the world working hard to turn the Green New Deal vision into reality. For example, ReImagine Appalachia, a collection of individuals and organizations seeking to “built a sustainable 21st century Appalachia,” is restoring damaged lands and water, refashioning the electric grid, building a sustainable transportation system, reforesting the region, while at the same time promoting union rights and ensuring that workers in extractive industries remain vital elements of the workforce in the post-fossil fuel economy.
Mass organizing is central, of course, to the attainment of the goals set forth by Reimagine Appalachia. Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia, says ReImagine Appalachia “reaches out and engages a wide variety of stakeholders – labor, faith, enviro, racial justice, criminal justice reform advocates, local electeds and others.”
Indeed, participation from below is the key to ensuring a societal transformation towards sustainability. As Amanda Woodrum so eloquently expressed to Truthout, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In addition, ReImagine Appalachia appears to have developed a very effective local elected outreach strategy, which, according to Amanda Woodrum, “has secured a number of endorsements from local electeds and passed community resolutions in several communities.” Equally important, the organization has launched BLAC, the Black Appalachian Coalition, an initiative led by Black women, as Black Appalachians have been hit hardest by the downward mobility of the neoliberal project since the 1980s.
The outcomes of international climate summits are very discouraging, but the work done at the grassroots level by researchers and activists alike in the fight against humanity’s greatest existential crisis is quite inspiring.
So, yes, the struggle ahead promises to be hard and brutal, but the “general will” can always prevail in the end even under the most gruesome of circumstances if people are willing to fight for the right cause. And no cause can be more sacred than saving planet Earth.
It was already clear that meatpacking plants hosted some of the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks. But a congressional investigation released in late October revealed just how dire the situation is. The COVID-19 infection and death toll in slaughterhouses run by the country’s largest meat conglomerates is now nearly three times higher than previously estimated. Considering the hazards cited by the report — crowded assembly lines, lax screening precautions, sweat-saturated masks and barriers made with “flimsy ‘plastic bags on frames’” — it’s little surprise that in some plants, more than half of workers have contracted the virus.
Emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigation paint a picture of executives who aggressively pushed back against safety measures in the pandemic’s early days. The CEO of Smithfield Foods, for example, called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendations “problematic” and lamented that touchless mask distribution would cause each employee to miss 30 seconds of work. Meanwhile, Smithfield workers were filing complaints that they were not spaced six feet apart, were denied breaks and couldn’t breathe through masks saturated with sweat. Others said their production line was so quick, they weren’t able to turn away to cough. “If you’re not in a casket, they want you there,” former Smithfield worker Sonja Johnson told The Washington Post.
“The lack of care and the lack of interest in providing workers with the most basic protections by the companies is shocking,” said Magaly Licolli, director of an Arkansas-based poultry worker organization, in a recent Food Chain Workers Alliance report on frontline worker organizing. “With this pandemic it’s about fighting or dying. There is no other option.”
Meat processing plants were dangerous places to work even before the pandemic. And while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — the federal agency responsible for ensuring workers’ safety — acknowledges the presence of hazards like noise, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, repetitive motions, hazardous chemicals and exposure to airborne pathogens in slaughterhouses, it provides only limited protections from these dangers through its general standards that apply across industries.
When it comes to air quality, in particular, OSHA has failed to develop standards for any sector — even though meat-processing facilities are notorious for spreading viruses due to temperature and humidity levels that encourage pathogens to thrive. OSHA has also failed to adopt standards to protect workers from musculoskeletal disorders, a particularly severe problem in the poultry industry. Instead, OSHA has largely developed “nonbinding guidance” for employers or unsuccessfully attempted to invoke the OSHA Act’s general duty clause — which requires employers to ensure the workplace is free of “recognized hazards.” It has generally been understood as a backstop in the absence of specifically applicable standards but is difficult for the agency to justify when challenged.
OSHA also issued “nonbinding guidance” during COVID-19 when, as the congressional investigation argues, it should have issued an Emergency Temporary Standard to protect workers. As a result, meatpacking companies were left largely unchecked. Investigators describe this as a “political decision” by OSHA leadership under former President Trump. Yet even under the Biden administration, the agency has still not implemented those sorely needed safety rules — or so many of the others that could help to curb the health hazards and injustices facing workers.
On his first day as president, Joe Biden signed an executive order on advancing racial equity and claimed he would make racial equity and support for underserved communities “the business of the whole government.” Protecting marginalized workers must be central to this strategy for it to succeed. By implementing workplace protections in key industries like meatpacking, OSHA now has the chance to address the disproportionate impact of health hazards and promote racial equity in industries employing BIPOC workers long left unprotected due to the nonexistence of binding regulatory standards.
Fortunately, there are signs of progress. In September, the Biden administration announced new initiatives at OSHA to address heat hazards in the workplace — a dangerous issue that disproportionately impacts immigrant farmworkers, and for which OSHA has never had an enforceable national standard. OSHA launched a rulemaking process on October 27 to finally create such a standard, which will replace its previous “nonbinding guidance.”
This is a significant step in the right direction. It will save lives. But when it comes to remedying the disproportionate impacts of hazardous workplaces, it is just the beginning. Meat-processing workers deserve protection, too.
For years, slaughterhouse workers and their advocates have been calling for a slowdown to increasing factory line speeds, which crowd workers closer together and raise their risk of injury. They’ve asked for strengthened inspection programs that address not only food safety, but worker safety, and allow workers to designate a representative to accompany inspectors. And they’ve demanded that their basic rights — to bathroom breaks, to leave from work due to medical and other emergencies, and to protection from retaliation when filing complaints — be respected. Federal legislation could address many of these longstanding issues to protect workers over the long term, in addition to compelling OSHA to create emergency pandemic standards.
Advocates are also calling on OSHA to keep a record of pandemic-related infections and deaths, including the racial demographics of those affected. Because — as October’s congressional investigation shows — lives are lost when companies aren’t held publicly accountable for protecting their workers. As long as these companies continue to prioritize profits over people, the federal government can no longer stand aside and must step in to uphold safety, equity and justice for the workers our food system depends on.
Just before the November 2 election, in which Trump-endorsed Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race with the help of 57 percent of white women, a right-wing dark money group called Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) spent thousands in ads to promote its new attack website, ToxicSchools.org.
The site features a scandalizing 2016 Washington Post headline: “McAuliffe vetoes bill permitting parents to block sexually explicit books in school.” But what the ad (and the headline) obscured was the actual context of the resolution: The Republican bill was a response to one mother who sought to ban Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking novel Beloved, a story about Black trauma and resilience in the decades following the end of slavery, because of a scene of sexual violence. Strikingly, it would have made Virginia the first state in the country to allow parents to censure such school books.
Much of this story is not new. As Jenn Jackson observes in Teen Vogue: “Current events may be relatively silent on the role of women in white supremacy, but history is quite loud.” The indelible image of white mothers in Little Rock, Arkansas, heckling 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the Little Rock Nine to arrive the day their public high school integrated in 1957, may come to mind. In her historical account of white women’s involvement from the 1920s to the 1970s in efforts to stop school integration, Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth McRae refers to these white women as the “constant gardeners of segregation.”
But there are differences, too. Today’s “mothers of massive resistance” appear to represent an organic local uprising of “concerned parents,” but the outcry is being stoked by dark money groups like IWV.
Attacks on public school curricula can serve many purposes, including undermining teachers’ unions, promoting school privatization and impacting elections, like Virginia’s. They also conjure outrage among the most racist elements of the Republican base.
Proposed legislation prohibiting discussions of systemic racism (which Republicans are misrepresenting as “critical race theory”) could be far-reaching, potentially banning pedagogically fundamental terms like “anti-racism,” “diversity training,” “patriarchy” and “whiteness” from schools, as one bill that recently passed the Wisconsin legislature did.
These astroturf groups are a reminder yet again that the white nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces for reproducing white supremacy. Part of the way this works is through hoarding resources, something even some liberal and progressive white women do when they declare their support for policies like school desegregation and then refuse to send their white children to integrated schools. “Tracking,” the designation of separate paths for students based on educational performance, sometimes called “modern-day segregation,” is another way.
So how have right-wing women’s groups, funded by anonymous donors, come to take an oversized role in local school politics as concerned moms?
As historian Nancy MacLean has shown, men like economist James M. Buchanan and billionaire Charles Koch, who funded Buchanan’s center at George Mason University (the impetus for which was Buchanan’s antipathy toward school integration in Virginia), have sought to intentionally hide the political nature of their libertarian-minded organizations for decades.
Dark money organizations spawned by Koch and other billionaires have since spread like a noxious, invasive weed, from the Heritage Foundation to Americans for Prosperity to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In recent years, this network has integrated women-led groups that provide a “soft” cover for a deeply political agenda.
But don’t let the fact that there are women out front fool you. The women championing today’s dark-money attacks on public schools serve a regressive political agenda, just as the women who tended the gardens of segregation did almost a century ago.
The diplomatic effort behind COP26 — the United Nations climate conference — failed to meet the scale of the climate emergency. While an agreement was reached to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, even this was watered down in last-minute negotiations. Too little, too late for frontline communities on the edge of extinction.
Every year, governments throw trillions of public dollars at oil, gas and coal companies. In the past 30 years, just 100 of these companies are responsible for over 70 percent of the emissions causing climate chaos. The shortcomings of COP26 means active citizens must push national governments to end these ridiculous fossil fuel handouts — including in the United States.
Some subsidies may have made economic sense in their day: The “intangible drilling costs” deduction, passed in 1913, allows companies to immediately write off the costs of digging for oil.
But not now. Not in this moment of climate disaster. Institutions are rapidly divesting from the sector and even heirs to the oil industry are calling for an end to the industry.
Congress can lead us into a new era of fossil-free energy. For one, the Build Back Better Act, if it should pass, would be the U.S. government’s largest investment in climate action.
Unfortunately, the current version of the legislation has some crater-sized holes. There are concerns that it falls short on funding programs that benefit historically marginalized communities and it does nothing to address intangible drilling costs or other domestic fossil fuel handouts.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration identified some $121 billion over 10 years in subsidies that should be repealed by Congress. Negotiators must include these repeals in the final version of the bill.
Fossil fuels are extremely hazardous for humanity. In 2018, researchers estimated that exposure to fossil fuel emissions accounted for almost 20 percent of total global deaths. This does not even touch on the deaths related to extreme weather or to the political instability that the climate crisis is intensifying.
The climate crisis will affect all of us, but not all of us equally. We are facing a disaster that is hitting marginalized communities, Indigenous groups and people of color harder and sooner.
Of course, Congress didn’t simply overlook subsidies in the Build Back Better Act. The oil and gas industry has already spent over $80 million on lobbying in 2021. Proposed repeals threaten Washington’s fossil fuel-friendly status quo and many companies are already lobbying to protect their tax breaks.
From Washington to Glasgow, host of the recent UN climate change conference (COP26), industry lobbyists are “flooding the zone.” Fossil fuel company representatives at COP26 outnumbered the largest country delegation and were twice the size of the official UN constituency for Indigenous people.
Without question, the fossil fuel industry is holding up action in Congress on subsidies. Democratic Party leaders are caving to corporate interests and moderate Democrats claim to be worried about unfair targeting of the industry — which is ironic, given how heavily the subsidies have favored it up until now.
All of this despite the fact that voters in both parties support ending these handouts.
Keeping those “intangible drilling costs” and other handouts alive is a priority for Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia — a fact revealed in a leaked memo this summer. This is not particularly surprising. Manchin has taken almost $600,000 from the oil and gas industry in 2021 alone — hundreds of thousands more than any of his colleagues in the U.S. Senate.
Fittingly, the state fossil of West Virginia is a giant sloth. Its slow movements reflect what climate scientist Michael Mann calls the industry’s new approach of “climate inactivism.” Its guiding principles: delay, deflect, disinform, do almost anything to keep emissions going and subsidies flowing.
Congress is taking meaningful steps to build back fossil-free, including allocating billions of dollars for clean energy development in Build Back Better. But funding innovation alone is not sufficient to stave off extinction: We must put an end to extraction, too. This starts with stopping the subsidies and reclaiming public funds to address climate impacts and historical environmental injustices.
There is a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s bleak masterpiece Apocalypse Now that came to mind in the aftermath of the Glasgow climate conference and Wednesday’s big oil lease shindig for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.
Captain Willard, played by an impossibly young Martin Sheen, has dragged a boat crew deep into the Vietnam jungle in search of his target, Col. Walter Kurtz. The boat arrives at the Do Lung Bridge, the scene of what appears to be a permanent battle, and the night is split with explosions, rifle fire and the screams of the dying. Willard goes in search of the commanding officer, only to find a handful of U.S. soldiers cowering behind an earthen wall. “Hey soldier,” he asks one hollow-eyed troop, “do you know who’s in command here?” The soldier stares at him a moment and replies, “Yeah,” before turning back to the darkness.
The implication is clear: You’re not in charge, captain. Neither am I, or any of these others here. Those voices out there in the gloom beyond the perimeter, the ones moving unseen in great force? They’re the ones running this nightmare. In Glasgow, representatives from 200 countries came together to give speeches and praise each other for taking action, but in the end, they could not bring themselves to say, “Coal is bad.”
“Case in point,” reportsThe Los Angeles Times. “The Glasgow pact for the first time in more than 25 years of negotiations makes explicit reference to the fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it calls only for a ‘phasedown of unabated coal’ — language that was supposed to read ‘phase-out’ until it was weakened at the last minute by India. It calls for a ‘phase-out’ of ‘inefficient’ fossil-fuel subsidies, but includes no commitment to ending oil and gas production.”
Tens of thousands of protesters, many of them young people, roared their displeasure at the scant progress made in Glasgow. “Now is the time,” said Dominique Palmer, a 22-year-old activist. “Yesterday was the time. We need action right now.” Eric Njuguna, a 19-year-old activist from Kenya, echoed Palmer’s sentiments. “Cognitive dissonance,” he said. “We were expecting serious commitments at COP26 on climate finance and climate mitigation. The commitments aren’t strong enough.”
