Category: Op-Ed

August 16, 2021

The UK Is Exceeding US Climate Action — But That’s Not Saying Much

The release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impact of human-induced climate change detailed, in no uncertain terms, the scale of the disaster humanity is now facing, with the UN Secretary-General calling it a “code red” for human civilization. Devastating wildfires — like those experienced this summer in southern Europe, in Siberia and in the American west — extreme drought and flood conditions, and so many more horrors are all likely to become norms rather than once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennia events.

Over the past few weeks, the climate news has gotten worse. Heat domes over the northwest U.S. and the western provinces of Canada killed hundreds of people, devastated wildlife populations on land and in sea, and created desert-like thermometer readings in regions more used to temperate rains and snows. In California, the Dixie Fire is now the state’s second-largest in history. Pollution from western fires is now making the air quality in locales such as Salt Lake City and Denver more dangerous to breathe than the air in New Delhi, which, in recent years, has regularly posted some of the worst air quality data on Earth. Another report suggested the Gulf Stream had now become unstable, and that its breakdown could lead to unprecedented climatic changes in the northern hemisphere. And news stories abounded of the Arctic polar air clogged with smoke from Siberia’s burning tundra.

In the United States, while President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry responded to the IPCC report by urging immediate action on climate change legislation — and climate activists insisted we must go above and beyond the Biden administration’s demands — Republican leadership, long skeptical of the science of global warming and loath to commit politically to the societal changes needed to get a handle on the cascading crisis, was largely silent in the face of this drumbeat of bad news.

That telling silence from GOP grandees was, perhaps, marginally better than the party’s response to an IPCC report in 2018 that detailed the differences between limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees as opposed to letting things rip and accepting two degrees or more of temperature increases. Back then, under President Trump, the party attempted to dismiss climate change as a hoax, and mitigation strategies as being too much of a drag on the economy. But, in a closely divided Congress, today’s GOP silence is almost as destructive as GOP climate change denialism, making it desperately difficult to pass legislation vital to helping the world to transition away from carbon-based economies. Moreover, even if Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are staying silent on the IPCC report — and even if senators such as Marco Rubio now begrudgingly and belatedly accept that at least some of the causes of global warming involve human activity — a significant wing of the party, revolving around conspiracists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and far right senators such as Ted Cruz, is still firmly wedded to denialism.

Should the Republicans reclaim Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, it’s a fair bet that they would, in short order, reinstate Trump’s anti-environmental policies, and once more put the pedal to the metal on approving new oil drilling leases and weakening fuel economy standards.

In Europe, by contrast, politicians from around the political spectrum have moved to accept the IPCC’s findings and, to varying degrees, take urgent action on climate.

Perhaps nowhere is that contrast between U.S. and European conservatives more in evidence than in the U.K., which is hosting the COP26 summit in Glasgow later this year, where nations large and small hope to hash out specific carbon-reduction goals and international investments to mitigate climate change, and whose government has committed, even if it is hazy on the details, to a carbon net-zero society by the year 2050.

Alok Sharma, the U.K. government’s climate change envoy and the minister in charge of the COP26 summit talks, has repeatedly referred to an imminent “catastrophe” if radical policies to curb the climate crisis are not enacted globally. He has said that large-scale actions need to be implemented now, rather than years down the line, and has averred that wealthy nations are morally obligated to help poorer countries, on the climate frontlines, to put in place costly mitigation strategies.

And, in the wake of the IPCC report’s release, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has already committed the U.K. to phasing out petrol- and diesel-based internal combustion engines in new vehicles by 2030, said the world must “consign coal to history.”

There are, of course, fierce policy debates in the U.K. as to whether the government is doing enough. Johnson’s conservative government has, quite rightly, come under heavy criticism for paying lip service to climate change goals while, at the same time, giving the green light to more oil exploration in the North Sea, and pondering in recent months whether to open new coal mines in England’s northeast, despite the acknowledgement that coal use is environmentally untenable.

It has been praised for announcing the phase-out of the internal combustion engine in cars, while being critiqued for not having a strategy in place, as France now has, to reduce short-distance flights and replace them with less environmentally destructive train travel. And, internally, the Johnson government is deeply divided over whether or not to impose new import taxes on products that come from overseas with a high carbon footprint. Johnson himself is thought to favor such a tax, but fiscal conservatives in the Treasury have come out in opposition to the idea. So far, it looks as if the Treasury is poised to win that fight.

On other themes dear to conservatives’ hearts, such as hostility to immigration, crafting tax policies that favor the rich and the powerful, eviscerating workplace safety regulations and proving their “tough on crime” credentials, right-wingers in Europe and the U.S. are often in lockstep. On the environment, however, and especially on climate policy, U.S. conservatives are a particularly destructive, and irrational, outlier (although we must also acknowledge that climate policy and economic policy are strongly linked).

The fact that the U.K.’s conservative right-wing government is immersed in an internal policy debate not on whether climate change is a reality, but on how best to use government powers to tackle it, shows how much of an outlier U.S. conservatives have become on this issue — and, given the power they wield in Congress and at a state level, how dangerous their views on the environment are to the future well-being of the world.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 15, 2021

We Must Fight Privatization of Medicare and Medicaid to Win Single-Payer

Right now, there are essentially two approaches to improving our health care system. Either we expand the Affordable Care Act, or we expand Medicare. So far, President Joe Biden has pushed for the former with his administration’s expansion of insurance subsidies in the American Rescue Plan. Neither approach, however, will get us to what we need if the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid continues unchecked.

The threat is real. Private health insurance companies, hospitals and pharmaceuticals care about one thing: making more money. Since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, these companies have worked diligently to privatize what are ostensibly public goods.

Medicare and Medicaid were created to provide health care to the elderly and poor in our country. It was designed as a public good financed and administered by the government, and as such, was a landmark expansion of our understanding of what our government could do for us.

But over the years, private interests have encroached on that early promise, turning what was once a public good into another profit-making opportunity for the health care industry. Their first big breakthrough was when former President George W. Bush passed the Medicare Advantage program (also known as Medicare Part C) in 2003. Suddenly, millions of elderly Americans — and the billions of dollars that the government was spending on their care — were now available to private companies.

By offering coverage that traditional Medicare did not, such as for nursing home and long-term care, plus hearing, vision and dental care, companies were able to increase profits by signing up elderly Americans and getting both government money to pay for the care, plus the extra premiums that Medicare Advantage charged. What had once been administered as a purely public, not-for-profit program by the government has now become an increasingly corporate-controlled system. In 2020, 42 percent of Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in a Medicare Advantage program.

The same pattern has played out with Medicaid. In the place of Medicare Advantage programs, we now have Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (MCOs). Here, states give blocks of money to private, for-profit organizations to provide coverage to Medicaid beneficiaries. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Medicaid was expanded to all adults with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level in states that didn’t opt out. By 2018, 69 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries were enrolled in MCOs.

With the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, the government has ceded decisions over who gets care and for what to private companies whose driving interest is increasing their bottom line.

With the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, the government has ceded decisions over who gets care and for what to private companies whose driving interest is increasing their bottom line. This inevitably leads to narrowed networks, refusal of care and curtailed benefits. Meanwhile, the government is paying for both the health care of its elderly and poor — and covering whatever profits health insurance companies can skim off the top.

Meanwhile, health insurance companies know that Medicare for All is an increasingly popular policy. In theory, this could wipe out their very existence. Instead, they are trying to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid piece by piece, and turn a public good into another cash cow for the industry.

The immediate solutions are not complicated. First, we can eliminate Medicare Advantage programs and MCOs. Furthermore, we can stop underfunding Medicaid; fill in the gaps in Medicare, so that the elderly can get hearing, vision and dental care; close Medicaid coverage gaps; and allow Medicare to bargain down drug prices. Finally, we can lower the Medicare eligibility age and create a public option. Ultimately, though, all Americans should be able to get the health care they need, free of narrow networks, cost barriers and a system that incentivizes denial of care.

When Americans push for Medicare for All, they must also push back against the insurance industry’s relentless infiltration of Medicare and Medicaid, or we will be back where we started — health care meted out by private corporations, always looking at their bottom line.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 13, 2021

DeSantis and Abbott Count on Reelection Despite Letting Tens of Thousands Die

Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement.

Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.

Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens — and thousands of their citizens’ children — die or get “long Covid” and the people of their states will simply forget and move on.

They’re encouraged in that belief by the scientific reality that contagious diseases usually follow a predictable curve of increasing infections until hitting a point where so many people are dead or immune that the disease can no longer expand its range. From there, the disease incidence declines steadily and eventually flattens out to a low level. Add in rapidly expanding vaccination and the curve collapses even faster.

It happened centuries ago with the Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) and Smallpox, among other diseases. Before vaccines it happened every year with chickenpox, mumps and measles. It happens now every year with the flu as it did in a big way in 1918. We’ve all seen that curve both in history and in our own lives.

The question is how many adults and children in Florida and Texas will have to die or get “long Covid” before those states hit the “herd immunity” threshold… and whether the good citizens of those states (particularly the Republican voters) will tolerate that level of disability and death just to satisfy the tough-guy egos of their respective governors.

After all, Trump presided over what was arguably the worst period of unnecessary mass deaths and disability in the history of America… and DeSantis and Abbott voters still love him.

Multiple scientific analyses of Trump’s response to the pandemic, the most credible highlighted by Dr. Deborah Birx after she left the White House, show that at least 400,000 Americans would not have died if Trump had simply put into place a nationwide mask and social-distancing mandate like most other countries did.

But Trump, afraid that any concessions to public health would soften the economy and therefore his re-election chances, chose instead to encourage people to ignore masks and other protective measures and just go shopping and get back to work.

That part of Trump’s bet didn’t quite work out as planned: he lost the election. But his longer-term bet, that most Americans would soon forget and not blame him for all those unnecessary deaths, has paid off.

Instead of being saddled with the Stalin-like title of a mass murderer of his own people (Stalin used famine instead of disease), Trump is back to holding rallies and basking in the warm glow of his cult’s adoration… while continuing to spread disease among his followers!

DeSantis and Abbott think they can pull off the same trick, and they may well be right. Killing large numbers of Americans rarely sticks to Republicans.

George W. Bush made a similar bet back in 2001 after 9/11, as Spencer Ackerman documents in detail in his new book Reign of Terror. Bush could have simply taken the Taliban up on their offer to arrest Bin Laden and turn him over for prosecution, but instead he began bombing the second-poorest country in the world, where the average income was around $700 a year.

The following year he doubled down on his bet, repeating LBJ’s trick of lying us into an unnecessary war, this one with Iraq, leading to over a million dead and displaced Iraqis and thousands of dead Americans.

LBJ isn’t remembered so well, in large part because the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC brings into shocking relief the level of death and sacrifice his lies caused. It’s safe to bet that Republicans will never allow a memorial of that type for veterans of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars… or to the memory of the half-million-plus Americans who died of Covid on Trump’s watch.

Plus, Democratic President Joe Biden has taken on the task of cleaning up the messes from Bush’s illegal wars and Trump’s democide, and he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to rub either in Republicans’ faces.

So, how will this play out for DeSantis and Abbott? Both are betting that deaths and “long Covid” disease will plateau soon and then begin to drop and they can then do a victory lap. But they may be waiting quite a while, given the low vaccination rates in their states and the particularly ugly virality and potency of this new variant.

And Delta, unlike the original Covid that was often called the “Boomer Remover,” is landing children in hospitals by the hundreds in both states. Last month, in an early foretaste of the brute force of this variant, the nation was shocked when 5-year-old Wyatt Gibson — an otherwise normal, healthy child with no preexisting conditions — died in his mother’s arms at a children’s hospital in Georgia.

And children are also getting long Covid, which may disable them for life. As the Agence France-Presse news service reports about a normal, American healthy 10-year-old in Philadelphia who got long Covid, “His symptoms were debilitating: pain in his legs so bad he couldn’t walk anywhere and gastrointestinal distress and nausea so severe he had to lie in bed. Unable to navigate stairs, he crawled instead.”

And the damage wasn’t limited to this child’s body:

“At school, basic math equations and completing homework assignments became enormously challenging for the usually grade-A student. Kasturirangan describes it as a ‘kind of confusion, because he couldn’t grasp basic things that he’d normally find so easy to deal with.’”

The National Institutes for Health on their nih.gov website explains in a scientific report titled “Children With Long Covid”:

“Almost half of children who contract Covid-19 may have lasting symptoms, which should factor into decisions on reopening schools… Evidence from the first study of long covid in children suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 percent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities.”

The authors add that such symptoms include long-lasting “fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, insomnia, respiratory problems and heart problems” and that “there may be up to 100 other symptoms, including gastrointestinal problems, nausea, dizziness, seizures, hallucinations and testicular pain.”

Meanwhile, as Kerry Eleveld writes for Daily Kos:

“What can protect those children, however, is universal in-school masking for students and staff. It’s been studied by Duke University researchers who tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction.

“‘We have learned a few things for certain,’ wrote the researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health. ‘Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection.’”

With school mask mandates banned by DeSantis and Abbott, however, children’s hospitals in Florida and Texas are now staggered by Covid; the headlines tell the story.

“COVID-19 Cases Among Kids Overwhelming Florida Hospitals” blares The NY Post; “Florida Sets COVID Hospitalization Records Again, Including Highest in Nation for Children” says The Daytona Beach News-Journal.

In Texas, the Dallas NBC TV affiliate KXAS (Channel 5) headlined their story this week: “‘Full-on Surge’: Tarrant County Leaders Worry About Children’s Health, Hospital Capacity.” CNN delivers the grim news with this headline: “Baby Girl with Covid-19 Airlifted 150 Miles Because of Houston Hospital Bed Shortage.”

Will DeSantis and Abbott be able to withstand this kind of news as their infection rates, particularly among children as school resumes, continue to climb?

How many deaths and how much illness will Florida and Texas Republicans accept in the name of “owning the libs” by refusing to allow schools to mandate masks?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions right now, but betting that a Republican can’t get away with something awful close to murder is always a bad bet.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 12, 2021

Trump Politicized Basic COVID Safety Measures. It’s Still Killing Us.

The school board for Williamson County, Tennessee, held a meeting on Tuesday night about taking steps to deal with the terrifying Delta COVID infection surge. After four hours of debate, the board voted to implement a temporary mask mandate for grammar school students and staff, said mandate being set to expire on September 21.

Almost immediately, all hell broke loose. A clutch of infuriated parents mobbed mask advocates to their cars, where they bellowed through the driver’s side of one car window, “You can leave freely, but we will find you and we know who you are.” One mask advocate, a doctor named Britt Maxwell with children who attend school in the district, was called a “traitor” as he left the gathering. “I don’t see how anyone can say that when I’ve been on the frontlines of this pandemic since the beginning, treating patients in rooms, unvaccinated for the vast majority of it, hoping I wouldn’t take it home to my family. For someone to say that is mind blowing,” Maxwell told CNN.

Traitor? To what, exactly?

The answer to that question is easy enough: If you advocate for masks, and even for the vaccines, you are a traitor to Donald Trump, and to the white-power nation he sought to champion had he managed to steal a second term in office. This — all of this — is his war, which he began almost two years ago when he deliberately started going out of his way to disdain masks, science and scientists in his endless quest to buff his image on television.

In doing this, Trump politicized the most basic of pandemic safety measures. It is as if he named Band-Aids un-American, and demanded that we bleed to show our heedless fealty. Trump has been gone since January — in no small part because millions of people were horrified by his behavior regarding COVID — but in the minds of his acolytes chasing school board members through nighttime parking lots, he is and will always be the only leader they will ever follow.

It is not just angry parents at a school board meeting. Governors Gregg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida are fighting mask mandates tooth and nail, getting crosswise with their own local officials even as hospitals in their states are so packed with new COVID patients that people are practically falling out of the windows. Primetime Fox News personalities like Tucker Carlson weave paranoid fictions out of thin air in order to keep Trump’s base riled and combat-ready. It is all of a piece.

It is as if Trump named Band-Aids un-American, and demanded that we bleed to show our heedless fealty.

Abbott, DeSantis and Carlson are easy to understand: They are filthy opportunists who don’t give a fig for the people they harm. In this, they are all like Trump himself, who could not possibly give less of a damn about the Republican Party, especially if there is a buck to be turned. To their gruesomely belated credit, however, some Republicans are beginning to realize that becoming the Party of COVID is the political equivalent of volunteering for leprosy. The New York Times reports:

They and other national and local GOP officials cast their opposition to such measures as an effort to protect personal choice. But some fear the party is on track to make itself the face of the delta variant — endangering fellow Americans while also risking severe political damage in the long term.

“They’re making a political bet on the lives of the people they serve,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael S. Steele, who has been sharply critical of former president Donald Trump and has formed an exploratory committee for a potential 2022 Maryland gubernatorial bid. “The party leadership has gone so far out on this limb that there they stand with a saw in their hand and they’re sawing it off.”

Many of the people rallying to this strange and self-destructive banner are likewise easy to read. Fed a 40-year gorge diet of bigotry and racism by the same Republican Party that now fears for its future, they’ve been told by politicians who want their money that they are losing their culture, their guns, their religion and their standing within society. Donald Trump saw this clearly and set it on fire to light his way to the presidency, and those flames will not be doused anytime soon.

