Those opposed to this dangerous development are invited to join the monthly vigil at the main gate of RAF Lakenheath, scheduled for this Saturday, from 12 noon to 2pm. More details here.

CND Chair Tom Unterrainer said:

“CND has been calling on the government to come clean about the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain since 2022 - with more evidence proving that RAF Lakenheath is being primed for such a mission gradually uncovered ever since.
It is completely inappropriate for the public to be finding out about such a major escalation in nuclear dangers via reports in British newspapers and the assessments of security experts. Starmer must make a public statement about this major change in Britain's security arrangements and allow for a transparent and democratic debate on this to be held in Parliament. Enough of the gaslighting and hiding behind national security - the public deserve the truth!”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

As Palestinian health officials say overnight Israeli strikes killed dozens in Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak with a teacher trying to evacuate Rafah with her young children, who urges the U.S. government to stop the bloodshed. “My message to President Biden: We are innocent civilians, and we have no fault in what is happening,” says Duha Latif. “Our children deserve to live a normal life like the rest of the world’s children.” Latif is fundraising to gather the money she needs to enter Egypt. The latest Israeli bombardment was conducted as part of an operation to free two Israeli hostages and came amid warnings from U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders against Israel’s expected ground invasion of Rafah. Aid agencies fear the offensive would cause massive casualties.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: Gary Kramer – Public Domain

For the Nimiipuu people, protecting wolves and grizzly bears is akin to protecting a family member. According to our law, every animal has a vital place in this world. When we disrupt that, we upset the entire balance within an ecosystem. We believe strongly in the sacredness of all life. Since time immemorial, we have shared this land with wolves and bears – sharing our resources, sharing food and learning from one another. It is critical that we maintain protections for our relatives, the wolves and grizzly bears, to ensure these species can continue to carry out their roles on this land.

In recent years, wolves and grizzly bears have faced increasing persecution in the Northern Rockies. The threat of hostile state management in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana only compounds the threats these species are already facing. To ensure the continued recovery of grizzly bears and gray wolves, continued protections under the Endangered Species Act are necessary – especially in light of the aggression we’ve seen toward these species in our states.

Most recently, Montana and Wyoming petitioned the federal government to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment hopes these petitions will be rejected and ensure continued protections for grizzly bears in our region. We have already seen what has happened to wolves in the Northern Rockies since they were delisted – we cannot allow grizzly bears to face the same hostile state management and extreme killing.

Our group is also part of a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s wolf trapping and snaring laws that facilitate the killing of up to 90% of Idaho’s gray wolf population. The lawsuit contends that continued and expanded wolf trapping and snaring will injure and kill non-target grizzly bears, which are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Idaho has ignored the potential impacts to grizzlies and charged forward with its extreme killing practices to eradicate as many wolves as possible. We joined this lawsuit to end the trapping and snaring of wolves in grizzly bear habitat during non-denning periods.

In just a single year after Idaho’s aggressive new wolf trapping and snaring laws took effect in 2021, Idaho’s wolf population declined by 13 percent. We should be doing everything we can to protect and live alongside both wolves and grizzly bears, not actively facilitating their eradication. These species are incredibly important to the Nimiipuu people, and we are working to end the assault on these species – for the benefit of our environment and for future generations.

Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment recently spoke with tribal elders to document their stories about both wolves and grizzly bears. One elder spoke of seeing a gray wolf and how beautiful an experience it was – that an almost ghost-like figure moved past at a fast pace, and how fortunate they felt after. Another spoke of how connected we are to wolves and grizzlies by our shared food and resources. Another marveled at the harmonies from wolves – singing to one another across the canyons. Another’s daughter was named after the wolf, as she worked hard to take care of her family and boys. And another spoke of the need to work to better understand grizzly bears and their needs and restore our ecosystems back to their natural configurations.

The stories shine a light on just how important grizzly bears, wolves and the rest of the natural world have been to the Nimiipuu people for generations. These stories are passed down to all of us – stories of our ancestors and how important the species have been toward ensuring the continued survival of our landscapes and each of us. Every single one of us is connected. As we face the continued loss of nature, we should be fighting harder to protect these species, not harm them.

In the coming months, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide whether to maintain protections for the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. We are hopeful that the agency will decide to continue protecting the species, as climate change, habitat destruction and increased killing of bears has only made the situation more dire. We must do all we can to better foster connections between isolated grizzly populations and recommit to their recovery in the lower 48, including priority ecosystems like the Bitterroot and Cascades.

And as we move toward a decision in our Idaho litigation, we are hopeful for a ruling that protects both wolves and the ESA-protected grizzly bears that are indiscriminately killed through trapping and snaring. The Endangered Species Act has afforded grizzly bears protections and Idaho’s extreme killing program for wolves has put both species at risk.

In recent years, officials in this region have proven to be incredibly hostile toward the species that Indigenous communities, and most Americans, know and love. People travel from all over the world to see our grizzly bears and wolves, and they spend significant money in our region while they are here. We should be protecting these species and the role they play in our ecosystems, our culture and our economy, not targeting them. The extreme hostility toward these keystone species will only hurt all of us if it continues.

This first appeared in the Idaho Capitol Sun.

The post Since Time Immemorial, We Have Shared the Land with Wolves and Bears: They Deserve Our Protection appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julian Matthews.

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As members of the New York City Council convened last month to discuss the Law Department’s budget, they asked the city’s top lawyer to account for the rising cost of police misconduct.

The topic had been driving headlines for weeks. In February, an analysis of payout data had shown that the city shelled out $121 million in NYPD-related settlements and judgments in 2022, a five-year high. Weeks later, officials announced that millions more in taxpayer dollars would go toward what lawyers for demonstrators called a “historic” deal to settle claims involving the NYPD’s violent response to racial justice protests in 2020. Of particular concern to some members of the council’s Committee on Governmental Operations was reporting by ProPublica and New York Magazine on how city lawyers aggressively fight these kinds of misconduct claims, even in the face of compelling evidence that officers crossed the line.

“I found it really troubling,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler of ProPublica’s reporting, which focused on the unit that handles the most high-profile police misconduct cases, the Special Federal Litigation Division, or Special Fed. “And I am concerned about the approach of the Law Department over many years.”

In response, Sylvia Hinds-Radix, the head of the Law Department, told Restler and the committee that she “vociferously” disagreed with any characterization that agency lawyers fought claims tooth and nail “without evaluating what is before us.”

“We have the obligation to defend those things we do,” she said. “And the cases that need to be settled, we evaluate them and settle them.”

Left unmentioned in Hinds-Radix’s March 22 testimony was any reference to Jawaun Fraser, whose case provided an almost textbook example of her department’s hardball approach, a strategy that confounded even the judge overseeing the lawsuit. Just a day earlier, a federal jury in Manhattan had awarded Fraser $2 million after city lawyers spent the previous three years fighting him in civil court.

