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Category: Op-Ed

  • Josh Hawley’s “Love America Act” Is All About Protecting Racism

    Sen. Josh Hawley speaks during a hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Former-slave-state Missouri Senator Josh Hawley doesn’t want America’s white children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution.

    And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day.

    Hawley, of course, is the guy who gave a fist-salute to the armed white supremacist traitors who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th to assassinate Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. He hopes to ride his white supremacy shtick to the White House.

    Doubling down on the GOP notion that America is a nation exclusively of, by and for white people, Hawley has now proposed a law he calls “The Love America Act of 2021.” The bill is only 3 ½ pages long. There’s a bit of legalese to make it into legislation, defining what “school” means, etc., but this is what it says:

    “RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — …[N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.”

    That’s it. That’s the gist of the entire bill.

    In other words, public schools that teach the actual history of our Constitution lose all their federal funds — our tax dollars — and essentially go out of business. It’s really just that simple: white supremacist Republicans like Hawley don’t want your kids to know the true history of America.

    Black children, they say, are old and tough enough to experience racism but white children are just waaay too young and fragile to learn about it.

    Hawley’s protests notwithstanding, racism and white supremacy were very much a part of our founding documents. Consider “Father of the Constitution” (and slaveholder) James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

    It was the third week of August and the issue of America taxing “property” (a code word for slaves) got tied to the debate about how many representatives each state should have in the U.S. House of Representatives.

    The five slave states wanted all their enslaved people counted toward representation — even though they couldn’t vote or enjoy any of the rights of citizenship — but didn’t want to pay any “property tax” on them. The eight “free” states vehemently objected both to counting enslaved people to increase the slave states’ representation in Congress and to subsidizing them via tax law.

    It produced one of the great speeches at the Constitutional Convention, which Madison dutifully transcribed.

    Gouverneur Morris (“Gouverneur” was his first name, not his title) represented Pennsylvania, and single-handedly wrote the Preamble to the Constitution. He was 35 years old, a lawyer and a graduate of Kings College (what we now call Columbia University). And he was an ardent abolitionist.

    “He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery,” Madison wrote, summarizing Morris’ speech. “It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”

    Warming to his topic, Morris began an extended rant about how destructive slavery was to the new nation they were birthing. It illustrates how wrong Hawley is in saying that racism and white supremacy had nothing to do with writing the Constitution.

    “Compare the [slave]-free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people,” Morris said, “with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other states having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery.”

    Morris said the enslavement of people was a curse on America that was visible to anybody who simply looked. The free north was prosperous; the south, where people were enslaved, was poor.

    “The moment you leave the Eastern [slave] States,” he said, “and enter New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys, and entering Pennsylvania, every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed southwardly, and every step you take, through the great regions of slaves, presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings.”

    But the white supremacist slaveholders representing the slave states in the Convention wanted more power in Congress and lower taxes in their own states, much like today’s Republicans. The key to that, they believed, was having some or all of their states’ enslaved Black people counted toward representation in Congress, even though they were in chains and unable to vote.

    In an echo of this very argument last month the white supremacists of the Georgia legislature passed, and Governor Brian Kemp signed into law in front of a painting of a slave plantation, legislation that would give Georgia’s Republicans the ability to simply toss out the votes of people in largely Black districts with the excuse that they “suspect,” with or without evidence, that “fraud” happened.

    Georgia has already begun to purge local voting officials in Black districts, replacing them with safe white Republicans who will make sure elections produce the “right” outcome.

    It’s such a radical law that the CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, Nsé Ufot, bluntly told Politico that unless the law is overturned by ending the filibuster and passing the For The People Act, “we’re fucked.”

    As if we’re torn in half through some weird time machine, Madison continued with his transcription of Gouverneur Morris’ speech.

    “Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation?” Morris demanded of his colleagues. “Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included [in determining representation}? The houses in this city (Philadelphia) are worth more than all the wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.”

    And then Morris nailed down precisely how and why racism and white supremacy were written into the Constitution with the so-called “3/5ths compromise” (among other places) that gave southern states more members in the House of Representatives than their white population would justify.

    “The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this,—that the [white] inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina, who go to the coast of Africa, and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow-creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes… than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, who views, with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.”

    It was all about using racism and white supremacy to increase the power of white people in the South, and then force the rest of the country to subsidize them.

    Keep in mind that Democrats in the U.S. Senate today represent 41 million more people than do the Senate’s Republicans. And, echoing 1787, Georgia and 17 other Republican-controlled mostly-former-slave-states have now put into law the power for them to deny the vote to Black people or simply refuse to count their votes.

    But back to 1787:

    Morris paused to gather his thoughts, and then, Madison noted, continued, this time calling out the Southern oligarchs who flaunted their riches made possible by slave labor while asking the northern states to pay for their defense and otherwise subsidize them with northern tax dollars.

    “He would add,” Madison wrote, “that domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution. The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of aristocracy.”

    Morris was probably shouting at this point; such language is rarely found in our founding documents and may help explain why Madison kept his “notes” secret until his death nearly 50 years later. Morris pointed out how the south was essentially demanding that the north subsidize them financially, something that continues to this day.

    “And what is the proposed compensation to the Northern States,” Morris demanded, “for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity? … The … tea used by a northern freeman will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave….”

    Morris lost the argument and the southern slave states got extra representation in Congress along with no federal taxation of their “property.” But the GOP sure doesn’t want you or your kids to know that.

    If Hawley’s bill were to become law, any public school that taught Morris’ anti-slavery speech would lose all federal funding. This is how white supremacy works today and, indeed, has worked in this nation since our founding.

    Their strategy is straightforward: Control history (from Texas editing Martin Luther King out of its textbooks to generations of statues of Confederate generals), suppress the political power of Black people while subsidizing Red states, and do it all with a thin patina of legalese.

    Northern states generally make it easy for all people to vote while former slave states do everything they can to suppress the Black vote (along with the votes of young people and older Social Security voters).

    Former slave states like Hawley’s Missouri represent the overwhelming majority of states to have passed voter suppression legislation. And they’re still hustling tax dollars from the rest of us, just as Morris complained about in 1787.

    Northern states get back a fraction of every dollar they send to Washington, DC while former slave states get as much as $2 for every tax dollar they send the federal government.

    As the AP noted in 2017:

    “Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

    “Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”

    White supremacy, racism and the rest of America subsidizing Red states weren’t just realities in 1787: they’re alive and well today.

    Hawley and his white supremacist buddies in the GOP want to keep it that way, and their hateful “Love America Act” is just the latest disgusting part of their strategy. We’ve been tolerating and subsidizing these losers since 1787 and it’s time to stop.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cheney and Kinzinger Are Bad — But I Hope They Bring the Fire on 1/6 Committee

    Trump supporters scream at the photographer in the U.S. Capitol

    The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol Building, which was undertaken live on television on January 6, 2021 by Donald Trump devotees, opens for business tomorrow. There will be no penalties levied at the end of these hearings, no punishments doled out. The point of the exercise is simplicity itself: This happened, it happened in this way, here is who bore the brunt, there is who bears the stain of final responsibility, and this is what must happen going forward if we wish to cling to the threads of this tattered and tottering democracy.

    “[O]n Tuesday, four police officers — two from the Capitol’s protection squad and two from D.C. police — are set to provide the first public testimony before the select committee,” reports The Washington Post. “They are expected to testify about their experiences of both physical and verbal abuse on Jan. 6, as they tried to protect the Capitol from a swelling horde of demonstrators determined to stop Congress’s efforts to certify the 2020 electoral college results and declare Joe Biden the next president.”

    While the stark testimony of the various witnesses will surely lie at the heart of this unfolding process, the political logistics behind these hearings are what truly fascinates at this point.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped two hardcore House Republicans — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — to join the panel of Democrats who will hear testimony on the Capitol attack. This, after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy attempted to foist brazen, career liars like Jim Jordan on the committee. Pelosi sent that suggestion packing, and now the venomous relationship between the two is akin to that between owls and crows: two animals, according to Hunter S. Thompson, who will attack each other on sight.

    At first blush, the inclusion of Cheney and Kinzinger would seem to represent a giant step back. These are what passes for “moderate,” responsible Republicans today? Adam Kinzinger basically believes just about anyone should be able to carry a concealed pistol just about anywhere, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, thinks war with Iran is a bully idea, opposes federal funds for clinics that provide abortions, opposes the Equality Act offering legal protections to the LGBTQ community, and generally represents everything that makes your average progressive want to climb a tree and start speaking squirrel until the bad noise stops.

    And as for Liz Cheney? Where to begin. The notorious WMD lies peddled by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, got millions of people killed, maimed and displaced, and broke the national economy across its knee. Rather than shun these pestiferous familial policies that led the country into our current downward spiral, Liz Cheney embraced them, chairing the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group with no lesser light than Elliot Abrams, who advocated for war in Iran and further militaristic mayhem in the Middle East.

    “[A] few months of courage (if, indeed, that’s what you can call simply accepting the results of a fair and free election) cannot erase a political record that includes support of mass surveillance and the military’s use of torture — even waterboarding! — as well as a hawkishness second only to that of her father (George W. Bush’s war-mongering second in arms),” reports Stuart Emmrich for Vogue. “And let’s not forget the hardline stance she took against gay marriage in 2013, just as she was about to embark on her elected political career (a bid for the U.S. Senate that she ultimately abandoned before deciding instead to run for the House), despite the fact that her own sister Mary, who is a lesbian, married another woman just a year earlier.”

    That right there — the very gruesome horror of it — is also the magic of it, maybe the best inside move/rib jab of Speaker Pelosi’s long career. The rank awfulness of Cheney and Kinzinger is what makes their presence on the panel a golden opportunity for those seeking justice and truth about 1/6, and likewise makes their presence a bewildering political conundrum for every Trump defender seeking to discredit the process.

    You’re telling me these two aren’t righteous Republicans in the modern vein?

    How do you make that argument? How do you say the committee is nothing but a vat of left-wing progressive nonsense seeking to shame a noble man like Trump, if those two are part of the line-up? Before all this happened, Kinzinger’s star was on the rise, and Cheney was the #3 horse in the GOP stable. In a parallel universe where Trump and 1/6 never happened, I’d spit upon hearing their names.

    Now? I’ll still spit, but I will also be watching them the way astute baseball fans observe an ace pitcher on the mound in the seventh game of the World Series, how they work the dirt, how they paint the corners of the strike zone, and most important of all, how well their fastball eats up the batter. McGhan, McCarthy, Wray, Milley, Meadows, Ivanka, Stone, Giuliani, Tuberville, Brooks… oh, man.

    Cheney and Kinzinger are at the mercy of their voters next year, having burned their bridges to Trump’s GOP. The best they can do for themselves is bring all the fire they can to this hearing, to prove they were right to take the stand they did. It is in their most profound self-interest to focus on getting to the truth of all this. It is, in fact, their best re-election campaign strategy. Set ‘em up and knock ‘em down, and let the million flowers bloom.

    If Pelosi and her colleagues are as wise as they seem with these choices, they will have Cheney and Kinzinger ask all the dagger questions during these hearings. The pair’s only Republican sin is their disdain for Donald Trump. In the larger majority world beyond the GOP, that’s no sin at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Big Lie Promises to Be a Centerpiece of the GOP’s 2022 Election Strategy

    Donald Trump speaks to his audience, in an indoor venue

    Over the weekend, Donald Trump held a huge indoor rally in Arizona, called “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” which in all likelihood will end up being a super-spreader event since so many of his followers are anti-vaccine and anti-mask. They showed up in great numbers, dressed in their flamboyant MAGA gear, excited and thrilled to be in the presence of their leader.

    Trump made passing reference to the vaccines in his endless speech, taking credit for them and telling people he thinks they should get them but then going out of his way to say he respects those who choose not to do it. Of course, the crowd really only cheered the latter.

    But the rally was billed as really about “election integrity,” which in Trumpworld translates to the Big Lie about 2020. And he delivered. He went on and on about the so-called “fraud” spreading bogus details along the way, reinforcing his determination to organize the party around his lost cause. In the context of January 6th and Trump’s ongoing Big Lie, there was a darker message as well.

    “Our nation is up against the most sinister forces…This nation does not belong to them, this nation belongs to you,” Trump said.

    He wasn’t talking about a foreign enemy. And the reference to 1776 was, as you’ll no doubt recall, one of the insurrectionist rallying cries on January 6th, even pushed by GOP members of Congress on that day:

    Let’s just say that Donald Trump is not distancing himself from the insurrection. In fact, he is using code words and conspiracy theory signals to suggest that he’s still as happy about it as he reportedly was when it happened.

    Meanwhile, in Washington, we have seen the Republican Party do everything in its power to bury any investigation into that day. They’ve waged an ongoing tantrum over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s various attempts to put together a commission or select committee to gather a full account of what happened on that day. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insists that no investigation that doesn’t include Republicans who are pushing the Big Lie and are, therefore, complicit in the insurrection, can possibly be fair. (Would he would have wanted members of Al Qaeda on the 9/11 commission as well?)

    While there’s little doubt that a few GOP members of Congress are true believers, this is really all about one thing: the 2022 elections. And the last thing Republicans want to be talking about in that campaign is the trainwreck of January 6th. But even if they had been able to derail a congressional investigation, they can’t shut up Donald Trump, and he can talk of nothing else — and the Republican establishment is increasingly worried about it.

    CNN’s Manu Raju asked South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune… about the former president’s claim that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a “lovefest.””That’s not what any of us here experienced,” he responded. “Trying to rehash and revisit and re-litigate the past election is not a winning strategy for trying to get the majorities back in 2022.”

    Raju asked the South Dakota senator if Trump’s claims of widespread fraud will hurt the party’s chances in the 2022 midterms. “I mean, he’s gonna keep saying it. There’s not anything we can do about it,” Thune said. “But like I said, anytime you’re talking about the past, you’re not talking about the future. And I think the future is where we’re gonna live.”

    Trump spoke to this at the Arizona rally this past weekend:

    I tell this to people. I tell it to Republicans and a lot of them are very good people and they say, “Well, sir, we have to get onto the future.” Let me tell you, you’re not going to have a future. First of all, our nation is being destroyed, but you’re not going to have a future in ’22 or ’24 if you don’t find out how they cheated with hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes, because you won’t win anything. You won’t win anything.

    Whether they like it or not, the GOP strategy in 2022 is going to be about relitigating 2020. Trump is out there endorsing candidates who defended him and nixing anyone who may have balked, creating even more anxiety among Republican leaders. He is still in charge.

    You might wonder why they are so nervous since Trump does get out their base and in the midterm that could be decisive. Well, they are probably aware that Trump continuing to dominate will also help Democratic turnout. And while it is very true that much depends on the Democrats’ ability to deliver the material benefit they promised, negative partisanship is a very powerful motivator and nobody brings it out like Donald Trump.

    CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein has written about this, noting that Democrats were able to produce exceptional turnout in 2018 and 2020 among people who don’t always vote because of the deep antipathy to Trump. They have all the contact numbers for these folks and will be sure to let them know exactly what Trump is up to, even if they aren’t paying close attention.

    Michael Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO, has said that the 7.7 million voters who didn’t vote in 2016 but came out in the next two elections, along with the 18 million first-time voters in 2020 are key to success in 2022. According to the Catalyst election analysis, half of those first-time voters who cast a ballot for Biden, did so to vote against Trump. If he’s out there talking his usual trash, the Democrats will likely have a much easier time persuading those voters to come out in 2022.

    Beyond that, Mitch McConnell is almost certainly concerned about Trump’s ongoing disparagement of the voting system. After all, he knows there’s a good chance he lost the Senate because Trump’s accusations of rampant electoral corruption resulted in Georgia Republicans failing to vote in the runoff that elected two Democratic senators. Trump has a very loyal base but there may be more than a few who figure it just isn’t worth it when they hear the constant refrain about corrupt election systems.

    Whether Democrats are able to take advantage of this opening remains to be seen. The official line is that they are going to depend upon a good economy and the proverbial “kitchen table issues” to get out the vote. But last week the president himself seemed to indicate that he understands that Democratic voters are still highly motivated by their loathing of the man who still insists he won the election. At a campaign rally for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, Biden threw down the gauntlet, calling McAuliffe’s Republican opponent a “Trump acolyte.”

    Biden added: “I whipped Donald Trump in Virginia and so will Terry.” He trolled Trump in a way designed to thrill the crowd, which it did:

    He knew what he was doing. It was a subtle, but effective jab at the former president who famously had to hold his glass with two hands. Don’t be surprised to see more of this. If Trump won’t go away the Democrats wouldn’t be fools not to take advantage of it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I Had Decided to Quit Opioids. Being in Prison Made It Harder in Every Way.

    A close-up of a white Oxycodone Hydrochloride pill.

    Six years ago, I came to prison addicted to opioids, ready to serve time for a crime I committed to support my addiction. I had hit rock bottom and wanted to get clean.

    In an effort to seek help, I signed up for a state-funded drug class called Modality. Within the first few weeks, I found out the civilian facilitators were selling synthetic marijuana and Suboxone to the incarcerated people. I immediately signed out.

    Then I tried to attend a knockoff Alcoholics Anonymous meeting held in the chapel every other week, but I stopped going because it felt like a gang meet-up. Most of the attendees were affiliated and just used the chapel to talk with their clique.

    Three years ago, I transferred to the prison where I’m currently incarcerated. Here, a private company called GEO Group began a new addiction class, but when I asked to enroll, I was told that I must have a drug possession or drug trafficking charge to be accepted. Even though I’m an admitted drug addict and actively seeking help, I was turned away.

    Florida, where I’m incarcerated, has the third-largest prison population in the U.S.; 16 percent of those behind bars here are incarcerated for drug-related offenses that involve lengthy or minimum-mandatory sentences. While imprisoned in overcrowded institutions, people with addictions are not provided adequate drug and alcohol classes because programs cost money. Correctional institutions are primarily concerned with security, not treatment — ironically, most drug contraband enters into prison from the officers who make cash from exchanges — and there is typically no rehabilitation offered.

    The punitive way we treat people addicted to drugs has shaped my life. After being introduced to pain pills while working as a bartender pulling long shifts, I became hooked on and off over the five years prior to my arrest. In the beginning, opioids made me feel like I was wrapped in a warm blanket, without a worry in the world. But in time, after daily use, my body built up tolerance to the pills, and one wasn’t enough. Soon I needed two to feel the high, and eventually three. I would buy whatever was available.

    When I ran out of pills, the withdrawal was certain and unbearable. I had restless leg syndrome, chills, anxiety, insomnia, nausea, sweating, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea and fever, all for several days or longer. I would do anything to avoid getting dopesick, even returning to the drugs. To wean myself, I tried using synthetic narcotics like methadone and Suboxone, which provided some relief, but they’re highly addictive substitutes. What’s more, many of the clinics that sell these alternatives only take cash and charge hundreds of dollars for a five-minute appointment. The prices were so high that I couldn’t always afford to get clean.

    An appointment to get Suboxone was $300, and the medication cost me $14.00 per pill — while street pills cost me $5.00 each. It was easier and cheaper for me to buy black market pain pills than to get treatment. When I was arrested for selling stolen goods at pawn shops, I was getting high every day and at rock bottom.

    After being taken to the county jail, I was thrown into a “cold cell” to detoxify with no medical assistance. Although I was taking a daily cocktail of Xanax and 30-milligram morphine pills, the nurses refused to provide me help, instead ignoring me during three days of unbearable opiate and benzodiazepine withdrawal. I was then inventoried into the criminal legal system as a repeat offender with no option of drug court or any alternative treatment.

    Even though I’d committed my crimes to support my habit, rehabilitation was never part of the conversation — serving time in prison was my only chance at redemption. And once I began my 10-year sentence, I was presented with an even steeper challenge: stay clean inside a stressful environment where drugs are easy to access and there’s no real rehabilitative support.

    You might think that prison at least keeps out the drugs that brought many of us inside, but drug addiction is still rampant. Many families send money to their loved ones only to have it spent on getting high. Violent fights, thefts and extortion are common, and it seems impossible for some people inside to climb out of the pit of addiction and hopelessness — especially when there are so many things to escape from by using: reality, depression, regret.

    Most people just leave prison burdened with the same drug problems that got them arrested in the first place, and then return to society with those same issues — a cycle of failure repeating itself over and over.

    I was determined not to repeat that cycle and I’m succeeding as a recovering addict behind bars. Using my family as motivation, I’ve been sober for over six years, even though I can get my drug of choice anytime I want to. Suboxone, Molly, weed and fentanyl are readily available to me, yet I choose to stay clean.

    I meditate, exercise daily, communicate with my large family weekly and — crucially — remind myself that if I’d never abused drugs then I’d never have come to prison. I’ve reached a point in my life where nothing is going to be a higher priority than my kids. My future. I think of my cousin, who was buried in 2020 after he died of a heroin overdose while sitting in his drug dealer’s car. I think of how deeply drug addiction has impacted my family.

    I’ve changed for the better over the past few years, but I’ve done it without any help from a corrupt system that locks people up rather than treats them. It’s an injustice not to provide any opportunity for meaningful change. If we as a society would promote healing instead of judgment, rehabilitation instead of punishment, the entire country would be better off for it.

    Dedicated to Shawn McKenna; died 2020 from overdose.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mitch McConnell Is Threatening to Stifle Debt Ceiling Vote to Get What He Wants

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes his way to a news conference after the Senate Republican policy luncheon in the Capitol on July 20, 2021.

    If you enjoy the sound of gears grinding and the sight of brazen insurrectionists playing the hurt bird, this week on Capitol Hill is at the top of your menu. It’s got everything: traitors running amok, Democrats actually acting like they have the majority and Republicans threatening to take the global economy hostage — again — because it’s all they know how to do.

    Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday rammed through a vote to open debate on the portion of President Biden’s infrastructure plan that cannot be passed by way of reconciliation. Predictably, the vote was hamstrung by a GOP filibuster and lost 51-49; Schumer himself voted against it in the end, but only because doing so allows him to bring the measure up for another vote.

