Category: Op-Ed

August 30, 2021

As Biden Threatens More War, Don’t Forget the Afghanistan Invasion Was Illegal

President Joe Biden’s decision to end the Afghan war – one that should never have been fought in the first place — was correct. Missing from the national discourse, however, is analysis of the illegality of the 2001 U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan (dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom”) and resulting war crimes committed by four U.S. presidents and their top officials and lawyers. Once again, the United States has lost a war it started illegally. But as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the Biden administration continues to kill — and promises to persist in killing — Afghan people.

Twenty years of the U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan cost at least $2.26 trillion and resulted in the deaths of more than 2,300 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. The “war on terror” George W. Bush launched with his “Operation Enduring Freedom” has included the torture and abuse of untold numbers people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo and the CIA black sites. It has exacerbated right-wing terrorism in the United States and provided the pretext for the ubiquitous surveillance of Muslims and those who dissent against government policy. And whistleblowers who expose U.S. war crimes have been rewarded with prosecutions under the Espionage Act and lengthy prison sentences. We must not forget the illegality, death and destruction that the war in Afghanistan has caused over the decades, lest we repeat our lethal mistakes.

The U.S.-Led NATO Invasion of Afghanistan Was Illegal

Like the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was unlawful and led to the commission of torture and targeting of civilians, which constitute war crimes. All three of those wars caused the deaths of thousands — even millions — of people, cost trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, and devastated the countries of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than one month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As I explained at the time, the U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan violated the United Nations Charter, which does not permit the use of military force for retaliation. The Charter mandates that countries settle their disputes peacefully using diplomatic means. But the United States repeatedly rejected diplomatic attempts at peaceful resolution.

On October 15, 2001, The Washington Post reported, “President Bush rejected an offer from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to turn over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to a neutral third country yesterday as an eighth day of bombing made clear that military coercion, not diplomacy, remains the crux of U.S. policy toward the regime.”

Moreover, in late November 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar approached Hamid Karzai, who shortly thereafter became interim president of Afghanistan, in order to negotiate a peace deal. The U.S. rejected that overture. “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said. He added that the U.S. did not want to leave Mullah Omar to live out his life in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or killed.

The Charter says that a country can use military force only when acting in self-defense or with permission of the UN Security Council. Neither of those preconditions was present before the United States invaded Afghanistan (or Vietnam or Iraq for that matter).

In order to constitute lawful self-defense, an act of war must respond to an armed attack by another state. According to the Charter, the need for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation,” under the well-established Caroline Case. This bedrock principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was conducted in 1945 to 1946 to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals, and the UN General Assembly.

The bombing of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under the Charter because Afghanistan did not attack the United States on September 11, 2001. The 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not armed attacks by another state. The hijackers were not even Afghans; 15 of the 19 men came from Saudi Arabia. Moreover, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the U.S. after September 11, or the United States would not have waited nearly a month before initiating its bombing campaign.

Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States. The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted evidence that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him. That proof was not forthcoming so the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden. Bush began bombing Afghanistan.

Although the Security Council had passed Resolutions 1368 and 1373, neither authorized the use of force in Afghanistan. Those resolutions condemned the 9/11 attacks; ordered the freezing of assets; criminalized terrorist activity; mandated the prevention of terrorist attacks and the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urged the ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.

The U.S. failure to commit to multilateralism — the cornerstone of international law at the heart of the UN Charter — is the fundamental flaw of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

Since the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court did not come into effect until 2002, the crimes against humanity perpetrated on 9/11 should have been prosecuted in domestic courts under the well-established doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allows countries to prosecute foreign nationals for the most heinous of crimes. Also, the Security Council could have established. And the Security Council could have established a special tribunal for the 9/11 attacks, like it did in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was illegal.

The Commission of War Crimes

The illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and resultant “war on terror” led to the commission of war crimes, including torture and targeting civilians.

Bush’s administration instituted a widespread program of torture and abuse. A 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documented the use of waterboarding, which constitutes torture, and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Detainees were slammed into walls; hung from the ceiling; kept in total darkness; deprived of sleep, sometimes with forced standing, for up to seven and one-half days; forced to stand on broken limbs for hours on end; threatened with mock execution; confined in a coffin-like box for 11 days; bathed in ice water and dressed in diapers.

On March 5, 2020, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ordered a formal investigation of U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials for war crimes, including torture, committed in the “war on terror.” The ICC prosecutor found reasonable grounds to believe that, pursuant to a U.S. policy, members of the CIA had committed war crimes. They included torture and cruel treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity, rape and other forms of sexual violence against people held in detention facilities in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

During the Obama administration, prisoners held at Guantánamo were force-fed, which amounts to torture. Obama’s use of drones to kill people in seven different countries violated the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

Donald Trump conducted airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that killed record numbers of civilians, also in violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

The Biden Administration Continues the Killing as It Pulls Out of Afghanistan

As Biden completes the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, his administration continues to kill people there.

On Thursday August 26, Islamic State Khorasan (or ISIS-K) detonated a suicide bomb outside the Kabul airport. As many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members were killed. BBC reporter Secunder Kermani cited eyewitnesses who said that a significant number of those killed were shot by U.S. troops “in the panic after the blast.” Indeed, The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials admitted “that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.”

Nevertheless, on August 27, Biden retaliated with a drone strike that apparently killed “an ISIS-K planner,” even though “there was no evidence so far that he was involved in the suicide bombing near the airport on Thursday.” The U.S. Central Command released a statement that said, “We know of no civilian casualties” from the U.S. drone strike. But according to The Guardian, an elder in Jalalabad reported that three civilians were killed and four were injured in the U.S. drone strike.

The United States must completely refrain from using military force in Afghanistan.

On August 27, the United Nations Security Council issued a press release affirming that “all parties must respect their obligations under international humanitarian law in all circumstances, including those related to the protection of civilians.” The Council stated that “any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed.” Moreover, the Council “reaffirmed the need for all States to combat by all means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other obligations under international law . . . threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.”

Nonetheless, on August 29, Biden launched another drone strike against suspected members of ISIS-K, blowing up a vehicle apparently containing explosives. The Central Command did not know whether the strike caused civilian casualties, calling the attack “a self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul.”

Biden’s administration has pledged to conduct “over-the-horizon” operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. plans to monitor terror threats with surveillance and execute air strikes from beyond Afghanistan’s borders, particularly in the Persian Gulf. But as the Security Council stated, all countries have a legal duty to comply with international law.

The United States must completely refrain from using military force in Afghanistan. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) said, “the answer cannot be more war and violence. The answer cannot be launching more ineffective and unaccountable counterterrorism operations.” Jacobs added that the United States “owe[s] it to all those who lost their lives to not commit the same mistakes” it made nearly 20 years ago after the September 11 attacks.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 30, 2021

Don’t Listen to Panetta and Bolton. The US Must Stay Out of Afghanistan.

It began as it always seems to, with some entrenched stakeholder in the foreign policy establishment solemnly invoking their idea of The Right Thing To Do. “[B]ottom line is that our work is not done in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta during a CNN appearance on August 27. “I know we’ll be removing our troops by a certain date, but the bottom line is our work is not done…. We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS.”

Twenty years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, these people still think flapping “our work is not done” remains a viable argument for the Forever War, i.e. the so-called “war on terror.” Even after getting battered for days with images of the mayhem at Kabul airport, American opinion remains solidly against continuing our failed war in Afghanistan, which has prompted the stay-forever advocates to ramp up the volume.

“The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof,” announced Lindsey Graham as he twirled the old, bloody shirt. “This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, much worse than Saigon,” snarled Mitch McConnell with brazen incoherence; does he think we should still be fighting the Vietnam War? “It’s been a catastrophe and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse,” opined alpha warmonger John Bolton. Even Donald Trump, who ran for president on withdrawing from Afghanistan and brokered the deal that led to this mess, dropped in his two cents. “This is not a withdrawal,” he howled at a rally in Cullman, Alabama. “This was a total … surrender.”

In their haste to reactivate the war-profit ATM and trillion-dollar mineral/gas rights bonanza that is and has been Afghanistan, our pals in the establishment have either glossed over or gruesomely perverted a few pertinent facts.

First and foremost, the Taliban clearly perpetrates horrific violence, repression, and misogyny … but they also despise the Islamic State and ISIS-K (or “ISIS-X,” as Trump named them the other day when he flubbed the teleprompter again). Beyond cultural and religious differences is the fact that members of ISIS, like al Qaeda, want to violently spread their influence worldwide. Allowing al Qaeda to do so bought the Taliban 20 years of war and a prolonged near-death experience. They have not forgotten the lesson.

The Taliban were furious over the Kabul airport bombing, just as they were unhappy with the 9/11 attacks. They want to make Afghanistan into their own far-right religious fascist arena, and are not interested in going beyond their borders. When ISIS or al Qaeda start murdering citizens of other countries within their borders and without, it messes with their plans. Because of this, it is not a reach to conclude that the best people to “get ISIS” are the ones who are already there.

Twenty years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, these people still think flapping “Our work is not done” remains a viable argument for the Forever War.

This decision would not be unprecedented. An earlier phase of the war in Afghanistan bore witness to “an all-out military challenge by the Islamic State to the Taliban’s supremacy as Afghanistan’s Islamist guerrilla force,” according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic. “These two factions fought a war — and even though the Taliban had a decades-long head start, the competition was a close one in certain areas, particularly eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. intervened to help the Taliban.”

It’s a bleak option, the very idea of considering the Taliban to be some sort of ally in this specific struggle. By doing so, we would be giving tacit endorsement to their nascent government, and through that, endorsement to the various shades of hell they will almost certainly inflict on civilians, particularly women. It is a jagged rock to swallow, but it is also what happens when you lose a war. When the Visigoths crested the seventh hill of Rome, Emperor Honorius was not waiting at the gate with a list of insistent demands. They would have flung his body from the walls with that list jammed down his throat. It just doesn’t work like that.

What demands we can make will come couched in a coalition of 98 countries, which have banded together with the U.S. to apply as much economic pressure on the Taliban as possible. “The United States and 97 other countries said on Sunday that they would continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan after the American military departs this week,” reports The New York Times, “and had secured an agreement with the Taliban to allow safe passage for those who are leaving.”

The Times goes on to state that the dialog from these 98 countries “was meant to convey an implicit message about incentives — namely, foreign aid to the government — that the international community would use to enforce it.” Make no mistake: With hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghan allies still trying to flee Afghanistan, this offer amounts to nothing more or less than a ransom, one these countries hope the Taliban will accept. Again, this is what happens when you lose a war.

It is to be hoped that this devil’s bargain will buy safe passage for those who have been left behind amid the efforts being put forth to extract as many as possible. Of course, efforts must be made to allow for many more people to leave — including people who haven’t collaborated with the United States.

But the war-shouters are looking desperately for any reason to return to Afghanistan, because they believe such a return will wipe the slate clean of the compounded follies that led us to this desperate place to begin with.

Make no mistake: The guilty parties passing as the “foreign policy establishment” — the Panettas, the Pompeos and the Boltons, the battalions of guilty-ass former administration bigheads who put us there in the first place and kept us there for a generation — will try, regardless of circumstances, to push us back into full and open conflict.

A subtle-not-subtle propaganda effort along these lines revealed itself over the weekend.

The papers on Sunday morning were filled with the faces of the 13 servicemembers who died in the Kabul airport bombing, after a Saturday release by the Pentagon of their personal information. The TV networks have been equally tenacious in putting the names to the faces, with anecdotes for each of the fallen — which is as it should be. Nicole Gee just made sergeant; her car is still parked at the base back home. Ryan Knauss was drawing pictures of himself as a Marine when he was in second grade. David L. Espinoza called his Mom the day before he died to tell her he loved her, and that he was safe with his teammates.

This is just and proper. These 13 were tasked with an impossible job amid lethal circumstances. They were not killing civilians, but saving them from the folly of their own government, and more than 100,000 people have been lifted to safety because of the efforts they and their compatriots have given. Their loss is utterly heartbreaking.

During another filthy, useless war, the one in Vietnam, my father won the Bronze Star for organizing and executing a similar rescue: Getting civilians out of the way of another of our lethally bad ideas. He wore a small lapel pin of that decoration to his dying day, most proudly whenever he found himself surrounded by the flapping chickenhawks of war in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yet I am freighted with too much dismal memory to take these recent tributes to fallen servicemembers at face value. During the long years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when “we don’t do body counts” was the watchword of the Pentagon, you had to do quite a bit of digging to find the names of the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of US servicemembers who were killed over there. George W. Bush, may his name be forever cursed, closed Dover Air Force Base to the press, so the American people could not see the caskets coming home for processing.

The Pentagon did not hand out pictures and detailed biographies, as they did on Saturday. The dead were a dirty secret, and bad for the war effort.

There is deliberate purpose behind both the silence then and the siren now, and each purpose is equally gut-wrenching.

There was a time — a long time, years — when I sometimes felt like I was one of the few people putting names to the numbers. I did so diligently with Truthout, as often as I could, and I would weep over my keyboard on occasion because of it … because after a while, some of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, the families of those fallen would reach out to me with emails asking why their beloved was dead. It was my own little John Kerry conundrum: How do you tell a mother her son died for a lie? I did my best, and it burned me down.

In 2004, I wrote an article called The 500, about the latest round of dead soldiers the Iraq war had produced. I named them, and at the beginning and end of the piece, I quoted Wilfred Owen, a WWI soldier/poet who died on the last day of the war, when they were ringing the church bells in celebration.

The similarity between Owen and these 13 — dying on the doorstep of the end of it — is almost too much to bear. But if we are to be honest citizens of this berserk nation, we have to ask why these 13 suddenly merit such attention, when the thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years barely merited notice, and needed nigh-anonymous people like me to say their names.

These 13 deserve to be honored. They do not deserve to be exploited to whip up public emotion to re-enter a lost war because the “Establishment” wants back into Afghanistan to obscure its serial failures over the last two decades. That, I fear, is the case here. It’s the oldest goddamned trick in the book, and the “news” media falls for it each and every time. Ratings, you see.

President Biden met the bodies of the 13 at Dover when they arrived home. Because of his son, I do not believe this was theater, but I don’t trust the rest of them any further than I could throw them. These 13 names are worth running across the sky — they are — while most of the thousands and thousands of others who are equally dead thanks to the twin disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq remain as anonymous as a shadow in the dark.

There is deliberate purpose behind both the silence then and the siren now, and each purpose is equally gut-wrenching. Some 26,000 Afghan children have been killed or severely injured in our Afghanistan war since 2005. Do not let the “Establishment” get away with this again.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 30, 2021

Hurricane’s Collision With COVID Illustrates Threat of GOP Hostility to Science

It is an understatement to say there is a lot going on right now. The two biggest stories over the weekend were the winding up of the dangerous airlift out of Afghanistan and the arrival of an epic hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Now is a dangerous time — but judging from the news coverage, I don’t think we’ve fully grasped just how much danger Americans are actually in.

In a number of states, this latest COVID-19 surge, driven by the lethal Delta variant, has now surpassed the deadly surge of last winter. In two hard-hit states, the massive hurricane is coinciding with an equally massive surge in hospitalizations, making for an extremely volatile situation.

According to LAIlluminator, which covers Louisiana state and local government, hospitals have been at capacity for weeks, as have all the other hospitals throughout the region, causing the authorities to make the frightening decision not to evacuate patients. There was nowhere for them to go. Temporary shelters had to be kept at lower numbers because of the COVID risk and nursing homes residents who would normally be transferred to hospitals due to serious medical conditions were told to shelter in place.

The Illuminator reports that while Louisiana has had a rough go with this round of COVID, it was thought to be turning the corner last week. On Friday COVID hospitalization was below 2,700. That is 300 fewer than the week before but the positivity rate is still very high and people not able to follow precautions during the emergency will cause more of the virus to circulate, likely leading to another surge. Nobody knows what will happen to the inevitable victims of injuries and accidents in the aftermath.

Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, reintroduced an indoor mask mandate weeks ago and has been exhorting people to get vaccinated but many of his rural constituents have refused to comply. The state has only a 40% vaccination rate, much lower than the national average. Like many others, they managed to get most elderly patients the shot, but younger folks just haven’t seen the need. The cultural and political pressure among Republicans in the state to defy the health professionals, and their Democratic governor, is enormous.

The Mississippi coast took a battering from the hurricane as well, but its COVID surge is far more life-threatening to many more people in the state. The New York Times reported that Mississippi was “uniquely unprepared” for this latest onslaught of COVID patients:

The state has fewer active physicians per capita than any other. Five rural hospitals have closed in the past decade, and 35 more are at imminent risk of closing, according to an assessment from a nonprofit health care quality agency. There are 2,000 fewer nurses in Mississippi today than there were at the beginning of the year, according to the state hospital association.

The Times characterizes this as a combination of “poverty and politics” but really, it’s just politics — that’s what’s at the heart of the poverty and everything else.

The state is never very generous when it comes to benefits, which they tend to see as going to “the wrong people” (if you know what I mean). But by rejecting the Medicaid expansion that came with the Affordable Care Act, they willfully deprived themselves of the money that would have allowed them to alleviate many of the current deficiencies in their system. And Mississippi’s Republican governor has basically given up, the Mississippi Free Press reports:

After Mississippi became the world’s No. 1 hotspot for COVID-19, Gov. Tate Reeves told attendees at a Republican Party fundraiser in Memphis, Tenn., on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, that Mississippians “are a little less scared” of COVID-19 than other Americans because most share Christian beliefs (about 70% of all Americans identify as Christian).

“When you believe in eternal life—when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things,” Bill Dries reported the governor saying in the Daily Memphian.

I’m no Biblical scholar but I do seem to recall something about the Lord helping those who help themselves.

This summer’s Delta surge has hit all the states but has been particularly virulent in the Southern states, the epicenter of anti-vax activity.

It’s as if the less vaccinated are “magnetized” to attract Covid-19. https://t.co/e2lytPtNy0

— Mark (Vaxxed and Masked) Mucci (@MLMucci) August 24, 2021

And yes, there are a number of reasons why people haven’t gotten vaccinated in the last few months when they’ve been (mostly) easily accessible, free and very effective. Many young people erroneously believe they aren’t in danger of serious illness and some people of color are just generally leery of government edicts to take vaccines because of America’s woeful history of using those populations for experimentation. But the largest cohort of people who are winding up in the hospital are those who are refusing for irrational political reasons. The vast majority of deaths could have been avoided if the victims had gotten vaccinated.

And just as they did during the first surges, they are not only adamantly against vaccine mandates, they are protesting all mitigation measures such as requiring masks in schools despite the fact that children under 12 are unable to be vaccinated so there is also a surge of kids getting sick and being hospitalized. And following their leader, Donald Trump, they are still perversely willing to take dangerous, untried snake oil cures while refusing to take the vaccine which has been received by hundreds of millions of people all over the globe with only minor side effects.