Fraser had sued New York and three NYPD detectives after spending two years in prison on a robbery conviction that was later overturned. A jury found not just that officers had fabricated evidence against him but that the city itself was liable for massive failures in NYPD training. Yet for years, city lawyers had treated it as what’s called a “no-pay” case, steadfastly refusing to settle while labeling Fraser a “drug dealer” who was unworthy of “a dime.”

They maintained that position even as Fraser’s lawyers revealed numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the arresting officers’ own testimonies — and as evidence mounted that the NYPD had, for decades, failed to properly train its 35,000-officer force on their legal obligations to disclose certain material, like past lawsuits, that could impact officers’ credibility in court. That violation flew in the face of bedrock legal protections codified by Supreme Court rulings from a half-century ago, beginning with the marquee 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, which requires the government to turn over information favorable to the accused.

Amid the revelations, the senior district court judge overseeing the case took the rare step of declaring that she’d “never understood why this was a no-pay case, and I understand it less now.” The judge, Colleen McMahon, went on to say that in her 22 years on the bench, she’d never seen documentation of the city’s constitutional failures “like the evidence I’ve heard in this case.”

“I am pretty appalled by what I have heard,” the judge said.

A Law Department spokesperson defended Special Fed’s litigation of Fraser’s lawsuit, saying in a statement that after evaluating “all the facts and evidence” agency lawyers “challenged this case all the way to trial.”

“While we are disappointed with the verdict, we respect it,” said department spokesperson Nick Paolucci.

But Thomas Giovanni, who served as a top official in the Law Department from 2014 until last December, said the agency’s police defense practice too often seeks to justify misconduct after the fact, rather than proactively identifying problems, settling them early and pushing its client to reform.

“Are we the oncologist,” he asked of the city lawyer, “or are we the janitor?”

Some civil rights lawyers in the city say the Law Department’s conduct in the Fraser case suggests the latter.

Fraser’s civil lawsuit centered on a botched buy-and-bust operation that NYPD narcotics officers conducted in a Manhattan public housing project on Oct. 21, 2014 — and the lawsuit history of the detectives who played key roles in Fraser’s arrest.

In sworn filings, the police said Fraser confronted an undercover police officer that day, robbing him of a fake New York state license and $20 in drug buy money. Fraser, then 18, denied this, saying that the officer offered up his ID as proof that he wasn’t a cop, and that the detectives framed Fraser for robbery after he merely took a photo of it.

Even though no drugs or buy money were discovered on Fraser that day, he was charged based on the detectives’ claims that he stole the undercover officer’s ID. The case hinged on the officers’ testimony versus Fraser’s, and a jury eventually convicted him of a robbery charge. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

What that jury didn’t know, and what Fraser’s appellate lawyers only discovered years after his conviction, was that six officers involved in his arrest had been named in a total of 35 civil lawsuits. Yet Fraser’s defense lawyer said he only received two cases from a prosecutor ahead of trial — a lack of disclosure that would later prompt a judge to overturn Fraser’s conviction in 2019. The following year he filed a lawsuit in civil court seeking accountability — and compensation — for the actions of the NYPD detectives who had put him behind bars.

In her opening statement last month, though, Special Fed attorney Caroline McGuire’s pitch to jurors was that Fraser was actually guilty of the robbery and was now trying to “trick you into awarding him money.” She pointed to comments Fraser had made to a parole board in which he appeared to accept responsibility for his “crime” — a position Fraser said he only took after older inmates counseled him to express remorse if he wanted to get paroled.

McGuire argued that Fraser had been lucky to get his conviction overturned, going so far as to say that his own defense lawyer was partly at fault for the whole ordeal because he hadn’t looked up lawsuits against the officers “despite the fact that it would have taken him only five minutes.”

McMahon stopped her. “My first instruction of law, under the Brady rule, a defense lawyer has no obligation to look for lawsuits,” the judge explained.

“You had better watch it,” she warned McGuire.

After the city lawyer finished, the judge went even further, excusing the jury and summoning to the podium the chief of Special Fed, Patricia Miller, who was watching from the gallery.

“Ms. Miller, do you have an explanation for why one of your assistants would come into my courtroom and suggest that a defense lawyer has an obligation to go look up material that he doesn’t have any obligation under Brady to look up?” she asked.

Miller told the judge that McGuire hadn’t intended to mislead the jury and was in fact trying to make a point about the relevance of the lawsuits — an argument McGuire’s co-counsel then reiterated. But the judge rejected the city’s position entirely: “I’m here to tell you what came out of Ms. McGuire’s mouth was not permissible,” McMahon said.

Over the next week, Fraser’s lawyers pointed out multiple inconsistencies in the various police accounts of Fraser’s arrest, casting doubt on the official narrative of events. Among them: The undercover officer claimed that Fraser had stolen his ID, but no officer testified seeing a detective recover it from Fraser. In fact, only a photocopy of it was later submitted as evidence.

Fraser’s lawyers also elicited testimony that went to several officers’ credibility, showing that the undercover officer and another detective had never told the prosecutor in Fraser’s case about a combined eight lawsuits they’d been named in, which alleged false arrest and other civil rights violations, and which settled for $246,500 in total. (The district attorney’s office, which has its own obligation to search for such material, also conducted an incomplete search in Fraser’s case, failing to turn up all the lawsuits the office knew about, a prosecutor testified in Fraser’s civil trial.)

As it turned out, the NYPD itself had for decades failed to train its employees on their legal duties to inform the people they arrest of important information that might help their cases. Thousands of pages of internal training materials turned over in the Fraser case revealed that it wasn’t until 2014 — 51 years after Brady was decided and only after New York’s highest court affirmed that records of civil lawsuits had to be turned over — that the NYPD put in writing officers’ disclosure obligations. And even then, the department at first mischaracterized them, not clarifying its instructions until 2017 to include not just information which could exonerate an accused person, but also material that goes to officers' own credibility, such as civil lawsuits.

The failure of basic disclosure became all the more remarkable when Fraser’s lawyers learned that the department maintained an extensive database of civil lawsuits against officers — though it would remain largely inaccessible to the cops referenced in it, as well as to prosecutors.

A top NYPD lawyer in charge of the database testified that officers and assistant district attorneys interested in finding out about lawsuits could email her. To raise awareness about its existence, she started giving oral presentations to cops about their obligations to know their lawsuit histories beginning in 2014, instructing them about “Googling yourself.”

The supervisors who received those training sessions were then supposed to tell rank-and-file officers at roll calls ahead of their tours about their legal responsibilities, the NYPD lawyer said on the stand, a scenario that Judge McMahon likened to the 1980s police procedural “Hill Street Blues.”

“I’m flabbergasted by what I have heard in the last two days, I got to tell you, I’m flabbergasted,” McMahon said on March 17.

In response to all this, Special Fed’s closing arguments to the jury were fairly straightforward: If they believed that Fraser had committed the 2014 robbery, and thus hadn’t been framed, the rest was moot. To bolster their position, the attorneys returned to Fraser’s two parole board appearances in 2017 and his comments there, including what seemed to be an acknowledgement that he was dealing drugs on the day of his arrest.

