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Category: Op-Ed

  • Report Outlining How to Cut $1 Trillion From Defense Budget Is Just a Start

    An Air Force F-35A Lightning II prepares to receive fuel from a KC-135 Stratotanker during a training sortie over the United Kingdom, on April 28, 2017.

    Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade. A rational defense policy could yield far more in the way of reductions, but resistance from the Pentagon, weapons contractors, and their many allies in Congress would be fierce.

    After all, in its consideration of the bill that authorizes such budget levels for next year, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently voted to add $25 billion to the already staggering $750 billion the Biden administration requested for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. By any measure, that’s an astonishing figure, given that the request itself was already far higher than spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s.

    In any reasonable world, such a military budget should be considered both unaffordable and deeply unsuitable when it comes to addressing the true threats to this country’s “defense,” including cyberattacks, pandemics, and the devastation already being wrought by climate change. Worst of all, providing a blank check to the military-industrial-congressional complex ensures the continued production of troubled weapon systems like Lockheed Martin’s exorbitantly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is typically behind schedule, far above projected costs, and still not considered effective in combat.

    Changing course would mean real reform and genuine accountability, starting with serious cuts to a budget for which “bloated” is far too kind an adjective.

    Three Options for Reductions

    At the request of Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the CBO devised three different approaches to cutting approximately $1 trillion (a decrease of a mere 14%) from the Pentagon budget over the next decade. Historically, it could hardly be a more modest proposal. After all, without any such plan, the Pentagon budget actually did decrease by 30% between 1988 and 1997.

    Such a CBO-style reduction would still leave the department with about $6.3 trillion to spend over that 10-year period, 80% more than the cost of President Biden’s original $3.5 trillion Build Back Better proposal for domestic investments. Of course, that figure, unlike the Pentagon budget, has already been dramatically whittled down to half its original size, thanks to laughable claims by “moderate” Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) that it would break the bank in Washington. Yet such critics of expanded social and economic programs rarely offer similar thoughts when it comes to the Pentagon’s far larger bite of the budgetary pie.

    The options in the budget watchdog’s new report are anything but radical:

    Option one would preserve the “current post-Cold War strategy of deterring aggression through [the] threat of immediate U.S. military response with the objectives of denying an adversary’s gains and recapturing lost territory.” The proposed cuts would hit each military service equally, with some new weapons programs slowed down and a few, as in the case of the B-21 bomber, cancelled.

    Option two “adopts a Cold War-like strategy for large nuclear powers of making aggression very costly and recognizing that the size of conventional conflict would be limited by the threat of a nuclear response.” That leaves nearly $2 trillion for the Pentagon’s planned “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal untouched, while relying more heavily on working with allies in conventional war situations than current strategy allows for. It would mean that the military might take longer to deploy in large numbers to a conflict.

    Option three “de-emphasizes use of U.S. military force in regional conflicts in favor of preserving U.S. control of the global commons (sea, air, space, and the Arctic), ensuring open access to the commons for allies and unimpeded global commerce.” In other words, Afghan- or Iraq-style boots-on-the-ground U.S. interventions would largely be avoided in favor of the use of long-range and “over-the-horizon” weapons like drones, naval blockades, the enforcement of no-fly zones, and the further arming and training of allies.

    But looking more broadly at the question of what will make the world a safer place in an era of pandemics, climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality, reductions well beyond the $1 trillion figure embedded in the CBO’s recommendations would be both necessary and possible in a more reasonable American world. The CBO’s scenarios remain focused on military methods for solving security problems, assuring an all-too-narrow view of what might be saved by a new approach to security.

    Nuclear Excess

    The CBO, for instance, chose not to look at possible savings from simply scaling back (not even ending) the Pentagon’s $2-trillion, three-decades-long plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, complete with accompanying new warheads. Scaling back such a buildup, which will only further imperil this planet, could easily save in excess of $100 billion over the next decade.

    One significant step toward nuclear sanity would be to adopt the alternative nuclear posture proposed by the organization Global Zero. That would involve the elimination of all land-based nuclear missiles and rely instead on a smaller force of ballistic missile submarines and bombers as part of a “deterrence-only” strategy.

    Land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles were accurately described by former Secretary of Defense William Perry as “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world.” The reason: a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon being warned of an oncoming nuclear attack by an enemy power. That would, of course, greatly increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war and the potential destruction of the planet prompted by a false alarm (of which there have been several in the past). Eliminating such missiles would make the world a far safer place, while saving tens of billions of dollars in the process.

    Capping Contractors

    While most people think about the Pentagon budget in terms of what it spends on new guns, ships, planes, and missiles, services are about half of what it buys every year. These are the contracts that go to various corporate “Beltway bandits” to consult with the military or perform jobs that could often be done more cheaply by federal employees. Both the Defense Business Board and the Pentagon’s own cost estimating office have identified service contracting as an area where there are significant opportunities for large-scale savings.

    Last year, the Pentagon spent nearly $204 billion on various service contracts. That’s more than the budgets for the Departments of Health and Human Services, State, or Homeland Security. Reducing spending on contractors by even 15% would instantly save tens of billions of dollars annually.

    In the past, Congress and the Pentagon have shown that just such savings could easily be realized. For example, a provision in a 2011 defense law simply capped such spending at 2010 levels. Government spending data shows that, in the end, it was reduced by $42 billion over four years.

    Closing Unneeded Bases

    While the Biden administration seeks to expand domestic infrastructure spending, the Pentagon has been desperate to shed costly and unnecessary military facilities. Both the Obama and Trump administrations asked Congress to authorize another round of what’s called base realignment and closure to help the Defense Department get rid of its excess capacity. The Pentagon estimates that it could save $2 billion annually that way.

    The CBO report cited above explicitly excludes any consideration of such cost savings as politically unfeasible, given the present Congress. But considering the ways in which climate change is going to threaten current military basing arrangements domestically and globally, that would be an obvious way to go.

    Another CBO report warns that the future effects of climate change — from rising sea levels (and flooding coastlines) to ever more powerful storms — will both reduce the government’s revenue and increase its mandatory spending, if its base situation remains as it is now. After all, ever fiercer tropical storms and hurricanes, as well as rising levels of flooding, are already resulting in billions of dollars in damage to military bases. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that, in the decades to come, more than 1,700 U.S. military installations worldwide may be impacted by sea-level rise. Future rounds of base closings, both domestic and global, should be planned now with the impact of climate change in mind.

    Turning Around Congress, Fighting Off Lobbyists

    So far, boosting Pentagon spending has been one of the only things a bipartisan majority of this Congress can agree on, as indicated by that House decision to add $25 billion to the Pentagon budget request for Fiscal Year 2022. A similar measure is included in the Senate version, which it will debate soon. There are, however, glimmers of hope on the horizon as the number of members of Congress willing to oppose the longstanding practice of shoveling ever more funds at the Pentagon, no questions asked, is indeed growing.

    For example, a majority of Democrats and members of the leadership in the House of Representatives supported an ultimately unsuccessful provision to strip some excess funds from the Pentagon this year. A smaller group voted to cut the department’s budget across the board by 10%. Still, it was a number that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. That core group is only likely to grow in the years to come as the costs of non-military challenges like pandemics, climate change, and the financial impact of racial and economic injustice supplant traditional military risks as the most urgent threats to American lives and livelihoods.

    Opposition to increased Pentagon spending is growing outside of Washington as well. An ever wider range of not just progressive but conservative organizations now support substantial reductions in the Pentagon budget. The challenge, however, is to translate such sentiments into a concerted, multifaceted campaign of public pressure that will move a majority of the members of Congress to stop giving the Pentagon a yearly blank check. A new poll from the Eurasia Group Foundation found that twice as many Americans now support cutting the Pentagon budget as support increasing it.

    Any attempt to curb Pentagon spending will run up against a strikingly powerful arms industry that deploys campaign contributions, lobbyists, and promises of defense-related employment to keep budgets high. In this century alone, the Pentagon has spent more than $14 trillion, up to one half of which has gone to contractors. During those same years, the arms industry has spent $285 million on campaign contributions and $2.5 billion on lobbying, most of it focused on members of the armed services and defense appropriations committees that take the lead in deciding how much the country spends for military purposes.

    The arms industry’s lobbying efforts are especially insidious. In an average year, it employs around 700 lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress. The top five corporate weapons makers got a return of $1,909 in taxpayer funds for every dollar they spent on lobbying. Most of their lobbyists once worked in the Pentagon or Congress and arrived in the world of arms contractors via the infamous “revolving door.” Of course, they then used their relationships with their former colleagues in government to curry favor for their corporate employers. A 2018 investigation by the Project On Government Oversight found that, in the prior decade, 380 high-ranking Pentagon officials and military officers had become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for weapons contractors within two years of leaving their government jobs.

    A September 2021 study by the Government Accountability Office found that, as of 2019, the top 14 arms contractors employed more than 1,700 former military or Pentagon civilian employees, including many who had previously been involved in making or enforcing the rules for buying major weapons systems.

    The revolving door spins both ways, with executives and board members of the major weapons makers moving into powerful senior positions in government where they’re well situated to help their former (and, more than likely, future) employers. The process starts at the top. Four of the past five secretaries of defense have also been executives, lobbyists, or board members of Raytheon, Boeing, or General Dynamics, three of the top five weapons makers that split tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts annually. Both the House and Senate versions of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act extend the periods of time in which those entering the government from such industries have to recuse themselves from decisions involving their former companies. Still, as long as the Pentagon continues to pluck officials from the very outfits driving those exploding budgets, we should all know more or less what to expect.

    So far, the system is working — if you happen to be an arms contractor. The top five weapons companies alone split $166 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2020, well over one-third of those issued by the Department of Defense that year. To give you some sense of the scale of all this — and our government’s twisted priorities — Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2020, nearly one and one-half times the $52.5 billion allocated for the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.

    Which Way Forward?

    The Congressional Budget Office’s new report charts a path toward a more rational approach to Pentagon spending, but the $1 trillion in savings it proposes should only be a starting point. Hundreds of billions more could be saved over the next decade by reassessing our national security strategy, cutting back the Pentagon’s nuclear buildup, capping its use of private contractors, and scaling back the colossal sums of waste, fraud, and abuse baked into its budget. All of this could be done while making this country and the world a significantly safer place by shifting such funds to addressing the non-military risks that threaten the future of humanity.

    Whether our leaders meet the challenges of today or continue to succumb to the power of the arms lobby is an open question.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Social Workers Can No Longer Remain Silent on Oppression of Palestinians

    Sahar Francis, director of Palestinian NGO "Addameer (Conscience) for Prisoner Support and Human Rights", which supports political prisoners detained in Israel and in Palestinian prisons, speaks before cameras at the offices of al-Haq Centre for Applied International Law in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on November 8, 2021.

    In October, the State of Israel criminalized six Palestinian human rights organizations, designating them as “terrorist groups,” which effectively outlawed their work, and put their workers (human rights defenders) at serious risk. These organizations — Addameer, Al-Haq, Defense for Children International-Palestine, Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, Union of Agricultural Work Committees and Bisan Center for Research and Development — all represent the best of what social and community work can look like: resistance to state oppression and struggle against political, legal and social norms that uphold racial/ethnic supremacy, all the while directly supporting those most harmed and providing vision for a more just society. To be clear, these are organizations leading the fight for the human rights and social welfare of Palestinians. And it is precisely because they have been successful in their work of exposing the injustices of Israeli military occupation and apartheid that the State of Israel is trying to delegitimize them.

    In these moments, when the oppression of marginalized communities is in such stark relief and the criminalization of social movements is so clear, social work is too often silent. As two social workers deeply invested in social movements and the wellbeing of all people, we believe our field has an obligation to stand with oppressed people, and to fight alongside those at the margins. This is what makes our contributions just and worthwhile. We understand social work to encompass many kinds of workers and approaches, not only those with credentials and licenses. Still, we know that individuals and organizations most embedded in professionalized social work are often the least likely to act when it is unpopular or inconvenient. To realize the social work we aspire towards, we must live up to our obligation, and act, especially when it is risky to do so.

    Across historic Palestine, these six targeted organizations have long fought to defend the lives and rights of Palestinians who are struggling for freedom, justice and equality. While these are leading Palestinian human rights organizations, they are reflective of a larger constellation of organizations working for the welfare of the Palestinian people. As the U.S. social work community continues to reckon with its own complicity in colonization and white supremacy, it can look to organizations like these as an example of the kind of social work we should aspire to cultivate: It is the social work that centers self-determination, solidarity and justice. It is the social work that stands up to those in power, despite the risks and inevitable attacks. And it is the social work that is criminalized and outlawed because it threatens the status quo. As social workers, we must stand with these organizations, and with Palestinians, against settler-colonization and the criminalization of resistance.

    Israel’s criminalization of Palestinian human rights defenders is an escalation in its longstanding occupation and expanding colonization of Palestine that clearly attempts to stifle a growing movement for Palestinian freedom. Israel’s claim that these six organizations were supporting and funding the armed activities of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was recently confirmed as being unfounded by several media outlets. The claims were also refuted by several European governments. Yet, this tactic of smearing and criminalizing social movements is characteristic of many governments seeking to protect their dominance, including here in the U.S. From the Black Panthers to the American Indian Movement to Black Lives Matter, the FBI has long sought to use the law to repress organizing for Black liberation, for Indigenous sovereignty, and for social justice more broadly. The legally codified and racialized use of the word “terrorist” to describe these organizations and individual Palestinian human rights defenders highlights how racialized criminalization is used as a primary tactic by governments and corporations to defend white supremacy and colonization. In condemning Israel’s decision, UN human rights experts declared it “a ​frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere.”

    Still, transnational resistance to state oppression and the criminalization of resistance is longstanding, and growing, in particular between Palestinians and social movements in the U.S. The Movement for Black Lives has reenergized historic Black-Palestinian solidarity efforts and recently more than 300 social justice organizations in the US sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that the Biden administration condemn Israel’s action. Social workers must join these movements and must stand in defense of Palestinian civil society, condemn Israel’s attempts to obstruct their crucial work, and struggle alongside all criminalized and oppressed peoples.

    Our communities cannot afford the costly price of our silence. For Palestinians, it has meant the continued expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the establishment of a system of apartheid. For Black, Indigenous and people of color in the U.S., it has meant stolen land, mass criminalization and incarceration, poverty and social, political and economic exclusion. And yet, our silence is not so hard to understand. Too often, social work has chosen professionalization, growth and partnership with harmful state agencies over social justice, solidarity and self-determination. And when it comes to Palestine, there is even more pressure to keep quiet.

    Indeed, there are powerful forces at work trying to keep people and organizations from speaking and acting in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians. There are many examples of individuals and organizations in the U.S. who have been punished for their support for Palestinians — from losing jobs to suffering social sanctions to being smeared, such as in the case of justice movements like Black Lives Matter. To show up with and for the Palestinians comes with material consequences. However, if social work is to meet the demands of our values and to move toward becoming a field that truly centers social justice, we must take risks and act in solidarity with those at the margins in the most vulnerable moments, not just when it is convenient.

    Social work in the U.S. often cannot see beyond the Western image and borders in which it was created, putting serious limits on our efforts for lasting social justice, for building solidarity, and joint, global struggle. As social workers in the belly of the beast of empire, it is our responsibility to reject boundaries and respond to how U.S. imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism and sexism have impacted the Global South — the economic crises, forced migrations, and adverse effects on mental and physical health. As a profession and community, it is imperative that we move to an internationalist and transnationalist approach to take on the overarching systems of power and oppression that span the globe, maintaining inequality and supremacy.

    The Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council and Palestinian NGO Network speaks to the spirit of liberation work far and wide, across communities: “This appalling decision [to criminalize the six Palestinian civil society/human rights organizations], which reflects decades of Israeli attempts to control the Palestinian people, is nothing but another failed attempt. The oppressed, not intimidated, will always demand justice and accountability.”

    We call on social workers to not be intimidated, but to stand alongside Palestinians and all oppressed and steadfast people, globally leading the way to freedom.

    For social workers, and for anyone who wants to speak, act and join the Palestinian freedom struggle, there are countless ways to show up. You can join other social workers by signing an open letter asking the NASW to stand with Palestinian civil society and condemn Israel’s actions. You can follow and support the six organizations financially: Addameer, Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International — Palestine, The Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees. You can also follow and support Palestinian and Palestinian solidarity organizations in the U.S. including Adalah Justice Project, Palestine Legal, Palestinian Youth Movement, United States Palestine Community Network, and Jewish Voice for Peace. You can support and participate in the Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which seeks to end the occupation of Palestine, actualize equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and make possible the internationally protected right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. And you can study and organize with your social work community or any other community you a part of. There are many study materials including DecolonizePalestine, Institute for Middle East Understanding, and Difficult Conversations about Israel and Palestine. The struggle for Palestinian freedom can be aided through social work rooted in solidarity and self-determination, which stands strongly against state repression and criminalization.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats’ Failure to Effectively Champion Voting Rights May Cost Them in 2022

    Voting Rights and Economic Justice activists prepare to be arrested on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on October 28, 2021, after they tried to gain access to Hart Senate Office Building while protesting.

    For the past year, since the 2020 presidential election, the Republican Party has waged war on the democratic process. It has initiated phony “audits” of swing-state election results that former President Donald Trump falsely claimed were rigged against him. State GOP parties have purged Trump critics, including fellow Republicans, from positions of power. And in Georgia and elsewhere, state legislators have passed laws that make it easier for the governing party to purge election officials who don’t bend to partisan claims of fraud.

    Ultimately, however, even with laws making it easier to remove low-level election officials, each state’s secretary of state still has the most say over how elections and post-election controversies are conducted in their jurisdiction. This is why the Trumpified GOP has also been steadily ratcheting up pressure on higher-ranking officials.

    Recently, Trump has been throwing his political weight behind a slew of primary challenges designed to weed out all remaining opposition within the Republican party to his claims that he can only lose an election if his opponents rig the vote count. Trump is, for example, pushing to oust Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who had the temerity to push back against Trump’s demands that he “find” enough pro-Trump votes to deliver the Peach State to him in 2020.

    And in one state after another, GOP legislators have passed, and governors have signed, laws intended to massively roll back access to the ballot box, and make it ever more difficult for poor and non-white residents to vote. Legislators have proposed draconian restrictions in 43 states this year, in an effort to roll back early voting, to impose onerous voter ID requirements, and to limit actions such as the Black church–led “Souls to the Polls” walks on the Sunday before Election Day in many states throughout the South in particular. As of July at least 17 states had signed such restrictions into law, with more states likely to follow suit.

    This is a meticulous, multipronged and deeply strategic attack on the viability of, and protections underpinning, American democratic institutions.

    In response, Democrats in Congress have pushed two pieces of legislation intended to shore up the Voting Rights Act, which has been largely drained of its force by the Supreme Court over the last decade. The most ambitious of these, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, included a host of provisions that expand automatic voter registration, protect early and mail-in voting systems, and ensure that states are subject to federal review if legislatures begin passing laws that look like they discriminate against voters of color. The second act, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, brokered as an act of compromise by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), is less far reaching but still critically important. It aims to limit gerrymandering, whereby political parties carve out voting districts that are almost immune to partisan challenges; reforms the campaign finance system; and sets in place a slew of protections for access to the ballot box.

    Yet neither of these bills has garnered significant Republican support in the Senate, although Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) did come out in favor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. In fact, quite the reverse: To date, every time the Senate votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell orders his people to lockstep filibuster and otherwise frustrate passage of the legislation. The result has been an ongoing stalemate, with McConnell seeking to sustain the state-level stampede toward massive voter suppression in the upcoming elections.

    Given the byzantine rules of the senate, this stalemate is one that Democrats can only break by ditching the filibuster. Scrapping the filibuster has been known as the “nuclear option” since Republican majority leader Trent Lott coined that phrase when musing on what he saw as the dangers of meddling with age-old institutional rules. In 2013, Democratic leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for presidential nominees. More recently, McConnell rode roughshod over it when it came specifically to Supreme Court nominees. To date, though, neither party has given the formal nod to entirely abolishing the antiquated process. Yet, given the five-alarm-fire nature of the attack on voting rights, such an option is now more needed than ever before, for without doing so, popular and vital political measures aimed at protecting fundamental parts of the country’s democratic system will continue to be stymied by a determined and anti-democratic minority.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who is nowhere near as adept as McConnell in ruthlessly keeping his caucus in line, has, however, failed dismally to move forward on this.

    Ironically, the biggest obstacle to reform is Manchin, who ostensibly supports protecting voting rights, yet has refused to contemplate abolishing or modifying the filibuster. President Joe Biden himself, the senate institutionalist that he is, has also not fully thrown his weight behind the efforts to overturn the filibuster. As a result, the Democrats have, with a lot of grumbling but precious little real bite, stepped back on the issue, and the GOP senators, whose 50 members represent 41 million fewer Americans than do their 50 Democratic colleagues, are being given free rein to run roughshod over the democratic process.

    Time is running out fast for the Democrats on this issue. Failure to protect voting rights federally this year makes it all but certain that in a critical number of closely contested states in 2022 and again in 2024, the full force of the GOP-controlled state political machinery will be brought to bear to limit the franchise and also to make it easier to reject inconvenient political results that don’t go the way the GOP and their marquee candidates want them to.

    Had the Democrats been riding high at this point in the electoral cycle, the failure to protect voting rights might not have been so catastrophic. After all, if the Democrats were to blow the GOP out of the water by huge margins, no amount of shenanigans would alter that outcome. But by no stretch of the imagination is the party faring well with critical parts of the electorate. The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging support in rural America, and it is deeply underwater with suburban independent voters, who have provided the critical margins of victory in the last two elections. The best case scenario in 2022 is that Democrats recover just enough to hold their own; the worst case and more likely scenario is that a combination of voter disillusionment due to legislative letdowns and aggressive GOP-led restrictions on the franchise couple to create a GOP sweep similar to the Tea Party wave of 2010 that overwhelms the Democratic Party and consigns it to minority status in Congress for years.

    In the aftermath of last Tuesday’s election results, the Democrats’ prospects in next year’s midterms look increasingly tenuous; and, in consequence, their failure to forcefully advocate for meaningful voting rights protections looks increasingly self-destructive.

    Biden’s popularity has sunk to dramatically low levels, and even though large majorities of the public support the infrastructure bill that just passed Congress, it seems unlikely that the president or his party will, in the short term, benefit politically from its passage, especially since so much attention has centered on the intraparty warfare within the Democratic caucus process leading up to the bill’s passage rather than the substance of the bill itself.

    This was a self-inflicted wound, as has been the abject failure to tackle McConnell’s shameful obstructionism on voting rights. It will make it that much harder for the Democrats to stand a fighting chance come 2022; and that, in turn, could have huge implications for the 2024 presidential election.

    For if the GOP controls both houses of Congress in 2023 and 2024, and if state parties continue their crusade to undermine ballot box access and to eviscerate vote count protections going into the next presidential election, the stage will have been set for a contest in which the institutional brakes that just about worked in 2020 and early 2021 to stop Trump’s attempted coup no longer hold. And that could, truly, be the death knell of democracy in the U.S.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schools That Ban Symbols of Antiracism From the Classroom Are Normalizing Racism

    A woman holds a Black Lives Matter flag along with protesters holding signs during the Occupy City Hall Protest and Car Caravan hosted by Chicago Teachers Union in Chicago, Illinois, on August 3, 2020.

    A few years ago, I took my kids on the Hemings Family Tour of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. We came to learn about people enslaved by our third president.

    At the start of the tour, the guide asked the group to guess the most valuable slave on a plantation. I knew the answer immediately, but as part of the only Black family on the tour, I wanted to know who the white people valued.

    After all the other guests gave incorrect answers. I spoke up.

    “The most valuable slave on a plantation is someone like me,” I said. “A woman of childbearing age, because I can produce more slaves for free.”