Especially not by him: “According to four people who’ve independently spoken to Trump about a potential pro-vaccine campaign, the former president has shown little interest in tying his name to broader efforts to get people inoculated,” reports The Daily Beast. “According to two of the sources who have spoken to Trump about this, he has occasionally referenced polling and other indicators — such as what he’s seen on TV — that show how the vaccines are unpopular with many of his supporters. This has left the impression with some of those close to Trump that he doesn’t want to push too hard on the subject, so as to not ‘piss off his base,’ one of the two people said.”

I fear — for good damn reason — this will lead to more bloodshed. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin warning of the increasing threat of violence posed by Trump supporters who have been convinced the former president will somehow be returned to office this month. “Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” reads the bulletin. This chatter is analogous to that which preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but unlike that centralized event, these potential acts of violence might be scattered and difficult to detect until it is too late.

Don’t expect Trump to take any steps to stop such a scenario, either. Like anything that keeps his name in the papers, he loves it. His people who will continue to suffer right along with the rest of us, and he could not possibly care less.

The Cannibal King
Eats his own, even without
A seat on the throne…

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 12, 2021

House’s Hyde Amendment Vote Advances Abortion Justice and Racial Equity

Congress just took a historic step forward for racial, economic and reproductive justice 45 years in the making. Every year since 1976, lawmakers have chosen to deny insurance coverage of abortion to people working to make ends meet by adding a policy known as the Hyde Amendment to federal spending bills. But now, for the first time since Hyde’s inception, the U.S House passed a budget without this harmful policy.

The House vote marks a bold rejection of decades of injustice against women, people of color and people living paycheck to paycheck, among others targeted by Hyde. Now, we turn our attention to the U.S. Senate.

The push to end Hyde is happening at a pivotal moment. As a country, we are finally beginning to critically reckon with policies that hurt people of color, whether they shape our chances of surviving a pandemic or an interaction with police. Bans on abortion coverage are driven by the same forces motivating state-sanctioned violence and even voting restrictions. Each aims to control the lives of Black, Brown and other people of color, especially folks struggling financially.

Abortion coverage is absolutely a matter of racial and economic justice. The ban targets people enrolled in Medicaid. In 2019, this meant denying abortion coverage for one in five women of reproductive age. Today, Hyde’s targets are disproportionately Black, Latina and Indigenous, because they confront the steepest barriers to health care and financial security. This ban also hurts others marginalized by our health care system, including young people, immigrants and LGBTQ people.

These are the same communities who continue to bear the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, deepening Hyde’s consequences. Many people with low incomes can’t afford a $400 emergency, which is less than the average cost of an abortion. Most would also need to find money to pay for child care, missed work, and possibly travel and housing.

Not only does Hyde target those working to make ends meet, but withholding coverage of abortion care can be what pushes someone deeper into poverty. Studies have shown that if a woman seeks abortion but is denied, she is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who can get an abortion. Other research has found that when policymakers severely restrict Medicaid coverage of abortion, it forces one in four women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

In the face of an unprecedented spike in state restrictions on abortion and the threat of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that directly challenges reproductive rights, this House vote is a beachhead of expansion for abortion justice, racial equity and economic security.

New polling shows that a resounding majority of voters understand just how critical it is to keep working toward this better future. Nearly 7 in 10 voters in battleground congressional districts support Medicaid coverage of abortion care. This majority cuts across all ages and different racial and ethnic groups. It also cuts across the political spectrum.

Uprooting such an entrenched policy was only made possible by the dedication, grit and commitment of women leaders of color. Alongside allies, they have continued speaking up for abortion coverage in states and local communities, including Maine, Illinois and Texas. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) have advocated against Hyde since it was first authorized. With growing numbers of colleagues, she has championed the EACH Act, a bill to permanently reverse Hyde and similar bans on abortion. In the Senate, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) is leading this charge.

Like other relics of racism and economic inequality, it is time to leave the Hyde Amendment in the past where it belongs. Decisive support of abortion justice by voters nationwide proves that we are ready to do so. House lawmakers’ historic vote was a crucial step in the right direction. Senators must follow their lead. By finally rejecting Hyde, we can build a future where each of us can make our decisions with dignity and economic security.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 11, 2021

On $3.5 Trillion Package, McConnell Meets Defeat — But the Fight’s Not Over

In 1974, Muhammad Ali stepped into a boxing ring in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to face formidable heavyweight champion George Foreman, and by most in-the-moment reports of the day, Ali spent the first seven rounds of the fight getting the living Jesus beaten out of him. Foreman pummeled Ali with notorious power punches that started in his hometown of Houston and whistled into Ali’s ribs, shoulders and head. The assault was vicious and utterly relentless.

All the while, Ali laid back on the ropes, totally defensive and seemingly doomed… until the bell rang for the eighth round, and Foreman came out of his corner gassed. He had punched himself out against his docile, seemingly immobile opponent, and in a flurry of blows that shook the African night, Ali put the champion on his back. Once again, Muhammad Ali was the greatest.

I wonder if President Biden has been reading his Plimpton, Mailer, and the other sports journalism artists of the day. It sure seems like it. The tactic Ali deployed that night is called the “rope-a-dope” — lie back, let your opponent punch themselves out, survive the onslaught and then pounce. Ali pulled it off in ’74 to retain the title that was stripped from him when he refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War, and it sure as hell looks like Biden did the same to Mitch McConnell this week.

“The Senate took a major step early on Wednesday toward enacting a sweeping expansion of the nation’s social safety net,” reports The New York Times, “approving a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint along party lines that would allow Democrats to fund climate change, health care and education measures while increasing taxes on wealthy people and corporations. After an unusual bipartisan approval of a $1 trillion infrastructure package a day earlier, the vote over unanimous Republican opposition allows Senate Democrats to create an expansive package that will carry the remainder of President Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda.”

After a seeming eternity spent watching McConnell disrupt the legislative priorities of Democratic presidents, often with a shamelessness that bent the very light, seeing these two huge bills pass right under McConnell’s upturned nose was almost surreal. McConnell even voted for the first half, if only to let the folks back in Kentucky know that he showed up for work that day. The second half, where the real money and genuine change resides, survived every punch McConnell could throw.

For months, it seemed like McConnell would successfully slow-walk the bills to death, as has been his way for years. “Negotiation” in Mitch-speak translates cleanly to “Run out the clock,” and it looked for a long time (seven rounds, yeah?) like Biden had absorbed few of the hard lessons learned by his Democratic predecessor. Then, like a sudden wind, came the last 48 hours, the eighth round of the match. The president came off the ropes and laid out the minority leader like so much laundry with a legislative one-two punch that, if signed into law, will change the face of the country.

The president came off the ropes and laid out the minority leader like so much laundry with a legislative one-two punch that, if signed into law, will change the face of the country.

McConnell and the GOP are not out of moves yet, but their new tactics will not take place in the chamber. The American Action Network, the House GOP leadership group closely tied to the Congressional Leadership Fund, is preparing to roll out a $5 million ad blitz attacking vulnerable House Democrats over the volume of spending in this bill. These attacks could make it difficult for Speaker Pelosi to hold her caucus together. However, it’s worth remembering that these bills are wildly popular among a broad swath of voters across the political spectrum. Attacking them, and the House members who vote for them, may come to be nothing more than a nifty waste of money.

Of course, because these are Democrats we are talking about, Democrats will be the main problem going forward. McConnell is still staring up at the lights in that empty boxing ring wondering what the hell just happened, and now the Joe Manchins of the world get their chance to knock the whole thing over.

“Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession, not an economy that is on the verge of overheating,” the West Virginia senator said in a Wednesday statement. “I firmly believe that continuing to spend at irresponsible levels puts at risk our nation’s ability to respond to the unforeseen crises our country could face. I urge my colleagues to seriously consider this reality as this budget process unfolds in the coming weeks and months.”

Manchin, along with Kyrsten Sinema, Jon Tester and a clutch of like-minded “moderates,” now stand as the most perilous impediment to the passage of this legislation. Because zero Republican votes will be forthcoming no matter the final language, all 50 members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus — plus the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate — will be needed. One defection will be the whole ballgame. Manchin and his crew come to the table with a very large stick, and they know it.

“Senate Republicans can’t stop Democrats from spending as much as $3.5 trillion more on social priorities like climate change in the coming months,” reports Politico. “Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema can, though, and the GOP lobbying effort is already underway. After 19 GOP senators boosted a bipartisan infrastructure plan past a filibuster and onto the House, Republicans are yearning for results from their cooperation with Manchin and Sinema’s effort. Namely, they’re hoping to persuade the senior Democratic senators from West Virginia and Arizona to buck their party and shave down the social spending bill by holding out their votes.”

On the House side, the nearly 100-strong Progressive Caucus is threatening to withhold support for the $1 trillion portion of this package until the Senate first approves the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. The Manchin corners of the Democratic House majority are making their own nervous noises about the size of the bill, perhaps out of fear of that aforementioned GOP ad campaign. All of these challenges, and more, must be overcome even as the text of the bills is drafted and presented for review.

If these bills survive the uphill climb to the verge of passage, McConnell has one weapon remaining: The debt ceiling. “Forty-six GOP senators are warning that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling as Republicans ramp up pressure on Democrats to increase the nation’s borrowing limit on their own,” reports The Hill. “All but four members of the Senate Republican Conference signed on to the letter — addressed to ‘fellow Americans’ and released Tuesday night — that warns that the 46 GOP senators won’t support a debt hike, regardless of whether it’s attached to another bill or brought up on its own.”

The stakes could hardly be higher in the coming months, and the outcome is far from certain. On a pair of nights this week, however, Mitch McConnell decisively lost his title as master of the Senate, and legislation that will actually help people saw the beginnings of daylight. Rope-a-dope, indeed.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 10, 2021

Senate Passes Infrastructure Bill With Some GOP Support. Don’t Get Too Excited.

Like wet molasses getting pushed up a sandy hill, President Biden’s two-pronged $4.7 trillion infrastructure package is wending its incremental way toward finally becoming reality.

This first portion, a $1.2 trillion package aimed at modernizing the country’s moldering public works and power grids, passed the Senate today by a vote of 69 to 30. This is a significant step. The number of Republicans who voted “Yes,” including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is no surprise, despite the partisan strife that is our collective daily bread these days; 18 GOP senators voted with all 50 members of the Democratic caucus to evade the filibuster earlier in the process, and the bill itself is wildly popular across a broad spectrum of voters.

These people will go home for the August break soon, and are happy to have something in hand to prove they actually work for a living. After all, it’s Washington D.C.; the details of the bill matter far less than the fact of the bill’s passage. In this instance, the bill contains a fraction of what was originally proposed — the GOP won a number of legislation-shrinking victories here, including the removal from the bill of a plan to increase IRS attention on wealthy tax evaders — but after years of fruitless “Infrastructure Weeks” dating all the way back to the Obama administration, it represents a notable triumph for a first-year president.

“The legislation, which still must pass the House, would touch nearly every facet of the American economy and fortify the nation’s response to the warming of the planet,” reports The New York Times. That last bit is more than a bit exaggerated; while there are aspects of the bill devoted to addressing the beyond-urgent climate crisis, the best climate bits got shaved off in negotiations between conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans. Progressive lawmakers will attempt to salvage some (though not enough) of those elements within the $3.5 trillion second prong of the plan.

Don’t expect to see orange-vested workers driving shiny black steel jackhammers anytime soon, alas; this bill, like all things in Creation apparently, must bend to the vacation plans of Congress. The House is out of session until September, so Biden won’t have anything to sign for real until people are well into the argument about who should be playing quarterback for the Patriots.

For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this delay could prove to be a boon. House progressives are rightfully outraged by the volume of vital climate material that was left out of this first bill, and others within the caucus want both portions to be voted on simultaneously. Short version: Pelosi will almost certainly not recall the House to vote on these bills earlier than scheduled; this will give her time to square these sundry circles, hopefully in favor of the planet for a refreshing change of pace.

The $3.5 trillion second half — what Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders on Monday called “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s” — is immediately next up on deck, and unless I miss my guess, the fur is going to fly on this one.

Minority Leader McConnell has made it plain that his entire caucus would gnaw off a limb before voting in favor of this massive, deeply progressive piece of legislation.

“For now, the Senate’s budget blueprint specifically paves the way for significant new spending on child care and education, as Democrats look to fulfill a promise to make community college free for two years,” reports The Washington Post. “The budget resolution also opens the door for lawmakers to extend a recent set of expanded federal tax credits that help families with children. Another bucket of spending would target the environment, addressing Democrats’ concerns that the bipartisan infrastructure deal would not go far enough to address issues related to the warming planet.”

Minority Leader McConnell has made it plain that his entire caucus would gnaw off a limb before voting in favor of this massive, deeply progressive piece of legislation. This puts the 60-vote filibuster threshold squarely back on the table, and in order to dodge it, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will have to shepherd this thing to daylight by way of reconciliation: a narrow, budget-based process that requires only 51 votes for passage.

There are 50 votes in the Democratic caucus, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote from her role as president of the Senate. Schumer does not need any Republican votes … unless Joe Manchin, or Kyrsten Sinema, or Jon Tester, or some other right-bent Democrat decides to go sideways and vote with McConnell and the Republicans. In the absence of any GOP votes in favor, such an act would all but doom the measure. If it does pass, this second-half bill would also be sent to the House, where it would face the same slate of travails as the first.

Oh, P.S.: Hovering over it all is the fact that McConnell is threatening to obliterate the U.S. economy to get his way, again. We saw a lot of this in 2011, when Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage while trying to thwart the Affordable Care Act. They ultimately failed, but the mere threat was enough to rattle the economy’s cage and proved to be a setback to the recovery after the financial Armageddon of 2008.

Why is this McConnell threat dangerous and reckless? The debt limit isn’t about spending more money, but is about promising to make good on what we’ve already spent. It is the “full faith and credit” of the federal government itself, and if that is allowed to be abrogated, it would cause a global economic earthquake in the middle of a growing pandemic while a great deal of the joint is either on fire or under water. Bad timing, thy name is Mitch.

“The Treasury Department has already begun deploying ‘extraordinary measures’ to fund the government’s obligations,” reports CBS News. “The Congressional Budget Office has said the government could run out of cash by October or November without an increase or suspension of the debt limit.”

As Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce is wont to say: “This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 9, 2021

Lawmakers Aren’t “Progressive” If They Ignore Palestinian Rights

Even after years of dedicated judo training, both Mohamed Abdalarasool from Sudan and Fethi Nourine from Algeria refused to compete in the Tokyo Olympics when they were slated to perform against an Israeli athlete. In an official statement, Nourine said to an Algerian TV station, “We worked a lot to reach the Olympics… but the Palestinian cause is bigger than all of this.” This gesture of sacrifice and solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel earned Abdalarasool and Nourine hero status in the Arab world and beyond.

In another refreshing move, corporate giant Ben and Jerry’s also chose the side of justice. On July 19, it froze operations in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and announced it would halt ice cream sales there as well — a partial boycott. (The company will continue operating inside Israel, even though Palestinians and our supporters have demanded that it shut down there, too.)

The ensuing Israeli and Zionist response to the announcement is an indication that this Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement victory is an important one.

While these types of victories appear to be few and far between, Palestinians and our supporters have reason to celebrate. In support of the “Unity Uprising” — the Palestinian people’s resistance to Israel’s occupation, colonization and ethnic cleansing — across historical Palestine (defined as the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and 1948 Palestine [what Palestinians call the state of Israel]) in May, protests in the U.S. and around the globe mobilized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to demand an end to the U.S. and other imperialist governments’ military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel.

Colleges and universities across the U.S. are actively changing the discourse on Palestine, despite massive repression against faculty, staff and Palestinian and other members of Students for Justice in Palestine who criticize Israel and Zionism. And efforts to criminalize BDS prove that our movement for liberation is gaining momentum.

In addition to Olympians, corporations, students, faculty, organizers and activists, and everyday individuals who are calling for freedom for Palestinians, even some in the U.S. House of Representatives, like the original Squad (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar), Cori Bush, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Mark Pocan, Jamaal Bowman, Marie Newman and Betty McCollum are openly criticizing Israel and taking bold stands in solidarity with Palestine. McCollum recently introduced the Palestinian Children and Families Act (HR 2590), which, if passed, would protect the rights of Palestinian children and their families by prohibiting Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to imprison children, build illegal settlements and annex Palestinian land.

Schakowsky and others have gotten a pass from many Palestinians and our supporters for far too long, and it is time for the “progressives” to prove that they deserve the mantle.

The life-affirming premise of HR 2590 is the eradication of violence against Palestinian children and their families. It prioritizes children’s safety and health by challenging the violent injustices of Israeli occupation and colonization. Specifically, the bill sounds the alarm on Israel’s abuse and torture of the nearly 700 children under the age of 18 who are prosecuted every year through Israeli military courts after being arrested, interrogated and detained by the Israeli army. The incarceration of Palestinian children (and political prisoners in general) is a tactic of Israeli colonizers that attempts to criminalize all resistance — from participating in a demonstration and throwing stones, to storytelling through dance — against the racist, apartheid state.

