Puyé Ruins, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“If we approach nature and the environment without [an] openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”

– Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,

On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near-vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.

When we finally hurled ourselves over the rimrock to the top of the little mesa, the ruins of the old city of Puyé spread before us. Amid purple blooms of cholla cactus, piñon pines and sagebrush, two watchtowers rose above the narrow spine of the mesa top, guarding the crumbling walls of houses that once sheltered more than 1,500 people. I was immediately struck by the defensive nature of the site: an acropolis set high above the corn, squash and bean fields in the valley below; a city fortified against the inevitable outbreaks of turbulence and violence unleashed by periods of prolonged scarcity.

The ground sparkled with potsherds, the shattered remnants of exquisitely crafted bowls and jars, all featuring dazzling polychromatic glazes. Some had been used to haul water up the cliffs of the mesa, an arduous and risky daily ordeal that surely would only have been undertaken during a time of extreme environmental and cultural stress. How did the people end up here? Where did they come from? What were they fleeing?

“They came here after the lights went out at Chaco,” Elijah tells me. He’s referring to the great houses of Chaco Canyon, now besieged by big oil. Chaco, the imperial city of the Anasazi, was ruled for four hundred years by a stern hierarchy of astronomer-priests until it was swiftly abandoned around 1250 AD.

“Why did they leave?” I asked.

“Something bad happened after the waters ran out.” He won’t go any further and I don’t press him.

Cliff dwelling, Puyé, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The ruins of Puyé, now part of the Santa Clara Pueblo, sit in the blue shadow of the Jemez Mountains. A few miles to the north, in the stark labs of Los Alamos, scientists are still at work calculating the dark equations of global destruction down to the last decimal point.

This magnificent complex of towers, multi-story dwellings, plazas, granaries, kivas and cave dwellings was itself abandoned suddenly around 1500. Its Tewa-speaking residents moved off the cliffs and mesas to the flatlands along the Rio Grande ten miles to the east, near the site of the current Santa Clara (St. Clair) Pueblo. A few decades later, they would encounter an invading force beyond their worst nightmare: Coronado and his metal-plated conquistadors.

Again, it was a prolonged drought that forced the deeply egalitarian people of Puyé — the place where the rabbits gather — from their mesa-top fortress. “The elders say that the people knew it was time to move when they saw the black bears leaving the canyon,” Elijah told me.

Elijah is a descendant of one of the great heroes of Santa Clara Pueblo: Domingo Naranjo, a leader of the one true American Revolution, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. Naranjo was half-Tewa and half-black, the son of an escaped slave of the Spanish. That glorious rebellion largely targeted the brutal policies of the Franciscan missionaries, who had tortured, enslaved and butchered the native people of the Rio Grande Valley for nearly 100 years. As the Spanish friars fled, Naranjo supervised the razing of the Church the Franciscans had erected — using slave labor – in the plaza of Santa Clara Pueblo.

Now the hope of the world may reside in the persuasive powers of a Franciscan, the Hippie Pope, whose Druidic encyclical, Laudato Si’, reads like a tract from the Deep Ecology movement of the 1980s, only more lucidly and urgently written. Pope Francis depicts the ecological commons of the planet being sacrificed for a “throwaway culture” that is driven by a deranged economic system whose only goal is “quick and easy profit.” As the supreme baptizer, Francis places a special emphasis on the planet’s imperiled waters, both the dwindling reserves of freshwater and the inexorable rise of acidic oceans, heading like a slow-motion tsunami toward a coast near you.

Climate change has gone metastatic and we are all weather wimps under the new dispensation. Consider that Hell on Earth: Phoenix, Arizona, a city whose water greed has breached any rational limit. Its 1.5 million residents, neatly arranged in spiraling cul-de-sacs, meekly await a reckoning with the Great Thirst, as if Dante himself had supervised the zoning plans. The Phoenix of the future seems destined to resemble the ruins of Chaco, with crappier architecture.

Puyé Cliffs, looking across the Rio Grande. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I am writing this column in the basement of our house in Oregon City, which offers only slight relief from the oppressive heat outside. The temperature has topped 100 degrees again. It hasn’t rained in 40 days and 40 nights. We are reaching the end of something. Perhaps it has already occurred. Even non-believers are left to heed the warnings of the Pope and follow the example of the bears of the Jemez.

Yet now there is no hidden refuge to move toward. There is only a final movement left to build, a global rebellion against the forces of greed and extinction. One way or another, it will either be a long time coming or a long time gone.

This is excerpted from The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.

The post Living on the Cliff’s Edge: the Anasazi, Pope Francis and the Fate of the Earth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

The following is a statement from Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress Education Fund:

“Our nation has grown prosperous and powerful because of competition and Google’s illegal monopolies are blunting our competitive edge in the tech industry. The company’s near-total dominance of the online advertising market hurts media companies, rival search engines, social media companies and anyone who consumes media on the internet. As one of the richest, most powerful companies in the history of humanity, a mere fine or slap on the wrist won’t cut it. For the good of our nation and the health of our tech and media industries the government must force Google to sell its advertising technology division.”

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

Southeast Asian nations face some of the highest tariffs threatened by Trump, which would burden even the region’s relatively wealthier countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. With limited options, many are offering concessions to the U.S. and avoiding retaliatory measures.

Vietnam, which sends about 30% of its exports to the U.S., is in a “precarious position,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, former head of political research at the Hanoi-based Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research.

If the threatened 46% tariff on Vietnamese exports is enacted, annual economic growth would drop to 3%-4% from about 8%, he told an online panel organized by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

“Half of our textiles and footwear is exported to the U.S.,” he said. A big rise in tariffs, Giang said, “could mean the mass layoff of millions of Vietnamese workers.”

“For Vietnam that would be very devastating because we are still in the period of development when we have to depend a lot on labor intensive manufacturing,” he said. “It could be very bad, not only for Vietnam’s economic development but also for stability.”

Trump on Wednesday announced a 90-day pause on higher tariffs for many countries hours after they were supposed to go into effect. At the same he raised tariffs on China to 145% after Beijing hiked its retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. to 84%.

(Leah Millis/Reuters)

Trump’s tariff shock therapy is purportedly aimed at encouraging a revival of American manufacturing, which fell as a share of the economy and employment over several decades of global free trade and competition from production in lower-cost countries.

Any changes could take years as many American corporations have made substantial investments in overseas production. Efficient manufacturing in the U.S., like elsewhere, also is reliant on components produced in other countries.

The impact of higher U.S. tariffs on Southeast Asian countries will be determined by how dependent each economy is on international trade and the U.S. in particular.

Some such as Vietnam have relied heavily on exporting to provide jobs and raise living standards and are reliant on both the Chinese and U.S. markets.

Other such as Myanmar, riven by civil war since 2021, have relatively little trade with the U.S., but business owners in the country told RFA that some industries and workers could still suffer.

“Myanmar’s exports are not that much going to the United States. However, what is being exported includes things like garments … as well as other finished goods such as bags and shoes,” said a business owner who didn’t want to be named. “These items will face some impact, although it’s relatively small.”

Indonesia, the biggest economy in Southeast Asia and the region’s most populous country with more than 270 million people, is insulated to a degree by its large domestic market and lower reliance on exports.

Malaysian exporters, meanwhile, are already discussing with U.S. customers how they can jointly absorb the cost of higher tariffs - which means both lower profits for the exporters already operating on thin profit margins and higher prices for American consumers.

The 46% tariff faced by Vietnam is the third highest among Southeast Asian countries and partly reflects U.S. accusations that Vietnam has become a conduit for Chinese manufacturers seeking to avoid U.S. tariffs on their goods.

Some administration officials have said one third of Vietnam’s exports to the U.S. are Chinese in origin. Research by Harvard and Duke universities, Giang said, shows the proportion is 2%-15%.

RFA Burmese contributed to this report.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA.

March Madness is back. In a special episode of Edge of Sports, Dave Zirin takes a retrospective look at past interviews with Washington Post journalist Danny Funt on sports gambling, and with professor Diane Williams on the NCAA’s checkered past regarding women’s basketball.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden, David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen

Transcript

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

Dave Zirin:

Welcome to Edge of Sports only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. In this special March Madness edition, we are proudly airing two interviews that could not be more timely as college basketball and the road to the final four take center stage. The first is on the explosion of app-based sports gambling in the United States and the second on the hidden history of NCAA women’s basketball. So let’s start with gambling. You may not realize this, but more people bet on the NCAA basketball tournament than even the Super Bowl. We’re talking $3.1 billion and that’s just the legal betting. The Final four may not be the Super Bowl in terms of ratings, but it is the profiteering Super Bowl for FanDuel, DraftKings and all of those gambling apps that have not only colonized the commercial time during games but are also integrated into the sports commentary itself.

Who is Charles Barkley betting on in the tournament he’s supposed to cover? He’s about to tell you. What they don’t tell you is that these wildly popular apps have led to a crisis of gambling addiction, particularly a youth gambling addiction. Thousands of young people are calling hotlines for addicts feeling like they have lost control of their impulses and their bank accounts. They’re learning a hard lesson from which the young used to be insulated. The lesson that the reason those casinos look so nice is because the house always wins. This proliferation of addicts has become a mental health crisis so deep that Congress is even taking a look to see if more regulation is needed, but rest assured that oversight will be resisted. The facts are that this addiction economy has become the financial lifeblood of sports, and we need a deep dive to understand what this is all about, whether we are sports fans or not, and there is no better person to guide us into the underbelly of this world. Then reporter Danny Funt. This is Danny Funt’s beat sports gambling. He covers it for the Washington Post and he has a book coming out that breaks it all down. So he knows this world and this interview could not be more relevant. I started by asking him how big legal betting is for the economy of sports and where the trend lines are pointing to. Let’s go to it now, Danny Funt.

Danny Funt:

Yeah, I’d say it’s transforming every aspect of the business of sports, the fan experience, certainly the laws that affect sports and those aspects. Yeah, it’s a game changer. 38 states and DC have legalized sports betting several more expected to in the near future and from teams to commissioners to certainly the ncaa. Everyone is trying to cash in on that legalization, making some suspect choices in the process. And yeah, I mean they’re sort of facing the consequences as we’ve seen in some pretty shocking headlines recently, but it’s only going to continue. I still think we’re in the early innings of this sports betting experiment in the us.

Dave Zirin:

So you’re saying that the recent headlines, you’re talking about some of the betting scandals involving athletes as well as some of the statements of coaches and players who talk about being heckled or even being threatened because of fans not making their gambling quotas. Is that what you’re referring to?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, exactly. It was kind of funny. March Madness is one of the biggest betting periods of the year, certainly a time when the sports books want to get positive coverage and attract as many new customers as they can, and yet there was just an onslaught of grim news from the sho Otani betting scandal, an NBA bench player who got caught up it looks like with some basically a version of point shaving involving his prop bets to the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers saying he gets menacing voicemails from people when the Cavs cost betters money, the list goes on. It was a rough month for betting advocates.

Dave Zirin:

Yes. So is a reckoning inevitable if these stories keep continuing of players finding themselves with spare time, their phones disposable income and wanting to make bets? I mean, it’s such a perfect stew for more scandal and what would a reckoning look like and is it just too much money for the leagues to even want to have a reckoning for the effects of gambling?

Danny Funt:

That’s such a pressing question. I don’t know exactly. I think I’m skeptical that leagues would actually, that have recently legalized betting would go so far as to outlaw it. I think they might reign in the sorts of things you can bet on. One of the things that leads to all sorts of suspicious betting is that obviously you can bet on much, much more than just who’s going to win nowadays. You can bet on basically every facet of the game down to how a certain play is going to play out. So I think things like that could face stiffer regulations, the ways you can bet on college sports already are being reigned in. But yeah, I think the leagues have placed their bet, lawmakers have placed their bet and they’re kind of having to live with it, and I don’t know what level of addiction or what level of corruption would have to go down for them really to pull back in a meaningful way, but they’re being tested recently.

Dave Zirin:

You mentioned addiction, gambling addiction. What are we seeing on that front in the United States especially? Obviously since the legalization,

Danny Funt:

Pre legalization, the number that was floated was that roughly 1% of the population is susceptible to gambling addiction post legalization. Now that basically every smartphone is a casino, those rates could be as high as 4% I’m told, which is really a staggering number. You think about it like in a full NFL stadium, maybe 3000 people could be suffering from gambling addiction. It’s kind of incomprehensible. I think beyond that, it’s important to recognize there’s a clinically diagnosed gambling addiction that needs a medical intervention, but then there’s all sorts of problem behavior. Just like with drinking alcoholism is one thing, but people might drink more than they ought to along that spectrum, and the same thing is proven true with gambling, and it’s so important to note with that, that it’s not just can I gamble or can I not gamble? It’s the ways you can gamble and some of the most profitable types of betting, some of the most popular types of betting are some of the most addictive, and that’s certainly driving addiction rates across the country.

Dave Zirin:

I’m speaking just anecdotally, but my son who’s in high school has come home and told me about kids placing bets with other kids because they got their parents FanDuel accounts and my son said, dad, we’re creating a new generation of bookies out of our high schools. Is that just my son’s massive public school experience or are we seeing indicators about youth gambling addictions?

Danny Funt:

No, I don’t think that’s one-off. How old’s your son, by the way? I’m curious.

Dave Zirin:

Actually, he’s 15. He turns 16 tomorrow.

Danny Funt:

Yeah, that’s a classic time of life to start playing around with this. No, I think sort of an irony of legalization is it’s shown a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, Hey, bookmaking is a winning business. Maybe I should get involved in that. I was just talking, I live near Colorado State University. I was just talking with a student there who said the legal betting age is 21 by 19, as soon as he got to college, he was betting through offshore sports books that are unregulated and through some campus bookies who just like your son’s classmates got inspired by all the betting around them and said, Hey, this is an easy way to make a buck. No, I think the argument for legalization was we’ve got this robust black market, let’s bring it into the sunlight just as the same way that happened with cannabis and regulate it, tax it, implement some consumer protections.