Even the COVID deaths of a spate of high-profile anti-mask protesters and flamboyantly anti-vax right-wing media stars don’t seem to have changed the minds of the hardest core, true believers. It seems that the only time any of them change their minds is when they are on their own deathbeds and it’s too late.

There have been millions of words written about the American right-wing’s hostility to science over many decades. Cynical politicians in the pockets of wealthy interests have worked hard to exploit it. But this weekend has illustrated both the long and short-term threat of this insensate attitude. The ongoing rejection of the dangers of climate change and the resulting warming of ocean waters is fueling the new devastating pattern of monster storms that we are seeing more and more often. The hostility to public health measures and life-saving vaccines during this pandemic has extended this crisis to the point that we are now endangering children and killing thousands of people who didn’t have to die.

In the states along the Gulf of Mexico this weekend two existential emergencies collided and it didn’t have to happen. It’s terrifying to contemplate but unless we are able to figure out a way to change the hearts and minds of the rigid and stubborn minority of science deniers in this country, this is just the beginning.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 29, 2021

Anti-Choicers Fail to See That Overturning “Roe” Will Impact Their Own Rights

Roe v. Wade is a lightning rod in the U.S. — but the irony is that it upholds several of our country’s oft-proclaimed core values. While the landmark SCOTUS case is frequently cited as the legalization of abortion, the case actually deliberates the concept of personal autonomy and liberty.

Specifically, Roe v. Wade articulates how states can regulate abortion, upholds the right to privacy in specific personal decisions and reiterates that it is not the state’s job to uphold a specific ideology. As we reckon with the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned in June 2022, every single person should consider the precedent that this could set. By dismantling the landmark case that protects an individual’s right to private decision-making about their body, conservatives are opening the door to the possibility of more state-level regulation of private decisions.

Let’s be clear: There is a fundamental difference between the regulation of health care practices that can lead to the death of your community (like not wearing a mask), and those that cause an individual physical, financial and social harm (like an unwanted pregnancy).

However, for those expressing concern about government regulation of health care, Roe v. Wade is a critical part of defining what constitutes a private decision that should be made by an individual or family instead of the government, such as contraceptive use, disability rights, the right to send children to religiously affiliated schools or to homeschool them, among other traditionally conservative priorities. In this way, the anti-mask, anti-vax and anti-choice movement is working against its own stated interest of “small government.”

At its core, Roe v. Wade is the protection of privacy and liberty, specifically the constitutional right to privacy within the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which has been interpreted for more than a century as encompassing privacy as a key tenet of liberty. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was that a person’s control over their own pregnancy should count as privacy. If a person is forced to carry an unplanned pregnancy, it presents a true risk to their physical, mental and financial well-being, and opens them up to social stigma. It also, importantly, does not define when life begins, because they argue, it is not the role of the state to determine that one theory of life is more correct than another, or that one ideology is preferred to another.

In addition, Roe v. Wade articulates that a state cannot regulate abortion to the detriment of a mother’s health. With this, the case signals that the life of a person is valued independently of the fact that they are carrying a fetus. Again, this might not sound significant, but without this recognition of the individual humanity of pregnant people, our rapidly increasing rates of maternal mortality (the worst among high-income countries), our lack of postnatal care for mothers, our pregnancy discrimination trends, and the many other ways we fail those giving birth could become even worse at the state level.

Don’t for a minute think that removing these protections would only impact those with uteruses — protecting against financial, physical and social harm is, unsurprisingly, good for an entire economy. There are myriad studies that demonstrate that a society writ large benefits when people are able to plan their pregnancies, when they can avoid the financial and physical harm caused by an unplanned pregnancy, when they can remain in the workforce, finish school, provide for their children and families, and make space for their own personal mental and physical well-being.

While overturning Roe may signal to conservatives that the Supreme Court is willing to buck the majority opinion for the sake of a moral positioning, they also risk losing their own right to make private decisions around their families. It could set us up for the reversal of the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which upheld a married couple’s right to access contraceptives in support of personal autonomy. Specifically, the right to privacy established in Griswold and reaffirmed by Roe was the building block on which the court upheld key rights like the right for parents to homeschool or to make their own medical care decisions.

As it seems likely that SCOTUS will at minimum strip the fundamental protections of Roe in June of 2022, it is worth pointing out to the folks cheering this change that, just because you don’t see yourself getting an abortion does not mean that you are exempt from the consequences of restricting other people’s rights. This is a lesson that history teaches us again and again. Maybe we should listen.

The reality is that Roe v. Wade was meant to be a starting point, and the case — quite honestly — is insufficient and has contributed to abortion access inequity across the country. If we continue to qualify our belief in personal autonomy — for instance, by naming pregnancy termination as undeserving of privacy — it paves the way for a potentially slow and painful removal of other basic freedoms. The role of the government is to help mitigate costs on our society — like reducing preventable death by distributing the COVID-19 vaccinations, by implementing speed limits and seat belt laws to reduce road deaths, or by taxing cigarettes to offset health care costs — and to help us live collectively while operating independently with the things closest to our physical selves, like pregnancy.

Just because you don’t see yourself getting an abortion does not mean that you are exempt from the consequences of restricting other people’s rights.

We all have an interest in protecting the right to abortion, because we all risk over-regulation of basic freedoms and the loss of privacy that has made space for LGBTQ rights, disability rights, education rights, marriage rights, contraceptive rights, child rights, and much more. Misplaced advocacy for overturning Roe could pave the way for a scary future, especially in states with conservative legislatures.

We all should advocate for the protecting of private decision-making and the reduction of unnecessary costs on our communities. To mitigate the dangerous consequences of overturning Roe, we need to invest more in grassroots organizations that are working to build strong state- and local-level coalitions. Policies have always been made at the state level, and in the post-Roe United States, it is essential to build stronger ground-up coalitions.

While SCOTUS may signal its position in next year, the majority of Americans still believe in a person’s right to access abortion care, and every person should be prepared to mobilize for the protection of private decision-making around true, individual choices.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 29, 2021

I Wanted to Join the Legal Cannabis Industry. Now I’m Sitting in Prison.

I’ve been incarcerated for the last 12 months at the Chesapeake Detention Facility, a supermax security lock up in Baltimore, Maryland, while awaiting my May 2022 trial in federal court. If convicted, I stand to be sentenced to anywhere from 10 years to life in prison without any possibility of parole.

The alleged offense that the federal government is squandering tax-payers’ money on confining and prosecuting me for is “conspiring to distribute cannabis” for transporting over 1,000 kilograms of cannabis from a state where it is legal, California, to a state where it is quasi-legal, Maryland, over the course of two years as part of my cannabis business venture.

I know what you’re thinking: “How can it be that the punishment for selling weed is so severe, especially in this day and age, with widespread decriminalization and cannabis medicinally or recreationally legal in the majority of states and territories that make up this country?” You’re quite justified in your skepticism. The states and local municipalities that make up this country have made great advancements in the liberation of the cannabis plant and in protecting the people who choose to use it.

But the federal government? They still classify cannabis as a “schedule I” controlled dangerous substance, meaning that it has “no medicinal value” and is “highly addictive.” It’s categorized in a class among heroin and crystal meth, and to give you an even greater understanding of the absurdity of the situation, the federal government classifies cocaine and Fentanyl in the lower severity categories, as schedule II and III drugs, respectively.

This is not some sort of archaic mistake left over from the days when Nancy Reagan equated supposed brain damage from cannabis use to the frying of an egg. No, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) holds an annual meeting where its top brass convene for the sole purpose of examining their controlled dangerous substance classification groups, adding new drugs to their scheduling categories, and reclassifying already scheduled substances to more appropriate sections based on new and relevant information regarding the nature or uses previously unknown for the substance.

How much public money has collectively gone toward this ceaseless crusade to imprison nonviolent, so-called “offenders” and militarize police forces all in the futile pursuit of trying to eradicate this plant? The few that benefit from this systemic fraud of the U.S. public will do anything to protect and perpetuate their scam, so I suppose it’s quite a boon to them that they currently have near-omnipotent control of the federal laws regarding the legal status of cannabis.

The U.S. has long ago been dubbed “the land of opportunity,” but with federal prohibition and potential prosecution looming over every state-licensed cannabis operation, who are the people who really prosper in the quasi-legal, state-sanctioned cannabis markets? Certainly not the proletarian. Due to federal illegality, it’s strictly forbidden for banks to assist or conduct business with cannabis ventures, so you can forget about any possibility of acquiring a small business loan. If you don’t already have deep pockets or access to large investment capital, it’s extremely difficult to establish oneself, let alone compete and succeed.

The only thing more ludicrous than corporate America’s attempts to monopolize the cannabis industry is the fact that the federal government still prosecutes U.S. citizens for involvement in conspiring to distribute or cultivate [cannabis].

Could this be by design to ensure that the spoils of the emerging legal cannabis industry go to the affluent rather than find their way into the hands of those most marginalized in society whom federal prohibition has impacted most? What opportunities and incentives are being provided for the societal caste most affected by federal cannabis prohibition? Where’s a place at the table for those with cannabis charges who’ve spent years (if they were lucky) and decades on average wasting away in the bowels of the U.S. gulag only to come home marked and defiled by their felony record as they reenter society? After all, if it wasn’t for the cannabis underground ignoring the Harry Anslingers, Richard Nixons and Jeff Sessionses of the world by flouting their antiquated laws, there would be no “green rush,” the newest manifestation of the “American Dream,” luring new participants from far and wide.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to most that those with felony convictions are nearly universally banned from participation in the green rush, with the exception of those in Long Beach and Oakland, two California cities willing to provide licenses to the previously incarcerated. So when I think of guys like John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker who spent all of his time conspiring with his cronies to hamper then-President Barack Obama rather than spending time attempting to emancipate the cannabis plant, now sitting on the board of Acreage Holdings, one of the largest publicly traded cannabis companies in the world, while I may face permanent exclusion from partaking in the green rush because the government is still prosecuting those without any political clout for cannabis, my stomach can’t help but turn.

The only thing more ludicrous than corporate America’s attempts to monopolize the cannabis industry is the fact that the federal government still prosecutes U.S. citizens for alleged involvement in conspiring to distribute or cultivate the same ancient, spikey-leafed plant that companies are actively attempting to copyright individual strains of. But when the only difference separating an entrepreneurial pioneer on the cutting edge of industry ringing the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and a prisoner condemned to over a decade of his life to languish in a federal penitentiary is a greasy handshake and a nod from Uncle Sam, ludicrous doesn’t even begin to describe it.

It’s time for us to say “enough is enough” and rise up to demand an overhaul of the systemic nepotism we call our criminal “justice” system that by design persecutes our brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, all while simultaneously enriching the elite and enabling corporate America to further divide up our country among themselves.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 29, 2021

Don’t Expect Real Climate Solutions From COP26. It Functions for Corporations.

In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in the U.K. in November — the 26th session of the talks that were launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — the governments of the world’s richest countries are making ever-louder claims that they are effectively confronting global warming. Nothing could be more dangerous than for social, labor and environmental movements to take this rhetoric at face value and assume that political leaders have the situation under control.

There are three huge falsehoods running through these leaders’ narratives: that rich nations are supporting their poorer counterparts; that “net zero” targets will do what is needed; and that technology-focused “green growth” is the way to decarbonize.

First, wealthier countries claim to be supporting poorer nations — which are contributing least to global warming, and suffering most from its effects — to make the transition away from fossil fuels.

But at the G7 summit in June, the rich countries again failed to keep their own promise, made more than a decade ago, to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance for developing countries. Of the $60 billion per year they have actually come up with, more than half is bogus: analysis by Oxfam has shown that it is mostly loans and non-concessional finance, and that the amounts are often overstated.

Compare this degrading treatment of the Global South with the mobilization of many hundreds of billions for the post-pandemic recovery. Of $657 billion (public money alone) pledged by G20 nations to energy-producing or energy-consuming projects, $296 billion supports fossil fuels, nearly a third greater than the amount supporting clean energy ($228 billion).

Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are magnified by poverty. This year’s floods, wildfires and record temperatures in Europe and North America have been frightful enough. The same phenomena cause far greater devastation outside the Global North.

In 2020, “very extensive” flooding caused deaths, significant displacement of populations and further impacts from disease in 16 African countries, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) annual climate report recorded. India, China and parts of Southeast Asia suffered from record-breaking rainfall and flooding, too.

Climate researchers have shown that absolute zero (not “net zero”) emissions is entirely achievable. The path is blocked not by technological factors, but by political ones.

Climate and weather events had “major and diverse impacts on population movements, and on the vulnerability of people on the move,” the WMO reported. Cyclone Amphan displaced 2.5 million people in India and Bangladesh last May. Many could return soon, but 2.8 million homes were damaged, leading to prolonged displacement. Severe storms in Mozambique piled on dangers for tens of thousands of people displaced by the previous year’s floods and who had not been able to return home.

The political leaders’ second fiction is their pledge to attain “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (the U.S., U.K. and Europe) or 2060 (China).

“Net zero” signifies a point at which the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount being withdrawn. Once, it may have been a useful way of taking into account the way that forests, in particular, soak up carbon dioxide. But three decades of capitulation to fossil fuel companies, since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, have turned it into a monster of deceit.

Thanks to corporate capture and government complicity, many of the greenhouse gas emissions projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report factor in huge levels of carbon removal by dubious technologies that do not, and may never, work at scale (e.g., carbon dioxide removal, carbon capture and storage, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). Governments have drawn up “net zero” targets reliant on these myths.

On top of this, the 2015 Paris agreement left rich nations to decide what share of global emissions they would take responsibility for. So the U.K. government, which laughably describes itself as “leading the world” on climate, uses targets for emissions cuts at half the level that scientists say is necessary.

The politicians’ third and more complex deception is in the technology-centered “decarbonization” measures they embrace in the name of “green growth.” These rely on tweaking, rather than transforming, the big technological systems through which most fossil fuels are consumed — transport networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, and industrial, agricultural and military systems.

An example is electric vehicles, promoted as the principal means to reduce transport sector emissions. Governments ignore the carbon footprint of the vehicles’ manufacture and electricity use (unless and until the grids are 100 percent green), and the roads and parking spaces that the vehicles use.

Alternative approaches focus on expanding public transport, shifting to non-motorized modes (walking, cycles, electric scooters), and reducing the total number of journeys, especially in cities. In a climate emergency, they ask, shouldn’t we stretch our imaginations beyond lives made miserable sitting in rush-hour traffic?

Tackling climate change involves subverting, confronting, confounding and defeating corporate power.

But governments avoid or oppose such solutions, because they would involve confronting the corporate power of oil companies, car manufacturers and property developers, in whose interests it is to perpetuate car culture.

A second example of governments’ corporate-based technology approach involves home heating and cooling. Small-scale technologies that can slash the energy throughput needed — proper insulation, electric heat pumps instead of gas, small-scale renewables generation — are eschewed. Instead, political leaders advocate incremental change to large systems, at a pace that suits the companies that control them.

In the U.K., architects protest as the government loosens building regulations, when it should be tightening them to ensure that new houses are near-zero-carbon. Trades unions in Leeds campaign for insulation and heat pumps — the right solution for the city’s housing stock — instead of a scheme to swap the gas network for hydrogen, that is little more than a survival strategy for the companies producing oil and gas on the North Sea.

In the U.S., community groups advocate zero-carbon energy systems as part of an integrated approach to a “just transition” away from fossil fuels.

Governments resist because the corporations resist. Energy corporations fear decentralized electricity generation outside of their control; property developers despise regulation that compels them to use zero-carbon building techniques; gas distributors hate electric heat pumps. Just as oil companies and car manufacturers dread radical decarbonization of transport, petrochemical giants fear plastic-free supply chains, big agribusiness is terrified by low-carbon food systems, and so on.

Climate researchers have shown that absolute zero (not “net zero”) emissions is entirely achievable, by reducing energy throughput and living differently. The path is blocked not by technological factors, but by political ones: by the dynamics of wealth and power that constitute capitalism — the same dynamics that force the burden of climate change on the Global South.

Tackling climate change involves overcoming those dynamics. It is not so much about replacing bad government with good government, as it is about subverting, confronting, confounding and defeating corporate power. It is about developing a vision of our collective future that goes beyond capitalism.

We see glimpses of the social forces that could achieve this. Resistance to neocolonial resource extraction, which is at the heart of the fossil-fuelled economy, rages across the Global South. In the Global North, there are acts of great heroism — by the saboteurs of the Dakota Access pipeline, for example — and new waves of direct action, by Extinction Rebellion and others, and school strikes in response to climate change.

Climate change protesters often accuse governments of “inaction.” Let’s look at it from a different angle: Governments are acting, but they are acting in accordance with capital’s economic imperatives.

They are allowing global average temperature to rise far more than 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, and pushing the resulting suffering on to hundreds of millions of people outside the rich world. They are empowering fossil fuel producers and corporations in fossil-intensive industrial sectors to dabble with dangerous techno fixes and false “solutions” in the name of economic “growth.” They are protecting their system.

The most powerful response to looming climate catastrophe will come not from within the COP26 process, but from outside it, in the actions of grassroots organizers, communities, social and labor movements, and of society as a whole.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 28, 2021

Supreme Court Ruling Against Eviction Moratorium Could Facilitate Surge in COVID

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court overwhelmingly ruled against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) most recent extension of the national eviction moratorium passed on August 3. This ruling will leave potentially millions of working class renters without any protections against eviction, particularly in southern states without statewide moratoriums, where the delta variant is still surging.

Despite the potentially catastrophic nature of the decision, the ruling nonetheless had the support of six of the nine Supreme Court justices, offering a stark reminder of just how conservative the court has become and how indifferent it is to the most basic needs of the working class. Only justices Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan dissented. The other six justices argued that the CDC had overstepped its bounds and that the provisions of the Public Health Services Act, upon which the extension was based, did not apply to “eviction moratoria, worship limits, nationwide lockdowns, school closures, or vaccine mandates.”

This decision also shows the failure of the Biden administration and both the Democratic and Republican parties to pass congressional legislation extending a national eviction moratorium. The fact that the Democratic Party holds the executive branch and both houses of Congress and yet cannot muster the votes to pass such a basic life saving measure shows where its priorities lie and who it serves.

While some states, such as New York and California, have imposed statewide moratoriums to offer some protections against eviction, renters in many southern states were protected only by the national moratorium. This means, millions of people could be forced to move in with family members, into homeless shelters, or even onto the streets. As the CDC has reported, such living conditions dramatically increase the risk of new infections, especially with the much more contagious delta variant. In fact, of the three states with the most renters behind on payments, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, not one has a statewide eviction ban. As Forbes reported:

“Mississippi led the nation, with 29% of renters (157,000) apparently behind on payments, closely followed by South Carolina at 28% (265,000) and Georgia at 24% (563,000).”