The crimes of Israeli occupation are made even more visible when we examine how incarceration under Israeli military rule impacts the emotional well-being of children. Take, for instance, Obaida Jawabra, who, before being shot and killed by the Israeli military during the Unity Uprising this May, detailed at length in a film produced by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) the suffocating nature of the occupation and the horrific treatment he endured while in the Israeli military detention system. The inhumane tactics of being bound, blindfolded, physically abused and left without family or legal representation are widespread and systematic examples of torture against Palestinian children like Jawabra. Other pervasive and traumatic experiences documented by DCIP include coercive interrogations, solitary confinement, painful methods of restraint and denial of due process. Palestinian children who are abducted from their families and detained in military prisons are left with devastating trauma.

In addition to addressing abuses by military courts, HR 2590 would also mitigate other forms of Israel’s campaign of terror on Palestinian children and their families, like land theft, home demolitions and ethnic cleansing. In May, Israel escalated its assault on Palestinians when it stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, disrupting worshipers’ rituals on the eve of Eid al-Fitr (the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of the month of Ramadan), and stepped up its deliberate expulsions of Palestinians living in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. From May 10 to 21, Israel also attacked the Gaza Strip from the air, with bombing raids that murdered entire families and indiscriminately destroyed infrastructure, including a building that housed international journalists from the Associated Press, Al-Jazeera, and other media outlets. The massive military operation killed more than 260 Palestinians, including at least 66 children.

Palestinians in Gaza, Jerusalem, Al-Lydd, Ramallah, and all across the diaspora responded to Zionist Israeli aggression with popular resistance. This historic Unity Uprising was symbolic of the Palestinian people’s steadfast determination to remain on their lands and inviolable opposition to compromise their right to live freely, in dignity and safety.

Palestinians across the world have different roles and responsibilities in our fight against Israel for national liberation. The U.S. government provides billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel, which is used to occupy and colonize our people. House Democrats just pushed through a State Department appropriations measure that promises $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel this upcoming budget year. (Unfortunately, of the progressives we describe as “bold” above, only Bush, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib voted against the measure; this development is indicative of the limitations of legislative work.)

There is nothing radical or even controversial about a law that states that U.S. taxpayers should not foot the bill for Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinian children.

Here in the U.S., many Palestinians unite in coalition with other oppressed communities against a government here that is responsible for systematic violations of the human rights and civil rights of Black people, immigrants, workers, and so many others. We support labor strikes, comprehensive immigration reform, struggles for women’s rights and mass civil disobedience because our liberation is bound with the liberation of all oppressed communities here and abroad. U.S. imperialism is not only the enemy of Palestinians, but of all the world’s people.

The institution we represent, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), believes in direct action organizing, but here in the belly of the beast, we also recognize that a diversity of tactics is sometimes necessary. This is why USPCN is a community-based sponsor of HR 2590, and why we are demanding that Congressional Progressive Caucus members in the House, like Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), Barbara Lee (D-California), Katie Porter (D-California), Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin) and Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) co-sponsor it immediately.

Four of Schakowsky’s colleagues in Illinois (Garcia, Newman, Danny Davis and Bobby Rush) are original co-sponsors of HR 2590. Five California congresspeople have also co-sponsored, while we wait on Lee and Porter, who represent parts of the Bay Area and Orange County, respectively, which have large Palestinian and Arab populations. Moore and Dingell also represent districts where many Palestinians and other Arabs live.

USPCN has chapters in all these districts, and we have already organized numerous actions targeting Schakowsky, who is clearly a champion for immigrant, workers’ and women’s rights. Her reluctance to co-sponsor HR 2590 is emblematic of the phenomenon of “Progressive, Except on Palestine.”

But that is not acceptable. Schakowsky and others have gotten a pass from many Palestinians and our supporters for far too long, and it is time for the “progressives” to prove that they deserve the mantle. USPCN has staged a sit-in at Schakowsky’s office, coordinated national call-in days targeting both her Chicago and D.C. offices, led a protest at her Chicago office and organized a Lights for Palestine picket on one of the busiest intersections in the city. This is a protest movement that she has never faced in all her years as a congresswoman. The other aforementioned “progressives” are on notice as well.

There is nothing radical or even controversial about a law that states that U.S. taxpayers should not foot the bill for Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinian children. Ultimately, this legislation challenges the status quo by exposing Israel’s horrifying crimes against children and support of settler violence, and by insisting that U.S. legislators, especially those who call themselves progressives, stop supporting a racist, white supremacist and apartheid state.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 9, 2021

We Reopened Too Soon, and Children Are Paying the Price

Cold War kids like me grew up with the Emergency Broadcast System as this thing that would periodically break into a TV or radio broadcast to scare the shit out of you. The first sign of trouble was a grinding noise collision, like the AOL dial-up sound of yore, but amped up to stadium concert decibels. A test screen would appear, and everything stopped, because we all knew this was what we’d hear when the missiles were finally flying and nuclear Armageddon was at hand.

In the center of the country, the system was and is used to warn about tornadoes, but the effect came with the same jarring resonance … until the voice said, “This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency…” and the world would start spinning again. No missiles, no funnel clouds, deep breath and pass the butter. The system has been upgraded to meet the modern age — it sends text messages to smartphones now instead of merely screeching at you from the TV or radio — but the drama remains the same when the bad noise comes: This means nothing, or this means everything. This past weekend, it meant everything in Austin.

“Austin, Texas, issued an emergency alert this weekend over the ‘severely worsening COVID-19 situation,’ which has reached a ‘critical’ point,” reports Yahoo! News. “The Warn Central Texas alert system was designed to be activated during a disaster. ‘Our hospitals are severely stressed and there is little we can do to alleviate their burden with the surging cases,’ Austin-Travis County Health Authority’s Desmar Walkes said in a statement. ‘The public has to act now and help our we will face a catastrophe in our community that could have been avoided.’”

It is time to sound the emergency alert for our children, before they are exposed to a COVID fate that — to repeat the refrain of the age — could have been avoided. This menace exists not just in the virus-raddled South and West, but everywhere kids might become exposed to the Delta variant, which at this juncture is basically everywhere. There were more than 110,000 new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed yesterday in the U.S., a two-week increase of 112 percent. Delta is the culprit. “By the end of July,” reports The New York Times, “it accounted for 93.4 percent of new infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

For the first time since the pandemic began, significant numbers of children are falling victim to the virus. “Children with COVID-19 used to make up 1 percent of patients hospitalized at Children’s Hospital New Orleans,” reports ABC News. “Now they account for about 20 percent, Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, told Good Morning America Monday. He said about half of the children hospitalized are under 2 years old. Most of the others are between 5 and 10 years old, so too young to be vaccinated. ‘This is not your grandfather’s COVID,’ Kline said. ‘This Delta variant is an entirely new and unexpected challenge.’”

Pediatric hospitals in Louisiana, Florida and Tennessee have been overwhelmed with new patients, with the sharpest increase taking place in patients under 12 years old. “Alan Levine, CEO of Ballad Health hospitals in Northeast Tennessee, replied on Twitter to news of Piercey’s projection to affirm that conditions are expected to become critical for some children,” reports the Nashville Tennessean. “‘And children have already died, and others are on ventilators, and ALL OF IT is preventable,’ Levine said. ‘So is what’s coming.’” Children are also becoming more impacted by long COVID, a version of the disease that can linger for months and involves a grim slate of deleterious effects.

Science has yet to comprehensively answer why Delta appears to affect young people more than the other strains have, but the steadily filling hospital beds stand as testament to the truth of it. “There are a lot of children now — all you need to do is do a survey of the pediatric hospitals throughout the country, and you’re seeing a considerable number of young people who are not only infected but who are seriously ill,” COVID expert Anthony Fauci told NBC News this weekend. “Again, the numbers compared to the elderly are less, but that’s a false comparison. These kids are getting sick. We’ve really got to make sure we protect them.”

Science has yet to comprehensively answer why Delta appears to affect young people more than the other strains, but the steadily filling hospital beds stand as testament to the truth of it.

Vaccinations — the one certain thing we can do to mitigate the virus — have begun to creep up after lagging for many weeks. Simultaneously, a push for government and the private sector to begin mandating vaccines is also on the rise. Facing the imminent return of millions of children to classrooms, the American Federation of Teachers is strongly advising a vaccine mandate for teachers before the school year begins. This represents a sea change for the union, which only last October advocated that teacher vaccinations remain voluntary.

Of course, young children cannot yet receive the vaccine themselves, leaving the responsibility for protecting them entirely in the hands of those adults who are able to safely receive vaccination. The more people who are vaccinated, the safer our children will be.

Due to the ongoing gap in vaccinations, however, it may already be too late to vaccinate our way out of this. The New York Times reports:

Epidemiologists had hoped getting 70 or 80 percent of the population vaccinated, in combination with immunity from natural infections, would bring the virus under control. But a more contagious virus means the vaccination target has to be much higher, perhaps in the range of 90 percent.

Globally, that could take years. In the United States, the target may be impossible to reach anytime soon given the hardened vaccine resistance in a sizable fraction of the country, the fact that children under 12 remain ineligible and the persistent circulation of disinformation about vaccines and the pandemic.

With so many people unvaccinated, in the United States and around the world, the virus has abundant opportunity not only to spread and sicken large numbers of people, but to mutate further. Some scientists have expressed hope that the virus has reached peak “fitness,” but there is no evidence this is so.

It was a nice summer there, for a while, but that’s over now. All of the fears we endured last year have returned with new, sharp teeth of the Delta variety, and many of the same seemingly settled questions need to be asked and answered once again. Are schools safe with the new variants on the loose? Are parents prepared for another round of home-bound education? What effect will all of this have on children themselves, who have endured so much already?

We reopened the country too much and too soon. Now we wait and see how much the jarring whiplash of that error in judgment will cost us.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 8, 2021

We Need a World Where the Olympic Refugee Team Can Go Home When the Games End

The Olympic Refugee Team filing into the stadium during Tokyo’s opening ceremonies provided a powerful, moving sight: almost 30 athletes, carrying the Olympic flag, striding alongside the delegations of almost every country in the world.

Instead of their home countries, these refugees represent the millions around the world who’ve been forcibly displaced from their homes. The team is made up of extraordinary individuals who have overcome huge obstacles just to survive — let alone train as world-class athletes.

They are swimmers, cyclists, judoken, wrestlers, runners, and more — from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, Sudan and South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and beyond.

Several were part of the Olympics’ first Refugee Team five years ago, including Yusra Mardini, a Syrian swimmer and refugee from the country’s civil war.

Her incredible story went viral. When their overloaded dinghy broke down in the Aegean Sea, Yusra and her sister jumped overboard and swam for three hours, pushing it to safety. They saved the lives of dozens desperately trying to reach safety in Greece.

Yusra’s was only one of the stories of extraordinary trauma and triumph from Team Refugees. But unfortunately, the population represented by the team just keeps growing.

At the time of the Rio Olympics five years ago, 65 million people were forcibly displaced. This year, that figure has soared to over 82 million. If it were its own country, Refugee Nation would be the 20th most populous country on earth, right between Thailand and Germany.

There are many reasons people are forced to flee their homes — including war and violence, extreme weather and climate change, and economic injustice. The harsh reality is that mass displacement has become normalized, acceptable in today’s world.

Global warming and climate chaos are so severe that climate refugees are emerging everywhere. Wars, including many involving the United States, continue to push millions of people out of their homes. And abject poverty, skyrocketing inequality, and a global pandemic are all forcing more desperately poor people to flee in search of work, food, and safety.

It’s not enough to honor millions of refugees with an Olympic team of their own — they need rights, not medals. As long as millions remain displaced, it remains important to build broad and global movements to defend their rights.

The rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include “freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State,” the right “to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” and the right to return to their homes when hostilities are over.

Unfortunately, from the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean to the arid U.S.-Mexico border, those rights are often denied. It’s a grim thing indeed that there are more people displaced now than at any time since World War II — so many that Refugee Nation appears to be a permanent feature of the Olympics.

Still, the courage of these extraordinary young athletes at the Olympics keeps the plight of refugees — and the responsibility of our own governments for their plight — in front of the eyes of the world.

Team Refugees’ entrance to Tokyo’s Olympic stadium provided a moment of hope and a moment of internationalism. It was beautiful.

But how much more beautiful, how much better than medals, if those athletes — and the 82 million displaced people they represent — could go home after the games? To a home for themselves and their families, in their own country or abroad, safe from the wars and disasters and poverty that drove them out in the first place?

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 7, 2021

The UK Is Embarking on Largest Military Spending Hike Since the Cold War

Late last year, with the pandemic in full, brutal swing, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in the U.K. announced a nearly 17 billion pound (what was then $21.9 billion) increase in military spending. The increase, spread over four years, represented the largest hike in “defense” investments since the end of the Cold War, and, while it was a tiny fraction of what the U.S. spends annually on defense, made clear Britain’s ambition to be seen as a global military superpower once more. In an era of escalating tensions between a U.S.-led NATO and Russia, and during a period in which economic competition between China and the West is increasingly morphing into a high-stakes arms race, Britain’s move to ramp up military spending made clear that the U.K. won’t be sitting out these new global struggles.

In fact, the U.K.’s decision to escalate military investments was based on an evolving military doctrine of “constant competition” with adversaries that would keep opponents such as China and Russia off-balance while, hopefully, staying just clear of provocations that could lead to war.

The U.K. government — heir to a party that, like the Republicans in the United States, has not hesitated to cut social infrastructure spending and to impose austerity budgets on the poor in recent decades — promised to soup up spending on everything from cybersecurity to nuclear weapons. In March, the government announced it would raise the cap on the number of warheads the country possessed by a staggering 40 percent, and that it would no longer make public the number of operational nuclear weapons that it controlled. Critics argued, to no avail, that this would undermine the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to which Britain is a signatory.

Folded into the new, more aggressive military posture, were changes that went far beyond the nuclear arsenal. Johnson’s government unveiled plans for advanced new naval systems, set up a new space command and committed to large investments in futuristic artificial intelligence research.

As a part of this new posture, in which post-Brexit Britain, isolated from its half-century-long relationship to the EU (or what was formerly known as the European Economic Community) and the power-brokers on the continent, takes on increasingly confrontational military policing roles globally and regionally, the U.K. recently sent an aircraft carrier and broader naval strike group into the South China Sea. The vessels, part of an international effort ostensibly designed to preserve freedom of navigation in contested international waters, sailed between Singapore and the Philippines, deliberately coming within a few miles of contested islands claimed by China in the region.

This follows on the heels of another venture, in which the U.K. sent a navy strike force into the waters off Crimea — territory illegally annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. In that instance, intended to show Britain’s sympathy for Ukrainian claims to sovereignty over Crimea, the confrontation came horrifyingly close to going hot, after Russia scrambled fighter jets and navy vessels and reportedly fired warning shots at the approaching British ships.

One can well make the claim that both Russia and China are taking deeply irresponsible actions on the world stage. Yet acceptance of that critique is different from acceptance of the desirability of giving Boris Johnson’s government carte blanche to launch whatever military adventures it chooses to embark upon.

In fact, Johnson’s government, seeking to shore up its right-wing populist credentials, seems now to want to reach for military solutions even against recent allies. This spring, in one of the stranger post-Brexit moments, the Brits began scrambling up naval vessels against French and other EU fishers in the English Channel. The vessels were rushed off to the island of Jersey and were apparently aimed at breaking a “blockade” of the local waters by fishers from the continent irate that their long-standing right to fish these waters had now been terminated. In the end, both sides stood down, but the very notion that the U.K. and France could come to the edge of a naval confrontation over fishing rights — with the British government egged on by a snarling, far right, flag-worshipping tabloid press — is simply astounding, and shows exactly how far Britain has veered off-course since the Brexit vote of 2016 set in motion the years-long process of divorce between the U.K. and its erstwhile partners within the European Union.

French fishing vessels haven’t been the only targets of the British military in the seas abutting Britain. For much of the past year, as Johnson’s government has ramped up its rhetorical and legal campaigns against asylum seekers, ultra-sophisticated military drones have patrolled British waters, looking for migrants desperately trying to enter the country’s waters on rafts.

The arms build-up, and Britain’s growing willingness to needle opponents militarily, is, to say the least, disconcerting. Yet it isn’t exactly a development out of the blue. For while Britain has, for most of its modern history, steered clear of maintaining large standing armies during peacetime, it hasn’t hesitated to use its naval assets to secure global influence.

In fact, in many ways, the U.K.’s new doctrine of constant competition and ongoing military assertiveness is a souped-up version of a mid-19th century imperial doctrine, “gunboat diplomacy,” perfected by statesmen such as Lord Palmerston as a way to realize British ambitions around the world without actually triggering war with other behemoths on the global stage. Palmerston was a master of the art of military populism; he routinely sent gunboats to potential flashpoints while talking about the military muscle-flexing as simply being a defense of British values of liberty, democracy and freedom. The press and much of the British public relished these shows of force, and for many years, Palmerston bestrode the halls of Westminster, first as foreign secretary, and then as prime minister. He relied on Britain’s raw power to impose his views, but, as importantly, he relied on bluster, in the sense that he was just gung-ho enough, just trigger-happy enough, to follow through on his threats, to convince opponents that ceding to Britain would serve their interests better than forcing an actual fight.

Today, Johnson is reimagining British diplomacy in a similar way. His government pledged to cut international aid from 0.7 percent of the gross national income to 0.5 percent, and recently won a parliamentary vote on the issue, despite former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May joining with a group of rebel members of parliament to vote against Johnson’s plan. Yet, even as his government slashes overseas aid in a cruel effort to balance a budget following stimulus measures designed to counter the economic impact of the pandemic, it increases military spending.

