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Category: Op-Ed

  • In Echo of Trump, Boris Johnson Says UK Must “Learn to Live With” Rising COVID

    Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives an update on relaxing restrictions imposed on the country during the COVID-19 pandemic at a virtual press conference inside the Downing Street Briefing Room in central London on July 5, 2021.

    The United States is a “divided nation,” we have heard for many years. Red State vs. Blue State, conservative vs. liberal, Donald Trump devotees vs. basically everybody else. Rumbling fears of a future civil war have risen, due in large part to the violent, well-armed groups that have rallied to Trump’s tattered banner, the sacking of the Capitol Building by those groups six months ago to the day, and to police forces that seem to sympathize with them even as murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse shoot peaceful protesters down in the street.

    If matters continue as they are, however, a bright new line will be drawn between “Two Americas”: The Vaccinated vs. the Unvaccinated. Of course, these groupings don’t fall entirely along ideological lines. Millions of people remain unvaccinated for reasons that have nothing to do with the politics of the last president. Some people with precarious employment, undocumented immigrants and other marginalized groups face daunting barriers to receiving the shot even if they want it, and others (including some Black unvaccinated people) are legitimately wary after centuries of abuse at the hands of the medical industry. Children under 12 aren’t yet eligible for the vaccine.

    For millions of others, however, the issue of vaccination comes down to straight politics. A solid majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, and it is no quirk of statistics that most of the states with the lowest rates of vaccination are also the states that were carried by Trump in the election.

    COVID has become part of the so-called culture war in the U.S., and refusing the vaccine amounts to an oath of fealty to the former president they incorrectly believe was robbed. The absurdity of this practically bends the light — COVID damn near killed Trump on the eve of the 2020 election, and both he and his wife were vaccinated the following January — yet it remains a dominant force not only in the politics of the nation, but its health as well.

    President Biden’s plan to vaccinate 70 percent of the country by July 4 fell short, and a national effort is underway to reach those who have not yet gotten the shot. With the rise of the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19, the need for this is deeply pressing.

    Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” leading COVID expert Anthony Fauci revealed that “about 99.2 percent” of current COVID-related deaths are taking place among the unvaccinated. “The overwhelming proportion of people who get into trouble are the unvaccinated,” said Fauci. “Which is the reason why we say this is really entirely avoidable and preventable.”

    “COVID-19 cases are rising sharply in several states with low vaccine coverage, fueled by the spread of the coronavirus’s more transmissible Delta variant,” reports Sarah Zhang for The Atlantic. “In southwest Missouri, understaffed hospitals are already having to send COVID-19 patients hundreds of miles away. The same July 4 party that is very safe in Massachusetts is riskier in Missouri, where much more virus is circulating (15 new cases per 100,000 people a day) and many fewer adults are at least partially vaccinated (56 percent).”

    Indeed, Missouri has fast become a case study in how low vaccination levels can quickly spiral into another health catastrophe. For the first time since March, COVID hospitalizations in that state have gone over 900 a day for four straight days. Hospitals are again beginning to run out of life-preserving ventilators.

    Speaking directly to conservatives who refuse to participate in the vaccination process, West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice minced no words when he appeared on Sunday’s edition of “This Week” on ABC.

    “They really are in a lottery with themselves,” said Justice. “You know, we have a lottery that basically says, if you’re vaccinated we’re going to give you stuff. Red states probably have a lot of people that, you know, are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that,’ but they’re not thinking right. I hate to say this, but what would put them over the edge is an awful lot of people dying. The only way that’s going to happen is a catastrophe that none of us want. And so we just got to keep trying.”

    This divide not only threatens the U.S. It was deeply disquieting to learn that Great Britain, under the leadership of Trump clone Boris Johnson, is preparing to lift virtually all COVID safety strictures and leave the British people wide open to the caprices of the virus. “Learn to live with it” is the new catchphrase coming out of 10 Downing Street — which is, you may recall, exactly the tack Trump wanted to take from the beginning no matter the loss in lives — and it is a move fraught with peril.

    “Johnson foresaw all nightclubs, museums, concert halls, theaters and sports arenas to be allowed to operate without capacity limits or distancing measures,” reports The Washington Post. “After the reopening, the government will no longer press people to work from home if they can…. If you want to crowd into a packed bar in Soho and fight the scrum for a pint at the counter, the government says it is up to you to decide whether to mask. Though some buses, subways and taxis may ask riders to wear face coverings, the government said it would not legally enforce the measures. One newspaper called it ‘the big bang’ of reopenings.”

    This is far from the first time Johnson has lifted safety mandates, only to have COVID come barnstorming back in. The Delta variant is now the predominant strain of COVID in the U.K., and that country is already witnessing what could be called a third wave of infections: 25,000 new cases a day, with England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty warning that the number could balloon to 50,000 a day within two weeks.

    The U.S. witnessed a similar scenario last summer, when warmer weather, pandemic exhaustion and the demands of capitalism inspired several states to throw caution to the wind and reopen virtually everything. The end result of this was a fall and winter marred by horrific infection rates, the worst of any time during the crisis, and that was before the Delta variant emerged.

    Susan Michie, a psychologist and researcher at University College London and a member of the Johnson government’s SAGE committee of scientific advisers, said of the “learn to live with the virus” concept, “Allowing community transmission to surge is like building new ‘variant factories’ at a very fast rate.”

    “Rates of infection are continuing to increase,” said Bobby Morton of Unite, one of the country’s largest unions, “and not only does mask wearing reduce transmissions, it helps provide reassurance to drivers and to passengers who are nervous about using public transport. The idea of personal responsibility and hoping that people will wear masks is absolutely ridiculous, members are already reporting there is an increase in passengers ignoring the rules on mask wearing.”

    Sounds all too familiar.

    The endgame to this unfolding scenario, both here and in the U.K., appears to be a desperate one. In the fullness of time, some of those who have refused vaccinations may witness their communities being so thoroughly pummeled by the virus that they may finally acquiesce to getting the shot. By then, the death toll will have increased again, and in the meantime COVID will keep receiving its most coveted gift: a laboratory of humanity to grow new variants, one of which may penetrate our vaccination shield and render the last 16 months of misery moot.

    “We have to assume that’s going to happen,” says Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge. “The more infections are permitted, the more probable immune escape becomes.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Physicians Have a Duty to Confront the Exploitative Industry That Employs Them

    Registered Nurses conduct a demonstration held by National Nurses United (NNU) in Lafayette Park to read aloud names of health care providers who have contracted COVID-19 and died on April 21, 2020.

    As physicians and trainees, we take an oath to do no harm. While this orientation may have practical applications within individual treatment plans, it begs some questions: Why stop at the passive “do no harm” rather than actively confronting harm? What is the physician’s duty to their patients and communities they serve? What role can we have in addressing the structural violence that causes harm to patients, such as homelessness and displacement, food insecurity, or trauma from the police and the prison system?

    To adequately address these questions, we must make the ideological shift from neutrality to intentional, politicized community engagement to confront harm. Confronting harm can take many forms, including fighting back against corporations and pharmaceutical companies that prey on patients; working to end medical practices that serve as social control and exploit marginalized people; advocating for reparations and reinvestment in communities (including but not limited to health care infrastructure); resisting colonization and state-based repression, even in the face of institutional backlash; and fighting for the liberation of Indigenous communities, both in the United States and globally.

    One role the physician can take on when confronting harm is that of witness. Physicians are uniquely positioned to be witnesses to the physical and psychological manifestations of structural violence. In these cases, we must move beyond reactionary practices and begin to see patients’ concerns, symptoms and trauma as not just problems to diagnose but the outcomes of a larger sociopolitical context. It is important for us to not lose sight of the whole picture when dealing with everyday issues like struggling to provide care to a patient who cannot afford medication; while this is an opportunity to advocate for an individual patient, it is also important to note this instance as a manifestation of the harms inflicted by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. For many patients, their diagnosed diseases may also be in large part due to structural oppression, with food insecurity, environmental racism, and lack of access to services due to segregation and disinvestment leading to physical harm.

    On an interpersonal level, the physician can serve as a witness for patients and work to address these harms through treatment and care that centers the needs and lived reality of the patient. On a structural level, the physician must work to amplify the voices of the most marginalized rather than speaking on behalf of patients. This work must be community-aligned and in service of addressing the structural roots of oppression. The group Doctors 4 Camp Closure is a good example of physicians using their social capital to witness and confront inhumane detention of migrants and refugees who experience harm at the hands of the U.S. immigration prison system. Health Justice Commons is a group that centers the voices of those most impacted by the harms of the medical-industrial complex, and they call into question the lines and implicit hierarchies between providers, patients and community members. These are just some examples of the ways in which physicians can use their position as witness to drive structural change.

    A second role that physicians can take on, beyond bearing witness, is that of a worker for wages. As health systems continue to grow, most physicians are workers in an industry increasingly operated by large hospitals, health systems, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and medical technology companies. This nexus of health care capitalism allows for the exploitation not only of patients and communities, but also us as workers as well. There is a reason there is such severe physician burnout, and it comes to the lack of power we have to make the best decisions for care. These groups that hold power benefit from physicians not organizing as workers and demanding change collectively — health care workers lose power by not building together, and it takes away from the ability to advocate as effectively as we could for ourselves, our patients and communities we serve.

    While our wage work may demand that most of us work within large institutions to care for patients, we must make an active choice to align ourselves with the communities we serve over the institutions we work in. Aligning ourselves as a labor force opens radical possibilities of change by giving us greater bargaining power. Take the issue of police in hospitals and emergency rooms during the uprisings of 2020. Many physicians and health care workers took issue with the fact that the police could make arrests in the ER — individually, any one physician may not have the power to escalate this issue. An organized labor force would be able to draw the attention of health care administration and demand the removal of police in the ER and in the health system at large. Organizing collectively also protects workers from institutional backlash, as seen against health care workers who speak out openly in support of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

    This kind of organizing in health care is not new — the National Nurses Union (NNU) works because nurses see themselves as workers who are organizing for themselves and the patients and communities they serve. Just most recently, the NNU published a statement against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for the relaxing of the mask mandate. As witnesses to the devastation of COVID-19, and as workers concerned for their own health and wellbeing, they collectively fight for change. And while less common, resident unions exist in pockets across the country; however, as physicians move up through the hierarchy, those unions tend to disappear. As physicians move through their careers, it is crucial to keep in mind who benefits from doctors not aligning with one another and with other health care workers: hospital systems and corporations. Ultimately, it is crucial for the care of patients and the movement toward health justice that physicians align as workers and witnesses; if not, we will be complicit in the structural harms we claim to stand against.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Baltimore to Stop Prosecuting “Nonviolent” Crimes. Activists Say More Is Needed.

    Police cars are seen outside of the Baltimore City Police Headquarters in Baltimore on August 8, 2017.

    The pandemic, in the midst of its many horrors, has temporarily slowed the number of arrests across some U.S. cities. With pressure from advocates and incarcerated organizers, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg in Seattle, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois, and City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore pledged to curb or stop prosecuting “low level” crimes in attempts to minimize the spread of COVID-19. By 2018, newly reelected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had already directed his office to stop prosecuting sex work, marijuana possession and marijuana drug paraphernalia.

    Most of these prosecutors have strictly tied their commitments to the duration of the pandemic. However, in March 2021, the Baltimore City State Attorney’s Office (SAO) announced that it will permanently instate its COVID-19 policy. Moving forward, the office said it will decline to prosecute crimes categorized as nonviolent, including Controlled Dangerous Substance (CDS, or drug) possession, attempted distribution of CDS, paraphernalia possession, sex work, trespassing, minor traffic offenses, open container, rogue and vagabond, and urinating/defecating in public.

    “The policies enacted over the past year have resulted in a decrease in arrests, no adverse impact on the crime rate, and address the systemic inequity of mass incarceration,” Mosby’s office wrote in a press release. Within a year, the incarcerated population dropped by 18 percent and there was a 39 percent decrease in people entering the carceral system in Baltimore City, according to the release. In a comparison between March 13, 2020 and March 13, 2021, violent crime was down by 20 percent, and property crime was down by 36 percent in the city. The Baltimore Police Department press office told Truthout that its officers made 14,043 arrests in 2020, a 43 percent decline from 24,826 in 2019.

    It is unclear whether the sharp decline in incarceration rates was a function of Mosby’s policies, or the natural result of COVID-19 related shutdowns. Across the country, from mid-March to mid-April, jail populations decreased by a quarter. In 527 counties, jail populations decreased and stabilized in May, while 270 others crept back up to pre-pandemic levels and 454 never decreased substantially.

    Nevertheless, the announcement was welcomed by several local organizations, including the NAACP and the Baltimore Crisis Response, Inc., an organization that provides mental health services throughout the city.

    Others welcome the news, while remaining skeptical that the policies, in practice, are sufficiently reining in police power over marginalized communities. Brandon Soderberg, longtime Baltimore-based journalist and author of I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad falls into this category.

    “This policy on the ground — in court — is far more complicated and limited than it seems,” he told Truthout. “The ‘war on drugs’ is not over in Baltimore.”

    Despite originally announcing that her office would decline to prosecute attempted distribution of drugs, Mosby’s strategic policy and planning director told The Baltimore Sun that the office will still charge “drug sellers,” who are caught with evidence such as baggies, scales, packaging materials or large amounts of drugs. On June 24, the Baltimore Police department tweeted that, in collaboration with the SAO, it arrested and indicted at least five members of a “drug trafficking organization.”

    Since Mosby’s COVID-19 policy went into effect on March 18, 2020, there were 30 instances in which “possession with intent to distribute” or “attempted distribution” of a controlled substance was charged and not dropped, according to Zach Zwagil, a data analyst with Open Justice Baltimore. An additional two charges involving marijuana are still being prosecuted.

    Even if an individual’s charges are eventually dropped, people who are arrested for distribution or possession of drugs still face serious hardships.

    Of 527 bail review hearings involving “attempted distribution” and “intent to distribute” as the most serious charge since March 18, 2020, 398 resulted in held-without-bail rulings, according to Zwagil, meaning a defendant can’t leave jail until their case is resolved, which can take months or years. Within the same time frame, 32 of 35 hearings involving possession or attempted possession as the most serious charge resulted in held-without-bail rulings. In July 2020, The Appeal reported drug possession with the intent to distribute as one of the three most common charges for people denied bond.

    “Try to tell someone who say, spent a month or so in jail on charges that were dropped that they should still see Mosby as progressive,” said Soderberg.

    Bilphena Yahwon, a local organizer, similarly told Truthout that prosecutorial policies must be closely assessed from the courtroom. “A lot of people don’t see how a prosecutor’s policies and a prosecutor’s integrity and a prosecutor’s actual work is seen in the courtrooms — not in the press — but when you actually go into the courtroom, to see how it is functioning, you actually get a grasp of what a prosecutor is about.”

    On the ground reporting from Baltimore Courtwatch — a group that documents daily hearings in court — exposes the fine print. On June 25, the group reported that a person’s case was dismissed after they were held in jail for a year. One of the involved officers was facing felony charges, yet the SAO pursued the case, according to Courtwatch. On June 26, the group reported that an individual had been held for more than six months on drug only charges. Assistant State’s Attorney Tyler Morrison recommended they be held without bail and Judge Jones agreed. Another individual was held without bail on drug only charges for over 14 months before being released on recognizance in June 26.

    Baltimore Courtwatch also reports that the odor of marijuana is often used as a pretext for stop-and-search. Then, if police find an illegal weapon during the search, the individual is arrested and typically held without bail. Such stops can be lethal for Black people in Baltimore. Infamously, in 2015 Baltimore City Police forcefully stopped and arrested Freddie Gray, later claiming he had an illegal switchblade. Police partially severed his spine and he died a week later.

    “I would love to celebrate a prosecutor that is actually moving away from the carceral system, but that’s not so,” Yahwon said. “And we know that it’s impossible for prosecutors to actually not participate in the carceral system.”

    Courts are structured to dole out punishment and reinforce dominant hierarchies, not solve underlying problems. And prosecutors, with only one tool in their toolbox — punishment — have a tendency to become increasingly punitive over time, wrote lawyer-researchers Seema Gajwani and Max G. Lesser. Gajwani, who was hired to help advance juvenile justice reform under Attorney General Karl Racine for the District of Columbia, watched this happen. “While hiring progressive prosecutors may slow the rate of punishment at the beginning,” they wrote “it will not change the trajectory.” Timothy Silard, chief of policy to the San Francisco district attorney from 1996-2008 told Gajwani and Lesser that no amount of training could counter this increasingly punitive trend.

    Even if prosecutors declined to pursue all “nonviolent” cases, the ongoing realities of policing and arrest would persist.

    “Violent Crime” Framing Drives Mass Incarceration

    Freddie Gray, despite not harming anyone, would have been considered a “violent” defendant, had he survived. In the public imagination, violent crimes constitute sexual assault, domestic violence and murder. In reality, the label is fairly arbitrary. Possessing a gun without a permit is considered violent. Wiggling in handcuffs can be charged as assault on a police officer in Washington, D.C., a violent offense.

    So-called “progressive prosecutors,” such as Mosby, Foxx and Krasner often reify the “violent” and “nonviolent” dichotomy by arguing that police resources should be directed toward aggressively pursuing “violent” crime instead of charges like drug possession. Yet this framing is weaponized against communities who experience state-sanctioned violence daily.

    “The state has the job of deciding what they consider a violent crime versus what they don’t,” Yahwon said. “This word of ‘violent’ crime, I always want to break down because there are so many violent crimes that are being done against Baltimore citizens [by the state], specifically poor Black ones.”

    The case of Keith Davis Jr. is a tragic and poignant example. In 2015, Keith Davis Jr. was shot by Baltimore police officers after they said he attempted to rob a cab driver — a claim the driver disputed in court. Three of the officers’ 44 shots struck Davis, leaving his sinuses severely damaged. During trial, based on the Baltimore Police Department claim that a gun was recovered nearby, he was convicted of possessing a gun with a felony conviction. Davis’s lawyers argued that the gun was planted. (Baltimore Police Department Gun Trace Task Force was later federally indicted for stealing money, and dealing and planting drugs.) Days later, Mosby’s office charged him with the murder of Kevin Jones, who was killed near the scene where Davis was shot by police. The SAO failed to convict Davis during three separate trials. On the fourth try — a rare occurrence — he was convicted of second-degree murder. Baltimore Circuit Judge Sylvester Cox recently granted Davis a fifth trial based on new documents Davis’s attorney filed 14 months ago.

    The state did not consider firing 44 shots at Davis a violent crime, Yahwon, who organizes with the Free Keith Davis Jr. campaign, pointed out. “So now the question becomes, ‘Exactly what violent crimes are we prosecuting?’” she said. “Here we have four officers, one of them being Catherine Filippou, who was investigated by the FBI for using her badge to aid a drug trafficking ring, who has committed a violent crime, such as this one. And yet, Marilyn Mosby got to decide that she would not prosecute them. So once again, what discrepancies are we using when we say violent crime?”

    Maintaining this dichotomy to appear progressive, Yahwon says, is an example of prosecutors co-opting radical messaging to ultimately maintain the carceral system. Roughly half of the country’s prison population — nearly 1 million people — are incarcerated for crimes categorized as violent. Following racist “tough on crime” policies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, according to the Prison Policy Institute, the number of people with life sentences increased five-fold, from 34,000 in 1984 to 162,000 in 2016. Life imprisonment is comparatively rare to nonexistent in most European countries. And if the U.S. released everyone convicted of crimes categorized as non-violent tomorrow, it would still have an incarceration rate greater than most countries in the world.

    The rhetoric is laying the foundations for supplanting the “War on Drugs” with a “War on Guns,” which is more palatable for progressives.

    “The language and the logic of how Mosby claims to reduce homicides as an elected official, continues to be through talking up policing and incarceration,” said Soderberg. “And so, she’s trying to split the difference between being progressive on what she considers nonviolent crimes. But when it comes to anything that might suggest violence — including gun possession which is not ‘violent’ — she is very carceral.”