That’s almost one million households that could face eviction if this moratorium is not extended again. Further, most of those who rent and the vast majority of those behind on their rent are often poor working class people of color, who are already faced with circumstances where the risk of infection is highest. For instance, Black renter households, as the Joint Center for Housing studies has shown, “are the most likely to be behind on rent and face eviction,” with Hispanic households facing very similar rates of “likely eviction in the next two months.”

Such a scenario would be terrible for those evicted, but it could also set off another wave of delta variant infections across the country with catastrophic consequences, especially since many of these states also have comparatively low vaccination rates and limited or no mask mandates for schools or public spaces.

And we know that eviction moratoriums work. According to the Legal Aid Society, eviction moratoriums in New York City alone saved the lives of more than 10,000 people during the first Covid wave. And in January, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that if federal policies to limit evictions had been introduced sooner, we “could have reduced COVID-19 infections by 14.2% and deaths by 40.7%.” That’s more than 250,000 people.

Such numbers, unfathomable just 16 months ago, show where the priorities of the system lie. It’s clear that for the U.S. ruling class, 250,000 deaths is nothing compared to billions of dollars in revenue that landlords earn each year and the ongoing disciplining of working people who are forced to pay the mortgages of the very rich and to forever live under the threat of eviction.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court did what it was designed to do. It upheld the right for the bourgeoisie to be free of restrictions to exploit and accumulate wealth, while simultaneously denying the right to the basic necessities of life for millions of working class families. This is not only reprehensible; it is, by any standards, criminal. To resist such institutions and to end such exploitation must be the final goal of all the concentrated activity of the working class.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 27, 2021

As a Doctor, I Fight to Make My State Let Pharmacists Prescribe Birth Control

People love the pill. As a pediatrician and a researcher who studies access to contraception, I speak to patients from all walks of life, and, even if they choose not to use the birth control pill themselves, most people support making it affordable and easy to access for everyone.

Its near-universal support is not surprising: Birth control can improve people’s lives by giving them the freedom to plan their families, allowing them to delay pregnancy until they decide they are ready. Still, for many people, getting to a doctor to get a prescription for birth control isn’t as easy as it should be.

That’s why I support and advocate for legislation that would make Indiana the 20th state to expand access to birth control by allowing pharmacists to directly prescribe and dispense the birth control pill and patch. Just last month, our neighbors in Illinois approved a measure to reduce barriers to contraceptive care by allowing pharmacists to provide birth control. States like West Virginia and Arkansas have done the same.

In Indiana and across the country, self-described “pro-life” politicians and organizations are often the only thing standing in the way of medically sound policies that would increase contraception access. It has been estimated that just one year after legislation allowing a pharmacist to prescribe birth control in Indiana, 86 unintended pregnancies would be averted. Ultimately, fewer abortions would occur — a stated goal of many “pro-life” lawmakers. These estimates don’t even take into account the significant impacts on infant and maternal mortality that would occur as a result of increased access to contraception.

Legislation increasing access to contraception should be widely hailed as “pro-life,” as birth control gives people the ability to control the trajectory of their lives, and does so by giving people the ability to decide when pregnancies will occur. Yet, certain politicians and organizations have pushed back at every turn for years on end. They are committed to blocking access for people and controlling people’s health care decisions despite mountains of evidence and economic analysis of the overall benefits, as well as the important benefit of trusting people to make decisions about their own bodies.

Expanding access to birth control is heavily supported by science and evidence, and endorsed by countless medical groups. Birth control is not only safe and highly effective at preventing pregnancy, it’s also overwhelmingly popular: More than 99 percent of sexually active women ages 15 to 44 have used at least one form of contraception. That’s more women than those who currently own a smartphone.

It’s clear that politicians’ opposition to this common-sense legislation is about control, not health.

Unfortunately, when people try to access birth control consistently, there are many barriers that can put this basic health care out of reach. Because the law currently does not allow highly trained pharmacists to dispense birth control, people need to take time off work or school to schedule a doctor’s appointment. In addition, millions of people face high costs and lack insurance coverage or access to a health care provider. Indiana, in particular, has a shortage of primary care providers and a majority of our counties have been deemed contraceptive deserts.

Allowing pharmacists to prescribe birth control is a simple solution that can combat these obstacles quickly, increasing the locations where people can get this care, with hours that are more expansive than doctor’s offices, thereby giving people greater control over their reproductive health.

It’s clear that politicians’ opposition to this common-sense legislation is about control, not health. We have a long history of politicians negating public health and evidence and instead putting their personal ideologies ahead of the communities that they are representing. While the focus often starts with abortion, the shift to blocking access to reproductive health as a whole (including contraception) extended to the national stage when former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence became the vice president. His attacks on Title X funding for comprehensive reproductive health care still have impacts today and have set the stage for continued legal challenges.

The people of Indiana vote for politicians because we want a better, stronger state that works to make our lives easier. We want the kind of legislation that would reduce health disparities, lower our health care costs, and give us the medical and reproductive freedom we need. Yet, again and again, politicians are choosing ideology over science.

Expanding access to birth control is heavily supported by science and evidence, and endorsed by countless medical groups.

It doesn’t take a medical degree to know that we need more health care, not less — especially during a pandemic that has devastated people’s health and finances. If the anti-abortion movement truly cared about our lives and our well-being, they would join me and the millions of people across our state who use and support birth control in advocating for policies that ensure no one has to go without the health care they need.

In their silence and their opposition, it’s clear that they don’t care. Even without their support, we are still millions strong. It’s time for Indiana to follow the model of the 19 other states that have already adopted this legislation, and to lead the rest of the country in making health care more accessible.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 26, 2021

We Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Need to Say So.

Apparent suicide bombers struck at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan just as evening was settling in, followed by a second bombing at a nearby hotel. The gate itself was not in use — other gates had been prioritized for the swift removal of U.S. personnel — but huge crowds of Afghan civilians were still gathered there, hoping for escape. U.S. intelligence had been warning such an attack was “imminent,” and had advised Americans to stay away from the airport for the time being. Multiple civilians and U.S. Marines were killed in the attack.

Reaction from the “news” media was swift: Here was the “nightmare scenario” for the Biden administration, which is of course solely responsible for the mayhem of this withdrawal, so there. While most agree that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, the way President Biden did so has become an ongoing disaster involving bodies raining down from airplanes and now a bombing at the airport.

It has been like this for days now, a relentless drumbeat of finger-pointing by the media, fueled by a parade of generals and politicians who have spent the last 20 years warming up Afghanistan for the calamity it has become.

Yet what has been missing from all the conversation on Afghanistan is the simple truth: WE LOST THE WAR. Almost nobody seems willing or able to speak those four words out loud. The coverage has been shrill and angry, like a family trying to discuss an embarrassing secret without actually naming it. To name it is to make it real, and the reality that WE LOST THE WAR appears to be too overwhelming for the motherboards of many. Not enough RAM to encompass the new program; the old one has been running for so long.

The coverage has been furious in its narrowed scope. Look at this! How embarrassing! We can’t leave anyone behind! Biden must be impeached! Much of this is certainly political opportunism on the part of Republicans — as activist journalist Jeff Tiedrich noted on Twitter, all those voices were silent when Donald Trump bailed on the Kurds while handing bases over to Russia — but there is more to it. For all that has been said, what has been left unsaid looms large: WE LOST THE WAR.

The August 31 withdrawal deadline is a stinging example of the phenomenon. Virtually every face on the television, including scores of influential people who had a hand in crafting this long and dismal failure, is demanding that Biden extend that deadline … but he can’t. For one thing, the bombings today underscore the need for as immediate an escape as possible. However, more than that, if we recognize the fact that WE LOST THE WAR, we are confronted with the fact that we do not get to unilaterally dictate the terms of our exit. The victorious Taliban set that deadline, as all triumphant armies do, and we are not in a good position to break it or demand more time, because WE LOST THE WAR.

This withdrawal is so messy because there is nothing on Earth more vulnerable than an army in retreat, which is precisely what we are, Afghan personnel and all, because WE LOST THE WAR. Biden could certainly have prepared better for this exit, with humanitarian efforts and refugee assistance, but he could not have made it easy, any more than he could turn water into wine.

The arrogance is astounding. WE LOST THE WAR, and yet all these people seem to think we still get to dictate terms to the world because we’re Americans, so there. Losers don’t get to dictate terms — if they’re lucky, they’re allowed to leave with the shirt on their back. We are watching the “mighty” U.S. navigate its second lost war in 20 years, and many are unable to process the fact that the world now gets to dictate terms to us.

Losers don’t get to dictate terms — if they’re lucky, they’re allowed to leave with the shirt on their back.

Last Monday, CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Abdul Ghani Baradar, de facto leader of the Taliban, to discuss the terms of the U.S. withdrawal. Baradar spent eight years in prison after getting captured during a CIA-run operation, and there he was, leader of a victorious army, sitting across the table from the director of the CIA and holding all the cards. The fact that Biden sent such a high-ranking official is a bright indicator of this nation’s thoroughly humbled estate.

If you’ve ever wondered what Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu felt while seated across from Douglas MacArthur on board the USS Missouri with the ink of surrender drying on the table before them, Director Burns could probably give you a fairly accurate description of those emotions. Baradar’s version was not nearly as stark or ceremonial, but having him at that table with the reins in his hand is an astonishing turn for this “invincible” nation.

If we are not prepared to say WE LOST THE WAR even with the rank fact of it pouring out of every television in America, perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place. Perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place, no matter what we are prepared to say.

That, though, is the rub: The TV people, the corporations who own them and the wars that pump up their ratings cannot openly admit defeat. Doing so might make it harder to start the next war, or the last one all over again. This is simply impermissible, and so rolls the wheel.

WE LOST THE WAR. Nothing gets better until we admit this and accept it.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 26, 2021

Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki Would Have Been 26 Today If Not for the US Drone War

On a Friday night in southern Yemen in October 2011, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was enjoying dinner with his 17-year-old cousin at an open-air restaurant. He was getting ready to say goodbye to him before heading back to his grandpa’s house in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa.

Abdulrahman was an American, born in Denver, Colorado, 26 years ago today, August 26. He spent the first seven years of his life in the United States, doing what a lot of other U.S. kids do: watching “The Simpsons,” listening to Snoop Dogg and reading the Harry Potter series.

But on that October night in Yemen, he wouldn’t make it back to Sanaa. While he was at dinner, a drone strike authorized by then-President Barack Obama was carried out. It killed him, his cousin, and several other civilians.

Abdulrahman should have been turning 26 years old today, but instead his future was robbed by the U.S. drone war. His grandfather wrote a plea for answers from the Obama administration in The New York Times in 2013 about the murder of his beloved grandson.

“Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead. Nearly two years later, I still have no answers,” he wrote.

This kind of grief is all too common in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, where most U.S. drone strikes are conducted.

Like so many victims of U.S. drone strikes, Abdulrahman was in “the wrong place at the wrong time.” For the al-Awlaki family, the circumstances around Abdulrahman’s death were incredibly familiar. Just two weeks prior, a U.S. ordered drone strike killed his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen accused of being a part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

While the drone strike on his father was intentional, questions still surround the Obama administration’s decision to order the drone strike that killed Abdulrahman. In 2017, the Trump administration approved a U.S. raid targeting al-Qaeda in al-Ghayil that killed Abdulrahman’s half-sister, Nawar al-Awlaki. Nawar was 8 years old and also a U.S. citizen.

How can the “war on terror” truly be about the country’s safety when it is directly killing U.S. citizens?

Right before President Obama took office, the CIA launched a drone attack on a funeral in Pakistan that killed 41 people. Drones quickly became the main manifestation of the war on terror during Obama’s time in office. The premise of increased use of drones was to keep U.S. boots off the ground in the Middle East and Africa. With drone technology, the U.S. was able to conduct covert wars in several countries at once.

Three days after he was inaugurated, Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed as many as 20 civilians. Even after knowing how deadly drone strikes really were, Obama went on to conduct 10 times more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Eight years and 540 drone strikes later, the U.S. public will never really know how many civilians were killed during those years. The U.S. military counts many teenage boys as “enemy combatants” instead of civilians.

In 2011, the U.S. military launched Operation Haymaker in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. Analysts at Bagram Air Force base would track militants’ cellphones, which proved inaccurate at times. Targets were often with their families or near bystanders when spotted by intelligence analysts. In 2015, The Intercept helped leak documents that showed during the period of Operation Haymaker, 90 percent of those killed by drone strikes were not the intended target.

President Donald Trump continued the brutal use of drones in Afghanistan. In November of 2019, he authorized a drone strike on a village in southeastern Afghanistan where local residents said that all the casualties that day were civilians.

“They keep saying that they are killing terrorists. But that’s not true. Farmers, shepherds and women are not terrorists. One of the victims, Naqib Jan, was a 2-year-old child,” said Islam Khan, a resident of the province that was attacked that day.

Americans were told that “terrorists” don’t respect U.S. rights and values. But what are the nation’s rights and values? The highest law of the land would suggest due process and liberty, something drone strikes and the PATRIOT Act do everything to undermine. Three U.S. citizens in a single family, two of whom were children, were executed without charges, evidence or a trial. The U.S. Supreme Court would not even uphold Anwar al-Awlaki’s right to due process because it was an issue of national security that the Supreme Court felt it had no jurisdiction over. Drone strikes that kill people, even suspected terrorists, are in violation of not only our own laws but international law as well. U.S. citizen or not, the U.S. military cannot continue to act as judge, jury and executioner for people.

Drone strikes and military occupation during the war on terror have been devastating, taking many more lives than the public will ever really be able to know. The only way to make a safer world is the abandonment of war on terror policies like drone strikes and forever wars. After 20 years of unimaginable brutality, the U.S. must be held accountable for the killing of Abdulrahman, Nawar, and countless other civilians across Asia and Africa.

Twenty years since the war on terror began, it has only created more enemies, instability and suffering. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Afghanistan. For two decades the U.S. occupied and bombed Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism. Between January 2004 and February 2020, the U.S. conducted over 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been mercilessly killed and millions displaced by the U.S. occupation and continual drone strikes. The group the U.S. spent decades and trillions of dollars fighting has now taken over the country. The U.S. has nothing to show for its occupation of Afghanistan but blood, and lots of it.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 25, 2021

Regardless of Media Spin, Yesterday’s Budget Vote Was a Progressive Victory

The corporate news media certainly do love their deftly twisted story lines. Yesterday’s House voting binge on a variety of hugely important pieces of legislation got the treatment. Why? Because apparently they need the “Dems in Disarray” trope fully in the mix the way hummingbirds need nectar.

For example, the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint — which includes crucial climate measures and social programs — passed on a straight party line vote on Tuesday. This was a large victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who faced down an “uprising” of conservative House Democrats. I put “uprising” in quotes, because, really, the whole point of that knife-to-a-gunfight exercise was so more people would hear the name “Josh Gottheimer.” Not exactly the storming of the Bastille. In the end, all nine “rebel” Democrats voted with the caucus, including Gottheimer, who led the farcical charge. William Wallace weeps.

The New York Times headline was a perfect example of the media phenomenon: “House Narrowly Passes $3.5 Trillion Blueprint,” as if the resolution passed by a single vote that was hanging by a finger. Progressives won this bill by the largest margin they could possibly win by. They won by a touchdown and a two-point conversion, and to call the win “narrow” is sneaky-misleading because everything in the House is narrow, due to the slim Democratic majority.

Little drops of poison in the ear… well, it worked on Hamlet’s dad, so why not the American people? The corporate noisemakers do know how to push those buttons. This sort of contorted spin was ubiquitous once the voting was done on Tuesday — The Washington Post used the words “revolt,” “frenzy,” “embarrassment” and “debacle” in the second paragraph of its report, while failing completely to note that Pelosi ran the damn table all day long — and is going to make things really interesting if it continues into September.

Why so? Next month is going to be one of the more extraordinary stretch runs of vital legislation in the history of the country. Coming soon to a vote are:

– COVID-motivated enhanced federal unemployment benefits, which expire September 6;
– The $1 trillion infrastructure bill, by September 27;
– The $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill by September 15 (non-binding deadline);
– The debt ceiling (fungible deadline, but best settled by end of September);
– Funding for the federal government, ends September 30 (this and the debt ceiling could be combined);
– Federal highway program authorization, expires September 30;
– Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) authorization, expires September 30;
– Increased benefits for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), expires September 30.

My head hurts. They’re going to have to start a whole new channel over at C-SPAN to cover the last day of next month alone. Think of all the interesting ways the corporate media will find to spin all of this in favor of their masters. Ow, yeah, my head hurts.

Tuesday also saw the passage in the House of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, easily the most vital piece of voting rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act itself. This was a concrete victory for voting rights activists. However, as the John Lewis Bill does not affect the budget, it cannot be passed via reconciliation in the Senate, and so must survive the filibuster and the 60-vote cloture barrier. In an evenly divided Senate and with Mitch McConnell riding herd over the Republican minority, it is all but certain the Lewis Act is doomed in that chamber. That not a single Republican voted for it in the House is a grim signal of its probable fate.

Keep an eye on how rapidly that media will staple the black hat onto the House Progressive Caucus. After the votes yesterday, the caucus immediately issued a statement that threw down a bright, flashing marker on the process: “[W]e will only vote for the infrastructure bill after passing the reconciliation bill.” The Gottheimer group was after the exact opposite; they were ultimately ameliorated by a Pelosi promise to consider the infrastructure bill by September 27. Like I said, a “revolt” settled that easily? Mmm, not so much.

“When asked about the new end-of-September deadline,” reports Punchbowl News, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she views the two pieces of legislation as being tied together, and indicated her vote on infrastructure is contingent on a reconciliation package being ready for a vote. ‘If that is not the case then they shouldn’t count on us,’ Ocasio-Cortez warned about progressives.”

This is no small threat; the Progressive Caucus is comprised of nearly 100 souls. They are a legitimate big dog with the power to derail any legislation they deem unworthy or incomplete. They have not flexed that muscle to date, but it sounds a lot like they’re getting ready to if they feel the need.

Next month is going to be one of the more extraordinary stretch runs of vital legislation in the history of the country.

The media will have ample opportunity to label the Progressive Caucus as “radicals,” while the House Freedom Caucus — composed of ultra-conservative Republicans — prepares to disrupt and derail the wildly popular infrastructure bill because, according to them, it is a “Trojan Horse for the radical Pelosi/Biden agenda.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is simply too weak to stop them. A lot of House Republicans would love to vote on this bill, but the Freedom Caucus is laboring to deny them the chance. In the immortal words of Al Pacino in Scarface, “Say hello to the bad guy.”

As for the Republican minority in the Senate, what do you expect from a pig but a grunt? The infrastructure bill should sail past the 60-vote cloture barrier due to its wide popularity, but it is almost certain that no Republican will vote for the budget bill. This is to be expected, which is why the Democrats are planning on pushing the bill to passage by way of the reconciliation process, which needs only a simple majority for victory, and not one Republican vote if the Democratic Caucus holds together.

