Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ Iman Abid about the economy of genocide for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Al Jazeera (7/1/25)

Janine Jackson: Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, has called down all manner of official and unofficial grief for saying what any thinking person would know: that a mass extermination and displacement project, such as Israel is carrying out in Palestine, doesn’t fund itself.

As US citizens, we know we’re involved, that our “tax dollars” are used by politicians we may or may not have elected to do things that we don’t condone, much less endorse. But what US elite news media seem to hate above all things is the connecting of dots, the recognition that we are all related across borders and boundaries.

That the thing that brought US sanction was Albanese’s naming of defense companies providing weapons used by Israel’s military, makers of equipment used to bulldoze Palestinian homes, is telling. Watching corporate media try to maintain the notion that, yes, Citizens United said money is speech, and you can’t curtail that, but no, you absolutely cannot say that people might not want to support companies who are funding a genocide. Well, that’s telling about media as well.

Joining us now to talk about this is Iman Abid. She’s director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Iman Abid.

Iman Abid: Thank you so much.

JJ: The statement in Albanese’s report, “While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, this report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many”—I mean, it’s only in a weird world of elite media that that would be something that you can’t say. That should just be a point of information in our understanding, yes?

IA: At any point in time that we target or uplift the war crimes that these large corporations are partaking in, we’ve seen just how silenced or suppressed people are, and Francesca has now been a part of that. She’s brought a lot to light in this new document that has come out, information that many people, in various forms, have already uplifted, but has done a really incredible job at trying to both consolidate and make the information a lot more accessible. And so, since it is a lot more digestible to see, it’s easier to access. Weapons manufacturers and large corporations have been extremely disappointed in what the world is able to finally see.

Iman Abid: “Weapons manufacturers and large corporations have been extremely disappointed in what the world is able to finally see.” (Photo: Thomas Morrisey, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.)

JJ: Right. Transparency is their enemy.

IA: Yeah, exactly.

JJ: And you would think that journalists—whatever they want to say about it—would support the idea that the public can understand exactly what’s happening. And yet that’s not the response that we’ve seen, from certainly the US officially, but also from journalists. I don’t feel that they are celebrating this report in a way that one would hope.

IA: Absolutely. I think that the reality is that much of the documentation, and the notes that are provided to us for review in this report, showcase not just what has been going on, and what corporations have been enacting for the last two years, throughout the duration of the genocide, but rather for the last few decades. This information has been available to the public, available to journalists and reporters, for a really long time, and for whatever reason, people generally choose to still avoid it.

Now, whether or not they themselves—certain news outlets have partnerships with some of these corporations, and they’re keeping them quiet for that purpose, or if there’s any other reason where maybe they as individuals are profiting off of these corporations themselves, we’ve seen just how silent people are when it comes to uplifting the harms of these corporations.

JJ: What do you hope or think might be the impact? Because it seems, obviously, Marco Rubio saying, “Ah! Shut up! Sanctions!” is telling that this information is important. What do you hope might be used? How do you think it might be used?

IA: My hope is that, especially for the American people, in any point in time, when this administration tries to silence someone, when they implement sanctions or any of that, I really encourage people to take a look at their work. And Francesca Albanese is an incredibly profound, extraordinary being who has spent their career building up and bringing awareness to the atrocities happening to the Palestinian people. This report is only one aspect of the work that she’s been so committed to.

NPR (7/10/25)

And I think that people like Marco Rubio, and other people within the Trump administration, don’t want you to see this, because they themselves are, again, establishing partnerships, or have established partnerships, with these corporations. And even some of the members of Congress, who have also uplifted and supported the sanctions on Francesca Albanese, some of them are war profiteers. They are the ones who are both building up the contracts with the federal government, or supporting the contracts with the federal government, to keep these corporations alive and thriving.

I think the report itself mentions on every single page just how Palestine is being used as this sort of military technology incubator. It’s an opportunity for these companies to use their work, and to see how it works on the Palestinian people. They’re almost using us as dispensable objects for their weapons. And I think that a lot of that is uplifted in this document.

And because of the atrocities that are being highlighted, and because of the direct connection to the United States Congress, the United States administration, it just shows an incredibly bad light on the US. And it also showcases just how harmful the partnerships and the military investment really is, across not only the US, but across the globe.

JJ: Elite media seem vigorously invested in policing lines between “us” and “them,” but it’s not working. Support for Palestinian human rights is growing, even as it’s being seriously criminalized. So where are you seeing daylight? Because I see a lot of people being extremely brave and using information, such as in this Albanese report, to say, “We’re armed. We’re armed with information, and we’re not going to buy the line that we’re being sold.”

IA: Absolutely. I think the movement has grown exponentially, and I think it’s simply because of the fact that we have watched this livestreamed genocide take place. And I think that when people see the level of death, when people see the level of atrocity, especially for those who’ve sat on social media platforms and watched the video footage and documentation of what’s been happening across Gaza, it’s become extremely difficult to deny what’s actually happening.

And people are moved. People are moved to speak up, people are moved to stand up, even against the faces of oppression, the Zionist forces that are trying to silence people, and they’re choosing to say that I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, I want to take a stand on this, and not just a stand in the streets, but a strategic stand that allows me and my community to actually move towards getting this genocide to end, and for us to stop upholding these atrocities being committed against Palestinians.

Al Jazeera (6/26/24)

It’s been deeply fortunate that so many reports have come out, even just the last two years alone, not only of the weapons that have been used on Palestinians, but just what specific correlation there is between the US, the complicity of the US, and what’s been happening across Gaza and the rest of the West Bank, and even in parts of Jerusalem. And so people are starting to really see that direct line between themselves as US taxpayers, and where and what their money is being spent on, and just how it’s actually being used to abuse, assault and murder Palestinians. And people don’t want to be on that side. People don’t want to be complicit. I don’t think anyone wants to be complicit in war crimes being committed, and mass genocides being committed.

And so I think we’re starting to see just how people are really trying to take that next step, and acknowledge there are different avenues that people can take to really get things to stop. And whether it’s the targeting of weapons manufacturers like Caterpillar or Hyundai or Elbit, whoever is actually equipping Israel with the technology and the software and the technology that’s being used to destroy homes, whatever it may be, people are using these sorts of reports to help uplift the documentation that already exists, to bring attention to these corporations that we, as the United States, as US taxpayers, are investing in.

And they’re choosing to say that we don’t want this. We don’t want this to continue. And we, again, as taxpayers can do something about it.

JJ: And I’ll end on the media thing, that it calls out the media hypocrisy, because when folks were pouring out their Bud Light because they had a trans person in an ad, media were sort of celebrating: Oh, you’re using your consumer voice, you’re speaking with your dollars, right? And then out of the other side of their mouth, they want to say, Well, BDS is criminal. You’re not allowed to not shop at a store, or whatever, that supports genocide. So to me, it tells the tale on US media’s understanding of what a consumer gets to do with their voice.

IA: Absolutely. Again, yes, the exceptionalizing of Palestine, the exceptionalizing of the BDS movement, still exists, but we are seeing a shift. We are seeing people break beyond that, and actually start to question and start to ask themselves, why has the BDS movement actually existed for as long as it has?

Again, boycotting, divestment, sanctions is not an area that’s just particular to the Palestinian movement. It’s been used with South Africa, it’s been used in other parts of the world, because it is something that actually works. When we stop the transfer of dollars to these corporations, and to these entities like Israel that are actually upholding the genocide and the mass expulsion of Palestinians, we do start to see the shifting of it.

Mondoweiss (5/8/25)

And the Israeli economy, as a matter of fact, is actually beginning to decline, because of the level of education and the expansion of the Palestinian solidarity movement across the globe. And people are trying to be wiser about where they’re spending their dollars. And so I think that we’re not in the exact place we want to be just yet, but we are moving the needle towards where we want to go, and people are being wiser about where money is going.

And so while governments and elected officials are really still working hard to suppress any sort of BDS movement, whether it’s through the anti-BDS proposals, or if it’s through the sanctioning of certain individuals, the people themselves are starting to actually say: “Well, wait a minute. Why are you choosing to suppress us for engaging in this, when we know it’s the right thing to do?”

And members of Congress are starting to be a little more alert, and start to say, “Wait a minute, this isn’t actually a winning issue for me if I choose to engage in it. And it’s not necessarily something that I should really be pushing for.” Because people are becoming more attentive. And it’s allowing us, again, to move the needle where we really want to see us going.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Iman Abid from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. They’re online at USCPR.org. Iman Abid, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IA: Thank you so much.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

But there’s going to be a new mine in East Tennessee — one of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency” and his designating coal a critical mineral.

Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government.

The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statement – a time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factors –  is reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape.

“We’re not just issuing permits — we’re supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape,” Adam Suess,  the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administration’s $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation.

The Department of Interior ruled that the Hurricane Creek Mine slated for Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have “no significant impact” and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years.

The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a century’s underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins.

The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. “We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation,” the organization said in a statement. “We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.”

Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mine’s public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek. Despite Trump’s promise that he is “bringing back an industry that’s been abandoned,” coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide. 

“What is this company doing differently that’s going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work?” he said. “All the time I’ve been working in Tennessee there’s only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there,” Hepler added. 

Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steel — and which Hurricane Creek hopes  to excavate — fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production.

Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyoming’s first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fool’s errand.

“I don’t see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal,” he said. “That’s not to say that the Trump administration won’t cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.”

Still, Hernandez said he isn’t seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administration’s moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects.

“The result is there’s just going to be it’s going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur,” Hernandez said. “There’s going to be less attention to the harm that’s caused by these operations.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is fast-tracking new coal mines – even when they don’t make economic sense on Jul 18, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Wallin comes armed with data and clarity. She dismantles the disinformation that has allowed the ultra-wealthy to hoard billions while public schools crumble and hospitals close. States that tax high-income earners are not bleeding millionaires. They are gaining revenue and creating more millionaires. They are investing in their people. They are proving what we already know deep down: we can tax the rich and build a society that works for everyone.

For decades, tax policy in America has been a weapon wielded against working people. It has been shaped by lobbyists, shielded by myths, and sold to the public as necessary sacrifice. But history shows us something else. It shows how tax codes have been intentionally designed to protect wealth at the top and starve communities at the bottom.

Wallin makes it clear. We are not fighting numbers. We are fighting a system that tells us scarcity is natural while billionaires pay less in taxes than teachers.

Tax Justice Is Democracy in Action

Economic inequality is a threat to democracy. When wealth concentrates, power concentrates. And when power concentrates, freedom erodes. That is why taxing the rich is not a fringe idea. It is a democratic emergency.

Wallin also emphasizes something often ignored in these conversations: gender equity. Women, especially women of color, are hit hardest by unfair tax systems. Correcting that is not just about fairness. It is about building systems that’s humane. 

This conversation is a call to action. States hold tremendous power to reshape the economy. Community organizing, public pressure, and clear messaging can push forward tax reforms that fund schools, roads, housing, and healthcare. Essential services are not luxuries. They are rights. And the money to pay for them exists.

The only question is whether we have the courage to demand it.

Wallin says it best: free markets are not free. They are designed by and for the wealthy, unless we intervene. Tax policy is not boring. It’s political warfare. And the sooner we treat it that way, the sooner we win.

We are in a moment of extraordinary possibility. Trust your instincts. Trust the data. And above all, trust the power of the people to build wealth and power for everyone.

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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Adhikari said, “Koi Bangali Kashmir nahi jayega. Jahan Musalman abaadi zyada hai, main party affiliation mein nahi bolta hu, mai BJP ke MLA (hokar) nahi (bolta hu)… main jiss tareekein se Bitan Adhikary ji ka wife, Samir Guha ji ka wife ka aasun dekha na… mai unko sujhaav de diya. Bhai jahaan musalmaan abaadi hai, usmein mat jao… Kashmir jana hai toh Jammu jao. Kashmir jaana hai toh Jammu mein jao, jahaan musalmaan abaadi zyada hai, mat jao. Mat jao. Apne kapda khulke, aur sindoor dekh ke chunchun ke maara hai. Humara Himachal Pradesh hai jaiye na, Devbhoomi hai. Uttarakhand jaiyena, Jaiye Orissa jaiye…Pura desh ghumna chahiye humlogo ko… lekin Bangal mein mai personal mera mai ek sensible citizen hu, mai airport mein Bitan Adhikari ji ka wife aur Sameer Guha ji ka wife jo mujhe bataya aplogo ka saamne, aur unka jitna bhi aansu dekha hai na… Main Bangali logon (ko) bata raha hu, aap musalmaan jahaan hai zyada, mat jaiye. Jaan pehle. Apne jaan ko raksha kijiye, chhota chhota bachha ko rakhsa kijiye. Didi behen ko raksha (kijiye)…”

(Translation: No Bengali will go to Kashmir. I am not saying this from my party affiliation or as a BJP MLA… The way I saw the tears of Bitan Adhikari’s wife, Samir Guha’s wife… I suggested to them. Don’t go where there is a majority Muslim population… If you want to go to Kashmir, go to Jammu… If you want to go to Kashmir, go to Jammu, but don’t go to a place where there is a majority of Muslims. Don’t go. (They) took off clothes, and checked the vermilion (on the women’s foreheads), and killed selectively. We have Himachal Pradesh, go there, it is our Devbhoomi. Go to Uttarakhand, go to Odisha… We should travel the whole country.. I am a sensible citizen… I saw Bitan Adhikari’s wife and Sameer Guha’s wife at the airport, whatever they told me in front of you people… I have seen their tears. I am telling the Bengali people — do not go to a place which has a majority Muslim population. Life first. Protect your life, protect your children. Protect your sisters.)

#WATCH | Kolkata | On J&K CM Omar Abdullah inviting people of West Bengal to visit J&K, WB LoP and BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari says, “… No Bengali will visit Kashmir. I am saying this out of party affiliation, don’t visit places where Muslims are in the majority. Go to Jammu if… pic.twitter.com/Fn0IZ3KEQK

— ANI (@ANI) July 10, 2025

Hours before Adhikari’s comments, Abdullah had assured potential tourists from West Bengal that the J&K government had taken sufficient security-related steps after the terrorist attack in Pahalgam. He also urged people to trust those who had been to Kashmir after the attack rather than believing “those sitting outside and making judgments without even knowing the place.” It is worth noting that on an average, 25-30% of Kashmir tourists are reportedly from Bengal.

In his remarks, Adhikari used the attack in Pahalgam to ‘warn’ Bengalis against visiting Muslim majority areas. Adhikari had met the families of two victims of the attack, Bitan Adhikari and Sameer Guha — both of whom were Bengali. The implications of Adhikari’s remarks are layered. In a statement after India’s retaliatory Operation Sindoor, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri had said that the terrorists “didn’t just want to traumatise victims and families to ‘send a message’, but targeted the economy in Jammu Kashmir, and attempted to provoke ‘communal discord’ in India, which failed.”

However, when the Leader of Opposition of West Bengal, a state that provides a significant fraction of tourism to Kashmir, urges the residents of his state to refrain from visiting due to the majority of Muslims, it furthers the communal narrative while also implicitly calling for an economic boycott of Muslims. This clearly amounts to religious discrimination and hate speech.

New Bengal BJP Chief’s ‘Muslim Outreach’

Interestingly, Adhikari’s comments come days after newly elected Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya spoke about the BJP’s outreach to the minority community in West Bengal. “Even if the Muslims do not vote for us, our development must and will reach their homes,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with India Today’s Insight. Before this, in a seeming departure from the party’s erstwhile political stance, Bhattacharya stated that his party was not against Muslims, and envisaged a West Bengal where Muharram and Durga puja immersion could be held side by side without communal clashes. This remark came at the very event where he was formally introduced as the state unit chief and in the presence of Adhikari.

In stark contrast to this, Adhikari has clearly said in the past the Bengal BJP MLAs had been elected by Hindus, while the Mamata Banerjee government was “a govt of Mollahs”. Addressing media persons outside the state assembly on February 17, 2025, Adhikari had said, “I, along with Agnimitra Pal, Biswanath Karak, and Bankim Ghosh, take pride in the fact that we won with Hindu votes — not with Muslim votes. BJP MLAs and MPs hold their positions today because of Hindu and ST votes… this government — a government of Mollahs, a government for Muslims… has targeted me. The chief minister is an appeaser of Muslims, an enemy of Hindus, leading a government that is nothing less than Muslim League 2.0…”

Again, in July 2024, while claiming that Muslims of West Bengal had not voted for the BJP in the Lok Sabha election, Adhikari called for putting an end to the party’s slogan of ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikaas’. Speaking to journalists after the party’s first working committee meeting following the poll results, he also called for doing away with BJP’s ‘minority morchas’.

When asked to comment on Suvendu’s remarks on Kashmir, Bhattacharya said, “I don’t know in what context our Leader of Opposition is saying this. The stone pelting in Kashmir has stopped, and after the Pahalgam incident, there is panic in the minds of the people. I don’t know under what situation he (Adhikari) has said this now, and I haven’t heard (what he said). Maybe he said it because he thinks Himachal Pradesh is more beautiful. There is no dispute in the party about this (the remarks).”

Bhattacharya has also called Adhikari’s controversial remarks on Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas a ‘personal stance’. One wonders whether it is the new state unit chief’s minority outreach agenda that made Suvendu sound the disclaimer on July 10 that he was not speaking from party affiliation.

Adhikari, once Mamata Banerjee’s protege, beat Banerjee from the Nandigram seat in the 2021 assembly polls by a margin of 1,956 votes. According to the 2011 census, Nandigram has a Muslim population of 40.32%, second to the Hindu population of 59.37%.

The post Don’t go to Kashmir & Muslim majority areas, says Bengal LoP Suvendu amid new state BJP chief’s minority outreach appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

A West Papuan independence movement leader has warned the Melanesian Spearhead Group after its 23rd leaders summit in Suva, Fiji, to not give in to a “neocolonial trade in betrayal and abandonment” over West Papua.

While endorsing and acknowledging the “unconditional support” of Melanesian people to the West Papuan cause for decolonisation, OPM chair and commander Jeffrey P Bomanak
spoke against “surrendering” to Indonesia which was carrying out a policy of “bank cheque diplomacy” in a bid to destroy solidarity.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka took over the chairmanship of the MSG this week from his Vanuatu counterpart Jotham Napat and vowed to build on the hard work and success that had been laid before it.

• READ MORE: Marape says it is culturally ‘un-Melanesian’ not to give West Papua a seat at the table
• Fiji advocacy group slams Indonesian role in MSG as a ‘disgrace’
• Other West Papua reports

He said he would not take the responsibility of chairmanship lightly, especially as they were confronted with an increasingly fragmented global landscape that demanded more from them.

PNG Prime Minister James Marape called on MSG member states to put West Papua and Kanaky New Caledonia back on the agenda for full MSG membership.

Marape said that while high-level dialogue with Indonesia over West Papua and France about New Caledonia must continue, it was culturally “un-Melanesian” not to give them a seat at the table.

West Papua currently holds observer status in the MSG, which includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji — and Indonesia as an associate member.

PNG ‘subtle shift’
PNG recognises the West Papuan region as five provinces of Indonesia, making Marape’s remarks in Suva a “subtle shift that may unsettle Jakarta”, reports Gorethy Kenneth in the PNG Post-Courier.

West Papuans have waged a long-standing Melanesian struggle for independence from Indonesia since 1969.

The MSG resolved to send separate letters of concern to the French and Indonesian presidents.

In a statement, Bomanak thanked the Melanesians of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) of Kanaky New Caledonia for “unconditionally support[ing] your West Papuan brothers and sisters, subjected to dispossession, enslavement, genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and ethnic cleansing, [as] the noblest of acts.”

“We will never forget these Melanesian brothers and sisters who remain faithfully loyal to our cultural identity no matter how many decades is our war of liberation and no matter how many bags of gold and silver Indonesia offers for the betrayal of ancestral kinship.

“When the late [Vanuatu Prime Minister] Father Walter Lini declared, ‘Melanesia is not free unless West Papua is free,”’ he was setting the benchmark for leadership and loyalty across the entire group of Melanesian nations.

“Father Lini was not talking about a timeframe of five months, or five years, or five decades.

“Father Lini was talking about an illegal invasion and military occupation of West Papua by a barbaric nation wanting West Papua’s gold and forests and willing to exterminate all of us for this wealth.

‘Noble declaration’
“That this noble declaration of kinship and loyalty now has a commercial value that can be bought and sold like a commodity by those without Father Lini’s courage and leadership, and betrayed for cheap materialism, is an act of historic infamy that will be recorded by Melanesian historians and taught in all our nations’ universities long after West Papua is liberated.”

Bomanak was condemning the decision of the MSG to regard the “West Papua problem” as an internal issue for Indonesia.

“The illegal occupation of West Papua and the genocide of West Papuans is not an internal issue to be solved by the barbaric occupier.

“Indonesia’s position as an associate member of MSG is a form of colonial corruption of the Melanesian people.

“We will continue to fight without MSG because the struggle for independence and sovereignty is our fundamental right of the Papuan people’s granted by God.

“Every member of MSG can recommend to the United Nations that West Papua deserves the same right of liberation and nation-state sovereignty that was achieved without compromise by Timor-Leste — the other nation illegally invaded by Indonesia and also subjected to genocide.”

Bomanak said the MSG’s remarks stood in stark contrast to Father Lini’s solidarity with West Papua and were “tantamount to sharing in the destruction of West Papua”.

‘Blood money’
It was also collaborating in the “extermination of West Papuans for economic benefit, for Batik Largesse. Blood money!”

The Papua ‘problem’ was not a human rights problem but a problem of the Papuan people’s political right for independence and sovereignty based on international law and the right to self-determination.

It was an international problem that had not been resolved.

“In fact, to say it is simply a ‘problem’ ignores the fate of the genocide of 500,000 victims.”

Bomanak said MSG leaders should make clear recommendations to the Indonesian government to resolve the “Papua problem” at the international level based on UN procedures and involving the demilitarisation of West Papua with all Indonesian defence and security forces “leaving the land they invaded and unlawfully occupied.”

Indonesia’s position as an associate member in the MSG was a systematic new colonialisation by Indonesia in the home of the Melanesian people.

Indonesia well understood the weaknesses of each Melanesian leader and “carries out bank cheque diplomacy accordingly to destroy the solidarity so profoundly declared by the late Father Walter Lini.”

“No surrender!”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A West Papuan independence movement leader has warned the Melanesian Spearhead Group after its 23rd leaders summit in Suva, Fiji, to not give in to a “neocolonial trade in betrayal and abandonment” over West Papua.

While endorsing and acknowledging the “unconditional support” of Melanesian people to the West Papuan cause for decolonisation, OPM chair and commander Jeffrey P Bomanak
spoke against “surrendering” to Indonesia which was carrying out a policy of “bank cheque diplomacy” in a bid to destroy solidarity.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka took over the chairmanship of the MSG this week from his Vanuatu counterpart Jotham Napat and vowed to build on the hard work and success that had been laid before it.

• READ MORE: Marape says it is culturally ‘un-Melanesian’ not to give West Papua a seat at the table
• Fiji advocacy group slams Indonesian role in MSG as a ‘disgrace’
• Other West Papua reports

He said he would not take the responsibility of chairmanship lightly, especially as they were confronted with an increasingly fragmented global landscape that demanded more from them.

PNG Prime Minister James Marape called on MSG member states to put West Papua and Kanaky New Caledonia back on the agenda for full MSG membership.

Marape said that while high-level dialogue with Indonesia over West Papua and France about New Caledonia must continue, it was culturally “un-Melanesian” not to give them a seat at the table.

West Papua currently holds observer status in the MSG, which includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji — and Indonesia as an associate member.

PNG ‘subtle shift’
PNG recognises the West Papuan region as five provinces of Indonesia, making Marape’s remarks in Suva a “subtle shift that may unsettle Jakarta”, reports Gorethy Kenneth in the PNG Post-Courier.

West Papuans have waged a long-standing Melanesian struggle for independence from Indonesia since 1969.

The MSG resolved to send separate letters of concern to the French and Indonesian presidents.

In a statement, Bomanak thanked the Melanesians of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) of Kanaky New Caledonia for “unconditionally support[ing] your West Papuan brothers and sisters, subjected to dispossession, enslavement, genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and ethnic cleansing, [as] the noblest of acts.”

“We will never forget these Melanesian brothers and sisters who remain faithfully loyal to our cultural identity no matter how many decades is our war of liberation and no matter how many bags of gold and silver Indonesia offers for the betrayal of ancestral kinship.

“When the late [Vanuatu Prime Minister] Father Walter Lini declared, ‘Melanesia is not free unless West Papua is free,”’ he was setting the benchmark for leadership and loyalty across the entire group of Melanesian nations.

“Father Lini was not talking about a timeframe of five months, or five years, or five decades.

“Father Lini was talking about an illegal invasion and military occupation of West Papua by a barbaric nation wanting West Papua’s gold and forests and willing to exterminate all of us for this wealth.

‘Noble declaration’
“That this noble declaration of kinship and loyalty now has a commercial value that can be bought and sold like a commodity by those without Father Lini’s courage and leadership, and betrayed for cheap materialism, is an act of historic infamy that will be recorded by Melanesian historians and taught in all our nations’ universities long after West Papua is liberated.”

Bomanak was condemning the decision of the MSG to regard the “West Papua problem” as an internal issue for Indonesia.

“The illegal occupation of West Papua and the genocide of West Papuans is not an internal issue to be solved by the barbaric occupier.

“Indonesia’s position as an associate member of MSG is a form of colonial corruption of the Melanesian people.

“We will continue to fight without MSG because the struggle for independence and sovereignty is our fundamental right of the Papuan people’s granted by God.

“Every member of MSG can recommend to the United Nations that West Papua deserves the same right of liberation and nation-state sovereignty that was achieved without compromise by Timor-Leste — the other nation illegally invaded by Indonesia and also subjected to genocide.”

Bomanak said the MSG’s remarks stood in stark contrast to Father Lini’s solidarity with West Papua and were “tantamount to sharing in the destruction of West Papua”.

‘Blood money’
It was also collaborating in the “extermination of West Papuans for economic benefit, for Batik Largesse. Blood money!”

The Papua ‘problem’ was not a human rights problem but a problem of the Papuan people’s political right for independence and sovereignty based on international law and the right to self-determination.

It was an international problem that had not been resolved.

“In fact, to say it is simply a ‘problem’ ignores the fate of the genocide of 500,000 victims.”

Bomanak said MSG leaders should make clear recommendations to the Indonesian government to resolve the “Papua problem” at the international level based on UN procedures and involving the demilitarisation of West Papua with all Indonesian defence and security forces “leaving the land they invaded and unlawfully occupied.”

Indonesia’s position as an associate member in the MSG was a systematic new colonialisation by Indonesia in the home of the Melanesian people.

Indonesia well understood the weaknesses of each Melanesian leader and “carries out bank cheque diplomacy accordingly to destroy the solidarity so profoundly declared by the late Father Walter Lini.”

“No surrender!”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

You're not alone in this. We have our community, and countless others refusing to be silenced.

Join us at a NoKings.org protest today. And if you're in NYC, be sure to vote for Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani. Watch their fun joint endorsement video in the show notes. Find your early voting polling station there, too. Early voting starts today!

Show Notes:

Minnesota Lawmaker Killed, Another Wounded By Suspect Impersonating Police: The shootings, which occurred at the lawmakers' homes, appeared to be politically motivated. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/minnesota-lawmakers-shot-brooklyn-park_n_684d786ce4b0fcc493777718

Fun Joint Endorsement Video: Zohran & Brad: No matter who, rank us #1 & #2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdeiaMRvWSI

NYCers, early voting starts today! Find your polling place: https://findmypollsite.vote.nyc/

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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief.

This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission.

Let’s start with some basics. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a humanitarian organization. It’s a U.S.- and Israeli-backed scheme run by people with no track record in neutral aid work. Its first director Jake Wood, resigned on May 25, saying the organization failed to uphold humanitarian principles. Then the Boston Consulting Group, which had secretly helped design GHF’s aid operations, pulled out and apologized to staff who were furious about the firm’s complicity in a system that enabled forced displacement and sidelined trusted UN agencies.

GHF’s brand new director is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical PR executive best known for helping Donald Trump recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and push the U.S. embassy move there—a move that only fanned the flames of conflict.

GHF’s entire premise is rooted in deception. It was launched with Israeli government oversight, without transparency, without independence, and—critically—without the participation of the United Nations or any respected humanitarian agencies. In fact, the UN has refused to have anything to do with it. So have groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme, whose leaders have warned in no uncertain terms that GHF’s model militarizes aid, violates humanitarian norms, and places Palestinian lives at even greater risk.

GHF has never been about delivering aid. It’s about using the illusion of aid to control the population of Gaza—and to give cover to war crimes.

People in Gaza are starving because Israel wants them to. There are thousands of aid trucks, many loaded with supplies from the United Nations, that—for months—have been blocked from entering Gaza. They contain food, water, medicine, shelter materials—the lifeblood of a besieged civilian population. But instead of letting them through, the U.S. and Israel are pushing their own version of aid: a privatized, militarized operation. Armed U.S. contractors working with the GHF are reportedly earning up to $1,100 per day, along with a $10,000 signing bonus.

The GHF plan is to make aid available only in the south, forcibly displacing people from the north—driving them toward the Egyptian border, where many fear a permanent expulsion is being engineered.

From the very start of GHF’s operations, with the opening of two distribution sites in southern Gaza on May 26, the chaos turned deadly, with Israeli military shooting at hungry people seeking food. In its short time of operation, nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded. These are not tragic accidents—they are predictable outcomes of militarizing aid.

Let’s also address the fear-mongering claim that when the UN was in charge of aid delivery, food was being stolen by Hamas. There is no credible evidence of this and Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme, has publicly refuted this allegation, saying that trucks have been looted by hungry, desperate people.

The real threat to aid integrity isn’t Hamas—it’s the blockade itself, which has created an artificial scarcity and fueled black markets, desperation, and chaos..

To truly help the people of Gaza, here’s what needs to happen:

• Shut down GHF and reject all militarized aid schemes.

• Restore full U.S. funding to UNRWA and the World Food Programme—trusted, experienced agencies that know how to do this work.

• Demand that Israel end the blockade. Let aid trucks in—UN trucks, Red Cross trucks, WFP trucks. Flood the strip with food, medicines, tents.

• Demand an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing and create space for meaningful relief and political solutions.

The starvation in Gaza is not a logistical failure. It is Israel’s political choice. And GHF is not a lifeline. It is a lie. It is complicity. It is diabolical. And U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to fund it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas state legislators dropped efforts to spend millions of dollars to buy what experts call ineffective child identification kits weeks after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that lawmakers were again trying to fund the program.

This is the second consecutive budget cycle in which the Legislature considered purchasing the products, which promise to help find missing children, only to reverse course after the news organizations documented the lack of evidence that the kits work.

ProPublica and the Tribune originally published their findings in a 2023 investigation that revealed the state had spent millions of dollars on child identification kits made by a Waco-based company called the National Child Identification Program, run by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire. He had a history of legal and business troubles, according to public records, and although less expensive alternatives were available to lawmakers, Hansmire used outdated and exaggerated statistics about missing children to help boost sales.

He also managed to develop connections with powerful Texas legislators who supported his initiatives. In 2021, Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell authored a bill that created a Texas child safety program. The measure all but guaranteed any state funding would go to Hansmire’s business whenever lawmakers allotted money for child identification kits. That year, the state awarded his company about $5.7 million for the kits.

Two years later, both the House and the Senate proposed spending millions more on the program. But when the final budget was published, about a month after the newsrooms’ investigation, legislators had pulled the funding. They declined to answer questions about why.

Funding for the program appeared again in this year’s House budget. State Rep. Armando Martinez, a Democratic member of the lower chamber’s budget committee, suggested allotting $2 million to buy the kits for students in kindergarten through the second grade. The Senate, however, didn’t include that funding in its version of the budget.

The newsrooms published a story in early May about the proposed spending plan. The final version of the budget that lawmakers passed this week again had no designated funding for the identification kits.

Campbell, Martinez and the leaders of the House and Senate budget committees did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests for this story or written questions about why the funding didn’t make the final cut.

Hansmire did not reply to an interview request this week. In a prior response, he told the newsrooms he’d resolved his financial troubles and said that his company’s kits have helped identify missing children, though he did not provide any concrete examples. Hansmire told reporters to reach out to “any policeman,” naming several departments specifically. The newsrooms contacted a number of them. Of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that responded to the queries, none could identify one case where the kits helped find a runaway or kidnapped child.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant who previously oversaw the Louisiana Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said legislators made the correct decision to eliminate the identification kits from the budget because there is no data proving they actually help improve kids’ safety. She remains disappointed that Texas lawmakers continue to give the program any attention and hopes they won’t contemplate the funding in the future.

“Every dollar and every minute, every hour that you spend on a program like this, is a dollar and a minute and an hour that you can’t spend on something that is more promising or more sound,” said Pearson.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Here’s a blub — a promotional positive statement about the book:

“We are in a fight for our lives against a rising authoritarian tide, and this clear-eyed, compelling, clarion call of a book has a message everyone needs to hear. We will not save ourselves if we do not also fight for the lives of others–including non-human animals. No one is better positioned than Will Potter to connect the dots between fascism and factory farming, and he does so with energy, conviction, and incredible insight.”

— Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

I’m digging the book he sent me. Stay TUNED.

Yes indeed, things have gotten really really worse, and the book thus far is about ag-gag, the history of those laws, and we go back farther than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, way back to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Even farther back to Matthew in that book about bearing witness, or Islam and the concept of being a martyr, witness, whistleblower.

Oh, I recall this bullshit interview/debate on Democracy Now with Will Potter and the schill goofy woman working for the lobby, man, and the manufactured balance, the false balance, the broken equivalency.

Thirteen Years ago: States Crack Down On Animal Rights Activists And Their Undercover Videos

My most recent radio interview about to hit the airways June 18, KYAQ.org, but DV and Paulokirk readers get the preview here: The right to community. And that is what the politicians and their thug dictators, the corporations, the polluters and the destroyers, want DESTROYED forever. The-Right-to/for/because of Community

So, moving on before I get back to reading Will’s new book, the infamy of AmeriKKKa and the world, as we slaughter not just the billions of birds and bovine and swine, but our fellow human beings.

Bearing witness? Goddamn!

Child Gunned Down by the IDF, His Crime? Being Born Palestinian: Israel is annihilating Palestinian children. Amer Rabee was one of them

Amer had a name. He had a smile. He was loved. He was real. And now, he is gone. We owe him more than silence. We owe Gaza’s starving children more than silence.