    The trend is national. In October 2020, the U.S. attorney announced that the DOJ would ramp up its prosecutions of firearms-related crimes, particularly against people arrested with a gun who have a prior criminal record. Biden has upheld this policy. According to the Philadelphia district attorney’s office data portal, firearm possession arrests have ballooned from 387 in 2015 to 709 in 2020 — a five-year record.

    A report by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that the confiscation of illegal guns through racist “stop-and-search” methods did not reduce rates of gun violence in Baltimore. The report did find that “highly focused enforcement of gun laws” and “focused-deterrence initiatives,” a strategy whereby police and members of the community work together to identify, surveil and sometimes offer social services to populations considered likely to commit violent crimes, reduced gun violence in some cases. The Prison Policy Initiative, a data-driven nonprofit investigating mass criminalization, doesn’t recommend such tactics, however, citing a report that found it associated with an increase in “intensive punitive enforcement efforts such as surveillance, investigations, arrests and intensified prosecutions.” Many abolitionists agree, arguing that police — as white supremacist and violent institutions — are the problem, not part of the solution and their involvement perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and poverty in the long-term.

    The carceral system is “built on genocide and colonialism, anti-Blackness and white supremacy,” said Yahwon. “Infiltrating it ain’t gon’ change it.” Approaches to “change the system from within,” such as the progressive prosecutor movement, can in fact sometimes thwart the aims of abolition, which is both a project of dismantlement and a creative process. “We have to build new structures, new things have to exist that are not connected to the old things that we had before,” Yahwon said. “When we infiltrate, we’re preventing the ability of the destruction of the old things to occur…. How can you dismantle something that you’re in?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Olympics Needs to End Restrictions on Free Speech of Athletes

    Gwendolyn Berry (left), turns away from U.S. flag during the U.S. national anthem on June 26, 2021 in Eugene, Oregon. In 2019, the USOPC reprimanded Berry after her demonstration on the podium at the Lima Pan American Games.

    An important debate is brewing about free speech at the Olympics. After years of the International Olympic Committee restricting the free expression of athletes at the Games, some prominent athletes are calling for the unlimited right to speak freely — including the right to protest.

    The advocates include Canadian decathlete Damien Warner, an Olympic bronze medallist in 2016, who has said: “If there’s something on their mind, then athletes should be allowed to speak.” The IOC, he said, is “on the wrong side of history.” The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Olympic Advisory Committee takes a similar view.

    In response, the IOC has relaxed its Rule 50 on “advertising, demonstrations and propaganda” to allow free speech in interviews and meetings, but has stood firm on the prohibitions against “political” statements on the field of play and during ceremonies. The committee threatens to punish any athlete who disobeys.

    Understanding Rule 50

    The IOC Athletes’ Commission supports Rule 50, saying it believes “the focus at the Olympic Games must remain on athletes’ performances, sport and the international unity and harmony that the Olympic Movement seeks to advance.”

    But another of the recommendations from the Athletes’ Commission, following a survey and consultation process, was to “increase opportunities for athletes’ expression during the Games.”

    “The feedback was that they didn’t want it to interfere with the competition itself, so ensuring that the competition itself was protected,” explained Rosie MacLennan, a double gold medallist in the trampoline and chair of Canadian Olympic Committee Athletes Commission.

    In worldwide polling, Rule 50 has won the support of the majority of athletes for this position. The Canadian Olympic Committee Athletes Commission has reported that 80 per cent of surveyed athletes supported the rule.

    Growing Athlete Activism

    The push for free speech is an artifact of growing athlete activism in recent years in response to racism in European soccer, the unrelenting police violence against Black people and other minorities in countries like the United States and Chinese human rights violations in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.

    At the 2019 Pan American Games in Peru, two American athletes, fencer Race Imboden and hammer thrower Gwen Berry, conducted silent protests against “racism, gun control, mistreatment of immigrants, and a president who spreads hate” back home.

    For many years, Rule 50 completely prohibited critical athletes’ statements or demonstrations at games — and sporting bodies compelled their athletes to comply and athletes went along with it.

    The style was epitomized by basketball superstar Michael Jordan, who famously avoided political statements “because Republicans buy shoes too.”

    When the Canadian skier Laurie Graham likened herself to a cruise missile flying down the hill to a World Cup victory, I asked her not to use a metaphor of death and destruction for a peaceful activity like sport. She quickly agreed, which thrilled me. But then she said that she didn’t want to get in trouble with her sponsors, who told her to avoid controversy.

    The Need to Speak Out

    As a competitor in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics who wrote a widely syndicated student newspaper column from the Olympic Village, I fully support the right to free speech. I have always believed that athletes should take responsibility for the circumstances and sports in which they are involved and they cannot do that without the right to speak out.

    Athletes should be able to wear personal signifiers, such as Indigenous sashes or rainbow fingernail polish, both of which have been allowed or banned from competitions and ceremonies at different times.

    Free speech is an internationally established human right. It’s not something that should be conferred or denied by a vote. The majority should never be able to silence the minority.

    I still subscribe to John Stuart Mills’ admonition that “if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

    The intercultural education cherished by the Olympic Movement would be enhanced by completely free speech. We can’t be hectoring others about what we believe, but we do need to be honest about who we are.

    I’ve spoken in China about athletes’ rights. While few agreed with me, no one was shocked. They listened. So did I. The IOC should embrace and support such interactions and tell authoritarian hosts that this is what the Olympics are about.

    What Will the Punishment Be?

    If some athletes still decide to protest in Tokyo or at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and are punished, that punishment will become the issue. I would be horrified by a repeat of 1968, when the IOC expelled U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos from the Mexico Olympics for protesting against poverty and racism from the victory podium — in effect banning them for upholding the Olympic aspirations.

    With all the challenges facing Tokyo and Beijing, it’s unlikely that Rule 50 will be reconsidered before both Games take place. But the issue won’t go away, and I would like to think the final restrictions will be abolished by the Paris Olympics in 2024.

    In the meantime, athletes like MacLennan, who regularly consults Canadian athletes, should take advantage of the opening provided by the IOC consultation to push for ongoing athlete engagement and athlete-centered reforms on an international basis — including much more significant athlete voice and vote on decision-making bodies.

    Once in-person meetings resume, athletes should revive the former practice of open meetings in the Olympic Village where they can introduce and discuss the issues most on their minds — including the geo-political issues that buffet the Games.

    If there was genuine opportunity for athletes to become involved in sport governance and public policy, there would be far less reason for them to demonstrate.

    Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, always saw the Olympics as a pedagogical project and athletes as the self-actualizing subjects of their activity and learning. If athletes are to learn, they need to learn to deal with political and intercultural issues and when and how to speak out.

    The IOC should embrace free speech as a contribution to its highest goals.The Conversation

    Bruce Kidd is an honorary member of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Anti-CRT Laws Seek to Divide Teachers’ Unions and the Struggle for Black Lives

    Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers join members of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and their supporters as they hold a demonstration outside LAUSD headquarters on Tuesday, June 23, 2020, in Los Angeles, CA.

    Republicans are fighting to limit the ways public school teachers talk to their students about U.S. racism. But the heads of teachers’ unions — like the AFT and the NEA — are refusing to organize workers to fight back.

    Over the last few weeks, Republicans passed laws that ban public school teachers from teaching what they call “critical race theory” in five states: Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho, Tennessee, and Iowa. They have pushed for similar bills in 15 other states.

    Even though Republicans say they are targeting “critical race theory,” the attacks have little to do with that set of ideas. Critical race theory comes from the academic field of legal studies and explores the effects of race on policy and law. But in Oklahoma and Texas, for example, the bills stop universities from making students take diversity training. They would also stop teachers from giving any educational credit to students for taking part in actions like anti-racist protests.

    And in Texas, whenever teachers discuss race in current events, they have to show “contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” That means that when white supremacists rally with torches and chant anti-semitic slogans, and when a white supremacist kills an anti-racist protester with his car — as happened in Charlottesville in 2017 — teachers would be required to say that both sides had valid points of view.

    Divide and Conquer: Unions and the Anti-Racist Movement

    These laws aim to make it harder to teach students honestly about the role that white supremacy continues to play in the United States. And they are aiming to make it harder for teachers to help their students connect to, and understand, the struggle for racial justice that hasn’t ended.

    Above all, though, officials are trying to keep one of the most powerful sectors of workers in the U.S. — teachers — separated from a powerful anti-racist movement that shook the country last summer.

    Last year, Black youth led a massive struggle against the white supremacist police. That uprising sent shockwaves through the ruling class — and not just Republican leaders. The mayors and governors who savagely put down the uprising in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Portland and elsewhere were all Democrats.

    Teacher unions, too, have shown major power and leverage over the last year. Both Republican and Democrat leaders — both Trump and Biden, and an army of Democratic mayors — tried to reopen public schools throughout 2020 and 2021 in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Teachers’ unions upset their plans again and again. The local teacher union in Philly, for example, refused to report to unsafe schools. In Chicago, too, they defied the mayor’s unsafe plan to reopen. Unions won key concessions — pushing back school openings until infection levels had fallen more, for example, and securing vaccines for teachers.

    That fight cost the ruling class major profits. Early in the pandemic, newspapers like Bloomberg were reporting that closed schools meant billions in lost productivity for the bosses. That’s because closed public schools means parents — many from the working class — have to stay home too.

    All of this means that it’s no surprise that lawmakers are fighting tooth and nail to limit the ways teachers and students talk about race. It’s crucial for the ruling class to keep one of the most powerful social movements in recent memory separate from one of the most unionized, organized segments of workers to protect its profits and its power.

    Union Leaders Respond — Weakly

    The laws against teaching “critical race theory” are a direct attack on teachers’ work. But the leaders of teacher unions are refusing to truly fight back.

    The heads of the NEA — the biggest union in the U.S. — have only made a few weak statements in response to the legislation. In an interview, Becky Pringle says the laws “won’t stop” teachers from teaching about racism. And NEA Today, the union’s magazine, ran a story on the importance of learning about racism. For its part, that article called for teachers to take part in the Zinn Project, to pledge to individually teach the truth about race and oppression in U.S. history. But NEA leaders are stopping well short of organizing a mass refusal of the new rules — the NEA Today article just calls for “raising awareness.” And they’re stopping well short of organizing the union to disrupt business as usual in Texas, Oklahoma, or beyond — through a walkout or strike, for example.

    In the AFT, too — my union and the eighth biggest union in the country — we’re getting precious little beyond a few sharp words. AFT president Randi Weingarten put out a statement that criticized Florida’s new rules on teaching race and defended the importance of critical race theory in an interview. The Texas AFT also issued a statement critiquing the new set of rules there.

    But it’s clear that no statement will stop this latest attack on teachers. Instead, Weingarten, Pringle, and other union heads are waiting for the Democratic Party to save them — the reason they spend so much time fundraising for Democrats like Biden.

    But this is a failed strategy. It wasn’t Biden or any Democrat who stopped the unsafe school openings from happening. Exactly the opposite was true: it was teacher unions themselves, taking action on their own by refusing to return to their classrooms, that delayed the reopenings. They did this in defiance of the Democratic Party. It was Democratic mayors and Biden himself vowed to open schools during the pandemic.

    And it wasn’t Democrats who fought white supremacist cops after the murder of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor; it was activists, led by Black youth, who did that in the streets, toe to toe with the cops. In fact, Democratic mayors in Philly, Portland, and DC attacked the movement against the cops, all while Biden called for cops to just shoot Black people in the leg instead of the heart.

    Fighting Back

    Stopping this latest round of attacks on teachers means relying not on the Democrats but on ourselves and the weapons we hold as workers. The pandemic showed teachers the key power they hold to affect the economy. That leverage is even greater now than it was a few months ago: the capitalists are desperate for an economic recovery to recoup the profits they lost during the pandemic shutdown.

    Using our leverage means doing more than making statements. It means taking real action: sickouts, walkouts, strikes, and pickets to defend our right to teach the actual, racist history of the United States. These actions could help build real solidarity actions with Black Lives Matter locals. In other words, they could help build exactly the kind of power between the anti-racist movement and teachers’ unions that the Republicans are terrified of.

    Our union leaders are waiting for Biden and the Democrats to save us. They won’t. Fighting the latest attack on teachers means fighting from the bottom up, in our locals, taking action on the job and forcing our leaders to really join the struggle for Black lives.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Time to Stop Trying to Redeem Patriotism

    Flags fly near the Washington Monument on the National Mall on July 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Frederick Douglass, the legendary formerly enslaved abolitionist, was invited in 1852 to deliver an address on the meaning of July 4 by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. At the time he made his remarks, chattel slavery was still eight years away from the confrontation of the Civil War. Douglass minced no words in explaining his feelings about a nation that had until only recently consigned him to bondage, a nation that continued to enslave millions of people.

    “I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July,” Douglass proclaimed. “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

    History has a keen way of twisting the knife. Note well: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who passed away this week after a lifetime spent inflicting war and sorrow on others, enjoyed for a time the ownership of a weekend cottage and spread named Mt. Misery, near the Chesapeake Bay. It was there that Frederick Douglass reached the limits of his tolerance while still enslaved, and beat the living hell out of a white farmer named Edward Covey.

    It was at Mt. Misery that Douglass’s owners brutally endeavored to break him for offering his challenge to white power. It was there that he steeled himself against the horrors visited upon him by those who claimed to own him. After winning his fight for freedom, Douglass went on to write himself furiously into the pages of history. Rumsfeld bought the site of Douglass’s misery and triumph for $1.5 million, and sold it in 2019 for $2.4 million.

    This is our history. This happened.

    “America is false to the past,” charged Douglass in 1852, “false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” It is difficult to read these words and not think of our current, strange debate over “critical race theory.” One would think the teaching of that which happened would be imperative to our educational priorities, but in these United States, those who control the present fear that knowledge of the past threatens their hold on the future. Thus, the curtain of ignorance is dropped in the name of “patriotism.”

    Patriotism. The meat and mead of this national holiday that was so thoroughly scorned by a former slave some 169 years ago. What does it even mean? Will it persist as an excuse to avoid bearing honest witness to the clank of slavery’s chains, the crack of its whip, or the deliberate massacre of those who called this land home before boats from Europe plowed ashore some five centuries ago? Doesn’t this concept of patriotism simply aid us in denying that the rank crimes of the past lay a binding stench upon the present?

    If you do not know where you came from, you cannot truly know where you are going, and that means you are lost.

    There is a cohort in this country who would have our schoolchildren believe slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples were blips instead of foundational institutions, critical to the development of American-style capitalism, and bald statements of policy that have carried forward to this very day. They fear common knowledge of this is “bad for the brand,” to use the modern parlance, an offense against the advertising that would have you believe “The American Dream” is something more substantial than what it truly is: a business deal, bereft of morality and therefore capable of anything.

    Let us, in this bold and battered century, relinquish patriotism. Let us not cleave to land or the fiction of borders, to flags or an idealized past that gives lie to the innocent blood that feeds our “tree of liberty” even now. Let us, instead, cleave to one another, to our shared humanity, and to the future we may yet salvage once we realize, recognize and thoroughly shun the forces of oppression that have formed the backbone of the United States lo these many long years.

    In the name of Frederick Douglass, and every enslaved person who had their voice beaten from them, and all the dispossessed then and right now, let us tell the truth though the heavens fall.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • July 4 Glorifies the US Military — a Force With White Supremacy at Its Core

    an illustration of a menacing soldier concealed in red, white and blue camouflage

    In his “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July” speech, Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass highlighted the gross contradictions of a country that claimed to celebrate freedom and independence while embracing slavery. Douglass, however, took solace in America’s age. “There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages,” Douglass said in his speech on July 5, 1852. The country was 76 at the time.

    Today, the settler-colonial nation-state of the U.S. turns 245 years old. Yet the underlying problems of white supremacism that Douglass addressed in his famous speech persist. Among the contradictions of today’s Independence Day observations will include the honoring of the armed forces for “keeping America safe” and “defending our freedoms,” despite the prevalence of white supremacy in the ranks and the fact that many current and former service members participated in the January 6 breach at the U.S. Capitol, which sought to violently disrupt the certification of a legitimate presidential election.

    On April 1, the Department of Defense “completed” a 60-day stand-down to address the growing problem of white extremism in the military. The review was prompted by the fact that 20 percent of those facing charges from the January 6 events have a background in the armed forces. The stand-down centered around conversations with rank-and-file soldiers that would allegedly “reinforce the military’s values.” The information gleaned from these discussions would be sent up the chain of command. What would happen next is unclear, at least from what we’ve been told by Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.

    The lack of clarity on next steps is likely due to the fact that no official data would be collected during these conversations. The top brass in charge of coordinating the discussions believe that conversations that reinforce values of the military would be enough, and that data collection would be unnecessary. Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said the stand-down would also be a chance to listen to service members [about] their own feelings about extremism. Such a policy is counterproductive, according to the chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lecia Brooks, who has been calling for more data collection on the scope of right-wing extremism in the military. As Brooks said in a March 25 interview with Democracy Now!, the day after she testified at an Armed Services Committee hearing on extremism in the Armed Forces, “data drives policy.”

    In May, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created an “extremism task force.” This task force has a July deadline to make “recommendations on potential changes to military justice.” Again, any recommendations will be based on scant official data because the military is notorious for not wanting to acknowledge or document the problem of white supremacism in the ranks.

    This is what we do know: Veterans make up 25 percent of all militia members in the U.S., according to a recent report from The New York Times. In early 2020, one in three active-duty service members reported to the Military Times that they saw evidence of white supremacism in the ranks. An August 2020 poll conducted by the Military Times reported that 57 percent of troops of color have personally experienced some form of racist or white supremacist behavior.

    In 2018, Brandon Russell, a member of the Floridian National Guard, was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence for harboring explosives. It was revealed during the trial that Russell had founded a violent neo-Nazi group. In May 2020, an Air Force sergeant who belonged to a boogaloo extremist movement was accused of murdering a federal security agent. In June 2020, an active-duty soldier named Ethan Melzer was charged with plotting a mass casualty attack in collaboration with his neo-Nazi group.

    Nonetheless, far right Republican leaders like Rep. Pat Fallon from Texas, who was on the post-January 6 committee to address white supremacism in the ranks, was particularly dismissive of the 60-day stand-down, calling it “political theater.” More liberal-minded politicians like House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington) acknowledge that these problems exist but seem unwilling to push for serious changes in policy.

    If the military’s handling of sexual assault is any indication of how the “task force” to confront right-wing extremism will go, then we can assume that there will be plenty of talk without much action to root out the problem.

    One in three women are sexually assaulted in the military. This problem has been acknowledged for many years. Yet the number of women who are assaulted in the military continues to increase.

    In 2020 there were 7,825 reports (a large number of cases go unreported) of sexual assault in all branches of the military, a 3 percent increase over 2019. A number of hearings on sexual assault followed the release of the 2012 Academy Award-nominated documentary “Invisible War.” “Invisible War” exposed the depth of the sexual assault epidemic and resulting cover ups in the U.S. military. Nearly a decade later, promises from generals and politicians to solve the issue have clearly proven empty.

    Very little has been said about the results of the 60-day stand-down since it concluded on April 1. Silence is exactly what top brass and politicians count on because fixing the problem would pose a threat to their first priority — a strong empire that requires violence and oppression to achieve its goals. From the earliest days of supporting the colonization of Turtle Island to the use of the national guard against Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter protests — and from the wars on Japan and Vietnam to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — the armed forces needed to dehumanize others as irredeemably violent, dangerous and uncivilized in order to encourage its soldiers to treat them as an enemy.

    The U.S. isn’t young anymore. One can’t help but wonder what Fredrick Douglass would say if he were to give a speech on the country’s 245th birthday. The “great streams” of American racism, white supremacy and sexism have indeed worn deep. A full 169 years after Douglass’s speech, the U.S. is still bogged down by many of the same contradictions. Any progress that has been made wasn’t due to benevolent rulers or a compassionate state apparatus, but came as a result of courageous people coming together to shine light on and resist intolerance and oppression.

    As American flags are posted on porches and fill front lawns across the U.S., let’s not let them block the light of justice. This Fourth of July, let’s not hide behind empty promises, cover-ups and manipulative patriotism. Let’s continue to expose what the military and other American institutions want to hide. Let’s fight against empire.