That would be the problem right there. The real trouble in the Senate, to the astonishment of none, will come from Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Jon Tester and however many “moderate” Democrats are lurking in the tall grass. They have threatened to vote against the bill unless it is pared down significantly. If and when this bill goes up for a final vote maybe $2 trillion smaller than the House-passed bill, you can thank conservative Democrats, who are at least as dangerous and destructive as their Republican pals.

A wild and wooly month lays before us. When the progressives fight to salvage vital programs for the people and the environment, while Republicans and their right-leaning Democratic quislings chop away at the funding for those programs like maddened beavers, see if you can guess who the corporate media will side with. Three guesses, the first two don’t count.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Biden Boosted Food Stamps. Let’s Do the Same to All US Anti-Poverty Programs.

The Biden administration recently announced a record permanent increase in the value of food stamps aid going to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients around the country. The average amount received each month by each of the 42 million Americans relying on SNAP, formerly titled the Food Stamp Program, to put food on the table was $121 before the pandemic hit. It will now increase by $36, or 27 percent, reflecting what the Agriculture Department believes to be a more realistic cost of healthy foods.

This boost is nothing to sneeze at – it constitutes the largest permanent boost in the history of the public benefits program. But to truly end hunger in the United States and address the ongoing economic crises faced by people across this country, it’s vital for the same sort of boost to happen across all U.S. anti-poverty programs, with funds extracted from corporate profits and the ultra rich.

Bernie Sanders, chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee has proposed just this, putting forward one bill to restore the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, which is where it was until Republicans reduced it to 21 percent in 2017. He has also introduced a second bill to create a progressive estate tax that would kick in on estates valued at $3.5 million and above. Such reforms would generate large sums of money that could be used to expand health care access, to put in place more programs tailored to low-income children, to expand safety net programs to noncitizen immigrants, and so on. These reforms will, however, take time; in the meanwhile, increasing the value of SNAP benefits is a good way to get bang-for-the-buck in reducing hunger, one of the most destructive consequences of poverty.

As with so many of the new social programs and spending being pushed by the Biden administration, the impetus for the recent boost in SNAP benefits came with temporary fixes put in place during the first two waves of the pandemic. Then, with tens of millions of Americans suddenly out of work and unable to meet their basic needs, Congress temporarily increased the value of food stamps aid sent out to recipients by 15 percent. But that boost was initially slated to expire at the end of September.

Many states also utilized an emergency provision of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, passed in March 2020, allowing them to increase a SNAP recipient’s benefits to the maximum allowed on the sliding scale, thus effectively making the program an all-or-nothing affair rather than one calibrated to the different income levels of recipients. By this summer, however, some Republican-led states, which had already begun rolling back increased unemployment benefits, had their sights set on their expanded SNAP systems, and began rolling back their emergency rules that allowed for these increased benefits.

The GOP critique of these benefits was disingenuous. For even though the original increases were only meant to be temporary, the reality is that the United States has long failed to allocate enough resources to properly provide for the nutritional needs of its poorest residents. The COVID crisis shone a spotlight on the hunger crisis that has long been brewing in the shadows, and the temporary increases in food stamps and unemployment benefits were effective at taking millions of families out of absolute poverty; they showed that targeted government interventions can be dramatically powerful tools to mitigating the worst impacts of economic inequality.

This boost is nothing to sneeze at – it constitutes the largest permanent boost in the history of the public benefits program.

The Biden administration’s permanent increase in food stamps this month is an overdue acknowledgement of this reality. And it stands in stark contrast to the efforts by his predecessor to block emergency SNAP payments to the poorest of recipients at the height of the public health crisis.

In fact, from the earliest days of the Trump administration, SNAP came under sustained fire from a political leadership that saw recipients as spongers and loafers, and viewed cutting SNAP as a key part of its toolkit to further limit the welfare system and further undermine vital anti-poverty programs. In the very first months after Trump’s inauguration, administration officials proposed cutting the program by $191 billion over 10 years. Luckily, that didn’t fly. Then, in late 2019, members of the Trump administration unveiled rules tightening up work requirements for recipients without children — putting the food stamps of roughly 700,000 people at risk. They also sought to make states more rigorously police who could enroll in SNAP, and recalculate income of applicants in a way that made it easier to deny benefits. All told, the Urban Institute estimated that if these reforms were fully implemented, the number of recipients in several states would fall by at least 15 percent in 13 states. Then, during the pandemic, the Trump administration continued to wage war on SNAP, despite private food bank and food pantry networks being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suddenly hungry people lining up on foot and in cars to access their food supplies.

Thankfully, Trump’s team never really managed to implement its draconian cuts to food stamps. There was no congressional consensus to accept these cuts, and no public support to impose hunger on millions of Americans already living on the margins. In fact, by the time the pandemic rolled around, the administration had been participating in a yearly stunt for three years already, regularly promising huge cuts to food stamps as a way to assuage its anti-government base, while knowing full well that of all the big pillars of the U.S. welfare system, food assistance is the one that has garnered more bipartisan support in Congress — and among the public — than virtually any other part of the social support web outside of social security and Medicare.

Biden came to power last January projecting ambitions to use government in the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had done, as a counterbalance against economic policy that kept millions of Americans in dire poverty. He had, as a result, a dramatically different understanding of the social safety net from his predecessor, and a willingness to put his weight behind huge expansions in government programs ranging from the provision of health care to low-income people to child tax credit payments offered to parents by the federal government.

During the pandemic, the Trump administration continued to wage war on SNAP, despite private food bank and food pantry networks being overwhelmed.

Among his earliest executive actions, the new president increased the amount of SNAP benefits targeted at 12 million of the U.S.’s lowest-income families. In this, he was following in the footsteps of FDR, who created the country’s first food stamp program, which lasted from 1939-43; John F. Kennedy, who presided over the creation of food stamp pilot programs in 1961; and Lyndon Johnson, who pushed Congress to enact the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which made the program both permanent and national in scope. As the program expanded in the wake of that Act, so it came to play a crucial role in efforts to rein in poverty. In recent years, researchers have found that an additional 4.4 percent of the population would be in poverty without this program.

Biden has ambitions to use the power of government to massively reduce poverty in this country. In particular, he has focused on halving child poverty in the coming years, through direct monthly payments to families, and through a better use of existing programs such as SNAP.

But to truly change the landscape of poverty and inequality in this country, this turn toward state spending can’t just be framed in limited ways as a project to restore consumer spending. And the expansions to public benefits programs can’t adequately be paid for through tax revenues without a targeted effort to redistribute the gross profits that corporations have been hogging in increasing proportions each year.

The U.S. was at its most dynamic economically in the post-WWII decades, when income inequality was lower than at other moments in the country’s history, and when corporate tax rates were higher. Today, wealthy individuals and corporations pay less into the tax pot and, in consequence, public systems and benefits programs are chronically underfunded. The president has the public behind him on the changes needed to tackle poverty in the U.S. Now he needs to marshal his negotiating skills to get the fractious Democratic coalition in Congress to coalesce around this agenda.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Parenting Amid Delta Is the Heartbreak That Didn’t Need to Happen

My back feels like it is made of old winter ice, rotted and black, still hard and so cold. I want to lie on my stomach and have someone take a rolling pin to it, up and down, side to side, so I can hear it crack and shatter, so I can take in breaths that don’t shudder in the exhale, so my shoulders will come down from beneath my ears, if only for a few minutes, before everything freezes again.

An unbroken night’s sleep is a dim memory of a paradise I failed to fully appreciate when last I was there, a priceless gift taken for granted by a spoiled child. All my dreams are frustration dreams, lost in a maze, lost in a vast building without beginning or end, lost in a strange and menacing cityscape, lost in the dark. I snap awake and sit on the edge of my bed with the blanket wrapped over me like my own personal oxygen tent and try to shake the dream off, but it is always waiting for me beneath my pillow when I return, coiled like an asp sent to do murder in the night. Perhaps you can relate.

I have it easy; at least I had a childhood, replete and complete. My 8-year-old daughter is not so fortunate. Someone will coin a glib nickname for her generation — Generation Rona, or something — that will comprehensively fail to encompass the damage she and her peers are absorbing as we speak. Hemingway said the world breaks everyone, and some grow strong at the broken places. I hope to Christ this is true for my daughter, even as I writhe upon bearing witness to the breaking. So begins another COVID school year.

The pandemic exploded the last four months of my daughter’s first-grade year, routed and ravaged the entire term of her second grade, and now waits like some infinitely patient vampire to suck the life out of her third grade. Indifference to the spread of the virus opened the door for the emergence of variants, one of which is proving to be far more menacing to our children. No vaccine is available for those younger than 12.

It is so rotten, so foul, so unfathomably unfair.

It was better for a while. Late spring and early summer actually hedged toward normal. She was back in the school building, masked and distanced but there, and not trying to navigate at-home education via Zoom. She stopped being alone all the time, and her mother and I could see the strain lines lift from her face like a magic trick after the first day she was back.

The beginning of summer camp at the close of June should have been glory, but was instead another false dawn. Just as my daughter was reuniting with camp friends, running through sprinklers and doing crafts with beads after the long gloom, I found myself required to write this:

The inescapable truth emerging from this ongoing crisis is that very little of it is, in fact, under control. Half the U.S. population remains unvaccinated, including children under 12, and a certain segment of that unvaccinated population disdains even the most unobtrusive protections as an affront to freedom, because Trump. Many areas of the world beyond our borders are struggling to contend with the pandemic, allowing the virus to replicate variants that will continue to test our progress, if not subsume it altogether.

I hate that paragraph. I hated it when I wrote it, and I hate it now, because it did not have to be this way. That “certain segment, because Trump” cohort has directly caused an absolutely horrific infection spike in several of the states Trump carried in 2020, a spike that has spread its shadow over the whole country, just in time for school. Governors like DeSantis in Florida, Abbott in Texas and Lee in Tennessee are pitchforking their constituents into the pandemic’s maw because each seeks Trump’s mantle, full in the knowledge that even attempting to do so is a boon to their fundraising efforts.

I find that I am able to function only if I shove the feral scream of rage in my head into a vault with a heavy lock, and even then, my hands shake. It is one thing to say, “A portion of the country no longer believes in the common good.” It is another to watch that un-belief devour my daughter’s happiness like a glutton at the cafeteria.

More than once over the last few weeks, she has asked me, “Daddy, why are you holding your breath?” I realized I was, exhaled slowly, and told her I was thinking of something to write about. This was not a lie: I was thinking of the people who conflate masks and vaccines with fascism, and my fury rose, and I forgot to breathe, again. I am so worried about my daughter that she has begun to worry about me. My calm, soothing, don’t-worry-be-happy façade — held now for 19 months entirely for her sake — has begun to crack.

I had a run-in some days ago at the playground with a member of the Trump brigades. Our daughters played happily on the monkey bars while she and I chatted about nothing in particular. Like a cloud passing over the sun, a portion of our conversation touched upon something that had been touched by the pandemic, and her entire demeanor changed before my eyes.

“I don’t mean to talk politics, but,” she began, and I immediately prepared myself, because I knew full well that whatever came after “but” was going to boil me if I didn’t lock it all down like a ship confronting a gale. I was not disappointed, which is to say I got exactly what I expected. Everything after “but” was a strangled retinue of fiction, false patriotism, un-science and paranoia. She may as well have had a “Q” seared into the middle of her forehead like a Medieval monk emerged from some crumbling splinter abbey on the bleak side of the river.

When my turn to speak came — it turns out she did need to breathe, and so had to stop the ramble for a tick — I kept it as simple as I could: “My grandmother stole sugar packets from restaurants to her dying day because of what she experienced during the Great Depression. I can’t imagine what she went through. To equate wearing a mask for the common good to tyranny and real hardship makes me want to climb a tree and live with the squirrels.”

Verbatim. You can guess I’d been honing that line for such a confrontation, and it did not let me down. She became very still, eyes wide, looking at me like I was a spider she’d found hiding between the pages of her favorite book. “My daughter needs a bottled water,” she muttered, almost to herself. She collected her daughter — dear God, that poor kid — and was gone, leaving me there on the bench to wonder if I’d done any good at all.

This is not the aftermath of a meteor strike or a massive earthquake. Actual people are responsible for this slow slide toward another harrowing COVID winter.

Maybe? Doubtful. The poison has been injected deep, as I suspect will be evidenced by Monday’s FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine. Many vax-hesitant people claimed they were waiting for that approval before getting the shot, and now that it’s here, I imagine the next verse will be, “But that approval was too fast.” You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it give a shit about its community.

Remember that great Staples commercial with the dad exuberantly picking out school supplies in front of his two sullen children to the tune of, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? That was a quarter century ago, and the role reversal now is unsettlingly stark.

Today, most of the kids are champing at the bit to get back to school because it’s normal, Normal, NORMAL! to be in a classroom with children their own age, and not hotboxed at home with doom spilling out of the television like a bilge tide and a tablet standing in for a friend if the kid’s family is able to afford one. The parents, on the other hand, are sullen with worry that the Delta variant will plow through the coming year like a bulldozer with blade down and engine bellowing. Today is the Bizarro World version of that ad.

This is not the aftermath of a meteor strike or a massive earthquake. Actual people are responsible for this slow slide toward another harrowing COVID winter, because they refuse to be responsible for the rest of us, as we have chosen to be responsible for them by masking up, getting the shot and following basic scientific guidance.

Meanwhile, for many parents of young children, autumn threatens to be a season of holding our collective breath. Again.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Don’t Just “Close” Prisons — Demolish Them and Reinvest Their Funding

As the movement to defund the police and prison has continued to gain steam, more are embracing a key decarceration strategy: closing down prisons and jails. Struggles for prison closures have always been an important organizing tactic for those of us working against the prison-industrial complex. Unfortunately, some state governments have attempted to co-opt the rhetoric of prison closure without truly putting it into practice.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has announced two prison closures — Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI) in Tracy, and California Correctional Center in Susanville — in the wake of the devastating impacts of COVID-19 as well as the ongoing forest fires endangering vulnerable people across the state.

But what does the state mean by “prison closure?” Sure, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) will transfer the people locked within these prisons to other remote locations throughout the state, and there will be some staff shuffling. But what is actually being offered by CDCR is called a “warm shutdown”: The prisons will maintain a skeleton crew of staff, a smaller budget and, in the instance of DVI, will then be used as a training site for corrections officers.

The problem is, like all prisons, DVI is infamous for its decades of oppressive and harmful tactics and toxic culture. I know this first-hand: I spent two years caged in DVI. It was an experience I’ll never forget, and why I know for sure that DVI should never be used to train any prison staff.

DVI is known as “gladiator school” to people throughout the prison system because of the history of violence permitted and ignored by staff that took place over the course of this prison’s history. When I was sent there, it took a five-hour bus ride to arrive at the facility from Wasco State Prison, a reception center where many start their sentence. Riding in, I could see the housing wings — dirty clothes piled up outside, debris waiting to be picked up. All of the housing units were clearly dilapidated, but I had no idea how bad it really was until I got inside. We were herded from the receiving and release area led to a tiny, ramshackle building. It was raining and the ceiling was leaking.

We were pushed through monstrous, pronged cattle turnstiles into cages that were filled far beyond capacity, as if we were animals at a factory farm. We waited for six and a half hours, only then to be ushered through a series of ambivalent nurses and stern interviewing sergeants. We were given a kit called a “bedroll” –– a tattered shirt, one pair of underwear and socks, and some old sheets. As we were escorted through a large corridor, dayroom after dayroom was crammed full of beds and people until we arrived at “fish row.” That’s where they house new intakes to the prison, on the first floor of C-Wing.

I entered my cell and the guard slammed the door shut behind me. It was completely dark. After several minutes of searching, I discovered an old pull-string light above the top bunk; the lightbulb was missing. It was very cold from the rain outside, and a puddle pooled beneath the grated but open window. Closing the window wasn’t an option — the surrounding window panes were broken. The cell was disgusting; it had a smell that could only be described as “rotten.” The mattress was torn in half.

I shouted to a person in the cell across from mine: “How do I get a light and a mattress?”

He answered, “You won’t get anything from them [the prison guards]. They’ll ignore you if you ask.”

This was my first day in DVI-Tracy.

One might assume it got better — it didn’t. The truth is, although privileges slightly improved as I made it into the general population of the prison, conditions did not. The shower drains were clogged and the water severely discolored — black and orange most days. The prison guards were dismissive, rude and aggressive. While this is typical within the California prison system, DVI-Tracy seemed to be tinged with a special kind of hatred for imprisoned people that only comes from a longstanding, toxic internal culture built on the idea that we are “less than.”

Tracy is known to have the largest recreational yard and gym within CDCR, but we only got to go outside once or twice a week at most. Instead of being offered as a space for recreational purposes, the gym was used to cage hundreds of people, specifically putting up to hundreds of triple-stacked bunk beds and ensuring that every bed was full. Sometimes weeks would go by without any “outside time.” Isolated, we made “fishing lines” out of the elastic in our boxer shorts to pass notes to one another. I lived the next two years like this. Others would spend their entire lives under these horrid conditions.

I was in DVI in 2003 and 2004. During this time, CDCR as a whole was under federal monitor due to reports of severe abuses and mistreatment of incarcerated people in its system. Did any of the federal monitoring change the abhorrent living conditions? My experience of DVI is that no amount of external pressure or monitoring actually changed anything significantly. Windows were left broken; lightbulbs were hard to get; water was left muddy, metallic and orange-black; and drains were left clogged until someone “important” did a walk through. Then things were fixed only to the degree that they appeared “suitable.” Eventually, everything would fall apart again and no one cared — except the people who lived there. This was — and I assert still is — the culture within DVI-Tracy. It’s endemic. It cannot be “trained out.”

The only way to ensure that the toxic culture at DVI is eliminated is to eliminate the prison as a whole. Tear it to the ground and deactivate the staff positions completely. DVI’s closure will save California $119 million in 2021-22 — and an additional $150.3 million every year after. That savings could be used for reentry programs for formerly imprisoned people and to directly support the economies of the towns that are impacted by DVI’s closure.

Demolishing DVI will ensure that CDCR can never use this horrid, archaic place for anything ever again. Its demolition could serve as a model for decarceration efforts around the country.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 23, 2021

The Biggest Gamble of Nancy Pelosi’s Life

The final act of a showdown between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine rebellious “moderate” House Democrats is coming to a head this week, as the chamber barrels toward a procedural vote that will either forward or doom President Biden’s $4 trillion infrastructure/budget plan. If the plans pass the procedural vote, the infrastructure and budget bills will be drafted over the course of many weeks. If the procedural vote goes down, it may be damn near political Armageddon for the Biden administration and the Democrats in general.

Speaker Pelosi has signaled her intention to bring both bills up for a vote simultaneously, a “dual track” that would dramatically expedite the process. This move is important given that many of the most crucial provisions dropped from the infrastructure bill — priorities pertaining to the climate crisis and fulfilling basic human needs — are contained in the budget resolution. But the move has, predictably, drawn the seeming ire of nine House members — Josh Gottheimer, who leads the effort, Filemon Vela, Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez, Ed Case, Jared Golden, Jim Costa, Carolyn Bourdeaux and Kurt Schrader — who argue that the bills cost too much and should be pared down before attempting reconciliation with the Senate.