    It was the right answer. All I could do was grab my children and hold them tight.

    I didn’t read that answer in a book somewhere. I knew it in my bones, because I’ve lived in this country for four decades and have taken in enough information to know that bodies like mine, particularly during the founding of this country, were and are valued only if we are profitable. Too often, Black students are forced to conform to white culture and be subjected to repeated incidents of anti-Blackness in order to receive an education.

    Last month, just 40 minutes away from our home in Portland, Oregon, high school students participated in a virtual slave trade, where students joked about how much they’d pay for their Black classmates.

    They even said things like “All Blacks should die” and “They can run but they can’t hide.”

    I’m horrified that the Black students had to find out literally how much — or how little — their bodies are valued by their white classmates.

    Then, just a few days later, a teacher’s aide in the same district was placed on leave after she came to school in blackface. She said she was dressing up as the civil rights activist Rosa Parks and was protesting Oregon’s educator vaccination requirements.

    I wanted so badly to be shocked by this news. But I know that these incidents are ripple effects from a troubling recent policy decision by the Newberg School Board, which voted to ban teachers from hanging “Black Lives Matter” flags in their classrooms because the board sees them as political symbols.

    What that board fails to realize is that such symbols tell Black students that they are seen, protected and loved. And that matters in a place like Newberg: According to the most recent public data, Black students make up just one percent of the student population.

    The data also show that there is not a single Black teacher in the district. These facts make the flags even more imperative as they provide an easy way for kids to know who is on their side.

    “Students need to know who their allies are when they feel the need to talk or a safe space just to be themselves,” MaryJane Bachmeier testified at a school board meeting on behalf of the Newberg Education Association Executive Board against the ban on hanging Black Lives Matter flags.

    She’s right. Newberg’s school board members also failed to recognize that by rejecting symbols of inclusivity and antiracism, they are normalizing hateful behavior. That one vote has left kids unprotected and exposed to an increasingly racist environment at school.

    What’s happening in Newberg, Oregon, isn’t an anomaly. School boards across the nation are voting against historically accurate and culturally responsive curriculums. Students and teachers are being censored from saying “Black Lives Matter.”

    It’s time we recognize that these actions by public officials who seem to wish to keep systems of oppression in place are the first push of a chain of dominoes that can lead to the kinds of racially insensitive actions we’ve seen in Newberg.

    Black kids will go on to internalize the values displayed by the adults around them.

    Someday, they too will know in their bones what I knew that day on the plantation.

    Fortunately, many people across the country are working to prevent this from happening. I am the executive director of an education advocacy organization in Oregon, and we’ve seen educators, parents, students and school board members step up to advocate for students’ rights to learn from history and feel seen in school.

    This past year, we worked to elect more than 50 leaders to school boards across the state because we see how dangerous it is to have closed-minded people in charge.

    Schools are the first place where we see the humanity — or inhumanity — of people not in our families. As such, all school leaders — from teachers to local elected officials — must take responsibility for the ripple effect of their disregard for communities of color.

    If they don’t, we all should worry about what kind of trauma Black kids will carry around by the time they’re my age, based on the harrowing experiences they’re having today.

    This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Students Are Pushing US Colleges to Sever Ties With Military-Industrial Complex 

    Students and young people are witnesses to the ways in which U.S. education is deeply complicit with war and militarism.

    The violence wreaked by U.S. wars since 9/11 has been immense — more than 929,000 total deaths, including an estimated 380,000 civilian deaths. And the U.S. has spent a staggering $14 trillion in Pentagon expenditures since the Afghanistan War in 2001, up to one-half of which went directly to defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

    While these facts are outrageous, they aren’t surprising in a country built on colonial violence — a country whose power and expansion are derived from war-making, with such militarism being grounded in every institution arising from the state, including education.

    Students and young people are witnesses to the ways in which the U.S. education system is deeply complicit with war and militarism, and in increasing numbers we are demanding change. As student organizers with Dissenters — a national movement that is building local teams of young people across the country and mobilizing to reclaim our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving institutions, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world — we were part of a weeklong effort at the end of October, in which students at 16 campuses across the country rose up to unite around three central demands: 1) Universities must divest all holdings and cut all ties from the top five U.S. war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrump Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics; 2) All cops off of all campuses; 3) All recruiters off all campuses.

    Such a statement lies at the heart of Dissenter’s organizing and the Dissenter’s overall “Divest from Death” campaign, which helps students mobilize against any war-making institutions their schools may be invested in. In fact, U.S. colleges and universities are complicit in lining the pockets of war profiteers and overall defense contractors. Colleges like American University award lucrative board positions to war profiteers like Wesley Bush, the former CEO of Northrop Grumman; and just this February, a $75 million donation from major shareholders of General Dynamics — the Crown Family — was approved by the University of Chicago’s newly renamed Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice. Meanwhile, hundreds of other U.S. universities continue to renew contracts with U.S. defense companies to fund and fuel internship programs, arts and cultural buildings on campus, and to maintain a steady STEM-to-war pipeline at the nation’s top engineering schools.

    With the clear stake that U.S. institutions have in perpetuating endless war, it’s no wonder that young people at colleges across the country are rising up to demand our schools sever ties with the military-industrial complex.

    The rising momentum of antiwar organizing among students was especially apparent on Oct. 25-31 during the Dissenters Divest from Death Week of Action, as young people from Chicago, to Washington, D.C, to California, to Hawaii explicitly centered humanity over profit by disrupting “business as usual” at their institutions through direct action.

    Students Fight Investment in Militarism

    On October 11, the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) sent out an email to its student body proudly claiming that its city was one of the first to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States, and asking students to research and acknowledge the land we are on to honor the day. All the while, the University of California and CalTech have received upwards of $300 million to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. – a project that has been actively opposed by Indigenous Hawaiian protesters. Mauna Kea is a sacred place, and to build a large telescope on top of it would be a desecration. While protesting the construction of TMT on their land, Indigenous Hawaiians, including elders, have been met with arrests by settler-state police and threats of even greater violence, including the calling in of the National Guard. Where is the honor in ignoring and trampling over the calls being made by Indigenous Hawaiians to put a stop to the development?

    Hawaii Dissenters workday at Ka’ala Farm and Cultural Learning Center.

    Now more than ever, UC Berkeley students are building coalitions with organizers throughout Hawaii as they fight to protect Mauna Kea from TMT. However, they are not the only university contributing to the construction of TMT. In fact, Punahele Kutzen, a student organizer of Hawaii Dissenters in Manoa, emphasizes that while the University of California is a full partner in the construction of TMT, “so many universities are direct profiteers of this desecration,” including the California Institute of Technology and Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) associate schools like Johns Hopkins, Yale, and more.

    Student organizers involved with the Hawaii Dissenters in particular have continued to make their resistance to such funding and imperialism known against this construction, as well as various other forms of desecration on Hawaiian land. During the Divest from Death Week of Action, Hawaii Dissenters’ main focus was on highlighting the climate imperialism resulting from the U.S. military’s ongoing occupation of Hawaii.

    Stressing the imminent threat to the water supply and ecosystem by the Navy’s underwater missile testing and fuel tanks, Hawaii Dissenters directly confronted military officials and settler state politicians about their role in Red Hill — a military fuel storage facility in Hawaii.

    Conducting a community teach-in titled “Red Hill 101” as part of a coalition of O’ahu-based Water Protectors, Hawaii Dissenters also made public comments at last week’s Red Hill Task Force Meeting, in which they challenged the military and state’s claims of national security as justification for poisoning O’ahu waters and overall Hawaiian land. Beyond their week of action, Kutzen clarifies that Hawaii Dissenters are “continuing to plant pilina [relationship or union] and build connections with folks from the ground up, connecting with ʻĀina [the land] as we fight for genuine security.”

    In Chicago, students at University of Chicago have been fighting a different battle against their institution’s direct investment within militarism and destruction. University of Chicago Dissenters spent their week of action partnering up with #CareNotCops and other student organizations to protest Paul Alivisatos’s inauguration as president of UChicago.

    “President Alivisatos may be a new face, but he is beholden to the same donors, billionaire trustees,” said a representative of #CareNotCops, who wished to remain anonymous.

    Alivisatos proposed 10 “vectors and culture of engagement” for his new direction of the University — but none of them promises true change.

    “The vectors do not denounce UChicago’s active role in domestic militarism, through CPD and the University of Chicago Police Department, where ‘engagement’ is the harassment and surveillance of our Black neighbors and peers. Nor do they address UChicago’s role in international militarism — in fact, these ‘vectors’ only mention an expansion of UChicago’s investment portfolio, which currently includes four of the five largest weapons manufacturers in the country (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon), and other war profiteers,” said the representative.

    History shows us that “elite” U.S. schools like UChicago do, and will — without apology — displace and demolish whole swaths of Black neighborhoods, fund warfare and deforestation through investing multibillion-dollar endowments, bust unions, steal wages, force out disabled students and sexual assault survivors, send cops to shoot those in crisis, harass Black neighbors with private police forces, and more as it suits its financial interests.

    “That’s why we want the university to divest precious money and resources from the UChicago Police Department, and invest in funding #EthnicStudiesNow, #CulturalCentersNow and #ReparationsNow for the South-Siders whose lives have been affected by university expansion,” said Nico Emmanuel-Henderson, a Dissenters organizer at UChicago.

    Students Fight the Revolving Door Between the University and the Military

    Besides direct investment in funding and research to war-making institutions, universities have other insidious ways of ingraining militarism in the school structure. Most prominently, these include recruitment to military and policing programs like the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), which often have a major presence on our campuses. Programs like the ROTC often offer students money in grants and scholarships — or even payment of future scholarly endeavors — if they were to sign up. Such promises ensure a steady stream of college students — who too often struggle to pay for outrageous tuition on top of the other crucial resources like books, food, rent, and more — to participate in and perpetuate violent militarism and oppression.

    Moreover, recruitment looks like universities making space for weapons-manufacturing companies to scout out potential employees on campuses, both formally and informally. At schools like Howard University (HU), Lockheed Martin is especially prominent, and has been targeting Howard’s Black student population to “diversify” its own team and staff. In other words, the company is searching for Black computer science, engineering and business majors — science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students — to contribute in doing the work of militarism and oppression.

    But when we consider this horrific STEM-to-militarism pipeline, it leads us to the important question of who is behind such recruitment strategies and what stakes they have in militarism. Too often, higher-ups at universities who approve or even advocate for programs that benefit militarism have a deep connection, and thus fealty, to war-making and militarism.

    American University Dissenters posing with banner at their school’s School of International Service.

    American University (AU) most recently approved Wesley Bush — former CEO of the weapons-manufacturing company Northrop Grumman — to the Board of Trustees in January 2021, leading to a school-wide campaign against him. For their Divest from Death Week, AU Dissenters organized a “trick or treat” canvassing event to garner more signatures on their petition to remove Bush from their Board, and orchestrated a banner drop within the School of International Service — the most renowned department at American University. On top of on-campus organizing, AU Dissenters dedicated this week and beyond to standing in solidarity with Howard University students organizing the Blackburn Takeover. In fact, for almost a month now, HU students have been protesting their hazardous dorm living conditions– including mold, roaches and vermin– by occupying their Blackburn Student Center. Students’ list of demands include a meeting with the Howard administration, full academic, disciplinary and legal immunity, that student rights to vote for the Board of Trustees be reinstated, and a legitimate housing plan. As temperatures continue to drop and with the Howard administration continuing to antagonize them, student protesters rely on outside sources for food, encampment materials and things to keep warm. For the week of action, AU Dissenters was able to raise enough money to purchase a generator for them, and are making weekly supply runs for students at Blackburn, “for however long it takes.”

    AU students are making strides in their organizing, and have even caught the attention of other administrative members. In fact, in response to students sending letters for Bush’s removal, American’s University’s current president (and former Secretary of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration) Sylvia Burwell sent an email to students about Bush’s presence on the board, saying, “Members of the Board of Trustees represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, all of which are critically important for advancing the university’s mission. Wes Bush’s extensive experience in the corporate and philanthropic sectors will augment the board’s efforts and contribute to our work and our community.”

    Burwell is right about one thing: Board of Trustees members play a crucial role in advancing the university’s missions. In fact, the Board of Trustees is a critical structure in university administration, as it controls the development of the school’s overall objective, school policies, and how money can be used to implement these programs and policies. In other words, the Board of Trustees handles where students’ money goes and how that money is used. So when the board has vested interests in war and militarism, we must recognize how this can and does take precedence over the needs of students attending the university.

    Mya Franklin, a member of Northwestern University’s chapter of Dissenters, emphasized this in a statement made during the Divest from Death Week of Action: “Divesting from militarism is deeply personal because there are people on the Board of Trustees at Northwestern that have not only the power, but the ability, to provide services like stipends for low-income students, expansion of CAPS [Counseling and Psychological Services, the school’s primary mental health service], viable avenues to support survivors of [sexual assault], but they don’t. Instead, they are actively fueling death and destruction.”

    A banner dropped over an arch on Northwestern University’s campus.
    A banner dropped over an arch on Northwestern University’s campus.

    The Board of Trustees members Franklin is talking about include Phebe Novakovic, the former CEO of General Dynamics, as well as Dennis Muilenburg, whose developments as the former CEO of Boeing include creating weapons used by the Israeli military to massacre Palestinians. Northwestern Dissenters were quick to call this out in their week of action, doing a banner drop and flyering their Research and Technology building with posters reminding students of how these board members and the institution as a whole are actively fueling death and destruction.

    The work to purge university administrations of war criminals isn’t easy. After all, these are powerful individuals whose connections and resources can be weaponized to terrorize all opposition — even if they are young students. And with these profiteers being well-integrated (and monetarily beneficial) to the internal administrative structure, universities will do anything to protect them. Most of the time, this includes harassing and surveilling students on campus.

    As a member of the American University Dissenters, I (Ngakiya Camara) personally recall instances of being surveilled on campus and have been agitating against AU’s practice of doing nothing to protect Black students on campus, while simultaneously doing everything to protect Wes Bush.

    Meanwhile, Mya Franklin of Northwestern Dissenters recalls being harassed by Northwestern University Police Department (NUPD) officers while doing the banner drop and flyering, stating, “Someone ripped down one of our posters as it was drying. [A] NUPD pig pulled up and harassed us. That morning, we all acutely experienced militarism as we were fighting for anti-militarism.”

    So long as universities are prepared to prioritize the role of war criminals on our campus over the livelihood of their students, these instances will persist. And as long as powerful war profiteers occupy crucial administrative positions like the Board of Trustees, resources meant for students will be used to strengthen the lucrative ties that these profiteers have to the institutions they worked for and are invested in. But even in the face of powerful war profiteers, we will not be silent.

    Our universities, which boast to be hubs of progressiveness and inclusivity, partner with the very same death institutions that perpetuate imperialism and settler-colonialism. From their direct investments in research for colonial constructions like TMT in Hawaii or cops in Chicago, to their approval of war profiteers to their Board of Trustees, these instances too often happen behind closed doors, beyond the watchful gaze of students whose lives are threatened by these systems of militarism. But we — students and folks impacted by U.S. militarization — are watching, and recognize the power we have in faltering the systems of violence our universities strive to maintain.

    It’s now time for universities to recognize us, and our demands for them to divest from death. From Washington, D.C. to California to Hawaii, we are seeing other young people mobilizing on their campuses to call for their schools to sever ties with the military-industrial complex. We won’t stop until we turn the tide against war and militarism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Public Banking Has the Potential to Truly Revolutionize Our Economy

    Advocates for a public bank rally in Los Angeles on October 5, 2021.

    The potential for public banking — or managing taxpayer funds through publicly-controlled financial institutions rather than private banks — first became real to me in the office of my city councilmember in the spring of 2019. A group of us had fanned out through City Hall to speak with every member of the council about the benefits of establishing a Philadelphia Public Bank. The staffer we were chatting with was new to the idea, and grew more and more interested. “The Council person would really like this idea,” he said. “It’s good for the common people. It’s good for the city budget. I’m going to talk with her about it. I think she’ll want to support it.” In that moment the concept of public banking, which I found compelling and had been promoting informally for years, became not just another good idea but an attainable goal.

    It’s been a puzzle to know how to best organize around economic issues. Once we’ve identified our economic system — and more particularly the financial system — as the root of so many of our problems, what do we do next? Transforming the economy is too big to easily build campaigns around, and the number of people who can be mobilized purely on ideological grounds are small. While Occupy Wall Street was a great national teach-in on wealth inequality, including a critical understanding of the importance of democracy, it didn’t offer enough focus or program to keep people in motion.

    With an eye open to possibilities, I jumped at the opportunity to attend the founding conference of the national public banking movement, conveniently held in Philadelphia in 2012. The idea that our public money should be kept under the control of the public and used for the public good, rather than deposited in private banks to be used for private gain, was compelling. The reality that we have our own public banking model — in the 100-year-old state Bank of North Dakota — was grounding. We were all blown away by a 12-year-old from Canada who told their country’s story: how the creation of a national bank in the 1930s allowed them to build critical social, health and economic infrastructure; how a political change in the early 1970s moved control of that wealth to the private sector; and how billions of dollars that could otherwise have been used for public good have since been siphoned off to private banks.

    This is the situation we face in the United States. Currently, private banks create all the money in circulation — except for the bills and coins issued by the Treasury — by making loans. The Federal Reserve is a network of private banks with a special relationship to the Treasury. Interest on our growing federal deficit is paid to banks that hold Treasury notes. When banks become “too big to fail,” it is our tax dollars that bail them out. It’s clear that we have to address control of the money supply in order to solve a host of social, equity and climate issues. Yet, where can we get the leverage to make such a massive transformation?

    The distinction between revolutionary and reformist reforms can help us here. Revolution could be framed as transformation of our money system from one that is privately-managed for profit to a democratically-managed public utility. Visionary federal legislation to do this has been proposed, but the frame is too abstract to attract popular support. We can’t get from here to there without some steps in between.

    There are many things we can do to make our current economic system more bearable and fair within the context of the current system: raise the minimum wage, oppose predatory lending, strengthen the social safety net. These “reformist reforms” are all important and totally worth doing. And any reform that builds grassroots solidarity and momentum helps create the conditions for demanding more. But in and of themselves, they don’t challenge the power dynamics that are built into a system that privileges the accumulation of private wealth at the expense of all other life on the planet.

    A “revolutionary reform” is like a wedge into the power status quo, and I see public bank campaigns as playing this role. They provide a tangible local hook around which to organize, while calling into question the root issue around power and control. They get people thinking about the big questions: Why should our taxpayer dollars be held by private banks to be invested in their own interests when we have pressing needs at home? Why should half the cost of long-term public borrowing go to paying back interest to private bondholders? Why don’t we have control over our common wealth? A public banking campaign doesn’t go all the way. It doesn’t directly challenge the rights of private banks to essentially own our nation’s money supply. But it’s a clear step in that direction, and one that ordinary people can get excited about taking.

    The potential of public banking as a popular issue was made clear in Los Angeles in 2018. That story started with an earlier activist campaign to get the city to divest from fossil fuels. Voters approved this measure, but the city discovered that all the banks that were big enough to handle its money were complicit in fossil fuel investment. There was no place they could move the money to. The City Council president acted that summer to put a referendum on the fall ballot to establish a public bank. With only a few months in which to organize, the divestment group pivoted to an all-out campaign to support the referendum. They did an outreach and social media blitz and got endorsements from hundreds of civic, labor and other community groups. Measure B received over 44 percent of the votes, with 430,488 Angelenos voting yes to a public bank. This was not enough for a win, but an astonishing achievement from a grassroots, volunteer-run campaign with minimal funding — and it laid the foundation for a series of advances in the establishment of a structure for creating public banks throughout California.

    As I became involved in the Philadelphia Public Banking Coalition and started talking with people around the city about the potential of a public bank, I had the same experience of people catching on immediately. They had just never considered that there might be an alternative. We led an information session with the Philadelphia Urban Coalition, a group of mostly Black church leaders, who resonated strongly with the message that it’s just not right for big banks to use our public money to maximize their profits, when great needs in the city are unmet for lack of financial resources.

    Several of us went to our local farmers market on a series of Saturdays through the next summer, gathering petitions for a public bank. Everyone who was willing to talk not only got the logic of the concept right away, but was grateful to know about the campaign and eager to support it. Later, when we reached out to local community organizations to offer information sessions, the concept always made intuitive sense.

    Fortunately, our coalition has not only engaged in community outreach efforts, but also worked the inside track in City Hall. From the beginning, we have had a strong ally in City Councilmember Derek Green, and have worked closely with him over the years. One of our members who used to work as legal counsel for City Council actually drafted the legislation that Green introduced in January 2021 with a veto-proof majority — the result of a vigorous lobbying campaign on our part. Since then, we have continued our dual strategy of gathering more community support and working with the legal and financial departments in City Hall to hash out the details. We are working particularly hard on building in a democratic governance structure, to ensure that the bank is not only insulated from political influence, but rooted in the communities it is meant to serve.

    The public banking movement all across the country has experienced a groundswell since 2019, and it continues to rise. The question now is not whether there will be another U.S. bank to join the Bank of North Dakota, but when. Philadelphia is joined with the California Bay Area and Los Angeles in a race to establish our first municipal public bank. After years of dreaming and hard work, the goal of having legislation in place before the end of 2021 seems like a real possibility.

    Of course, that’s not the end of the story. A reform, revolutionary or not, is still a reform. But it’s more than just an improvement in the conditions of those who suffer under our current deeply inequitable and unjust economic system. It’s an opening wedge, a beginning of a transfer from private to public control of our financial system, a shift in the storyline about who rightfully owns and controls our common wealth.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Technology Fetishism Reigns at COP26. It’ll Keep Us Burning Fossil Fuels.

    U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) on November 2, 2021.

    The “problem with COP,” said a UN observer, is that “everyone has a business class mentality.” In the groupthink of political leaders and diplomats gathered at the Glasgow summit, above all those from the Global North, when addressing the climate crisis, a business approach must prevail. Efficiency measures and new technologies take the star role. Regulation should be “soft”: all promises and no sanctions. Virtually all industries should carry on expanding without restraint — and of the 35 stalls at COP26 that parade countries’ green credentials, only two mentioned the need to shut down fossil fuels. “The marketplace,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry assured journalists in Glasgow, will shut down the fossil fuel industries so there’s no pressing need for politics to intervene.

    This mindset is increasingly at odds with the real world. The degree of hope vested in tech solutions is unrealistic. The market isn’t shutting down the fossil fuel sector at anything like the pace required, in Kerry’s USA and elsewhere. Pollution by the wealthy must be addressed head on: The richest 1% will soon be emitting 16% of global emissions. Alongside fossil fuels, some other industries (aviation, cattle, SUVs) simply must shrink. This can be achieved while avoiding the hairshirt, as the Cambridge University engineer Julian Allwood has shown, but it will require robust regulation.

    The business class is dominating the COP26 agenda in more direct ways too. Global negotiations require the hosts to ooze credibility, yet this is running low in Glasgow. Details are emerging every day of the influence of climate deniers and the fossil-fuel lobby at the heart of Britain’s government.

    Protester holds a sign featuring Boris Johnson's face surrounded with the text "Bla Bla Bla While We Burn Burn Burn" during a COP26 demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.
    Protester holds a sign featuring Boris Johnson’s face surrounded with the text “Bla Bla Bla While We Burn Burn Burn” during a COP26 demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.

    A striking example occurred on November 3. The summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had been relishing the limelight. But on that day he quit the stage and flew by private jet to London to dine with Charles Moore, his former boss from his days as a Daily Telegraph columnist. Moore, a notorious climate-change denier, is a close chum of Owen Paterson. Paterson, a Tory parliamentarian and former government minister, has been embroiled in a long-running corruption scandal, which was now dominating the headlines.