In reality, yes, some of that has happened, but it’s also caused the black market to surge for a number of reasons with adults and certainly with young people. Young people, I don’t know exactly what age definitely are more susceptible to compulsive bedding, which is obviously dicey because they probably have a lot less disposable income, but it’s a reason why advertising that targets college students. You can understand why they’re attractive new customers, but that’s some of the most controversial types of marketing and some of the partnerships that Sportsbook struck up in recent years literally with universities in some of those cases got shut down pretty quickly just because that seemed like a line too far. Even for gambling advocates.

Dave Zirin:

Do the legal gambling concerns, the fanduels, et cetera, do they give a damn about these issues of addiction? You see they do the 1-800-GAMBLER at the end of their ads, or is this just window dressing the equivalent of a cigarette company saying, oh, by the way, you can get lung cancer?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, so true. I mean, I think whether they give or damn or not meaningful change can’t come from sportsbook self-policing. Just a week ago I talked to a guy who was one of the top officials at one of those kind of second tier sports books, and he was saying the incentives just aren’t there to crack down internally on problem gambling. Those are literally your best customers. Those are your whales who you’re showering with promotions and egging on with these kind of concierge services to keep those people betting. So their rationale as well, they’re our best customers. If we boot them, they’re just going to go to our competitors. We’re going to lose market share. They’re going to find a way to keep betting. So it’s not really in our best interest to do anything meaningful about that, which is why this person and a number of people across the industry are saying regulators need to impose much, much stiffer fines when sports books are caught recruiting or egging on problem betters, and there’s also ways beyond that, just really simple fixes short of banning gambling that would make a difference.

Like one of the tenants of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses. Chasing your losses is like pre-game. I bet on the Denver nuggets to win, they’re down at the first quarter, I place another bet they’re losing at halftime even more. I place a third bet. You can kind of trick yourself into thinking, well, the odds have gotten better, so if they make a miraculous comeback, I’ll make a fortune. Obviously, more often than not, that doesn’t play out classic way to bet over your head. So if a tenant of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses, perhaps sports books could just not take those bets past the point. If I keep depositing money in my account during a game and upping my bets, they could just cut you off and say, you need a cool down period. Things like that seem to me like a lot more practical incremental changes that definitely would make a difference.

Dave Zirin:

Let’s talk about the European experience with legalized sportsbook betting its effect on soccer. Does that have anything to teach us about how bad this could get or where this could go?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, I think absolutely the UK betting market is about a decade ahead of the US as far as legalizing online betting. If you just walk around London, the betting shops are all over town. It’s kind of those people over there are kind of numbed to that culture, but as far as seeing where they are as foreshadowing where the US could be, there’s definitely been kind of an awakening that, not that they’re going to ban petting anytime soon, but the public health consequences that come with it. I wrote it down anticipating that question. There was a study last year that found that what they called gambling related harms cost the UK 2.3 billion annually. So that’s a case where sure, they maybe get tax revenue. Sure, it might create jobs, but the harms are clearly outweighing the gains, at least according to this study. And you’ve got similar studies in the US showing that the economic price of the economic activity goes down in states that have vibrant legal betting markets, even if they’re bringing in a certain amount of gambling tax revenue. Again, the scales are imbalanced Beyond that gambling addiction. There is just a fact of life and it’s ubiquitous if you go to a soccer match just like it’s becoming at all sorts of American sports. So yeah, a lot of warning signs of where the US market could be headed.

Dave Zirin:

Now, I haven’t been surprised to see the explosion of sports gambling. I haven’t been surprised to see the rise in addiction rates. I’ll tell you what has surprised me is seeing how this has been embraced by members of the sports media. What are the implications of seeing so many established grade A trusted members of the sports media embracing this, giving odds during games and becoming spokespeople for sports betting? That has surprised me. What are the implications of that in your mind?

Danny Funt:

I think it’s definitely normalized sports betting and made it seem acceptable to the mainstream. You could argue in a lot of different things whether media is just a reflection like a mirror of society or whether it’s influencing society. I think there’s no doubt that there’s certainly been an influence in making sports betting just ubiquitous and intertwined with the fan experience. One of the first articles I wrote on this topic was for the Columbia Journalism Review. Looking at that question, what caught my interest actually was the ethical question of whether sports reporters should be betting on games. It seemed like a ripe opportunity for gambling’s version of insider trading, and I think some of that is definitely taking place, but just as far as media companies embracing gambling, there’s a lot of factors that made this the perfect time for sports betting to explode in the us.

Definitely one of them is how so many sports outlets are imperiled and facing brutal financial times. I know you looked at Sports Illustrated recently in one of your recent episodes, they tried to latch onto this bandwagon licensing their name to a sports book in Colorado here and a few other states that clearly didn’t write the ship, but yeah, from the biggest personalities in sports to the biggest names in sports, E-S-P-N-I think is a huge example. Recently licensing their name to a sportsbook, and now you go on ESPN’s website, you turn on a game, you’re indicted with appeals to bet on ESPN bet. I actually just spoke with a very knowledgeable bet who worked as an odds maker as well. He was saying similar to you that his 8-year-old son was seeing so many ESPN bet ads. This guy felt obligated to teach his son like the basics of probabilities, why betting is a losing venture for customers. It’s kind of surreal to think that a parent would feel a responsibility to coach their 8-year-old on that as they might responsible drinking or the dangers of smoking, but that’s just the world we live in.

Dave Zirin:

So if you were in charge of the sports world, how would you handle all of this? Is the wine simply out of the bottle and it’s just about managing the crisis? Is it possible to still ban this and get it out of sports? Where are we right now? And if you did have that kind of power, what could be done?

Danny Funt:

As I said earlier, I’m skeptical just practically speaking that any states are going to outlaw sports betting that have legalized it anytime soon. I think definitely when states kind of go online and are a little late to the party like Ohio and Massachusetts in the last year or so in North Carolina in recent months, they’re imposing much strict stricter regulations than some of the early states, just seeing bad examples of things that could easily have been avoided. So risk-free promotions were a reason why millions of people, I think took up sports betting thinking, oh, this is literally free money. I can’t lose. You certainly could lose your money. You could also get hooked on gambling from a false sense of how easy it could be. Those have been kind of stamped out. I think more promotions are basically fraudulent still and deceptive, and those could be police more aggressively.

I think a fairly straightforward fix that if I was this sports betting czar I would see too is in a lot of states, I think the regulatory apparatus just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes the state lottery is in charge of overseeing sports betting. Now obviously the lottery is in the business of raising money for the states. What sort of incentive do they have to crack down on sportsbook operators that are bringing in betting revenue? Even more questionable, I’d say, is when the lottery is in charge of running the sportsbook. In that case, you’ve got someone who’s functioning as an operator and a regulator. It’s no surprise that there are plenty of examples of them not self-policing very effectively. So I think state by state, if you had a truly independent commission that was charged with overseeing sports books, it would be a little bit of a fair fight. So often when customers say, Hey, this is deceptive. Hey, I’ve been screwed over by a sportsbook. The deck is stacked so much in favor of the operators of these companies, those sorts of complaints, even when I think they’ve been wronged, pretty egregiously, just go nowhere. So I think if you had a really aggressive independent regulator state by state, that would make a big difference, and there’s very few examples of that currently.

Dave Zirin:

I want to paint a picture for you and I want you to tell me if I’m being a Cassandra

Or if this is in the land of the possible, a chicken little, if you will, is there a future where sports gambling becomes so hegemonic to the fan experience that people start keeping their kids away, they don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate. The audience for sports thins, the profit margins do not. People start thinking the fix might be in, so they start drifting away, and at the end of the day, gambling, which has been so profitable as a revenue stream actually hollows out sports as we know it. Is that in the land of the possible, like an actual darn near destruction of this incredibly vast athletic industrial complex

Danny Funt:

Man, that really got my wheels turning. I hadn’t thought of that. And yeah, it seems feasible. The leagues are certainly betting against it. You brought up the integrity of the game, like do we think matches are fixed? There was always some of that, but it’s just gone through the roofs post legalization. Even players like Rudy Gobert on the Minnesota Timber Wolves made this money just at a referee recently and got a hundred thousand dollars fine for it. The obvious insinuation is he’s saying the ref is on the take. Maybe he’s looking out for a bet by swallowing his whistle or something. The confidence in the integrity of the games has definitely taken a hit, and yet the leagues aren’t spooked enough by that to really do anything about it. So that’s something that I’m really interested in as far as people saying, let me keep my kids away from sports. I just find American sports are so deeply rooted. I don’t know. I mean, maybe parents don’t take their kids to the race tracks because they don’t want them to start betting on horses. That might be a precedent worth looking at. But as far as football, basketball, golf, baseball, major sports that are the first things we talk about when we meet people, I don’t know. That feels a little out there, but I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.

Dave Zirin:

Hey, horse racing and boxing, were once two of the most popular sports in the United States. So just because something is doesn’t mean it will always be. I can’t let you go without mentioning that you’re doing a book and I was hoping you could tell us something about the book. What about sports gambling? Are you set to explore? What’s your thesis? What are you going for with this book?

Danny Funt:

Thank you for asking. I would say what I’m going for is I want to rewind a bit because I feel like just as a sports fan myself, as someone who follows politics pretty closely, it felt like the Supreme Court opened the door for states to start legalizing, and then seemingly overnight it was just, okay, New Jersey, Delaware. Soon after that, New York, Illinois we’re up to 38 states counting Nevada that have legalized, as I said, more are going to do. So you don’t hear a robust public debate about that. It seems like, okay, this is a moneymaking opportunity for states. We used to be adamantly against it, but now other states are doing it, so we got to get on board. The leagues used to speak about sports betting literally as an evil that was poisonous to sports. Now they’re sports bettings biggest backers, again, seemingly overnight.

So with the book, I definitely want to force us to have a serious conversation about these pros and cons, whether, as we’ve talked about today, the harms outweigh the positives. I also want to pull back the curtain a bit on what goes on inside of sports books. We see ads for FanDuel and draft gigs and Caesars pretty much everywhere. I don’t think a lot of us know exactly how those companies operate, how they think, they think about betters, what their motivations are, and I’m going to definitely get inside of those companies and give a closeup look at how they approach this game and try to anticipate where this is all going. As we’ve talked about, looking at Europe, even just looking at states that are a couple of years ahead of some of the others and the second guessing they’re having about what they’ve signed up for. So it’s a bit retrospective. It’s a bit of making sense of this chaotic world we’re living in and looking forward and seeing, as I said, we’re in the early innings. Is this going to be something that the powers that be are going to wish they hadn’t signed up for?

Dave Zirin:

Wow, that was the truth about the gambling industrial complex. Thank you, Danny. Fun. But now in this special March Madness edition of Edge of Sports, we turned to women’s hoops. Last year, the women’s college basketball Final Four for the first time, drew higher ratings than the men’s, significantly higher. In fact, this was historic, yet much of the way it was explained, centered around the then Iowa Senior Guard, the record breaking Kaitlyn Clark, whose Hawkeye’s team lost in the finals to South Carolina. Others countered this saying that the growth of the game is deeper than one player. A recent New York Times article opined that the NCAA had long set the table for this level of interest to take off, but both of these theories are woefully inadequate. Such a superficial analysis ignores the way that the NCAA suppressed women’s hoops for years. It also overlooks the Hidden history, the very foundation of Women’s College of Basketball that dates back decades to a league called The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the A IAW, the A IAW is a remarkable story all its own, and was the collegiate hoops home for legends like Lynette Woodard, Nancy Lieberman, and the Queen of the Court, Lucia Harris.

It’s also a history that the NCAA does its best to obfuscate because in this saga, they’re not the good guys. Well, we are about to revive one of my favorite interviews that we’ve done on the show. We are speaking to former roller derby great and current McDaniel College professor Diane Williams, who is the source of knowledge about the history of the A IAW. You want to learn where modern women’s college basketball really comes from. We got you on Edge of sports.

Speaker 3:

So I’ve been a fan of the Iowa Women’s team since I was a grad student there. Got to know a little bit about the coaching stuff, got been watching those teams for the last 10 plus years, and Caitlin Clark is an individual who is incredible, obviously ridiculously talented. I’m thrilled. She went to Iowa. She was an Iowa kid, and she really is an interesting figure in that she’s really taking seriously the idea of being a role model and the idea of being a star. I think in an interesting way, she’s balancing those pretty well and thinking about both her own success, her team’s success, and the broader picture of women’s basketball, of women’s sports, and of just celebrating the potential that is there, and she’s showing us some of that potential in her play and in the way she’s navigating all the different pressures and excitement of this moment.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, I think she’s really interesting too. I’ve felt like there’ve been times where the media has tried to play her against other players, particularly Angel Reese, Kelsey Plum, who we’re going to talk about a little bit more, and she doesn’t take that bait. I feel like she’s really sort of mature and intentional about being a white superstar, and that’s certainly unique for somebody that age.

Speaker 3:

It’s also such a reminder to me of all those top players on those teams have played together. They know each other, they go way back. And I think sometimes that’s one of those things that when media wants to jump in and divide, we forget that there’s relationships already existing there, and depending on how the players want to relate to each other, Caitlyn Clark seems to be dedicated to the lifting up and supporting across the board, and let’s go. Let’s all get better together. I mean, and relishing the competitiveness and the She’ll trash talk. She’s dedicated to her team. She’s going to defend what she thinks is right, and she always has, and she wants everybody else to too, right? Yeah.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Now, when she hit that 30 footer to set the NCAA women’s scoring record breaking Kelsey Plums, mark, the announcers were really big on saying that Caitlyn Clark has now scored the most points in college women’s history. Now, that’s not quite correct, is it?

Diane Williams:

No, it is not. So before the NCAA offered women’s intercollegiate sport period, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics, the A IAW, they had for 10 years been hosting Women’s Intercollegiate Sport. It was led by women. It was the entire athletic governance organization was founded by women who were physical educators and who were really dedicated to creating a different kind of sport culture and one that was for women, and it was educationally rooted. It had, the organization was focused on student athletes rights, their wellbeing, sport being a part of their educational experience, something that the NCAA sort of has a different take on a little bit more of a commercial view on that side. And so the scoring record, actually, Kelsey Plums record was from the NCAA years, which started in 82, but there’s 10 years of history before that that were also, there was another important record that Caitlyn Clark broke a few games later.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, speak about that. Who was the A IAW all time scoring leader?