    Bringing this to a vote now was an interesting decision by Schumer. All through the week, allegedly “moderate” Republicans, and more than a few Democrats, begged Schumer to hold off on the debate vote because they were really close to getting the whole thing nailed down, you guys, they swear. Schumer, after apparently having been injected with some form of galvanizing memory juice, was able to recognize foot-dragging when it was right there under his nose, and called for the vote anyway.

    Schumer lost, but didn’t lose, because the message was clear: This thing is coming, and GOP senators need to decide if they are going to vote against a wildly popular set of bills. It was refreshing to see the majority leader recognize when his colleagues across the aisle are wasting time for the sake of wasting time. This time, he had no truck with it, and now everyone’s positions are vividly staked out.

    The most significant indication that Republicans were wasting time deliberately because they have few moves left is the fact that they made all sorts of conciliatory “we’ll get this done soon” noises after the debate vote failed. If they had the horses to kill the thing outright, they’d say so — and do so — in no uncertain terms. They are using “let’s work together some more” the way deep-sea predator fish use phosphorescent lights at the end of an antenna stalk to lure prey in the darkness of the ocean depths. Fortunately, and perhaps only for now, Schumer appears unwilling to take the bait.

    On the other side of the building, the move toward an actual investigation into the January 6 sacking of the Capitol building got spicy. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy coughed up five Republican names for the committee, including two terrible Jims: Jordan and Banks. Jordan in particular was an execrable pick, a Technicolor “eff you” to Speaker Pelosi and the whole notion of an actual investigation. Pelosi responded by chopping Banks and Jordan off McCarthy’s list, at which point McCarthy had a tantrum and pulled every Republican from the panel. “We will run our own investigation,” he said.

    The mainstream press responded to this with entirely predictable “Oh Noes Bipartisanship!” noises, but in point of fact, McCarthy appears to have done Pelosi — and indeed the entire country — a great service.

    “We should be thankful that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) just pulled Republicans out of any involvement in the select committee to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection,” report Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman for The Washington Post. “In so doing, he ensured that the committee’s investigation will both have more integrity and be more likely to undertake a valuable accounting.”

    The folks at Politico agree: “[McCarthy’s] announcement that he would withdraw all his members from the panel unless she reverses course is exactly what a lot of Democrats were hoping for. Now, Democrats (plus Rep. Liz Cheney) can subpoena whomever they want, whenever they want, without any protest. If they decide to have closed-door depositions with Trump White House officials, the former president will have no spies in the room to report back. And the public hearings will be free of GOP complaints.”

    It’s definitely weird to see Democrats go two-for-two in a strategy clash with Republicans, but they will need every once of acumen to deal with the looming fiasco behind door number three. The debt ceiling vote arrives in 10 days — that pesky thing which, if bungled, threatens to turn the global economy into Thanos infinity dust — and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he will stifle the debt vote to get what he wants.

    “Top Senate Democrats accused the minority leader Wednesday of plotting to hold the economy hostage,” reports Politico, “after McConnell said he doesn’t expect any Republican senators to vote to prevent the U.S. government from defaulting on its loans in the coming weeks.”

    Of course, Lindsey Graham is more than happy to play pilot fish to McConnell’s great white shark. If you feel like you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you have. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce explains:

    In 2010, for the first time in the country’s history, the newly elected Republican congressional majorities threatened to trash the country’s full faith and credit by refusing to suspend the debt ceiling. This was around when Mitch McConnell infamously referred to the debt ceiling as a “hostage that’s worth ransoming.” As the economy was still staggering out from under the economic catastrophe of 2008 and 2009, the mere threat of holding the debt ceiling hostage was enough to slow the economic recovery.

    Comes now Lindsey Graham and his merry band, just as the entire nation is still staggering under the burden of a revived pandemic and still staggering out from under four years of presidential corruption … flipping the playbook to the same damn page. It is relevant to point out that the debt ceiling was raised three times during the last administration, including in the wake of a budget-busting tax cut, without a peep from Graham or McConnell. Graham says he’ll lay out the terms of the extortion next week.

    Well, bully for next week. This incipient debt ceiling crunch will almost certainly affect both the infrastructure debate and the 1/6 committee’s investigation. McConnell and Graham have signaled they will turn the national and global economies into a garbage fire if they don’t like the lay of things. Biden and Schumer are going to have to summon heretofore unheard-of levels of resolve to call this incredibly reckless bluff, which they must do. If they don’t, all of this will come to nothing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Are Using Antitrust Reform as a Trojan Horse to Attack Democracy

    Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley attend a Senate Judiciary Committee markup in the Hart Senate Office Building on June 10, 2021.

    Over the past year, we have seen a tidal wave of support to address and rein in monopolies like we haven’t seen in decades. As companies like Amazon and Facebook have demonstrated the dangers of having too much power concentrated in one company — and as corporate consolidation has upended entire sectors of our economy, from farms to pharmacies — regulators and elected officials have taken unheard-of new steps to stop the spread of unchecked corporate power.

    These past few weeks, the Biden administration and Congress have signaled strong support for greater antitrust action: the appointment of Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, the advancement of leading anti-monopoly scholar Lina Khan’s nomination to the Federal Trade Commission, a slate of House bills targeting Big Tech’s corporate power, and a strong executive order on competition from the Biden administration.

    But as antitrust reforms have grown in popularity, they have found an unlikely set of backers: far right politicians like Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley who, just months ago, openly supported a white nationalist insurrection and have voted time and again to cut taxes for corporations.

    Some might be tempted to welcome their support — a sign, perhaps, of newfound bipartisanship under the Biden administration. It is a temptation we must resist at all costs.

    Supporters like these won’t make it easier to win meaningful antitrust reforms that help us build a functional, multiracial democracy. By framing the antitrust fight as solely an economic populist one, they will doom the project altogether and could pave the way for a dangerous alliance between big business and government that will ease the path to power for white nationalists.

    To understand why, we need to understand the history of anti-monopoly policy making.

    The Incompatibility of Monopolies and Democracies

    In the late 19th and early 20th century, a handful of megacorporations like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel rose to dominance, growing powerful enough to dictate terms to lawmakers. Their rise was accompanied by the erosion of worker and consumer protections, ruthless tactics to wipe out competitors and, unsurprisingly, massive economic and racial inequality.

    Starting in the early 1900s, lawmakers increasingly began to push back and through a series of new laws and court decisions, broke up monopolies and placed some limits on their power. In Europe, by contrast, powerful monopolies were put into power and then co-governed with genocidal dictators in Germany, Spain and Italy. Fascist state power was propped up by corporate monopolies.

    While the antitrust reforms of the early 20th century and a militant labor movement helped stave off corporate consolidation and unchecked power, in the 1970s, a bipartisan pro-business effort came together to eliminate guardrails that had prevented businesses from gaining too much power. It’s no surprise that decades later, monopoly powers are on the march again — and neoliberalism is bringing to power leaders with fascist tendencies like Donald Trump. Tim Wu, who is Biden’s special adviser on competition policy, noted these contrasts in the opening of his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age: “Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership.”

    It would be naive to think that somehow, in the wake of Trump’s defeat, that democracy is safe and we can repair the harms done to our multiracial society. What is clear is that there is a rising strain among certain Republicans who are Trump’s strongest supporters and have taken up the populist mantle of antitrust — as though they hadn’t been corporate America’s allies in Congress for years.

    We should not be fooled. When Senator Hawley and Senator Cruz call for breaking up corporate power, they are co-opting antitrust language to both punish “woke corporations” taking anti-racist stances, and to build up their base — especially people and communities facing unemployment, wage stagnation and disinvestment. They are not true believers in multiracial democracy — antitrust is merely a tool for them to play out a personal agenda against perceived tech bias against conservatives.

    I’ve seen this strategy in action myself. Growing up in India in the early 1990s, I was witness to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party that rules the country today. The party fused an economic program of national self-sufficiency and economic populism with Hindu nationalism and ruthless attacks on Muslims. As a child, my friends and I canvassed for the BJP, having been recruited by a neighbor with a few rupees and some candy. The election propaganda we distributed lured regular people in with the promises of a more prosperous future — what they left out was that their reforms were designed only for upper-caste Hindus in clear rejection of a secular democracy.

    I didn’t understand that the result could only be the violent social, economic and political exclusion we see in India now.

    This is the future that awaits us if we buy Hawley and Cruz’s snake-oil promises and normalize their economic policy platforms. Our dream of building a multiracial democracy will be destroyed as fascists and monopolists consolidate power.

    There is a better way to do antitrust. Rather than submitting to the swan song of bipartisanship, we need to ground antitrust work within an explicitly anti-racist framework and show how monopolies disproportionately harm real people in Black and Brown communities. In their groundbreaking paper on race and monopoly, the group Liberation in a Generation noted the need to make antitrust work more accessible and intersectional: “These technical conversations cover up the human pain and the racism responsible for that pain, often purposely … this is one way that racism is removed from economic discussions and debates.”

    At the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE) where I work, we’ve targeted, with our Black and Brown partners, Amazon for blatantly profiteering off of communities of color. From sales of smart surveillance technologies — like Rekognition and Ring, that ramp up racial profiling of Black and Brown people, to data-sharing partnerships with 2,000 law enforcement agencies — Amazon entrenches its monopoly power through its surveillance empire. Monopoly power is what lets Amazon continue to get away with this racist business model, by insulating the company from both popular opinion and regulators.

    In India, too, people are showing how unabated corporate power worsens systemic racism. Last year, for example, Indian farmers and their unions rose up to protest new farm bills from the BJP-led government that would have left them at the mercy of big agriculture corporations. Their uprising ripped the veneer of economic populism off of Hindu nationalism by showing how it impoverishes working people in the country.

    What gives me hope in the face of Hawley’s rhetoric, and the dangers it presents, is activists and organizers in the United States, India and worldwide who are coming together and standing up to fight corporate monopolies and anti-democratic state power in a multiracial struggle.

    Democratic lawmakers and regulators who are currently evaluating solutions to limit monopoly power, whether in Big Tech or other industries, need to be vocal that this work is happening to build up a multiracial democracy. They need to take their cues from these activists, especially those of color, and center anti-racism in their analysis and policies, rather than chasing the mirage of bipartisanship. This is the time to be having briefings and hearings on Capitol Hill that bring in the voices and solutions from activists, workers, farmers and small business owners, especially those of color. Without that, anti-monopoly will just be another tool that clears the path for white nationalists to win state power.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly One in Five Americans Are in Collections for Medical Debt

    A pair of ambulances that serve both southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas are parked in the ambulance bay at the Poplar Bluff Regional Medical Center in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, on July 19, 2019.

    Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans.

    That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies.

    There is quite literally no reason for these corporations to exist, at least when it comes to providing for the health needs of 99 percent of Americans.

    Virtually every other developed country in the world has a universal healthcare system to provide for the needs of all of their citizens. The one exception is Switzerland, where everyone is required to purchase health insurance, but all the primary health insurance companies must operate as nonprofits and the federal government pays the premiums for low income and poor people.

    Other developed countries typically have a few health insurance companies around but mostly they serve the very wealthy, insuring that if they become sick or injured they get private suites in the hospital or have jet- and helicopter-based air ambulance service when out of country. In a few countries they fill in cracks, like for dental or eyeglasses. But, other than Switzerland, that’s it.

    Severe parasite infections can inhibit a host’s ability to respond to disease, and that’s just what’s happening to America right now as we’ve faced and continue to face the Covid pandemic. More than half of all Americans who’ve become infected with Covid and survived are now “struggling with medical debt” as a result of their illness, according to a new study by The Commonwealth Fund.

    Even people who didn’t get Covid are being wiped out by medical debt:

    Think about the people who live around you, on your street or in your apartment building. Imagine one out of every five of them, from the very old to newborns, having already had their medical debt turned over to another parasitic American industry, debt collectors.

    One in five Americans. Today. Are in collection for medical debt. Getting harassing phone calls day and night. Having their checking accounts garnished, their credit and ability to get a new job ruined for years or decades. One in every five people in America. And every one of their lives has been turned upside-down because they or their child got sick.

    We are the only developed country in the world that does this to its citizens, and the only reason we do it is so people like Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, can walk away with, literally, a billion dollars.

    Meanwhile, the University of Chicago finds that 8 million Americans have started a crowdfunding page to raise money to cover their own medical bills, and an additional 12 million pages have been started by others trying to pay bills of friends, relatives, children or grandparents who aren’t computer literate.

    One third of all GoFundMe and similar sites are people trying to raise money to pay for medical bills not covered by insurance companies. Families like George Fushi’s are desperately turning to the contributions of friends and even strangers to simply avoid homelessness.

    A City University of New York/Harvard study found that the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt; it averages over a half-million families wiped out this way every year. The number of people in Canada, all of western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan who went bankrupt exclusively from medical debt last year: Zero.

    As Michael Hiltzik writes for the Los Angeles Times: “It’s also virtually unique to the U.S. among developed countries; when experts from Japan and Europe were asked by the PBS program ‘Frontline’ about the prevalence of medical bankruptcy in their countries, some had trouble even comprehending the question.”

    Poll after poll shows that a solid majority — 60 to 80 percent, depending on how the question is phrased — want America’s legislators to put a national healthcare system in place or give people an easy and inexpensive option to buy into our biggest single payer system, Medicare.

    And, indeed, we still have two single-payer systems left over from LBJ’s Great Society programs in the 1960s that were able to get passed just a decade before the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery and corruption: Medicare and Medicaid.

    Medicare, of course, pays for healthcare for people over 65, and Medicaid covers healthcare costs for low-income working people, the profoundly poor and elderly folks in nursing homes. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid coverage to all low-income Americans…until five “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court changed the law to let individual states decide if their citizens deserved it.

    Twelve states today deny Medicaid to many or most of their low-income working citizens even though the federal government pays for almost all of it. Every single one’s legislature is run entirely by Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

    That’s no coincidence: the GOP has been the party of billionaires and predatory corporations ever since Warren Harding’s election in 1920, when it turned its back on Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and purged the Party of its progressives.

    They then spent the past four decades stacking the federal court system and the Supreme Court with partisan hacks and prostitutes to big money and big business so they could continue their bloody business of extracting cash from working people and shoveling it into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

    But it’s not just low-income people who are being sucked dry by our medical industry. The study by Commonwealth Fund found that fully a third of insured Americans under 65 had difficulties paying off medical debt last year. The same was true for half of uninsured Americans under 65 just in the past year.

    In my new book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out how the average American is paying around $3000 a year more for healthcare and health insurance than Canadians, Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans.

    That money is lining of the pockets of the literally thousands of health industry executives who each “earn” over a million dollars a year (some “earning” tens or hundreds of millions a year). We pay 24 percent of our GDP for healthcare and healthcare insurance.

    By comparison, Taiwan’s singly-payer healthcare system in its entirety, including doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, all care facilities, all billing and payment operations — everything — costs that country just a bit over 6 percent of GDP. In most developed countries it’s 6 to 14 percent.

    Insurance premiums make up 24 percent of gross US payroll, while a Canadian-style nonprofit Medicare-For-All system would cost between 10 and 14 percent depending on how it was implemented.

    And every effort Democrats make to deal with the problem — including their most recent “infrastructure” bill that would cut drug prices and expand Medicaid to those 12 states that have refused to do so themselves — faces 100% rigid opposition from bought-and-paid-for elected Republicans.

    Meanwhile, the healthcare industry has funded literally hundreds of websites and “advocacy” organizations that have flooded the internet with lies and misinformation about how healthcare is done around the world or the “horrors of single-payer.” Just try googling the issue and you’ll find the majority of the top hits come from these sources: the industry is readying for war.

    As Covid sweeps across America with a fourth wave, this time hitting the Red states and counties hardest because their unvaccinated citizens have been listening to Republican politicians and watching Fox “News,” medical bankruptcies are starting to explode.

    The only way to deal with parasites is to remove them from their host. It’s time to expand Medicare to full coverage in all regards for all Americans so we can dislodge these healthcare parasites from our body politic.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Has Convinced His Followers He’s About to Return to Office This Summer

    Donald Trump points at his fans in front of a large banner reading "CPAC"

    Donald Trump lost the presidential election more than eight months ago, yet for many of his followers, it is a matter of faith that at some point later this summer, he will somehow be “reinstated” as president.

    Trump himself has been fanning the flames of this fantasy, appearing either in person or from his Mar-a-Lago perch via satellite link at political rallies in which speakers have, at various times, called for martial law, spouted QAnon conspiracy theories and urged military intervention against Joe Biden’s administration. On Telegram and other encrypted social media sites, there are increasingly strident calls for violent actions aimed at reinstating Trump. And die-hard supporters such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have been touring the country claiming that vote count “audits” in Arizona and elsewhere will trigger Supreme Court rulings that negate Biden’s victory.

    The drip-drip of conspiracist rhetoric by Trump and his acolytes, as well as the congressional GOP’s craven refusal to throw its weight behind a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol breach, has had a measurable impact in this era of disinformation and social media panics.

    Last month, a Hill/HarrisX poll found that about 30 percent of Republicans thought it likely Trump would be declared president again this year. Other polling has found that a significant percentage of all respondents think Trump could well return to the presidency in 2021; this includes up to 1 in 5 Democrats and 3 in 10 Independents — who, presumably, largely view this prospect not with glee but with horror.

    In less fraught times, such a gaping lack of understanding of how basic political processes in this country work would be dismissed as the rantings of a fringe cult. But in the wake of January 6, when thousands of hard rightists, with Trump’s tacit blessing, stormed the Capitol and went on a hunt for political figures they viewed as enemies, it’s hard to over-emphasize the dangers that this movement poses to the future of U.S. democracy.

    Earlier this summer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed Congress specifically on the danger that this movement could turn to violence again. As the supposed August “Trump reinstatement” date neared, the DHS worried the individuals and groups could shed blood as a way to somehow trigger a broader conflict. Far from easing his foot off the accelerator in this moment, Trump has, once more, poured gasoline on a fire, this time through valorizing insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt — who was shot dead by a police officer as she and others surged into the Capitol — and claiming, without evidence, that she was actually assassinated by a Democratic security official.

    Last week, reports circulated about how the top military brass was convinced, in the run-up to the January 6 congressional certification of the Electoral College vote, and in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration, that Trump was about to order a military coup.

    A new book, I Alone Can Fix It, by two Washington Post reporters, has detailed how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other top generals believed such an order was a real possibility and discussed mass resignations as a way to stymie Trump’s democracy-busting plans.

    That such discussions were taking place at the very highest levels of the military is surreal in and of itself, indicative of just how far off the rails the Trumpites were heading in their final days in office, and just how far removed from democratic norms that entire rotten regime had gotten.

    Milley’s willingness, along with that of his top military colleagues, to resign rather than carry out illegal orders was honorable, but of itself it would not have been adequate. If they were so concerned, why didn’t they go public with those grave worries in late 2020, warning the public that coup-plotters were gaining traction inside the White House, instead of waiting months after the fact to belatedly air their sense of unease to reporters? Silence in such a desperate situation, even if mandated by a desire to remain politically neutral, seems sorely insufficient.

    Had those hunkered down with Trump in his final redoubt ended up declaring a form of martial law and ordering new elections in key swing states, Trump’s team could simply have appointed other, more pliable generals to replace those unwilling to be complicit in his dictatorial ambitions — men and women whom he would undoubtedly have tried to portray as “enemies of the people” and against whom his fierce propaganda apparatus would instantly have been turned.

    Moreover, while the top generals grew increasingly wary of Trump’s methods and his values as his presidency wore on, among military veterans, a majority continued to support the real estate mogul into the 2020 election and beyond. Veterans and other weapons-trained personnel (especially in law enforcement) formed the backbone of extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers, who were central to both the Capitol breach and other pro-Trump protests around the country. There’s no guarantee they would have followed the generals over Trump in such a battle of the wills.

    There is, in fact, a long — and largely ignored — history of extremism within the military, one that Trump tapped into ruthlessly. Acknowledging this, earlier this year Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a service-wide review designed to tackle extremism among rank-and-file personnel; reports still abound of current and ex-military personnel involved in far right groups, such as Atomwaffen Division and other racist and extreme-nationalist organizations, although the scale of this is hard to estimate since the military has been notoriously lax in compiling relevant data.

    The more we learn about Trump’s last months in office, and his willingness to lean on the muscle provided by paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers, the clearer it becomes that talk of coups and martial law was far more than just idle chatter. Trump couldn’t fathom losing his reelection bid and bowing out gracefully; he had no interest in a peaceful transfer of power and a preservation of basic democratic principles, and he felt no moral limits on his exercise of power to beget more power. The recent revelations about how worried the military’s top brass were about being ordered into action against U.S. civilians give further evidence of just how close the American democratic experiment came to a catastrophic collapse.

    Alas, that danger was not neatly and finally put to rest on the evening of January 6, when Trump’s insurrection collapsed; nor was it eradicated on January 20, when Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president. More than a half year later, it is still percolating, fanned by a graceless ex-president and his preening, egotistical fantasies about a summertime Second Coming.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Tried to Absolve Himself for Afghanistan Aftermath — But He Voted for War

    President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Afghanistan from the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 8, 2021.

    Former president George W. Bush recently took a break from painting portraits of the wounded soldiers he fed into the maw of dual wars 20 years ago to complain about the end of one of those wars. In a rare interview, given to German news agency Deutsche Welle (DW), Bush had himself a nice little sad about the fact that the Biden administration was finally shutting down U.S. military involvement in the two-decade bottomless pit that was, and will ever be, his Afghanistan conflict.

    Calling the withdrawal a “mistake,” Bush said, “I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad and sad.” Of course, the results of U.S. intervention (and its aftermath) in Afghanistan are indeed bad and sad. After 20 years of war, thousands of dead, wounded and traumatized U.S. servicemembers and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed, severely injured or displaced, absolutely nothing of substance was accomplished beyond lining the pockets of the warmaking industry. Despite U.S. propaganda to the contrary, the women and girls who suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of the Taliban before the war are threatened with the same fate now, because U.S. intervention was never actually about human rights — and imperial war and militarism aren’t solutions to human rights abuses in any event.