    That same day, on Johnson’s instructions, Tory MPs voted to overturn the finding by Parliament’s standards committee that Paterson had acted corruptly — and to rip up the Parliament’s entire system for combating sleaze. It was an extraordinary move. Corruption had been proved: Paterson did receive a six-figure annual sum to lobby for private companies in Parliament, he did fail to declare this, and it is against parliamentary rules.

    The Paterson story that day concerned his corrupt activities, but we should be aware that, of his other career highlights, hostility to environmentalism is high on the list. He has long been at the center of Britain’s climate-denial fraternity — which includes his own brother-in-law, Matt “King Coal” Ridley. Paterson claims that global heating could be a good thing for Britain; he pooh-poohs those who “get emotional” about such issues.

    This was no mere yapping from the fringes. In the mid-2010s Paterson used his position as environment secretary to push for the expansion of fracking, among other environmental delinquencies.

    This invites us to ask: Why would Johnson put his political capital in support of this tool of the fossil-fuel industry — not only risking that the Tories be seen once again as the party of sleaze, but also soiling his own green credentials?

    The answer has much to do with the morphing of climate denial into climate delay and climate dereliction.

    Johnson is the archetype. Prior to his premiership he was a proud climate sceptic, of a Malthusian stripe. He fed his Telegraph readers with scraps of climate mysticism, proposing that a mini ice age could be upon us “by 2035,” and throwing snide remarks at the renewables sector — wind turbines can “barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.”

    Most memorable was his Telegraph column entitled “Forget global warming: global over-population is the issue.”

    “The biggest single challenge facing the Earth,” Johnson argued, is not climate change but women’s unrestrained fertility. He tips his hat to his father, Stanley, a World Bank and EU technocrat and Malthusian zealot. Although both men are vocal exponents of controlling women’s fertility, Johnson Sr. fathered six children and Johnson Jr. has added at least half a dozen more to the global population. This is no ordinary hypocrisy. For Malthusians, different moral rules do and should apply to rich and poor. That’s what Malthus is all about; it’s what earned him his place on the conservative seat in the pantheon of classical political economy.

    Upon entering 10 Downing Street, Johnson experienced a Damascene conversion, or so the story goes. “How Boris Johnson went from climate sceptic to eco-warrior” ran the typical headline. As any eco-warrior knows, the pressing task facing global capitalism is to quit its addiction to fossil fuels. On this count, how would the new eco-campaigning government fare? Would it, in the interests of a habitable planet, wage war on the combustion of oil and gas with the ferocity that its Thatcher-era predecessor had, in the interests of capitalist enrichment, waged war on the striking coal miners?

    Not a bit of it. Johnson stuffed his cabinet with climate deniers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, opponents of renewable energy such as Andrea Leadsom, and supporters of the coal industry such as Priti Patel. His education minister, Nadhim Zahawi, trousers nearly £400,000 (roughly $540,000) per year from an oil firm. His health minister Sajid Javid, is a militant supporter of the fracking industry — and “a big fan” of the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand. Even Alok Sharma, appointed by Johnson as President of the COP26 summit, is on the fossil-fuel payroll. He pockets five-figure sums from at least two oil companies, and has repeatedly voted in parliament for fossil-fuel expansion.

    Johnson’s conversion, then, was not to eco-warrior. Yet it did mark a shift. According to one of his aides, he was partly responding to “elite fashion” and to a changing electoral atmosphere. “Forget global warming!” doesn’t play well with voters. “We’re making things happen!” certainly does.

    But the crucial staging post on Johnson’s journey from climate denial to climate delay came when he woke to the potential of green growth. Whereas for his earlier self, climate change posed a threat to the neoliberal “business as usual” that had served his class so well and must therefore be doubted or denied, Johnson 2.0 recognizes that essentially the same economic agenda could, with moderate adjustments, be marketed as a response to the climate crisis. The core green-growth message is that all systems — energy, travel, housing, etc. — can continue as normal and indefinitely even if, in some cases, new materials and technologies are required. The subtext is that fossil-fuel consumption need not be addressed directly; technologies will provide a short-circuit, a “technological fix.”

    The surest test of whether a strategy can be classed as “eco-warrior” or “climate delay” is to ask whether it demonstrably reduces emissions in the next few years, or rests on future speculative promises. Three events last month shed light on the British government’s credentials in this regard.

    The first saw the campaign group Insulate Britain block ports and motorways to voice the demand that government should fund the insulation of all social housing by 2025, followed by the low-carbon retrofit of all homes by 2030. This plan offers an obvious ‘win win’: a jobs program that would upgrade skills; insulation of the draughty homes of poorer citizens, ending fuel poverty and saving thousands of lives; and the retrofitting of all homes to enable a successful transition from gas heating to electric heat pumps, thereby switching off one of Britain’s biggest fossil-fuel spigots. Any government of an “eco-warrior” disposition, or one that supported a social agenda of leveling up, would embrace it. Johnson’s sought to put the protestors behind bars.

    Second, just as COP26 delegates were gathering in Glasgow and applying the finishing touches to their NDCs, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced his budget. It contained virtually no funding for buildings insulation, no significant green measures and some positively brown ones, notably the slashing of tax on domestic aviation — this in a small country crisscrossed by rail and coach networks.

    Two COP26 protesters hold signs calling for serious climate policy in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.
    Two COP26 protesters hold signs calling for serious climate policy in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.

    The third was the government’s Net Zero Strategy. Alongside electric vehicles, nuclear energy and offshore wind it emphasizes three technologies: carbon capture and storage (CCS), synthetic aviation fuel (SAF), and hydrogen (which receives 501 mentions in its 368 pages). These, the document claims, will be central to enabling Britain to reach net zero by 2050.

    Without doubt, the Net Zero Strategy signals a transformation in energy policy and significant emissions reductions may well result. Equally striking, however, is that the keystone technologies are speculative. Hydrogen, SAF and CCS are proven, but they are currently tiny in scale, and many are failing. At present, Britain boasts no functioning CCS projects, no “green hydrogen” plants, and no SAF plants. Their success as pillars of the net-zero program would require a large-scale jump-start and subsequent roll-out, to include not only the construction of the plants themselves but of storage facilities and distribution networks, plus the adaptation of entire heating and transport systems (in the case of hydrogen) and the exploration of suitable aquifers (in the case of CCS). Typically, that sort of scale-up takes decades.

    Green hydrogen and SAF, moreover, require colossal energy inputs that will somehow have to be provided. Britain’s hydrogen strategy, published this August, places its heavy bets on blue hydrogen, with only small projects for its green cousin. Blue hydrogen should be renamed brownish-blue: It’s dubious and leaky, and it gambles on CCS succeeding at scale. The ulterior aim is to grant a new lease of life to the fossil fuel giants.

    The complexity and scope of even one of these programs is enormous. Arguably, one could see Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority as an analog, though that would be to overlook the fact that its central technology, the dam, was built upon millennia of engineering trial and error: It faced no novel problems of scaling up. We should certainly refrain from likening them to missions of “targeted specificity,” such as the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. And yet this is precisely the comparison that John Kerry drew earlier this year. “Fifty per cent of the reductions we have to make to get to net-zero by 2050,” he proposed, “are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. … But look at what we did to push the creation of vaccines, look at what we did to go to the moon, look at what we did to invent the internet.” (If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah. The world is burning but the fire brigade will arrive. Half of the equipment they need doesn’t exist and they don’t know how to make it, but hey, they’ll find a way. If you’re troubled and need inspiration, gaze at the moon.)

    COP26 demonstrator holds a sign that says "DEAR CAPITALISM, IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME. JUST KIDDING IT'S YOU." in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.
    COP26 demonstrator holds a sign that says “DEAR CAPITALISM, IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. JUST KIDDING IT’S YOU.” in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.

    This mindset is pervasive, a dominant strand within elite responses to the climate emergency in Britain, the U.S. and beyond. Its consequences are troubling. It sustains the technocratic myth that decarbonization must center on the deployment of new technologies, with a downplaying of the potential roles for well-known technologies (such as buildings insulation) and for social-systemic change. It breeds complacency: We needn’t worry about burning oil and coal because the tech guys will catch and store the carbon; fuel for transportation can simply be switched from hydrocarbons to hydrogen; planes can fly on biofuels and batteries, and so on.

    The leaders gathered at COP26, with the British government to the fore, remain in the thrall of technology fetishism. It’s a syndrome that in recent memory proved the undoing of what had been a supposedly successful COP gathering. I am referring to COP21 in Paris, which yielded the celebrated Paris Agreement. That concord of 2015 was based heavily on the COP delegates’ magical belief in a particular technology: Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Since then, BECCS has been discredited and the Paris Agreement on which it was built has crumbled. The hosts of COP26 appear determined to learn nothing from that debacle. The true beacons at COP26 are the civil-society movements that have encircled the negotiations, applying pressure to those within and raising awareness without. As the summiteers disperse, so the task turns to building on that experience and holding lawmakers’ feet to the fire.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporate News Conveniently Piles Blame for Virginia on Progressives

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, takes the stage during a campaign event at Caboose Commons on November 1, 2021 in Fairfax, Virginia.

    In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s elections, media commentators from virtually all points on the political compass have coalesced around a summary condemnation of progressive Democrats.

    This can perhaps be explained by a cynical yet accurate observation that has been espoused by introspective journalists now and again — political reporters are herd animals, a flock of birds who turn and wheel together in search of The Narrative. After Terry McAuliffe’s narrow defeat in Virginia and a close call in New Jersey, The Narrative came together with seamless ease: Pundits started agreeing that Democrats are reeling from these sudden electoral reversals, and that progressive intransigence in Congress is largely to blame.

    Indeed, the word “reeling” seemed to be everywhere on Wednesday morning. For a time, The Washington Post had permutations of “Democrats reel” in dueling headlines at the top of their homepage. CNN, The New York Times, even the august Virginia Mercury all followed suit in one “reeling” form or another. A Google search for “Democrats Reeling Virginia” yielded more than 2 million results by Thursday. The Narrative had been established beyond any ambiguity.

    But it is worth digging deeper to understand both the election results and the media attack on progressives that followed them. First of all, there are dozens of reasons why an exhausted electorate chose to lurch away from a party whose president pulled down 84 million votes a year ago, and who won Virginia by 10 points. The pandemic continues, and millions of parents and workers still feel the bruises raised over a frightening and frustrating 18 months of grinding uncertainty, and reasonably or otherwise, visited their wrath on the party currently in charge.

    Running against Trump a year after his defeat was not nearly as effective as Democrats had hoped it would be. Beyond that, brazenly racist campaign tactics cloaked in a discussion on “education” turned the conversation in Virginia inside out… and if we’re talking raw politics, we can’t leave out a McAuliffe gaffe that made Gerald Ford look like Marcus Aurelius. One may agree with McAuliffe’s statement, but it was kerosene on the GOP’s fire, they ran wild with it, and McAuliffe proved himself insufficient to the task of dealing with the aftermath. All in all, it was an ugly race, and Republicans do ugly campaigns far more effectively than Democrats.

    So there’s all that, but I have a strong sense that the sudden, thunderous consensus that progressives dragged down the Democrats on Tuesday stems from more than mere herd behavior by political reporters. With much of the “news” now owned by a few massive corporations, there is little affinity for progressive views and values in your average newsroom. “Socialism” is a conjuring word for the hedge fund class, as much as it is with the poorest members of Trump’s base. Often, this media bias is revealed in a passive way: Instead of attacking progressives, the press simply pretends they don’t exist.

    Wednesday’s crass chorale was far more immediate, vivid even. Much of the moneyed elite despises President Biden’s Build Back Better Act because of all the social and climate reforms it contains, and despises progressives for fighting so effectively in favor of it. The corporations that own the news have spent hundreds of millions on lobbyists trying to tear the Act down, and they have not come away empty-handed. Thanks to the ceaseless efforts from pro-corporate senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, along with a clutch of corporate Democrats in the House, the bill is a shadow of what it was.

    The fact that the bill still exists with a few teeth left, combined with the amount of time it has required for corporate Democrats to smash it up in the face of stalwart progressive opposition, has been galling for powerful people who are all too used to getting their own way. In the aftermath of Virginia, congressional progressives were offered as a scapegoat. Indeed, mutterings that “A loss would be the progressives’ fault” had been rumbling for days before the vote, from Washington, D.C. to the very lips of Terry McAuliffe, himself a Clinton ally and no friend of the left.

    The truth is that conservative Democrats made a hash of the legislative process in this instance, and have not yet stopped. Manchin continues to play the part of The Riddler, while Sinema has gone as dark and quiet as a deep-diving nuclear submarine. The pressure to pass something, anything to set the table for next year’s midterm elections was extreme before Virginia. After the barrage of headlines and condemnations, that pressure has only increased.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told Democrats that she intends to hold a vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday, and the Build Back Better Act on Friday. This would de-couple the bill, an action progressives have fiercely resisted since the summer. Pelosi appears to be betting that the weight of blame for Tuesday will compel the Congressional Progressive Caucus to run up the white flag and join her in the suck tide of milquetoast history.

    It would not surprise me in the least if Speaker Pelosi is secretly pleased with Tuesday’s election results. She has been seeking the proper club to wield against the Congressional Progressive Caucus ever since it became clear that Manchin would only settle for a hollowed-out shell of a bill. The torrid reporting on Virginia, if you believe what you read in the papers, gives her that club. The next 48 hours will show us how she chooses to swing it. One thing seems certain: Someone will be “reeling” before the deal goes down, if it goes down at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • India Walton’s Mayoral Defeat in Buffalo Sets Dangerous Precedents for the Left

    India Walton (in foreground on right), the Democratic Party nominee in the 2021 election for mayor of Buffalo, New York, walks to a polling place with supporters on October 28, 2021.

    As results were tallied on Tuesday, it became clear that incumbent Buffalo, New York Mayor Byron Brown’s campaign to restore himself to the mayoralty of Buffalo via a last-ditch write-in campaign had succeeded, defeating democratic socialist and Democratic Party nominee India Walton. Brown will now serve his fifth consecutive term. Walton’s defeat comes as a major blow to many on the left who were heartened by the socialist woman of color’s ascendancy in an unlikely blue-collar city, as well as her espousal of policies like criminal legal reform, economic redistribution, local democracy and other core left ambitions.

    Brown’s write-in campaign initially appeared quixotic: a grasp at retaining power by a jilted mayor who was felled by his own hubris. He failed to debate or significantly campaign against Walton in the primary, dismissing her as a potential threat. However, despite a slow start to the write-in, Brown, drawing upon the kind of connections that come with two decades in the mayoralty, was able to gather powerful allies and amass momentum to overcome the socialist Democratic nominee, literally rubber-stamping his return to office and ensuring the continuation of punishing neoliberal austerity in a city marred by yawning racial and class inequalities.

    Pulling Out All the Stops

    The forces arrayed against Walton were formidable. Business interests and local power brokers had an intrinsic incentive to maintain Brown, who was a friend of real estate development and a major player in an entrenched New York Democratic Party machine, formerly headed by now-deposed Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Brown and his allies leveraged his deep donor networks, a friendly media establishment, and a local elite who were “running around with their hair on fire,” panicking at the notion of a socialist executive. With these powers aligned behind him, Brown was able to chart an unorthodox path to victory.

    After Walton took an early lead in fundraising, Brown’s ability to mobilize his longstanding alliances with developers and the business elite meant that the leftist candidate’s head start was soon negated, granting Brown a late advantage. Brown’s fundraising operation included the generous use of loopholes to obscure the fact that he was receiving contributions from real estate LLCs, in defiance of campaign finance law. Corporate and development interests opened their coffers to him, and Republicans also rushed to his aid, including arch-reactionary Carl Paladino, a real estate baron and bigot notorious in the region. Brown saw no need to disavow or disclaim any of these compromised sources.

    An early, coordinated wave of opposition drops in local media seemed calculated to stir up controversy around Walton’s “scandals,” which consisted of, at worst, minor peccadilloes. Later, Brown attempted to use the courts to allow himself to run on a third-party line, despite his months-late application. (The case was adjudicated by a judge whose brother was, egregiously, a real estate developer and Brown donor.) At one point, the possibility of a Walton victory led some members of the Buffalo Common Council to venture the idea of doing away with the mayor’s office entirely, in favor of a “city manager” system.

    These fervent measures are indicative of just how threatened capital and power were by the prospect of a democratic socialist in an executive seat. It was of course inevitable that Walton would face an establishment reaction to her insurgent candidacy, but it comes as something of a surprise that entrenched interests managed to boost a write-in candidate over the Democratic nominee. Still, first-time candidate Walton’s campaign was not without strategic errors; she made missteps in messaging, occasionally faltered in her reaction to attacks and failed to establish some crucial vectors of support, particularly with labor.

    As with any loss, there are lessons, and portents, for the left. Now that Walton’s upset has itself been upset, the tactic of a do-over write-in campaign to thwart a leftist challenge has been proven viable. The precedent set in this race is a worrisome one for socialists: The establishment has just been handed another weapon in their perpetual war against candidates who even hint at pursuing anything other than the uninterrupted flow of profit.

    Party Abandonment and High-Profile Endorsements

    It may be tempting to ascribe Walton’s loss to the general reluctance of the New York Democratic Party to back their own nominee. Gov. Kathy Hochul, notably, refused to lend her endorsement. Meanwhile, State Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs made some revealing comments while justifying the party’s refusal to issue any support, comparing Walton’s surprise primary victory to a hypothetical campaign by former KKK leader David Duke. The tacit implication was that Walton’s platform was extreme, and comparably repugnant to Duke’s — a telling glimpse into just how averse people in power are to even the vaguest socialism.

    But Walton — unlike Brown — was not bereft of party supporters in the mainstream, even if some offered their support reluctantly. The local Erie County Democrats, despite some initial hesitancy, did ultimately endorse Walton, and criticized Brown’s flirtation with the Republican Party. Walton received further support from the likes of, perhaps surprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Chairman Jacobs’s incendiary comments about Duke late in the race also backfired; he was subject to strident criticism for the gaffe, apologizing after initially doubling down.

    Brown, despite his status within the party, received little to no overt support from prominent officials. Though some doubtless wished to see the mayor reinstalled, they were likely unwilling to publicly condone his recalcitrant write-in. Meanwhile, Walton had figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigning for her, as well as the endorsement of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as actor Cynthia Nixon, among others. Her loss cannot be entirely attributed to hesitance on the part of Democrats, though their withholding of the state party’s endorsement certainly distracted from campaigning.

    Future left candidates might draw conclusions: While media coverage and recognition is a necessity, a candidate risks being undermined if material, on-the-ground campaign architectures are not equally vibrant. Walton did have the support of numerous passionate and dedicated volunteers, the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America and community housing activists, among others. Yet ultimately, she was left vying for executive office in the critical absence of progressive infrastructure and the backing of institutional power brokers like organized labor.

    Bad-Faith Attacks and Messaging Stumbles

    It became clear early in the race that Walton would face an antagonistic media siege. A steady stream of anti-Walton articles issued forth, and multiple opposition drops and unfriendly reports relied on making forays into her past to concoct “scandals” out of the troubles she had faced as a Black woman and parent on the lower end of the income scale — things like parking tickets, taxes underpaid by a few hundred dollars and other attempts to make hay out of minor personal foibles. The narrative that emerged, in Buffalo News op-eds and elsewhere, was that she was unequipped to handle executive office, and generally could not be trusted. Much of this relied on conjecture, stereotyping and innuendo.

    However, Walton also stumbled into unforced errors. Her assurances of friendliness to business interests and developers — likely intended to ease establishment concerns — distracted from the message that had initially buoyed her to a primary victory. Such declarations, along with some social media messaging, seemed calculated to soften her image as a “radical,” presumably to stave off media attacks and win over more liberals by tacking to the center.

    These gestures at moderating may have done far more harm than good; the Buffalo Teachers Federation (BTF), which backed Walton in the primary, declined to endorse her in the general election following comments she made to business leaders indicating that she supported “school choice,” i.e., charter schools. Although Federation President Phil Rumore declined to elaborate on the local’s decision, it was Walton’s earlier assurances that she was opposed to charters that had helped secure BTF’s primary support. Another gaffe involved a Walton campaign mailer sent out to constituents prematurely touting a BTF endorsement, when in fact the union had remained pointedly neutral. Other small mistakes accumulated; Walton demonstrated a lack of familiarity with the tax abatement programs she campaigned on opposing, and mistakenly construed Buffalo’s charter schools as for-profit.

    Another possible contributing factor was a late-summer personnel shakeup: Walton had brought in a new campaign manager fresh off of two New York City campaigns, with no clear background in local Buffalo politics. A broader restructuring of the organization may also have made it more difficult to find solid footing in post-primary messaging. Walton spent much of her time on the defensive, reassuring landlords and business owners while distancing herself from initial positions like defunding the police.

    The campaign may have been hampered by a sense of inevitability, characterizing Brown’s write-in as the doing of a “sore loser,” rather than a serious challenge — perhaps overconfident that victory was assured by virtue of the fact that Walton was the Democratic nominee. Meanwhile, polling continually showed that Brown had a significant lead on Walton, even as her campaign seemed to downplay his write-in effort.

    Unions Send a Clear Message

    In post-election analysis, the support of unions may prove to have been a critical hinge. Curiously, Walton, despite her working-class bona fides and former union membership, attracted relatively little labor support. Worsening things were further missteps, as when Walton mailers were sent out without a union bug: meaning they were printed by non-union print shops. Union officials noticed, and were highly displeased. Major unions like the Service Employees International Union 1199 and Communications Workers of America District 1, both of which have shown willingness to work with progressives, declined to endorse Walton — even though she was once an 1199 member.

    Although Walton wasn’t entirely without union backers, few, with the possible exception of the New York State Nurses’ Association, were significant political players in Western New York. Again, losing the support of the Buffalo Teachers’ Federation robbed Walton of her largest and most politically influential labor ally. Meanwhile, major unions like American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and an AFSCME affiliate, the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), aggressively campaigned for Brown, mobilizing their members to support his write-in effort.

    A complex series of interests and factors delivered Brown an advantage in union support that may have tipped the scales in favor of the dethroned mayor. Some unions, especially those in the building trades, lean conservative, and have an interest in maintaining the high rates of development spurred by Brown’s tax abatements and real estate-friendly policy. Many significant unions seemed to hesitate over the summer, then either intervened on Brown’s behalf or sat out the race entirely.

    As November approached, Brown, with major union advocacies secured, looked to those backers for help distributing the rubber stamps meant to facilitate ballot write-ins. Supporters in both the CSEA and the Transport Workers Union of America were deputized to spread the stamps to voters. The stamps, legal under New York election law, were a mundane but likely essential factor in overcoming Brown’s disadvantage as a write-in candidate. In addition, labor mobilized for a member-to-member program, as detailed in HuffPost, that urged their fellow union members to back Brown.

    Walton also missed out on potential advantages that could have been conferred by connecting major issues, such as tax abatements, to the challenges faced by key unions like AFSCME. Buffalo’s financial woes have been exacerbated by expansive development and tax giveaways for developers, starving the city of resources needed to support an increasingly strained infrastructure and workforce. Even though those issues directly impact municipal workers, Walton, though she regularly spoke on tax abatements, never seemed to make the connection.

    Although some mistakes are to be expected from a first-time candidate (and it was always unlikely in any case that a majority of organized labor would support Walton), the resounding lack of labor support raises questions about Walton’s strategy. Her campaign may have missed other critical opportunities by failing to do early and sufficient outreach to unions. In a city with little standing progressive infrastructure, these missteps could have been deciding factors in bestowing Brown with his own unlikely ascent to power.

    Lessons for the Left

    Walton’s loss underscores a troubling pattern for democratic socialist insurgents: To this point, victory has most often proven viable in low-turnout primaries in solidly blue areas, against entrenched incumbents who decline to seriously campaign. These were the conditions under which Ocasio-Cortez prevailed against Rep. Joe Crowley, and Jamaal Bowman against Rep. Eliot Engels. However, in these cases, the incumbents acknowledged their loss and allowed left nominees to run against Republicans without intervening. Brown has now proven that, for candidates defeated in a primary, gallant concession of November’s race is not an absolute necessity, and that an ascent to power can be continued unbroken — if they’re willing to run against their own party line.

