This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by ProPublica.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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New recruits in the North Korean army are pleading with their parents through the military base fence, almost begging them to buy them food, because they aren’t getting enough during the weeklong registration, residents in the country told Radio Free Asia.
“The spring military draft has reached its final stage. Parents of new recruits are complaining about the poor quality of food in the barracks,” a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
In North Korea, every man must serve seven years in the military, and every woman five.
Every spring and fall, young soldiers-to-be flock to military facilities all over the country.
Serving is a rite of passage, and families come to the barracks to see their children off. At the end of registration, which can last longer than a week after all the medical and fitness tests, the recruits are issued an official Korean People’s Army uniform.
Tearful farewells
Seeing one’s son or daughter in uniform for the first time is often an emotional experience, sources in the country say.
Parents shed tears of joy that their child has reached adulthood, but they are also tears of sadness because they know that life in the military is grueling, and that they won’t see their children for some time.
Whether sad or glad, the parents stay near the barracks to say good-bye to their kids.
“The area near the provincial military mobilization department is crowded with parents of new recruits from all over the region,” the resident said. “I also stayed there for 10 days until I could see my son in uniform.”
She said that the parents wait outside the fence all day, and if their kids have not received their uniform yet, they turn in for the night and return the next morning.
Most recruits will not be assigned to units in their hometowns. In the case of North Hamgyong province, the recruits are usually sent further south to Kangwon or South Hwanghae provinces.
Paltry rations
But parents say their children come to them asking for more food because they are fed such meager rations on base.
“Most children ask their mothers to buy them food through the fence,” the resident said.
“When I asked what they were served at the barracks’ cafeteria, I was told that they get just a single bowl of rice mixed with corn,” she said. “The portions were too small, and the only side dish was salted radish.”
She said the children telling their parents how hungry they were made many mothers cry.
“The parents worry about the hunger their children will experience during their time in the military,” she said. “How nice would it be if the authorities actually fed the children well, after all, the children are preparing to leave their parents and serve.”
This picture from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) via KNS on April 26, 2024 shows North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un (C) paying a visit to Kim Il Sung Military University in Pyongyang to mark the 92nd anniversary of the founding of North Korea’s army. (KCNA VIA KNS/AFP) In better times the soldiers got a little bit more food.
Prior to the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, soldiers received 800 grams (1.7 pounds) of food per day. Now they get only 600 grams (1.3 pounds).
In comparison, a single meal ready-to-eat, or MRE combat ration, for a U.S. soldier weighs between 510 to 740 grams (1.1 to 1.6 pounds) and likely contains far more calories. And they are fed three times a day.
North Koreans rarely eat meat these days, usually only three to five times per year, during the major holidays.
The resident described the North Korean rations as “pathetic.”
Food vendors
There are those who stand to profit from the poor quality of army food though, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
“Every draft season, food vendors gather around the provincial military mobilization department,” he said, adding that the peddlers sell things like rice mixed with artificial meat or tofu, and sweet snacks. The soldiers are so hungry that it’s big business.
For the rich kids though, it’s a different story, the Ryanggang resident said.
On April 10, the country’s leader Kim Jong Un made a visit to Kim Jong Il University of Military Politics – named after his father and predecessor.
“He brought a generous meal for them that included bulgogi (barbecued meat) and apples,” he said.
Parents who gathered outside of the barracks were angry at the news because the kids of the elite receive what enlisted soldiers can only dream about.
“In this one fact, we can see that while Kim Jong Un says he is for the people, in reality, he values the elites,” the resident said.
The future high-ranking officers do not need special treatment, he said.
“I wish Kim Jong Un would care about enlisted soldiers who have to suffer for a long time after they leave their parents at such a young age.”
Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahn Chang Gyu for RFA Korean.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The World Food Programme is warning northern Gaza has reached a “full-blown” famine that is spreading south. This comes after the Israeli military has spent months blocking the entry of vital aid into Gaza, attacking humanitarian aid convoys and opening fire on Palestinian civilians waiting to receive lifesaving aid. We get an update on conditions among the besieged and starving population of Gaza — including of children now suffering from the psychological effects of intense and prolonged trauma — from Dr. Walid Masoud, a vascular surgeon and a board member of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund who is just back from heading a medical mission to Gaza.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The South Korean YouTuber’s video shows his visit last April to the Blue Flower, a North Korean restaurant in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital – one of 70 North Korean restaurants operating worldwide, mostly in Asia.
Collectively, they earn the cash-strapped North Korean government about US$700 million, according to the U.N. Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea.
But they violate international sanctions.
All North Korean workers were supposed to have repatriated before the end of 2019, but many have kept working.
The Blue Flower itself was closed several months later – in August 2023 – possibly for violating sanctions, cambodianess.com reported. But many of these restaurants remain open.
In his travels around Southeast Asia, the YouTuber, identified by a pseudonym Lee to protect his identity, told RFA Korean that he discovered several other North Korean restaurants – but staff in Laos and Vietnam refused to let him film the inside of the eateries.
“I spoke with the boss at a North Korean restaurant in Cambodia and he said business was good,” said Lee. “Most North Korean restaurants in Southeast Asia that I visited had good business.”
North Korean waitresses perform in front of a large menu at a North Korean-owned restaurant in the Chinese border town of Dandong, February 11, 2013. (Mark Ralston/AFP) The North Korean workers are dispatched overseas to serve customers and entertain them by dancing and singing, and most of the money the restaurants earn is forwarded to Pyongyang.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism to North Korea had dwindled to nearly zero. Only recently, it has restarted for guided tours from Russia.
So the restaurants, which are also found in China and Russia, were perhaps one of the only ways to experience North Korean culture firsthand.
Prior to the pandemic, the restaurants were seemingly struggling, but Lee says the ones he has been visiting were relatively successful.
Northern cuisine
Korean cuisine varies by region, and so it is hard to generalize about how Northern cuisine may differ from that of the South, but connoisseurs can identify differences.
A tour company describes the North Korean varieties as using fewer spices and sauces than varieties in the South, while an escapee who settled in the South and opened a restaurant in Seoul told Voice of America that northern dishes are simpler, made with more traditional cooking methods.
At the Blue Flower, Lee enjoyed eating gamja jjijim, or potato pancake, and kalguksu, or knife-cut noodle soup. Varieties of both dishes exist in South Korea as well.
The Blue Flower served the potato pancake with honey as a dipping sauce, which would be uncommon in the South.
He was also served with a North Korean variety kimchi, most of which aren’t as spicy as South Korean varieties, and several kinds of banchan (often translated as “side dishes”). And he washed it down with a cold Taedonggang beer, brewed in North Korea.
Hostesses stand at the entrance of a North Korean restaurant in Hanoi, October 6, 2023. (Nhac Nguyen/AFP) “I ate alone on the first floor of the restaurant, but he said that there also held performances on the second floor. So, the second floor was reserved for group events,” said Lee.
He said the Blue Flower was different from the North Korean restaurant he visited in Vietnam, which seemed to mimic the South Korean dining experience.
According to Lee, the server at the Blue Flower told him she had been in Cambodia for three years, meaning she arrived in 2021.
With sanctions in effect, her presence at the Blue Flower in 2023 should have been illegal, but North Korea has been known to get around sanctions on its dispatched workers by sending them on tourism or student visas.
Exploiting loopholes
In fact, since early 2019, North Korea has been using the student visa loophole to staff its restaurants in Cambodia, a North Korean restaurant worker who escaped from her employer in Phnom Penh and resettled in South Korea in 2016, told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“When I was working, we went out on work visas, but I talked to some friends who were sent out in 2019 and they were all on student visas,” said the woman, who is identified with the pseudonym Kim. “They lied to get their visas and that’s how they are overseas.”
In March 2016, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2270 on North Korea, prohibiting U.N. member states from doing any business with the North Korean regime.
At that time, China showed an even firmer commitment to implementing sanctions against North Korea than ever before. It refused to renew the visas of North Korean restaurant workers in the country and ordered the closure of North Korean companies.