Britain is now the only G7 country cutting rather than increasing its international aid commitments. It is, at the same time, spending more on its military than any other G7 member apart from the United States, making it the fifth-highest military spender on the planet. In 2020, Germany spent 1.4 percent of its GDP on its military, and France, itself in the middle of a significant military build-up, spent 2.1 percent. Britain, by contrast, spent 2.2 percent. The current round of military spending increases will further widen the gulf.

This combination of withdrawal from non-military international obligations and high-profile military spending speaks volumes for the priorities of post-Brexit Britain. Moreover, it speaks volumes about the values underpinning Johnson’s particularly noxious brand of right-wing, nationalistic populism.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 6, 2021

Democrats Propose Medicare for a Few More Instead of Demanding Medicare for All

Health care activists were uniformly disappointed, albeit not surprised, when President Joe Biden, in initially proposing the American Families Plan, failed to include in the legislation his major campaign promise to prioritize expanding Medicare.

The response from Democrats was as swift as it was tepid. Instead of fighting for real health care reform, the House and Senate wrote letters respectfully requesting the administration to tweak the plan around the edges: lower the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60; decrease prescription drug costs; place an out-of-pocket cap on health care costs; and expand coverage to include dental, vision and hearing.

The letter failed to acknowledge the administration’s own desire to make increases to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange subsidies permanent, not to mention expanding Medicare to cover everyone, and include all medically necessary services, prescription drug coverage and long-term care. This should be what Congress is fighting for as COVID-19’s Delta variant brings the pandemic raging back with a fourth wave. Shamefully, they are not.

Why are progressive Democrats proposing such incrementalist reforms? What does this signify for Medicare for All supporters, and what are the prospects for such a program in the future? Rather than inspire, Democrats scold and deflate the energy necessary to win. Rather than organize, they ask for crumbs, get even less, and then blame activists for not supporting their “leaders’” plans.

Even the $3.5 trillion package Democrats are assembling, which addresses some health care concerns, still falls far short of what is needed to save a health care system besieged by a pandemic.

Weak Proposals Leave Much on the Table

Lowering the eligibility age to 60 sounds good. After all, it would add 23 million Americans to Medicare. However, of those, 75 percent already have private health insurance, 12 percent have Medicaid and 7.8 percent are uninsured. In other words, only 1.8 million individuals in this age group would gain health coverage that do not already have it. The proposal is even weaker than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, when she offered to lower the age to 50 or 55 even without the presence of a global pandemic.

It is unclear what the bulk of the new beneficiaries, over 17 million individuals who have private health insurance through their employers, would choose to do. Do they buy supplemental coverage, or will they become cherry-picked by Medicare Advantage plans?

Passing H.R.1976, the Medicare for All Act of 2021, is the kind of history-making this country needs from Democrats right now. The pandemic is still here, and we cannot delay any longer.

The Office of the Inspector General reported that private Medicare Advantage plans continue to inflate risk-adjustment payments, cheating tax payers out of billions of dollars every year. Medicare Advantage companies, ready to enroll a healthier, younger group, are watering at the mouth with yet another proposal to increase profits and continue to drain the Medicare Trust Fund. (We are told funding will not come from the Trust Fund, although it is unclear how that would work.)

Are Democrats using tax dollars to expand Medicare simply to increase profits of corporations? Is this the message they want to send to the public as we gear up for midterm elections?

Equally unknown is what would happen to the 3 million people on Medicaid who would be newly eligible for Medicare. True, these low-income beneficiaries will have access to broader networks under traditional Medicare, but will certainly be exposed to more out-of-pocket costs, including premiums, deductibles, co-pays, prescription drug costs, and for some, a lack of dental, hearing or vision coverage.

Only a criminal health care system would deny dental, vision and hearing coverage at the time in one’s life when these are needed the most. No doubt Medicare needs to be improved, but this incrementalist approach makes it harder to mobilize a public that supports improved and expanded Medicare for All.

A program that only produces a small (and questionable) net gain of coverage for some, leaves the majority of the population without any incentive to join the fight. The July 24 rallies in over 50 cities, largely shunned by Democrats and corporate media, show people are ready to move for Medicare for All, not Medicare for a Few More.

The Fight That Will Mobilize the Nation

Democrats’ request, which the president agrees with, states that Medicare should have the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and maintain the savings that would be achieved by such price negotiations — up to $450 billion over a decade — to pay for the improvements and expansions to Medicare. Sen. Bernie Sanders and 16 other Democratic senators write that their demands present “an historic opportunity to make the most significant expansion of Medicare since it was signed into law.”

Really? Democrats can make this a truly historic opportunity by doing everything they can to instead pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021, which would establish a national health insurance program for all U.S. residents from birth or residency; cover all medically necessary services including inpatient, outpatient, prescription drugs, mental health and substance use services, reproductive health care, gender-affirming care, dental, vision, hearing, physical therapy and long-term care; eliminate all premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance; abolish obscene profit-making from our health care system; reduce classism and racism by eliminating a means-tested program for the poor; save over 68,000 lives every year; eradicate medical bankruptcy; and save $458 billion every year.

Passing H.R.1976, the Medicare for All Act of 2021, is the kind of history-making this country needs from Democrats right now. The pandemic is still here, and we cannot delay any longer.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent

My work days move to the sound of McCoy Tyner’s mastery pouring out of the Pandora app on the television. Every so often, and always against my better judgment, I’ll flip to one of the alphabet soup “news” networks to get an update on how screwed we are. They seldom disappoint, which is to say they always do, and I flee back to the piano of the gods at speed.

Lately, however, those forays to CNN or MSNBC have been fraught with a special sort of gall. In between the litany of doom that is the average break-to-break broadcast, they’ve been showing wall to wall commercials congratulating viewers on COVID being over. “It’s been a long year, but now that things are getting back to normal…” intones one, followed by another announcing “We made it!” The imagery is all sunrises and maskless couples noshing pasta in crowded restaurants, everyone wreathed in smiles and presumably vaccinated…

…and then the broadcast begins again: “Good morning, I’m Fippy Fuzznerf sitting in for Ankles McGee, and here are our top stories. There were more than 96,000 new cases of COVID-19 recorded yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 131 percent. Around the world, known cases of COVID have surpassed 4 million infections. Scientists credit the dramatic infection spike in this country to the national dominance of the highly contagious Delta variant, and to the fact that millions of Americans still refuse to accept vaccination. Leading COVID expert Anthony Fauci anticipates we may see as many as 200,000 new infections per day until this new spike recedes, or until enough people have gotten vaccinated. We’ll be right back after these messages.”

“…Now that the pandemic is over, isn’t it time to start planning your special vacation at last? At BookYourCrap.com, we have all the tools you need to organize the trip you’ve been dreaming about for a year…”

Sigh.

Thanks to the incredible bungling of this crisis for vital months by the Trump administration, that last horse appears to have left the barn.

“Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term ‘herd immunity’ came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives,” reports The New York Times. “Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.”

There were more than 96,000 new cases of COVID-19 recorded yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 131 percent.

Of course, it is not all gloom and shadows at this juncture. The number of people dying from COVID has plummeted, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines. Vaccination rates are ever so incrementally on the rise. Those who are vaccinated currently face a very low chance of enduring a virus “breakthrough” which infects them, and those who do become infected have a much, much lower chance of hospitalization. The vaccines are not seamless, a small percentage of people who got the shot(s) are still getting damn sick, but the drear finality of mass death at the end of a ventilator tube has receded dramatically for the time being.

If that were the whole story, I would just put on my mask and bend my shoulder to the task of convincing as many people as possible to get vaccinated. I will still do so every single day, but there are weevils in this loaf that threaten to ruin all the progress we have made so far. Delta, you see, is not the only variant. New ones — specifically named Epsilon and Lambda — have emerged, and early research indicates these new breeds of COVID might be far more effective at breaching our vaccine defenses than Delta.

“The Epsilon and Lambda variants of COVID-19 are ‘variants of interest,’ according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and early studies show they have developed a resistance to vaccines,” reports NJ.com. “Japanese researchers found the Lambda variant, which was initially discovered in Peru and is now spreading throughout South America, is highly transmissible and more resistant to vaccines than the initial COVID-19 strain…. Meanwhile, the Epsilon variant that was initially discovered in California in 2020 is spreading in Pakistan and is proving to be resistant to vaccines, according to researchers.”

The current national conversation on COVID is not broad enough. It is essential to get millions more vaccinated — it’s an absolute top priority — but we must also recognize that we’ve let this thing burn for so long that it appears to be on the edge of evolving beyond our defenses. A virus evolves within its host at an astonishing rate. Every new host gives COVID a chance to concoct a variant with the ability to turn our vaccines into white wine spritzer, and as noted, there were almost 100,000 new infections yesterday in this country alone.

The variant that partly defies our vaccines may have already emerged in the form of Epsilon or Lambda, but the research on those two has only begun. The Law of Large Numbers strongly suggests the emergence of a more strongly vaccine-resistant variant is going to happen sooner or later, and thanks to our bungled response for the first year of the crisis — and to the ongoing intransigence of millions who disdain science because it makes Donald Trump look bad — the rise of such a circumstance is all but inevitable.

The TV commercials are peddling an alluring fiction, but the facts are difficult to dispute: This thing is not over, and the way matters are going, it may never be over. The wolf is through the door, and the feeding is fine indeed.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent.

Last week, the Urban Institute released stunning data on how the huge infusion of government assistance to counter the economic effects of the pandemic had reduced poverty in the U.S. The researchers found that because of enhanced unemployment benefits, rent assistance, eviction moratoriums, increased access to food stamps, tax credits and stimulus checks paid directly to families, the U.S. poverty rate (a conservative, and at times inadequate, estimate of poverty, but one used by poverty scholars for generations) had plummeted to a projected 7.7 percent for 2021. This contrasts with an official poverty rate, calculated by the U.S. Census, of 10.5 percent in 2019; and an Urban Institute estimate that by the end of 2020, the poverty rate had declined to 9.5 percent, largely because of federal and state government interventions to support the income of huge numbers of Americans. That trend continued into 2021: The Urban Institute researchers concluded that child poverty has now declined to 5.6 percent, a far lower number than ever previously recorded in the U.S.

On one level, the data was entirely counterintuitive. After all, as the COVID crisis has raged the past 18 months, we have witnessed Great Depression-era level spikes in unemployment and unprecedented increases in housing and food insecurity. On the other hand, it oughtn’t to have been entirely surprising, because in 2020 and 2021, Congress, despite its general dysfunction, managed to pass into law several pandemic relief packages worth trillions of dollars — and much of that money ended up flowing, often at speed, to households around the country.

The lesson is clear: Ambitious, outside-the-box government programs and investments can be extraordinarily effective in helping vulnerable Americans escape poverty. The Urban Institute’s research concludes that absent these interventions, the poverty rate at the end of 2020 would have been above 20 percent of the population.

There’s a historical precedent for big-thinking and big-spending government programs successfully driving down the poverty rate: At the height of the “war on poverty,” in the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States also began posting huge drops in the number of residents living in poverty — though at a slower pace than occurred in 2020 and 2021.

From 1964 to 1973, from the year Lyndon Johnson began putting in place the building blocks of his anti-poverty programs to the year that Richard Nixon began shifting the emphasis away from these programs and toward more punitive social policies such as the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs,” poverty in the U.S. declined by 42 percent.

But, as political priorities shifted, and as the moral language around poverty morphed from the LBJ-era notions of poverty being a societal problem to the Reagan-era notions of poverty being the fault of poor people’s behavior and choices, the needed investments in social infrastructure began to wane. From the 1970s on, for most groups of Americans, the poverty rate either plateaued or increased. The numbers waxed and waned somewhat, but by and large, for most of the past half-century, with the exception of dips in 2000 and in 2018-19 triggered by historically low levels of unemployment, between 12 and 15 percent of Americans in any given year have lived in poverty — with a shockingly large number of those living in what economists term “deep poverty,” where their incomes only take them to (at most) half of the poverty threshold, and where significant physical and mental health impacts are most likely to occur.

Of course, poverty has never been distributed evenly. Thanks to this country’s foundations in slavery and colonialism and its ongoing practices of systemic oppression, African American, Indigenous and Latino communities have long had far higher poverty rates than whites. And until the most recent anti-poverty interventions, young people, especially those living in single-parent households, were more likely to live in poverty than were older Americans .

In fact, during these decades, for the elderly — who benefited from the creation of Medicare and a series of other targeted efforts — poverty plummeted, and continued to decline even after the broader war on poverty ended. At the start of LBJ’s anti-poverty efforts, more than one in four seniors lived below the poverty line. A half-century later, with Medicare, Supplemental Security Income and other benefits having been cemented into the social compact, fewer than 1 in 10 seniors were in similar straits.

Of course, some of this data should be taken with a grain of salt: For decades, experts have critiqued the government’s definition of poverty, and the threshold that it uses to determine whether individuals and families are income-insecure as failing to fully measure economic hardship. Most poverty measures used by the federal government don’t, for example, fully take into account the high cost of housing in states such as California or New York; nor do they fully recognize that things such as affordable broadband access are now necessities of life rather than luxuries. Certainly, during the Trump era, falling official rates of poverty masked deepening fissures of inequality and deepening financial straits faced by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

When the government invests in anti-poverty programs, across-the-board measures of poverty show that these programs can work to improve the financial condition of millions of Americans. Yet, despite that, too often those programs fail to sustain popular support over the long-term.

In fact, historically, across-the-board anti-poverty programs have only ever attracted lukewarm political support from U.S. leaders. Poverty embarrasses those in power. They don’t like to talk about it or admit its durability. In the 1960s, the sociologist Michael Harrington wrote of a poverty that was rendered invisible by the broader affluence that hemmed it in. As a society, we have, over the decades, been remarkably willing to sweep our poverty crisis under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Harrington’s book, The Other America, helped trigger a political and cultural awakening around poverty. It helped open eyes and create the conditions in which it was possible to put in place interventions such as Medicare and Medicaid, an expansion of food stamps, free and reduced school meals, increased job training and housing programs in poor neighborhoods, and so on. But, over time, the public’s appetite for these programs — and the costs of maintaining them — waned, and poverty rates began creeping up again.

Today, in 2021, the country has a huge opportunity. Out of the pandemic, remarkably creative economic and political thinking has emerged about how to reduce poverty. Federally, one-year child tax credits are now in place that will massively reduce child poverty this year. At a state level, states like California are implementing universal pre-K education. Ideas around creating guaranteed income programs are no longer dismissed as being utopian or un-implementable. A dramatic expansion of unemployment benefits was shown not only to be possible, but to be remarkably effective at keeping unemployed people afloat economically.

Yet all of these changes are as fragile as were so many of the programs of LBJ’s war on poverty. Already, Republican states have dismantled their expanded unemployment benefits. Already, Congress and President Biden have allowed the federal eviction moratorium to sunset — despite millions still struggling to pay their rent. Already, there is a political battle underway about whether or not to continue the child tax credits beyond this current year.

Take these tools away, and poverty could all too easily boomerang back up to pre-pandemic levels within months. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions — and an entirely avoidable one at that.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 3, 2021

I Was Thrown in Solitary at 14. My Jailers Added a Day Each Time I Fought Back.

This piece is a winner of Truthout’s Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize.

Content Warning: The following essay contains mentions of violence against youth, and solitary confinement.

Day 1 of 3

They strip me to my boxers and lock me in a dry cell. No mattress.

They call it a dry cell because it doesn’t have a toilet or sink. As solitary confinement goes, this ain’t shit because they have to regularly let me out to use the bathroom.

In front of my cell, a tier divides the dry cells from the boys’ dorm where 70 bunk beds and 140 green footlockers line a rectangle hall. Youth counselors monitor wards from a Plexi-glass and concrete station which divides the dorm into wings.

Standing at my cell window, I see O-Dog watching me. He raises his arms, fists together, to form an “O” over the wave cap on his head. It’s a symbol of solidarity that means, we’re from Oakland, fuck this world. A youth counselor tells him to stop talking to the dry cells.

“O-love, no love!” I shout through the crack under my door, earning another day in confinement.

Day 2 of 4

A pencil nub clatters under the door. I rush to my window, but whoever passed me the contraband is already ghost. The dorm is empty. A chest-high wall and Plexi-glass divide the dorm from the dayroom where kids shoot Eight Ball and play Connect Four.

I marked two lines on the wall because that’s what convicts do in the movies. I lie on the cool stone slab, determined to accustom myself to the hardship. Goals: That’s how to survive solitary confinement.

Day 3 of 4

I use the pencil sparingly, so it doesn’t run out on me.

I mark the days on one wall, write my age, 14, on the other. On the slab, I draw an eye. A counselor catches me and asks where I got the pencil.

“I found it.”

He smiles but doesn’t mean it.

Day 4 of 5

I glare at O-Dog through my window. He won’t look at me. Nobody will. The counselors threatened to lock up anyone caught communicating with me. I turn and kick my door a dozen times like a mule. A counselor rushes to my cell and tells me to stop. I shout the lyrics to an N.W.A. rap:

Fuck the police!

coming straight from the underground.

Young nigga got it

bad ‘cause I’m brown!