    Democratic socialists do not compete on equal terrain; any missteps are seized upon and magnified. Yet another hurdle has now been thrown up against leftist candidates, who already face towering structural disadvantages. With a newly viable pathway to November victory, incumbents — especially those with independent relationships and power networks that aren’t reliant on party power brokers — may now salivate at the chance of a second shot. The consequences for the left could be dire.

    One of the lessons that socialists might take away from this painful defeat is that national media attention and popular surrogates speaking on a candidate’s behalf are no substitute for robust campaign infrastructure and supportive local coalitions. Although Walton scored high-profile endorsements and a late campaign visit by Representative Ocasio-Cortez, she lacked the support of local institutions with the trust of and access to voters. Ultimately, local organization and power proved more of a determining factor than star power. The volume of national attention obscured weaknesses where they mattered most: in Buffalo.

    More than any other recent loss by progressives, Walton’s brings with it a troubling set of implications, on top of the sting of dashed hopes. Analogously to recent disingenuous attempts to use recall processes to remove leftist officeholders like Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, it seems that the write-in, a mechanism of ostensible democracy, has now been weaponized. The widespread assumption that write-ins are a long shot, an exercise in futility, has now been shattered. Already facing an uneven playing field and the reliable opposition of powerful interests, socialist candidates may find themselves stymied by yet another tactic now added to the formidable arsenal of capital and power.

    Walton’s loss means that the neoliberal project will continue in a city with deeply entrenched inequality, and that Brown’s machine will persist, at least for the time being, having survived its most critical challenge in decades. The dynamic of Buffalo’s supposed “redevelopment” — really, a hollow shell of expensive projects and tax giveaways that assured corporate profit and did less than nothing for the poor — now seems destined to continue, to the detriment of Buffalo’s people, particularly its people of color.

    Though the Walton campaign’s own missteps may have damaged her chances, Brown’s glorious return is still a grim lesson about the lengths to which power will go to protect profit and capital. The world is worse off for having been denied a chance at democratic socialist governance in Buffalo.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A US Military Jury Is Seeking Clemency for a Guantánamo Detainee

    Razor wire tops a fence near the guard tower at the entrance to Camp V and VI at the U.S. military prison for "enemy combatants" on June 25, 2013, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

    With all of the hoopla this past week over the off-year elections, President Biden’s foreign trip, and the ongoing drama on Capitol Hill, there was very little discussion of the latest chapter in one of the most important and horrific stories of our time.

    The New York Times reported on an unprecedented sentencing hearing of a detainee held at Guantánamo Bay. It was the first time a prisoner detailed in public the torture he underwent at the hands of the U.S. government. There are no adequate words to describe the grotesque war crimes committed against this man. Times’ reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered the Guantánamo legal proceedings for many years now, vividly detailed the story of 41-year-old Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from a Baltimore high school and, as a lost young man, took a trip back to his home country in 2002 after his mother died. There he was seduced into joining a terrorist organization. As he put it, “I went willingly to Al Qaeda. I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”

    Khan was captured by American forces in 2003 and has been held in legal limbo ever since, despite the fact that he cooperated from the beginning. But according to his testimony, the more he cooperated, the more he was tortured. As with so many other victims of the brutal U.S. torture regime, Khan was compelled to make up tales in order to get the torture to stop. When his tales didn’t pan out, he was tortured some more.

    The maze of national security restrictions put on Guantánamo prisoners attempting to defend themselves (an almost 20-year long process) has generally made it impossible for them to speak out about what happened to them. But apparently, (it isn’t clear from the reporting) Khan’s lawyers found a way for him to publicly detail the torture he endured without specifically accusing any individuals. So last week, in open court, he took the stand and expressed remorse for his actions and forgave his tormentors. In front of his horrified father and sister, both of whom are American citizens, he laid out for the record what happened to him.

    Kahn described in detail the primitive conditions in which he was held: naked, with his hands chained above his head or shackled to the wall crouching “like a dog,” beaten and sleep-deprived to the point of hallucination. He was waterboarded repeatedly and nearly drowned. And then there was the sexual and “medical” sadism, as Rosenberg reports:

    [A]fter he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a purée of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.

    The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses.”

    “They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water,” he said, adding that he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.

    He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.

    When CIA officers transferred Khan from one black site to another, they would insert an enema and then duct tape a diaper on him so he wouldn’t have to be taken to the bathroom.

    Kahn was eventually charged with four terrorism charges and pled guilty to delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003 that was traced to the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time of the bombing, Kahn was already in custody. He also worked with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in some failed plots during his brief period with al Qaeda.

    At his trial, the lead prosecutor conceded that Kahn got “extremely rough” treatment but told the jury he was lucky to be alive when the victims of al Qaeda are not. Kahn’s lawyer said “Majid was raped at the hands of the U.S. government. He told them everything from the beginning.”

    The jury of eight military officers was required to hand down a sentence of 25 to 40 years. They gave him 26 years beginning from his guilty plea in 2012. But in an unexpected twist, obviously moved by the testimony, seven of the eight jurors wrote a letter to the overseer of military commissions asking him to grant Kahn clemency. They did not know of a secret deal that was struck earlier this year with the Pentagon in which the sentence could actually end early next year and no later than February 2025 because Khan turned government cooperator upon pleading guilty.

    Some of the details of these monstrous tactics were known already due to the “executive summary” of the classified Senate Torture Report that the Obama administration ensured would be withheld from the public. You may recall that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA were at each other’s throats over that project with the CIA issuing criminal referrals against Senate staffers and the committee accusing the CIA of penetrating its computers. (As it turned out, the Inspector General found that the CIA was wrong on both of those issues and then CIA Director, John Brennan, was forced to apologize.) The Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, banning “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush administration’s Soviet-style euphemism for torture. But no one has ever been held accountable.

    In 2018, Gina Haspel, who was involved in the CIA’s infamous destruction of CIA tapes that documented the practice and was personally involved in the torture of one terrorist suspect, became the head of the CIA under Donald Trump, the man who won the presidency in 2016 by declaring:

    Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat, And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.

    Torture doesn’t work. And the use of it, as well as the cover-up by two administrations and the crude endorsement by a man who would be president, is one of the greatest moral stains on America’s reputation in its long history of moral stains. And this one happened on our watch.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin Refuses to Support Reconciliation Bill If It Contains Words

    Sen. Joe Manchin speaks during a news conference on the Senate Side of the U.S. Capitol Building on November 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    When all is said and done, there’s nothing left to say or do. That’s how I’m feeling abut the descriptive powers of the English language as it pertains to the ongoing one-man hostage crisis known as Joe “Freaking” Manchin. How many new and novel ways are there to say it? THE MAN WANTS TO DESTROY THE BUILD BACK BETTER ACT, period, and he will keep moving the goal posts until he (and his coal-soot paymasters) gets what he wants.

    How many times has this snake shed its skin? First it was the money, but then the money came down, so it became about his fear of creating an “entitlement nation.” That was a good one, coming from a senator whose West Virginia home takes in more federal aid for its citizens than any other state except New Mexico.

    Manchin did active, palpable harm to thousands of his own people when he slashed his way through the Medicare, prescription drug pricing, child care and tax reforms that one sat at the heart of President Joe Biden’s social agenda. He put life on Earth as we know it in peril by stomping out the most effective climate measures contained within the legislation. Late last week, after even more concessions from the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), the bill looked like it had a chance. Right on cue, Manchin moved the goal posts, again.

    First, though, he let everyone dangle over the weekend off the barbed hook he offered instead of a straight answer when asked if he would support the proposed legislative framework. Progress, progress, we’re making progress, muttered the Democratic crowd, but all were nervously looking over their shoulders like swimmers in well-chummed waters, waiting for the fin and the teeth and the eyes that roll over white before the chewing starts.

    On Monday morning, Manchin told CNN, “I think there needs to be clarity on where everybody stands.” By the end of the day, everyone knew where he stood, which was nowhere, again, while the bill was once more left thrashing on the deck like a boated marlin dying of fresh air in broad daylight.

    “I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact it will have on our national debt, our economy and the American people,” Manchin told the assembled media on Monday afternoon. “Every elected representative needs to know what they are voting for and the impact it has, not only on their constituents, but the entire country. I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward. But I’m equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”

    Fine, noble talk… and complete bullshit. Manchin knows what is and was in this legislation. The man caterwauling about its price tag was all too happy to attack and destroy all the parts of the bill that were meant to pay for the bill. There is nothing ideological about this beyond the profit ideology of his donors. If you want to kill something, you go for the heart and lungs. That is what Manchin and his pharmaceutical cohort Kyrsten Sinema have been doing all along, and that’s what Manchin did again on Monday.

    The most crass part of Manchin’s little Monday homily came when he attacked the CPC for holding the bill “hostage” because they want it passed simultaneously with the infrastructure bill. All of Congress wants the infrastructure bill: It is toothlessly bipartisan, and has already passed in the Senate by a wide margin. Yet the CPC knows that passing infrastructure without the Build Back Better Act will all but doom the Act to defeat, which is what Manchin and his money people have sought from the beginning.

    “Just want to make sure I have the past 24 hours right,” tweeted HuffPost senior politics reporter Kevin Robillard. “Progressives move towards doing what Joe Manchin wants, then he holds a press conference and says a bunch of stuff basically guaranteeing progressives won’t do what he wants.”

    Greg Sargent of The Washington Post was even more pointed. “Ugh,” he tweeted. “Just nonstop bad faith from @Sen_JoeManchin, cloaked in phony pieties casting him as the only responsible party in town.”

    For its part, the CPC continues to say all the right things about making progress and having hope. “We are taking the president’s word at the fact that he believes he can get 50 votes in the Senate,” CPC chair Pramila Jayapal said just after Manchin’s Monday presser. Jayapal made it clear that none of Manchin’s actions, now or going forward, will affect the CPC’s demand that both bills be passed together. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to maintain that a vote on one or both will take place this week, even as she said the same thing last week, and the week before.

    Everyone involved is going to have to have a little come-to-Jesus moment with themselves and this whole process regarding the machinations of Joe Manchin. The man wants everything, which means he wants nothing, as in no Build Back Better Act with its pesky $550 billion in climate rescue funds. As a funny friend noted the other day, Manchin will only support a bill that contains no words. Hilarious, right? Also God’s own truth.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senate Must Confirm Biden’s FCC Picks to Ensure Open and Affordable Internet

    Federal Communication Commission Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel testifies during an oversight hearing to examine the Federal Communications Commission on Capitol Hill on June 24, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    After many months of waiting, the Biden White House has tapped Jessica Rosenworcel to be Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair and Gigi Sohn for the fifth and final seat on the five-person commission. Until these vacancies are filled, the agency will remain deadlocked at two-two, Democrats vs. Republicans. Now that there’s daylight for a clear majority, action at the FCC is urgent to protect an open internet, make it more affordable to everyone and address the disgraceful lack of diversity in ownership of U.S. media.

    Questions about who would take these key leadership positions had swirled around Washington, D.C., all year. Taking this much time to name anyone beats even the longest delay in recent memory: Back in 1977, President Jimmy Carter managed to at least nominate a new chair by mid-September of that year.

    In the interim, the Biden administration had repeatedly stated that ensuring people have access to high-speed internet is a priority. The delay in naming a permanent chair to the FCC as well as a fifth commissioner has hobbled the agency’s ability to ensure that U.S. broadband is open and affordable to everyone.

    To do so, the FCC needs to return to its authority under Title II of the Communications Act to regulate internet access like the essential utility it is. Now the White House has given the FCC the leadership and votes it needs to get the job done — and it’s incumbent on the Senate to confirm Rosenworcel and Sohn as soon as possible.

    The stakes were clear even before Biden took office. The Trump administration’s disastrous decisions gutting the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband and repealing net neutrality rules in late 2017 marked a cultural moment. Without net neutrality protections, powerful companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are free to take from internet users the ability to choose where we go and whom we connect with online. People demonstrated outside of Verizon stores — since Verizon was a former employer of Donald Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai — in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the days leading up to the repeal. My media reform advocacy group, Free Press and our allies — including Democratic FCC commissioners and lawmakers — assembled on a cold December morning with dozens of activists outside the FCC to protest the decision and call for the return of protections.

    Since Biden’s inauguration, public interest groups and activists have sent letters and petitions to the White House and Senate leadership calling for the agency to get the majority it needs to repair the damage done during the Trump years.

    These shouldn’t be partisan issues, and outside of the Beltway, they aren’t. But they are inside D.C. and the FCC. Without the votes needed to restore FCC authority over broadband, the agency has been unable to take all of the bold action it needs to take. It hasn’t been able to fully stop internet service providers from cutting off people’s service during the COVID-19 pandemic, or investigate these companies’ unjust and unreasonable use of data caps to milk more money out of an emergency COVID funding program for internet subscribers.

    In addition, while the agency successfully created that new program (called the Emergency Broadband Benefit) under a pandemic-relief bill that Congress passed last year, it couldn’t require providers to accept that benefit on every plan they offer because it didn’t have the votes to do so. It implemented these new bills Congress is passing only in ways that would pass muster with the agencies’ two Republican commissioners. The short-staffed FCC also couldn’t fully guarantee its longstanding Lifeline program — which offers a subsidy to those who can’t afford the high costs of communications — would be useful for broadband, or take other transformative steps to ensure affordable high-speed internet access for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, which are disproportionately affected by the digital divide.

    With a filled-out commission, the agency can and must do all of that and more. It must conduct the race-equity audit called for by Free Press’s Media 2070 project, MediaJustice and more than 100 organizations and community leaders. The audit would include a thorough FCC investigation of the history of racism in its media policies, and identify reparative actions the agency can take.

    The administration now faces a serious time crunch: Confirmation of FCC nominees like Rosenworcel and Sohn could take months. But we don’t have that kind of time now, thanks to how long the White House took to finalize these picks.

    Now the ball is in the Senate’s court. If it truly wants to prioritize an affordable internet, net neutrality protections and an equitable media system, it needs to confirm Rosenworcel and Sohn. The time to do so is now. Everyone can help make this happen by contacting their senators in support of quick confirmation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republican Poll Watchers Make Their Return in Virginia Gubernatorial Race

    Supporters hold up homemade signs as Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin speaks at a campaign rally on October 29, 2021, in Warrenton, Virginia.

    There’s just one day to go before the much anticipated Virginia gubernatorial race will be decided, and since the polls say it’s close, I think we can expect some MAGA fireworks whether their candidate, Glenn Youngkin, wins or loses.

    If they lose, we know that they will say the vote was rigged. If Youngkin wins, Donald Trump’s Big Lie will be equally well-served. They will say it’s because of the vigilance of the hordes of Republican poll watchers who are set to descend upon polling places on Election Day. Trump made clear what he wanted last year at the presidential debate and they will not let him down this time:

    “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it. Today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went in to watch. They’re called poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

    He was lying, however, as usual.

    One woman who claimed she was working for the Trump campaign had complained that she was not allowed in a satellite early voting location. However, she did not have an official certificate because, by law, no poll watchers were authorized at such locations. Trump was likely under the assumption that he could just send his MAGA mob to storm the polling places, no questions asked. And a spate of new election laws being enacted by Republican state legislatures are essentially making that reality now.

    Trump’s comments during that debate set off election officials’ alarm bells all over the country. What Trump was describing is better known as voter intimidation. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford tweeted the next day, “Voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada. Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted.” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said that the president’s loose talk was dangerous, adding:

    “The President is blatantly urging his supporters to congregate at polling places, go inside, and ostensibly harass and intimidate voters.While there are authorized ‘poll watchers’ who monitor polls on Election Day, their duties are clearly laid out, and they do not include what President Trump has suggested.”

    There were some poll watching shenanigans on election day in 2020, but the Big Lie launched the GOP into action.

    Last May, The New York Times reported a national program to train tens of thousands of MAGA faithful to “watch.” The report highlighted one recruitment seminar in which a precinct chair in a white suburb of Houston exhorted volunteers to go into the Black, Asian and Latino areas on election day because “that’s where the fraud is occuring.” That is not true, of course. But it illustrates what they actually have in mind: suppression and intimidation of racial and ethnic minority voters, particularly in urban areas.

    That is nothing new. Partisans used such tactics for centuries. I wrote about this years ago here on Salon, including the stunning tale of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist who, as a young lawyer in Arizona, personally applied some ugly racist intimidation against Latino and Black voters in the 1964 presidential campaign. The GOP ran the program in which he participated called “Operation Eagle Eye” throughout the nation.

    While researching his book on the Goldwater campaign, called Before the Storm, historian Rick Perlstein unearthed a memo written by a Lyndon Johnson staffer outlining the scheme:

    “Let’s get this straight, the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

    But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.”

    I bring this up again because it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t invent this stuff. He’s never done anything original in his life. People have been at this for a very long time. Trump’s just supercharged it.

    Over the past half century, the nation had made great strides in controlling the threat of poll watcher intimidation. The majority of states put laws in place to ensure that people felt safe at their polling places. The problem was pretty much snuffed out for several decades. But now it’s back.

    The Washington Post reports that Virginia has poll watchers by the hundreds ready to go Tuesday. In fact, they have already been on the job during the early voting. In Democratic counties, the poll watchers are 2-1 Republican, many of them trained and organized by the Youngkin campaign. The candidate, who insists he’s not a MAGA kind of guy, has been pushing the voter fraud myth like crazy and his voters are out in force. One of the Virginia groups doing training was created by a Republican candidate who lost his election by 23 points in 2020 and refused to concede. According to the Post, other groups involved in similar activities throughout the country are Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Limited Government, No Left Turn in Education and Alliance for Free Citizens, led by former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a vote fraud zealot who Trump once enlisted to prove that Hillary Clinton didn’t win the popular vote in 2016. (Needless to say, he failed.) Another group called The Virginia Project, a purveyor of the Big Lie, has been subtly intimidating election officials. At one of its meetings, Joe Flynn, the brother of General Michael Flynn, asked the crowd if they believe Joe Biden won the state of Virginia in 2020. The crowd roared, “No!” Biden won the state by 10 points.

    Glenn Youngkin may very well win the election tomorrow. The polls are neck and neck. And if he does, the pundits and analysts will immediately construct a narrative that tells us the national implications of the GOP victory. But the right’s narrative will be that they were able to keep the Democrats from stealing the election the way they stole 2020 and they’ll double their efforts around the country. The Big Lie will be validated one way or the other.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Taxi Drivers in New York City Are on Hunger Strike for Debt Forgiveness

    Yellow cab drivers attend a rally demanding debt forgiveness for cabbies, along with some drivers taking part in a hunger strike, outside City Hall in New York City, on October 20, 2021.

    Taxi drivers organized with the New York City Taxi Workers’ Alliance (NYTWA) have been protesting outside City Hall for 43 days. Twelve days ago they started a hunger strike, demanding debt forgiveness for the thousands of Taxi drivers buried by medallion loan debts. Drivers have been immersed in a financial crisis, leading to depression and other health problems. This situation led nine workers to commit suicide in 2019 due to the overwhelming burden and misery brought about by their exorbitant debt to the city. In the last two years, their situation has become even more precarious due to the Covid-19 crisis which drastically reduced their amount of work.

    Workers at City Hall held vigils for the nine drivers lost in 2019 and displayed signs demanding debt forgiveness and condemning the lies they faced from the state and banks. In our discussions with the drivers, they explained that many were duped by the city to take out huge loans to invest in the yellow cab medallion that permits drivers to operate in the five boroughs of New York City. The price of the medallion rose up to $1 million before 2014. Many drivers — the majority of whom are immigrants — believed it was a good job opportunity and safe long-term investment. This was the dream that was sold to drivers from countries such as Tibet, Haiti, India, Pakistan, and Nepal. As one driver said “That was our American dream. It turned out to be a scam.”

    A scam is exactly what it was — a result of decades of exploiting taxi drivers to fund New York City’s budget. Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani “placed political allies inside the Taxi and Limousine Commission and directed it to sell medallions to help them balance budgets and fund priorities,” according to The New York Times. His successor, Democratic mayor Michael Bloomberg, continued the practice in order to balance the city’s $3 billion budget deficit. Drivers saw the price of medallions begin to skyrocket in the early 2000s. At the same time, predatory lenders were encouraging buyers to take out as much money as possible in order to profit off the interest of these loans, which artificially inflated medallion prices even higher. Drivers found themselves in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no relief in sight.

    The city government made $855 million from these drivers, who went into debt having been promised the exclusive right to operate taxis in the city. But in 2014, Uber and Lyft swooped in, decimating the taxi business and exploiting a new sect of contracted workers with meager labor protections. While taxi drivers are burdened with a number of regulations and fees such as permits and licensing costs, Uber can operate in the city with almost no regulation. Uber has raked in major profits as it completely undermined taxi drivers across the city, while hyper-exploiting its own drivers who see a fraction of every fare. As a result, the value of medallions plummeted.

    Many workers who voted for de Blasio in 2014 are now disillusioned by his mayoral administration. In 2014, the city received federal funds reserved for the taxi business. Instead of using the money to bail out drivers crushed by their loans, de Blasio gave the money to banks and hedge funds who engaged in predatory loans targeting taxi drivers. One driver shared a heartbreaking tale of another driver who killed himself in front of de Blasio’s mansion: “The mayor still does nothing.”

    The current financial crisis destroying the lives of New York City taxi drivers is more than one mayor’s failed program; it’s the result of a strategy by both capitalist parties to profit off of the backs of workers. Whether Republican or Democrat, bourgeois politicians have the same objective: maintaining the exploitation of the working class for capitalist profit. There is no interest in the livelihoods of workers.

    Taxi drivers, who are not only responsible for paying off their cabs and forfeiting pieces of their earnings to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) and credit card companies, are also still burdened with paying off loans for the medallion itself. A driver voiced his frustration: “We can’t make money anymore. I’m paying $650,000 off in loans that I’ll never pay off and there is too much competition in the city to make really anything. Our pandemic started in 2014 the moment Uber showed up.”

    While the striking taxi drivers condemn Uber and Lyft, they do not see the workers who drive for them as enemies, recognizing the similarities between their plights. One driver commented: “I have friends who drive Uber. They’d have a fare for 80 dollars to the airport and get nothing from it.” The experience of drivers in both the public and private sectors is marked by precarity and exploitation. That is why taxi drivers must connect their struggle to that of Uber and Lyft drivers by organizing together and thereby strengthening the fight for drivers’ rights.

    Taxi drivers are fed up, and are organizing themselves as workers to fight for their demands — a crucial step in improving their lives and realizing their own strategic position within capitalism.

    The working class must stand in solidarity with taxi drivers, demanding total medallion debt forgiveness rather than acquiescing to meager grant programs that barely scrape the surface of the drivers’ debt. We must also stand against the predatory speculation upon the lives of the working class by banks and lenders. Moreover, exploitative app companies like Uber and Lyft should be banned from wreaking havoc upon the working class and devastating public transportation. The state, which is tasked with providing safe and efficient public transportation, instead works in favor of banks, hedge funds, and corporations that destroy the lives of workers.

    The plight of New York City taxi drivers illustrates how corporations, bourgeois politicians of both capitalist parties, and the State work hand-in-hand to profit off the backs of Black and Brown immigrant workers who keep the city running every day. That is why it is crucial to build an alliance between the taxi drivers, app drivers, and even MTA workers tasked with dealing with the crumbling infrastructure of the subways from climate change. It’s clear that neither the government nor its capitalist politicians will bring the necessary solutions; only the consolidated power of the working class and oppressed will.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Not Just the Missionaries — There Were 782 Kidnappings in Haiti This Year

    A couple of people walk in the deserted street in Port-au-Prince on October 18, 2021.