By his own admission, Fraser had as a teenager sold crack. But he maintained at his civil trial that he’d given up the trade by the time of his arrest and was proud to have landed a job as a sheet metal union apprentice.

The jury believed Fraser, and after the weeklong trial deliberated for about a day before finding unanimously in his favor.

The city’s approach to the Fraser case may now cost taxpayers more than double what they would otherwise have been liable for.

Two years before the jury verdict, Fraser’s lawyers say, they offered to put the matter to rest for $1.6 million, inclusive of attorneys fees. “From then until time of trial, they told us they had no interest in discussing settlement,” said Joel Rudin, one of Fraser’s lawyers. When he asked his adversary at Special Fed why, the answer that came back was revealing. According to Rudin, the city lawyer said he had been told that “higher-ups had made a decision it was a no-pay case,” and that the NYPD “didn’t want to settle.”

While the NYPD can offer its opinion on proposed settlements to city lawyers, former Special Fed attorneys say the decision to offer a deal is exclusively theirs — and the city charter gives the city’s chief financial officer, the comptroller, the ultimate authority on whether to cut checks. (The Law Department did not address ProPublica’s questions about the settlement discussions in Fraser’s case.)

With attorneys’ fees, the total city cost in Fraser’s case could now jump to $4 million, including a total of $425,000 in punitive damages assigned to three officers in the case.

The NYPD did not say whether the detectives have faced any internal disciplinary action or changes to their duties. In a statement, a department spokesperson said officials are “disappointed in the verdict, and remain committed to meeting our disclosure obligations.” The police and law departments also noted that the NYPD has enhanced its efforts to raise awareness around discovery rules in the past decade and took steps to ensure that disclosures are “complete and timely.”

As for its approach to civil litigation, the Law Department “takes seriously its obligation to carefully evaluate the merits of each case and challenge claims at trial as necessary,” the agency spokesperson said.

But to Fraser’s lawyers and others in the city’s civil rights bar, Special Fed’s posture — and its apparent deference to the NYPD — helps enable the kind of police misconduct at the heart of cases like Fraser’s. A report released this month by the city comptroller found that the NYPD accounted for a third of all tort payouts citywide last fiscal year and that its settlement costs — $237.2 million — were the highest among all city agencies.

“There’s still this kind of dismissive approach” in the NYPD about being sued, said Michael Bloch, another of Fraser’s attorneys. “And that is a really fundamental problem that, unfortunately, I think is going to continue to result in people like Jawaun being falsely convicted of crimes.”

Indeed, the verdict in Fraser’s case also exposes the city to additional liability in future cases involving NYPD officers’ failure to turn over impeachment material. (Fraser’s lawyers have already identified at least three convictions that were overturned in recent years because of such disclosure failures.)

Meanwhile, prosecutors are also dealing with the fallout from the civil case.

Given the finding that the undercover officer and another detective had fabricated evidence in Fraser’s case, a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said officials in a post-conviction review unit are examining current and past cases that have relied on the officers. Defendants in about 20 open cases brought by the city’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor are being notified of the jury’s verdict, and officials in that office are reviewing past cases as well, a spokesperson there said.

Both officers are still on the job. A lawyer for their union didn’t respond to questions.

For his part, Fraser said measuring cost is harder than tallying amounts on a verdict sheet. The whole ordeal forced him to leave New York, which he said is no longer “my happy place,” and where he is wary of the police. He now lives in quieter surroundings in suburban New Jersey. He has no plans to return to the city that he called home before he was imprisoned.

But the worst part by far was losing those formative years with his children. From his son’s first day of day care to his daughter’s first song and dance at school, these are times with his kids that he said he can never get back.

“Sometimes the kids don’t remember it, but I don’t even have that memory to tell them about it,” he said. “Because we didn’t get to do it, because I was incarcerated.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jake Pearson, ProPublica, and Mike Hayes for ProPublica.

Seeing Trump arraigned in New York on Tuesday was satisfying even if the outcome of the trial cannot be foreseen and he has a presumption of innocence. There is obviously evidence that he falsified his business records for the purpose of hiding material facts from the American people in October 2015, so as to defeat Hillary Clinton even after the release of the Billy Bush interview in which he boasted of grabbing random women by the genitals. Major Republicans began peeling away at that point, and the revelation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal affairs (while Melania was pregnant with Baron) would likely have finished him off.

The new American comfort with indicting former presidents, bringing the U.S. into line with European democracies, however, is bittersweet, since there are past presidents who should also have sat in a court looking stony-faced and bitter.

1. In some ways similar to Trump, Grover Cleveland, who had two non-consecutive terms in the nineteenth century, raped a woman he was courting, Maria Halpin. He threatened to ruin her with a lawsuit if she ever revealed the rape. She banished him from her life, but then found she was pregnant. When news that he had fathered a child emerged during his next campaign, Cleveland had his flacks bury Halpin in smears as a fallen woman, so that she could not get a hearing. Trump and his people are capable of such smear campaigns, too, but nowadays they have the “catch-and-kill” technique for shutting women up. Interestingly, part of Tuesday’s indictment mentioned that Trump paid a doorman $30,000 to shut him up after he claimed to know about a child Trump sired out of wedlock. As with Cleveland, Trump has been accused of rape, as well. In the me-too era, Grover Cleveland might have had to contend with Ronan Farrow and might have ended up like Harvey Weinstein.

2. George W. Bush should have been impeached or at least indicted for lying the country into the Iraq War. Trump probably managed to kill more people with bad health and environmental policy than Bush did with his Iraq misadventure, but Bush’s crime was still epochal. Congress passed a law in 1996 allowing trial of any US national who breaches the Geneva Conventions, so I think there could theoretically be a lot of charges against Bush if the DOJ wanted to bring them.

3. Ronald Reagan sold US anti-tank weapons to Iran while that country was on the State Department’s terrorism list. There was no Congressional appropriation. Essentially, the weapons were stolen from the Pentagon storehouses and sold to a dummy corporation in Switzerland that then sold them to Iran. The money Iran paid for these weapons was kept in off-the-books black accounts and used to support the right wing death squads in Nicaragua. The latter was in defiance of the Boland Amendment, which was US law. Reagan shredded the constitution, armed the Ayatollah, and backed armed paramilitaries that violated the Geneva conventions every which way from Sunday.

4. Richard Nixon committed so many crimes it would be hard to know where to start with indictments. He was forced out of office for having ordered the covert ‘plumbers’ group to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Most people no longer remember that he did this twice. More important than Watergate was Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, revealed by the Pentagon Papers. President Gerald Ford made an error in pardoning Nixon, since that act set up an expectation among later presidents that there would never be any accountability.

5. Warren Harding helped his Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, usurp from the Navy control of two key oil reserves, Elk Hill in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming. Fall then took hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and bribes to lease these oil fields to private companies. It is not clear that Harding himself had his palms greased, but he knew very well what Fall was up to, and neither interfered nor reported it to anyone. I’d say he was clearly an accomplice. Fall went to jail, but Harding was never charged.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Dan Hind.