“I will vote against the budget resolution, as we’ve said, as the nine of us committed publicly,” said Gottheimer on Saturday. “We will vote against a budget resolution if the infrastructure package isn’t brought up first.”

The Gottheimer group backed this assertion with an editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post: “Time kills deals,” they wrote. “This is an old business saying and the essence of why we are pushing to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress and immediately to President Biden’s desk — as the president himself requested the day after it passed the Senate.”

The irony is palpable. For months, conservative Democrats like this group pushed back hard on the cost numbers on these bills, delaying them frequently though not fatally. Now they want a quick bill for Biden to pass because “Time kills deals.” It’s not what you say, I guess, but when you say it that matters to this crew.

I say “seeming ire” because all too often actions like this by House members amount to little more than grandstanding, an attempt to wedge something they want into the bill, or just to see their names in the papers for a few days. As the time of reckoning has drawn near, however the Gottheimer group has held fast. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been coaching these nine House members on how to gum up the gears. Those nine could not have asked for a better obstructionist education.

Meanwhile, Pelosi has been under pressure from the House Progressive Caucus, which has signaled its intent to vote against the package if both elements are not considered simultaneously. Thankfully, for the moment, Pelosi appears to be siding with them, if only because of the numbers involved.

If those nine House Democrats successfully defeat the procedural vote and Pelosi can’t scoop up enough GOP votes, the Biden administration will have to deal with calamity both at home and abroad.

The Progressive Caucus enjoys more than 100 House members, far outstripping the muscle being brought to bear by the Gottheimer group. With its sizable membership, the Progressive Caucus has enormous influence over any bills that come along, due to the Democrats’ slim majority in that chamber. It is easier for Pelosi to wrangle nine votes from some “rebels” than from that large and — on this issue — largely unified group.

This is most especially true of the budget bill, progressive support of which is virtually ironclad. There is good reason for this: The bill will, in many ways, change the face of the country. It delivers vitally needed funds “to help parents and children, including new funds for child care, universal prekindergarten and paid sick leave,” reports The Washington Post. “On health care, meanwhile, Democrats hope the budget fosters a major expansion of Medicare so that it can cover dental, vision and hearing benefits, along with new prescription drug rules that might lower the cost of medicine for seniors.”

The budget bill also dramatically increases spending on issues related to climate change, such as pollution and alternative energy sources. This is essential to the Progressive Caucus, after they watched most of the climate-related material get dropped from the infrastructure bill by a cohort of “moderates” in the Senate.

“There is no way we can pass those bills unless we do so in the order that we originally planned,” Pelosi said to her leadership team during a private call on Monday. “This is no time for amateur hour. For the first time, America’s children have leverage. I will not surrender that leverage.” In fact, if the nine stick to their guns, Pelosi may well go looking for nine Republican House votes to fill the gap. She may be able to do it, too; the bills are incredibly popular across the political spectrum.

“This is the path forward: we’re passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill alongside the jobs and families package. Period,” Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal said last week. “The American people expect us to deliver on child care, paid leave, housing, healthcare, climate action, and more — and we must.”

The stakes could not be higher. On the domestic end, if the procedural vote loses, Biden’s signature legislation attempt will have been defeated by members of his own party. Abroad, the grim aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan continues to dominate the news. Such a twin-bill calamity could make life much easier for Republicans in the 2022 midterms.

However, if these bills survive this procedural vote, a crucial step will have been taken. It will represent a victory for Pelosi, the president and most Democrats, but far more importantly, it will represent a bit of much-deserved daylight for the people of this country who have waited a long, long time for desperately needed help.

Nancy Pelosi is making the biggest gamble of her political life. We will find out soon where the dice fall.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 23, 2021

Republicans Rush to Squash Local Control in Fight Against COVID

Not too long ago, there was a time when Republicans insisted that they were against Big Government and wanted to push it down as much as possible to local control. They extolled the virtues of town councils, school boards and community commissions for being close to the people and, therefore, more responsive to the needs of their constituents. Government officials were neighbors and co-workers and friends so they had a better chance of truly understanding the issues people care about.

But it was always a bit of a con since there were plenty of things they wanted the much-hated “Big Government” to do, such as dictate others’ personal behaviors and impose their religious beliefs on them. And they have been positively giddy about supporting a gigantic military even as they have lately pretended to be isolationists only interested in fortress America, which certainly doesn’t require the bloated military budget they rubber stamp without question. Nonetheless, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s old saying that conservatives wanted to make the federal government small enough to “drown in the bathtub” was generally understood to mean that the national government should devolve to allow as much local control as possible.

And then came the pandemic.

From the beginning, governors of Republican states have done everything they could to undermine local leaders in their states, from public health officials to school boards to mayors, as they tried to battle this deadly virus by putting in place mitigation strategies to keep their constituents from dying. And it continues to this day. It started with former President Donald Trump, of course, when he turned the pandemic response into another ideological war back in the spring of 2020 to try to salvage his presidency. His only concern was that the economy would be roaring when it came time to vote in the fall so he sent a strong signal to his GOP allies that this would be the priority. They were happy to oblige.

GOP governors quickly took up Trump’s negative message about masks and public health warnings about super-spreader events were boldly disregarded. Some quickly filed lawsuits, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which said there could be no restrictions on religious gatherings. With some exceptions, the GOP leadership opportunistically reacted to the pandemic as if it were a liberal plot to deprive them of their freedoms as a political strategy.

Trump eventually left office presiding over the third surge of the virus and it was the worst by far. Obsessed as he was with The Big Lie and having survived COVID himself, he was no longer interested despite the fact that the vaccines were coming online and had the potential to end the pandemic in America in a matter of months. He made some flaccid attempts to claim credit for the development of the vaccines but didn’t even bother to make it public that he and his family had received their shots until months later. Trump’s legacy on the pandemic is solid: he was a massive failure.

President Biden, on the other hand, assumed office and focused immediately on the vaccine rollout, getting hundreds of millions of people vaccinated in record time, sending FEMA and the military around the country to help out, and pushing the states in every way possible to make the vaccines accessible. For a few months, it looked as if we might have gotten through the worst of it and could all go back to living our lives as before. Unfortunately, all that Republican caterwauling about the mitigation strategies had been extended to the vaccines and tens of millions of GOP voters have refused to save their own lives and the lives of those around them out of a determination to believe conspiracy theories, misinformation and the not so subtle signals from the GOP elite.

Now we are in what President Biden has called “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” with the Delta variant having swept the country and hospitalizing thousands of people just as we are confronting the prospect of sending kids back to school. Children under 12, who are unable to be vaccinated are at the mercy of these ideologically indoctrinated zealots who refuse to protect their own children and the children of others from this strain that is making many of them sick.

The “mask wars” are back, this time with angry parents demanding that their kids not be required to protect themselves and others in crowded classrooms and defiant customers refusing to adhere to local mandates for masks inside public places. And while vaccinations have picked up in the last couple of weeks, there remain at least 70-80 million eligible people who are still not protected. According to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Republicans make up the vast majority of people who refuse to get vaccinated, wear masks or otherwise accept the reality that we are dealing with a deadly virus. And they are acting out all over the country.

And once again, GOP governors are coddling them by banning mask requirements in schools, vaccine mandates for employers and any other means of getting enough people vaccinated to stop the progress of this virus. Right-wing media is pushing snake oil cures like an anti-parasite treatment for horses and cows, as Tucker Carlson did last week on his highly-rated Fox News broadcast. (The FDA had to send out a warning that humans should not take this drug after numerous reports from poison control centers around the country.) The results are shocking.

In Republican states, hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated COVID patients, many of them younger than 50. In Mississippi, they are putting patients in parking garages, and in Texas, they have to medevac aortic dissection victims to other states because they don’t have any ICU beds. Hundreds of patients are unable to find hospital beds. And local officials are having to battle their state governments in Texas, Florida and South Carolina to allow them to do something about it while in Arkansas and Tennessee, the Republican governors are fighting with their own GOP legislatures to allow local officials to enact life-saving regulations.

This is just one more example of the rot at the heart of what we once called the conservative movement. They never cared about small government and local control. They just pretended to. When push comes to shove they are always ready to squash anyone who disagrees with them using any means necessary, all the while calling it “freedom.” If people die because of it, well, that’s just politics.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 23, 2021

15 Insurers Drop Trans Mountain Pipeline After Grassroots Pressure

Every morning, I walk along the waters of the Salish Sea on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State. Most days I am lucky enough to see the pink of the sunrise over Mount Rainier. This spring, millions of tiny herring eggs covered the beach, bringing with them a riotous cacophony of sound, including sea lions barking into the dead of night.

This place is the very heart of me. This coast is the solace that I seek when I am overwhelmed by the pandemic, by the everlasting wars, and the twisting fear of the climate emergency.

Today, the shores are smoky from fires raging across North America. I can’t see the mountains because of the smoke. The Salish Sea is threatened by the expansion of the single largest industrial project on the planet, the largest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in North America: the Alberta tar sands. The Trans Mountain pipeline is slated to increase tanker traffic carrying 890,000 barrels of crude oil through this region, and the risk of an oil spill is significant.

We are fighting climate disruption that sets our homes on fire and covers us in a blanket of smoke for entire seasons. Smoke is putting my best friends and family members’ lives at risk because of severe asthma, compounding lung damage from COVID, and other health impacts. The herring, sea lions, and all the life I see on my daily walks are at risk too; thousands of sea creatures died in the last heat wave.

Over the better part of the last decade, communities have been giving their all to resist the pipeline that puts this place at risk. Indigenous people resist the pipeline on their territory because it destroys the sacred: grave sites, creation sites and drinking water.

Indigenous Secwepemc Land Defenders known as the Tiny House Warriors are providing solar-powered housing for their community members and asserting sovereignty through living in a tiny house village along the pipeline route on Secwepemc land. Tsleil-Waututh members and Coast Salish relatives, Mountain Protectors and allies continue to assert their laws at the Watch House, kwewkweknewtx, a grassroots coalition of activists who have constructed a traditional Coast Salish structure along a pipeline easement to assert Indigenous rights and keep a watchful eye on the pipeline and storage tanks in Burnaby, Canada.

As a thanks for the stewardship of their own land, these communities are being criminalized with constant state surveillance and increasing violence from police.

As a thanks for the stewardship of their own land, these communities are being criminalized with constant state surveillance and increasing violence from police. Every time they try to silence us, our movement to stop this pipeline and all tar sands expansion projects grows. We will not stop fighting.

There is another group beyond governments and corporations that make this destruction possible: insurance companies. You might not think of insurers at first, but everything is insured: vehicles, your health, and even the Trans Mountain pipeline — a toxic, 68-year-old leaking pipeline and its related expansion.

Over the last five years, 26 of the world’s major insurance companies have limited their coverage for coal, and 10 for tar sands. Lloyd’s of London, an insurance giant, has committed to backing out of the tar sands sector at the end of last year. Recently, another insurance company ruled out coverage for Trans Mountain — the 15th in a wave of companies exiting the project.

Now, the pipeline company, Trans Mountain Pipeline LP, is petitioning the Canadian federal government to keep its remaining insurers secret. (The Canadian government stepped in to buy the pipeline company in 2018 from its previous owner, Kinder Morgan Inc., for $3.6 billion.)

The company is desperate to keep those insurers under wraps because they are increasingly responding to growing pressure from youth organizing direct actions at insurance offices and hundreds of thousands calling them out through petitions. During a week of action on Trans Mountain insurance, there were over 25 protests around the world, in countries as far away from the project as Uganda.

Insurers are facing costs for major oil spill as well as the costs associated with climate change; industry losses from natural disasters were $83 billion in 2020.

One of the companies backing Trans Mountain, Chubb, was the first North American insurer to rule out coal. Chubb’s policy ruling out coal reflected their “commitment to do our part as a steward of the Earth,” according to CEO Evan Greenberg. Yet, according to Reuters, Canadian regulatory filings showed Chubb increased the coverage it provides for Trans Mountain for its 2019/2020 certificate to $200 million. The company remains a top oil and gas insurer.

Greenberg and the insurers covering Trans Mountain know better than most the cost of climate chaos on communities by the numbers: Insurers are facing costs for major oil spill as well as the costs associated with climate change; industry losses from natural disasters were $83 billion in 2020. Yet, these insurers are continuing to invest in and underwrite fossil fuels, making multimillion-dollar deals to support the status quo.

As I walk along these shorelines, considering the impacts of this pipeline on all that I hold dear, corporate insurance boardrooms making multimillion-dollar deals are far away from the real impacts on communities, on the land and on these waters. The risks to this pipeline and supertanker project far outweigh its benefits — and CEOs like Greenberg are profiting off of the theft of this land and the destruction of this water while we watch it go up in smoke.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 23, 2021

Expanding the Military Draft Is Not Feminism. Abolishing Draft Registration Is.

In the past year alone, nearly 3 million women in the United States have been forced out of the workforce due to coronavirus-related issues. Across the country, women are being pushed into crushing poverty as homelessness and mass incarceration rise among women and children at alarming rates, and health care, voting and reproductive rights continue to be under assault.

What’s the government’s response? Passing expanded paid family leave? No. Continuing expanded unemployment benefits? Absolutely not. Unwilling to provide solutions to the very real issues that everyday people are facing, Congress has instead found a way to suck more resources into the war machine: expanding the draft to include women.

The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service is a task force created in response to a ruling by the courts in 2016 that the male-only U.S. military draft and draft registration was unconstitutional. This commission recently recommended that Congress expand “Selective Service” — the precursor to a general draft — to include women. Last March, despite 90 percent of public comments opposing expansion of the draft, the commission concluded its report with a recommendation to Congress to include women in the registration for the Selective Service. Too bad for them, because we know that our liberation will not be realized through war crimes.

As 18- to 25-year-olds, we are within the age range to have to register with Selective Service. As we face a global public health crisis, environmental disasters and increasing state violence, the recommendation for expanding the draft at this time should be seen as a declaration of war on all future generations.

Our generation is growing stronger. Young people are the emerging leaders of struggles for water in places like Detroit, and defenders of land and sovereignty of Indigenous nations. We have been on the streets in the battles for health care, voting rights and for a world that places life above profit. We have engaged in the Movement for Black Lives and last summer’s uprisings for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We have organized and participated in what have become the largest demonstrations for Palestine that the U.S. has ever witnessed.

We are a generation that understands that no matter how hard the military tries to co-opt feminism and progressive ideals, war will never be a part of a framework for imagining equity because the first casualty of war is always human dignity. As draft-age people, the only military draft system reform we support is the complete abolition of compulsory military service.

Our lives have been marked by lies, surveillance and the realization that our government is constantly trying to manufacture our consent for war.

We don’t just want to abolish selective service; we want to abolish the poverty draft, and U.S. militarism altogether. The U.S. military regularly uses economic coercion to bolster its numbers. Recruiters prey on low-income Black and Indigenous youth and communities of color who are simply trying to survive. Recruiters tell them that joining the military is the only way to achieve financial security. But if the U.S. is actually concerned about equity, it doesn’t look like selective service, and it certainly doesn’t look like an economy that forces young marginalized people to join the military.

The commission sees the draft recommendation as a “low-cost insurance policy against an existential national security threat.” We have seen how in the past, concerns about “national security” have led to atrocious civil rights violations including Japanese internment, racialized McCarthyism against Black activists and surveillance of Muslim Americans. These “concerns” have never panned out.

Our lives have been marked by lies, surveillance and the realization that our government is constantly trying to manufacture our consent for war. We know very well that the military-industrial complex is a violent and bloodthirsty monster, and we want nothing to do with it. The draft has always faced loud and public resistance, and it certainly will now too. Young people who oppose militarism will not let our friends buy into war propaganda.

In a nation that has the world’s largest military budget and more than 800 overseas military bases, we refuse to let our bodies be a source of endless cannon fodder and exploitation: One in four women in the U.S. military have reported experiencing sexual assault and more than half have experienced some form of harassment. Requiring women to register for the draft would endanger them in more than one way should they ever need to be selected.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan by leveraging concerns about women’s rights under Taliban rule. Women’s rights will never be achieved through military occupation and bombing.

Moreover, the military shouldn’t be planning strategies that depend on having women like us available to kill, maim or morally wound. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan by leveraging concerns about women’s rights under Taliban rule. Now, after 20 years of military occupation, thousands of Afghan women have been killed and displaced by war. The Taliban was not deterred and took Kabul this week, shortly after the U.S. pulled out. Women’s rights will never be achieved through military occupation and bombing.

The words of civil rights activist Ella Baker echo in our vision for peace: “You and I cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism, until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year, until they win it.”

Instead of expanding draft registration to women, Congress should abolish the Selective Service. The military doesn’t need it. The people don’t want it. Young people hate it, as evidenced by the low rate of compliance with the requirements to register and to report each change of address. Congress doesn’t want to have to pass it. Now is the time to end the draft system — in all its forms — for everyone.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 22, 2021

Tech “Solutions” Are Pushed by Fossil Fuel Industry to Delay Real Climate Action

This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on the state of Earth’s climate, released the first installment of its Sixth Assessment Report on global warming. It was signed off by 195 member governments. It spells out, in no uncertain terms, the stakes we are up against — and why we have no time to waste in taking dramatic steps to build a green economy.

The IPCC has been publishing reports on the state of the climate and projections for climate change since 1990. The first IPCC report surmised that human activities were behind global warming, but that further scientific evidence was needed. By the time the Fourth Assessment Report came out in 2007, the evidence for human-caused global warming was described as “unequivocal,” with at least a 9 out of 10 chance of being correct. The report confirmed that the warming of the Earth’s surface to record levels was due to the extra heat being trapped by greenhouse gases and called for immediate action to combat the challenge of global warming.

The Sixth Assessment Report finally states in absolute terms that anthropogenic emissions are responsible for the rising temperatures in the atmosphere, lands and the oceans. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is destroying the planet. And, in a similar tone to some of its previous reports, the IPCC warns that time is running out to combat global warming and avoid its worse effects. Without sharp reduction in emissions, we could easily exceed the 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) temperature threshold by the middle of the century.

Of course, we are already in a climate crisis. Heat waves have broken records this summer in many parts of the world, including the Pacific Northwest of the United States and western Canada; wildfires have ravaged huge areas in southern Europe, causing “disaster without precedent” in Greece, Spain and the Italian island of Sardinia; and deadly floods have upended life in China and Germany. Global average temperatures stand now at 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. A global warming increase of 1.5°C would have a much greater effect on the probability of extreme weather effects like heat waves, floods, droughts and storms, and at 2°C, things get a lot nastier — and for a much larger percentage of the world’s population.