    It’s well past time that we damn the river of hate that continues to run through this country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Most Student Debtors Can’t Make Their Payments. It’s Time for Debt Cancelation.

    As college students around the country graduate with a massive amount of debt, advocates display a hand-painted sign on the Ellipse in front of The White House to call on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order to cancel student debt on June 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    In recent years, many centrist economists have claimed that canceling student debt is economically regressive in that it would disproportionately favor higher-income households. Yet, study after study has revealed that this is not the case. In particular, a new study by the Roosevelt Institute explains that the “regressive myth rests on a series of misleading methodological foundations,” demonstrating that, contrary to these regressive claims, student debt cancelation at each proposed level of cancelation — Biden’s $10,000 proposal, Warren and Schumer’s $50,000 proposal, or the Institute’s own proposal of $75,000 — would see those most economically marginalized benefiting the most.

    The Roosevelt Institute study authors contend that previous assessments depend too heavily on annual household income, which does not fully account for a household’s overall assets. Instead, they incorporated student debt distribution data by race and household wealth, which is often ignored in studies that show cancelation to be regressive, to demonstrate that canceling student debt is fundamentally progressive while also taking into account the impact of student debt on the entire population, not just student debt borrowers. The authors note that this measure “more accurately depicts the size of the burden experienced by those in lower-income households, for whom each dollar of debt is actually a more substantial barrier to economic security, access to consumer credit, and increases in net worth.” Furthermore, the authors did not include private debt, since only federal student loans are eligible for cancelation under the present student debt cancelation proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer as well as the Biden administration, while valuing student debt by its costs toward borrowers, not lenders (Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, included private debt in his proposal).

    By looking at the share of wealth, not just student debt in absolute numbers, it becomes clear that borrowers in the lower percentiles are much more burdened than their counterparts in the higher percentiles. In other words, student debt makes up a larger share of their annual household incomes or share of household wealth compared to higher percentile households which makes repayment difficult and almost impossible. This is precisely why the study finds that the greatest benefits of student debt cancelation accumulate to those in the bottom 40 percentile for all racial groups. Moreover, by examining the distribution of student debt by wealth and race instead of the standard income variable, cancelation provides ample evidence that the racial wealth gap would narrow in the process. The study’s authors note that Black borrowers would, in fact, benefit significantly more from student debt cancelation than their counterpart white borrowers at every point on the income and asset distribution continuum, reflecting the fact that Black borrowers must borrow more for expenses than white students of equivalent income levels due to the racial wealth gap in family resources. For instance, Black borrowers in the poorest 10 percent of household wealth would receive around $17,000, whereas white borrowers in the same percentile would receive approximately $12,000 under the Warren-Schumer plan. Meanwhile, the wealthiest households across all race groups would benefit from debt forgiveness by an average of $562.

    It is critical to emphasise the significance of this study. It is another in a long series of studies that have provided evidence that student debt cancelation is progressive from an economic standpoint. A prominent scholar on the topic, Marshall Steinbaum of the University of Utah, showed that the Warren-Schumer plan would see the lowest earners who owe more than their annual income in student debt owe just one-fifth of their annual income. According to a Brandeis University analysis, 76 percent of student loan holders would have their debt canceled with Warren’s $50,000 proposal.

    We have very good reason to believe that canceling student debt provides significant economic benefits that help stimulate the economy, too. Previous research showed that canceling all student debt creates over 1 million jobs per year while increasing GDP by up to $108 billion. Over 10 years, cancelation generates between $861 billion and $1,083 billion in real GDP in 2016 dollars. Freed from the heavy burden of debt, students would utilize the extra money for day-to-day living expenses and pay off other obligations.

    As student debt remains in place, it is causing significant and unequal harm to marginalized borrowers, which can only be reduced and remedied by cancelation. For instance, as shown by a recent report from the Student Borrower Protection Center, students of color disproportionately struggle to pay their student debt at a higher rate than white students — creating a vicious cycle of economic inequality along racial lines. The authors note, “America’s student debt crisis is a civil rights crisis.” Additionally, on average, Black graduates owe $7,400 more than white graduates. Thirty-two percent of Black borrowers and 15 percent of Latinx borrowers are in “default” with their payments. In New York, the six communities with the greatest levels of student loan default are largely non-white and centred in the Bronx, even though they have relatively smaller average loan balances.

    Moreover, the cost of cancelation is not a straightforward concept since the total amount of student debt owed by borrowers and the costs of cancelation are not the same thing. As Sparky Abraham argues, lending money is a gamble on the future. If a substantial number of borrowers struggle to pay off their debt or die in debt, forgiving all the debt would cost less than the total amount owed, $1.7 trillion. The only way the federal government loses revenue through cancelation is when all borrowers pay back their debt.

    That is the direction we are now taking, which implies that the federal government is currently collecting payments and hence, inevitably losing money on a considerably smaller percentage than commonly assumed. The standard system — get the loan, pay it back in fixed amounts over time — only works for roughly a fourth of the loans. A whopping 75 percent of student debt is carried by those who are either not paying or are paying a fixed amount based on their annual income because they can’t afford their normal payments. This suggests that cancelation would cost substantially less than the total owed by borrowers since the federal government would end up losing revenue due to accruing interest and the inability to pay the total balance by student loan borrowers.

    But, of course, the economic costs of cancelation should not even be the principal deciding factor. Even if student debt forgiveness is somehow shown to be economically “regressive,” it would be irrelevant. Forgiveness is an ethical matter, regardless of “cost.” The issue at hand is the harm caused to students and its moral implications. By forcing repayment on their student debt, society is dooming its next generation to miserable and suffering lives for essentially nothing other than to increase neoliberalism’s assault on the general population, as Noam Chomsky points out. Thus, student debt — and not its forgiveness — is the truly regressive policy and an unjust imposition.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Wields a Cruelly Narrow Definition of Infrastructure Like a Bludgeon

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell leaves his office and walks to the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol on June 14, 2021.

    Back in late March and early April, as President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan began to take shape, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear he would oppose the large-scale investments envisioned by the administration.

    By the early summer, after months of negotiations between the parties in Congress and with the public pushing for large-scale infrastructure spending, it now seems that there is bipartisan support in Congress for a more limited — though still nearly trillion-dollar — package. This package, if it passes, will shore up investments in basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges, drinking water supplies, electric vehicle charging stations and public transit systems. If President Biden signs it into law, it will, even in its truncated form, be a big deal, generating jobs and improving communities for years to come.

    Yet, it should have gone much further. Instead, to get toward any sort of fragile bipartisan consensus, the administration had to drop plans for more ambitious investments, forsaking many of its bolder climate investments. It also jettisoned what the administration had labeled the American Families Plan, in the process ratcheting back ambitions for what looked and sounded like a new War on Poverty, the centerpieces of which were massively expanded federal investments in education, health care access and social programs.

    These more ambitious proposals, to be funded by moderate increases in the corporate tax rate –from 21 percent up to 28 percent, essentially reversing a key provision of the 2017 tax law passed by a GOP-led Congress — have now been bundled into a separate package of legislation, which, if it passes, will do so with no GOP support.

    Last week, Biden got himself into a political mess by ad-libbing the notion that he would veto the bipartisan bill if Congress didn’t also pass the more ambitious additional legislation. While he quickly walked that proposal back, the comment gave McConnell — who is far more concerned with finding ways to politically undermine the Biden administration than with actually working toward a bipartisan bill to shore up vital infrastructure — cover to backpedal on his commitment to the legislation. By Monday of this week, the “bipartisan deal” looked to be in real risk of disintegrating into an acrimonious political food fight. And, as the week went on, the acrimonious exchanges involving McConnell, Pelosi, and other congressional leaders continued.

    In opposing large-scale investments in the environment, or in health care systems, or in early childhood education as somehow Democratic boondoggles, McConnell and the Republicans are attempting to impose an artificially narrow understanding of what legitimate “infrastructure” investments look like. In their world, it’s all about bricks-and-mortar. It’s the sort of hard-hat understanding of infrastructure that Trump, the hotel-and-real-estate-developer-cum-president,embraced. If you can physically see it, it’s real; but if the investments are, instead, aimed at educating minds, or making bodies healthier, or making the environment cleaner and safer, well,that’s somehow illegitimate and ought to be taken off the table.

    This capricious definition of what qualifies as genuine infrastructure projects is entirely hubristic. The well-known UC Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics George Lakoff has written extensively on how the Republicans have used language to powerful effect to shape the terms of the policy debate over the past generation. For example, he describes how they successfully convinced many people in the U.S. to think of the estate tax as a nefarious “death tax,” or to think of onerous restrictions on abortion as simply being “pro-life.”

    Since the spring, polls have shown that a sizeable majority of Americans support a large-scale infrastructure package. And that support has only grown over the months. By mid-June, two-thirds of Americans supported the ambitious proposal that the Biden administration had put on the table. Huge majorities of Democrats and Independent voters realize that the country’s disorganized infrastructure is in need of urgent upgrades, and that part of what qualifies as “infrastructure” is the environment, as well as the health and educational opportunities of the U.S. population.

    Biden’s team has bowed to McConnell’s political hostage-taking strategy and hugely scaled back its original plans not for lack of popular support, but because of McConnell’s willingness to burn the house down to keep his increasingly right-wing base online. And that McConnell feels confident in this strategy, and might even put the kibosh on the bipartisan deal arranged by several of his own senators, is largely due to the fact that, for years, the GOP has set an extreme agenda and then worked feverishly to shape the language in which that agenda is framed so as to maximize its effectiveness.

    A majority of the public might support major infrastructure investments, but in a political system as gerrymandered and otherwise skewed to favor the GOP as is the modern U.S. system, McConnell can disregard majority opinion and prioritize the issues most likely to drive GOP voters in key states and congressional districts to the polls.

    This isn’t a calculus that makes for good governance; after all, banishing major green investments from a once-in-a-generation infrastructure bill, even as the Western half of the country is being hobbled by drought and by searing heat, is a recipe for long-term disaster. But, as Lakoff knows, it is indeed a strategy capable of securing short-term political payoffs. And, these days, that seems to be all that the GOP leadership, unmoored as it is from a coherent set of ideological beliefs, cares about.

    The Democrats have a window at the moment to enact sweeping social reforms. They have a majority in both the House and the Senate — albeit a narrow one. They control the White House.And they have public opinion on their side. Given all of this, it would be political malfeasance to let McConnell and the minoritarian Republicans seize control over the infrastructure investment debate. Putting money into education, or the environment, or health care isn’t “soft” or “illegitimate.” These are vital expenditures, and the sooner Democrats reclaim the narrative on this, and go on the offensive against McConnell’s hostage-taking antics, the better.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rumsfeld Was Not “Controversial.” He Played a Leading Role in Mass Murder.

    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 17, 2005.

    When word came down yesterday that former Defense Secretary and brazen orchestrator of mass death Donald Rumsfeld had shuffled loose the mortal coil at age 88, CNN and the other networks began to do their standard back-and-fill exercises to shore up the fiction while burying the truth after a genuine monster drops dead. “Controversial,” they called Rumsfeld, while showing footage of him scurrying around the wreckage after the Pentagon attack on September 11. “I think that’s what we’ll all remember,” said one talking head of those images.

    Not if I have anything to say about it.

    See, on the same day he was doing no more or less than what any average citizen would likely do at an emergency scene, Rumsfeld returned to his office and immediately began scheming to use the attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq. “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],” read the notes by an aide taken that day. “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    Ten months later and nine months before the war, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of that invasion, as was explained in the Downing Street Memo, and through the testimony of actual patriots like Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who watched Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and his George W. Bush cronies concoct fraudulent “evidence” for that war in the Office of Special Plans.

    The world we live in today was created in fire and blood by Donald Rumsfeld and his think tank pals at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) — along with all the Republicans and Democrats complicit in empowering their sordid plans. Having been gifted on 9/11 the “new Pearl Harbor” extolled in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the PNAC plan for military domination of the Middle East, powerful PNAC men like Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney proceeded to throw a generation of Americans and Iraqis into a meat grinder that is still turning out bodies some 18 years later. They did this to win elections, accrue power, and the war profits were in the trillions.

    Rumsfeld and his people did not operate in a vacuum, of course. To this day, the ranks of congressional Democrats and Republicans still contain those who voted to initiate and fuel this ongoing calamity. One of them — former Senator Hillary Clinton — lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, in no small part because of her record on Iraq. Another enabler, Joe Biden — who claims he was “fooled” by the Bush administration on Iraq after he voted for it, but was not — is now president of the United States despite his record on Iraq.

    Rumsfeld’s tactic of choice in grasping for war? Fear. “Every day since September of 2002, we heard from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Fleischer, Rice, Powell, and several times from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, that Iraq’s weapons program represented an immediate and severe danger to the American people,” I wrote on June 22, 2003. “The shadow of September 11 loomed long and dark over these statements, and the approval ratings for combat indicated that Americans were willing to believe these Bush administration claims rather than accept even the most remote possibility that Iraqi weapons could be used on the home front.”

    Plastic sheeting and duct tape, remember? Because Rumsfeld and Co. said Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium from Niger for use in a “robust” nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

    “We know where they are,” Rumsfeld said of the fictitious WMD on March 30, 2003. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” In a 2011 memoir titled Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld expressed regret for claiming to know where the WMD were, but insisted the toppling of Saddam Hussein was worth the price. Of course he did; he didn’t pay it, at all.

    A properly detailed obituary of Donald Rumsfeld would run longer than a Gore Vidal novel. For that obit to be complete, it would have to include the mainstreaming of torture by the willing hand of the secretary of defense.

    “We are awash in photographs of Iraqi men – not terrorists, just people – lying in heaps on cold floors with leashes around their necks,” I wrote on May 10, 2004. “We are awash in photographs of men chained so remorselessly that their backs are arched in agony, men forced to masturbate for cameras, men forced to pretend to have sex with one another for cameras, men forced to endure attacks from dogs, men with electrodes attached to them as they stand, hooded, in fear of their lives.”

    Flash forward to February of 2016, and we had then-presidential candidate Donald Trump proudly declaring, “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” His crowds went wild every time they heard this. By 2018, Mike Pompeo was promoted to secretary of state, and Gina Haspel took his place as the head of the CIA.

    “She was not just another pro-war shouter back in DC,” I wrote at the time of her nomination to that post. “Haspel was in it [torture] up to her throat. For a time, she ran one of the “black sites,” this one located in Thailand, and was so proud of her work that she destroyed the tapes of her interrogations. For this, she was neither fired nor prosecuted, and pending confirmation will be in charge of one of the largest intelligence organizations in the world.”

    Before Congress, Rumsfeld took full responsibility for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and other sites. Eventually, he was fired for his gross incompetence, and is now remembered by most as the worst defense secretary in U.S. history. His boss, George W. Bush, spends his days painting portraits of the soldiers he sent to slaughter, while Dick Cheney likely lingers in a hyperbaric chamber somewhere, drinking children’s tears from a crystal goblet. None of them have experienced a nanosecond of consequences for what they did, all of which was done deliberately and with intent.

    Aided and abetted by active complicity from both parties, Donald Rumsfeld and his PNAC ilk are in the national bloodstream, poisoning us from the inside out. Although they hardly acted alone, they played key roles in fueling the imperialism and militarism that characterize the United States. Trump was only one element of the consequences their actions brought upon us and the world.

    The TV people can call Rumsfeld “controversial” as they please — many of them are complicit in supercharging his lies into the national zeitgeist, so it’s little wonder they’re disinterested in the truth — but all I see is another war criminal who got away with mass murder, torture and grand theft. His war was a smash-and-grab robbery writ large, and we will likely never fully recover from it. Neither will Iraq.

    Rest in pieces, Mr. Secretary. May we never see your like again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Backlash to Abortion Ban in New Hampshire Could Derail GOP Scheme to Flip Senate

    John Sununu speaks at a podium

    Trying to explain New Hampshire politics to outsiders — even fellow New Englanders — is a bit like a frog trying to tell a tadpole what it’s like on dry land. Most people from “ovah theyah” across the border see this state as a craggy, snowbound, mostly white, sparsely populated bastion of conservative ideology that gets first crack at the primaries every four years. This is accurate, mostly, sort of. Certainly, it used to be, and for a very long time.

    This is also the state that has gone for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 2004, when John Kerry ended the success Republicans had enjoyed there, with a few interruptions, for decades. New Hampshire’s current congressional representation is entirely comprised of Democrats — two in the House, two in the Senate — and three out of four of them are women. The pundits call us a “swing state” now, though we haven’t swung to the GOP for five elections and counting.

    There is certainly plenty of craggy conservatism to be found here, and more than a bit of the wild-eyed variety. I share a ZIP code with Christopher Cantwell, the infamous “Crying Nazi” from the fascist Charlottesville riot in 2017 (one of Donald Trump’s “very fine people”), and the northern half of the state is as reliably Republican as any rural, majority-white district in Wyoming or Alabama.

    The national politics of New Hampshire changed over the last two decades for a variety of reasons, but tallest among them has been the influx of Massachusetts voters moving north to find more affordable land and housing. It costs fifty bucks to look out the window in Boston these days, and much of that state has become steeply unaffordable. Avalanches of Massachusetts-style voters have piled into the southern New Hampshire counties of Rockingham, Hillsborough and Cheshire — the most populous counties in the state — and changed the voting dynamic dramatically.

    Why is all of this important? Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) are looking squarely at Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s junior senator, who is up for reelection next year. They believe New Hampshire’s Republican governor Christopher Sununu can win her seat as part of the GOP’s overall plan to recapture the Senate majority. Polls so far suggest the seat is winnable for the GOP. To no small degree, this race is key to their hopes. Sununu has yet to commit to running for Hassan’s seat in 2022, although he has told the news media that he is “very open” to entering the race.

    Governor Sununu, however, just walked that potential run into a buzzsaw.

    Very quietly, the governor signed a hard-right budget bill into law last week — a law that is already creating backlash within the state. Contained within it were major tax cuts that will affect education, a ban on the teaching of critical race theory and other “divisive” topics, and a 24-week abortion ban that threatens doctors who perform them with prison and massive fines.

    The abortion ban makes no exceptions for rape or incest, and it requires an ultrasound to be performed before the procedure. An audit will be performed by the state to “financially and physically separate” facilities that perform cancer screenings from facilities that perform abortions. Planned Parenthood’s cancer screenings save thousands of lives each year.

    At least before the passage of the hard-right budget bill, Sununu has been very popular here, almost as popular as Massachusetts’s Republican governor, Charlie Baker. He won his seat in a landslide, and has drawn largely positive reviews for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Strangely, though, this makes him soft in the eyes of the national Republican Party, which has been taken over by people who think Italian war satellites stole the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Thus, we get this budget, a dress rehearsal for how Sununu will act and vote if he chooses to run and makes it to the Senate. All the hot buttons are included — taxes, abortion, critical race theory — to make the GOP base smile.

    Not everyone is smiling. “I think it’s despicable,” responded New Hampshire’s senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “It is clearly people who don’t understand the ramifications of what they have done. From my history in this state, this is unprecedented in the Live Free or Die state, that we would see this extreme legislative attempt to get between the bodies of women and their doctors. If you don’t like abortion, you should support family planning.”

    “Since New Hampshire became a nationally watched swing state, there have been two issues that have defined which way elections typically go,” writes James Pindell for The Boston Globe. “While, sure, the state is susceptible to the national political mood, the general rule is that if a Democrat comes out for increased taxes or if a Republican is actively trying to restrict abortion access, they are toast…. The latest polling this spring from the University of New Hampshire found that at least 88 percent of residents say abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances.”

    Sununu’s troubles — should he run — don’t end there. Thanks to the inclusion of a ban on critical race theory in schools, a mass resignation has taken place on the governor’s selected panel that is devoted to promoting diversity.

    “Members of a state-sanctioned diversity and inclusion panel have resigned over New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s decision to sign a budget that included a ban on teaching ‘divisive concepts’ about race and ethnicity,” reports The Laconia Daily Sun. “On Tuesday, 10 members of the 16-member Governor’s Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion submitted a letter of resignation to Sununu citing his support for the provision of the spending package he signed last week that prohibits teaching about systemic racism and sexism in public schools and state-funded programs.”