The widow of murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Monday denounced former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his comments about her husband in Pompeo's upcoming memoir, in which he questions Khashoggi's journalism credentials and his allegiances.

As excerpts from Pompeo's book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, became public a day before its publication date, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi told NBC News she wishes she were able "to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband, and collect money from it."

Elatr Khashoggi fired back after NBC News reported that in Pompeo's book, he writes of Jamal Khashoggi, "He didn't deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was—and too many in the media were not."

The book contains accusations that Khashoggi "was cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood," alludes to his coverage of and friendship with Osama bin Laden when both were young, and says he was an "activist" rather than a journalist.

Elatr Khashoggi, whom the Saudi national married in 2018 in an Islamic ceremony, told NBC that "Jamal Kashoggi is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood" and that he "always condemned" the September 11, 2001 attacks masterminded by bin Laden.

"Whatever Mike Pompeo mentions about my husband Jamal Khashoggi, he doesn't know my husband," Elatr Khashoggi tweeted.

Khashoggi, who wrote critically of the Saudi government, was killed in October 2018 by a group of assassins in Istanbul. Khashoggi's family sued Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and accused him of personally ordering the execution in 2020, and a United Nations report found that "high-level officials" in Saudi Arabia were responsible for the murder, but last year the Biden administration recommended that bin Salman, as prime minister, be shielded from U.S. lawsuits regarding the case.

While attacking Khashoggi for his loyalties, Pompeo, a Republican who has said he is considering a 2024 presidential run, notes in the book that the U.S. has a "strategic" relationship with the Saudis to consider.

"Shame on you, Mike Pompeo, HarperCollins, and Broadside Books for publishing these lies about my husband," tweeted Elatr Khashoggi.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

There is a desperate need for a ceasefire in Ukraine. Russia's war continues to bring death to thousands, displacement of millions, and the destruction of towns and cities across Ukraine. The war, now entering its ninth month, has been illegal from day one. It violates both the UN Charter and international humanitarian law. Years of provocations by NATO, Europe and most of all the United States did not justify Russia's decision to invade Ukraine. 

Yet there is another key reason that a ceasefire is urgent: the war in Ukraine raises the direct threat of nuclear war.

A ceasefire to end the war was urgently needed on February 25, the day after the war began. A ceasefire was imperative when Russia escalated its attacks and seized Ukrainian territory in the south and east of the country starting in early April. A ceasefire was critically important when the Ukrainians succeeded at wresting back much of the seized territory in September. And a ceasefire is desperately required now as the Ukrainian counter-offensive continues and Russia persists in its retaliation against civilian targets across Ukraine. 

In some ways ceasefires can seem complicated—by themselves they don't solve the problems that led to armed conflict in the first place. By themselves they don't hold the perpetrators accountable. By themselves they don't change the balance of forces on the ground when they go into effect. In short, by themselves, ceasefires are never enough. But in one fundamental way they are as urgent and simple as can be: once declared, and for as long as ceasefires hold, while other issues are being negotiated, people are no longer being killed, injured or made homeless. 

Last week, 30 progressive members of Congress released a letter calling on the White House to broaden its Ukraine strategy to include support for a ceasefire and direct diplomacy with Russia to help stop the war. Within hours of the release, an outraged pressure campaign erupted from the media and other political figures, resulting in the Congressional Progressive Caucus quickly withdrawing its letter. Still, its release in the first place was significant, as was the fact that it had won the support of 30 members of Congress. These included some of the most influential progressives in the U.S. House, including Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), and others. 

The high-visibility call urging support for a ceasefire and diplomacy was significant partly because, so far, the Biden administration has sent over $65 billion dollars and uncountable stores of advanced weapons systems to Ukraine (and Congress is debating an additional $50 billion), all while acting as if it were only a supportive bystander with no say in ending the war. The United States is in fact functioning as an active player in the conflict, supplying the arms, training and funding that are helping to keep it going. 

In so doing, the administration is continuing Washington's long history of rejecting urgently needed ceasefires where civilian lives were at stake (though mostly not when the lives being lost are on the U.S. allies' side). For Washington, wars are generally viewed through the lens of who is gaining or losing military and economic power as the determinative factor in when to call for an end to fighting—not the human cost. 

Under George W. Bush's administration in 2006, for instance, six days into Israel's assault on Lebanon, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked about the urgent need for ​"a ceasefire now." She rejected the call, saying that imposing a ceasefire had to wait until ​"conditions are conducive to do so." A few days later, as Rice headed to the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported that her mission had nothing to do with a ceasefire but was instead aimed to ​"build support for the effective crippling of Hezbollah." About 1,200 Lebanese were killed in the war, overwhelmingly civilians, and about one-third of them children. The large majority of these deaths occurred after Rice's rejection of a ceasefire. Nearly three years later, as Israel's ​"Cast Lead" war against Gaza raged, Rice again refused a potential ceasefire orchestrated by the United Nations, saying the United States would not support a ceasefire until it could be deemed ​"durable and sustainable." In doing so, she equated an immediate ceasefire with permanent negotiations, and guaranteed that the one-sided war (in which Israeli forces would ultimately kill 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians) continued for 16 more days.

Do ceasefires guarantee that diplomatic negotiations for permanent solutions will immediately begin? No—but it's far more difficult to even consider negotiations while fighting continues to rage. It's happened before in history. Negotiations between the United States and Vietnam went on for almost five years while the fighting continued, until the 1973 agreement that required U.S. troops to withdraw from South Vietnam. But those examples are rare. In most cases, ceasefires operate as a precondition for peace treaties and negotiated settlements. 

There are many reasons a ceasefire in Ukraine is so desperately needed. First off, there's the dire human cost of the war, especially among Ukrainian civilians. There have also been global consequences, including the economic fallout from the war itself, from the sanctions imposed on Russia and the stalled shipping from Black Sea ports as well as higher oil prices and supply chain delays. These economic disasters have led to a lack of food available in the Global South, and resulted in hunger and threats of famine. Then there's the environmental impact of the war, as attention and crucial funding for new sustainable energy sources collapses and the search for alternative sources of dirty fossil fuels escalates global warming. In response to the war, global powers including the United States and European countries have seen a global escalation of militarization and militarism. All of these factors, alone or together, would justify a pressing search for an immediate ceasefire.

Yet there is another key reason that a ceasefire is urgent: the war in Ukraine raises the direct threat of nuclear war. The United States and Russia are the primary nuclear-armed states, together controlling 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world. Senior Russian military leaders have reportedly discussed using a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, a grim prospect that could lead to mass devastation and, potentially, a wider global conflict. Meanwhile, Washington is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade and modernize its arsenal of nuclear weapons. 