    After the interview, DW reached out to Kabul-based journalist Ali Latifi for his thoughts on Bush’s comments. “I think it’s very interesting that he’s suddenly, you know, concerned about women and children,” said Latifi. “His war made a lot of widows and made a lot of children orphans.”

    A number of comparisons have been made to the U.S.’s scrambling retreat from Vietnam 46 years ago. While sailors are not pushing perfectly good helicopters off the flight decks of Navy ships to make room for fleeing U.S. personnel, the onrushing chaos in Afghanistan cannot be denied. A major effort is underway to evacuate Afghan translators and others who aided the U.S. war effort. There is no good way to end an unwinnable war. “A hundred percent we lost the war,” special operations forces Marine Raider Jason Lilley told Reuters. It was time to go.

    But are we going? Mr. Bush can rest easy on that score, because while virtually all U.S. military forces have been withdrawn, the private military contractors (read: mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan in force. In fact, those companies are hiring at an enormously escalated rate, as they rush more private soldiers into the country to fill the gaps left by the U.S. military.

    “Contractors are a force both the U.S. and Afghan governments have become reliant on, and contracts in the country are big business for the U.S.,” reported New York Magazine back in May, when the withdrawal was in its early stages. “Since 2002, the Pentagon has spent $107.9 billion on contracted services in Afghanistan, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis. The Department of Defense currently employs more than 16,000 contractors in Afghanistan, of whom 6,147 are U.S. citizens — more than double the remaining U.S. troops.”

    If the war is over, and ultimately lost, why do these contractors remain? For that, you’ll have to ask the mining industry, not that the leaders of that industry tend to do much talking. They’re too busy, see. Afghanistan holds upwards of 1,400 mineral fields containing lucrative materials like barite, chromite, coal, copper, gold, iron ore and lead. The country has huge reserves of natural gas, as well as petroleum. The gemstone mines turn out emeralds, rubies, red garnet and lapis lazuli.

    Mining interests from all over the world had their eye on Afghanistan’s natural riches long before the war began, and that interest has never waned. Back in 2018, Donald Trump claimed the U.S. was “getting very close” to achieving a safer strategic situation there so those resources could be exploited. “In a partial survey conducted by the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, the country’s mineral wealth is estimated at $3 trillion,” reported CNBC at the time, “more than enough to compensate for the war’s cost.”

    There was always more to that war than September 11 and terrorism, and those resources likely offer part of the reason why the U.S. spent thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and more than 7,300 long days trying to make that country safe for plunder.

    Any student of history could have told them: Empires don’t tend to fare well in Afghanistan. U.S. assistance during the Soviet war there only strengthened that reality.

    Hearing George W. Bush pule about our withdrawal from Afghanistan is galling, as he and his administration — in combination with almost all the Democrats and Republicans in Congress at the time — own majority stock in blame for this debacle. Both Presidents Obama and Trump stayed in that war for a combined 12 years. Nothing got better, because neither wanted to be the White House left standing without a chair when the music stopped. They did not want defeat and retreat on their records, and so it finally fell to President Biden to say enough, thanks in part to many years of pressure from grassroots antiwar movements.

    Yet Biden is not without culpability in all this. In a CBS interview in February of 2020, the topic of withdrawal from Afghanistan was raised by host Margaret Brennan, who asked if Biden would bear responsibility if the U.S. withdrew and the nation collapsed into chaos. “Do I bear responsibility?” Biden replied. “Zero responsibility.”

    A nasty echo of Trump in those words, and far from the truth besides. In September of 2001, then-Senator Biden voted with 97 other senators to give Bush the authority to wage war in Afghanistan. That vote also approved what has become known as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), one of the most broad, violent and insidious pieces of legislation ever to pass through Congress. That AUMF is why the U.S. was legally able to remain in Afghanistan for 20 years, and served as a blueprint for the 2002 AUMF, which gave us the Iraq War. Biden voted for that, as well.

    If you voted for it, Mr. President, you’re responsible for it, too. It’s a big ol’ crap sandwich, and everyone gets to take a bite.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Let’s Call the “Border Crisis” What It Is: Another Big Lie From the Right

    Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks to the media after a tour of part of the Rio Grande on a Texas Department of Public Safety boat on March 26, 2021, in Mission, Texas.

    Republican politicians and commentators spent the last week of June promoting their claim that this year’s increase in apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border constitutes — in the words of Fox News host Sean Hannity — “a crisis of a monumental scale.”

    The campaign’s high point came on June 30 when former president Donald Trump visited a stretch of the border wall near Pharr, Texas, and delivered a number of “questionable statements” about his administration’s supposed enforcement successes. With him was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who plans to have his state build a border wall of its own. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was not to be outdone: Her office had announced the day before that the state was sending 50 of its National Guard members to the southwestern border.

    A group of far right lawmakers, including Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, were also at the border. They toured the area near La Joya, Texas, on June 29 — accompanied by unindicted January 6 rioter Anthony Agüero — and joined up with Trump’s tour the next day.

    This series of photo ops looks like an effort to keep the public focused on border apprehensions at a time when media outlets have largely moved on from their earlier exaggerated coverage of the topic. MSNBC cable TV host Joy Reid has even gone so far as to describe the situation at the border as “a nonexistent crisis.”

    Analyzing the Numbers

    There are real crises at the border, of course. The Biden administration is still failing to provide adequate treatment to minors who have crossed from Mexico, and it’s continuing a 2020 Trump policy of expelling migrants under Title 42 of the U.S. health code, although there may be a change at the end of July to exempt family units. This policy has resulted in thousands of asylum seekers suffering violent attacks after being forced back into dangerous areas in northern Mexico. And while GOP politicians talk about “Biden’s open borders policies,” migrants continue to die in their efforts to elude capture at a frontier which is actually quite well guarded. In May, the Border Patrol reported finding the bodies of 203 migrants so far in fiscal year 2021.

    But the present increase in border apprehensions hardly justifies the term “crisis.”

    It’s true that as of June, this fiscal year’s apprehensions had topped 1 million for the first time since 2006. Still, this only seems high because of a sharp contrast with the previous 14 years. Apprehensions were unusually low during that period, as Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, an expert on immigration patterns, showed in a 2020 study. Apprehensions exceeded a million a year for most of the period from 1983 to 2006, but they declined significantly during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. This year’s increase is at most a return to normal.

    But it may well be a temporary uptick. “My guess is that [the 2021 increase] shows the effects of the COVID epidemic,” Massey told Truthout in an email. Economic hardships created by COVID may have pushed more Mexican workers to cross the border, he noted, and these conditions might also explain the increase in asylum seekers from Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

    In addition, stepped-up border enforcement itself accounts for part of the increase. The number of apprehensions is inflated because of the Title 42 policy, according to a fact sheet from the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. By simply pushing migrants back across the border without formally removing them, the policy makes it easier for migrants to attempt repeated crossings — and to be apprehended more than once. From 2014 to 2019, before Title 42 went into effect, only 15 percent of the migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol had been apprehended previously in the same year. In May 2021, recidivists accounted for 38 percent of apprehensions.

    In any case, an increase in apprehensions at the border doesn’t necessarily translate into more migrants getting into the United States without being caught.

    When commentators compare apprehension figures now with those from previous years, they ignore the fact that the number of Border Patrol agents has nearly doubled since 2003. According to a June tweet from the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the number of people who cross the border without being apprehended might be five times lower now than it was 15 years ago.

    Challenging the Narrative

    The GOP’s hyped-up “border crisis” is simply the latest stage in a long-term process of exaggerating the impact of unauthorized immigration. Undocumented U.S. residents only make up 3 percent of the country’s population, and the number has been declining since 2007. Nevertheless, U.S. adults rank immigration as the second most important problem facing the U.S., according to a July 1 Ipsos poll.

    Undocumented immigrants aren’t actually a problem, but the Republican Party has framed them “as criminals and lawbreakers and a grave threat to the nation in order to motivate and mobilize the Republican base, to great effect,” Massey told Truthout. Up until now, the Democrats have failed to push back, he added. They “have sought to placate conservatives by agreeing to boost border enforcement and internal deportations in hopes that the Republicans will move toward legalization for those already here.” Massey called this “a completely unrealistic expectation.”

    What can be done to challenge the conservative narrative? Massey noted that “it is difficult to counteract the effect of so much misinformation and disinformation that is put into the public sphere by well-funded political and ideological actors.” Still, there are signs of movement.

    Joy Reid’s dismissal of the “border crisis” is a step in the right direction — as is shown by the reaction from the right-wing media. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has also pushed back, pointing out that the topic can be used to start a serious conversation on migration’s root causes. It’s possible to have what Massey calls “a reasoned appraisal of what’s happening at the border,” but more people need to step up and call this “crisis” what it is: another big lie from the right.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Delta Variant Is Feasting on the Unvaxxed — and It’s Getting Worse

    A man in a mask and gloves rests his head on his hand while seated in a wheelchair

    “If matters continue as they are,” I wrote on July 6 about vaccinations and the Delta variant of COVID, “a bright new line will be drawn between ‘Two Americas’: The Vaccinated vs. the Unvaccinated.”

    The Wall Street Journal this morning would seem to agree: “The Delta variant is hardening a divide between people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and those who aren’t, prompting hospitals to brace for new case surges and health authorities to redouble vaccination efforts. Now the most common strain in the U.S., Delta is spreading as public life resumes at restaurants, sporting events and other public settings across the country.”

    There are two stark truths here: The vaccines work, and the Delta variant is chewing through the unvaccinated within the population with a level of relentlessness that threatens to undo any progress we have made to date. The number of deaths from COVID are way down across the board, which is nothing but good. The longer this thing is allowed to burn through unvaccinated hosts, however, the more likely new variants become, and one of them could eventually blow past our vaunted vaccines like they were so much tap water.

    Every person who died of COVID in Maryland during the month of June was unvaccinated. 97 percent of those who died from COVID in Louisiana since February were unvaccinated. In Alabama, 96 percent of those who have died from COVID since April 1 were unvaccinated. “In Los Angeles County, nearly every COVID-19 case, hospitalization and death is in unvaccinated people,” Reuters reports. “Of the 1,059 new cases reported that day, nearly 87% were in people under the age of 50.”

    New cases are up 70 percent because of the variant and the stagnation of new vaccinations; nearly 32,000 new infections were reported yesterday, a two-week increase of 140 percent. “There is a clear message that is coming through,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky told reporters. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

    Walensky is not the only expert voicing deep concern over the downward path we appear to be taking. On Sunday, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN, “I am worried about what is to come because we are seeing increasing cases among the unvaccinated in particular. And while, if you are vaccinated, you are very well protected against hospitalization and death, unfortunately that is not true if you are not vaccinated.”

    At about the same time Murthy was speaking to CNN, former head of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb was delivering a similarly dire warning on CBS: “This virus is so contagious, this variant is so contagious that it’s going to infect the majority — that most people will either get vaccinated or have been previously infected or they will get this Delta variant. And for most people who get this Delta variant, it’s going to be the most serious virus that they get in their lifetime in terms of the risk of putting them in the hospital.”

    There are people who have not gotten the vaccine for various understandable reasons … and then there are the (often Trump-supporting) others, described by an Arkansas ER doctor named Ken Starnes. Starnes works near the border of Missouri and Arkansas, and confronts with dreary regularity the mulish indifference to science and the well-being of others presented by those who won’t get the shot because they won’t because they won’t, so there.

    “When I was in college I did telemarketing for a while,” Starnes related to Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce. “In those jobs they give you a sheet of things to say to overcome objections when people don’t want to buy from you. But how do you overcome an objection when they don’t give you one? They just look at you [and] shrug [their] shoulders. I tried giving them the science. I tried mild anger and looking at everybody over my glasses like their disappointed father. They are just not gonna do it and nothing I say is going to change that so it makes me wonder whether I even need to keep trying.”

    Matters are not faring much better abroad. In The U.K., today is being called “Freedom Day”: the day when virtually all COVID restrictions are lifted. The day finds new British Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who received both doses of the AstraZenaca vaccine, infected with the virus. (He reports his symptoms thus far are mild.) Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Finance Minister Rishi Sunak have been told by health officials to quarantine at home because of their exposure to Javid. Meanwhile, new COVID cases in the U.K. have spiked to levels not seen since the last wave hit there in January.

    In Africa, catastrophe looms. “The Delta variant is sweeping across the continent,” reports The New York Times. “Namibia and Tunisia are reporting more deaths per capita than any other country. Hospitals across the continent are filling up, oxygen supplies and medical workers are stretched thin and recorded deaths jumped 40 percent last week alone. But only about 1 percent of Africans have been fully vaccinated. And even the African Union’s modest goal of getting 20 percent of the population vaccinated by the end of 2021 seems out of reach.”

    And as for Donald Trump, the author of so much of this misery? He continues to hold court at his Bedminster club, spinning fabulations for whomever comes to kiss his ring. On Sunday, he put out a statement claiming people were refusing to get vaccinated because “they don’t trust the Election results.” EXACTLY, Donald, and you are to blame for that. Your big lie already has a gruesome body count to its name, and that number climbs by the day.

    In 1972, a clutch of brilliant group dynamics scientists from MIT authored a study that claimed “industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources,” according to Vice. A recent new study of that 1972 paper comes to an utterly chilling appraisal: The report is devastatingly accurate, as all the predicted pieces are falling into place.

    The worst outcome — extinction — remains avoidable, but only if human beings take the wheel in immediate and dramatic fashion. COVID is but one test we face. Combined with the others –most notably the climate crisis and the economic worship of “growth” against the backdrop of a collapsing global ecosystem — it appears grimly clear that too many of us simply won’t work to fix these things because they won’t because they won’t, so there. Hell of an epitaph for a species.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Migration Is Not a “Crisis.” It’s Survival and Resistance to Ongoing Genocide.

    A little girl hugs her mom's neck as she's carried

    Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people. For years, Cáceres and her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, had led the struggle to halt that project. It turned out, however, that Cáceres’s international recognition — she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 — couldn’t protect her from becoming one of the dozens of Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists killed annually.

    Yet when President Joe Biden came into office with an ambitious “Plan for Security and Prosperity in Central America,” he wasn’t talking about changing policies that promoted big development projects against the will of local inhabitants. Rather, he was focused on a very different goal: stopping migration. His plan, he claimed, would address its “root causes.” Vice President Kamala Harris was even blunter when she visited Guatemala, instructing potential migrants: “Do not come.”

    As it happens, more military and private development aid of the sort Biden’s plan calls for (and Harris boasted about) won’t either stop migration or help Central America. It’s destined, however, to spark yet more crimes like Cáceres’s murder. There are other things the United States could do that would aid Central America. The first might simply be to stop talking about trying to end migration.

    How Can the United States Help Central America?

    Biden and Harris are only recycling policy prescriptions that have been around for decades: promote foreign investment in Central America’s export economy, while building up militarized “security” in the region. In truth, it’s the very economic model the United States has imposed there since the nineteenth century, which has brought neither security nor prosperity to the region (though it’s brought both to U.S. investors there). It’s also the model that has displaced millions of Central Americans from their homes and so is the fundamental cause of what, in this country, is so often referred to as the “crisis” of immigration.

    In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. began imposing that very model to overcome what officials regularly described as Central American “savagery” and “banditry.” The pattern continued as Washington found a new enemy, communism, to battle there in the second half of the last century. Now, Biden promises that the very same policies — foreign investment and eternal support for the export economy — will end migration by attacking its “root causes”: poverty, violence, and corruption. (Or call them “savagery” and “banditry,” if you will.) It’s true that Central America is indeed plagued by poverty, violence, and corruption, but if Biden were willing to look at the root causes of his root causes, he might notice that his aren’t the solutions to such problems, but their source.

    Stopping migration from Central America is no more a legitimate policy goal than was stopping savagery, banditry, or communism in the twentieth century. In fact, what Washington policymakers called savagery (Indigenous people living autonomously on their lands), banditry (the poor trying to recover what the rich had stolen from them), and communism (land reform and support for the rights of oppressed workers and peasants) were actually potential solutions to the very poverty, violence, and corruption imposed by the US-backed ruling elites in the region. And maybe migration is likewise part of Central Americans’ struggle to solve these problems. After all, migrants working in this country send back more money in remittances to their families in Central America than the United States has ever given in foreign aid.

    What, then, would a constructive U.S. policy towards Central America look like?

    Perhaps the most fundamental baseline of foreign policy should be that classic summary of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. As for doing some good, before the subject can even be discussed, there needs to be an acknowledgement that so much of what we’ve done to Central America over the past 200 years has been nothing but harm.

    The United States could begin by assuming historical responsibility for the disasters it’s created there. After the counterinsurgency wars of the 1980s, the United Nations sponsored truth commissions in El Salvador and Guatemala to uncover the crimes committed against civilian populations there. Unfortunately, those commissions didn’t investigate Washington’s role in funding and promoting war crimes in the region.

    Maybe what’s now needed is a new truth commission to investigate historic U.S. crimes in Central America. In reality, the United States owes those countries reparations for the damages it’s caused over all these years. Such an investigation might begin with Washington’s long history of sponsoring coups, military “aid,” armed interventions, massacres, assassinations, and genocide.

    The U.S. would have to focus as well on the impacts of ongoing economic aid since the 1980s, aimed at helping U.S. corporations at the expense of the Central American poor. It could similarly examine the role of debt and the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement in fostering corporate and elite interests. And don’t forget the way the outsized U.S. contribution to greenhouse gas emissions — this country is, of course, the largest such emitter in history — and climate change has contributed to the destruction of livelihoods in Central America. Finally, it could investigate how our border and immigration policies directly contribute to keeping Central America poor, violent, and corrupt, in the name of stopping migration.

    Constructive Options for U.S. Policy in Central America

    Providing Vaccines: Even as Washington rethinks the fundamentals of this country’s policies there, it could take immediate steps on one front, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been devastating the region. Central America is in desperate need of vaccines, syringes, testing materials, and personal protective equipment. A history of underfunding, debt, and privatization, often due directly or indirectly to U.S. policy, has left Central America’s healthcare systems in shambles. While Latin America as a whole has been struggling to acquire the vaccines it needs, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua rank at the very bottom of doses administered. If the United States actually wanted to help Central America, the emergency provision of what those countries need to get vaccines into arms would be an obvious place to start.

    Reversing economic exploitation: Addressing the structural and institutional bases of economic exploitation could also have a powerful impact. First, we could undo the harmful provisions of the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yes, Central American governments beholden to Washington did sign on to it, but that doesn’t mean that the agreement benefited the majority of the inhabitants in the region. In reality, what CAFTA did was throw open Central American markets to U.S. agricultural exports, in the process undermining the livelihoods of small farmers there.

    CAFTA also gave a boost to the maquiladora or export-processing businesses, lending an all-too-generous hand to textile, garment, pharmaceutical, electronics, and other industries that regularly scour the globe for the cheapest places to manufacture their goods. In the process, it created mainly the kind of low-quality jobs that corporations can easily move anytime in an ongoing global race to the bottom.

    Central American social movements have also vehemently protested CAFTA provisions that undermine local regulations and social protections, while privileging foreign corporations. At this point, local governments in that region can’t even enforce the most basic laws they’ve passed to regulate such deeply exploitative foreign investors.

    Another severe restriction that prevents Central American governments from pursuing economic policies in the interest of their populations is government debt. Private banks lavished loans on dictatorial governments in the 1970s, then pumped up interest rates in the 1980s, causing those debts to balloon. The International Monetary Fund stepped in to bail out the banks, imposing debt restructuring programs on already-impoverished countries — in other words, making the poor pay for the profligacy of the wealthy.

    For real economic development, governments need the resources to fund health, education, and welfare. Unsustainable and unpayable debt (compounded by ever-growing interest) make it impossible for such governments to dedicate resources where they’re truly needed. A debt jubilee would be a crucial step towards restructuring the global economy and shifting the stream of global resources that currently flows so strongly from the poorest to the richest countries.

    Now, add another disastrous factor to this equation: the U.S. “drug wars” that have proven to be a key factor in the spread of violence, displacement, and corruption in Central America. The focus of the drug war on Mexico in the early 2000s spurred an orgy of gang violence there, while pushing the trade south into Central America. The results have been disastrous. As drug traffickers moved in, they brought violence, land grabs, and capital for new cattle and palm-oil industries, drawing in corrupt politicians and investors. Pouring arms and aid into the drug wars that have exploded in Central America has only made trafficking even more corrupt, violent, and profitable.

    Reversing climate change: In recent years, ever more extreme weather in Central America’s “dry corridor,” running from Guatemala through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, has destroyed homes, farms, and livelihoods, and this climate-change-induced trend is only worsening by the year. While the news largely tends to present ongoing drought, punctuated by ever more frequent and violent hurricanes and tropical storms, as well as increasingly disastrous flooding, as so many individual occurrences, their heightened frequency is certainly a result of climate change. And about a third of Central America’s migrants directly cite extreme weather as the reason they were forced to leave their homes. Climate change is, in fact, just what the U.S. Department of Defense all-too-correctly termed a “threat multiplier” that contributes to food and water scarcity, land conflicts, unemployment, violence, and other causes of migration.

    The United States has, of course, played and continues to play an outsized role in contributing to climate change. And, in fact, we continue to emit far more CO2 per person than any other large country. We also produce and export large amounts of fossil fuels — the U.S., in fact, is one of the world’s largest exporters as well as one of the largest consumers. And we continue to fund and promote fossil-fuel-dependent development at home and abroad. One of the best ways the United States could help Central America would be to focus time, energy, and money on stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

    Migration as a Problem Solver

    Isn’t it finally time that the officials and citizens of the United States recognized the role migration plays in Central American economies? Where U.S. economic development recipes have failed so disastrously, migration has been the response to these failures and, for many Central Americans, the only available way to survive.

    One in four Guatemalan families relies on remittances from relatives working in the United States and such monies account for about half of their income. President Biden may have promised Central America $4 billion in aid over four years, but Guatemala alone receives $9 billion a year in such remittances. And unlike government aid, much of which ends up in the pockets of U.S. corporations, local entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats of various sorts, remittances go directly to meet the needs of ordinary households.