    President Joe Biden has received daily briefings this week on the 17 North American missionaries and children who continue to be held hostage in Haiti, according to the White House, and the U.S. has reportedly deployed three FBI agents to Haiti as well.

    The involvement of U.S. citizens and one Canadian citizen in this particular hostage situation have caused the kidnapping to draw some attention to this incident within U.S. media, but the broader context of widespread kidnappings in Haiti continues largely to go unnoticed in the U.S.

    In the first half of October alone, at least 119 known kidnappings (that is the official number) have taken place in Haiti. And according to the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, there have been at least 782 known kidnappings in Haiti since January 2021.

    The kidnapping that led to the hostage situation in which the U.S. has become politically involved occurred in Croix des Bouquets, a town located 11 miles from Port-au-Prince. According to the weekly New York-based Haitian Newspaper Haiti Observateur, on October 16, the notorious Haitian gang Katsan Mawozo (400 Mawozo) kidnapped more than 30 individuals, including 17 American and Canadian missionaries and children ranging in age from 8 months to 15 years who were in Haiti as part of the Ohio-based group Christian Aid Ministries. The gangs are asking for $17 million in U.S. dollars.

    A day later, on October 17, another armed gang, the G-9 Family and Allies, drove off the de facto prime minister, Ariel Henry, prohibiting him from commemorating the assassination of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first leader of independent Haiti, who was assassinated on October 17, 1806. That this gang could categorically prevent the prime minister himself from entering the area of Pont Rouge for the ceremony speaks to the fact that gangs are becoming stronger and expanding their control of the country. Misery and fear continue for thousands of people in Haiti. Emperor Dessalines must be turning in his grave.

    Because Americans are now being kidnapped in Haiti, we are hearing about an issue that has long plagued Haiti, which has the highest rate of kidnapping per capita of any country in the world. American and Canadian lives matter. Yet thousands of Haitians have been and continue to be tortured, killed, raped, extorted and kidnapped on a daily basis. Nearly 95 percent of kidnappings in Haiti since 2018 have targeted Haitian citizens. As a representative from the Christian Aid Ministries stated, “This time of difficulty reminds us of the ongoing suffering of millions of Haitians. While our workers chose to serve in Haiti, our Haitian friends endure crisis after crisis, continual violence, and economic hardship.”

    A popular Haitian film, Kidnappings (2008), depicts the complexity and nuance of the kidnapping economy in Haiti. The rise of kidnappings is believed to have started in the early 2000s under former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who armed people in the slums as a way to protect himself because he didn’t have enough police. The great majority of the people who align themselves with Aristide — known as chimè — lived in Cité Soleil, a commune of Port-au-Prince.

    Political parties, political authorities, the political elite and the business elite have been nurturing the gangs and fomenting the kidnapping crisis. The kidnapping business is in fact supported by the convergence of interests of the political and business elite and the international community, while the interests of the vast majority of Haitians are obviously not taken into account. Now the gangs cannot be tamed, and they are everywhere. The gangs need ammunition, weapons and ransom money in order to function. Clearly, all those resources flow through international channels.

    Yet the gangs are now managing the very people who originally commissioned and controlled them. If the powers that be — both in Haiti and in the international community, including the United States — really want the kidnappings to stop, they have the ability to leverage banks and arms experts to make it harder for the gangs to continue their kidnapping business.

    Some sources have stated that there are around 500,000 illegal guns in Haiti.

    Indeed, there are so many guns that there are swaps between Haitian gangs and Jamaican gangs. The large number of illegal guns in Haiti facilitates the kidnapping trade. But Haiti does not produce guns. Where are the guns coming from? Who allows them into the country? Who benefits from their presence? Although Haiti signed the International Arms Trade Treaty in 2014, it is unclear to what extent it is respected. In spite of the U.S. arms embargo requiring that any firearms that are supposed to go to Haiti go through the U.S. State Department, it is still easy to import guns to Haiti, in part because of the weak police force and corruption of political and business elite.

    Until there is real conversation about the deep inequality that marks Haitian society and sustainable change is enacted, the business of kidnapping will continue. We cannot and should not talk about the gang violence in Haiti without putting it in a larger historical, geopolitical and social context. Among the issues we should probe are the role of the police and criminal legal system in Haiti. The police are not respected or trusted by a majority of Haitians. It is estimated that over 70 percent of Haiti’s prison population is in pretrial detention.

    The business of kidnapping is not unique to Haiti, nor is it new. Kidnapping was spread through the Americas by the Europeans. Gangs and kidnapping have been imported to Haiti the same way cholera and guns were imported. Europeans went to the African continent and kidnapped people to enslave them for profit in the Americas. Prior to the arrival of the enslaved, Europeans kidnapped Native Americans (in the case of Haiti, the Taínos). For instance, in the early 16th century, Queen Anacaona, ruler of the kingdom of Xaragua, was abducted by the Spanish under false pretenses. In June 1802, Toussaint Louverture, a prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution, was kidnapped and taken to France on a ship called Le Héros and imprisoned in the Jura mountains, where he died in 1803.

    We could think of the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) as a form of kidnapping — an abduction of Haitian freedom and the very notion of liberty. The U.S. Marines took $500,000 from the Haitian National Bank in 1914, supposedly for safekeeping, but really to protect U.S. assets and prevent a German invasion. Smedley Butler, a career Marine, described his role in the occupation in the following terms: “[I was] a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

    Kidnappings, power and greed are all connected.

    In 2004, former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said the U.S. kidnapped him and forced him to leave Haiti.

    In 2010, Radio Prague International reported the release of a Czech humanitarian aid worker and a colleague after they were kidnapped. In October 2012, it made headlines in Haitian newspapers when Clifford Brandt, a member of a prominent Haitian family, was arrested because he had kidnapped the children of another bourgeois family.

    In February 2021, two Dominican filmmakers and their Haitian interpreters were kidnapped in Haiti. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July, the number of kidnappings has increased. There have also been unconfirmed rumors circulating in Haiti that Moïse was supposed to be kidnapped and not assassinated by the mercenaries.

    Two Haitian proverbs can speak to the kidnapping issue in Haiti: “Grangou nan vant pa dous” (Hunger in the belly is not an easy thing), and “Jou mwen leve a se li mwen wè” (The day I get up, that is the only day I can count on). In order to understand the gang issues in Haiti and the attendant issue of kidnapping, we must analyze the context of social inequality and structural violence. Imagine a person who does not have a job and cannot eat. That person can easily be manipulated due to their desperate need to gain access to these basic necessities. There are barely any opportunities for the youth. The structural violence in terms of lack of education, access to health care, lack of food sovereignty (to name but a few) must be addressed. Many people are forced by necessity to participate in the economy of kidnapping. According to a 2020 report by the National Human Rights Defense Network, some gang members are providing services that the state should be providing, stepping in support some community members with food, health care and education costs.

    What are the solutions to this problem?

    Kidnapping must be understood and dealt with in terms of class relations and local power relations. There needs to be agreement among Haitians of all classes about the type of government they want. This should be a government that can hold elections democratically and fairly and create a sustainable infrastructure that puts education, health care and security as its main priorities.

    Haitians in Haiti and in the diaspora are channeling some of their collective efforts to build a better Haiti into a project called the Commission for Haitian Solution to the Crisis (Forum Société Civile Haïtienne). Formed by 13 commission members from different Haitian civil society groups, the group was founded in May 2021. The commission brings together over 300 locals and regional organizations based in Haiti, seeking local strategies to the ongoing political, social and economic crisis in Haiti.

    We must also view this issue in a geopolitical context, including colonial, post-colonial and neocolonial histories as well as neoliberal policies. It is clear that foreign interventions in Haiti have only worsened the situation. Foreign troops, organized crime, class inequalities, corruption, and the so-called Core Group (made up of the United States plus ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany and the European Union, along with representatives from the United Nations and the Organization of American States) are a dire combination.

    The narratives of Haiti as a failed state do not take into account the ways in which the Haitian state in conjunction with the international community has continuously and actively failed Haiti. This failure has contributed to the neoliberal policies; structural violence and inequality; a lack of infrastructures; and political, social and economic instability leading to ongoing social disruptions.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s DOJ Dismissed Suicide Risk for Assange in Appeal of Extradition Denial

    Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange leaves Southwark Crown Court in a security van after being sentenced on May 1, 2019, in London, England.

    The Biden administration asked two United Kingdom High Court judges to overturn the British district judge’s denial of extradition of journalist Julian Assange this week during an October 26-27 appeals hearing in London. If extradited to the United States, the WikiLeaks founder would face 175 years in prison for exposing evidence of U.S. war crimes. Determined to bring Assange to trial in the U.S. on the indictment filed by former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is raising spurious issues on appeal.

    On January 6, U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied extradition because of the strong likelihood Assange would commit suicide if extradited to the U.S., where he would be held under onerous prison conditions. She relied largely on expert testimony by defense expert Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at Kings College London. Kopelman testified, “I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the United States were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.”

    The U.K. 2003 Extradition Act forbids extradition if “the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him.” Baraitser found the risk of suicide to be “substantial” or “very high,” and that it would thus be oppressive to extradite Assange to the U.S.

    In its appeal, the DOJ claims that Baraitser should have disregarded Kopelman’s testimony because, in his preliminary report, he misled the court by not mentioning that Stella Moris was Assange’s partner, and they had two young children together. The DOJ is asking the High Court to reweigh the evidence that Baraitser assessed during the four-week evidentiary hearing in September 2020.

    For the first time on appeal, the DOJ is providing conditional “assurances” that if imprisoned in the U.S., Assange 1.) would not be sent to the maximum-security prison ADX Florence in Colorado; 2.) would not be subject to onerous Special Administrative Measures that would keep him in virtual isolation; and 3.) could serve any custodial sentence he may receive in Australia. In order to excuse its tardy offer of these so-called assurances, the DOJ erroneously argues that the burden was on Baraitser to request such “assurances” from the U.S. before denying extradition.

    All of the DOJ’s appellate arguments are disingenuous. Moreover, the DOJ should have raised these issues at the September 2020 evidentiary hearing, when they could have been tested by cross-examination.

    Psychiatric Expert Kopelman’s Evidence

    Baraitser accepted Kopelman’s testimony that Assange “suffers from a recurrent depressive disorder … sometimes accompanied by psychotic features, often with ruminative suicidal ideas.” Kopelman said that the “imminence of extradition or extradition itself would trigger a suicide attempt, but it was Mr. Assange’s mental disorder that would lead to an inability to control his wish to commit suicide.”

    In citing her reasons for adopting Kopelman’s assessment, Baraitser wrote:

    [Kopelman] assessed Mr. Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr. Assange’s background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.

    The DOJ is now arguing on appeal that Baraitser should have excluded Kopelman’s evidence (or afforded it less weight) because he omitted from his preliminary report that Assange has a partner, Moris, and they have two children. Kopelman was concerned about Moris’s anxiety about the privacy of her children. Both Kopelman’s subsequent report and his testimony at the extradition hearing did refer to Morris and their children.

    There were concrete dangers that Kopelman was worried about when he made the decision to withhold the information about Moris and the children from his preliminary report. “They arose from real concerns about a risk to Stella Moris’ safety and privacy, and that of her children,” Assange’s lawyers wrote in their brief to the High Court. They included “the extreme measures of surveillance employed against Mr. Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, the targeting of Stella Moris and the children; and the discussions they participated in about kidnapping or poisoning him.”

    Baraitser considered Kopelman’s two reports as well as his testimony before denying extradition. She acknowledged his initial concealment but excused it, writing:

    I did not accept that Professor Kopelman failed in his duty to the court when he did not disclose Ms. Morris’s relationship with Mr. Assange…. In my judgment, Professor Kopelman’s decision to conceal their relationship was misleading and inappropriate in the context of his obligations to the court, but an understandable human response to Ms. Morris’s predicament…. In short, I found Professor Kopelman’s opinion to be impartial and dispassionate; I was given no reason to doubt his motives or the reliability of his evidence.

    The defense brief cited the report of Professor Keith Rix, the U.K.’s acknowledged expert on the ethical duties of psychiatric experts. Rix opined that Kopelman acted “professionally,” “responsibly,” and “exercised appropriate and reasonable caution” in not disclosing the relationship with Moris and the children in his first report.

    Kopelman’s testimony was corroborated by the evidence of defense expert Dr. Quinton Deeley, an experienced developmental psychiatrist. Deeley stated that Assange’s Asperger’s syndrome increased the risk that he would commit suicide if faced with the prospect of extradition to the U.S.

    The DOJ is seeking to relitigate the issue of Kopelman’s credibility and is asking the High Court to reassess the weight to be given the evidence of the defense experts versus the prosecution’s experts. As Assange’s lawyers wrote in their appellate brief, it is a “well-established principle that the appellate court should respect the competence of the [district judge] to determine for herself the issues of the reliability and weight of the expert witnesses she herself heard.”

    Furthermore, at the hearing before the High Court, the defense cited recent new revelations about the CIA’s plotting to kidnap or assassinate Assange to further corroborate Kopelman’s opinion. Defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald told the justices, “There are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill him.”

    The DOJ also maintained that the extradition decision must be based only on Assange’s present mental state and cannot make a prediction about what it will be if he is extradited. But Fitzgerald cited the case of activist and computer scientist Lauri Love, in which the High Court used the same approach that Baraitser did in the Assange case. Love also has been diagnosed with depression and has Asperger’s, which is correlated with a reduced capacity to resist suicide. And there was psychiatric testimony in both cases that onerous conditions in U.S. prisons would exacerbate their suicide risk.

    The High Court judges who presided at the appeals hearing in Assange’s case were Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde. Burnett, the most senior judge in England and Wales, ruled with another judge to reject the U.S. request for extradition in the Love case, also because of high risk of suicide. Holroyde was one of two judges who ruled on August 11 to allow the U.S. to expand its grounds for appeal in the Assange case.

    U.S. “Assurances”

    The defense presented considerable testimony at the evidentiary hearing that if Assange was extradited to the United States, he would be subject to Special Administrative Measures — which are onerous conditions that would keep him in virtual isolation — and he would be held at ADX Florence.

    “Throughout the 1½ years of these proceedings below, (a) the defence evidence squarely raised the impact of either [Special Administrative Measures] or ADX (among other regimes of isolation) as one of the factors contributing to the risk of suicide, and (b) the US chose to challenge the substance of that evidence, rather than remove the risk with assurances,” notwithstanding repeated comments by defense witnesses on the “notable absence of assurances or guarantees,” Assange’s defense lawyers wrote in their appellate brief.

    Now the United States is providing the court with “assurances” that if Assange is extradited to the U.S. and imprisoned, Special Administrative Measures will not be imposed on him, and he will not be held at ADX. The U.S., however, is reserving the right to impose Special Administrative Measures or hold Assange at ADX if Assange’s future behavior warrants it. Whether his future behavior warrants it will be decided by the CIA and the attorney general (who is head of DOJ). It was the CIA that planned how to kidnap or kill Assange, and it is the DOJ that is prosecuting Biden’s appeal against Assange. Chief Justice Burnett stated during defense counsel’s argument, “It’s not contested that the CIA is intensely interested in Mr. Assange.”

    When one of the judges asked James Lewis, who represented the United States, why they didn’t make these assurances before Baraitser issued her ruling, he replied disingenuously, “It was our position that it was highly unlikely he would ever be put in [Special Administrative Measures] so opportunity never arose” during the evidentiary hearing.

    Even if Assange is not subject to Special Administrative Measures or held at ADX, he will nevertheless be placed in pretrial administrative segregation, which bears “strong similarities with respect to isolation and sensory deprivation” to Special Administrative Measures and, once they are imposed, there is no reasonable likelihood of challenge, according to testimony at the evidentiary hearing. Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who provided the documents that WikiLeaks published, was being held under administrative segregation when she attempted suicide.

    Post-conviction, Assange would be held “under substantially similar conditions of isolation at whichever unknown high security prison (if not ADX),” the evidence showed. That could be a Special Housing Unit, High Security Unit, Special Management Unit or Communication Management Unit. “All of these regimes, especially in combination, constitute long-term and extreme isolation,” according to the testimony, and they carry the same “well known risks which solitary confinement poses to the mental health of those subjected to it for prolonged periods.”

    During his argument for the defense, Mark Summers stated, “The evidence is overwhelming that regardless of [Special Administrative Measures], and regardless of the ADX, if extradited, Julian Assange is surely headed for extreme isolation, pre- and post-trial.”

    The United States also says it will not object to Assange serving any custodial sentence he may receive in Australia. Summers cited a case in which the U.S. reneged on its assurances that Spanish drug trafficker David Mendoza Herrarte could serve his prison sentence in Spain if he was first extradited to the U.S. for trial. The U.S. retorted that the prosecutor had just assured that Mendoza could apply for a transfer to Spain and the DOJ denied the application. Moreover, the U.S. cannot guarantee that Australia would consent to host Assange’s incarceration.

    It will be several weeks before the High Court issues its ruling on Biden’s appeal. The losing party can ask the U.K. Supreme Court to review the case.

    More than two dozen press freedom, civil liberties and international human rights groups, and people around the world, are protesting the persecution of Assange. This case is a bellwether for the future of investigative journalism and the survival of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Centerpiece of the Build Back Better Climate Plan Has Been Stripped Out

    President Joe Biden prepares to walk off a stage after giving a speech on his Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and Build Back Better Agenda at the NJ Transit Meadowlands Maintenance Complex on October 25, 2021, in Kearny, New Jersey.

    Months into the Democrats’ messy, public internal debates on President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plans — and despite a massive effort by Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speak Nancy Pelosi to seal the deal this week — it is still far from clear whether the factions of the party will work out a way to pass the reconciliation bill, which has already been chiseled down beyond recognition.

    In an effort to prevent the bill from being gutted even further, the Congressional Progressive Caucus once again held the line this week, insisting that Speaker Pelosi delay a vote on the separate $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Build Back Better budget reconciliation package is ready to move forward in tandem with the larger infrastructure bill. In response to the show of collective power from the group of progressive lawmakers, Pelosi announced late Thursday that she was delaying the vote on the larger bipartisan bill.

    But even if the Build Back Better Act does pass, due to the huge scalebacks that conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have demanded, what once had the potential to be transformative in the way that signature New Deal and Great Society programs were is now in part reduced to being another public display of the dysfunction of Washington, D.C., in the face of overwhelming challenges, and in the churn of a tsunami of lobbying efforts against the legislation by business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

    Nevertheless, if it does pass, the bill could still meaningfully impact many people’s lives by extending the federal payments to families with children, increasing Pell Grant spending, and allowing for large expansions in the country’s stock of affordable housing. Perhaps the most important aspect of the legislation is that it will cement in place the notion that tackling climate change is a priority federally.

    Even the stripped-down version of the bill, which looks likely to come in at about $1.75 trillion in new spending, as opposed to the $3.5 trillion originally envisaged, currently promises to contain upward of $500 billion to fund climate change-related investments, most of it devoted to tax incentives to encourage companies to move toward cleaner energy products. That’s a lot of money, and if used effectively, it has the potential to alter the country’s relationship to fossil fuels and to carbon emissions over the next decade.

    But what could have been a moment in which the full force of the federal government was laser-focused on transforming the economy to rapidly and permanently move away from fossil fuels, and on mitigating the effects of global warming, has instead degenerated into a food fight. Yes, there may still be a lot of money unleashed to tackle climate change, but it will be done with ill will, begrudgingly and denuded of vital provisions designed to turbo-charge the restructuring of the economy.

    Senator Manchin’s role in all of this has been particularly unsavory, a somewhat compelling masterclass of one man’s shameless exercise of raw, king-making power.

    The senator from West Virginia, one of the country’s leading producers of both coal and natural gas, has gone after provisions in the legislation that penalize fossil fuel producers and try to force, at speed, a transition to cleaner energy. He has used his position both as a key swing vote and as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to push a “my-way-or-the-highway” approach to the legislation.

    Manchin opposes penalties for utilities companies that don’t increase the share of low-carbon power that they generate by 4 percentage points each year from 2023 through 2030.

    As a result, the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which at one point was the centerpiece of the climate proposals, and which both incentivizes the move to clean energy and, more importantly, penalizes those companies that don’t make the move, was stripped from the reconciliation bill before the Senate. What is left are hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits to companies that move toward renewable energy production and usage — but that will, according to estimates, only get the country about halfway to where it needs to be if it is to meet the goals set in the upcoming COP26 meeting in Scotland.

    Manchin also has set himself against the idea of a fee charged to companies that emit methane, a huge contributor to global warming, into the atmosphere. As a result, it’s looking increasingly likely, as Democrats scramble to reach a deal — any deal, at any cost, simply so they can say to voters that they got something done — that the methane fee will, in coming days, end up on the cutting room floor.

    Meanwhile, the idea of a carbon border adjustment tax — which progressives have long been pushing as a way to even the playing field between companies that produce goods overseas in lax regulatory environments and U.S.-based companies, which are subjected to more rigorous environmental regulations — hasn’t picked up enough traction. The White House, which feared that taxing products based on the amount of carbon it took to produce them would contribute to higher consumer prices in an already inflationary context, was never enthusiastic about the tax.

    The Biden administration made it clear during the summer that it wouldn’t push for the measure. Now, it is also becoming clear that there isn’t enough support in the Democratic caucus in the Senate to include such a plan in the final reconciliation bill. Thus, while the European Union is on the verge of moving ahead with this method of reining in carbon emissions, the U.S. remains on the sidelines.

    There is overwhelming pressure on the Democrats to pass a reconciliation bill in the next week so that Biden can sign it before he addresses the COP26 meeting in Glasgow. After all, the all-too-obvious electoral consequences to the Democrats of this key legislation going down in flames are too ghastly even for a mediocre Senate leader such as Schumer to stomach.

    But at the same time, it’s not at all clear that the legislation that does ultimately pass will be transformative enough to rescue the Democrats from their self-inflicted malaise, or even start to meet the massive needs of the moment. The climate change compromises are particularly dispiriting — better than nothing but far less ambitious than what is needed to meet the escalating climate crisis that is now so clearly and vividly upon us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Opinion: Inquiry into anti-Alberta energy campaigns was a misuse of power

    The post Opinion: Inquiry into anti-Alberta energy campaigns was a misuse of power appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Progressive Dems Balk at “Trust Manchin” After Frantic Push by Biden and Pelosi

    President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi depart a House Democratic Caucus meeting in the U.S. Capitol on October 28, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    As of this writing, the President Biden has departed for Europe with no legislative clarity in hand, despite a full court press on Thursday morning that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The framework he proposed for the Build Back Better Act has not been explicitly endorsed by either Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, which means it does not actually exist yet.

    House progressives — with the blessing of Sen. Bernie Sanders — emerged from an early afternoon meeting with Pelosi saying they are still not supportive of a plan to de-couple these two bills, which Pelosi had proposed this morning. Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal told CNN after the meeting that she is a “no” on Pelosi’s proposed vote today. She will not be alone.

    Unless something truly dramatic breaks loose this afternoon, this was a big loud morning that moved the process along barely at all. There’s a framework for the Build Back Better Act now, but it only exists if Manchin and Sinema decide to say it does. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is not willing to gamble the fate of the Build Back Better Act on the good word of Biden, because his good word depends on what Manchin and Sinema will do, and if history is any guide, he has no basis to make that promise safely.

    In other words: Legislatively speaking, it’s still yesterday around here.

    The mayhem began when President Biden came to Capitol Hill to serve congressional Democrats some thin gruel for breakfast. On the menu: The framework for a Build Back Better Act that is half of what it was a month ago, and half again what it was when first devised. For dessert: A push to de-couple the Build Back Better Act from the infrastructure bill, so the infrastructure bill can be voted on first and by itself.