At current trends, it’s most unlikely that global warming can be held at 1.5°C. We have already emitted enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to cause 2°C of warming, according to a group of international scientists who published their findings in Nature Climate Change. Even a 3°C increase or more is plausible. In fact, the Network for Greening the Financial System (a group of central banks and supervisors) is already considering climate scenarios with over 3°C of warming, labeling it the “Hot House World.”

Yet, in spite of all the dire climate warnings by IPCC and scores of other scientific studies, the world’s political and corporate leaders continue with their “business-as-usual” approach when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.

Almost immediately after the release of the new IPCC report, the Biden administration urged the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase oil production because higher prices threaten global economic recovery. In fact, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, actually criticized the world’s major oil producers for not producing enough oil. Naturally, Republicans responded by demanding that the Biden administration should encourage U.S. oil producers to boost production instead of turning to OPEC.

Preposterously, the Biden administration seems to think that the best way to tackle global warming caused by anthropogenic emissions is through increasing levels of combustion of fossil fuels.

This must also be the thinking behind China’s affinity for coal, as the world’s biggest carbon polluter is actually financing more than 70 percent of coal plants built globally.

The Network for Greening the Financial System (a group of central banks and supervisors) is already considering climate scenarios with over 3°C of warming, labeling it the “Hot House World.”

Or perhaps this is all part of a framework that assumes, “We are doomed, so let’s get it over with quickly.”

In either case, one suspects that political inaction and the prospect of losing the battle against the climate emergency may be the reason why the new IPCC climate report has fully embraced the idea of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere with the aid of technology as a necessary strategy to contain global warming.

The need for carbon removal was also addressed in the IPCC’s 2018 special report on the 1.5°C temperature limit, both through natural and technological carbon dioxide removal strategies. And an IPCC special report on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) dates all the way back to 2005. But it seems that IPCC is now placing greater emphasis than before on innovation and carbon-removal technologies, especially through the process known as direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).

The actual rationale for the emphasis on a technological fix (geoengineering, by the way, which involves large-scale intervention in and manipulation of the Earth’s natural system, is not included in the IPCC’s latest report) lies in the belief that we can no longer hope to limit global warming to 1.5°C without carbon dioxide removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, which will then be stored into underground geologic structures or deep under the sea.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of technological promises to address the climate crisis, and the main result is delaying action towards decarbonization and a shift to clean energy, as researchers from Lancaster University have so convincingly argued in a published article in Nature Climate Change.

As things stand, technological solutions to global warming are largely procrastination methods favored by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. The carbon removal industry is still in its infancy, costs are extremely high, and the methods are unreliable. Nonetheless, both governments and the private sector are investing billions of dollars in the industry and attempts are being made to sell the idea to the public as a necessary step in avoiding a climate catastrophe. A Swiss company called Climeworks is just finishing the completion of a new large-scale direct air capture plant in Iceland, and a similar project is in the works in Norway with hopes that it would actually lead to the creation of “a full-scale carbon capture chain, capable of storing Europe’s emissions permanently under the North Sea.” South Korea is also working on a carbon capture and storage project that may become the biggest in the world.

In the U.S., Republican lawmakers have also been very aggressive in touting carbon capture and storage technologies since the introduction of the Green New Deal legislation by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey in 2019.

It all adds up. Relying on technology to attempt to meet climate targets at this stage of the game is meant to obstruct the world from moving away from the use of fossil fuels. If we emphasize those false “fixes,” we are simply quickening the pace of a complete climate collapse with utterly catastrophic consequences for all life on planet Earth.

Our only hope to tackle effectively the climate crisis and save the planet rests not with technological solutions but, instead, with a Green International Economic Order. We need a Global Green New Deal (GGND) to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And this means a world economy without fossil fuels and the industry behind them that is destroying life on the planet.

Decarbonizing the global economy and shifting to clean energy is not an easy task, but it is surely feasible both from a financial and technical standpoint, as numerous studies have shown. According to leading progressive UMass-Amherst economist Robert Pollin, we need to invest between 2.5 to 3 percent of global GDP per year in order to attain a clean energy transformation. Moreover, while 250 years of growth based on the use of fossil fuels have delivered (unequal) economic benefits to the world, a world economy run on clean energy will bring environmental, social and economic benefits. One major study released out of Stanford University shows that a GGND would create nearly 30 million more long-term, full-time jobs than if we remained stuck with what it calls “business-as-usual energy.”

The latest IPCC report, just like previous ones released by the organization, predicts disaster if we do not radically — and immediately — curb carbon dioxide emissions. But we know by now that we cannot rely on our political leaders to do what must be done to save the planet. Nor can we expect technology to solve the climate emergency. Carbon removal and carbon capture technologies won’t solve global warming in time, if ever. Only a roadmap calling for a complete transition away from fossil fuels will save planet Earth.

Pressures from below — led by those on the front lines, labor unions, environmental groups, civil rights movements and students — are our only hope for the necessary changes in the way we produce, deliver and consume energy.

And change is happening. We are moving forward.

Think of how a climate awareness protest by a Swedish teenager turned into a global movement. Or the impact that the Sunrise Movement has had on U.S. politics on account of its activism on the climate crisis within only a few years after it was founded. Or the fact that we have 20 labor unions in California (including two representing thousands of oil workers) endorsing a clean energy transition report produced by a group of progressive economists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Or of the great work that the Labor Network for Sustainability is doing in engaging workers and communities in the mission of “building a transition to a society that is ecologically sustainable and economically just.”

The future belongs to the green economy. It can happen. It will happen.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 21, 2021

Will the Voices of Those Who Were Always Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?

America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Stephen Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time — not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, California. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. President George W. Bush insisted that Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

Clark: Do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

Ferencz: We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

Clark: So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Lee and Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

On Sept. 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and a co-author of this article (Medea Benjamin). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that “a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing antiwar voices but the fact that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that they have military “solutions.”

Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend.”

Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war hawks when she confronted Gen. Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

As secretary of state in Bill Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the legality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand its control of U.S. foreign policy.

But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer. It only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia. These trends are most pronounced among America’s longtime allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

On Oct. 19, 2001, Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

Now that dropping more than 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan over the course of 20 years has failed to change the way “they” live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Then we should pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 21, 2021

The Real Impact of the $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Will Be Felt Locally

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that passed earlier this month fell short of many progressive aspirations, shrinking to fit Republican demands. However, if implemented wisely (in conjunction with the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill), it could still open the door to important new possibilities for U.S. governance, in which the feds, cities and states learn to better cooperate with each other to use their economic leverage to ramp up large-scale (and long-overdue) social investments.

After all, $1 trillion-plus is a lot of money. If and when the 2,700-page bill becomes law, vast sums will start flowing to build or upgrade bridges, roads and sewer systems — traditional brick-and-mortar infrastructure investments. Even a small state like Mississippi stands to gain upwards of $3 billion for its highways and hundreds of millions of additional dollars to repair bridges.

But it isn’t just about bricks and mortar. The bill will also expand broadband access, improve cybersecurity, set up huge networks of electric vehicle charging stations around the country and clean up polluted superfund sites. There are provisions for improving wildlife crossing points on roads, for creating better pedestrian and bicycle routes in cities and for tackling invasive species.

As is the way with big spending bills like this, much of the actual implementation will occur over the coming years at a city and state level. That’s critical to remember, because, for decades now, many localities have failed to invest adequately in infrastructure, preferring instead to cut taxes and to defer needed improvements. The result has been dilapidation, with the U.S. ranking 13th out of advanced economies in the quality of its infrastructure, according to a much-quoted study by the World Economic Forum. In 2019, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported that state and local government infrastructure investments had declined from a high of 3 percent of the country’s GDP in the 1960s to less than 2 percent a half century later. Making matters worse, the CBPP researchers found, was that the federal government was also pulling back on such investments. The result has been akin to what, in earlier decades, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith derided as “public squalor, private affluence” — a society with a glut of wealthy people living in wealthy neighborhoods, surrounded by a crumbling public infrastructure that they have largely opted out of.

Now, finally, that trend may be in the process of being reversed.

Cities, in particular, stand to gain massively from the infrastructure bill, with an array of ambitious public transport expansions ready to go. In northern California, for example, the Bay Area’s BART trains are soon to be extended down to the San Jose area. And across the country, in Boston, a coalition of business leaders recently unveiled a sweeping plan to use infrastructure dollars to massively upgrade the city’s public transit system, to set in place an all-electric bus fleet, and to boost local investments already underway in climate change mitigation methods, such as improving culverts and dams to better resist flood surges, and investing in high-tech coastal and weather monitoring systems.

Many older cities will use some of the dollars coming their way to update water systems that are reliant on lead pipes. In fact, fully $15 billion is specifically ear-marked for this, allowing Chicago — which had already started work on creating pilot programs, using its own funds, to remove lead pipes in some neighborhoods — and other cities a once-in-a-generation chance to remove these dangerous, antiquated pipes.

For western states, billions of dollars allocated for water infrastructure investments will allow them to increase their storage facilities, upgrade their dams and invest in state-of-the-art desalination projects. Given the dire drought situation in the West and Southwest, which recently triggered unprecedented restrictions on Colorado River water distribution, such investments are both long overdue and also increasingly vital for the western states’ booming populations. These projects won’t, of course, solve the water crisis by themselves, but they will at least allow states a fighting chance to invest more in long-term strategies to mitigate this growing calamity.

For decades now, many localities have failed to invest adequately in infrastructure, preferring instead to cut taxes and to defer needed improvements.

For southern states, which have generally lagged on building up rural infrastructure in recent years as their political leaders have instead focused on tax cuts, the bill offers an accelerated move toward broadband access that is, in some ways, comparable to the rural electrification projects of the New Deal. In Georgia, for example, which ranks near the top of state lists for internet access, but which has a large urban-rural divide, $100 million will become available for rural broadband expansion. A similar amount will go for broadband access in Mississippi, which ranks near the bottom for internet access, according to a U.S. News survey.

This something-for-everybody approach explains why the infrastructure bill enjoys such strong public support, and why, despite the GOP’s desire to hamstring the Biden administration at every turn, Mitch McConnell and many of his colleagues felt compelled to support its passage.

For decades, a disproportionate number of state and local governments, pandering to a conservative public sentiment, have bought into conservative strategist Grover Norquist’s infamous notion that the duty of public officials is to shrink government down to a size that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Now, in a pandemic era that has clearly demonstrated the importance of big-spending, rational, effective governance, the public’s thinking on this has shifted dramatically. Increasingly, so too has that of U.S. political leadership. Assuming the infrastructure bill does indeed soon pass into law, it could provide city, state and federal leaders a unique opportunity to show residents that, when the funds are made available, government can actually deliver projects and programs that improve people’s lives in tangible, easy-to-understand ways.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 20, 2021

Right-Leaning Columnist Calls Forever War a “Myth”

As this appears to be my week for taking the piss out of shabby right-wing news personalities, I bring you now Jeff Jacoby, pet conservative of the Boston Globe editorial page. Long-time readers of this space may remember the last time I made a foray into the talking points bulletin board passing for Jacoby’s ideas: His near-giddy 2017 assertion that there were a number of positives to be gained thanks to runaway anthropogenic climate disruption. His headline: “There Are Benefits to Climate Change.” No, you read that correctly.

“In the church of climate alarmism, there may be no heresy more dangerous than the idea that the world will benefit from warming,” opined Jacoby. “Polar melting may cause dislocation for those who live in low-lying coastal areas, but it will also lead to safe commercial shipping in formerly inhospitable northern seas.”

Take all the time you need with that. My favorite bit is “may cause dislocation” vs. “will lead to safe commercial shipping.” Ghastly priorities revealed by the chosen use of simple verbs is pretty much Jacoby’s speed. Reading that piece four years later amid all the climate chaos of the moment, I can’t help but be reminded of the three crucified fellows singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It is exactly, precisely that absurd.

Jacoby’s latest foray into the strange and wrong came on the August 17, and was titled “The Myth That Afghanistan Was a ‘Forever’ War.” For those unfamiliar with the term, the “Forever Wars” refer to the experience endured by the soldiers who have been getting sent to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations in the Middle East and North Africa since the onset of the first Gulf War. For the mathematically disinclined, that is 31 years of war.

“It is strange, this talking point about Afghanistan being the ‘longest war’ or a ‘forever war,’” writes Jacoby. “Yes, the United States has been involved in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, but the last time American forces suffered any combat casualties was Feb. 8, 2020, when Sgt. Javier Gutierrez and Sgt. Antonio Rodriguez were ambushed and killed. Their sacrifice was heroic and selfless. But it makes little sense to speak of a ‘forever war’ in which there are no fatalities for a year and a half.”

Let us grant Jacoby the recognition that, yes, the war in Afghanistan did not actually last “forever.” That is a practical impossibility. If the war went on until the sun burned out and all life on Earth perished, it would still not have lasted forever, because the universe would continue on without us, marking time in its own way.

The pejorative use of “forever” in this matter stems not from a marking of time, but from a sense that nothing will change, end or improve. After 31 years of war, it was a sense that the soldiers fighting in it shared broadly. Thirty-one years may not be “forever,” but for troops on their eighth or tenth deployments, it sure God feels like it.

The term lies at the beating heart of the war-making expedition undertaken by George W. Bush after 9/11: a policy of open-ended combat against terrorism for as long as terrorism exists, enshrined in two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that remain the military’s standing orders to this day. It is by definition endless, i.e. “forever,” until the policy changes.

Speaking of the soldiers, we must take a moment with Jacoby’s assertion that “it makes little sense to speak of a ‘forever war’ in which there are no fatalities for a year and a half.”

Afghanistan and Iraq were ATM machines for the warmakers for three decades plus a year.

None shall argue that combat, injury and death are the worst aspects of war for any soldier… but war is excruciating in many ways. Soldiers are not suffering from PTSD because the plane ride home was bumpy. A troop on multiple deployments may never see any fighting because they work in the mess hall or as an aide to senior officers far from the violence, but that person will still feel the long emptiness of “forever.”

Jacoby goes on to name a number of countries — Japan, Germany — where a U.S. military presence has existed far longer than the Afghanistan War, ignoring the fact that the shooting stopped there decades ago, and the possibility of sudden large-scale combat is gone. He concludes with a lament about the U.S.’s “diminished credibility” after the Afghanistan withdrawal, to which I retort: If 20 years, trillions of dollars and thousands of casualties are not proof of commitment, you have to wonder what kind of friends we’re talking about.

That’s the point, really: The ending itself is the problem for Jacoby and those who think as he does. Afghanistan and Iraq were ATM machines for the warmakers for three decades plus a year. Now, one of those ATMs has been shut off — none can say for how long — and the money spigot pinched.

Simple terms like “forever wars” bring the pathos of the situation home to a citizenry that has at least partly ignored Afghanistan for two decades. It is part of the reason why a majority wanted the war over, and is why the war has — for now — ended. Attacking the term is a desperate flail at blunting the majority belief that all of this has gone on for far too long.

Obama, Trump and Biden all campaigned on ending this war, because they are politicians, and know full well what the people want to hear. Biden actually did it, although it should be noted that the manner in which he carried it out has come at enormous cost measured in wrenching human suffering.

Biden ended the war, and people like Jacoby don’t like it. Wars aren’t supposed to end anymore, see? It’s bad for business, like a healthy ice sheet blocking a potential shipping lane. So frustrating.

Finally, and not for nothing, it is the soldiers themselves who chose to use the phrase as a shared recognition of their experience. It takes quite a bit of gall for Jacoby or anyone else to unilaterally try and take that away from them by calling it a myth. “Forever” is in the eye of the beholder. For myself, reading Jacoby’s articles can feel like forever, too. It’s all about perspective.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 20, 2021

Listen to Haitians, Not to Those Promising to “Save” Them From Disaster

Almost exactly 230 years ago, on a plantation near modern-day Cap-Haïtien, enslaved people met under the leadership of Dutty Boukman (a hougan, or Vodou priest) and Cécile Fatiman (a manbo, or Vodou priestess), to plan a revolt that would come to be considered the official beginning of the Haitian Revolution. Boukman’s invitation to the enslaved people at that meeting on August 14, 1791, known as the Ceremony of Bois Caïman, was a challenge to the white narrative in Saint-Domingue that saw enslaved people as without soul, agency or spirit. As scholar Jean-Eddy Saint Paul has stated, Haiti was the first nation to insist that “Black lives matter,” and in 1804, it became the world’s first Free Black Nation as it cast off the yoke of slavery. But that independence has come at a tremendous cost.

In his recent essay, “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire,” poet Sony Ton-Aime stresses that in order to truly understand the problems that have plagued Haiti — in terms of lack of infrastructure and political, social and economic instability — we must view them in the context of empire. He writes:

The shadow of the American government has haunted political life in Haiti since 1804, when the impertinent Black and enslaved rebelled against their “masters” and secured their freedom. The same freedom that the French and the Americans were boasting so mightily about as the model for the future of society just some decades prior. Yet Haitian freedom was a threat to Americans’ survival. It threatened the economic security and the metaphysical comportment of a racist country busy establishing itself as the hegemon of the hemisphere. They decided to suppress this kind of freedom by keeping a close watch on Haiti and a constant presence there. The best way to do so was to sow chaos and tell a story in which Haiti was always in need of saving, of civilizing, of occupying.

This story is still being told today without context, as evidenced from the recent The Washington Post article titled, “Haiti’s long, terrible history of earthquakes and disaster.”

It seems that Haiti only makes it into the U.S. news when some disaster strikes. Saturday, August 14, 2021, was no different. At around 8:30 am, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit the southwestern part of the country.

My friends and family members sent worried texts from Haiti. One of my cousins, from the town of Hinche, in the Central Plateau, about 106 miles from the epicenter, told me, “We were on the second floor balcony and the whole house moved from side to side.” It was like reliving the 2010 earthquake again.

I consciously choose not to open the images that people have been sending me.

It is so much easier and simpler to blame natural and human-made disasters on religious beliefs instead of contextualizing history and its connections to empires.

On Saturday, the day of the earthquake, I was on a panel titled, “In the Name of Boukman,” organized by the Caribbean Literary Conference (Caricon) to commemorate the 230th anniversary of Bois Caïman. This event is often misrepresented, particularly in certain church circles both in Haiti and in the United States, as a “dedication of the island to Satan,” and has been used to justify invasions and efforts at conversion. It will not be surprising if the same narrative is repeated in the context of this earthquake. After all, it is so much easier and simpler to blame natural and human-made disasters on religious beliefs instead of contextualizing history and its connections to empires.

A friend sent me a text saying, “I am sorry about Haiti.” I have received other texts and email versions of that same statement. #EarthquakeHaiti is trending on Twitter. Countries around the world are offering their condolences in a similar manner and some say they are ready to send humanitarian aid. In a statement, President Joe Biden described the United States as a “close and enduring friend to the people of Haiti.” But despite the “friend” rhetoric, the patronizing narratives of disaster and helplessness that surround Haiti are being repeated.