    At present, migration is a concrete way that Central Americans are trying to solve their all-too-desperate problems. Since the nineteenth century, Indigenous and peasant communities have repeatedly sought self-sufficiency and autonomy, only to be displaced by U.S. plantations in the name of progress. They’ve tried organizing peasant and labor movements to fight for land reform and workers’ rights, only to be crushed by U.S.-trained and sponsored militaries in the name of anti-communism. With other alternatives foreclosed, migration has proven to be a twenty-first-century form of resistance and survival.

    If migration can be a path to overcome economic crises, then instead of framing Washington’s Central American policy as a way to stop it, the United States could reverse course and look for ways to enhance migration’s ability to solve problems.

    Jason DeParle aptly titled his recent book on migrant workers from the Philippines A Good Provider is One Who Leaves. “Good providers should not have to leave,” responded the World Bank’s Dilip Ratha, “but they should have the option.” As Ratha explains,

    “Migrants benefit their destination countries. They provide essential skills that may be missing and fill jobs that native-born people may not want to perform. Migrants pay taxes and are statistically less prone to commit crimes than native-born people… Migration benefits the migrant and their extended family and offers the potential to break the cycle of poverty. For women, migration elevates their standing in the family and the society. For children, it provides access to healthcare, education, and a higher standard of living. And for many countries of origin, remittances provide a lifeline in terms of external, counter-cyclical financing.”

    Migration can also have terrible costs. Families are separated, while many migrants face perilous conditions, including violence, detention, and potentially death on their journeys, not to speak of inadequate legal protection, housing, and working conditions once they reach their destination. This country could do a lot to mitigate such costs, many of which are under its direct control. The United States could open its borders to migrant workers and their families, grant them full legal rights and protections, and raise the minimum wage.

    Would such policies lead to a large upsurge in migration from Central America? In the short run, they might, given the current state of that region under conditions created and exacerbated by Washington’s policies over the past 40 years. In the longer run, however, easing the costs of migration actually could end up easing the structural conditions that cause it in the first place.

    Improving the safety, rights, and working conditions of migrants would help Central America far more than any of the policies Biden and Harris are proposing. More security and higher wages would enable migrants to provide greater support for families back home. As a result, some would return home sooner. Smuggling and human trafficking rings, which take advantage of illegal migration, would wither from disuse. The enormous resources currently aimed at policing the border could be shifted to immigrant services. If migrants could come and go freely, many would go back to some version of the circular migration pattern that prevailed among Mexicans before the militarization of the border began to undercut that option in the 1990s. Long-term family separation would be reduced. Greater access to jobs, education, and opportunity has been shown to be one of the most effective anti-gang strategies.

    In other words, there’s plenty the United States could do to develop more constructive policies towards Central America and its inhabitants. That, however, would require thinking far more deeply about the “root causes” of the present catastrophe than Biden, Harris, and crew seem willing to do. In truth, the policies of this country bear an overwhelming responsibility for creating the very structural conditions that cause the stream of migrants that both Democrats and Republicans have decried, turning the act of simple survival into an eternal “crisis” for those very migrants and their families. A change in course is long overdue.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • If the Supreme Court Overturns “Roe v. Wade,” It Will Impact Us All

    A protester holds a purple sign reading "STOP BANNING ABORTION" during a protest

    In June of 2022, upwards of 35 percent of the U.S. could instantly lose access to legal abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark case in 1973 which held that a person’s right to choose an abortion was integral to their right to privacy and therefore should not be dictated by the government. Through decades of carefully orchestrated, conservative state-level action, 24 states are poised to overturn Roe protections, including 10 with immediate “trigger bans” in place, which would remove already limited abortion access as soon as federal protection ends. While this is overwhelming, there are steps we can take now to protect and expand abortion access. Since change happens from the ground up, one of the most critical things we can do is to increase our support of state- and local-level reproductive rights and justice activism.

    For people living in these “trigger ban” states, or in historically excluded communities across the country, already limited abortion access could end entirely. For those in sanctuary states like Colorado, limited resources could become even more strained. For all states, tenuous abortion access laws are only as strong as the current makeup of that state’s lawmakers. It took decades in Washington State and in Virginia, for example, to build up progressive state legislatures to advance reproductive rights protections, but it would not take long to undo that progress if either state legislature flipped to a conservative majority. In Southern states like North Carolina, a conservative state legislature is continuing to push through abortion restrictions despite the fact that the majority of constituents support Roe.

    Every single person in the U.S. would be impacted by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We all know and love someone who has had an abortion. In fact, an estimated 23.7 percent of people who can give birth will have an abortion by age 45. Without Roe, it will be even be more likely you or someone you love could be criminally charged for having a miscarriage: In Georgia, people could face up to 30 years in prison for miscarrying; in Alabama, an individual was charged with manslaughter in the loss of pregnancy after being shot; in Washington State for miscarrying in a hotel room — or even for using certain forms of birth control. Any one of us could be sued for driving a friend or partner to their abortion, under the new Texas law that criminalizes “aiding and abetting” of abortions. If you are lucky to live in a place with state-level abortion protections, you could expect that your independent clinics and abortion providers, who are already under-resourced, would be further constrained when people from neighboring states come to seek care. No one is exempt from the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade, and no one should underestimate the power of precedent when it comes to removing individual rights to bodily autonomy.

    The protection of reproductive rights at the state level, both the creation of policies that improve abortion access and the prevention of restrictive policies that reduce it, has taken decades. It has been most effective with local power- and relationship-building, the intentional centering of community voices and the cultivation of egoless leadership. Expanding reproductive rights can only be accomplished through the continued building of trust with and participation by community members in the grassroots organizing groups.

    Central to this discussion is that reproductive rights are only a small piece of the abortion access ecosystem. Local and regional abortion funds, and organizations like SisterSong, have for decades emphasized that legal protections are only the bare minimum, and often not even that. The right to live in health and safety takes far more than basic legal protections, and actual abortion access is dependent on several more factors than just whether Roe holds. This remains true, and if Roe is overturned, abortion access would become even more dependent than it already is on where a person lives, their income level, their physical ability, their type of insurance, where they are in their pregnancy, and deeply ingrained disparities due to their race, gender and how they self-identify. Roe has never been enough. We need better.

    Fortunately, we are not without power. We can donate to or volunteer with grassroots organizations in our states and communities. We can support local abortion funds and volunteer to escort patients at clinics. We can ask local candidates — from school board commissioners to city councilors to state legislators — where they stand on reproductive rights, health and justice issues. We can vote in all municipal and state elections, and hold elected officials accountable to their campaign promises about abortion protection. We can remind each other that the decision to get an abortion is personal. We can and should speak out about why we support abortion access to help remove harmful abortion stigma. We can remind each other that the majority of people across the country support abortion access, and that the conservative action is not reflective of the majority viewpoint.

    Abortion access impacts every single person in our country, regardless of gender, geographic location, income or political orientation. We cannot lose our fundamental right to private decision-making about our own bodies, and — while this feels frightening and overwhelming — we all can and should work together to make a difference. Your voice matters. Every voice does.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disgraced Former Governor Claims He’s Been Exonerated, But the GOP Isn’t So Sure

    Then-Gov. Eric Greitens delivers the keynote address at the St. Louis Area Police Chiefs Association 27th Annual Police Officer Memorial Prayer Breakfast on April 25, 2018, at the St. Charles Convention Center.

    Prior to his inauguration, Donald Trump predicted “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.”

    A few weeks later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated that Trump’s inaugural ceremony had drawn the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” Photos from the National Park Service seem to contradict this claim, as do statistics on public transportation ridership, as well as estimates of the number of television viewers.

    During a “Meet the Press” interview, Chuck Todd asked Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway why Spicer would attest to such a “provable falsehood.” Conway responded that Spicer had given “alternative facts” — thereby coining a new term for “facts” that aren’t true.

    In May 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate possible connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. While the report that was eventually released did “not conclude that the President committed a crime,” it plainly stated that “it does not exonerate him.” Nonetheless, Trump tweeted that there was “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed this untruth by repeating that the Mueller report had provided Trump “a complete and total exoneration.”

    Using “alternative facts” to claim “exoneration” has since been parroted by other politicians. Disgraced former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, for instance, insists that he has “been completely exonerated” after the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC) dismissed all but two of the complaints directed at his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. However, not being charged with a crime is not the same as being “exonerated.”

    While a consent order states that “the MEC found no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Eric Greitens, individually, and no evidence that Governor Greitens knew of the … violations,” as a result of the investigation, the “Greitens Campaign agreed to pay fines totaling over $178,000,” which isn’t exactly an sign of guiltlessness.

    Furthermore, similar to how Trump has emphasized the part of the Mueller report that did “not conclude that [he] committed a crime,” while ignoring that “it [did] not exonerate him,” Greitens has latched onto the “no evidence of any wrongdoing” part of the consent order to profess his unconditional absolution.

    For instance, when conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt brought up the former governor’s “multiple allegations of misconduct,” Greitens maintained that he’d “been fully exonerated” as the MEC “found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”

    When Hewitt, a lawyer and law professor, pressed Greitens about conflating the MEC investigation of campaign violations with the GOP-led investigation by the Missouri legislature that culminated in a bipartisan report detailing graphic sexual allegations, Greitens continued to defend his innocence.

    Since that interview, Hewitt has stated that Greitens is “a deeply-flawed individual” and that it would be “a doomed race” if he emerged as the victor of the upcoming Republican primary for retiring Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat, which has been under GOP control since 1987.

    In addition to Hewitt, many other prominent conservatives have openly doubted Greitens’s electoral prospects. For instance, six-term Rep. Vicky Hartzler frets that Greitens’s “problems in the past … could jeopardize [Missouri] from staying in strong, conservative Republican hands.”

    Karl Rove, the political strategist often credited with George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, argues that “[a]nybody who breaks his marriage vows and conducts multiple affairs and has one with his hairdresser and ties her up in the basement of his own home and takes pictures of her … that’s not a winning message for Republicans.”

    With a straight face, Greitens shamelessly declares that “[w]hen we’re able to look back with pride, we can look forward with confidence.” Since the advent of “alternative facts,” politicians like Trump and Greitens have shown a willingness to move beyond bending the truth towards peddling a parallel version of it.

    During his term as president, Trump made more than 30,000 misleading statements. Greitens has followed in the footsteps of such dishonesty by promoting baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Instead of attending the Missouri Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Days event or a Missouri Cattlemen’s Association fundraiser, Greitens gallivanted off to Arizona in search of bamboo-laced ballots. He argues that there should be similar audits in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

    Greitens admits that his support for Trump is “more than a catch phrase.” This is because Greitens’s campaign rests upon his self-declared “exoneration,” which — like Trump’s self-declared “exoneration” — rests upon “alternative facts.” As such, the rehabilitation of Greitens’ political career is reliant upon accepting the upside-down reality that Trump has built. One consequence of this is that while other Senate hopefuls can focus on campaigning locally, Greitens is forced to chase conspiracies in other states in order to convincingly maintain the illusion that he has become entangled within.

    According to Greitens, “[r]ight now, our country needs fighters,” and he’s “here to fight.” Given his own history of running from a fight by resigning as governor, rather than face the prospect of being impeached by his own party, it appears that after four years of “alternative facts,” even Greitens is confused about what’s true.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • My Heart Aches for Cuba — and I Yearn for More Solidarity From the Global Left

    A man is holding a sign during the demonstration in support of Cuba organized in Amsterdam on July 17, 2021.

    My mother is 68 and is now alone in Havana, Cuba. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have met every night thanks to WhatsApp. For a long time, these brief, daily conversations allowed me to check on her, alleviating her loneliness from the COVID-19 lockdown. But our routine was abruptly stopped a few days ago, in the afternoon of Sunday, July 11, when the Cuban government started to restrict access to the internet. We are now incomunicadas, like almost everyone else on the island. Only pain and sadness linger, as an invisible link between all Cubans.

    The shutdown of the internet was the first muzzling measure. It was imposed just a couple of hours after the outbreak of the popular protests that have rattled the whole country for several days on the week of July 11. As Cubans live through the deepest socioeconomic and political crisis in decades, thousands took to the streets, peacefully asking for food, medicines, the acceleration of vaccination against COVID-19, freedom of speech, economic reforms and political change.

    The habitual shortage of food and first aid products and the energetic deficit have been aggravated by the stagnation of the tourist industry due to the pandemic and the U.S. government hindering of the flow of remittances sent by Cuban-Americans to the island. This year, the Cuban government introduced a series of economic reforms that triggered inflation resulting in popular discontent. In the last weeks, Cuba has also known a cataclysmic COVID wave: Cases skyrocketed, placing the island as the fifth country with most daily infections in Latin America. The globally recognized Cuban Health System has been a source of pride for Cubans, thus the COVID crisis exacerbated became a powerful source of disillusionment. Movements like San Isidro and 27N, protesting police brutality and for more civil liberties, have been particularly active during the last months, increasingly support among the youth and intellectuals and artists.

    On July 11, the people’s demands weren’t received with attentive listening, as one would expect from the leadership of a Revolution “of the humble, with the humble, and for the humble,” as Fidel Castro said in the Socialist Declaration on April 16, 1961; instead they were met with scorn, vilification and, worst, violent repression. In recent days, Cuban people have been brutally chased through the streets by the police, regular military forces and undercover agents. Even squadrons of the Special Units, with their black uniforms, threatening weapons, and unmuzzled dogs, were deployed into the streets. Also known as the Black Wasps (avispas negras), the elite combat commandos of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are highly skilled and purposely trained to defend the island from military offensives.

    However, in the rare and shocking videos leaked despite internet restrictions, anyone who dares to watch could see the patrolling troops running, threatening unarmed people and beating them. “We are not afraid,” many in the crowd shouted. After three days of protests, an estimated 200 Cubans are considered disappeared, presumably arrested. The killing of one man has been officially disclosed.

    Violent confrontation between Cubans was explicitly incited by the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, when he announced that “the combat order [was] given,” inviting “the revolutionaries” to fight in the streets. Lurking behind these words, there is a rhetorical — yet crucial — confusion.

    Who are the Cuban people — the “revolutionaries” — here? Are they the middle-aged, light-skinned men comfortably sitting in a well-climatized salon in the Palace of the Revolution — or “the Palace,” as the president calls the government headquarters — to discuss the destiny of the lives of the humble, of those protesting in the streets, the lives that none of these men share? Or are they the protesters — Cubans of all races, genders, and ages, sweaty and depleted, shouting their frustration in a desperate effort to gain some control over their own lives?

    They are not a politically monolithic group. A multitude of people struggling week by week to make ends meet includes Cubans of diverse ideological and political positions. In the crowd were members of the Cuban left who criticize certain aspects of their society while defending the gains of the Cuban Revolution, such as the young Marxist Frank García Hernández. He was arrested as he participated in the demonstrations in Havana, along with LGTBQ activists Maikel González Vivero and Mel Herrera. Also detained was the dissident artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the “San Isidro” movement, who recently held a hunger strike in protest of state censorship. In the protests, some participants clearly voiced their thirst for freedom and desire to put an end to the Castroist regime. Others articulated their anti-government sentiment as explicitly anti-communist. Everyone, regardless of their ideological choice, seemed to share the same exhaustion and deprivation, drowned in an intolerable feeling of asphyxiation.

    When the Cuban government responded with violence to the claims of the people whose interests they are supposed to defend, it acted like any other government anywhere in the world, rather than following the socialist character that once defined the revolution. For some, this is a difficult truth to accept.

    I understand how hard it could be for the global left to process these unprecedented events. Aspects of Cuba’s original revolutionary project have for decades fueled leftist imaginations. Perhaps this is what has drawn some on the left to focus so single-mindedly on discussions of the U.S. embargo’s huge role in creating the economic desperation driving the protests without also wrestling with the complexity of the protest movement and the painful reality of the state repression that the protesters have faced.

    I understand them, I insist, because for me, a Cuban woman born and raised on the island between the 1970s and 1990s, it’s even more devastating to see the Cuban troops intended to protect the country against its enemies instead beating their neighbors. Does this mean that the masses of Cuban people who are protesting are now seen as the enemy?

    Like me, many Cubans have been sleepless lately, viscerally perturbed by those images. We are suffering, for our people in Cuba, for ourselves, for the future of the nation. Dreadfully, uncertainty looms over our days.

    But, still, I understand. I can understand that, for the global left, if Cuba fails to cast the image of the socialist exception, where is then hope to be found? On what grounds to build utopia? The current situation in Cuba brings up uncomfortable emotions, steered by these questions.

    Thus, many on the Left are hesitant to listen to the claims of Cuban protesters over the state’s official tale. This saddens me, even though, as I continue to make clear, I can understand the political — and existential — crisis behind their fears. But I think the Cuban people deserve better. More solidarity, perhaps. Solidarity with the hospital workers and doctors who have attained Cuba’s profound medical achievements and saved lives throughout Latin America. Solidarity with the Cubans that barely escaped death when fighting in Angola in a bloody, long civil war, whose end propitiated the termination of South African apartheid. Solidarity with the state-owned hotel employees that regularly serve contingents of European, Latin American or Canadian tourists; with the maids, cooks, gardeners always smiling, entertaining their tropical fantasy. They or their children, their neighbors and friends were the people protesting this week. Cuba’s Abdala and Soberana, the first COVID vaccines developed in Latin America, weren’t invented, fabricated and administered by the bureaucrats in the “Palace.” The Cuban people, those that took the streets to change their lives and were repressed by the government, are the ultimate generators of Cuban wealth.

    Lifting the embargo would considerably contribute to the improvement of Cuban’s lives. It would also help hold the Cuban government responsible for truly providing for its people (since it would no longer be able to attribute all problems to the embargo). The terrible impact of the almost 60-year-old embargo, and particularly the tough sanctions implemented by former President Donald Trump during his tenure, is undeniable. These restrictions and sanctions must be lifted. But to limit the solution to ending the embargo is rather simplistic.

    The Cuban situation is far too complex to involve only one factor. Not all its “mysteries” can be solved by removing the embargo. There are other, domestic problems, and those are the problems fueling the frustrations that launched multitudes to the streets. The government’s response to the popular upheaval unveiled some of them: If they insist that there’s no money to buy food and medical supplies, why are there enough resources for military training and to acquire the weaponry and equipment exhibited by the Special Units and deployed against people in the streets? Why is there money for weapons and not for syringes to complete the vaccination of the very same people that developed the vaccines Abdala and Soberana?

    In the end, the disruption of the internet that makes my mother lonelier and more vulnerable has proved to be a successful strategy for the government. It is a twofold weapon, keeping Cubans uninformed of what is happening in their own country — as they cannot know where the demonstrations are being held and how they were crushed by the authorities — and simultaneously making it nearly impossible for outsiders to know what is happening on the island. The lack of knowledge and disinformation are certainly some of the reasons precluding the global left from realizing that it is possible to choose humanitarian internationalism over a small-minded nationalism. State violence must be denounced everywhere, even in Cuba, the last rampart of leftist hopes.

    Acknowledging the mass nature of the protests in Cuba and explicitly condemning the state’s repression of the protesters does not require lessening the vehemence of their calls for the U.S. to end the embargo, or muffling their adamant opposition to U.S. intervention in Cuban politics. But it does mean that more people within the global left must make a real effort to gain an understanding of the realities on the ground in Cuba.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No Cops, No Corporations — Boston LGBTQ Community Reimagines Pride Celebrations

    A woman stands with a QTPOC flag, the rainbow elements of which are falling off, in triumph.

    Far from the tourist traps and high-end shopping establishments that line the route the Pride Parade once took through the commercial Downtown Boston, an alternative vision of what a pride march can be has been taking shape in the city over the past two summers. In the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain — predominantly communities of color — grassroots marches organized by Trans Resistance MA took to the streets to celebrate LGBTQ life and push mainstream LGBTQ organizations to do more than simply hold a yearly parade. They called for the inclusion of vulnerable queer and trans people of color in Pride celebrations and concrete actions to address these communities’ needs. As criticisms of the corporatization and lack of diversity in Pride celebrations have grown in cities and localities all over the U.S., the changes in Boston could well be a sign of the direction the LGBTQ movement will take in years to come.

    As of July 9, Boston Pride, the nonprofit which has organized the city’s June parade since 1970, is no more. The organization announced its intention to dissolve, referencing the activist pressure which has challenged the group’s board of directors on issues of diversity and community support for the past two years. Its statement read, in part:

    It is clear to us that our community needs and wants change without the involvement of Boston Pride. We have heard the concerns of the QTBIPOC [Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and People of Color] community and others. We care too much to stand in the way. Therefore, Boston Pride is dissolving. There will be no further events or programming planned, and the board is taking steps to close down the organization.

    We know many people care about Pride in Boston, and we encourage them to continue the work. By making the decision to close down, we hope new leaders will emerge from the community to lead the Pride movement in Boston.

    This oblique reference to the concerns of QTBIPOC communities comes after more than a year of escalating tension, starting when Boston Pride’s board of directors changed a statement from its communications team to remove references to police brutality and the words “Black Lives Matter” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Eighty percent of Boston Pride’s volunteer workforce resigned in response, with former volunteers organizing efforts to pressure the board to make way for new leadership after years of fruitless effort to change them from within. Some of the most committed formed Pride 4 the People, an organization dedicated to bringing about a leadership change in Boston Pride. Though these activists had long called for the board’s resignation, they were stunned at the abrupt shuttering of the organization without any plans for a transition or transfer of any resources Boston Pride amassed over its long history.

    What comes next, after a local Pride organization accused of having been too corporate, too pro-police, too assimilationist, too detached from the community, and not diverse enough dissolves?

    “It’s a beautiful thing to celebrate being out and being yourself, but people are starting to ask: What is pride? Who gets to celebrate pride, and how?” Julia Golden, the interim president of Trans Resistance MA, explained.

    Trans Resistance was founded in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others to stage alternative Pride events with an activist focus in communities of color. For two years in a row, Trans Resistance has staged a June LGBTQ rights march, providing a model of what a more community-focused, inclusive Pride might look like.