As a result, some North Korean restaurants closed, and workers packed their bags and returned to North Korea.
The restaurants are still open, however, and Kim says that the sanctions only hurt the livelihood of the workers.
“The sanctions against North Korea did not actually affect the business of overseas North Korean restaurants that much,” said Kim. “In 2017, China said it supports sanctions against North Korea and inspected all the goods overseas North Korean workers were bringing back to North Korea. When workers got home, there were missing items, and everything was torn.”
Additionally, said Kim, North Korea’s way of getting around sanctions was not to send the workers back to North Korea, but to a different country so that they can work more before being discovered and possibly repatriated. They often don’t know where they are going up until the moment they depart.
“The process is kept secret, so the workers don’t know much about it,” she said. “When the restaurant closes, almost everyone takes a plane and heads out to China.”
She said the managers of restaurants look for business partners anywhere they can find them, and on a moment’s notice, everyone boards a plane and they fly to the next country.
It is an existence that many of the workers dislike, but they have no choice but to comply with their orders.
Marketing curiosity
A North Korean restaurant once located in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, began business after the 2019 sanctions went into effect.
Shin Hyunqwon, who runs a travel agency in Uzbekistan, told RFA that the restaurant thrived, not only through word of mouth from local residents, but also as a hotspot for South Korean tourists.
Five employees dispatched from North Korea escaped in May, June and August 2022, one after another, causing the business to close. Since then, there have been no North Korean restaurants in the capital of Uzbekistan, Shin said.
North Korean restaurants in China and Russia, which have closer relationships with North Korea, have been thriving regardless of sanctions against North Korea.
One reason for that is by catering to South Korean tourists’ curiosity about North Korea and providing an opportunity to interact with North Korean staff.
A North Korean restaurateur who operates a restaurant in northeastern China said he had been in the business for decades. It has been an official policy to refuse service to South Koreans, but not all the restaurants comply.
“On the outside, they are all North Korean restaurants, but some of them are jointly operated by North Korea and China,” said Park. “In North Korean restaurants where the owner is Chinese and the employees are North Koreans, they accept South Korean customers.”
The situation is similar in Russia where South Koreans are banned from entering North Korean restaurants. However, Russia has stricter rules on South Koreans entering the country than China.
Translated by Claire S. Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chin Min Jai for RFA Korean.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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New York-based Hoda Osman has spent the past six months helping Gaza journalists replace cameras, laptops, and phones lost or damaged in the Israel-Gaza war. More than 5,500 miles away, in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, Wafa’ Abdel Rahman coordinates humanitarian supplies and cash assistance for reporters under Israeli bombardment, while Rania Khayyat, also in Ramallah, is in constant contact with dozens of Gaza journalists to understand their needs.
Together, these three women play a central role in the difficult task of supporting Gaza’s press corps at a time of unprecedented strife and loss amid Israeli attacks and restrictions on basic supplies. At least 95 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October 7. The vast majority of these fatalities are Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes; Israeli forces also killed three Lebanese journalists and two Israelis were killed by Hamas. With international journalists blocked from entering Gaza, the responsibility of covering the war falls on those who are living through it.
Osman, executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Khayyat, communications officer at the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, and Rahman, the founder and director of the women- and youth-focused Palestinian NGO Filastiniyat, are committed to helping Gaza journalists survive and continue to report. Collectively, they have provided aid to hundreds of journalists on the ground. (CPJ recently supported these three groups with a $300,000 grant in emergency funds.)
CPJ spoke with Osman, Rahman, and Khayyat in separate phone calls about the day-to-day reality for journalists in Gaza and the challenges with providing aid in wartime. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Hoda Osman, executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
What are you hearing from journalists on the ground?
The day-to-day includes a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability. They have a home today, they might not have a home tomorrow. They have their family members with them today, they might lose them tomorrow. They themselves are alive today, they might be injured or killed tomorrow. Almost all the journalists we know have lost someone. The recent Israeli air strike on the hospital in Deir el Balah, where several journalists were injured, was a potent reminder of how things could change any day.Almost all the journalists we know have been displaced, many of them have more than once, and many of them are living in tents. They have lost a lot of weight and it’s visible in pictures. Finding food and water is a daily challenge, especially in the north [where the international community warns of a famine]. One of the journalists told me he reports stories of people facing hunger when he himself is hungry. Using the bathroom is extremely difficult; imagine having to stand in line for hours to use the bathroom. One journalist told me they limit how much they drink so they wouldn’t need to use the bathroom frequently. These journalists are covering this war while facing this humanitarian crisis that everyone in Gaza is facing right now.
There are also work-related challenges. There is no protective gear in Gaza, except what was already there. Transportation due to fuel shortages is difficult, so moving from place to place to report is a problem. One journalist was jokingly telling me that donkey and horsecarts have now become the norm. Another journalist I know walks several kilometers every morning from their tent to the hospital where they work and walks back at the end of the day.
Then there are communications: How do you work as a journalist without power or connectivity? It’s a huge challenge to charge phones or other devices. A couple of journalists we know had their phones stolen because they were charging them in public places. Many journalists left their equipment when they left their homes, and they end up losing work because they have nothing to use to report. I can’t tell you how many journalists tell me they’re using their mother’s phone; some journalists write and file stories on their nieces’ phones. They’re not high-quality phones. They do everything on one device, if they’re lucky to have one. They record, they edit, they take pictures, they write, and they file. They get very little rest and they work constantly.
Members of the media gather in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on October 25, 2023. (Photo: AFP/Mahmud Hams) What type of support are you giving to journalists in Gaza?
Our focus from the start has been on replacing the lost or damaged equipment, allowing journalists to continue working and providing for themselves and their families. It also gives them a purpose: It helps to continue to work. We had to adapt constantly to the changing situation and where the journalists were. They kept moving south, so we changed our operations to be able to provide what they needed, wherever they were. We also provided humanitarian assistance like tents, mattresses and covers, clothes, and toiletries. We set up a couple of common working areas that are equipped with solar panels, chairs, tables, and internet connectivity. So far, we’ve assisted 150 journalists with both humanitarian assistance and equipment replacement.
Can you talk about the equipment your group has been able to provide to journalists?
We are purchasing everything from inside Gaza and there are shortages now. We have resorted to buying used equipment when we can’t find what is needed on the market. For photojournalists, whose work is taking pictures and videos, if they have no camera how do they do their work? We are providing them with phones that have high enough quality to take good quality pictures and videos, like the iPhone 14 Pro Max. For the journalists who are not photojournalists and they write, they report, they interview, we try to determine the need and are careful about making sure we provide them with something really helpful for their work.
It’s especially important to support the journalists with equipment to continue reporting because no foreign journalists are allowed to enter Gaza. Many of the journalists who work for international organizations have been evacuated, so who is going to cover what is going on if these brave journalists don’t continue to do it?
Rania Khayyat, communications officer of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate
What are you hearing from the journalists you’re supporting about their daily lives?
They are under threat and used to living with the voice of the drones in the sky the whole time. They are used to expecting any explosion at any time. Outside of [the southern Gaza city] Rafah, it’s very dangerous. They really expect to die daily. Every time you call them, they always tell us the same sentence, it may be their “last call.” When you call them, you feel like you’re in a nightmare.
We’re not always able to communicate with people in north Gaza, and we’re happy if we can get a line with them. It is impossible to get money to journalists in the north. Many of them want to move to Rafah, but they have family members who are disabled, they cannot move.It’s a personal decision.They stay in danger. There are about 150 journalists who remain in north Gaza.
Two journalists in Gaza pick up supplies provided by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate. (Photo: Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate) How are Gaza’s journalists continuing to work during the war?
If they did not do their job, nobody would know what happened. This is their only source of income, so they are obliged to do their job in a very hard situation. It also depends on who the journalist works for. If he is a freelancer in Rafah, his mobility is only on foot. If you work for an outlet that gives you a car and fuel, that’s easier.