The stories representing the earthquake are being told via two lenses: an outside and an inside one. Outsiders’ stories will most likely be told from the perspective of “saving” Haiti, since that narrative is good for business. Insiders — Haitians and Haitian Americans — will tell different stories to help us get through these hard moments. Our stories will be more complicated. They will be intertwined with memories of the January 12, 2010, earthquake, as well as with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, ongoing gang activities in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, the COVID pandemic, and hurricane season.

They will also be stories about how Haitians in Haiti and in the diaspora are putting our resources together to help others. I am in contact with three individuals from Les Cayes and Jérémie who are working on ensuring that people in those areas receive monetary aid long after the disaster tourists have left. Personally, knowing these inside and complex stories helps empower me because they help me focus on the fact that Haiti did not make a pact with the devil, nor is it materialistically poor or damned.

Any help or support that outsiders would like to offer to Haiti must be done in the spirit of racial and cultural humility.

Raoul Peck’s film, Fatal Assistance, made after the 2010 earthquake, offers many lessons on how aid should not be administered. Will outsiders have learned these lessons? Will the people who truly need aid receive it? Will international aid organizations meaningfully engage ordinary Haitians in their relief efforts?

Or will the response mainly be, “I am sorry about Haiti”?

Haitians in Haiti from all walks of life must be at the center of all relief efforts because they are the ones who know what they need to rebuild Haiti. Any help or support that outsiders would like to offer to Haiti must be done in the spirit of racial and cultural humility, and the helpers must be mindful of their positionalities and their country and culture’s history with Haiti.

We must finally shift to another narrative — like the one alluded to by Naomi Osaka, who considers herself Japanese, Haitian and American: “I know our ancestors’ blood is strong, we’ll keep rising.”

Like Boukman. Like Cécile Fatiman.

It is time to hear the stories of the Haitian people — not those of empires, which will justify their meddling while offering no accountability.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 19, 2021

More Than 750 US Military Bases Remain Around the World

It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”

“What are freedom fries?” we demanded to know.

Our teacher quickly reassured us by saying something like: “Freedom fries are the exact same thing as French fries, just better.” Since France, she explained, was not supporting “our” war in Iraq, “we just changed the name, because who needs France anyway?” Hungry for lunch, we saw little reason to disagree. After all, our most coveted side dish would still be there, even if relabeled.

While 20 years have passed since then, that otherwise obscure childhood memory came back to me last month when, in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden announced an end to American “combat” operations in Iraq. To many Americans, it may have appeared that he was just keeping his promise to end the two forever wars that came to define the post-9/11 “global war on terror.” However, much as those “freedom fries” didn’t actually become something else, this country’s “forever wars” may not really be coming to an end either. Rather, they are being relabeled and seem to be continuing via other means.

Having closed down hundreds of military bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon will now shift to an “advise-and-assist” role in Iraq. Meanwhile, its top leadership is now busy “pivoting” to Asia in pursuit of new geostrategic objectives primarily centered around “containing” China. As a result, in the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa, the U.S. will be trying to keep a far lower profile, while remaining militarily engaged through training programs and private contractors.

As for me, two decades after I finished those freedom fries in Germany, I’ve just finished compiling a list of American military bases around the world, the most comprehensive possible at this moment from publicly available information. It should help make greater sense of what could prove to be a significant period of transition for the U.S. military.

Despite a modest overall decline in such bases, rest assured that the hundreds that remain will play a vital role in the continuation of some version of Washington’s forever wars and could also help facilitate a new Cold War with China. According to my current count, our country still has more than 750 significant military bases implanted around the globe. And here’s the simple reality: unless they are, in the end, dismantled, America’s imperial role on this planet won’t end either, spelling disaster for this country in the years to come.

Tallying Up the “Bases of Empire”

I was tasked with compiling what we’ve (hopefully) called the “2021 U.S. Overseas Base Closure List” after reaching out to Leah Bolger, president of World BEYOND War. As part of a group known as the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition (OBRACC) committed to shutting down such bases, Bolger put me in contact with its co-founder David Vine, the author of the classic book on the subject, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.

Bolger, Vine, and I then decided to put together just such a new list as a tool for focusing on future U.S. base closures around the world. In addition to providing the most comprehensive accounting of such overseas bases, our research also further confirms that the presence of even one in a country can contribute significantly to anti-American protests, environmental destruction, and ever greater costs for the American taxpayer.

In fact, our new count does show that their total number globally has declined in a modest fashion (and even, in a few cases, fallen dramatically) over the past decade. From 2011 on, nearly a thousand combat outposts and a modest number of major bases have been closed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia. Just a little over five years ago, David Vine estimated that there were around 800 major U.S. bases in more than 70 countries, colonies, or territories outside the continental United States. In 2021, our count suggests that the figure has fallen to approximately 750. Yet, lest you think that all is finally heading in the right direction, the number of places with such bases has actually increased in those same years.

Since the Pentagon has generally sought to conceal the presence of at least some of them, putting together such a list can be complicated indeed, starting with how one even defines such a “base.” We decided that the simplest way was to use the Pentagon’s own definition of a “base site,” even if its public counts of them are notoriously inaccurate. (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that its figures are invariably too low, never too high.)

So, our list defined such a major base as any “specific geographic location that has individual land parcels or facilities assigned to it… that is, or was owned by, leased to, or otherwise under the jurisdiction of a Department of Defense Component on behalf of the United States.”

Using this definition helps to simplify what counts and what doesn’t, but it also leaves much out of the picture. Not included are significant numbers of small ports, repair complexes, warehouses, fueling stations, and surveillance facilities controlled by this country, not to speak of the nearly 50 bases the American government directly funds for the militaries of other countries. Most appear to be in Central America (and other parts of Latin America), places familiar indeed with the presence of the U.S. military, which has been involved in 175 years of military interventions in the region.

Still, according to our list, American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. And while their total numbers may be down, their reach has only continued to expand. Between 1989 and today, in fact, the military has more than doubled the number of places in which it has bases from 40 to 81.

This global presence remains unprecedented. No other imperial power has ever had the equivalent, including the British, French, and Spanish empires. They form what Chalmers Johnson, former CIA consultant turned critic of U.S. militarism, once referred to as an “empire of bases” or a “globe-girdling Base World.”

As long as this count of 750 military bases in 81 places remains a reality, so, too, will U.S. wars. As succinctly put by David Vine in his latest book, The United States of War, “Bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”

Over the Horizon Wars?

In Afghanistan, where Kabul fell to the Taliban earlier this week, our military had only recently ordered a rushed, late-in-the-night withdrawal from its last major stronghold, Bagram Airfield, and no U.S. bases remain there. The numbers have similarly fallen in Iraq where that military now controls only six bases, while earlier in this century the number would have been closer to 505, ranging from large ones to small military outposts.

Dismantling and shutting down such bases in those lands, in Somalia, and in other countries as well, along with the full-scale departure of American military forces from two of those three countries, were historically significant, no matter how long they took, given the domineering “boots on the ground” approach they once facilitated. And why did such changes occur when they did? The answer has much to do with the staggering human, political, and economic costs of these endless failed wars. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the toll of just those remarkably unsuccessful conflicts in Washington’s war on terror was tremendous: minimally 801,000 deaths (with more on the way) since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.

The weight of such suffering was, of course, disproportionately carried by the people of the countries who have faced Washington’s invasions, occupations, air strikes, and interference over almost two decades. More than 300,000 civilians across those and other countries have been killed and an estimated nearly 37 million more displaced. Around 15,000 U.S. forces, including soldiers and private contractors, have also died. Untold scores of devastating injuries have occurred as well to millions of civilians, opposition fighters, and American troops. In total, it’s estimated that, by 2020, these post-9/11 wars had cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion.

While the overall number of U.S. military bases abroad may be in decline as the failure of the war on terror sinks in, the forever wars are likely to continue more covertly through Special Operations forces, private military contractors, and ongoing air strikes, whether in Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, even when there were only 650 U.S. troops left, guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the U.S. was still intensifying its air strikes in the country. It launched a dozen in July alone, recently killing 18 civilians in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. According to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, attacks like these were being carried out from a base or bases in the Middle East equipped with “over the horizon capabilities,” supposedly located in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, and Qatar. In this period, Washington has also been seeking (as yet without success) to establish new bases in countries that neighbor Afghanistan for continued surveillance, reconnaissance, and potentially air strikes, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in Tajikistan.

And mind you, when it comes to the Middle East, the UAE and Qatar are just the beginning. There are U.S. military bases in every Persian Gulf country except Iran and Yemen: seven in Oman, three in the UAE, 11 in Saudi Arabia, seven in Qatar, 12 in Bahrain, 10 in Kuwait, and those six still in Iraq. Any of these could potentially contribute to the sorts of “over the horizon” wars the U.S. now seems committed to in countries like Iraq, just as its bases in Kenya and Djibouti are enabling it to launch air strikes in Somalia.

New Bases, New Wars

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, thanks in part to a growing push for a Cold War-style “containment” of China, new bases are being constructed in the Pacific.

There are, at best, minimal barriers in this country to building military bases overseas. If Pentagon officials determine that a new $990 million base is needed in Guam to “enhance warfighting capabilities” in Washington’s pivot to Asia, there are few ways to prevent them from doing so.

Camp Blaz, the first Marine Corps base to be built on the Pacific Island of Guam since 1952, has been under construction since 2020 without the slightest pushback or debate over whether it was needed or not from policymakers and officials in Washington or among the American public. Even more new bases are being proposed for the nearby Pacific Islands of Palau, Tinian, and Yap. On the other hand, a locally much-protested new base in Henoko on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Futenma Replacement Facility, is “unlikely” ever to be completed.

Little of any of this is even known in this country, which is why a public list of the full extent of such bases, old and new, around the world is of importance, however difficult it may be to produce based on the patchy Pentagon record available. Not only can it show the far-reaching extent and changing nature of this country’s imperial efforts globally, it could also act as a tool for promoting future base closures in places like Guam and Japan, where there at present are 52 and 119 bases respectively — were the American public one day to seriously question where their tax dollars were really going and why.

Just as there’s very little standing in the way of the Pentagon constructing new bases overseas, there is essentially nothing preventing President Biden from closing them. As OBRACC points out, while there is a process involving congressional authorization for closing any domestic U.S. military base, no such authorization is needed abroad. Unfortunately, in this country there is as yet no significant movement for ending that Baseworld of ours. Elsewhere, however, demands and protests aimed at shutting down such bases from Belgium to Guam, Japan to the United Kingdom — in nearly 40 countries all told — have taken place within the past few years.

In December 2020, however, even the highest-ranking U.S. military official, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, asked: “Is every one of those [bases] absolutely positively necessary for the defense of the United States?”

In short, no. Anything but. Still, as of today, despite the modest decline in their numbers, the 750 or so that remain are likely to play a vital role in any continuation of Washington’s “forever wars,” while supporting the expansion of a new Cold War with China. As Chalmers Johnson warned in 2009, “Few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities… If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.”

In the end, new bases only mean new wars and, as the last nearly 20 years have shown, that’s hardly a formula for success for American citizens or others around the world.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 19, 2021

Sean Hannity Uses Afghanistan Crisis to Advertise MyPillow Products

It is getting exponentially more difficult to maintain a positive attitude these days. As if COVID’s rampaging Delta variant and the climate screaming, “Told you so!” by way of fire and flood were not sufficiently disheartening, there is the last act of our 20-year calamity in Afghanistan to contend with. The corporate “news” networks are reveling in footage of Afghan civilians running for their lives while pundits gravely opine about nothing of depth or substance beyond the six opportunistic inches in front of their faces.

This, though, is verging deeply into last-straw territory: On Tuesday night, Fox News wretch Sean Hannity took a moment during his nightly show to offer a few words for the families of those Americans still trying to find a way out of the chaos in that country, just in case they were in a mood to do some shopping.

“How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport?” asked Hannity. “Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. I don’t even think My Pillow can do it. MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer. These are going to be a lot of sleepless nights for so many of our fellow Americans. We’ve got to get them home.”

That happened, and on live television. With the deft touch of a lowered bulldozer blade, Hannity perfected the ruthless art of disaster capitalism. That he used the plight of those families to pitch a product, made by a guy running around the country barfing up dangerous 2020 election fictions, took another bad year and turned it positively surreal. It was as filthy as anything I have ever seen, which makes it about par for the current course.

Hannity’s execrable pillow peddling was reinforced one short night later by Fox’s vile potato monster Tucker Carlson, who stomped right through the gruesome aftermath of the U.S.’s 21st century wars to offer yet another reason to target immigrants and love the GOP. There is concern within European governmental circles, you see, that the far right could capitalize politically on another refugee crisis arising from the Middle East, as they did in 2015. Carlson cottoned to this, and made for daylight like a rattlesnake in the corn.

“[W]e are now living through the biggest influx of American refugees in American history,” Carlson said on Wednesday night. “We are on pace for at least 2 million illegal immigrants arriving in America this year alone. That’s far more than the number of asylum applicants who arrived in Europe in 2015. That was over 1 million, just over 1 million, that totally changed Europe forever.”

Quick quiz: What do the 2015 refugee crisis and the current Afghanistan refugee crisis have in common? If you guessed “failed American wars,” go pick yourself out a prize. The calamity of Iraq — which spawned the war in Syria and the violent rise of ISIS just across the border — was the catalyst for the 2015 tide of humanity seeking to flee the carnage. The cause of the crisis unfolding today is, again, another U.S. warmaking debacle. Can’t talk about that on Fox News, though, or any other major media outlet for that matter. Makes it harder to sell those pillows.

Racism, war and capitalism are the nucleotide bases within the DNA of the business deal we call “The American Dream.”

Two years ago to the day, Donald Trump told the press his administration was having “having very good discussions” with the Taliban about establishing a peace deal and ending the war. He was, as usual, half-assing his way toward a cheap talking point and a few minutes of positive TV coverage, as current events most vividly demonstrate. This was also the day Trump announced that the U.S. was interested in buying Greenland. “It’s something we talked about,” he said. “Denmark essentially owns it, we’re very good allies with Denmark.”

So it goes, I suppose, in the land of the free, or something. Hannity tries to sell fascist pillows to the families of Americans caught in a post-war zone of fear and uncertainty, while Carlson once again tried to spook the Fox-watching horses about refugees (the ones we caused to flee their homeland with 20 years of bombs and shooting) and immigrants, and all two years after the world heavyweight champion of shabby presidents told us all was so well that he was in the market for a large partially melting land mass.

You could write all this off as standard-issue Fox/Trump material, but that would be a dangerous mistake. Racism, war and shamelessly voracious capitalism are the nucleotide bases within the DNA of the business deal we call “The American Dream.” This is not new; it is, in fact, as old as the first European invasion of this land. The fact that it has its own dedicated TV network is only slightly more malevolent than the reality that the other networks are almost — but not quite — as bad.

Anyone want to buy a pillow? They’re great at soaking up tears.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 19, 2021

Illinois Becomes First State to Mandate Teaching Asian American History in K-12

On July 7, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed HB 0376 — the Teaching Equitable Asian American History Act (TEAACH Act) into law, making Illinois the first state in the nation to mandate the teaching of Asian American history in K-12 public schools. Championed by Illinois State Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz and State Sen. Ram Villivalam, and co-sponsored by Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Chicago and members of various community organizations and educational institutions, the legislation responds to the call for inclusive curricula as a strategy for addressing the spike in anti-Asian racism and violence in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the legislation is more than that. As an educator at a public university where I serve as a founding director of Global Asian Studies, an academic program that was a product of an almost two-decade, student-led movement to create an ethnic studies program, this legislation uplifts the student demand for learning about Asian American histories and reaffirms that Asian American students’ communities and lived experiences matter. It recognizes how ethnic studies allows students to engage with their education while affirming their sense of belonging in academic spaces; a suturing that directly leads to student success.

Following Arizona’s ban on the teaching of ethnic studies in 2010, the Illinois TEAACH Act reflects ongoing statewide efforts in the nation since then to address the importance of ethnic studies in K-12 curricula such as in Oregon, Indiana, Nevada, Texas, Vermont, Connecticut, Washington, Virginia, Washington D.C. and California. The TEAACH Act specifically pushes for the inclusion of a unit of Asian American history while highlighting the diversity of experiences for this community.

University of Illinois Chicago students like Cyril Dela Rosa remind us of the importance of recognizing the “large plurality of Asian American students in Illinois” and the diversity of this category, as well as the intersectionality of race, gender, ethnicity class, sexuality, religion and many other aspects of identity that shapes our experiences as Asian Americans. This is also at the core of why it is important to disaggregate Asian American racial data so that we can see such plurality, as well as resist the false “model minority” frame that has often projected this community as one that is not in need of resources.

In fact, specific communities within this larger category of “Asian American” are shown to experience the largest income inequality. It is also a community that has been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disaggregating the Asian American racial category likewise requires being attentive to the specificities of histories and politics of every community, not simply conflating Asian American with Pacific Islander experiences, for example.

Importantly, the Illinois legislation uplifts the importance of reframing the narrative of exceptionalism that is often used to articulate the representations and experiences of Asian Americans, recognizing the complexities of the positionality of Asian Americans within the U.S. racial imaginary, as poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong powerfully describes.

This narrative of exceptionalism materializes in the longstanding view of the “model minority” myth that has falsely depicted Asian Americans as a monolithic category of high-achieving and economically mobile individuals, but also has been used as a racial wedge to forge an anti-Black agenda. It also materializes in how anti-Asian racism and violence in the aftermath of the pandemic have been interpreted by the public as an anomaly, when in fact, it only reveals a much longer history of anti-Asian violence that is a product of white supremacy in this country.

This understanding is at the core of what critical race theory offers — a lens for seeing the roots of racial violence. As abolitionist teacher, writer and scholar Dylan Rodríguez rightly points out, “anti-Asian violence is an expression of the white nationalist domestic warfare totality, not a momentary exception to it.” It is a form of violence that has advanced white nationalism by targeting minoritized communities.

But perhaps the dual position that Asian Americans occupy in the U.S. racial matrix as both the “model minority,” and in times of economic or public health crises, the “yellow peril,” contributes to differences in how Asian Americans experience this violence. Yet as so many others have pointed out, there is nothing new about the anti-Asian violence we have witnessed, given that the long history of racism directed at Asians dates back more than a century — from the 19th century Chinese Exclusion Acts, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, the deportation of Cambodian Americans, the murder of Vincent Chin at the height of economic nationalism, the post-9/11 racial profiling and violence directed at Muslim and Sikh communities, and the gendered violence committed by the U.S. military overseas, to name just a few targets.

Thus, to teach about Asian American history is to teach against white supremacy including histories of slavery, settler colonialism and Orientalism, specifically centering the U.S. empire in this analysis. To teach about Asian American history is also to resist the narrative of exceptionalism that often presumes Asian American communities are a “quiet” and passive body who are disengaged from social movements or activist work.