The Russian war in Ukraine broke out even as the consequences of other recent brutal wars—in Libya and Syria, in Yemen and Somalia, even the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—continue to ravage the people where they were fought. Victims of those wars match or surpass the numbers of those killed or injured in the Ukraine war. The same goes for those forced out of their homes and even turned into war refugees in other countries. And yet none of those wars ever came close to exploding into global nuclear conflagration. While they involved hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and weapons, those component wars of Washington's so-called ​"global war on terror" never threatened to escalate to a nuclear exchange. The war in Ukraine, from its start, has represented a greater global threat than any of those earlier wars.

In Syria's multi-faceted war against ISIS, U.S.- and Russian-backed forces, and U.S. and Russian troops themselves fighting on opposite sides, frequently faced off directly. But Moscow and Washington made certain they had a military hotline designed to prevent direct escalation between the nuclear powers. The war in Syria was brutal. Russia's 2016 assault on the ancient city of Aleppo resulted in not only the destruction of much of the city but the deaths of at least 440 civilians, more than 90 of them children, according to Human Rights Watch. The following year, the United States launched thousands of air and artillery strikes against Raqqa, the Syrian city of almost half a million people, which ISIS had claimed as its ​"capital." The U.S.-led assault left the city virtually destroyed, and killed at least 1,600 Syrian civilians, according to Amnesty International.

Neither Russia nor the United States showed much concern about the Syrian civilians they killed, wounded, left homeless, or forced to become refugees while Aleppo and Raqaa were largely destroyed. The priority for Moscow and Washington was to ensure that no U.S. or Russian troops or pilots were killed by their global opponents. Their global strategy more or less worked—thousands of Syrians were killed, millions lost their homes, but the sort-of proxy, sort-of direct fighting never escalated into a direct exchange, nuclear or otherwise, between U.S. and Russian troops or warplanes. Concern about just such a dangerous result was part of the reason that some in the United States rejected calls for a no-fly zone in Syria. If implemented, it would have had to begin with a U.S. attack to destroy anti-aircraft systems across the country, most of which were Russian-made and many of which were operated by Russian advisers.

The Ukraine war is different. This time around, as the Washington Post described it, ​"the military ​'deconfliction line' between the United States and Russia went cold," following the Russian invasion, and the two countries' defense ministers didn't talk for more than five months until a late October telephone call finally broke the silence. And even before the Russian invasion, military engagement between Russia and the United States was actually already underway in and around Ukraine. It was the United States and its closest NATO allies that carried out the post-Soviet provocations against Russia, including the eastward expansion of NATO to newly-independent countries once part of the Soviet Union. It was and remains, the United States, not Ukraine, that has built military bases and stationed strategic weapons, for itself and on behalf of NATO, in post-Soviet NATO countries surrounding Russia. Moscow's threats to Ukraine's territorial integrity and national legitimacy are matched by Russia's vaguer, but no less serious, threats against Kyiv's strategic and arms-supplying partners. 

With both nuclear powers setting red lines, and no quick-reaction military-to-military communications system, the threat grows every day that even a small-scale escalation by either side, accidental or not, could quickly spiral into a far more dangerous, far more deadly exchange. 

That's why an immediate ceasefire—not one dependent on being ​"durable and sustainable" or focused on ​"crippling" the other side—is so necessary. 

What will come next? There must be real, serious diplomacy and negotiations. As is always the case with negotiations, that means a long bargaining process. The United States certainly has no right to impose specific concessions on Kyiv—Ukraine is a sovereign country. But as the primary weapons supplier and economic backer of Ukraine's military and government, Washington has not only the right but the responsibility to push for diplomacy. Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin's hostile rhetoric, the claim that Russia isn't interested simply isn't enough, especially when Russian officials have voiced openness to participating in talks. 

Neither side is likely to show willingness to negotiate without pressure—and telling the leadership in Kyiv that Washington will continue to provide unlimited billions of U.S. tax dollars and weapons to continue this war, at the potential cost of far more Ukrainian lives, with no endgame in sight, is simply not acceptable. The risks are too great.

The United States doesn't need to tell Kyiv what it should concede, but it certainly should make clear its own diplomatic positions. That could start with making clear that U.S. sanctions on Russia, designed ostensibly to push Russia to negotiate, will in fact be lifted when a ceasefire in Ukraine is implemented. 

Second, the United States could call for new bilateral U.S.-Russian talks designed to reopen and strengthen all existing and abandoned nuclear disarmament and arms control treaties. That could start with a new commitment from both the United States and Russia to implement Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which calls for the recognized nuclear weapons states to move towards ​"nuclear disarmament, and … general and complete disarmament."

Third, the United States could announce its intention to halt construction on its latest overseas military base, currently being built in Poland just 100 miles from the Russian border. The base is designed to serve as the Pentagon's 5th Army Headquarters, and will include the deployment of strategic missiles as well as a full field battalion of soldiers, the first permanent U.S. troop deployment among NATO's eastern European post-Soviet members. 

Any or all of these moves by the United States—while appropriately limited to Washington's own negotiating positions—could go a long way in pushing reluctant politicians in both Kyiv and Moscow to reconsider their need for a ceasefire and diplomacy. And they could go equally far in reducing the current threat, however small it may seem, of direct U.S.-Russian nuclear engagement.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Phyllis Bennis.

The post Democrats Will Get Their Asses Kicked and They Deserve It, Though the Alternative is Even Darker appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Van Deusen.

They came off the buses and planes hoping for a promised new life, a home, and paying work. They brought their children, on their best behavior, excited to meet American kids and enroll in school. Hungry from the long trip, they were wondering what their first meal would be like in their new homes in their new country.

The racist governors are apparently coordinating their activities with Fox "News," whose "reporters" typically show up to greet the arriving visitors with cameras and microphones, scaring the hell out of them.

Instead, they faced Fox "News" cameras and hack "reporters" shouting questions at them in a language they didn't understand. Blinking back tears, they asked in Spanish what they'd done wrong.

It turns out what was "wrong" was their skin color and national origin, at least in the minds of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.

Racists understand how to get the attention of other racists. And, really, that's all they want, no matter how many people are hurt in the process.

This is an old, old story.

In the fall of 1962, Deputy US Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach supervised a group of US Marshals providing protection to James Meredith as he became the first Black person to ever enroll in the University of Mississippi.

Meredith, a top student in high school, had just completed a 9-year stint in the US Air Force (including 3 years in Japan) and had taken his application for enrollment at UM all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor on September 10, 1962.

Three weeks later, as Meredith was preparing to enter the University on September 30th, a mob of white people attacked Katzenbach's US Marshals with bricks and fired upon them with pistols and rifles.

Two people died, 206 US Marshals and National Guardsmen were wounded, and there were over 200 arrests.

Meredith finally registered for his classes on October 1st, producing an explosion of activity across the South by the various White Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, the predecessor to today's MAGA movement. (Meredith would complete his courses and graduate, then get his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1968.)

Five months after Meredith enrolled at UM, in the last week of February, 1963, Charles Bennett, president of the White Citizens' Council of Shreveport, Louisiana, approached a Black father of eight children, Alan Gilmore, telling him he knew of an employment opportunity in Trenton, New Jersey and would help him get there.