The internet and communication services have been interrupted many times and are expected to be interrupted, so journalists are finding alternatives. They tell me, “If you didn’t get me on this number, try this Israeli number,” or, “I will get an internet connection from Egypt.”
Food supplies for distribution by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate. (Photo: Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate) How are you planning to provide support to journalists as the war continues?
This is a hard thing to predict. We don’t know what will happen, even the scenarios of the war: Will it end or will it expand? The journalists still hope to return to their homes, even under rubble. They all say, “Even under rubble we will live better than being in a tent.” It all depends on political developments. Every day we have new needs and we try to respond to them based on the situation. I’m speaking with about 10 journalists daily, mainly on WhatsApp. Others, it’s every two or three weeks. I check in on them and see what they need. I ask how they are. They are really my friends.
Wafa’ Abdel Rahman, founder and director of Filastiniyat
What can you tell us about the reality on the ground for Gaza’s journalists?
There is a difference between the journalists who are based in the north of Gaza — Jabalia, Gaza City, Beit Hanoun — a different reality for those in the middle, and another different reality in the south. When it comes to the north, it’s worse because you have the famine. It’s not just the bombardment, it’s the lack of food, water, and medicine.
These are not journalists who have been deployed to Gaza, and it’s not their choice to be there. This looks very tough when talking about women journalists: Everyone is expecting them to take care of the family, to maintain the family, to cook for the family. The majority want to continue reporting, while at the same time taking care of their families.
Can you talk about the importance of journalists being able to continue reporting on this war?
First, there is nobody else [to report], and we need to put more pressure on letting international media in. Second, which is no less important: With the bombardment of the main human rights organizations and [reports of] the targeting of their field workers, whether they like it or not the journalists become human rights defenders. Journalists are the ones who are documenting the crimes. They are our eyes and ears on the ground. They’re the voices of those who are killed and those who are still surviving. We need them.
Even when it comes to the assistance distribution, it’s the word of the journalists. They’re covering where you can go, what you can do, where you can find vaccines. The journalists are needed inside Gaza, and they are needed for the outside world to know what’s going on. It’s a huge responsibility.
A Gaza journalist inspects a tent at a makeshift camp for displaced people in front of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza, after the area was hit by an Israeli airstrike on March 31, 2024. (Photo: AFP) Your organization has provided material aid to journalists, from hygiene kits to tents for female journalists to work and sleep. What do you provide when such materials are hard to come by?
After everything got scarce, the best way to provide help was cash. We started providing cash to women journalists, who are the priority, but we’re helping male journalists too. We have so far served more than 300 women journalists and 120 male journalists with cash. The average amount of cash assistance given to journalists is 800 shekels (US$217). We’ll need to increase this again because the prices have, in some cases, increased by 600 percent. For example, sugar is 70 shekels (US$19.42) a kilo now and it was six shekels (US$1.66) before the war.
What is in high demand by the journalists you’re helping?
The first demand is for a ceasefire now. Second, journalists want to evacuate Gaza, it’s a demand that is growing a lot.
On the ground, we still need tents for the families of the journalists. We need to preserve their dignity, so structures like portable houses would be better until this war is over. There are also the primitive needs: the clean water and the medicine. There is no medicine, you can’t find anything for the flu, for headaches. Getting those in is a luxury.
What does it mean for journalists to want to leave Gaza, knowing they might not be able to ever go back?
It’s as simple as that, it’s genocide. You’re not talking about a war or a conflict. Those people we’re talking about, they survived six wars before. In 2021, according to our monitoring, more than 49 media outlets were destroyed and bombarded, including our office in Gaza. Despite all the difficult situations that they went through, they never thought of asking for evacuation. Never. Today it’s not a question of can they stand it, it’s a life or death threat.
[Editor’s note: CPJ has not independently confirmed the total number of media outlets attacked in 2021.]
The targeted killing of journalists says a lot. We’ve seen how people are reacting to journalists. One of our reporters moved from Gaza City to a relative’s house further south. He had one condition, that she doesn’t work. In order for her to continue working she would wait for everyone to sleep. She’s working in secrecy, and when we publish her work we don’t use her name upon her request, because it’s too dangerous for her. When you don’t have social protection because everyone is scared for their lives, and when you see with your own eyes your colleagues and friends getting killed, it’s not easy. This is why they reach this point of khalas [“enough”], it’s time to leave.
Our editor evacuated to Egypt with her children and she continued working. I wanted to give her a couple of weeks off, I wanted her to settle. She said she felt guilty and she wanted to work. They evacuate, but they don’t really leave.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lucy Westcott.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Enough already.
Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.
Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.
We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.
We are approaching a reckoning.
This is the point, as the poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and anarchy is loosed upon the world.
We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better.
Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past.
This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government—through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny—has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces who walk among us.
Many of them work for the U.S. government.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released thirty-five years ago and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
We are little more than expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
The answer is the same in every age: fear.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is transforming the populace into fearful, compliant, pacified zombies content to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Cellblock door, Alcatraz. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ Ismael Lopez and his wife Claudia Linares were asleep in their beds on the night of July 23, 2017, when they were awakened by a loud knocking on the door of their trailer. Ismael got up and opened the door. Two men were standing on the porch with guns. They didn’t identify themselves. Lopez’s dog ran out. One of the men, Samuel Maze, shot and killed it. Frightened by the late-night banging, Lopez had answered the door with a shotgun. As Maze shot the dog, the other man, Zachary Durden, pointed his gun at Lopez and told him to drop the shotgun. When Lopez turned to put the gun down, Durden shot Lopez in the back of the head, killing him instantly. With Lopez’s body lying still on the floor, Durden cuffed him. Maze and Durden were cops with the Southaven, Mississippi police. They had come to the trailer to serve a warrant. But they were at the wrong address. They weren’t even on the right side of the street. No charges were brought against either cop. When Claudia Linares filed suit for wrongful death, the city of Southaven defended itself by arguing that Lopez had no civil rights to violate because he was a Mexican living in the US without documentation. A federal court rejected that argument. But after the case finally went to trial last week, an Oxford, Mississippi jury rejected Linares’ suit, ruling that the two cops didn’t use “excessive force.”
+ On a March night in 2020, Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old black man, was walking back to his sober living home in Tacoma, Washington when he was confronted by three police officers. Ellis was carrying a box of raspberry-filled donuts and a bottle of water. The cops claimed they stopped him because he was walking “erratically.” When Ellis protested, he was tased and beaten. While on the ground, Ellis was hogtied and beaten again. The cops took turns kneeling on his back and sitting on him. Then they wrapped a nylon bag around his face. Less than an hour after he was accosted by the police, Ellis was dead, a death the Pierce County medical examiner ruled a homicide. Now the three officers who tortured and killed Manuel Ellis, Matthew Collins, Christopher “Shane” Burbank, and Timothy Rankine are going on trial. Collins and Burbank for second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter and Rankine for first-degree manslaughter. The officers have all been on paid leave since the killing and have collected more than a million dollars in salary and more in benefits. In the last 50 years, only 6 law enforcement officers have been charged with unlawful killings in Washington State, half of them in this case.
+ A Colorado cop named Gabriel Jordan was cited for indecent exposure after he allegedly masturbated in public while staring at a woman at the Denver Police Academy. Jordan was in uniform and on duty at the time. He has been placed on paid leave. In 2015, the same cop shot and killed a 17-year-old girl named Jessica Hernandez. The slain teenager’s family received $1 million in a settlement.
+ According to a review of police databases nationwide by the Intercept, out of 54 officers involved in 14 high-profile killings since 2014 that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests, only 10 had their certifications or licenses revoked as a matter of disciplinary action.