*****

I talk about this EVERYDAY — how do we go on without YELLING at the top of our lungs everywhere all the goddamn time?

Progress

[Palestine Will Be Free]

Oh, what great progress! We have come so far

What glorious days I wake up to!
What mirth and joy the mornings conjure.
After starting my day with coffee and Wagyu steak,
I tap-dance to work and present my deck.

All fun and games with the friends at work,
As we discuss last night’s game we streamed.
“Oh, how he shot — and the one he missed —
They should build him a statue in the city’s midst.”

At noon, I got the letter with the bonus check —
My hard work is really stacking the deck!
That called for a celebration, so we went
To this exquisite bar a colleague had picked.

We did good business this year, my boss said,
As our machines were deployed across the East and the West.
We’re ramping up production — the demand is high.
I already smell the next check — oh, how I fly!

We wrapped up another busy day at work,
As we built more machines to send across the pond.
On the way home, I called my spouse,
And we went to her favourite: Roundhouse.

As we got home, on the TV they showed
One of our products being dropped by the shore.
Our President announced, “No holds will be barred,
In support of our friends who always want more.”

Smacking my lips, I looked up the scrip,
Giddy as a kid, I slept like a pig.
More work tomorrow, as we must ship more
Of our fearsome products to our friends by the shore.

Oh, what great progress! We have come so far.
With my MIT degree, I have become a star.
My machines hum low as they cross the sea,
Carving silence where children used to be.

*****

More of the monsters, the criminals, the continuing criminal enterprises of finance and predatory and disaster and penury and polluting capitalism:

JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon calls on US to stockpile bullets, rare earth instead of bitcoin!

Crime boss in a 5,000 dollar suit:

“We should be stockpiling bullets,” he continued.

“Like, you know, the military guys tell you that, you know, if there’s a war in the South China Sea, we have missiles for seven days. Okay, come on. I mean, we can’t say that with a straight face and think that’s okay. So we know what to do. We just got to now go about doing it. Get the people together, roll up our sleeves, you know, have the debates.”

And so the clown show is so on track to take the USA down the path of intellectual-spiritual-agency starvation. No one in the NBC piece is railing against the military and the fool Trump, no-sir-ee.

Army says Trump’s military parade could cause $16 million in damage to Washington streets

The repair costs are part of the estimated $45 million price tag for the upcoming parade.

Bone spurs Trump, man, what a complete Chief Fraud.

“We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it,” Trump added.

The parade will be part of a massive celebration in downtown Washington that includes a number of events, historical displays and a demonstration by the Army’s famous parachute team, the Golden Knights.

The parade itself will include about 130 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 tanks, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 28 Stryker armored fighting vehicles and a number of vehicles towing artillery launchers. More than 50 helicopters will also participate in an “extensive flyover” in the nation’s capital.

The event will also bring more than 9,000 soldiers from around the country to Washington, about 7,000 of whom will march in the parade itself. The event will also include at least eight Army bands, and some troops will ride on the nearly three dozen horses and two mules expected to march as part of a historical section of the parade.

[Photo: Poison Ivy League school Harvard!]

And you thought colleges were places of sanity and caring? Forget about it.

As colleges halt affinity graduations, students of color plan their own cultural celebrations. Affinity graduations recognize the range “of challenges and obstacles” that students from minority backgrounds face as they work toward their degrees, said one professor.

Death spiral in almost 100 percent of American life:

The Harvard joins many other institutions across the country that have canceled affinity graduations after the federal cracked down on funding for colleges. Notre Dame canceled its Lavender Graduation for 50 LGBTQ students, with members of the university’s Alumni Rainbow Community and the Notre Dame Club of Greater Louisville stepping in to host an independent ceremony this month.

Wichita State University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky also canceled some or all of their affinity ceremonies. The Hispanic Educators Association of Nevada said it canceled its event for Latino students because of a lack of financial support.

This is what education once again means to the perversions called US Secretary of Ed.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her department will give the state ten days to sign an agreement rescinding its Native American mascot ban and apologizing to Native Americans for having discriminated against them and attempted to “erase” their history.

JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York education department, dismissed McMahon’s visit as “political theater” and said the school district was doing a “grave disservice” to its students by refusing to consult with local tribes about their concerns.

“These representatives will tell them, as they have told us, that certain Native American names and images perpetuate negative stereotypes and are demonstrably harmful to children,” he said in a statement.

You feeling the dictator’s blues yet? President Trump has long called for escalating the U.S. drug war against Mexican cartels and wants tougher penalties for dealers selling fentanyl and other street drugs in American communities. “I am ready for it, the death penalty, if you deal drugs,” Trump said during a meeting with state governors in February, where he said dealers are too often treated with a “slap on the wrist.”

But despite his tough rhetoric, Trump has sparked controversy by pardoning a growing number of convicted drug dealers, including this week’s move to grant clemency to Larry Hoover, 74, who was serving multiple life sentences in federal prison for crimes linked to his role leading the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples.

“Larry Hoover was the head of perhaps the most pernicious, efficient drug operation in the United States,” Safer said. “They sold over $100 million of drugs a year in the city of Chicago alone. They were responsible for countless murders. They supported their drug territories with ruthless violence.”

*****

A LITTLE pushback?

What? Everything about Trump, man, is the most perverse, weird and dystopian and of course, Snake Oil Salesmanship and Three Card Monty and Chapter 11-13 full bore.

Not digging the Catholic Church, but can you imagine making rabbis tell the truth, the Fortune 300 or 5,000 go before a board of truth and reconciliation? Imagine if the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Maiming Polluting Poisoning Starving Occupied Palestine had to disclose that client-extortionist privilege? Patient-Doctor confidentiality? Doesn’t exist, and DOGE is coming after the food stampers and the disability pittance recipients while the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires get to keep their dirty felonious secrets, well, secrets.

The sickness throughout the land, as Flag Day and Rapist in CHief’s B-Day and the Military Uniformed Mercenary Hired Guns Army have their anniversary, and we continue writing at Dissident Voice and elsewhere the crimes, man, the inhumanity, the absolute Orwellian and Phillip K. Dick nature of this dystopia.

*****

Some of us are tired of surviving

For many in Gaza, death isn’t always the worst outcome.

Mohammed R Mhawish

May 31, 2025

What kind of world forces people to beg for death to feel peace?

I’ve survived so many times now I’ve lost count. I was pulled from the rubble with my son after our home was flattened, walked for hours carrying a bag of bread and the bones of what once was a life, fled neighborhoods, towns, and streets we once called home, only to find no home waiting on the other side, and every time I survived, something else died. Sometimes, it was a friend. Sometimes a cousin and sometimes a colleague. Some other times it was the sound of my son’s laughter and my own belief that living means something.

Survival is not a blessing.

I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain. People wake up every day in a different place than where they were yesterday and find it more crowded and more tired and more broken. Stepping over children sleeping on cardboard under trees is now a normal thing, and the days are all the same. So are the struggles of hunger and water and the bitter metallic taste. The same questions about where we should go next, what we will eat today, and who else we’ve lost.

A reporter captured the moment at midnight, as the sky lit up like day from illumination flares.

Watch the post on Instagram

The caption reads: “We are dying. The Israeli bombing is relentless. Women and children are the victims. No safe places left. No food, no water. Famine is spreading rapidly.”

I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.”

She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.

Another man in Deir Al Balah was standing in the middle of a bombed street and sweeping glass and dirt into a pile. He’d lost two of his daughters, and when I asked him why he didn’t leave earlier, he said, “I didn’t want to spend the last moments of my life running.”

It’s neither courage nor resistance, only exhaustion, the kind that comes with an understanding that in Gaza there is no such thing as a safe place. We just run until our legs and souls give out. And even if we make it out alive, we still carry the weight of every person who didn’t.

In one video, a child sits on top of the rubble sobbing. His father is still trapped beneath the debris.]

Watch the video on X

People always say survival is the goal and we’re lucky to have made it. But there’s no such thing as luck about people dissolving slowly and dying in slow motion.

During my months reporting from there, I saw children who don’t speak anymore. I once saw a boy in Jabalia who used to love cartoons but now just sits and stares at the wall. When I tried to ask for his name, he covered his ears. His mother said he hasn’t spoken since the missile hit their home and took his sister.

When someone cries out of an injury, we know they’re still holding on. But when they just stare at the ceiling as they bleed, we know they’ve already left, even if their body hasn’t.

There is nothing noble about this kind of survival. There is no aftercare or healing.

A young Palestinian student, Shayma, describes what it’s like to be forcibly displaced amid the devastation and having nowhere to go. The camera pans across the flattened neighborhood where she is sheltering. aljazeeraenglish

We don’t want to die. But when some of us fantasize about death, it’s because we’re full of everything that hurts. Our moms whisper that they envy those who died peacefully and quickly. I myself used to shower in cold water at night just to feel something cold. My neighbor lost her baby to dehydration around the time my son and I were diagnosed with malnutrition in March 2024. She still carries his blanket in her bag.

And here my friends tell me to stay strong and safe. But I don’t want strength anymore. I don’t want to be the one who survived everything. I don’t want my son to grow up believing that pain is something you get used to or that losing everything and still breathing means you’re lucky.

We all have our tricks for trying to suffer a little less. Some stop talking about the people they lost because even saying a name is unbearable. Some lie to themselves and pretend their loved ones are still displaced just somewhere they can’t reach. Some stop eating because food feels like a betrayal when the person you used to share it with is gone.

I once believed that writing would help me make sense of it and that putting these stories down would somehow soften them. But even that doesn’t work anymore. I can’t keep writing about mass graves and call it documenting and narrating pain while still living inside it.

There is nothing poetic about this grief. It is ugly and it is heavy and it is repetitive. Sometimes I walk for hours just not to think and keep my body moving while my mind shuts down, or just to delay the next memory from arriving.

I still wake up sometimes believing we’re back home and feel like I’ll hear my mother’s voice and make coffee in our old kitchen.

The truth is, survival, when it’s endless and hollow and filled with nothing but hunger and mourning and fear… it begins to feel like a punishment.

We are alive in ways no one in this world would envy.

So when the people in Gaza no longer pray for safety, it’s because we’ve seen too much and lost too many.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

In the latest episode of Working People, we go back to the picket line to get a critical update on the longest ongoing strike in the United States. In October 2022, over 100 workers represented by five labor unions—including production, distribution, advertising, and accounts receivable staff—walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PPG). The strike began after the newspaper’s management, Block Communications, which is owned by the Block family, cut off health insurance for employees on Oct. 1 of that year. After more than 2.5 years on strike, with other unions reaching contracts or taking buyouts and dissolving their units, workers represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh are the last remaining strikers holding the line. We speak with a panel of union officers for the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh about how they’ve managed to stay on strike so long and about recent legal updates that have given them hope that an acceptable end to the strike may be on the horizon.

Panelists include: Ed Blazina, striking transportation writer at the PPG and one of the Vice Presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh; Erin Hebert, also one of the Vice Presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and a striking copy-editor and page designer at PPG; Emily Matthews, photographer on strike and treasurer for the Post-Gazette Unit of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

Additional links/info:

• Pittsburgh Union Progress website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Donate to Support Striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Workers
• Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh website
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Union Progress, “The strike is over for 3 Pittsburgh news production unions, but the journalists’ strike continues”
• Ian Karbal, Pennsylvania Capital Star, “The strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is now the longest in the nation. And it’s not over”
• Mel Buer, Working People / The Real News Network, “Two years into a strike, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers aren’t ready to give up”
• Bob Batz Jr. & Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “A start to the end of the strike? Feds file for temporary injunction to return Pittsburgh news unions to work”
• Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams / The Real News Network, “‘AI will not scab us’: Post-Gazette newsroom decries use of artificial intelligence”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “(Livestream) After months of striking, media workers aren’t backing down”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “(Livestream) Strikes at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, University of Michigan, and more”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s half-year strike”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are going back to the picket line to get an update on the longest ongoing strike in the United States. In October of 2022, over a hundred workers represented by five labor unions including production, distribution, advertising and accounts receivable staff walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike at the storied publication the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The strike began after the newspaper’s management block Communications, which is owned by the block family cut off health insurance for employees on October 1st of that year.

As Ian Karbal wrote in December for the Pennsylvania Capital Star. Since 2017 Post Gazette journalists have worked without a union contract. The papers owners appeared to show little interest in negotiating a new one, but in 2020 they imposed new terms on employees. Workers learned during the pandemic that the cost of their healthcare plan would increase for many and some would lose banked sick days. Among other unfavorable changes, some newsroom staff were also fed up with the blocks who had drawn increased scrutiny to the paper through a series of widely criticized editorial and personnel decisions. For years, the Post Gazette had refused to cover annual premium increases for the production workers healthcare plan. According to Joe Pass, the lawyer for the three production unions and the Newsroom Guild, when the company imposed a $19 per week increase to employees in 2022 while pushing them into a high deductible plan pass said that that was a breaking point.

The ultimate tally was 38 to 36 in favor of the strike. The day after the vote, less than 60% of the newsroom walked out. According to Zach Tanner, president of the newspaper Guild. Though over a short time, the number of strikers grew with 60 on the picket line and 35 remaining at work. This is Max speaking. We call those scabs. Augh continues, but the paper was able to continue publishing online strike leaders say that documents shared with them by the paper a standard practice show. The company has given new hires and workers who remained at the paper unprecedented bonuses and ahead of schedule raises since the strike began. Their documents show that in total over 260 $900,000 has been awarded this way since October of 2022. An administrative law judge has ruled that the Post Gazette failed to bargain in good faith and the National Labor Relations Board took the rare step of issuing an injunction request to resume bargaining that could effectively end the strike.

The post gazettes owners have appealed that move now for two and a half years, strikers have held the line while putting their professional skills to work and producing without pay. Mind you, the Pittsburgh Union progress, an award-winning newspaper that we at the Real News have proudly taken out ads in and collaborated with striking journalist Steve Mellon and I actually just won a prestigious Izzy Award together for our collaborative reporting on the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s absolutely remarkable what Steve and his colleagues have done with this strike paper and in my personal opinion, it is one of the single most impressive and inspiring feats of journalism and solidarity in the 21st century. And in a March update on the strike posted in the Pittsburgh Union progress editor Bob Batz Jr. Writes workers in three news production and advertising unions that have been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for two years and five months over a dispute about their healthcare coverage have voted to accept settlements that end their strike, their jobs and their union locals or unit, but it’s over for the production and advertising workers.

They are members of the typographical or advertising union and the Mailers Union, both locals of the communication workers of America as well as the Pressman’s Union unit. There are 31 workers who are losing their jobs as well as their unions or unit as their buyout stipulate that their locals or unit drop all pending unfair labor practice charges and then dissolve. Now, we’ve been covering this strike and talking to striking workers over the past two years here on this show and at the Real News Network and today we’re going to dive back in to get an update on how folks are doing, where things stand now with the strike and what folks like you out there can do to help. And I’m honored to be joined on the show today. First by Ed Blaina, a striking transportation writer at the Post Gazette and one of the vice presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

We are also joined by Aaron Abert, also one of the vice presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and a striking copy editor and page designer at the Post Gazette. And we are joined as well by Emily Matthews, a photographer on strike and treasurer for the Post Gazette unit of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. Ed Aaron. Emily, thank you all so much for joining us today and I wish we were convening under better circumstances, but I just wanted to say up top to reaffirm that we here at The Real News, all of us here and our listeners at Working people continue to stand in solidarity with y’all as colleagues and fellow workers. And I know that our listeners are deeply invested in this struggle even though so many folks around the country have forgotten it, have not given it and y’all the support that you need over these past two and a half years. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But since this will be the first time in this strike that our listeners are hearing some of your voices, I wanted to just start by asking if we could go around and you could introduce yourself and just tell us a little more about who you are, the work that you did at the Post Gazette and the work that you’ve been doing for the strike and while on strike over the past two and a half years.

Ed Blazina:

Thanks, max. I’ll start. My name’s Ed Blazina. I am striking transportation writer. I’ve been a journalist for, I forget how old I am, sometimes 45 years, been at the Pittsburgh papers. We had the Pittsburgh press and then when it went out of business, the Post Gazette was there as well. I’ve worked for both of those papers since 1983. For the last 10 years I’ve been the transportation writer at the Post Gazette. I’ve been a union officer for 25 years and now we’ve been on strike for two and a half years. I’m eligible to retire. I’m old enough to retire and retire with full benefits. I refuse to let the blocks in my career this way. I’m not going to go down while we’re on strike. We’re going to fight this thing through to the end. What we’re doing now is raising as much money as we can to keep this going. As you mentioned, it’s gone on so long. Among the almost distressing things we hear is that people don’t remember that we’re still on strike. That’s particularly painful to me because the Pittsburgh press went out of business because of a strike back in 1991, and at that time it was a public tragedy that the newspaper was on strike. TV stations read the comics on television, they read obits. It was a calamity.

The Pittsburgh Press tried to print a edition, not scab. We were not unionized in the newsroom at the Pittsburgh Press, but they tried to print and distribute a paper while the other unions were on strike and there were 5,000 people in front of the building. I’m not sure. In two and a half years we’ve had 5,000 people show up total at the rallies we’ve had. It’s a different time now, so it makes striking much more difficult. Right now I’m doing two jobs. I’m covering transportation as well as I can for the union progress. Not everything I did before, but the major things keeps me sane, if you want to call it two and a half years on strike being sane. And the other aspect is we’re running a strike. I’m a vice president for the union. We’ve raised well over a million dollars to help people be able to stay on strike. We run speakers bureaus, we do all kinds of things to try to keep our name out there and let people know we’re on strike.

But it’s two and a half years now, so it’s difficult. You mentioned the numbers, it was sad hearing you recount what’s happened since the strike began. We probably have half the people that we had before because lots of people aren’t like me. I’ve had a career, I’m at the end of my career. We have folks here today with us who are younger who are still trying to build a career. It’s hard to tell somebody who’s 25, oh, stay on strike for two years, your career will come back. Don’t worry about it. That has to be extremely tough to do. I’m glad I don’t have to do that. I’m at the end of my career. I can afford to fight to strike through to the end, so it’s tough, but we’re still at it and we’re still going to be here. We’re not going anywhere.

Erin Hebert:

Yeah. My name is Erin Hebert. I actually graduated from journalism school 10 years ago this month. I got the reminders of that on my Facebook and I’ve been at the Post is that since 2016, vast majority of my professional career as a journalist. I started there as a copy editor as what was called a two year associate position, which does not exist anymore. But essentially when I was hired, I was making less than half of what top salary union hires make now at the post edge. So I was making about $25,000 working a full-time schedule, working a copy desk schedule. I had benefits. I was happy to have the opportunity, but the first couple of years for me, there were a struggle. And my experience at that point in my career as a really young person are a big part of why I think I’ve stayed out for so long and why I feel so committed to seeing this through.

Because I haven’t had a contract since March, 2017, which was it five months after I started. So I haven’t had a contract that entire time and the contract is the only reason that I was able to be hired as a 23-year-old. And then by the time I hit 25, after my two years of service were up as an associate, my salary jumped to $60,000, which is our top line salary. So it was a dream of mine to, especially when I was coming out of journalism school, hearing that newspapers were dying when I was so dedicated to this craft that I had studied, I was like, oh, cool, I can come here. I can tough it out for two years on a lower salary, be in a cool city as a young person, be in a newsroom and eventually make a good living in an affordable city.

And I really fell in love with Pittsburgh too. And that’s, I think a big part of why a lot of us are out here is because we care about the city and we care about making the journalism field here accessible and welcoming for new talent. I don’t know, I’m from Louisiana and I didn’t know anything about unions before I came here. So I show up on my first day and an officer comes up to me and tells me the spiel, Hey, there’s a union meeting. I didn’t know what I knew nothing. I didn’t know anything about it. And the education that I’ve gotten, the life education that I’ve gotten, being in Pittsburgh and being with this local and at this newspaper are really just completely, I can’t even begin to describe how much my life has changed over the past 10 years. And a couple of years into my time at the post gisette I started, it was when issues with the publisher started to prop up more and more.

He was interfering more. And I was seeing the frontline of that as a copy editor because I was on the night desk. I was getting the calls from John Block saying, we need to change this different things that have been well addressed in the media before Everyone knows that these have been issues at the paper. So I kind of started looking for a way out and thinking that maybe journalism in the age of Trump was not for me, that if this was the direction that it was headed in, that was not going to be that not going to work for me. So I started exploring social work as a career and ended up going down to part-time as a copy editor while I was in grad school for social work at the Post Gazette. And while I was studying all of the strike talk has started happening and I said, okay, well part of I want to do organizing work.

I was more involved with the union by then, and I just felt really passionate about the social welfare portion of striking and how people take care of each other in crisis because that’s what I was studying. So they wanted the strike. I did a call from Steve Mellon, or sorry, the night before, and he says, Hey, you want to be head of the health and welfare committee with me? And I said, yeah, of course I would do anything with Steve. He’s the best. And it’s been a real rollercoaster since then. But I’m really proud of the work that we put in at the beginning of the strike to keep this going because I don’t think we would’ve made it this long had we not actually spent time making the systems that have allowed us to take care of each other and to raise money. And that have allowed us to get closer to each other personally.

It is very much like a family at this point, and that’s not something that is ever going to go away even when we go back to work. So it’s really just completely changed my perspective on a lot of things, but especially the value of my labor and also the importance of rest because I think the strike was the first time that a lot of us were forced to stop our work that we had been doing for so long and kind of think about what our lives were looking like without work. And that’s kind of the stuff that I’m focused on right now is how do we continue to take care of each other and finish this out and raise money because you’re right, we haven’t had the amount of attention on this strike that we should have.

Emily Matthews:

Hi, I’m Emily Matthews. I’m a photographer on strike, and I’m also the treasurer for the Post Gazette unit of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. I started at the Post Gazette in February of 2020, so I’ve almost been on strike for as long as I had worked at the Post Gazette, which is kind of crazy to think about and kind of crazy to think about how much can change in two and a half years. I got engaged, got married, adopted a cat, and yet we were still on strike. Some things don’t change at the Post Gazette. When I was working at the Post Gazette, Aaron and I started off as a two year associate and it was described to me as in between an internship and full-time. But really I was just treated as a regular employee just making minimum wage. When my two years were almost up, the union actually had to get involved to see if I was staying or not because they just wouldn’t tell me.

I think about two weeks before my two years were up, they finally let me know that I was staying and my manager was like, well, at least we got you on a few months before your two years were up. I was like, no, it’s not a few months. It was a couple weeks. So just that experience and knowing that the company didn’t really seem to care got us as individuals and how much the union did help kind of made me realize that, oh, I should get involved with the union. I care about the people that I work with. I want to make sure that they can have a job that lasts for as long as they would like. And at the Post Gazette, I was taking photos of anything that came up depending on the day from events to sports to whatever portraits and on the union progress.

I mostly focus on high school sports. I take photos of, right now it’s baseball and softball. We’re getting into the championship season, so we’re in the quarterfinals and semifinals right now. I think working on the Pittsburgh Union progress has really helped me because when we first started out, like Aaron said, it was kind of a shock not to have that amount of work every day that I was used to not going to multiple assignments every day. And I think as journalists, we do kind of have our identity tied up in what we do for better or for worse. So I remember just sitting in my apartment thinking, what am I doing? Who am I without taking photos? And the union progress did really help with that too. It gives me a reprieve from doing all the strike related activity, even though it is strike related, it feels more like a day-to-day at a regular job almost while also doing our strike work, which includes raising money.

We have a Stewards network where we call each other and check in to make sure everyone’s feeling okay, see what people need, let people know what’s going on, what fundraising events or other things that we have going on that we want people to show up to and attend. And I think doing all this has just really shown me how much everyone cares about each other. Before the strike, I didn’t really go into the newsroom as much because I’m a photographer, so I would just go out on assignments and usually edit in my car or edit there. So I didn’t spend a lot of time in the newsroom talking to my coworkers. It wasn’t until we walked out on strike that I really started to get to talk to people and get to know people. And now I’ve come to realize that I really care about everyone that I’m on strike with and hope that strike comes to an end soon and you can get back to work. I’m from Pittsburgh, I grew up here. I grew up with the Post Gazette, so I always wanted to work at the Post Gazette and I would like to work there for as long as possible, but I don’t feel confident that I can do that without a contract. That’s where I’m at right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ed, Erin, Emily, I wanted to ask before we sort of dig into the nitty gritty of strike updates, because I tried to jam in as many as I could in the intro, but I know there’s a lot more stuff that’s been going on from people crossing the picket line to people taking buyouts and union units essentially becoming non-existent to injunctions being issued against the Post Gazette. So I want to ask if you can kind of walk us and our listeners through that in a minute, but hearing you guys kind of talk in the first round, it was really making me think that our listeners and folks out there who maybe haven’t been following this strike the whole way through, really need to sit and think about what it actually takes to go out on strike in the middle of a pandemic and stay on strike for two and a half years along with everything else that’s going on in the goddamn world today. Can we just go back around and could you guys say a little more about what that was like personally for you? What it’s been like personally for you to hold the line this long

Ed Blazina:

Again, for me, it’s been a little bit different because I’m older. By dumb luck, I put in for full social security a month before the strike happened. We didn’t know we were going on strike. So financially the strike hasn’t been as big a deficit as it has been for other people. And my plan was because newspapers have been in bad shape for a long time. We’ve had our pension frozen for 15 years and I have a pension, but it hasn’t been growing. So my plan was to work two years after I went on Social security and bank that money put away some more for retirement. Well, right now, fortunately I’m living off of that money, so my experience isn’t quite the same as everybody else, but it’s been enlightening to see other people, how dedicated they have been. It’s humbling to see how people react when you tell ’em you’re on strike. For started out with nine months and then a year and a half now, two and a half years, I went to the CWA convention as part of our delegation.

My job there was to raise money. I wasn’t there as a delegate to the convention. And after three days I felt like a drug dealer. I hit $11,000 on the spread of my bed in the hotel room from people giving us money to support the strike that is humbling beyond belief. A couple of quick stories I to a democratic meeting up in Butler County, a small county north of Pittsburgh to speak at one of their candidate events, and they allowed us to put out a candidate to collect some money. At the end of the event, this woman who’s older than I am, came waddling up to me and handed me a $10 bill and said, my husband died six weeks ago, but I know he’d want me to give this to you. We had miners come up from Southern West Virginia out to the production plant out in Clinton by the Greater Pittsburgh airport, and big group of cuff guys and a few women.

And again, after they were done ka biting with us on the picket line, woman came up and handed us $20 and said, this is all I have, but you should have it. I think it’s important that you have it. That kind of stuff is amazing and it gives me hope every day that we know we’re on the right side and we know we can make it through this, through things like that. The help of other people, gifts, big and small, that’s how we get through this kind of thing, supporting each other, the support we get from other people. Even a show like this where you welcome us in to come in and tell our story, that’s amazing support.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it just makes me think of another working person that I interviewed on this show the month after y’all went on strike. If I recall correctly, Marcus Darby, he was on strike at CNH industrial in November of 2022. And I remember talking to Marcus and he said something that really stuck with me when he was communicating to our listeners that he said, look, when you guys turn this episode off, you go back to your life. I’m still on strike. I can’t turn this off. So please just don’t forget that, right? And I think just having that appreciation for the time that this takes, the strength that it takes to endure for such a long period of time, I hope everyone listening out there understands how much your solidarity, your support, your refusal to forget struggles like these can keep them going in the darkest of times. Erin, Emily, I wanted to bring y’all back in here if you had anything else you wanted to add on, just what it’s been like for you personally to go out on strike and what it’s taken to stay on strike.

Erin Hebert:

I think one of the interesting things about, I guess strikes in general, but this strike from my perspective is that we obviously have this one common experience, but we also have vastly different experiences among individual people in this union. Age-wise, it’s a big variety, marital status, single childless children, whatever. And for me, I’m really good at the beginning of things. When something’s first going, I’m very gung ho. And then I found during the middle it got really, really hard for me, and part of it was just personal burnout from grad school and the pandemic and everything that comes with being a person in the world these days. So I did have to take a pretty significant chunk of time off from the strike. However, I also had to earn money outside of the strike because I don’t have retirement. I’ll be 32 in a couple of months.

I’m at a point in my career. I’m not married, I don’t have family who can help me, so I had to look for other work. And I was doing housing casework for a HUD funded program for unhoused people with disabilities in Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. So I was doing that for 10 months last year. And during that time I was, I wasn’t as active in the strike because I had to earn money and that job was so stressful and I ended up experiencing burnout from that as well. Had to take the winter off to rest and recover. I was having a lot of chronic health issues pop up. And since I would say March, I’ve been back at it and back working. And now that we got the 10 E, the 10 E decision that we got has been a big momentum push for me for sure, because it kind of showed, oh, there’s a light, we can see the end.

There’s this actionable thing that has come down that we hopefully will be able to rely on. At least it’s the biggest piece of leverage that we’ve ever had. So now that we have this, and like Emily said, she’s not ready to go back without a contract, I’m not ready either because I, over my almost nine years working or being aware of blocked communications existence, I’ll leave it that way. As a company, I have seen, and Ed has seen it too, just from different perspective, everything that a manager could do would do on any level. The ways that even a manager not sticking up for you can completely, even if your manager or a manager in general isn’t actively harmful to you, if you know that they’re not going to have your back because they’re afraid of what upper management will do, that’s not a good working environment.

So I’ve seen an experienced that side of the post A and the union that was 91, it’ll be 91 this year, newspaper deal A, yeah, 91 years old. That’s the only reason that the paper has persisted for so long because without it, who knows what would’ve happened. So I think reminding myself of that has been really important. Resting, listening to my body when it tells me to rest, to take time off, which is the case in any organizing space, is rest and recovery. And also making sure to save time for happy moments. And a lot of those happy moments come from interacting with the community and being out there and just having conversations with people who you never would’ve necessarily connected with otherwise, who tell you, oh, this family member of mine was in a union. I know the struggle my dad was on strike, whatever.

Hearing people’s personal stories when you know that they get it and they get what it’s like to, I mean, not have a steady income and not have enough to pay your bills. And I’m really proud of, like I said earlier, the work that we did to build up our strike fund and to get all the systems in place because that’s a lot of people we’ve had. We have such a variety of experiences on this strike, and it’s the only way that we’ve been keeping it going is through talking to people in our community and each other and raising money.

Emily Matthews:

I think being on strike, it’s easy to get in my own head, thinking journalism all across the country. Is it a bad place? Why am I doing this? Is it even worth it? Are we even going to have jobs in a couple years? Why am I losing all this money if it’s just going to go away anyways? And like Erin said, I think going out in the community and talking to people really helps with that because just the other day I was taking photos at a high school track meet and this one coach came up to me and he said, oh, you’re with the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Brad Everett, who’s one of our sports reporters, he’s amazing. He puts his whole heart into every story that he does. And I was like, oh yeah, I know Brad, I work with him. He’s great. And he was like, oh yeah, he’s the best. He deserves everything. He’s the best source reporter that I know. And so just hearing how much praise that my coworkers get and fellow strikers get just lights a fire in me to keep going and like, yeah, Brad does deserve everything and he works hard and he’s good at what he does and he deserves to have a job that he can go to.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now. Ed, Erin, Emily, I wanted to ask if y’all could sort of give our listeners an update since we last had post Gazette strikers on the show. We’ve had folks like Steve Mellon, Bob Bats, like so many incredible folks from the Pittsburgh Union, progress from your union, kind of helping to educate our listeners over the years on what this strike is about, why it’s important and what critical updates are coming. And I know there’s a lot there to unpack. So I wanted to ask if we could just spend the next 10 minutes here, really sort of given folks the key updates in the strike over the past year or so, particularly the past six months, because I think listeners know that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Post Gazette was bargaining in bad faith. Again, it feels like all these rulings have come down explicitly saying that the Post Gazette is being shitty, breaking the law, not fulfilling their legal obligations to bargain in good faith, yada, yada, yada, and then nothing happened or that’s what it feels like over here. So can you help walk us through what the back and forth has been like, what the key updates have been in the strike, especially over the past 6, 8, 10 months here? So Ed, let’s go back to you and please, all of y’all give us whatever updates you can.

Ed Blazina:

You think it sounds that way to you, try living through it. It was almost two. It was more than two years ago that we won the administrative law judge ruling from the NLRB, but the system is slow. It’s rigged per management. It’s not set up to help workers as much as it should. The company appealed that original decision from January of, I’m getting my years wrong. In 2023, they appealed. It took over a year for the full board of the NLRB to throw out their appeal, and the only thing we could find out along the way is it’s in process. In conjunction with that and running parallel to that was our attempt to get a court order to put us back to work. It’s an unfair labor strike. There’s ridiculous amounts of damage that’s been done to people’s lives because the company has repeatedly violated federal labor law.

So we went to court to get a 10 J injunction, sorry, this is going to be a little bit of alphabet soup here. A 10 J injunction is while something is going on, once the appeal was decided, then it moved over to what’s called a 10 E for enforcement. So there are no more appeals for the company at the NLRB level. So now the Labor Board goes to court to enforce its own order because the Labor Board has no power to do anything on its own. It has to go get a judge to order that what they have determined is in fact the case and decide what should happen from there. So back in February, we had a hearing before the third Circuit Court of appeals to argue whether there should be an injunction or not. It took another month for them to decide that yes, there should be an injunction.

It’s extremely rare for a union for the NLRB to get a 10 E injunction. There were, I think three or four filed in the previous year, and not all of them were approved by the courts. Ours was approved by the courts. What’s the first thing the company did? They appealed. They asked the same judges to go back and reconsider what they had ruled previously. No more evidence, nothing to change their opinion, just we think you were wrong. You should look at that again. Oh, and also your order was to restore the healthcare. Should that be just for the people who are on strike or should that be for everybody who should be in the unit that’s still working? As you said before, the scs, anything to delay they have done now, two weeks ago we court threw out that appeal. So there are no more appeals.

They are done appealing. There’s nowhere else they can go. So there’s an order that they restore the healthcare. They’ve missed now two deadlines for even taking any step towards doing that. There’s paperwork that has to be filled out by those still in the office. The union members, the strikers have filled out their paperwork and sent it in. The company hasn’t even, we know from people on the inside hasn’t even asked for the information from the employees. So the NLRB is preparing to file for fines against the company for refusing to follow a court order. And we don’t know what those fines will be, but we know that in previous cases, those fines are hefty and they usually double every day. They’re putting themselves at more financial risk to keep fighting for. We don’t know what that’s what’s most perplexing about this whole thing is what is their end game.