Diane Williams:

Yeah, so there’s two. The big college scoring leader was Lynette Woodard from Kansas, and she set that record right at the end of the a I W’s time, even leading intercollegiate athletics for women. And actually, if you watched the game when Clark broke that record, Lynette Woodard was there. She was at Carver Hawkey Arena in Iowa City. They interviewed her before the game. They gave her a standing ovation, and both her and Clark have talked about the significance of both of them being there, and the idea that partly Woodard said, Clark is helping to bring attention to this history that has been really ignored. Some would argue buried that there’s so many women in intercollegiate basketball we don’t even know about. We don’t know their stories, we don’t know their glories, and yet this history is just, it was 10 years before the NCAA offered sport, and it was big.

Dave Zirin:

So you used the word buried. Why do you think this history is so buried and because that certainly speaks to an intentionality, to use that word again about the A IAW and honestly, I love sports history. Without your work, I never would’ve known about the A IAW. Why is this history obscured?

Diane Williams:

Well, so I don’t know if I can necessarily say why I don’t know the intentions, but I can tell you a little bit of the story. Right? When the a IW started, the NCAA didn’t have interest in facilitating women’s sports, and the folks, the women who went on to lead the organization said that, great, we’re going to go do it ourselves then. And they created a nationwide governing organization that was, at its peak, it was 970 plus members, colleges and universities across the country hosting 19 different sports, which is more than the NCAA has ever offered for women or men in three different divisions. So in 10 years, they grew from nothing to huge, and were really proving that there was, I mean, a lot of appetite for women’s intercollegiate athletics, which was feeding down to high school and youth, right? There’s this whole revolution happening, and they were leading it when Title IX was finally, so Title IX was passed in 72.

It took a number of years for it to be interpreted, and it wasn’t intended to be applied to sports. It was an educationally focused bill about academic programs funding. But immediately, particularly on the women’s side, they realized, oh, this could help us get some money, and we sorely need money. We have the resources. Were laughably small for what they were trying to build. And so during the seventies, title IX is being interpreted. The Congress is figuring out how do we even apply this to sport? What does it look like to have gender equity in sport? Sports are really different than who gets led into a dentist program or dental training program. And so ultimately, in 79, some standards come out of how we’re going to actually account for gender equity in sport. They’re both clear and kind of convoluted in different ways, but it became clear that it was actually going to be enforced.

Well, that was the idea. And really, I think the NCAA got nervous that while the NCAA as a governing organization and the A IAW, they weren’t subject to Title ix, but all of their member institutions were. And so if they were not in line with the law, it could be a problem. And so the NCAA had been sort of working with the A IWA little bit on parallel tracks in the early part of the seventies. They had verged away from that by the later part of the seventies. And by the time that this all happened, not only was the NCAA and men’s sport organizing against Title IX being applied to athletics against football being included, they were trying to get it exempted. There’s all kinds of things happening. But the NCAA was working actively against Title ix, including athletics, but it decided to switch course and start offering women’s championships without discussion with the A IW, without even recognition that there was already a massive infrastructure in place that was hosting women’s championships and the A IW.

There was some movements to try and work together. Maybe we can come together and find the best of both worlds, right? A highly competitive, financially sustainable model pulling from the NCAA side, but that valued the student athlete experience more and the wellbeing of the student athletes that quickly got dismissed by the ncaa, and instead, they chose to offer competing championships the same weekends as the A IW championships. In some cases, they financially incentivized schools to join their championships. They had the money and resources to say, we can pay for your travel, pay for your food, pay for your lodging. If you come to our championships. The A IW was just starting to generate some cash, just had some media contracts, couldn’t compete. And within a year, the A IW had ended ceased operations. And so the NCAA won in some ways, and there was a pretty big loss of an emphasis on student wellbeing for women’s sport and women having women role models in leadership positions in sport.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Ruthless by the ncaa. Talk about intentionality.

Diane Williams:

Yeah.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Before we stay on that, the time in which the A IAW came to be feels very much in the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Were there direct connections between the broader struggle and the emergence of this organization?

Diane Williams:

So ideologically, yes. In that it was a movement to bring women into spaces that they had been told they weren’t allowed to be in.

And in a very public way, the organization itself was trying to navigate bringing together women who wanted to expand women’s sport opportunities across the country from different geographic regions, different political persuasions. Some of those women would’ve been all for identifying as feminist, and plenty of them would’ve been absolutely not to mention if they did, they could get fired if they were rocking the boat too much. They were all sort of navigating these expectations while trying to push forward something that was actually pretty radical, bringing women’s sport into the mainstream in this way. And so there was a lot of negotiating happening, which I think is often the case behind the scenes a little bit more. The A IW was working with some of the education and legal organizations in DC and they were hooked in. They had convinced them that women’s sport was actually a really important part of this whole conversation around women’s liberation and society. Then the Women’s Sport Foundation started around this time. There’s a lot of connecting happening, often a little bit more behind the scenes from the A IW what they were putting out front, but the connections were happening and it was helping when they needed to lobby congress say that they could call in some of those networks to talk about the importance of women’s sport and young girls in as a part of educational equity as a part of women having a more viable and a more vibrant role in society.

Dave Zirin:

So what at Long last do you think is the legacy

Diane Williams:

So many

Dave Zirin:

Of this organization, what is their living legacy today?

Diane Williams:

I see as you and I’ve talked about, I see some of their legacy in the movements around student athletes being active, demanding better conditions that they’re playing in just speaking up in realizing that they should have a say in the organization that is leading intercollegiate athletics. And that is something that is so different than the NCAA’s norm. Some of the shifts that have happened in the interest of student athlete rights has really been a part. Often there’s connection to people who are involved with a IW actually both in the leadership of the NCAA or schools, if they stuck it out, they often were there making change at people like Dr. Christine Grant and Charlotte West and plenty of others. So I mean, I really see the positive legacy is, and student, this is kind of cool because student athletes don’t necessarily know that they’re actually a part of a legacy.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, I was thinking about

Diane Williams:

Dartmouth,

Dave Zirin:

The men steam forming the union and about how even if it’s not conscious, there is a thread that exists because of what you said, of demanding a voice

Diane Williams:

And

Dave Zirin:

Demanding some sense of ownership and autonomy over your life as a college

Diane Williams:

Athlete. Yeah. One of the former presidents of the A IW that I interviewed Pig Burke at the University of Iowa, said, well, paraphrasing, she told me when they’re college athletes, they’re 18, they’re legally adults. They should have a say in what’s happening out there in sports out there in their sport experience. And so that the union move is so exciting, and I’d like to imagine that a governing organization would consider how the student athletes are experiencing what they’re experiencing on teams and in the championship structure and in the schedules and all these things. And yet the NCAA has proven that they don’t care. They haven’t, there hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to that and meaningful engagement of student athlete voice in governing that is so different than the model that is so top down that they have set up and was something that was integrated in the A IAW model. Student athletes had representation on the executive board on down to the school level, really different set up. So I hope that is, I see some of the legacy in there. I see the legacy for sure in some of the women coaches who are still coaching who go back to a IW days players who are in coaching sport media positions. There’s an interesting spill out from people who are connected to sport through the A IW and took those values into the jobs that they had even when it was under the ncaa.

Dave Zirin:

This history is actually getting a little bit of life with Lynette Woodard coming to the fore. It seems like this whole history is just ripe for a book. Is that something you’d be interested in pursuing?

Diane Williams:

I’m working on that. I’m working on

Dave Zirin:

That. You are working on a book. I’m about this. Terrific. Will you return to the program when the book is in print so we can go through what you learned?

Diane Williams:

Absolutely.

Dave Zirin:

That’s fantastic. And one last question, please. When you teach about this organization at McDaniel College, what is the reaction? I mean, I assume few if none know about it, but is this something that makes the students’ eyes go wide?

Diane Williams:

I think so. And I will say one of the neatest things about this organization that makes me want to talk about it to everybody, one is that it was visionary. It was a group of people who said, what exists in the norm isn’t good enough and we think we can do better. And then they did. And that to me is exciting because it reminds us that it’s flexible, how we manage sport, how we think about sport, what sport even looks like, who gets to be involved. And two, every single school had people, usually women that were leading the women’s athletic department, that were coaching their teams that are local heroes that that school may or may not even know about. And so when I teach about this at McDaniel, I get to talk about Carol Fritz, who was the women’s athletics director there. We have a beautiful display of women’s sport history like uniforms and field hockey sticks and things that I can point them to. And we can bring this history to a very local level and learn more about someone who’s like her name is on this beautiful display, but we don’t see her around as much anymore. But we can also learn more about the kinds of struggles that she and every other institution had. Somebody there that was doing that work and encountering a whole lot of resistance and deserves their flowers, deserves their thanks and deserves some cheering on from a generation that is now learning about it. Again,

Dave Zirin:

Thanks everybody for tuning in. We are so proud of Edge of Sports and hope to bring you more coverage at the collision point of sports and politics in 2025. Now, I want to let you know how you can support sports journalism without Stephen A. Smith, pat McAfee and ESPN’s Confederacy of Jackasses. Join the Real News Network now and power the independent media you believe in. Become A-T-R-N-N member. Do it today because that means more fearless journalism, more hard hitting investigations and more stories the mainstream media will not touch. Your support isn’t just appreciated. It’s essential. And don’t forget, subscribe to our channel, sign up for our newsletter and hit the bell icon so you never miss a report. Remember, we don’t get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going together. We can keep covering the sports and politics stories, others will not for Edge of Sports in the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zin. I want to say thank you to you, the viewers, the listeners. I want to thank Kayla Rivara, Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden, and the entire TRNN team that keeps us going. Please support this work because in this era, if our media is not independent, if our media is not fearless, then truly we are lost.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Dave Zirin.

Chinese- and Russian-made drones using night vision cameras are giving Myanmar’s military junta an advantage in its war against rebel groups, according to sources on the ground, touching off what one observer termed a “drone arms race” between the two sides.

The new weaponry is upping the ante in Myanmar, where drones were once solely a tool of the armed opposition seeking a cheap way to level the playing field against a far better-equipped military, which seized control of the country in a 2021 coup d’etat.

Since early February, pro-junta channels on the social media platform Telegram have posted video footage of what appears to be military drone bomb attacks on rebel forces in Kachin state’s Bhamo township using either infrared or thermal night vision cameras and causing casualties.

On Feb. 20, British military intelligence publisher Janes International Defense Review cited the footage in a statement which claimed that Myanmar’s military “has begun enhancing its expanding unmanned aerial vehicle capabilities, adapting forward-looking infrared systems for tactical attack drones.”

Officials from two anti-junta groups — the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, and a civilian defense unit based in Bhamo — confirmed to RFA Burmese that the military has deployed such drones in combat to devastating effect.

“The junta is using night vision drones in Bhamo battles,” said KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu. “Our officials in the fighting reported that the drones are very advanced, with night vision cameras.”

Naw Bu said he was unaware of night vision drones being used by the military in other parts of the country.

Infrared imaging uses radiation emitted or reflected by objects to create images, while thermal imaging measures heat emitted by objects to create images based on temperature differences. Both provide users with a way to track objects at night.

It was not immediately clear which technology the drones were fitted with. Thermal cameras are a type of infrared camera, but not all infrared cameras produce thermal images.

Drones from China, Russia

Fighting between the junta and the KIA has been intensifying in Bhamo since early January, according to sources in the region.

A member of an anti-junta civilian defense group in Bhamo told RFA that junta forces had been using night vision drones for “about a month” and called their destructive power “considerable.”

“We have [equipment] that can disrupt radio frequencies, and when we hear a drone flying overhead, we have time to defend against it,” said the fighter, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “Nonetheless, on some occasions, we continue to face [drone] attacks with highly explosive bombs, despite our preparations.”

The rebel fighter did not disclose details of casualties caused by these drones, and RFA was unable to independently verify confirm the number of people killed or injured in the attacks.

(Myanmar Military)

Some ethnic armed and civil defense groups have claimed that the junta is using drones made in Russia and China — two countries that have backed the military regime since the coup — with a higher reliance on those from China.

Captain Zin Yaw, a former military officer and a member of the Civil Disobedience Movement of public servants who quit their jobs to protest the coup, told RFA that the junta is likely to continue pursuing advanced drones.

“We see that they are actively seeking advanced technology to engage in modern warfare,” he said. “The junta chief [Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing] recently visited Russia, and they may have gained a technological advantage from the trip.”

‘Drone arms race’ underway

Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the military’s use of high-tech drones went unanswered by the time of publishing.

But Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, composed of former military officers, told RFA that he expects the junta will gain a significant advantage with the advanced technology.

“Armed resistance forces should reassess their strategies because their available resources are no match for those of the nation’s military,” he said. “Over time, their resources will dwindle, while the [junta] continues to expand its capabilities.”

Jonah Blank, a senior political scientist at global policy think tank the RAND Corporation, said the military and rebel forces “are now in a drone arms race,” after rebels deployed drones to challenge the junta’s air superiority and the military responded with more advanced drone technology “to try to regain its edge.”

“But these technological advances tend to become cheaper and more easily available very quickly — the rebels will soon have them too," said Blank, who is also a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore.

He characterized drones as “inherently democratizing technology,” noting that even the most advanced U.S. and Chinese drones “are far less expensive than these powers' manned aircraft.”

“This trend inherently favors an irregular army,” he said.

According to data compiled by RFA, junta air and artillery strikes killed at least 1,769 civilians and injured some 3,720 across the country in 2024.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

Undocumented Myanmar migrant workers in southern China are living in fear amid an increase in raids by Chinese authorities on farms and factories near the border, workers and labor activists say.

The arrests increased after 500 workers at a factory in Yunnan province protested against poor labor conditions in early March, migrant workers told Radio Free Asia.

Ever since, Chinese police have made daily arrests of at least 30 Myanmar migrant workers in the border towns of Ruili and Jiegao who are undocumented or carry expired border passes, which people use to cross the border without a passport, the workers told RFA Burmese.