If it is cognitive dissonance you seek, Mr. Njuguna, look no further than the sun-bleached, oil-poisoned waters in the Gulf of Mexico. President Biden and his Glasgow coterie had not been back long enough to adjust to the time zone changes when his administration presided over a massive lease sale for oil drilling rights in the Gulf.
Biden ran hard on salvaging the environment, and his administration says it tried to stop this sale, but there it went anyway: Lease Sale 257 generated $191,688,984 in high bids for 308 tracts covering 1.7 million acres in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). “ExxonMobil Corporation submitted the highest number of total bids at 94 and Chevron U.S.A. Inc submitted the largest value of total high bids at $47,128,011, lease sale 257’s final notice of sale information package shows,” reportsRigzone. “Other companies participating in the sale included Shell Offshore Inc, BP Exploration & Production Inc and Equinor Gulf of Mexico LLC.”
Yep, there’s BP back in its old stomping grounds, where you can still see how the 130 million barrels of crude oil it dumped into the waters 11 years ago continue to do deep damage to wildlife and the overall environment. Now BP and its pals are going to build a whole new slew of rigs right on top of the boneyard they created a decade ago.
… and even that really isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is that it will take years to bring this new oil-pumping infrastructure online, which means these things will just be getting started on extraction when we roll through the year 2030, a date many climate scientists see as a point of no return regarding carbon emissions and the warming of the planet. In effect, the oil industry just paid top dollar to the U.S. government for the privilege of building profitable suicide machines in the dying waters of the Gulf.
The infrastructure bill contains billions in fossil fuel subsidies, even as it was stripped of all meaningful climate policy. The Build Back Better Act, a lifeboat for those stripped-out climate policies, now hangs by a thread, its fate largely controlled by a coal baron from West Virginia. The Glasgow climate conference probably harmed the environment with all the jet fuel burned to get there and back, but it accomplished little else. Now, leases for more oil drilling are flying to anyone who can write the government a big enough check.
“Apocalypse normal means we can go back to school, get on planes, and hit up restaurants and bars — as long as we don’t think too hard about disabled people, unvaccinated children or long COVID. It means experiencing escalating heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and scrolling past news about ‘code red’ climate reports, and the refugees that climate catastrophes create, without retaliating or rebelling against political leaders who have once again refused to chart a different course.” In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes tackles the idea of “getting back to normal.”
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. On this show, we talk a lot about building the relationships and analysis that we need to create movements that can win. Today, I want to say a few words about the idea of getting back to normal. In the wake of an all-but-pointless COP 26, the gutting of Biden’s infrastructure bill, and the collapse of progressive leverage on the Build Back Better act, we should be talking about the fact that we live in extraordinary, disastrous times, and how nothing remotely adequate is being done to address the scope of what we are up against, but instead, our political leaders, the mainstream media, and a whole a lot of everyday people, continue to fetishize normalcy. The very first episode of this podcast aired on February 10 of 2020, and it was recorded only a few weeks before COVID-19 would transform the world we live in. During that episode I said, “An overwhelming political climate has left many Americans frozen in a state of uncertainty. Unable or unwilling to fully process the enormity of climate change or the tragic circus of Trumpism, many are going through the motions of normalcy while the world burns.” If you crammed in some mention of the pandemic, and our failure to process the deaths of more than 5 million people, I could have been talking about what we’re experiencing now, in November of 2021. Granted, Trump is no longer president, but Trumpism is alive and well and taking over school boards, while Republicans dismantle voting rights and reproductive freedom at the state level. Amid this ongoing right-wing attack, a lot of people are burnt out, but I also think many are experiencing something that we could call moral injury.
I recently had a health care worker named Hannah Winchester on the show, and Hannah explained that the distinction between burnout and moral injury was the assumed causation of a person’s hurt and fatigue, as well as the presumed remedy. When we tell people they’re suffering from burnout, the problem is usually approached in terms of what the person experiencing burnout can do differently to manage their stress or maintain a better work/life balance. But when we talk about moral injury, we’re talking about our reactions to conditions that are being imposed upon us, and to the dehumanization and exploitation that we’re experiencing. When the problem is that we are being mistreated, devalued and dehumanized, the solution is not to budget our time better, or do some deep breathing exercises, or to treat ourselves to a bubble bath. We can do all of those things, if we want to, but they are not solutionary.
Nearly 100,000 people died of overdoses in the U.S. between March 2020 and March 2021. During 2020, the proportion of mental health-related emergency room visits among youth aged 12–17 years old increased 31% from the previous year. Some studies indicate that rates of depression and anxiety have returned to pre-pandemic levels, but as the editors of Scientific Americanrecently wrote, “The longer-term disruptions, losses and volatile shifts from hope to fear to languishing are harder to parse. COVID has already killed or disabled millions, deepened economic insecurity and racial inequality, and forced radical adaptations to daily life; its serious effects on mental health and well-being very likely will continue and in ways still unknown.” What we have experienced during the pandemic is a deadly system becoming much deadlier. We have seen that we don’t have the structures of care that we need to assist people in times of crisis, and that people who are treated as disposable on a good day will be completely ground under during times of crisis. We cannot obligingly recreate normalcy on those terms.
2020 may have been the most politically energetic year of my lifetime. We saw a mass rebellion against police violence converge with a mass movement of mutual aid. We also saw a lot of energy channeled into Trump’s removal, which I believe was necessary, but those efforts also set us up for some problems. For one thing, the election of a Democrat, in such dire times, gave people a lot of misplaced hope. Sure, Biden was preferable to a modern cartoon Hitler who hijacked planes full of PPE and tried to overthrow the government, but the neoliberal leadership of Democrats delivered us to Trumpism, and right now, it looks like they’re on track to do it again.
People wanted to believe that electing Biden meant that we had turned a corner, and in a sense, we had, at least temporarily. We dodged the ascent of full blown right-wing authoritarianism, and that’s not nothing. But even amid the optimism of the moment, I don’t think there was as much naivety about Biden as we saw under Obama, where so many people believed that if we gave him time, and asked in just the right way, a neoliberal Democrat would fix our problems. I don’t think the disillusionment we’re seeing is the result of people having believed in Biden, the way people believed in Obama. Some people actually managed to get hyped about Biden, but I think largely, what people got attached to, whether they will admit it or not, was that the idea that Biden would bring back normalcy.
After all, maintaining a shitty status quo is what Democrats do best. So I think a lot of people hoped that if we just got the wheels of government turning again, we would get our old lives back. Biden certainly wanted us to believe that. In fact, a return to normal is still the driving theme of his presidency. But the normal we knew is dead, and what we’re being offered is something like a zombie, and much like the zombies of film and television, this normal is deadly, and it will only become more decrepit with time. Zombie normalcy, or apocalypse normal, means we can go back to school, get on planes, and hit up restaurants and bars — as long as we don’t think too hard about disabled people or unvaccinated people, including children, or long COVID. It means experiencing escalating heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and scrolling past news about “code red” climate reports, and the refugees that climate catastrophes create, without retaliating or rebelling against political leaders who have once again refused to chart a different course.
According to CNN’s “Back-to-Normal Index,” the U.S. economy “is operating at 93% of where it was in early March” of 2020. I find that page fascinating because… I’m fascinated by morbid things. Sometimes, I think I find politicians interesting in the same way that I find serial killers interesting, but that’s kind of silly, because serial killers do far less damage to society. Interestingly, one of the factors that the “Back-to-Normal Index” charts is unemployment, which the page notes, fewer people are applying for. There’s no mention of the fact that far fewer people now qualify for unemployment, so the fact that fewer people are applying doesn’t necessarily mean that unemployed people are experiencing less hardship. But it does suggest that conditions are improving for employers, many of whom would prefer a more desperate, pliable workforce — and after all, the page is called the “Back-to-Normal” index, not the “Quality of Life and Society Index.” Within the realm of “normalcy,” workers still get screwed. That’s the status quo, so for the system, the fact that more people are going to run out of money and accept jobs that are dangerous and/or dehumanizing is actually a big win.
I also want to talk about schools for a moment, because, holy hell, what teachers, families and students are going through has been mindblowing for me. Just look at my own city: After fighting relentlessly to get students back in classrooms, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has offered next to nothing in the way of contact tracing or a functional testing apparatus for students. After promising and failing to deliver regular testing for students, Lightfoot’s administration recently declared that regular school-based testing for students was never really necessary. After vaccinations for children five and up were approved, many parents hoped local schools would host vaccination clinics. But instead of planning for that contingency, Chicago Public Schools have given every public school student in the entire city of Chicago a single day off to find a vaccination appointment somewhere in the city. It’s all been a really tragic spectacle to behold. Anytime the mayor has been questioned about the lack of safety measures around COVID in Chicago Public Schools, she talks about the importance of in-person learning. The reality is that, for these students, in-person learning is no longer a question mark. It’s happening. That is no longer the debate. The city simply isn’t taking responsibility for creating safe environments for students. Why? It never has. This posture toward safety is actually completely normal for Chicago Public Schools. That normalcy is simply occurring in the context of a pandemic, which means that for some people, it has proven deadly, and for others, it will lead to disability and debilitation.
So what does apocalypse-normal feel like for people who give a damn? Pretty terrible, right? We are being told to live our lives, but the world is not the same and we are not the same — and we were already pretty upset with the world when this whole thing began. Some of us hoped that the pandemic might be a portal, as Arundhati Roy wrote, and that the crisis and destabilization of capitalism might stoke a great political awakening, and lead us somewhere new. Some people have given up on those hopes. I personally believe it’s too soon to gauge the radicalizing power of the pandemic, and that those shifts are still ongoing, but I understand why people feel forlorn. Electoral contests have traditionally usurped energy that might otherwise propel radicalism, and there’s perhaps no better example of that phenomenon in my lifetime than the election of 2020. However necessary Trump’s removal may have been, and I believe it was essential, electoralism definitely tempered a moment of rage and rising consciousness, and the relief that people experienced, after Trump’s removal, has manifested itself in disturbing ways. Tearful liberal outrage about children in cages under Trump has given way to indifference about the Biden administration’s adoption of some nearly identical policies.
I’ve talked a bit on the show about the liberal abandonment of migrant justice, and honestly, I think that gear-shifting mentality is also responsible for some of the bizarre shaming we witnessed last spring, when some liberals scolded vaccinated people who continued to wear masks, as if they were holding up progress by not having faith in the restoration of normalcy. “Trust the science,” they insisted, as though “the science” were a singular, verified authority, rather than a global scramble among experts that produced a lot of incorrect conclusions along the way. Still, cautious vaccinated people were mocked, lectured, pathologized and even blamed for the hesitancy of people who refused to get vaccinated. Why? Because they weren’t cooperating with a transformation that a lot of people desperately wanted — the so-called transition back to normal.
I’ve had some people tell me that for them, “back to normal,” means spending time with their friends and loved ones again, or resuming certain activities or routines, and I get that, but honestly, I think we should start speaking with more specificity. If we are talking about how we can’t wait to see our loved ones again, I think we should say that, rather than using the word “normal.” As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think we should jump down people’s throats for saying they want to get back to normal, but I do think we can have engaging conversations about what we do and don’t miss about the way things were, and about how we actually deserve a lot better than the normal we had. I think the Great Resignation is evidence that some people may be ready for those conversations. I think the important thing is to speak from a place of empathy, curiosity and solidarity, rather than lecturing people for using the word “normal” to describe what they want. Instead of pontificating about how normal was bad for a lot of people, I think activists and organizers need to listen, and also talk about the things we miss and would like to get back, while also asking important questions about what needs to be different, and how we can get there. That’s advice I’ve been giving since the beginning of the pandemic, but I think it bears repeating. Because I see you all struggling, and I appreciate that you’ve held onto your humanity enough to know that, even if you’re tired, and you’re not sure which way to pivot, that what we are being handed is bullshit.
The pandemic has given us a preview of life during an era of collapse. As climate catastrophes and mass displacement continue, apocalypse-normal will mean an ever-increasing tolerance for preventable suffering and mass death. We all want a light at the end of the tunnel. But even though the pandemic isn’t permanent, we are living in an era of catastrophe. We cannot pin our hopes on some distant glow. We need to create light where we are, and extend it to one another. And sometimes, we’re going to have to grab a pick axe and destroy whatever’s obstructing the light. And whatever we do, we cannot afford to imagine that normalcy is that light, because it’s just a mirage drawing us deeper into the desert.
The good news is that the pandemic has also reminded us that human potential runs in more than one direction. We’ve seen the power of mutual aid and collective action, and human ingenuity. We’ve been reminded that mass protest can bring the powerful to their knees and thrust ideas as big as prison abolition into mainstream dialogues. The fact that the Democratic establishment is still attacking the defund movement and blaming it for their own missteps and failures tells you that our ideas have gained ground. Never be discouraged by those accusations, because Democrats are not being hindered by radical ideas they’ve never embraced or subscribed to. They are being hindered by the fact that their rhetoric is aimed at everyday people, who are desperate for just policies and financial relief, while their actions serve the rich. They are hindered by their own broken promises and the fact that they rely on fear and shame for voter turnout while their opponents stoke the enthusiasm of actual zealots. The answers will not come from them, and if anyone hasn’t reconciled that yet, it’s time. What we have is each other and our willingness to shake the shit out of this system.
Apocalypse-normal is now. But we can decide that we won’t live and die on these terms. We can decide that we won’t abandon the vulnerable, in our schools or workplaces, or on a global scale. We can refuse to go through the motions. We can develop new ways of living and caring for one another. We can make demands that reflect the scope of our struggles, rather than boxing up our hopes and imaginations, and bending to the will of the ruling class. We can fight the zombies of the old world, here on the edge of oblivion, and I believe that we can win.
I want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
After a white cop fatally shoots someone, prison reformers often suggest hiring more Black cops or more women. But diversifying the police force won’t end police violence, and neither will milquetoast reforms that have been tried and tried again.