We have no idea what their end game is. They’ve now lost at every level of court that they’ve gone to. The other unions have been put out of business because they reached a point where I mentioned the 10 J injunction. They filed for a 10 J injunction and the US District court judge in Pittsburgh turned down their request. Basically her attitude was industries change and if that’s the conditions that you have to work under and you don’t want to, oh, well that’s too bad. So they were left without any recourse. So they took not very good buyouts, frankly. I’m sure they would say the same thing. They did the best they could, but they had nowhere else to turn. So they took buyouts and dissolved their units. So now the newspaper Guild is the only unit left on strike, and we’re waiting now for that enforcement procedure.

Emily Matthews:

I feel like one of the most frustrating things about all of this is just the long timelines and not having many answers to anything. And one of, well, the publisher for the post is that John Robinson block, he lives in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, and he seems like one of the people in the company who is actually willing to talk to us. He actually, when we knock on his door, he seems excited to talk to us. So we’ll go to his house every so often, especially when something comes up, something in the courts or just something that we hear through our sister unions in Toledo or whatever, and we’ll knock on his door and talk to him and he likes to talk. He’s a talker. It’s sometimes difficult to piece out some useful information from what he’s giving us, but it’s better than nothing. And his willingness to talk to us is beneficial too. It seems like from him, from his perspective, the other board members and his brother Alan, who also is the head of the BCI company, no one really talks to John. It seems like from what he tells us, even though he should have this power in the company to have an impact and make a difference, he claims that he doesn’t. It’s all his brother. He doesn’t have a say in anything. He doesn’t talk to their lawyer, he can’t do anything. I think that also makes them kind of angry and I think that also fuels his willingness to talk to us like, well, no one else is talking to me, so I might as well talk to my workers because they’ll actually provide an ear and listen to me.

Ed Blazina:

He is such a different individual. This is a dysfunctional family, unfortunately, that runs the paper. And if I had to guess, the reason they still have a paper in Pittsburgh is so that John has something to do and leaves Alan and the rest of them alone, and they just want to give enough money to keep the doors open, but not enough to treat people in a civil and humane fashion by giving them a raise. Oh, maybe once every 10 years. I don’t think it’s as important to the rest of the group as it is to John, and he’ll leave their other profitable businesses alone if they let him run the newspaper. So it’s a tough situation to deal with.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ed, Erin, Emily, I want to ask in the last kind of 10 minutes that we’ve got here, what a realistic and good resolution to this strike looks like at this point. Like you guys said, you were the last ones standing. The newspaper guild strikers are the ones holding the line now after other unions that you walked out on strike with back in October of 2022, some signed deals, some got buyouts and their unions effectively dissolved, and you guys are still holding the line, fighting it out in the courts and waiting these agonizingly long periods for more updates on the decisions that have already been made that the block family is challenging, so on and so forth. So I think we gave listeners a good update there on where things stand now. But I guess in the final 10 minutes that we’ve got here, what should folks listening to this be looking for?

What can we expect? What kind of resolution are y’all hoping for right now? And frankly, what messages do you have for folks listening to this about what they can do to help what people out there have done to help that you want to lift up? What can folks listening to this who genuinely want to support their fellow workers, maybe they didn’t know that their fellow workers have been on strike for two and a half years over in Pittsburgh, but they know now and they want to know what they can do to help and they want to know why this is important. Any final messages that you have in that vein that you want to share with our listeners? I just wanted to kind of turn things over to you guys in the final minutes here to offer any closing thoughts you’ve got there.

Ed Blazina:

I think the important thing here is, and not to make it sound like we’re way more important than we are, but the fight we’re fighting could have happened anywhere. It happened to happen here, but it’s extremely important that companies can’t do what the post Gazette they’re trying to do. Employers are very much monkey see, monkey do. If they see an employer getting away with eliminating healthcare, bullying their employees, stretching out a strike for as long as possible, hoping people will just walk away and then they win. That’s what happens. Other companies will try to do the same thing. We can’t let that happen. It’s too important for all of us to be able to feed our families to have good jobs, good union paying jobs where we have rights in the workplace and a say in how things are run. So sticking it out for two and a half years, yes, that’s been tough, but we’re there because of everybody else and the people that have supported us, the people who will come up behind us and need a job and need the protections that we’re fighting for. It’s extremely important that the nlrbs power be upheld. There have been cases in Texas where they’ve tried to rule that the NLRB is unconstitutional. That’s just ridiculous, but it got through a court there. We can’t let that happen. And if we have to be the last people in line to draw that line in the sand and enforce that, so be it. We’ve been here this long, there’s no reason to go away now.

Erin Hebert:

For me, this strike has always been existential. It’s been about the contract and we’ve known that the blocks and Allen block especially has always wanted to get rid of the union in the newsroom. And for me, experiencing the difference between a union job as I have had at the post gisette and my first job out of college and also all the jobs that my family has had in right to work states where I’ve lived. I was in Louisiana then I moved to Florida immediately after, before I came to Pennsylvania. So I know the difference between a union job and a non-union job, especially in journalism. And I cannot fathom giving in to a company who is so flagrantly violating labor law and just for years has treated its employees with such disdain, I mean literal disdain that, I mean, I went to journalism school and was told that you comfort the afflicted and you afflict the comfortable.

So this is kind of the ultimate iteration of that. And I think moving forward, we just want people to know that we are fighting for good journalism in Pittsburgh and for a strong newspaper in the city that we really, really love and care about and that it’s Mr. Rogers neighborhood. I love the city and I want us to have a strong daily newspaper. I don’t want it to go under because of bosses who can’t treat their employees fairly or well at all. And being treated well is more about more than about, more than just pay. I want to make it clearer. So moving forward, I think we’re trying to make ourselves more seen in the community This summer, it was really hard starting the strike in October of 2022 and then going right into winter where in Pittsburgh, everyone hibernates and goes inside. So every time the spring rolling around, it’s a good chance for us to get out and about.

And I guess I would just say that if you’re a person who’s in Pittsburgh or you see any of us out, if we’re ever in DC doing an action with the News Guild, people come and talk to us and ask us what we’ve been through. We always have our QR codes when we’re out for you to donate for people to donate. We’re working on new merch and new projects for things to put out into the community like artwork and music and just different community-based projects that’ll help us raise money but also shine a light on our supporters in Pittsburgh and around the country.

Emily Matthews:

Also, if you’re not in Pittsburgh, but would also like to help, we have a link. I know it’s on the Union Progress website through the Action Network where you can donate, you can also buy t-shirts. We have two really cool designs designed by our own striker, Jen Kundra. So check out the Pittsburgh Union progress. We have updates all the time on strike related things as well as Pittsburgh things. And we do have a bargaining date coming up on June 5th, so hopefully, fingers crossed, something will come of that. Even if it doesn’t, we always update on the union progress. So make sure to check it out after that to see what’s going on. And in the meantime, we always appreciate just messages of support too. If you can’t donate money, send us a message. It’s always uplifting to hear from the community.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just with the last one to two minutes that we got here, I wanted to ask if any of y’all have direct messages to our fellow colleagues in the journalism industry. I’m doing my best here to still, I mean, on episodes like this, I try to be somewhat objective. I don’t have, objectivity is a myth, but I’m trying to be at least fair, transparent, get people the truthful factual information, firsthand information from y’all that they need. But all the while I’m sitting over here just boiling because I want to scream at every one of our fellow workers in the journalism industry, what the fuck are you guys doing? How have you not been, pardon my French, but how have you not been raising hell over this from the day this strike started? Like Ed said, if the blocks get away with this, what makes you think that you’re going to be safe when you’re employer looks over and says, Hey, why don’t we do what the Post Gazette did?

And think of all that we lose in the industry when we lose journalism as a good paying career, a career that people want to invest in and stay in and make their career lives out of. I’ve talked to Steve Mellon and Bob Batson and other colleagues of yours at Pittsburgh Union progress about the meaning of this strike for all of us who depend on journalism, local and national, and it makes my blood boil that so many in our industry have forsaken y’all and forgotten y’all and in my opinion, have frankly slit their own throats in our collective throat because this is going to impact all of us. So anyway, I’m getting hot here. So in the last minute, do any of you have any direct messages to folks out there in journalism that you want to share before we close?

Ed Blazina:

Just exactly what you said. It absolutely can happen to you. Don’t let it happen. Get involved in journalists have this thing, and it’s something I’ve had to learn. Even though I’ve been a union officer for 25 years, we always wanted to be neutral. We can’t take a stand on things. Well, I’m sorry. My job, I can take a stand over and absolutely I’m going to, but it’s something you have to learn. We are reticent to go to politicians to give us help. Well, heck, we have a bunch of politicians in the Pittsburgh area who have refused to talk to the Post Gazette because we’ve told them, don’t cross our picket line. It was hard for us to do, but you have to do it. There’s lots of things you don’t like to do, but you have to, and this is one where you have to

Emily Matthews:

Working in journalism too, it’s easy just to appreciate that you have a job in journalism and just to accept your working conditions for what they are. But you never know when your conditions can change for the worst and when you’re in a really bad spot and at that point it’s too late. So you need to unionize early, unionize ahead of the company’s, whatever they’re planning on doing, get one step ahead of them, unionize, organize, talk to your coworkers, make sure everyone’s doing okay. There could be things going on with different people that you just don’t know about because people are afraid to speak up and talk about it. I think that’s another important thing to do is to, even if you’re not in a union, start talking to your coworkers. See what issues arise, see what problems they’re having, try to organize and figure out how to unionize. There’s lots of resources out there to do that.

Erin Hebert:

I would say to also remember that not everyone in journalism, even at Legacy outlets, so to speak, come from a background where they have financial support. A lot of people working at big national outlets, I mean, there’s that whole, the scandal over the New York Times preferring to higher Ivy League graduates. There’s definitely a very stark class disparity in journalism that I’ve found and that I’ve discussed with other people on strike who also come from lower middle class backgrounds, I guess you would say socioeconomically, and just remember, not everybody has the freedom. Some of us need union protections to be able to earn a living in our field. Not all of us grew up with family connections to the industry. Not all of us can make the switch to pr. Like everyone says, oh, you can’t make it work in journalism, go to pr. We shouldn’t have to do that.

We should be guaranteed good jobs that allow us to do the work of covering our communities, and which over two and a half years of this strike, the city has been, I mean, the social circles that I’m in, it’s just everybody’s talking about this stuff and everybody has a different opinion on it, but nobody seems to really care to ask us directly. It’s kind of just talking, and I just think it’s important to remember that, as Emily said, this can happen to you at any time. You cannot trust the boss to have your back or anybody who is okay cowering to the boss and not standing up to the boss, and that you can only get past that by talking to your fellow workers and talking about your experiences. Honestly, even when it’s hard or it’s embarrassing or you think you’re not going to be believed based on what you’ve experienced,

Ed Blazina:

And even if you’re in a union, you have to pay it forward too. One good example of that is the New York Times tech workers had a short strike back at the beginning of the year. Actually it was before that. It was just before the election. They struck during election week, brilliant move because a lot of what the New York Times does on election night is based on what those folks do technically in their computer systems. They had a strike. Their strike fortunately lasted I think less than two weeks, but in that time, they raised so much money that after their strike, they had $114,000 left over that they donated to us. We end our strike. I’m sure there’s somebody we’ll pay it forward too, because that’s what you have to do. We’re all in this together whether we like it or not.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, ed Blaina, Aaron Abert and Emily Matthews, three union officers for the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh who have all been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for over two and a half years. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Speaker 6:

When my fish you no longer see, I live on, yes, I live on wherever we go. We are going to roll the union on the Some I live on. Yes, I live on wherever Hungry, hungry. Are we just as hungry as hungry can be? The some I live on, yes. I live on where mean things are happening in this land. It’s red or sung. I live on, yes, I live on wherever the book mean things are happening. In this land is read. I live on, yes, I live on wherever the video tape of me showing I live on. Yes, I live on. If I have help to make this a better world to live in, I’ll live on. Yes, I live on when my body is silent and in some lonesome grave I’ll live on. Yes I on when my songs are on, I.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Journalists in Papua New Guinea are likely to face legal threats as powerful individuals and companies use court actions to silence public interest reporting, warns Media Council of PNG president Neville Choi.

As co-chair of the second Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) National Meeting, he said lawfare was likely because Parliament had passed no laws to protect reporters and individuals from such tactics.

Choi said journalists were being left unprotected against Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) — legal actions used by powerful individuals or corporations to silence criticism and reporting.

• READ MORE:The Media Council of PNG

“In Papua New Guinea right now, we don’t have any law to stop SLAPPs,” Choi said.

“Big corporations or organisations with more money can use lawsuits to silence people, civil society and the media. That’s the reality.”

SLAPPs are lawsuits filed not to win on merit, but to drain resources, silence critics, and stop public debate.

In some other countries, anti-SLAPP laws exist to protect journalists and whistleblowers. But in PNG, no such legal shield exists.

Legal pressure for speaking out
“We’ve seen it happen,” Choi added, referring to ACTNOW PNG’s Eddie Tanago, a civil society advocate who has faced legal pressure for speaking out.

“He’s experienced it. And we know it can happen to journalists too.”

Despite increasing threats, journalists do not have access to legal defence funds or institutional protection.

Choi confirmed that there was no system in place to defend reporters who were hit with defamation lawsuits or other forms of legal retaliation.

“Our advice to journalists is simple. Do your job well. The truth is the only protection we have,” he said.

“If you stick to facts, follow professional ethics and report responsibly, you reduce your risk. But if you make a mistake, you leave yourself open to lawsuits.”

The Media Council, in partnership with Transparency International under the CCAC, are discussing the idea of drafting an anti-SLAPP law but no formal proposal has been put forward yet.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”

More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

‘To pressure Hamas’

The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”

At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

Reporter Aaron Boxerman writes up top:

For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.

That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.

Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.

Who you choose to believe

The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”

But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:

The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.

While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”

You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.

Boxerman goes on to report:

Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.

It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”?  Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?

It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Research assistance: Wilson Korik

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry.

Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution.

Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world.

Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee.

Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle.

‘Harvested by trafficked slaves’

AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.”

The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign.

Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework.

The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil.

“This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”

The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.”

AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.”

More labor rights than US

New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.”

From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil.

Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned and/or deported by ICE.

The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm, as these sensational articles present.

Brazil’s coffee industry provides 580,000 full time jobs and millions of harvest-season temp jobs. According to Coffee Watch’s own letter, the highest number of workers rescued from “slave-like conditions” in any year since 2003 was 333, in 2023.

When Higonnet tells the Times that “thousands” of coffee workers in Brazil work in “outright slavery” (a more than semantic leap from the Brazilian legal category of “slave-like” working conditions), she is misleadingly referring to Coffee Watch’s composite figure of 4,128, cited in Coffee Watch’s letter to Customs as the total number of coffee workers rescued from “slave-like” conditions between 2003 and 2024.

Whereas the number of 221 workers rescued from slave-like conditions in 2024 certainly doesn’t represent the total number of workers subjected to those conditions that year, no methodology is presented to estimate what that undercount might be. The number of Brazil’s federal labor inspectors is 2,800, including 900 new hires this year, and the number estimated by IPEA needed to bring Brazil up to international standards is 3,700, so an undercount is a clear possibility, but it’s certainly a far cry from Collingsworth’s insinuation that most Starbucks coffee purchased from Brazil was produced by “trafficked slaves.”

On the back of slave labor

Guardian (4/24/25): “Starbucks charges like $6 for a cup of coffee, where most of that has been harvested by forced laborers and child laborers.”

Like the United States and most other countries in the Americas, Brazil was built on the back of slave labor, and was the last country to eradicate it, in 1888. The legacy of this today is that it has the highest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa, and huge problems of structural racism, including large but shrinking levels of inequality, and lack of opportunities for the poorest segments of society, which are disproportionately constituted of the 56% of the nation’s population that is Afro-Brazilian.

There is a large population of landless rural workers, who with support from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) have been successfully fighting for land rights since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in 1985. Today, although millions of landless rural workers toil away in degrading conditions for low wages on farms producing export commodity crops like coffee, sugar and soy—some of which cross the line into violating Brazil’s slave-labor legislation—there is also a growing population of millions of family farmers who don’t employ anyone.

Today, 78% of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms, producing around 48% of the total amount of coffee, are small-holder family farms. If Coffee Watch succeeds in lobbying the US government to halt imports from Brazil, the hardest-hit sector will be the same group that fair trade advocates work to empower. Without millions ferreted away in investment funds and offshore holdings, it’s the family farms that run the risk of financial ruin, not the agribusiness plantations, or companies like Starbucks and Nestlé that work with them. When small farmers lose their livelihood, they often become rural workers themselves, which, as Coffee Watch’s own letter to Border Patrol demonstrates, are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable labor sectors in Brazil.

Based on the actions of five farms that belong to a cooperative of 19,000 of them, Coffee Watch and the media organizations supporting its campaign are targeting an industry largely composed of family farmers. It’s reminiscent of Operation Car Wash, an “anti-corruption” campaign backed by the US DoJ that bankrupted Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies, and caused 4.4 million direct and indirect job losses, under the guise of punishing a handful of corrupt business executives.

Just as was the case with corruption in the construction industry, the directors of the farms, the cooperative and the US corporations they sell to deserve to be held liable for their labor crimes. But punishing the industry as a whole will cause disproportionate suffering for the working class and poor, and raise Brazil’s level of extreme poverty.

Different definitions

Coffee Watch’s letter to acting Customs Commissioner Pete R. Flores cited US and International Labor Organization (ILO) legislation on slave labor used to justify the demand to block coffee imports from Brazil, but uses the Brazilian federal government’s much wider definition of “slave-like” labor conditions for the facts and figures used to back its argument.

Brazil, a nation with a long history of slavery and oppressive labor conditions in rural areas, first recognized modern slavery as a problem in 1995, and widened its definition of “slave-like” labor in 2003 under President Lula da Silva. It created a series of enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for violating labor laws, including a “dirty list” of companies convicted of using slave labor. These employers are required to pay a minimum of 20 months salary at minimum wage to each rescued worker, as well as court fines, and can face up to eight years in prison.

Companies stay on the dirty list for two years and, during this time, are blocked from receiving government contracts or credit. Among the best-known companies that have appeared on the list is FEMSA, the world’s largest bottler of Coca-Cola. FEMSA was put on the list in 2018 after labor inspectors discovered truckers and warehouse workers at one of its Brazilian plants were being forced to work between 80 and 140 hours of overtime per month.

This was one of many cases in which “slave-like” working conditions, although oppressive and illegal, did not mean they were being held captive or forced to work for no remuneration. Brazil’s definition of slave-like working conditions has some overlap with US and ILO law, for example, holding workers in captivity and forcing them to work for very low or no wages. But it also includes things that are legal in the US, even for those US agricultural workers who are not undocumented, let alone the US’s 800,000 prison slave laborers.

As Brazil’s National Justice Council explains, the 2003 change in Brazil’s definition of slave labor represents

significant progress in the fight against this social problem, because it goes beyond lack of freedom, expanding the criminal definition of slavery to include cases of subjection to degrading working conditions, exhaustive work hours or debt bondage.

Coffee Watch’s own letter to Flores states:

The Brazilian approach to forced labor is somewhat more expansive than the ILO’s, as it may allow for prosecution of employers who subject workers to extremely degrading conditions, regardless of whether coercion was present in the employment relationship.

Any single violation of Brazil’s different criteria for slave-like working conditions makes the employer liable. This can include things like excessively long work days, not having an adequate number of bathrooms for the number of workers, making workers rent gloves and other safety equipment from the employer, not compensating workers for transportation to and from the work site, and not providing an adequate amount of drinking water. It would be easy enough for an organization such as Coffee Watch to verify this, but it’s a fair assumption to make that at least some of the coffee workers rescued from slave-like conditions since 2003 were victims of oppressive labor conditions that would not constitute slave labor by ILO or US legal criteria.

Landless rural laborers

This is in no way meant to minimize the oppression of those rural workers in Brazil’s coffee trade who are working in what Brazil’s government calls slave-like conditions. With over 1 million people employed in the sector, however, their situation is an outlier. Much more troublesome are the low wages and lousy working conditions that represent the norm in the industry—especially the fact that most temporary harvest laborers work off the books, outside of many of the safeguards in place to protect worker rights.

Another problem is the low number of labor inspectors—the result of six years of gutting of the Labor Ministry by neoliberal presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, who, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2017, left the government with neoliberal spending caps. These were only partially dismantled by a compromise amendment called the New Fiscal Framework, enacted as Lula returned to power in 2023.

Capping social spending increases at 2.5% per year above inflation may have led to the compromise of only hiring 900 of the 1,800 inspectors needed to bring Brazil up to international labor standards, but the fact remains that Brazil has not reached the goal of one inspector for 10,000–15,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization.

Around the world, landless rural laborers are among the most oppressed, poorest members of the labor force. Nevertheless, Brazilian coffee farms are not regularly raided by masked government police and their workers thrown into prison camps. In this political juncture, US institutions have little moral standing to criticize labor rights for agricultural workers in other countries—especially in countries like Brazil, whose labor rights issues stem in part from the US-backed military dictatorship’s systematic campaign of arrest, torture and murder of labor union leaders.

Fundraising boost

The idea that Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection would act to increase the price of coffee right now, in the name of “human rights,” based on abuses in five coffee farms, is very unlikely. This exposes the move as a publicity stunt, clearly designed to boost fundraising and legitimacy for a new NGO.

If Coffee Watch were focused more on improving the lives of coffee workers than on institutional promotion, it could show solidarity by supporting the MST and CONTAG in their fight to help landless agricultural workers start their own farms.

Taking big corporations like Starbucks and Nestlé to task for failing to obey local labor laws is commendable. But given the long history of US NGOs acting as regime change cheerleaders for the US State Department in Latin America, the priority that many of these organizations place on self-advancement over benefiting their target populations, and the long, cushy relationship between sleazy corporations like ExxonMobil and NGOs like Transparency International USA, can human rights guidelines for the Global South established by a US organization with no funding transparency really be trusted?

You would think a publication like the New York Times would exercise enough due diligence to include the voice of, say, someone from Brazil’s DA office, or an official from an agency that works to monitor, punish and prevent occurrences of slave-like working conditions. Instead, it published a slightly modified press release from Coffee Watch, and the journalists involved probably thought they were doing their good deed for the month.

Featured image: Cachoeirinha farm in Nova Resende, Brazil, on the government’s “dirty list” for labor abuses (photo: Ministry of Labor and Employment).

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Brian Mier.

Mehfuza Khatun shared the Facebook post on April 24, two days after the Pahalgam attack in which 26 people were killed. She alleged that gynaecologist Dr C K Sarkar had “refused” to treat her pregnant sister-in-law on account of the latter’s faith. A call recording was also released by the patient’s family, where one voice is heard confronting the other about some remarks made earlier.

This was a time when reports of retributive hate crimes against minorities started pouring in from various parts of the country in response to the Pahalgam massacre. According to survivors’ accounts, the terrorists had tried to single out non-Muslims from the tourists.

Alt News spoke with the patient and her husband and examined the phone from which calls were made to the doctor and her messages were received. Our investigation independently established that the doctor had indeed made Islamophobic comments and asked the patient to never go back to her since “people from her religion killed others.”

What Exactly Happened at Dr C K Sarkar’s Clinic on April 24

According to the aggrieved patient’s testimony given in the presence of her husband, she called up Dr Sarkar around 1:30 in the afternoon on April 24 and asked whether Dr Sarkar would be available at her home clinic in Maheshtala which is in the same apartment complex where the patient lived. Dr Sarkar agreed to see her between 3 and 4 pm. This was the fifth time she was visiting Dr Sarkar.

When the patient visited the clinic with her three-year-old daughter, and stated her full name, the doctor appeared offended. She then said, “I have decided not to see Mohammedan patients henceforth.”

When asked why, the doctor responded, “You’re killing people in Kashmir.” The patient replied, “What do I have to do with that?” The doctor then said, “People from your religion are killing people from my religion… how do I treat Mohammedan patients after that?”

The patient told us that she could only respond by saying, “The ones who are doing it are ignorant and uneducated.” The doctor allegedly then went on a communal rant in front of the three-year-old child, which lasted about 15 minutes. The patient could not recall everything that was said to her, as she “went blank”. Some of the remarks she remembered included, “You go to mosques and madrassas, and that is where terrorists are made”; and, “If you were on your honeymoon and your husband had been killed by people from my religion, then you would realise how painful it is.”

After her communal rant, the doctor clinically examined the patient and wrote out a prescription. The consultation fee was paid via UPI. As the patient was leaving the clinic, the doctor told her not to return, stating that she would no longer be seeing Muslim patients. However, she wrote ‘Review after 3 weeks’ in the prescription. Alt News has seen the prescription.

Once the patient left the clinic, she called up her husband immediately and recounted her ordeal. Some time later, at 4:26 pm, she gathered courage to call up Dr Sarkar again and confront her about the incident. This call had been recorded on the patient’s phone.

The Phone Call: “I won’t see any Mohammedan patients anymore… Don’t ever come to me again. You kill others.”

Here is a transcript of the conversation that took place:

Patient: *address* theke bolchi
I’m speaking from *address*.

Doctor: Hain bolo bolo
Yes, go ahead, speak.

Patient: Apni amake jei kotha gulo shonalen na ma’am, amar khub kharap legeche.
Ma’am, the things you said to me really hurt me.

Doctor: Keno? Ki kharap legeche?
Why? What hurt you?

Patient: Apni amake je bollen Mohammedan aar dekhbona.
You told me you won’t treat Mohammedans anymore.

Doctor: Dekhbona toh, ami ekhon theke promise korchi.
I won’t, I’m promising from now on.

Patient: Amar uchit chhilo apnake oi muhurte oshomman kore beriye chole asha.
I should have humiliated you and walked out at that very moment.

Doctor: (Unclear) Amar ki boye geche, ami aar dekhbona ekhon theke.
(Unclear) What do I have to lose? I won’t treat (Muslims) anymore from now on.

Patient: Na na, ami jabo o na apnar kache dekhate. But apnara skhikkhito… (unclear)
No, no, I won’t come to you for treatment either. But you are educated…

Overlapping voices…

Doctor: Tomra khun korbe… manush ke… (unclear) j dhormo bole khushir Eid.. Pabitra Eid.. (unclear)… manush ke khun kora ta ki pabitra Eid?
You people will kill… people… (unclear) the religion which celebrates Happy Eid, auspicious Eid… Killing people is auspicious Eid?

Patient: Accha ma’am, onekshomoy toh ache jara Hindu ra Muslim ke maarche… Amra ki kichu jani je ke maaarche, ke korche?
Ma’am, there are also times when Hindus kill Muslims… Do we even know who is killing whom?

(Doctor’s words are unclear for some time)

Doctor: Tomra shob jeneo chup kore thaako…(unclear)
You all stay silent even after knowing everything…(unclear)

Patient: Apni amake bokchen. Ami ki jani je ami ki korchi? Apni ekta shikkhito manush hoye erom byabohaar koren…
You’re scolding me..  You’re an educated person behaving in this way with me…

(Doctor’s words are unclear for some time)

Doctor: Tomader (unclear) shekhano hoy.
You people are taught (unclear).

Patient: Apni ekta shikkhito daktar hoye amar shonge… apni patient dekhben. Apni patient er shaathe orokom byabohaar korun.. koren tahole…
You, being an educated doctor, should be treating patients. If you treat patients like this then…

Doctor: Na ami dekhbo na, keno dekhbo, je dhormer lokera amar dhormo ke ebhabe maare?
No, why should I treat them? Why would I treat people of a religion who attack my religion like this?

Patient: Keu kauke marchena… (unclear)
No one is killing anyone… (unclear)

Patient: Ami apnake patient dekhate gechi, ami toh maarte jaini ghore.
I came to you as a patient, not to kill anyone in your house.

Doctor: Hain oitoh bari giyei tomar mathar modhhye shob dhukiye diyeche oigulo, jani toh.
Of course, those things have been stuffed into your head at home, I know that.

Patient: Barite keu dhokayeni madam… apni amake bollen… khub kharap lagchilo.
No one has brainwashed me at home, madam… Whatever you said to me… I felt very bad.

Doctor: Kharap lagar kichu nei, tumi jeta kharap (unclear) jara terrorist taader ke mere dite hobe.
There’s nothing to feel bad about. What is wrong… (unclear)… the terrorists must be killed.

Patient: Apnake osomman korbona bole apnake dekhiye ami elam. Apni khub kharap byabohaar korechen amar shaathe.
I did not want to humiliate you, hence I sat through the consultation. You misbehaved with me.

Doctor: Na ekdom kharap korini. Ami aar ekdom e dekhbona, ami aar kono Mohammedan patient dekhbona.
No, I didn’t behave badly at all. I just won’t treat… I won’t treat any Mohammedan patients anymore.

Patient: Apni dekhben na, apni bhaar mein jaan apni dekhben ki dekhben na, apnar byapar.
Whether you treat or not, you go to hell.. whether you treat or not, that’s your business.

Doctor: Asho keno amar kache? Lojja korena ashte?
Then why do you come to me? Don’t you feel ashamed to come here?

Patient: Ami jaani apni ekta boro terrorist?
I know you’re a big terrorist, right?

Doctor: Aar konodin ashbena amar kache. Tumi khun koro manush.
Don’t ever come to me again. You kill others.

Patient: Apnio khun kora manush.
You also kill people.

It is clear from the above conversation that when Dr Sarkar was confronted about her remarks, she remained defiant and repeated that she would not be treating Muslim patients in future.

After the Facebook post describing the patient’s ordeal had gone viral, Dr Sarkar sent an apology text to the patient.  In her messages sent through WhatsApp, she said she was sorry if she had ‘disheartened’ the patient. She says that she was sick “due to loss of my close family members relatives.” (sic) “Don’t take it otherwise and don’t harrass me unnecessarily”. Dr Sarkar, in a third message, said that a few patients had been cruel towards her in the last few days. She was upset and thinking of closing her practice in the area, and so she said that. “U r my good patient I will always take care of u if u feel so ,” (sic) she wrote. Alt News is in possession of a screenshot and a screen recording of the WhatsApp chat, but we are not making it public.

“If she is trying to justify why she said something, she must have said something reprehensible”, the patient’s husband observed, while showing us the WhatsApp messages.

After the patient’s ordeal was reported by some media outlets, Dr Sarkar went on to issue a video statement saying, “I am Dr C K Sarkar. I have been a medical practitioner for the last 30 years in Behala, South 24 Parganas. I believe in medical ethics. All patients are equal to me, I prioritize all my patients equally. I see no value in caste, religion and race. I try to treat my patients properly and ethically. If some people had a problem with me… please do not listen to the rumours. I know there have been attempts to sabotage my career on social media and in news reports. These kinds of rumours are spread during a time of crisis. I hope you will not fall for it.” The statement was uploaded on Facebook by an anesthesiologist named Promod Ranjan Roy.

The ‘Domestic Help’ Theory

When The Quint contacted Dr. Sarkar, she denied the allegations and stated that she had many Muslim patients and thus had no reason to discriminate. “I was talking to my maid about what had happened in Pahalgam when she (the patient) visited me. I never made such communal remarks, why would I?” She also stated that she had sent an apology to the patient. When asked about the call recording, Dr Sarkar alleged that the call recording had been tampered with.

She made the same allegation in a chat with a journalist named Anindya Chowdhury. “I never said that I would not see Mohammedan (Muslim) patients. She wrongly interpreted my words,” she said in a telephonic interview. Throughout the interview, Dr Sarkar reiterated that the phone call recording had been tampered with.

The West Bengal Doctors’ Forum (WBDF) said in a statement, “It appears that some discussions unrelated to the patient, involving members of the doctor’s household, may have inadvertently been overheard. If any such conversation was not to the patient’s liking, it is beyond the professional purview of the doctor to address private matters of household conversations.”

Responding to these claims, the patient told Alt News that at no point did the doctor address her house-help while making those remarks. The house-help’s working hours coincided with the patient’s appointment, and she was present around the house. She had left a few minutes before the patient’s departure. The patient also categorically stated that when Dr. Sarkar asked her not to go back to her ever again, the domestic help had left by then.

WBDF also asked for “an independent investigation involving the doctor and the aggrieved person to unearth the truth in a neutral way.”

Propaganda Outlets Question Veracity of Call Recording

Taking a dig at The Quint for reporting on the incident, propaganda website OpIndia published a ‘fact-check’ of the incident. OpIndia called the patient’s ordeal a “fake story” and proceeded to provide what they called ‘evidences’ to invalidate it. While refuting the patient’s allegations, OpIndia has claimed that the phone call recording is ‘unverified’. The outlet emphasized the need for a forensic investigation of the purported audio clip.

OpIndia posted a thread of their ‘fact-check’. Here are the archive links of each tweet of the thread: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

#Exclusive

Do you remember the story of a Kolkata-based doctor who ‘denied’ treatment to a Muslim patient over the Pahalgam terror attack?

Turns out it was fake news.

It was peddled by The Quint, Maktoob Media & others to create the narrative of ‘Muslim victimhood’

(1/n) pic.twitter.com/tWIxxbo1su

— OpIndia.com (@OpIndia_com) April 30, 2025

Only Fact, run by Vijay Patel who identifies himself as an investigative reporter, published a fact-check as well. Quoting Dr Sarkar, they also claimed that the recording was fake and edited. Here is an archive of the ‘fact-check’.

No, Dr. Champakali Sarkar Did Not Refuse Treatment to a Muslim Patient After Pahalgam Attackhttps://t.co/0ag5l5yBDJ

— Only Fact (@OnlyFactIndia) April 30, 2025

When this correspondent visited the patient’s house on May 1, Alt News received access to the phone from which the call to Dr Sarkar was made. We examined it by going to the Phone app (inbuilt app), from which the call was made, and played the recording. The call was made at 4:26 pm on April 24.

A screen-recording of the whole process can be seen below. The dialed number (that of the doctor) has been purposely hidden. Alt News tried to reach out to Dr Sarkar on the same number. The person who answered the call identified herself as Dr Sarkar, but refused to comment.

From the video of the call recording and the metadata of the video, we can conclusively say that the call recording released by the victim’s family has not been tampered with. Consequently, it can also be ascertained that Dr Sarkar admitted to making communal remarks while defending herself, where she generalized Muslims as people who kill others.

“I don’t have a problem with the doctor refusing to treat my wife in future. Though it is perhaps unethical, it is her call. What I strongly object to is the communal discrimination. What she told my wife is an expression of a mindset that has the potential to disrupt communal harmony in a society. That is what bothers me so much,” the husband of the patient, who is an optometrist by profession, said.