+ Last Thursday night, the Minor High School band was on the verge of finishing its “Fifth Quarter” rendition of Cameo’s funk classic, Talking’ Out the Side of Your Neck, after a football game in Birmingham, Alabama, when local cops approached the band director, Johnny Mims, and demanded he stop the performance, so the police could clear the stadium. Mims told the officers the band was almost done and that there was only a minute left in the song. Then the cops turned the lights out at the stadium and as the band wrapped up the song two officers tried to arrest Mims for not complying with their request. When Mims declined to put his hands behind his back, a cop pointed a stun gun at the teacher and tasered him, as many as three times, in front of the 175-member band, many of them his students. Mims was taken to the hospital. After he was discharged, he was arrested and taken to jail, where he was charged with harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. “I’m a Christian guy and I’m called to forgive but this situation makes me more apprehensive about the police,” Mims said. “You may not know what their intentions might be even when you’re doing something positive.”
+ In 2020 reporters for Reuters documented more than 1,000 deaths related to police use of tasers. Most of the deaths occurred between 2000 and 2018. Black Americans accounted for a disproportionately high number of those deaths.
+ Glynn Simmons was only 22 years old when he was convicted of murdering Carolyn Sue Rogers during the robbery of a liquor store in Edmonds, Oklahoma. The jury in the case sentenced Simmons to death, even though a witness testified that Simmons had been with him in Louisiana playing pool at the time of the killing. Simmons told the cops, “I don’t even know where Edmonds is at.” Simmons, who has always asserted his innocence, spent the next 48 years in prison, much of it on death row. The young black man was convicted based on the testimony of a witness who had been shot in the head during the armed robbery. But during a police line-up, the witness identified two other people as the perpetrators, not Simmons. During the trial, the police buried this report and prosecutors refused to turn it over to the defense. This week an Oklahoma judge vacated Simmons’ conviction with prejudice, meaning he can’t be tried again. After his release, Simmons told reporters: “I’m going to spend what is left of my life helping others in similar situations.”
+ When a father called the police in Columbus, Ohio to report that his 11-year-old daughter had been manipulated by an adult man into sending him explicit photos, the cops showed up at the father’s house, acted dismissive of the complaint and blamed his daughter for being a perpetrator of the sex crime committed against her. One of the cops told the father of the girl that his daughter could be charged with making “child porn.” The exchange was captured on the door-cam of the father’s house. One of the cops says: “I mean, she can probably get charged with child porn.”
“Who, she can?” the dad replies, incredulously. “She’s 11 years old.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the cop insists. “She’s still making porn.”
+ In 2014, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky called on Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign from the Supreme Court, writing in the LA Times: “If Ginsburg waits until 2016 to announce her retirement, there’s a real chance that the Republicans would delay the confirmation process to block an outgoing president from being able to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.” In the end, it was Scalia who resigned (by dying in his sleep in a hunting lodge) and proved Chemerinsky’s prediction.
+ In 2011, the first year with complete data, San Francisco police made arrests in about 2% of reported car break-ins. Today, that figure is less than 1%.
+ Last year, the Las Vegas Police Department cleared only 15.5% of the rape cases they investigated. This year the clearance rate is even worse with the cops solving only 14% of their rape cases.
+ Since former cop Eric Adams took office as Mayor of New York City, the NYPD has made more than one million traffic stops. Of those who were pulled over, 62% were given citations and 2% were arrested. Nearly 90% of those who were arrested were Black or Hispanic. Blacks and Hispanics make up about 52% of NYC’s total population, but only 22% of the city’s drivers. Meanwhile, white New Yorkers, who make up 40% of the city’s drivers, accounted for only 25% of traffic stops by the NYPD.
+ This week Illinois became the first state to end cash bail. To give you an idea of how revolutionary this development is: there are currently at least 500,000 locked up in US jails without having been convicted of a crime, that’s more than twice as many currently people in jail awaiting trial than it incarcerated in all of its prisons in 1970.
+ After public outrage over the handcuffing and arrest of a six-year-old girl at an Orlando school, Florida changed its law increasing the minimum age for such arrests to…7. Meanwhile, the Florida legislature is taking up a bill to gut child labor laws and allow minors to work full time and overnight. Old enough to work the night shift at the slaughterhouse, but too young to learn that gay people exist.
+ At least 32 people have died inside LA County’s jails this year, with 14 of the deaths occurring since June. That’s an average of about one a week.
+ Despite Biden’s pledge to end private prisons at the federal level, a review by the ACLU shows that the US Marshals Service is renewing private prison contracts on a much larger scale than previously reported. “Secret loopholes” in a Biden Administration Executive Order allow for 1/3 of the detainees to remain in private facilities.
+ From 2014 to 2018, 35 women at the federal women’s prison in Carswell, Texas reported they had been sexually assaulted by a staff member.
+ In 2018, Coloradans voted to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being punished for refusing prison work assignments, which pay around 13 cents an hour. According to an investigation by 9News in Denver, since 2018 there have been at least 727 documented cases where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work. The punishments have included changes in housing, loss of privileges and delayed parole.
+ ShadowDragon is a tool that lets ICE monitor pregnancy tracking sites like Baby Center. “When people post about their pregnancies to BabyCenter,” says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I think it’s safe to assume they are doing so without the expectation that ICE is watching.”
+ From 2006 to June 2022, around 1,400 people were arrested for actions related to their pregnancies, according to a report by Pregnancy Justice. Most of the arrests involved allegations of substance use, even when there was no harm to the fetus or infant. The report cites the spread of fetal personhood laws—which give fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses the same legal rights as people—to the increase in the criminalization of pregnant women. Nearly 77 percent of cases where pregnant people were arrested occurred in states that expanded the definition of child abuse to include fetuses, fertilized eggs, and embryos.
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+ What an F-35 sounds like going down…
I admit I’ve watched this too many times https://t.co/VPWP8Vr2gC pic.twitter.com/7Axbpu7S9t
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) September 20, 2023
+ This is going to be my new ringtone…
+ How Paul Valéry defined war: “A massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of those who know each other but don’t massacre each other.”
+ The ever-expanding Pentagon budget has become so complex and labyrinthine that analysts at the Defense Department have developed an AI program called Game-Changer to help the joint chiefs and top generals keep track of what goes where and for how much. As Cockburn reported in Corruptions of Empire, they used to explain the Pentagon budget to Reagan with a series of cartoons…
+ The US ensured that Pakistan got an emergency loan from the IMF after Pakistan agreed to secretly sell arms to the United States for the war in Ukraine. According to a report in the Intercept by Ryan Grim and Murturza Hussain, the loan allowed the Pakistani military to crush internal dissent, halt the election and imprison former PM Imran Khan.
+ 300 US troops will march in South Korean President Yoon’s military parade in Seoul later this month. Who will these troops be marching with? Well, Yoon’s pick for Korea’s Defense Minister has a history of speaking at a far-right gathering. Among his many provocative statements: “It is only a matter of time before Moon Jae-in’s head is cut off.”
+ Bipartisanship in action: Senators Angus King, the Maine liberal, and Deb Fisher, the conservative from Kansas, took to the pages of the Washington Post in a joint op-ed to defend the development of the new sea-launched cruise nuclear missiles (SLCM). Feel safer?
+ With a mutual security pact with the US pending, Mohammad Bin Salman told FoxNews: “If Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, we must obtain one as well.”
+ Speaking of nukes, this week was the 43rd anniversary of a nuke exploding in its silo. At 3:00 am on the morning of September 19, 1980, the highly-volatile liquid fuel of a nuclear-armed Titan II ICBM exploded inside an underground silo 3.3 miles north-northeast of Damascus, Arkansas, and approximately 50 miles north of Little Rock. Both the missile and silo were destroyed. One person was killed and another 21 injured.
+ The Guantanamo War Court has been in existence for more than 22 years. It has had 5 chief judges and zero trials.
+ Apparently, the Biden White House had to order its own ambassador to Japan–none other than Rahmbo Emanuel–to stop taunting China on social media.
+ Ha’aretz editorial on Netanyahu’s meeting with Elon Musk: “In Europe and in the U.S., Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem joining forces with the Holocaust deniers, antisemites and their enablers who pose a threat to the safety of Jews — as long as it serves his political interests.”