Benjamin Jancewicz, a Baltimore-based abolitionist, points out that around 62 percent of the American police force is white, and around 85 percent of cops identify as male. But that lack of representation is not where the issue of policing lies. Jancewicz asserts that police have an established culture of “oppression and dominance” that does not change even when the force has more women or BIPOC officers. “Baltimore,” he points out, “has a 40 percent Black police force” which has not affected the “already established culture of corruption and brutality.”
In 2015, Freddie Gray died in police custody after being brutalized by Baltimore cops, and the police violence and misconduct in Baltimore hasn’t ended there. This is because a system will not and cannot reform itself, especially “when you dump more money and more personnel into it,” according to Jancewicz.
How do we know when a reform is actually going to funnel more money and power to the prison-industrial complex? In an interview with Truthout, Sarah Fathallah, an Oakland-based abolitionist, points to a Critical Resistance framework that helps to determine if a proposed reform “is an abolitionist step that works to chip away at the scope and impact of policing, or a reformist reform that expands its reach.”
The framework guides us to look at reforms critically and ask: Does the proposal reduce funding to police? Does the proposal challenge the notion that police increase safety? Does the proposal reduce the tools, tactics and technology police have at their disposal? And does the proposal reduce the scale of the police?
When it comes to hiring more police officers as an attempt to diversify, we can immediately see that this reform will not lessen the scope of the prison-industrial complex.
Instead, Fathallah says, “Hiring more diverse cops often expands the funding and bodies police departments have at their disposal.” Fathallah saw this firsthand in Oakland, where the City Council voted to approve a police academy in September 2021, citing “discrepancies between the gender and racial makeup of the police compared to communities” to justify the need to hire even more cops.
Focusing on the identities of the police who are committing violence actually prevents us from taking aim at the real issues. Fathallah rightfully points out that these pushes for gender and racial diversity frame “police brutality and murder as individual issues to solve” while reinforcing the “‘bad apples’ narrative of policing, that the police are harmful because of individually blameworthy and racially biased police officers.”
Pushing this narrative is imperative for those who seek to preserve the existing power structures, because it wrongly suggests that huge social problems are actually the failures of individuals, rather than structures.
The violence and cruelty of the prison-industrial complex has been well-documented since its inception, and public consciousness is reflecting this reckoning. More and more people are becoming increasingly critical of the prison-industrial complex. In the summer of 2020, this criticism came to a head with the protests against police violence after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Brutal police violence and the horrors of incarceration never stop, but when examples of them are catapulted onto the national stage, people want answers and solutions.
Because policing and incarceration are inherently violent and racist institutions, prison-industrial complex abolitionists have been working to dismantle them in the hopes of creating a safer and more just world. Without the prison-industrial complex, abolitionists argue that we can divert resources to life-giving resources and services, rather than death-making institutions.
Prison-industrial complex reformers and preservationists generally argue that the system is “broken” — that it has problems that are ultimately solvable, but that maintaining its existence is imperative for public safety. The truth is that the prison-industrial complex is functioning exactly as it is meant to; its creation was never intended to provide justice, but instead it was born of the desire to maintain white supremacy and racial capitalism. When we reframe our understanding of the prison-industrial complex, it becomes clear that it is accomplishing its intended purpose.
In this context, it becomes clear that reforms, such as hiring more Black cops or more women cops — as well as proposed changes like bans on private prisons, body cams on cops and requiring that police verbally warn before shooting — will never solve the problem of police violence.
While police violence can be enacted by individual officers due to racial bias, it is not limited to that. Fathallah says it is also (if not more so) “the outcome of intensive over-policing and systemic criminalization of racialized poverty,” meaning diverse hires will not stop violence.
When concerned people focus on reforming the police and removing the so-called bad apples, policing is able to continue existing in much the same way. Fathallah mentions the phrase “preservation through transformation,” coined by Professor Reva Siegel that describes the phenomenon wherein a violent institution shifts and changes just enough to remain legitimate in the eyes of most.
Hiring diverse cops changes who is doing policing and what the police look like, but it doesn’t change what policing is. And it certainly doesn’t change the fact that the system is actually functioning exactly as it was designed to do.
The only way to stop police violence is to abolish the police. “Policing itself is a form of violence,” says Fathallah, “and violence is a fixture of policing, not a glitch in its system.” Once we acknowledge that truth, then we can see that no reform will change what police are and what they were created to be: protectors of a white supremacist state, of racial capitalism and of private property.
Trump fans who spend their days yowling about the tyranny of face masks and vaccine mandates should look up from grubbing in the right-wing news trough and encompass what is happening in Austria. “Under new rules announced by the government on Sunday,” reportsThe New York Times, “adults and minors 12 and older who have not been vaccinated or recovered from a coronavirus infection cannot go outside except to buy groceries, seek medical care or travel to school or work.” The edict will affect some 2 million people, and will remain in place for 10 days.
Yikes, right? That’s some heavy shit right there. Here in the U.S., the majority of pro-science people who have been vaccinated watch in seething frustration as every gain made against COVID is driven backward again by a clump of bitter-enders tap-dancing on our last nerve while holding badly lettered “Stop the Steal” signs. Yet I haven’t heard it suggested here that we stuff those people into their homes and tell them to only come out for work and groceries. Austria has taken “not screwing around” to a whole new gear.
My immediate instinct — and second instinct, and third — is to be horrified by this. No amount of impatience with the war on facts being waged by the anti-vax crowd justifies imposing home detention on an entire segment of the population because they disagree with a government edict… right? Does it matter that it’s only 10 days, for now? Is this the point where we have reached this particular Rubicon? Dare we cross it? Has Austria and any other country that lays down such stringent control measures fully prepared itself for a massive, possibly violent backlash? You can bet your last ragged dollar there would be one here.
Austria, Germany and other European countries have good reason to fear, regardless of how they may choose to act. COVID-19 is once again tearing a swath through the continent, with both infection and death rates rising rapidly. “Case numbers have soared across the continent — more than 50 percent last month — and the worrying trend has continued this month as winter begins to bite,” reportsNBC News. “The [World Health Organization] said Friday that nearly 2 million cases were reported across Europe in the previous week — the most the region has had in a single week since the pandemic began.”
Perhaps more ominously, the deadly Delta variant of COVID now has its own variant, designated AY.63. First discovered in Norway back in June, the variant’s variant has since spread across the country. Researchers currently believe AY.63 is no more dangerous than the Delta variant itself, and that vaccines are still highly effective against it. This is good news, of course, until the next variant comes along, and the one after that, and “Does all our stuff still work?” becomes the breathless question of the moment.
This latest European COVID surge comes at a fraught time for the U.S., which just lifted international travel restrictions after 19 months. New rules are in place — inbound visitors must have proof of vaccination and a recent negative test in order to board an international flight — but COVID is COVID, and will find a way. Two possible entry points for the virus are that travelers under the age of 18 are exempt from the rules, as are travelers from some 50 countries where vaccination availability is low.
Also, according to CNBC, “U.S. citizens are not required to present proof of vaccination before departure. However, if they do not, they will have to show proof of a negative Covid test taken within one day, instead of three days for travelers with a Covid vaccination record.”
Here in the northeast, the cold has arrived and put its feet up for another long visit. Large Thanksgiving and other holiday gatherings loom, as does the traveling required to bring far-flung families together. Nineteen months of this has left the public wobbly with virus fatigue, and therefore more likely to throw caution to the wind. The vaccinations will help enormously, but if Europe and its far more severe control measures are any guide, another fall/winter wave of infections seems unavoidable. This thing isn’t finished with us yet, and may never be.
As ever, we come to the moment where it is time to sing a few verses of everybody’s least favorite life anthem, “It Didn’t Have to Be This Way.” From Politico:
New emails and documents released by a congressional committee investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic show the extent to which top White House officials interfered in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s efforts to warn Americans about Covid-19.
The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.
The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.
The horse has left the barn on this one, but I think Austria has it backward. Instead of locking down the unvaccinated portion of the population, we should have sent Trump and his enablers home instead, and made it impossible for them to foment this massive act of negligent homicide. Water under the bridge, for sure, but imagine the possibilities.
In the meantime, wear your mask if you can, get the shots and boosters if you can, and get your kids vaxxed as well, if you can. Barring the rise of some truly monstrous variant, this winter will be nothing like what we endured in 2020, but I fear it will be bad enough. Over the last seven days in the U.S., infection rates have increased 14 percent to just above 86,000 cases. In that time, more than a thousand people died.
We are not finished with this yet, and it’s time to harden ourselves to this truth. Another COVID winter is upon us, and stout hearts will again be required.
Like an Ent of the woodlands hauling its trunked legs from the rooty firmness of the soil, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department finally bestirred itself on Friday and rose against the castled walls of the previous presidential administration. After weeks of bated silence, Garland secured two charges of contempt of Congress against former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who had saucily refused to comply with subpoenas for testimony and documents.
“Since my first day in office,” noted Garland in a Friday statement, “I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law. Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.”
Fine words, but not the actual message. The actual message telegraphed by the deeds and words of the attorney general was far simpler: Mark Meadows? Yes, you’ll be next. Earlier that same Friday, former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows likewise blew off subpoenas for testimony and document production produced by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack. Scant hours later, the Bannon indictments were announced, and the elevator in Meadows’s stomach probably went all the way down to the basement.
The fate of these subpoenas now rests with the courts, which will have to decide if Trump’s all-encompassing legal theory on executive privilege has any bearing in reality or the law. However that turns out, the Justice Department laid down an unmistakable marker for any other potential witnesses wishing to make nice with Trump by defying congress: Be prepared to trade subpoena compliance for a couple of felony charges.
“Mr. Meadows’s actions today — choosing to defy the law — will force the Select Committee to consider pursuing contempt or other proceedings to enforce the subpoena,” said committee chair Bennie Thompson and committee member Rep. Cheney in a joint Friday statement. “If his defiance persists and that process moves ahead, the record will reveal the wide range of matters the Select Committee wished to discuss with Mr. Meadows until his decision to hide behind the former President’s spurious claims of privilege.”
On Monday, Bannon surrendered to federal authorities and was charged with two counts of contempt. “On the way into the FBI’s Washington Field Office to turn himself in,” reportsABC News, “Bannon cut a promo on one of his social media accounts for his radio show, advising his supporters to not ‘take their eye off the ball.’”
Bannon and Meadows are but the first on the select committee’s long list. “This week the committee released 16 new subpoenas over two days,” reportsThe Hill, “encircling Meadows by demanding depositions from a number of those he worked closest with at the White House…. The tension with Meadows is coming to a head as the committee seems determined to trace his involvement in Trump’s election efforts at the Department of Justice; in Georgia where Trump pressured the secretary of state there to ‘find’ 11,780 more votes; and in the planning of rallies just before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.”
These latest developments come as new revelations about the Trump administration’s involvement in the 1/6 Capitol attack continue to emerge. On Sunday, ABC News reported on the existence of yet another memo, written by another Trump lawyer, offering another detailed roadmap for how to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. The lawyer in question is former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, and the memo she penned was emailed by Meadows to the top aide of then-Vice President Mike Pence scant days before the insurrection. According to ABC News:
Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won. The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of “7pm eastern standard time on January 15th” to send back a new set of votes, according to [author Jonathan] Karl. Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, “no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state.”
Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean “Congress shall vote by state delegation” — which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.
This Ellis memo, in combination with the now-infamous Eastman memo, serves to underscore the enormous pressure that was brought to bear on Pence. The vice president was the fulcrum upon which the entire plot depended; without his deliberate interference in the vote certification happening the day of the attack, Trump’s designs could go nowhere. Trump leaned hard on Pence to acquiesce, but in the end, and after some stern advice from fellow former Indiana senator and Vice President Dan Quayle, Pence stayed the constitutional course, and was nearly murdered for it by an infuriated Trumpian horde.
In the meantime, and serving as further proof of the vise grip Trump holds on the Republican Party, a predictable clot of GOP officeholders has risen in defense of Bannon. They do not declare his innocence, or try to buttress the gossamer privilege claims he clings to. No, they simply threatened the government with further chaos — “they will go after Biden’s aides for unspecified reasons if they take back the House majority in next year’s midterm elections,” according to The Washington Post — if their man is not let go.
“Power in Washington shifts slowly, but when it shifts, it shifts with great force,” Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce wrote after the events of last Friday. “You can feel it moving now, and when the former president looks out the window at Mar-a-Lago, he’ll notice that, out on a lake, the ducks are suddenly all in a row.”
We shall see. At long last, the Ents of the Justice Department are on the march. Whether they’re headed toward a wood-chipper or not remains to be determined.
From TheWashington Post’s investigation of the January 6 insurrection to The Wall Street Journal’s series about Facebook and Reuters’ examination of how “qualified immunity” protects police from prosecution for excessive force, establishment news outlets deserve credit for breaking a number of momentous stories in the past year. Yet, the establishment press missed, minimized, or mis-framed at least as many important stories as they covered thoroughly and accurately. That is why our organization, Project Censored, a nonprofit news watch, continues to monitor and identify the top 25 vital, sometimes earth-shaking stories that corporate news media ignore or distort each year.
Past critics have complained that the stories included in Project Censored’s annual lists are not actually “censored” because some of them have been covered by “dozens of publications,” albeit smaller, independent ones. Others point out that stories that appear on our list sometimes receive attention from “at least one major mainstream newspaper, magazine, [or] television news program.” Such criticisms miss the point of Project Censored’s work and gloss over significant gaps, biases and blockades in corporate media coverage that the Project exposes.
The “censored” stories that Project Censored lists in its annual story have not necessarily been completely and irrevocably repressed by the government or some other powerful institution, such as big business or a political party.
Censorship in that specific sense is known in First Amendment law as “prior restraint,” the direct effort to prevent publication or publicization of ideas or expression. That sort of censorship is relatively rare in the United States.