    “We just had a march last year, this year we had a march, a vigil, and a concert in Franklin Park while Boston Pride had no events,” said Golden, who identifies as nonbinary and Latinx. The setting of the march, from Nubian Square to Franklin Park, is at the heart of the activism because, like so many U.S. cities, Boston is highly segregated. People of color in Boston have long expressed that when they attended the Pride festivities in Downtown Boston they didn’t feel as though they belonged, and didn’t see many people who represented them. Trans Resistance aimed to change that, bringing Pride into neighborhoods where HIV/AIDS and homelessness still loom large over queer communities of color.

    Issues such as these are not tangential to this new vision of Pride. Activists stress that beyond just a new setting or more diverse faces, they want a Pride that directly concerns itself with addressing community concerns such as HIV and youth homelessness by advocating for change and raising funds for those who need help most. Though Pride originated as an uprising against police violence at Stonewall in 1969, many activists believe Pride marches have morphed into self-congratulatory, commercialized affairs with no political goals beyond a nebulous awareness that LGBTQ communities exist. A founding board member of Trans Resistance, and former hair of Black Pride for Boston Pride, Casey Dooley, explained how the march in Franklin Park sought to change that.

    “It was really amazing, that first year, to see so many community members pull off this event in just a week,” Dooley said. “It was so powerful and beautiful to see, to make sure we’re supporting Black trans community members, because there really isn’t that support right now.”

    Dooley mentioned that a current goal of Trans Resistance’s partner organization, Trans Emergency Fund, is to buy a permanent building to offer housing to trans and nonbinary people experiencing homelessness.

    Community-based housing initiatives are a growing part of trans activism in many parts of the U.S., not just Boston. Therefore, it seems fitting that one of the founders of Trans Resistance MA is Chastity Bowick, the executive director of the Transgender Emergency Fund, an organization whose goal is to provide housing and homelessness services to transgender people in Boston. Bowick described her relationship with Boston Pride before 2020 thus, “As I became more known in the community, Boston Pride would call me in June to have me at their flag-raising, but I wouldn’t hear from them for the rest of the year. I was the lead representative for the leading agency for the trans services — you’d think I’d have heard from them. But we were only called in June for the flag-raising, never allowed a seat at the table.”

    Bowick was so moved by the first Trans Resistance march that she struggled to speak when her time came to do so. “It brought tears to my eyes to see the diversity, the inclusion, having people come to me, saying they saw this parade going down [in] the hood and they’ve never seen that in the hood — a pride march coming to the community that we’re from. It was so liberating. The overwhelming support was amazing as well.”

    In addition to a shift in values in practices, activists say they want the organizations that arise in the wake of Boston Pride’s dissolution to embrace new leadership structures. Both Casey Dooley and another former Boston Pride volunteer, Henry Paquin, described Boston Pride as having a hierarchical structure where the small Board of Directors had the final say on everything, and resources were parceled out in ways that seemed arbitrary and unfair, including giving Paquin (who is white) a much easier path toward planning fundraisers and events than Dooley (who is Black). Dooley and Paquin both expressed hopes for a new organization that listens to the community, that prioritizes representation for everyone in the community, that has transparent processes for decision making, that advocates for services for those in need and that provides mentorship to newcomers who want to lead.

    Trans Resistance MA, Transgender Emergency Fund, and Pride 4 the People have announced that they’re working with six other LGBTQ organizations in Massachusetts, including the Boston Dyke March and Urban Pride, to reimagine what Pride in Boston will be going forward.

    These emerging leaders of Boston’s LGBTQ movement hope they can inspire those in other parts of the country as well. Boston is far from the only city to have tensions around equity, inclusion and political priorities around Pride. It’s not even the only city in which the mainstream organization responsible for planning the parade has suddenly dissolved: Philadelphia also underwent something similar in June.

    As communities across the U.S. demand more radically political, inclusive, activist-driven and community-minded marches and decision-making processes, the upheaval in Boston may be just the start of a new generation of Pride organizing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestinian Feminists Are Resisting Colonization by Fighting Sexual Violence

    Palestinian women hold placards as they gather for a demonstration in support of Palestinian woman prisoners in Israeli jails in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Gaza City, Gaza, on November 6, 2019.

    Earlier this summer, several news outlets reported that the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey, where Palestinian Americans gather for community organizing, civic engagement and humanitarian relief efforts was “bombarded with threats for 7 hours.” Yet perhaps due to the patriarchal culture underlying the U.S. media, the news reporters did not give much focus to the highly gendered and sexualized nature of these threats, which were laced with language about sexual violence and rape:

    Caller: “Is this the terrorist community center?”

    Caller: “I’m going to come rape you and give you a taste of your own medicine.”

    The sexualized nature of these threats was just one recent example of how the Israeli state and its supporters across the globe often rely upon sexism and homophobia to further the project of Israeli settler-colonialism.

    Indeed, the Israeli state’s reliance on the gendered and sexualized targeting of Palestinian bodies is an essential component of colonization that disproportionately devastates the lives of women and LGBTQ people and obstructs the possibilities of mothering, caretaking and relationship-building.

    Yet all along, Palestinian feminists have been exposing, resisting and shaping a world beyond the hetero-patriarchal violence that is foundational to the Israeli settler-colonial project while demanding, on a global stage, that the Palestinian struggle is a feminist and a reproductive justice issue.

    As Israeli settler-colonialism finds its perfect ally in U.S. settler-colonialism, U.S.-based advocates of Israel have been reifying this pattern for decades by consistently bullying Palestinian community leaders and activists, and threatening them (not only women) with rape and sexual assault. The recent attack on Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) member Rasha Mubarak, president of Unbought Power, is but one example of how this repression strategy especially targets women organizers. After she co-led an effort demanding that Florida state legislators condemn Israeli violence and support free speech on Palestine, pro-Israel advocates accused her of being an “Islamist” who targets “Jews and Gays.”

    Whether real or threat, sexualized violence invoked in service of the Israeli state furthers one of the foundations of settler-colonialism — dominating and controlling Palestinian people, which necessitates the violation of Palestinian women’s bodies. A patriarchal logic and its heteronormative gender binary drives the necessity of these colonial violations while reducing women to mere bearers of future generations and therefore, those responsible for reproducing Palestine.

    Consider the massacre of Deir Yassin village, a central moment in the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their villages during the Nakba of 1948, an event Palestinians and Arabs insist that “we will never forget” and that right-wing supporters of Israel deny ever happened. Recounting her experience when Zionist fighters went house to house with submachine guns, Fahimeh Ali Mustafa Zeidan later recalled:

    [They] took us out one by one. They shot the son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra, who was still being breast-fed, they shot my mother too…. They then lined us up, shot at us, and left.

    Many Palestinian testimonies of the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel involve memories of rape and sexual assault, even as Israel’s literal and metaphorical targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies continues 73 years later.

    Palestinian Feminist Collective banner
    Banner image for Palestinian Feminist Collective.

    For instance, Palestinian Feminist Collective member Nada Elia has documented Israeli military intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar suggesting that the only thing that would deter attacks by a Hamas militant “is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped.” She also reminds us of Israeli Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked who openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.”

    Just as white supremacist forces in the U.S. scapegoat Black mothers in an attempt to avert attention from the state’s racist criminalization of Black men, Israeli state officials and media scapegoat Palestinian mothers, describing them as “terrorist supporters” who would prioritize throwing their children out into the streets to die over loving and protecting them.

    Elia adds that such comments reflect an Israeli infrastructure designed to sustain high rates of miscarriages by blocking basic resources such as water and medical supplies, and generally creating inhumane and unlivable conditions for Palestinians. For supporters of Israeli settler-colonialism, controlling Palestinian reproduction is essential to maintaining a Jewish majority on Palestinian land.

    This is why, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, pioneer of Palestinian reproductive justice feminism, has established, Israeli state policies encourage Jewish Israelis to reproduce while discouraging Palestinian Israelis from having children. This also explains why Souzan Naser and the collective we co-lead, MAMAS, have been demanding that Palestinian liberation is a reproductive justice issue.

    Palestinian political prisoners (meaning all Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails), despite their gender identity, face the threat and reality of systemic sexual violence and torture. Paralleling the homophobic and sexist imperialist strategy that U.S. soldiers used in the Abu-Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq, the Israeli state targets political prisoners using the racist assumptions that Arab culture is “hyper-misogynist” and rooted in apparently backwards or “savage” concepts of family honor and shame. In one well-established pattern, Israeli soldiers threaten Palestinian detainees that they will bring in a family member to watch the soldiers sexually assault them or punish them by sexually assaulting their family member.

    Freedom Within Reach - Palestine Action Toolkit Cover
    Cover image for Palestinian Feminist Collective’s “Freedom Within Reach” Palestine Action Toolkit.

    This colonialist and imperialist strategy is driven by the racist idea that sexualized punishment is a “special” way to punish people from the Arab region. As this colonialist-racist logic goes, since the many people often lumped together as “Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims” are considered “exceptionally sexist,” sexual violence is deemed especially appalling to them. Of course, as organizer Trishala Deb asks in their analysis of U.S. soldiers who used a similar logic against Iraqi war prisoners, for which culture would these acts of sexual assault, rape and murder be less appalling?

    To be sure, Elham Bayour and Lena Meari remind us that such strategies aim to scare Palestinians from participating in resistance against Israeli colonization. Yet they also shift public attention away from U.S. and Israeli state violence and toward the apparent “sexual savagery” or “backwardness” of Palestinians and Arabs.

    Pinkwashing is a related strategy that Israel deploys to distract attention away from its oppression of Palestinians in the face of a growing international Palestinian solidarity movement. AlQaws activists, centering the experiences of queer Palestinians, describe pinkwashing as an international propaganda effort that aims to rebrand Israel as a liberated “modern” and therefore “gay-friendly” state compared with what it portrays as hyper-homophobic “Palestinian-Arab-Muslim culture.”

    AlQaws reminds us that pinkwashing not only serves to justify settler-colonialism (i.e. “savage” homophobic Palestinians need to be dominated and civilized by modern, progressive, gay-friendly Israelis) but it also divides Palestinians. For instance, it alienates queer Palestinians by defining Palestinian sexual diversity as non-existent or unnatural.

    Exposing the impact of these strategies on Palestinian communities, Sarah Ihmoud says Israel’s targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies generates patriarchy among Palestinians, leading to shifts in power relations within families and communities. For example, some family members, concerned about the threat of sexual assault, might wittingly or unwittingly strengthen patriarchal currents by understandably steering daughters away from political activism.

    Just as colonialist U.S. policies forced Indigenous children to separate from their parents and attacked the rights of Indigenous mothers, many Palestinians are denied the possibility of mothering, protecting their loved ones, and reveling in the joy of relations, togetherness and community building. In the West Bank and Gaza, the hundreds of Israeli check points and roadblocks that restrict Palestinian movement are a crucial site of violence against Palestinian women’s bodies. There, women in labor are denied or delayed from reaching hospitals and forced to give birth at checkpoints, resulting in miscarriages and death.

    There are many other ways in which Israeli colonization is constituted by a systematic attack on Palestinian mothering and caregiving, as well, including Israeli soldiers’ raids of Palestinian homes are often accompanied by sexual harassment of mothers and daughters. Israel’s systematic shooting of children with impunity, its longstanding enforcement of family separation among Palestinians, and the devastating impact of ongoing massacres and killings on rising rates of miscarriages and still births.

    In the face of these atrocities, since the beginning of the 20th century, when European Jews began migrating as part of the colonization of Palestine (before the state of Israel was established in 1948), Palestinian women have been forging unapologetic visions and movements of resistance. Eileen Kuttab’s mapping of these movements teaches us that the period of the 1920s-1947 entailed a distinct feminist national liberation agenda; 1948-1967 involved resistance and mutual aid work in the face of the massive destruction and fragmentation resulting from the creation of the state of Israel; 1967-1976 involved sustaining society in the face of intensified pressures and a growing resistance movement; and 1976-1981 inspired women’s mass-based organizations that organized and mobilized women in villages and refugee camps using national as well as women’s issues as frameworks for their work, extending and growing throughout the first intifada [uprising] of 1987-1991.

    The massive escalation of Israeli violence during the second intifada of 2000 weakened women’s movements, and the next decade witnessed what Manal Jamal calls “western promoted gender empowerment” that “undermined the cohesiveness of the women’s movement” and disempowered the grassroots.

    In the U.S., Palestinian and Arab feminists have been forced to contend with Zionism and racism within the U.S. women’s movement all along, including the consistent exclusion and repression of Palestinian feminist perspectives within activist communities that many refer to as “progressive except for Palestine.”

    As Lila Sharif of the Palestinian Feminist Collective puts it,

    Mainstream feminism has omitted a critique of Zionism and reified the racist idea that “Arab culture” is solely responsible for the repression and oppression of Palestinian women.

    This explains why, in 2001, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco (AWSA SF) Chapter published the paper, “The Forgotten ’ism: An Arab American Feminist Critique of Zionism, Racism, and Sexism” as part of the Oakland, California-based Women of Color Resource Center’s platform at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Our intervention was a follow-up to Betty Friedan’s silencing of Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi at the 1985 UN conference on the status of women in Nairobi, Kenya, when she criticized Israel. Many Arab Women’s Solidarity Association SF members went on to join INCITE! Women and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color against Violence as INCITE! committed to its Palestine Points of Unity, including solidarity with the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and divestment from Israel in the early 2000s.

    These realities speak to why Palestinian and Arab feminists have built alliances primarily in radical Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) feminist spaces. Palestinian alliances within U.S. BIPOC feminist movements have their roots in the period of the first intifada of the 1980s. At the time, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Association (UPWA) allied with members of the Third World Women’s Alliance, which came out of the feminist impulse within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In an interview, Camille Odeh, national director of the UPWA told me:

    Founded in 1986 and disbanded in the early 1990s, the UPWA was practicing intersectionality before the term was coined in academia. We forged solidarity with feminist movements representing Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, South Africa, many countries in the Arab region, and the U.S., [to form] the UPWA. Holding panels on sexuality, the UPWA was ahead of its time, and we connected the grassroots, working class with academics–all sitting at the table doing popular education work.

    Today, we are witnessing the continuation of these legacies through the unified Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), which was founded in 2021 and is based in the U.S. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s founding pledge invites allies to embrace Palestinian liberation as essential to feminist struggle. As Sarah Ihmoud states, the pledge exposes the alliance between many strands of U.S. feminism and Israel; honors the feminist traditions that have come before us; affirms the visible and invisible ways Palestinian women have been resisting and envisioning a different future; and insists on the inseparability of gender and queer emancipation and decolonization.

    The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s extensive toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for allies committed to solidarity with Palestinian liberation. According to Loubna Qatami, the collective continues the legacy of historical Palestinian women’s movements, affirms the unity of Palestinian peoplehood across borders; and validates a coalitional politics with Black, Indigenous and all global freedom struggles.

    Today’s U.S.-based Palestinian feminist movement is anti-colonial in its resistance and decolonial in its insistence on what Leena Odeh explains as “re-discover[ing] a new sense of belonging — to us, to each other, to the earth … and plant[ing] seeds of values centered liberation, healing and steadfastness in all of our communities so that we can reclaim our wholeness.”

    In an interview with Truthout, Lila Sharif explained this dual vision:

    With the most recent Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Feminist Collective finds creative ways to sustain ourselves and each other. Publicly, we take up digital spaces to center Palestine as a feminist issue; ally with Black, Indigenous and transnational feminist movements; lead workshops; and speak on radio, TV and across the U.S. to support our sisters in Gaza and across Palestine. Our decolonial component encourages carrying each other through collective grief. We uphold, celebrate, learn from and continue the work of Palestinian (and Arab) women who have sustained life. Their practices have included writing, teaching, caregiving, organizing, revolting, transmitting history, and others that call out, resist, and defy settler colonialism, military violence, racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia and capitalist exploitation. We also recognize how Palestinian women sustain joy and pleasure through singing, dancing, preparing and sharing food, storytelling, poetic expression, praying, planting and harvesting. We see Palestinian feminist praxis rooted in decolonial aspirations in Palestine and beyond, thereby radically transforming mainstream feminism.

    Through collective healing and mobilizing, building and fighting, our Palestinian and Arab feminist movements exist to resist. Activism is not a choice. It is survival. As we carry the blood of our people in our hearts, we will continue to rise up out of love for our land, our histories, and one another far beyond freedom, and we will continue to grow, from the ashes of every Israeli assault, “roses from thorns.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Supporters’ Anti-Science Crusade Is Threatening Us All

    A protester holds an anti-vaccination sign as Trump supporters rally on May 16, 2020, in Woodland Hills, California.

    The number of new COVID-19 infections in the country topped 26,500 yesterday, a two-week increase of 111 percent. Experts broadly agree the reasons behind this new infection spike are twofold: (1) The Delta variant of COVID is highly infectious and on the verge of becoming the dominant strain in the U.S.; (2) Millions of people continue to refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks.

    Note well, there are plenty of people who remain unvaccinated for very comprehensible reasons: They live in areas where the shot is still difficult to obtain, or they are prevented from doing so for unavoidable work/life requirements, or they have vaccination hesitancy that is deeply rooted in an understandable distrust of medical experts who have grossly abused their communities for generations.

    The problem, however, is that millions of people remain unvaccinated — and won’t wear masks — because they think Donald Trump won the 2020 election, because Trump says he did. The way they have chosen to combat the ocean of criticism earned by the Trump presidency is simple, and utterly lethal: If Trump is good, that means science is bad, so screw science and screw you, too. If this self-destructive practice is not interrupted, we may be in for another long and brutal winter.

    “Vaccines have been available to most Americans for months,” reports CNN, “but still only 48.2% of the country is fully vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — and the rate of new vaccinations is on the decline. Meanwhile, case rates have been going up dramatically. In 47 states, the rate of new cases in the past week are at least 10% higher than the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Of those, 35 have seen increases of over 50%. Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans, a group which is now seeing the largest impacts of the pandemic.”

    Matters are becoming dire enough to spur the largest nurses’ union in the U.S. to urge the reinstatement of the mask mandate. National Nurses United executive director Bonnie Castillo transmitted a letter to the CDC warning, “The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over.” The letter goes on to lay out a swath of terrifying infection numbers. “NNU strongly urges the CDC to reinstate universal masking, irrespective of vaccination status, to help reduce the spread of the virus, especially from infected individuals who do not have any symptoms,” pleads the concluding message.

    “Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans,” reported CNN. But why? Qui bono? Who benefits? As it turns out, the same old right-wing hucksters are the ones who benefit the most, the ones who will say anything in order to dent the conversation and increase their own power, no matter how many of their own people they trick into an early, gasping grave. Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg News explains it:

    It works like this. A fringe group of the party seeks to differentiate itself from the mainstream. To do that, its members set out to prove that they are the True Conservatives and everyone else is a wishy-washy Republican in Name Only at best, and a collaborating liberal at worst. However, by now the mainstream of the party has become so conservative that there are no easy moves to make that involve pushing one or another policy preference….

    The key point here is that there is no counter move available to the rest of the party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can say that they oppose such-and-such a policy because they are liberals, not socialists. There’s no parallel move for the Republican congressional leaders, Kevin McCarthy in the House or Mitch McConnell in the Senate. That doesn’t mean that mainstream conservatives always go along, but within the norms of the party they’re not allowed to call anyone too conservative, let alone any more negative characterization.

    How do you set yourself outside and above the conservative pack? Start by refusing to wear a mask. Follow that by refusing to get vaccinated. Not long after, begin making spurious claims that the vaccinations are deadly, and when people don’t die in sufficient numbers to support that egregious lie, downshift to the argument that vaccinations and masks are the newest iteration of Nazi fascism.

    I do not see an easy solution to this problem, especially in a country that prides itself on freedom of opinion, even monstrously self-destructive opinion. How do you fix this when the governor of Florida is selling t-shirts attacking Anthony Fauci, the government’s lead COVID expert, even as that state endures 3,000 new COVID hospitalizations a day? New infections in Florida are up 429 percent over the last two weeks, a number only matched by Tennessee, where the government has all but declared the topic of coronavirus to be off limits.

    The way things are headed, we could soon be forced back into our masks for all occasions, back into seclusion, and worse, forced to bear witness to a segment of the population as it kills itself in the culmination of 40 years of nihilistic Republican ideology. One wonders if it really could have ended any other way.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pfizer Is Upholding Global Vaccine Apartheid. Today We Risk Arrest to Stop It.

    Priscilla Robinson (middle) takes part in a collective blockade outside the Pfizer headquarters on E. 42nd Street in New York City on July 14 to demand that Big Pharma stop prioritizing profits over global access to COVID-19 vaccines.

    Pfizer is getting away with murder by only allowing rich countries to get the lion’s share of its COVID-19 vaccines. Today, I am putting my body on the line to stop this gross inequity.

    With COVID-19 cases on the rise again due to the dangerous Delta variant, it’s becoming clear to many Americans that the pandemic’s toll on the U.S. is far from over. But for much of the rest of the world, because of corporate greed, the pain and loss from COVID is set to rage unchecked through largely unvaccinated populations.

    In my rural community of Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, many are still at risk of contracting COVID-19. As in other parts of the United States, those most at risk are those who refuse to be vaccinated. But the rest of the world doesn’t have this luxury: Billions of people still haven’t received their first dose not due to personal hesitancy but due to their inability to access a COVID vaccine.

    Roughly 85 percent of all COVID shots administered have been in higher-income countries, and unless pharmaceutical makers allow greater access to their formulas now, many millions of lives will be lost that can, and should, be saved.

    Yet in this moment of incomprehensible global tragedy and crisis, Pfizer is spending millions to block more manufacturers from producing these desperately needed, lifesaving vaccines. Why? So that it can lock in as much profit as possible.

    Here’s how it works: Under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) intellectual property rules, the private producers of the COVID-19 vaccine are given monopolies over their product. They can charge sky-high prices, while keeping the supply limited. A TRIPS waiver, which has been proposed to the WTO, would change all that and open the door for more doses to be produced at a lower cost for developing countries.