    The Congressional Progressive Caucus has fought since August to thwart this de-coupling, because doing so all but assures the Build Back Better Act will die at the hands of conservative Democrats, who have already beaten the thing almost beyond recognition. On Wednesday afternoon, Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Japayal told reporters that “there are over three dozen members who feel strongly” about keeping these two bills coupled.

    Biden wanted something — anything, really — in his pocket when he went wheels-up for Europe. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week,” he reportedly told the morning group, evoking the peril of elections that are more than 12 months away.

    Late Thursday morning, Sen. Sanders — one of the principal authors and staunch defenders of the Build Back Better Act — told reporters that “it doesn’t make sense” to pass the infrastructure bill without securing the fate of the Build Back Better Act. “I think that the House should not be voting for an infrastructure bill unless they see very clear language and know that there are 50 senators on board, whatever the agreement may be,” continued Sanders. The message was unmistakable: This thing is nowhere without clarity from Manchin and Sinema.

    After Biden concluded his pitch to the Democratic caucus, House Speaker Pelosi essentially scolded the Congressional Progressive Caucus for not charging into agreement with the new framework, chiding them not to “embarrass” the president, according to CNN. When asked about Manchin and Sinema, who can still chop down any or all of the proposed framework, Pelosi told the assemblage they would simply have to trust Biden to get it done. She will reportedly call for a vote on infrastructure alone this afternoon, and will leave the vote open until it passes.

    Manchin and Sinema still lurk. Sinema released a statement a bit after 11:00 am saying she was glad to see “significant progress” on the bill, without actually indicating whether she will support it. Manchin, speaking to reporters at about the same time, was equally opaque. “It’s all in the hands of the House,” he said, which is hilarious coming from the senator whose hands have been very busy denuding this bill. “No comment” by any other name is still “No comment.”

    Biden, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris, spoke just before noon to formally announce the existence of the Build Back Better Act framework. He thanked congressional Democrats for their hard work, saying, “Nobody gets everything they want. That’s consensus.” This was more than a tad disingenuous; the progressives did the motherlode of compromising in good faith, only to be lied to on more than one occasion. The only “concession” made by conservative Democrats was the fact that the bill still exists in its current tattered form; they didn’t want this bill to exist at all.

    On Wednesday, via social media, progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar came down hard on the reasons why the Build Back Better Act has been rendered a shadow of its former self. “First, instead of centering the needs of the American people, corporate Democrats have purely been about lining the pockets and serving the interests of the donor class,” she wrote. “If you really want to know why a provision is being killed, all you have to do is follow the money…” The Twitter thread went on at length to explain how corporate money and fossil fuel lobbyists twisted the Build Back Better Act almost beyond recognition.

    Mark my words: Pelosi and her “moderate” House allies will lay this whole fiasco at the feet of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This is balderdash; nobody wanted this bill more than the House progressives, and they had to watch as Pelosi let the House conservatives she is so protective of tear it apart. Above all else, however, this mess falls on Manchin and Sinema almost completely. They have sown enough chaos to bring us to this brittle moment, which I suspect is what they wanted all along.

    Despite what the pundits and “moderates” may say going forward, there is actually no reason why infrastructure must be passed today without the Build Back Better Act. The deadline was artificially constructed around Biden’s travel plans, which is no way to run things when you’re trying to nail down significant legislation. This is, then, an artificial crisis, created by a bunch of right-leaning Democrats who want to have their cake and destroy it, too. No sale.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • House Committee Is Ready to Subpoena Lawyer Who Wrote Trump’s Overthrow Memo

    January 6 committee

    The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is looking to boat a big, weird fish. John Eastman, a true bat from the conservative D.C. think tank belfry, is expected to be subpoenaed by the committee over his role in attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. More specifically, the committee would like to have words with Mr. Eastman over the memo he wrote for Trump’s legal team that was nothing more or less than a blunt blueprint for toppling the certification of a free and fair election.

    A product of the Federal Society’s right-wing lawyer assembly line, Eastman is one of a thousand GOP lawyers slobbering around the nation’s capital providing grist for the nonsense mills at Fox News, OAN and a galaxy of talk radio shows. If the name rings a bell, it’s because he gained some notoriety in 2020 by writing an op-ed for Newsweek claiming that Kamala Harris was not a true U.S. citizen, and therefore could not serve as vice president. Yeah, that guy.

    Over the course of his career, Eastman clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, worked at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis (made famous by one of its former partners, Ken Starr), and did some nationally syndicated radio with Hugh Hewitt. He got his ass beat sideways in a 1990 House race and a 2010 run for California attorney general, with the latter eventually being won by none other than Kamala Harris. He is chairman of the board of the National Institute for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, and is a director with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which exists to attack elections with frivolous lawsuits.

    It was likely his work with Public Interest that drew him into the spiraling orbit of Trump’s frantic post-election attempts to overthrow the results, and it was the memo he wrote for Trump’s doomed cause that has brought him to the attention of the select committee. Titled “January 6 scenario,” the document does not equivocate about its purpose and ultimate goal.

    “There is very solid legal authority,” reads the opening paragraph, “and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes (as Adams and Jefferson did while Vice President, regarding their own election as President), and all the Members of Congress can do is watch.”

    Eastman then dives in with both feet, citing the Electoral Count Act even as he declares it “likely unconstitutional.” He then lays out a step-by-step process by which then-Vice President Mike Pence refuses to certify the Electoral College votes in seven states, including Arizona. This would knock the total Electoral College vote count down to 454, and thanks to the seven states chosen to be withheld, this new accounting awards Trump the presidency by a count of 232 to 222.

    “Howls, of course, from the Democrats,” begins Eastman’s explanation of the second phase of the operation, “who now claim … that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the ‘the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote….’ Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.”

    This was the mind bomb that was dropped on Pence prior to the January 6 certification of the election. According to Trump and his team of legal galaxy brains, the Eastman document was all the justification Pence needed to overturn the results. Pence wobbled badly, but ultimately refused to go along with the scheme.

    On that day, on the other side of town, Eastman was one of the speakers who helped whip Trump’s followers into the violent frenzy that resulted in the sacking of the Capitol, and could possibly have resulted in Pence’s murder had the former vice president not been so fleet of foot.

    You can see why the select committee wants to have Eastman in for a chat. Eastman, for his part, has been contorting himself into bold new shapes trying to dodge the idea that he wrote the roadmap for democracy’s Armageddon. In an unusually pugnacious National Review interview, Eastman tried to argue that a push to get Pence to overturn the results was “not viable,” dismissing anyone who thought otherwise.

    The Claremont Institute, which employs Eastman, took this absurd argument to new heights by claiming the memo did not, in fact, ask Pence to overturn the election. “The defense is among the most carefully worded straw-man arguments in modern political history,” argues Aaron Blake for The Washington Post. “Essentially, the [Claremont] statement isn’t disputing that Eastman provided a ready-made procedure for Trump and Pence to get the election overturned — he clearly and unambiguously did so — it’s that he didn’t explicitly say Pence should overturn it himself.”

    These are the fun details the select committee would like to parse with Mr. Eastman. They are prepared to subpoena him but would prefer if he testified voluntarily. To date, at least five Trump administration staffers have volunteered their testimony in this fashion.

    “That engagement, be it voluntary or compelled, already appears to be yielding damning information,” writes Eric Lutz for Vanity Fair, who points to the explosive recent report by Rolling Stone as evidence. Only former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has refused to comply with a subpoena, and he now has a whole new legal adventure rolling out before him. Stay tuned.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liberal Anti-Racism Is Fixated on Symbolic Gestures. We Need Concrete Action.

    A mural of George Floyd peers over the heads of people walking on the sidewalk

    We often hear from politicians that slavery is “America’s original sin.” This phrase has become a cliché, thoughtlessly intoned mostly by Democrats, though occasionally also deployed by Republicans in a bid to look like they are taking racism seriously. In most cases, it seems like little more than a way of gesturing at the unique gravity of racism. Nevertheless, if we take this bromide at its word — that grappling with racial oppression is not just a social or political problem, but also downright theological — it reveals the inherent deadlocks in liberal anti-racism.

    The Historical Roots of “Original Sin”

    In Christian theology, “original sin” has two basic meanings. On one level, it refers to Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden — the first or “original” sin committed by the “founding” members of the human race. More importantly, though, it denotes the consequences of that initial sin for subsequent generations of humans. According to a theological tradition that runs from St. Augustine to Martin Luther and John Calvin and beyond, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they did more than commit a single offense. They knocked their will, their capacity for making moral decisions, permanently off-kilter. Where Adam and Eve had previously been in harmony with God’s righteousness, they were now out of tune in a way that they could never fix. Even worse, they passed this moral incapacity on to their children, who passed it on to theirs, and so forth. Thus, according to this view, we are afflicted with the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin from birth, our individual “origin.”

    The apparently trivial decision to eat a certain piece of fruit against God’s orders thus carried unimaginably tragic consequences. Every single human being was now morally damaged from birth, incapable of fulfilling God’s moral standards. Thankfully, the story goes, God arranged for us to be saved by becoming incarnate as a human being. By living a perfect life and freely sacrificing himself, Christ created an infinite store of righteousness on behalf of his fellow human beings, which we can access through the sacraments administered by the Church. But although the rite of baptism allows us to be “forgiven” for our inborn state of moral incapacity, the underlying problem is unfixable in this life. In our fallen world, every human being must struggle with their inclination to do the wrong thing, an inclination that will inevitably prevail over our good intentions at least some of the time. Only death and resurrection can bring true healing and allow us to conform fully to God’s moral demands.

    This theological story is in many ways strange and convoluted, but it is familiar. It is the teaching of essentially every mainstream Christian denomination in the U.S., and given that most politicians are still practicing Christians, we have to assume that those lamenting “America’s original sin” are familiar with, as it were, the original original sin. And the connection is fairly clear: In its founding moment, the U.S. accepted a wicked compromise on slavery, which infected all subsequent generations of white Americans with the stain of racism. This stain is so durable that it may never be fully repaired.

    The Empty Ritual of Liberal Anti-Racism

    Surely that minimal parallel is what most politicians have in mind when they deplore “America’s original sin.” But I believe we can push further. Even if original sin can never be cured — in the sense of allowing us to consistently do the right thing — it can be forgiven, through vicarious sacrifice and ritual action. While Abraham Lincoln may have declared the deaths of Union and Confederation soldiers to be the necessary sacrifice in his second inaugural address, it is most often the sacrifice of Black people on behalf of true American ideals that is in view. This is why we hear so often that Martin Luther King Jr. “gave his life” for justice, when in reality he was assassinated and had no say in the matter. Similarly obscene was when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her gratitude to George Floyd, who supposedly “gave his life” in service of the quest for greater racial justice in the U.S. In both cases, their lives were taken, not given. Nevertheless, their ostensible “sacrifice” creates a fund of righteousness that somehow makes up for white America’s intractable racism.

    The way white, liberal America exploits Black suffering is through ritual actions. We can think here of the infamous shot of congressional Democrats kneeling in commemoration of George Floyd, decked out in Kente cloth. This ritual reenactment of Floyd’s death, in ceremonial garb connected to African culture, bears obvious parallels to Christian rites that seek to reenact and identify with Christ’s sacrifice. Most responses to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 have been just as purely symbolic: more television programming on Black themes, greater attention to Black History Month, the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Meanwhile, police funding has actually gone up, and another high-profile police murder happened literally at the same time as the guilty verdict against Floyd’s killer was being announced.

    In short, the notion of racism as “America’s original sin” underwrites a cycle of performative guilt and ritual repentance among white liberals, as a substitute for any concrete action. After all, who could presume to fix a problem of such theological proportions? And it is becoming increasingly clear that no one, perhaps apart from those kneeling in Kente cloth, is satisfied with this theological approach to race. On the left, there has been a groundswell of radical and yet clear and practical demands that aim to concretely dismantle the institutions — above all the police — that forcibly preserve the racial hierarchy.

    Meanwhile, the right has taken aim at even the most minimal symbolic anti-racist gestures while attempting to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights era. The crusade against critical race theory is above all an attempt to push back against the idea of racism as “America’s original sin.” The bills specify that any instruction presupposing that white people are “inherently racist” should be disallowed. They also take aim at the first sense of original sin by denying that the founding of the U.S. involved any sin at all. In place of liberal guilt, textbooks in conservative states — as well as in private religious schools elsewhere — often elide the history of slavery and racism and sometimes openly valorize it, claiming that slaves were well-treated and even implying slavery was a voluntary condition.

    Overcoming Racism Requires Breaking With the Frame of “Original Sin”

    The conservative backlash is dangerous and cynical, but there is a moment of truth in their objection to liberal anti-racism. What conservatives are implicitly asking is: If racism is so unavoidable and unfixable, why should we be made to feel guilty about it? The same question could be asked of the Christian doctrine of original sin: What sense does it make for God to demand the impossible of us?

    The obvious solution here is to abandon the theological frame altogether. Yet I believe the Christian tradition does offer us some resources for rethinking the problem of “America’s original sin.” Even though Augustine’s view has largely prevailed in the Western world, it is far from the only interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden and its implications for us. Many of Augustine’s predecessors held that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and instead followed the devil’s misleading advice, they were tricked into accepting the devil as their ruler. The consequences of their action were passed down, not biologically, but as the status of slavery or citizenship is passed down. In becoming a member of the human race, God was trying to overthrow the devil’s social contract from within, allowing humanity to imagine a new form of life together.

    To draw a parallel with this alternative theological view, the founding of the U.S. did not irreversibly infect all white people with the ineradicable stain of racism — it trapped us in a bad social contract. If we want to escape the negative consequences of that social contract, we need to withdraw from it and join a new, better one. In place of individual guilt, we would get a structural analysis of the mechanisms of racial oppression. Instead of blaming racist outcomes on individual attitudes, we would note that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the institutional structures designed to accommodate race-based chattel slavery for life continue to produce racist results by giving racists control over powerful veto points. And one solution could be to do something seen as a heresy in the United States: draft and ratify a constitution that was not designed by slavers.

    In other words — and here both theological views agree — the U.S. must die and be resurrected as something new and better. It must be born again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jim Crow Politics Have Descended on Education

    A man holds a sign reading "CRITICAL RACIST THEORY IS POISON" during a protest

    The United States is at war with itself, and education is one of its more recent casualties. The institutions crucial for creating informed, engaged and critical citizens are under siege. One consequence is that the language of democracy is disappearing along with the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible.

    The signs are everywhere. Jim Crow politics are back with a vengeance. Both during and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party has dropped any pretense to democracy in its affirmation of authoritarian politics and its embrace of white supremacy. This has been evident in their weaponizing of identity, support for a range of discriminatory policies of exclusion, the construction of a wall that has become a resurgent symbol of nativism, and under the Trump regime the internment of children separated from their undocumented parents at the southern border.

    The rush to construct a home-grown form of authoritarianism is also clear in the passing of a barrage of voter suppression laws introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures, all based on baseless claims of voter fraud. Voter suppression has become the new currency of a rebranded form of racialized fascist politics. As of September 1, 2021, 361 bills had been put into play in 47 states while 19 states have passed 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote, particularly poor Black people. Neoliberalism’s survival-of-the-fittest ideology has turned even more toxic. The right-wing appetite for maliciousness and cruelty now translates into a form of learned brutality—allowing people to think the unthinkable and embrace the tenets of white supremacy.

    Voter suppression laws fuel white supremacy and fit nicely into the racist argument that whites are under siege by people of color who are attempting to dethrone and replace them. In this case, such laws, along with ongoing attacks on equality and social justice, are defended by right-wing extremists as justifiable measures to protect whites from the “contaminating” influence of immigrants, Black people, and others considered unworthy of occupying and participating in the public sphere and democratic process. Similarly, voter suppression laws are defended as legitimate attempts to provide proof of “real Americans,” code for defining people of color as “counterfeit citizens.” In actuality, these laws are not only racist in intent, but are also meant to enable permanent minority rule for the Republican Party, the end point of which is a form of authoritarianism.

    The attacks on critical race theory are a barely disguised effort by white supremacist to define who counts as an American and has a long legacy in which those groups deemed unworthy of citizenship disappear. The language of historical and pedagogical erasure extends from the genocide inflicted on Native Americans to the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and includes the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the second world war and the rise of the racialized carceral state. There is more at work here than the whitening of collective identity, the public sphere, and American history. There are invocations of whiteness, as Paul Gilroy suggests, that enhance “the allure of [a] rebranded fascism.”

    The Republican Party’s labeling of critical race theory as “ideological or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well as the ways in which it is enforced through policy, laws and institutions. For many Republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in which racism persist in American society. For instance, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has stated that “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” DeSantis has not only labeled critical race theory as “false history,” but he has also extended the discourse of his virulent attack on any vestige of critical education and critical race theory to almost unrecognizably repressive lengths. As Eric Lutz points out, DeSantis has taken the

    culture war a step farther, signing laws that will require students and staff at public universities to be surveyed on their political beliefs; bar higher education institutions from preventing access to ideas students may find “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive;” and force-feeding K-12 students “portraits in patriotism” that contrasts America with communist and totalitarian regimes.

    In this updated version of apartheid pedagogy and historical cleansing, the call for racial justice is equated to a form of racial hatred leaving intact the refusal to acknowledge, condemn, and confront in the public imagination the history and tenacity of racism in American society. Apartheid pedagogy transforms the criticism of racial injustice and structural racism into a breach of law and makes it an object of malignant state oppression and violence.

    The attack on critical race theory restricts what educators can say and teach in the classroom and does so by invoking the language of fear and retaliation. As Heather Cox Richardson points out in her October 16, 2021, newsletter, teachers who refer to the work of Frederick Douglass, the Chicano movement, women’s suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, Indigenous rights, and the American labor movement all run the risk of losing their jobs in states such as Texas. Many teachers are not just confused about what they can and cannot say in the classroom about social justice issues but also live in daily fear over the consequences they may face “for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism.” Such fears point to more than the curtailing of freedom of expression and the idealizing of history by whitewashing it. They also identify America’s slide into a re-branded fascist politics that is difficult to ignore. This type of indoctrination and intrusion into shaping the curriculum makes it clear how right-wing Republicans view what it means to be a “patriotic American.” The threat of white supremacy has even been acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech he delivered marking the Tulsa race massacre. Biden warned that U.S. democracy was not only in danger but that Americans had to recognize and challenge the “deep roots of racial terror.”

    Legalizing Racial Oppression and Apartheid Pedagogy

    The racialized climate of fear, intimidation and censorship is spreading in the United States. This is evident in the fact that anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bills have been introduced or passed in 27 state legislatures across the country in order to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. These reactionary attacks on critical thought and emancipatory forms of pedagogy echo an earlier period in American history. Such attacks are reminiscent of the McCarthy and Red Scare period of the 1950s when heightened paranoia over the threat of communism resulted in a slew of laws that banned the teaching of material deemed unpatriotic, “and required professors to swear loyalty oaths.”

    Such repression is never far from an abyss of ignorance. Right-wing attacks on critical race theory also ignore any work by prominent Black scholars ranging from W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Y. Davis to Audre Lord and James Baldwin. There is no mention of even Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory in the 1980s. Nor is there room for complexity, evidence or facts, just as there is no room for either a critique of structural racism or the actual assumptions and influence that make up CRT’s body of work. Such attacks raise fundamental questions about the goal of higher education and role of academics in a time of mounting authoritarianism.

    This is especially true at time when higher education has become a site of derision, an object of censorship, and a way of demonizing faculty and students who address critically matters of racial inequality, social injustice and crucial social problems. Let’s be clear. For the Republican Party, higher education has become a battleground for conducting a race war waged in the spirit of the Confederacy and conducted through the twin registers of censorship and indoctrination. Right-wing politicians now use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racial injustice and white supremacy. In doing so, they undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.” In this context, the language of history appears frozen, stripped of its critical insights, and reduced to a weapon of miseducation. History no longer teaches us what tyranny looks like or to recognize the ethical grounds of resistance. It no longer provides lessons about the courage to act. Ignorance destroys civic culture and undermines democracy by eliminating an informed public capable of understanding and shaping the forces that bear down on their lives.

    Apartheid pedagogy is about disavowal, erasure and disappearance. It promotes a manufactured ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. The right-wing attempt to impose “patriotic education” on educators is part of a longstanding counter-revolution that conservatives have waged since the student revolts of the 1960s. The 1960s call by students to democratize the university and open it up to people of color was then considered by many liberals and conservatives as a dangerous expression of dissent. In one famous instance, this was duly noted by ruling class elites such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in the Trilateral Commission of 1973 who complained about what was called the “excess of democracy” in the United States. This counter-revolution also fueled the ongoing corporatization of the university in which business models defined how the university is governed, resulting in faculty being reduced to part-time workers, and students being viewed merely as customers and consumers. Another register of this ongoing counter-revolution with its embrace of apartheid pedagogy includes an attempt by Boards of Trustees to remove faculty from making decisions regarding both matters of administrative governance, faculty appointments, and who decides who gets tenure. In addition, many Republican-led states are not only making decisions about what books can or cannot be taught — a decision that should be left up to teachers — but are also calling for what they call teaching opposing views in classrooms. In one instance, a school administrator in charge of curriculum in a Texas school district informed a group of elementary school teachers that “if their classroom libraries included books about the Holocaust, students should also be steered toward books with ‘opposing views,’” as if there were a legitimate opposing view to counter the death of 6 million Jews and others.

    In addition, right-wing legislators have also introduced laws to limit funding to higher education institutions that teach critical race theory. For instance, Ohio Republican State Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur introduced a bill titled “Promoting Education Not Indoctrination Act” that threatens to cut state funding by 25% to any Ohio public university that allows the teaching of critical race theory. Arthur’s disdain for democracy was also evident in her attempts to erase from state-mandated curriculum guidelines any mention of the notion of common good, a view in sympathy with her repugnant views of racism, environmentalism and critical thinking itself. Ron DeSantis has passed legislation that mandates that Florida’s two public universities “use objective, nonpartisan, and statistically valid” surveys to measure “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives” exist on the campuses. Beyond imposing what amounts to ideological surveys, the law also encourages conservative students to secretly record classes in the event they file a lawsuit against the university. This is about more than censorship; it is about the whitewashing of history and education regarding any issue that is at odds with the right-wing’s notion of patriotic education. As the novelist Francine Prose argues:

    If teachers are obliged to tell their classes that there is “another point of view” about whether the Holocaust occurred, must American history lessons now also include books asserting that the United States was never a slave-holding nation or that racism ended with the Emancipation Proclamation? If the discussion surrounding a novel or story leads a class to conclude that LGBTQ+ people are entitled to basic human rights, must the class be asked to seriously consider the opposing view: that those rights should be denied to anyone who differs from the heterosexual norm?

    Such attacks are also being funded by foundations such as the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, which often rely on the endorsement of conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell. Some of most powerful enablers of the attack on “anti-racist programs” in higher education and elsewhere include such as organizations such as the Koch Brothers foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is particular pernicious given that it increasingly provides the template for anti critical race theory bills which are then used by many state legislators. This is apartheid pedagogy with a vengeance.

    Education Must Develop Young People’s Capacity for Democracy

    One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what higher education should accomplish in a precarious democracy? How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination, and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy? How can education be enlisted to fight what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon, “the slow cancellation of the future?”

    Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. Education and pedagogy should provide the conditions for young people to think about keeping a democracy alive and vibrant, not simply training students to be workers. Yes, we must educate young people with the skills they need to get jobs but as educators we must also teach them to learn “to live with less or no misery [and] to fight against those social sources” that cause war, destruction of the environment, “inequality, unhappiness, and needless human suffering.” As Christopher Newfield argues, “democracy needs a public” and higher education has a crucial role to play in this regard as a democratic public good rather than defining itself through the market-based values of neoliberal capitalism.

    One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty, and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect classroom knowledge, values and social problems with the larger society, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to translate private troubles into wider systemic issues while transforming their hidden despair and private grievances into critical narratives and public transcripts. At best such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent or what might be called moments of rupture or empowering transgressions. Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective and independent — qualities that are indispensable for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform and governmental policy.