Instead, the independently reported stories that Project Censored highlights as “censored” have typically been subject to partial or incomplete corporate coverage. This indirect censorship is more subtle but no less consequential: The effects of underreporting or misreporting may ultimately be more harmful than nonreporting. Furthermore, an indirect blockade of news coverage need not be total in order for an issue to remain unknown to all but a small segment of the public that actively seeks reporting on that topic. Using stories drawn from Project Censored’s 2020-2021 story list, we identify four recurring patterns of indirect censorship in corporate news coverage where the outlets failed to provide the coverage and context that these stories deserved based on their social significance and relevance to current political and cultural debates.
Important Facts and Perspectives Omitted
Consider, for instance, the historic wave of wildcat strikes for workers’ rights since the onset of COVID-19, one story on the Project’s 2020-2021 list. Responding to dangerous working conditions and stagnant wages, tens of thousands of U.S. service workers, drivers, health workers, teachers, and others have taken part in more than a thousand brief, impromptu, unauthorized work stoppages. This recent burst of labor unrest may go down in history as the largest wave of wildcat strikes since the early 1970s. Nevertheless, with the exception of isolated coverage in local and specialized corporate news outlets, for more than a year, until July 2021, establishment news outlets failed to cover these strikes in any depth, much less systematically.
Without the context of an ongoing, national wave of wildcat strikes, reports of individual work stoppages here and there failed to convey the magnitude of locally organized worker resistance to pandemic working conditions. The only wildcat strike that attracted any sustained commercial media attention up until October 2021 (when reporting by corporate media on the current strike wave began belatedly to pick up) was the August 2020 National Basketball Association players’ refusal to play in the aftermath of the police shooting of Black motorist Jacob Blake; work stoppages following the Blake shooting by WNBA and MLB teams also attracted some corporate media attention.
Discordant News Framed as “Opinion”
News that challenges the political and economic status quo is frequently framed as “opinion” or “commentary” by corporate news media. For example, independent outlets such as The Nation, the Guardian and The Intercept have carefully chronicled the efforts of Canary Mission, a scandal-mongering website devoted to demonizing Israel’s critics, and its impact on free speech rights. Dating back to 2019, establishment coverage of Canary Mission and the organization’s McCarthyite tactics has been limited to an editorial in TheNew York Times by civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander. Similarly, reporting on how factory farming creates a perfect breeding ground for new diseases that can easily spread to humans was covered most thoroughly by small, independent investigative news outfits. Apart from a substantial report published by Vox, the only corporate coverage of note was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.
Isolated Corporate Coverage
Project Censored’s 2020-2021 story list also includes several topics that were the subject of extensive and well-researched articles in a single major corporate newspaper or magazine but which never got picked up or investigated further by any other major news organization. For instance, Europe’s hunger for biomass fuel made from American forests was the subject of an excellent New York Timesarticle, but no other corporate news outlet so much as ran an op-ed on the topic. The Atlanticreprinted an article from Hakai Magazine, an online journal based in Canada that focuses on ecological issues, about the dire consequences of the darkening of coastal waters, another story on Project’s 2020-2021 list, but no other corporate news outlet paid any attention to the topic whatsoever.
Blockaded Issues
Finally, some of the stories among this year’s Top 25 have, in fact, been completely ignored by the corporate news media. The dangers and legal harassment facing journalists investigating global financial corruption, for instance, has received some attention from the corporate news media outside the United States, but virtually none at all domestically. YouTube’s wholesale demonetizing of progressive channels and video makers has been utterly overlooked by U.S. corporate media, even as they have run several stories about YouTube deplatforming right-wing pundits and politicians.
The Need for Independent Media
Corporate news media are guilty of both “sins of omission” (neglecting significant facts about important issues, failing to follow up on stories that challenge the status quo) and “sins of distortion” (framing news that contradicts conventional wisdom as “opinion,” failing to interpret clearly interrelated events, such as the recent spate of wildcat strikes, as part of an overarching trend). This record of establishment press failure — amply documented by 45 years of Project Censored’s annual story lists — underscores the vital necessity of independent news reporting. In counterpoint to the corporate media’s narrow definitions of who and what count as newsworthy, which often reinforce deep-rooted inequalities, independent news outlets bring to light newsworthy stories that simultaneously expose social injustices and highlight compounding gaps and biases in corporate news coverage.
Teaching college has the odd social position of being a job with high prestige but, in the vast majority of cases, very low wages. More than half of all teaching faculty are “adjuncts” — part-time, precarious workers paid on a per-class basis, with no benefits or guarantee of continued employment. According to one survey, more than half of all adjuncts make less than $3,500 per 3-credit course, and in 2012, the median pay-per-course was only $2,700, the equivalent of $24,000 per year for a full teaching load. At large research universities, many introductory courses are also taught by graduate students, who are typically paid between $13,000 and $34,000 per year, depending on their school and subject area. Graduate student workers at Columbia, New York University, and Harvard have all gone on strike in the last year, because student workers are not paid a living wage even at the wealthiest, most elite universities.
But as pitiful and exploitative as these wages are, the median adjunct rate of $2,700 per course is still five times as much as Grinnell College in Iowa is paying some of its language instructors. And Grinnell — one of the most prestigious liberal arts schools in the country — isn’t the only college doing it. In fact, similar practices are fairly common.
The source Left Voice spoke with knew of two so-called “language assistants” at Grinnell who make $12/hour, although wages for each language assistant are at the discretion of each academic department. Their duties include teaching conversational courses and lab sections, as well as tutoring. On a per-credit basis, the language assistants are paid less than a quarter of what an adjunct would be paid to teach the same class.
Language assistants at Grinnell can be asked to work up to 20 hours per week, although it’s unclear how many hours are actually scheduled for the typical student worker. However, if someone worked 20 hours per week every week for the full academic year (nine months) at $12/hour, they would still only make $9,072. Even including the value of room and board, which the language assistants receive for free, their income is still only $23,470 for the year — about $5,000 less than what is considered a living wage for Poweshiek County, Iowa, where Grinnell is located.
On Student Workers and Exploitation
It’s an adage among student workers that whether they count as “students” or “workers” depends on which label benefits the university most at any given time. For example, when student workers try to unionize, the universities argue that the labor they perform is part of their studies, similar to an internship, so they should not be viewed as workers. This happened at Grinnell, when the union of dining hall workers voted to expand membership to all student workers, but the university filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that tutoring and research assistant jobs are not real labor. But when unionized student workers go on strike, suddenly they are in violation of their labor contracts and should have pay deducted accordingly.
One of capitalism’s internal laws demands that every employer seek to minimize labor costs as much as possible without sacrificing productivity. It’s part of how capitalists extort “surplus value” from workers. Universities do this in several different ways, including using the labor power of adjuncts and students. As of 2018, more than 90 percent of all Grinnell students work for the college at some point during their time there. The college cannot function without them.
In rural locations like central Iowa, it can be difficult to attract adjuncts, and with only undergraduate programs, Grinnell College has no graduate students to draw from to teach classes for cheap. Rather than invest in hiring permanent full-time faculty, the college instead recruits young adults to provide language instruction on 1-year contracts, without providing them any pedagogical training. While the language assistants do receive free tuition, most of them already have undergraduate degrees from their home countries, making one year of additional credits from Grinnell of little value, even as transfer credit.
One way universities justify this sort of behavior is by claiming that lab sections and conversational courses are not “real” classes, so they hire student workers at rates far lower than a faculty member would make. Even though the total number of hours for labs and conversation courses is less than a standard lecture or seminar, and hence total compensation will of course be lower, the pay per hour in the classroom is still egregiously low. And these classes count as real credits, with students receiving actual grades.
There is no hiding that this is real academic labor, and it should be compensated as such no matter who is doing the teaching.
Employing international student workers also benefits the college, as it seeks to maximize its financial position, in other ways. First, the student visa prohibits international students from working off campus under most conditions. Workers with this type of visa are more constrained in their ability to find alternative employment, which makes them easier to exploit.
Second, employing student workers gives the university additional leverage to defend its exploitation. The labor the language assistants are hired to perform is framed as supplemental, as a “great opportunity” for young adults to make a little bit of money while enjoying the “main” experience of studying and socializing abroad. Even if many student workers hired for these positions do enjoy themselves, exploitation is still exploitation, and $12/hour is still not a living wage. These workers are being taken advantage of regardless of whether the experience has some “enjoyable” elements.
Full-time lecturers at Grinnell make almost 10 times as much per hour of teaching as these assistants, which means the surplus value generated by hiring student workers instead of faculty is very high. Even private tutors, who work with only one student at a time, are typically paid at a higher rate.
The Grinnell College student newspaper wanted to run a piece about underpayment of language assistants, but was unable to do so because all of the language assistants they reached out to declined to comment — most likely out of fear over losing their jobs. Given that at least two had been willing previously to discuss their working conditions privately, it seems that the university may have issued some form of gag order.
These kinds of labor practices, specifically exploiting international students to teach language courses, are not limited to Grinnell. The source Left Voice spoke with already had direct knowledge of similar systems at Wesleyan University and Pomona, Middlebury, and Williams colleges — all very highly ranked schools. Many more schools participate in the Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant Program, which operates in a very similar way. For speakers of “less commonly taught languages” in this program, universities are not required to pay students a penny in wages, and instead are recommended to give students a monthly stipend of $500–$600 or free room and board in exchange for up to 20 hours of work per week. That arrangement is even more exploitative than the conditions at Grinnell.
Exploitation is a material economic relationship, not a feeling. Over half of billionaires in one survey said they work 60 or more hours per week, and they may feel very tired, but they are not exploited. At the same time, teenagers who work at the neighborhood pool with their friends all summer, or campus tour guides who genuinely love talking to people about their schools, are both still being exploited. It doesn’t matter how easy, fun, or even well-paying your job is; if someone is generating surplus value from your labor over which you have no control, you are being exploited.
Colleges and universities like Grinnell are exploiting international students for their multilingual capabilities, paying them a tiny amount compared to what a faculty member or even a graduate student would make, and claiming it is okay because the real pay comes in the form of a “cultural experience” and the tuition value of the courses they take — even when those courses count toward no degree or other useful credential. Neither one puts food on the table. These student workers deserve a living wage that is, at minimum, comparable to other instructors on campus who teach labs and other one-credit classes.
The U.S. is now more than 20 years beyond the Patriot Act of October 2001. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 brought a heavy U.S. state focus on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S., rationalizing an expansion of policing and surveillance activities against them. It also inspired the convergence of shared struggles for liberation out of a growing consensus that we cannot abolish policing without abolishing U.S. militarism and empire building.
The “anything goes” context of 9/11 opened up possibilities for expanded forms of policing and surveillance that are unconstitutional. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as “special registration,” put in place by the Department of Justice in 2002, targeted Arabs and Muslims as well as those from the Middle East and South Asia. Overly broad interpretations of “material support” laws denied people — generally Arabs and Muslims — their freedom and even threatened some forms of humanitarian aid.
But none of this was entirely new. All this was preceded by President Richard Nixon’s “Operation Boulder,” which law professor Susan M. Akram has described as “perhaps the first concerted US government effort to target Arabs in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and to discourage their activism on issues relating to the Middle East.”
Ironically, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City attack opened the door to the Clinton administration pushing forward a legislative effort allowing the government “to use evidence from secret sources in deportation proceedings for aliens suspected of terrorist involvement. Under the measure, the government would not have to disclose the source of the damaging information to the person whom it is seeking to deport,” The New York Times reported. A white extremist, then, had carried out a deadly bombing, but it was Arabs and Muslims (including Black Arabs and Black Muslims) who faced the prospect of deportation without ever being able to confront their accuser — or even know the identity of those accusing them.
The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established a new court charged only with hearing cases in which the government seeks to deport aliens accused of engaging in terrorist activity based on secret evidence submitted in the form of classified information. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the secret evidence court so that secret evidence could be more easily used to deport even lawful permanent residents as terrorists.
As Arab and Muslim communities were subjected to institutionalized racial profiling, this too frequently encouraged individual anti-Arab and Islamophobic actors who further intimidated and committed acts of violence against Arab and Muslim individuals in everyday life. Between 2000-2009, these violent incidents increased by over 500 percent; since 2016, 484 incidents of hate-motivated violence have been reported and many continue to remain unreported. In the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian regions, of course, the U.S. military killed people en masse while engaging in torture. The U.S. government also supported authoritarian dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who would further the U.S. imperialist agenda and simultaneously collaborate in the ongoing colonization of Palestine and siege of Gaza.
According to the Project on Government Oversight’s Jake Laperruque, the U.S., in its rush to crack down on these domestic communities, swept up international communications on an enormous and unprecedented scale. Laperruque also notes that internal U.S. communications were surveilled, as were internet metadata.
When eventually disclosed, this surveillance troubled and infuriated people across the political spectrum, some who cared about ending racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and some who generally had spent years inflaming such hatred. Many strands of society were incensed that their communications were being monitored by the government. Yet those with history in U.S.-based Global South liberation movements who were targeted by programs like Nixon’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) or those whose ancestors were killed via collaborations between the KKK and the FBI knew all too well that the Constitution was meant to protect white supremacy rather than protecting us all. At the same time, the Patriot Act truly alarmed liberals and radicals alike in its potential to perpetrate a massive expansion in policing, surveillance and repression.
The George W. Bush administration had effectively circumvented the Fourth Amendment with its protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Attempts to override the entirely bankrupt legislative action of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, was a consequence less out of concern over targeting Muslims and Arabs than anger over the widespread sweeping up of so much information about U.S. citizens — read: white people.
I lived through these past 20 years between communities in California, Illinois and Michigan. The fear was real. While working-class Arab Muslim immigrant men over the age of 16 were forced to register at their local Immigration and Naturalization Service office as part of the NSEERS program, their loved ones stood outside wondering if they would ever see them again.
The reports of violence against Arabs and Muslims — and those perceived to belong to those categories — were terrifyingly routine. Some stories reached the mainstream media; most circulated simply through word of mouth.
Now, in 2021, following the defeat of former President Donald Trump and his open promotion of anti-Muslim policies, we are witnessing the culmination of efforts led by Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. to build community-based power beyond the psychological and emotional incarceration endured between the Bush and Trump years.