+ Just before his confab with Netanyahu, Musk took to Twitter to condemn the family of George Soros, who Musk claimed “wants nothing less than the destruction of Western Civilization” by flooding the country with hordes of migrants.
+ In response, Netanyahu this week accused his Jewish critics in the US and Israel of being enemies of the Jewish State and allies of the PLO and Iran.
+ This week a UN committee designed ancient Jericho, the West Bank city that is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited communities, as a “Palestinian world heritage site,” a move that was immediately condemned by Israel’s Foreign Ministry as “another sign of the Palestinians’ cynical use of UNESCO.”
+ Trump’s Rosh Hashanah message was a virulent attack on liberal Jews that trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes (including disloyalty), claiming that they had voted “to destroy America & Israel.”
+ Azerbaijan has launched a military raid into the breakaway region of Karabakh, which has seen more than 7,000 people forced out of 16 villages. This latest episode of ethnic cleansing has been made possible by weapons supplied by Azerbaijan’s leading arms supplier: Israel, which provided 69 percent of Baku’s major arms imports from 2016 to 2020. Israel increased its weapons shipments to Azerbaijan during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
+ The Pentagon budget is at new record highs, but a new GAO report documents the pitiful condition of military barracks across the country, which are rife with mold, gas leaks, brown tap water, and broken sewage pipes. Is it any wonder there’s a recruiting crisis? Wait, that’s because of its “woke” policies. My bad.
+ Okinawa’s governor, Denny Tamaki, testified to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that the relocation of a U.S. military base on the island “threatens peace.” Tamaki asked “the world to witness” that the US “proceeds [with building the base] despite the fact that it was clearly opposed by Okinawan voters in a democratically held referendum.” Tamaki noted that the Okinawa prefecture hosts 70% of all the U.S. military bases in Japan while accounting for only 0.6% of the country’s total land area.
+ Two years after the Taliban banned girls from school beyond sixth grade, Afghanistan is the only country in the world with restrictions on female education. According to the U.N. children’s agency, more than one million girls are affected by the ban.
+ Nancy Pelosi contrasted herself with Kevin McCarthy last weekend by saying she was under pressure to impeach Bush when she became speaker in January 2007, but she resisted because she didn’t think that lying about the reason to go to war in Iraq rose to that level, which is surely a judgment almost as corrupt as the decision to go to war itself.
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“It’s time we fight for what’s right,
We’ve been pushed around and knocked down,
We’ve had enough, it’s over this time,
We’re gonna hold down til the end,
For a record contract, a record win”
– Shane Cothran, #UAW Local 1853#StandUpUAW pic.twitter.com/8UHX99bMtR— UAW (@UAW) September 20, 2023
+ Luigi Gjokaj, vice president of UAW Local 51, on the strike against Stellantis, maker of Jeeps: “The Jeep Cherokee that was built in Belvidere went to Mexico, and Stellantis actually raised the price on it. They’re paying these workers (in Mexico) $20 a day because they can get away with it; exploiting people in a situation.”
+ In 2022, GM CEO Mary Barra was paid $538,000……EVERY WEEK OF THE YEAR. She’s been paid more than $200 million in the last 9 years.
+ Trump announced on Monday he’s skipping the next GOP debate to address striking autoworkers in Detroit (where he will tell them they’re being conned by their union leadership, who he claims is in bed with China), while DeSantis spent the day attacking Senator John Fetterman–who’s still recovering from a stroke–for wearing a hoodie in the US senate: “The US Senate just eliminated its dress code because you got this guy from Pennsylvania [Fetterman]–who’s got a lot of problems. He wears, like, sweatshirts and hoodies and shorts. We need to be lifting up our standards in this country, not dumbing down.” Is it any wonder Trump is creaming him in the polls?
+ New CNN/UNH poll shows DeSantis in freefall in New Hampshire since the last poll in July.
Trump: 39% (+2)
Ramaswamy: 13% (+8)
Haley: 12% (+7)
Christie: 11% (+5)
DeSantis: 10% (-13)
Scott: 5% (-3)
Pence: 2% (+1)
Burgum: 1% (-5)+ James Hohman, for the Washington Post editorial board: ‘The U.S. Capitol is, or should be, thought of as the temple of the world’s oldest continuous democracy. Within that, the Senate floor is its most sacred space. Throughout history, those who participated in its proceedings dressed accordingly. Until now.” Yes, I’m sure Preston Brooks wore the finest linens, woven from cotton hand-picked by South Carolina slaves, when he nearly beat the abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate with a gold-headed cane made of the hardest gutta-percha wood.
Head of the gutta-percha cane used by Preston Brooks to attack Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate in 1856 (in the collection of the Old State House Museum, Boston, Massachusetts)
+ If we’re going to have dress codes in the Senate, they ought to be NASCAR-like uniforms displaying all the logos of the senator’s political sponsors.
+ Fetterman: “I figure if I take up vaping and grabbing the hog during a live musical, they’ll make me a folk hero.”
+ UAW president Shawn Fain on Trump’s plans to speak in Detroit and possibly visit the picket lines: “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers. We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding of what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
+ When they tell you who they are, you ought to believe them. Here’s who Tim Scott (who claims to get direct messages from the Supreme Deity) is (girlfriend or not): “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were gonna strike. You strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me.”
+ In other words, God wants you to work longer hours for less pay. Not sure this divine injunction is meant for CEOs, however. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that average CEO compensation (including stock awards and options) was $25.2 million in 2022, a slight decrease from 2021, due largely to stock market declines. Since 1978, however, CEO compensation has soared by 1,209.2% compared with a 15.3% increase in a typical worker’s compensation. In 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker. Back in 1965, they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker.
+ Records released by the UK Cabinet Office reveal that Liz Truss claimed £23,310 from an annual public fund for former Prime Ministers, despite only holding the position for 49 days.
+ $10 billion: the amount Google pays out each year to companies like Apple to make it the default search engine on their devices.
+ A recent analysis of the once fashionable NFT (non-fungible token) market, shows that 95 percent of the highly-touted crypto assets are now essentially worthless.
+ A study of income redistribution in France by the Institute National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INEES) found that before redistribution the ratio of income of the highest-income people (10% of the population) to the lowest-income people (13% of the population) was 18-to-1. After redistribution, it shrank to 3-to-1.
+ Lower-income black families have been pushed out of their homes by a developer buying up houses on their block in West Philly, who now whines that his “market-rate” apartments have an occupancy rate of only 50 percent.
+ Less than 1% of Africans have an income above the rich world’s median, and fewer than 1% of the people living in the rich world have an income below the African median.
+ A new paper by William Marble (What Explains Educational Polarization Among White Voters?) addresses the political realignment in the US, where white working-class voters have become more conservative on economic issues, while whites with college degrees have become more progressive on issues like taxation, social insurance, redistribution and government intervention in the economy.
+ According to Goldman Sachs, India will surpass the US and become the world’s second-largest economy by 2075.
+ Lula at the UN General Assembly: “Amidst the wreckage, far-right adventurers emerge who deny politics and sell solutions that are as simple as they are wrong. Many have fallen to the temptation of replacing failed neoliberalism with primitive, authoritarian and conservative nationalism.”
+ Poverty levels in Nicaragua have been cut to 13.3% of the population by 2022, according to the calculation by the World Bank, They stood at 48% in 2007.
+ FoxNew’s Shannon Bream: “It does generally seem that Republicans get blamed for shutdowns.”
Karl Rove: “Well, generally because Republicans are responsible for the shutdowns, they seem to eagerly want it, so there’s a reason they get blamed.”
+ According to CNN’s Kristin Wilson, since 1995 the House has failed to pass rules 8 times, all under GOP control. Gingrich: 6 in four years; Hastert: 2 in 8 years; McCarthy: 3 in 8 months, including twice this week. Boehner, Pelosi and Ryan never lost a rule.