Win Naing, who landed a job at a toy factory Ruili in early January, was issued a border pass so that he could commute to work, but it was short-term and has since expired.

But now he’s too afraid to go outside, and isn’t sure when he’ll next see his his wife and three children, who are just across the border in Myanmar.

“Since we stay inside the factory, we don’t have to worry as much about being arrested, but we can’t leave at all,” said Win Naing, who earns around 1,500 Chinese yuan (US$210) per month, considered a decent salary. “Without passports, we have to work and live very cautiously.”

Most of those detained are being held in prisons in Ruili and nearby Yinjing village, they said, although some have been deported and banned from re-entering China “for several years.”

People are desperate for jobs

Every day, nearly 10,000 people wait at the border in Muse, in Myanmar, for a chance to cross into China and authorities only issue passes to about 700 of them.

Short-term border passes are good for one week of entry into China, and when they expire, holders must reapply for one in Muse. But those who make it across often overstay their pass, said a resident of Shan state’s Kutkai township named De Dee, who is working in Ruili.

That puts them at risk of arrest during frequent police inspections in places such as the Htike Li and Hwa Fong markets, where Myanmar migrants are known to live and work.

“Chinese officials conduct checks on the streets and even inside homes,” she said. “Around 30 or 40 migrant workers are arrested each day.”

The situation is similar in Jiegao, a migrant working there said on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. He said there are frequently “police cars circling the markets,” while authorities regularly “stop motorbikes and arrest people.”

A migrant working in Muse told RFA that the amount of time undocumented workers are detained in the Ruili and Yinjing prisons varies, as does the lengths of bans on their re-entry to China.

“Some undocumented migrants ... are detained for a week, 10 days, or a month,” he said. “Those arrested in early March — mostly women— following the protest were banned from reentering China for about five or six years.”

Those banned from re-entry who need to return to China are forced to pay more than 2 million kyats (US$953) — an incredibly steep cost for the average Myanmar citizen — to do so via illegal routes, the migrant added.

Aid workers were unable to definitively say how many Myanmar migrants have been arrested in China since the protest earlier this month, and RFA was unable to independently confirm the number.

‘There are so many of them’

Attempts by RFA to contact the Chinese Embassy in Yangon about the arrests of undocumented Myanmar nationals in Ruili and Jiegao went unanswered by the time of publishing, as did calls to the Myanmar Consulate in Yunnan.

RFA Mandarin spoke with a Chinese resident of Ruili surnamed Sun who said that police in the town had been targeting illegal Myanmar migrants for at least six months, although the arrests had intensified beginning in March.

“Most of them are men who enter the country and go to the industrial park to find work, including jobs making parts for domestic cell phones and daily-use hardware, with salaries of 1,000-3,000 yuan (US$140-420) per month,” he said.

Sun said that illegal migrants who are arrested “are usually repatriated, but not fined.”

A merchant surnamed Zhang from Yunnan’s Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, where Ruili and Jiegao are located, told RFA that Myanmar migrants also find work in area restaurants and massage parlors.

He said that “because there are so many of them, the Chinese police are not in a position to carry out mass expulsions” and choose to repatriate small numbers of them back to Myanmar at a time.

Translated by Aung Naing and RFA Mandarin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese and RFA Mandarin.

He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

‘Strongly in sync’

Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

So it really is a cosy setup.

Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

Sheer bribery

Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

QME’s collision with international law

He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Mississippi Free Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Beneath the city of Jackson, Mississippi, is a Rube Goldberg-esque network of pipes that brings water to residents. The system, by one estimate, is twice as long as it should be for a city of this size. Much of it has been in disrepair for years; some parts are more than 100 years old.

Underground, broken pipes have spewed water into the surrounding earth or sent it bubbling up from cracked streets. For every gallon of water that reaches a customer’s tap, at least another gallon doesn’t, according to a June estimate from the manager of the water system.

Aboveground, the symptoms of those problems have been faucets that sputtered and toilet bowls that didn’t refill. Teenagers in the county’s juvenile-detention center were sent to other facilities to shower, one official said. Hospitals that regularly lost water built their own wells. Roughly every few days, people in one part of town or another have received notices telling them their water was unsafe to drink unless they boiled it first. At times, like for two weeks in the winter of 2021, many residents had no running water at all.

But for years, state employees inspecting Jackson’s primary water system noted few problems with the distribution system — the pipes that delivered water to its customers. In the 16 years before the system collapsed in 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 residents in and around Jackson dependent on bottled water for weeks, inspectors admonished the city just a couple times about the pipes underground. They identified issues with low water pressure just once and noted high water loss a few times. But they issued no formal reprimands or fines.

From 2006 through 2021, Jackson’s inspection score from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which oversees water systems in the state, averaged nearly 4 out of 5. The few times MSDH identified major problems in Jackson, all but one were tied to its water plants, not the distribution system.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said the state’s failure to flag ongoing problems in Jackson’s water system, including those in the pipes, contributed to the Jackson water crisis in August 2022. Over several years, the state’s inspections “did not reflect the conditions of Jackson’s system,” the inspector general’s staff wrote. As a result, they wrote, problems “were left unresolved until the eventual catastrophic failure of the system,” when the city’s main water plant finally buckled. It took weeks until the city could reliably pump clean water to residents.

The Office of Inspector General said the EPA, as the agency ultimately responsible for compliance with federal drinking water standards, shares some responsibility for the state’s failures because it didn’t make sure the state was properly enforcing its regulations. The agency said in a response included in the report that it agrees with the inspector general’s findings.

MSDH hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the report; its response to the Office of Inspector General wasn’t immediately available. But the findings aren’t exactly new to state regulators. The report, which covers inspections from 2015 through 2021, corroborates reporting by the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that looked at state inspections dating back to 2006.

The news outlets told MSDH this year that their reporting showed that the states’ inspections had failed to identify problems in the distribution system and to require the city to act. MSDH officials disputed the claim as “patently false,” saying its inspections were based on information provided by the city. The agency said the city of Jackson failed to take on the responsibility “to respond to any potential pressure or water loss issues.”

In an interview late last year, State Health Officer Dan Edney defended MSDH’s oversight. Still, he said he expected the EPA to tighten its rules on how states oversee water systems. “The EPA probably, after studying this event, is going to change some things in terms of how they want inspections to be, and I welcome that,” he told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Such changes, he said, would allow Mississippi “to intervene in a little bit more meaningful way, sooner.”

Such changes are indeed underway. In response to the inspector general’s report, the EPA plans to review how MSDH conducts federally required inspections. Beyond Mississippi, the EPA is checking other states’ oversight in the Southeast. And federal officials will update EPA guidance on how to perform federally required inspections to include a process for handling ongoing problems such as those that plagued Jackson’s distribution system.

MSDH’s inspections do include questions about the pipes underground. But time and again, the agency’s inspection records did not reflect what was going on beneath the surface in Jackson.

Every year when inspectors came, they checked water quality, reviewed records and policies and looked over equipment. They filled out a two-page questionnaire, awarded points based on the answers and wrote up pages of recommendations. On every inspection report from 2006 to 2020, inspectors answered no to a question about whether there was “any indication” of pressure problems. Only in 2021 did they answer yes, noting that a fire at a water plant had caused pressure to drop.

Edney, who became the state’s chief health officer in 2022, admitted to the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that this was “surprising.” As a practicing physician, he had experienced water pressure problems at Merit Health Central, a hospital located in a part of town that was often the first to lose water during an outage.

There was other evidence as well: the city’s own boil-water notices, which alerted people to problems in the system. Low pressure resulting from a line break can allow bacteria to seep into the pipes, which is why Jackson residents regularly received such notices. From August 2014 through July 2022, Jackson issued more than 1,500 boil-water notices, according to city records in the possession of MSDH, including at least nine notices that affected everyone in the city. Such notices aren’t normally reported to the EPA. But, inspector general staff wrote, “if state surveyors find an exorbitant number of boil water notices” during a federally required inspection, “the state could report the issue to the EPA.”

The Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica asked Edney how inspectors could have noted pressure problems just once even as Jackson regularly shared boil-water notices with MSDH. Edney said the state doesn’t consider water pressure to be a problem unless it’s “consistently” below 20 pounds per square inch, and Jackson often posted pressures of 21 to 30 psi. “If they’re consistently running 22 psi, then they pass,” Edney said. “That’s an acceptable low pressure.”

Though that figure might be acceptable to Mississippi, it is much lower than the standard pressure specified in a set of guidelines that the EPA recommends water systems follow. Those guidelines, produced by a consortium of state water regulators, say that a water system’s “normal working pressure” must be at least 35 psi and generally should be between 60 and 80 psi.

Both MSDH and the EPA pointed out that these are just guidelines. There are no federal requirements for how high water pressure must be; the EPA says most states set the minimum at 20 psi to ensure that firefighters have the water they need.

Ken Kopocis, who led the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said a water system operating on a thin margin like Jackson’s did is just “one small hiccup” away from an interruption in water service or a widespread outage. “This is going to happen,” he said. “It’s only a matter of happenstance that it got delayed as long as it did.”

When pressure in a water system drops unexpectedly, there are two likely causes: a decline in water production at plants or water loss due to broken pipes.

Estimates suggest that for years, Jackson has lost half or even more of its treated water. It was a well-known problem among the people who ran the utility. In 2012, an engineering firm warned that the rate of water loss was increasing. In 2016, a public works official estimated that Jackson was losing 40% of its water, according to a news story at the time.

Data from the city’s water plants indicates the situation may have been even worse. Between 2013 and 2022, Jackson’s water plants produced an average of about 45 million gallons of treated water a day. On a normal day, the city should require 18 to 20 million gallons, according to Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, the federally appointed management firm now running the city’s water system.

It wasn’t until after Henifin’s team took over the water system in 2022 that Terence Byrd, who managed one of the utility’s two water treatment plants for about five years, realized how those leaks contributed to the constant cycle of breakdowns and repairs at the plants. “Our plants were running into the ground,” said Byrd, who is now working for JXN Water, “because they were trying to pump against so many leaks in the system.”

Bill Miley, who was responsible for fixing those leaks when he served as utilities manager for the city of Jackson, said that work kept his ever-shrinking crews and hired contractors running nonstop. “I had enough to keep three crews busy near seven days a week,” he said.

The city experienced more than 7,300 breaks over a five-year period, according to the EPA inspector general, far above the industry benchmark. A former city official told federal employees that a single line break leaked 4 million to 5 million gallons a day — a total of 10 billion to 13 billion gallons from 2016 to 2022, according to the inspector general’s report. State inspectors, however, never flagged the frequent line breaks as a serious problem that warranted official corrective action.

Nor did they evaluate Jackson based on how much water it was losing. Their questionnaire asked only whether the city was tracking water loss at all and whether “acceptable” records were available for review. For all but two of 16 years, inspectors said Jackson’s records were fine.

The exception was in 2008 and 2009. The first year, inspectors noted that Jackson hadn’t provided acceptable records, which was considered a “significant deficiency,” and they told the city to respond with a plan to fix it. In 2009, state inspectors again noted the lack of records on their report. From 2010 on, MSDH’s inspection records show, the agency considered Jackson’s records acceptable.

Three current and former officials with Jackson’s water system told the news organizations that the inspection reports were wrong in calling the city’s water records acceptable. They explained that tracking water loss requires functional meters to measure how much water customers use. But in Jackson, the city’s water meters have been in a state of constant failure for at least the last decade. The city had no way to accurately calculate how much water it was losing, and officials knew it at the time.

In a written statement sent before the inspector general report was published, MSDH said that, under state law, there was nothing further the agency could have done to mandate that the records reflected reality. “There is no established and enforceable consequence of providing inaccurate water loss information,” the agency said. And there’s little chance that state lawmakers would grant the agency the authority to set a limit. The Legislature “is unlikely to support changing the regulatory environment for every public water system in the state as a result of Jackson and its specific lack of system maintenance,” MSDH officials said.

Inspectors eventually made note of Jackson’s water loss in their 2019 report, saying that city records showed that water loss was “around 50%.” The following two years, inspectors put it at more than 40%. Even then, Edney said MSDH had no authority to intervene because the state doesn’t have a limit on how much water a local utility can lose. “Maybe there needs to be,” he said.

The state’s limited approach to enforcement comes up repeatedly in the inspector general’s report. State employees overlooked some problems, and they didn’t consistently document others or escalate those that continued from year to year, inspector general staff wrote. When state employees did identify serious problems, they didn’t always notify the city and sometimes didn’t record them in an EPA database. As a result, the EPA didn’t know just how bad things were in Jackson.

The water system portrayed in the state’s inspection reports contrasted sharply with the experience of residents of Windsor Forest, a majority-Black neighborhood located far from the water plants and pumping stations.

For most of the six years that Paidra Evans has lived in the South Jackson neighborhood, she’s had trouble getting enough water to wash dishes or hose down her car. When the 2022 crisis hit, she was caring for her husband, a truck driver, as his health slowly declined. “A lot of times, when I had to bathe him on the bed, the water would be brown,” she said. “He couldn’t brush his teeth or anything. He said: ‘Baby, what is going on? Just let the water run, run, run, and then maybe it’ll get clear.’”

Her neighborhood “had been a focal point even before the crisis started,” JXN Water’s Byrd said. (As of October, JXN Water said it had transitioned the neighborhood to the city’s well system, alleviating these long-standing issues; Evans said her water pressure has improved.)

Miley, the city’s former utilities manager, was well aware of those problems. He said he knew something was wrong whenever he got a call from Merit Health Central. When the pressure dipped in the system, Merit would lose water above the fifth floor — a warning that others in the city weren’t getting water either.

Merit, which by 2015 was the only hospital in the city without its own water supply, eventually decided to pay $11,000 a month to park water trucks outside in case of an outage. The bill goes up to $10,000 per day when the hospital needs the water.

At the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Justice Center in South Jackson, every two months or so the water pressure would decline so severely that staff needed bottled water to cook and flush toilets, said Eddie Burnside, the facility’s operations manager. That started in 2018 and continued until at least 2023, he said.