In fact, this is a community who have long resisted, and done so by forging cross-racial solidarities — whether it is the alliance between Filipino-American labor organizer Larry Itliong and farmworker champion Cesar Chavez during the Delano Grape Strike, the multiracial and student-led coalitions that launched the Ethnic Studies movement in the 1960s, various Afro Asian solidarities, or the current campaign for a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

To be sure, it is important to teach about the varied economic and social contributions of Asian Americans. However, more than ever, to teach this history means resisting the twinned frame of liberal multiculturalism and heritage education, instead emphasizing critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and abolition as frameworks for understanding Asian American experiences and identities while seeing their connections and solidarities with other communities.

It is important to remember the sentiments of University of Illinois Chicago students like Meenakshi Parihar, whose experiences in the post-9/11 U.S. remind us of the presence of Islamophobia within Asian American communities. This is coupled with taking note about how the curricula we develop must center an anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory pedagogy if we are to teach about the root causes of social inequalities and notice what happened with the ethnic studies model school curriculum that passed in California, which abandoned these critical frameworks, and instead, privileged politicians and lobbyists in determining the curriculum’s content.

As the country grapples with understanding the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Indigenous and communities of color, anti-Asian violence, police brutality and racialized capitalism, the passage of Illinois’s TEAACH Act is a watershed, but more importantly, a necessary corrective, and an opportunity to rewrite and remake how we teach U.S. history from a framework of social justice and a robust understanding of diversity.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 18, 2021

TX Governor Gets Rare COVID Treatment While Banning Mask and Vaccine Mandates

When the definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, August 17, 2021, may be remembered as one of the great forks in this terrible road. One path leads to ever-deepening calamity, and the other returns basic common sense to the fight against the virus. We cannot know the outcome today, but I strongly suspect the wrong road will be taken, and another lethal winter will once again put us, and our children, at the mercy of that which did not have to happen.

It was announced yesterday, August 17, that Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas and a vocal opponent of mask mandates, has contracted COVID. He is the 11th governor to do so to date. The announcement brought back vivid memories of the October 2020 day when we found out that Donald Trump had become infected.

As was common during the Trump administration, the general reaction was the paradox of being shocked and thoroughly unsurprised simultaneously. Trump had spent the year essentially daring the virus to catch him, flouting and mocking even the most basic protective measures. In this, he planted the seeds of our current crisis, as millions of his still-devout voters continue to follow his self-destructive lead.

Abbott is cut from the same bolt of hidebound cloth. The Texas governor has gone to war against several municipalities in his state because they want children to wear masks when they return to school. Given the growing body of terrifying evidence that the Delta variant of COVID is going after kids far more than we have seen before, this seems like a reasonable precaution for all to take. Not so, according to Abbott, whose disdain for local government flies in the face of, well, everything conservatives often pretend to stand for.

The arm-flapping hypocrisy does not end there. Abbott is by all reports asymptomatic, which should come as little surprise: He has been vaccinated three times. The vaccines have been highly effective at minimizing the damage of infection so far, but those numbers have recently grown distressingly blurry.

As part of his treatment, Abbott is also getting the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment, which is usually only used for patients in dire condition. He is not, but he’s getting it anyway.

With three shots, Abbot is among a favored few; only half the country has been fully vaccinated, and those who have their shots look now to the necessity of booster shots. The COVID Delta variant has caused an explosion of infections, even among inoculated people like Abbott. There were almost 140,000 new infections yesterday alone, a solid portion coming from Abbott’s state.

The actions of Abbott, and of ideological/conniving pals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, may come to be seen as nothing short of criminally negligent homicide.

To recap: The governor of Texas has caught COVID after striving to thwart minimal safety measures for children. His state’s medical infrastructure is trembling on the verge of collapse. Yet he himself has been vaccinated three times, making him rare in the populace and assumedly safer than most. From this bubble, which still did not completely protect him, Abbott has made it his business to keep others in far more peril of infection from minimal precautions like masks.

The icing on the cake is this astonishing video, taken the night before Abbott’s infection announcement. There he was, in a packed room filled with elderly donors, and nary a mask in sight. Was he spraying virus around the room like a one-man superspreader? These were his people, but one wonders if they have all gotten three inoculations like their mask-flouting governor. It’s possible, which in many ways makes the visual all the worse.

How bad is it getting in Abbott’s state? “Texas health officials have requested five mortuary trailers from the federal government in anticipation of a possible spike in deaths brought about by surging coronavirus numbers in the state,” reports The Washington Post. “Mobile and refrigerated mortuary trucks were seen as a grim symbol during earlier waves of the pandemic. Trailers were delivered to cities to keep pace with mounting deaths, and in some places they reportedly remained in place as makeshift morgues months into the pandemic.”

School has begun in a number of places, and many more will open soon. In Texas, they will throw their doors wide to a maskless tide of unvaccinated children who are at greater peril of infection than at any time in the pandemic. The actions of Abbott, and of ideological, conniving pals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, may come to be seen as nothing short of criminally negligent homicide on a mass scale if the worst does come.

This is COVID. If we have learned anything, it is that the worst often does come, sooner or later, through whatever gaps we negligently provide it. Governors like Abbott and DeSantis are deliberately providing those gaps because they want to inherit Trump’s tarnished (yet lucrative) throne, and need to play to their base in order to do so. It is as ruthlessly cynical as anything that has ever been seen in this land — Let them eat virus! — and threatens to get a lot more people killed.

This is that fork in the road — is a mask-hating governor catching COVID after three shots enough to turn heads and slow down this thundering herd of deadly foolishness? Don’t expect Abbott to get religion after his infection; Trump didn’t, and in fact doubled down hard on his ongoing war on science. That got us this. What will Abbott and his friends get us, but more of the same or worse?

At some point very soon, a greater power than Abbott and DeSantis is going to have to take these matters in hand. Until President Biden takes decisive action, the rest of us will witness the numbers climb every day, as the infection spreads to more and more of our children.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 18, 2021

I’m a Pediatric Surgeon in Louisiana Watching Kids Suffer From COVID. It’s Real.

I am a simple country surgeon. I take care of children in Louisiana from birth until the hospital tells me they’re too old for our colorful walls and stickers. You will see these children when you stroll along New Orleans’s French Quarter, playing makeshift drums with their bands in Jackson Square or reaching out for beads along the St. Charles Mardi Gras parade route. You may forget about them after each hurricane fades from the news, but they are here, living, thriving and yearning for a normal that seems to fade deeper into their short memories. These children still come in waves through our doors at Children’s Hospital New Orleans after being shot; getting in a car accident; or experiencing a sickle cell crisis, cancer, premature birth, appendicitis or asthma exacerbations … and the pandemic has not spared them.

This has been a hard year and a half for everyone, and it seems like with every wave it gets worse. Five days ago, after a particularly hard weekend on call, I pleaded with friends to reconsider their stances against masking, vaccinations and distancing. I have read the anti-masking and anti-vaccination posts and memes, and I desperately want to convince those with hesitation that COVID is real — and that this Delta wave is different, especially as it pertains to children. I want to emphasize that the vaccine has been tested and is safe for us, and can protect against severe sickness. Masking and distancing can minimize the risks of contracting or transmitting the virus. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in Louisiana, has been pleading for a month that she and her colleagues are having to make decisions that should be unfathomable in the greatest nation in the world.

It’s true that the vaccine is not 100 percent guaranteed against COVID — but what in life is guaranteed, except death? We say, “United we stand, divided we fall,” and yet, I can’t help thinking that we have already fallen.

I wish I could invite those who are resisting anti-COVID measures to spend a day with us at the hospital. The majority of my day seems normal — operations, clinics, rounds — except that none of the operations are for children who require an overnight admission for a problem that is not time-sensitive, because our hospital is back to full capacity. Then I see a car full of kids who’ve been in an accident, and some test positive for COVID. They’re intubated due to other injuries, and I have to tell mom that her youngest child’s respiratory status may decline because of the virus, on top of the bruising to his lungs. Mom also tests positive, and now can only visit her children in the hospital while balancing the need to effectively isolate herself. Meanwhile, the room next door holds an immunocompromised child who does not have the defenses to fight a viral infection.

I walk to the intensivist’s office to discuss our other COVID patients. Is the toddler on a ventilator getting better? How about the baby who has been on the most intense form of life support, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)? How do we balance the increased risk of blood clotting due to COVID with the fact that he has developed a brain bleed secondary to this life-sustaining therapy? This little guy only weighs a few pounds. He has required so many blood transfusions that it’s putting a strain on our already depleted blood bank. There is another baby who got COVID from a visiting family member because they didn’t want to miss out on snuggling even though they felt sick, and now is further isolated from his family. We have 15 to 20 other COVID-positive children who are currently admitted to the hospital.

I know how to deal with stress. I completed five years of general surgery residency, two years in a research lab, and two years of pediatric surgery fellowship. I have seen death. I have learned from my complications. But this is different than stress. As doctors, we talk about wellness and resilience, moral distress and second victim injury. These are all real – the majority of us entered medicine because it was a calling, because we wanted to be healers. But it turns out we can’t save everyone by ourselves. We need all of your help to prevent the spread of COVID, so these beds, nurses, and resources remain available. Because each ECMO circuit, every ventilator, every bed that is taken up by COVID is going to be away from a baby with heart disease, a cancer patient, a child who needs surgery but can’t get it right now because we have no more staff. If you saw what these nurses saw and how hard they worked for the last year, you would understand why so many are leaving their calling. Morally, how am I supposed to choose between your child and someone else’s baby when we only have one ICU bed left?

Every ventilator, every bed that is taken up by COVID is going to be away from a baby with heart disease, a cancer patient, a child who needs surgery but can’t get it right now because we have no more staff.

What haunts me most are the children I never get to meet. The other night, I had to say no to a transfer because area hospitals are full for ECMO capability, and we were also reaching capacity. It reminded me of the time, as a fellow, I received a frantic call from a nearby hospital of a toddler who had been shot in the abdomen. The desperation from the other ER physician as he described the distended abdomen, most certainly full of blood, in a small body that he was doing his best to pump blood back into. “What can I do?” he asked. I attempted to talk him through a resuscitative thoracotomy. “Cut his chest open. Open the pericardium. Cross clamp the aorta and keep doing compressions. If you get a heartbeat back, send him here as fast as you can.” I never met that child, but I will never forget his parents, frantically looking for their baby boy in our hospital hallways because they were told he was coming to us. They were covered in blood, pleading for any information anyone may have, unsure of where to go to find their baby — and their eyes emptying as I had to tell them that he never made it to us.

If you know me, you know I’m arrogant enough to think I can fix almost anything. However, I can’t fix someone that I never get to meet. Many hospitals are at the point where we have to say “no.” North Texas is out of pediatric ICU beds. University of Mississippi is setting up patient care areas in the parking garage. Patients are getting ICU level care in the ER hallways. In Baton Rouge, Dr. O’Neal has been unable to accept transfers for a month — 20 to 25 “nos” a day. My vascular surgeon colleague at the same hospital in Baton Rouge could not accept a transfer of a patient with a clot in the leg because the hospital was full. I can only imagine that without the time-sensitive intervention required, this person has lost their leg. They never got to meet the doctor who could fix their problem.

I am a simple country surgeon. I am not an expert in public health or infectious disease, but I am pretty good at fixing kids with a scalpel. Help us to keep helping these kids, your kids, by allowing me to do my job to the full capacity I can. Please, vaccinate if you qualify. Continue to wear a mask and wash your hands. Stay home if you’re sick. These are clear ways to save children’s lives — and prevent their lives from being endangered in the first place.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 18, 2021

Stanley Aronowitz, Who Taught Us Teaching Must Be Political, Has Passed

Stanley Aronowitz, a great public intellectual and a dear friend and inspiration to me for 40 years, died on Monday.

I first met Stanley when he gave a lecture at Brown University in 1975. I was a high school teacher, attending lectures at Brown University. Most of the people I saw were dull and uninspiring. When I heard Stanley lecture, I was floored. He was a working-class intellectual filled with passion; he was brilliant, affable, funny and capable of making connections I never imagined. We talked after his lecture and our friendship began that day. Soon afterwards, I read his path-breaking book False Promises. His insightful and often lyrical writing matched his skills as a speaker, merging a passionate sense of commitment with theoretical rigor and accessibility.

Stanley and I drank together, shared stories, challenged each other and co-authored a few books over the years. I never had a conversation with him in which I didn’t learn something. I loved his warmth and ability to both listen and to intervene in a discussion fearlessly. He took shit from no one. He loved to dance and listen to good music.

I read and helped to edit much of Stanley’s work. He was always generous with his time in order to read my work and he always made it better. His Crisis of Historical Materialism greatly expanded and enriched my view of critical Marxism. Every chance I got, I invited him to whatever university in which I was teaching. He was one of the best public speakers I have ever encountered. He was always on fire. He never used a note.

On a number of occasions, a manuscript would show up at my door from Stanley, written on a subject I didn’t realize he knew about. He never failed to surprise me with the scope of his knowledge and the wisdom he brought to a project. He was both a street fighter and a hard-boiled romantic for whom the radical imagination was at the heart of a politics that mattered, and he was one of few great intellectuals I knew who took education seriously as a political endeavor.

Stanley Aronowitz was a scholar and engaged public intellectual from another generation, and we will not see the likes of him again. I will miss you Stanley. Rest in peace, my brother.

Fighting the monsters continues until the last breath. I will do my best, as you always suggested.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 17, 2021

Corporate Media Are Erasing US’s Long-Term Culpability for Afghanistan War

For a time back in the bad old days of Donald Trump, it seemed as if the corporate “news” media had ever so slightly corrected their hard-wired rightward tilt. They were still awful when viewed from a progressive vantage point, and Fox News was going to Fox News no matter what, but as the daily grind of the Trump presidency grew into a roaring existential threat to the country, that media often said what needed saying, providing context, background, fact checks and experts by the score to warn against “normalizing” fascism.

Maybe it was only a sense of self-preservation that wrought the change — the news media are, of course, “the enemy of the people” according to Trump, and would have been a certain target of his wrath had he ever been able to fully slip the leash. Having the angry mob turn its eyes to you, knowing that they know your name, has a mystic way of concentrating the mind.

That appears to be over now as the world encompasses the sudden change of power in Afghanistan, and it’s ugly as hell.

As always, Fox News is going to Fox News, but that network is outdoing even itself when it comes to dangerous and misleading coverage of the situation in Afghanistan. During his Monday broadcast, vile potato monster Tucker Carlson warned that the collapse of the Afghan government would release a death tide of refugees that would wash over the U.S. and straight up your driveway.

“If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we’ll see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months,” Carlson intoned, “probably in your neighborhood. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade and then we’re invaded.” Laura Ingraham went on to push the theme: “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan?”

“Probably in your neighborhood.” If you were wondering whether incoherently hateful immigration polemics were again going to be a GOP staple of the upcoming campaign season, look no further. Fox got the RNC talking points and lacquered them to the bathroom doors, probably.

Take a deeper dive into that, and what you see is a brazen example of a news network running as fast as it can from a mess of its own devising. Among a variety of things, the collapse of Afghanistan can be laid at the feet of two decades of presidents, politicians and military commanders deliberately bullshitting the public on the actual situation in that country. During that time, the main delivery vector for flag-humping hyper-nationalistic rubbish like that has been Fox News.

That streak remains unbroken. The daytime Fox broadcasts spent most of their time yesterday breathlessly blaming President Biden for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, gleefully bypassing an ocean of history and nuance that — if provided — might help the right-leaning public avoid getting led by the nose into another war that is almost old enough to buy a beer. By the evening, they were folding their nonsense coverage into racist GOP talking points. An opportunity squandered, try to contain your shock.

The United States lost the war in Afghanistan, just as we lost the war in Iraq, just as we lost the war in Vietnam not so terribly damn long ago.

The other alphabet soup networks, along with a forest’s worth of newspapers, have fared little better in the delivery of useful information. Instead, we have been fed a steady diet of pundit-heavy drivel about “winners and losers,” with an unmistakable avoidance of anything which might remind viewers and readers that, more often than not, this sort of galloping tragedy is what happens when a war is lost.

I’m not here to stand in front of Joe Biden. He voted for this mess back in 2001, and while it is abundantly clear more should have been done to extricate our allies and personnel before the country fell, he faced a grim Hobson’s Choice: Get out the way we did, or begin pulling people out months ago and perhaps precipitate a running slaughter all the way to Kandahar and Kabul. Nothing is more vulnerable than an army in retreat, and that’s precisely what we were.

That being said, the president deserves at least some of his lumps, if for no other reason than because he’s where the buck stops. Yet this buck has stopped a few places before landing on Biden’s desk, but you’d never know it listening to the broadcasts or reading the boiling-oil editorials.

Former President Obama has barely merited a mention, despite having presided over and expanded this war, and despite having clearly failed to end it. Former President Trump signed a half-assed peace deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, which essentially handcuffed the Biden administration to some form of the current outcome.

The top-page motive behind Trump’s deal in Doha, according to BBC News: “The move would allow US President Donald Trump to show that he has brought troops home ahead of the US presidential election in November.” The GOP is so proud of all this, in fact, that they removed an RNC web page praising Trump for the deal.

And let us not forget the biggest soup bone in this particular stew, though the corporate “news” media devoutly wishes we would. You will be heartened to know that George W. Bush and his wife Laura have been “watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness.” One would hope so. After all, here is the man who started the war, and then abandoned it for his Iraq misadventure without ending it, leaving office with the Afghanistan mission a rudderless mess that set the tone for the next dozen years to come.

Journalist Eric Boehlert has some thoughts:

The U.S. has spent trillions in Afghanistan stretching back 20 years, yet Biden, who has been in office for seven months and who campaigned on bringing the troops home, is being tagged as an architect for the Taliban’s inevitable rise to power there. A convenient, gaping hole in the coverage and commentary? The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was unalterably damaged when President George W. Bush hijacked that post-9/11 military mission and foolishly turned the Pentagon’s time, attention, and resources to a doomed invasion of Iraq….

Today the media’s role in marketing the Iraq War has been flushed down the memory hole, even though Iraq should be central to any discussion about the U.S.’s running failure in Afghanistan. “Remarkably, the word ‘Bush’ was not mentioned once on any of the Sunday shows” this weekend as they focused nonstop on Afghanistan, noted Jon Allsop, at the Columbia Journalism Review. You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.

There is more to this than the corporate “news” media’s self-serving, myopic coverage. The United States lost the war in Afghanistan, just as we lost the war in Iraq, just as we lost the war in Vietnam not so terribly damn long ago. These wars represent more than 60 years of profiteering to the benefit of a preciously guarded few, while the rest of us drown in the blood and soot of aftermath.

These things are not discussed by the corporate “news.” Bad for business, you see.

However, if you are looking for a bit of context, here is some to consider: After the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S.S.R. collapsed and ceased to exist only two years later. The Soviet Union’s war was ten years shorter than ours, and it was not contending with viral variants of COVID-19 when it left.

I doubt the corporate “news” media will talk about that, either, but it’s the truth.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.