The post ‘People from your faith kill others. Don’t come to me again,’ Kolkata doctor told pregnant Muslim woman appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Two years ago, Texas lawmakers quietly cut millions of dollars in funding for kits intended to help track down missing kids, after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed there was no evidence they had aided law enforcement in finding lost children.

The company that made the kits had used outdated and exaggerated statistics on missing children to bolster their sales and charged for the materials when similar products were available for less or for free.

Now, some Texas legislators are again pushing to spend millions more in taxpayer dollars to purchase such kits, slipping the funding into a 1,000-page budget proposal.

Although the proposal does not designate which company would supply them, a 2021 bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell all but guarantees Texas will contract with the same vendor, the National Child Identification Program. Back then, Campbell made clear that her intent was to enshrine into law a long-standing partnership between the state and NCIDP that goes back more than two decades. Her legislation, signed into law that June, also specified that whenever the state allocated funding for such materials, the Texas Education Agency must purchase identification kits that are “inkless,” a technology that NCIDP has patented.

The Waco-based company is led by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who ProPublica and the Tribune found had a history of failed businesses and financial troubles, including millions of dollars in federal tax liens and a ban from conducting certain finance-related business in Connecticut due to his role in an alleged scheme to defraud investors.

Hansmire cultivated relationships with powerful Texas legislators who went on to support his initiatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, championed Campbell’s legislation funding the kits and later told the news organizations that the state should prioritize anything that can speed up the return of a missing child. Campbell told lawmakers in a hearing that the bipartisan measure, which was brought to her by Hansmire and Patrick, was important to “protect our children.”

Patrick, Campbell and Hansmire did not respond to interview requests for this story. Hansmire previously told the newsrooms that his debts and other financial issues had been resolved. He also defended his company’s kits, saying they have helped find multiple missing children, and instructed reporters to ask “any policeman” about the kits’ usefulness. However, none of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that the news organizations reached — including three that Hansmire specifically named — could recall any examples.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant and former Louisiana State Police sergeant who oversaw that state’s Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said she has never seen any cases demonstrating that these kits work, including in the last two years since lawmakers discontinued the funding.

“I don’t understand why we’re going back to this,” said Pearson, who spoke with the newsrooms recently and for their previous investigation. “It wasn’t a good idea in 2023 and it’s not a good idea now.”

Despite the lack of evidence, Pearson said companies like NCIDP are able to profit off the kits by marketing them as part of a larger child safety program, a strategy that makes opposing lawmakers look as if they are against protecting children. Texas allocated nearly $6 million for the kits between 2021 and 2023.

Lawmakers did not explain their reasoning when they decided to stop paying for the kits in 2023. Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, who chairs the high chamber’s Finance Committee, told the newsrooms at the time that both the House and the Senate had agreed to remove the funding “after review and consideration.”

During this year’s budgeting process, Democratic state Rep. Armando Martinez proposed adding $2 million to the House’s budget to provide kits to families with children in kindergarten through second grade.

Martinez did not respond to an interview request.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

Bonnen was among the 33 lawmakers who voted against Campbell’s bill that established the child identification kit funding four years ago. The newsrooms attempted to reach a handful of those legislators, but none responded.

Huffman and the Senate have so far chosen not to restore the program’s funding. Huffman declined the newsrooms’ interview requests.

“The entire budget process is ongoing,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “No final decisions have been made on most issues.”

Legislators from the two chambers will continue hashing out the differences between their budget proposals in a joint committee that operates behind closed doors. There’s no guarantee that the funding will make it into the final budget, which lawmakers must pass before the legislative session ends in early June.

Pearson cautioned legislators to question whether the kits are the best use of state funding, given the absence of documented success.

“My advice would be for lawmakers to ask themselves, ‘If this was your personal money and not the taxpayers’, would you spend it on this program?’” Pearson said. “And the answer is going to be no.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

An alliance between the far right and Silicon Valley oligarchs has given rise to a form of “end times fascism,” says journalist Naomi Klein, who details in a recent essay co-authored with Astra Taylor how many wealthy elites are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. Klein says that while billionaires dream of escaping to bunkered enclaves or even to space, President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders are turning their countries into militarized fortress states to keep out immigrants from abroad and ramp up authoritarian control domestically.

“There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and ’40s had a horizon” for a utopian future, says Klein. Today, by contrast, “we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future — not just actively betting against it, but fueling the fires that are burning this world.”

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

Image by Thanos Pal.

Once again, Donald Trump is taking steps to destroy our planet. He signed an executive order fast-tracking deep-sea mining in U.S. and international waters for critical minerals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese. The problem is that such activity will cause irreversible damage to fragile deep-sea ecosystems.

The Trump administration has framed the directive, which involves the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, as a strategy to boost the U.S. economy and counter China’s dominance in mineral supply chains. They claim it secures America’s national interests but it threatens marine ecosystems, violates global governance, and creates a diplomatic problem where none needs to exist in the first place.

A 1970s mining test, reviewed by the National Oceanography Centre, showed that while some deep-sea creatures recovered after mining, larger animals did not return to the test site. Trump’s directive, which encourages mining without robust environmental safeguards, risks permanent damage. Environmental groups like Oceana and the Center for Biological Diversity are warning that heavy machinery scraping the seabed will disrupt ecosystems for centuries, with sediment plumes smothering marine life and altering oxygen flows. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, considered a prime mining target, is important to scientists due to its rich marine life and they fear it will disappear forever if Trump gets his way.

Not enough research has been conducted to safely ensure that we will not permanently destroy marine ecosystems. The deep sea is fragile and highly misunderstood. Other countries, such as France and Canada, understand the seriousness of the situation and have called for a moratorium until countries can agree on stronger regulations. Trump, of course, has no respect for international maritime law or the concern of other countries and is intent on disregarding scientific consensus, jeopardizing fragile marine ecosystems, and threatening an environmental disaster. Through his order, Trump is deliberately attempting to preempt global consensus on this sensitive and important issue and risks sparking a free-for-all in international waters, as competing nations will exploit resources without any international oversight.

By signing such a directive, Trump is flouting the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Furthermore, the ISA is working on negotiations to finalize mining rules and if Trump bypasses the ISA, what is the point of rules-based order? This will cause nothing but retaliation between countries, perhaps a possible conflict, and certainly the erosion of trust.

Of course the White House is calling its effort to carry out destructive deep-sea mining as a boon for the U.S. economy, and estimates it will cause $300 billion in GDP growth and bring in more than 100,000 jobs over the next decade. But will it? This is nothing but speculation aimed at exciting the public. The facts remain that deep-sea minig has not been proven to be cost-effective commercially, and environmentalists agree that land-based resources are sufficient to meet America’s mineral demands.

In fact, Trump’s directive willfully ignores the economic fallout of environmental damage that deep-sea mining will cause. Fishery operations will be disrupted, waters will become contaminated, and any lost biodiversity will harm coastal communities and industries reliant on healthy oceans.

Trump’s “America First” approach may sound like music to MAGA ears, but this policy endangers deep-sea ecosystems, causes severe ecological devastation, flouts international law, and rejects global cooperation. We must protect – not exploit or destroy – our oceans.

Trump should be taking seriously the warnings of scientists, environmentalists, and climate activists. Instead of racing to mine the ocean bed and destroy fragile ecosystems, the U.S. should join global efforts to study and protect deep-sea ecosystems. It’s not “America First” – it’s “Our Planet First.”

The post Don’t Let Trump Get Away with Deep Sea Mining  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

Cargo ship on the Columbia River bound for Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Trump tariff story keeps getting crazier. It may seem like ancient history now, but it was just over three weeks ago that Donald Trump gave us “Liberation Day,” a set of massive tariffs on imports from almost every country in the world, including the uninhabited Heard and McDonald islands off the coast of Antarctica.

The tariffs were billed as “reciprocal” even though they bore no relationship to any tariffs or other trade barriers these countries impose on US exports. Incredibly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick actually defended the Heard and McDonald Islands’ tariff, insisting that it was not a mistake at all but rather to prevent transshipment from other countries attempting to evade tariffs.

Lutnick’s explanation was obviously absurd. First, they left many other uninhabited islands without tariffs, apparently leaving the door open for transshipment through them. More importantly, if our customs staff really can’t catch items coming in from uninhabited islands, then they will be completely useless dealing with a complex system of tariffs charging vastly different rates between countries and on different products from the same country. The bottom line is that we yet again see how the Trump administration finds itself unable to admit a mistake.

But back to the timeline: As the markets were crashing Trump backed away on April 9, eliminating his so-called reciprocal tariffs and saying that he would lower his tariff on most countries to 10 percent. Note that this is still a very large tariff. When we negotiated trade deals with Mexico, Canada, and other countries their average tariffs were already well below 10 percent. In the context of “reciprocal” tariffs that were as high as 40 or 50 percent, Trump’s fallback tariff seemed low, but not by pre-Trump real world standards.

Trump boasted that a reason for the rollback was that 75 countries around the world had called to negotiate with him, although he refused to give the list of countries. Trump also went ahead and imposed 25 percent taxes on imports of steel and aluminum, which went into effect in March. He imposed 25 percent taxes on imports of cars and car parts which went into effect at the start of this month.

The big tariff that Trump did not delay on April 9 was the 104 percent tax on imports from China. He actually raised this to 124 percent in response to China’s retaliation. He raised his tax further to 154 percent a few days later and some items are even subject to higher taxes. In addition to its retaliatory tariffs, China also announced that it was suspending exports of rare earth minerals which are essential for many manufacturing processes in the United States. It also is boycotting US soybeans, which means US soybean farmers are losing their largest customer.

But then Trump decided to exempt smartphones and a number of other electronic devices from his massive taxes on China’s imports. Whether this was due to a special relationship with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, or concern about outraged consumers looking at $2,000 iPhones, is anyone’s guess.

The tariff game is still far from over. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the tariff levels between the US and China were not sustainable and Trump hinted they would likely come down soon, even though there was no evidence of high level negotiations. These comments got a great reaction from financial markets, leading to big stock rallies, but left open the question as to the purpose of the tariffs.

Just to remind everyone, if we go back to “Liberation Day,” Trump’s tariffs were supposed to be about bringing manufacturing back to the United States and ending our trade deficits. Many of us pointed out that this was unlikely to work even in the best case scenario. But if the tariffs were just a negotiating ploy, or a way for Trump to extort favors, they are certainly not going to have much impact on manufacturing. They may make Trump even richer, but no one will invest in the United States based on a tariff that can disappear in a year or even a week.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump’s Now You See Them, Now You Don’t Tariffs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Image by Edgar Serrano.

As residents of a Vermont town that recently passed the AFSC Apartheid-Free Communities pledge, we write today to ask our Vermont state and federal representatives to stop collaborating with the weapons industry made up of corporations like GlobalFoundries, General Dynamics, and Israel’s Elbit Systems that, besides building deadly weapons, have been exposed as causing severe harm to our pristine Vermont environment.

American and Israeli weapons are being used to continue the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and we oppose this warmongering system. We strongly object to Vermont being a home to these global corporations. We object especially given that our delegation to Washington, Senators Sanders and Welch and Representative Balint have brought legislation to stop the flow of offensive weapons to Israel. Besides being part of an industry that makes things that kill and oppress people, including in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, these companies also produce surveillance tools that abridge our own rights and freedoms. But that is a whole story of its own.

Voters in Winooski, Plainfield, Thetford, Newfane, and Brattleboro passed the Apartheid-Free pledge and joined together to stop support in Vermont for Israeli apartheid and occupation that makes genocide possible. At our own town meeting in Thetford, residents were reminded that in the 1980s Vermonters protested South African apartheid which resulted in the passage of a Vermont divestment bill. As Vermont voters who have signed on to the AFSC pledge, it is our task to take on the powerful weapons companies in Vermont.

The means of collaboration with these weapons companies is through our

congressional delegation’s and state government’s political aspirations to bring high tech jobs to Vermont. Our state government is also dedicating 4.5 million dollars to make Vermont a high tech hub, and as Governor Scott’s office boasts in a press release last year, “to transform the Green Mountain State into a world leader” in semiconductor production. We ask our representatives at both the state and the federal level to oppose these chip-making industries in Vermont that make targeting systems that kill civilians even though touted as “smart.” We believe that now more than ever Vermont’s business-as-usual exposes all of us to the moral hazard of Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions. We are therefore compelled to inform fellow citizens that Vermont officials are in fact collaborating with a system fueling genocide in Gaza and the apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The weapons industry, furthermore, is a double-edged sword in Vermont. Besides being for war, the manufacture of these weapons and weapons components is ruining our environment. The largest employer in Vermont, Globalfoundries, is a major polluter. A recent article in Seven Days exposed this tragic situation: “Water samples submitted to state regulators since 2023 show 17 different PFAS present in wastewater regularly released into the [Winooski] river from the Essex Junction plant.” These “forever chemicals” linger in the environment causing cancer, birth defects, reduced immune system function, and learning and behavioral problems for children–and there is a growing call to eliminate their use. Additionally, the vast amounts of water and electricity required to make these chips puts a strain on our environment. This high tech industry is really a manifestation of the war industry in Vermont, and it is misusing our resources as well as creating a toxic environment for Vermonters.

The online news site Vermont Digger reported that the Department of Defense has awarded nearly 200 million dollars to defense contractors General Dynamics (Williston) and Elbit Systems (one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers based in Haifa, Israel) to supply the army with the Iron Fist Active Protection System. A General Dynamics brochure states that the system works by launching a small warhead from atop a vehicle “defeating or destructing the threat through a shock wave effect.” At the same time, another of Vermont’s large weapons manufacturers, Globalfoundries, participates in the trusted foundry program for the department of defense, producing chips for aerospace and defense systems. Globalfoundries exposes itself as a war-maker by showing the controversial F-35 fighter jet in its own promo about the “trusted foundry program.” Nothing subtle here.

As we’ve said, while these companies, and the contracts our politicians help bring in for them, build weapons of war, they also hurt our Vermont environment and will cause health problems going forward. Marguerite Adelman of the Vermont PFAS/Military Poisons Coalition contends that “after the celebrated grants and contracts have been fulfilled, Vermont citizens will be paying personally with their health and their money for a very long time.”

Vermonters don’t want these lethal things produced in our state with our tax money. We want be promoting education, health care, energy self-sufficiency, basic needs that continue to require our attention. We are asking our Vermont representatives to not collaborate with a system designed for making wars. Let’s set a good example in Vermont, and truly work towards peace and a healthy environment

Lynne Rogers and Duncan Nichols live in Thetford, Vermont

The post Don’t Collaborate With the War Industry appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings. 

Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been. 

For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.

Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.

“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program. 

And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier. 

“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.

An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.

No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.

Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers. 

“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.

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Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.

While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.” 

It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine. 

Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.

Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information. 

But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. on Apr 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Photograph Source: Oren Rozen – CC BY-SA 4.0

In conversations about Israel and Palestine, I am often asked about my views on the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

My questioners point to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul over the past two years and inquire why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end Netanyahu’s rule.

My answer is simple – the real problem facing Israel is not its current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, and particularly not in relation to the basic human rights of Palestinians. A recent Israeli Supreme Court decision underscores my point.

On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with Israel’s Supreme Court, asking the court to instruct the Israeli government and military to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and address the civilian population’s humanitarian needs amid the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

The petition was submitted at a time when aid was entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimal needs of the population, of whom 75 percent had already been displaced. The rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north where there were already documented cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.

The court did not issue a ruling for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue restricting aid unchecked. Three weeks after the rights groups filed the petition, the court convened only to provide the government additional time to update its preliminary response to the petition. This set the tone for how the petition would proceed over the next 12 months.

Each time the petitioners provided data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and emphasized the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government for further updates. In its April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023, and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the checkpoints. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to every humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not come close to meeting the population’s needs.

In October 2024, at least half a year after the petition was submitted, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government claimed that it had been monitoring the situation in northern Gaza closely and that there was “no shortage of food”. Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza – thus acknowledging that the aid entering the Strip was insufficient.

On March 18, 2025, after Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed its bombardment of Gaza and the minister of energy and infrastructure halted the supply of electricity to the Strip, the petitioners submitted yet another urgent request for an interim order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court failed to issue a ruling.

Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations had filed the petition, the court issued a verdict. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that it lacked merit. Justice David Mintz interlaced his response with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] and the respondents went above and beyond to enable the provision of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even while taking the risk that the aid transferred would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”

Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed again and again to acute levels of malnutrition and starvation, Israel’s Supreme Court – both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling – has ignored Israel’s legal obligation to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including by wilfully impeding relief supplies. In effect, the court legitimized the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

This is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. It’s March 27 ruling – and almost all other rulings involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial court – one that protects the rights of the settler population while legitimizing the dispossession, displacement, and horrific violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court might not reflect the values of the existing government – particularly on issues relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.

Hence, the liberal Zionists who fill Tel Aviv’s streets every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial overhaul that endangers democracy, but against an overhaul that endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the court’s horrific ruling on humanitarian aid, or, for that matter, on how the court has consistently upheld Israeli apartheid and colonial pillars. The regime, in other words, can continue to eliminate Palestinians unhindered as long as the rights of Israel’s Jewish citizenry are secured.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera.

The post Why I Don’t Cheer for Israel’s ‘Pro-Democracy’ Movement appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Neve Gordon.

Ultrabulk, trans-oceanic cargo ship, Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Okay, maybe you do read these in the newspaper, but not as much as you should.

1) The dollar’s status as the leading reserve currency does not mean we have to run a trade deficit,

2) There is no direct relationship between the budget deficit and the trade deficit,

3) The explosion in the size of the trade deficit at the start of the century cost millions of manufacturing jobs,

4) The trade deficit is considerably smaller today than it was two decades ago,

5) Manufacturing jobs are not necessarily good jobs. Unions made them good jobs, not the factories.

The graph below shows the trade deficit back to 1947. It helps to make several of these points.

The Dollar as a Reserve Currency and the Trade Deficit

Many people claim that the United States has to run a trade deficit in order to supply the rest of the world with dollars, since it is the leading reserve currency in the world. This story is badly confused for two reasons.

First, while the dollar is the leading reserve currency, it is not the only reserve currency. Euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, and even Swiss francs are held as reserves by central banks. Most reserves are in the form of dollars, but these other currencies can be and are used as alternatives. The same is true for international trade. While most trade is carried through in dollars, companies and countries use whatever currency they find convenient, and often this is not dollars.

The other point of confusion is that the United States can provide other countries with dollars without running a trade deficit. This can be clearly seen in the years from 1947 to 1973, when the US ran modest trade surpluses in most years. During this period, the United States literally was the world’s reserve currency, with other currencies being legally pegged to the dollar.

They were able to acquire dollars though US foreign investment. If the US is investing more abroad than foreigners are investing here, then we will be supplying the rest of the world with dollars without running a trade deficit.

The Relationship Between the Budget Deficit and the Trade Deficit

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s it was common to refer to the budget deficit and trade deficit as “twin deficits.” The argument was that the budget deficit meant that we had insufficient national savings and therefore had to borrow from abroad, which implied a trade deficit. (I’m skipping some steps, but that was the underlying logic of the argument.)

This argument never fit the data very closely even in those years. The trade deficit was brought down from 3.0 percent of GDP in 1987 to less than 0.4 percent of GDP by the fourth quarter of 1991, even as the budget deficit was increasing as a share of GDP. The story fell apart completely in the late 1990s as the trade deficit expanded to almost 4.0 percent of GDP even as the government was running a budget surplus.

The story here was the value of the dollar against other currencies. In 1987, the Reagan administration negotiated with our major trading partners to bring down the value of the dollar against the German Mark, the French franc (this was pre-euro), the British pound, and the Japanese yen. This process proved successful, as the dollar fell in value against these currencies and the trade deficit fell with it.

The trade deficit remained relatively low until the mid-nineties, when Robert Rubin replaced Lloyd Bentsen as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and adopted an explicit high dollar policy. They put meat on the bones of this policy in the East Asian financial crisis where the I.M.F. insisted that the fast-growing East Asian countries pay off their debts rather than get a partial write-down. This meant lowering the value of their currencies against the dollar, so that they could run large trade surpluses.

The harsh I.M.F. policy also prompted other developing countries, including China, to accumulate as many dollars as they could as insurance, so that they would not face the same fate as the East Asian countries. This meant keeping down the value of their currencies against the dollar. China was the most important country accumulating large quantities of dollars, but many other developing countries were following the same path. In the first years of the new century, the trade deficit expanded further, eventually peaking at over 6.0 percent of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The Tale of Two Graphs: The Trade Deficit in the 00s Cost Millions of Manufacturing Jobs

Many economists claim that we lost manufacturing jobs due to productivity growth and that the trade deficit had little or nothing to do with it. They show this point with a graph that shows manufacturing jobs declining as a share of total employment in more or less a straight line from 1970 to 2010.

I counter this with another graph showing the absolute number of jobs in manufacturing. While this fluctuates with the business cycle, there is only a modest downward trend from 1970 to 2000. From 2000 to 2007, before the Great Recession, we lost 4 million manufacturing jobs, or one quarter of the total. We lost another two million in the recession, although we later got roughly half of these jobs back.

It is dishonest to claim that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the 00s was just due to productivity. It’s pretty odd that productivity just happened to cost so many jobs when the trade deficit was exploding but not in the prior 30 years or subsequent 15 years. States in the Midwest, like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, lost 30 to 40 percent of their manufacturing jobs. This was a huge deal to the affected workers and their communities. We need to recognize this fact. Also, it could have been avoided; there was nothing natural about the pattern of globalization we followed.

One last point, the productivity folks are right in the sense that even if we got the trade deficit to zero, we would only see a modest increase in the number of manufacturing jobs. By my calculation, it would go from 8.0 percent of the labor force to 9.0 percent of the labor force. That is not exactly transformational.

The Trade Deficit Has Fallen Sharply in the Last Fifteen Years

I realized that there is enormous confusion about the size of the trade deficit when I saw a New York Times article earlier this week that told readers the trade deficit was $1.2 trillion and that this was record high. Both parts of this story are wrong. The trade deficit was actually $900 billion last year. The $1.2 trillion figure is only for trade in goods. The US runs a large surplus on trade in services — items like insurance, shipping, and payments for intellectual products. There is no obvious reason to exclude services from the story.

Also, the fact that the deficit is not anywhere near a record when measured as a share of GDP (the only reasonable measure), is also important. Calling it a record implies that the deficit is large and growing, which could seem scary. In fact, it is roughly half the size of its peak in 2005. Insofar as we see the trade deficit as a problem, it is half as large a problem as it was twenty years ago.

Unions Made Manufacturing Jobs Good Jobs, Not the Factories

In 1980, manufacturing jobs offered better pay and benefits, especially for non-college educated workers, than other jobs. This is no longer true. Most or all of the manufacturing wage premium has been eliminated.

The obvious explanation for this fact is the decline of unionization in manufacturing. In 1980, almost one-third of manufacturing workers belonged to a union compared to just 15 percent in the rest of the private sector. Last year, these numbers were 8.0 percent for manufacturing compared to 6.0 percent for the rest of the private sector. That 2.0 percentage point gap does not make much difference in terms of pay and benefits for workers in manufacturing.

This means that there is little reason to prefer manufacturing jobs to jobs in health care, transportation or other sectors. If we want workers to have good-paying jobs, we should want to see more union jobs, whether in manufacturing or any other sector.

Facts Beat Confusion

There is much nonsense in debates on trade — and not all of it is coming from the Trump administration. There is plenty of room for disagreement on policy going forward, but the disagreements will not change these five facts.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Five Facts About Trade You Don’t Read in the Newspaper appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

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On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.

DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney general’s defense team that beat back public corruption charges.

Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.

“This whole program sounds like money laundering,” he said.

Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.

“We should look into civil RICO charges,” Mazzara said.

DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Security’s top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.

“I took it as a threat,” one attendee said. “It was traumatizing.”

For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trump’s administration. They policed language that Trump’s appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.

None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.

“All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today,” one worker texted after the announcement that they’d been fired.

Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administration’s move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as it has done elsewhere. “DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

CRCL staff “often functioned as internal adversaries to slow down operations,” McLaughlin added. She did not address questions from ProPublica about the February meeting. Mazzara and Schutt did not reply to requests for comment.

The office’s closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didn’t want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.

The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 — on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, a CRCL investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.

Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.

“Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and that’s the point,” a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, “They don’t want oversight. They don’t care about civil rights and civil liberties.”

The CRCL staff, most of them lawyers, emphasized that their work is not politically motivated, nor is it limited to immigration issues. For instance, sources said the office was investigating allegations that disaster aid workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency had skipped over houses that displayed signs supporting Trump during the 2024 election.

“The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties touches on everyone,” one fired employee said. “There’s this perception that we’re only focused on immigrants, and that’s just not true.”

The final days of the civil rights office unfolded in a cloud of uncertainty and panic, as with other federal offices getting “RIF’d,” the Beltway verb for the government’s “reduction in force.”

Staff members described the weeks before the shutdown as a whittling away of their work. Dozens of investigative memos posted online in a transparency initiative? Deleted from the site. The eight-person team on racial equity issues? Immediately placed on leave. Travel funds to check conditions at detention centers? Reduced to $1.

As fear intensified that the civil rights office would be dismantled, staff tried to lie low. Leaders told staff to stop launching investigations that came from media reports, previously a common avenue for inquiries. Now, only official complaints from the public would be considered.

Staff was particularly frustrated that under this new mandate it couldn’t open an official investigation into the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal resident who was arrested for participating in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

With dozens of employees spread across branches or working remotely, many civil rights staffers had never met their colleagues — until the Trump administration’s return-to-office order forced them to come in five days a week. By early March, when reality had sunk in that their jobs were likely to be eliminated, they began quietly organizing, setting up encrypted Signal chat groups and sharing updates on lawsuits filed by government workers in other agencies.

“It’s inspiring how federal employees are pushing back and connecting,” one worker said.

Beyond Trump’s mandate to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, leaders told staff to omit from memos words such as “however,” which might sound combative, or “stakeholders,” which came across as too warm and fuzzy.

“Daily life was one miserable assignment after the next,” a staffer said. The orders coming down from Trump appointees were intended to “basically tell us how to undo your office.”

In what would be the last days of the office, the atmosphere was “chilling” and “intimidating.” Some personnel froze, too afraid to make recommendations, while others risked filing new investigations in final acts of defiance.

When the news came on a Friday that they were all being fired, civil rights staff were told they couldn’t issue any out-of-office reply, one former senior official said.

They are still technically employees, on paid leave until May 23. Many have banded together and are exploring legal remedies to get their jobs back. In the interim, if complaints are coming in, none of the professionals trained to receive them are around.

Days after the meeting in which allegations of money laundering and organized crime were loosely thrown at CRCL employees, the program in question was shut down. That effort had essentially earmarked money to local charities to provide nonviolent immigrants with case workers who connect them to services such as human trafficking screening and information on U.S. law. Created by Congress in 2021, the goal was to keep immigrants showing up to court.

Now, Trump’s DHS is suggesting the case worker program is somehow involved in human smuggling. Erol Kekic, a spokesperson for the charity the federal government hired to administer funds in that program, said Church World Services received a “weirdly worded letter” that baffled the organization’s attorneys.

“They said there could be potential human trafficking,” he said, referring to DHS. “But they didn’t accuse us directly of it.”

The nonprofit is working on its response, he said.

Elsewhere, the absence of Homeland Security’s civil rights oversight is already reverberating.

With their office closed, CRCL staff now fear the hypotheticals: At ports of entry, Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure are relaxed; if CBP abuses its power to root through phones and laptops, who will investigate? And if DHS began arresting U.S. citizens for First Amendment protected speech? Their office would have been the first line of defense.

As an example of cases falling through the cracks, CRCL staff told ProPublica they had recommended an investigation into the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University who was in the country on a valid work visa. Federal prosecutors said in court she was detained at an airport in Boston in connection with “sympathetic photos and videos” on her phone of leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Reuters reported she told border authorities she did not support Hezbollah but admired the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons.

Staff also wanted to look into the case of a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico along with her parents when they hit an immigration checkpoint as they rushed to an emergency medical visit.

In Colorado, immigration attorney Laura Lunn routinely filed complaints with CRCL, saying pleas with ICE officials at its Aurora detention center were often ignored. Those complaints to CRCL have stopped her clients from being illegally deported, she said, or gotten emergency gynecological care for a woman who had been raped just before being detained.

But now, she asks, “Who do I even go to when there are illegal things happening?”

Lunn’s group, the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, has also joined in large group complaints about inadequate medical care, COVID-19 isolation policies and access to medical care for a pod of transgender inmates.

She’s among those trying to find clients who were housed in the Aurora facility but have mysteriously disappeared. Her clients had pending proceedings, she said, yet were summarily removed, something she’d never seen in 15 years of immigration law.

“Ordinarily, I would file a CRCL complaint. At this moment, we don’t have anyone to file a complaint to,” Lunn said.

That sort of mass deportation is something CRCL would have inspected. In fact, staff members said they had just launched a review into Trump’s increased use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, an inquiry which now appears to have vanished.

In New Mexico, immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said she’s filed more than 100 CRCL complaints, helping her secure medical care and other services for sick and disabled people.

She said she has several pending complaints, including one about a detainee who has stomach cancer but can’t get medication stronger than ibuprofen and another involving an HIV-positive patient who hasn’t been able to see a doctor.

“CRCL was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam.

OPEN LETTER: By Martyn Bradbury, editor and publisher of The Daily Blog

NZME directors ‘have concerns’ about businessman Jim Grenon taking editorial control

NZME’s directors have fired their own shots in the war for control of the media company, saying they have concerns about a takeover bid including the risk of businessman Jim Grenon taking editorial control.

In a statement to the NZX, the board said it was delaying its annual shareholders meeting until June and opening up nominations of other directors.

Grenon, a New Zealand resident since 2012, bought a 9.3 percent stake in NZME for just over $9 million early in March.

NZME is publisher of a number of newspapers, including The New Zealand Herald, as well as operating radio stations and property platform OneRoof.

Within days of taking the stake, Grenon had written to the company’s board proposing that most of its current directors be replaced with new ones, including himself, and said the performance of the company had been disappointing and he was wanted to improve the editorial content.

NZME has now told the stockmarket it had concerns whether Grenon’s proposals were in the best interests of the company and shareholders. — RNZ News

Dear NZME Board,

I was once a columnist for The New Zealand Herald, but I’m too left wing for your stable of acceptable opinions and now just run award-winning political podcasts instead.

Normally as board members of a financialised media company in late stage capitalism with collapsing revenue thanks to social media, you don’t generally have to consider the actual well being of our democracy.

Let me be as clear as I can to you all.

You hold in your hands the fate of Fourth Estate journalism and ultimately the democracy of New Zealand itself.

As the largest Fourth Estate platforms in the country, your obligations go well beyond just shareholder profit.

Alt-right billionaire Jim Grenon has in my view been extremely disingenuous.

The manner in which NZME has been sold as underperforming so that the promise of a quick buck from OneRoof seems the focus point is made more questionable because I suspect Grenon’s true desire here is editorial control of NZME.

His relationship with a far-right culture war hate blog that promotes anti-Māori, anti-trans, anti-vaccine, climate denial editorial copy alongside his support for culture war influencers suggest a radicalised view of the world which he intends to implement if he gains control.

Look.

NZME is right wing enough, your first editorial in The New Zealand Herald was calling for white people to start war with Māori, Mike Hosking is the epitome of right wing commentary and the less said about Heather Du Plessis Allan, the better, but all of you acknowledge that 2 + 2 = 4.

Alt-Right billionaires don’t admit that.

Alt-right billionaires tend to lean into divisive culture war rhetoric and are happy to promote 2 + 2 = whatever I say it is.

You cannot allow alt-right billionaires with radicalised culture war beliefs take over the largest media platforms in the country.

This moment demands more than dollars and cents, it requires a strong defence of independent editorial content, even when that editorial content is right wing.

The NZ Herald, Heather and Mike are without doubt right wingers, but they are right wingers who pitch their argument within the realms of the real and factual.

Alt-right billionaires do not do that.

If NZME is taken over and the editorial direction takes a hard right culture war turn, you will be dooming NZ democracy and planing us on a highway to hell.

You must, you must, you must stand against this attack on editorial independence.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

OPEN LETTER: By Martyn Bradbury, editor and publisher of The Daily Blog

NZME directors ‘have concerns’ about businessman Jim Grenon taking editorial control

NZME’s directors have fired their own shots in the war for control of the media company, saying they have concerns about a takeover bid including the risk of businessman Jim Grenon taking editorial control.

In a statement to the NZX, the board said it was delaying its annual shareholders meeting until June and opening up nominations of other directors.

Grenon, a New Zealand resident since 2012, bought a 9.3 percent stake in NZME for just over $9 million early in March.

NZME is publisher of a number of newspapers, including The New Zealand Herald, as well as operating radio stations and property platform OneRoof.

Within days of taking the stake, Grenon had written to the company’s board proposing that most of its current directors be replaced with new ones, including himself, and said the performance of the company had been disappointing and he was wanted to improve the editorial content.

NZME has now told the stockmarket it had concerns whether Grenon’s proposals were in the best interests of the company and shareholders. — RNZ News

Dear NZME Board,

I was once a columnist for The New Zealand Herald, but I’m too left wing for your stable of acceptable opinions and now just run award-winning political podcasts instead.

Normally as board members of a financialised media company in late stage capitalism with collapsing revenue thanks to social media, you don’t generally have to consider the actual well being of our democracy.

Let me be as clear as I can to you all.

You hold in your hands the fate of Fourth Estate journalism and ultimately the democracy of New Zealand itself.

As the largest Fourth Estate platforms in the country, your obligations go well beyond just shareholder profit.

Alt-right billionaire Jim Grenon has in my view been extremely disingenuous.

The manner in which NZME has been sold as underperforming so that the promise of a quick buck from OneRoof seems the focus point is made more questionable because I suspect Grenon’s true desire here is editorial control of NZME.

His relationship with a far-right culture war hate blog that promotes anti-Māori, anti-trans, anti-vaccine, climate denial editorial copy alongside his support for culture war influencers suggest a radicalised view of the world which he intends to implement if he gains control.

Look.

NZME is right wing enough, your first editorial in The New Zealand Herald was calling for white people to start war with Māori, Mike Hosking is the epitome of right wing commentary and the less said about Heather Du Plessis Allan, the better, but all of you acknowledge that 2 + 2 = 4.

Alt-Right billionaires don’t admit that.

Alt-right billionaires tend to lean into divisive culture war rhetoric and are happy to promote 2 + 2 = whatever I say it is.

You cannot allow alt-right billionaires with radicalised culture war beliefs take over the largest media platforms in the country.