    Sununu and his campaign people seem to have badly misread the voters of New Hampshire, but they also may have no choice. Sununu will join the national Republican clubhouse in the Senate if he runs and wins, and in the aftermath of Trump, you don’t get to do that without providing the kind of far-right political street cred that would make Barry Goldwater wince.

    It’s a long time until November of 2022, but the radio ads attacking Sununu for these new abortion rules have already appeared in heavy rotation, and they won’t stop. This is a race worth watching if it happens: It may prove, again, that right-lunging national Republicanism is unpalatable to the locals.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Northwest Heat Wave Is a Symptom of Terrifying Runaway Climate Feedback Loops

    Everett Clayton looks at a digital thermometer on a nearby building that reads 116 degrees while walking to his apartment on June 27, 2021, in Vancouver, Washington.

    The village of Lytton, British Colombia, just northeast of Vancouver, saw temperatures on Sunday top 116 degrees. The roads are buckling in Portland, Oregon, under the onslaught of the heat, and the power cables on their streetcars are melting. The historic temperature spike is being caused by a “heat dome” above the affected region, meteorologists say, a confluence of events so rare they only come together every 1,000 years or so. Thanks to anthropogenic climate disruption — a fancy way of saying “humans did this” — these thousand-year events are becoming annual calamities.

    “One of the primary reasons I moved to the Pacific Northwest was because of what I knew was coming in the climate crisis,” Dahr Jamail, who reported on climate for many years for Truthout, told me on Tuesday. Jamail lives in a small town in Washington State. “I’d done my research. I knew the projections for potable water availability, temperature spikes, arable land availability and where the climate impacts would be the mildest. For all of those, and more, the Pacific Northwest was one of the best places to live in the contiguous 48 states.”

    However, Jamail noted, even since moving to Washington several years ago, he’s seen marked climate shifts.

    “Where I live on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, it was 97 yesterday,” continued Jamail. “The day before it was almost as hot. The concrete slab upon which my home stands was the only cool spot. By the early afternoon, I was lying on it face down for respite. Across the water in Seattle, the Emerald City had never seen 100 degrees. Yesterday was the third time in the last three days it saw triple digits, and it was still 90 degrees at 8pm. All this, when less than a year ago, this region had the worst air quality in the world for days on end as we were engulfed in wildfire smoke blowing in from California.”

    This is it. This is here. This is now. Even the safest places provide no safety. The theoretical has become actual; we have crossed the threshold into the unmistakable consequences of our horrid stewardship of this ridiculously precious planet and its ecosystems.

    The western U.S. appears to be caught in a positive climate feedback loop, though there is little objectively positive about it. A “feedback loop” from the perspective of climate change “is the equivalent of a vicious or virtuous circle — something that accelerates or decelerates a warming trend,” according to a BBC climate report from earlier this year. “A positive feedback accelerates a temperature rise, whereas a negative feedback decelerates it.”

    One example of a current and ongoing positive feedback loop is taking place in the Siberian tundra. Human-caused warming has led to the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which in turn has led to the release of billions of tons of methane out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Methane is a warming accelerant, one of the most dangerous kinds we are dealing with. When it gets dumped into the air in such quantities, warming is accelerated, more permafrost melts, more methane is released, warming is further accelerated, etc.

    The feedback loop out west — human-caused warming leading to a massive drought which exacerbates warming, etc. — has come to include the current heat dome phenomenon. Put bluntly, the dome is making every other climate-related impact worse, and the potential consequences go far beyond the dangers posed by high heat to human health.

    People out west are sitting in deep dread of the looming fire season, which could be worse than any we have seen. The drought has worsened, and the snow pack in the mountains — a vital feeder to the water table — is all but gone. With the arrival of the heat dome, much of the region is a bomb waiting to go off.

    If the fire season this year is as bad or worse than expected, the next domino to fall in the effects of climate disruption will be potable water, which makes all this nothing less than an existential national emergency. From The New York Times:

    When wildfires blaze across the West, as they have with increasing ferocity as the region has warmed, the focus is often on the immediate devastation — forests destroyed, infrastructure damaged, homes burned, lives lost. But about two-thirds of drinking water in the United States originates in forests. And when wildfires affect watersheds, cities can face a different kind of impact, long after the flames are out.

    In Colorado’s Front Range, erosion from fire-damaged slopes during the summer rains could turn the flow of the Poudre and its tributaries dark with sediment, dissolved nutrients and heavy metals, as well as debris. This could clog intake pipes, reduce the capacity of reservoirs, cause algal blooms and cloud and contaminate the water, sharply raising maintenance and treatment costs. In the worst case, the water would be untreatable, forcing the cities to use alternate supplies for a time.

    As climate change helps make wildfires burn hotter and longer, the risks to water supplies grow. But most people don’t think about the risks, said Kevin Bladon, a hydrologist at Oregon State University, even after a damaging fire. “Here we are in 2021,” he said. “We’re really removed from the 2020 wildfire season. Most people are thinking the problems are over.”

    (Emphasis added.)

    “The runaway feedback loops of the climate crisis are in full swing,” notes Jamail. “Most of the unraveling is occurring at a pace far more accelerated than the worst-case projections of our climate models. That wildfires are scorching millions of acres every year at a record pace should not come as a surprise. Nor should the impact of this on human water supplies. But what will likely come as a surprise to most will be the abrupt panic when the prices of food and potable water spike, or when the place where they live finally becomes unlivable for lack of water.”

    The future is hot. The future is dry. The future is on fire. The future is now.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s First Pentagon Budget Is One of the Highest Since World War II. Why?

    President Joe Biden speaks alongside Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during a visit to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2021.

    President Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of spending since World War II — far higher than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s, and roughly three times what China spends on its military.

    Developments of the past year and a half — an ongoing pandemic, an intensifying mega-drought, white supremacy activities, and racial and economic injustice among them — should have underscored that the greatest threats to American lives are anything but military in nature. But no matter, the Biden administration has decided to double down on military spending as the primary pillar of what still passes for American security policy. And don’t be fooled by that striking Pentagon budget figure either. This year’s funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.

    That mind-boggling figure underscores just how misguided Washington’s current “security” — a word that should increasingly be put in quotation marks — policies really are. No less concerning was the new administration’s decision to go full-speed ahead on longstanding Pentagon plans to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, including, of course, new nuclear warheads to go with them, at a cost of at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades.

    The Trump administration added to that plan projects like a new submarine-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile, all of which is fully funded in Biden’s first budget. It hardly matters that a far smaller arsenal would be more than adequate to dissuade any country from launching a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies. A rare glimmer of hope came in a recent internal memo from the Navy suggesting that it may ultimately scrap Trump’s sea-launched cruise missile in next year’s budget submission — but that proposal is already facing intense pushback from nuclear-weapons boosters in Congress.

    In all, Biden’s first budget is a major win for key players in the nuclear-industrial complex like Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on the new nuclear bomber and a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); General Dynamics, the maker of the new ballistic-missile submarine; Lockheed Martin, which produces sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); and firms like Honeywell that oversee key elements in the Department of Energy’s nuclear-warhead complex.

    The Biden budget does retire some older-generation weapons. The only reason, however, is to fund even more expensive new systems like hypersonic weapons and ones embedded with artificial intelligence, all with the goal of supposedly putting the United States in a position to win a war with China (if anyone could “win” such a war).

    China’s military buildup remains, in fact, largely defensive, so ramping up Pentagon spending supposedly in response represents both bad strategy and bad budgeting. If, sooner or later, cooler heads don’t prevail, the obsession with China that’s gripped the White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress could keep Pentagon budgets high for decades to come.

    In reality, the principal challenges posed by China are diplomatic and economic, not military, and seeking militarized answers to them will only spark a new Cold War and a risky arms race that could make a superpower nuclear conflict more likely. While there’s much to criticize in China’s policies, from its crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong to its ethnic cleansing and severe repression of its Uyghur population, in basic military capabilities, it doesn’t come faintly close to the United States, nor will it any time soon. Washington’s military build-up, however, could undermine the biggest opportunity in U.S.-China relations: finding a way to cooperate on issues like climate change that threaten the future of the planet.

    As noted, the three-quarters of a trillion dollars the United States spends on the Pentagon budget is just a portion of a much larger figure for the full range of activities of the national security state. Let’s look, category by category, at what the Biden budget proposes to spend on this broader set of activities.

    The Pentagon’s “Base Budget”

    The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which, in past years, has included routine spending for fighting ongoing conflicts, was $715 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2022, $10 billion more than last year’s request. Despite complaints to the contrary by advocates of even higher Pentagon spending, that represents no small addition. It’s larger, for instance, than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No question about it, the Pentagon remains by a long shot the agency with the largest discretionary budget.

    One piece of good news is that this year’s request marks the end of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. That slush fund was used to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also included tens of billions of dollars for pet Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with current conflicts.

    While off-budget emergency spending has typically only been used in the initial years of a conflict, OCO became a tool to evade caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. That legislation has now expired and the Biden administration has heeded the advice of good-government and taxpayer-advocacy groups by eliminating the slush fund entirely.

    Unfortunately, its latest budget request still includes $42.1 billion for direct and indirect war-spending costs, which means that, OCO or not, there will be no net reduction in spending. Still, the end of that fund marks a small but potentially significant step towards greater accountability and transparency in the Pentagon budget. Moreover, congressional leaders are urging the Biden administration to seize savings from the ongoing Afghan withdrawal to sooner or later reduce the Pentagon’s top line.

    As for what’s in the base budget, there are a number of particularly troubling proposed expenditures that warrant attention and congressional pushback. Spending on the Pentagon’s new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile — known formally as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent — has nearly doubled in the new proposal from $1.4 billion to $2.6 billion.

    This may seem like small change in such a budget, but it’s just a down payment on a system that could, in the end, cost more than $100 billion to procure and another $164 billion to operate over its lifetime. More importantly, as former secretary of defense William Perry noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon a warning of an attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. In short, the new ICBM is not just costly but exceedingly dangerous for the health of humanity. The Biden budget should have eliminated it, not provided more funding for it.

    Another eye-opener is the decision to spend more than $12 billion on the F-35 combat aircraft, a troubled, immensely expensive weapons system whose technical flaws suggest that it may never be fully ready for combat. Such knowledge should, of course, have resulted in a decision to at least pause production on the plane until testing is complete. House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-WA) has stated that he’s tired of pouring money down the F-35 “rathole,” while the Air Force’s top officer, General Charles Brown, has compared it to a Ferrari that “you don’t drive to work every day” but “only drive it out on Sundays.”

    Consider that an embarrassing admission for a plane once publicized as a future low-cost bulwark for the U.S. combat aircraft fleet. Whether the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, the three services that utilize variants of the F-35, will stay the course and buy more than 2,400 of these aircraft remains to be seen. Count on one thing, though: the F-35 lobby, including a special F-35 caucus in the House of Representatives and the Machinists Union, whose workers build the planes, will fight tooth and nail to keep the program fully funded regardless of whether or not it serves our national security needs.

    And keep in mind that the F-35 is only one of many legacies of failed Pentagon modernization efforts. Even if the Pentagon were to acquire its new systems without delays or cost overruns — something rare indeed — its expensive spending plans have already earned this decade the moniker of the “terrible twenties.”

    Worse yet, there’s a distinct possibility that Congress will push that budget even higher in response to “wish lists” being circulated by each of the military services. Items on them that have yet to make it into the Biden Pentagon budget include things like — surprise! — more F-35s. The Army’s wish list even includes systems it claimed it needed to cut. That the services are even allowed to make such requests to Congress is symbolic of a breakdown in budgetary discipline of the highest order.

    The base budget also includes mandatory spending for items like military retirement. This year’s request adds $12.8 billion to the Pentagon’s tab.

    Running Tally: $727.9 billion

    The Nuclear Budget

    It would be reasonable for you to assume that the Department of Energy’s budget would primarily be devoted to developing new energy sources and combating climate change, but that assumption would, sadly enough, be wildly off the mark.

    In fact, more than half of the department’s budget goes to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program. The NNSA does work on nuclear warheads at eight major locations — California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (two facilities), South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — across the country, along with subsidiary facilities in several additional states. NNSA’s proposed FY 2022 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $15.5 billion, part of a budget for atomic-energy-related projects of $29.9 billion.

    The NNSA is notorious for poor management of major projects. It has routinely been behind schedule and over cost — to the tune of $28 billion in the past two decades. Its future plans seem destined to hit the pocketbook of the American taxpayer significantly, with projected long-term spending on nuclear weapons activities rising by a proposed $113 billion in a single year.

    Nuclear Budget $29.9 billion

    Running tally: $757.8 billion

    Defense-Related Activities

    This is a catch-all category, totaling $10.5 billion in the FY 2022 request, including the international activities of the FBI and payments to the CIA retirement fund, among other things.

    Defense-Related Activities $10.5 billion

    Running tally: $768.3 billion

    The Intelligence Budget

    There is very little public information available about how the nation’s — count ’em! — 17 intelligence agencies spend our tax dollars. The majority of congressional representatives don’t even have staff members capable of accessing any kind of significant information on intelligence spending, a huge obstacle to the ability of Congress to oversee these agencies and their activities in any meaningful way. So far this year there is only a top-line figure available for spending on national (but not military) intelligence activities of $62.3 billion. Most of this money is already believed to be hidden away in the Pentagon budget, so it’s not added to the running tally displayed below.

    National Intelligence activities: $62.3 billion

    Running tally: $768.3 billion

    The Military and Defense Department Retirement and Health Budget

    The Treasury Department covers military retirement and health expenditures that should be in the Pentagon’s base budget. Net spending on these two items — minus interest earned and payments into the two accounts — was a negative $9.7 billion in FY 2022.

    Military and Defense Department Retirement and Health Costs: -$9.7 billion

    Running tally: $758.6 billion

    Veterans Affairs Budget

    The full costs of war go far beyond the expenditures contained in the Pentagon budget, including the costs of taking care of the veterans of America’s “forever wars.” Over 2.7 million U.S. military personnel have cycled through war zones in this century and hundreds of thousands of them have suffered severe physical or psychological injuries, ratcheting up the costs of veterans’ care accordingly. In addition, as we emerge from the Covid-19 disaster months, the Veterans Affairs Department anticipates a “bow wave” of extra costs and demands for its services from veterans who deferred care during the worst of the pandemic. The total FY2022 budget request for Veterans Affairs is $284.5 billion.

    Veterans Affairs Budget: $284.5 billion

    Running tally: $1,043.1 billion

    International Affairs Budget

    The International Affairs budget includes funding for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, integral parts of the U.S. national security strategy. Here, investments in diplomacy and economic and health activities overseas are supplemented by about $5.6 billion in military aid to other countries. The Biden administration has proposed overall International Affairs funding for FY 2022 at $79 billion.

    International Affairs Budget: $79 billion

    Running tally: $1,122.1 billion

    The Homeland Security Budget

    In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created by throwing together a wide range of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. The proposed DHS budget for FY2022 is $52.2 billion, nearly one-third of which goes to Customs and Border Protection.

    Homeland Security Budget: $52.2 billion

    Running tally: $1,174.3 billion

    Interest on the Debt

    The national security state, as outlined above, is responsible for about 20% of the interest due on the U.S. debt, a total of more than $93.8 billion.

    Interest on the debt: $93.8 billion

    Final tally: $1,268.1 billion

    Are You Feeling Safer Now?

    Theoretically, that nearly $1.3 trillion to be spent on national security writ large is supposed to be devoted to activities that make America and the world a safer place. That’s visibly not the case when it comes to so many of the funds that will be expended in the name of national security — from taxpayer dollars thrown away on weapons systems that don’t work to those spent on an unnecessary and dangerous new generation of nuclear weapons, to continuing to reinforce and extend the historically unprecedented U.S. military presence on this planet by maintaining more than 800 overseas military bases around the world.

    If managed properly, President Biden’s initiatives on rebuilding domestic infrastructure and combatting climate change would be far more central to keeping people safe than throwing more money at the Pentagon and related agencies. Unfortunately, unlike the proposed Pentagon budget, significant Green New Deal-style infrastructure funding is far less likely to be passed by a bitterly divided Congress. Washington evidently doesn’t care that such investments would also be significantly more effective job creators.

    A shift in spending toward these and other urgent priorities like addressing the possibility of future pandemics would clearly be a far better investment in “national security” than the present proposed Pentagon budget. Sadly, though, too many of America’s political leaders have clearly drawn the wrong lessons from the pandemic. If this country continues to squander staggering sums on narrowly focused national-security activities at a time when our greatest challenges are anything but military in nature, this country (and the world) will be a far less safe place in the future.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Delta Variant Spreads, WHO Urges Masks and Social Distancing

    A man wears a face mask on his arm, where it clearly belongs

    On Friday afternoon, precisely when almost nobody was looking or listening, the World Health Organization (WHO) dropped a large and dispiriting brick: Due to the sprinting rise of the Delta COVID-19 variant, everyone needs to continue wearing masks and keep practicing social distancing. For millions of vaccinated people who have rolled like blissed-out dogs in the freedoms newly provided by the shots, this was profoundly unwelcome news.

    “People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses,” announced WHO assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products Mariangela Simao. “They still need to protect themselves. Vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission. People need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene, the physical distance, avoid crowding. This still continues to be extremely important, even if you’re vaccinated when you have a community transmission ongoing.”

    The abundance of caution on display is due to the Delta viral variant, which was born in the cauldron of India’s ongoing COVID misery and has begun making itself at home both here and around the world. That, you see, is the merciless genius of the virus: It seeks only to replicate itself within human hosts, and is always evolving to thwart our immunological/vaccinated defenses.

    “Alphabetically, chronologically, the virus is getting better and better at its primary objective: infecting us. And experts suspect that it may be a while yet before the pathogen’s contagious potential truly maxes out,” writes Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic. “As long as the virus has hosts to infect, it will keep shape-shifting in ways we can’t fully predict. That biological caprice makes it harder to anticipate the next pandemic hurdles we’ll need to clear, and assess the dangers still ahead.”

    One of the inescapable question marks that arise when dealing with this wily foe concerns the vaccinations themselves: Do they work on the variants? Will they always work on the variants? How safe am I after having gotten the shots? Turns out, it may partly depend on which shot you got.

    “The vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years,” reported The New York Times on Monday morning. “The findings add to growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms — which is not guaranteed. People who recovered from Covid-19 before being vaccinated may not need boosters even if the virus does make a significant transformation.” The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, along with several others, are expected to be less effective in dealing with these variants, according to this study.

    So… maybe the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines work for years, but maybe they don’t, and the Law of Large Numbers says a vaccine-proof variant will emerge if COVID-19 is allowed to burn unchecked through the global population. Strange how this Monday announcement about vaccination effectiveness came on the heels of Friday’s WHO advisory that all continue to wear masks.

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

    I fear what we have experienced this spring and summer in the U.S. could possibly be a false dawn, ersatz light from the other side of the tunnel that is actually another onrushing train. Thanks to the vaccines, the impact here may not be as severe, but the ideological divide in this country is mutating into an immunological divide that cannot be bridged with words or promises or prizes. Add to that the racist gap in vaccine access, and the recipe for another gruesome winter is before us all.

    Don’t toss those masks just yet.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nina Turner Leads Ohio Race, But Corporate Democrats Want to Stop Her

    Nina Turner

    When Hillary Clinton endorsed Nina Turner’s main opponent recently, it was much more than just an attempt to boost a corporate Democrat. Clinton’s praise for candidate Shontel Brown was almost beside the point. Like other power brokers and the big-money PACs now trying to sway the special election for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio, Clinton is doing what she can to keep the deeply progressive Turner out of Congress. (Rep. Marcia Fudge, who previously held the seat, resigned to become President Biden’s HUD secretary.)

    Time is short. Polling shows Turner with a big lead, early voting begins in less than two weeks and Election Day is Aug. 3. What scares the political establishment is what energizes her supporters: Turner won’t back down when social justice is at stake.

    That reality was clearly audible last Tuesday night during the first debate of the campaign, sponsored by the City Club of Cleveland. “I am running to be a voice for change, to uplift the downtrodden, including the poor, the working poor and the barely middle class,” Turner began. “You send me to Congress, I’m going to make sure that we tax the wealthy, make them pay their fair share, and to center the people who need it the most in this district.”