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+ According to New York Magazine, Donald Trump used “moderate abortion rhetoric” during his bizarre Meet the Press interview with the compliant and docile Kristen Welker. An example of this “moderation”: “Nobody wants to see five, six, seven, eight, nine months. Nobody wants to see abortions when you have a baby in the womb. I said, with Hillary Clinton when we had the debate, I made a statement, “Rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, you’re allowed to do that, and you shouldn’t be allowed to do that…Look, the Democrats are able to kill the baby after birth.”
+ In fact, less than 0.9 percent of all abortions occur in the third trimester.
+ Before imposing a sentence on the Nebraska mother who bought abortion pills for her daughter and helped bury the fetal remains, the judge in the case ordered a psychological evaluation. Then last week the same judge abruptly canceled his own order. Why? The judge cited “lack of funding.” According to court records in Nebraska, the typical cost of a psych evaluation from a registered shrink is $169. Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund, told Jezebel: “It’s fucking fucked up.”
+ Two South Carolina state senators (Penny Gustafson and Katrina Shealy) who voted for an abortion ban at 6 weeks will receive the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation “Profile in Courage” Award. Just imagine the kind of people 40 years from now who will be getting the RFK Jr Profile in Courage awards…
+ Black women in America are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth. Lack of health care insurance is a big issue, but even when they have insurance many Black women still have a hard time convincing doctors to take their concerns seriously: “If you’re a Black woman, you get dismissed.”
+ Democracy in America Update: Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2020. But Ohio’s Redistricting Commission, dominated by Republicans, has chosen to adopt a map where the partisan breakdowns will be 62 GOP seats to 37 Democratic in the Ohio House and 23 GOP seats to 10 Democratic in the Ohio Senate.
+ A word from our guardian of public morality Howard Stern: “Lauren Boebert is a disgrace to the country.” Gitmo is a disgrace to the country. Lahaina getting burnt off the map is a disgrace to the country. Pregnant women being shot for suspected shoplifting is a disgrace to the country. 600,000 homeless people on the streets of the US is a disgrace to the country. Boebert’s antics barely count as a commercial interruption in our free-fall from grace…
+ When Trump was sued, he didn’t pay his personal lawyer. When his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was sued for representing Trump, he didn’t pay his personal lawyer. Now his personal lawyer is suing him.
+ Rep. Ralph Norman says his vote to advance the Continuing Resolution rule out of committee on Monday night was an accident and he plans on voting against it on the floor: “To be honest with you, I was asleep at the switch. I thought it was the vote with the New Mexico.” Whatever that means…
+ In pushing his plan to require young voters to take a political literacy test, the spastic Vivek Ramaswamy often compares it to the citizenship test his parents had to pass. But it turns out, his father isn’t a US citizen…
+ Florida with its aging population has the highest rate of COVID-19 hospitalizations, even as its governor and state surgeon general urged people, even those in high-risk groups, to avoid getting booster shots this fall…
+ As we brace for the fall COVID surge, the CDC quietly announced it will stop updating its COVID-19 excess deaths database at the end of September.
+ Naomi Klein on Russell Brand, who has been accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, including a 16-year-old girl: “Of course, Russell Brand’s followers deny the allegations. He has groomed an audience to deny/disbelieve everything they see and hear, which is very different from healthy skepticism. This knee-jerk denialism is precisely why people with plenty of skeletons in the closet love conspiracy culture: they have a built-in defense against accountability. It’s all a conspiracy, always. I have met Brand, been on his show (years ago). It took a hell of a lot of courage for these women to come forward. They have all my solidarity.”
+ Tim Ballard, who was portrayed by Jim Caviezel in the child sex-trafficking movie The Sound of Freedom, left the organization Operation Underground Railroad after seven women accused him of sexual misconduct. Apparently, the self-promoting “anti-slavery” crusader invited as many as seven women to act as his “wife” on undercover missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking, where Ballard allegedly coerced those women into sleeping with him or showering together, telling the women that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Vice reports that Ballard sent at one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, his body adorned with fake tattoos. He is said to have asked another woman “how far she was willing to go” to save children. The Sound of Freedom was the “sleeper hit” at the summer box office, quietly pulling in more than $210 million at the box office, largely through a promotional campaign spread by religious conservatives and self-empowerment gurus like Tony Robbins.
+ Meanwhile, the producer of The Sound of Freedom, Paul Hutchinson, has been accused of touching the naked breasts of an underage trafficking victim during “an operation” in Mexico in 2016.
+ The movie about the sexual assaults of the people who made the Sound of Freedom is going to be better than the movie they made.
+ In her new book, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson claims that Rudy Giuliani sexually assaulted her on J6, putting his hand “under my blazer, under my skirt … like a wolf closing in on its prey.” Hutchinson also reveals that Trump’s reluctance to wear a mask during the height of COVID was driven by his vanity: “When he looked at the straps of his mask, he saw they were covered in bronzer. He wasn’t happy about that. ‘Why did no one else tell me that? I’m not wearing this thing.’”
+ The same week Texas outlawed racial discrimination based on hairstyles, Darryl George, a Black high school student in Houston, was suspended twice because school officials say his dreadlocks violated the district’s dress code.
+ Clarksville, the fifth largest city in Tennessee, is seeking an exemption from the state’s Sunshine law, which requires all official business to be conducted in public. One of the city commissioners said she thinks requiring the city to conduct public business in public “stifles communication and collaboration.”
+ If only the NYT would fact-check David Brooks’ columns as thoroughly as Twitter readers…(or at all).
+ Of course, fact-checking David Brooks’ columns would defeat the point of running them in the first place.
+ Joyce Carol Oates: “(bar bill: $66. food bill: $12. tip: $0 N Y Times expense account)”
+++
+ Since humans appeared on the planet, the rate of species extinction has accelerated by 35 times. In the last 500 years alone, at least 73 complete branches of the evolutionary tree of life have gone extinct.
+ A new report from Global Witness shows that it’s becoming more and more dangerous to be an environmental activist. Between 2012 and 2022, at least 1,910 people advocating for environmental protection were killed worldwide. In 2022 alone, at least 177 environmental activists were murdered, about every two days.
+ On the last day of WINTER in South America, temperatures peaked as high as 45°C (113°F) in Brazil. The highest temperature in its history for any day of any month.
+ The 2023 Canadian wildfire season so far:
+ 5% of Canada’s forest area burned;
+More 43 million acres of forest charred, greater than the size of Florida;
+ 3 times more carbon produced than previous record wildfire year;
+ 2.5 times more acres burned than the previous record year.
+ Studies from Antarctica reveal that ice sheets can collapse into the ocean much faster than previously thought, up to 2,000 feet a day.
+ Arctic lakes used to function as carbon sinks. Now they’re emitters.
+ Southern California air regulators could have collected more than $200 million in fines from the region’s worst smog polluters over the last decade. Instead, they adopted a rule exempting polluters from having to pay, saying the fines wouldn’t help.
+ Even if no new coal plants are built in the future, the International Energy Agency says that the emissions from the world’s existing coal plants, if they remain online, would make it impossible for the world to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.
+ Around one million people who lived or worked at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from 1953 to 1987 may have been exposed to contaminated drinking water. Many women on the base experienced repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and other defects during that period.
+ According to an analysis by First Street, around 39 million properties—roughly a quarter of all homes in the US—are being underpriced for the climate risk to insure those properties. This year the price for Florida property catastrophe reinsurance has jumped 30-40%, according to Moody’s, prompting a new spike in homeowners’ premiums.
+ An extreme weather event like the floods that swept more than 10,000 people to their deaths in Libya has become up to 50 times more likely and up to 50% more intense compared to the planet under a 1.2C cooler climate.
+ Iraq is running out of water. The flows of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers are down by half. Yet these shortages haven’t stopped the oil industry from hogging more than 25% of the nation’s daily water consumption.
+ A new study out of the University of Michigan links wildfire smoke to dementia: “All airborne particles increased the risk of dementia but those generated by agricultural settings and wildfires seemed to be especially toxic for the brain.” A new study links wildfire smoke inhalation to higher rates of dementia.