This moment demands more than dollars and cents, it requires a strong defence of independent editorial content, even when that editorial content is right wing.

The NZ Herald, Heather and Mike are without doubt right wingers, but they are right wingers who pitch their argument within the realms of the real and factual.

Alt-right billionaires do not do that.

If NZME is taken over and the editorial direction takes a hard right culture war turn, you will be dooming NZ democracy and planing us on a highway to hell.

You must, you must, you must stand against this attack on editorial independence.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

So, it isn’t surprising that the Tesla Takedown campaign has blossomed with large and enthusiastic protests with people from all walks of life and ages to stop this madness. As a result, Tesla’s stock has tanked with its brand now viewed as more akin to Hitler’s Volkswagen than a vehicle to fight climate change. In Germany, Tesla’s sales have crashed and a miniscule number of people have said they will buy one in the future.

Tesla Takedown is one of the many raging streams of opposition to Trump and Musk, most visible with Bernie Sanders “The Fighting Oligarchy Tour ” drawing thousands of people, many in Republican strongholds, across the country. As Bernie declared at a recent rally at Arizona State University:

“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight. We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”

Income inequality, fear of authoritarianism, and working class concerns are not where you usually find British television personality Jeremy Clarkson, an enthusiastic Thatherite, multi-millionaire, former co-host of Top Gear and the Grand Tour, and currently the host of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime.

Let’s be clear that he is not on our side, but he has taken the opportunity to puff out his chest and declare that he was right all along about Elon Musk. Musk sued Clarkson for defamation for a critical review of one of Tesla’s early vehicles nearly two decades ago. Musk lost the case. Musk, like Trump, uses lawsuits whatever their merit to silence critics. So, it was a good thing that Musk lost the suit. And, Clarkson is greatly enjoying the turn-of-event against Musk. But, he can’t leave at that.

He recently wrote in the Sunday Times:

The fact, then, is this. I was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews. Musk claimed I wasn’t. And this is his payback. And what makes it so juicy is that he’s being pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place. The eco hippies.

“Eco-hippies” is the type of nasty swipe that Clarkson likes to make against anyone concerned about climate change. The fact is that Tesla cars were bought by a largely upper, middle-class grouping, where climate change was a way Musk marketed his cars to them. The turn against Musk is not first and foremost about his cars, but his political role in the Trump administration.

I’ve seen a lot of people passing around Clarkson’s pompous column, Seventeen years after that nice Mr. Musk sued me, victory is mine, as if it is something that vindicates our opposition to Trump and Musk. It is not. Clarkson is a notorious bigot and misogynist, who was fired from the BBC’s top-rated Top Gear for assaulting a staffer. For opponents of Trump and Musk, Jeremy Clarkson is not our friend.

The post Opponents of Elon Musk Don’t Need Jeremy Clarkson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

So, it isn’t surprising that the Tesla Takedown campaign has blossomed with large and enthusiastic protests with people from all walks of life and ages to stop this madness. As a result, Tesla’s stock has tanked with its brand now viewed as more akin to Hitler’s Volkswagen than a vehicle to fight climate change. In Germany, Tesla’s sales have crashed and a miniscule number of people have said they will buy one in the future.

Tesla Takedown is one of the many raging streams of opposition to Trump and Musk, most visible with Bernie Sanders “The Fighting Oligarchy Tour ” drawing thousands of people, many in Republican strongholds, across the country. As Bernie declared at a recent rally at Arizona State University:

“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight. We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”

Income inequality, fear of authoritarianism, and working class concerns are not where you usually find British television personality Jeremy Clarkson, an enthusiastic Thatherite, multi-millionaire, former co-host of Top Gear and the Grand Tour, and currently the host of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime.

Let’s be clear that he is not on our side, but he has taken the opportunity to puff out his chest and declare that he was right all along about Elon Musk. Musk sued Clarkson for defamation for a critical review of one of Tesla’s early vehicles nearly two decades ago. Musk lost the case. Musk, like Trump, uses lawsuits whatever their merit to silence critics. So, it was a good thing that Musk lost the suit. And, Clarkson is greatly enjoying the turn-of-event against Musk. But, he can’t leave at that.

He recently wrote in the Sunday Times:

The fact, then, is this. I was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews. Musk claimed I wasn’t. And this is his payback. And what makes it so juicy is that he’s being pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place. The eco hippies.

“Eco-hippies” is the type of nasty swipe that Clarkson likes to make against anyone concerned about climate change. The fact is that Tesla cars were bought by a largely upper, middle-class grouping, where climate change was a way Musk marketed his cars to them. The turn against Musk is not first and foremost about his cars, but his political role in the Trump administration.

I’ve seen a lot of people passing around Clarkson’s pompous column, Seventeen years after that nice Mr. Musk sued me, victory is mine, as if it is something that vindicates our opposition to Trump and Musk. It is not. Clarkson is a notorious bigot and misogynist, who was fired from the BBC’s top-rated Top Gear for assaulting a staffer. For opponents of Trump and Musk, Jeremy Clarkson is not our friend.

The post Opponents of Elon Musk Don’t Need Jeremy Clarkson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

Groundwork Collaborative’s Chief of Policy and Advocacy Alex Jacquez reacted with the following statement:

“The Trump Administration just told seniors that they should shut up and sit down if they don’t receive their Social Security checks on time. The real ‘fraudsters’ are Trump’s out-of-touch billionaire donors and advisors denying seniors their hard-earned benefits to pay for their next tax giveaway.”

Email press@groundworkcollaborative.org to speak with a Groundwork expert about DOGE and the Trump Administration’s assault on Social Security.

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

Groundwork Collaborative’s Chief of Policy and Advocacy Alex Jacquez reacted with the following statement:

“The Trump Administration just told seniors that they should shut up and sit down if they don’t receive their Social Security checks on time. The real ‘fraudsters’ are Trump’s out-of-touch billionaire donors and advisors denying seniors their hard-earned benefits to pay for their next tax giveaway.”

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

Photograph Source: rochelle hartman – CC BY 2.0

The paper sheet crinkled under me as I shifted on the vinyl examination table. The doctor paused. “Hmm,” she said quietly.

This was January 2021. I’d patched together a few gigs since completing a masters degree program the previous year, but was still struggling to find full-time work at the height of the pandemic.

A nagging feeling told me not to delay my annual well-woman exam again, having skipped it in 2020 due to COVID-19 and being uninsured. And I’m glad I went — the doctor found a concerning level of precancerous cervical cells.

Cervical cancer was once a common cause of cancer death in the U.S., but increased access to preventive care over the last several decades has cut death rates by more than half. Federal funding for Medicaid, which helps states expand health care services to low-income populations, has contributed to this success.

So it was for me, too. Although I was unemployed, I was able to access the initial screening and follow-up treatments through Medicaid. (State Medicaid programs can have different names. In my state, Wisconsin, it’s BadgerCare.)

Thanks to this coverage, my case was detected early. I made a full recovery and subsequently landed a job with health care benefits. However, if it had been up to Republican lawmakers, this story may have had a very different ending. With Trump’s support, nearly every single House Republican voted to pass a budget resolution that cuts an unimaginable $2 trillion from social services, especially Medicaid.

They’ve packaged this attack on Medicaid as an effort to cut “wasteful” spending and punish the “parasite class.” That’s how billionaire Elon Musk — who was raised with a silver spoon in an affluent, all-white suburb in apartheid South Africa — refers to Americans who use federal benefits.

We are not parasites. We are your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

The vast majority of Medicaid recipients are working or in school. Others have jobs that don’t provide health insurance or are temporarily unemployed, as I was. Medicaid is also a critical lifeline for 10 million people with disabilities, two-thirds of seniors in nursing homes, 14 million adults who have a mental health condition or substance use disorder, and tens of thousands of children who receive mental health services in public schools.

More than 72 million U.S. citizens — over 20 percent of the population — rely on Medicaid.

That includes over 33 million people nationwide living in congressional districts represented by Republican lawmakers who are pushing for these devastating cuts.

Medicaid is an example of government success — access to health care like the screening and treatments I received saves lives and money. What’s so great about going back to an era where people die from preventable diseases?

That’s not all. While slashing Medicaid, the GOP budget blueprint boosts spending for Pentagon contractors, a disastrous mass deportation policy that rips apart families and would forcibly displace millions of taxpayers, and$4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

I now study that spending for my work. And talk about waste and fraud.

If Trump and the GOP were truly interested in saving taxpayer dollars, they wouldn’t be increasing the near-trillion dollar Pentagon budget, which has never passed an audit. Half or more of that spending goes to war profiteers — for-profit Pentagon contractors whose business models rely on government handouts and who routinely overcharge taxpayers.

Elon Musk’s businesses alone have received at least $38 billion in government funding from the Pentagon and other agencies. What was that again about a parasite class?

Cutting effective, life-saving services to further enrich billionaires and Pentagon contractors like  Musk is the worst possible option. These things don’t save lives — Medicaid does.

We still have time to fight back against this dangerous budget. And we must. Our health and futures depend on it.

The post Pentagon Contractors Don’t Save Lives or Money–Medicaid Does appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Hanna Homestead.

“The Grapes of Wrath” by Michèle White, 2025.

Having declared a national emergency on the first day of his administration, the newly sworn-in American president Donald Trump announced plans to implement tariffs on Canadian goods, countering his own reworked NAFTA/USMCA reciprocal free trade agreement from five years earlier. After weeks of insulting remarks, annexation jokes, and social-media frothing, a 25% tariff came into effect on March 5, which lasted a day before being threatened again for April 2 in another disruptive flip flop, roiling stock markets and setting off a tit-for-tat economic war between two previously friendly nations. The “world’s longest undefended border” just got a whole lot chillier. As the saying goes, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Citing an imbalance in trade, the United States added fentanyl and illegal immigrants to the mix to justify the national emergency … from Canada. Good fences make good neighbo(u)rs, but the strategy doesn’t wash as with most Trumpian logic. In 2024, the US had a global trade deficit of over $1 trillion, $60 billion with Canada. Excluding subsidized petroleum products, which helps keep American gas prices low, the exchange in goods is almost equal, while the US runs a surplus in services. The amount of drugs and illegals entering the United States from Canada is also minimal. Are these the acts of a rational player or a smokescreen for more uncertainty and a new kind of trampling on the rights and dreams of others?

Whatever the motivation, the economic ramifications of impeded trade between two highly integrated economies are potentially devastating, costing millions of jobs in both countries, especially in the carmaking industry where hundreds of different parts can transit the border many times before a finished vehicle rolls off the factory floor. The cultural, social, and political ramifications are incalculable with many Canadians venting their anger by cancelling trips to the States, booing the American national anthem at sporting events, and enacting “Buy Canadian” or “Anything but American” campaigns. The maker of Jack Daniel’s noted that removing American liquor from Canadian stores is “worse than a tariff.” Echoing the feelings of many anxious compatriots, a former Canadian ambassador to the US stated that relations “may never be the same.”

As a Canadian, I admit to harbouring some anti-American sentiment that comes from growing up next to a giant. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously declared that living next to the United States is “like sleeping with an elephant.” A popular saying is “When the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold.” But this is different. Our best friend older brother wants to own us, or at least says he does. Some call it a negotiating tactic. Oh yeah, “your mother wears army boots.” WTF? Is this the level of American diplomacy?

I also admit having grown up admiring the US, both learned and experienced in Canada and abroad. I regularly watched American TV shows – there were 3 Buffalo stations in the Toronto area – puzzling over the subtle differences in our worlds. Hockey teams I played on billeted each other as we played home-and-away games versus teams from Detroit. Many of my heroes are American (the list is very long). But when an American president stakes claim to Canada as his own and openly taunts the prime minister as the governor of the 51st state, it’s no longer geopolitical gamesmanship. American elephantism/exceptionalism has run wild. The US is now as dangerous to Canadians as in the days of cross-border raids during the War of Independence, the 1814 burning of the White House, or “54-40 or fight.”

Canadians get it, probably more than many Americans think. You feel you’ve been pushed around after you helped save the world for democracy in World War II. The country that spent trillions of dollars to beat the Soviet Union to the moon quite literally created the modern world with the transistor, integrated circuit, personal computer, and the Internet. We have you to thank for the car, IBM, and Elvis Presley (but not the telephone, universal health care, or Joni Mitchell). And now we are all ungrateful.

Sorry to suggest how you might feel, but do you really believe Canada threatens your existence with fentanyl and underpaid workers or that international agreements can’t be renegotiated? Go ahead, pull the other one Johnny Appleseed. More likely, the chaos is by design to undermine governance and put even more power in fewer hands. Of course, the facts don’t matter in Trump’s supercritical black hole of imploding nonsense.

Perhaps gangster tactics are needed to forge a successful real estate business in New York City. Self-promotion, barstool bullying, and buying one’s own ghostwritten books en masse to ensure entry on the New York Times book list may be the cost of success in such rarefied skyscraper air, but bullying people is not the mark of anything great. Leader? Statesman? No responsible governmental steward plays games with the lives and livelihoods of hard-working citizens and families. I think Trump has watched too many Times Square reruns of The Godfather. Government is not a business and everything is personal.

Is it fealty you want? Oh Donald. You are so fine. Must everyone kiss the hand? Please tell us your world is more than game-playing, whatever the consequences to others, in the name of a fairytale Golden Age. The conflict-seekers taking advantage of the conflict-averse. The rich stamping on the poor. Prehistoric, medieval, the American Way? Don’t you know Lucy will never hold the ball for good old Charlie Brown?

Is it our minerals – the gold, copper, nickel, and uranium? You could have asked politely and we would have sold more to you at a reasonable price (now surcharged by 25%). Is it 2% GDP spending on NATO, an organization you actively undermine? Do you want to arm the world in what economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls “military Keynesianism” so that others will buy more American weapons, adding to an already bloated death industry and undercutting social spending and diversity?

Do you want Canadians to apologize for “American Woman,” even though New Yorker Lenny Kravitz also covered that classic ‘70s Guess Who hit. In this case, “woman” is a metaphor for the coloured lights that hypnotize. Sorry for the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series for the first time on foreign soil in 1992, but Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in Toronto and Jackie Robinson played his first professional game for the Montreal Royals. Besides, you’ve won the last 30 Stanley Cups. Three decades of Detroit, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other amazing American cities lifting the greatest sporting prize ever – even Anaheim’s Disney-owned Ducks – albeit with mostly Canadian players.

Sorry that Superman was co-created by a Canadian. Sorry Margaret Atwood wrote about a Christian patriarchal takeover in the Republic of Gilead, a.k.a. a future USA gone mad. I know Canadians are famously courteous and nice and apologize too much (sorry), but we’re not sorry for any of that. It’s called life. We all know the madness isn’t going to stop, but why didn’t you tell us you wanted to break up? You are like a crazed boyfriend from an Alanis Morissette song. Oh yeah, Americans don’t do irony.

We are sorry for the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 that knocked out power to most of the eastern seaboard after a transmission line near Niagara Falls tripped. That got fixed and the shared international CANUSE grid is stronger for it. We didn’t cause the largest ever US blackout, however, that crashed the grid for two days in northern Ohio in 2003. Canada was initially blamed, but it was a fallen American tree and software bug. Essentially, reduced public works such as insufficient tree pruning because of too much deregulation. If you don’t pay for services, everything goes to pot (shades of DOGE to come). We’re not sorry for the Texas freeze of 2021. That was Ted Cruz. No it wasn’t, sorry, I lie – see what happens when facts don’t matter?

But don’t worry friends, I doubt Ontario premier Doug Ford will turn off the juice to New York, Michigan, or Minnesota. That’s illegal in winter and dumb. Premier Ford is a conservative, but politics and economic takeovers make strange bedfellows. I am proud that Canadians also encourage friendly civic mindedness by asking everyone to shovel their snow within 24 hours of a snowfall as seen in cutesy government-funded ads: “Be nice, clear your ice.” If you are over 65, the city workers do it for free. Big city homes do come with locks, although some doors are probably still left open as our Michigan neighbour Michael Moore famously noted in Bowling for Columbine. Many Canadians have never seen a gun in their life other than in a police holster.

What is it you really want, Donald? Our lifestyle? We are sorry the US doesn’t live up to world standards when it comes to health, education, and diversity. Or civility. Calling women names is neither presidential nor patriotic to a nation of supposed god-fearing citizens. Your misogyny is beneath even a schoolboy taunt. Nor are community-minded citizens “commies,” “libtards,” and “losers.”

Why are Americans so angry? Breitbart is littered with vile. Ditto the Murdoch-owned New York Post? Clearly one has to watch out for the armed bands of evil squirrels, beavers, and moose amassing on the Canadian border. Dudley Do-Right and Nell Fenwick are readying the furry forces. It may be a constitutionally protected war of words (or paid Russian bots), but who actually thinks this? Is it our stoicism (a.k.a. “socialism” to Americans) nurtured in the depths of yet another endless winter?

Like many Americans, Canadians grew up during the biggest jump in technology since the Industrial Revolution in an age of transistors, space travel, and satellites. Like others, we were left to navigate a vastly different world than that of our parents, both scary and revealing, from relaxed social mores and crazy Cold War posturing to an explosion of artistic expression in a growing technological tyranny. How did we drift so far apart, brother? We are not a coloured square on a Risk board to conquer. It’s not our place to tell other countries what to do, but can you please curb your arrogance?

Sadly, we have to get used to the vindictive game playing, exaggerated outrage, and unpredictable behaviour as Bizarro Trump exports the chaos in his own country abroad. The motive behind his rambling, unsympathetic, and know-it-all posturing may be to undermine governance and increase billionaire wealth even more. Sowing dissent at home is not enough; the US is now encouraging division elsewhere to turn life into permanent crisis, anxiety, and poverty for the wealthy to exploit the fearful. So long fellowship, respect, and diversity; hello more 1% wealth and fewer taxes for the rich. First he took Manhattan, then he tried to take the World. But as Leonard Cohen warned us “there is no beauty to their weapons.”

We can debate the hierarchy of social responsibility: garbage pickup, sanitation, infrastructure, emergencies, policing, tax collecting (sales tax/income tax) and the efficiencies within any public system. But why doesn’t Donald Trump fix his own US health system, education scores, and potholes first? Canada can be an example of how to provide a publicly funded universal health care that both aids and protects workers (thank you Tommy Douglas, number one in a 2004 “Greatest Canadian” newspaper poll). Did you know a tenant can’t be evicted from a Canadian home in winter? Equal pay and a 40-hour work week are the law. The minimum federal wage is $17.30/hour indexed to inflation. As Dylan sang “the money you make can’t buy back your soul.” Or “The first one now will later be last.” That’s from the Bible.

For all his divisiveness at home Trump is uniting the world … against the United States. The governing Liberals were expected to lose the next election, but are now rising in the polls as former banker Mark Carney takes over from the outgoing three-term prime minister Justin Trudeau. In his acceptance speech on March 9, Carney stated, “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”

Others are signalling with their “elbows up” in a nod to Mister Hockey, Gordie Howe, who played 25 seasons for the Detroit Red Wings and whose poorly remunerated prowess was instrumental in establishing a hockey labour union. Across Europe, far-right parties are being asked to reconcile their fealty to Trump and his anti-European rhetoric. America First is becoming America Alone as the world unites in opposition against such gauche tribalism.

Degrading or even dismantling an integrated economy won’t happen overnight. The resistance is beginning as citizens rise against the common enemy seeking to rip up long-standing agreements. Deep down, we all know more unites than divides us. Trump’s cruelty has been laid bare from Ukraine to Gaza and from Panama to Greenland. If the politics were any good, there would be no need to bully. Business uncertainty may be the most important last check as investors shun the United States amid a looming Trumpcession. The painted ponies go up and down. No one wants to keep on rockin’ in an un-free American world.

Cruelty will never be a virtue. Trump has tapped into the vengeful apocalyptic Christian war machine, imaging himself at the head of the troops, their blood-wine feet hovering over whoever dares call out the lies, venality, and misogyny. The answered chorus is not to declare “Glory glory Hallelujah” but to call out the wrath as a failed ideal, a misinformed and misguided act of a dying republic. When the abuser claims abuse and the bully cries victim, we know the vintage has spoiled. Conflict is a con, sold by those afraid to understand the meaning of communion and the depth of community.

Trump isn’t responsible for all the nastiness blowing from the south, but he is the mouthpiece, permanently campaigning on a trail of pain while spending other people’s money. For now, the boycotts will grow against Colgate, Coke, Gillette, …, and the United States. We will protest, stand up, and be heard. Because we don’t live in Donald Trump’s angry world. The Toronto singer Jim Cuddy lamented about how “We used to be the best of friends,” but as Montreal Canadiens star goalie Ken Dryden and former member of parliament notes, “Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian.” I am Canadian. Sorry friends, life is not a game and Donald Trump is nobody’s king.

Michèle White is a Toronto artist and professor emeritus at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). “The Grapes of Wrath” is part of an ongoing series entitled “Written on the Body.” Her newest work can be viewed on squarespace and Instagram.

The post The United States Versus Canada: Mine Eyes Don’t See Any Glory appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John K. White.

Photograph Source: advokatsmart.no – CC BY 2.0

As climate-fueled disasters escalate, insurers are getting richer while leaving Americans in the lurch. Citing climate-related losses, many insurance companies are exorbitantly inflating rates, refusing to renew policies, and delaying, denying, or underpaying claims.

The latest of many examples is Los Angeles, where wildfires devoured over 40,000 acres and left thousands unhoused and unemployed.

Many families were dropped by their insurers or struggled to find affordable options before the fires. Some turnedto the state’s coverage plan, which costs more and covers less. But despite years of profitability from dumping the riskiest policies onto the overburdened state plan, insurers are already demanding rate hikes to squeeze more profit from consumers.

It’s a story Americans in other parts of the country know all too well.

After Hurricanes Laura and Ida devastated Louisiana in 2020 and 2021, claims languished for months or years. Families were often forced to sue to receive insurance compensation.

Following Hurricane Ian in 2022, Floridians’ payouts were drastically reduced from what insurers initially promised. Six months later, tens of thousands of claims were still open. And two years later, 25 percent had been closed without payment.

In Hawaii, insurance companies held up the 2023 Lahaina wildfire settlement for a year and a half before providing compensation.

These issues aren’t exclusive to coastal or wildfire-prone states. Homeowners in Iowa, for example, struggled for two years to resolve insurance claims following a destructive 2020 derecho.

Delays and underpayments can result in significant financial hardship and emotional strain. Families face out-of-pocket expenses for temporary housing, repairs, and secondary damage (like mold growth). These can increase debt and lower credit scores, ultimately making mortgage and other routine obligations more difficult or even impossible to meet.

Raising premiums likewise exacerbates burdens on both homeowners and renters and increases mortgage delinquency rates. These impacts are worse for Black, Latin American, Native American, and lower-incomehouseholds of all races, as exposed recently in hard-hit Black neighborhoods around Los Angeles.

The insurance industry isn’t just stiffing homeowners with claim denials and rate hikes. It’s also financing the driving force behind these disasters themselves.

By continuing to underwrite and invest billions of dollars in fossil fuel projects — knowing full well that growing climate risks are making homes uninsurable — insurers actively contribute to the disasters they later refuse to cover.

Insurers market themselves as “good neighbors” or assure homeowners they’re “in good hands.” But they accumulate wealth and pay dividends to shareholders with money generated by the premiums paid by working people — who don’t get a refund when there aren’t disasters.

This is a feature, not a bug. The system is working as designed by and for the industry.

Our elected officials let this crisis fester by failing to hold insurers accountable. The industry’s model of profiting in good times and walking away in bad cannot stand. Insurance should be a safeguard for families, not a gamble where the house always wins.

At a minimum, this means: enforcing and assisting homeowners in fair, fast claims handling; stopping extreme premium hikes, especially after disasters; and preventing companies from holding states hostage or fleeing the market following a disaster.

It also means phasing out and blocking the expansion of investments in fossil fuels; requiring investments in (and premium discounts for) climate mitigation to protect our housing stock, especially affordable housing (which includesaffordable insurance).

Finally, it means exploring a national disaster insurance backstop to stabilize coverage — and rejecting attempts to force working people to bail out insurers.

Policymakers have a choice: continue prioritizing corporate profits over people — or finally stand up for homeowners who have played by the rules, paid their premiums, and somehow still ended up holding the bag.

The post Don’t Let Insurance Companies Fleece Homeowners appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kelsey Condon.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As parents, we’re horrified by the denial of health care to trans children that’s being imposed on families and communities across this country right now.

Through President Trump’s executive orders and harsh anti-trans laws in different states, policy makers are making it a crime to provide for trans kids’ medical needs. That’s sickening. We’re especially outraged that the people leading these attacks are often doing so in the name of “parents’ rights.”

Our children aren’t transgender, but we want to be clear: These attacks don’t speak for us.

Like all parents, we feel deeply what it means to care for our kids’ health. We remember how scary it was the first times they had fevers or broken bones. When our kids are hurting or afraid, we’ve worked to comfort them even when we feel afraid ourselves.

We know the anxiety our kids may have — or that we have as parents — in anticipation of a doctor’s visit. We also know the relief and gratitude of a visit that goes well, especially when we trust that we have competent health professionals to collaborate with.

We’ve never had to consider the possibility that powerful political forces could compel our children’s doctors not to provide the care that they determine to be in our children’s best interest, based on their professional judgment.

Yet that’s exactly what these politicians are doing to families with trans children right now. Age-appropriate gender-affirming care — as determined by kids, their families, and health professionals — is the standard of carethat’s universally endorsed for trans kids by reputable medical organizations.

Access to this care, which lawmakers and the president are targeting so aggressively, can be a matter of life and death. We’re appalled that these officials are demonizing trans kids, their families, and health professionals in their attempts to deny it.

This is bullying in its most repulsive form: powerful men targeting vulnerable children, all with the full weight of the law. And just like we teach our kids, if bullies aren’t challenged, they feel emboldened to target other vulnerable people.

We urge any parents of cis-gender children who think these attacks on trans children don’t impact their own families to consider what this could mean. Your own children could be targeted in the near future, based on some other hateful ideology conjured up by the bullies.

As disgusted as we are by these attacks, we’re also heartened by the rising sensibilities about gender and sexuality that we’re witnessing in our kids’ generation. The world they’re creating together is less judgemental, more inclusive, and more affirming than the one we grew up in.

Like so many things with parenting, sometimes this requires learning and adjustment on our part. But instead of fearing this emerging world, we honor it — and find ourselves being transformed by it. A world where trans kids are safe to be who they are is a world that honors the fullness of everybody.

We’re not the exceptions. Surveys show that significant majorities of parents say they would support their children who come out as trans or nonbinary and encourage others to do the same. And vast majorities agree that kids and their parents, not politicians, should get to decide what medical care is appropriate.

We hope that parents everywhere can raise our voices in defense of this more inclusive world against those who seek to destroy it — especially by targeting children and families. As parents, we have a responsibility to protect kids — not just our own, but all the children of our communities.

We already see glimpses of a world where we treat each other with greater compassion and dignity. That world — and its children — deserve to be nurtured and protected.

The post We’re Parents: Trump’s Attacks on Trans Kids Don’t Speak for Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Khury Petersen-Smith, Basav Sen and Lindsay Koshgarian.

Match Group, the tech company that owns Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge, Tinder and other popular dating services, has known for years which users have been accused of sexual assault and rape, but kept those reports hidden from others on the app, according to a new investigation. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market and facilitates meetups for millions of people in scores of countries around the world. “Match Group is aware of a lot of the scale of the harm on their apps. They actually track this on their backend,” says journalist Emily Elena Dugdale, one of the authors of the investigation produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. “Similar to many tech companies, there’s really little regulation that requires them to actually tell you what’s going on on their apps.” We also speak with whistleblower Michael Lawrie, the former head of user safety and advocacy at OkCupid. He says he quit after his concerns about user safety went unheeded. “I was seeing a lot of stuff,” Lawrie says. “It became impossible for me to carry on working there, ethically and morally.”

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

The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and five high-ranking Justice Department officials resigned Thursday to protest the Trump administration’s order to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Danielle Sassoon, who was the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in her resignation letter that dropping the case against Adams would violate her duty to uphold the law fairly and consistently. A top Justice Department official ordered the charges against Adams dropped earlier in the week, citing the case’s impact on the mayor’s ability to help with the administration’s immigration crackdown as it expands raids and deportations. After Sassoon resigned in protest, Justice Department officials moved the case from New York to the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division, which led to five more prosecutors resigning. Meanwhile, Adams met with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan to discuss the possible reopening of an ICE office inside New York’s Rikers Island jail. “Clearly he knows that he has to get on board; otherwise, he may be on a train to some federal prison,” says Ron Kuby, a longtime criminal defense and civil rights attorney based in New York who has been following the case closely. He says that while the mass resignations have illustrated that it’s possible to stand up to the Trump administration’s abuses, Adams is likely safe for now. “This is effectively going to be the end of the case once the administration finds somebody sufficiently spineless to actually file the papers,” says Kuby.

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

The post Don’t Get Distracted: Bitter Economic Pills & Threats to Free Press Hit Everyone appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

After commuting the sentences of over 2,500 people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, Joe Biden has set a record for most pardons and commutations by a U.S. president. But Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier remains behind bars. Over 120 tribal leaders are calling on Biden to grant clemency to Peltier as one of his final acts in office, warning this may be the last opportunity Peltier has for freedom. Peltier is 80 years old and has spent the majority of his life — nearly half a century — in prison despite a conviction riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct. In December, tribal leaders, including the NDN Collective’s Nick Tilsen, met with a pardon attorney at the Department of Justice to prepare a recommendation on Peltier’s case for Biden. With only a few days left in Biden’s term, Native Americans are eagerly anticipating his decision. “All of us see a little bit of ourselves in Leonard Peltier, and that’s why we fight so hard for him,” says Tilsen. “This is about paving a path forward that gives us the opportunity to have justice and begin to heal the relationship between the United States government and Indian people. And so, this decision is massive.”

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

A former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Alon Liel, has warned over a “dangerous” attitude of younger generations in Israel towards the war on Gaza.

“They’re accepting the fact that there is no alternative to fighting, and this is the majority, especially the young people today,” he told Al Jazeera in an interview.

He added that as part of the older generation in Israel, he could remember a time when even the right wing used to say they wanted peace.

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• ‘Suspend Israel ties’ plea to global medical professionals – Auckland hospital protest vigil over Gaza
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

“Now young people . . . say we don’t want peace. We will not benefit from peace,” he said.

Liel said that he believed it ws “a very dangerous attitude that is developing” and there needed to be “a very fundamental change in the thinking of Israel, and maybe a fundamental change in the attitude of the international community to the conflict, too”.

He also said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had so far failed to achieve his goals in the 15-month war — “destroying” Hamas and freeing the hostages.

Israelis were frustrated that captives remained in Gaza and surprised that, in recent weeks, Israeli military activity there had intensified, Liel said.

‘Surprised’ over military intensity
“Generally speaking, Israelis are quite surprised that the intensity of the military activity is growing. I think the general feeling here was a month or two ago that [the war] will fade away and slow down, but it is not,” he said.

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and six wounded yesterday in further battles with the Palestinian resistance in northern Gaza.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, still faced the problems of looking like he had no victory in the war, and that any prisoner exchange with Hamas could topple him, he added.

“Any exchange will involve the release of many prisoners we have in our jails, and might — and probably will — topple his government,” Liel said.

“So he’s trying to manoeuvre and trying to find the point in time in which we will not be seeing the Hamas people and their supporters dancing in Gaza when they get the prisoners back and describing the result as a victory.”

Brazil court order over Israeli soldier
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, hailed a decision by a court in Brazil to order a probe against a visiting Israeli soldier, saying legal actions against Israelis suspected of crimes in Gaza were “necessary and overdue”.

The remarks on X came in response to the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) announcing that a Brazilian court had acted on a complaint it had filed against Israeli solider Yuval Vagdani and ordered the country’s police to launch an investigation.

Israeli media later reported that Vagdani had fled the South American country.

The Hind Rajab Foundation was established to breaking the cycle of Israeli impunity and honouring the memory of Hind Rajab and all those who have perished in the Gaza genocide.

Hind Rajab was a five-year-old girl murdered by Israeli soldiers on 29 January 2024 in a car in which six family members were also killed, and two would-be paramedic rescuers were also slaughtered. She died with 335 bullet wounds in her body.

“Apartheid Israel will go to great lengths to shield its soldiers since a conviction abroad for crimes against Palestinians is a precedent it cannot afford,” Albanese wrote on X.

“Yet, justice is unstoppable,” she said.

In #Brazil and elsewhere, legal actions against Israelis suspected of crimes in Gaza are necessary and overdue. #Apartheid Israel will go to great lengths to shield its soldiers since a conviction abroad for crimes against Palestinians is a precedent it cannot afford. Yet,… https://t.co/y9nNd9GqN3

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) January 5, 2025

Israeli plans to help accused soldiers
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports Israel’s government was preparing to assist soldiers who may face arrest for participating in war crimes in Gaza when they travel abroad.

So far, more than 50 complaints have been filed against Israeli soldiers in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Belgium, France and Brazil.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) ban on Al Jazeera is part of a broader attempt to silence criticism of its security operation in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, say activists and analysts.

The ban came almost a month after the PA launched a crackdown on a coalition of armed groups that call themselves the Jenin Brigades, reports Al Jazeera.

The groups are affiliated with Palestinian factions such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and even Fatah, the party that controls the PA.

Since early December, the PA has besieged the Jenin camp and cut off water and electricity to most of its residents in an ostensible attempt to restore “law and order” across the West Bank.

indiscriminate Jenin tactics
However, its indiscriminate tactics in Jenin coincide with a wider attack on free speech, activists and human rights groups told Al Jazeera.

Critics have claimed that the PA crackdown due to pressure by the Israeli authorities which have also imposed recent bans on Al Jazeera.

The PA originated with the Oslo Accords between Palestinian and Israeli leaders in 1993. It mandated that the PA recognise Israel and eliminate Palestinian armed groups in exchange for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by 1999.

Israel, however, has used the last 30 years block statehood while to expanding illegal settlements on large swathes of stolen Palestinian land, nearly tripling the number of settlers in the occupied West Bank to 700,000.

As an occupying power, it still controls most aspects of Palestinian life and frequently carries out raids, killings and arrests in the West Bank, even in areas where the PA is supposed to be in full control.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Amnesty International (12/5/24) found that “Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.”

Imagine for a moment that a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred somewhere in the world, and the Western corporate media refused to use the word “earthquake” in reporting it, instead talking ambiguously of a “tectonic incident” that had caused buildings to collapse and people to die.