The Arab Resource & Organizing Center in California’s Bay Area along with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago have for years fought back in coalition to support anti-imperialist and abolitionist principles. Left-leaning Arab and Muslim movements are affirming that just because Trump is out doesn’t mean these efforts will relent under President Joe Biden, especially not with his interventionist history and long years of support for Israeli’s colonial policies that have been killing, containing and displacing Palestinians with U.S. weaponry.
These organizations recognize that U.S. empire-building connects movements fighting anti-Black police violence, those pressing back against anti-Arab U.S. militarism and the “war on terror,” as well as groups resisting the militarization of the border and the ongoing colonization of Native land.
The recent news out of Virginia Beach of an ongoing racist attack on a Black family’s home with “music blaring racial slurs and monkey sounds as strobe lights flashed” at the house while authorities dithered sounded all-too-familiar to me. It reminded me of my own research in 2021 with the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy in the Chicago area on the status of racial justice for Arab Americans.
I had been connected to a Muslim woman who was harassed by her neighbors for three years, notwithstanding a restraining order. She told me she felt like a hostage in her own home and police were unwilling to stop the ugly attacks from neighbors coming up to the window and shouting, “F–k Arabs, f–k Muslims.” This would be followed by calls for the family to get out of the U.S.
The animosity both families have faced is painful and traumatic and stems from the same root cause — U.S. racial capitalism and empire building. But younger generations of Black people, Arabs and/or Muslims have also in the last decade recognized more than ever the necessity of conjoining our struggles against racist police violence.
This was seen most visibly in Ferguson, Missouri, but is also witnessed, for instance, in Palestinian-Black solidarity efforts across the country as young Palestinian Arab activists organize against police violence disproportionately targeting Black people, while Black activists align with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
As the Palestinian Youth Movement said in its 2014 statement of solidarity with Ferguson: “Whether the PATRIOT ACT or COINTELPRO, the targeting and criminalization of our communities must end now.” These efforts have extended through defund the police and abolition efforts uniting both communities.
Shortly after 9/11, I remember the national coalitions like Racial Justice 9/11 that grew overnight when tens of social movements affirmed their unity in the face of the expanding powers of the U.S. nation-state. Today, similar coalitions are inspired by the shared concern over the ways U.S. counterinsurgency tactics that repress movements have expanded, violently justifying the repression of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC)-led groups like the Movement for Black Lives.
When the Bush administration consolidated its internal war on Arabs and Muslims with the Patriot Act, it helped show Trump the power to move a portion of the U.S. public toward increasingly outward-facing white supremacy. Yet it also set in motion new coalitions. These coalitions have urgently grown out of the imperialist and racist policies implemented first by President George W. Bush, and then even more openly by Trump.
I wouldn’t wish those first traumatic months in 2001-2002 on anyone. Yet the solidarity resulting at least in part from the overreach and unconstitutional nature of the Patriot Act, followed by the racism of the Trump administration, gives me a measure of hope.
For all Trump’s efforts to roll back previous social movement wins, many breakthroughs came out of his 2016 presidential victory. More and more grassroots mutual aid movements have materialized, affirming the necessity of growing practices of collective love and reciprocity as alternatives to state violence. Two Muslim women, one Palestinian and one North African, entered the U.S. Congress in 2019 in Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib and Somali American Ilhan Omar. They were joined earlier this year by Rep. Cori Bush, who was active in the Ferguson demonstrations and has openly spoken of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians.
In the midst of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza this past May, Representative Bush tweeted: “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.” She added: “We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.” Tellingly, she spoke of being anti-apartheid.
Their voices in the halls of Congress are unprecedented. The effort to undermine them is intense. Yet we must remember that the long U.S.-led war on terror is an extension of the U.S.’s colonial, expansionist and racial capitalist project, rather than an exception. We cannot get stuck in celebratory hope after the defeat of Trump. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not only complicit in the war on terror but also helped expand it.
As Kali Akuno, Brian Drolet and Doug Norberg posted on Facebook on October 27, in their critique of efforts to “save democracy,” this stance is not “an argument to avoid or ignore fighting the further advance of fascistic authoritarianism. It is a critique of a view that restricts people to fighting against certain variants of capitalist governance to the exclusion of fighting against the capitalist system itself.”
If anyone recognizes that President Biden does little to help the U.S. achieve democracy, equality or diversity, it’s my Arab immigrant community. Further, there is no sign of social transformation with Trump continuing to loom on the 2024 horizon and racist provocateurs continuing to organize and contest the 2020 election of a centrist candidate. This is why we need to be willing to imagine a radically alternative future.
Twenty years ago, I remember Arab activists like Rana Elmir demanding an end to the Patriot Act. Forced to reckon with it, they understood its potentially dangerous future. They shouted at protests that it not only expands the containment, repression, and profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but could also massively expand the U.S.’s power to repress all progressive and BIPOC communities.
So here we are. Nicole Nguyen, expert on surveillance and the war on terror, reminds us that by expanding the concept of the “violent extremist” the United States has repressed resistance against the war on terror and resistance against the police.
In the face of this repression, we have no choice but to expand our practices of solidarity, creating hope through the convergence of shared struggles for liberation rooted in collective BIPOC traditions of care, nurturing relations with the land and each other, and in commitments to horizontal, non-hierarchical self-determination.
October has come and gone, and despite promises to “raise awareness” by the hundreds of pink ribbon marketing campaigns that pop up during “Breast Cancer Industry Month,” it is estimated 43,000+ people will die from breast cancer in the U.S. this year alone. In fact, in 2021, breast cancer surpassed lung cancer to become the most commonly diagnosed cancer globally.
Though we are bombarded with pink ribbon promotions across our newsfeeds, our TV screens and in empty proclamations made by our legislators, breast cancer activists are not falling for it. Each year, more and more people debunk the pink ribbon promises they see in their targeted ads and turn a critical eye toward these profit-driven campaigns.
Yet one egregious pink ribbon promotion has escaped heavy scrutiny since its inception in 2009 — the Pink Ribbon Banking Program, a partnership between Susan G. Komen and Bank of America.
The banking program consists of a credit and debit card, and — you guessed it — the renowned pink ribbon graces the front of the card, suggesting a philanthropic intent with each of your purchases. Through the program, Bank of America has pledged to donate $1.5 million to Susan G. Komen between 2021 and 2023.
Just as this banking program has snuck under the radar and escaped the scrutiny faced by many other pink ribbon marketing partnerships, so too has Komen’s near-refusal to acknowledge the environmental causes of breast cancer.
Despite decades of studies resulting in a growing body of evidence definitively indicating there is a connection between environmental factors and breast cancer, Komen’s website dubiously classifies breast cancer and the environment as a risk factor “under study.” The limited information the organization does provide on breast cancer and the environment conveniently omits information on corporations contaminating our air, water, and bodies with chemicals linked to a range of diseases and disorders, including breast cancer.
One obvious reason for this omission is that many of the corporations responsible for toxic environmental exposures are some of Susan G. Komen’s biggest co-conspirators. In the case of the Pink Ribbon Banking Program, the large donation pledged by Bank of America, a major fossil fuel funder, results in a conflict of interest whereby Komen cannot acknowledge or act on the link between fossil fuel exposures and breast cancer.
The fossil fuel continuum exposes us to chemicals including benzene, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins and per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) during extraction, processing, and the manufacture of fossil fuel products and byproducts, creating environmental exposures each linked to increased breast cancer risk. Bank of America has invested $42.1 billion in fossil fuels in 2020 alone, and the institution was one of the top three financial institutions to fund worldwide fossil fuel expansion between 2016 and 2020.
By accepting Bank of America’s donation — an arguably a small one given the institution’s financial prowess — and providing the feel-good marketing of the pink ribbon, Komen props up the fossil fuel industry, an industry that can cause the very disease the organization claims to want to end. By following the money, the path from the Pink Ribbon Banking Program to the proliferation of cancer-causing fossil fuels is laid bare, and the partnership is clearly pinkwashing.
Worse yet, while Komen has upped anti-racist talking points over the last year, environmental racism is inherent to the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuel infrastructure disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous, people of color and low-income communities, and the construction of this infrastructure — including the Canadian oil giant Enbridge’s Line 3 Pipeline, also funded by Bank of America — results in the violation of numerous Indigenous treaty rights and human rights. Water Protectors are criminalized and subject to state-sanctioned violence, and Indigenous communities have reported increased rates of human trafficking and missing and murdered Indigenous women as the fossil fuel industry ravage their communities.
This is unacceptable. Fossil fuels are destroying our lands, poisoning our water, causing climate catastrophe, and increasing our risk for breast cancer, yet Komen has expressed pride in this partnership. After years of accepting funds from partners whose products have been linked to increased risk of breast cancer, it is safe to say that Susan G. Komen’s cause marketing program is toxic.
The organization has partnered with corporations including KFC, Ford Motor Company and another controversial fossil fuel profiteer fracking company Baker Hughes. Komen accepted $100,000 from Baker Hughes in 2014 after the oil giant produced 1,000 pink fracking drill bits, in an effort they claimed would “serve as a reminder of the importance of supporting research, treatment, screening, and education to help find the cures for this disease.”
We don’t need absurd pink drill bits or pink ribbon banking cards to address breast cancer. We need corporations — and especially leading breast cancer organizations like Susan G. Komen — to take decisive action to stop breast cancer before it starts.
Susan G. Komen is compromised. The organization has a legacy of continued, unabashed complicity in pink ribbon cancer-causing partnerships, and can start on the road to truly addressing breast cancer by ending the Pink Ribbon Banking Program. Komen must stop banking on breast cancer and divest from pinkwashing now.
The left was recently faced with a disheartening reversal in the tug of war for the mayoralty of Buffalo, New York. The success of incumbent mayor Byron Brown’s unlikely write-in campaign in meeting the challenge of socialist upstart and Democratic nominee India Walton, who had bested Brown in a surprise primary win earlier this year, was almost as much of an upset as Walton’s initial turn of the tables. A Brown restoration via write-in had seemed so improbable — until the weight of establishment pressure (along with some unforced errors on the part of the Walton campaign) tilted the scales.
Now, in the wake of Brown’s revanchist triumph, left-of-center Democrats in Our Revolution, the political action nonprofit associated with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), have declared their intention to punish Brown for his subversion — they’re proposing that Brown’s position on the New York Democratic National Committee (DNC) be revoked in response to his betrayal of the nominee, which would have been treated as a grave transgression had a leftist perpetrated it. This admonishment, however, is almost certainly destined to remain symbolic. To power, hypocrisy — when it’s in service of the status quo — is deemed a virtue.
A Slap on the Wrist
Brown’s newest laurels (a fifth term reinstalled as mayor of Buffalo) come in addition to his existing membership in the New York Democratic National Committee, where he represents Buffalo Assembly District 141. He was also a state party chair until 2019.
Larry Cohen, DNC member and chair of Our Revolution, has called for a campaign to remove Brown from that position in retaliation for his blatant electoral sabotage. They described an intention to press other Democrats to issue this citation of sorts, contending that Brown, after all, actively subverted the Party’s nominee with his recalcitrant write-in, accepting support from Republicans in order to do so. As some have pointed out, Brown’s actions are, among other things, a violation of Democratic Party rules. Were another candidate to attempt such a maneuver from the left, it would not be unreasonable to expect a swift and merciless condemnation.
Cohen told Politico, “When you pull a stunt like this, somebody wins a primary, a working-class woman, and you go to every rich donor in both parties to fund a write-in campaign … it’s a disgrace.” Politico also quoted a statement from Walton herself, echoing Cohen: “Not only do I support the DNC revoking Byron Brown’s post; I believe it would set a dangerous precedent not to.” (Politico’s resulting headline initially deemed the effort “payback,” a phrasing that Walton took issue with in a tweet. The headline appears to have been changed; progressives are now “taking aim.” The Wall Street Journalmore vividly characterized it as “revenge” and “the long knives coming out” — in this metaphor, progressives are, of course, the Nazis.)
Still, any actual reprimand for Brown is, as Politico correctly notes, highly unlikely to take place. Party moderates are content with Brown’s glorious restoration, the swatting of another left-wing gadfly. There is almost no chance that any Democratic elites will entertain the notion of tarnishing the return of a moderate champion. Censuring Brown for trampling on the Democratic nominee — by political isolation, by making any kind of threat to his status with the application of pressures, whether grassroots or internal to the party — might at least have utility in discouraging future write-in gambits. But in truth, the censorious gesture has little connection to on-the-ground politics, appearing more akin to sniping between progressive and moderate elites.
Walton is right, though, that the precedent Brown has set is dangerous — especially for the left, whose future primary winners will likely feel far less certain about the solidity of any victory, now that the write-in has been weaponized. Brown has now proved that concession is a custom, not a law; any establishment candidate stung by a loss to a leftist may now seriously weigh a (well-resourced) write-in as a convenient do-over tactic. Former Rep. Joe Crowley might be kicking himself that he bowed out with such grace and solemnity when he was booted from his seat by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018.
But Our Revolution’s recent overture, unless it gathers momentum beyond elite insider and NGO circles, seems, at best, a bitter afterthought. To venture that centrists might rebuke their recent victor in service of high-minded notions like “party unity” is to proceed under the idealist assumption that the Democratic power structure operates according to a set of internally consistent moral strictures. As Cohen is likely aware, rather, bigwig moderates are happy to cite “party unity” and cohesion (“Vote Blue No Matter Who”) when these ideals can be leveraged against the left. But such lofty notions are the first thing discarded whenever they come into conflict with the determining material interests of power and capital: the real ideological pillars of establishment Democrats.
Default to Hypocrisy
Observers unfamiliar with the modus operandi of power might find it baffling on its face that the Democratic Party would countenance such an apparent betrayal. Brown, after all, toppled a Democratic nominee on a third-party line, and was happy to court funding and votes from Republicans in order to do so. Such readiness to welcome him back into the fold might read as hypocrisy.