The counselor, square-jawed and buzz-cut, crowds my window. He looks like an angry cop irritated by the blood he’s gotten on his uniform. He says if I don’t stop shouting, he’ll send me to Inyo Hall: the real hole. I stop yelling but keep rapping. I dance because it feels good. I start with a Chuck D strut, throwing my knees high and side to side as I back away from the door, and then I transition center-cell into an in-your-face robot routine.

Fuck the police!

Fuck, fuck, fuck the police!

I make sound effects, as if I’m mixing a record, with my mouth.

Fuck, fuck, fuck the police!

Day 5 of 6

“I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” I tell the counselor when he comes by for his hourly suicide check. He says he already took me to the bathroom.

“That was number one. I gotta go number two.”

The counselor’s shark-fin nose flares, but he unlocks the door.

***

“I gotta go to the bathroom, I drank too much, it’s hot.”

***

“I gotta go to the bathroom, I might have diarrhea.”

***

The counselor ignores me the next time I ask to use the bathroom. I don’t actually need to go, but what if I did? That would be child abuse — this motherfucker is trying to get away with child abuse!

“You gotta let me go to the bathroom,” I shout. Wards in the dorm find something to do that involves facing away from me: rustle through their lockers, write letters, swing hand-sized radios over their heads chasing better FM reception. O-Dog glances at me long enough to shake his head, no.

***

I’ve been mule-kicking the door for an hour. My sole throbs. I’m strong. Keep kicking.

***

I lie on my slab for three hours. They won’t let me out. I pee under the door. They call me an animal before they duct tape a blanket over my window, draping my cell in darkness.

I shit against the door, wipe my ass with my boxers. The stink grows a body in the dark that bites my skin. I take center-cell and fight it, shadow box it. I expel air through my nose with each punch, suck breath through my teeth dodging shadow punches. Hisses fill the dark.

Fight it, fight it, fight it.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 3, 2021

I Want to Start School So I Can Learn to Write Letters to My Dad in Prison

This piece was granted special recognition through the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize.

My name is Little Coconut. My birthday is May 18. My favorite color is pink, no I mean glittery red. I like learning about dinosaurs. I watch Totally Spies and Loud House. Sometimes I watch Charmed with my grandma and SpongeBob with my great grandpa. Sssssshhhhhhhh that’s a secret.

My dad is in Connecticut. He is in jail but he is not a bandit. He does not know all these things about me unless I tell him. When I finally get to visit I will pretend to make him meals. I like cooking.

The police told my mommy she can’t bring me to visit him. Not all police are bad but I saw them step on a man’ s neck on TV. They kill us because we are Black and beautiful, they are afraid of us. My mommy told me I am Black and beautiful.

I miss my karate class and therapy session when I go visit him, but I get to see my cousins if they are home. When I go to school this year, I will learn to write him letters.

I cannot wait for Daddy to come home so we can be a family with Mommy, Grandma, and Mrs. Little Violet, my cat.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 3, 2021

A Prison Guard Raped Me and Threatened My Life. Now I Fight for Others’ Lives.

This piece is a winner of Truthout’s Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize.

Content warning: The following essay contains mentions of rape, anti-trans violence and violence against incarcerated people.

I am a queer, Blackfoot mother of four kids, three dogs, two ferrets and one nonprofit organization. Once, I had an amazing career as a costume designer in the Atlanta entertainment and burlesque industry. But in 2013, I was arrested and sentenced to 12 months in prison. Theoretically, that’s nothing. Everyone told me I could do my time, come home and get back to my life as if it never happened. Before I left for prison, my brother said, “It’s a cake-walk deployment, Sis. You’ve survived worse.”

I was shipped to a prison in south Georgia. A few months in, I was attacked by another woman in our dorm. She slammed my head into the concrete floor multiple times. She kicked me repeatedly, giving me several prison-issue combat boot bruises before my dormmates pulled her off. I was knocked unconscious and bleeding on the floor. I awoke to find a security officer standing over me, smacking me in the face and yelling, “Get your ass up to medical or we’ll drag you to lockdown.”

In the medical office, the doctor said I had a concussion and bruised ribs but refused x-rays. He gave me two Advil and sent me limping back to my dorm. The following year, that doctor was fired after being linked to the deaths of at least nine women, and it was revealed that he had previously been sanctioned for medical negligence in another state.

Later, a prison’s special investigator took my statement. I told him that I wanted to press charges against my attacker. He said “Nope, sorry. We don’t do outside charges here. What happens in prison, stays in prison.”

I got up on a rainy morning, put on my browns (most people don’t actually wear orange in prison), and went to the gym with my dorm. I was walking laps with a couple of girls when the male officer approached us. He pulled me aside and said he needed to speak with me. Everyone knows that one-on-one interactions are not allowed between officers and inmates of the opposite sex. He said, “This will just take a second.” He grabbed the sleeve of my shirt and led me down the hall.

He said that he had seen another inmate pass something to me and he had to collect it. I told him that I had nothing. Chills ran down my neck as he eyed my body from top to bottom and said: “I’m going to check you out anyway” with a smirk. I knew what was about to happen to me. I kept my eyes down and refused to look at him.

The officer opened the door to a storage room. I remember the smell… sports equipment and a utility table. He pushed me into the room and shut the door behind him. I was terrified, I kept my back to him and my eyes on the floor ’cause I was not going to have this man’s face burned into my memory for the rest of my life. That’s when I began silently counting.

I was shaking when he started groping me over my clothes in a twisted version of what he called a “pat-down search.” He got to the waistband of my pants and pulled them down to my ankles, then started rubbing up my legs with his bare hands. By this time, I was crying… “Please don’t.”

He grabbed me by the throat and shoved my head onto the table, pressing his thumb into my voicebox, making it impossible for me to make a sound. He knew where to push and the exact pressure it took to keep me silent without cutting off air or leaving a bruise. He seemed to have done this before, many times. I heard him unbuckle his pants. I felt him spit on my ass and rub his penis in it before penetrating me. It was so forceful that he damaged my urethra and I was peeing blood for days after.

While he was raping me, he said, “If you say anything, you will never see your kids again. I will kill you. We know how to make accidents happen here.”

It was over in 7 minutes and 34 seconds.

When he was done, I silently stood, crying, and tried to fix myself. He said, “Wipe your face off, girl. Next time you see me, you’re gonna beg me to do it again.” I was desperate to get out of his presence and determined to report him to security. Then my mind flashed back to what the prison’s special investigator said, “What happens in prison, stays in prison.” I knew there was no point in reporting. I told no one.

After that, I did not leave my dorm unless it was mandatory. I went home in November 2014.

I’m also a survivor of childhood sexual assault. In 7 minutes and 34 seconds, the barriers that held back my childhood trauma for 25 years were crushed. Instead of just the trauma of my prison rape, I now have nightmares of being assaulted as a 6-year-old as well.

What happens in prison does not stay in prison. Within two weeks of coming home, I had to move out of the bedroom I had shared with my partner for 13 years. My children couldn’t hug me without feeling me flinch. To this day, I am terrified of most men and never stand too close.

I watched the #MeToo movement unfold before my eyes. I realized that the #MeToo movement cannot exist in prison, because speaking out could cost you your life. Then I thought about the people I had left behind in hell, people that I love. Trans people suffer some of the worst abuses. I heard the head of security tell a trans man that he got raped cause he needed to be reminded that he was “born with a pussy…. that’s what pussies are for.” Officers often encourage trans prisoners to commit suicide — they might slide a razor under a trans woman’s cell door, or drop a bag of pills into a trans man’s property. This is followed by relentlessly telling the prisoner to kill themselves.

Here in Georgia we lost 11 transgender and gender-nonconforming lives in one year. Officers seem intent on increasing this number by adding deaths in prison. Officers will leave a trans woman’s cell unlocked, so other inmates could have easy access to her, betting on if the woman would still be alive in the morning. These women face my 7 minutes and 34 seconds 20 times a day. I poured my heart into purpose and by 2016 I had started an organization that fights for the safety and medical care of trans prisoners.

This essay is one of the very few times I have ever described my own experience in prison, and I am unlikely to do it again. The officer who assaulted me was sent to work in another facility and eventually fired because another woman he assaulted was brave enough to speak up. I still feel shameful about not protecting the women who came after me and shameful about not having the courage to report him.

Now, I have a secret habit of throwing my activities into spaces of 7 minutes and 34 seconds. I try to fill that time with positive things that give life instead of taking it. In 7 minutes and 34 seconds, I can send a supportive letter to a prisoner. In 7 minutes and 34 seconds, I can read a bedtime story to my grandson. In 7 minutes and 34 seconds, I can write the most amazing hate mail for Department of Corrections administrators and even the governor.

I have helped save and affirm lives in those 7 minutes, over and over again. What can you do to give life in that time?

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 2, 2021

January 6 Commission Is Necessary But Isn’t Likely to Break Trump’s Grip on GOP

The start of the January 6 commission is a good time to pause and ask ourselves: What would a reasonable process look like after the attempted coup?

Those of us who are horrified by Donald Trump’s experiment with making himself a dictator should acknowledge that these processes are political trials — we need to be honest. Had the crowd sacked Congress, and held it, what would Trump have done to the Democrats? As a president, he threatened repeatedly to put Nancy Pelosi on trial, and to lock up Hillary Clinton. Had he been kept in power by an insurrection against an election result, he would have a debt to his supporters, and it would be Democrats who would now be on trial.

The difference between democratic leaders and dictators is not whether they put their opponents on trial (it is legitimate to do so in some cases when those opponents have attempted a coup) but how the trials are held — above all, whether they are fair.

The most celebrated example of a political trial in history is the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. In his compendious study of political justice over the last 2,000 years, the distinguished jurist Otto Kirchheimer acknowledged that the tribunal was, in a sense, victor’s justice. The defendants accused of war crimes included high-profile members of Hitler’s regime: Rudolf von Hess, his deputy leader; Julius Streicher, Hitler’s chief antisemitic journalist. No Allied generals or politicians were on trial.

The difference between a political trial and a mere propaganda exercise, as Kirchheimer explained it, was this: In a fair political trial, the judge is prepared to accept the defendant’s story. The judge does not “mortgage” his or her “freedom in advance.” They are calm, they are objective, they listen to the defendant’s case.

In the main Nuremberg trial, three of the 24 accused (Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche) were acquitted. It was a political trial, but not the quick judicial lynching which would have followed if Hitler had won. The justice shown to the accused was slow and careful. It showed the different standards between democracy and fascism.

In an ordinary political trial, part of the way you establish fairness is by giving the decision-making power to people who are theoretically independent of politics — judges. But of course, in a process such as this, the commission has to be undertaken by political representatives. That significantly limits the ability of Democrats to make this process look fair.

For the far right outlet Breitbart, the fact that people were arrested shows that for the first time in U.S. history, the country has “political prisoners.” (This is, of course, fundamentally inaccurate: Political imprisonment, overwhelmingly targeting leftist organizers, has long been a standard feature of U.S. incarceration.) Taking his cue from the far right, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proposed a slate of Republican members who had voted to overturn the presidential election results. He wanted his candidates to frustrate the commission at every turn. House Speaker Pelosi vetoed that maneuver, but has been left dependent on a narrow band of anti-insurrection Republicans. The pro-Trump Republicans are trying to say that these won’t be fair hearings; the Democrats are trying as hard as they can to prove the opposite.

A fair hearing is not just about the decision reached by judges, it is also about the approach of those people prosecuting the charge. The best-known single piece of reporting on a political trial is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, written after Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who managed the logistics involved in the mass deportations of Jews to extermination camps, was captured by Israeli agents in 1960 and charged with war crimes.

Arendt treated this as the last of the Nuremberg trials and insisted on the righteousness of Eichmann’s prosecution. She argued that the judge had been scrupulously fair. But her account is critical of the prosecutor who, she insisted, neglected to prove Eichmann’s guilt in his emphasis on defending the politics of Eichmann’s captors. The prosecutor’s opening speech listed for several days the crimes suffered by the Jews over 3,000 years, starting with the Bible and the Egyptian pharaohs. “It is not an individual that is in this book,” he said, “but antisemitism throughout history.”

In other words, the prosecutor neglected his responsibility to use the trial as a way of educating the audience watching in their homes on the injustices that had been committed. This is the approach that should be taken, when it comes to dealing with the events of January 6 in legal terms. The commission is a chance to educate the public about what truly happened and why — a process which is useful for illuminating both the larger forces and specific circumstances that prompted the mob violence at the Capitol.

The likes of the American Conservative insist that there is simply no need either for the commission or for trials: the worst crime committed when the crowd sacked the Capitol was simply “trespass.” The first days of the January 6 commission show how hard Democrats have been working to prove the case that this was something much more sinister.

We can see, in the moves that preceded the launch of the January 6 commission, and in the selection of evidence so far (including the choice of opening with the testimony of police officers — usually subjects of endless Republican goodwill), that both left and right understood how difficult it will be to for Democrats to break through the partisanship that accompanied Trump’s two impeachments. Both of those cases saw majority support among blue voters and the rejection of them by most Republicans.

The fact that even after January 6 — after the killings, after all the nooses and zip ties — 55 percent of Trump voters still describe what happened at the Capitol as “defending freedom,” shows how hard the challenge is going to be to break through the partisan cynicism that still protects Trump and his movement. It also shows the grip that an authoritarian leader can maintain over much of the populace, even after exiting the halls of power.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 2, 2021

Sha’Carri Richardson’s Story Shows Us Drug Testing Is a Harmful Drug War Tactic

Right now, Sha’Carri Richardson should be running toward her Olympic dream, but she’s not because of a harmful drug war practice: drug testing.

In June 2021, Richardson made headlines as one of the fastest women in the United States with her 100-meter sprint performance in the U.S. Olympic Trials. Less than two weeks later, she tested positive for THC, received a one-month suspension from competition, and was later excluded from the U.S. Olympic Team.

While many racial justice and policy advocates were outraged by how Richardson’s positive marijuana test was handled, her experience was just the most visible instance of a deeply rooted practice that has harmed countless people for decades.

For the past 35 years, drug testing has been an essential, yet largely under-examined, pillar of the “war on drugs.” Drug testing was widely adopted following the Drug-Free Workplace Act in 1988 under the false pretense of making workplaces safer and “drug-free.” In reality, these tests do nothing to show current impairment and are used as grounds for termination. They are disproportionately used to deny care and to target, surveil and criminalize Black people.

Richardson’s case reveals a deeper truth — drug testing has become far too pervasive and normalized, even in situations where it is clear that it is not tied to performance or safety. For example, the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) has claimed that marijuana is banned primarily due to pressure from the White House, not because of concerns for athletes’ well-being or integrity in sports. But drug testing wasn’t always a part of our lives and we don’t have to continue to accept it now.

People should never be drug tested for any drug, for any reason, that can lead to punitive consequences, regardless of which drugs they use and why they use them. Even drug testing for safety-sensitive positions, like those involving machine operating or medical procedures, cannot detect on-the-job impairment. Workplace accidents are often associated with stress, fatigue and illness rather than with drug use, and alternative assessment methods, including ongoing performance evaluations or performance-based tests, would more accurately and ethically measure current impairment.

We should channel the outrage we feel about Richardson’s punitive treatment toward the institutions that subject many people to this kind of draconian surveillance every day.

Take the public benefits system, for example. Applicants to the federally established Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are targeted by testing, whether they use drugs or not. Thirteen states authorize drug testing of TANF recipients. In most of those states, a positive drug test means sanctions and losing benefits altogether. These drug testing policies most acutely target Black people, who are disproportionately likely to be sanctioned and disproportionately poor. The impact of these sanctions? Increased risk of hunger, eviction and homelessness, utility shut-off and inadequate health care.

People don’t “fail” drug tests. Drug testing fails us.

Within the family regulation system (commonly referred to as the “child welfare system”), many doctors routinely drug test pregnant people and newborns, often without verbal or written consent. Although a drug test cannot indicate how much of a drug someone has used, whether someone is currently impaired or under the influence, or whether any harm has stemmed from that use, a positive drug test can lead to a newborn child being ripped from their parents’ arms despite no evidence of harm to the child. Who are the primary targets of pre- and post-natal drug testing? Black women and their newborns, who by one estimate are 1.5 times more likely to be drug tested than non-Black women. Meanwhile, favorable media representations abound of white middle-class and wealthy parents using marijuana.

The selective use of drug testing in contexts that disproportionately target Black people, particularly poor Black people, while white people openly admit to using marijuana and sing its many benefits, highlights the extreme double standard around drugs, where some of us are trusted to use responsibly and others are portrayed as deviant rulebreakers. People of all races use drugs at similar rates, but enforcement in these areas parallels all tools of the drug war — it’s never about the drug. It’s about the perceived user.

Has drug testing achieved any of the purported goals of reducing drug-related accidents and harm? No, because, as noted earlier, drug testing only detects past use and not current impairment.

Has it decreased overdose deaths? No, criminalization and drug prohibition haven’t made us safer and have instead produced generational trauma and devastation and have fueled an overdose crisis.

Has it connected people with services? No, surveillance and the threat of punishment deter people from seeking care and block people from much-needed nutritional, financial and medical support.

People don’t “fail” drug tests. Drug testing fails us.

We should not accept that the systems that are meant to provide support — like health care and public benefits — are denying care based on drug use and dictating what we can and cannot put into our bodies. This is how insidious the drug war is: It can be used to deny jobs, tear apart families and block public benefits in a time of need.