    The current right-wing attacks on education dangerously weaken the critical and democratic impulses of education. Moreover, they are designed strip history of its critical and most troubling elements, and in doing so weaken the pedagogical opportunities for students to develop in free and open exchanges of ideas while undermining the conditions that promote critical thinking, dialogue, and civic engagement. Matters of truth, evidence and reality itself disappear in this form of pedagogical repression. Such actions set the stage for a generation of students unable to distinguish truth from fantasy, unable to resist the false allure and claims of demagogic leaders, and unprepared to reject conspiracy theories and lies. In other words, this form of education prepares them to accept a world where manufactured ignorance is the norm and where repeating the worst elements of the past becomes an unquestioned reality.

    Resistance in this sense begins with the refusal to accept a crudely functional view of education that only values those modes of research, knowledge and teaching that can turn a profit. We must reject educational views that consign administrators, faculty, and students to the prison house of common sense and cynicism. We must reject the attacks on teacher unions and the reduction of knowledge, values and modes of governance to the language of managerial capitalism. We must refuse to turn education into work stations of right-wing ideology and white supremacy, or into factories designed to domesticate thought and cauterize the imagination. We must speak out against the power of bean counters to align educational research with the idolatry of data, which attempts to define the unmeasurable and promote a deadening instrumental rationality that suffocates consciousness. We must resist the empirical frenzies that turn courageous ideas into ashes, all the while degrading civic virtue and ignoring the shadow of a fascist politics engulfing the globe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Social Infrastructure Bill Has Been Gutted. Progressives May Not Let It Pass.

    Sen. Joe Manchin mingles with guests before speaking during an event with the Economic Club of Washington at the Capitol Hilton Hotel on October 26, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    For those still playing along at home, still chasing the details of this long and ugly slog toward passage of a standard infrastructure bill and a second bill called the Build Back Better Act, this latest update brings grim tidings.

    Due almost entirely to their own self-interest and devoted service to those who fund their campaigns, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have managed to either kill or mortally wound multiple elements of the social infrastructure bill that would have dramatically improved the lives of millions. Many of those items had already been removed from the standard infrastructure bill, on the promise they would be included in the second bill. This was a lie.

    Gone, or almost gone from the bill are vital new climate provisions that would force utilities to move to clean energy; a Medicare expansion that includes dental, vision and hearing coverage; prescription drug pricing reform that is vital to funding the bill itself; free community college; new taxes on the ultra-wealthy; and 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.

    Manchin and Sinema did this, with some backstopping from a few House Democrats deep in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. The Republicans barely had to get out of bed. “We’re still ‘no’ on everything,” they’ve occasionally reminded us as they sit back and watch the shit show unfold.

    After days of relative silence as these provisions were stripped from the bill, Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) — by far and away the most constructive and fair-handed players in this process — sounded a warning alarm: If the Medicare expansion and climate provisions are removed from the bill, despite numerous promises they would be included, there is no promise the 96-strong Caucus will vote to approve it.

    Without their votes, the bill is almost certainly doomed in the House, as less than 10 Republican House members have indicated they will support it. The Congressional Progressive Caucus votes are the margin, and at present, that margin is in peril.

    “Bottom line is that any reconciliation bill must include serious negotiations on the part of Medicare with the pharmaceutical industry, lower the cost of prescription drugs. That’s what the American people want,” Sanders said forcefully on Tuesday, adding that a “serious reconciliation bill must include expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing aids and eyeglasses.”

    “Progressives are fighting to tackle the climate crisis, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing, and guarantee family leave in America,” tweeted progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar. “These are the investments major countries make in their communities and we can too.”

    “Medicare treats your eyes, teeth, and ears like they’re not part of your body,” tweeted progressive Rep. Cori Bush. “It makes no sense. The Build Back Better Act currently expands Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing. We need to make sure that happens.”

    The Democratic senator from West Virginia coal was unmoved.

    “Sen. Joe Manchin on Monday shut down one of Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders’s biggest priorities, expanding Medicare, which Manchin warned would undermine the solvency of the broader program,” reports The Hill. “Sanders insisted in a tweet Saturday that his proposal to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision must be included in a budget reconciliation package that is likely to come in well below the $3.5 trillion price tag Democratic leaders initially envisioned. But Manchin on Monday threw cold water on Sanders’s push to expand Medicare, warning the program faces insolvency in 2026.”

    Manchin is also insisting the price tag for the social infrastructure bill be no higher than $1.5 trillion, a full $2 trillion less than the amount Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus settled on after much compromise.

    Because these are Democrats we are talking about, we are now required to cross the ever-treacherous span between the nauseating and the utterly surreal. On the far side of that chasm stand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who have spent this entire endeavor watching Pelosi’s precious “moderate” Democrats gnaw through these bills like beavers.

    At a historic crossroads that is nothing less than a genuine existential crisis, the Speaker and the Majority Leader have watched as life-and-death provisions of these bills are chopped away by fellow Democrats chasing dollar signs around the building. Their advice to every Democrat in the face of this? Don’t worry, be happy!

    “If we don’t act like we are winning, the American people won’t believe it either,” Hoyer reportedly told Democrats during a recent private meeting. Pelosi, for her part, has been telling her caucus that the contest is over, and the corporations have won again. “Embrace this,” she reportedly told the room during that same private meeting, “and have a narrative of success.”

    Yes, of course, pretend to lead and have a “narrative of success” so people “believe we’re winning.” This is the politics of fiction, of cowardly lions with gavels and titles, all roar and no bite. That should have been the Democratic Party slogan since right about when Pelosi and Hoyer got involved in big-time politics. “Democrats: Pretending to Lead Since 1981, Because Reagan Was Scary and Republicans Say Mean Things.”

    This is not entirely true, of course. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has from top to bottom fought the good fight since the beginning. If they could be criticized for anything, it is that they were credulous enough to believe the promise that those vital provisions stripped from the infrastructure bill would be revived in the Build Back Better Act.

    Perhaps they should have chosen the infrastructure bill as their hill to die on, an immediate signal that compromising on such life-or-death provisions was unacceptable. That’s all hindsight, and besides, how much can the CPC do when the party’s leadership folds like a hotel laundromat?

    Another twinkle of a bright spot: Sen. Elizabeth’s wildly popular “two cents” campaign platform to tax the ultra-wealthy may become part of the Build Back Better Act, a replacement for the other taxation vehicles that were gutted from the bill. The idea being proposed is not exactly the same as hers, but it is a close cousin, and would do much to claw back some of the money Donald Trump gave away to his rich pals in December of 2017. Whether it survives the denuding process remains to be seen.

    Soon, soon, Pelosi and company keep telling us. The bills will be ready for passage soon… but the Congressional Progressive Caucus may have something to say about that before the deal goes down. It’s a dirty business, and it’s not finished yet.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Deadly US Sanctions Are Exacerbating the Pandemic Globally

    Women have their blood pressure checked before receiving the first dose of the Cuban vaccine candidate Abdala against COVID-19, during a mass vaccination campaign at the Andres Blanco complex of Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas, Venezuela, on June 30, 2021.

    There was a sigh of relief for people who are concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic when President Biden took office in January. After a year of COVID denial, Biden promised to “follow the science” and put more effort into containing the virus than the Trump administration did. But 10 months later, a new report by the Department of the Treasury makes it clear that “following the science” only applies when it protects the profits of the wealthy class.

    On January 21, President Biden issued a National Security Memorandum that, in a section titled, “COVID-19 Sanctions Relief,” ordered various departments to “review existing United States and multilateral financial and economic sanctions to evaluate whether they are unduly hindering responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide recommendations to the President.” This section suggested an interest by the administration in reversing the “maximum pressure” economic warfare campaign waged by President Trump.

    Sanctions are restrictions on trade, finance and travel that are technically supposed to be used to punish certain actors — governments, corporations or individuals — only when they are convicted by a body, usually the United Nations, of committing a crime. But over the past few decades, the United States has increasingly issued its own so-called sanctions outside of any legal process as a tool to punish or retaliate against almost 40 countries representing a third of the global population.

    While the United States calls these ad hoc actions “sanctions,” they are more accurately described as unilateral coercive measures — state actions that violate human rights and multiple international laws. These unilateral coercive measures create an economic blockade that prevents targeted countries from, for example, having access to their assets that are abroad, conducting financial transactions or transporting goods.

    Economic blockades prevent countries from purchasing basic necessities such as food, medicines and equipment, creating scarcity and driving up prices. This leads to preventable suffering and deaths that are less visible than when bombs are dropped but are just as deadly. For example, the Center for Economic Policy and Research found that these U.S. “sanctions” contributed to the deaths of 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017 and 2018. Unilateral coercive measures have more recently prevented Venezuela from paying for cancer treatment for patients who were sent abroad to receive specialized care, leaving hundreds of patients stranded.

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States’ unilateral coercive measures have blocked the purchase of medical equipment such as ventilators, medications and even vaccinations through the World Health Organization’s COVAX program designed to make vaccines more available globally. This is why the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres wrote to the leaders of G-20 countries in March 2020, stating, “I am encouraging the waiving of sanctions imposed on countries to ensure access to food, essential health supplies, and COVID-19 medical support. This is the time for solidarity not exclusion.”

    As nations around the world responded to the COVID-19 crisis by sharing medical supplies and personnel to combat the pandemic, the Trump administration issued more unilateral coercive measures. This forced impacted countries to find ways around the economic blockade. Some countries bypassed U.S.-dominated financial institutions by trading in currencies other than the dollar or using alternative platforms. Some — such as Mexico, which used its navy to deliver medical supplies and other necessities to Cuba — have openly defied the U.S. blockade.

    Additionally, nations are joining together to call upon the United Nations to live up to its own charter, which prohibits unilateral coercive measures. In July, 18 countries launched the “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations.” Their initial declaration calls out the United States using diplomatic language, stating: “We also underscore the need to avoid selective approaches and call for the full compliance with and strict adherence to both the letter and spirit of the tenets contained in the Charter of the United Nations, which are at the core of multilateralism and serve as the basis for modern day international law.”

    This growing resistance to the United States’ illegal unilateral coercive measures has alarmed the U.S.’s foreign policy establishment and corporate elites. A primary purpose of sanctions is to weaken governments that dare to stand up to domination by the United States by causing hardship and civil unrest, making it easier to overthrow their leadership. Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted this unspoken tactic when he said, “We will coup whoever we want,” following the U.S.-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia, a country with vast stores of lithium needed for electric car batteries — an essential resource for the largest electric car company.

    The Trump and Biden administrations have gone so far as to kidnap, imprison and torture a Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab, who was trying to negotiate the purchase of food and medications from Iran in June 2020. Saab was held illegally in Cabo Verde as the United States tried to get permission to extradite him on the basis of unfounded charges of “money laundering.” When that failed, the U.S. used extraordinary rendition on October 16 to bring him to Miami where he is currently in detention. The U.S. is trying to make an example of Saab to deter others from doing the same.

    The first report in response to President Biden’s order in the National Security Memorandum to review sanctions makes this fear of defiance abundantly clear. The Treasury 2021 Sanctions Review, released on October 18, states concern over “new challenges” such as alternative payment systems that skirt the U.S. dollar and recommends greater investment in personnel and technology to overcome these threats and “protect the integrity of the U.S. financial system.” There is no mention of COVID-19 anywhere in this report.

    The report also recommends encouraging U.S. allies to support the U.S.’s economic warfare to give it greater legitimacy by, in part, “advocating for UN sanctions when possible.” The United States has a history of pressuring nations to impose sanctions on its targeted countries through the United Nations, which is a legal avenue as opposed to the U.S.’s illegal unilaterally imposed measures. And it recommends more effort to “enhance its public messaging and engagement” to effectively build public support for unilateral coercive measures.

    It appears that is more important to the United States government to spend money on protecting the interests and profits of its transnational corporations than it is to roll back the economic blockades to protect public health. So far, the Biden administration has only removed a few of the hundreds of new unilateral coercive measures imposed by President Trump.

    Anticipating that the Biden administration would not prioritize health in its reviews of sanctions, the U.S.-based Sanctions Kill coalition, of which I am a member, released its own report, “The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions,” in September. This report documented clear examples of how the U.S.’s unilateral coercive measures impair the ability of nations to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Iran has been unable to purchase necessary medications and other supplies resulting in preventable deaths from COVID-19. Cuba developed its own vaccines against the virus that causes COVID-19 but has been unable to purchase enough syringes to vaccinate its population because of the economic blockade.

    The report cites an October 2020 statement from United Nations Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan, which sums up the overall impacts well: “Targeted countries face shortages of medications and medical equipment, including oxygen supplies and ventilators, protective kits, spare parts, software, fuel, electricity, drinking water and water for sanitation, cannot use foreign assets for humanitarian imports, their citizens and medical personnel cannot get access to information about COVID-19, telemedicine or use communication and educational platforms. In the long-term perspective unilateral sanctions hinder targeted countries’ ability to respond to COVID-19, to implement national response plans; result in breaches of existing regional and bilateral cooperation/integration mechanisms; make populations dependant [sic] on humanitarian aid and prevent the economic recovery of the targeted countries through the development and maintenance of necessary infrastructure.”

    As UN Secretary General Guterres stated, the world needs cooperation to end the COVID-19 pandemic. As long as the virus is able to proliferate anywhere in the world, it puts everyone at risk. New variants have already arisen that are more infectious and more lethal. If the pandemic continues, newer variants could develop that resist protection by the current vaccines. This could put us back to square one.

    The United States’ unilateral coercive measures are unquestionably hindering the ability of nations to respond to the pandemic, but this isn’t the only harm they are causing. In addition to suffering and deaths in countries targeted by the U.S., the unilateral coercive measures are driving isolation of the United States from the global economy as countries shun the U.S. dollar. They prevent U.S. industries from trading with targeted countries and fuel animosity towards the U.S. They also put the United States at risk of criminal and civil prosecution that could result in orders to pay substantial reparations to the victims of this policy.

    Instead of doubling down on its “sanctions,” the United States must cease this deadly and illegal economic war on the world. Global resistance to sanctions is growing and as the multipolar world arises, the United States could find itself isolated and prosecuted for its actions. For the well-being of the world, people in the United States have a responsibility to stop this escalation and demand an end to sanctions.

    The Sanctions Kill coalition has a sample presentation that anyone can download and share with their local organization or community group to better understand what sanctions are and the harm they cause. The coalition is urging people to send the new report to their members of Congress and call on them to stop the United States’ illegal coercive measures. And, the Alliance for Global Justice has organized a campaign to raise awareness about the kidnapping of Alex Saab and put pressure on the Biden administration to free him. The executive office has the power to end the deadly “sanctions” now.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Explosive Report Says GOP Congress Members Helped Plan Jan. 6 Capitol Attack

    Capitol rioters riot at the u.s. capitol

    “Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff,” roared the late-Sunday Rolling Stone headline. The report describes two January 6 protest insiders who claim they worked “back to back to back” with several Republican House members — Representatives Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — and their senior staffers, who they allege were “intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.”

    These two Jan. 6 organizers “have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol,” according to Rolling Stone. “This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.”

    If confirmed, this report would put the word “bombshell” to shame, and would also go a long way toward explaining why Trump’s congressional allies have been turning themselves inside out trying to change the subject. An unfortunate grain of salt must be taken with this, however. Rolling Stone’s journalistic reputation took a hit over its reporting on the Duke University rape scandal seven years ago. Because of this, confirmation by other news outlets is essential. As of this writing, it appears only The Hill has chosen to pick up the Rolling Stone story.

    There is good reason to believe the Stone report is sound. First and foremost, it reveals that these two sources have been actively cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee, providing specific details on who was involved with which aspects of the insurrection. Such a claim could and likely would be debunked by members of that committee if it weren’t accurate.

    The Rolling Stone report comes in tandem with a damning Washington Post report detailing how space within the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C. was used as a war room for efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. “They called it the ‘command center,’” reports the Post, “a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election…. Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.”

    Central to this effort was the enormous pressure brought to bear against Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election results on the same day as the insurrection took place. While Pence wobbled badly under the strain, seeking advice at one point from fellow former Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, he ultimately chose to certify the election results. At the peak of the day’s violence, Pence was whisked from the building by the Secret Service as a mob of furious Trump supporters stormed the halls of the Capitol demanding his head. The Willard operation was so serious, in fact, that its members brought in a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron, who specialized in psychological operations, to aid in the overall effort.

    Multiple witnesses are set to testify under subpoena before the committee about what they knew of pre-meditated plans for violence on January 6, and how high up the chain that premeditation went. One of them, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon — who said on his podcast the day before the violence that “all hell is going to break loose” and “tomorrow is game day” — is ignoring his subpoena. By a vote of 229-202, the House approved a measure holding Bannon in contempt of Congress, and his legal fate now rests in the strangely quiescent hands of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

    There are many moving pieces to this, but a sense is growing that those involved in planning and executing the attempted overthrow of the election on Jan. 6 may be running out of room to maneuver. Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the Jan. 6 investigation committee, told CBS News on Sunday there is “no question” the attack that day was premeditated. One wonders if Thompson is among the committee members who have spoken to the sources in the Rolling Stone report. It sure sounds like it.

    Thirty years ago this week, the remnants of Hurricane Grace were engulfed by a powerful nor’easter in the waters off the Mid-Atlantic states. The combined system, jostled by a barometric ridge and a cold front, charged north as a subtropical cyclone before becoming a wildly atypical hurricane itself. The “No Name Storm,” or the “Halloween Storm,” as it came to be called, raged for days and killed 13 people. Not long after it passed, a National Weather Service forecaster named Robert Case and an adventure author named Sebastian Junger gave it a name that stuck: The Perfect Storm.

    Thirty years later, another perfect storm is brewing over Washington, D.C. If it comes together just so, the obedient minions of Donald Trump, along with Trump himself, could be exposed as active practitioners of treason within the halls of the very government they purported to serve.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Right to Vote Should Be Available to Everyone — Including Prisoners Like Me

    Prisoners’ inability to vote means we can’t vote for fair-minded judges who will protect our rights in civil court.

    People in prison often begin their life in marginalized communities where their families’ right to vote has historically been suppressed. Today, voter suppression of those communities is again on the rise. The fact that people are actively trying to legislate additional hindrances to already marginalized communities’ right to vote highlights the need to ensure the right to vote for all of these communities’ members — even if they are in prison.

    This is especially true because, once convicted, their imprisonment further marginalizes them from society. In Illinois, where I’m incarcerated, everyone in prison is completely stripped of their right to vote until release. (For the thousands of people sentenced to die in Illinois prisons, this is a lifetime denial of the right to vote.)

    As someone who has been sitting in prison for the last two decades, I know the full effects of being disenfranchised. It leaves us vulnerable to a voting public that has almost zero concern for our welfare, and deprives us of both a voice in society and what could be a powerful tool to facilitate our return to useful citizenship.

    Fortunately, the organization Chicago Votes has been working to pass Senate Bill 828 in partnership with State Representative Lashawn Ford. If passed, this bill will restore voting rights to the roughly 30,000 individuals incarcerated in Illinois prisons, including me. After nearly passing in the final days of the 2021 regular legislative session with 64 “yes” commitments in the House of Representatives, confusion over the bill’s constitutionality stalled its passage. Since then, Chicago Votes and advocates have worked to address misbeliefs around the bill’s constitutionality. Now, the bill is poised to move during the fall veto session, which would make Illinois the first state in the United States to restore voting rights to people in prison.

    Those of us in prison are severely affected by our inability to vote. First, judges in Illinois are elected. For decades, getting elected required promising to be, or proving they were, “tough-on-crime” — meaning they would, or were, handing out overly harsh prison sentences. Those judges never had to worry about the victims of those harsh sentences voting against them in the next election, because prisoners do not have the right to vote.

    This continues today and affects all of one’s appeals and resentencing hearings. Moreover, the inability to vote means we can’t vote for fair-minded judges who will protect our rights in civil court, nor vote against judges who openly discriminate against petitions filed by people in prison.

    Second, most legislators don’t view anyone in prison as their constituents simply because they can’t vote. This is true whether they were a constituent prior to incarceration or whether the prison is in their district. If legislators don’t need to court the votes of people in prison, it ensures they are unlikely to take their concerns or viewpoints into consideration when passing legislation.

    That simple fact greatly contributed to the passing of tougher and tougher sentencing guidelines, and also ensures that today’s “reforms” of those extreme sentencing laws won’t help the currently incarcerated.

    Thus, for numerous reasons the disenfranchisement of people in prison helps to ensure that they serve more time in prison. This does not serve any true penological or public safety goal. Rather, it largely just serves to benefit the personal political careers of judges and legislators, many of whom have already retired. Therefore, those in prison have a serious liberty interest in obtaining the right to vote.

    The fact that people in prison can’t vote for state legislators also leaves them extremely vulnerable to abuse by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Legislators constantly cater to the guards’ union because they are a powerful voting bloc. This allows them to get legislation passed that is beneficial to prison guards, but detrimental to those of us in prison. This has negatively affected everything from our right to access public records, to our ability to peacefully protest inhumane living conditions via hunger strikes.

    We are also captive consumers at the “mercy” of monopolistic companies that routinely engage in price-gouging and other anti-competitive business practices — all to the detriment of the incarcerated. Additionally, the IDOC adds unnecessary, and unjust surcharges, or increases prices by demanding kickbacks or “commissions.” This too is at our expense.

    Without the right to vote, this is effectively “taxation without representation.” Thus, people confined to the IDOC were not only exploited by yesterday’s “tough-on-crime” politicians and ignored by today’s “reformers,” but are continuously exploited financially throughout our incarceration.

    People in prison are also largely prohibited from earning a living wage, and are often forced to work for pennies per day with no days off for months on end in unsafe working conditions.

    Being disenfranchised means we cannot vote for legislators who will look out for our interests — who will pass laws to stop our exploitation, require a living wage for prison labor, ensure we receive adequate medical care, have access to educational programming, and more.

    Society has this misconception that people in prison are “anti-social” or hell-bent on destroying society and should therefore not be allowed to vote so they can’t “poison the system.” Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Don’t get me wrong; society’s constant efforts to marginalize, ostracize, oppress and discriminate against the incarcerated definitely doesn’t help engender strong ties to society; but despite all of that, ties to the community usually remain.

    That’s because no matter how much society dehumanizes us, we remain just that — human. We are human beings with families and friends out in free society that we care deeply about. I myself am a son, father and grandfather. My right to vote, if restored to me, would be exercised primarily in support of my family’s safety and economic well-being.

    My vote for candidates would also probably be much more informed than the average citizen’s, due to the fact that I have the time to research both the candidates and their stances on the issues. Moreover, I have the time to get a real understanding of the issues and not just vote along party lines or for someone who spouts the best misleading rhetoric.

    People in prison also have a ton of experiential knowledge that can be used to help heal societal ills. We not only have firsthand knowledge about injustices embedded in our legal system, but we also have firsthand experience with oppression and being at the “mercy” of unaccountable agents of the state. For many people who come to prison, this makes us acutely aware of the injustices other people suffer and allows us to relate with empathy.

    This is a significant factor not only in why people personally impacted by mass incarceration are at the forefront of the movement to decarcerate, but also why people who leave prison often get involved in working for nonprofits, become “violence interrupters,” fight against racial discrimination, corruption, and more.

    Denying someone the right to vote is an extremely dehumanizing act. Rather than further ostracizing people in prison — the majority of whom will return to their communities someday — society should work to increase people’s attachments to society.

    Restoring people’s right to vote while in prison would go a long way toward engendering feelings of belonging to society. This would both make it more likely that the incarcerated would work towards the betterment of society, and increase the likelihood that they will be “returned to useful citizenship,” as our state constitution insinuates should be the goal.

    The right to vote should be available to everyone, incarcerated or not.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Looking to Get Cops Off Your Campus? Start Here.