In 2020, Hinds County installed a pump at the facility to draw water from the city’s pipes, Burnside said. But problems continued; Burnside said detainees drank bottled water when pressure dropped too low to trust what came out of the pipes.

Jordan Rae Hillman, JXN Water’s chief operating officer, confirmed in a written statement that pressure at Henley-Young dropped whenever there were significant line breaks anywhere in the city. She said it was a consequence of the facility’s relatively high elevation and the water system’s challenges in keeping the system pressurized.

Now, with the intervention of the federal government, pressure across the city has begun to increase. Melanie McMillan, Merit Health’s spokesperson, said the hospital has seen “tremendous improvement.”

That’s due to a drastic reduction in water loss, said Henifin, head of JXN Water. The city’s two plants now produce just 38 million gallons a day to meet demand, down from 55 million gallons a day last summer. “Great progress,” Henifin said; still, half of that water doesn’t make it to customers.

JXN Water has periodically monitored pressure outside Henley-Young, part of a new network of sensors across the city. The most recent measurement in February showed street-level pressure of 38 psi, just above what the guidelines recommended by the EPA say is the lower limit for normal pressure. Soon, a new jail nearby will provide well water, permanently freeing the juvenile facility from the city’s water service.

Though Mississippi regulators defended their oversight of the city’s water system, Edney acknowledged in two interviews that MSDH could do more to make sure communities have reliable, safe drinking water. When systems are out of compliance, the state will use the threat of fines to force water systems to make repairs, he said.

Kopocis, who headed the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama years, echoed water regulators in a few other states in saying that the gaps exposed by the Jackson water crisis extend beyond Mississippi. Most states do not have water quality laws that are stricter than the federal government’s. And regulators in several states said inspectors there focus on water plants, not pipes.

That means problems like Jackson’s may go undetected before a major failure. Robert Brownwood, who works for California’s water regulator, said Jackson is like Flint, Michigan — another struggling, majority-Black city that made headlines for a water crisis beginning in 2014. “As Flint was for lead,” he said, “Jackson is the poster child for distribution infrastructure and repair.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press.

Aerial view of missile launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba. Photo: John F. Kennedy Library.

A famous US politician shot.  Nuclear missiles being positioned close to the territory of an enemy superpower. A nervous world wonders, ‘What next?”.  It happened in the 1960s; it’s happening again today.  We need a good song to wake us up.

Dylan’s breakthrough from songwriter to counter-culture prophet occurred a couple of months after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a year out from the assassination of President Kennedy.  A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was recorded – famously – in one take – in December 1962 – a couple of months after the world held its breath and waited for Armageddon.

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

He first clattered it out as a poem on his typewriter a few months earlier in a world edgy with Cold War tensions, in an atmosphere with more than a whiff of Plutonium and turmoil in the air.

Thom Donovan, writing in American Songwriter said: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is a revelation song. It’s a beat-poet psalm with an end-of-times warning … It represents a feeling of hopelessness. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg famously wept the first time he heard the song.”

Things have not changed a lot since then.  We are in the midst of a crisis that is at least as dangerous as 1962.  It centers once more on a superpower intent on placing missile systems in the enemy’s backyard.  The US announced this week that it will position Tomahawk cruise missile, SM-6 and hypersonic missiles in Germany from next year.  They travel up to 5000km/h – so decision and response times for the Russians will be vanishingly short.  We’re back to the brink of thermonuclear war.  Without serious pause to think, we’ve leaped back to the 1960s.

Things have changed a lot since then.  John F Kennedy isn’t US President, Joe Biden is.  Should we be worried?  The US has started firing missiles (using Ukrainians to press the red button) into Russia and promises many more.  We also seem to lack the writer-prophet, the songs and the sense of atomic anxiety that electrified the world and launched a peace movement.  The realization of what was at stake drove JFK to secretly write to his Russian counterpart Nikita Khrushchev on 26 October:

“If there is no intention,” he said, “to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”

What an excellent thought. If only Joe Biden could think like that.  But who was pulling on the rope at Kennedy’s end?  We should all know – and never forget – that all the US chiefs of staff in 1962 argued for an immediate missile strike on Cuba followed by a full-blown invasion.  During the crisis US Strategic Air Command was moved to DEFCON 2 – which is as scary as it sounds – meaning readiness for imminent nuclear war.

Having caused the crisis in the first place, Kennedy and his brother Bobby at least over-ruled the warlords and quite possibly saved our species.  Would Joe Biden have the strength of mind to overrule the joint chiefs of staff if a similar moment arose on his watch? The atmosphere in the US is febrile, as evidenced by the shooting of Donald Trump this week.  The Washington elite seems to be losing its collective mind, Biden being an avatar for the decline in critical faculties at the very moment we are entering the red zone.

Two sets of events, which have important echoes today, precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The US had moved Jupiter medium-range nuclear missile systems into Turkey, prompting the Soviets to take countermeasures, including preparing to station missiles in Cuba and send Ilyushin jet bombers to the island.  Kennedy and the Americans were understandably deeply concerned about this breach of the Monroe Doctrine and the very real threat it posed.

For its part, Cuba welcomed the deterrence Soviet missiles would provide.   The previous year the Americans had launched the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and followed it with Operation Mongoose, a series of terrorist attacks inside Cuba carried out by the CIA.  The government was also working with Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante to assassinate Cubans leaders.  As with the current US government, they were also using sanctions as economic warfare, intimidating other countries from trading with Cuba, so as to crush the country and trigger regime change.  It all sounds remarkably familiar, doesn’t it?  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more it changes the more it’s the same old story.

Both sides pulled back. The US withdrew the missiles from Turkey, promised not to invade Cuba and the Russians withdrew their weapons. Today the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine is intensifying; huge bases are being built in Romania, others soon in Finland and elsewhere. Fingers again hover over nuclear triggers but our culture has lost any visceral, kinetic, fear of what we are only minutes away from every single day from now on.

John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the “heroes” on the American side of the Cuban Missile Crisis, were both assassinated.  To their credit, they had realized what was at stake and had chosen the path of de-escalation.  Arms control and non-proliferation became central to great power diplomacy from the 1960s onward; important treaties like SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and the 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) eliminated entire categories of weapons and dialed back tensions.

Now the temperature is again rising to boiling point; the treaties have been abandoned, nuclear weapons are again in high production, and all the lessons learned, the visceral fears felt, have been lost.  The US will start stationing long-range missiles in Germany in 2026, a massive escalation that Russia has promised to respond to.

Trying to lure people back from the precipice is more ancient than Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet. The fact we haven’t suffered what peace advocates have been warning about doesn’t make them wrong; the stakes are too high, the politicians and military people are too irresponsible not to keep sounding the alert.   De-escalation, restraint and dialogue must replace the clamor and rush to arms.  Otherwise, one day, out of a blue sky, a hard rain’s gonna fall.

The post Warning From the Edge of the Abyss appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eugene Doyle.

Last night’s Matariki drone show was an emotional experience for some of the thousands who huddled under the glow at the edge of Lake Rotorua on the eve of Aotearoa’s national indigenous holiday today.

The Aronui Indigenous Arts Festival is hosting the first ever matauranga Māori story told with 160 drones over the Rotorua Lake last night and tonight.

The show is created by Te Arawa artists Cian Elyse White and Mataia Keepa, who were helped to tell the story by Rangitiaria Tibble and James Webster.

• READ MORE: Other Matariki reports

In both te reo Māori and English, the show tells the stories of environmental markers connected to the star cluster.

Lynmore Primary School deputy principal Lisa Groot went with a group of tamariki from the school.

The teachers had spent time together remembering those who had died in the past year, and so the display hit deep.

“The waka picks the stars up on the way, seeing it in the drone show made us quite emotional.

‘So simple to understand’
“It was so simple for everyone to understand.”

She said the group had wanted to join up for the event.

“We wanted to finish our night together, it was a beautiful way to do it.”

Frances Wharerahi said to be part of the Matariki festivities gave the children te ao Māori experiences alongside whānau.

The show was appreciated by a wide audience, and Wharerahi said as she looked around at who was watching and there were old and young standing with “people from all parts of the world”.

A statement from the charitable trust said it believed that while the drone show was a risk for a reasonably new trust, it had paid off.

“Arts is an essential service. Arts deserves investment.

‘Tough time for people’
“It’s a tough time for people at the moment with the current state of inflation and the economic climate, however, events that deliver on social impact and the uplift of communities that can be brought together under a positive premise are important to our livelihood.

“These events sustain us and give our future generations something to aspire towards.”

Rotorua Trust is among the major funders of at least at $10,000, and in-kind partners helping to promote, volunteer or support include Bay Trust, Te Kuirau Marae, Bay of Plenty Regional Council and Rotorua Lakes Council.

Aronui Indigenous Arts Festival was founded in 2019 and aimed to create a platform for Rotorua arts talent.

The charitable trust is made up of local community arts and business leaders.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Published as a collaboration.

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

Welcome to the future of climate change… Pakistan.

If one could classify a global warming beta test as a success towards an ultimate goal of apocalypse, unfortunately, it has turned Pakistan into a country populated by millions of displaced people in the early chapters of a horror story with no ending in sight because it is likely to get worse. Pakistan has been thrashed back and forth from one year (2022) of biblical flooding to years of record-setting heat. Normality has fled, chased out by an ogre of darkened apocalypse in the making.

Wherefore, Inside Climate News d/d June 8, 2024 has a remarkable series entitled “Living on Earth”, which recently interviewed Rafay Alam, who is an environmental lawyer and a member of Pakistan’s Climate Change Council. The title of the interview: “As Temperatures in Pakistan Top 120 Degrees, There’s Nowhere to Run”. That interview is the basis for this article about a country of 240 million people at the brink of apocalypse.

Based upon Pakistan’s severe climate experience, here is what Rafay Alam concludes, a widely shared viewpoint throughout the Global South:

There is a significant denialism on climate change in places like the United States. And it angers me because I see people affected. I see animals affected. And this is a lived experience for the global majority, the Global South. It’s extremely infuriating to see people who’ve participated in this global warming deny it, deny any accountability, try and move on as if nothing’s happened and try and continue to make money and drive that bottom line.

There’s an adage of the 1950s “Ugly Americans” that lingers to this day outside of America’s borders. It pejoratively references Americans as loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, with ugly ethnocentric behavior, which also applies to U.S. corporate interests internationally. Regrettably, climate change is reviving this debasing dictum in a very big way, 70 years later. And people who think today’s sociopolitical atmosphere is poisoned, divided, and postured for trouble in the USA should look over their shoulders, as anger foments around the world with America a target. Trouble’s universal.

Rafay Alam resides in Lahore (pop. 13M) known as the “City of Gardens.” It is the cultural heart of Pakistan with exquisite arts, cuisine, and music festivals, known for filmmaking and the recognized home of the intelligentsia. Lahore is a sophisticated metropolis that’s a safe place to live. According to the World Crime Index, the city is safer than living in London, New York, or Melbourne.

Yet, life for millions in Pakistan has changed for the worse seemingly overnight. Today, the country experiences persistent heat waves over 120°F in some cities, and summer is just beginning. Anything approaching the normal rhythm of life of past decades has been overwhelmed by brutal severely damaging climate change. The country is still recovering from the biblical flooding of 2022 when normal rainfall turned voracious 400% to 800% beyond anything ever experienced, a torrential downpouring lasting weeks in regions of the country that do not drain into the Indus Basin. Thus, a 100-kilometer (62-mile) artificial lake formed, displacing 10 million and impacting 30 million, bringing in its wake $35B infrastructure damage, roads swept away, schools swept away, hospitals swept away. It will take a generation to rebuild. This is climate change in full blast mode.

Rafay Alam:

We’ve seen temperatures since the middle of May to the first of June currently more than 50 degrees Centigrade, which is well over 120°F. Lahore, where I live is 44°C today, which is about 111°F… I go for a walk in the evenings when the sun sets It’s not unpleasant, but I notice animals and birds collapsed to the ground looking for water, dogs on the side of the road unable to get up… Recently, it was 125°F, the hottest place on Earth, at Mohenjo-Daro, which is home to an ancient civilization.

Accordingly, Pakistan is not just experiencing a scorching heat wave, it is actively experiencing the climate crisis in all its variations on a real time basis. And according to meteorologists: “It’s going to stay hotter for longer.”

Climate change has wrought an economic nightmare, as Pakistan has sought flood relief that came as loans, not grants or aid, which has doubled Pakistan’s external debt in only two years. This is devastating for a country that is trying to regain its footing and rebuild an economy that climate change clobbered.

Nevertheless, the country is learning to live with devastating temperatures by changing life’s normal patterns. Schools are let out by 12:00 noon but shutdown entirely when temperatures rise too far, which is a common experience of late.

Of even more concern, and possibly the most dangerous scenario of all, the monsoon season is coming by the end of June, early July which will convert dry heat to extreme humid heat with deadly wet bulb temperatures. At 95°F and 70% humidity, it’ll impact the human body like 120°F. That’s deadly because at that level the human body cannot release heat by sweating. Rather, it bakes internal organs. Hmm- it’s been triple digits for some time now with daytime forecasts to remain in triple digits to the end of June, and likely beyond into the heart of the summer.

Agriculture is 20% of Pakistan GDP. And according to Alam, a leading English newspaper recently ran a headline about crops decimated in Pakistan by heat, cotton basically sizzling, maize, mangos, and other vegetables and fodder for cattle, expecting a decline of productivity. Nearly one-half of the Pakistani workforce is in agriculture and they’re being hammered down to the poverty line by unforgiving climate change.

This heat wave is a man-made event due to the greenhouse gases consumed and thrown into the atmosphere by the Global North since the industrial revolution These greenhouse gases have to stop. (Alam)

Meanwhile, he claims the country must adapt as soon as possible to an off-the-rails climate system fed by profit-motives outside of Pakistan. He suggests changes to agriculture by working on heat-resistant crops. Currently, no crops can withstand 50-plus Centigrade temperatures. And the water economy must learn to adapt as 90% of water goes to agriculture, which is 20% of GDP employing 40% of the workforce, which is at the poverty line.