    Recognizing the severity of the crisis and our shared interest in a global solution, this waiver would allow producers around the world to start manufacturing the vaccine, increasing the supply and lowering prices to make critical medication available to everyone. Putting their own profits over peoples’ lives, Pfizer is fighting tooth and nail to prevent a waiver, even if it means exacerbating the global vaccine apartheid.

    President Joe Biden, after months of grassroots organizing and pressure, announced his support for the waiver this May. But he can also often be found by the side of Pfizer’s CEO and Chairman, Albert Bourla, at photo ops thanking the executive for donating pitiful amounts of vaccines to poorer countries.

    Meanwhile, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is opposing waiver negotiations so that the German firm BioNTech, which helped develop Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, can continue to reap billions in profits while the world suffers. Pfizer and BioNtech are not the heroes in the COVID crisis they claim to be.

    Our demands are realistic and achievable today. Pfizer can stop blocking the waiver today. Pfizer can voluntarily share technology with the World Health Organization today. Chancellor Merkel can support the TRIPS waiver today. We can save lives today. This is not a question of science; this is a question of political will. Will politicians find the courage to fight against Big Pharma?

    That’s why I joined hundreds of other demonstrators, led by Justice is Global, Health Global Access Project (GAP), and more, in a mass demonstration in New York City today calling to end vaccine apartheid and save lives everywhere. Starting at the United Nations, we took our demands to the German Consulate, where we called on Chancellor Merkel to stop blocking the waiver in advance of her upcoming visit with President Biden this week.

    Today, I am one of the hundreds who are demonstrating outside Pfizer’s headquarters with signs reading “Pharma Greed Could Kill Us All,” and chanting “vaccine apartheid, no more.” Hundreds who, like me, are tired of seeing corporate greed put before human lives. We are health activists, doctors, clergy, union members, members of impacted diaspora communities, and more. Together, we linked arms, sat down, and blocked access to the Pfizer building. We are currently on E. 42nd Street in New York City, blocking the road that leads to the Pfizer building as well. We just got notified by police that they plan to take actions to remove us. You can watch the direct action on Facebook Live right now.

    When it comes to COVID, corporate greed and political delays are literally killing people no different from us, except for where they live. That’s why I am risking arrest right now. Because I know a better world is possible. At this very moment, we have the technology to save countless lives. We have the knowledge and the resources to end the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats’ New Version of Infrastructure Bill Claws Back Trump Tax Cuts for Rich

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks during a news conference following the Senate Democrats policy luncheon in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2021.

    The second half of President Biden’s combined $4.1 infrastructure plan has finally landed, after a long and often aggravating first half of summer. A number of the details still have to be worked out and then announced. It is less than half of what progressives in Congress wanted, far more than most Republicans can abide, and detailed enough that “moderates” like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Kyrsten Sinema will likely find places to gum up the works if they choose to.

    Who knows, maybe that makes it a good bill. Once the details come out in full, it may be revealed as a great bill, one of three offered by the Biden administration to save the country from COVID, rebuild our infrastructure and bring some humanity back into government after more than 40 years of trickle-down cruelty. A triple-shot like this has never been attempted in my lifetime, much less achieved. If passed, it’s the kind of thing that can change a country, and Lord knows this country could use some change.

    But it won’t be anything if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fails to hold his caucus together when voting day arrives. All 50 Democratic and Dem-affiliated senators, plus Vice President Kamala Harris serving as President of the Senate, will be needed to pass this bill via reconciliation. They are aiming to get this done before the August recess, so buckle up.

    “We are very proud of this plan,” said Schumer after it was announced. “We know we have a long road to go. We’re going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans’ lives a whole lot better.” Bernie Sanders, who initially sought a $6 trillion bill, said, “This is, in our view, a pivotal moment in American history.”

    Despite the absence of key details such as how this legislation intends to confront climate change, what we do know of the bill so far is fairly impressive. It includes a large expansion of Medicare to include money for hearing, vision and dental coverage. House progressives wanted this in tandem with a lowering of the eligibility age, but that was left on the cutting room floor when Mark Warner warned the moderates would balk at the price, and the bill was pared down.

    Politically speaking, emphasizing an expansion of Medicare was a savvy move. Medicare is perhaps the most popular, well-run government program in existence. Making it even better also makes it easier to pass the larger legislation, and furthermore makes it virtually impossible for Republicans to roll it back at some future juncture.

    Manchin on Tuesday threw his first rock in the road, because of course he did. “I think everything should be paid for,” he told reporters. “We’ve put enough free money out.” While announcing the bill, both Schumer and Warner took pains to assuage Manchin’s complaints by saying the bill would be “robustly” paid for. That payment, according to Schumer, will be carried by the wealthiest among us; taxes for those making less than $400,000 a year will not be raised.

    The specter of a tax on the wealthy drew the ire of the Beast of Bedminster. “Republicans in the U.S. Senate must not in any way, shape, or form increase taxes that were won in the TRUMP TAX CUT, the largest in the history of our Country,” said Donald Trump in a Tuesday statement. “It’s what made our economy grow and great.”

    Speaking personally, clawing back some of the trillion-and-a-half Trump gave away to rich people back in 2017 is one of my favorite parts of this bill. Fixing that by way of taxes to fund these worthy public endeavors would go a long way toward scourging Trump’s fetid legacy from government.

    You’ve heard the saying about laws and sausages? You never want to see how either are made. We are entering that phase of the operation, and arms will be twisted up into the ceiling fans if this thing has a prayer of passing. We will see if Biden’s epoch in the Senate will serve him as a negotiator now that the rubber has met the road.

    “With no votes to spare in the Senate and only four in the House (soon to be three, with Republicans expected to win a runoff in Texas), President Joe Biden heads to the Senate today to begin the hard work of whipping the party in line behind the Democrat-only deal,” reports Politico. “He got a head start when Budget Chair Bernie Sanders endorsed the deal, even as the Vermont independent spent much of the first part of the Democrats’ presser looking at his shoes.”

    Cute snark there, Politico. Sanders sure didn’t sound like a sad little shoe-gazer at the presser. Calling the bill “the most significant piece of legislation since the Great Depression,” Sanders went on to say, “The wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families of this country. What this legislation does is says we’re going to create millions of good-paying union jobs rebuilding this country not only from physical infrastructure, but dealing with the human needs of our people which are many, and which have long been neglected.”

    I’ll buy that for $4 trillion. There is a lot of road between now and final passage of these bills, and notoriously terrible economist Larry Summers just met with Biden at the White House to bemoan the terrors of inflation. If Summers gets in Biden’s ear about that, it’s entirely possible the president himself could reach out to shave down his own bills. As I said, there’s a lot of road left.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Should Dismantle US Bases in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home

    Soldiers board a CH-47 Chinook helicopter as they depart from al-Qaim base, Iraq, on March 9, 2020.

    At Bagram Air Base, Afghan scrap merchants are already picking through the graveyard of U.S. military equipment that was until recently the headquarters of America’s 20-year occupation of their country. Afghan officials say the last U.S. forces slipped away from Bagram in the dead of night, without notice or coordination.

    Taliban fighters are rapidly expanding their control over hundreds of districts, usually through negotiations between local elders, but also by force when troops loyal to the Kabul government refuse to give up their outposts and weapons.

    A few weeks ago, the Taliban controlled a quarter of the country. Now, it’s a third. They are taking control of border posts and large swaths of territory in the north of the country. These include areas that were once strongholds of the Northern Alliance, a militia that prevented the Taliban from unifying the country under their rule in the late 1990s.

    People of good will all over the world hope for a peaceful future for the people of Afghanistan, but the only legitimate role the U.S. can play there now is to pay reparations, in whatever form, for the damage it has done and the pain and death it has caused. Speculation in the U.S. political class and corporate media about how the U.S. can keep bombing and killing Afghans from “over the horizon” should cease. The U.S. and its corrupt puppet government lost this war. Now it’s up to the Afghans to forge their future.

    So what about America’s other endless crime scene, Iraq? The U.S. corporate media only mentions Iraq when our leaders suddenly decide that the 150,000-plus bombs and missiles they have dropped on Iraq and Syria since 2001 were not enough, and dropping a few more on Iranian allies there will appease some hawks in Washington without starting a full-scale war with Iran.

    But for 40 million Iraqis, as for 40 million Afghans, America’s battlefield is their country, not just an occasional news story. They are living their entire lives under the enduring impacts of the neocons’ war of mass destruction.

    Young Iraqis took to the streets in 2019 to protest 16 years of corrupt government by the former exiles to whom the United States handed over their country and its oil revenues. The 2019 protests were directed at the Iraqi government’s corruption and failure to provide jobs and basic services to its people, but also at the underlying, self-serving foreign influences of the U.S. and Iran over every Iraqi government since the 2003 invasion.

    A new government was formed in May 2020, headed by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, previously the head of Iraq’s Intelligence Service and, before that, a journalist and editor for the U.S.-based Al-Monitor Arab news website. Despite his Western background, al-Kadhimi has initiated investigations into the embezzlement of $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues by officials of previous governments, who were mostly former Western-based exiles like himself. And he’s walking a fine line to try to save his country, after all it has been through, from becoming the front line in a new U.S. war on Iran.

    Recent U.S. airstrikes have targeted Iraqi security forces called Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which were formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State (IS), the twisted religious force spawned by the U.S. decision, only 10 years after 9/11, to unleash and arm al-Qaida in a Western proxy war against Syria.

    The PMFs now comprise about 130,000 troops in 40 or more different units. Most were recruited by pro-Iranian Iraqi political parties and groups, but they are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and are credited with playing a critical role in the war against IS.

    Western media represent the PMFs as militias that Iran can turn on and off as a weapon against the United States, but these units have their own interests and decision-making structures. When Iran has tried to calm tensions with the United States, it has not always been able to control the PMFs. General Haider al-Afghani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer in charge of coordinating with the PMF, recently requested a transfer out of Iraq, complaining that the PMFs are paying no attention to him.

    Ever since the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani and PMF commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020, the PMFs have been determined to force the last remaining U.S. occupation forces out of Iraq. After the assassination, the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq. Following U.S. airstrikes against PMF units in February, Iraq and the United States agreed in early April that U.S. combat troops would leave soon.

    But no date has been set, no detailed agreement has been signed and many Iraqis do not believe U.S. forces will leave, nor do they trust the Kadhimi government to ensure their departure. As time has gone by without a formal agreement, some PMF forces have resisted calls for calm from their own government and Iran, and stepped up their attacks against U.S. forces.

    At the same time, the Vienna talks over the JCPOA nuclear agreement have raised fears among PMF commanders that Iran may sacrifice them as a bargaining chip in order to negotiate a nuclear agreement with the United States.

    In the interest of survival, PMF commanders have become more independent of Iran, and have cultivated a closer relationship with Prime Minister Kadhimi. This was evidenced in Kadhimi’s attendance at a huge military parade in June 2021 to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the PMF’s founding.

    The very next day, the U.S. bombed PMF forces in Iraq and Syria, drawing public condemnation from Kadhimi and his cabinet as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. After conducting retaliatory strikes, the PMF declared a new ceasefire on June 29, apparently to give Kadhimi more time to finalize a withdrawal agreement. But six days later, some of them resumed rocket and drone attacks on U.S. targets.

    Whereas Donald Trump only ordered retaliatory strikes when rocket attacks in Iraq killed Americans, a senior U.S. official has revealed that President Biden has lowered the bar, threatening to respond with airstrikes even when Iraqi militia attacks don’t cause U.S. casualties.

    But U.S. airstrikes have only led to rising tensions and further escalations by Iraqi militia forces. If U.S. forces respond with more or heavier airstrikes, the PMF and Iran’s allies throughout the region are likely to respond with more widespread attacks on U.S. bases. The further this escalates and the longer it takes to negotiate a genuine withdrawal agreement, the more pressure Kadhimi will get from the PMF, and other sectors of Iraqi society, to show U.S. forces the door.

    The official rationale for the U.S. presence, as well as that of NATO training forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, is that the Islamic State is still active. A suicide bomber killed 32 people in Baghdad in January, and IS still has a strong appeal to oppressed young people across the region and the Muslim world. The failure, corruption and repression of successive post-2003 governments in Iraq have provided fertile soil.

    But the U.S. clearly has another reason for keeping forces in Iraq — as a forward base in its simmering war on Iran. That is exactly what Kadhimi is trying to avoid by replacing U.S. forces with the Danish-led NATO training mission in Iraqi Kurdistan. This mission is being expanded from 500 to at least 4,000 troops, made up of Danish, British and Turkish personnel.

    If Biden had quickly rejoined the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran on taking office, tensions would be lower by now, and the U.S. troops still in Iraq might well be home already. Instead, Biden obliviously swallowed the poison pill of Trump’s Iran policy by using “maximum pressure” as a form of “leverage,” escalating an endless game of chicken the United States cannot win — a tactic that Barack Obama began to wind down six years ago by signing the JCPOA.

    The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the JCPOA are interconnected, in that both are essential parts of a policy to improve U.S.-Iranian relations and end America’s antagonistic and destabilizing interventionist role in the Middle East. The third element for a more stable and peaceful region is the diplomatic engagement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in which Kadhimi’s Iraq is playing a critical role as the principal mediator.

    The fate of the Iran nuclear deal is still uncertain. The sixth round of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna ended on June 20, and no date has yet been set for a seventh round. Biden’s commitment to rejoining the agreement seems shakier than ever, and President-elect Ebrahim Raisi of Iran has declared he will not let the Americans keep drawing out the negotiations.

    In an interview on June 25, Secretary of State Tony Blinken upped the ante by threatening to pull out of the talks altogether. He said that if Iran continues to spin more sophisticated centrifuges at higher and higher levels, it will become very difficult for the U.S. to return to the original deal. Asked whether or when the United States might walk away from negotiations, he said, “I can’t put a date on it, [but] it’s getting closer.”

    What should really be “getting closer” is the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Iraq. While Afghanistan is portrayed as the “longest war” the United States has fought, the U.S. military has been bombing Iraq for 26 of the last 30 years. The fact that the U.S. military is still conducting “defensive airstrikes” 18 years after the 2003 invasion and nearly 10 years since the official end of the war proves just how ineffective and disastrous this U.S. military intervention has been.

    Biden certainly seems to have learned the lesson in Afghanistan that the U.S. can neither bomb its way to peace nor install U.S. puppet governments at will. When pilloried by the press about the Taliban gaining control as U.S. troops withdraw, the president answered:

    For those who have argued that we should stay just six more months or just one more year, I ask them to consider the lessons of recent history. … Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us, and the current security situation only confirms, that “just one more year” of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely. It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.

    The same lessons of history apply to Iraq. The U.S. has already inflicted so much death and misery on the Iraqi people, destroyed so many of its beautiful cities and unleashed so much sectarian violence and Islamist fanaticism. As with the shuttering of the massive Bagram base in Afghanistan, Biden should dismantle the remaining imperial bases in Iraq and bring the troops home.

    The Iraqi people have the same right to decide their own future as the people of Afghanistan, and all the countries of the Middle East have the right and the responsibility to live in peace, without the threat of American bombs and missiles always hanging over their heads, and their children’s.

    Let’s hope Biden has learned another history lesson: that the United States should stop invading and attacking other countries.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Just Say We Won”: How Trump’s Big Lie Started, and Why It Won’t End Soon

    Former President Donald Trump leaves after a rally on July 3, 2021, in Sarasota, Florida.

    It all started on election night 2020 with four words from Rudy Giuliani: “Just say we won.” According to I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s new book on Donald Trump’s disastrous final year, Giuliani was in the White House Map Room watching the returns come in from Michigan. The early in-person votes had heavily favored Trump, but that lead was being steadily eroded by an avalanche of mail-in votes that largely favored Joe Biden. According to the book, many in the room thought Giuliani had been drinking.

    “Same thing in Pennsylvania,” reports a Washington Post review of the book. “’Just say we won Pennsylvania,’ Giuliani said. Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. [Bill] Stepien, [Stephen] Miller and [Mark] Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible. ‘We can’t do that,’ Meadows said, raising his voice. ‘We can’t.’”

    Ultimately, they did, and here we are. What has become known as The Big Lie — the fiction that nefarious pro-Biden forces stole the election from Trump — has become holy writ for a large majority of Republicans, and was a prime motivation for the January 6 sacking of the Capitol building. A significant number of GOP voters believe Trump will somehow be reinstated next month, and almost all of them will have his back if he runs again in 2024.

    Today, GOP candidates are being lined up for the 2022 midterms with only one metric to measure their qualifications: Do they support the former president’s la-la-land contention that the election was stolen? Those who do are welcomed into the fold. Officeholders who refuse face daunting primary challenges from pro-Trump opponents. The Republican Party’s basic operating principles — which were never great shakes to begin with — are being rewritten on the back of a MAGA hat.

    Enter a clutch of judges who heard Team Trump’s preposterous post-election legal arguments and shot them to pieces like clay pigeons at a skeet-shooting range. Trump’s legal team, comprised of Giuliani and a number of lesser lights like L. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, ranged far and wide peddling dangerously inaccurate, poorly written and ultimately cynical arguments in an attempt to overturn the election while “legitimizing” Trump’s ongoing complaints. Almost uniformly, their petitions were denied. Even the Supreme Court, top-heavy with Trump appointees, wanted no part of it.

    Now, the bill for that elaborate legal and political ruse is coming due. Rudy Giuliani was recently stripped of his law license in New York and Washington, D.C., for his part in this farce, not a terrible blow since the former mayor only has one client (Trump), and he still can’t get that sole client to pay him. For Powell and Wood, however, the consequences got a whole lot louder on Monday:

    The latest effort to hold former president Donald Trump and his allies accountable for months of baseless claims about the 2020 election played out Monday in a Michigan courtroom, where a federal judge asked detailed and skeptical questions of several lawyers she is considering imposing sanctions against for filing a suit seeking to overturn the results.

    U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker said she would rule on a request to discipline the lawyers in coming weeks. But over and over again during the more than five-hour hearing, she pointedly pressed the lawyers involved — including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — to explain what steps they had taken to ensure their court filings in the case filed last year had been accurate. She appeared astonished by many of their answers.

    While their suit aimed to create a broad impression that the vote in Michigan — and specifically Detroit’s Wayne County — had been troubled, the affidavits filed to support those claims included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state, Parker said.

    Two moments from Monday’s hearing stand out in sharp relief. Judge Parker spent several hours battling her way through the budget of legal nonsense Wood and Powell had foisted on her. At one point, in a moment of perfect exasperation, Parker looked over the petitioners and exclaimed, “This is really fantastical. How could any of you as officers of the court submit this affidavit?”

    The best part, for my money, came when the court reporter flipped out on Donald Campbell, who was serving as Wood and Powell’s attorney for the hearing and had been interrupting everything that moved all day.

    Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce reports: “’We have been here since 8:30 this morning,’” [the court reporter] thundered, and then ripped all present for talking over each other and making her job 10 times harder than it had to be, adding that if they wanted a transcript that didn’t look like it was typed by drunken marmosets, they should knock that shit off immediately. (I’m paraphrasing.) Judge Linda Parker, who also was fed up, let her court reporter roll.”

    It was that kind of a day, and there are more to come. Parker will decide within a few weeks whether to sanction Wood and Powell for their post-election legal shenanigans. Powell appears ready to die on this hill, while Wood — according to Pierce — “spent most of his time at the hearing trying to throw all the others under the entire train. I kept waiting to hear a cock crow.” This fictional drama played out in a number of states, and judges there may also want to share their thoughts — and perhaps a dollop of punishment — for what these fools have put us through.

    These potential sanctions, while satisfying to many people who are mortally tired of this seemingly endless Trump-serving hooey, will probably dent the armor of the faithful not one bit. Every loss is further proof of the deep plot against them, every sanction a martyr’s prize … which makes them the prize for people like Trump, who will continue to rake cash from their pockets with hollow promises of victory and vengeance to come. It is very nearly a frictionless fundraising machine now, and won’t stop for a judge or anyone else.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Billionaire Tax Cheat Travels to Space for a Few Minutes

    Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson drinks champagne with crew members after flying into space aboard a Virgin Galactic vessel, near Truth and Consequences, New Mexico, on July 11, 2021.

    It isn’t often that we see a New York Times paragraph so freighted with syrup and honeyed goo, but there it was on Sunday afternoon, like something you’d order at IHOP to beat back a hangover: “Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.”

    Better lede: “Fulfilling his desire to beat a fellow billionaire into the lowest verge of space, notorious tax cheat Richard Branson burned some of the money he owes his home country in order to fling himself past the troposphere so he could experience weightlessness for as much time as it takes to make a decent bowel movement. An achievement that will go down in corporate history, Branson now holds bragging rights over the guy whose monopolies are eating the economy alive.”

    Not what I’d call the right stuff.

    When I was 12 years old, I got in trouble because of space. In 1983, my friend Andrew and I went to the Circle Cinema to see The Right Stuff for real, Philip Kaufman’s soaring film based on the Tom Wolfe book about the early days of space travel. I didn’t tell the person picking us up that the movie was more than three hours long, because I didn’t know, and didn’t notice once I was inside. I was utterly captivated from the moment Levon Helm spoke the opening words: “There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die.” I emerged from the theater with stars in my eyes to find my ride, who had been lapping the block for more than an hour, red-faced and furious from having been made to wait.

    I was gone, and a fair portion of me still resides in the little palace of wonder that was constructed 37 years ago by that masterpiece of propaganda… because it happened. Astronauts strapped themselves to the nosecones of fluky missiles and dared the thing to kill them before they got home again. Later, they jumped into shuttles that got more perilous to fly with each passing year, and some of them came home in tiny smoldering pieces.

    In the intervening years, we have borne witness to moonwalks, Mars landings, the exploration of Saturn, the majesty of the Hubble telescope, and the daunting yet thrilling idea that somewhere out there, farther from Earth than anyone has ever been, the Voyager deep space probe — seeking other intelligent life — is carrying music made by Aboriginal Australians, percussion from Senegal, Mozart, Bach, a Navajo night chant, and the blues lamentations of Blind Willie Johnson, who died penniless in 1945 after sleeping in the rainy ruins of his burned-down house.