Obviously, reporters would be called out for deliberate linguistic ineptness and a bizarre obfuscation of truth. And yet just such a verbal sleight of hand has been on display for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip, where corporate media outlets continue to dance around the word “genocide” while the Israeli military carries out the systematic mass killing of Palestinians.

Since October 2023, nearly 45,000 people have officially been killed in Gaza—although as a letter to the Lancet medical journal (7/20/24) pointed out back in July, the true death toll at that time was likely to exceed 186,000. A new report (BBC, 11/8/24) from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicates that almost 70% of the over 8,000 Palestinian fatalities verified by the UN over a six-month period were women and children; a survey of medical volunteers in Gaza found that “44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza” (New York Times, 10/9/24).

Nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced, and most of the territory has been reduced to rubble.

‘Committed with intent’

From the beginning of the Israeli assault, officials like President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) made it clear that they saw themselves as being at war with a population.

As per Article II of the Genocide Convention, “genocide means…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israeli leaders again and again have effectively admitted genocidal intent. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23), at the beginning of Israel’s assault, declared:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) likewise insisted, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible…. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mother Jones, 11/3/23) invoked a biblical justification for genocide: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The Bible (1 Samuel 15:3) says of the Amalekites: “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.”

And Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi couldn’t have been more clear (X, 10/7/23), posting the following comment to X at the outset of hostilities in October 2023: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”

In other words, Gaza is a pretty textbook case of genocide. But the term “genocide” is ostracized by the corporate media world because it violates the political line of the United States, the global superpower that is currently enabling Israel’s genocidal behavior—to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. And the media’s refusal to call a spade a spade has produced all manner of linguistic gymnastics.

‘Blistering retaliatory offensive’

A New York Times memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) said of the word “genocide,” “We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not.” The same memo declared, “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7.”

In the eyes of the Associated Press (12/4/24), for example, the genocide in Gaza is merely “Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive,” while Fox News (11/3/24) detects a “fight against terrorists” and the Washington Post (12/3/24) sees “one of the most deadly and destructive wars in recent memory.”

Or take the New York Times, where a memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) leaked earlier this year explicitly instructed journalists to avoid using words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” when discussing “Palestine”—another word whose use was highly discouraged. On October 7, the one-year anniversary of Israel’s ongoing assault, the US newspaper of record headlined the affair as “The War That Won’t End,” with the G-word appearing only in a fleeting reference to “accusations of genocide and war crimes.”

This particular Times dispatch begins with Yaniv Hegyi, an Israeli who “fled his home last October 7, after terrorists from Gaza overran his village in southern Israel.” As ever, the selectivity with which US media deploys the T-word safely obliterates the chance that domestic audiences will be confronted with the fact that the state of Israel has literally been terrorizing Palestinians since the moment of its foundation on Palestinian land in 1948—or that Zionist terrorism preceded even that moment.

Only after we’ve been introduced to Hegyi, victim of “terrorists,” do we meet Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian who “fled his home on October 12, after the Israeli Air Force responded by striking his city in northern Gaza.” Which brings us to another tactic that has been institutionalized in the US political and media establishment alike: the perennial Israeli monopoly on “responding,” “retaliating” and generally engaging in “self-defense” no matter what it does—including genocide.

Never mind that Israel would have nothing to “retaliate” against if it hadn’t up and invented itself on other people’s land, and then spent the next 76 years (and counting) occupying, forcibly displacing and slaughtering Palestinians en masse. Fortuitously for Israel, the corporate media are ever standing by to set the record askew.

‘Propaganda war never stops’

The Wall Street Journal (12/5/24) calls for ethnic cleansing as an alternative to genocide: “Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza.”

That said, the media have been increasingly unable to abide by a de facto blanket ban on the word “genocide,” given, inter alia, Amnesty International’s recent determination (12/5/24) that Israel is committing just that in the Gaza Strip. In such cases, then, the term inevitably finds its way into news reports—but only as an allegation.

CNN (12/5/24), for instance, reported that Amnesty had “said that it had gathered ‘sufficient evidence to believe’ that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people—a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.” The rest of the article similarly alternates between Amnesty’s charges and Israel’s vehement rebuttals.

This template was also followed by AP (via ABC, 12/4/24), NBC News (12/5/24) and the other usual suspects. Significantly, this sort of rebuttal option is never extended to Palestinians; you’d never see Yaniv Hegyi fleeing his home from “conduct by Gazans that the Israeli government says amounts to terrorism—a charge the government of Gaza has vehemently denied.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/5/24) took it upon themselves to pen a diatribe against the organization that had chosen to “lend…its once-good name to the genocide lie,” and thereby “assure… its good standing in the anti-Israel herd.” Bearing the headline “The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops,” the rant came accompanied by an entirely irrelevant 23-minute documentary on “the worst antisemitic riot in American history” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which took place in 1991.

According to the Journal, Amnesty has committed an “inversion of reality”: It’s actually Hamas that is the “genocidal” actor—and, by the way, there are “terrorist headquarters in hospitals” in Gaza. This is just about the most unabashed apology for war crimes you can ask for. Israel has pulverized the bulk of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, and an October UN press release noted that

Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.

By converting Israel into the victim not only of “terrorists” but also of a “propaganda war,” the Journal is engaging in its own criminal “inversion of reality.” But for a corporate media committed to complicity in genocide by linguistic omission, it’s all in a day’s work.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

Governor Powes Parkop of Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby has appealed to West Papuans living in his country to carry on the self-determination struggle for future generations and to not lose hope.

Parkop, a staunch supporter of the West Papua cause, reminded Papuans at their Independence Day last Sunday of the struggles of their ancestors, reports Inside PNG.

“PNG will celebrate 50 years of Independence next year but this is only so for half of the island — the other half is still missing, we are losing our land, we are losing our resources.

• READ MORE: West Papuans in Port Moresby host family day
• Other West Papua reports

“If we are not careful, we are going to lose our future too.”

The National Capital District governor was guest speaker for the celebration among Port Moresby residents of West Papuan descent with the theme “Celebrating and preserving our culture through food and the arts”.

About 12,000 West Papuan refugees and exiles live in PNG and Parkop has West Papuan ancestry through his grandparents.

The Independence Day celebration began with everyone participating in the national anthem — “Hai Tanaku Papua” (“My Land, Papua”).

Song and dance
Other activities included song and dance, and a dialogue with the young and older generations to share ideas on a way forward.

Some stalls were also set up selling West Papuan cuisine, arts and crafts.

Governor Parkop said: “We must be proud of our identity, our culture, our land, our heritage and most importantly we have to challenge ourselves, redefine our journey and our future.

“That’s the most important responsibility we have.”’

West Papua was a Dutch colony in the 9th century and by the 1950s the Netherlands began to prepare for withdrawal.

On 1 December 1961, West Papuans held a congress to discuss independence.

The national flag, the Morning Star, was raised for the first time on that day.

Encouraged to keep culture
Governor Parkop described the West Papua cause as “a tragedy”.

This is due to the fact that following the declaration of Independence in 1961, Indonesia laid claim over the island a year later in 1962.

This led to the United Nations-sponsored treaty known as the New York Agreement.

Indonesia was appointed temporary administrator without consultation or the consent of West Papuans.

In 1969 the so-called Act of Free Choice enabled West Papuans to decide their destiny but again only 1026 West Papuans had to make that choice under the barrel of the gun.

To this day, Melanesian West Papua remains under Indonesian rule.

Governor Parkop encouraged the West Papuan people to preserve their culture and heritage and to breakaway from the colonial mindset, colonial laws and ideas that hindered progress to freedom for West Papua.

Republished with permission from Inside PNG.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

To all of you mourning and quailing and brooding about how to withstand the coming authoritarian storm, we present the heroic Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer for whistleblowers who shows us a canny way forward. When his client, a former Pence aide, went on air to call conspiracist hack Kash Patel "a delusional liar" who'd trash the FBI, Patel - bullies gonna bully - threatened to sue her. In turn, Zaid slung the most sublime troll back at him. Monty Python's Trojan Rabbit lives!

In a foul pack of flunkeys and bootlickers to Trump, paranoid crackpot Kash Patel, "The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump," has been "exceptional in his devotion." Despite little expertise, he rose rapidly in Trump's White House - "each new title set off new alarms" - and was so fanatical an alarmed Mark Milley once reportedly warned him, “Life looks really shitty from behind bars." So, a perfect fit for the new regime. The other day, he went on Steve Bannon's podcast - yes, he and it are still here - to call for "offensive operations" to jail Americans, government officials to media, the Great Orange One deems "the enemy." "We will go out and find the conspirators," Patel raved. "Yes, we are going to come after people in the media," all those radical scribblers who helped Biden "steal" the 2020 election. "We're going to come after you, whether criminally or civilly... We're putting you all on notice.” He seems nice.

After Patel's nomination to head the FBI, Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism aide to Mike Pence, went on MSNBC to declare his "unfitness to serve." "Let me just be very clear about that," she said. "He would lie about intelligence. He would lie about operations." Citing a mission in Nigeria where she said Patel's incompetence "put the lives of Navy Seals at risk," she went on, "At some point I realized I need to check Kash’s work (so) I wasn’t misinforming Mike Pence...I had to go around him. This is a guy who openly has contempt for people in national security." At the FBI, Troye said there is fear from people "who know Patel is fully capable of just doing partisan investigations. It will be insane if he becomes director." After an outraged Patel and his hack lawyer demanded she publicly retract her comments or they'd sue her for meanness, Troye responded, "I stand by my statements."

Enter her attorney Mark Zaid, the founding partner of a rare, renowned practice focused on national security law, freedom of speech claims and government accountability. Zaid, who has represented many government or military whistleblowers with grievances against the entities they once served, cites the ongoing, critical need to "challenge the authority that controls this complex dark world." In 1998, he founded the James Madison Project, aimed at reducing government secrecy; he also teaches a D.C. Bar Continuing Legal Ed class on Freedom of Information, and is repeatedly named a D.C. "Super Lawyer" for his national security work. If Agent Mulder, the fictional FBI agent on the X Files ever needed a lawyer, a National Law Journal article once argued, "Zaid would be his man."

Recently, Zaid went on record personally advising possible targets of The Orange One's vengeance “take a vacation outside of the country" around inauguration time, at least for a while, "just to see what happens." "Hey, by the way, John Brennan, when you appeared on CNN in October 2023, what you said was classified and you're going to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act," he speculated. "Is that going to happen? I have no idea." After Patel's "conspirators" rant, Zaid wrote, "Trump is fulfilling his promises by nominating those who have publicly decried #RuleOfLaw & promised to literally jail political enemies." Up first, for Zaid, is his client Troye: Right on time, Zaid got a letter from Patel's lawyer repeating their threat to sue Troye if she did not "publicly detract her defamatory statements."

This is not, of course, Zaid's first rodeo. So he gleefully shot back a polite response - see below - topping it with this image of a jeering French knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He graciously added, "To answer your specific question as to Ms. Troye's intention, I think Monty Python expresses it best." LOL. In the memorable scene it's from - most of you know this, right? - King Arthur's Knights approach a castle seeking shelter; in exchange, they'll let the castle's master join their quest. Snubbing the offer, the Frenchman claims his master has a Grail - "I told them we already got one," he tells his giggling mates - before launching into a vicious flood of insults, also animals. "You silly king, you don't frighten us, English pig dogs!" he shrieks. "Go and boil your bottoms...I blow my nose at you, so-called Ah-thoor Keeng...I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" Etc.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Except for the insane Frenchman and the flying cow and the Pythonesque mayhem they represent, Zaid's letter is entirely, by-the-books polite. "Dear Mr. Binnal," he writes. "Thank you for your letter dated Dec 4 regarding the threat of your client to file a lawsuit," blah blah blah. Of his client, he respectfully notes, "Many if not all her statements have been previously or similarly stated by a wide swath of the knowledgeable population." Adding, "Be that as it may," he points out, they have asked Troye to "confirm (her) intent" within five days of getting their letter, so here he promptly is. "As you know, I am personally well aware (of) your client's appetite to sue individuals, and your firm's proclivity to support such lawsuits," he writes; as proof of that awareness, he notes he has motions pending in two federal district courts seeking sanctions against them for their idiocy. Oh, the burn. #RightBackAtYa, you silly king.

Asserting he and his colleagues "fully expect many federal employees to become whistleblowers," Zaid also posted a request for donations to help them do so pro bono. Their non-profit, non-partisan legal organization Whistleblower Aid allows workers of conscience from both government and the private sector to "report government and corporate lawbreaking. Without breaking the law." And they're hiring. The first-listed job requirement: "An interest in justice, resilient democracy and corporate accountability." Ending his letter to Patel's lawyer, Zaid loftily notes, "I am reminded of the Italian proverb, 'A lawsuit is a fruit tree planted in a lawyer's garden.' I can only imagine the number of apples and oranges growing in your backyard. Whether they thrive or not, of course, is the question." He signs off, "With best wishes, Sincerely," etc etc. In other words, farting in your general direction.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

“We’ve just seen the prices before our eyes just skyrocket,” said Bishop, who is 39. She moved her family to Richmond, Virginia from California a few years ago to stop “living paycheck to paycheck,” but things have been so difficult lately she’s worried it won’t be long before they are once again barely getting by. 

Families nationwide are dealing with similar financial struggles. Although inflation, defined as the rate at which average prices of goods or services rise over a given period, has slowed considerably since a record peak in 2022, consumer prices today have increased by more than 21 percent since February 2020. Frustration over rising cost of living drove many voters to support president-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on ending inflation. 

Simply put, inflation was instrumental in determining how millions of Americans cast their ballots. Yet climate change, one of the primary levers behind inflationary pressures, wasn’t nearly as front of mind — just 37 percent of voters considered the issue “very important” to their vote. Bishop said that may have something to do with how difficult it can be to understand how extreme weather impacts all aspects of the economy. She knows that “climate change has something to do with inflation,” but isn’t sure exactly what. 

In 2022, inflation reached 9% in the U.S. — the highest rate in over 40 years. That was part of a global trend. The lingering impacts of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, higher fuel and energy prices, and food export bans issued by a number of countries contributed to a cost of living crisis that pushed millions of people worldwide into poverty.

Extreme weather shocks were another leading cause of escalating prices, said Alla Semenova, an economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “Climate change is an important part of the inflationary puzzle,” she said.

In February of 2021, Winter Storm Uri slammed Texas, causing a deadly energy crisis statewide. It also caused widespread shutdowns at oil refineries that account for nearly three-quarters of U.S chemical production. This disrupted the production and distribution of things necessary for the production of plastics, which Semenova says contributed to ensuing price hikes for packaging, disinfectants, fertilizers and pesticides. 

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Food prices are another area where the inflationary pressure of warming has become obvious. A drought that engulfed the Mississippi River system in 2022 severely disrupted the transportation of crops used for cattle feed, increasing shipping and commodity costs for livestock producers. Those added costs were likely absorbed by consumers buying meat and dairy products. Grain prices jumped around the same time because drought-induced supply shortages and high energy prices pushed up the costs of fertilizer, transportation, and agricultural production. Not long after, lettuce prices soared amid shortages that followed flooding across California, and the price of orange juice skyrocketed after drought and a hurricane hit major production regions in Florida. 

Though overall inflation has cooled considerably since then, the economic pressures extreme weather places on food costs persist. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that weather disruptions drove global food prices to an 18-month high in October. In fact, cocoa prices surged almost 40 percent this year because of supply shortages wrought by drier conditions in West and Central Africa, where about three-quarters of the world’s cocoa is cultivated. This can not only impact the price tag of chocolate, but also health supplements, cosmetics, and fragrances, among other goods that rely on cocoa beans. 

“What we have seen, especially this year, is this massive price spike,” due to abnormal weather patterns, said Rodrigo Cárcamo-Díaz, a senior economist at U.N. Trade and Development. 

But the impact on consumers “goes beyond” the Consumer Price Indicator, which is the most widely used measure of inflation, said Cárcamo-Díaz. His point is simple: Lower-income households are most affected by supply shocks that inflate the price of goods as increasingly volatile weather makes prices more volatile, straining households with tighter budgets because it can take time for wages to catch up to steeper costs of living. 

Rising prices are expected to become even more of an issue as temperatures climb and extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe. In fact, a 2024 study found that heat extremes driven by climate change enhanced headline inflation for 121 countries over the last 30 years, with warming temperatures expected to increase global inflation by as much as 1 percent every year until 2035. Lead researcher and climate scientist Maximilian Kotz noted that general goods, or any physical things that can be bought, broadly experienced “strong inflationary effects from rising temperatures.” 

Electricity is already getting more expensive as higher temperatures and disasters strain grids and damage infrastructure, driving higher rates of utility shutoff for lower-income U.S. households. Without significant emission reductions, and monetary policies set by central banks and governments to mitigate the financial impacts of climate change by stabilizing prices, this inequitable burden is slated to get much worse. Severe floods derailing major production regions for consumer electronics and auto parts have recently disrupted global supply chains and escalated costs for things car ownership in the U.S. Persistent climate shocks have even triggered an enormous increase in the cost of home insurance premiums.

All told, the inflationary impact of climate change on cost of living is here to stay and will continue to strain American budgets, said Semenova. “The era of relatively low and stable prices is over,” she said. “Costs have been rising due to climate change. It’s the new normal.”

That’s bad news for families like the Bishops, who are simply trying to get by. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Don’t blame Biden for inflation. Blame the climate. on Dec 5, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Experts on climate change are at a loss for words and at a loss for understanding how and why the climate change issue, which is negatively impacting planetary ecosystems, is largely ignored. The proof of this is found at the celebrated UN climate conferences, where talk is cheap, like COP29 held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. These are annual events with a long history of poor results. This frustrating stagnation has been ongoing for over 30 years.

Meanwhile, climate denialists, including the entire Republican Party, have brainwashed the public that climate change is not all that it’s cracked out to be, “no worries, it’s a hoax, ignore the radical leftists, ignore science, and oh, yes, they are communists.”

However, the climate system is not listening to fairy tales. It’s on a tear that’s broadcast nightly via headline news re super hurricanes: “Disastrous Hurricane Season Cost Soar Past $100 Billion in US, Estimates Say,” USA Today, November 1, 2024. And severe drought that threatens the existence of the Amazon rainforest, The Shriveling Mighty Amazon River Drying Out, October 11, 2024, as Antarctic glaciers slip slide away: Scientists in Chile Question Whether Antarctica Has Hit a Point of No Return, Reuters, August 8, 2024.

The world has changed like never before.

Meanwhile, insurance premiums for home ownership skyrocket, especially Florida and California. Climate change is challenging homeownership as some insurers in regions where radical climate change hit hardest drop coverage altogether: “Cimate Change Should Make You Rethink Homeownership,” New York Times, October 29, 2024.

And: “Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance,” Congressional Budget Office, August 2024. How do deniers explain this?

When studying climate change, there are climate scientists and advocates of all sorts, but few understand and relate the true impact as well as Dr. Peter Carter, who’s studied the science since 1988 and an Expert Reviewer of IPCC reports. His analyses go to the core of the climate change issue. He’s openly critical of the failures of national economies to act quickly enough, and he’s on a warpath to crush climate deniers that preach falsehoods.

Tough Climate Times Ahead

Dr. Peter Carter (retired physician and founder of Climate Emergency Institute, est. 2008) posted a climate update, “November 2024: Tough Climate Times Ahead.” A synopsis of his report, in part, follows herein:

Ever since the IPCC 2018 1.5C warning of a climate emergency that required immediate mitigation efforts by major economies of the world to hold temps to 1.5C pre-industrial, everybody that can make a difference has sort of disappeared while the emergency gets worse, and worse. Where are they?

With the ranks of active advocates shrinking, Carter has appealed for help in taking the case to the major nations of the world, reaching out to climate scientists to get involved publicly by telling it like it is, making the case for immediate mitigation measures to stem “a dire climate emergency.”

And he’s looking for help to counter massive denial campaigns, especially in the U.S.: “There’s still dangerous climate change denial.” Social media is full of ridiculous denials, which originate from fossil fuel corporations and from the Republican Party. It’s not just Trump who is skeptical; it’s the whole Republican Party.

However, there’s plenty of news to dispel the lies.

The US has suffered back-to-back powerful hurricanes, not totally unusual, but the intensity is very unusual and off-the-charts bred by abrupt climate change. Hurricanes have caused $100B damage.

These things don’t happen by themselves in isolation. Human influence has changed the climate and not for the better. It’s important to connect the dots of what is happening right before our eyes, meaning fossil fuel companies, big banks, and big economy governments all threaded to climate change: “They must be held accountable… They are getting away with mass murder on a scale we have never seen before.” (Carter)

It’s a scientific fact that as the lower atmosphere warms via greenhouse gases, the more moisture it holds. Moreover, with tropical storms, water vapor increases five-to-seven times per degree of Centigrade, resulting in torrential rains, atmospheric rivers, and floods, some of the most damaging aspects of climate change.

For example, because the UK is experiencing much heavier rains than ever before, agricultural fields become waterlogged, resulting in a decline of agricultural production. This new era of extreme climate behavior impacts food supply, as the UK suffers from “weather whiplash”: “Climate Change is a Growing Threat to UK Farming,” Yale Climate Connections, October 25, 2024.

The IPCC 6th Assessment calls for immediate action on global emissions, but that call to action is nowhere to be found; it’s not happening. Therefore, we must force governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels, a dead-end industry. For decades we’ve known fossil fuels can be completely replaced by renewables as “Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surge to Record $7 Trillion,” IMF, Aug. 24, 2023. Imagine splurging $7 Trillion per year on renewables, a 10-fold increase over current spending.

Shocking New News for 2024

“It’s very clear climate change is no longer decades in the future. It’s very obvious it’s happening now, so we need to adapt.” (Jim Skea, chairman IPCC)

“The whole of Europe is vulnerable and especially the Mediterranean. We are already seeing desertification taking place, not only in North Africa, but some of the southern margins of Europe, like Greece, Portugal and Turkey,” (Jim Skea)

The Telegraph interviewed IPCC Chair Jim Skea: It’s too Late to save Britain from Overheating, Says UN Climate Chief, October 5, 2024.  According to the interview, humanity has lost the opportunity to hold global temperature to 1.5C. And it will take a heroic effort to limit it to 2C.

Since the mid 1990s, the ultimate danger has been set at 2C above pre-industrial, which incidentally, according to Dr. Carter, is catastrophe on a global basis. All tipping points will be triggered at that level… then, it’s too late.

The most feared tipping point is permafrost thaw, which is emitting more and more CO2 (carbon dioxide) and CH4 (methane) than ever. It is melting in the Arctic and subarctic regions, emitting three major greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4 and N2O (nitrous oxide). Atmospheric CH4 is going up a lot.

“The observed growth in methane emissions follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most pessimistic greenhouse gas scenarios, which predict global temperatures could rise above 3°C by the century’s end if such trends continue.” (Source: “The 2024 Global Methane Budget Reveals Alarming Trends,” The European Space Agency, October 9, 2024)

According to Dr. Carter, scientists are uniformly agreed that the permafrost plight may be irreversible. In the most recent The State of the Cryosphere Report scientists claim permafrost melt is so bad/threatening that people should “be frightened.” This alone should motivate worldwide mitigation measures to halt CO2 emissions.

Alas, permafrost is now officially competing with cars, trains, planes, and industry: “An international team, led by researchers at Stockholm University, discovered that from 2000 to 2020, carbon dioxide uptake by the land was largely offset by emissions from it.” (Source: “NASA Helps Find Thawing Permafrost Adds to Near-Term Global Warming,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, October 29, 2024)

Moreover, some of the most shocking news is the State of Climate Change Report in 2023 of huge global surface increases in temperature, part of which was El Nino related, but it was not nearly powerful enough to kick up temperatures so radically. Obviously, something else was at work. Putting the 2023 experience of massive heat into IPCC projections, it hits the “very worst-case scenario category,” because the planet is now tracking above the worst-case scenarios at 8.5 W/m² (watts per square meter) which measures the radiative forcing that heats the planet. This is serious trouble.

[Side Note: According to NOAA data, the Earth’s average radiative forcing in 2000 was approximately 2.43 W/m², with most of this forcing coming from increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. “Before the industrial era, incoming and outgoing radiation were in very close balance, and the Earth’s average temperature was more or less stable” – MIT Climate Portal]

A major source behind the issue is straight-forward: We’ve never produced or burned more coal than today. It’s the worst thing we can do. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2023 global coal usage reached an all-time high, driven by strong demand in China and India, with production also peaking at record levels…  for 2024, global coal demand is expected to remain largely flat with production levels of 2023. This crushes Paris ’15.

Earth’s Carbon Sinks Are Failing

Earth’s carbon sinks are losing efficiency. This is horrific news. The Global Carbon Project of the past three years discovered land and ocean carbon sinks starting to lose efficiency. According to Dr. Carter, “this is a terrifying development.” We may be losing our most important natural buffers by up to 50%. The IPCC didn’t expect this to happen until after 2050, if at all, but it’s here now.

A recent study claims the planet’s overall carbon sink absorbed zero carbon or negligible amounts last year. This is the shocker of the year. Well, actually, it’s the shocker of the century. It’s a game-changer, and a devastating climate curse.

The Global Carbon Project 2nd Assessment on the status of methane CH4 and nitrous oxide N2O found each greenhouse gas to be tracking the “IPCC worst-case scenario.” This confirms Dr. Carter’s overriding thesis that we’re pushing the climate system to the edge of a dangerous spiral.

Carter: “Yes, honestly, it is time to panic…. but mysteriously there is no panic in the world.”  The 2^nd Assessment found all three greenhouse gases going up faster than anybody ever thought possible.

Is there hope?

Dr. Carter says we must communicate with people and tell the truth. We must make sure the world knows we are in a global climate planetary emergency. All kinds of emergency declarations were initiated in 2018 with the alarming IPCC 1.5C warning, but it has faded; it is gone. That warning can be put back into place. And we must harass politicians “to stop fossil fuels, to stop wiping out our future.” And hold corporations accountable. And stop harassing and jailing peaceful climate protestors.

There are possibilities of hope because we have the nuts and bolts of renewables to replace fossil fuels many times over. But fossil fuels are increasing at the same rate, or faster, as renewables. This is a road to nowhere.

In summation, the climate system is tracking above the IPCC’s worst-case scenario, and in Dr. Carter’s words: “It is time to panic: Yes, panic.” But who really knows this? And who really knows but could care less? Something somehow must be done well in advance of the world suddenly waking up one day when it’s too late with the sudden realization: “We are screwed.”

Academy Award Nominee Don’t Look Up (2021) is a perfect analogy for today’s situation.

The storyline: Astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet the size of Mount Everest headed straight for Earth. Warned by Dibiasky and Mindy, the political establishment, brushing off the astronomers while they’re preoccupied with an election campaign, adopt a political slogan: “Don’t Look Up” to win the election.

Sound familiar?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Joakim Wei Bernild: I’m not going to get into how we met, but as to how the band started out, I think Anton was the initiator—he’d made some music and called me up, right?

Anton Falck: I had made a demo song and some music guy had heard it, randomly, and wanted to book me for a festival, and I was like, “What the fuck?” And then I felt like I had to make a band. Joakim was a natural choice, because we were both noobs, so we were on the same level, on the same page.

JWB: Even though we only had one or two songs, we were given a 45-minute slot.

AF: We didn’t understand then that we had the power to say that we wouldn’t be able to play for that long.

JWB: We sat down and made 45 minutes’ worth of songs.

AF: Really long songs.

I’m going to assume that “Holiday,” one of your earliest singles, which is fairly standard-length and radio-ready, wasn’t one of them. I love the journey—the sort of “breakup in paradise” plot line—that “Holiday’s” lyrics chart. Its first lines—“Good, skin-kissing summer days/ Sun City, I’m here to stay”—capture the feeling, the boundless optimism, that characterizes the first moments of going on vacation. I still like to listen to it whenever I’m stepping out of an airplane, down one of those staircases on wheels. It’s the perfect score for that moment: the humid air of somewhere tropical hitting you in the face, and you’re all hyped up about how much leisure lies ahead of you.

AF: It’s funny because I’m really not a vacation person. I’ve never traveled to a warm country with palm trees just to relax. I tried doing it for the first time two years ago. I went on a normal holiday because we’d been traveling so much, seeing the world, but always through the lens of being on tour. It is a very different way of traveling. I find that going—just going—on a vacation is really, really weird. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s not for me. I think that, for me, the song is more of a metaphor, somehow—a state of mind.

I had taken the song’s refrain—“Our love was a holiday”—and the plea that it ends on—“Won’t you just hold me one last time?”—to describe a kind of romance that can’t be fitted into a routine, and can only exist in this exceptional, time-out-of-time space of a vacation.

JWB: We had a few years, three or four years, during which we toured a lot, and that’s when we wrote that song.

AF: When you’re a musician at our level of the industry, the work of touring is its own reward, because you know you’re not going to come home with a ton of money. It was always about trying to have as much fun as possible while away. We knew it was a specific time in our lives that we would look back on at some point, one that wouldn’t last forever. Touring is this weird kind of holiday. You’re away from home, but it’s still work.

You’re both from Denmark. A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of the outsized success that Scandinavians—and, I think, Swedes in particular—enjoy in the field of popular music. There’s this cultural hypothesis that it’s because they place a great deal of emphasis on music education programs and choral music in early childhood.

AF: It could also have something to do with the way a language is built. When Swedish people talk, they sound like they’re singing. I speak Swedish, and for a long time when we were writing songs, I would sing in Swedish first to come up with the melodies, then translate the lyrics, because we don’t want to release music in Swedish.

JWB: We’ve done something similar with Japanese. We don’t speak Japanese, but we can emulate the way it sounds to come up with melodies.

AF: Languages really change the way you sing. Japanese songs rarely rhyme, but somehow they don’t sound weird. If you were to sing without rhyming in Danish, it would sound really, really strange.

Did you guys see that movie Triangle of Sadness? So much of the dialogue didn’t hit my ear right, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that Ruben Östlund, the film’s writer and director, was working outside his native language. It struck me that what might figure as a hurdle for someone writing a film in which the characters engage in believable exchanges might actually be ideal for someone writing really moving pop songs, which tend to deal in hyperbole and cliché. To write a pop song in English, you don’t necessarily need to be extremely acquainted with how native speakers actually go about using it in their day-to-day lives. What do you make of your choice to write and record music in English?

AF: We never could have written the same songs in Danish; listening to them would probably make us want to throw up. Then, of course, there’s the practicality of wanting to be understood by as many people as possible, to have an audience outside of little baby Denmark, a country of only six million people. When I write in English, I find myself falling into using the same 500 words that are nearest to me. In English, we can get away with expressing ourselves in a way that is somehow more blunt and honest. I spend a lot of time reading thesauruses, looking words up online, or even taking my lyrics and translating them into Latin or Portuguese, then translating the output into yet another language, back and forth a few times in Google Translate, and then bringing them back into English. Somehow, Google Translate will fuck it up or add some weird extra layer, and sometimes—by doing shit like that—I’ll find the most beautiful words. We proudly use a lot of cheat codes.

There’s this line in your song “Someone New” that goes, “Hey baby, this is goodbye. Like, ‘talk to you never.’” How eye-roll-inducing that would be as a line of dialogue in a film or a novel! Yet it plays so well in the context of a pop song; it really lands.

AF: We’re always trying to position ourselves right on the cusp of irony and a kind of seriousness that can be cringe. It might be hard for people to decipher, but we actually—most of the time—mean everything we say.

JWB: It’s difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to listen to our music as a native English speaker. I often think about that with rap music, where all of these really harsh things are said. If the same things were being said in Danish, I don’t know if I could bear being out in society—to hear that playing in the background, very casually, in the supermarket while I shop.

Speaking of supermarkets, I wanted to ask you guys about money—

AF: How much do you need?

A lot! Last year, you had an installation at the Copenhagen Contemporary, a kind of popup shop called the First Hate Supermarket, stocked with items—such as framed portraits and towels with your faces printed on them—that far surpassed the typical merchandise offering for bands.

AF: I don’t know how this compares internationally, but in Denmark right now, people are really focused on owning the right apartment, the right designer clothes, the right car—maybe a Tesla if they can. Everybody’s having kids and everything has to look perfect. For a while, we were also considering where to take this project, sort of along those lines. Did we want to follow our guts and keep making weird, alternative pop music? Should we record a song in Danish and make it a national hit in Denmark and try to make money off it? We put so much work into the music, but when it comes down to it, with the way the music industry is put together now, with Spotify and streaming, we aren’t really making any money from the music. We want to make a living from what we do, but people only want to buy things. The “Supermarket” was a provocation. We wanted to make money by selling all of this stuff that is external to the music, while also drawing attention to the reality that it’s one of the only ways that we can make a living.

Much of the merchandise was emblazoned with this logo, a sort of amalgamation of various planetary symbols, that appears throughout your imagery as a band. Your song “Fortune Teller” features a play on words in the phrase “pull up,” which means both the action of drawing a Tarot card and, in contemporary slang, of arriving somewhere in style. Is astrology something you believe in? Is magic?

AF: It’s a funny tendency how, in the last few years, everyone in our generation got a deck of Tarot cards or downloaded some kind of astrology app, but these things have definitely always been a theme for us. The First Hate symbol is more than just a logo; it’s also a rune or a sigil. It’s a way of directing a lot of energy into a single symbol—and it doesn’t have to be something that other people understand for it to make sense to us. I mean…maybe if you know, you know.

Your first full-length album was titled A Prayer for the Unemployed. What kinds of jobs have you guys held—or not held?

AF: We’ve always been hustling different jobs. Our friend Dee, who’s from Scotland, found a laminated card in a church where she grew up that said “A Prayer for the Unemployed,” and we thought that was really funny.

When your song “Commercial” was released in the spring of 2022, I and many other barely employed members of our generation’s creative class were, perhaps a little cynically, banking on the belief that investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets would be our ticket to long-term financial solvency. I would listen to that song on repeat during the days when it was my job to moderate a group chat for the owners of an NFT—a literal .gif that they had purchased for hundreds of dollars. I was supposed to whip them into a frenzy, insisting that the token’s value was poised to surge, and muting or blocking users for expressing what we called “F.U.D”—which, initially, I thought stood for “fucked-up discourse,” but actually stood for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It was weird, the way that song’s refrains of “Money loves me” and “Pump the prices” were uncanny echoes, almost word for word, of the sorts of sentiments I was being paid to encourage and reward.

JKB: What you were doing there is very much what major labels do with their artists. They take an artist and pump them up and give them loans—money, but also jewelry and fancy cars—and then they push the image that a certain rapper, a certain singer, is so successful, that people come to believe it. And then they are! That’s also like a magic spell, in many ways.