+ Every year, around 400,000 Europeans die from diseases linked to air pollution. A Guardian investigation found that 98% of Europeans live in areas with highly damaging fine particulate pollution that exceeds World Health Organization guidelines. Nearly two-thirds live in areas where air quality is more than twice as dangerous as the WHO’s guidelines.
+ Claiming the UK had already made extraordinary progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says he’s delaying by five years a ban on new gas and diesel cars that had been scheduled to take effect in 2030.
+ It’s like watching a watershed snuff film…
“About one-third of forests across 80 drinking watersheds serving coastal cities have been cut during the last 20 years, NASA found”
Check out the full article to learn about the state of our #forests and how that affects our coastal communities: https://t.co/hK4aGi0h2q pic.twitter.com/MavmqPb3Hm
— Oregon League of Conservation Voters (@OLCV) September 20, 2023
+ A major new research paper published in Science suggests that pre-1492 soil-enrichment practices in the Amazon’s generally bad soils captured so much carbon that in places the soil now contains as much carbon as the (once) immense canopy.
+ There are only two majority-black towns in West Virginia. One of them, Institute, was left out of a state regulatory plan earlier this year to tighten limits on cancer-causing chemicals.
+ In 1970, around half of American kids walked or biked to school. Now only ten percent of kids go to school those ways. Even when the school is closer than a mile away, only about a third of children walk or bike there.
+ A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that fully remote workers produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of people who spend their days working in offices.
+ El Niño has barely started and already scientists are saying they’ve never seen anything like it before.
+++
U/OUROBOROS696969/REDDIT.
+ If you search for “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square on Google, the first result is likely to be an AI-generated selfie.
+ The combined payroll of the two best teams in the American League, the Orioles and Rays, is $170 million–$108 million less than the Yankees and $170 million less than the Mets, neither of which will make the playoffs.
+ John Waters at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony: “Here I am, closer to the gutter than ever.”
+ What Cheryl Strayed read while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail…
The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Dubliners, James Joyce+ Book banners have adopted a definition of “pornography” that is so ridiculous it has been used by the Katy Texas School District to ban Dr. Seuss’s Wacky Wednesday and a book about a “naked” crayon that has lost its wrapper. Meanwhile, a Houston-area teacher was fired after reading passages from the graphic novel edition of the Diary of Anne Frank. The district sent an apology to parents for making their kids read about Anne Frank. Apparently, the teacher was meant to use the PragerU edition of Anne Frank’s Diaries, where the Nazis were hiding Anne in Bergen-Belsen in order to save her from the clutches of the advancing Red Army.
+ Stanley Cohen: “The paradox of more Palestinian children being familiar with the story of Anne Frank than Texans.”
+ From Kafka’s diaries: “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
+ Letter to the editor, Pittsburgh Press, February 5, 1936: “The critics who are constantly assailing the President [FDR] for being a Socialist do not know what Socialism is.”
+ Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for Sept. 14, 1940: “A sense of invasion–that is lorries of soldiers and machines–like cranes–walloping along to Newhaven. An air raid is on. A little pop rattle which I take to be a machine gun, just gone off. Planes roaring and roaring. Percy and L. say some are English. Mabel comes out and looks: asks if we want fish fried or boiled.”
+ Jack Bruce on the time Ahmet Ertegun, head honcho of Atlantic Records, didn’t want to release “Sunshine of Your Love,” which would become Creem’s biggest hit: “I was aware that I had a huge crossover song on my hands, but it wasn’t easy to persuade the record company people. Especially the big boss of Atlantic. We had done a rough recording of it and he didn’t like it. When I played it to him, he said ‘psychedelic hogwash’. He didn’t want to release it. I was very lucky because Booker T and Otis Redding came into the studio and said it would be a smash. In fact, it became Atlantic’s biggest-selling single.”
+ Dylan: “All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains & lovers who are really geese & swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come & take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die.”
+ There’s little more satisfying than to watch a pompous bigot, who has paraded his misogyny and racism around for decades with a sense of royal impunity, suddenly implode with his own hand on the detonator. The long overdue self-immolation of Jann Wenner came in what started out as a typically friendly NYT interview by David Marchese to pitch Wenner’s tedious new book The Masters, featuring his fawning interviews with some of the most over-hyped figures in popular music: Bono, Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, and Springsteen. All artists so over-exposed that no one really needs to hear another word from them. Marchese made the obvious point that all were white men who played guitar-oriented rock and Wenner, the contempt for women and black artists drooling from his lips, just couldn’t resist the temptation to dig his own grave, jump in it and bury himself with the mud he’s slung for decades:
NYT: There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist? What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?
JW: Well, let me just. …
NYT: Carole King, Madonna. There are a million examples.
JW: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.
NYT: Oh, stop it. You’re telling me Joni Mitchell is not articulate enough on an intellectual level?
JW: Hold on a second.
NYT: I’ll let you rephrase that.
JW: All right, thank you. It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.
Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as “masters,” the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.
NYT: How do you know if you didn’t give them a chance?
JW: Because I read interviews with them. I listen to their music. I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it.
NYT: Don’t you think it’s actually more to do with your own interests as a fan and a listener than anything particular to the artists? I think the problem is when you start saying things like “they” or “these artists can’t.” Really, it’s a reflection of what you’re interested in more than any ability or inability on the part of these artists, isn’t it?
That was my No. 1 thing. The selection was intuitive. It was what I was interested in. You know, just for public relations’ sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism. Which, I get it. I had a chance to do that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever.
A couple of days later, Wenner had been booted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and denounced by the current staff of the magazine he co-founded.
+ Wenner’s aspersions against Joni Mitchell, Janice Joplin and Grace Slick ring especially hollow. Our own Phyllis Pollack had a “deep conversation” with Grace a few years ago. Slick had many interesting things to say and was much wittier than anything I’ve ever heard from Bono, the most banal frontman in rock history.
+ This one’s for you, Jann Wenner…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
Cory Doctorow
(Verso)Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program
Christopher Bosso
(University of California)Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1942-1983
Robert Bresson
Edited by Mylène Bresson
(NYRB)Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
Mitski
(Dead Oceans)Where We Are
Joshua Redman
(Blue Note)Who’s Next/Life House [Super Deluxe Edition]
The Who
(Geffen)Our Power Knows No Limits, Yet…
“Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.” – John LeCarré
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
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This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.
But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation.
It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.
“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.”
A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low and moderate-income people.
Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models which relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly.
“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”
The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.
But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California-based nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities.
The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.
“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.”
A community of mobile homes in Boulder City, Nevada
George Rose / Getty ImagesMobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections, older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient and better functioning than some traditional homes.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning.
“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren.
This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.
Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.
In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home.
A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.
Read Next Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach.
“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”
On the other side of the country though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly.
This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills.
Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit organization focused on climate solutions in Upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.
Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.
Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes, “it affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.”
Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: they’re just not considered.
In Ithaca, that means that many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage, which is far below what it would take to electrify them which provides challenges for Nicholson.
“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park, ” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”
Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold-snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners.
This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change.
“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat…They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.”
Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.
“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mobile homes could be a climate solution. So why don’t they get more respect? on Sep 8, 2023.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Siri Chilukuri.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
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Join The Conversation
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Ben Shapiro, conservative commentator and lead singer of an Alvin and the Chipmunks tribute band, has some thoughts about former President Donald Trump’s arraignment yesterday on federal charges in Florida.
“When the Justice Department gets reduced to pure politics, you have a problem,” said Shapiro on his eponymous show. He continued:
Now I hear people screaming, ‘But you just said that Trump may have committed criminal activity here, the allegations against him are very strong.’ That’s true [but] the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats. … If the basic line here is the Republicans are just supposed to accept that Republicans who are guilty of crimes get indicted, and Democrats who are guilty of crimes get slots on CNN and MSNBC, that is not a workable solution for anyone. … The double standard is what is going to destroy the credibility of the institution.