Gilmore had previously driven a cab and worked in a grocery store and bakery, but had lost his job during the slight economic downturn of 1963.  

Bennett provided Gilmore with bus tickets for himself, his wife, and their eight children as well as $75 in spending money and "a dozen cans of sardines to snack upon" during their 2-day journey to Trenton.

He also gave Gilmore the address of what he thought was the home of Nicholas Katzenbach, telling him that Katzenbach was the employer in need of and awaiting Gilmore's services.

"I can't find any work here [in Shreveport]," Gilmore told Bennett according to news reports. "I hope I can find something there. I appreciate your sending me on this trip. Thank you very much."

As soon as the Gilmore family was on the bus, the White Citizens' Council called a press conference and President Bennett announced that the next day the Gilmore family would show up at Katzenbach's home.

It was to be, Bennett said, "a reverse freedom ride," a reference to the Freedom Riders of that era who traveled the South by bus to integrate public transportation.

White Citizens' Councils and their allies in the Klan put several such Black families on buses for the north; the organized campaign operating out of several states was called the "Freedom Ride North."

"Katzenbach has shown himself to be a friend of the Negro and a great civil rights leader," the newspapers quoted Ned Touchstone, chairman of Shreveport's Freedom Ride North Committee. He added that Katzenbach should "take a personal interest in getting the Gilmore family settled."

And, sure enough, the newspapers thought the twist was enough of an unusual story that they gave it wide coverage. One clipping from the JFK Library is at the bottom of this article; there were others across the nation that week.

In response, multiple mayors and governors of northern states targeted by the Freedom Ride North campaign wrote outraged letters to the Kennedy White House, demanding action.

For example, John M. Arruda, mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts wrote to President Kennedy:

"Efforts by segregationists to relocate certain citizens of southern cities is a cruel merciless hoax. Massachusetts has always been a haven for the oppressed, but conditions are such that employment opportunities are limited.

"I suggest Executive Order or legislation whereby the federal government would assume costs, if these unfortunate people become public charges, and then empower the Attorney General to bring an action to make the person or persons responsible for this cruelty personally liable for the costs incurred by the government.

"If they pay the costs of their traffic in human lives and misery, their attitude will no doubt change."

Mark Twain, it is said (probably apocryphally), told us that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Today the role of the White Citizens' Councils and the Klan has been picked up by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The two governors have been sending refugees and undocumented immigrants on buses and chartered planes in those states to cities in the north, including, most recently, dropping people off at Martha's Vineyard and in front of Vice President Harris' home in Washington, DC.  

The racist governors are apparently coordinating their activities with Fox "News," whose "reporters" typically show up to greet the arriving visitors with cameras and microphones, scaring the hell out of them.

The immigrants themselves have told people they were approached by friendly Spanish-speaking people, typically women, representing the Governors' offices, who told them that jobs or "expedited work permits" were awaiting them if they'd only get on the bus or the plane.

The Washington Post noted yesterday, in a bizarre echo of the 1963 White Citizens' Council of Shreveport's Ned Touchstone:

"DeSantis aide, Jeremy Redfern, tweeted a photo of former President Barack Obama's Martha's Vineyard home with a pointed message: '7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.'"

Recognizing an old racist trick from his parents' generation, California Governor Gavin Newsom sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding action:

"Like millions of Americans, I have been horrified at the images of migrants being shipped on buses and planes across the country to be used as political props. Clearly, transporting families, including children, across state lines under false pretenses is morally reprehensible, but it may also be illegal.

"Several of the individuals who were transported to Martha's Vineyard have alleged that a recruiter induced them to accept the offer of travel based on false representations that they would … receive expedited access to work authorization. The interstate travel at issue provides a basis for federal jurisdiction over this matter.

Newsome goes on to "strongly urge" the DOJ to investigate "possible criminal or civil violations of federal law based on this fraudulent scheme." He suggests kidnapping statues, as well as Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) laws be brought to bear against Abbott, DeSantis and their co-conspirators.

Newsome also points out that the migrants and refugees wouldn't have been targeted this way if it wasn't for their national origin "and the intent appears to have been to humiliate and dehumanize them," putting the two governors in violation of federal civil rights laws.

Congressman Joaquin Castro agreed:

As Adam Serwer noted in 2018, writing for The Atlanticabout the Trump policy of tearing apart migrant families and vanishing their children into out-of-state foster care or adoption, "the cruelty is the point." Brutality has always been a key element of fascist and, to quote President Biden, "semi-fascist" politics and policy, whether in 1930s Europe, 1970s Chile, or 21st century Texas and Florida.

We've come a long way since 1963, and federal and state laws protect civil rights in ways that were only imagined during the early years of that era.  Hopefully Garland will take Newsome's request seriously.

As President Joe Biden would say, America is better than this.

Exploitative and cruel stunts from the racist 60s have no place in this century, and Fox and CNN (apparently this is part of their new Swing to the Right)—which both gave major coverage to the migrants' arrivals—should apologize both to the migrants and the American people.

And Abbott and DeSantis should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport.

UPDATE: We just learned from NBC News that 100% of the people they interviewed at Martha's Vineyard are not "undocumented" but are actually people who have applied for and been accepted for refugee status. They have upcoming court dates in Texas that, if they miss, will cause them to lose their status. This just gets worse and worse.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

The climate emergency intensifies daily as the planet warms. More frequent and powerful heat waves, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are costing billions of dollars while driving unprecedented human migration that fuels conflict. Despite the enormity of the problem, there is still good news to report. As governments prepare for the upcoming United Nations global climate summit to be held in Egypt in mid-November, developments in the fight against catastrophic climate change suggest that, against all odds, hope is not lost.

In the United States, the world’s greatest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the Senate passed what has been called the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. The bill passed by reconciliation, requiring only 50 votes rather than the usual 60. The vote was 51 to 50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaker.

After the House passes the bill and it’s signed into law by President Biden, roughly $370 billion will fund a broad array of programs intended to cut U.S carbon emissions by 40% by the year 2030, over 2005 levels. Tax credits and other incentives to buy and install renewable energy equipment like solar panels and wind turbines, and to invest in clean energy manufacturing make up a bulk of the funding. Up to $60 billion in environmental justice funding is for incentives to bring wind, solar and other renewable technologies into poor, marginalized communities long shut out of green investments.

The bill, however, includes significant trade-offs, including major handouts to the fossil fuel industry, primarily to win the needed support of conservative Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. Manchin has made a personal fortune worth millions from his family coal business. He is the largest recipient of fossil fuel industry donations in Congress. Among the concessions Manchin won was a side agreement to expedite fossil fuel permitting, including for the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline. If built, the MVP will carry two billion cubic feet of fracked gas across more than 1,000 streams and wetlands in Appalachia, including parts of West Virginia.