The chorus of your new song “Run Down Love” goes: “Run down love/ Run down my thighs/ Run down love / cruising tonight.” It seems to be about cruising for sex, the chance sexual encounter in a public place. How do things like chance, serendipity, and randomness play into your process of composing and recording songs?

JWB: This feels like a bit of a cliché, but sometimes when we are recording, the first attempt will sound the absolute best, and you can’t replicate it, and you can’t edit it.

AF: When we’re writing lyrics, sometimes a sentence pops out of nowhere, and then we build a whole song around that. All of these small moments of luck are much more valuable than sitting down with the intention of working with a theme, somehow. And yeah, that song is about cruising, which is, as you said, all about luck: you never know who’s hiding in the bush.

How did you land upon your band’s name? Is it an inversion of “first love?” A play on “first date?”

AF: Thank you bandnamemaker.com.

Really? That’s a bit of randomness.

AF: Most of the things we do are very random. Things don’t have to make sense to begin with.

JWB: You can always give them meaning later.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Karim Kazemi.

Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.

For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led militarisation of the Pacific, their native populations have fought to defend their lands and way of life.

On 6 February 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of the British Crown and the Māori groups of Aotearoa. The treaty (which has no point of comparison in Australia) claimed that it would ‘actively protect Māori in the use of their lands, fisheries, forests, and other treasured possessions’ and ‘ensure that both parties to [the treaty] would live together peacefully and develop New Zealand together in partnership’. While I was in Aotearoa, I learned that the new coalition government seeks to ‘reinterpret’ the Treaty of Waitangi in order to roll back protections for Māori families. This includes shrinking initiatives such as the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) and programmes that promote the use of the Māori language (Te Reo Maori) in public institutions. The fight against these cutbacks has galvanised not only the Māori communities, but large sections of the population who do not want to live in a society that violates its treaties. When Aboriginal Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupted the British monarch Charles’s visit to the country’s parliament last month, she echoed a sentiment that spreads across the Pacific, yelling, as she was dragged out by security: ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. … We want a treaty in this country. … You are not my king. You are not our king’.

Walangkura Napanangka (Pintupi), Johnny Yungut’s Wife, Tjintjintjin, 2007.

With or without a treaty, both Aotearoa and Australia have seen a groundswell of sentiment for increased sovereignty across the islands of the Pacific, building on a centuries-long legacy. This wave of sovereignty has now begun to turn towards the shores of the massive US military build-up in the Pacific Ocean, which has its sights set on an illusionary threat from China. US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, speaking at a September 2024 Air & Space Forces Association convention on China and the Indo-Pacific, represented this position well when he said ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. For Kendall, the problem is not that China was a threat to other countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it is preventing the US from playing a leading role in the region and surrounding waters – including those just outside of China’s territorial limits, where the US has conducted joint ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises with its allies. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall continued. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.

George Parata Kiwara (Ngāti Porou and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki), Jacinda’s Plan, 2021.

In 1951, in the midst of the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950–1953), senior US foreign policy advisor and later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles helped formulate several key treaties, such as the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, which brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US’s war plans, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals – part of the US’s aggressive strategy in the region – came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields: Hawaii (since 1898), Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900). Out of this reality, which swept from Japan to Aotearoa, Dulles developed the ‘island chain strategy’, a so-called containment strategy that would establish a military presence on three ‘island chains’ extending outward from China to act as an aggressive perimeter and prevent any power other than the US from commanding the Pacific Ocean.

Over time, these three island chains became hardened strongholds for the projection of US power, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite signing various treaties to demilitarise the region (such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986), the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations in French colonial outposts such as Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. The US also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.

Christine Napanangka Michaels (Nyirripi), Lappi Lappi Jukurrpa (Lappi Lappi Dreaming), 2019.

While some of these Pacific Island nations are used as bases for US and French power projection against China, others have been used as nuclear test sites. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. One of them, conducted in Bikini Atoll, detonated a thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darlene Keju Johnson, who was only three years old at the time of the Bikini Atoll detonation and was one of the first Marshallese women to speak publicly about the nuclear testing in the islands, encapsulated the sentiment of the islanders in one of her speeches: ‘We don’t want our islands to be used to kill people. The bottom line is we want to live in peace’.

Jef Cablog (Cordillera), Stern II, 2021.

Yet, despite the resistance of people like Keju Johnson (who went on to become a director in the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health), the US has been ramping up its military activity in the Pacific over the past fifteen years, such as by refusing to close bases, opening new ones, and expanding others to increase their military capacity. In Australia – without any real public debate – the government decided to supplement US funding to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that it could house US B-52 and B-1 bombers with nuclear capacity. It also decided to expand submarine facilities from Garden Island to Rockingham and build a new high-tech radar facility for deep-space communications in Exmouth. These expansions came on the heels of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership in 2021, which has allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their strategies. The partnership also sidelined the French manufacturers that until then had supplied Australia with diesel-powered submarines and ensured that it would instead buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines for the missions the US and UK are conducting in the waters around China.

Over the past few years, the US has also sought to draw Canada, France, and Germany into the US Pacific project through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2022). In 2021, at the France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have also opened a dialogue about coordinating their military activities against China in the Pacific.

Yvette Bouquet (Kanak), Profil art, 1996.

Yet these partnerships are only part of the US ambitions in the region. The US is also opening new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines – the first such expansion in the country since the early 1990s – while intensifying its arm sales with Taiwan, to whom it is providing lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Meanwhile the US has improved its coordination with Japan’s military by deciding to establish joint force headquarters, which means that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea will be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries (not by orders from Washington).

However, the US-European war project is not going as smoothly as anticipated. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and New Caledonia (2024), led by communities who are no longer willing to be subjected to neocolonialism, have come as a shock to the US and its allies. It will not be easy for them to build their island chain in the Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Unimaginably, Israel's campaign of genocide and elimination escalates, with up to 800 Palestinians killed in 17 days "in full view of the world." Amidst relentless bombardment, displacement, starvation, trauma and shelling so incessant their "bodies don't stop trembling," Gazans recount apocalyptic scenes: limbs and corpses in the streets, body parts "hanging on the walls," children shot filling water jugs, hundreds trapped in homes and hospitals without power, water, food, aid: "All that’s left is the will to breathe."

Surely emboldened by the unceasing flow of arms and blood money from a complicit U.S., and an accompanying silence from much of the world, Israel has undertaken a series of massacres in central and northern Gaza - Nuseirat, Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun - where an estimated 100,000 Palestinians are trapped without food, water or "any illusion of safety." In Beit Lahiya, Israel flattened a crowded five-storey residential building in a "horrifying" attack that killed 93 displaced Palestinians, including at least 20 children. Nabil Al-Khatib, 57, and his family were sheltering in a UNRWA school until Israel began bombing it. Flying shrapnel wounded eight of his children and grandchildren before they could flee during a brief lull. "We picked up the children and ran,” he said. "We left everything behind, our lives as we knew them. But we had each other." He saw others who "have already lost everything - their homes, families, limbs...The horrors we have lived are indescribable. Even mountains cannot hold it."

Survivors describe "a nightmare beyond comprehension," with savage air strikes "vaporizing" victims, corpses crushed under rubble, limbs torn off, people bleeding out on the street from lack of aid. A poet in exile mourned his 7-year-old cousin and 18 trapped members of his family killed in a strike; the day before, he said, "I told everyone tanks and soldiers were besieging them, but no one heard." Often, IDF soldiers invade homes or shelters, evict residents, and set fire to what's left so they cannot return. Despite "catastrophic" conditions, Palestinian civil defense forces have had to suspend operations in the wake of attacks on its teams: "Our work has completely stopped." And while Israel claims it allows civilians to flee south "in a safe manner and through organized routes," the Palestinian Authority says survivors face a far grimmer choice. "The Occupation army is forcing residents to either flee under bombardment, or (stay to) face being killed by a strike "in what resembles a circle of certain death."

Injured young man hugs body of child killed in Israeli strike on Jabalia refugee camp(Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israeli military leaders' bloody new assault reportedly followed political leaders' approval of an extremist "General's Plan," which entails an ever-more barbarous approach to ethnic cleansing. Among its goals aimed at "changing the doctrine of war" are calls to "move from the concept of deterrence to decisiveness," hiring more "offensive" officers, and focusing on "a clear (if delusional) victory against the enemy." En route, it is hoped, "All of Gaza will starve." And so it is. On Oct. 28, in "a new way to kill children," the Knesset passed a bill banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the key source of humanitarian aid for 2.9 million people in some 30 refugee camps. The move to ban UNRWA, which runs 147 medical facilities and schools for 660,000 children along with providing vital food and water, came after months of Israeli efforts to discredit the group's work by charging several employees - 230 of whom Israel has murdered - with taking part in Oct. 7 attacks - a claim both the UN and EU refute for lack of evidence.

Still, after a year of blocking over 80% of humanitarian aid at every turn while denying it was - and with Gazans getting about 10% of the food they need - Israel's latest move, critics say, has hastened "the collapse of the humanitarian system." With their incursions in the north virtually blocking most access to food and water, aid agencies say almost all Gazans face "punishing food scarcity." Most are lucky to eat one skimpy meal a day, nine of 10 children lack the nutrition they need to grow, babies born healthy too often die when their ill-nourished mothers can't breastfeed, about 50,000 children under five need or will soon need urgent treatment for malnutrition, fuel shortages and high prices have caused a “crippling" lack of vital bread, and at least 37 children are dead of malnutrition. "There is nothing," says Oxfam's Mahmoud Alsaqqa, "You are talking about tens of days that they are not receiving any supplies." Says another worker, "In essence, if people don’t die from the war, they face the very real threat of dying from hunger.”

Most harrowingly, hunger, like bombs, hits mostly children. Over 16,700 children have died in Israeli air strikes, including at least 710 babies under 1, their ages listed as "zero"; many thousands more have been maimed and wounded. One aid worker mourns "an entire generation sacrificed," and warns those children who have survived to date "are running out of time." Most distressingly - at least to those who retain the moral clarity to insist that, no matter what, you don't kill children - "Kids aren't terrorists." Many warn that the war risks becoming, for a generation of occupied, traumatized, parentless, understandably enraged Palestinians, a "terrorism-creation factory" for decades to come. Bilal Salem, a photojournalist documenting the carnage in Gaza, breaks down when he describes the way children "cling to their parents, desperate for protection their parents can’t give." “We move through the ruins like ghosts, trying to capture what’s left of people’s lives," he says, "but the truth is, there’s not much left.”

Relatives of Palestinians killed in Israeli attack mourn at al-Awda Hospital (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, after a year of Israel systematically targeting and crippling Gaza’s health system - one war crime among many - most of its 36 hospitals are barely functional, leaving hundreds of thousands of war victims without care. According to data from Gaza's Health Ministry, Israeli forces have killed 1,151 Palestinian health workers, including at least 165 doctors, 260 nurses, 300 support personnel, 184 health associates and 76 pharmacists. More than 300 health workers have been detained, and at least two prominent doctors have died under torture in Israeli custody. Most recently, Médecins Sans Frontières staffer Hasan Suboh was among those killed in one of Israel's attacks on homes in the north; his tattered MSF vest was found under the rubble. "To see it destroyed," said MSF in a statement, "is representative of how in this war, Israel, the U.S. government, and the rest of Israel's allies have disregarded the protection of healthcare workers, and ripped the rules of war to shreds."

The ongoing attacks in northern Gaza have left already frayed hospitals yet more overwhelmed, and literally besieged. Israeli forces have barred the World Health Organization from delivering supplies or evacuating patients, even as they've attacked those trapped inside. At Kamal Adwan Hospital, surgeon Dr Mohammed Obeid says at least 30 people are dead; another 130 patients need urgent care: “There is death in all types and forms. The bombardment does not stop. The artillery does not stop. The planes do not stop.” Dr. Mohammed Salha, director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, says about 180 people - staff, patients, displaced families - are trapped inside as Israeli tanks stand guard and missiles bombard the area. Earlier, forces shelled the hospital's upper floors, killing or wounding over 40 patients and staff; the bombs set off a fire at a nearby school that took out the hospital's power. Israel ordered doctors to evacuate; they refused. “We are just waiting for death to come," said Obeid. "Or a miracle."

Boy injured in Israeli attack on Jabalia Refugee Camp is treated at al-Ahli Baptist Hospital (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Amidst the vast devastation of Israel's genocide, survivors are often left with not just rage and sorrow, but a powerful desire to honor those lost to them, to insist on their humanity and tell their stories so "their deaths are recorded for posterity." Thus did Dr. Areej Hijazi, a Gaza obstetrician, write moving obituaries for three colleagues he studied with at Al-Azhar University whose deaths reflect the grievous depth and breadth of his community's losses. "These three dedicated physicians have been taken from us," he writes. "But their memories are alive in our hearts, and their work will continue to inspire us." Dr. Inas Mahmoud Yousef, 29, was a family doctor, mother to 3-year-old son Hassan, and pregnant with her second child when an Israeli missile hit her home last October. It killed her, Hassan, her unborn child; it also killed her husband’s parents, his brother, his wife and their two children. The only survivor was Inas’ husband, Dr. Ali al-Nweiry, an orthopedic surgeon; he had a spinal cord injury and is now a paraplegic.

Dr. Maisara Alrayyes, 28, was a member of Médecins du Monde, with a master’s degree in women's and children’s health from King’s College London. He was killed in a November airstrike with 11 relatives, including his parents and his wife, pregnant with their first child. The next day, Dr. Maisara’s two brothers couldn’t bear to leave their family under the rubble, and went to retrieve the bodies; another Israeli missile killed them. Finally, Dr. Nahed al-Harazin was head of obstetrics and gynecology at Al-Shifa Hospital. She was killed last December in an Israeli attack, along with her mother, two brothers, and their wives and children. Dr. Nahed and her family had refused Israeli orders to evacuate; she was so devoted to work that, during bombings, she'd sometimes walk the four kilometers to Al-Shifa if she had to. Once, Hijazi recalled, she reassured him when there was heavy shelling near Al-Shifa. "Don't be afriad," she told him. "Stand here next to me." "Mark the silence," writes poet Emily De Ferrari. "Mark the scream."

Body of Palestnian killed in Israeli attack on Jabalia lies in street(Photo by Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea/Anadolu via Getty Images)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a lawyer for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and doug.clark@propublica.org.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch, and Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is cautioning New Caledonia’s local government to “be reasonable” in its requests from Paris ahead of a Pacific fact-finding mission.

A much-anticipated high-level visit by Pacific leaders to the French territory is confirmed, after it was postponed by New Caledonia’s local government in August due to allegations France was pushing its own agenda.

President Louis Mapou has confirmed the Pacific leaders’ mission will take place from October 27-29.

• READ MORE:  ‘We’ll be talking about the future of negotiations’, says Rabuka on New Caledonia mission
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports
• Other CHOGM reports

Rabuka is one of the four Pacific leaders taking part in the so-called “Troika Plus” mission and confirmed he will be in Nouméa on Sunday.

He told RNZ Pacific during his visit to Aotearoa last week that as “an old hand in Pacific leadership”, listening was key.

“I’m hoping that they will be very, very reasonable about what they’re asking for,” the prime minister said.

“When they started, the Kanaky movement started during my time as Prime Minister. I told them, ‘look, don’t slap the hand that has fed you’.

‘Good disassociation arrangement’
“So have a good disassociation arrangement when you become independent, make sure you part as friends.”

This week, Rabuka told RNZ Pacific in Apia that he would be taking a back seat during the mission.

Veteran Pacific journalist Nick Maclellan, who is in New Caledonia, said there was “significant concern” that political leaders in France did not understand the depth of the crisis.

“This crisis is unresolved, and I think as Pacific leaders arrive this week, they’ll have to look beyond the surface calm to realise that there are many issues that still have to play out in the months to come,” he said.

He said there appeared to be “a tension” between the local government of New Caledonia and the French authorities about the purpose of Pacific leaders’ mission.

“In the past, French diplomats have suggested that the Forum is welcome to come, to condemn violence, to address the question of reconstruction and so on,” he said.

“But I sense a reluctance to address issues around France’s responsibility for decolonisation.

‘Important moment’
“The very fact that four prime ministers are coming, not diplomats, not ministers, not just officials, but four prime ministers of Forum member countries, shows that this is an important moment for regional engagement,” he added.

In a statement on Friday, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat said that the prime ministers of Tonga and the Cook Islands, along with Solomon Islands Foreign Affairs Minister, would join Rabuka to travel to New Caledonia.

Tongan PM Hu’akavameiliku will head the mission, which is expected to land in Nouméa after the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa this week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.

Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as “an anti-Enlightenment program.” The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.

John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): “Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”

McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters’ “infuriated chanting.” He said:

Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans…. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus…. Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….

The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

He’s clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech “permissible.”

Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is “a form of abuse” of Jewish students through the “relentless assault” of protesters’ Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president’s decision to “crack down” on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.

‘Flagrant unprofessional conduct’

For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), “upholding the ideals of free speech” requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.

In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters’ speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as “breaching grade privacy requirements” (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).

A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.

Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax “said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’…. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Wax made public comments about Black students’ grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.

The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel’s recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor’s white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

Given McWhorter’s previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn’t have to listen to speech like “from the river to the sea,” one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax’s subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.

Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be “Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous,” his headline declared, but “She Shouldn’t Be Punished” for them.

‘Living with discomfort’—or not

“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy…but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member,” a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).

McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”

He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”

The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s “discomfort—or even anger and injury” is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a “form of abuse” that they should not be expected to simply “be able to tolerate.”

Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax “engaged in ‘flagrant unprofessional conduct’ that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn” from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”

McWhorter deems the disciplinary action “egregious,” yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.

Acceptable and unacceptable restrictions

Columbia University’s suspension of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict “the ideal of free speech,” in McWhorter’s view, because the university had not “categorically prohibited criticism of Israel.”

McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with “identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment”:

Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.

The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.

McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, “pushing” demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas “categorical” prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.

It’s remarkable that McWhorter doesn’t see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.

Enormous chilling effect

Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): “Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics…have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”

What’s more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.

McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having

shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.

Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”

Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent

behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging…supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.

Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.

Tip of the iceberg

Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): “Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza…colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter’s attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):

Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.

On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have been fired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.

If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.

But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New York Times and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it’s remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Israeli strikes continue to rain down on Lebanon, including a strike that killed rescue and health workers in Beirut. Lebanese authorities say 1.2 million people have been displaced by the Israeli attacks. Israel announced eight of its soldiers were killed while invading southern Lebanon this week. Israel launched the ground invasion after assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday, despite Nasrallah reportedly agreeing to a 21-day ceasefire. “This overwhelming use of force cannot change people’s agency,” says Nadim Houry, Lebanese researcher and executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative. “The region does not want to be a satellite of Israel or a satellite of the U.S. And by the way, the region does not want to be a satellite of Iran either. The problem is the region is not really being given much of a choice.”

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

The state of Missouri is set to kill Marcellus Williams tonight. Williams has always maintained his innocence in the 2001 killing of St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle during a robbery. The jurors, prosecutors and victim’s family are all supporting Williams’s bid for clemency, which has been denied by Missouri’s Republican governor and state Supreme Court. “What we see is a system that’s looking at finality over fairness, rushing to get to an execution date instead of taking the time to stop this execution and look at the merits of what is being argued,” says Williams’s attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, who is now seeking a last-minute reprieve and reassessment of the case from the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

The post They Eat Humans, Don’t They? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

—Thomas Jefferson

Public trust in the government to “do what is right” understandably remains at an all-time low.

After all, how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.

Consider for yourself.

Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the more than two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.”

Don’t trust the government with your property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

 Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $35 trillion and growing, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.

Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.

Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

“We the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, get back to basics. Get to know your neighbors, your community, and your local officials. This is the first line of defense when it comes to securing your base: fortifying your immediate lines.

Second, understand your rights. Know how your local government is structured. Who serves on your city council and school boards? Who runs your local jail: has it been coopted by private contractors? What recourse does the community have to voice concerns about local problems or disagree with decisions by government officials?

Third, know the people you’re entrusting with your local government. Are your police chiefs being promoted from within your community? Are your locally elected officials accessible and, equally important, are they open to what you have to say? Who runs your local media? Does your newspaper report on local events? Who are your judges? Are their judgments fair and impartial? How are prisoners being treated in your local jails?

Finally, don’t get so trusting and comfortable that you stop doing the hard work of holding your government accountable. We’ve drifted a long way from the local government structures that provided the basis for freedom described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, but we are not so far gone that we can’t reclaim some of its vital components.

As an article in The Federalist points out:

Local government is fundamental not so much because it’s a “laboratory” of democracy but because it’s a school of democracy. Through such accountable and democratic government, Americans learn to be democratic citizens. They learn to be involved in the common good. They learn to take charge of their own affairs, as a community. Tocqueville writes that it’s because of local democracy that Americans can make state and Federal democracy work—by learning, in their bones, to expect and demand accountability from public officials and to be involved in public issues.

To put it another way, think nationally but act locally.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there is still a lot Americans can do to topple the police state tyrants, but any revolution that has any hope of succeeding needs to be prepared to reform the system from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

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This article contains descriptions of mental illness, alcohol addiction and suicidal ideation.

Early one morning in February 2023, before the sun rose over Phoenix, Ravi Coutinho went on a walk and, for a brief moment, thought about hurling his body in front of a moving bus. He had been feeling increasingly alone and depressed; anxious and unlovable; no longer sure if he was built for this world.

Several hours later, Ravi swiped open his iPhone and dialed the toll-free number on the back of his Ambetter insurance card. After navigating the automated voice system, he was routed to a friendly, fast-talking customer service rep with a slight foreign accent. His name was Giovanni.

“How can I help you today?” Giovanni asked.

“Hi, I am trying to find a psychiatric care provider,” Ravi said.

“So, you are looking for a primary care provider?” Giovanni asked.

“No,” Ravi replied, seeming confused. Ravi tried to clearly repeat himself. “Psy-chi-at-ric.”

“Psychiatric, all right, so, sure, I can definitely help you with that,” Giovanni said. “By the way, it is your first time calling in regards to this concern?”

Ravi paused. It was actually the sixth attempt to get someone, anyone, at Ambetter to give him or his mother the name of a therapist who accepted his insurance plan and could see him. Despite repeatedly searching the Ambetter portal and calling customer service, all they had turned up so far, he told Giovanni, were the names of two psychologists. One no longer took his insurance. The other, inexplicably, tested patients for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia and didn’t practice therapy at all.

“I’m a little concerned about all this,” Ravi said.

This had not been part of the plan Ravi had hatched a few months earlier to save his own life. Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and living in the heart of Austin, Texas’ boisterous Sixth Street bar district, the 36-year-old former college golfer had become reliant on a dangerous form of self-medication.

His heavy drinking had cost him his marriage and was on the verge of destroying his liver and his livelihood. His therapist back in Texas had helped him understand how his mental illnesses were contributing to his addiction and vice versa. She had coached him through attempts to get sober.

He wanted to save his business, which sold dream vacations to golfers eager to play the world’s legendary courses. He wanted to fall in love again, even have a kid. He couldn’t do that when he was drinking a fifth of a gallon of liquor — the equivalent of nearly 17 shots — on any given day.

When all else had failed, he and his therapist had discussed a radical move — relocating to the city where he’d spent his final years of high school. Phoenix symbolized a happier and healthier phase. They agreed that for the idea to work, he needed to find a new therapist there as quickly as possible and line up care in advance.

Ravi felt relieved when he signed up for an insurance plan right before the move. Ambetter wasn’t as well known as Blue Cross Blue Shield or UnitedHealthcare. But it was the most popular option on HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace, covering more than 2 million people across the country. For $379 a month, his plan appeared to have a robust network of providers.

Frustrating phone calls like this one began to confirm for Ravi what countless customers — and even Arizona regulators — had already discovered: Appearances could be deceiving.

After misunderstanding Ravi’s request for a therapist, Giovanni pulled up an internal directory and told Ravi that he had found someone who could help him.

It was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating the elderly. This was strange, considering that Giovanni had asked Ravi to verify that he was born in 1986. “I mean, geriatric psychiatry is not …” Ravi responded, “I mean … I wouldn’t qualify for that.”

Annoyed but polite, Ravi asked Giovanni to email the provider list on the rep’s computer. He figured that having the list, which he was legally entitled to, would speed up the process of finding help.

But Giovanni said that he couldn’t email the list. The company that ran Ambetter would have to mail it.

“What do you mean, mail?” Ravi asked. “Like physically mail it?”

Ravi let out a deep, despondent sigh and asked how long that would take.

Seven to 10 business days to process, Giovanni responded, in addition to whatever time it would take for the list to be delivered. Ravi couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity.

“Nothing personal,” he told Giovanni. “But that’s not going to work.

“So I’m just gonna have to figure it out.”

This baffling inability to find help had tainted Ravi’s fresh start.

In the weeks before the call with Giovanni, Ravi had scrolled through Ambetter’s website, examining the portal of providers through his thick-rimmed glasses. He called one after the next, hoping to make an appointment as quickly as possible.

Of course, it was unreasonable to expect every therapist in Ambetter’s network to be able to accept him, especially in a state with an alarming shortage of them. But he couldn’t even find a primary care doctor who could see him within six weeks and refill his dwindling supply of antidepressants and antianxiety meds.

Days before he was supposed to move to Phoenix, he texted friends about his difficulties in finding care:

“Therapists have been 0-4.”

“Called ten places and nothing.”

“The insurance portal doesn’t know shit.”

Ravi didn’t know it, but he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.

Ambetter’s parent company, Centene, has been accused numerous times of presiding over ghost networks. One of the 25 largest corporations in America, Centene brings in more revenue than Disney, FedEx or PepsiCo, but it is less known because its hundreds of subsidiaries use different names. In addition to insuring the largest number of marketplace customers, it’s the biggest player in Medicaid managed care and a giant in Medicare Advantage, insurance for seniors that’s offered by private companies instead of the federal government.

ProPublica reached out to Centene and the subsidiary that oversaw Ravi’s plan more than two dozen times and sent them both a detailed list of questions. None of their media representatives responded.

In 2022, Illinois’ insurance director fined another subsidiary more than $1 million for mental health-related violations including providing customers with an outdated, inaccurate provider directory. The subsidiary “admitted in writing that they are not following Illinois statute” for updating the directory, according to a report from the state’s Insurance Department.

In a federal lawsuit filed in Illinois that same year, Ambetter customers alleged that Centene companies “intentionally and knowingly misrepresented” the number of in-network providers by publishing inaccurate directories. Centene lawyers wrote in a court filing that the company “denies that it made any misrepresentations to consumers.” The case is ongoing.

And in 2021, San Diego’s city attorney sued several Centene subsidiaries for “publishing and advertising provider information they know to be false and misleading” — over a quarter of those subsidiaries’ in-network psychiatrists were unable to see new patients, the complaint said. The city is appealing after a judge sided with Centene on technical grounds.

Even the subsidiary responsible for Ravi’s plan had gotten in trouble. Regulators with the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions found in 2021 that Health Net of Arizona had failed to maintain accurate provider directories. The regulators did not fine Health Net of Arizona, which promised to address that violation. When ProPublica asked if the company had made those fixes, the department said in a statement that such information was considered “confidential.”

These were exactly the type of failures that Ravi’s mother, Barbara Webber, confronted as the head of an advocacy group that lobbied for greater health care access in New Mexico. From her Albuquerque apartment more than 300 miles away from her son’s his new, 12th-floor studio, she listened to Ravi vent about how hard it was to find a therapist in Phoenix.

Ravi was Barbara’s only child, and they had always been close. In the seven years since Ravi’s dad died, they’d grown even closer. They talked on the phone nearly every day. Barbara was used to supporting Ravi from afar, ordering him healthy delivery dinners, reminding him to drink enough water and urging him to call crisis hotlines amid panic attacks. But when Ravi crashed at her apartment while waiting to move to Phoenix, she saw more of his struggles up close. At one point, she called 911 when she feared for his life.

Despite her desire and ability to help him, Ravi didn’t want to stay with his mom for any longer than necessary. He didn’t want to feel like a teenager again.

Barbara understood her son’s desire for independence, and when he first encountered insurance barriers, she drew from her expertise and coached him through ways to try to get past them. But by the middle of February, a few days after Ravi settled into his new place, there was no good news about his mental health care. She felt the need to step in.

So, she called Ambetter to try to get better information than what Ravi was looking at online. But Khem Padilla, a customer service rep who seemed to be working at a call center overseas, couldn’t help her find that information. She then asked Padilla to send referrals to therapists.

When Padilla followed up, he only sent phone numbers for mental health institutes, including one that exclusively served patients with autism. “I wish that everything will work together for you,” Padilla wrote in an email to Barbara and Ravi on what happened to be Valentine’s Day, “and [don’t] forget that you are Loved.”

Loneliness is one of the strongest forces for triggering a relapse in someone addicted to alcohol, and Ravi’s early days in Phoenix provided a dangerous dose.

His old friends were often busy with work and family. He hadn’t found his way to a new Alcoholics Anonymous group yet. And he struggled to find matches on dating apps. (“Phoenix Tinder is a wasteland,” he told one friend.) His only consistent companion was Finn, a half-Great Pyrenees with a thick coat of fluffy white hair, whom he took on long walks around the city. “His unconditional love brings me so much joy,” he’d told his mom.

Alone in his apartment with Finn, vodka within reach, Ravi felt guilty about calling his loved ones for help. Even though his mom and his friends would pick up the phone at just about any hour, Ravi hated the idea of bothering them.

But he couldn’t resist after he hung up with Giovanni, the customer service rep. That afternoon, Feb. 22, he fired off a frustrated text message to his mom.

“How is it this hard?!” Ravi seethed.

Barbara’s next move was to reach out to a member of her nonprofit board who happened to work for a Centene company. The board member helped pull strings in late February to get Ravi a care manager, a person who works for the insurer to help patients navigate access to providers. But not even his new care manager, Breona Smith, a licensed professional counselor based in Arizona, could connect him to a therapist.

She spent 16 minutes calling in-network providers to check if they could see him. Four couldn’t. One could. Instead of calling more, she sent along a single therapy referral. When Ravi called that office, the staff had to verify if they accepted Ambetter. But Ravi never heard back.

Smith did get him a referral for a psychiatric nurse practitioner who could refill his meds; he first saw him one month into his move. Ravi hoped that the office might be able to refer him to a therapist, but none of the three providers it ultimately passed along took Ambetter. One of them had stopped taking insurance a decade ago; another had only ever seen patients willing to pay cash.

Without therapy, Ravi’s descent took on a momentum of its own.

One day, he drank himself to sleep and woke up with a pillow full of blood from his nose. On another, he white-knuckled a version of do-it-yourself detox that caused violent vomiting.

A close friend from high school, David Stanfield, was watching it all unfold. Ravi had always made David feel like they could pick up where they’d last left things. But this new withdrawn person, who would break into a sweat on a crisp night in the 60s, was a far cry from the guy he once knew.

Ravi was beginning to remind David of his brother-in-law, who had died of a drug overdose a few years earlier. So when Ravi sent a series of distressing texts, indicating that he had relapsed, David and another friend staged an intervention and took Ravi to the hospital.

But Ravi resisted rehab that didn’t come with therapy. He wondered what good another detox would do if it didn’t help him combat the root causes of his addiction. He was also worried that it would get in the way of his ability to work; Ravi was still booking some golf vacations through his business and figured he would have to surrender his phone during a rehab stay.

Instead, Ravi sated his withdrawals by feeding his body more alcohol, giving way to a March whirlwind of blackouts, massive hangovers and despondent texts to friends. When Ravi showed up to a baseball game looking pale and disheveled, a friend’s young son turned to his dad and asked: Is Ravi OK?

By early April, almost two months had passed since Barbara’s first call to Ambetter alerting them that Ravi was having trouble finding a therapist. Ambetter was obligated by state law to provide one outside of its network if Ravi couldn’t find one in a “timely manner” — which, in Arizona, meant within 60 days.

Within that span, its own records showed, he’d wound up in the emergency room seeking treatment for alcohol withdrawal and called a crisis line after he had thought about ending his life. Yet despite 21 calls with Ravi and Barbara, adding up to five hours and 14 minutes, the insurer’s staff had not lined up a single therapy appointment.

Smith called Ravi four times over two weeks, right as his mental health crisis worsened. When he didn’t respond, she closed his case on April 7. Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to questions about what information she tried to share with Ravi on these calls.

As Ravi’s attempts to find a therapist slowed down, his descent accelerated.

There was the episode at a Phoenix Suns game when paramedics had to treat him for severe dehydration after he downed a bottle of vodka.

There was the time he left the dog food container open and Finn got extremely sick from eating a week’s worth of food.

As Ravi crossed into his fourth month in Phoenix, he sat alone in his parked Kia Forte, surrounded by nothing but the lonely quiet, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

Barbara didn’t expect to spend Mother’s Day with Ravi. But after he told his uncle that he was having visions again of jumping in front of a speeding bus, she boarded a last-minute flight to Phoenix and settled into his couch where she could watch him as he slept.

On the morning of May 13, she was roused by his flailing limbs. He was having a seizure. Paramedics rushed Ravi to the hospital, the second time in the past month and fourth since the year began. Doctors gave him benzodiazepines, Valium and Librium, to treat the seizures and anxiety caused by his alcohol withdrawal. “Mom,” Ravi told Barbara, “I don’t want to die.”

One kind of treatment suggested by hospital staff, an intensive outpatient program, seemed the best fit. It would allow Ravi access to his phone for his business purposes. But neither Ravi nor Barbara could get a list of in-network programs from Ambetter, nor could they find them in the portal.

As Ravi called every program he could locate in metro Phoenix, and failed to find a single one that took his insurance, Barbara decided to pester her board member again. (The board member did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

A few days later, someone with Centene provided the names of two in-network programs out of the dozens in Arizona. Only one offered the individual therapy Ravi was looking for.

That Friday, May 19, Barbara rode with Ravi to Scottsdale, where the intake staff at Pinnacle Peak Recovery drug-tested him. He tested positive for the benzodiazepines the hospital staff had administered following his seizure. Treatment programs sometimes restrict patients who test positive for those drugs because of the liability, experts told ProPublica. Pinnacle Peak Recovery’s staff urged Ravi to come back the following week. Barbara flew home, hopeful that Ravi would be admitted. (Pinnacle Peak Recovery did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

On Monday morning, Ravi wrote the date, May 22, on a sheet of paper. He tore it out of a notebook, held it up to the side of his face and took a selfie with it. It was a way of marking time as well as a milestone: the first day of his newfound, hopefully permanent sobriety.