Shapiro is correct that there is a stunning double standard in the investigation and prosecution of prominent U.S. politicians. Where he went wrong was in claiming that up is down and black is white — i.e., that this double standard favors Democrats.
That’s because Democrats seem to be somehow, for all intents and purposes, barred from several key roles in the U.S. justice system, even under Democratic presidents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1935 and has had eight directors in the subsequent 88 years. Literally none of them has been a Democrat. (This does not include figures who’ve served as acting director, generally for short periods.)
Similarly, no Democrat has been named as a special counsel (or special prosecutor or independent counsel, the names for similar earlier positions) for a significant investigation for 50 years. As The Associated Press puts it, special counsels are outside attorneys appointed by the attorney general when the AG perceives the Justice Department as “having a conflict or where it’s deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.”
It’s impossible to know exactly why Democrats aren’t permitted to fill these positions. But Democrats of recent generations seem to be diehard institutionalists, desperately yearning for Republicans to accept that a “fair” system can find Republicans guilty, so they never appoint a Democrat. Meanwhile, Republicans couldn’t care less what Democrats think, so they also never appoint a Democrat.
Take special counsels first. Jack Smith, who leads the prosecution of Trump, is a registered independent. One of his previous jobs was overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity section. There he unsuccessfully prosecuted John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, in a campaign finance case with some similarities to the charges Trump has been indicted for in New York state. The most Democratic thing about Smith is that his wife was one of three producers of a positive documentary about Michelle Obama.
The most recent Democratic special prosecutors for a prominent investigation date from the Watergate scandal. Archibald Cox, who’d been solicitor general in the Kennedy administration, was appointed in May 1973 and then fired by Richard Nixon five months later. According to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, “the Washington mill dismissed Archibald Cox as too soft.”
Cox was replaced by Leon Jaworski, a Texas Democrat — i.e., the kind of Democrat who’d voted for Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and in 1980 founded “Democrats for Reagan.”
As far as Democratic special counsels go, that’s pretty much it. Arthur Christy, who investigated President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, was a Republican. Gerald Gallinghouse, who investigated Carter’s 1980 campaign manager Timothy Kraft, was a former Democrat who’d become a Republican a decade before his appointment.
Next up was Lawrence Walsh, who ran the Iran–Contra inquiry during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Walsh was a lifetime Republican, who’d been deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration and an early Ronald Reagan supporter. Republicans went absolutely berserk attacking Walsh and did everything possible to obstruct his work. (Interestingly, as of this writing, the Wikipedia page for Walsh falsely claims he was a Democrat.)
During the same period, Whitney North Seymour Jr. investigated Reagan deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver. Seymour was a Republican.
During the Clinton administration, the inquiry into the Whitewater affair was first run by Robert Fiske, a Republican. He concluded that White House aide Vince Foster had indeed committed suicide, rather than being taken out by one of the many assassins on Bill and Hillary’s payroll. Republicans believed this raised “questions about Fiske,” so he was replaced by Kenneth Starr. Starr, a Republican, somehow investigated Whitewater by digging into Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. The Whitewater assignment was wrapped up in 2003 by Robert Ray, a Republican.
Another independent counsel was appointed during the Clinton administration to look into the FBI’s siege of Waco, Texas. The man chosen for the job (by Clinton’s attorney general) was John Danforth, a Republican.
Shockingly, the streak of Republicans was broken during the George W. Bush administration when Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed in 2003 to look into the Valerie Plame affair. Fitzgerald was a self-declared independent.
Then it was back to Republicans. Robert Mueller, who was picked to head the investigation into any intersection between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, is a Republican. John Durham, appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to look at the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, is a Republican. Robert Hur, chosen by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, is a Republican.
Other Republican figures who’ve held the position include Alexia Morrison, Larry Thompson, Arlin Adams, and Joseph diGenova — who’s such a big Republican that he was was hired by Trump to help overturn the 2020 election. But to be clear, it is not the case that literally no Democrat has been appointed to run such an investigation in the last five decades. There is definitely at least one: Curtis Emery von Kann, who was in charge of the crucial inquiry into Eli Segal, a White House assistant to Bill Clinton. Segal was in charge of AmeriCorps while simultaneously helping a nonprofit called Partnership for Public Service raise money, for free. Von Kann, who was a registered Democrat as of 1985, found that Segal had committed no wrongdoing.
Everything is crystal clear, however, when it comes to directors of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, who served in the position for 36 years, was formally an independent but privately a staunch Republican. His immediate successor Clarence Kelley, appointed by Nixon, was a Republican.
Then Carter appointed William Webster, a Republican. Reagan appointed William Sessions, a Republican. Clinton appointed Louis Freeh, a Republican. George W. Bush appointed Robert Mueller, a Republican. Barack Obama appointed James Comey, at the time a Republican. (He’s now officially unaffiliated.)
Then Trump fired Comey and appointed the current FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican. When Biden took office, he kept Wray in place.
Democrats appear to have accepted that the rules forbid any Democrat from holding one of these positions because it just wouldn’t be fair.
Incredibly enough, these basic facts are rarely discussed in the corporate media. Democrats appear to have accepted that the rules forbid any Democrat from holding one of these positions because it just wouldn’t be fair. Meanwhile, Shapiro and other right-wing figures who cry out to the heavens about the inequity of our justice system somehow leave these facts out of their presentation. It’s enough to make a cynic suspect that even-handed justice is not their agenda at all.
This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Religious and civil organizations representing Vietnam’s Montagnard people said they weren’t involved in armed attacks on two police stations that left nine people dead over the weekend.
Sunday’s attack took place in Dak Lak province in the remote Central Highlands – a region that’s home to some 30 tribes of indigenous peoples known collectively as Montagnards.
Two state newspapers, VnExpress and Cong Thuong, published detailed information about the incident, saying that at dawn on Sunday, around 40 people wearing camouflage vests split into two groups to attack the two police stations in the Ea Tieu and Ea Ktur communes.
Police on Tuesday updated the number of people arrested in the attacks to 45. Two people surrendered to police and 10 others were arrested on Monday night, according to a Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security update.
The ministry used the phrase “the group causing insecurity and disorder at the People’s Committees of Ea Tieu and Ea Ktur communes” to refer to the attackers.
A joint letter issued Monday night by a group of Dak Lak government agencies and organizations strongly condemned the attacks and called on the public “not to post or share related information that has not been verified.”
It also urged people “to stay vigilant and not ‘listen to, believe in, or follow” reactionary elements and hostile forces who take advantage of the situation to create distortion and entice people to oppose local authorities, causing political security in the area.”
‘Montagnard people are commoners’
The Bangkok-based Montagnard Stands for Justice group said on Facebook that the organization had no connection with the incident and wasn’t affiliated with any groups or individuals assisting in the use of violence.
The organization, whose founders are political refugees in Thailand and the United States, also said they were concerned that any armed uprising would hinder their efforts to advocate for religious freedom in Vietnam.
Frustration in the region has grown after decades of government surveillance, land disputes, economic hardship and crackdowns on unofficial churches.
Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, the U.S.-based co-founder of the Vietnam Evangelical Church of Christ, told Radio Free Asia that he didn’t think any Montagnards were involved in the attacks.
“Montagnard people are commoners who live with their religious faith,” he said. “When their religious faith or land is violated, they, of course, will have to voice up. However, I don’t think Montagnard people in Dak Lak province were capable enough to organize such an armed force of 30 to 40 people.”
He said he was able to contact church members in the area where the attacks occurred on Sunday. They expressed confusion and said they didn’t know what was happening, he said.
The executive director of North Carolina-based Dega Central Highlands Organization, Y-Duen Buondap, told RFA that his organization also wasn’t involved in the attacks.
“We don’t have any members involved in these incidents,” he said. “However, we have the information that the Montagnard people have rioted to demand their rights and interests, as they could not bear further suffering. They are suppressed, beaten, arrested and cornered daily.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