    I get the argument against space exploration: Public money should be used to help people here on Earth instead of chasing stardust beyond the atmosphere, and the “space race” lionized by The Right Stuff was a well-orchestrated propaganda arm of the Cold War. Shifting the burden of financing these endeavors to the private sector frees up desperately needed funds for, well, everybody. So they say, anyway.

    Something in me still cleaves to the dream of space exploration, however, and no amount of pragmatism about funding can shake it loose.

    Why?

    Because of the Hubble Deep Field.

    Please look at this image closely. First taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, the “Deep Field” is a series of pictures of a black spot of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Once the exposures were done, the pictures revealed thousands of galaxies in that one tiny dot. Thousands of galaxies, with millions of stars and billions of planets. Spread that dot across 360 degrees of sky, and you are confronted with an incredibly crowded universe and the astonishment of time travel — the galaxies shown are billions of years old now — wonders stacked upon wonders, and the likelihood of life somewhere out there if the Law of Large Numbers has any meaning.

    The Hubble Deep Field altered my perspective forever. It happened because public money was spent on it. The spark of discovery fires the imagination. I bow to the counter-argument about funds needed elsewhere, but I will always be that kid in the dark theater way back in Reagan’s first term when we all expected to die in a pillar of nuclear fire. On that screen was wonder, a reach for achievement, and hope. There is something magical about that aspect of the human experience.

    But this corporate billionaire space race? You can keep it. Billionaire Jeff Bezos is slated to blast off on his own tax-free ego project in nine days, and the corporate media will fawn over it as they did for Branson on Sunday. Corporate news treating a corporate space race like the Armstrong landing? Sounds like savvy marketing to me, but it leaves inspiration in ashes.

    What’s to follow? The first trillionaires racing each other to the moon to see who can carve their corporate logo into the dust and rock so the whole planet can see it every night, whether they want to or not? You know that’s next, right? Of course it is, and the corporate media will lavish praise on it like they did all day on Sunday. Never mind that space is the most inhospitable environment we’ve ever encountered as a species, so billionaire dreams of sipping poolside champagne with a full view of Earth are, to be blunt, unrealistic.

    Space travel used to be about “us,” a collective effort by the country to reach beyond previously unreachable limits. That was the Cold War propaganda, anyway, and it had an unavoidable allure. Now, it’s about “them,” the 0.1 percent who hide their fortunes and use those revenues to give their egos a televised tongue-bath in zero-g, followed by a gala event suffused with celebrities. Space exploration is now a plaything for those who already exist in an alien atmosphere. I’m pretty sure Chuck Yeager would not be impressed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Should Carve Out Exemption in Filibuster to Protect Voting Rights

    House Majority Whip James Clyburn speaks during a news conference to introduce H.R. 4, Voting Rights Advancement Act, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C, on February 26, 2019.

    The U.S. Senate is back in session today, as Texas Republicans prepare to pass another massive voter suppression bill. The only remedy available to the American people is for the federal government to use its constitutional authority to regulate federal elections to block what President Biden has referred to as the GOP’s “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

    The House of Representatives passed a law that would block much of the damage done by Texas’ and other Red states’ laws — the For The People Act (HR1 and SB1). But Republicans in the Senate are blocking it with a filibuster.

    But the filibuster is not inviolable.

    The Senate has drilled three major holes in the filibuster since 1917, each time citing the Constitution as their rationale, and if they’re not able to end this arcane, historically racist device then it’s time to drill a fourth “constitutional” hole in it for voting rights.

    About those already-passed “constitutional” holes:

    The filibuster was made possible by a senate rule change in 1806, but didn’t actually get used as a serious way to block debate on legislation until the arrival of “Father of the Confederacy” John C. Calhoun in the Senate; he began using it aggressively in 1837 to block any discussion of the abolition of slavery. (The year before, in 1836, the House had banned any discussion of slavery at all, a law John Quincy Adams delighted in breaking every day the House was in session.)

    When a senator invoked a filibuster, it ground the entire senate to a halt until the original proposed legislation was withdrawn, causing the near-instant death of numerous attempts by Northern senators to weaken or cripple laws relating to slavery in the South. There was quite literally no way around it, or to continue Senate business, other than to withdraw the proposed legislation.

    By 1917, it had mostly been used to block discussion (post-Civil War) of Civil Rights legislation, although with World War I looming and German submarines regularly torpedoing U.S. commercial ships, President Woodrow Wilson wanted Congress to appropriate money to arm some of those Merchant Marine ships with anti-submarine depth charges.

    Southern members of Congress, led by House Majority Leader and notorious white supremacist Claude Kitchin (D-NC), opposed the measure because he and his southern buddies were still essentially fighting the Civil War and didn’t want to “further enrich Wall Street.”

    Over a dozen of Kitchin’s allies in the Senate declared a filibuster and President Wilson, furious, went to the public.

    The March 5, 1917 New York Times front page was filled all the way across the top with the screaming headline: ARMED SHIP BILL BEATEN; PRESIDENT ISSUES A STATEMENT SAYING WE ARE MADE ‘HELPLESS AND CONTEMPTIBLE,’ WITHOUT REMEDY UNTIL THE SENATE AMENDS ITS RULES; 33 SENATORS ALREADY PLEDGED TO END OBSTRUCTION.

    “The Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action,” stormed President Wilson. “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

    The nation erupted.

    Filibustering senators were burned in effigy in multiple states and newspapers across the nation called for their defeat in the next election. People were outraged. It was the talk of barbershops and Grange halls and the VFW.

    President Wilson demanded action, saying, “The remedy? There is but one remedy. The only remedy is that the rules of the Senate should be so altered that it can act…and save the country from disaster.”

    To resolve the crisis, Senator Thomas Walsh (D-MT) proposed what he called a “Constitutional Option.” His logic was straightforward.

    The Constitution:

    • Requires each body of Congress to reset or re-ratify its rules at the beginning of every Congress (every 2 years)
    • Requires Congress to conduct the people’s business in a republican fashion (by vote)
    • Requires elections every two years for 1/3 of the Senate, and the newer senators are freshly representing the most recent “will of the people”
    • Therefore anything that can permanently block the Senate from doing any constitutionally-mandated business is blocking republican democracy and thus the will of the people in violation of the spirit, if not the text, of the Constitution itself

    Walsh laid it out clearly: “It is because the new members, coming fresh from the people, ought to have the right to be heard and be accorded the opportunity to vote in the light of information gleaned at every stage of the passage of a bill or resolution.”

    A filibuster that couldn’t be overcome, Walsh said, effectively blocked “[t]he sense of the people … concerning measures passed as well as those proposed.”

    The Senate re-convened and passed Walsh’s “Constitutional Option,” putting it into the Senate’s rules later that week so, going forward, a 2/3rds supermajority of senators could overcome a filibuster so the Senate could resume business.

    In response, Americans stopped burning senators in effigy and America entered World War I the following month.

    Over the years since, the 2/3rds requirement was reduced to 3/5ths, senators can now invoke a filibuster with an email, and “two-track” was introduced so filibusters don’t slow down other senate business, but the filibuster remained.

    In 1980, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-TN) amended the “Constitutional Option” to exclude taxing and spending legislation from being filibustered.

    His rationale was that, because spending money to do the nation’s business is a defined responsibility of Congress in Article I of the Constitution, taxing and spending legislation (within limits) could ignore the filibuster and be passed with a simple majority vote.

    Today we call this “Budget Reconciliation” or just “reconciliation” and it’s been used over 25 times.

    The 1917 “Constitutional Option” — that a filibuster could be overcome with a supermajority vote — stands to this day, but using the Constitution as a rationale for blowing holes in the filibuster like the Senate did in 1917 and 1980 got a name change more recently.

    Seventeen years ago, in 2003 when Democrats were filibustering one of George W. Bush’s judges, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott renamed the Constitutional Option as the “Nuclear Option” and suggested it should be expanded from just Article I work (taxing and spending) to include Article III types of work (approving judges).

    Senator Lott didn’t get his way; it took Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include approving federal judges (with the exception of the Supreme Court) under the Constitutional Option/Nuclear Option. On November 21, 2013, after years of Obama’s judicial nominations being routinely blocked by Republican filibusters, Reid pushed through a new set of Senate rules that exempted judges from the filibuster.

    Approving judges, after all, is also an explicit duty of the United States Senate found in the Constitution.

    Mitch McConnell expanded the Constitutional Option/Nuclear Option in April of 2017 when Democrats declared an intent to filibuster Trump’s first SCOTUS nominee, Neal Gorsuch, who replaced Merrick Garland as the nominee-in-waiting when President Obama’s term in office expired.

    Thus, today the Senate has an exclusion to the filibuster so that all the Senate’s advise and consent obligations can be performed with regard to judges with a simple majority vote.

    Thus, two of the duties of the Senate listed in the Constitution — appropriating and spending money, and ratifying the President’s judicial nominees — are today exempt from the filibuster.

    It’s time to add a third.

    The Elections Clause of the Constitution empowers Congress to “make or alter” state regulations with regard to elections.

    If the filibuster itself can’t be done away with or turned into a “Jimmy Stewart filibuster,” then — argues Congressman Jim Clyburn — another constitutional obligation of Congress should be included in the “Constitutional/Nuclear Option”: laws, this one to protect citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

    “We need to get rid of the filibuster for constitutional issues,” Clyburn said, “just as we have done for budget issues. If you want to argue about how high a wall ought to be, whether or not you ought to build a wall, those are issues that are political… but you ought not be filibustering — nobody should filibuster anybody’s constitutional rights. We have done it for the budget under reconciliation. And reconciliation is a much better word to apply to constitutional issues than it is to the budget.”

    Clyburn is right. As Thomas Paine pointed out, the right to vote is foundational to all other rights and is what gives legitimacy to our government itself. In 1795, in his Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, Paine wrote:

    “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more in the choice of representatives. … To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. The proposal therefore to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property.”

    Paine was right, as is Clyburn. Senator Schumer, if he can’t get his caucus to go along with more forceful actions like eliminating the filibuster altogether, should do what his predecessors Senators Baker (1980), Reid (2013) and McConnell (2017) did: drill another “Constitutional” hole in the filibuster.

    The right to vote is far more important than Congress spending money or approving judges. It deserves at least equal treatment, and, like in 1917, the crisis is upon us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Attack on “Critical Race Theory” Deploys a Dangerous Fiction of Neutrality

    A white hand erases color-treated photos of protest movements

    In the summer of 2020, amid uprisings against racism and calls to defund the police, right-wing writer Christopher Rufo appeared on Fox News to sound the alarm about “critical race theory.”

    Rufo framed the academic field as a conspiracy that aimed to use analyses of structural racism and white privilege to undermine the American republic. Critical race theory, he said, “pervaded every institution in the federal government” and “is now being weaponized against the American people.” The implication was that the movement against the police could not have sprung up as a response to a state that abandoned its people in a pandemic and continued to subject them to horrendous violence. Instead, Rufo offered an explanation that was more palatable to Fox News’s audience: Critical race theory had generated these protests, and it was responsible for what Fox News viewers would see as “violent” crime and wanton property destruction.

    Watching his show that evening was then-President Donald Trump, who took swift action. Two days later, his budget chief worked toward canceling all governmental diversity trainings. In the fall, the federal government issued an executive order that aimed “to promote unity” and “to combat anti-American race and sex stereotyping.” Fifty-six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government worked to roll back what little effort it had put into ending both racism and sexism, all under the guise of combating “critical race theory.”

    In actuality, critical race theory is a subgenre of legal studies that emerged in the 1970s and that plumbs the ways in which race and gender structure U.S. laws and policies, excluding some and granting rights to others. But Rufo, Trump and the right wing are not really focused on critiquing this academic field. They want, instead, to stir up a moral panic as a means of gaining further control over public institutions and of winning local and state elections. Attacking the idea of “critical race theory” — which, in the context of right-wing media, seems to mean whatever the critics want it to mean — is a means to an end.

    “The goal,” Rufo tweeted recently, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Or, as he later said, he aimed to turn “it into a salient political issue with a clear villain”: leftists, as well as Black Lives Matter, anti-fascists, and all the other specters the right claims endanger U.S. democracy. Many on the right decided to follow his lead. With all their talk of racism and sexism, Rufo and his ilk claimed, these critical race theorists undermined the Republic’s originary creed that “all men are created equal,” except, of course, enslaved people, women, Indigenous people, and many others.

    Rufo’s “decodification” has been by and large successful. David Theo Goldberg, who has contributed to critical race theory, was mailed a document that described the field as “hateful fraud” that claims “you are only your race” and that descends from the thought of “such hate promoters as Marx” — but the attack on critical race theory has also come to target writers who cover race in other ways (beyond the critical race theory field), like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It also counts among its targets diversity trainings, public school educators teaching about racism, and more. In short, critical race theory has come to stand in for any discussion of race that might imply that racism or sexism has continued in any form and that some people today benefit from either — a low bar if ever there was one.

    The right’s assaults on this way of thinking has focused primarily on education. Take, for instance, House Bill 1532, introduced in Pennsylvania, which states that, “No instructor, teacher or professor at a public school district or public postsecondary institution shall require a student to read, view or listen to a book, article, video presentation, digital presentation or other learning material that espouses, advocates or promotes a racist or sexist concept.”

    What exactly is being banned here rests on one’s premade assumptions about what constitutes racism or sexism. Does this ban the teaching of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia because it glorifies white supremacy, or does it ban analyzing the ways in which the text depends on and disseminates racist ideas? The answer, of course, is the latter: This legislation would seek to ignore the ways in which the past continues to harmfully shape our present. Those who’ve advanced this bill characterize admissions of the existence of white supremacy as “racism” and, in particular, as being racist against white people. Just as right-wing attacks on “cancel culture” purport to be in defense of “free speech” but actually aim to control who can say what, so too do these bills purport to end racism and sexism, but in reality, hope to advance a racist and sexist agenda.

    Most frustratingly, these efforts are bearing fruit. A week after Oklahoma’s governor signed a bill banning critical race theory from being taught, for instance, an Oklahoma Community College course on race and ethnicity was canceled. By the instructor’s own account, she never used the words “critical race theory” in the class. But that didn’t matter. Her class was a casualty in a broader effort to use local Republican control over states to advance a more racist and sexist curriculum and to ratchet up a McCarthyist hunt for leftists.

    This is especially frustrating because structural racism and sexism continue to pervade schools. Any number of scholars on education can point to numerous ways in which schools continue to harm Black, Indigenous, poor, women, transgender, disabled and otherwise marginalized students. And both of us, in southern Illinois and northern Florida respectively, were taught that the Civil War was a war of northern aggression centered on state’s rights. Education has by no means been a utopian oasis, free of “bias.” In response to those challenging education’s hierarchies and to their limited gains, Republicans today seek to legislate a racist and sexist curriculum. Educators have fought for an inch, and Republicans seek to set them back a mile.

    Having already dismantled Social Security and public housing, among other governmentally funded institutions, Republicans now aim to exert control over some of our last remaining public institutions: public schools and colleges. The Republican attacks on critical race theory are of a piece with the coordinated assaults against transgender youth, teachers’ unions and socialism, as well as attacks on teaching evolution and advocating for prayer in the classroom. They descend from a long history of right-wing assaults on education that extend from the post-Reconstruction era to the Red Scare purges of left-wing teachers and the protracted resistance to desegregation. In the end, the attack is not merely a culture war, but rather a mode of leveraging control of public institutions. As Republicans well know, these assaults have long-lasting effects and can affect schools long after local legislators leave office. They damage not only the present, in other words, but also the future.

    Such attacks also aim to shore up a base for electoral victories. The raucous scenes of right-wing protesters interrupting school board meetings and the sheer number of school board recall elections remind us that their campaign against critical race theory is not simply a harmless panic. It is also an effective means of galvanizing political organization, which has the appearance of arising from the grassroots, even though it actually descends from a robustly funded, top-down, national effort. The Republican gambit is to use an attack on critical race theory to stir up their base to stay electorally engaged, and if they limit the livelihood of those outside their constituency, so much the better.

    This attack cannot be thwarted merely by rebutting the fallacy at the heart of the terms, because this effort to win future elections and control public institutions is not actually about critical race theory. That the conservative base is mobilizing around a movement which they misrepresent is beside the point. Instead, political organizers and constituents must continue to push for local change. Republicans in a number of states have, for too long, used dominance over local legislatures to advance draconian agendas and undermine federal and municipal progressive policies. Wresting back control over local governments is necessary not only in the battle against the gutting of public education, but also in the struggle against voter suppression, incarceration, and more.

    This work must be coalitional. In the case of the current assault on so-called critical race theory, we must build a base in the trenches by organizing alongside those who are directly being targeted — student and teacher, young and old — by the right. We must support the young people whose daily lives largely take place in schools and the teachers’ unions in what is, for them, a labor struggle about the kind of work they get to do and the conditions under which they work. And we must run school board and superintendent candidates that advance actual anti-racist policies. This effort must be undertaken on the ground, even as it keeps an eye to national and international politics.

    To do so, we must mobilize in a way that can clearly articulate the importance of maintaining a system of public education which robustly grapples with the real, material forces that drive social, civic and political life in this country.

    Thankfully, some of this work is already happening. In Philadelphia, where we both live, teacher-led groups like the Caucus of Working Educators and youth-led organizations like the Philadelphia Student Union and UrbEd have challenged the ongoing assault on students of color, trans people and women in local schools.

    And nationally, groups like Black Lives Matter at School and Education for Liberation Network have worked to empower teachers in their effort to challenge racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Their work recognizes that education itself is never values-neutral. They emphasize, in other words, what the actual field of critical race theory sought to detail: how the language of neutrality obscures its own power and dominance. Unearthing and challenging that violence is but one necessary step to stymying the backlash against last year’s wave of antiracist organizing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • To Protect Themselves From Heat Waves, the Working Class Needs to Get Organized

    A construction worker carries a 24-pack of bottled water over his shoulder on June 14, 2021 in Los Angeles, where an early season heat wave was in full swing across much of California.

    The end of June saw temperatures soar all around the United States, with historic heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest and excessive heat advisories, watches and warnings elsewhere. The heat is not just uncomfortable, it’s deadly, buckling roads and melting bridges, with temperatures climbing over 120 degrees in Death Valley, California and British Columbia.

    While the 100 million computer workers in this country are more likely to be able to work safely indoors, other urgent and necessary work must continue outdoors, no matter the severity of the weather. The entirety of the working class is (or will be) affected by climate change, but it’s farm workers, letter carriers, construction workers, sanitation workers and other outdoor workers who are unable to escape to air conditioning, and are on the front lines of the environmental crisis. This clarifies the fight against climate change as one not just for environmentalists: Rising temperatures are a workplace safety issue. Relatedly, there is growing awareness among climate activists that workers’ rights and the future of the climate are inextricably linked. Continuing to connect these two existential issues is our best shot at a livable world in which we can all work safely and with dignity.

    Between 1992 and 2017, at least 815 workers in the U.S. were killed and more than 70,000 were injured from heat stress injuries. It’s likely that the true number of workers hurt or killed due to extreme heat is much higher than reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Many workers who labor outside — particularly agricultural workers and construction workers — are undocumented or otherwise vulnerable and precarious, and may not know to report illnesses to OSHA. And of course, their employers are likely to misclassify a heat-related death. As temperatures continue to rise year after year, we can guess that the number of heat stress injuries and deaths will rise too.

    On June 29, the United Farm Workers (UFW) slammed reports of heat-wave-related illnesses and deaths as ​“entirely preventable,” called on Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to protect farm workers by issuing emergency heat standards. (At least 63 people have died in Washington and Oregon since the heatwave began.) Even in perfect weather, farm workers do physically demanding labor for very low wages and no benefits. And according to Centers for Disease Control data from 2008, farmworkers already were perishing from heat at a rate of 20 times other civilian workers. Now temperatures have climbed to well over 100 degrees in the Pacific Northwest, and a farmworker in Oregon was killed by the heat on June 26. UFW rightly calls heat protections for workers ​“a matter of life and death.”

    And while farm workers may be among those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, they are not the only workers organizing for safety in our changing environment. After a member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) died after installing phone service for a customer in 100 degree heat in 2011, the union began negotiating over heat stress workplace standards. An International Union of Painters and Allied Trades local that represents political, nonprofit and campaign workers in the Pacific Northwest fought for heat and smoke safety to protect canvassers in their most recent collective bargaining agreement, which was signed in January 2021 after successive smoky summers due to multiple wildfires.

    Even those who work primarily inside have started organizing around these issues. Library workers in New York City bargained for a clause in their 2015 to 2020 contract entitled ​“operation of the library in the event of extreme temperatures,” requiring a temperature and humidity indicator on each level of the buildings, and compensatory time for staff who continue working in weather above 85 degrees and 44 percent humidity.

    As buildings get older with no federal investment to retrofit them, and as summers get hotter and hotter, there will be more pressure on electrical grids, potentially resulting in power outages. We can expect that even computer workers will be expected to work without air conditioning and in dangerous conditions. Amazon, run by the richest man in the world, forced warehouse workers in Washington to work in near-90-degree heat, because the company wasn’t equipped to deal with the current heat wave. (This is not the first time Amazon has allowed their workers to suffer in the heat—multiple workers have collapsed from heat-related causes.)

    Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced legislation to require OSHA to create and enforce standards to protect workers in extreme temperatures. (Currently OSHA has no specific standards around working in high-heat environments.) The legislation, entitled the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, is named for a 53-year-old farmworker who died after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105 degree heat in 2004. The act will require OSHA to establish measures like paid breaks in cool areas, access to water, limitations on time in the heat, and emergency response for illnesses caused by the heat. It will also ask that employers provide training for employees on how to recognize the potential risk factors of working in extreme heat, and ways to respond to symptoms if and when they arise.