A different world is possible, and people who use drugs are already envisioning it. Ending drug testing would disrupt the broader web of drug war surveillance, getting us closer to that future: one where we can all be open about our drug use; where people can choose to use drugs for a multitude of reasons, including pleasure; where Black people, people of color and other marginalized people aren’t targeted and punished for real or suspected drug use; where people can access the supports they desire without fear; and where the drug war, in all its forms, is abolished.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 2, 2021

Trump’s “Shadow Cabinet” Ensures His Coup Is Ongoing

Even though the number of dying Trump followers increases daily, his coup rolls on.

Now, in the Trump shadow-universe he’s created a shadow-government for his shadow-fans. It’s not as wacky an idea as it seems and suggests Trump’s solidifying his control over the GOP going toward 2022 and 2024.

Last November, on election day, I suggested on my radio program that if the Biden ticket were to lose (something we did not expect, but after 2016 who knows what can happen) they should set up a “shadow government” to be a visible and ongoing opposition and alternative to Trump’s second term.

Apparently, somebody on Team Trump was listening. Or they copped the idea from the same place I did — the UK, Canada and Australia, all countries where the party out of power assembles a “shadow government” with a “shadow cabinet” that regularly informs voters of how and why they’d run the government differently were they in power.

Friday, Trump’s last Chief of Staff, former Tea Party Congressman Mark Meadows, appeared on a fringe rightwing TV internet show and repeatedly referred to Trump’s “Cabinet.”

“We met with several of our Cabinet members tonight,” Meadows said. “We actually had a follow-up … meeting with some of our Cabinet members.”

Referring to Trump as “the president,” just as Trump does himself in the daily fundraising emails I receive from him, Meadows added, Trump is “a president who is fully engaged, highly focused and remaining on task.”

In other words, the coup rolls on.

Voltaire’s old quote, that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” is playing out right in front of our eyes.

People are dying for Trump, getting into fights with hospital staff as they’re about to be intubated, insisting that Trump was right when he said that Democrats’ reaction to the growing pandemic was just their latest “hoax.”

Jim Jones, as I noted in an earlier op-ed, was a piker by today’s standards: he only convinced 913 people to commit suicide. Trump has convinced millions to expose themselves to a deadly virus, and at least 400,000 who didn’t need to die are now no longer with us.

Across America mini-Jim Jones’ like Pastor Greg Locke are rising up to preach the gospel that vaccines and masks are the work of the devil and getting sick or dying for Trump is a sure path to heaven.

Meanwhile, the coup rolls on.

Florida, although not alone among Red states and counties in encouraging death and disease, is apparently leading the nation both in megalomaniac preachers and Covid deaths.

Ron DeSantis, who won his election by only 32,463 votes (after his party purged more than 7 percent — over one million — of Florida’s voters from the rolls in the preceding 2 years) has now overseen the death of over 39,000 people in his state alone.

And now DeSantis, apparently trying to live up to his moniker of “DeathSantis,” has issued an executive order forbidding Florida public schools from requiring schoolchildren to wear masks. Voltaire had nothing on this guy, and he’s #2 behind Trump in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

But no matter how many they kill, the coup rolls on.

It also turns out sedition and treason are pretty profitable. Bizarre scam notwithstanding, Trump, DeSantis and the entire Trump contingent in Congress are making big bucks off saying that avoiding Covid is for pansies and that Trump actually won an election he lost by 7 million votes in 2020.

Trump is sitting on over $100 million from his grift just in the 6 months since he lost the election, and DeSantis has raised over $44 million. Marjorie Traitor Greene raked in over $3 million in the first three months of this year while she did virtually nothing in Congress (having lost all her committee assignments for lying to voters) while other “Trumpy” Republicans are rolling in the dough as well.

As they drain their followers of cash, the coup rolls on.

But no part of the Trump scam is as troubling as is its potential to ultimately end democracy in this country (and, eventually, around the world).

A recent CBS News poll found that about half of all registered Republican voters thought rigging elections for their own party was a better idea than promoting ideas that would win elections.

“Almost half of Republicans admit they’re ready to ditch democracy” read the ominous headline in The Washington Post.

The rightwing billionaire oligarchs’ best bet for eliminating democracy and keeping their regulations and taxes low is to make sure Trump’s coup rolls on.

While “shadow” governments in the other three big English-speaking countries are all designed to simply inform voters about the differences between the parties and how the out-of-power party would govern given current circumstances, Trump’s shadow Cabinet is part of his ongoing coup attempt.

He began his coup attempt the day after he lost the election, when he publicly repudiated the election results and began harassing the Department of Justice and multiple Secretaries of State and election officials to declare that Biden only won because of “fraud.”

All he needed, he told them, was for the DOJ to declare official doubts about the outcome and he and his “R congressmen” would take care of the rest.

“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump told then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

Rosen and the DOJ didn’t go along, so Trump simply switched strategy from coercion to an outright murder attempt on Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi as his coup rolled on.

The high point of his coup was on January 6th when he encouraged his followers to attack the Capitol to “stop the steal,” and refused to mobilize the DC National Guard until long after his terrorists had left the building. (Unlike every other state, the DC National Guard can only be activated by the President because DC has no governor.)

Making sure the coup never ends but keeps rolling on is probably Trump’s best chance to avoid going to jail for crimes ranging from rape to bank fraud, sedition and treason. Running for office gives him both some political and legal immunities and access to more cash, so he’s going to persist and amp up the volume of his efforts.

But Trump’s neofascist coup is no longer limited to himself and his fellow DC insiders.

State after state is being taken over from the ground up by Trump supporters who want to end multiracial democracy in America and turns us back into a white-supremacist ethnostate.

From Oregon to Florida and all across states in between, local school boards are being seized by anti-American supporters of the former reality TV star.

The world watches with horror and our actual president, Joe Biden, finds himself, along with Democrats in Congress, frustrated at every turn by Trump’s loyalists and a few Democratic senators who are taking money from the same billionaires who fund the GOP and empower Trump.

Meanwhile, the coup rolls on.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 1, 2021

Labor Unions Must Start Building Toward Bigger and Longer Strikes

On July 24, more than 600 Frito-Lay workers in Kansas who had been on strike for three weeks finally signed a new union contract. The contract, won at great personal cost for the striking factory workers, came with a modest 4 percent wage increase, and the right to at least one day off per week.

It is absurd that these workers had to undertake a painful strike in order to win those things, and they deserve praise for being willing to fight so hard for their own rights. But after the congratulations, we should also be honest about another thing: The enormous amount of effort invested in the strike resulted in fairly paltry gains. This is sadly common, and it underscores the fact that employers often have a built-in advantage when their workers go on strike — namely, that low-wage workers can’t afford to go very long without getting paid. If the labor movement wants to take full advantage of the recent surge in worker militancy, it’s time that we build more than a piecemeal solution to this perpetual problem.

The long decline in union density since the 1950s is well known, but the portion of workers who are union members is not the only way to measure the level of latent labor power in America. Strikes themselves are a meaningful metric as well. Having a lot of strikes happening shows that there are many strong, aggressive and confident unions at work. They also create a positive feedback mechanism for organized labor as a whole — strikes get attention, and successful strikes are a tangible demonstration of union power in action. Strikes keep unions in the news, and in the minds of the majority of working people who are not themselves union members. Every time someone sees striking workers win something, it may occur to them that unions have something to offer. In this way, strikes drive new organizing and the expansion of labor power nationwide.

Data going back nearly 50 years shows strike activity in America peaking in 1974, when 1.8 million workers were involved in a work stoppage, and then fell steadily to a low of a mere 25,000 workers in 2017. In the past few years, however, strike activity has rebounded sharply, with more than 400,000 workers participating in 2018 and 2019. (In 2020, major strikes fell again, but that year of Covid-19 is hard to compare to previous ones.)

The pandemic was a galvanizing event for the half or so of the working population who saw, in a very tangible way, that their lives are considered disposable. Right now, we can look across the country and see some of the upswells of worker anger that have burst forth into strikes: the nurses in Massachusetts, the miners in Alabama, the Spectrum workers in New York whose endless battle drags grimly on. These high profile strikes, to a large extent, define union power in the public mind. Winning them is important not just for the workers on the picket line, but for the entire labor movement. And, when strikes are very hard, their biggest vulnerability is the simple reality that workers on the picket line are not getting paid — the brutal economic calculus that ultimately defines how long and hard people can fight before they need to settle.

Individual unions do have strike funds, but these are meager — often, union members can expect to get a few hundred bucks from a strike fund in the time they might have gotten a few thousand from work. Strike funds will always pay less than wages. (A little math can help demonstrate why: In Alabama, for example, 1,100 miners have been on strike for four months. If the United Mine Workers paid each of them even a thousand dollars a week, they would have already spent more than $50 million. To guarantee that rate of compensation for every strike would rapidly bankrupt most unions, and would create an incentive for unions to push hard against big strikes by members.) But the strength of the labor movement is about thinking collectively in the largest possible sense. If we want to encourage more big, high profile strikes that can carry on long enough to secure major gains, we have to have a big, national strike fund.

To be perfectly clear, I’m not holding my breath for the creation of a centralized strike fund big enough to cover lost wages for anyone who goes on strike. The entities big enough to make those sorts of payouts are called “businesses.” What we can do is to build one central strike fund for the entire labor movement, that can jump in and boost the strike pay for workers engaged in strikes of major strategic value — and to issue hardship grants to striking workers with specific needs — so that those strikes can carry on long enough to be worthwhile. If the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas had had a little more money to carry them through, perhaps they could have won something better than, basically, the working conditions of a factory worker a century ago.

Every union could kick into a central strike fund that has the authority to bolster the benefits of workers engaged in strikes that have great importance for all of us. This is collective power in action. Once a fund like this is established, it can fundraise, to bring in private donations; it could also seek out government funds, the same way that unions should be doing for their new organizing efforts right now, while they have friends in Washington. (How to create new funding streams for organized labor is an exciting topic for another day.) The point is that a much larger pool of money can be put together collectively by the entire universe of unions and their political allies than can be compiled by any individual union. And that big pool of money can serve as a potent sort of insurance for workers who are considering a tough strike, but unsure of whether they can hold the line long enough.

The labor movement would greatly benefit from a huge increase in big picture thinking. We do not want to just sit back and let things happen to us, and react as best we can. We want to have a plan and then make it a reality. We should not just want to wait for strikes to happen, then maybe throw a few bucks into a GoFundMe and hope for the best. We need to recognize some basic truths: More strikes are good for the growth of the labor movement as a whole. Each strike is a public test of union power. We all have an interest in making high profile strikes successful. And the strategic application of funding to help striking workers succeed benefits all of us by facilitating and encouraging the next strike, and the next organizing campaign, and a brighter future in which unions are strong and ubiquitous once again.

Let’s get to work.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 1, 2021

Election Officials Are Facing Unprecedented Threats to Independence and Safety

The following is adapted from oral testimony given Wednesday before the House Administration Committee about efforts to subvert the election process. The written testimony is here.

This spring, the Brennan Center commissioned a national survey of election officials. We found that roughly one in three feel unsafe because of their job, and approximately one in six listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern.

In order for democracy to function, we cannot accept this situation. Election officials across the country, regardless of political affiliation, risked their lives in a pandemic to help us vote safely in 2020, with the highest turnout since 1900. They are being repaid with violent threats and intimidation, political interference, and disinformation campaigns that paint them as cheaters instead of the heroes that they are.

There are several priorities for Congress to consider.

First, violent threats against election officials and associated election disinformation are ongoing problems and they threaten the security of our elections. Congress should provide support for the protection of election officials and workers.

Second, the Election Administration Commission and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency have worked to help with combating election disinformation and mal-information, or doxing. This includes their work to promote auditable paper ballot systems. This work should continue, with support from Congress.

Third, Congress should protect election officials from partisan interference.

In the spring, we partnered with the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School to conduct interviews and conversations with dozens of election officials and over 30 other experts. The result was a report published last month, and what we learned from these discussions was heartbreaking.

We found that local election officials feel unsafe because they are being harassed and threatened in the wake of the 2020 election. Several of them reported that their family members, including elderly parents and young children, were harassed using crude language or threatened with violence last year.

Multiple election officials told us that the persistent harassment forced them and their families to flee their homes and seek mental health treatment for their children. And when they reached out to law enforcement for help, the response was often insufficient to ensure the official and their family felt safe.

In addition to the appalling harassment and threats, many experienced interference by partisan and political leaders. As president, Trump famously placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”

We have found that less sensational forms of this disturbing political interference abound. Many state and local party leaders have censured officials who told the truth and refused to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election. A law was passed in Georgia that replaces the secretary of state as the chair of the State Election Board with a legislative appointee. Other states have introduced bills that would criminalize acts like sending mail ballot applications to voters.

Virtually every election official we spoke with indicated that this behavior is partially driven by mis- and disinformation about the election. Lies about the 2020 election, in particular the lie that it was stolen, serve to instigate and legitimate attacks on election officials. One official compared the attempt to combat online disinformation with truthful information to screaming into a hurricane.

Ongoing partisan reviews being conducted or sought in locations like Maricopa County, Arizona, present an example, happening in real time, of how false claims of election discrepancies can be amplified by prominent voices. And the disinformation campaigns they fuel continue to harm election officials. When Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs spoke out against the incompetent review, credible threats against her increased, resulting in Republican Gov. Doug Ducey providing her with a personal security detail.

Our report identifies a number of solutions to these threats to our democracy. These include three ways Congress can help.

First, the Department of Justice recently announced a task force to address the rise in threats and intimidation of election officials and election workers. Legislators should consider funding for safety training, including how to protect one’s personal information, and physical security of election offices.

Second, the underlying problem of disinformation is a task for the whole of society to tackle, and the private sector will likely need to play a large role. Social media companies could choose to promote truthful information from election officials over attention-grabbing conspiracy theories. Hearings like this that recognize the contributions of local election officials also play a role.

Finally, Congress can explore legislation that protects election officials from unwarranted partisan removals.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 1, 2021

Trump Loyalists Are Behind Lawsuits Excluding Farmers of Color From Debt Relief

“Equality before the law” — for a constitutional principle, it is one of the most basic, perhaps the most important.

It is also the idea (at least the one openly stated by right-wing law firms, such as the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) that is driving the legal injunctions blocking President Joe Biden’s $4 billion debt relief initiative for farmers of color. The effort is part of the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 stimulus package.

As the argument runs, it is not fair for any specific group of farmers, although they may belong to historically marginalized groups of people, to be singled out for special treatment.

We are told that farming is tough for everyone in the occupation. White farmers also have debts that could be forgiven. Everyone should have equal access to the same resources. Therefore, Biden’s proposal is being decried as unconstitutional. Yet, as simple and logical as this line of reasoning sounds, the arguments provided are deeply flawed.

What these injunctions really display is a ploy by right-wing political actors and the conservative law firms that give them cover, to gin up the support of rural white people.

There have been three separate injunctions filed — in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. Each represents white farmers not only from those three states but around the country.

The filing from Wisconsin roots its argument in individual rights. Here, the reasoning is based on the 1995 case Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, which held that group-based allegations of racism must be scrutinized with respect to the effects on individuals.

Specifically, the plaintiffs take a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurring opinion from Adarand, which reads, “Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.”

There is an interesting bit of constitutional philosophy here but also one that is problematic: Basically, it’s debatable whether there is a “focus upon the individual” in the Constitution.

The fact is that there are many references to group rights in our country’s founding document. Look no further than the First Amendment, with respect to the freedom to practice religion free of discrimination. As far as I know, a religion comprised of one individual does not exist.

The same could be said of the Second Amendment and militias. Again, this is a clear “focus,” not on individual, but rather on group rights. So, for the plaintiffs filing these injunctions to base their arguments on the idea that the U.S.’s magna carta is rooted solely on individual rights is incorrect.

The Florida injunction, which the Texas plaintiffs claim is the basis for their case, takes issue with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) designation of “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” (SDFRs).

Here, the reasoning goes that direct evidence needs to be shown as to the experiences of racism. The plaintiffs argue that, “although the government argues that historical discrimination against SDFRs also included things such as higher interest rates, less advantageous loan terms, and delayed approvals, the record evidence does not appear to show that SDFRs with current loans suffered such discrimination.”

The problem is that evidence is not the issue; or rather, claims that evidence of racism must be provided are not required for the USDA to act with respect to historically marginalized farmers and ranchers.

It is worth noting that the SDFR designation was created as part of the 1990 Farm Bill, referring explicitly to producers who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their group identity. Included are not only African Americans, but also Latinos, Indigenous people, and Asian and Pacific Islanders.

With the designation, the USDA secretary of agriculture was granted the power to “carry out an outreach and technical assistance program to encourage and assist socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and veteran farmers or ranchers, in owning and operating farms and ranches, and in participating equitably in the full range of agricultural programs offered by the Department.”

The main point here is on “participating equitably.” Specifically, the USDA has the power, in ways that it sees fit, to directly work with historically marginalized groups of people to counter systemic discrimination.

Debt forgiveness is one such initiative. After all, if people are in debt, then they are less likely and able to participate in other programs. For instance, Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) loans — which provide resources to farmers to practice farming in ways that improve soil, water and animal health — in part depend on having sound financials. So, the case coming out of Florida misunderstands the SDFR designation, which has been on the books for over 30 years.