Meanwhile, it is currently harvesting season. Agricultural workers are waking up when the sun rises for only a couple of hours of work before it gets too hot to work. When it’s too hot to work any longer, people congregate inside for shelter from the sun. But those who live near fields are warned that snakes and scorpions also seek cooler spaces, entering homes en masse seeking shelter.

Alam’s biggest concern is for most Pakistanis who are middle class, working class and at the poverty line, unable to withstand climate shocks much further. Moreover, there are really not many safe places for them to go to escape global heat, unless they have a rich friend.

Even heading to the Himalaya mountains for cooler terrain could be treacherous. There are over 3,000 glaciers that, due to global warming, form glacial lakes in the mountains. Over time, these blow apart in outburst of devastating unannounced floods bringing down mountainsides as roads and bridges are washed away leaving those seeking cool mountain air stranded. According to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, the Hindu Kush Himalaya is a “hotspot of risk” for outburst floods.

Pakistan, unfortunately, has become a proving ground for what climate change is capable of. And there’s no reason to expect it to remain confined to the borders of Pakistan.

Rafay Alam first became aware of climate change’s potential impact nearly 20 years ago when he saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, May 2006), which opened a lot of eyes. Yet, the nations of the world have failed to adequately confront the primary cause, burning fossil fuels, that fuels radical climate change that’s whiplashed Pakistan’s environment beyond limits.

Alam believes the basis of the legal systems and the international system can’t cope with an existential crisis such as climate change: “One of the worst ways to deal with something like climate change is to divide the world into 200 different countries and have them argue with each other.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -IPCC- is testament to this, 30 years later and CO2 is still increasing each year without missing a beat, targeting Pakistan. But, for certain, Pakistan is not an isolated case.

According to Alam, in conclusion:

Earth’s ecosystem has been in balance since the last ice age… That civilization is over… the way that we interact with each other- extremely heavy energy use, extremely heavy water use, incredibly consumptive of natural resources producing greenhouse gases for just about everything… It’s this behavior, this civilization, which is at risk. And yes, it is very much an apocalypse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to address the conference on its opening day to be followed on February 17 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who will make his first in-person appearance at the conference since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

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He addressed the 2023 conference virtually.

An estimated 50 world leaders are expected to attend the annual event that bills itself as the world's leading forum for debating international security policy. The governments of Russia and Iran have not been invited.

It will be an encore for Harris, who spoke at the conference in 2022 and 2023, but the stakes are different this year.

She faces the task of reassuring allies that Washington remains committed to defending their security after Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, questioned defending NATO allies who failed to spend enough on defense from a potential Russia invasion.

Harris plans to pledge that the United States will never retreat from its NATO obligations, and contrast Biden's commitment to global engagement with Trump's isolationist views, a White House official was quoted by Reuters as saying.

"The vice president will recommit to defeat the failed ideologies of isolationism, authoritarianism, and unilateralism...[and] denounce these approaches to foreign policy as short-sighted, dangerous, and destabilizing," the official said.

Harris is expected to meet with Zelenskiy during the conference, according to the White House.

She will be joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who just completed a visit to Albania, where he reinforced what he called an "extraordinary partnership" between Washington and Tirana.

The U.S. vice president will also express confidence that the American people will continue to support the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine.

Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on economic and military aid from its Western allies, has been facing a shortage of ammunition and military equipment on the battlefield and is now facing intense fighting for the eastern city of Avdiyivka.

Kyiv also is desperate for a replenishment of supplies of air-defense systems to protect its civilians and infrastructure, which are hit almost daily by Russian shelling and drone attacks.

Harris is certain to be asked about a $95.34 billion military-aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that the Senate, led by Democrats, approved on February 13 but that may never be put up for a vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representative because of Trump's opposition to it.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s European allies have begun increasing their support for Ukraine.

Ahead of his arrival in Munich, Zelenskiy was scheduled to travel on February 16 first to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then to Paris to sign a security pact with French President Emmanuel Macron, his office in Kyiv and the Elysee Palace in Paris said.

Berlin did not release any details about Zelenskiy's meeting with Scholz, but Germany is also negotiating a security agreement with Kyiv.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and dpa

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Neta Auto and Great Wall Motor were among the Chinese carmakers making their debut at the Gaikindo Indonesia International Auto Show, hoping to tap into growing demand for eco-friendly vehicles in the world’s fourth most populous country.

Though currently a niche product, electric vehicle (EV) sales are poised for rapid growth in Indonesia. The government is aggressively promoting the country as a production hub for EV batteries and cars, while offering new consumer subsidies to shift domestic demand up a gear.

“We are very excited to enter the Indonesian market, which has huge potential for electric vehicles,” Wang Chengjie, vice president of Neta Overseas, said at the event being held on the outskirts of Jakarta. 

Neta presented three models at the show and initiated pre-orders for the popular Neta V crossover, which has a price tag of 379 million rupiah ($25,000). Great Wall Motor Group (GWM), meanwhile, showcased the Ora Good Cat, a compact electric hatchback with “cat-like features” and cheerful colors that drew crowds of curious onlookers.

Neta will next year become the second Chinese car manufacturer to establish an EV assembly line in Indonesia, after Wuling began producing its AirEV locally in 2022. South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co. also manufactures electric cars at a plant near Jakarta.  

Japanese automakers that have long dominated the Indonesian car market. Toyota, Honda, Daihatsu, Mitsubishi and Suzuki accounted for about 85 percent of total car sales in Indonesia in 2022, according to data from the Association of Indonesian Automotive Manufacturers (Gaikindo).

However, they have been slow to introduce electric cars, partly due to the lack of infrastructure and incentives for adoption. Now, Chinese companies are looking to fill the gap.

While the potential for growth is huge, EVs currently account for a fraction of total automobile sales in Indonesia. Just 10,327 electric battery-powered cars were sold in 2022, or about 1% of combined car sales.

By 2025, the government is aiming to have 400,000 electric four-wheelers and 1.8 million electric two-wheelers on the roads.

But a range of obstacles stand in the way, including an insufficient number of charging stations, the expense of buying a car and inconsistent policies, the Institute for Essential Services Reform, a private think tank, said in a report released in February. The reliability of electricity supply could also be a problem in rural areas, it said.

To boost the demand for electric vehicles, the government has unveiled a subsidy program that will cover the sales of 200,000 electric motorcycles and 35,900 electric cars. It will also cover the conversion of 50,000 combustion-engine motorcycles to electric propulsion systems. 

For producers, the government offers zero percent export duty and value-added tax for electric cars and buses that meet certain domestic content requirements. Consumers can receive up to 80 million rupiah ($5,130) for each purchase of an electric car made onshore and the government will ensure lower ownership costs. 

The subsidy program, which began on March 20 this year, is a complement to Indonesia’s efforts to develop domestic EV production facilities to take advantage of the country’s rich reserves of nickel, a key component of the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs.

Luhut Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment, has expressed hopes for Indonesia to become “one of the top three countries in the world producing EV batteries as well as electric cars” by 2027.

The Indonesian government is also keen to promote electric vehicles as part of its strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 29% by 2030.

Competition heats up

Chinese electric car makers are not only competing with the Japanese brands, but also with other players from South Korea, the United States and Europe.

French carmaker Citroen and Germany’s Mercedes-Benz were among the brands showcasing their electric vehicles at the Indonesia auto show.  

And the Indonesian government has long wooed American manufacturer Tesla to invest in car and battery manufacturing in the country. 

President Joko Widodo in May last year visited the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk in Texas. And last August, Tesla signed contracts worth several billion U.S. dollars to purchase nickel from two companies in Indonesia.

But with early investments in Indonesia, Chinese carmakers might have a head start.

Wuling, which has been selling its conventional cars in Indonesia since 2017, sold 8,000 units of its popular AirEV small electric car last year, accounting for roughly 80% of Indonesia’s four-wheel EV sales.

Chinese companies Chery and DFSK Motor also have a presence in the country.

Chery, which had entered the Indonesian market in the early 2000s but failed to gain traction, returned this year with fresher products, including the sophisticated and futuristic-looking Omoda 5, the electric version of which will be on sale next year. 

While Chinese electric cars attracted interest at the international auto show, some people expressed doubts about their quality and reliability.

Arsita Kamila said the Ora Good Cat was “cute and practical” for city driving, but she would not rush into buying one.

“I wonder whether it will last long, especially the battery, because it’s the most expensive part,” she said.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahmad Syamsudin for BenarNews.

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Quito, June 27, 2023—Political paralysis and spiking crime pose grave threats to press freedom in Ecuador, finds a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published today.

CPJ’s report, “Ecuador on edge,” found the country’s journalists face the prospect of acute violence amid a security crisis with no precedent in recent history. In 2022, Ecuadorian press freedom group Fundamedios documented 356 attacks on the press, the highest number since 2018. In the first four months of 2023, the organization reported a total of 96 attacks.

In recent months in Ecuador, two journalists were forced to flee due to death threats, explosive devices were mailed to multiple broadcasters, and reporters are compelled to be accompanied by law enforcement in order to cover violent areas.

The fear of physical retribution has led Ecuadorian journalists to self-censor, producing a chilling effect on vital public-interest reporting. As a consequence, local communities across Ecuador are without access to reporting affecting their daily lives, notably in the lead-up to the general elections scheduled for August 20, 2023.

“Ecuador’s public safety crisis has triggered a serious deterioration in the conditions for local press, underscoring the urgent need for investment in mechanisms that strengthen press freedom and fortify journalist safety,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Ahead of Ecuador’s upcoming elections, it is essential to the integrity of the country’s democracy that local journalists can report the news without fear of reprisal to ensure Ecuadorians are informed and have access to reporting that holds power to account.”

The legacy of former President Rafael Correa’s anti-press sentiment continues to inflict lasting damage on press freedom in Ecuador, which saw retaliatory defamation lawsuits and restrictive measures against the media become commonplace.

President Guillermo Lasso, who took office in 2021, has taken steps to protect the press, yet political turbulence has thwarted the administration’s progress towards comprehensive media reform.

The report includes CPJ’s recommendations to Ecuador’s executive branch and judicial, administrative, and law enforcement authorities, as well as the international community, to implement actions to strengthen Ecuador’s press freedom commitments.

These include calls to guarantee financial resources for the effective functioning of the existing mechanism to protect journalists and a commitment from the Lasso government that Ecuadorian journalists and media outlets can report the news without fear of reprisal, particularly in the weeks ahead of the elections.  

###

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide.

Note to Editors: CPJ’s report is available on cpj.org in English and Spanish.

Media contact: press@cpj.org

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

This happened back in April amid talk that the people of Batanes could be caught in the middle should war break out between China and Taiwan, an island just a few hundred kilometers away, Cabardo recalled.

Neighbors began to fret that month when American servicemen landed here in tilt-rotor aircraft and vessels during joint exercises with their Philippine counterparts, Cabardo, a mother of two who is in her 40s, told a reporter with BenarNews, an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

“There was panic buying. People were hoarding food,” said Cabardo, who owns Centro, a small restaurant in downtown Basco, the quiet capital of the island chain, whose total population is less than 20,000.

People who live in this tiny province surrounded by sea in the Luzon Strait are on edge, worrying that Batanes could easily be exposed to fighting between rival superpowers should they go to war over Taiwan. 

The presence of the foreign troops participating in the recent drills with Philippine troops got the locals buzzing that this was to prepare for a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. But both the Philippines and United States officially denied that the war games were connected to such a threat.

Batanes folk usually believe the news coming out of the mainland – more specifically, Manila, the country’s capital and seat of government, Cabrado said.

“So when the reports about the training came out and the Americans were seen in our province, they thought they would be [ensnared in the] conflict, so they panicked,” she recalled during the interview with BenarNews in May.

Batanes serves as a natural demarcation between the Philippines and Taiwan. These lush green islands are celebrated for their stone-crafted houses, coral walls, and charming cogon grass roofs.

Batanes is the smallest province in the Philippines. Surrounded by 4,500 square kilometers (1,737 square miles) of sea, the province’s total land mass is 203.2 square kilometers (78.4 square miles) – one third the size of Metro Manila. 

Because of the tension between Taiwan and China, Batanes has gained attention lately as a potential flashpoint in the geopolitical struggle between China and the U.S., its geopolitical rival and close ally of both Taiwan and the Philippines. 

Analysts say Batanes is key terrain that both sides may vie to occupy were war to break out in the Taiwan Strait.

To ensure control of the Luzon Strait, China may take control of the Batanes Islands to use them as a base for enclosing the Bashi Channel with anti-ship and anti-air missile coverage, said Jay Batongbacal, director of the Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea at the University of the Philippines.

“A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would require blockading and isolating [Batanes] from access by the U.S. and other allied forces. China will bombard Taiwanese defenses first before launching amphibious and air invasions,” he told BenarNews as he painted some scenarios.

‘China will make us a target’

As an ordinary citizen, former Batanes Gov. Telesforo Castillejos said he was aware of the predicament facing locals, given their province’s proximity to Taiwan, which China sees as a renegade province.

“If I allow the Americans to use our island as a stepping stone to whatever activity… then China will make us a target,” said Castillejos, who grew up in Basco in a family of farmers.

“I am not an expert. But from a layman’s point of view, if the West Philippine Sea is a major concern of our country – having that international tribunal decision won by the Philippines – how much more for a small island [chain] like Batanes?” he said, referring to territories claimed by the Philippines in the contested South China Sea. 

“I will not be surprised if one day, they [China] will present some old maps claiming part of their territorial waters is Batanes.”

In mid-2016, the Philippines won a landmark case before an international arbitration tribunal in its territorial dispute with China over the waterway. But Beijing so far has refused to abide by the ruling and has carried on with its military expansionism and program to build artificial islands in the maritime region. 

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. While Indonesia does not regard itself as a party to territorial disputes in the waterway, Beijing claims historic rights to parts that overlap with Indonesia’s EEZ.

According to Castillejos, 76, Batanes has largely been forgotten by the central government, which lately has been sending coast guard and navy patrol ships to the islands, though few and far in between.

“We cannot even secure our territorial waters. And our marine resources are being depleted by China. The same problem until now. Our government is not in a position to secure our territorial waters,” he told BenarNews.