    The contrast was sharp with Brown, who chairs the Democratic Party in Cuyahoga County, a major population center that includes the city of Cleveland. The discussion of health care was typical: Brown voiced a preference for a “public option,” while Turner strongly advocated Medicare for All while calling the current health care situation “absurd” and “asinine.” Brown sounded content to tinker with the status quo. Turner flatly declared: “The employer-based system, the commodification of health care, does not work in the United States of America. Almost 100 million people are either underinsured or uninsured right now.”

    After Brown emphasized that “we have to be able to compromise so we can get some things done,” Turner closed with a jab at those eager to block the momentum of her campaign for Congress: “You need to have somebody that will lead this community, who does have a vision and understands being a partner does not mean being a puppet, that working with does not mean acquiescing to. … You will always know whose side I am on.”

    That’s exactly the problem for the party establishment. Its backers know full well whose side Turner is on.

    So the attacks are escalating from Brown’s campaign. It sent out a mailer — complete with an out-of-focus photo of Turner, made to look lurid — under the headline “Nina Turner Opposed President Biden and Worked Against Democrats.” A more accurate headline would have been: “Nina Turner Supported Sen. Sanders and Worked Against Neoliberal Democrats.” The Brown campaign’s first TV ad, which began airing last month, features her saying that she will “work with Joe Biden … that’s different than Nina Turner.”

    A former editorial page editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brent Larkin, wrote: “Brown will be a well-financed candidate with deep-pocketed supporters who aren’t afraid to play rough. That’s because Turner can’t be beaten unless opponents plant seeds of doubt about her fitness, convincing voters her harsh criticisms of President Joe Biden would make it impossible for her to get things done for her community. The notion that Biden might punish a constituency important to him because Turner represents that constituency in Congress is far-fetched. During the 2020 campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris was bitterly critical of Biden’s civil rights record. Nevertheless, Biden chose her as his running mate, effectively rewarding her with the vice presidency.”

    Brown’s backers are eager to “play rough” because corporate power is at issue. It’s not only that Turner crisscrossed the nation, speaking eloquently in support of both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, serving as a national co-chair during the last one. Powerful backers of the Democratic Party’s top leadership — cozy and enmeshed with corporate America and the military-industrial complex — realize that “Rep. Nina Turner, D-Ohio” would significantly increase the leverage of genuinely progressive members of the House. For the Clinton wing of the party, that would be a frigging nightmare.

    As the marquee anti-Turner candidate, Brown is leaving the more blatant smears to outfits like the “Protecting Our Vote PAC” (which spent $41,998 in the last cycle in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat now-Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri). That PAC has released a scurrilous attack ad through Facebook, not merely telling viewers to vote for Brown but claiming, among other things, that “Nina Turner is not a real Democrat, you can’t trust her,” and she “has no respect for anyone, not even our president,” and “Nina Turner is all about Nina, she doesn’t care about Ohio, she doesn’t care about getting things done, all she cares about is making noise.”

    Though some may see Turner only as a firebrand speaker at political rallies, I was in dozens of meetings with her last year when her patient hard work was equally inspiring as she put in long hours with humility, compassion and dedication. I saw her as the real deal when we were colleagues for several months while she worked with RootsAction.org as a strategic delegate adviser for the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

    Recalling how she works behind the scenes, I can understand even more why the party establishment is so anxious to block her entry to Congress. While Turner is a seasoned legislator — she served on the Cleveland City Council and in the Ohio State Senate for a total of nine years — she’s committed to the meticulous and sometimes tedious work of organizing and coalition-building that, in the long run, can make all the difference for progressive change.

    The day that Clinton made her endorsement of Brown, a tweet from Turner offered an apt retort. Saying that she was “proud to be running a campaign focused on the issues that matter most to working people,” Turner added: “My district knows all too well that the politics of yesterday are incapable of delivering the change we desperately need.”

    The next day, underscoring wide awareness that the corporate “politics of yesterday” must not be the politics of tomorrow, the Turner campaign announced that it raised six figures in donations in less than 24 hours; Clinton’s intervention had been a blessing. Overall, at last report, the Turner campaign has received donations from 54,000 different individuals, with contributions averaging $27.

    Dollars pouring into Shontel Brown’s campaign are coming from a very different political and social universe. As the Daily Poster has reported, “business-friendly Democrats” and Washington lobbyists for huge corporations — including “Big Oil, Big Pharma, Fox News and Wall Street” — are providing big bucks to stop Nina Turner from becoming Congresswoman Turner.

    Bernie Sanders described the situation clearly in a recent mass email: “The political establishment and their super PACs are lining up behind Nina’s opponent during the critical final weeks of this primary. And you can bet they will do and spend whatever it takes to try and defeat her.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.

    People protest the NYPD's handling of the opioid crisis

    My little sister Keeley died of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in February 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to descend on the United States. Keeley was the mother of a young child. She was pregnant. She was 29 years old.

    Fatal overdoses like Keeley’s have increased steeply in recent years. During the year ending in November 2020, approximately 92,000 people died of a drug overdose in the U.S. — a stark increase over 2019, when approximately 70,630 people died of overdoses. There was a particularly unprecedented rise in overdoses once the pandemic hit. Some of the most impacted groups have been Black and Indigenous communities. While federal data are flawed in terms of delineating which drugs and drug combinations were involved in overdoses, the increase in deaths is clearly significant.

    Republicans have wrongly pointed to the overdose crisis as a rationale for high levels of policing. And unfortunately, many of President Joe Biden’s answers to the overdose increase — such as expanding criminalization-based drug courts, increasing court-mandated drug treatment, training police to administer overdose antidotes and emphasizing fentanyl criminalization — are also grounded in law enforcement.

    Yet policing directly contributed to my sister’s death. To prevent overdose deaths and truly confront the crisis, we must defund and abolish the police.

    Keeley was first arrested at 14, for stealing store merchandise to sell in order to buy drugs. She spent the next 15 years cycling through probation, home confinement, juvenile detention, jail, prison and court-mandated drug treatment.

    It’s no secret that trauma often drives drug misuse. Each time Keeley was arrested, she fell deeper into addiction. She spoke of her arrests as being “kidnapped and locked in a cage.” While incarcerated, she was traumatized by routine strip searches, physical violence and coerced psychiatric medication. She gave birth to her first baby while incarcerated; her daughter was ripped from her arms as she was dragged back to prison.

    Between arrests, Keeley tried mightily to hide her drug use. Her daughter was her “whole world,” she said, and she knew that seeking help in a drug-related emergency could trigger a child services investigation. Plus, Keeley’s experiences of police “help” had often involved them confiscating her clean needles and even her naloxone, the life-saving antidote to opioid overdose. So she avoided calling 911, sometimes even during health emergencies like overdoses.

    The threat of returning to jail is an obstacle to seeking emergency help for many people who use drugs. Black and Indigenous people and other people of color who use drugs are especially under threat, given the racist foundations of U.S. policing. A 2020 study in Criminal Justice Policy Review notes, “Overdose calls predict Black arrests in poorer urban areas,” and of course, high rates of racist police-perpetrated violence mean that calling 911 in the face of a dire emergency may mean risking even more bloodshed.

    Thus, police involvement discourages people who use drugs from seeking medical care. Meanwhile, the criminal system only offers them false — and sometimes life-threatening — “solutions.”

    In early 2019, my sister was sentenced to two years in drug court, which meant entering a court-mandated treatment program — the type of program Biden is pushing to expand. Keeley was frequently drug-tested; she knew that if there were illicit drugs in her system, she could be sent back to jail — and possibly locked up for longer than if she’d been sentenced by a regular court. Keeley didn’t feel ready to quit heroin, but she tried, in order to comply with court orders.

    When you stop using heroin, your tolerance lowers, making you more vulnerable to overdose. When Keeley relapsed, she died.

    My sister breathed her last breath in a tent under a viaduct, hiding from the police.

    Nearly a year and a half after Keeley’s death, the police remain pervasive in politicians’ proposals for addressing this crisis. The Biden administration has extended a harmful ban on fentanyl-like substances, and there’s a broad bipartisan push for the expansion of drug courts — the coercive programs in which Keeley died. Meanwhile, politicians and prosecutors are championing drug-induced homicide laws, which are now on the books in 20 states, and can result in murder charges for those who share drugs with someone who overdoses. These laws, like the criminal legal system as a whole, impact Black, Indigenous and people of color more severely. Drug-induced homicide laws don’t prevent overdose — in fact, they discourage people from calling 911.

    It’s time to acknowledge we can’t arrest our way out of the overdose crisis.

    Fortunately, a better call to action is in the air, thanks to the work of abolitionist organizers: Defund the police, and redirect resources toward life-affirming priorities like housing, food assistance, education and noncoercive health care. Supporting people in meeting their basic needs, including housing and cost-free medical care, is one of the most important ways in which we can help people avoid overdose.

    Funds should also be channeled toward addressing some of the specific needs of people who use drugs, like offering widespread drug-checking to ensure drugs’ purity and distributing fentanyl test strips and naloxone. We need supervised consumption sites, with medical staff who can help prevent or treat overdoses and offer clean needles. Such sanctioned programs exist in at least 11 countries, with clear success and no recorded overdose deaths. Medication-assisted addiction treatment — including heroin-assisted treatment (which is currently available in seven countries, and is highly effective) — should be cost-free and accessible to all who want it.

    Additionally, we must fund honest drug education designed to help people make informed decisions about their use. As neuroscientist Carl Hart has emphasized, simply teaching people about the dangers of mixing heroin and alcohol, for example, could save lives.

    In moving away from police and toward these life-affirming priorities, we must also directly challenge drug criminalization, a white supremacy-driven system that hurts the people it purports to help. Full legalization, undertaken in a just way that attends to impacted people’s needs and prioritizes providing real reparations to communities harmed by the drug war, can promote true drug safety.

    Finally, we can’t separate the violence of drug policing from the violence of the entire institution of policing. Working to legalize drugs should also push us to challenge the concept of criminalization more broadly.

    What would’ve happened if, instead of being policed and criminalized, my sister would’ve been given tools to survive while using drugs?

    What if we decided it was never acceptable to kidnap anyone and lock them in a cage?

    What if instead of grounding our “solutions” in capturing and torturing people, we grounded them in principles of autonomy, care and noncoercive support?

    For the sake of untold numbers of people at risk of overdose in the coming months and years, I hope we can start asking these questions. Instead of prioritizing the survival of a racist and harmful policing system, we must start treating people who use drugs as human beings and prioritize their lives.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Isn’t Holding Back on Voter Suppression. Democrats Must Go on Offensive.

    Supporters of the Freedom Ride for Voting Rights chant on the National Mall during a rally near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 26, 2021.

    On Tuesday, Senate Republicans voted against the For the People Act, which would have strengthened access to the ballot. If we take this vote at face value, we must acknowledge that Joe Biden’s 47 years in the Senate, Kamala Harris’s time in the Senate and her presiding over this process, and Chuck Schumer’s experience and leadership means nothing because they couldn’t ensure passage of this bill. This means that Mitch McConnell is still the majority leader setting the agenda for the Senate. The right to vote is that important, and Tuesday’s failed vote is an indication that we need to escalate. Unless we are prepared to concede those points, then we must escalate our fight for voting rights protection. We need to act like this is the urgent and existential threat to our democracy that it is.

    In the November 2020 election, voters turned out in massive numbers. Americans expressed their desire for a country that works for and includes all. Many of us felt we turned a corner in terms of registering and turning out voters. But progress wasn’t pleasing to all. In an unprecedented attempt to stifle electoral participation, Republican legislatures across the country responded to the November election by enacting a wave of measures that will make it harder for communities of color to vote.

    According to the Brennan Center for Justice, between January 1 and May 14, 2021, 14 states have passed 22 laws making it harder for Americans to vote. Considering many legislatures are still in session and at least one chamber of many legislatures has passed measures making it harder to vote, there is good reason to expect additional barriers to the ballot box. Given this unprecedented political engineering and gamesmanship, the greatest threat to U.S. democracy is proving to be voter suppression.

    If Republicans can control who votes and when they vote, they can pass any number of laws without consequence or fear of losing their seats. They can hold a fierce grip on power, no matter what they do.

    Right now, every state has different laws governing who can vote, how they vote and when they vote. This patchwork of policies makes it difficult for voters, let alone voting rights advocates, to navigate or push back on voting restrictions and protect their constitutional right to vote. It also increases the likelihood of voters being unfairly criminalized for not knowing the ever-changing rules in their respective jurisdictions. This newest crop of voting restrictions is not about election integrity, as Republicans claim. It is part of a broader attempt to hold onto power.

    For Republicans, nothing is more urgent. Even in the U.S. Congress, where there has been record in-fighting between the Never Trumpers and Trump 2024 camps, Republicans have unified around the goal of restricting the franchise. For this batch of legislators, no other policy proposals appear to matter. One of their main points of agreement is a mission to make it harder for people of color to vote.

    Democrats, on the other hand, have yet to discern how to lead with the authority granted them in 2020, in defense of the right to vote. They are still expending too much effort trying to get a recalcitrant party to agree to ensure Americans’ fundamental rights.

    Democracy advocates must be laser-focused because we are at ground zero. Many of us have spent our lives working for access to the ballot. When we organize and turn people out to vote; we are not interested in the personality of the person they are voting for, we are interested in what each candidate will do to make life better for marginalized people. We are tired of living in a nation that refuses to accept our full participation, and we need leaders who appreciate our concerns and desire to have agency over our lives, schools and communities.

    That means we will evaluate elected leaders not by whether they show up but by what they do when they show up. We are not interested in campaign pledges; we are interested in action.

    It is nice that Vice President Harris has been appointed by the White House to lead this charge, but we must be clear that nothing short of progress will appease us. We are not interested in historic appointments if those appointments don’t deliver on the very thing the American people have been demanding: agency over their communities, resources for their communities, a chance to live free from fear and with full participation in our nation’s democracy.

    We need federal legislation to govern how elections are run across the country and prevent state legislatures from restricting the franchise for political gain. The late Rep. John Lewis spent his life fighting for the right to vote, and such legislation was the last political battle he took on before his death. He understood what too many of us take for granted: Instead of trying to beat the hundreds of voter suppression bills one by one, we need federal legislation to preempt voting restrictions at the national level.

    Senator Schumer must now determine how to protect the right to vote. But I will caution our leaders that pivoting to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is an attempt to kick the can down the road; it is a rhetorical red-herring. Even suggesting this pivot tells me Republican and conservative Democrats think that we’re incompetent. Just because it carries John Lewis’s name doesn’t mean it does the same things that the For the People Act does. We need both. Going back to square one is going backwards. It is not moving us forward. Furthermore, there is nothing that precludes Congress from doing both. Framing this issue as an either/or is a false choice.

    The For the People Act would have set a federal standard for elections and prevent states from developing policies that would make it harder to vote. States would no longer be able to limit early voting, because it is proven to help people vote. They would not be able to restrict and consolidate drop boxes, because doing so makes it more difficult for voters to cast a ballot.

    Democrats have a slim majority in Congress. They cannot risk that majority by moving slowly, cautiously, carefully. They must match Republicans’ intensity and treat attacks on voting rights as existential threats.

    Advocates will not be pacified by symbolic measures that fail to yield change. We do not want to be placated. We want the job done. We are also not interested in being patronized by congressional leaders whose interest is merely maintaining safe legislative districts at all costs, especially when we know exactly which communities will be disproportionately shouldered with that cost: marginalized communities.

    We are at ground zero. Elected officials must act like it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • What Angers Mitch McConnell More Than Our Unfair Tax Code? Those Who Exposed It.

    Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell listens during a news briefing after the weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on June 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Recently leaked data revealed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and several other U.S. billionaires have paid zero federal income taxes in some past years.

    This has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell up in arms — but not because of what the scandal reveals about our rigged tax system. Instead, McConnell wants to go after the whistleblowers who exposed the scandal.

    “These people ought to, whoever did this, ought to be hunted down and thrown into jail,” McConnell said in a radio interview.

    What I suspect really bothers McConnell is that this data is likely to increase the pressure on him and other lawmakers to raise taxes on the wealthy. For the first time in decades, serious proposals to do just that are actually on the table in Washington. And the timing couldn’t be better.

    Poor and low-income Americans have paid the biggest price for the pandemic, while U.S. billionaires have seen their fortunes increase by more than $1 trillion. Now is the moment for America’s ultra-rich to contribute their fair share to an economic recovery that will make the nation stronger in the face of future crises.

    How are billionaires getting away with paying so little to Uncle Sam now? A key reason is that our current tax system rewards wealth, not work.

    The top tax rate on paycheck income is nearly double the rate at which Wall Street windfalls are taxed. But while you and I rely on our paychecks to make ends meet, the very rich make most of their money from financial investments.

    In fact, America’s top 1 percent hold more than half of all U.S. wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds.

    In short, their wealth makes their money for them. Yet they’re taxed at far lower rates.

    President Joe Biden wants to get rid of this perverse tax preference for the wealthy. He’s proposing that we tax wealth the same as work for people who earn more than $1 million a year.

    Another Biden proposal would close a loophole that allows the wealthy to escape capital gains taxes altogether on assets they pass on to their heirs. Under his plan, individuals who inherit family businesses and farms — and continue to operate them — would not be affected.

    In 12 recent polls, voters, including independents, support these and other Biden tax proposals by 60 percent or more.

    Some Congressional Democrats are calling on the president to go further to tax the top 1 percent. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed an annual wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million, as well as levies on Wall Street speculation and excessive CEO pay.

    Equitable reforms like these are critical if we want to modernize our public infrastructure and give families the economic security they need to fulfill their potential in the world’s richest country.

    If we don’t unrig our tax code, billionaires will keep getting away with stiffing Uncle Sam — and sticking the rest of us with the bill.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Right Has Chosen Critical Race Theory as Its New Boogeyman to Scare Voters

    People hold up signs during a rally against "critical race theory" (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia, on June 12, 2021.

    Critical race theory (CRT) has been around for over 40 years. So why is there so much talk about it now?

    Following the racial justice uprisings of 2020, when critical race conversations broke out across the country, racial progress seemed possible. And then came the backlash.

    In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, attorneys general from 20 states have requested that the department’s grant funding through the American History and Civics Education programs include language that opposes what they see as the “deeply flawed and controversial teachings” of CRT in schools. At least 25 states and multiple municipalities have proposed or passed legislation banning CRT in schools.

    But let’s take a step back. Is the backlash valid?

    According to Char Adams, Allan Smith and Aadit Tambe, “There is scant evidence … that critical race theory is being widely taught in K-12 public schools.” Further, critical race scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings have suggested the recent backlash isn’t about critical race theory. According to Ladson-Billings, “I think what people are really going after at this point is the 2022 and the 2024 elections.”

    Ladson-Billings’s sentiment is spot on with Charles Blow, opinion writer for The New York Times, who suggests, “Critical race theory is the political right’s new boogeyman.”

    But in the context of education, this boogeyman is more of a strawman, because the very thing being called critical race theory to scare many Americans isn’t critical race theory at all.

    So, what is critical race theory?

    To start, critical race theory is not a theory at all, but rather a series of concepts and ideas, developed and debated for the better part of the past half century, with aspirations of explaining the enduring, shape-shifting and complex behaviors of racism in U.S. society. It both explains and demystifies the construct of race and its centrality to the unique and peculiar project of a country founded on the extravagant exploitation of other people’s lands and labor.

    These theories, concepts and ideas, which first grew out of legal studies, helped scholars and other individuals seeking to understand the consequences of the U.S. origin story, as deeply rooted in race as it is, begin to pin down how racism and racial disparities are complex, changing, and often possess subtle social and institutional dynamics.

    Critical race theory is not just a set of ideas, though; it is a fundamental adjustment for how we should look at the world and see the realities that a focused lens on structural inequities might present. Thus, as much as it offers ideas, critical race theory offers evidence, a lens to both see and question that world that we live in. While we make up less than 14 percent of the U.S. population, why do Black people make up close to 40 percent of the U.S. prison population and an even greater share of the U.S. jobless population? Why are Black women evicted at grossly disproportionate and alarming rates, and why do Black and Brown children make up over half of the children living in poverty?