But really, these injunctions have little to do with sound reasoning. Digging into the actual forces behind these cases, we find Donald Trump loyalists including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller. They started the nonprofit that filed the injunction in the Texas case.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the injunction in Florida, is bankrolled by various conservative and libertarian groups such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Donors Trust, which is tied to the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

Additionally, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is behind the case filed in Wisconsin, draws most of its financial support from the Bradley Foundation. This foundation is behind funding several right-wing nonprofits around the country that are hostile to unions and skeptical of climate change.

In line with this strategy, leaders of the Wisconsin Institute — a recipient of Bradley foundation grants — have publicly stated that they have political objectives in mind with this injunction, intending to expand nationally in projects that target leftists and anti-racism.

The point is that these lawsuits against farmers of color have little to do with “equality before the law.” Bankrolled by conservatives with political ambitions, this race-baiting, white-identity politicking is all about maintaining a conservative base of voters heading into 2022 and beyond.

If the interests behind these injunctions really thought farming was tough, then they would invest time and energy in backing legislation that would actually help our country’s producers, like the Justice for Black Farmers Act; the Farm System Reform Act; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposed program to restructure farm loans; and/or Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s bill that would strengthen antitrust enforcement.

Instead, what we have are nothing but right-wing ploys that do nothing but divide rural people and distract them from working on creating meaningful change in our communities.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 31, 2021

Glen Ford’s Journalism Fought for Black Liberation and Against Imperialism

I had the honor of working with the late Glen Ford for nearly 20 years. His passing has created a huge void not just for Black Agenda Report (BAR), the site we co-founded with the late Bruce Dixon, but for all of Black politics and left media. Ford identified his political and journalistic stance with both, having created the tagline: “News, commentary and analysis from the black left” for BAR. He was the consummate journalist, a man who demanded rigorous analysis of himself and others, and he lived by the dictum of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Ford co-founded a publication in line with his core values: He did not suffer fools gladly, succumb to corporate media and government narratives, or feel obligated to change his politics in order to elevate the Black face in a high place.

Ford spoke of learning this lesson the hard way. He told a story of regret, his ethical dilemma, when he gave one such Black person, Barack Obama, a pass in 2003. At that time, Ford, Dixon and I were all working at Black Commentator. Obama had announced his candidacy for the United States Senate and he was listed as a member of the Democratic Leadership Council (DCL), the right-leaning, corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Obama had also removed an antiwar statement from his website.

Ford and Dixon posed what they called “bright line questions” to Obama on issues such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, single-payer health care and Iraq. His fuzzy answers should have flunked him, but Ford chose not to be seen as “a crab in a barrel,” one who pulled another of the group down. Obama was given an opportunity to comment in Black Commentator and Ford wrote, “[Black Commentator] is relieved, pleased, and looking forward to Obama’s success in the Democratic senatorial primary and Illinois general election.”

As he witnessed Obama’s actions on the campaign trail and eventually in office, Ford never again felt obligated to depart from his political stances or to defend a member of the group whose politics were not in keeping with the views of the Black left.

From that moment on, Glen Ford did not let up on Obama, just as he did not waver from his staunch opposition to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. Black Agenda Report became the go-to site for all leftists. BAR’s critique of Obama when he led the destruction of Libya was no less stinging than critiques of George W. Bush when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Ford declared that Obama and the Democrats were not the “lesser evil” that millions of people hoped for. Instead, they were just the more effective evil, and they were always in BAR’s journalistic sights.

Ford was always an uncompromising defender of Black people and never shrank from explaining the mechanisms which place that group at or near the bottom of all positive metrics and at or near the top of all the negative. He was one of the first to amplify the term “mass incarceration” in his unsparing analysis of the United States and its dubious distinction as the nation with more people behind bars than any other: more than 2 million, with half of those being Black, a cohort which makes up one-quarter of all the incarcerated in the world. Black Agenda Report can be counted on to give this information consistently and with no punches pulled.

Glen Ford was a committed socialist, a Vietnam-era military veteran and a member of the Black Panther Party. He spent part of his childhood and youth in Columbus, Georgia, in the days of apartheid in the United States. Those life experiences shaped his work and left a legacy that anyone who considers themselves a leftist ought to follow.

He worked in the media throughout his adult life and served as a Capitol Hill, White House and State Department correspondent for the Mutual Black Network. In 1977, he co-found “America’s Black Forum,” which was the first nationally syndicated Black-oriented program on commercial television.

Glen Ford did not let up on Obama, just as he did not waver from his staunch opposition to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism.

Now the number of media outlets is very small, thanks in large part to Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act. Just six corporations control 90 percent of all media we read, watch and hear, and that means that there are very few working journalists, and an even smaller number with Ford’s experience and worldview. The most “successful” of those who fall into the category of journalists are mostly scribes, repeating the narratives which are favored by politicians and the corporate media.

We desperately need left media and journalists like Glen Ford. Any reader of Black Agenda Report won’t expect The New York Times or The Washington Post to tell them what is happening in Haiti or Cuba. Thanks to Ford’s consistent analysis, they understand that even those who want to be well informed seldom are unless they also read Black Agenda Report.

Glen Ford will be missed by all who knew him and by all BAR readers. He and journalists of his ilk are small in number and irreplaceable.

Glen Ford presente!

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 31, 2021

Pelosi Is Wrong – Biden Has the Power to Cancel Student Debt, and He Should

When President Trump used his executive authority to pause the nearly $2 trillion in outstanding student loan payments and interest back in March 2020, there was no pushback from legal experts or uproar from Congress members, from neither Democrats nor Republicans. Of course, the sudden advent of a deadly, airborne viral pandemic signified a future so grim that partial student loan cancellation seemed uncontroversial, even for an unforgiving Trump administration. While former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos didn’t tout the temporary pause as partial debt cancellation, that’s actually what it was. Notably, both DeVos and the Trump White House pointed to the Higher Education Act as authority that made the payment pause legally acceptable. This is the same authority activists and progressive Democrats are urging Biden to use to deliver on his campaign promise of unilateral cancellation for all borrowers.

That’s why Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims earlier this week that President Biden didn’t have the power to cancel student debt by executive action were so jarring. “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” she said, adding “He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power…. The President can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion. Not everybody realizes that.”

Legal experts, members of Congress, and actions taken by the Biden administration clearly belie the Speaker’s arguments. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said on CNN later that night, “The president does have the power to cancel student loan debt. You know how I know that? Because President Obama did it. President Trump did it. And President Biden has already done it.” Indeed, the Biden administration extended the federal student loan payment moratorium into September, ensuring more debt cancellation via executive action as a result.

Let’s say you were enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness or an Income-Driven Repayment plan during the moratorium. Non-payment counted toward your monthly qualifying payment timeline, meaning borrowers whose 10- or 20-year payment plan end dates fell under the 16-month pause became beneficiaries of debt cancellation through executive action.

“If you normally pay $400 a month in loans for qualifying PSLF payments, didn’t pay while the moratorium was placed, and received PSLF in July 2021, your accumulated monthly payments, or essentially $6,400 of debt, was canceled via the executive order suspension,” said Alexis Goldstein, Director of Financial Policy at the Open Markets Institute.

Beyond those enrolled in forgiveness programs, for 16 months now, the pause has unilaterally canceled interest for every borrower covered under the moratorium, allowing nearly 45 million Americans to pay significantly less over the same amount of time.

Pelosi is flat-out wrong when it comes to the limits of executive power on debt cancellation. She took the lazy route, long trodden by naysayer politicians: Proclaim the mechanism needed to deliver bold actions doesn’t really work instead of implementing morally just, politically popular proposals that uplift everyone. We see this playing out in realms beyond debt cancellation. For example, despite a massive victory in Georgia, Senate Democrats said the parliamentarian, an unelected nonpartisan that seemingly gained insurmountable influence over the quality and quantity of major legislation, now controls our fate on everything from a $15 minimum wage to the climate crisis. Of course, Biden says he would have “strongly supported” an extension of a crucial eviction moratorium, but due to a pesky opinion by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, not an actual ruling, the White House was forced to punt responsibility to Congress in the eleventh hour to apply the same moratorium Biden already extended through executive action.

According to Pelosi, when it comes to student debt, Biden’s executive authority legally justifies partial loan cancellation, just not more partial loan cancellation. Along with the theme of abrupt powerlessness, it’s evident that Pelosi and Biden have yet to truly engage with the fundamental arguments for eliminating the $1.8 trillion in student debt, particularly because they’ve both made the weakest possible arguments against it.

Pelosi dug even deeper with her nonsensical remark, questioning the policy wisdom of a student debt jubilee and undermining her Democratic colleagues’ push for cancellation in the process. “Suppose your … child just decided they at this time did not want to go to college, but you’re paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations. You may not be happy about that,” Pelosi said.

This would be a strong point if one were opposed to every single public good. (Bye, bye libraries!) Thanks to economist Stephanie Kelton’s recent expansion on the framework of Modern Monetary Theory, which acknowledges the federal government doesn’t actually need our tax dollars to pay for vital programs, we don’t need to engage and ultimately reify Pelosi’s dangerous argument. As Kelton notes in her book The Deficit Myth, unlike households, the federal government cannot go broke because it issues the currency it spends. In other words, the real challenge isn’t raising funds, rather we’re in a political battle over how public money is spent, and on who — the wealthy or working people.

Ideology aside, arguments like Pelosi’s misrepresent how student debt cancellation works financially. The “cost” to the taxpayer comes on the front-end, when the loans are made. From there, it’s all a guessing game as to how much of the debt will be repaid by borrowers. The government often guesses wrong, and the Department issues re-estimates to correct, as they did in late 2020. Further, the government often employs utterly draconian collection techniques to squeeze payments out of defaulted borrowers who can’t afford it: garnishing wages; seizing Child Tax Credits, EITC, or tax refunds; or taking away social security benefits from seniors in default. (Seniors are the fastest-growing segment of student debtors. In 2015, 40,000 seniors had their Social Security garnished due to student loans.)

To add to the chaos of failed herculean attempts by the government to collect on ballooning student loans, several major loan service providers (Granite State, PHEAA, and Cornerstone) have recently announced they would end their contract collecting student debt for the government, leaving more than 10 million borrower accounts in the lurch and increasing pressure on Biden to extend the moratorium and cancel the debt altogether.

Debt cancellation would be one of the largest bottom-up economic stimulants in American history.

It’s actually cheaper for the government to write off this debt than it is to keep it on government books. In fact, debt cancellation would be one of the largest bottom-up economic stimulants in American history, creating millions of jobs and boosting annual GDP by up to $108 billion per year for the next ten years. And because student debt is disproportionately held by women and students of color, the one-time executive action would narrow enormous gender and racial wealth gaps.

If racial equity and economic prosperity aren’t convincing enough for Pelosi, perhaps she should take a cue from the voters that put her in office. Just this week, San Francisco officials passed a bold resolution calling on Biden to cancel all federal student debt, joining a chorus of other major cities crying out for an economic stimulus and debtor liberation.

But Pelosi isn’t alone in her misunderstanding of how debt works, who holds it, or how it can be wielded. Biden too has made very poor arguments against cancellation, insinuating that canceling student debt would mostly benefit graduates who went to Ivy League universities, individuals who must be unworthy of debt cancellation because the institutions they attended are so elite that free attendance would be unfair, right? This was quickly refuted by activists who pointed out that just 0.3% of federal student loan borrowers are estimated to have attended Ivy Leagues, that 98% of Harvard undergrads have no student loans at all, and that if we really wanted to address Biden’s newfound concerns about the rich getting richer, we could simply impose a wealth tax.

While Biden’s recent remarks on student debt have all been debunked or met with outrage, his dismal record on student loans and borrower protections goes back decades. In 2005, Biden was one of the 18 Democratic s enators who broke ranks and cast a vote for a Republican-led bill that stripped bankruptcy protections from private student loans, giving birth to a mammoth predatory industry that caused “enormous financial problems for working families.” In the 1970s, Biden backed the Middle Income Student Assistance Act, eliminating income restrictions on federal loans to expand eligibility to everyone. In 1980, Biden voted to extend loan eligibility to students with no parental financial support, leading to the first explosion of default rates.

Biden’s history as a foot soldier for corporate lenders and their lobbyists is more than troubling. However, the fact that in 2020 he campaigned on unilateral debt cancellation and reversing the legislation he championed decades ago highlights the power of debtor organizing and the severity of our nation’s student debt crisis. Biden campaigned on the “immediate” cancellation of at least $10,000 of student debt per borrower as crucial COVID-19 relief. He later committed to much more, including full cancellation for students who went to public colleges or HBCUs earning under $125,000.

In April, the White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said Biden would make a decision on student debt cancellation after instructing the Department of Justice to draft a memo on Biden’s legal authority. The White House has not provided an update on when the memo would be released, despite Klain’s initial timeline of a “few weeks,” leaving the verdict out on whether Biden will keep his campaign promise.

It’s unlikely that Biden will cancel student debt out of the goodness of his heart, and it’s doubtful that a memo determining his authority to eliminate debt at broad-scale will be the final feather that weighs the ideological scale in our favor. What we’ll need is strong debtor organizing to push us over the edge — collective financial leverage so powerful it mimics the conditions that allowed for even a Trump administration to cancel debt. The Debt Collective, a debtors’ union and member organization I’m a part of that went as far as to write an executive order for Biden, is planning a Washington, D.C., action in September as the moratorium is slated to end. For those who want to push for full student debt cancellation and free college, joining that action would be a great place to get started.

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

Both the Delta Variant and Thin-Willed Democrats Are Lethal to Our Society

Two headlines had themselves a nasty little car accident in my mind yesterday. “Pro-Sanders Group Rebranding Into ‘Pragmatic Progressives’” blew through a stop light and t-boned “‘The War Has Changed’: Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta Infections Likely More Severe,” right there in the intersection of my prefrontal lobe. Shattered safety glass everywhere, air bags sagging over steering wheels, a side-view mirror in the gutter like a lost shoe … it was ugly.

“The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox,” reads the grim tide of words under the second headline, from the Washington Post. “The [Centers for Disease Control] document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.”

Of course, I have absolutely had it with the “Because Trump” brigade and their Bellagio fountain of self-interested bullshit when it comes to getting the shot (among a great many other things, but we’ll leave that for later). Those who refuse to be masked and/or vaccinated as they cling to right-wing conspiracy theories have become petri dishes for the variants that are stealing more and more lives and putting all of us at grave risk.

“Pro-Sanders Group Rebranding Into ‘Pragmatic Progressives,’” however, is the jerk that ran the light. “Rather than insisting on ‘Medicare for All — Sanders’ trademark universal, government-funded health care plan — or the climate-change-fighting Green New Deal, Our Revolution is focusing on the more modest alternatives endorsed by President Joe Biden,” reports the Associated Press.

Check me here, because I could very well be off-base: In a time when drastic measures are shriekingly necessary to stave off a whole cavalcade of calamities, an advocacy group founded on the principles of lifelong advocate Bernie Sanders is downshifting from progressive advocacy to some sort of milquetoast cuddling with the conservative Democrat in the White House? The guy who got one quarter of what he asked for in his first infrastructure try and dared to call it a triumph after the Republicans ate his (and our) lunch.

“The senator didn’t comment for this story,” reads the report, and Christ on crutches, I hope that means Sanders doesn’t endorse this move. Progressive advocacy groups are not supposed to get along with the conservatives they’re advocating against. Activists on our side seldom get what they came for, and are usually struggling against terrible odds — and that is the fugging point. We seldom get what we want, but we always push for what everyone needs.

The view is foreshortened when your shoulder is to the wheel, and sometimes we don’t recognize progress when it happens.

We never stop, and 20 years later, we look behind us and maybe say with dim surprise, “Damn, we got some stuff done.” The view is foreshortened when your shoulder is to the wheel, and sometimes we don’t recognize progress when it happens. But what we cannot do is trade in our shovels for some spats and a snazzy seat on the rubber chicken circuit. Shame upon you, “Our Revolution.” Your revolution isn’t just over; you surrendered.

God save us from our “friends.”

There were 71,621 new COVID infections yesterday, a two-week increase of 151 percent. The president and the media are going back and forth about “messaging” while nihilist Republicans do everything they can to kill off their own voter base (and everyone else) with lies and galling distractions. The Delta variant gains steam, and Democrats haggle over what to cut from vital legislation, with the cool hand of “Our Revolution” pressed fondly against their backs.

We are embarked upon dark waters, again. It will be worse in two weeks, because this is COVID, and it’s always worse in two weeks when the virus trends as it does today. This is no time for advocates to seek the low road; it’s already underwater, and no half-assed infrastructure bill can fix it.

“Stout hearts” is all I have to offer. I am holding on to mine with both hands, but as Stephen Crane wrote, it is bitter — bitter… “But I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.”

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

Biden Furthers Trump Immigration Policy With Expedited Deportations of Families

On the campaign trail, Biden promised humane immigration policies, seeking to win votes from all those people horrified by the concentration camps at the border and the draconian immigration policies of Donald Trump.

But as president, Biden is a continuation of, not a break with, Trump.

On Monday the Biden administration gave one more example of this. The administration announced that it will remove migrant families without due process; if border officials deem a family unqualified for asylum, they will be deported immediately.

“Expedited removal provides a lawful, more accelerated procedure to remove those family units who do not have a basis under U.S. law to be in the United States,” the Department of Homeland Security said.