In February this year, the Philippines, under an expanded defense pact, gave the United States access to four new military bases – a deal that one analyst described as “central” to Washington’s aim to deter any Chinese plan to attack Taiwan.

In 2014, the Philippines and U.S. signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which supplemented the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999. The VFA provides legal cover for large-scale joint war games between the two longtime allies and stipulates that U.S. forces can only rotate in and out of the Philippines, a former American colony.

Castillejos considered President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s policies like how having the EDCA could help protect the people if conflict broke out between China and Taiwan.

“But I always pray and believe that war will not happen because no one will be a winner,” he said.

According to Batanes Vice Gov. Ignacio Villa, local authorities have contingency plans in place should something bad occur in the Taiwan Strait.

Under the plan, they would build a “tent city” that could accommodate thousands of refugees, considering that an estimated 150,000 Filipinos work in Taiwan.

“The Americans will be helping in this measure,” he said.

‘We are living peacefully here’

German Amboy Caccam, the mayor of Basco, echoed that sentiment. When the people of these islands voiced their concerns, the United States provided reassurances and pledged assistance, he said.

“First, there is the repatriation of Filipinos in Taiwan returning home. It is anticipated that Batanes will serve as a transit point,” he explained.

“Therefore, if Batanes becomes a transit point, we may face an influx of refugees. Our primary concern lies in providing sufficient food and water. While we have enough resources to sustain the existing population, we are currently unprepared to cater to the needs of refugees,” he added.

If he had to decide, said Caccam, a former public school teacher, he would not allow the Americans to stay in the country to make their province the venue for future military drills.

“I don’t like it. We are living peacefully here. We are a potential target because of their presence. But if that’s the policy of the government, we can’t do anything,” he said.

Known for its traditional low-slung houses built to withstand any typhoon, the main sources of livelihood for the people of Batanes – which is more commonly known among locals as Ivatan – are fishing and tourism.

Bishop Danilo Ulep, the head of the Catholic Church in Batanes who has lived in these islands since 2017, said the locals were hardy people who could adapt to whatever was thrown their way. 

This, he said, now potentially included being a pawn in a larger geopolitical war.

The people here “possess the remarkable ability to overcome any form of adversity,” Ulep told BenarNews.

The man of the cloth described the Batanes islanders as modest and humble people “who can thrive without the luxuries commonly found on the mainland” and who show “remarkable solidarity by supporting and assisting one another.” 

“They have the strength to triumph over any misfortune that comes their way. This is a quality I have personally witnessed in them,” Ulep said.

BenarNews is an online news organization affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jeoffrey Maitem for BenarNews.

According to a recent article: “Is Nuclear War More Likely After Russia’s Suspension of the New START Treaty?” Nature, March 7, 2023: “The world has lurched a step closer to the prospect of nuclear war, say researchers, after Russia declared last month that it would suspend its participation in its last major nuclear arms treaty with the United States.”

Additionally, on March 25, 2023, Reuters: “Putin Says Moscow to Place Nuclear Weapons in Belarus.”

Also, January 2023, BBC News: “India and Pakistan Came Close to Nuclear War: Pompeo.”

All of which begs the question of what is the impact of thermonuclear explosions in war and what is the likelihood in today’s disoriented world? The ramifications of exploding thermonuclear warheads are described in some detail herein, as if a reality.

“In 2023 we find ourselves facing a risk of nuclear conflict greater than we’ve seen since the early eighties. Yet there is little in the way of public knowledge or debate of the unimaginably dire long-term consequences of nuclear war for the planet and global populations.” (Source: “Public Awareness of ‘Nuclear Winter’ Too Low Given Current Risks Argues Expert,” University of Cambridge, Feb 14, 2023)

Nobody expects a nuclear war to really happen. It simply cannot happen. Right?

Well, not so fast, atomic bombs were dropped on masses of people, e.g., Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, both direct hits, tens of thousands of dead. And thus, are today’s leaders, who are armed with nuclear arsenals, any less impetuous than leaders of 75 years ago? Maybe, but maybe not.

“On dozens of occasions because of human error or technical miscue or active threat, the world has come dangerously close to the brink of nuclear conflagration… it is a terrifying history of which most people remain ignorant.” (Julian Cribb, How to Fix a Broken Planet, Cambridge University Press, 2023.)

There is an urgent need for public education within all nuclear-armed states that is informed by the latest research. We need to collectively reduce the temptation that leaders of nuclear-armed states might have to threaten or even use such weapons in support of military operations… if we assume Russia’s nuclear arsenal has a comparable destructive force to that of the US – just under 780 megatons – then the least devastating scenario from the survey, in which nuclear winter claims 225 million lives, could involve just 0.1% of this joint arsenal. (Cambridge)

Because of the real threat, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to its most threatening level ever at only 90-seconds to midnight largely because of multiple risks of a nuclear event out of the Ukrainian/Russian war zone. Along those lines, the Bulletin published an article explaining the impact of nuclear explosions, entitled: “Nowhere to Hide, How a Nuclear War Would Kill You – and Almost Everyone Else.”

A synopsis of that telling article follows herein:

Within microseconds of a nuclear blast, X-ray energy is released as a superheated fireball with temperature and pressure, like the Sun, so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of nuclei and subatomic particles. As for example, today’s US nuclear arsenal of Minuteman III missiles with W87 thermonuclear warheads carry the destructive force of a fireball that will grow to more than 2,000 feet diameter, emitting light so intense that it’ll ignite fires at great distances. The thermal flash will cause first-degree burns at up to 8 miles from ground zero.

Thereupon, a super-powerful Blast Wave hits, traveling faster than the speed of sound with enormous destructive capability, destroying/flattening houses, and gutting skyscrapers causing massive numbers of fatalities, all in less than 10 seconds. The Blast Wave gives rise to a mushroom cloud of deadly radioactive split atoms, which drop out of the mushroom cloud as wind carries it across the landscape, exposing post-war/post-blast survivors to lethal and/or near-lethal doses of ionizing radiation. These lethal effects last days-to-weeks.

Today’s nuclear warheads are 10-times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in Japan in the 1940s. As such, a direct hit on NYC would kill 1,000,000 people within 24 hours along with more than 2,000,000 serious injuries.

A regional war, for example, between India and Pakistan, involving 100 1.5-kiloton nuclear devices launched at high population sites would kill 27,000,000 people quickly. By way of contrast, and beyond regional war, an all-out nuclear war between, say Russia and the US, with over 4,000 100-kiloton nuclear warheads, at a minimum, would kill 360,000,000 quickly. Two years thereafter the nuclear war famine would likely be 10 times as deadly a force as the original bomb blasts.

Incomprehensibly, according to the Bulletin, some military/policy circles, as of today, believe that a limited nuclear war can be successfully fought and won. But that line of reasoning presupposes a limited nuclear war that does not morph into an all-out thermonuclear battle possibly engineered by a revengeful/maddened leader, like General Ripper of Dr. Strangelove. If the abominable fantasy of a crazed general/leader of a regional contest were to morph into an all-out exchange, it would likely bring in its wake the death of more than one-half of the human population on the planet.

Accordingly, the post-blast nuclear winter scenario would bring a quick drop in land temperatures with massive widespread agricultural collapse. New research into the advent of a nuclear winter scenario demonstrates much more severe longer-lasting damage than earlier studies.

A regional nuclear war, for example between India and Pakistan crazily bombing one another, would lead to widespread firestorms so powerful in cities and industrial areas that it would cause severe global climatic change, disrupting all forms of life for decades. For example, with India and Pakistan each launching 100 warheads it would emit a stratospheric injection of five million tons of soot or pulverized superheated dust, heating the stratosphere, and forcing serious ozone depletion, whilst cooling land surface under the cloud of soot.

Once the injections of soot hit the atmosphere, they’ll stay for months-to-years, blocking sunlight and rapidly decreasing land temperatures. In turn, stratospheric temperatures increase by up to 30°C within four years, thereby causing more loss of ozone and removing its protective shield against excessive ultraviolent radiation thus burning-up vegetation as well as humans, in fact, most life on Earth, as loss of the all-important ozone layer leads to a tropical UV index above 35 within three years, which will last for four years. According to the US EPA, a UV index of 11 is categorized as “extreme danger,” severely damaging humans as well as inhibiting photolysis reaction needed for leaf expansion and plant growth.

Moreover, a large-scale nuclear winter, e.g., a US-Russia war, would cause below freezing temperatures throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere, even during summer. Under the circumstances, global temps will drop by 8°C, bringing the onset of a mini-ice age. Meanwhile, global ocean temperatures would drop by 3.5°-to-6.0°C. depending on the scale of warfare, resulting in a marine food web deficiency as total available seafood production suffers a 20-40% drop, at a minimum, and stays at reduced levels for at least four years.

According to a recent meeting of the UN Security Council, March 31, 2023, the risk of nuclear weapons use is higher than at any time since the Cold War.

“Risks of a direct military confrontation between the two nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, are steadily growing, the TASS news agency quoted a senior Russian diplomat as saying on Tuesday.” (Reuters, April 25, 2023)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

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Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

“An emerging compromise on annual defense policy legislation will endorse a $45 billion increase to President Joe Biden’s defense spending plans,” Politico reports. “. . . The deal would set the budget topline of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act at $847 billion for national defense.”

You know, more than the world’s next nine defense budgets combined. We have more than 750 military bases around the world. We’re sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine to keep the war going, in the wake of our two decades of war in the Middle East to rid the world of terrorism . . . excuse me, evil. As a result, the planet is bleeding to death. Not to worry, though. We still have nukes.

How safe and secure can we get?

And here’s Northrop Grumman, presenting to the world the B-21 Raider, an updated nuclear bomber, a.k.a., the future of Armageddon. No need to worry. When Armageddon is ready to happen, it will happen smoothly, at the bargain cost of $750 million per aircraft.

Northrop Grumman itself puts it this way: “When it comes to delivering America’s resolve, the B-21 Raider will be standing by, silent and ready. We are providing America’s warfighters with an advanced aircraft offering a combination of range, payload, and survivability. The B-21 Raider will be capable of penetrating the toughest defenses to deliver precision strikes anywhere in the world. The B-21 is the future of deterrence.”

We’re dancing on the edge of hell.

Is it possible for humanity to evolve beyond this? Prior to Armageddon? Advocating that humanity’s collective consciousness must transcend militarism and an us-vs.-them attitude toward the planet means lying on a bed of nails. Consider the weird and mysterious act of violence that took place recently in Moore County, North Carolina, which may — or may not — have been triggered by a drag show.

Somebody opened gunfire at two electric substations in the central North Carolina county over the weekend, causing multi-million-dollar damage to the power grid and leaving some 40,000 households without power for half a week. While the perpetrator and motive remain a mystery to law enforcement officials, one person wrote on Facebook: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” She then posted a photo of the Sunrise Theater, in downtown Southern Pines, along with the words “God will not be mocked.”

The theater had a drag show scheduled that night, which, prior to the power grid attack, had been vehemently opposed by many right-wingers.

The Facebook claim that the power outage was meant to stop the drag show may have been totally bogus (and also a failure, by the way, with spectators lighting the show with their cell phones so it could go on). Maybe we’ll never know for sure. But even if the poster, furious about the scheduled show, had simply co-opted a motive for the criminal act, essentially ascribing it to God, it’s still indicative that there’s a lot of poison in the air. If you hate something, don’t try to understand it. Go to war. There was, after all, a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs several weeks ago — indeed, mass shootings directed at multiple targets are, good God, commonplace.

I fear that war remains the logical terminus of collective human consciousness. Indeed, war is sacred, or so surmises Kelly Denton-Borhaug, citing as an example a speech delivered by George W. Bush on Easter weekend in 2008. She noted that W “milked” the Easter story to glorify the hell the country was in the process of wreaking in Iraq and Afghanistan, throwing a bit of Gospel into his war on evil: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

She writes: “The abusive exploitation of religion to bless violence covered the reality of war’s hideous destructiveness with a sacred sheen.”

But perhaps even worse than war’s pseudo-sacredness is its normalcy, a la that never-questioned trillion-dollar budget that Congress tosses at the Pentagon every year without fail. And the total pushes up, up, up every year, bequeathing us, for instance, that Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, ready to deliver Armageddon on command.

Short of Armageddon, we simply have armed hate-spewers, ready and ever so willing to kill an enemy at the grocery store or a school classroom or a nightclub.

Understand, love, heal . . . these are not simple words. Will we ever learn what they mean? Will we ever give them a budget?

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

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No connection between the two killings has been confirmed, but authorities say both may have been involved in business deals gone sour, sources in Laos told Radio Free Asia. 

On Sept. 15, villagers from Vientiane Province’s Phon Hong district found a body floating near a dam that was identified as belonging to Chinese businessman You Hai Yang, 37, who had operated an iron bar manufacturer. The body was found in a plastic bag with his hands and feet bound, a police official said.

“They are still investigating and the cause is unknown,” a police official from Vientiane’s Naxaythong district told RFA’s Lao Service. “There is no closed-circuit camera at the location where they dumped the body. They don’t know where it came from, what direction. They know only that this body is of the person from the iron bar company.”

Yang was a “big boss” at his company, and had come to Laos three months prior, another police official from the capital said. The body was cremated in Vientiane, and some of the bones are to be sent to China for further investigation. The suspected motive is a business-related conflict, the second police official said.

Dismembered body

Two weeks later, Thai police on Sept. 29 discovered a suitcase floating in the Mekong River containing the dismembered body of Viphaphone Kongsy, 36, chairwoman of the Lao VIP investment company. A dual citizen of Laos and China, the woman also went by the name Lì Jūn Vp. She had been missing since Sept. 10.

The Lao Ministry of Public Security set up a special committee to investigate, but hasn’t released any statements or information about evidence. 

An official from the rescue team in Thailand’s That Phnom district, where the body was found, told RFA he went to pick up the body bag and found evidence that suggested murder. 

“Her face was beaten by something strong like an iron bar,” he said. “The right side of her stomach has been torn out. She might have been beaten hard with an iron bar before she died.”