    This intense look at the evidence from a perspective that refuses to position vulnerable people as the “problem” allows for a counterstory, both of how history gets explained and about how racism gets resolved. The idea here is that one cannot solve a problem that one does not or does not want to understand.

    It should be noted that many anti-CRT legislation advocates come from a pool of people who have been adamantly whitewashing history (literally). For at least a decade or so now, in some states, these “advocates” have been unwavering in their attempts to ensure that history books offer watered down accounts of colonization and slavery in the U.S. This campaign against truth was kind of a tee-up to the current anti-CRT movement.

    This right-wing campaign sweeping across the country is just the latest iteration of anti-anything science or social progress that tells us to accept lies — in this case, that structural racism doesn’t exist in the U.S. The deniers of racism, much like the deniers of climate change and science itself, tell us to reject truth on the regular and vilify those who fiercely seek it to make decisions informed by it.

    In my own work and in partnership with communities and schools across the country, I have seen how hungry people are for truth. And in the pursuit of truth, we have used CRT to change schools for the better.

    In Community District 13 in New York City, I worked with school leaders using CRT to completely eliminate its out of school suspension gap. In Detroit, Michigan, I worked with school leaders using CRT to foster deeper community understanding and collective empathy in order to foster bold and broad conversations about improving literacy. Across the country, I’ve worked with school leaders, teachers, parents and students using CRT to help us to develop more informed educators, design more racially just systems, and address stubborn but troubling racial outcome and opportunity disparities.

    At its best, CRT has provided in each of these spaces a blueprint for advancing the racial consciousness necessary for educational justice. It has provoked courageous questions that are not about nursing our cowardly comforts but finally putting an end to our immobilizing indifference.

    So, what is CRT? It is the audacity to tell the truth in places built on lies. This truth will make us free, all of us, even though there are some who don’t want us all to be free, who have been and remain willing to sever a nation to ensure that some of us stay chained.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Better Than Trump” Isn’t Good Enough. End Deportation Now.

    An immigration activist is seen during a march to Constitution Avenue ahead of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled The Essential Role of Immigrant Workers in America, on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    On the campaign trail, Joe Biden went to great lengths to establish the dramatic differences between himself and Donald Trump on immigration. Biden was very clear: He would reunite separated families, resettle 125,000 refugees and put privately run immigration detention centers firmly in the past.

    Six months into his administration, immigration organizers are feeling whiplash.

    The White House followed through on its promise of a 100-day deportation moratorium, but quickly abandoned the goals of its own executive order when it was blocked by a Trump-appointed federal judge, rather than pursuing legally available solutions like granting individuals temporary protection from deportation.

    The Biden administration stopped adding immigrants into the Migrant Protection Protocols (which forced those seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico while their cases were processed in U.S. courts), and agreed to allow children to cross the border without being turned away, but Vice President Kamala Harris communicated a very different message when she explicitly told migrants and asylum seekers, “Do not come [to the United States].”

    President Biden broke his promise to raise the refugee cap, although he reversed course after overwhelming pressure from advocates.

    Biden shut down two of the worst detention centers in the nation — including Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center, where scores of women said they suffered medical abuse and forced hysterectomies — but this is only a beginning when it comes to curbing the horrific human rights abuses endemic to immigrant detention.

    Since Biden took office, there have been more than 450,000 deportations or expulsions, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention is up more than 60 percent — skyrocketing from 14,715 people on January 15 to 26,197 as of June 18. However, above all, the president’s budget exposes the hypocrisy of his administration’s position on immigration: Biden called for an $18 million increase in funding for the enforcement agency.

    We have reached an inflection point. Will President Biden bury the tradition of criminalizing asylum seekers, tearing apart families and expanding the United States’ role in destabilizing governments in Latin America? Or will it continue “business as usual?”

    While there is reason for alarm, there is also reason to hope for real shifts during this administration, driven by grassroots organizers. That is because the Biden administration has demonstrated some responsiveness to organizing — and that willingness to reverse course in the face of widespread public outrage gives us a unique opportunity to influence policy.

    The White House is in the middle of rewriting a set of guidelines that dictate how ICE will conduct arrests, detentions and deportations — called the “enforcement priorities” or “prosecutorial discretion” (“PD”) memo. Currently, ICE agents have the power to decide who to arrest and detain based on an individual agent’s “good faith belief” about whether or not an immigrant presents a threat to “public safety.” This classification then determines how people get prioritized for deportation — basically, who immigration agents spend their time pursuing and detaining.

    The existing rules in the PD memo identify anyone who entered the U.S. after November 20, 2020 — including asylum seekers — as a priority for deportation, which exposes an untold number of vulnerable people to dangerous political and social situations. They also grant the ability to label individuals aged 16 or older as being in “active participation” with a gang, and thus a priority for deportation. ICE can assign this label on intentional participation at their discretion, doubling down on an arbitrary and discriminatory framework used by law enforcement.

    The rules governing ICE agents also presume that any immigrant who has been convicted of an “aggravated felony” is a public safety risk and removal priority. In fact, the term “aggravated felonies” is designed to ensure that people have as few rights as possible to fight detention and deportation.

    Take it from Paul Pierrilus, a New York financial consultant, who was deported to Haiti under the Biden administration on February 2, despite never even setting foot in that country: “You made a promise to stop deportation and close detention centers. These detention centers are caging of innocent people. You can use your executive power to uphold your promise.”

    If we learned anything in 2020, it’s that the policing and mass incarceration systems in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people — and our immigration enforcement system is an extension of that. Relying on traffic offenses, calls to the ICE hotline, eviction histories, and other objectively unreliable evidence only legitimizes demonstrated racial profiling practiced by police forces.

    The ripple effect caused by each deportation spreads far and wide. During the 30 forums held as part of Mijente’s Eyes on ICE campaign, 150 people testified to their experiences with the enforcement agency. The consensus was clear: Detention and deportation negatively impact children, families and communities. The deportation of a parent or family member causes traumatic mental and physical health effects in children, and an increase in child poverty, impacts that create significant strain on local communities. In fact, research shows that deportation causes other community members to become fearful and mistrustful of public institutions and reduce participation in schools, health clinics, faith and cultural activities, and other crucial civic institutions.

    That’s the status quo. But right now, President Biden has an opportunity to break with the dangerous policies of the Trump administration, move away from the mistakes of the past, and demand that immigrants be recognized as whole human beings with families that love them, businesses that need them and communities that rely on them.

    We are in a moment of racial reckoning in this country, with communities across the country calling for an end to mass incarceration and racist policing. It is time to end the carceral approach to immigration, which relies on these same flawed systems. It’s time to proactively limit ICE’s power to harm undocumented people and our communities.

    The Biden administration has a choice to make: continue to destroy immigrant families, or pursue humane and just immigration policies that aim to end mass incarceration, criminalization and deportation of immigrants.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trumpists Have Made Alarming Advances in Their Quest to Control Elections

    Protestors in support of former President Donald Trump gather outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum where Ballots from the 2020 general election wait to be counted on May 1, 2021, in Phoenix, Arizona.

    In state after Republican state around the country, a push is underway to create legal pathways to subvert election results. This effort is buoyed by the fact that well over half of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump is the “true president.” And it will be further bolstered by Trump’s summer-of-hate tour, during which he plans to traverse the country to give stump speeches aimed at keeping himself in the political spotlight, putting pressure on any and all GOP officials and political leaders to continue to hew to his lies. Trump appears ready to actively campaign against any GOP political figure who supported his impeachment and opposes his ongoing claims to having won the election.

    From the beginning of his presidency, Trump and Trumpism both appeared to be a cult and a deeply authoritarian political movement, one that tapped into some of the most violent impulses in U.S. political history. It was a combination of the demagoguery of McCarthyism and the conspiracism of the John Birch Society. It valued absolute loyalty tests — not to country or to the Constitution, but to the person of Donald J. Trump. And in demanding loyalty, it brooked no dissent, insisting that individuals and institutions bend repeatedly to its will.

    In the weeks after the November election, when it was clear that Trump had massively lost the popular vote and had also lost the Electoral College vote, it was increasingly clear that Trump would attempt to hold onto power by any means necessary. Sure enough, there he was on January 6, goading on an enraged mob of Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, neo-Nazis, and other violent extremists whom he had invited to D.C. with the express purpose of making it impossible for Congress to certify the election result. The resulting bloodshed, as horrific as it was, ought to have surprised no one. Trump had, after all, been encouraging armed assaults against institutions of power for the better part of a year, calling on militias to “liberate” Michigan and other states from COVID-related public health restrictions and for his supporters to monitor the November 2020 polls. And GOP leaders, instead of distancing themselves from him, had essentially given him a free pass.

    That the January 6 insurrection did not lead to greater bloodshed than it did was due more to luck than to lack of will. In the months since then, it’s become clear that the Capitol Police and National Guard were essentially, for many hours, ordered to stand down in the face of the far right attack. It has also become clear just how far Trump’s team was willing to go to basically order Department of Justice personnel into the fray to further their election fraud claims and attempt to overturn a democratic election result. And, in the ongoing seditionist language of Michael Flynn and other acolytes, it’s become clear just how comfortable these right-wing extremists were in utilizing military force to cling to power, and how, nearly half a year into the Biden presidency, they cling to the hope that an armed uprising, involving elements of the military and others, will somehow return their Great Leader to the White House.

    The failed mob attack of January 6 ought to have been the event that lanced this toxic, poison-filled boil. In its wake, the GOP leadership, at a congressional and a state level, has had ample opportunity to cauterize the wound and sever their never-particularly-stable alliance with Trump.

    At the federal level, had a handful more GOP senators found the courage to vote to convict the disgraced ex-president following his second impeachment, he would have been destroyed as a viable political figure and possible future candidate. More recently, had Sen. Mitch McConnell not rallied his senators to vote against the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, Congress could have thrown its full investigative muscle into unraveling the extent of Trump’s anti-democratic plans.

    At the state level, state GOPs could have supported the congressmembers, including Liz Cheney, who had the moral courage to vote to impeach Trump for his actions (though not the courage to oppose his agenda while in office). Instead, those state parties have taken vote after vote to censor the pro-impeachment figures; activists have heckled and booed senators who voted to convict; and state lawmakers in one state after the next have moved to embrace Trump’s fantasies about rigged elections and massive fraudulent voting.

    In Arizona, they have set in motion an utterly disreputable “audit” of election results that is being carried out with no transparency by a cohort of avowedly pro-Trump, and conspiracist individuals and organizations.

    In Georgia, they have voted to constrict the franchise and to undermine the role of elections officials, from the Secretary of State on down, by allowing GOP elected officials to replace officials they deem a threat to the electoral process. Recall that, in 2020, the secretary of state stood firm in the face of extraordinary intimidation tactics from Trump, from his lawyers, and from his trolls who unleashed volleys of death threats and other threatening behavior against him. Come 2022 or 2024, that official, and county-level officials, might not have the ability to both withstand such pressure and to continue to hold their jobs.

    In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection and needs to keep Trump on board, has called a special legislative session this summer that most commentators assume comes with the specific intent of dramatically tightening voting requirements, and constricting both absentee voting and early voting.

    Around the country, state officials are buying into Trump’s rhetoric about a stolen election, and are putting in place rules designed to make it easier for the governing party and election officials to reject votes that don’t go their way. And around the country, too, as the media continues to give Trump a vast amount of free publicity by covering his each and every utterance, it is fast becoming a litmus test for GOP primary voters as to whether or not candidates support the most outlandish and far right of conspiracy claims and worldviews. As a result, the last vestiges of moderation and of rationalist politics are now being driven from the GOP. The GOP is now, the better part of a year after Trump’s thumping election defeat, on the verge of becoming more like a full-fledged far right party as seen in Europe than a mainstream conservative party.

    Addressing a QAnon event, Trump’s disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn argued that the U.S. military should intervene in domestic politics in much the same way as did the Myanmar military earlier this year. The most shocking thing about Flynn’s speech wasn’t his words — after all, Flynn by now has a long history of saying entirely despicable, fascistic things in public settings; it all was in the crowd’s reaction: he was wildly cheered rather than booed off the stage.

    Trump was an entirely malignant, destructive president. Now, from his post-presidential gilded exile in Mar-a-Lago he is setting the stage for future waves of extremism and violence, and his henchmen are, increasingly, flirting with the language of paramilitarism and coups. Trump is demanding that state parties and federal political figures toe his line, and he is using his popularity among the GOP base to take down establishment Republican figures and to replace them with unbending loyalists and sycophants. His reactionary followers, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, are pushing a “domino theory,” arguing that a series of state audits of elections results will ultimately lead to Biden’s demise and to Trump rising, phoenix-like from the political ashes.

    Goaded on by this tsunami of disinformation, 30 percent of Republicans now believe that Trump will magically be “reinstated” as president by August, or shortly thereafter — a stunning number and one that should cause grave concern. Never before in U.S. history has a defeated president spent the year after he left office trying to undermine the election result, attempting to seize control over all the state levers of power within his party so as to further his personal political ambitions, and using his proxies to gin up the notion of violence against his successor.

    Trump was in the gutter as a president, and there he remains. As Trumpists take over political apparatuses around the country, he is becoming even more of a threat and a havoc-maker. I do not doubt that Trump would, if he ran for president again, be thoroughly defeated in any even remotely free-and-fair election. But, as Trump loyalists seize control in more GOP-led states, and as election law changes are implemented that make it easier for governing Republicans to undermine unfavorable election results in their states, I have every doubt that upcoming elections and the vote counts that follow can be guaranteed as free-and-fair in the first place.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Terrifying UN Draft Climate Report Urges Total Transformation of Our Way of Life

    A protester holds a placard reading "Our house is on fire" during a climate demonstration outside the Hague, Netherlands, on June 24, 2021.

    The western states have been stuck in a blast furnace of hot weather as spring transitions to summer. Record-breaking heat, drought and extreme stress to power grids have almost half the country in deep distress. The last couple of days have seen a small reprieve, but that’s about to end.

    “The National Weather Service is warning of a ‘Record-Breaking and Dangerous Heatwave’ hitting this weekend and early next week,” reports Brian Kahn for Gizmodo. “Weather models are also coalescing around blistering heat. If the forecasts come to fruition, we’re not just talking about a few daily records falling here and there. We’re talking about a heat wave for the ages that could absolutely destroy all-time records from Washington to California as well as parts of Canada.”

    According to a terrifying, massive and excruciatingly detailed report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP), what is happening out west is not a meteorological fluke, but a hard look at the immediate future of the planet. “Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30,” reports AFP.

    If the data and conclusions in this IPCC report are accurate, what immediately awaits us is staggering:

    By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity’s stewardship of the planet. But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 — too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems, some scientists say.

    The challenges it highlights are systemic, woven into the very fabric of daily life. They are also deeply unfair: those least responsible for global warming will suffer disproportionately, the report makes clear. And it shows that even as we spew record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are undermining the capacity of forests and oceans to absorb them, turning our greatest natural allies in the fight against warming into enemies.

    It warns that previous major climate shocks dramatically altered the environment and wiped out most species, raising the question of whether humanity is sowing the seeds of its own demise. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.”

    Beyond the dire warnings contained in the report, the assessment of current efforts to curtail climate disruption is damning. One example offered is the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to a 1.5 degree Celsius increase — two degrees at most. This was based on the assumption that the Earth would not warm that much before the year 2100. According to the data included in the report, “On current trends, we’re heading for three degrees Celsius at best…. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization projected a 40 percent chance that Earth will cross the 1.5-degree threshold for at least one year by 2026.”

    In other words, nearly every idea floated by governments to address climate disruption is woefully insufficient and out of date. “Current levels of adaptation will be inadequate to respond to future climate risks,” reads the IPCC report. Billions face the threat of coastal destruction, drought, famine, fire and plague … not after 2100, but today, tomorrow and the day after that.

    All of this is already happening, and much of it cannot be stopped. This is no longer a theoretical exercise to solve a problem that is 80 years away. This is now.

    One immediate example is the drought-ridden west, and the massive conflagrations caused by the high heat and dry air. “When wildfires blaze across the West, as they have with increasing ferocity as the region has warmed, the focus is often on the immediate devastation — forests destroyed, infrastructure damaged, homes burned, lives lost,” reports The New York Times. “But about two-thirds of drinking water in the United States originates in forests. And when wildfires affect watersheds, cities can face a different kind of impact, long after the flames are out.”

    While the report takes a dim view of current efforts to curtail climate disruption, its message is not entirely pessimistic. Much of the damage to come is already baked into the situation, yet areas of significant mitigation are possible — but only if action is taken immediately.

    “There is very little good news in the report,” reads the AFP dispatch, “but the IPCC stresses that much can be done to avoid worst-case scenarios and prepare for impacts that can no longer be averted…. But simply swapping a gas guzzler for a Tesla or planting billions of trees to offset business-as-usual isn’t going to cut it, the report warns.”

    “We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments,” reads the IPCC report. “We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”

    Is the United States capable of such a radical transformation? We can’t get people to wear masks in order to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, there are millions of dollars to be made lying to a large segment of the population about issues like climate disruption, and our governing bodies cannot summon the necessary majority to fix a pothole.

    Our capitalism is driving everything that is murdering the planet — oil, war, consumption — and that capitalism has powerful defenders.

    If the western U.S. goes up in flames like an untended tinderbox and California’s huge economy is derailed, if another major city like New Orleans is devoured by a climate storm, if the United States sees a sharp uptick in displaced climate refugees fleeing for their lives, maybe Mitch McConnell will forego the filibuster and let a solution come to a vote, but I am not holding my breath.

    I always wince when I hear someone say we are “destroying the planet.” The planet is just fine, thank you very much, 4 billion years and counting, and we humans are to this space-bound orb what amounts to an annoying summer cold. “Next up,” Earth appears prepared to announce. “Let’s see if another species can do better in a few million years. Pardon the mess; the last tenants were real assholes.”

    For our own sake, for the sake of all life, and in the name of simple enlightened self-interest, we need to change everything about how we exist as creatures on this planet, and we need to do it now.

    It is almost, but not quite, too late.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • State Lawmakers Are Using a Powerful Tool to Mandate Renewable Energy Use

    Wind turbines operate on a wind farm in Marshalltown, Iowa. As of 2020, wind energy powers 57 percent of Iowa's net electricity generation -- a bigger share than any other state.

    As we work to combat the climate crisis, it’s clear that electricity providers must shift toward using more renewable energy to generate power. Clearly, more regulations are needed. But depending on where you are in the country, the word “regulation” is met with heavy resistance. So, why not try a reframe?

    Some clever folks did just that. They came up with the label “Renewable Portfolio Standard,” also called “Renewable Energy Standards,” a policy approach that has spread rapidly with real impact.

    The Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is a public mandate, typically initiated by a state legislature with the purpose of increasing energy from renewable sources — wind, solar, and other alternatives to fossil fuel and nuclear power. Another purpose has been to drive renewable innovation by signaling a predictable, growing market. The law sets renewable energy production targets for utilities — either in the amount of energy they produce or as a share of their energy output — along with consequences for not meeting them, usually a fine.

    Way back in 1983, Iowa became the first state to try this type of renewable energy mandate. The state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard mandated that Iowa’s two main utility companies own or secure by contract a total of 105 megawatts (MW) of renewables, or enough to power several hundred homes. Not a terribly impressive requirement … but a start. From this baby step came a big leap. By 2019, Iowa was the second largest wind power producer, after Texas. And by 2020, wind energy from more than 5,100 turbines powered 57 percent of Iowa’s net electricity generation — a bigger share than any other state.

    As of early 2021 the state was generating around 11,500 megawatts of renewable-based energy, nearly 110 times the energy potential of Iowa’s original 105 megawatt renewables target.

    Iowa’s success has played a pivotal role in moving others to use the Renewable Portfolio Standard. Now, 30 states, plus Washington, D.C., and three territories have adopted the policy or a similar approach to mandate a shift in electricity generation.

    In 2004, as the most oil-dependent state in the nation, Hawaii changed its renewable portfolio “goal” to an enforceable standard. In a 2015 update to the standard, Hawaii became the first state to set a target of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Gov. David Ige explained: “Hawaii spends roughly $5 billion a year on foreign oil to meet its energy needs. Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment, and energy security.”