    While this legislation is important and timely, most workers in this country lack the true ability to safely advocate for themselves in the workplace. Thanks to our backwards labor laws, union density hovers around 11% nationwide, even though unions’ approval ratings are in the clear majority. If workers want to be in charge of their own health and safety, it’s imperative that we pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which will allow workers the ability to unionize without fear of retaliation. (Disclosure: This author has been involved in organizing to pass the PRO Act.) Unionized workplaces are safer than non-union workplaces: They are 30% more likely to face an inspection for a health and safety violation, because union members are more likely to know their rights and have the ability to fight for them. (Unionized workplaces are also much more likely to have health and safety committees, which exist for the sole purpose of ensuring the workplace is safe.) And of course, unions are why we even have OSHA, thanks to the leadership of beloved and dearly remembered labor leader Tony Mazzocchi.

    Environmentalists, long seen as either opposed to workers or just apathetic to their plight, have begun to realize that without a strong working-class movement, there’s no real hope of fighting climate change. And with Biden’s deeply disappointing infrastructure legislation, we’re going to need a base of millions to push for a much more aggressive plan to fight climate change. That’s why the Green New Deal Campaign Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America went all in on pushing for the passage of the PRO Act. Unions don’t just protect members’ health and safety in the workplace, they have the ability to turn regular people into political actors with the skills and tools to fight for a dignified life both on and off the job. As workers feel the growing effects of climate change at work and at home, they’ll need to fight their employers for health and safety protections, and they’ll also need to go to battle with the politicians and fossil fuel executives who have allowed temperatures to rise so drastically.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Head of Dam-Building Company Convicted in Murder of Activist Berta Cáceres

    Environmental activists gather in front of the Office of American States in honor of prominent indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, on April 5, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

    Catastrophic climate change is heating the planet, shattering records from Siberia to California, fueling wildfires, droughts and hurricanes. Yet, land and water defenders fighting to save the planet face threats ranging from intimidation to imprisonment to assassination.

    In Honduras, Berta Cáceres was a leader of the indigenous Lenca people’s campaign to stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, which they consider sacred. She was gunned down in her home on March 2nd, 2016. Seven men who carried out the execution were convicted, but the person who ordered the killing escaped justice — until this week. On Monday, the Honduran Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, found Roberto David Castillo guilty of ordering the murder of Berta Cáceres. Castillo was the head of Desarrollos Energeticos or DESA, the company that was trying to build the dam. He was a 2004 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and a Honduran military intelligence officer. His conviction won’t bring Berta Cáceres back, but it might deter similar attacks and ultimately save lives.

    Honduras has long been a virtual colony of the United States, providing bananas, coffee, and minerals for export, produced with cheap labor that has created one of the greatest gaps between rich and poor anywhere in the world. Honduras has also been a base of operations for the U.S. military and CIA, from the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala to the Contra forces in the 1980s when the U.S. attempted to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

    After he was elected in 2006, former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, despite being a member of the elite, promoted populist, progressive policies, like an increase in the minimum wage. On June 28, 2009, Zelaya was ousted in a coup d’état. Since then, corrupt, U.S.-backed rightwing presidents have ruled Honduras, prioritizing privatization of public resources and multinational corporate profiteering. Mass unemployment and increasingly violent criminal gangs have added to the already dire conditions there, driving tens of thousands to seek the safety of asylum in the United States.

    A vigorous grassroots resistance movement has grown in Honduras, led by workers and indigenous communities. Berta Cáceres co-founded COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation of Honduras, in 1993. In 2006, she began organizing against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, successfully driving out DESA’s key partner, Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam builder. Cáceres was honored for her leadership in 2015 with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Less than a year later, she was dead. In the wake of her murder, DESA’s international funding partners backed out of the project, and the dam remains unbuilt.

    “Berta Cáceres was someone who called out Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration constantly,” Pitzer College professor Suyapa Portillo, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “She used to say Honduras is a laboratory for what the U.S. wants to do in other countries, not just in Latin America.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the overthrow of Zelaya without publicly calling it a coup. In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden met with the first coup president, Porfirio Lobo, reaffirming the “long and close partnership” between the two countries. Biden was supported on that trip by his advisor Tony Blinken, who is now Secretary of State.

    Honduras’ current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, has been implicated in the cocaine trafficking for which his brother Tony Hernández is currently serving a life sentence in prison.

    “The role of the U.S. in Honduras and the reason we’re critical of it is because it has been a role of extractivism, of racial capitalism,” Suyapa Portillo added. “A role that has never been about respecting the sovereignty of Honduras or other Central American nations…We’re seeing more of the same.”

    The environmental/human rights group Global Witness, in its most recent annual report on attacks against land and water defenders, found at least 212 of these front line activists were killed in 2019, and that, as the climate crisis intensifies, so do attacks on defenders. Honduras was fifth on the list, with the highest per capita rate for murder of environmental activists in the world.

    In her 2015 Goldman Prize acceptance speech, Berta Cáceres said,

    “In our worldviews, we are beings who come from the Earth, from the water and from corn. The Lenca people are ancestral guardians of the rivers, in turn protected by the spirits of young girls, who teach us that giving our lives in various ways for the protection of the rivers is giving our lives for the well-being of humanity and of this planet.”

    The cost of preserving life should not be death. As the climate emergency intensifies, we all have a responsibility to protect front line defenders like Berta Cáceres.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The US Government Wants Palestine to Fade From View. Don’t Let It.

    Palestinian children release balloons as a message to the international community calling for the reconstruction of Gaza, end of siege, a safe and dignified life in the Gaza Strip on July 7, 2021.

    After this much time, you can predict the mainstream news coverage when it comes to Israel-Palestine. The headlines move in well-worn cycles. During periods of overt, physical violence in the region, the world pays attention. When the conventional violence recedes, so does that attention. Whenever it feels as though we are inching toward a precipice of some kind, shuffling however slowly toward change, the horizon blurs and it all fades from the headlines once again.

    While missiles in flight and buildings collapsing to rubble make for engrossing evening news, the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine is far more quotidian in nature. When the explosions stop, the occupation remains. Recently, the Israeli government began demolishing Palestinian properties in Silwan, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, in order to make space for a religious theme park. The baseline violence of everyday life is a malignant force of oppression that undergirds everything else. But it’s not worth prime coverage, apparently. Much less, outrage.

    This time around, it felt like there was a shift in the discourse; it felt like the calls for Palestinian liberation were finally expanding beyond activist circles and independent outlets to a broader subset of the American populace. It suddenly felt a bit less fringe and sacrosanct to criticize the Israeli government. Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, both stated that Israel is guilty of practicing apartheid. Ali Velshi on MSNBC and John Oliver on HBO, among others, echoed those sentiments.

    Though the conflation of critiquing Israel with critiquing Judaism is still alive and well — as I can attest being called a “self-hating Jew” and worse over and over again for the last month — many of the conversations I’ve had recently have been far more productive than ever before.

    Social media has certainly helped democratize coverage, and the various movements for social and racial justice that have risen to prominence in the U.S. appear to have increased our collective awareness around oppression, and strengthened our wherewithal to fight it. Even so, since the ceasefire — which, it should be noted, held for less than a month as Israel launched air raids on Gaza again on June 15 — Palestine has once again faded to the background in mainstream media spaces. And the Biden administration is undoubtedly thrilled about this predictable development because it means they, like their predecessors, can maintain “business as usual,” without having to answer for the inherent brutality of that business.

    No modern U.S. president has been particularly tough on Israel. Eisenhower threatened to withhold $100 million in aid when Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. Carter openly supported a homeland for Palestinians and brokered the Camp David Accords. Clinton oversaw the Jordan-Israel peace treaty and was in office during the Oslo Accords. George W. Bush refused to sell Israel bunker-buster bombs, was allegedly “frosty” about funding the Iron Dome, and condemned an Israeli air strike on Gaza. Obama was accused of being anti-Israel for stating that the illegal settlements expanding in the West Bank made it difficult for a two-state solution, and abstaining from a UN resolution vote calling for Israel to cease construction in the West Bank.

    Then there was Donald Trump, who stated he would be “history’s most pro-Israel U.S. president.” And through a certain lens, he absolutely was. He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the U.S. embassy there. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. He cut aid to Palestine. He helped broker the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu said Trump was the “greatest friend” that Israel has ever had in the White House, and he used Trump in campaign posters in 2019. That same year, it’s worth noting, research by the Pew Research Center found that out of 33 countries surveyed, Israel was the only country where a majority (55 percent) approved of Trump’s foreign policies.

    But regardless of what some U.S. presidents have said, their actions told a different story. The money, the weapons and the vetoes of UN resolutions kept on flowing. In 1981, the United States provided Israel with just over $2 billion in aid. That total has steadily increased in the subsequent decades and now sits at $3.8 billion, which is part of a decade-long, $38 billion deal signed in 2016. It’s the largest U.S. military aid deal ever signed. Since 1972, the United States has blocked at least 53 UN resolutions against Israel. The U.S. also sells Israel more weapons than any other nation, accounting for 70.2 percent of its arms purchases. As buildings were crumbling to dust in Gaza, the Biden administration approved a $735 million arms sale to Israel.

    When violence escalated in May, President Biden, the “good cop” on Israel during the Obama administration, not only refused to publicly call for a ceasefire himself, but opposed the UN Security Council’s attempt to do so. Biden has effusively praised Israel for decades, stating in 1986, “Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” Thus, it is not surprising that during the recent violence, his administration robotically repeated that Israel has a right to defend itself, over and over while refusing to comment on whether or not Palestinians had that same right. It appears that, in this administration’s eyes, the occupier can defend itself from the occupied, but not the other way around. This rhetoric is nothing new. It has been the default status for U.S. presidents since the occupation began.

    Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which the United Nations continually stated constitute a flagrant violation of international law, have been growing for over five decades.

    Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the number of Israelis living in occupied territories ballooned from 115,700 to over 600,000. That’s a 418 percent increase. The Oslo agreement was intended to mark an end to settlement expansion, a gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and eventually the creation of a Palestinian state — though much of that was implied rather than explicitly stated. Of course, none of it ever happened. And after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far right, ultranationalist Israeli, and Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party rose to power, the prospect of peace disintegrated entirely.

    As the settlements expanded, the military rule that governs the Palestinian neighborhoods situated between and around the Israeli settlements grew all the more draconian and oppressive.

    Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, do not have access to the same water supply, the same roads, the same electrical grids, the same food sources. Since the beginning of the occupation, another clear violation of international law, Order No. 101, has been in effect. The broad rule prohibits Palestinians from any assembly of 10 or more people that might be viewed as political in nature. This includes things like vigils and processions. The rule also prohibits Palestinians from publishing any political material without prior approval from the Israeli military. Violating Order No.101 is punishable with up to 10 years in prison.

    There are over 592 checkpoints and roadblocks that restrict the movement of Palestinians that Israeli Jews can pass right by. And due to a devastating blockade, life in Gaza is far worse than life in the West Bank. It is a densely populated, open-air prison with poisoned water, rationed electricity and a health care system that has been on the brink of collapse since the blockade began. Forty-five percent of the people who live in Gaza are under 15 years old and it is reduced to rubble on a fairly regular basis. Nearly every aspect of Palestinian life in the occupied territories is defined and controlled by the Israeli military.

    Joe Biden and the majority of lawmakers in the U.S. don’t want to talk about the occupation or the settlements. We must make them talk about it. We must use this momentum to fight for real peace, not the illusion of it. They want Palestine to remain in the background, we need to push it back to the foreground. This administration appears to want the region to hold its current trajectory. But it should be clear to everyone at this point that the situation is not only inhumane, but entirely unsustainable.

    The United States is directly supporting a country administering a widespread ethnonationalist project punctuated by a brutal military occupation. Our money is funding oppression. Our money is being used to sustain a system that is a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

    Activists and NGOs have done everything they can to keep the Palestinian cause alive for decades, from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to offering medical and nutritional relief, fighting for clean water, providing educational opportunities and medical care, and starting youth arts programs. All of those organizations need continued support, but they are facing a powerful military backed by an imperial superpower with boundless influence and a military budget larger than the next 10 countries combined. As long as the United States continues to offer unconditional support for Israel, the occupation and all its associated abuses will continue. Again, we the tax-paying public of the United States are funding this. That’s why it’s imperative for Americans to continue to speak out.

    This is an issue of human rights. If you care about oppression, justice and freedom, then you should care about Palestine — and not only when missiles are pirouetting through the sky. Sustained peace in the region means an end to the occupation.

    This time around, let’s not let Palestine fade from the front page.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Could Other Condos Collapse Like Surfside? Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Care to Know.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, visit a memorial to those missing outside the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building that partially collapsed on July 3, 2021, in Surfside, Florida.

    One of the coolest stories I’ve ever heard is about a bank building that was constructed back in the Carter administration. Snuggle up and I’ll tell it as I heard it, but be advised: All of this is really about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the political party he seeks someday to lead, but only if a famously truculent occasional resident (and recently defeated president) decides to spit the bit. Trust me; it all comes around in the end.

    In 1977, the skyline of New York City was graced with the arrival of a new and refreshingly unique building. Designed by architects Hugh Stubbins, Emery Roth & Sons and structural engineer William LeMessurier, the Citigroup Center — formerly the Citicorp Center, and known to most as the “Citibank Building” — stands out from the crowd in that packed cityscape.

    Gleaming white, with its unique roof peaked at a 45-degree angle, the Citibank building was constructed on huge stilts that make up the bottom nine floors of the structure; the builders chose stilts to accommodate the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, which occupied a corner of the building’s footprint on the ground level.

    “Nine-story stilts suspend the building over St. Peter’s church. But rather than putting the stilts in the corners, they had to be located at the midpoint of each side to avoid the church,” reported Slate in 2014. “Having stilts in the middle of each side made the building less stable, so LeMessurier designed a chevron bracing structure — rows of eight-story V’s that served as the building’s skeleton. The chevron bracing structure made the building exceptionally light for a skyscraper, so it would sway in the wind. LeMessurier added a tuned mass damper, a 400-ton device that keeps the building stable.”

    The Citibank Building was a true feather in the caps of its designers and constructors, until a year later, when a junior staffer of LeMessurier received a telephone call from an undergraduate architecture student Diane Hartley. Hartley told the staffer that, if her calculations were correct, the Citibank Building was unstable, especially in what are called “cornering winds” — winds that strike the corners of the structure rather than face on. In a high enough wind, the building would collapse.

    LeMessurier investigated, and sure enough, Hartley was right: The building was vulnerable to collapse in high wind, and hurricane season was coming. What followed was one of the quietest and most effective all-hands-on-deck emergency operations in the history of engineering, beginning with the most important moment: LeMessurier chose to act, and not duck his responsibilities.

    The building had to be reinforced, but in a way that did not cause panic for the thousands of people who lived and worked in the radius of where the 59-story, 915-foot structure might fall. If it went down sideways, the ensuing catastrophe would be unspeakable.

    “LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs,” reported Slate. “With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby, and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye on potential windstorms. They welded throughout the night and quit at daybreak, just as the building occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella was racing up the eastern seaboard.”

    If you’ve never heard this story before, there’s a reason: The day after the press got a whiff of the operation, workers at every major New York City newspaper went on strike. By the time they resumed work, the crisis had been averted, and the Citigroup Center now stands as one of the strongest and most structurally sound buildings on Earth.

    Super-cool, right? Tell that to DeSantis.

    “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that condominiums in Florida are ‘kind of a dime a dozen, particularly in southern Florida,’” reports The Tampa Bay Times, “but he would not commit to any state action to address concerns about the aging buildings, suggesting that Champlain Towers South ‘had problems from the start.’ Speaking after a briefing on Tropical Storm Elsa at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, the governor would not say if he supports calls to require that aging buildings throughout the state be re-certified to assure residents of their structural integrity in the wake of the deadly collapse of the 136-unit high rise in Surfside.”

    Workers at the ruins of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, have officially abandoned hope of finding anyone alive in the mass of rubble. It is now a recovery mission. The confirmed death toll stands at 54, with 86 people still unaccounted for. Some days ago, one of the rescue workers was required to identify his young daughter when her body was found by a coworker in the wreckage.

    A dime a dozen, Governor DeSantis? There are dozens of buildings just like Champlain Towers in and around the Miami-Dade region, and those that were built 40 years ago — as Champlain Towers was — went up in an era when building codes and safety measures took a deep back seat to speedy construction and maximized profit. How about a dime for every one of the dead, now and to come?

    Here is your Republican Party, friends and neighbors, in the guise of one who would lead it. A glaring problem with a tangible fix is elbowed aside in favor of laws banning critical race theory and blocking people of color from the voting booth. The party is so consumed with keeping its base riled by way of culture war fights that they have — for a very long time now — utterly forgotten how to govern.

    Maybe they never knew. Maybe they just don’t care, until another 150 people get killed when a second shabbily constructed building — sitting on sand in a state that will likely be underwater by the time my daughter retires, if not well before — comes crashing down to earth, then a third and a fourth. There will be more pious words, and the dodge will begin anew.

    The rescue of the Citibank Building should be a lesson for Florida and its “What, me worry?” governor. Flawed buildings can be fixed and lives can be saved, but only if authorities choose to act.

    But hey, what am I talking about, right? Citibank happened back when this country actually did stuff to help itself. Here in the U.S., we’re not really down with that anymore. Instead, we wait for the other shoe — or building — to drop, so our “leaders” can offer thoughts and prayers while preening for the cameras with the dust of disaster dulling the polish on their shoes.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mitch McConnell Says Bipartisanship Is “Over.” Believe Him.

    Mitch McConnell

    The seemingly ceaseless Biden administration push to find bipartisanship in the piranha pool of Congress is going to have to deal with Rep. Chip Roy first. Roy, a Republican congressmember from Texas, was caught on hidden camera holding forth on the GOP’s plans for the long months between now and the 2022 midterm elections.

    Speaking specifically about the dual infrastructure proposals put forth by the administration, Roy made the Republican position abundantly clear. “Honestly, right now, for the next 18 months, our job is to slow all of that down until we get to December of 2022, and then get in here and lead,” said Roy. Responding to a later question about infrastructure, Roy dismissed the administrations proposals as “liberal garbage” before saying, “I actually say, ‘Thank the Lord. Eighteen more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done.’ That’s what we want.”

    Clearly, the “18 months” reference indicates this video was taken back in May, but absolutely nothing has changed in the intervening weeks. If you doubt this, look no further than Kentucky, home state of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell returned to the Bluegrass State for the two-week July 4 congressional recess to brag about the money Kentucky would get from the stimulus bill he voted against, and to promise that nothing else like that was coming if he had his way about it.

    NBC News national political reporter Sahil Kapur recently attended a question-and-answer session between McConnell and Kentucky voters. Either McConnell was channeling Chip Roy or Roy was channeling McConnell, but both of them appear to be reading from the same script.

    “[The stimulus bill] passed on a straight party line vote,” said McConnell. “So you’re going to get a lot more money. I didn’t vote for it, but you’re going to get a lot more money. Cities and counties in Kentucky will get close to $700-800 million. If you add up the total amount that’ll come into our state: $4 billion…. So my advice to members of the legislature and other local officials: Spend it wisely because hopefully this windfall doesn’t come along again…. We’ve floated entirely too much money.”

    As if that was not clear enough, McConnell went on to state, “And that’s why the era of bipartisanship on this stuff is over.” A blinking billboard on the White House lawn — NO! (blink) NO! (blink) NO! (blink) — could not be less subtle.

    Not that we needed further clues here. McConnell’s game plan has been vividly obvious for 13 years now, and he shows no signs of relenting just because President Biden’s approval ratings are high and his infrastructure proposals are wildly popular, even among Republican voters. That is not the game for Mitch, and make no mistake: For him, it is all a game.

    “McConnell’s 2016 memoir is called The Long Game. He plays it well,” wrote Peter Nichols in a recent Atlantic piece on the minority leader. “For McConnell, politics is sport. He’s won and lost and is now aiming to recapture his old title of Senate majority leader in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘If you’re a football fan, it’s like the difference between being the offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator,’ McConnell told me. ‘The offensive coordinator has a better chance to score.’”

    McConnell has pledged to cause the death of Biden’s infrastructure plans, not because he believes they are bad for the country, but because he flatly refuses to let “the other side” have anything close to a victory.

    McConnell’s best protection from any consequences for his actions lies in the elemental nature of his party. According to a swath of recent polls, a quarter of the U.S. population now qualify as “highly right-wing authoritarian.” Nearly half of Republicans believe state legislatures should have the power to overturn elections. Close to 40 percent of Republicans support acts of violence to “protect the country.” Some 70 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump is still the president, and 30 percent of them believe he will be returned to office somehow in August.

    These people are not going to punish McConnell for his intransigence, even if it causes them pain in their everyday lives. Biden’s mistake is emblematic of a broader misstep that impedes Democrats and liberals when they confront “fascists, authoritarians and other illiberal forces,” warns Salon’s Chauncey DeVega. “Yes, the economy and ‘class’ are important, but fascist movements are also fueled by dreams of a fictive past and a return to ‘greatness,’ power, and dominance for one’s social or demographic group.”

    That sounds exactly like Trump’s campaign platforms from 2016 and 2020. If he runs in 2024, it will be his platform once again. This is the monster in the room, and McConnell is prepared to ride it for as long as he can stay in the saddle.

    A recent announcement by the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus — five Democratic senators and five GOP senators — endorsed a framework for the first half of Biden’s infrastructure plan that would not include new taxes, the version Biden will probably have to settle for if he wants any form of this legislation to see the daylight. The second half of the proposal — the “human infrastructure” bill filled with what Chip Roy calls “liberal garbage” and what many of the rest of us call basic human needs — will pass by way of reconciliation or will not pass at all, period, end of file.

    I suspect the coming weeks may see McConnell doing a rope-a-dope on the first half of the infrastructure plan, the one the “Problem Solvers” have endorsed, before ultimately doing all he can to undermine and eventually kill it. While this should harden Democrats’ resolve to pass the second half by way of reconciliation — and perhaps, God willing, finally inspire them to try and dismantle the pestiferous filibuster — there will be no true bipartisanship anytime soon.

    That era is over. Mitch McConnell said so into a live microphone, and on such matters, I take him entirely at his word. Biden should stop fishing for these piranhas. All they want to do is eat him and his policies down to the bone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.