But there’s no real contradiction here. Centrist acquiescence to Brown’s seemingly duplicitous behavior is wholly explicable in light of the material incentives from which ideological and rhetorical justifications derive. The answer is that Brown’s revolt was not a betrayal at all. It restored a major player in the New York Democratic machine to power and is broadly acceptable to major party elements, as it aligns with the interests of corporate and wealthy donors, to whom they are responsive.
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director at Our Revolution, also told Politico: “You’ve got the establishment Democratic Party trying to block the path forward for progressives, and it’s incredibly challenging and frustrating for the grassroots.” Capital and its emissaries were never going to allow a socialist to take office. It was clear from the outset that they would go to considerable lengths to prevent Walton from assuming the mayoralty (including eliminating the mayor’s office entirely).
To the point, Brown was lavished with funding from corporate allies. Most notably among them were numerous development interests that had benefited handsomely from his tax breaks and handouts to real estate, made in the course of Buffalo’s “redevelopment,” which was uneven, to say the least. During Brown’s terms, inequality continued to widen between the wealthy and the poor in Buffalo, where racial and economic disparities are “severe.” Brown had the backing of a friendly judge in an attempt to force his name onto the ballot, as well as elements of local media that gleefully publicized opposition drops against Walton for irrelevant personal issues: parking tickets, an old workplace conflict, a mean Facebook comment, a few hundred dollars in underpaid taxes. Meanwhile, Brown’s demonstrable history of graft and corruption was consigned to the background, when it was raised at all.
The establishment’s tacit acceptance of Brown’s challenge — and its repugnance at the prospect of a Walton mayoralty — found expression in the professed neutrality of some prominent Democrats. Few in the party, likely conscious of the optics of sanctioning a nominee’s sabotage, overtly endorsed Brown. Instead, they made their tolerance implicit by their passivity.
The stubborn “neutrality” of Governor Kathy Hochul, State Party Chairman Jay Jacobs, and several other leading Democrats was not neutral in the least. Taking the unusual step of declining to endorse the Democratic Party’s nominee was tantamount to supporting Brown. State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes went as far as to endorse him outright. Notable exceptions included the Erie County Democrats and, somewhat curiously, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. However, they certainly didn’t rush to her defense. (Jacobs also made a few unwise — and revealing — comments that implicitly compared Walton’s win to a hypothetical candidacy by noted racist monstrosity David Duke, which should illustrate the degree of his disdain.) These elites’ hesitance to endorse the party nominee is in line with a broader centrist revulsion at even the most milquetoast leftism, to say nothing of the raised hackles of Republicans like reactionary developer Carl Paladino.
It is perfectly comprehensible that liberal power structures should prefer a Brown victory via write-in campaign, however treacherous on its face, to the ascent of a nominal socialist. Calls for unity are deemed appropriate when they have the effect of silencing leftist critics — but when a betrayal on the scale that Brown has just perpetrated happens to thwart the left, we hear not a word. “Party unity” is a smokescreen; fealty is only demanded when it means getting in line behind a donor-friendly agenda.
Some Democratic strategists are defining that agenda, as Osita Nwanevu has written in The New Republic, via an approach that might be called “popularism” — hewing to whatever policies are most “popular” (by arguable metrics) to, theoretically, win elections and restore the Party’s worsening prospects. Naturally, this means repudiating the left, along with movements like “defund the police.” There’s a sort of circular logic there that, conveniently, legitimates existing centrist tendencies. In the same vein, we’ve seen a “Team Blue PAC” launched with the express intent of deflecting any left challenge to Democratic incumbents. The party remains bitterly divided. Yet the overwhelming majority of progressive politicians and candidates in the U.S. are far from Marxist revolutionaries — even tepid social democracy is exceptional. Any failures at the ballot box, centrists insist, can be attributed to even the most minimal overtures made to the left. These patterns are omnipresent: Tack to the middle, triangulate, compromise. In this way, the country continuously ratchets to the right, calibrated to the needs of capital. Accordingly, observers have seized upon Walton’s loss as irrefutable evidence of the unpopularity of left policy. Brown, predictably, described his win to CNN as “a rebuke of defund the police, a rebuke of socialism.”
The real battle lines in the United States are not drawn between Republican and Democrat; they lie between labor and capital. Centrist elites — indeed, the power structures of both capitalist parties — fall well within the latter camp. As such, Brown might have, on paper, betrayed the Democrats, but he never really switched sides. Though he enjoyed considerable support from unions as well, he was first and foremost the choice of the ownership class, as the electoral fracas in Buffalo has made eminently clear. We might hope that he suffers some symbolic consequence — but it will take more than a token reprimand of one comparatively minor figure to combat the power structure’s abhorrence of even the faintest specter of socialism.
The Communist Manifesto may be in the news lately because of Grimes’ trolling of the paparazzi, but it truly is one of the most important pieces ever published.
Think about next Friday. Imagine having it off. How would you use your extra day of freedom? Would you sleep? Catch up on doctor appointments? Call your friend? Spend all night watching movies with your family?
If it feels strange to imagine slowing down, then you’re not alone. We are living in a crisis of exhaustion, which in turn feeds a common tendency, or compulsion, to live life at maximum speed and efficiency — this was true before COVID-19 and is increasingly alarming now. We use phrases like “spend your time” because U.S. culture taught us that time is money; if we don’t use it, we “waste” time.
There are myriad reasons for the fact that we bring economic language into our everyday life, but one of the primary ones is simple: We work too damn much. A common response to the banality of excess work is that it’s necessary to get everything done — and that’s true. Between our daily political crises, health care system failures, the worsening climate crisis, racist and gender-based violence, ever-growing inequity, and the new stress of reviving our social lives in an ongoing pandemic, those of us who want to transform our communities have little time to waste. But these days, I think we have little to gain by following the same patterns of labor that landed us here.
This is why I’ve been an advocate and member of 4 Day Week: a campaign to reduce working hours, without reducing pay or benefits, starting with an ongoing petition campaign to recruit organizations to try it out in 2022. Here are three reasons why I’m on board, and why you should be too.
We Deserve, and Should Demand, Time to Rest and Recuperate
Perusing the Google search results of “future of work” will yield many results about automation and training digital skills, but very few on the well-being and material realities of workers left outside of the picture. Amid the current wave of worker exhaustion and dissatisfaction, the four-day workweek is first and foremost a tool that we can use to give us the tangible benefit of more time away from work to rest and recuperate.
The benefits of a four-day workweek to us as individuals and our work culture are clear: better physical and mental health, fewer burnt-out employees, more equitable workplace outcomes, and so on. But to me, a reduction of working hours for the same pay isn’t about those benefits — it’s fundamentally about justice. It should be workers and communities who reap the gains of technological innovation and “efficiency,” not just the executives and shareholders of corporations that increasingly perfect their tactics of excessive accumulation.
When we think about the future of work, we must realize we’re long overdue for innovations in the basic assumptions about how and why we work. The five-day, 40-hour workweek was invented for a version of work and life that made sense to businesses and workers in 1908. Is it not long past the time to question why we are using this more than 100-year-old, arbitrary system? Why can’t we change it and move toward something better? The COVID-19 pandemic and its ever-unfolding influence have shown us that transformation in work is both necessary and possible, and as fewer people return to work or want to return to offices, it’s the perfect time to consider a four-day week.
Here, it is important to note the foundational and inspirational work of Tricia Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization and practice that examines the liberatory potential of rest. She says it’s time to claim our right to rest and our right to refuse the grind culture of modern capitalism. Hersey, who for the last five years has led this platform, practice and movement, proclaims our need to rest as an inherent right, a spiritual necessity and an anti-capitalist resistance of white supremacy culture. In a recent post, she simply states: “Stop saying rest is a luxury or a privilege. It is not — it’s a human right.”
A Four-Day Week Would Center Humanity, Life and Sustainability — Not Output
Let’s go back to those classic U.S. ideas of “time is money,” “wasting time” or even “living to work.” There has been a steady march toward the “workification” or “economization” of every aspect of modern life, especially in the 21st century. As Amelia Horgan writes in her recent book, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism:
[Work] creeps in several directions. We work harder at work. We work longer hours. At work, we are expected to use our emotions and personalities for the benefit of our employers. Outside of our official working hours, we are called upon to excavate more of our social lives, turning hobbies into side gigs so that we can survive on our current jobs’ meagre salaries and scrape enough social and cultural capital or resources to get another job in the future.
This is not the result of a few overzealous employers. We’re trapped in a work culture that promotes the ideas of dedication to the workplace “team” or “mission” at all costs. What if time were life? What if people were valued not for their economic potential but for their humanity? What if we adopted a system of creation that centered sustainability over commodity production?
The four-day workweek alone can’t guarantee these futures, but it does allow us to talk about life beyond livelihood and “economic worth.”
For so many of us — advocates, social workers, activists, organizers, lawyers, policy makers, and more — work often consumes all our time, energy and mental health. This is the foundation of burnout. This too, is exploitation. So why not solve a problem at its root cause? Social justice movements and work are necessary and urgent, but in working to change the society we live in, we must push back against the toxic overwork and urgency that is so prevalent in our organizations and in ourselves.
I don’t want to rise and grind anymore. I want to show up more fully for my family, my friends and the causes I care for. I simply can’t do that if I’m exhausted every single day. Fighting for the change we want in the world does not have to grind us to our bones. In fact, we can’t allow that; we can’t expect to show up every single day without enough rest to solve today’s challenges. We are people, not machines, and a four-day workweek represents a step toward a culture that rebalances our lives, our relationships with work and our impact on each other.
More Time Off the Clock Means More Time Strengthening Broader Social Justice Efforts
Let’s take a look at an indirect benefit of a four-day workweek: Less time away from one another means more time with one another, building space and capacity for mutual aid, neighbors and communities.
Our time shouldn’t be replaced with another coercive requirement. The day must be for us, our loved ones and our chosen communities. With that additional time, not only will we be healthier and more capable of living our lives outside of work, but we will enhance our capacity for collective organization and social change. After all, research suggests that rest improves our attention and performance; why would this not be true for our movements?
We cannot expect to transform the world if we are not transforming our movements and organizations on a day-to-day basis. adrienne maree brown wrote about this similar conundrum over a decade ago when she led the Ruckus Society to change its concrete principles, actions and structures to reflect its vision of broader transformation. We now need to do the same when it comes to centering life, not output.
Sometimes I think organizing efforts fizzle or eventually disband because it’s someone’s third or fourth side project, and grind culture keeps us going until we literally break down — unless funding and a staff come along. (And even then we lose so much to the grind of the nonprofit-industrial complex.) The four-day workweek might shift our work culture to a more balanced place, where we have actual time to think about our own priorities, what we want to spend energy on, and how we can do it given our constraints. That balance might in turn create an aperture, an opening to a new future where we have gained some slight traction in the fight against injustice.
We Are at the Beginning of Something Big — But We Must Fight For Comprehensive Change
It bears stating that the four-day workweek is just one tool and a starting point. This should be just the beginning of a long, transformative journey.
Even so, for some, pushing for a four-day workweek in our current labor environment may seem distracting, even trivial. Certainly, what is at stake seems less urgent than other ongoing battles like the fight for $15; unionization efforts by teachers and Amazon warehouse workers; strikes at Frito-Lay and Nabisco factories; and the struggle for dignity for workers in the gig economy, domestic and care work.
There is also no doubt that to date, the four-day workweek conversation has centered white-collar office work. This criticism is fair, and the push for a four-day workweek must clearly do more to strongly center the working class, and low-wage and gig workers, especially. But other critiques that simply think it’s not possible are from writers and thinkers who don’t have the imagination, or belief, that how we spend our time is actually up to us.
What is clear is that if a four-day workweek remains a perk granted by employers, and not a systemic change, then this criticism will absolutely be true. While these groups of workers who would benefit are absolutely not all owners and managers, there is no denying that they are not the most exploited by our current system.
It is for precisely this reason, among others, that I would urge those of us who see the current system as broken to consider the transformative potential of a four-day workweek standard. As a foundational policy and movement, the four-day workweek might return material benefits to workers whether they’re a server or a health care worker.
If you agree, I urge you to sign and share my organization, 4 Day Week’s call to action and pass on the message that the future of work must be a future of transformation and justice for all — finally.
As a veteran who turned into an antiwar activist after deploying twice to Afghanistan, I’ve been railing against the toxicity of Veterans Day and calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan every year for the last decade.
This year, following the official end to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, there is a new kind of pressure because I fear most people in the U.S. will soon stop talking about Afghanistan — the country I think about nearly every day — entirely.
I know it’s tempting. The war is technically over. We saw it “end” nearly three months ago. But in reality, the war spills on in insidious ways that are harder to see and harder to resist: official and unofficial special forces operations, drone strikes and surveillance, and the training and maintenance of proxy forces.
It makes sense that, with the United States’ official withdrawal from Afghanistan, many people in the U.S. don’t want to think about it anymore. I get it — I also hate thinking about it. Most good people are disgusted by what the U.S. has done there for the last 20 years — to say nothing of the U.S. meddling in Afghan affairs throughout the ‘80s and beyond that helped give rise to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
I loathe waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of the violence that the U.S. wreaked in Afghanistan swirling like rotor wash in my mind. However, I have resigned myself to the fact that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is part of me. It’s part of all of us. To forget what our politicians, military leaders, big corporations, soldiers and all of our tax dollars did in that far off land for 20 years feels morally wrong. To forget will only allow it to happen again. We can’t just move on.
My regular thoughts of Afghanistan are bookended by the planes hitting the Twin Towers in 2001; and then the images of young Afghans civilians clinging to, and then falling off, the landing gear of one of the last military transport planes to flee Bagram Air Base in Kabul in disgrace on August 16, 2021.
In between those 20 shameful years, 775,000 U.S. service members would be deployed to the country. Over 2,400 of them would be killed. More than 20,000 would come home injured. A trillion dollars would be spent. Around 66,000 Afghan soldiers would be killed, and untold numbers of civilians would lose their lives.