What this really means is that terrified migrants fleeing persecution, violence, and sexual assault, who are making a long, violent, and terrifying trek to the U.S., will be interrogated by border agents. These migrants are fleeing their home countries because of the imperialist policies that have created violence, instability, and abject poverty. They have survived political persecution, violence, sexual assault and a long, dangerous trajector to the border.

And when they arrive to the border, asylum cases can and will be decided by the mood, the xenophobia, and the extortion of border patrol agents who are both prosecutor and judge. It means border agents will be in charge of deciding if immigrants have a “credible fear of persecution” on the spot.

Camille Mackler, founder and executive director of Immigrant ARC, said, “The expedited removal procedure involves sitting across a desk from a government agent signing a deportation order. There is no ability to see a judge, consult with a legal advocate (much less an attorney), or otherwise understand the process.”

This is on top of the rule enacted in the Trump era known as Title 42, which allows the United States to immediately send migrants back across the border even if they wish to make an asylum claim.

But Title 42 removals aren’t enough for Biden. The Department of Homeland Security announced that “ certain family units who are not able to be expelled under Title 42 will be placed in expedited removal proceedings. ”

Raices Texas tweeted, “This new policy is Title 42 on steroids” — the expansion of the ability to deport just about anyone who arrives at the southern border, including children.

Immigrants rights activists argue that “expedited removal and Title 42 result in longer stays in Customs and Border Protection facilities, where migrants experience inhumane and violent conditions.”

Robyn Barnard, senior advocacy counsel at Human Rights First, tweeted, “The whole point of expedited removal is to summarily deport ppl w/out seeing a judge to make their claim for asylum. DHS locks them up in prisons while they effect these summary deportations & it all happens in quick succession to make it cheaper for govt.”

Like every Democrat who came before him, Biden uses more “humane” language to cover up brutal policies against migrants. While there are open borders for capital with free trade agreements that facilitate the exploitation of workers, people are barred entry. This isn’t just about one law. We must struggle to close all the camps and open the borders not only to asylum seekers, but to all migrants.

Title 42

Title 42 is based on a 1944 public health statute to close the border to “non-essential” travel. Trump revived this policy in March 2020. It has been maintained and now expanded under the Biden administration despite protests and lawsuits.

As a result, explains the LA Times, “U.S. border officials have claimed unchecked, unilateral authority to summarily expel from the country hundreds of thousands of immigrant adults, families and unaccompanied minors who didn’t have prior permission to enter, without due process or access to asylum — let alone testing for the coronavirus.” In the year of Title 42, less than 1 percent have been able to seek protection in the U.S., and Title 42 was applied to over 80 percent of migrants. This included 16,000 unaccompanied minors and 34,ooo children expelled alongside their parents.

Human Rights lawyers and the United Nations say that Title 42 is illegal because it’s almost impossible to get asylum through this process. Lawyers claim that Biden, like Trump, is breaking international law.

“The Biden administration’s use of Title 42 is flatly illegal,” said Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Trump administration over the policy. The Biden administration is now defending the policy in court. “There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and Trump administration’s position,” Gelernt said.

Title 42 on Steroids

Susan Rice, head of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, tweeted, “Ignore the noise on TV: The U.S. CAN have an orderly, secure, and well-managed border — and still treat people fairly and humanely.

Today, we’re releasing a blueprint showing how we’re cleaning up the cruel and reckless policies of the past four years and fixing a broken system.”

But the truth is that Biden’s policies aren’t fair or humane, and Biden has no solutions for migrants. The “expedited removal” is actually more draconian than Trump’s already brutal policies. It means that even more people will be deported, and it gives the Border Patrol an absurd amount of power. It means an expansion of already brutal laws.

Rachel Sheridan, litigation counsel at Tahirih Justice Center, said, “Because of this policy, women seeking protection from domestic violence, sexual violence, human trafficking, and other forms of gender-based harm could be deported without having the chance to prove their case for asylum.”

There is no “fixing the broken system” based on militarization and borders. After all, immigration is the result of imperialist policies and with climate change, people won’t stop being displaced. And the criminalization of immigrants is convenient for employers in the U.S.; it allows the super-exploitation of migrants who are treated as second class citizens.

Close the Camps, Open Borders

The Biden administration’s immigration policies have continued those of Trump, with kinder and more polite language, like the explanation by Susan Rice above.

But the brutality continues.

The concentration camps on the border are overcrowded and lack basic health supplies. Kids are still in cages, and sexual assaults of children have been reported at facilities that remain open.

Migrants are merely fleeing the results of U.S. imperialism: the coups that destabilized countries, the debt that forces austerity of semicolonial countries, the U.S. corporations and their low wages, the climate change created by the wealthiest people in the world and U.S. corporations.

We cannot be pacified by Biden’s “kind imperialism” rhetoric. He’s maintaining and escalating the brutal policies of Trump and his Democratic and Republican predecessors. Humane rhetoric should not shake us from the fight we must continue to open the borders and to close all the concentration camps holding migrants.

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

Conservative Democrats Are Endangering Humanity. Exhibit A: Kyrsten Sinema.

For a while now, it seemed as if the interminable negotiations over President Biden’s massive infrastructure proposals would come to nothing. Many, myself most definitely included, believed the Republicans would play rope-a-dope with the bill until the August recess, at which point the process would collapse as all congressional eyes turned to the 2022 midterms.

Then, all of a sudden, it happened… or at least some of it did, but we don’t know which parts, because the bill isn’t actually written yet. All we know for sure is that Biden’s proposed $2.2 trillion bill was pared down during Senate negotiations to just $550 billion in new spending, amounting to about a quarter of what was originally proposed.

“Hours after the deal was reached on Wednesday, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to take up the infrastructure bill, as Republicans joined Democrats in clearing the way for action on a crucial piece of President Biden’s agenda,” reports The New York Times. “‘As climate policy, this is an appetizer,’ Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said of the package unveiled on Wednesday. ‘It’s not the main course.’”

Though the details remain sparse, the bill reportedly contains billions in funding for roads and bridges, a significant investment in public transit systems, and billions more invested in rail and freight lines. How this will all be ultimately paid for remains murky, as Senate Republicans successfully killed the part of the bill that would have sought major reforms within the IRS, specifically so that agency would go after rich people who avoid paying their fair share.

Investments in dealing with the effects of climate change were harshly curtailed. The end result of this portion of the process was disappointing for progressives, and the next phase promises to be a wild ride. For one thing, the price tag currently stands at $3.5 trillion. The bill will seek to make up for the lack of climate action in the first bill with a number of dramatic proposals. Finally, portions of the first bill that were deleted — the IRS reform policy, for one example — are expected to be revived in this second bill.

While the first half of Biden’s massive proposal garnered 17 Republican votes to open debate, this second bill is universally expected to have dead bang zero support from the GOP. The Democrats, therefore, will seek to pass the bill by way of reconciliation, which sidesteps the filibuster and requires only a majority to pass. This means Majority Leader Chuck Schumer needs to keep all 50 of his people in line for that future vote. Passing this second bill, and filling it with solid fixes for the flaws in the first bill, would be a historic achievement.

So, of course, in parachutes Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. The announcement of a deal had yet to echo off the far wall before Sinema poured battery acid on the prospects for passage of this second portion.

“[W]hile I will support beginning this process,” said Sinema in a written statement, “I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion — and in the coming months, I will work in good faith to develop this legislation with my colleagues and the administration to strengthen Arizona’s economy and help Arizona’s everyday families get ahead.”

In the coming months? So much for getting this sucker done at flank speed. Sinema’s announcement earned her high praise from low men such as Minority Leader McConnell. “I was certainly pleased,” said the minority leader after Sinema released her statement. “She is very courageous.” When you’re a Democrat getting this kind of acclaim from that kind of guy, it’s well past time to evaluate the manner in which you operate in the world.

“Sinema seems not to care that her own state is flooding, the West is burning, and infrastructure around the country is crumbling,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib in response to Sinema’s statement. “Sinema is more interested in gaining GOP friends and blocking much needed resources than fighting for her residents’ future. Time for the White House to play hardball. We didn’t elect Sinema as president and we won’t let her obstruction put a Republican in the Oval Office in 2024. It’s the reconciliation bill or GOP controlling every level of government again, period.”

Other progressives were equally annoyed with the incredibly shrinking nature of these bills, and how environmental protections always seem to wind up on the cutting room floor — to the detriment of all humanity. “Biden and Congress can’t get distracted by this pathetic version of an infrastructure package that only waters down much needed climate priorities, like transit, even further,” said Sunrise Movement Advocacy Director Lauren Manus. “The climate crisis is here — and we see it every day with fatal heat waves, monsoons, and wildfires.”

Some have counseled that ignoring Sinema is the wisest move at present. “She wants to come out of this as the person who wasn’t totally down with Democratic priorities and shaved the numbers down, at least a bit,” writes Josh Marshall for Talking Points Memo. “If she really wanted to stop the process, she wouldn’t vote to let it begin, which she is. That tells you the story.”

Maybe. Or maybe Sinema saw those 17 Republican votes and chose to take the ride, with the option for disruption still very much in hand. In any event, it was a strange conclusion to a laborious process, made all the stranger because it’s really just the beginning. If Schumer can’t keep Sinema and the other 49 Democrats in line for reconciliation, the second half of this legislation could wind up either being smaller than the first, or defeated altogether… and if the climate is left out of the final product, that defeat could, justifiably, come at the hands of the House Progressive Caucus.

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

Republican Reaction to 1/6 Hearing Was an Explosion of Denial

For a moment, put yourself in a pair of Republican shoes. The news today is dominated by testimony given by four police officers about the gruesome beatings they absorbed at the hands of a furiously violent tide of red-hatted Trump lovers on January 6.

You’re a Republican today. How do you react to that?

“Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham had a decidedly sarcastic reaction to the harrowing Tuesday testimonies of police who defended the Capitol from pro-Trump supporters on January 6,” reports Business Insider. Ingraham accused the officers of acting, and Carlson scolded one of the officers who compared his experience at the Capitol with his time as a soldier in Iraq. “It’s not Fallujah,” said Carlson, while Fox aired a conveniently mellow portion of the riot that merely showed people wandering around the building.

Over at the laboriously far right One America News Network (OAN), they didn’t even bother to air the testimony beyond a 20-second clip they talked over as it played. They did, however, give detailed coverage of an early GOP press conference where House Speaker Pelosi was blamed for the calamity because she is somehow in charge of the Capitol Police (she isn’t).

Later, OAN played another GOP press conference featuring Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed the people under arrest for sacking the Capitol were “political prisoners.” That protest was broken up by someone blowing a whistle, which was apparently so unnerving that one of the cars carrying the lawmakers sped the wrong way down 9th St. NW in order to escape. “It swerved in front of oncoming traffic onto Pennsylvania Avenue amid a hail of honking horns,” reports The Washington Post.

If you reacted like that, you’re doing it wrong. You can take those shoes off now. They pinch, I know.

This sort of desperately bizarre poo-slinging was not relegated to a couple of shameless “news” outlets and the Goofball Caucus of Gaetz and Greene. “I have yet to meet a Republican in Congress who has minimized and doesn’t believe that what happened on January 6 was serious,” serial denialist Rep. Jim Banks — who along with Jim Jordan was blessedly bounced from the committee by Pelosi — told CNN yesterday.

Banks has clearly never met Sen. Ron Johnson, who calls 1/6 a “peaceful protest.” Banks likewise ignores Rep. Andrew Clyde, who called the insurrection a “normal tourist visit,” after screaming in terror during the attack. In fact, there appears to be only two Republicans in Congress — Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney — willing to call this thing what it was in public, and both of them now sit on the select committee investigating that day. Only 35 House Republicans voted to create the committee in the first place, and almost all of them have been keeping their heads down ever since.

The unreality of all this denial serves to underscore the broader surrealist landscape we find ourselves in.

The unreality of all this denial serves to underscore the broader surrealist landscape we find ourselves in. The testimony of the four officers was deeply compelling — one of them, Michael Fanone, had a death threat called into his cell while he was testifying — but there were also police officers participating in the insurrection, and law enforcement’s support for Donald Trump is notorious. Cheney and Kinzinger comported themselves well yesterday, but on balance, their voting records make me want to hide under the bed. These are the heroes today?

Finally, and fundamentally, the idea that Republican officeholders and their supporters can somehow be reached took a mighty blow yesterday. Almost to a person, congressional Republicans bore witness to the horrors of 1/6 while inside the building that day, and then again yesterday as captured on camera and described in testimony. They either turned on their heels and called it no big deal, or they said nothing at all.

I guess I understand why. The last thing House Republicans want is to have these hearings on their backs as they prepare for the 2022 midterms. It’s bad enough that Trump is still lurking out there, waiting to smash and sabotage his own party at any given opportunity. The video and testimony from yesterday will become fodder for 10,000 Democratic campaign commercials next year, if not sooner, and that is bad news for the faithful.

Every Trump-backing Republican making money off the MAGA crowd’s fathomless credulity can perceive a reckoning because of that fealty not too far down the line. It is uncertain when the next 1/6 hearing will be taking place, but when it does, Republicans would do well to try and stave off a similar backlash reaction once confronted by the consequences of their deeds. Of course, they won’t. I’m really not sure they can.

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

First 1/6 Hearing Reveals What We Already Know: It Was a GOP Riot

The first four witnesses in today’s opening hearing into the 1/6 Capitol attack — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, alongside Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell — took their seats a little after 9:00 am Eastern time. A few minutes before, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and a handful of other congressional Republicans had just finished a press conference in which they blamed Speaker Pelosi for what went down last January.

It’s that kind of day, week, however long these hearings take. By muffing his little stunt trying to foist the unserious Jordan onto the committee, McCarthy created a situation in which the only two Republicans on the panel are no longer under his control. McCarthy has no means of disrupting the hearings, so you can expect he and his minions will run around waving their arms and screaming, anything to distract from the conversation taking place in that hearing room. If today was any indication, it will not work.

Those two Republicans — Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney — have been working diligently with Democrats on the committee since they were named to it, no doubt another detail that’s infuriating for McCarthy. The minority leader’s immediate response was to call the two co-operating GOP House members “Pelosi Republicans,” which… yeah. One of those days.

Both Kinzinger and Cheney have emphasized the need for “facts” (from Kinzinger, who has spread lies about abortion, LGBTQ rights and Iran, to name a few) and the need to “rise above politics” (from Cheney, whose Republican hawkishness spurred the way toward ongoing war, in the model of her father Dick Cheney). Neither of these people will be redeemed by their presence on the committee — far from it — but today their presence was something of a relief, given the alternative.

Chairman Thompson has made it clear that no person or topic will be off limits during these hearings, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has signaled the Justice Department will not interfere with subpoenas sent to former Trump officials, so a number of familiar names may find themselves called to testify.

Sgt. Gonell spoke after Thompson and Cheney, raw with emotion. The story he told was harrowing. “What we were subjected to that day was like something from a Medieval battle,” said Gonell. “We fought hand to hand.” He expected to die guarding the doorway where he and his fellow officers clashed with the rioters.

“Our children will know we stood for the truth.”

Officer Fanone spoke next. His was a familiar face, as he has appeared on the news channels multiple times to tell his story, and to scald congressional Republicans for insulting the truth of 1/6. His fury was likewise palpable as he described being tasered on the back of the skull, of getting beaten ruthlessly, and of nearly being killed by his own service weapon as the crowd chanted, “Kill him with his own gun!”

“The treatment shown my colleagues [by Republicans who deny the facts of the day] is DISGRACEFUL,” Fanone roared at one juncture, pounding the table loud enough to make the room jump. Following Fanone was Officer Hodges, who recounted his similar experiences with a brittle calm. Of the three, Hodges was the most unsparing in his clear declaration that the mob which attacked him was by, for and with Donald Trump.

Hodges, too, wept during his testimony when he reached the portion of his story recounting his close brush with death when he got caught between the two masses of fighting bodies. Most who have followed this story since January will recognize Hodges; he was the officer screaming for help as a man “foaming at the mouth” battered him in his helplessness and tore off his gas mask.

Officer Dunn opened his testimony with a request for a moment of silence for Brian Sicknick, one of the Capitol Police officers who died after the attack. Dunn — the officer who was captured on camera leading rioters away from vulnerable Congress members — laid out the evident tactical planning that went into the attack, the deliberate coordination of forces for the specific purpose of sacking the Capitol and disrupting the certification of the election.

Dunn recounted the torrent of racial abuse he absorbed from the mob, and shared that other Black officers he later spoke to had similar experiences to recount. Dunn quoted McCarthy’s searing criticism of Trump, spoken immediately after the attack was over, a vivid counterpoint to the minority leader’s abrupt about-face.

As we recognize the weight of these witness statements, we are by no means asserting the righteousness of the police or policing; we’re simply sharing the words of those impacted by this right-wing attack. All of us must simultaneously hold the fact that there were police officers involved in the January 6 attack, and that white supremacy — which drove so many of the Capitol attackers — also drives the core of policing.

Meanwhile, it is easy enough to see why Republicans want to thwart these hearings, if today is any indication of what is to come. January 6 was a Trump riot, a Republican riot, and the four witnesses today made no equivocation on that score. If it hasn’t happened already, I’m betting McCarthy will be getting an angry call from the Beast of Bedminster. Fortunately for democracy, all McCarthy and Trump can do is watch like the rest of us.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

Category: Op-Ed

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