When he returned to Pinnacle Peak, however, he tested positive again. The second rejection hurt more than the first. Three days later, Ravi went back a third time; the drugs were still in his system. “I don’t know what else to do,” he told Barbara over the phone. “I am screwed.”

The answer of what else could be done was, unbeknownst to Ravi, buried in the fine print of his own insurance policy. Ambetter’s contract promised to find an out-of-network treatment program and make it available to Ravi, so long as Ambetter’s own employees decided that it was in his “best interest.”

Even though Barbara hadn’t read the fine print either, she had a sense that Ambetter could do more to help Ravi. So she pulled up the number of the last Centene employee she’d spoken with.

In a text message, Barbara expressed concern that the window to get Ravi help was closing. She was certain that, without more medical support ahead of admission to a treatment program, Ravi was bound to relapse. If that happened, Barbara pleaded, there was a good chance that he would have another seizure. She warned that he might even die.

Barbara awaited word on what to do next. She got no response.

The following morning, May 27, she drafted a message to Ravi. She described her visceral memory of his recent seizure — waking to the sound of his screams, pounding on his chest after his heartbeat briefly stopped, calling 911, uncertain if he would survive. “Those few minutes are seared into my soul and will go with me til the end of my days,” she wrote.

Barbara also wrote that she wanted nothing more than for Ravi to be around for the rest of her years. She promised to support him no matter what. If he kept going, he could find peace with Finn and find someone to love. But he had to keep going — not for her, not for Finn, not for his friends, not for anyone else. “I love you,” she wrote, “but you must love yourself.”

She hit send. Ravi didn’t reply right away, which was unusual.

An hour passed, then another. As the afternoon gave way to evening, Barbara called three times, unable to reach him. She tried to reach Phoenix’s 911 dispatch but couldn’t get through.

Not knowing what else to do, Barbara called David, whom Ravi had asked to be his local emergency contact.

David had grown deeply frustrated with Ravi for not getting the care he needed. And he was worried for his friend. He agreed to call 911.

A police dispatcher sent an officer to knock on Ravi’s door. The officer could hear Finn barking from the other side. When no one answered, the officer called David, letting him know that the police couldn’t enter the apartment without the building’s security guard, who wasn’t around right then.

Unsatisfied, David and his fiancée, Aly Knauer, drove over to Ravi’s. A security guard, who had just gotten back from his rounds, was reluctant to let them into the apartment at first. But after David and Aly explained the urgency, the guard relented. They headed up to the 12th floor and turned the corner toward Ravi’s apartment.

When the guard unlocked the door, Finn squeezed past and darted out. As Aly grabbed Finn, David peered inside, calling out his friend’s name. Four empty vodka bottles were strewn across the apartment. The Murphy bed was folded up against the wall. No one seemed to be there.

David glanced toward the window that frames the Phoenix skyline and felt a sense of relief. His friend might still be alive.

When he turned to leave, he looked again at the bed. He realized it was slightly ajar. As he leaned closer, to see why the bed hadn’t fully locked into place, David spotted something jutting out from the gap between the mattress and the wall: a lifeless foot.

About the Reporting

This story was pieced together from more than 1,000 pages of Ravi’s medical records and insurance files; audio recordings of Ambetter customer service calls; police reports and photos; court filings from three states; reports from insurance regulators; Ravi’s texts, phone logs, social media messages and emails; and more than 25 hours of interviews with people who knew Ravi best.

It was also guided by a lengthy chronology of key events that Barbara had compiled in the months after her son’s death. One thing she couldn’t bring herself to do: read the autopsy report. She asked her sister to summarize the findings, which ProPublica obtained and reviewed. Ravi’s death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.

ProPublica sent a detailed account of Ravi’s attempts to get help to 12 legal, insurance and mental health experts. They independently identified a variety of problems, including Ambetter’s provider directory inaccuracies, its network inadequacy and its customer service shortcomings.

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Max Blau, illustrations by Vanessa Saba, special to ProPublica.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.

As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives, and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.

José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.

“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”

ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.

Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.

In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.

The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.

“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.

Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses. The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data — more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”

What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. 

Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.

And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone’s returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.

As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”

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That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.

The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries — big and small — parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.

All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC — thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oakland’s new school buses don’t just reduce pollution — they double as giant batteries on Aug 29, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

With a click, with a shock
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .

— “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.

Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked.  The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner.  When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.

It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

Let us hope but not be naïve.  The signs all point in one direction.  The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one.  Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies.  Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance.  But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

“It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.”  Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss.  The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes.  It’s not terribly complex.  Netanyahu and Biden are two of them.  Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat.  But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them.  They gladly kill other people’s children.  They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise.  This is hard for regular people to accept.

The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths.  He wrote:

And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

And lie and suppress we still do today.

Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments.  Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology.  The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked.  The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

It’s not hard to do.  That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.

Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?

Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?

How do you think it would respond?

The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day.  The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically.  After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”  Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond?  How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation?  And what kind of retaliation?

Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon.  Something is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region?  Will nuclear weapons be used?  Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set.  We enter the final act.

Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive.  So he thinks.  Psychotic killers always do.

The signs all point in one direction.  No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.

“Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”

If you have time.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Democrats got that rare opportunity in August 2022, two years ago this week, when they passed legislation putting nearly $369 billion into investments in renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy efficiency upgrades for homes, and other green technologies. When the legislation emerged from negotiations with then-Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the key holdout, it had a surprising name: the “Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Even though inflation rates were soaring, the law wasn’t supposed to do that much to counter rising prices in the near-term, though it did include provisions to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug prices and help Americans afford health insurance. What it was mainly supposed to do was address climate change — by one estimate, cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Since President Joe Biden signed it into law, the Inflation Reduction Act has seen tangible results. Last year, some 3.4 million families took advantage of tax credits for clean energy and energy efficiency upgrades, according to recent data from the Treasury Department. That translates to 750,000 homes newly outfitted with rooftop solar panels and almost 270,000 homes with energy-efficient heat pumps. Companies, buoyed by the legislation’s incentives, have invested $360 billion into making batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies. 

But ask the average American what they think of the country’s landmark effort to take on climate change, and you might get a blank stare. About 4 in 10 registered voters say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about it, according to polling done this spring by Yale University and George Mason University.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, Democrats aren’t getting much credit for climate action from the voters who care about it. Just over half of liberal Democrats say they haven’t heard much about the IRA. “That raises real red flags for me because, again, this is the base of your party,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “These are the people who are, in fact, the most attuned to politics and follow along with political news. And they don’t know about it.”

Congress once named bills more intuitively — think of the Clean Air Act of 1970. But the IRA follows a more recent tradition of carefully branded environmental bills, with Democrats emphasizing positive qualities they hope will resonate across the political spectrum. Only rarely do those positive qualities include the word “climate.” In 2009, for example, an effort in Congress to adopt a national cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions went by the name “American Clean Energy and Security Act.” 

This hesitancy to talk about climate change directly may trace back to a fundamental bias in American politics, Leiserowitz said. Most people, including politicians, believe that climate action is far more unpopular than it really is. In reality, the majority of Americans are already alarmed or concerned about climate change, and want to do something about it.

Leiserowitz goes so far as to call the Inflation Reduction Act a “communication failure,” one that could have implications for the presidential election this November. While addressing climate change isn’t generally the main issue on voters’ minds, a poll last year found that it was the third-place priority for younger voters, tied with preventing gun violence, topped only by economic concerns such as inflation and jobs that pay a living wage.

The good news for Democrats — and Vice President Kamala Harris, now the party’s presidential nominee after Biden dropped out in July — is that when people hear about the IRA, they tend to like it. Among those who say climate change is one of their top voting priorities, 97 percent supported the law after reading a short description of it. 

Now, with just three months to go until the election, it’s sure to be even harder to cut through the news cycle with a message about climate action. “If they wanted to gain the benefits of having passed this truly world-changing legislation, they frankly should have been communicating it over the past two years,” Leiserowitz said. Aside from the lack of political attention and media coverage, there’s another challenge to communicating the IRA’s benefits: People rarely encounter them firsthand. The tax incentives go toward things that aren’t frequent purchases, like electric vehicles and heat pumps, said John Marshall, the CEO of Potential Energy, a nonprofit climate marketing firm.

But the Inflation Reduction Act’s messaging problem started with its title. “Most people are never going to learn anything more about it than the name itself,” Leiserowitz said. “They lost the first and greatest opportunity they had to communicate, if the goal was to emphasize the climate piece.” People aren’t connecting the dots: In a survey in April, which didn’t provide much context about the law, only 16 percent of Americans said they thought the IRA was helping to address climate change. 

Many journalists initially resisted the name, using it sparingly in their articles, and often only to fact-check whether the bill would actually reduce inflation, said Angela Bradbery, a communication professor at the University of Florida. She pointed to an Associated Press article in 2022 that characterized the legislation as “Democrats’ flagship climate and health care bill” — a more accurate description, in Bradbery’s opinion. Biden has admitted that the IRA’s name was a missed chance. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” he said during a speech last August.

Much effort has been spent trying to conjure the magic words to “reframe” climate change to drum up more public support for political action, pointing to side benefits that would help the economy or public health (or inflation). As Biden often puts it: “When I hear climate change, I think jobs.” Yet that impulse may be misplaced. “That’s not why people think we should be taking action on climate change,” Leisorowitz said. “It’s about protecting the people, places, and things that we love. … This could destabilize civilization, and we’re talking about a few hundred thousand jobs it’s going to create?”

For the Inflation Reduction Act, a simple message resonates with people, according to Marshall’s marketing research: emphasizing that it’s a landmark achievement to tackle climate change.

The urge to overthink communication, Marshall suspects, comes from the fact that climate change takes decades to solve. “We as humans naturally get impatient with, ‘Oh, that message didn’t work. We still have climate change. Let’s try another,’” he said. “And the most important thing in marketing and messaging is you pick a thing and just stick to it, and you have conviction around it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Most Americans don’t know the country’s biggest climate law helps the climate on Aug 15, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

It illustrates how far companies will go to influence elected officials. Politicians have elections to worry about, giving them a general motivation to avoid moves that will be unpopular. In fact, one survey found that congressional representatives rated “staying in touch with constituents” as the most important aspect of their jobs. But behind the scenes, there’s a very meta struggle to sway what politicians perceive as popular opinion. 

“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but it’s what decision-makers think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Across the board, politicians tend to think climate action is much less popular than it really is. The latest example comes from a new study, published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this month, finding that local elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated support among their constituents for large solar projects. Based on survey responses from nearly 900 residents and more than 200 policymakers, researchers found that Pennsylvanians liked solar projects 7 percentage points more than natural gas ones. Local officials, however, misperceived that preference, thinking natural gas, which is primarily composed of the potent greenhouse gas methane, would be more popular.

Since local officials have a lot of sway over what energy projects get approved, this misperception could translate to less clean energy projects getting built, slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. Pennsylvania has been identified as the state with the fifth-most solar capacity by 2050, according to Princeton’s modeling for how the country could reach net-zero emissions. “In the vast majority of the U.S., the actual ‘Is this project going to be built or not?’ is decided at the local level,” said Holly Caggiano, a co-author of the study and a professor of climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia in Canada. 

Misunderstanding what Americans believe about climate change could be slowing climate action at the national level, too. A study in 2019, co-authored by Mildenberger, showed that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of putting restrictions on carbon emissions in their local districts. The same bias was true of elected officials at the state level, according to his research. “We should absolutely believe that those perceptions are limiting the ambition of climate and energy policy,” Mildenberger said. “It is one factor among many that makes solving the climate crisis harder.”

It’s not just politicians who hold a distorted view: People systematically underestimate public support for climate policies. A study from 2022 found that Americans imagined only a minority of their fellow citizens supported a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, when it was actually an overwhelming majority — meaning that actual support for climate policies was almost double what they thought. 

Part of the problem is that people who support renewable energy or climate policies don’t usually talk about it much, giving everyone else a distorted impression about how popular, or unpopular, those beliefs really are. “Often, opponents to projects are very, very loud,” Caggiano said. In addition, media coverage may give unpopular opinions outsized weight in order to present “both sides” of an issue. While that practice has been fading in climate science coverage, it’s still common in articles about climate policy debates, Mildenberger said.

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Some politicians have a more skewed view than others. Those who oppose climate action tend to be even further off in their estimates of what the public wants, because of a psychological bias that assumes most of their constituents share their opinions. But the information lawmakers are exposed to also affects the size of that perception gap — it widened when officials got more campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, and when they reported having more contact with conservative interest groups, Mildenberger’s 2019 study shows. Those groups might push commissioned polls that make a climate policy look unpopular, for example, Mildenberger said. 

“There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants,” Mildenberger said. 

Pro-fossil fuel interests might also engage in “astroturfing,” a PR strategy that fakes grassroots support for a cause, like Entergy’s natural-gas-fired power station in New Orleans. The tactic has also been used in national debates. In 2009, when Congress was considering the Waxman-Markey bill that would enact a federal cap-and-trade program, a lobbying group for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity forged more than a dozen letters opposing it, supposedly from local community groups concerned about rising energy prices, and sent them to members of Congress. The bill passed the House by a slim margin but was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

There are accurate sources of information showing what Americans think about climate change, like nonpartisan polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which find that nearly three-quarters of Americans want to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Learning that the position they hold is unpopular with the electorate can even lead politicians to change their position on an issue, at least according to one study from Belgium. 

More than a decade after the Waxman-Markey debacle, in 2022, Congress finally passed major climate legislation: The Inflation Reduction Act is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Since there wasn’t significant public backlash to the law, it’s one data point that can help correct politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion, Mildenberger said. But he warns that fossil fuel interests are still very active in trying to block climate-friendly policies. “We should have every reason to expect that they’re going to keep on bringing more distorted information into the political arena to try and tilt that arena in their favor.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Politicians don’t get how popular climate action is. That’s a problem. on Aug 13, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.

When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes — what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:

SHOCKING

Israel is quite possibly the only nation in the world where it is permissable and commonplace to go on TV and openly declare that the RAPING of prisoners should be a LEGITIMATE and OFFICIAL POLICY of the state and must be widely implemented.
pic.twitter.com/1PyRXk8fxU

— Niz (@NizMhani) August 7, 2024

2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes — or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins — not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them — men, women and children — are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

The official death toll in Gaza is a lie. The casualty numbers are far, far higher.

In my latest article, I explain how the trick has been pulled off: https://t.co/WfH4wt1bJM pic.twitter.com/qI0NFfRL8v

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 31, 2024

4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza — from bombing civilians to starving them — with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project.

And like other settler colonial projects — from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria — it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.

What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.

We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.

When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.

Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:

?SHOCKING?

Israel is quite possibly the only nation in the world where it is permissable and commonplace to go on TV and openly declare that the RAPING of prisoners should be a LEGITIMATE and OFFICIAL POLICY of the state and must be widely implemented.
pic.twitter.com/1PyRXk8fxU

— Niz (@NizMhani) August 7, 2024

2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Similarly, Matthew Marino, the Executive Editor of the University of Cincinnati Law Review, summed up the problem in the U.S. in March 2021:

Emergency powers have desirable features. As mentioned, Congress cannot act quickly in response to a crisis. Presidential authority has increased in most liberal democracies so presidents can effectively confront “a world besieged by complexity and crisis” that legislatures are ill-equipped to address. However, with more power vested exclusively in the President comes more potential for abuse of the emergency powers.

According to Marino, the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 was originally intended to hold back the executive branch, but “accountability and reporting provisions have not been vigorously enforced and therefore do not adequately restrain the President’s broad discretion under emergency statutes.” Congress members had “recognized that by refusing to terminate states of emergency, the President was retaining extraordinary power intended only for use during a genuine crisis.”

Marino adds that at that time, in 2021, the U.S. was under 40 ongoing states of emergency.

The NEA allowed President George W. Bush to declare a national emergency for the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and it allowed former President Trump to issue a “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak” on 13 March 2020. These are two of the “national emergencies” that stand out, but we are now accustomed, in fact, to constantly living under national emergencies, which can also be categorized in Agamben’s terms as “states of exception.” And most U.S. citizens are not aware of this, how different life is for us, compared to generations long ago, such as those who lived during the 19th century.

Agamben explains that the Patriot Act that was issued by the U.S. Senate on 26 October 2001 had already allowed the Attorney General to take into custody any alien suspected of endangering our national security, but under that law, within one week, the alien had to be charged with a crime or let go. (State of Exception 1.3). On 13 November of that year, then President Bush issued a “military order” entitled “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.”

But “in a 5-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2006, that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees. The court ruled that the tribunals violate U.S. laws and the international Geneva Conventions.”

In Agamben’s estimation, what was new about Bush’s order was that it radically erased “any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.” (State of Exception 1.3). For Agamben the legal situation of Taliban members captured in Afghanistan was similar to that of Jews in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. With insights from the philosopher Judith Butler in mind, he writes that “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy” in the situation of the detainee at Guantánamo. (State of Exception 1.3)

I have argued in previous essays (starting in March 2021) that the U.S. government has engaged in fearmongering in order to establish “states of exception,” increasingly since the 9/11 attack, including establishing such a state in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. In February of this year, I gave examples of how COVID-19 was being manipulated through a filter of censorship by the U.S. “national security state,” allowing them to exaggerate the danger posed by the virus, create a state of exception through our fear of it, and generate suspicion against anyone who would dare downplay the threat of the contagion or criticize the biosecurity industry.

The several years after 9/11 saw a huge expansion of the U.S. budget for biodefense. And to raise awareness about the trajectory that we are currently on, with respect to the ideologies surrounding biodefense, here I outline some of the legal changes that have facilitated biomedical “states of exception” and the growth and empowerment of the biodefense industry.

Emergency Use Authorization (EUAs)

Under these EUAs, it became OK during an emergency to resort to relatively risky medical interventions. In 2004, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act. This called for $5 billion for purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bio terrorist attack. This opened the door to “EUAs,” and on 4 February 2020 the “HHS Secretary determined that there is a public health emergency that has a significant potential to affect national security or the health and security of United States citizens living abroad, and that involves the virus that causes COVID-19.” This legal emergency made it possible for many people to receive the new vaccines, even at the stage when there were doubts about safety and effectiveness. While these vaccines may have saved the lives of millions, some previously healthy people have actually suffered various injuries and harms, such as myocarditis. Surely very few knew, if any, about such risks when they consented to receive the vaccine. Such is the disadvantage of authorizing the use of vaccines that have not been thoroughly tested in clinical trials.

The 2005 PREP Act

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2005. This law was essential to establishing a new system of irresponsibility for vaccine manufacturers. “During a public health emergency, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (“PREP Act”) gives immunity from lawsuits, for manufacturers, administrators and distributors of vaccines, as well as other qualified persons (i.e., healthcare and other providers) who prescribe, administer, or dispense countermeasures, unless they were acting with willful misconduct.” (Author’s italics. Of course, it would be difficult to prove willful misconduct in a court of law).

This PREP Act was a liability shield that protected manufacturers of “countermeasures.” It limited liability so that potentially life-saving countermeasures would be “efficiently developed, deployed, and administered.” (Author’s italics).

Kadlec and BARDA:

Following the introduction of those major laws in 2004 and 2005, the biodefense industry got a new law that facilitated the stockpiling of countermeasures in 2006. The Pandemics and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA, pronounced “Papa”) created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and established the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) position. Former President Donald Trump nominated Robert Kadlec for this position and he held it from August 2017 to January 2021.

In the words of Paula Jardine, who has written about various aspects of the military approach to COVID-19, the “ASPR controls the national stockpile of smallpox and anthrax vaccines and other public health emergency medical equipment such as ventilators. During emergencies this Assistant Secretary [the ASPR] has expansive powers enabling him or her to act as the single point of control co-ordinating national response.”

Other Transaction Authority (OTAs)

In 2016, the definition of OTAs was changed such that prototypes of countermeasures could be deployed. Originally, OTAs were up in the 1990s to help DARPA promote basic research and acquire weapons. “DARPA” stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense. Tom Burghardt wrote in 2010 that they have “geek squads” working on “bizarre projects hatched in darkness.”

Apparently, the Pentagon “loosened regulations guiding the use” of OTAs for the COVID-19 health policies. And through an OTA the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer gained financial support from the U.S. government. The mass media has not really questioned, problematized, or debated whether we want the mechanism of OTAs to authorize risky products, even when anyone can see that Pfizer used that mechanism. Pfizer is clearly referenced in a judge’s written decision for a case in which an employee named Brook Jackson sued Pfizer. Jackson’s case was dismissed, but the judge wrote:

Defendants claim that “due to pandemic-related exigencies, the Project Agreement was not a standard federal procurement contract, but rather a “prototype” agreement… Such prototype agreements are executed under the DoD’s “Other Transaction Authority.”

Trial Site News explains the case in a clear and succinct way. Jackson claimed that “in the race to secure billions in federal funding and become the first to market, Defendants deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question.” The Defendants included three companies, Pfizer, ICON, and Ventavia. Jackson had worked for Ventavia until she started to raise questions and blow the “whistle.” That’s when she was fired.

Turning the Switch

By 2020, all the legal machinery for the mRNA vaccine profit-taking was in place. On 31 January 2020, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency. Six weeks later, on 13 March 2020, Trump issued a “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak.” He authorized assistance administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Five days later, he notified the FEMA Administrator that his agency would be in charge of the federal pandemic response effort.

That was a first. FEMA had never been in charge of a public health crisis before.

In fact, according to Debbie Lerman, the National Security Council (NSC), a “group of military and intelligence people who advise about war and terrorism,” rather than civilian medical doctors who advise about disease, were the ones in charge of COVID-19 policy. (See Figure 2, “US Government COVID-19 Coordination and Response,” on page 9 of “PanCAP Adapted U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan,” 13 March 2020). The NSC decided the policy, and FEMA implemented it. Although Dr. Fauci has recently been publicly grilled about COVID policy failures, in fact, it appears that the NSC should be investigated since they made the big decisions.

Conclusion

In early 2019, Elizabeth Goitein, author of a report entitled “The New Era of Secret Law,” warned about what then President Trump could do to our country, given the unfortunate state of our laws.

Like all emergency powers, the laws governing the conduct of war allow the president to engage in conduct that would be illegal during ordinary times. This conduct includes familiar incidents of war, such as the killing or indefinite detention of enemy soldiers. But the president can also take a host of other actions, both abroad and inside the United States. These laws vary dramatically in content and scope. Several of them authorize the president to make decisions about the size and composition of the armed forces that are usually left to Congress. Although such measures can offer needed flexibility at crucial moments, they are subject to misuse. For instance, George W. Bush leveraged the state of emergency after 9/11 to call hundreds of thousands of reservists and members of the National Guard into active duty in Iraq, for a war that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Other powers are chilling under any circumstances: Take a moment to consider that during a declared war or national emergency, the president can unilaterally suspend the law that bars government testing of biological and chemical agents on unwitting human subjects. (“In a Crisis, the President Can Invoke Extraordinary Authority. What Might Donald Trump Do With This Power?” The Atlantic Monthly 323:1, p. 42).

Well, thanks to the DNC’s short-sightedness, Trump will probably get four more years to test out those emergency powers, once again, as he did with his “business-government-military partnership” Operation Warp Speed. Many decades ago a liberal president, too, violated our constitution by invoking emergency powers, in his role as the Commander-in-Chief, when he issued Executive Order 9066 directing that all Japanese-Americans residing on the West Coast be placed into internment camps.

In Where Are We Now?, Agamben cites the philosopher before him Michel Foucault, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, to question and analyze contemporary biosecurity ideologies, with his idea that “biopolitics tends to morph into thanatopolitics” (a politics of death). (Section 17, “Law and life,” Where Are We Now?). Arguably, that is especially true under a state of exception that is manipulated by a military institution, such as the Pentagon. He underlines the fact that the “first case of legislation by means of which a state programmatically assumed for itself the care of its citizens was Nazi eugenics” (Section 17).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

Day in and day out US officials at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon are openly admitting they are in command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian government on what they will or will not allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to do or not to do. US weapons permeate the Ukrainian War and kill Russian citizens daily and weekly. Failed attempts to shoot down incoming Russian precision cruise missile strikes end up with surface to air missiles (SAMs) veering off-course into residential buildings and even as we saw recently, a hospital in Kyiv during a Russian attack on the Artem missile plant.

They are all conveniently blamed on Russia but never admitted to being tragedies of the Ukrainian Armed Forces as the result of Ukrainian aggression in Ukraine against ethnically Russian Ukrainians in a fratricidal and genocidal war started in the wake of the United States government violent “Euromaidan” coup and subsequent Donbass War started by then acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchyinov in April 2014. If you were ethnically Russian and disagreed with the illegal actions of the all-corrupt Ukrainian fascist junta regime or its American masters, you were a terrorist, and the label gives legal precedent to whomever makes the accusation to kill the terrorists. Since late February 2014, Ukraine is nothing but de facto occupied US-EU government and military territory.

This has cost the citizens of the United States—as well as Europe—billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars, debt, and inflation as well as cost the United States its very status of hegemony as the preeminent power on Earth and the end of the Bretton Woods US-dollar dominated monetary system. Radical unprecedented NATO expansion eastward since 2004 has cost trillions of dollars of US debt levels and recent bellicose statements coming from NATO Secretary Jans Stoltenberg that, “…the defeat of Ukraine means the defeat of NATO” is a testament to the fact.

US President Joe Biden, whom has more to do with the events in Ukraine than one can truly imagine up to and including organizing the violent Maidan coup in Kyiv, is serving a conflict of interest that has resulted in nothing short of a Ukrapocalypse and possibly, the next World War. All of this decade-long nightmare has come at the expense of the well-being of the West and cost hundreds of thousands of human lives with no apparent end in sight. This is all blamed and gas-lighted onto Russian President Vladimir Putin whom has been forced to react to the outrageous impending danger created by the cross-Atlanticists which has accomplished nothing but threatening us all with a disaster of the century that should have never happened to begin with.

Voices of reason are few and far in between in Washington and Brussels but fortunately have become much louder with initiatives of people such as Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and Slovak PM Robert Fico whom are officials of countries that border Ukraine itself. Unlike the false omnipotence purported by the cross-Atlantic West, Orban and Fico understand the dangerous and unpredictable existing reality happening on their borders and refuse to be a party to the conflict and proponents of a peaceful solution.

On May 15, 2024 Slovak PM Fico was shot in an attempted assassination which clearly was the beginning of a campaign against anti-Ukrainian War critics by the cross-Atlantic warmongers whom are extremely paranoid and guilt ridden by condemnation of ‘undesirables’ brave enough to speak the truth and speak out against a wretched puppet regime in Ukraine under direct control of Washington and its cross-Atlantic conspirators. Also in May 2024 trouble was brewing in the country of Georgia where a major feud with Washington was unfolding in the wake of the Georgian PM Irakli Kobakhidze passing a law on foreign agents accusing former US Ambassador Kelly Degnan of supporting opposition in the country: “[I] spoke to Derek Chollet and expressed my sincere disappointment with the two revolution attempts of 2020-2023 supported by the former US Ambassador and those carried out through NGOs financed from external sources.”

On May 23, 2024 PM Kobakhidze was explicitly threatened by an EU Commissioner citing the May 15 shooting of Slovak PM Robert Fico. According to the Georgian PM, “Even amid the prolonged blackmail [by the West], it was stunning to hear this threat in a telephone conversation with one of the EU commissioners. As we spoke, the EU commissioner listed a whole range of measures that Western partners could take if the veto of the transparency law is overridden, and while listing these measures, he said, ‘You have seen what happened to Fico, and you should be very careful.” By no means a coincidence, the Georgian PM publicly stated in late June that, “Tbilisi will under no circumstances become a second Ukraine.”

In the first days of July 2024, PM of Hungary Viktor Orban traveled to Moscow and Beijing on a peace mission to discuss solutions of the ongoing Ukrainian War, in which Slovak PM Fico was not able to accompany Orban due to recovering from being shot in May. A severe slandering campaign against PM Orban ensued in the cross-Atlantic media as Hungary was now holding the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European July 1-December 31, 2024, which Orban sloganed to “Make Europe Great Again.” Thursday July 11, 20024 PM Orban met with former US President Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Florida on the sidelines of the NATO Summit being held in Washington. Of course, the main theme of the meeting between Trump and Orban was to concretely discuss peace planning of which both Trump and Orban are publicly campaigning and advocating to the global community to end the war in Ukraine.

Within 48 hours of concluding Hungarian PM Viktor Orban’s meeting in Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13, 2024 in Pennsylvania, thankfully only wounding the former US President in the right ear, but most unfortunately killing one and wounding another in attendance. Also on July 13, 2024 Ukrainian intelligence officers were admitting to failed assassination attempts on the life of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is of no coincidence the chain of events from May to July 2024 of attempted assassinations against anyone and everyone seeking to stop the war in Ukraine.

Upon PM Viktor Orban’s return from the United States, calls for stripping Hungary of its European Council Presidency and boycotts are in full swing. Orban has repeatedly refused to wear body armor and claimed he will not ever start doing so. The Hungarian PM clearly saw the writing on the wall of plans for war and the connection of Slovak PM Robert Fico’s assassination attempt in May 2024. Ladies and gentleman, war is on the horizon. Don’t say peace in Ukraine; you will be shot like President Trump just as President Joe Biden stated he would when he put Trump “in the bulls-eye.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by R.A. Jones.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo

Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade” (less or minimal government intervention in international markets). Free trade policies facilitated “globalization,” the euphemism for the post-1970 surge in U.S. corporations’ investing abroad: producing and distributing there, re-locating operations there, and merging with foreign enterprises there. Presidents before Trump had insisted that free trade plus globalization best served U.S. interests. Both Democratic and Republican administrations had enthusiastically endorsed that insistence. Dutifully performing ideological support duties, they stressed how globalization’s benefits to U.S. corporations would “trickle down” to the rest of us. Globalizing U.S. corporations used portions of their profits to reward both parties with donations and other electoral and lobbying supports.

Our last two Presidents reversed that position. Against free trade they favored multiple government interventions in international trade, especially imposing and raising tariffs. Instead of advocating free trade and globalization, they promoted economic nationalism. Like their predecessors, Trump and Biden depended on financial support from corporate America as well as votes from the employee class. Many U.S. corporations and those they enriched had shifted their profit expectations in response to the competition they faced from new, powerful non-U.S. firms. The latter had emerged during the free-trade/globalization conditions after 1970, above all in China. U.S. firms increasingly welcomed or demanded protection from those competitors. Accordingly, they financed changes in the political winds and shifts in “public opinion” toward economic nationalism.

Trump and Biden thus endorsed pro-tariff policies that protected many corporations’ profits. Those policies also appealed to those for whom economic nationalism offered ideological comforts. For example, many in the United States grasped the relative decline of the United States and its G7 allies in the global economy and the relative rise of China and its BRICS allies. They welcomed an aggressive counteraction in the forms of tariff and trade wars. Both corporations (including mass media) and their subservient politicians worked to build popular and voter support. That was needed to pass the tax, budget, subsidy, tariff, and other laws that would realize the shift to economic nationalism. A key argument held that “tariffs protect jobs.” A political struggle pitted the defenders of “free trade” against those demanding “protection.” Over the last decade, those defenders have been losing.

These days, most candidates and parties perform this particular ideological task for capitalism: persuading Americans that tariffs protect jobs. Note, however, that over the 50 years before around 2015, the same parties and their candidates mostly performed the opposite ideological task. Then they denounced tariffs as unnecessary, inefficient, and counterproductive government interferences. “Free international markets” would, they insisted, be much better for workers and capitalists. However, we need not and should not have been fooled then or now. Neither ideological claim is true.

Free trade profits some industries, but not others. Those that profit rely on exporting their outputs to foreign markets, invest there, or rely on importing products from there. Similarly, tariffs profit some industries (those they protect), but not others. As industries evolve and change, so do their relationships with international trade. Correspondingly, their attitudes toward free trade versus tariffs change.

Capitalist economies almost always pit pro-free trade against pro-tariff protection industries. Their battles vary from open, public, and intense to quiet and under-the-table. Their weapons include bribes, donations, and other kinds of deals offered to politicians mostly by the employers in the interested industries. Both sides also compete to enlist the public and especially voter support—“public opinion”—in order to swing politicians their way. Employers on each side spend millions to persuade the employee class to support their side. Politicians usually split according to which side offers more donations threatens more opposition in the next election, or has spent more to shape public opinion. Each side seeks to prevail, to make government policies favor free versus tariff-protected trade. One way to achieve that is endless repetition by politicians, business leaders, journalists, and academics of one side’s perspective in the hope and expectation that it becomes “common sense.”

Each side’s arguments are driven by their respective industries’ financial self-interest, not any shared commitment to the “truth” about tariffs versus free trade. As we show below, the truth is precisely that neither tariffs nor their opposite, free trade, necessarily protect jobs. At best, both protect some jobs at the cost of losing others. The truth is that we cannot know—and thus cannot measure—all the effects on profits or jobs caused by either free trade or protectionism. So politicians cannot know what the net effect on jobs will be of either free or protected trade policies of governments.

A simple example can clarify the basic points. Chinese auto-makers currently sell high-quality electric vehicles (EVs), cars, and trucks, globally, at very competitive prices. Those EVs can be found on roadways around the world, but not in the United States. That is because, until recently, a 27.5 percent tariff was applied in the United States. For example, if a Chinese EV’s port-of-entry price was, say, $30,000, it would cost a U.S. buyer $30,000 plus the 27.5 percent tariff (an additional $8,250) for a total U.S. price of $38,250. Recently, President Biden raised that tariff from 27.5 percent to 100 percent, thereby raising the Chinese EV’s price for potential U.S. buyers to $60,000. The EU plans similarly to raise its tariff against Chinese EVs from 10 percent to 48 percent, thereby raising the price to potential EU buyers to $44,400.

Those tariffs protect makers of electric vehicles inside the U.S. and EU precisely because those EV makers need not add any tariff to the prices they charge. Thus, for example, if EVs made in the U.S. and EU had cost $40,000, they would have been uncompetitive with the Chinese EVs priced at $30,000. Prospects of profit for them would have been grim. With the tariffs now imposed by the U.S. and proposed by the EU, their EV makers see profit bonanzas. Makers in the EU can raise their EV price from $40,000 to, say, $43,000, and still be cheaper than Chinese EV imports suffering the planned EU tariff and thus priced at $44,400. EV makers in the U.S. can raise their prices to, say, $50,000, sharply improving their profits while still outcompeting Chinese EVs priced at $60,000 (including the 100 percent tariff).