An estimated3.6 million Afghans have fled their homes because of the U.S. occupation. That’s the rough equivalent of the entire populations of Montana and Arkansas being forced to flee their homes (often after a loved one was killed) to try and find new ones in a space the size of Texas — only with far fewer resources than Americans would have access to, which is a low bar. We can’t just move on.
Mainstream outlets have already dropped most of their coverage of Afghanistan since the shameful exit in August. This is no surprise given that those outlets rarely covered the war when it was officially a war. They certainly won’t be steadily covering future air and drone strikes, or unofficial secret military operations carried out by U.S. special forces, if the past is prologue.
And they hardly cover the acts of war that are being carried out all around the world by the U.S. military at this very moment. Afghanistan is still part of the U.S.-led forever wars. U.S. taxpayer-funded death and destruction will be perpetuated by American soldiers and drone operators in Afghanistan for years to come. We can’t just move on.
So how do we keep reminding ourselves and the war makers that the U.S. military wasted countless lives and enormous amounts of money in Afghanistan? How do we stay disgusted by the violence of war?
The best way is to make sure that young people know the story of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to know that the U.S. is not interested in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. This is the line that is fed to students across the country who are being targeted by any one of the 10,000 recruiters that currently stalk high school hallways across the U.S.
One might also look to the 23 million Afghans threatened with starvation after a 20-year U.S. occupation — and now the suffocating U.S.-backed sanctions — to learn more about the “freedom” and “greatness” the U.S. brings.
Then there are the 2.2 million refugees fleeing Afghanistan. I’m sure they can tell long stories about the condition the U.S. left Afghanistan in. There is nothing noble about fighting the U.S.’s wars. It is an immoral act. The evidence is in. It’s been in.
Make sure your kids, your neighbors’ kids, and beyond develop critical thinking to counteract the propaganda spewed by recruiters. Make sure they don’t glamourize war in video games and movies. Find antiwar veterans to speak in their schools. There are organizations such as Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War that would love to help you with this. Volunteer to speak about the horrors of U.S. imperialism in high schools yourself. Protest when U.S. war history is heroicized in school or at sporting events. Fight for free education and health care so there’s less incentive to sign up for the military, particularly in marginalized communities, where Black and Brown youth are disproportionately targeted for recruitment. Make sure your kids are actively anti-racist, because a country can’t fight a war without racism.
The U.S. government knew we let our guard down after 9/11 and hell followed. We can’t ever let our guard down again. No amount of moralizing or drum–beating can ever inspire people like me to fight a war for U.S. war-makers again.
The trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan could have put us well on our way toward building sustainable, green infrastructure in the U.S.
A trillion dollars could have provided a home to every homeless person in the U.S.
A trillion dollars not spent on war could have saved millions of lives over the last 20 years.
There are so many things we can do with our resources and our lives when war isn’t an option. Knowing this, after watching what happened in Afghanistan over the past 20 years makes it impossible to move on.
Shortly before Virginia’s gubernatorial election on November 2, the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, circulated an ad in which a white woman calls for Virginia public schools to ban classroom discussions of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.
Pandering to racist fears and white racial anxiety, Youngkin also stated he would ban from schools what the right wing is inaccurately describing as “critical race theory,” a term which actually refers to a body of legal scholarship, but which right-wingers like Youngkin are using as a catch-all to describe any discussion of systemic racism in the U.S. And Youngkin made the boldface and dangerous assertion that educators are destroying America. Days later, Youngkin received 50.6 percent of the vote, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Youngkin’s attack on Virginia teachers’ ability to discuss structural racism are just one example of the GOP’s ongoing attack on public and higher education — an attack that is closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure.
The Republican Party makes clear that educational practices that inform, liberate, empower, and address systemic problems that undermine democracy are both a threat to its politics and a deserving object of disdain.
The Republican Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence. This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent among individuals and institutions that call attention to social problems.
The attacks on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern civil war. This is a war against reason and racial injustice that reproduces itself through the production of, as Toni Morrison herself notes, “cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies.”
Matters of conscience, social responsibility and equity have been purged from a Republican Party that feeds off the ghosts of an authoritarian past. Its disdain for justice and civic responsibility is also evident in its defense of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, its refusal to accept the election of Joe Biden as president and its immersion in a culture of lies.
The spirit of the Confederacy is obvious in the GOP’s voter suppression laws and its support of white nationalism and white supremacy. The spirit of U.S.authoritarianism is also alive in the Republican Party’s efforts to capture the machinery of state power in order to invalidate state elections along with attempts to suppress the votes of people of color. Such actions are frighteningly similar to attacks on Black voters during Reconstruction.
The legacy of Jim Crow and an updated version of the Southern Strategy are the driving forces in the Republican Party’s attempts to remove from public and higher education, if not history itself, any reference to slavery, racism and the teaching of other unpleasant truths. In this instance, white racial fears are activated, functioning like a coma to enlist the public in increasing acts of censorship, surveillance, and other practices that deaden the moral imagination and sense of civic justice.
The current policing of education in the United States cannot be abstracted from a larger strategy to identify the institutions and individuals who “make trouble” by uncovering the truth, resisting the warmongers, and exposing the violence at work by those politicians who invite the public “to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches.” Drawing on the work of Russell Banks, I believe that the currentattacks on educators who teach about the history and contemporary realities of racism are part of a broader attempt to silence those “committed to a life of opposition, of speaking truth to power, of challenging and overthrowing received wisdom and disregarding the official version of everything.”
Authoritarianism and education now inform each other as the Republican Party in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision, and support for curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism and a brutal policy of racial exclusion. Republican legislators now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican state legislators have put policies intoplace that erase and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge and the curriculum.
Horrified over the possibility of young people learning about the history of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have resisted long-standingforms of oppression, the Republican Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance. Science, racism, truth, climate change, and dissent are now relegated to a politics of terminal exclusion and social abandonment. Attacking discussions of racism in public schools and higher education, they have made clear that “the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal.” History now repeats itself with a vengeance given that the Republican Party has a long legacy of pandering to racial resentment and white supremacy. This is a legacy that extends from Richard Nixon’s war on Black people and Ronald Reagan’s racist use of the myth of the welfare queen to Donald Trump’s birther arguments and the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, Black journalists and athletes, and Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries.
As part of the ongoing culture wars, various Republican governors have banned the teaching of what they are inaccurately deeming “critical race theory” in public schools and have also threatened to cut back state funding for public universities that introduce anti-racist issues to students, including a great deal of the founding literature of Black Studies and other sources that provoke discussions that offer a remedy to racial injustice. At the core of these attacks is a totalizing attack on critical thinking, informed judgments, truth and the core values that inform a critical notion of citizenship.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has eloquently argued that what is at stake here is the freedom to write and bear witness, the freedom to learn that liberation and civic literacy inform each other, and to recognize that the freedom to teach and learn is under siege in a culture that is being policed by the new authoritarians. How else to explain that Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), the chair of the House General Investigating Committee, required that Texas school districts provide a list of over 800 books used in classrooms and libraries.
Not surprisingly, all of these books address important social problems. Krause also asked schools to report whether his designated list of books might make students“feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Karen Attiah notes that, “looking at Krause’s list, it’s hard not to conjure up images of totalitarian regimes and violent groups that have gone after books throughout history, from Nazi attacks on works considered ‘un-German’ in 1933 to al-Qaeda destroying precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. A gander at Krause’s list reveals an almost exclusive focus on race and racism, sex and sexuality, LGBT issues, abortion and — gasp — even puberty.”
It gets worse. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators want to banish certain wordssuch as “white supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “whiteness,” “multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.” For the Republican Party, words are dangerous, especially those that encourage critical interpretations, expand human agency, and produce sentences that open the possibilities for self-determination and a more democratic social order. Banning words and books constitutes a pedagogy of unlearning and disappearance, particularly with respect to care, empathy for the suffering of others, solidarity and the courage needed to confront injustices. Banning books and words injects ignorance into the public sphere, making reason toxic and justice irrelevant. Banning books and words is tantamount to a totalitarian dictatorship of illiteracy and politics of elimination. Even more, it both erases the genocidal brutality that such practices produced in the past and normalizes the possibility of their appearing again in the future.
Words and books that offer oppressed people the opportunity to gain self-representation and the ability to narrate themselves are now viewed by many Republicans as unpatriotic. Words that unfold in books that speak to a critical engagement with history, engage the possibilities at work in the unfolding of thehuman condition, and “bear witness to the full range of our humanity” are increasingly subject to an updated form of repression that prefigures authoritarian models of governance.
Words that encompass the far reaches of human intelligibility, offering an emancipated notion of individual and public agency are now examined with a heightened racial frenzy produced by a Republican Party and its acolytes who support the toxic principles of white supremacy and a politics of disposability. In this discourse, language functions to suppress any sense of racial justice, moral decency and democratic values. It is indebted to a politics of erasure and manufactured ignorance, and it wages a major assault on reason and justice.Moreover, it turns lethal by paving the way for a rebranded form of fascism. As part of its attack on and whitewashing of history, memory is trapped in a present that is wedded to a form of historical amnesia. Under such circumstances, words, language and thought itself are being erased or misrepresented so as to operate in an educational climate marked by what Richard Rodriguez once called “an astonishing vacancy.”
Fears about banishing books feature prominently in a number of dystopian novels that provide alarming examples of future authoritarian societies. Such lessons appear lost on a sizeable portion of the general public for whom the current historical moment imitates the horrifying fictional narratives explored in dystopian novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where books are outlawed or relegated to memory holes connected to incinerators used to destroy them.
American authoritarianism is alive and well. The Republican Party and its allies are waging an aggressive onslaught against any institution, policy and ideal that upholds democracy. In a startling statement that resonates with the previous horrors of history and the war on critical intellectuals, academics and journalists, Republican J.D. Vance, who is running for the Senate in Ohio, stated that, “The Professors are the Enemy.”
This deadly contempt for academics is present not only in the ways in which the neoliberal university has stripped them of ownership over their working conditions and modes of governance, but also in its utter disregard for their role as citizen scholars and public intellectuals. This disregard was unabashedly visible when the University of Florida prohibited four university professors from providing expert testimony in lawsuits challenging state policies endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In this blatant act of censorship, possibly a signal of what is to come, the University of Florida administration decided that it would look to the Republican governor to decide how to regulate university speech and the public activities of its faculty. As Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor, pointed out,
The university does not exist to protect the governor. It exists to serve the public. It is an independent institution to serve the public good, and nothing could be more to the public good than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath.
Fortunately, this blatant assault against freedom of expression and academic freedom was reversed as a result of mounting public and legal outrage.
The ominous shadows of history are once again flooding the United States. Historical memory serves us well in making clear that the banishing of words, ideas and books is the precondition for the horrors that produced the fascist politics of the 1930s in Europe and later in the 1970s and ‘80s in authoritarian regimes in Latin America. Republican J.D. Vance’s attack on academics mirrors a statement made by Gen. Millán Astray, a firm supporter of Francisco Franco, who on October 12, 1936, while attending a speech given by the Dean of Salamanca University in Spain, shouted, “Long live death … death to the intellectuals!! Down with Intelligence.” This grotesque utterance occurred in the midst of a civil war in which intellectuals were tortured, murdered and sent into exile. The terror it both evokes and legitimizes has now become an organizing principle of the Republican Party.
The banning of books also has historical precedents that speak powerfully to the dangerous authoritarian spirit that now animates Republican Party politics. On the evening of May 10, 1933, over 40,000 people gathered in Berlin in what was then known as the Opernplatz. At the urging of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, more than 25,000 books labeled as “un-German” were burned. Soon afterward, book burnings took place across Germany in a variety of university towns. The purpose of the book burnings was to “cleanse” Germany of the literature of “racial impurity” and dissent and “purify” the German spirit. There was more at work here than what the novelist Andrew Motion called a monumental “manifestation of intolerance”; there was also a forecasting of the killings, mass murders, disappearances, and genocide that would follow this symbolic act of racial hatred and purification.
The banning of books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance to the Nazi book burning, represents a startling vision of the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy and its willingness to resurrect totalitarian practices linked to earlier periods of censorship, repression, terror and state violence. In this case, as the great 19th- century German poet Heinrich Heine observed rightly, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” The banning of books and the dehumanizing of the writers who produce them is one step away from habituating the wider public into accepting the transition from censorship to more overt criminal acts on the part of the state. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole perfectly captures the implications such actions have for developing into a full-fledged form of authoritarianism. He writes:
As a society the American people are being habituated into accepting cruelty on a wide scale. Americans are being taught not to see other people as human beings whose lives are as important as their own. Once that line has been crossed … then we know where that all leads, what the ultimate destination is. There is no mystery about it. We know what happens when a government and its leaders dehumanize large numbers of people.
The Republican Party is not calling for the burning of books or the imprisonment of authors they target as “un-American,” (at least not yet) but the spirit that animates their calls for censorship, historical cleansing, so-called racial purity, disposability and politics is alarming and a precondition for something much worse. The Nazi assertion and threat proclaiming, “The state has been conquered but not the universities” could very well be viewed as a central feature of the Republican Party’s war on critical race theory, the banning of books and its all-out war on higher education as a democratic public sphere.
The attacks on critical modes of thinking in the United States are at the center of a looming civil war in which the horrifying phantoms of the past have been re-energized and now threaten to appear once again. Beneath the spectacle of the MAGA hats, the criminal assault on the Capitol and an expanding culture of lies, there is a reactionary cultural politics financed by corporate interests and legitimized by powerful social media platforms, conservative foundations and other cultural apparatuses whose endpoint is the death of democracy.
At the current moment in the United States, manufactured fear is now coupled with the mass production of ignorance and the surging political power of U.S.-bredauthoritarianism. These forces work in tandem in order to destroy higher education, which is one of the few public spaces left where truth and justice can be taught, and resistance can be cultivated against the looming danger of normalizingwhite supremacy and an updated form of American fascism.