“It’s doubling down on fossil fuels to get to renewables,” Tara Houska Indigenous lawyer and founder of Giniw Collective, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “In order to get access to renewable energy dollars and investments, upfront, the fossil fuel industry is handed millions and millions of acres of public lands, waters, side project deals where you see the rolling back of bedrock environmental law, all of this just to get investment into renewable energy. That is not a climate solution. Mother Nature does not deal in U.S. dollars.”

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the bill “a climate suicide pact.” Robert Weismann, President of Public Citizen, said on Democracy Now!, commenting on the 40% reduction in emissions the bill is expected to deliver, “That’s not nearly enough, but it’s consequential. And it’s consequential as opposed to the choice of doing nothing, which was unfortunately our alternative.”

Meanwhile in Colombia, the first leftist president and vice president in that nation’s history were inaugurated on Sunday. President Gustavo Petro is a former guerrilla who later became Mayor of Bogotá and a senator. Vice President Francia Marquez is Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian and first female vice president. The former housekeeper is a renowned social movement leader who was recognized with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018 for her work helping the women of La Toma in Colombia’s Cauca region organize to stop illegal gold mining.

A major element of their administration’s platform is to accelerate the shift to renewable energy, away from Colombia’s heavy reliance on oil and coal extraction.

When another former Bogotá mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, argued on Twitter that Petro’s proposed ban on fracking “simply means that oil dollars will be left underground, that young Colombians will have fewer opportunities, that there will be fewer public works,” Petro fired back, “Brother, the problem is not how many dollars remain underground if fracking is banned, but how many lives are lost above ground, if it isn’t.”

Real change is driven by powerful, grassroots movements. Colombia’s new leaders know this. In the United States, the role of movements is often lost in a government awash in dark money with armies of lobbyists to spread it around.

The achievements of the Inflation Reduction Act, Public Citizen’s Rob Weismann notes, “wouldn’t have happened absent movements across the country and the Bernie Sanders [presidential] campaign, which forced them on the agenda and forced them through Congress.”

Varshini Prakash, the founder of the Sunrise Movement, issued a call to action: “This isn’t the bill my generation deserves but it is the one we can get. It must pass to give us a fighting chance at a livable world…Youth leaders to Congress: Pass this bill, then get back to work.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

In late June, as I arrived at my weekly union stewards training, I stumbled upon a group of fellow delegates talking about the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. While these labor activists primarily discussed revelations that Trump allegedly approved of rioters’ call to ​“hang Mike Pence,” their political conversation flew in the face of the idea that working people are indifferent about the congressional hearings on last year’s near-coup. Don’t just take my anecdote as evidence — look at the nearly20 million people who watched the first hearing andthe 13 million who tuned in on June 28 to catch Cassidy Hutchinson’s surprise daytime testimony. CNN reports that almost six out of ten people in the United States are following the hearings, and CBS finds that nearly 70 percent believe it’s important to find out the truth about January 6. 

Hutchinson, a 26-year-old former White House aide, testified before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol that Trump was willing to let the MAGA rioters assassinate then-Vice President Pence. She revealed that Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows — her former boss—both knew the threat of armed violence days in advance and did nothing to abate the danger. These revelations confirmed some of the worst fears about how close the United States came to seeing the 2020 presidential election overturned. 

The January 6 committee has not brought charges against the individuals involved, as the body does not have that power, though some members have floated recommending criminal referrals to the Justice Department. Federal elected officials such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D‑Calif.) believe that the tacit purpose of the committee’s current approach is to demonstrate to the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland that there is sufficient evidence and public support to bring charges against the orchestrators of the riot and unconstitutional putsch, from Trump on down. 

The chorus of popular demands for justice and the defense of democracy is where the Left — and especially the organized socialist movement — is desperately needed.

The Left should engage in, not ignore, a key democratic crisis.

Scanning the social media feeds among my left-wing friends, however, I hardly see a mention of the hearings, and when I do, it’s often dismissive of the congressional committee. I see little reporting of the investigation in prominent socialist and progressive magazines, including In These Times, while others provide no coverage at all. My own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), issued only a single statement about January 6 since the day after the deadly attack, and nothing on the committee itself. This near silence is at odds not only with the millions of working people paying attention to the hearings, but also democratic socialist elected officials in Congress.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) revealed she feared more than death from the MAGA rioters, while her fellow DSA member Rep. Cori Bush (D‑Mo.) introduced legislation to expel members of the House of Representatives who aided in the January 6 attack. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.), meanwhile,posted in June that this hearing was not about ​“ideas” but ​“whether we maintain our democratic form of government.” These prominent socialists share the concern among the U.S. public, and especially the Democratic base, that the future state of elections is under threat. 

What I appreciated about being on the Left in the mid-2010s was the fact that we were much more on the pulse of the U.S. public than our liberal friends. The Left largely saw Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 2016 as fallible, and was able to offer viable alternatives. Through Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020, hundreds of democratic socialists and Berniecrats won races for elected office across the country. Outside of the electoral realm, socialists today are plugging into the fast-growing and restive labor movement that’s successfully organizing shops at Amazon, Starbucks and other major companies.

But these successes could all be for naught if we completely lose our flawed — but still existing — liberal democracy. If our current system is replaced by an illiberal form of government, like exists in Hungary, the working class will suffer more. Hungary is now viewed as a model for the American far-Right, which hosted their Conservative Political Action Conference in the European country, as its leader, Viktor Orbán, has made elections a mere formality while expanding the secret police. 

One way to prevent this authoritarian slide is through engaging in public pressure to push Garland and other Justice Department officials to prosecute Trump and his allies. That kind of campaign cannot be ​“left to the liberals” as some are wont to say. Socialists should be front and center, demanding that there be actual repercussions for the anti-democratic effort to overturn the election.

We cannot have a multi-racial working-class socialist society without first achieving a functioning democracy. Socialists have long stood for improving U.S. democratic institutions, as imperfect as they are. We fought for women’s suffrage and were militant participants in the Civil Rights Movement. At its core, the socialist movement believes in not just defending democracy, but spreading it to other realms outside of politics, from the economy to the workplace. 

The current reaction against liberal democracy is part of an effort to roll back reproductive rights and racial justice gains made in this country that required decades of struggle to win. We cannot let the anti-democratic, anti-choice and racist forces win. Socialists must again lead by example.

If we don’t, then reactionaries like Pence and Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑Wyo.) are likely to become the heroes of this effort, simply because they’re Republicans following their constitutional duty. Rather than ceding this ground to liberals and the GOP, socialists and organizers on the Left should step up pressure on Congress to pass Rep. Bush’s bill to punish those guilty of trying to overthrow the will of the voters. A national effort to raise awareness of this legislation, including a collaboration between DSA members and the congresswoman, could help build pressure to actually punish those politicians involved in the failed putsch. 

It’s easy to hope that January 6 was a one-off incident. But anti-democratic forces rarely give up so easily. Just look at the history of Chile. In that country there was a small military rebellion months before the right-wing coup on September 11, 1973 which ousted Salvador Allende. For a time, the democratically elected socialist government had officers and generals who obeyed the constitution. But facing enough pressure from coup-plotters and foreign agitators, that loyalty eventually ended.