    In 2018, California took the same step, setting a 100 percent renewable energy production goal by 2045. Understanding the urgency of this act, then-Gov. Jerry Brown declared to the press, “It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done.”

    The results are impressive: Clearly, lack of federal leadership did not stop significant state action.

    If you thought Iowa’s use of renewable portfolio standards was unexpected, consider that even in Texas — where we know ideas like “big government” and “regulations” sound unpopular — lawmakers were willing to pass a renewable energy requirement when it was framed as a “Renewable Portfolio Standard.”

    In 2002, after much give-and-take, the Texas legislature enacted Senate Bill 7, amending the state’s utility code and allowing for competition in the state’s retail electricity market. The Lone Star State put in place a Renewable Portfolio Standard. It required that by 2009 electricity providers collectively supply consumers with 2,000 megawatts of renewable power, enough to power about a third of a million homes.

    When it became clear that this goal would be met three years early in Texas, the state legislature more than doubled the requirement to just over 5,000 megawatts by 2015. As before, wind development blew past forecasts. This achievement was possible because Texas had approved construction of transmission lines to route electricity from remote wind farms to large urban markets. As of May 2021, the state’s installed wind capacity had reached nearly 40,000 megawatts — more than six times the goal mandated just four years earlier. Now leading the nation in wind energy, Texas currently generates 20 percent of U.S. wind-powered electricity.

    Meanwhile, in less than a decade, Virginia has become a renewable energy powerhouse. It’s on track to produce more than half of its electricity from renewables by 2035, and all of it a decade later.

    In March, the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act went into effect. It’s got real teeth: mandated benchmarks over 15 years for solar and wind investment and a Renewable Portfolio Standard requiring the state’s utilities to provide fully renewable electricity by 2045.

    If the entire U.S. were to adopt similar policies to these state-wide initiatives and enact a national goal of a 50 percent renewable energy standard by 2035, potentially we could cut CO2 emissions in the nation’s power sector by over 45 percent and reduce national natural gas generation by 38 percent over the next 15 years. These reductions—although falling slightly short of national efforts by President Biden to halve our current CO2 emissions within the next decade — would put us on track to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

    Almost half the growth of U.S. renewable energy from 2000 to 2019 can be linked to state Renewable Portfolio Standards — with more expected over the next decade. But that’s about the only blanket statement one can make about them. This reminds us of Justice Brandeis’s observation nearly 90 years ago, perhaps no more important today: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments …”

    States have implemented differing approaches. Standards range from Washington, D.C.’s call for 100 percent renewable energy by 2032 to Iowa’s modest, but long-surpassed, 1983 renewables goal. Many states mandate that renewables comprise a minimum share of retail electric sales — generally between 10 and 45 percent, though 14 states require 50 percent or greater. Rather than mandating that a particular share of energy be renewable, two national leaders, Iowa and Texas, require specific amounts of renewable energy capacity.

    In creating investment certainty, states’ “standards” mandates have been astonishingly successful in driving the growth of renewable energy and advancing renewable energy technology, all the while driving down our reliance and generation of fossil fuel source production, which has been steadily declining in the past several years. In fact, the U.S. now generates more than double the total renewable energy that was called for in the 29 states’ standards put together.

    While this statistic is extremely impressive, we must also note that individual states can’t fight this national effort alone. These regional efforts constitute only a fraction, albeit a powerful one, of the necessary measures our nation must take in order to foster renewable energy systems that aren’t reliant on detrimental fossil fuels.

    Let us all support the efforts of organizations and leaders rewriting our nation’s energy story. The youth-led Sunrise Movement as well as 350.org are leading the charge for renewable energy, fossil fuel emitter accountability, and just, equitable and sustainable energy grids — all the while upgrading the most crucial element of American infrastructure, democracy itself. They, among others, deserve praise and support for advancing the Green New Deal and President Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice. Renewable Portfolio Standards are just one tool in what must become a broad, transformative strategy for how we power our society — a strategy that, I’m thrilled to say, is already significantly underway.

    Note: If you want to discover where your state stands on renewable energy mandates, here is a handy interactive site from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The author would like to thank Nina Larbi, Olivia Smith and Rachel Madison for their assistance on earlier drafts.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel Sends Weapons to Duterte. Filipinx and Palestinian Struggle Are Linked.

    Activists from Filipino organizations march during a May 2021 Chicago rally in support of Palestine.

    “From Palestine to the Philippines, Stop the U.S. War Machine” is a common refrain that has echoed through the streets of the Philippines and the U.S. in the wake of recent attacks in the occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Despite documented casualties disproportionately affecting Palestinians, with at least 243 dead, 1,900 injured and 90,000 Gaza residents displaced, the Biden administration recently approved a $735 million arms sale to Israel, a package similar to the deal concluded with the Philippines. While the Philippines and Palestine might not be obviously linked in the popular imaginary, there is a complicated web of relations — threaded through militarism, settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism — that binds these entities together. Disentangling these ties and revealing the complicity of the Philippines in the displacement and devastation of Palestinian lives is the solidarity work that is urgently required of us at this time.

    In 2011, I had an opportunity to visit the occupied territories of Palestine alongside a delegation of Indigenous and women of color feminists. During that time, I saw the apartheid wall that divided and displaced people from their homes, the checkpoints where everyone and everything is subject to scrutiny, the neighborhoods where families are pushed out of their homes in the middle of the night, and the corrals that are built for Palestinian workers to line up every day to work in Israel and support the very state that has displaced them. From Hebron, Al-Bustan, to Sheikh Jarrah, we met people who persist and insist on staying in their homes even in the face of everyday acts of violence committed by settlers and Israeli soldiers.

    While much has been written about the complicity of the U.S. in supporting this form of settler colonialism, it is made hyper-visible at checkpoints that regulate passage through the occupied territories. For example, one such billboard I saw baldly declared: “US AID from the American People. The Jalameh vehicle crossing enhancement was funded by the American people through the US Agency for International Development to foster greater trade and development of the Area.”

    As an immigrant from the Philippines and a scholar of Filipinx/Philippine American studies, I recognize that this billboard could just as easily be located in the Philippines to reflect the enduring U.S. empire, sustained and nurtured by U.S. militarism, that continues to support the authoritarian regime of Rodrigo Duterte. Since 2016, the U.S. has provided the Philippines with approximately $550 million in military aid. These arms have anchored and facilitated Duterte’s execution of his own “war on terror,” culminating in the passage of the so-called Anti-Terror Bill in July 2020 — in reality, a “war on the poor” that has resulted in grave human rights violations. To date, the Duterte regime has been responsible for over 25,000 lives lost to state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings, the violent displacement of Indigenous communities, arbitrary arrests and the “red-tagging” of human rights defenders and community leaders suspected of engaging in “terrorist” activities, the widespread suppression and surveillance of the media, as well as countless sexist and misogynistic policies that have led to gender-based violence. This is the same leader who proudly defends these numbers by saying, “It is my job to scare people, to intimidate people, and to kill people.”

    Israel has long been a supporter of Duterte’s regime, serving as one of the major suppliers of arms to the Philippines. While Israel is also the destination of labor migration from the Philippines, with over 30,000 migrant workers currently working there, the precariousness of their working conditions makes this source of employment temporary, tenuous and unstable. Migrant workers receive work permits that allow them to work in the country for no more than 73 months. If their employer passes away, if they are fired or they quit their jobs, their visas automatically expire. Their work permits specifically stipulate that they are prohibited from engaging in any romantic relationships. If they become pregnant, their visas are revoked immediately, unless they agree to have their children deported to their home countries. Following rulings in 2006 and 2009 that mandated the deportation of migrant workers and their children who have overstayed their permits, the implementation of these policies have only escalated since 2017. Just this year, about 39 families, a majority of whom are Filipinxs, have been slated for deportation.

    Approximately 8,000 foreign caregivers arrive in Israel every year, with a majority of them coming from the Philippines. As of December 2020, there are approximately 55,000 caregivers, with Filipinxs comprising the vast majority. The influx of Filipinx workers in Israel, especially caregivers, surged in the late 1980s following the 1987 Palestinian Intifada and the ban on Palestinians entering Israel. Concerned about a labor shortage to care for its growing elderly population, Israel turned to the Philippines to hire women specifically to do this care work.

    As Filipinxs who have lived through various regimes that have occupied and colonized our country, including Duterte’s current authoritarian regime, witnessing the current Palestinian occupation and siege must get us to question the similar effects of prolonged occupation and examine our own histories and positions, as well as our commitments to long-term solidarity.

    We can take inspiration from global Filipinx solidarity movements among workers, students and the youth, and begin this work by dispelling the myths that dominate the public sphere and circulate in our communities; myths that prevent us from engaging in the important solidarity work necessary in these times. Doing so requires we:

    • Recognize that supporting Palestine does not mean supporting anti-Semitism. The critiques against occupation are directed at the state of Israel, not towards Jews or Judaism. They are about Zionism, which is a nationalist ideology tethered to the creation of the state of Israel. But what it has engendered in the process is to justify the military occupation of Palestine, dispossess thousands of Palestinians and establish an apartheid state where a racist hierarchy discriminates against non-Jews (and Jews of non-European descent). As such, movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which seeks to target the state of Israel, is founded upon eradicating all forms of oppression and racism, including anti-Semitism.
    • Recognize that the violence in the region is not a religious conflict. Instead, it stems from a settler-colonial movement that has led to the mass expulsion (Nakba) and forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland between 1947-49, and the subsequent imposition of a military regime that created the occupied territories of Palestine. This military occupation is not only the root of this conflict, it has governed Palestinians’ everyday lives and their fight for liberation. There are now over 7 million Palestinian refugees around the world calling for their right of return.
    • Understand the ineligibility of Israel’s articulation of “self-defense” as a legitimating defense of their continued occupation and siege of Palestinians. Israel has weaponized international law in ways that allow it to create the conditions for manipulating existing laws, including humanitarian laws, to justify their incursions in the occupied territories. The apartheid wall is not about keeping Israel safe and secure. It is about controlling every aspect of Palestinian life and livelihood from checkpoints that intensely regulate the mobility of Palestinians, unequal laws that limit their access to employment, relegate them to substandard housing and medical care, and evict them from their homes, such as in Sheikh Jarrah.
    • Recognize that supporting Palestine cannot be seen as a threat to the job security of overseas Filipinx workers who are working in Israel. It is important to recognize that these jobs have also come at the expense and displacement of Palestinian workers. Further, Israel is the same state that is responsible for the forced separation of families, Palestinian and otherwise, as it renders foreign migrant workers as disposable and always deportable. There is, no doubt, a long history of support between the Philippines and Israel dating back to the Holocaust when the Philippines became a refuge for Jews fleeing from Austria and Germany before World War II, as well as the Philippines’ status as the only Asian nation that was a signatory to the 1947 UN resolution creating the State of Israel. But that alone is not an argument for supporting occupation. It is also important to question this relationship and the casualties of such “friendly” ties and to recognize that Israel, the state that claims to employ thousands of Filipinx workers, is the same state that is quick to deport them and whose actions put Filipinx lives on the line.
    • Recognize that we are culpable too: U.S.-funded militarism is a culprit in fueling the extrajudicial killings promulgated by the state of Israel and the authoritarian regime of Duterte. American taxpayer monies are financing arms sales and the building of infrastructure that facilitates such violence. This is at the heart of proposed legislations, like the Philippines Human Rights Act, that will suspend U.S. security assistance to the Philippine military and police, and the U.S. House Resolutions in the wake of the $735 million arms sales to Israel, such as the one proposed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, Mark Pocan and Rashida Tlaib, and another by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

    At the end of many political gatherings, Filipinxs might recall a ritual: the call of “isang bagsak” (one rise, one fall) followed by a unity clap to symbolize rising and falling together. Now is the time to demonstrate that unity clap in support of the Palestinian people. Let us draw on the rich traditions of Filipinx resistance to domination and displacement, and respond to the Palestinian call for the global community to take action.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Is Stacking the Courts and Using Voter Suppression to Maintain Power

    Mitch Mcconnell

    Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued what surely must rank among the most hypocritical statements ever uttered by a senior senator. Were he to become majority leader again after the 2022 midterms he would, the Kentuckian stated, be “highly unlikely” to preside over a confirmation of a Biden-nominated Supreme Court justice.

    McConnell is no stranger to hypocrisy. Remember, he was the Senate leader who conjured a precedent out of his nether regions in 2016 in refusing to hold confirmation hearings for President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, and in claiming it was too close to an election and that the voters should have a say. And he was also the Senate leader who, a presidential election cycle later, then did a spectacular U-turn and rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s hearings and confirmation vote just days before last year’s Election Day, when more than half the country had already cast early votes.

    McConnell was also the leader who twice marshaled his caucus to oppose voting to convict Donald Trump, after the House had impeached him. The second time around, he did so despite publicly averring that Trump did, indeed, bear moral responsibility for instigating the January 6 insurrection. And he’s the same leader who, after acknowledging that the ex-president bore blame for the most dangerous insurrection in modern U.S. history, then promptly turned around and appeased his base by saying that he would “absolutely” support Trump in 2024 if he were the party’s presidential nominee, and that he would oppose a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection.

    In other words, McConnell is no stranger to the art of shameless double-talk. He has spent years consolidating his power at the expense of the integrity of basic civic institutions, and he has thought nothing of undermining the country’s democratic culture to appease his increasingly extreme base. Where Trump was bluster and bombast, McConnell is a political beast of a different species, a wily, deeply cynical operator who uses the levers of power in as ruthless a manner as any Senate leader in modern history.

    So, why is his statement on a potential Biden Supreme Court nominee any different from his past statements and actions? On one level, it’s not; it’s simply more of the same amoral politicking. But on another level, it’s exponentially worse than what has come before. If McConnell in 2016 was a caterpillar feeling his way toward a new, anti-democratic, ruling philosophy, McConnell in 2021 has completed his metamorphosis into a malignant moth. In that, he is marching lockstep with the ever more anti-democratic trajectory that the GOP — the party of mob attackers, conspiracists, QAnon adherents, white supremacists and voter suppression advocates — as a whole has now embarked upon.

    What the Senate minority leader — whose 50 senators represent 43.5 percent of Americans, and whose Senate caucus hasn’t represented a majority of the country’s population in a quarter century — is basically saying is that a minoritarian political party has an absolute right to stymie the political majority. He is averring that the GOP has a God-given free pass to impose on the entire country ever more extreme legal interpretations of everything from abortion access to environmental regulations to voting rights, no matter where the voting public stands on these issues.

    McConnell seems to have long viewed his legacy as being about securing a conservative hold on the judiciary for decades to come. Now that he has a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and has planted conservative flags up and down the federal judiciary, he is getting more audacious still, looking to use the wave of GOP-passed voter suppression laws to secure a congressional majority again and then to basically neutralize the ability of Democrats to have any say in who presides over the country’s powerful court system. After all, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court still occasionally pushes back against GOP excesses; witness the recent refusal to overturn the Affordable Care Act and its unwillingness to entertain Trump’s challenges to state election results in 2020. But if the Republicans could move toward a 100 percent conservative court, well, at that point nearly anything would be possible for GOP operatives. The courts would, at that point, simply be both a rubber-stamp for Republican social and economic priorities, and a reliable blocking mechanism for any and all progressive policies pushed at a city, state and federal level by Democrats, centrists and left-of-center groupings.

    In the sort of fractured, frequently stalemated and increasingly antagonistic political environment that has come to be the default in the U.S., the courts occupy a central role in the political process. They shape cultural norms, economic relationships, access to the ballot, and more. They determine what rights vulnerable, marginalized groups have or don’t have. And they set limits on what government can and can’t do on big-picture issues, such as immigration, health care provision, gun control and efforts to tackle climate change.

    McConnell’s shot across the bows on future Supreme Court nominees is the action of a man increasingly comfortable with the idea that howsoever a party rigs the game is legitimized simply in pursuit of power. If you can’t win free and fair at the ballot box, modern GOP thinking goes, then limit access to voting. And if even that fails and the GOP doesn’t win power despite a constricted voting environment, then Republicans seem intent on doing an end-run around the electorate and its priorities by stacking the courts with uber-conservatives.

    As the ultimate player of this toxic game, Mitch McConnell is now, in his own anti-charismatic way, the U.S.’s most dangerous practitioner of might-is-right politics. His legacy may well be the conservative judges whom he has helped elevate to positions of power around the country and all the way up to the Supreme Court. But, if he succeeds in regaining Senate control in 2022, he may also leave a legacy of the thorough destruction of democratic norms in a country that, rightly or wrongly, likes to consider itself the world’s most durable democracy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Supreme Court Ruled Against Enslaved Children Even as US Celebrated Juneteenth

    A police officer detains a child found drying cocoa in the village of Opouyo in the Soubre region of the Ivory Coast during an operation to remove children working on cocoa plantations.

    On the very same day last week that President Biden signed legislation declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court effectively declared in Nestle USA, Inc. v. DOE et al. that slavery was morally acceptable, and U.S. capitalists could continue to profit from it, as long as it occurred outside U.S. borders.

    While self-congratulatory celebrations proliferated in the wake of the new Juneteenth holiday, we are reminded of the wide gulf between symbolism and substance. Of course, symbols are extremely important. They draw attention to history and offer a frame for understanding it. They provide opportunities to affirm values and educate one another about how we got to where we are. Conversely, symbols of racism are mechanisms of continued trauma and insult. So, far be it for me to diminish the importance of symbols and historical markers.

    That said, this week there was a churning in my gut as I listened to commentaries and condemnations of the evils of slavery, and discussions of how unjust it was that our ancestors in Texas were enslaved for two and a half years beyond the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment before they could free themselves. What got less attention and should have triggered widespread outrage was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to side with the world’s biggest chocolate producer against former child slaves working on cocoa plantations in West Africa: On June 17, the Supreme Court ruled that the formerly enslaved children could not sue the Nestle and Cargill corporations, because their cocoa suppliers were based in Ivory Coast.

    West Africa’s booming cocoa industry supplies Virginia-based Nestle Corporation and Minnesota-based Cargill with ingredients for chocolate products that make these companies billions in profits. Nestle boasted over $26 billion in revenue in 2015. In contrast, the young litigants, originally from Mali, told horrific stories of being forcibly transported to work sites, beaten, kept in locked rooms overnight and compelled to work 14-hour days for little or no pay. Some testified that they were terrorized, tortured and tied to trees as punishment for attempts to escape. A U.S. Labor Department Report from 2015 estimated that more than 2 million children work under such conditions in cocoa-growing regions of West Africa.

    The lawsuit, which has meandered through the courts, was based on the Alien Tort Statute, a nearly obsolete law that has been used in recent years by foreign nationals seeking redress from U.S.-based multinational companies for human rights abuses.

    But in a painful reminder that neoliberalism’s “free market at all costs” philosophy is still alive and well, the Supreme Court justices in effect looked the other way. Ultra-reactionary Clarence Thomas led the way, writing for the majority, determining that since Nestle and Cargill had essentially outsourced the abuse and feigned ignorance, it was not their fault. Lawyers for Nestle and Cargill argued for a level of immunity that enables companies to continue to operate globally with impunity, when it comes to labor abuses.

    Democratic Party insider Neal Katyal — a former Obama Justice Department appointee (as acting solicitor general) — was defense counsel for the chocolate magnates. The scurrilous argument that Katyal made in front of the court back in December cited as a worthy legal precedent the fact that the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas to Nazi death camps in the 1940s was not held liable at Nuremberg tribunals. Therefore, he argued, Nestle and Cargill should not be held accountable for their complicity in child slavery today. Katyal went further to argue that holding U.S. companies responsible for overseas atrocities would put them at a “competitive disadvantage” relative to other countries. He delivered this morally bankrupt argument seemingly without shame and with a veiled and spurious sympathy for the enslaved children. According to Katyal and company, child slavery is not the fault of rich U.S. companies that incentivize these practices, but rather it is simply what Africans are doing to each other.