It would be wise for educators and others to heed Toni Morrison’s warning, so prophetically accurate at the present moment: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”
Clearly, faculty, students and others who take democracy seriously must work together to make higher education take on the responsibility of addressing the authoritarian cracks that have appeared in U.S. society. Critical education helps us to remember that justice and what it takes to be human are inextricably connectedand cannot be removed from a politics of solidarity. Justice is on hold in the United States, and, in part, this suggests that educators and those who refuse to live in a fascist world need to rethink the meaning of education and how it works as an instrument of empowerment, resistance and possibility. Fascist mythologies, racist social practices, misogynist governing structures, the prioritization of market values must be removed from higher education. Moreover, new structures of power must be enacted, and education must be reclaimed as a civic practice rather than a series of commercial exchanges. Only then will it be possible for higher education to operate as a democratic public sphere that takes seriously the notion democracy requires an informed citizenry and education is the foundation for that to happen.
Repressive forms of political education saturate everyday life and produce both areactionary shift in mass consciousness and a crisis of civic imagination. In part, this is due to an attack on democratic modes of education and public understanding in a variety of cultural apparatuses, extending from public and higher education to social media. Heightened racial hysteria has become normalized and needs to be challenged in all the cultural sites in which it appears. The pedagogical apparatuses of culture have turned repressive and dangerous, and need to be uncovered,resisted and overcome. The threat they expose to democracy should be foregrounded, and, in part, this is a role that higher education needs to address.
As Toni Morrison has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace“powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context” of tyranny. In part, this means constructing liberating pedagogies that address the dangers of white nationalism, white supremacy, political corruption and fascist politics. It also means educating students and providing faculty with the tools, time and space to create widespread forms of resistance in conjunction with other groups outside the university in orderto fight against the authoritarian attacks that constitute what amounts to a new civil war.
The struggle over education is too crucial to ignore or lose. The stakes involve not just the struggle over history, knowledge and values, but also over the truth, justice, power and the social conditions that make democratic modes of agency, identityand dignity possible. The danger democracy faces in the U.S. is almost unthinkable given the impending threat of fascism. Given the seriousness of this impendingdanger, historian Robin D. G. Kelley rightly observes, “We have no choice but to fight.”
One entry into such a struggle is to recognize that democracy and capitalism are diametrically opposed to each other. The current racist attacks on higher education cannot be successful in the long run if capitalism remains in place. Not only is there a need for critical educators to do everything possible to develop forms of popular education and a cultural politics that challenges the corporatization of the university, but they must also produce an anti-capitalist consciousness central to any viable notion of equality, freedom, justice and social change. Predatory capitalism is incompatible with democracy given the staggering inequalities in produces in wealth, income and power. David Harvey is right in asserting that,“The fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist movement.”What needs to be addressed is that the most powerful big lie in the United States is not that Trump won the 2020 election, but the normalized claim that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.
The struggle for a radical democracy suggests the need to develop a new languagethat enables people to think in terms of broader solidarities, necessary for overcoming a fractured political landscape. This should be a language that touches people’s lives, provides a comprehensive understanding of politics, offers a concrete program for social change and lays the foundation for a broad-based movement that will unite around a society steeped in the principles of democratic socialism.
Democracy and education have been pathologized under neoliberal capitalism and have drifted into a space that mimics the ineffable terrors of the past. Higher education in a time of growing authoritarianism must address the question of what its role is in a democracy and whether it is willing to define and defend itself as a democratic public sphere and protective space of critique and possibility.
As Hannah Arendt once put it in her seminal essay, “The Crisis in Education”:“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
The struggle over education must be seen as part of a crucial struggle for democracy itself. As Primo Levy warned us, “Every age has its own fascism.” His words are more prophetic than ever given the current collapse of conscience and the willingness, if not glee, of the Republican Party to embrace an American-style fascism.
As Amartya Sen once argued, it is time “to think big about society” — to move beyond the despair, isolation, theoretical abysses and political silos that stand in the way of developing a strong anti-capitalist movement. The danger facing the United States is real and must be met with the utmost resistance by a mass movement of workers, young people, academics, teachers, feminists and others who believe that making education central to politics is an urgent political necessity.
“This library is full of losers,” an HR person said to me as I signed my letter of resignation from my public library job. “A bunch of losers who just take, take, take. Good for you for moving up in the world.” I was truly shocked by her disdain for my coworkers.
The HR person approved of my resignation because I was leaving an assistant position to take a professional one at another library, joining the ranks of other degreed librarians after graduating from library school. But her comment dripped with scorn toward all the people who simply showed up to work each day, collecting their modest paychecks and serving the public. Indeed, her comment reflected a more widespread attitude that I’ve found among administrators (members of the professional managerial class) within the public sector: Many are capitalist groupies who see unionized employees working for the government as leeches. This anti-worker sentiment within the administrative ranks of many public libraries has made it easier for one of the most nefarious grifts in the U.S. economic system to take hold: the public-private partnership, a Reagan-era arrangement in which private industry “partners” with the public sector, claiming to be able to deliver more for less in service to the public.
Just the name makes me sick — the slick, corporate double-speak of it and the way partnership implies that these arrangements aren’t an insidious attack on public institutions. Perhaps the most nauseating of these assaults on the commons is one that has been silently infiltrating one of our most cherished public spaces: public libraries.
Library Systems and Services (LS&S) is a for-profit, private company that has been quietly infiltrating public libraries since 1997 when it successfully negotiated a contract to privatize the county library system in Riverside County, California. In the ‘90s and through the first decade of the 2000s, LS&S operated using a business model that will be familiar to anyone who follows local government issues in the U.S.: a private company descends on a municipal or county government that is in financially poor shape, and offers to take over (or “outsource”) management of a public service, like a library, for a fraction of the cost. This business model changed slightly, and alarmingly, about a decade ago.
In 2010, LS&S made headlines by securing contracts to privatize public libraries in affluent, economically healthy municipalities, rather than in struggling, economically marginalized communities. Flexing into a new type of market, the sky is apparently the limit for LS&S, which according to its own website has shockingly morphed into “the 3rd largest library system in the United States.”
If this is true, LS&S is a major threat to one of our most beloved, democratic and socialistic institutions. Operating unchecked, LS&S stands to make enormous profits by destroying decent-paying, unionized jobs, de-professionalizing an already struggling profession, and reducing library services to anti-human, vertically integrated content silos that do not reflect the values of local communities, all while remaining completely unaccountable to taxpayers.
How does LS&S manage to cut costs while operating services? On the backs of workers. When companies like LS&S privatize public goods, old contracts — and unions — are thrown out. Workers, even PMC workers like degreed librarians, cease earning annual salaries, solid benefits and government-backed pensions, and are instead given comparably lower hourly wages, private retirement accounts, and have no collective bargaining power or ability to file grievances. LS&S claims to be a public good — by saving communities taxpayer money — but it is actually destroying good-paying, union-backed jobs and paving the way for more private takeovers of public goods.
And for some people associated with the company, this almost appears to be a vendetta against working people. Consider the comments of LS&S founder and former CEO Frank Pezzanite. As reported in The New York Times, Pezzanite said that “a lot of libraries are atrocious … their policies are all about job security. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement.” Sounds an awful lot like most CEOs, hedge fund billionaires and other capitalists who make trillions in profits off of the labor of workers!
Additionally, as a private company, LS&S is able to circumvent transparency laws that taxpayer-funded governments are required to follow. In a nutshell: taxpayers fund LS&S-managed libraries, but have no ability to find out how LS&S operates. Freedom of Information Act? Nope — doesn’t apply to private companies. Public accountability? An interesting question. Normally, if a company does something you don’t like, you can boycott it. But if people boycotted a public library? Well then, I suppose local governments would have good, measurable data to use to justify further slashing budgets. LS&S is completely unaccountable, and we have no way of knowing how they conduct themselves internally, even as they manage a taxpayer-funded service.
And there is cause for concern in the way LS&S conducts itself, beyond just the alarming idea that one of the most beloved public institutions in American life is under serious threat of quiet privatization.
An activist engaged in public library advocacy told me that a dozen of the vendors that public libraries use to purchase books in bulk are actually owned by LS&S, so “many libraries are paying LS&S already and don’t know it.” I haven’t been able to independently confirm this claim, but it is something that investigative journalists should look into. If it’s true, his is even more sinister than it appears on its surface: this sort of vertical integration could set an extremely dangerous precedent that further erodes the public’s ability to control the information it consumes, not to mention which types of information resources are purchased by its tax dollars.
Furthermore, it’s worth taking note of who actually owns LS&S: Boston-based private equity firm Islington Capital Partners, whose co-founder, Paul Spinale, worked for Bain Capital during Mitt Romney’s tenure at the infamous firm. So just let that sink in: The same arch-villains known for siphoning taxpayer-funded government bailout money into their own pockets now have majority control over a private company that manages 80 public library systems in the U.S. and which loudly and proudly claims to be the “3rd largest library system in the US.” Even LS&S’s current CEO is a veteran grifter who previously worked for the Scantron Corporation, a company whose business model is arguably responsible for the anti-human practice of standardized testing across the education spectrum.
LS&S’s methods are not unique, but that doesn’t make them any less atrocious. It claims to take failing or shoddy public institutions and miraculously turn them around through its superior understanding of how things should be run — the same-old, same-old of private interests trying to edge out public goods. Think of Louis DeJoy and his seemingly intentional mismanagement of the U.S. Postal Service. While LS&S hasn’t been quite as disastrous for the public libraries, it represents a similar threat to the public interest: corporate takeover of public spaces. If LS&S can demonstrate that it is able to work enough corporate magic on enough libraries, then conservatives and libertarians (not to mention corporate Democrats) could be armed with over 20 years of corporate-engineered data to justify further privatization of public spaces.
What’s clear is that LS&S is not performing any actual miracles. It is destroying unionized jobs, denigrating and demoralizing workers, and contributing to the myth that unionized public sector workers are lazy, inefficient and unworthy of the benefits that they receive.
So where is the American Library Association (ALA), the professional organization that advocates for libraries and librarians, accredits library schools, holds two annual conferences and collects membership dues from nearly 60,000 librarians? Sadly, the ALA is sending mixed signals.
On the one hand, the ALA has gone on the record as staunchly opposing the privatization of public libraries, even publishing a list of talking points for communities that come up against entities like LS&S: “ALA affirms that publicly funded libraries should remain directly accountable to the public they serve. Therefore, the ALA opposes the shifting of policymaking and management oversight of library services for the public to the private for-profit sector.”
But if the ALA is so opposed to what LS&S is doing to public libraries in the U.S., then why did it bestow its prestigious John Cotton Dana Award (which bestows $10,000 grants to winning library programs) to the LS&S-run Riverside County Public Library in 2005? Or what about its inclusion of LS&S as an ALA-sanctioned scholarship funder? And why isn’t the ALA sounding a three-bell alarm at the national level, leveraging its considerable power and mobilizing its tens of thousands of dues-paying members?
Let me level with you: professional librarians come in all different flavors. Sure, you’ve got plenty of left-leaning, social-justice-oriented folks who are interested in things like serving marginalized communities, providing equitable access to the internet, and supplying quality reading materials and programming to children, teens and adults from all communities.
But this profession is also full-up with a whole other group: the gatekeepers; the library police; the librarians (and often administrators) who have a radically different agenda, and whose professional and personal ethics align a lot more closely with the pro-corporate, anti-union, anti-human ethics of private industry.
I’ve been in libraries for nearly a decade and have worked in four different organizations (including two large metro library systems) and I have encountered far more of the latter group than the former. Unfortunately, many librarians are happily welcoming their new corporate bosses rather than joining a unified effort against privatization.
It’s worth noting that librarianship as a whole is an extremely homogeneous profession that is over 80 percent white, and LS&S promises to continue this white domination within the industry: Just take a gander at the faces on display on LS&S’s Our Leadership page.
In the absence of institutional intervention or public outcry, LS&S will continue to gobble up public library systems as it works toward its de facto goal of proving that private is better than public.
Most recently, the company has its sights set on the St. Johns County Public Library in St. Johns, Florida. According to a Change.org petition and a post from the local news affiliate, the county commission has begun talks intended to move the county towards a partnership with LS&S. This county’s situation is a great example of an underlying problem that LS&S is great at exploiting. According to the St. Johns County Public Library director, the library budget of $6.8 million represents only 2 percent of the county budget. LS&S will make the case that even 2 percent is too much. And this is a proven LS&S tactic.
Take the company’s flagship case study, the Riverside County Public Library System. According to LS&S, the library was funded completely by a meager 1.15 percent ad valorem property tax when the company took over management of the system. LS&S likes to tout that this number hasn’t gone up once in 18 years under its management and yet services have basically doubled. But here’s the thing: this library was already tragically underfunded, with per-capita spending “in the lowest quartile of peer libraries,” according to a 2010 article in Library Journal. According to the same article, extra revenue was generated through leasing building space to a tenant in a large, under-used library administrative building and also through revenues generated from a new development in the county.
LS&S is not working miracles. It is slashing employee pay and claiming credit for savings that it doesn’t have much to do with, such as a county government leasing existing office space, and separate county funding sources generating new income for the library. But when LS&S comes to town, it’ll make the case that the meager amount of funding your public library operates on is actually too much.
I have an alternate proposal.
Instead of working toward maintaining or shrinking already miniscule budgets, local governments, armed with talking points and data from ALA-accredited librarians, should begin forcefully advocating for a significantly larger slice of the pie. Rather than selling libraries off to the highest bidder who promises to deliver more for less, let’s attack this problem at its root by taking away the weak point that LS&S is so great at exploiting — this public perception that public goods like libraries shouldn’t have large budgets. Follow the lead of public library advocacy groups like EveryLibrary and advocate for giving public libraries more money, and you take away the only real leverage LS&S has. And why not? When LS&S comes around, saying, I can give you more for less, it would be nice to look at them and say, No, thanks. We have plenty.