The same could happen here, especially as anti-Trump Republicans lose primaries, shifting the GOP toward pure fealty to the former president. Trump and his supporters are hard at work stacking the deck, from local election boards all the way up to the Supreme Court, which could have monumental consequences in determining future presidential elections. 

Trump has already signaled that he is likely to run again in 2024, and he still refuses to accept the 2020 election results, sowing distrust in the democratic system among his base. He’s made no secret of his desire to take power, no matter the legality or constitutionality of his means. We narrowly escaped his attempt two years ago. In the future, we might not be so lucky. 

This is why the Left should engage in, not ignore, a key democratic crisis. I want to be able to go to my union family and say ​“here’s what socialists are doing to hold the perpetrators of January 6 accountable.” Leftists have long fought to defend and expand liberal democracy in our goals of building a socialist government. Let’s continue that tradition.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by David Duhalde.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

I have two memories of Haiti. The first was in 1993. I had led a United Nations delegation to Haiti to ascertain the consequences of the embargo imposed by the U.N. The embargo intended to put pressure on the military-installed regime to restore president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power.

I was with a number of other colleagues; we were staying at a hotel of relative luxury near the capital Port-Au-Prince. The hotel had a panoramic view of the city and its surroundings, but, being mostly dry land, it was not an attractive sight. There was a disconnection between the comfort of the hotel and the surrounding poverty.

One morning I took a walk around the hotel when I heard a murmur of children singing. I tried to locate where the sound was coming from, when I realized it came from a group of boys and girls on the way to school, their books hanging precariously from their school bags. All were immaculately dressed in white. This was quite a feat, given the difficulties in obtaining water. The children happily singing may have been a touch of magic in their lives; witnessing it, was certainly mine.

The second memory was when I went to assess the Pan American Health Organization’s collaboration efforts with the government regarding public health. I was visiting a hospital in Port-au-Prince with a colleague when, all of a sudden, she asked me, “Did you see that?” Regrettably, I had. She was referring to a dead child covered by a sheet, flies buzzing around the corpse, seemingly abandoned in a hospital hallway. For days afterwards that sight was a recurring nightmare for me. It also was proof of the desperate state of Haiti’s hospitals.

Today, the dire situation in Haiti has increased exponentially. The country has the combined negative effects of political and social violence, the economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, there is continuous civil unrest and gang violence. Also, should a new resurgence of the infection occur, the country is unprepared to deal with it.

A month after Moïse’s assassination, on August 14, 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Tiburon Peninsula, followed by Tropical Storm Grace. The natural disasters affected two million people; left 2,246 dead; more than 12,700 injured; at least 329 missing, and up to 26,000 displaced. The Haitian government estimates it needs $2 billion to recover from the earthquake. As of last February, donors have pledged only $600 million.

The country is undergoing a serious political and constitutional crisis. Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who had been appointed by Moïse two days before his assassination, was found to have close links to a prime suspect in the assassination and to have maintained contact with him after the president’s assassination.

At this time of crisis for the country, Human Rights Watch has denounced the deportation of Haitians back to Haiti by the U.S. and other countries. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), from January 1, 2021 through February 26, 2022, 25,765 people were returned to Haiti, including 4,674 children, who make up 18 percent of returnees.

“No government should return people to Haiti. And the United States, which accounts for the vast majority of returns, should end the unnecessary and illegitimate use of public health regulation for abusive expulsion of Haitians,” stated César Muñoz, senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch. Muñoz is referring to Title 42 of the U.S Public Health Services Law.

Title 42 is a clause which the Trump Administration began using in 2020 to prevent migrants from entering into the U.S. It grants the government the ability to take emergency action to stop immigrants from entering the U.S. on the premise that it will prevent the introduction of Covid-19. On March 11, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ceased its authorization of Title 42 expulsion authority regarding unaccompanied children.

Is there is a future for Haiti? Unlike those who look on with despair at the difficulties the country is facing, Haiti’s human resources could be the foundation of a new revitalized society that would address the crises imposed by inept governments and foreign powers’ interference. Haiti needs economic and technical help, and effective financial assistance judiciously provided. The Haitian people deserve no less.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Monday called for an end to all Medicare privatization schemes following a Washington Post report spotlighting how Medicare Advantage plans are distorting patients' medical records to overbill the federal government and boost their profits.

"Medicare Advantage plans regularly deny needed care to seniors and frequently create fake illnesses to defraud the government," Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in a social media post.

"This is a clear-cut example of why we must end Medicare privatization programs."

"This is a clear-cut example of why we must end Medicare privatization programs," added Jayapal, the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the House. "Our seniors deserve better."

Privately run Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have long been notorious for the practice of upcoding, whereby large insurers and other MA firms make enrollees appear sicker than they actually are in order to reap larger payments from the federal government—even as they refuse to provide necessary care for tens of thousands of patients each year.

The Post on Sunday detailed the case of Kathy Ormsby, a former employee of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation who blew the whistle on the firm's efforts—alongside its parent affiliate Sutter Health—to pressure doctors into adding false diagnoses to patients' medical histories.

"The point of larding the medical records with outdated and irrelevant diagnoses such as cancer and stroke—often without the knowledge of the patients themselves—was not providing better care, according to a lawsuit from the Justice Department, which investigated a whistleblower complaint Ormsby filed," the Post noted. "It was to make patients appear sicker than they were."

"The maneuver translated into millions of dollars in inflated bills to the federal Medicare Advantage insurance program, the government alleged in its false-claims lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California," the newspaper added. "In a sample of hundreds of cases Ormsby audited, the government's lawsuit said, she discovered 90% of diagnoses for cancer were invalid, as were 96% for stroke and 66% for fractures."

Despite growing mountains of evidence documenting large-scale fraud and other abuses committed by private MA organizations, the Biden administration announced in April that MA insurers will get one of the largest payment increases in the program's history in 2023.

"Medicare Advantage insurers such as United Healthcare, Anthem, and CVS/Aetna are celebrating record profits in the tens of billions of dollars," Dr. Susan Rogers, president of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, told The Lever last week. "Their business plan is simple: inflate their Medicare payments by making seniors look sicker than they are, and then pocket more of those Medicare dollars by ruthlessly denying seniors' care."

Meanwhile, the Health and Human Services Department has decided not to reverse its enactment of one of the largest premium increases in the history of traditional Medicare this year, locking in higher costs for tens of millions of seniors just ahead of the pivotal midterm elections.

The administration is also pushing ahead with a pilot program known as ACO REACH, which critics have described as "Medicare Advantage on steroids."

If the pilot—which originated under the Trump administration—isn't halted, physicians and healthcare advocates warn that it could result in the total privatization of traditional Medicare in a matter of years.

"We must immediately end Medicare privatization programs like ACO REACH," Jayapal argued in April. "There's no excuse for allowing the same Medicare Advantage organizations to now administer 'care' for traditional Medicare beneficiaries."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

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