    So, as we mark our calendars for a yearly federal commemoration of the time when Black people in Texas finally achieved at least some modicum of freedom from bondage in the 19th century, let us also organize to mark Juneteenth with protests against ongoing 21st-century manifestations of slavery, from the heinous treatment of unfree child laborers on West African cocoa plantations working in service of U.S. corporate profits, to the slavery-like conditions that are the bedrock of the prison industrial complex in the United States.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • California Rent Forgiveness Shows It’s Possible to Shift Our National Priorities

    Renters and housing advocates attend a protest to cancel rent and avoid evictions in front of a court house on August 21, 2020, in Los Angeles, California.

    Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people have found themselves out of work, clinging to credit cards or a savings account, making use of the local food bank, and worrying about making the rent each month as the cash dried up.

    The relief packages passed by Congress were a lifeline for many, from the checks to the extended unemployment benefits and, perhaps most importantly, the eviction protections for those who simply couldn’t make rent because there was no work. The peril was ever-present, even with that help; if that firewall fell and landlords were allowed to evict for unpaid rent, the avalanche of immediate homelessness could have quite possibly been a country-killing event. Untold thousands put out on the street in the middle of a lethal pandemic? Unspeakable.

    Every time the nation has come to the expiration deadline for the last set of eviction protections, landlord coalitions pushed to have them end and renter’s groups pleaded to have them extended. To this point, they have been extended each time, but protecting people from the collapse of the economy has become another conservative plaything; a number of Republican governors have moved to slash unemployment benefits under the long-running racist, classist lie that relief money makes people not want to work. How soon until they try to apply that argument to rent?

    On Monday, however, the state of California, responding to sustained pressure from organizers and activists, showed the country a whole new way to go:

    Gov. Gavin Newsom says California will pay off all the past-due rent that accumulated in the nation’s most populated state because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a promise to make landlords whole while giving renters a clean slate…. California has $5.2 billion to pay off people’s rent, money from multiple aid packages approved by Congress. That appears to be more than enough to cover all of the unpaid rent in the state, according to Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Newsom on housing and homelessness.

    While employment among middle- and high-wage jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for people earning less than $27,000 a year are down more than 38% since January 2020, according to Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker based at Harvard University. “The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs — which are disproportionately people of color — are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

    How deeply embedded into the national psyche is the capitalist ethos? If an announcement like this came under the headline, “Spaceship From Planet XQ41 Appears Above Sacramento, Pays All Rent, Departs Through Hole in Sky,” my level of surprise would have been pretty much the same. How long was I asleep last night? What country is this?

    Bless my heart, it’s the United States of America, where government — local, state and federal — can actually help people if we choose to make doing so a priority. The federal government did so with the relief bills, states like California took their own necessary steps like this, and local governments along with activists labored mightily to keep as many people afloat as possible. Cries of “socialism” were muted for much of the pandemic, because even a Republican knows a boat with no bottom is going to sink no matter what Ronald Reagan or Grover Norquist has to say about it.

    To be sure, California’s historically robust economy is one of the main reasons why this action was possible. “The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies,” reports Bloomberg News. “The state’s gross domestic product increased 21 percent during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14 percent) and No. 3 Texas (12 percent), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30 percent more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden. Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China.”

    Again, we return to the idea of priorities. President Bill Clinton amassed a huge budget surplus at the end of his second term, but it was all but gone by April 2001 because the Bush administration gave it away to its rich friends in the form of tax breaks. The rest of us — many of us, anyway — got $300 and a suddenly fragile national economy that was almost immediately knocked reeling by September 11. The rest of those funds, along with trillions more, were squandered on two failed wars that stole the economic future from a generation of Americans.

    In 2001 and 2002, Congress passed Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to lay the groundwork for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic damage done by the money wasted on these bloody endeavors is almost impossible to quantify, but real enough to make California’s statewide rent amnesty seem a laughable fantasy, until it happened.

    Last week, almost 20 years after its inception, the repeal of the 2002 AUMF regarding Iraq was passed by the House. Its ultimate demise will be voted on by the Senate on June 22. The far more muscular 2001 AUMF remains intact, but there is a groundswell of support for ending it, as well. Congress has to deal with its little brother first, and then we shall see.

    Among many other shabby things, the combined 39 years given to those two authorizations were the sign and signal of our national priorities. The money spent on those wars left us uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19, as all the social and medical infrastructure needed to combat it was revealed to be cash-starved and withered to the point of collapse. Only when we embraced some “socialist” policy priorities were we able to pull back from the brink. Note well: Rep. Barbara Lee was right.

    Newsom could have argle-bargled about “job creators” and pulled a Bush, using his state’s budget surplus as an ATM for the wealthy and corporations. Instead, thanks to pressure from progressives, he paid the rent and delivered billions in tax relief to small businesses affected by the pandemic. The fact that this is remarkable tells us all we need to know about how far gone our priorities have become, but more importantly, it tells us what we can accomplish if we choose to change them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Complained COVID Testing Would Lose Him the Election, New Book Says

    Donald Trump

    I have mostly failed to be impressed by the “blockbuster” books about the Trump administration that have come out over the years. Part of it is simple exhaustion; the man was screaming at me from the TV when most of these books came out, so who needs it? The “revelations” were few and far between because Trump’s White House was itself an open book thanks to the leaks and the former president’s own unfiltered bluster. He’s a venal racist sexist blowhard who can’t be trusted? GET OUT NO WAY.

    Of all the Trump books that have emerged, only Bob Woodward’s Rage really brought the lumber when it came to new information. Somehow, Woodward got Trump on tape admitting that he knew COVID-19 was incredibly lethal and transferred via aerosol in February of 2020, right when Trump was publicly downplaying the menace posed by the virus. Again, people knew Trump had bungled the COVID response badly, but to hear him say these things three months before the 2020 election was devastating.

    There’s a new Trump administration book coming out next week, and I’ll be reading this one. Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta gathered more than 180 interviews with senior staff and leading medical experts to create Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. The Post published an article about the book today, and that small glimpse is harrowing.

    I enjoy learning new things, but I never wanted to know that Trump tried to send infected American cruise ship passengers to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?” he asked in February of 2020, the same month he was accidentally telling Bob Woodward the truth. Trump’s aides were horrified, but he kept pushing the idea, relenting only when some other shiny object diverted his attention.

    “Testing is killing me!” Trump railed at then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?” Azar was forced to remind Trump that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and Jack-of-No-Trades, had announced he was taking charge of a national testing program just five days earlier. Trump’s response: “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test.”

    That paragraph is the distilled essence of the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seventy-four words, and all the truth you can stomach. The failure to roll out even the most gossamer testing program in the early phases of the pandemic put hundreds of thousands of people in the ground, and the dying is not over. Why? Because high numbers of positive tests might make Trump look bad before the election.

    That was Trump’s only priority throughout, and we are still dealing with the aftermath. Matters have improved dramatically, to be sure. The Biden administration is investing billions into viral research. Testing rates are higher, just about half the country is vaccinated, and only 90 people died of COVID yesterday. “Only”? Yes, only: Some 5,077 people died on February 4, 2021, a year after Trump told Bob Woodward he was hiding what he knew to be the truth.

    Meanwhile, Trump deliberately poisoned half the country with the idea that science is the enemy and coronavirus is no big deal. It’s a political statement of freedom to refuse the mask and the vaccine, he not so subtly inferred day after day after day — all, again, to help win the election — and million of people rallied to his banner.

    Now, many of those people continue to die. Infection rates in high-vaccination areas are plummeting, while infection rates in low-vaccination areas are climbing with fearful intensity. As it turns out, most of those states were carried by wide margins by Trump in November of 2020. “So Connecticut, for example, where I am, shows no upsurge of infection,” former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Scott Gottlieb told Face the Nation on Sunday, “but Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri show very substantial upsurges of infections. That’s based entirely on how much population-wide immunity you have based on vaccination.”

    The Delta variant of COVID is making itself at home in these places, and young people are getting sick in disturbing numbers; Delta is more contagious, and most young people are not vaccinated yet. President Biden, speaking at a Friday news conference at the White House, implored young people to get the shots. “The data is clear,” he said. “If you are unvaccinated, you’re at risk of getting seriously ill or dying or spreading it.”

    I’ll buy the book by Abutaleb and Paletta, I’ll read it, and like as not I’ll damage the wall plaster with it when I’m done. Their book may be finished, and I hope it is a great success, but our story is far from over.

    We are all characters trapped within the passion play of an autocratic dunderhead who gets his ass kissed more than the Blarney Stone because there’s money to be made, and the entire Republican Party knows it full well. If COVID comes roaring back in unvaccinated pro-Trump communities when the weather turns this fall, nobody should be surprised. It did not have to be this way.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jan. 6 Wasn’t the End — the Right Is Trying a Hostile Takeover State by State

    Capitol rioters riot at the capitol

    On Sunday night, CNN aired a two-hour documentary called “Assault on Democracy” chronicling the evolution of the American right’s most recent embrace of conspiracy theories and authoritarianism which led to the insurrection of January 6th. Unlike most of the recent TV examinations of this phenomenon, CNN didn’t simply go back to the day Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower but traced the beginning of this latest lurch into right-wing extremism to the election of Barack Obama and the furious backlash that ensued. (The seeds obviously go back much further, but this is a logical place to begin with the Tea Party’s seamless transformation into MAGA.)

    The program rightly attributes the massive growth in conspiracy theories to the rise in social media during that period and especially takes on Facebook for its algorithms that lead people deeper and deeper into insular rabbit holes. Crude profiteers such as Alex Jones and Breitbart are exposed as well as good old-fashioned talk radio and Fox News. There can be no denying the massive influence of those cynical propaganda outfits on the events that transpired over the past few years.

    Perhaps the most disturbing moments in the special were the interviews with some of the MAGA faithful who were at the Capitol on January 6th, which was a trip to Bizarro World in itself. They still don’t see anything wrong with what happened and most of them, whether they are QAnon, Proud Boys, religious leaders or local politicians, are obviously 100% sincere in their belief in Donald Trump. If you didn’t think he was a cult leader before, you certainly will after hearing them talk about him. It’s downright eerie.

    Recounting the events of that awful day with all the dramatic footage, some of it new, in chronological order is still as dreadful to watch as ever. And we still are missing huge pieces of what happened that day.

    We know that Trump snapped at Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., when the House minority leader asked him to call off his followers as they stormed the Capitol: “Maybe you just don’t care as much about this election as they do!” It took much cajoling to get Trump to release the tepid statements he eventually made calling for peace and telling the insurrectionist that they are very special and he loves them. But for all the detailed leaking from the Trump White House over the course of four years, this is one afternoon they’ve kept a pretty tight lid on. (It’s also clear that’s one of the main reasons the Republicans have nixed the bipartisan commission, as some people would have to go under oath and testify about all that.)

    Perhaps all of this seems tedious by now. After all, we all know the story. Most of us watched it play out in real-time. But as CNN’s Brian Stelter pointed out, it’s important to keep telling it because the purveyors of lies and conspiracies keep trying to whitewash it into something completely different. He quoted this tweet:

    And as I noted last week, conceding to them also means letting down our guard and failing to be prepared for Insurrection Redux. Listening to those MAGA fans in the CNN documentary was very clarifying on that point. Those who took part in the insurrection and have been charged continue to believe they did nothing wrong and are no doubt prepared to do it again. Those who helped incite the mob from their pulpits and various rally stages have absolutely no regrets. There’s no doubt that there could easily be more violence.

    But just as important in continuing to tell the truth about January 6th is to continue to combat the Big Lie about the election.

    The MAGA faithful have been completely brainwashed and I don’t think they’ll ever change their minds. But devious, partisan players are hard at work in the states subverting the electoral system in ways that are truly insidious. It’s so bad that I think everyone is simply obligated to continue to focus very diligently on this issue. To that end, the New York Times reported some very disturbing new details out of Georgia, where Governor Brian Kemp signed a new law that allows Republicans to remove Democrats from local election boards:

    Across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats — though some are Republicans — and they will most likely all be replaced by Republicans.

    Democrats in the state rightly point out that had these laws been in effect last fall, there’s every chance that MAGA-friendly officials would have been put in charge of the election and Trump’s requests to “find” votes might very well have been successful.

    It isn’t just local officials. Some states are going after statewide offices as well.

    One of the more unbelievably transparent acts took place in Arizona, the epicenter of Big Lie activism, in which the Republican legislature introduced a bill that would strip the Democratic secretary of state of authority over election lawsuits. But in an act of epic chutzpah, they plan to have the law expire once she is out of office. (I assume they will reinstate it if another Democrat wins, but perhaps they feel they’ve put up enough roadblocks to ensure that never happens again). In Georgia, they’ve similarly turned the secretary of state’s office into little more than a ceremonial position with little authority.

    And this one is especially concerning because it tracks with the growing belief in a false legal theory that state legislatures are the one and only legitimate arbiters of elections, superseding all other elected officials and the courts:

    Kansas Republicans in May overrode a veto from Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, to enact laws stripping the governor of the power to modify election laws and prohibiting the secretary of state, a Republican who repeatedly vouched for the security of voting by mail, from settling election-related lawsuits without the Legislature’s consent.

    It is only a matter of time before one of these states passes a law that openly allows the legislature to overturn an election — and then does it.

    If you read the inane rationalizations by these Republican officials, some of whom are quoted saying they believe the Big Lie, it’s clear that the assault on democracy is actually just beginning. And it isn’t just about Donald Trump. The Republican Party realized that just a few tweaks to the election laws means they can call into question any election result they don’t like and take steps to overturn it. They are also very well aware that the specter of January 6th violence hovers still hovers over the country and they have millions of agitated Americans who are willing to believe anything. They have power and they are using it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Far Will the GOP Go to Steal the 2022 Election?

    The Declaration for American Democracy coalition hosts a rally calling on the Senate to pass the For the People Act outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 2021.

    How far will the GOP go to steal the 2022 election?

    The corrupt Republican Party, a wholly-owned division of corporate and billionaire America, has dropped all pretense of having any governing ideas that will help or improve America.

    Instead, they’ve gone all-outrage, all-the-time and believe that getting white people all cranked up about America’s racial history will provide a veneer of “issues” while they work hard in the background to rig and then steal elections.

    This is not new for the GOP.

    Back in the 1960s they were hysterical about young people smoking pot and “open homosexuality.” And they were doing everything they could to block people of color from voting through programs like William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that involved standing outside polling places and “challenging” people of color, thus forcing them to go home and get ID before they could vote…on the accurate assumption that most wouldn’t return. (This was before ID laws; you only needed ID to register to vote, and the biometric of your signature was how you verified identity on voting day.)

    In the 1970s they were freaking out about Black people protesting police violence: every single “riot” through the late 60s and early 70s was triggered by an incident of police violence against unarmed Black people. Nixon fed his “Southern Strategy” in 1972 with poisonous rhetoric about “burning cities.”

    Throughout the Reagan 1980s Republicans worked hard to destroy labor unions, cut taxes on the rich while raising taxes on working-class people, and freaked out even more about Black people (see George HW Bush’s infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ads). And abortion; with Reagan’s 1980 election, the GOP went from pro-choice to pro-forced-pregnancy.

    The 90s saw the GOP hysterical — positively hysterical — that President Clinton might have had sex with a consenting adult in the White House and lied about it. They were also working as hard as they could to ship factory jobs overseas (with, stupidly, help from Clinton) because de-industrializing America would destroy our labor unions, who generally supported Democrats. And, of course, they were getting “tough on crime” with stop-and-frisk and “three strikes” to make life miserable for Black people…who then could no longer vote because they’d been busted for a crime.

    In 2001, Osama bin Laden gave the GOP a huge gift with 9/11, and the Bush administration and Congress reacted exactly as bin Laden had publicly predicted: wasting trillions of dollars, starting unnecessary wars, and dialing back on the civil liberties that have historically been at the core of American values. And, of course, when President Obama was elected in 2008 they went nuts again about Black people.

    The second decade of the 21st-century saw the GOP fully embrace open and naked fascism with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who then doubled down on his party’s racism with attacks on Muslim Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and, of course, Black people, both in America and in what he called “shithole countries.”

    But where they’re going now to suppress the vote of non-white people is so over the top that even Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon didn’t dare try it.

    In Arizona they’re in open violation of federal law, “inspecting” actual ballots and voting machines and even hauling some of them off to a “cabin in the woods in Montana” for “more careful examination.” You can safely expect that any day now they’ll tell us that Trump “actually won” Arizona, and then the race will be on to “inspect“ ballots in other swing states.

    Down in Florida Republicans have been putting up “ghost” candidates and it appears they successfully used them to win two or three legislative state elections. This scam involves finding some random person who has the same last name as the Democratic candidate and getting that person on the ballot to confuse voters and split the vote against the actual Democrat.

    Meanwhile, 14 states have now passed laws (with another 30+ pending) to make it harder for young people, older people, Black/non-white people and low-income folks to register, to keep their names on the voter rolls, and to vote. In many of those states they’ve gone so far as to give openly partisan Republican officials the power to decide which votes will be counted and which votes will be discarded based on their own personal “suspicion.”

    Their newest strategy for the 2022 election is to freak out and piss off white people by falsely claiming that progressives, Democrats and Black people want to “teach white kids that they’re racist” and “should be ashamed of being white.” Republicans call this “Critical Race Theory” although it’s not; this “definition” of CRT is entirely manufactured by the GOP, and their faux outrage is pure politics.

    The GOP has been running scam after scam for 70 years now; Dwight Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president, as I document here. They’re going to try to pull it off again in 2024, but the prize in 2022 is the House and Senate — and state legislatures and governorships.

    In several states, like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, even though the majority of people statewide vote for Democrats, Republicans still control both the state Houses’ and Senates’ as well as a majority of those states’ congressional delegations to DC because of “surgically precise” mostly race-based GOP gerrymandering.

    And lording over the entire enterprise is a network of right-wing billionaires that has more employees, more offices and a larger budget than the GOP itself. The media almost never mentions them and they operate largely invisibly, but they are the dark-matter mass that deforms the orbit of American politics.

    The right-wing billionaires don’t much care about race, but gleefully have their think tanks and media outlets like Fox use lies about CRT and other racial issues (“Replacement Theory”) to get people out to vote for Republicans who will then give the billionaires more tax cuts and deregulation.

    Which brings us back to the question that opens this rant. “How far will the GOP go to steal the 2022 election?”

    All you have to do is look at what they did on January 6, and how seriously they’re now paddling to pin the blame on antifa or the FBI or anybody other than themselves, to know the answer. But it also goes even beyond what the FBI calls open “terrorism.”

    Now the Texas GOP is trying to recruit an army of 10,000 “poll watchers” to show up at polling places in minority and student neighborhoods during the 2022 election; prison tats, baseball bats and bullhorns are optional but no doubt welcome. What’s happening in Texas is being replicated in other states across the nation.

    Election workers and volunteers all across the country, but particularly in swing states, are getting death threats and quitting in droves, to be replaced by GOP and Qanon operatives. One in six election workers has received a threat and one in three is thinking of leaving their job. This is all at the same time 14 GOP states have increased the power of these election workers to turn away voters or simply refuse to count their votes.

    And now the NY Times is reporting that in Georgia and other states, GOP officials are actually firing and removing Black elections officials in largely-Black areas and replacing them with white Republicans. Georgia Republicans are “disappearing” Black election workers.

    Meanwhile, Republican politicians and billionaire-owned right-wing media are doubling down on their lie that Critical Race Theory is “a way to make white people feel bad.” This is just the 2021 version of the “political correctness” (PC) Limbaugh and the right used to complain about in the 1990s when it became unacceptable to use the N-word and other racial slurs in white circles. They’re openly bragging these lies about CRT will mobilize white voters to show up for the GOP.

    Legal or not, moral or not, consistent with American values or not, honestly or blatantly dishonest, they’ll do whatever it takes to seize and hold power.

    The For The People Act will clean up a lot of this, but not the GOP’s resetting how election systems work in the states so GOP officials can simply throw out votes from precincts or areas they simply “believe” (but cannot demonstrate or prove) have “fraud” (also known as “Black voters”). That’s going to require additional federal legislation.

    The next few weeks are critical and we all must contact our members of Congress and raise hell. The Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. Americans who care about the fate and future of our republic damn well better get active now.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.