    Black Lives Matter activist addresses participants in the mass sit-in on the Ohio State University (OSU) campus during the demonstration. Students staged a sit-in demonstration in reaction to the police shooting and killing of Ma'Khia Bryant, 16, the day before. Activists demanded that OSU sever ties with the Columbus Police Department to keep BIPOC students safe.

    The police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising in June 2020 galvanized campus organizing. Almost immediately, students at Hostos Community College named the racism inherent in policing and demanded their campus cut ties with the New York City Police Department. Students at Columbia University and Howard University launched tuition strike campaigns — a refusal to pay any tuition — demanding the divestment from Israel, the defunding of campus police departments, and the severing ties with local and federal policing agencies. A student-led coalition at the University of Minnesota successfully severed relationships with the local police. (However, simultaneously, the university almost immediately began to hire additional private security forces.)

    While mainstream media appear quick to proclaim the end of the #defundpolicing movement, last year’s vibrant campaigns have created fresh starting places for campus-based anti-prison-industrial complex organizing.

    With the fall 2021 semester seeing students filter tentatively back to in-person classes at colleges and universities across Turtle Island, assessment and study is overdue: What have we learned from a year of organizing? How are networks responding to emerging cul-de-sacs, or dead ends and false openings? What solidarities have been made possible? As two organizers and educators, in this spirit of study and movement-building, we share our reflections on the past year’s work — successes, challenges and experiments.

    Political Education Materials Are Powerful Tools

    Many campaigns and projects produced potent materials that aimed to educate people about the long racist histories of policing, particularly on campuses, with concrete tactics for abolitionist struggle. The University of Oregon’s critical history of policing timeline Instagram account offers crucial examples of the racialized violence perpetrated by police on that campus, while Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators’ “How to Grow Abolition on Your Campus: 8 Actions” provides entry points for abolitionist organizing, including starting abolitionist study groups and challenging discriminatory policies for college access. Timelines and tools like these not only continue to circulate and to support ongoing political education, but also often function effectively to archive crucial abolitionist campaigns and modes of resistance.

    Push Organized Labor

    Over the last two years, campus-based unions have included demands to defund police in bargaining and also worked horizontally to push for police unions to be removed from wider coalitions and the network of organized labor. In 2018 in Davis, California, the campus-based labor union, UAW 2865, representing the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions passed a proposal across the table calling for disarming and demilitarizing campus police. By 2020, other labor unions were taking up variations of these same demands: The striking Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor demanded a 50 percent cut to the Division of Public Safety and Security budget and that the university “cut all ties with police, including Ann Arbor Police Department (AAPD) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).” Similar organizing took place within the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University. More widely, organized labor is struggling to engage abolition, and campuses are one site to push this analysis and these demands.

    Demand More Than Defunding Campus Police

    Those with a badge and a uniform are not the only entities regulating and punishing on campus. Most academic disciplines actively naturalize and expand policing: For example, at Lehman College in the Bronx, students seeking access to the campus food pantry had to be accompanied by campus police, demonstrating the intimacy of student affairs offices and campus police departments. Abolitionist organizing on campus extends beyond defunding the police and involves building forms of community and developing authentic responses to harm that meet people’s needs. Initiatives — often pushed by campus feminists — offer responses to sexual assault that are non-carceral: Brown University’s Transformative Justice Program — created before the summer 2020 uprising — offers survivor-centered abolitionist engagements to gendered and sexual violence. By providing free, fresh vegetables, the Kingsborough Community College Urban Farm works to meet the needs of students and community members, and positions the college as centered around care — or advancing a mission of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “life-affirming institutions.” Dissenters, a newer national anti-militarization network, is supporting (and paying student staff members) to develop campus-based organizing infrastructure to challenge militarization. All of these initiatives, and more, are doing the affirmative work of building abolition.

    Multiply Opportunities for Ongoing Dialogues About Safety

    People want to feel safe. While many readers may be involved in abolitionist organizing, for some audiences, these demands are new. Organizing must include opportunities for people to talk, build and strengthen practices of safety. Our understanding of safety acknowledges that many people are unsafe on today’s heavily policed campuses, particularly those that are non-white. Over the last year, multiple webinars, teach-ins and days of action unfolded that created dialogues not only about the violence of policing, but other ways to ensure that communities were strong and safe. Abolition feminists have proliferated discussions of safety, such as at the University of Massachusetts where students, outraged by the prevalence of sexual violence on campus and the university’s persistent failure to respond, pushed out and visibly occupied space on campus. At Columbia University, Black and/or feminist organizers have resisted the university’s definition of safety through policing, demanding instead 24/7 access to counseling and rape crisis services. Reimagining and redefining safety can be complex work that requires ongoing engagement — in community.

    Make Visible the Tentacles of Policing

    The landscape of campus policing is diffuse, with multiple public and private law enforcement actors sharing jurisdictions and creating borders well beyond the campus boundaries. The University of Chicago has one of the largest private police forces in the world, a trend among elite, historically white, private universities in predominantly Black neighborhoods and cities. Universities also create memoranda of understanding with policing agencies from nearby municipalities that both allow for non-university agencies to police campus and university police forces to roam off campus. Agreements like these led to the detention of Black Lives Matter protesters in the University of California Los Angeles’s Jackie Robinson Stadium by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2020 and also were behind the 2020 shooting of Stephanie Washington by Yale Police Officer Terrance Pollock in a New Haven neighborhood. For some campus police departments, such as the University of California Police Department, the entire state is within their jurisdiction. One key outcome of last year’s campus uprisings was highlighting the massive and multi-faceted infrastructures of policing that unfold on campuses and in adjacent communities.

    Work Across Borders to Craft Coalitions

    By necessity, defund campaigns clearly moved across the artificial on-campus/off-campus boundaries, and demanded the abolition of all policing everywhere. Collaborations across borders of all kinds are generative. For example, Abolition May, a Turtle Island-wide campaign orchestrated by the Cops Off Campus Coalition, and the intergenerational organizing by CUNY for Abolition and Safety and the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, create linkages between sites, institutions and people that may initially seem disparate. Solidarity, not borders, will move us toward the horizon of abolition and liberation.

    Learn From Organizing at Other Educational Sites and History

    Pre-K-12 organizing has more recent militant histories demanding (and winning) police-free schools. The Black Organizing Project in Oakland, California, struggled for almost a decade before successfully removing police from pre-K-12 schools in June 2020. Post-secondary educational sites can learn from these K-12 struggles and from our own histories of resistance and repression. For example, tuition strikes have historically made visible struggles against austerity and policing. In the wake of the student movements of the 1960s, both campus police budgets and college tuition increased exponentially, in order to manage dissent and privatize education. As Ronald Reagan noted without any irony, “Those on UC campuses to agitate and not to study might think twice before they pay tuition, they might think twice how much they want to pay to carry a picket sign.” It is always a good time to study.

    Center Systems-Impacted Communities’ Analysis and Demands

    Centering the analysis and demands of systems-impacted people (those who experience the violence of prisons, policing and related systems of violent control — a population overwhelmingly Black, poor, Indigenous and/or queer) surfaces other key ways that post-secondary education must shift. These networks have deepened the movement to “ban the box” — a demand that applications for admission or employment not ask about histories of arrest or conviction. In California, formerly incarcerated students founded and lead the Underground Scholars Initiative, an organization that creates a prison-to-university pipeline by providing support and community, and access to resources and members engage in organizing and advocacy to create a world without prisons. Centering the experiences and needs of these learners also renders visible other imperatives: From the need for paid child care, free tuition and gender-affirming and accessible bathrooms, to the importance of divesting from pension plans that profit from incarceration and resource extraction, the organizing of systems-impacted people presents an expansive challenge to the university as it is and a vision for the university as it could be.

    Anticipate Administrative Obstructionism

    Higher education administrations respond to these militant and organized campus-based abolitionist campaigns with too familiar tactics: cooptation and absorption and also swift repression. For instance, calls for abolition are met with institutional responses: the creation of hollow task forces and working groups charged with “studying the issue” or a hasty invitation to a high-profile (and usually highly paid) racial justice or equity consultant or guest speaker. Yet more task forces to research the problems and suggest the alternatives are not needed. Campus policing needn’t be researched further when the demand is clear: Defund and abolish campus policing.

    Where Do We Go From Here?

    While the fall 2021 pace of organizing feels like simmer rather than a boil on many campuses, we know not only is the work continuing, but the organizing from the previous year has reshaped the landscape. Campus communities — from undergraduate students and dining hall workers, to adjunct faculty and neighborhood residents — are joining forces to counter policing in and by universities. As we build coalitions, reflect on strategy and study together, we continue to build a movement, one that extends from the graduate union picket line to the mutual aid distribution site. Find your comrades, and join this beautiful movement to get cops off campus and build the spaces and places for abolitionist teaching and learning in our communities. Abolition now!

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UK High Court Should Deny Extradition Because CIA Planned to Assassinate Assange

    Protesters hold placards and a banner during a march from the BBC to Royal Courts of Justice in support of Julian Assange on October 23, 2021, in London, UK.

    Why is Joe Biden’s Department of Justice continuing Donald Trump’s persecution of WikiLeaks founder, publisher and journalist Julian Assange?

    Barack Obama, concerned about threats to the First Amendment freedom of the press, decided against indicting Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Trump did indict Assange, under Espionage Act charges that could garner him 175 years in prison. A district judge denied Trump’s request for Assange’s extradition from the U.K. to the United States because of the extremely high likelihood that it would lead Assange to commit suicide. Trump appealed the denial of extradition.

    Instead of dropping Trump’s extradition request, Biden is vigorously pursuing his predecessor’s appeal against Assange, which the U.K. High Court will hear on October 27 and 28. At that hearing, the High Court should determine what effect the CIA’s recently revealed plan to kidnap and assassinate Assange will have on his fragile mental state in the event he is extradited to the United States.

    Judge Baraitser’s Denial of Extradition

    On January 6, U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser issued a 132-page decision denying extradition. “Faced with conditions of near total isolation and without the protective factors which moderate his risk at HMP Belmarsh [where Assange is currently imprisoned],” she wrote, “I am satisfied that the procedures described by Dr. [Leukefeld] will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide.”

    Baraitser relied heavily, though not exclusively, on the testimony of Professor Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at Kings College London. Kopelman diagnosed Assange with post-traumatic stress disorder and recurrent depression and concluded, “I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the United States were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.”

    “I am satisfied that the risk that Mr. Assange will commit suicide is a substantial one,” Baraitser determined. “I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

    The Biden administration is arguing that Baraitser should have disregarded Kopelman’s evidence or accorded it less weight because he didn’t write in his first report that Assange had a partner, Stella Moris, and they had two young children together. Although Kopelman knew about them, he was mindful of Moris’s anxiety about her children’s privacy. Both Kopelman’s subsequent report and his testimony at the extradition hearing referred to Moris and their children. By then, it was public knowledge.

    Baraitser, who considered both of Kopelman’s reports as well as his testimony before ruling, wrote:

    [Kopelman] assessed Mr. Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr. Assange’s background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.

    The United States will be allowed to present “assurances” that if Assange is extradited, tried, convicted and imprisoned, he will not be subject to special administrative measures (SAMs) — onerous conditions that would keep him in virtual isolation — or be held at the ADX maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado. The U.S. intends to provide an additional assurance that it would not object to Assange serving any custodial sentence he may receive in Australia. These so-called assurances, however, are conditional. The U.S. reserves the right to impose SAMs or hold Assange at ADX if his future behavior warrants it. Moreover, the U.S. cannot guarantee that Australia would consent to hosting Assange’s incarceration.

    The High Court should give considerable weight to the way in which explosive new revelations of the Trump administration’s plot to kidnap and assassinate Assange will affect his mental health if he is extradited.

    High Court Should Consider U.S. Plans to Kidnap and Assassinate Assange

    The indictment against Assange stems from WikiLeaks’ 2010-2011 revelations of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. They included 400,000 field reports about the Iraq War, 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, and evidence of systematic torture, rape and murder after U.S. forces “handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad,” the documents reveal. They included the Afghan War Logs, 90,000 reports revealing more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And the Guantánamo Files contained 779 secret reports revealing that 150 innocent people had been imprisoned there for years and documenting the torture and abuse of 800 men and boys, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

    Perhaps the most notable release by WikiLeaks was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship in Baghdad targets and fires on unarmed civilians. At least 18 civilians were killed, including two Reuters journalists and a man trying to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. A U.S. Army tank then drives over one of the bodies, cutting it in half. The video depicts three separate war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.

    It was WikiLeaks’ publication of CIA hacking tools known as “Vault 7,” which the agency called “the largest data loss in CIA history,” that incurred the wrath of Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Vault 7 materials revealed electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare by the CIA.

    In 2017, Pompeo called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and CIA and government officials hatched “secret war plans” to abduct and kill Assange, according to a stunning Yahoo! News report. Some senior CIA and Trump administration officials requested “sketches” or “options” for ways to assassinate Assange. Trump “asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him ‘options’ for how to do so,” according to the report.

    Pompeo advocated “extraordinary rendition,” which the CIA used in the “war on terror” to illegally seize suspects and send them to its “black sites” where they were tortured. The scenario was that the CIA would break into the Ecuadorian Embassy in which Assange was staying under a grant of asylum and clandestinely fly him to the United States to stand trial. Others in the agency wanted to assassinate Assange outright by poisoning or shooting him to avoid the hassle of kidnapping him.

    The CIA spied on WikiLeaks, and it aimed to sow discord among the group’s members and steal their electronic devices, according to the Yahoo! News report. The CIA also conducted illegal surveillance inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and spied on privileged attorney-client communications between Assange and his lawyers.

    Concerned that the CIA might kidnap or kill Assange, which could jeopardize a potential criminal prosecution, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a secret indictment against him in 2018. To bolster the DOJ’s case for extradition, the FBI collaborated with informant Siggi Thordarson to paint Assange as a hacker instead of a journalist. Thordarson later admitted to the Icelandic newspaper Stundin that he lied about Assange being a hacker in return for immunity from prosecution by the FBI.

    In 2019, after a new pro-U.S. president came to power in Ecuador, in order to facilitate the U.S.’s attempted extradition, London police dragged Assange from the embassy and arrested him for violating bail conditions. Assange remains in custody in London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison pending Biden’s appeal of the extradition denial.

    The High Court should give great weight to the U.S. plans to kidnap and assassinate Assange. The knowledge of those revelations will put even more mental stress on Assange, whom former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer described as having suffered “prolonged exposure to psychological torture” during his confinement. The High Court should affirm the district court’s denial of extradition.

    A Window Into U.S. War Crimes and Threats to Investigative Journalism

    “When Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the public was given an unprecedented window into the lack of justification and the futility of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Assange Defense co-chairs Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky wrote at Newsweek. “The truth was hidden by a generation of governmental lies. Assange’s efforts helped show the American public what their government was doing in their name.”

    Recent revelations of Pompeo’s threats against Assange that appeared in Yahoo! News have shed light on the dangers the national security state poses to investigative journalism and the public’s right to know. In light of these new disclosures, a coalition of 25 press freedom, civil liberties and international human rights organizations have intensified their call for dismissal of the DOJ’s charges against Assange.

    Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his committee has asked the CIA for information about plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange.

    The High Court will decide whether to affirm or overturn district judge Baraitser’s decision denying extradition. If they affirm Baraitser’s ruling, the Biden administration could ask the U.K. Supreme Court to review the case. If the High Court overturns Baraitser’s decision, Assange could appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court and then to the European Court of Human Rights if the Supreme Court ruling goes against him.

    Biden’s appeal of the denial of extradition should be dismissed. Julian Assange should be released and celebrated for his courage.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cinematographer’s Death by Prop Gun Is Not Just a Tragedy. It’s a Labor Issue.

    Halyna Hutchins attends the SAGindie Sundance Filmmakers Reception at Cafe Terigo on January 28, 2019, in Park City, Utah.

    Halyna Hutchins was killed at her workplace Thursday. She was 42 years old and was shot to death on a film set after an actor fired what should have been a prop gun. Official reports state that the gun was supposed to be filled with blanks, but the circumstances surrounding Hutchins’s death and the injury of the film’s director, Joel Souza, are still hazy. What is clear, however, is that the crew of the film had voiced concerns over safety on set for weeks. The entire camera crew, except Hutchins and one other crew member, walked off the job the morning Hutchins was shot, resigning over lack of payment, inadequate Covid-19 protections, and poor gun safety.

    Rather than hearing the workers’ demands, the producers instead hired non-union members to cut costs and keep to the production schedule. Since the news of Hutchins’s death broke yesterday, IATSE Local 44 reported that the prop master responsible for loading the gun was not part of the union.

    This ridiculous violation of workplace safety is but the latest in a long history of Hollywood not taking safety seriously on sets. Indeed, as the current organizing around IATSE shows, long hours, poor safety procedures, and increasingly fast turnaround times are breeding grounds for accidents and tragedies.

    One of the most well-known examples is the case of actor Brandon Lee, who was also killed by a gun that was supposed to be loaded with blanks, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Just in the past ten years, numerous crew and stunt workers have been killed on movie sets — typically as a result of lax workplace safety precautions. An Associated Press article from 2016 found that between 1990 and 2016, at least 43 people died on sets in the United States, and more than 150 were left with life-altering injuries.

    Hutchins’s death is made more complicated by the fact that the person wielding the prop gun was Alec Baldwin, a millionaire actor and a producer of the film in question. The extent of Baldwin’s role in the accident has yet to be disclosed to the public, but as a producer of the film, he must be held fully accountable for the set that he helped run and the procedures he was responsible for ensuring were followed. In addition, if it comes out that Baldwin behaved unsafely or irresponsibly, he must not be allowed to skate by without consequences.

    Unfortunately, the vast majority of these workplace deaths in the film and TV industry go without justice or action. When there are investigations, the response is typically a minimal fine without meaningful changes to workplace safety policies or procedures. These major entertainment companies have made a cold calculation: their budgets are big enough to simply bear the fines for accidents rather than actually take steps to ensure a safe workplace. Getting content out quickly is more important than the safety of their workers.

    As more and more films chase big stunt pieces, these deaths and injuries have only become more frequent. These are not just tragic or accidents or the result of individual error. The bosses of Hollywood have clearly shown, again and again, that they don’t care about their workers. This must be looked at for what it is: a labor issue.

    Hutchins’s death comes in the midst of the IATSE contract negotiations with conversations about working conditions in film and TV are being openly discussed in broad sectors. The terrible and hyper-exploitative conditions for most entertainment workers aren’t just grueling, they are unsafe, as Hutchins’ tragic death shows. Entertainment workers must organize and demand that their unions refuse to work until proper protections are in place.

    IATSE must demand a full and independent investigation into the death of Hutchins, who was a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, a branch of IATSE. In the midst of a fierce battle over working conditions, an IATSE member was killed in a workplace accident. This should enrage every IATSE member and everyone who believes that workers have a right to a safe workplace. It should serve as further fuel to fight until the end for the working conditions these workers demand, not the crumbs offered to them by the bosses.

    Justice for Halyna Hutchins and may she rest in power.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As COVID Travel Restrictions Ease, It’s Past Time to Repeal Title 42

    Haitian migrants are pictured in a makeshift encampment where more than 12,000 people hoping to enter the United States await under the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas on September 21, 2021.

    In November, after 19 months of extreme travel restrictions, vaccinated air travelers who are not U.S. citizens will finally be allowed back into the U.S. from 33 countries, including many European countries, China, India, South Africa, Iran and Brazil. At the same time, the land borders with both Canada and Mexico will also be opened for vaccinated travelers.

    Since the pandemic hit, U.S. travel restrictions — like those imposed in a rush by so many other countries around the world — have often been irrational. A non-citizen from, say, the U.K. or an EU country was barred entry for non-emergency travel, and remains barred even today, despite the fact that since early summer, vaccinated Americans have been allowed back into Europe, and despite the fact that Europe now has a higher vaccination rate than the U.S., as well as a far lower per capita daily death total.

    Other U.S. travel restrictions have shown clear signs of class discrimination. For example, citizens of Mexico who could afford airplane tickets encountered no obstacles flying in even at the height of the emergency, but citizens of Mexico, as well as asylum seekers, who sought to enter the U.S. via a less costly land-crossing were automatically denied crossing rights.

    The irrational, patchwork nature of travel restrictions will certainly continue into 2022. For instance, despite soaring infection rates in Russia, Russian citizens, whether vaccinated or not, were never barred from flying into the U.S., even when residents from the rest of Europe were. Ironically, however, as the new vaccination mandates for air travelers kick in, Russians will suddenly face a huge barrier to access, since the Sputnik vaccine hasn’t been approved by the World Health Organization, and thus travelers from that country, who will now be required to provide proof of an approved vaccine, will suddenly find their access to the U.S. restricted.

    But it’s along the southern border with Mexico that the full irrationality and cruelty of the pandemic-era travel restrictions remain on full display. The border closure with Mexico is a particularly nasty example of exclusionary politics masquerading as a public health response; and despite the opening of the land border for vaccinated travelers with legal travel documentation, public health measures — specifically the use of Section 265 of Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 — will continue to be used along the border as a tool of immigration policy rather than as a legitimate response to the pandemic.

    Back in the late winter of 2020, as the pandemic intensified, Trump administration officials saw an opportunity to toughen up their efforts to shut down the southern border to would-be migrants and to further their nativist agenda. Stephen Miller, Trump’s odious conspirator on anti-immigrant regulations, had long tried to invoke public health codes as a way to bar various categories of immigrants, especially those who were poor and non-white.

    Prior to the pandemic, White House lawyers had shot down the idea. But, with the COVID pandemic escalating, Miller revisited the idea of pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to invoke Section 265 of Title 42, a little-utilized public health measure allowing for the sealing of the border and the denial of entry (and of due process) to would-be asylum seekers during public health emergencies. Trump lawyers agreed that the situation allowed for draconian restrictions on right-of-entry.

    In sealing the southern border, Miller and his zealots were able to use the rationale that the people trying to access the U.S. were likely vectors of infectious disease. Trump, who had long talked of impoverished immigrants of color as vectors of crime and of sickness, gleefully approved Miller’s strategy. (The New York Times reports that he also was keen on Miller’s idea of deploying quarter of a million U.S. soldiers to the southern border — a proposal so extreme that the Pentagon itself rapidly closed down such discussion.)

    The CDC’s invocation of the provision was updated in September 2020 and again a month later, all with the aim of locking out asylum seekers and keeping the southern border as a wedge issue in the minds of conservative voters.

    When Biden became president, he did allow for the implementation of Title 42 to be modified, so that families with children wouldn’t automatically be expelled back into Mexico. And thousands of families have been allowed into the country in recent months as a result. But that reform was more than countered by another reality: As attempted border crossings surged in the first months of the new presidency, the Biden administration increasingly leaned into enforcing Title 42. Between February and August of this year, nearly 700,000 people were sent back across the border by Border Patrol agents using the public health provision as their rationale. In essence, despite the new administration tinkering at the margins, the basic structure of the exclusion policy remains in place; and, since a federal appeals court rejected an ACLU-led legal effort to force the administration to end its use of Title 42, it will stay in place into the new year.

    As seen in the Border Patrol’s shameful and violent response to Haitian asylum seekers in south Texas last month, the U.S.’s approach to vulnerable migrants along the southern border remains largely an exercise in brutality.

    Stephen Miller’s diabolically creative use of public health measures against impoverished migrants was grist to Trump’s mill as the pandemic gathered steam. But, it turns out, Trump wasn’t the only political leader to find the flawed public health rationale convenient. Nearly two years into the COVID crisis, as the U.S. stumbles its way toward gradually reopening access to the world’s travelers, and as the country’s own public health emergency continues largely because so many Americans refuse to get vaccinated, the Biden team appears eager to keep the draconian and inhumane Title 42 policy in its tool chest.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.