A couple days later, residents in Vientiane spotted what turned out to be her car floating in the Mekong River.

Her decomposing body parts are being kept at the Nakhon Phanom hospital in Thailand, a Thai police official said. “They have to test her relatives' DNA before they can return her body to Laos,” the official said. 

The two killings are the latest in a string of similar incidents involving Chinese nationals engaged in business in Laos, where China has invested heavily in infrastructure and manufacturing projects.

‘Very Afraid’ 

With the news of each case, the Lao public has grown ever more fearful, sources told RFA, sparking fears of growing lawlessness.

“News of the murder is making villagers very afraid. They want local officials, police and soldiers to patrol all the time, and the villagers want to take part to be the eyes and ears helping them as well,” said a villager from Phon Hong, where Yang’s body was found. Soldiers patrol the dam where the body was found 24 hours a day, he said.

“This was a murder with the intent to kill this guy without mercy,” a police official said, asking not to be identified.  “There have been killings in many provinces in Laos in the past mostly from drug trafficking and drug trades or robbery and stealing, conflict in the family, or among friends, but not as harsh as this one.” 

Reports of such killings have increased in recent years of growing resentment in Laos over Chinese business presence in the country, over Chinese casinos and special economic zones which have been linked to human trafficking and crime. 

Viphaphone’s investigation should be handled in a transparent way to ease the fears of the people, a Lao source who has been following the case told RFA. “They should announce what they know to the public, what’s going on, right now,” he said. 

Another Lao source who is following the case said that it was likely a business-related killing. “Based on observation, this case of murder looks like it stems from business conflict. But the police have not revealed anything yet,” the second source said. “We never dreamed that anything like this would happen in Laos.”

A former Lao government official with knowledge of cases like these also believes the deaths are a result of business conflicts, “perhaps with Laotian, Vietnamese or Chinese who invested money and had a conflict with her and lost,” he said.

A Lao expert on criminal law declined to express an opinion on the case or speculate on its outcome. “But I believe that related sectors must urgently solve this case because it is a horrible case for the public to think about,” the expert said.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya and Ounkeo Souksavanh. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

A United Nations organization on Monday joined critics of the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks across the globe hiking interest rates with the goal of reining in inflation.

"We have the tools to calm inflation and support all vulnerable groups. This is a matter of policy choices and political will."

With the world economy "in the midst of cascading and multiplying crises," a new U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report explains, "the attention of policymakers has become much too focused on dampening inflationary pressures through restrictive monetary policies, with the hope that central banks can pilot the economy to a soft landing, avoiding a full-blown recession."

"Not only is there a real danger that the policy remedy could prove worse than the economic disease, in terms of declining wages, employment, and government revenues, but the road taken would reverse the pandemic pledges to build a more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive world," the document warns.

The warning comes after the Fed late last month announced another widely anticipated 75-basis-point interest rate increase—a move that led some experts to accuse the U.S. institution of not only disregarding the negative impacts that such a policy has on the nation's poor but also ignoring a key driver of inflation: corporate greed.

As the UNCTAD document details, "Today, inflation is caused by a mixture of disruptions in global supply chains, high (container) shipping costs, the impact of war on key sectors, higher mark-ups, commodity-market speculators, and the ongoing uncertainty of an evolving pandemic."

"In this situation, central banks cannot bring inflation down at a socially acceptable cost," it continues. "Instead, supply-chain disruptions and labor shortages require appropriate industrial policies to increase the supply of key items in the medium term; this must be accompanied by sustained global policy coordination and (liquidity) support to help countries fund and manage these changes."

The report adds that "in the meantime, policymakers should seriously consider alternative paths of action to lower inflation in socially desirable ways, including strategic price controls, better regulation to reduce speculative trades in key markets, targeted income support for vulnerable groups, and debt relief."

"If monetary tightening in the advanced economies continues over the coming year, however, a global recession is more likely, and, even if it is looser than the 1980s, it will almost unavoidably harm potential growth rate in the developing economies," the document states. "The permanent damage to economic development in these countries will not only be substantial but will also leave the ambition to achieve a better world by 2030 dangling by the most precarious of threads."

The report's recommendations include windfall profits taxes targeting industries that are cashing in on the current economic conditions. Fossil fuel giants, for example, have been repeatedly accused of price gouging throughout this year.

"Do you try to solve a supply-side problem with a demand-side solution?" asked Richard Kozul-Wright, who led the team in charge of the report, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We think that's a very dangerous approach."

UNCTAD noted in a Monday statement that the U.S. interest rate hikes "are set to cut an estimated $360 billion of future income for developing countries (excluding China) and signal even more trouble ahead."

The Journal highlighted that the Fed is not alone in hiking interest rates.

"The European Central Bank and the Bank of England are also raising their key interest rates more rapidly than during recent decades," the newspaper reported. "According to the World Bank, more central banks raised borrowing costs in July than at any time since records began in the early 1970s."

UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan stressed Monday that "there's still time to step back from the edge of recession."

"We have the tools to calm inflation and support all vulnerable groups. This is a matter of policy choices and political will," she said. "But the current course of action is hurting the most vulnerable, especially in developing countries, and risks tipping the world into a global recession."

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

MOGOLLON, NEW MEXICO

Canadian mining company Summa Silver Corporation just released a statement that it has staked a large package of contiguous mining claims at its Mogollon Project near Silver City, New Mexico. Mogollon sits in the heart of the Greater Gila region, and the new claims more than double the company’s project size, now significantly encroaching onto National Forest lands, including areas where threatened Mexican spotted owl and Gila trout have been documented.

Summa Silver’s exploratory drilling operations are taking place just a few miles from the boundary of the Gila Wilderness, this country’s first, designated almost 100 years ago through the efforts of the visionary conservationist Aldo Leopold. The Greater Gila region is known for its exceptional biodiversity, hosting more species of birds and mammals than any other region in the Southwest, including the only population of Mexican gray wolves. The Greater Gila is home to over 200 rare plant and animal species, with over 30 listed as threatened or endangered.

“Mogollon is a one-of-a-kind, truly magical place. It is a blend of well-preserved history of days-gone-by with a tremendous amount of nature knocking at its door: an abundance of wildlife, peace and serenity amidst birds chirping, hummingbirds zooming, and forest trees rustling, and at night, a dark sky sanctuary highlighted by a single owl hooting or a pair of owls calling to each other,” said long-time local resident Bob Moore.” How sad it is that a foreign, penny stock company with grand plans involving thousands of acres of private and public lands for mineral extraction can waltz right in and destroy what is cherished by the Mogollon residents and its active visitors, sight-seers, birders, nature lovers, hikers, bikers, equestrian enthusiasts, and avid hunters.”

In addition, Summa Silver’s exploratory drilling operations are taking place on the traditional homelands of the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache.

“The Creator, Yusen, charged the Chiricahua people with stewarding the land, the air, the water, the plants, the animals, and the spirits in what is now called the Greater Gila region. This is our reason for being,” said Bill Tooahyaysay Bradford, Ikegee Nant’an (Vice Chief) and Beh Goz Ani (Attorney General) for the Chiricahua Apache Nation. “The site where Summa Silver seeks to mine is sacred to the Chiricahua as the place where Yusen divided the night and the day as a gift to humans and animals. We commemorate this through the Moccasin Dance and the Moccasin Game. Our obligation to Yusen is to resist any attempts to damage or destroy this sacred place. We, the Chiricahua Apache Nation, hope for the opportunity to share the importance of this place with Summa Silver and to encourage them to cease their efforts to mine not only in Mogollon but within the Greater Gila region.”

“Mogollon and the entire Greater Gila Bioregion are facing the hard truths of climate breakdown, ongoing aridification, and biodiversity collapse,” said WildEarth Guardians’ Greater Gila New Mexico Advocate Leia Barnett. “The last thing this ecosystem and this community need is a new mine that damages public lands, pollutes public waters, and further endangers iconic wildlife species.”

The Greater Gila is the headwaters of the Gila River, one of the West’s last free-flowing rivers, in addition to the Mimbres, the Little Colorado, the Verde, and the San Francisco rivers. The actions of Summa Silver directly jeopardize Mineral Creek, Silver Creek, and Whitewater Creek. All of these waterways combined provide critical habitat for some of the most imperiled aquatic species, including Gila trout, Gila chub, Chiricahua chub, Apache trout, loach minnow and Chiricahua leopard frog. In addition, the Greater Gila is one of just a few internationally designated Dark Sky Sanctuary sites. New mining operations destroy and degrade all that make Mogollon and the Greater Gila exceptional.

CONTACTS:
Leia Barnett, WildEarth Guardians, (970) 406-2125, Lbarnett@wildearthguardians.org
Bob Moore, Mogollon Concerned Citizens, (575) 539-2744, sosilvercreek@gmail.com
William Bradford, Chiricahua Apache Nation, (703) 517-5719, chiricahuaprofessor@hotmail.com
Ian Bigley, Earthworks, (775) 772-8393, ibigley@earthworksaction.org

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CounterPunch News Service.

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As the United Kingdom endures its hottest day on record amid Europe's unprecedented and ongoing heatwave, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg warned Tuesday that the worst is yet to come—unless people around the world work together to dislodge the profit-maximizing economic system that is endangering life on Earth.

"This is not 'the new normal,'" Thunberg wrote on social media. "The climate crisis will continue to escalate and get worse as long as we stick our heads in the sand and prioritize profit and greed over people and planet. We are still sleepwalking towards the edge."

Thunberg's comments came as temperatures in Britain exceeded 40ºC (104ºF) for the first time in recorded history and continued to rise.

Such life-threatening conditions are consistent with climate scientists' long-standing and oft-repeated warnings that heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters will increase in frequency and intensity as long as greenhouse gas emissions, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, continue to soar.

As The Guardian reported:

Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, said the record was a "grim milestone" and part of a "slide into unknown territory for humanity as we heat our planet." She urged "every politician who is calling for a watering down of climate policy to explain their thinking."

Nigel Arnell, a professor of climate system science at Reading, said emergency heat health alerts like the one in place for much of England could happen every two to three years by the 2050s, and more frequently if the world remains on track for temperatures to rise by over 2ºC by the end of the century.

It's not just the U.K. that is being scorched. Large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere—from Europe to Asia to North Africa and North America—are suffering under the weight of brutal heatwaves and devastating wildfires. More than 1,100 heat-related deaths have been reported this month in Portugal and Spain alone.

Thunberg's stark warning about the world's current trajectory toward an even hotter future echoed Monday's unequivocal message from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

"We have a choice," said Guterres. "Collective action or collective suicide. It's in our hands."

"We need a concrete global response that addresses the needs of the world's most vulnerable people, communities, and nations," he added. "This has to be the decade of decisive climate action."

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

Over the last few months, we have slowly awoken to a troubling new world. The unfamiliar America that is emerging has become post-Roe, post-gun control, post-safe schools, post-Supreme Court impartiality, post-majoritarian and possibly post-fair elections (we shall see in November and in 2024). The US, which has been teetering on the edge of a cliff for some time, is now starting to tip into an abyss of "minority rule medievalism.”  

Previously in my book Fixing Elections: the Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics, published in 2002 following the debacle of the 2000 presidential election meltdown, I warned that if we didn’t take care of business and repair our extremely flawed and unrepresentative democracy, we would at some point veer into a dangerous minefield that I called “post-democracy.” Now, twenty years later, we are perilously close to reaching this singularity of no return.

Our mudslide into post-democracy, if left unchecked, is more likely to unleash, not Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, but a government of, by and for the few—that is, tyranny.

Fortunately, we can pinpoint the reasons this is happening. And having identified the reasons, we can plot a corrective course. The current struggles are not so much due to extreme divisions within and among the American people, who are not as divided as it might appear. Rather, they are a product of the failure of our antiquated, 18th-century political system to translate majority opinion into policy and law.

But it will not be easy to reform our clanking political system. Reform efforts will require more attention from more people than ever before. While there are many important issues that affect our lives and that the US must solve, there is one issue that is fundamental to all of them – having a functioning democracy. If we don’t fix this one we will never solve climate change, inequality, balanced gun control or ensure the sanctity and security of our elections. This one is the root of the tree, and it is increasingly clear that it is rotten. We are running out of time to fix it.

The end of majority rule?

Majority rule, the notion that a constituency with more than half the popular support should be able to decide policy—and should not be dominated by a group that has less than half support—is one of the bedrock principles of representative government. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 22 said a fundamental maxim of democratic government required "that the sense of the majority should prevail." Yet today the US violates this sacred imperative on a regular basis. Our political system has evolved over the last several decades so that its flawed and antiquated institutions continually frustrate that Hamiltonian standard, fostering a dangerous experiment with "minoritarianism."

Let’s look at our key democratic institutions, and the threat that each of them pose to our representative democracy. First I present the diagnosis; then I offer the remedies.

US House of Representatives. In the "People's house," a number of analyses have shown that, for the Democrats to win a bare majority of seats, they often must win well more than half of the nationwide popular vote in all 435 House district seats. In some election years, such as 2012 and 1996, the Democrats won the national popular vote but Republicans won House majorities. However don’t feel sorry for Democrats; in previous decades, the Republican Party was consistently cheated out of seats due to such votes-to-seats distortions, losing as many as 43 House seats in 1976, and losing an average of twenty-seven seats per congressional cycle from 1976 through 1988.

Today's imbalance is due to natural partisan demographics, in which Democratic voters increasingly live in more concentrated urban districts, making it easier to pack them into fewer districts during partisan redistricting. The resulting one-party fiefdoms ensure predictable outcomes, a decline in competition in all but a handful of districts, and declines in voter enthusiasm and turnout.

Partisan control over redistricting magnifies this effect. After the red wave election of 2010, Republicans took over many state legislatures and drew more than five times as many House districts as Democrats. In the redistricting of 2022, the GOP controlled the drawing of lines for 2.5 times as many seats as Democrats. For that reason, a number of experts are predicting that Republicans will take back the House in 2022 (unless a huge pro-Roe mobilization leads to  Republican defeats).

Doubly magnifying this effect, with 90 percent of legislative districts often heavily lopsided in favor of either Democrats or Republicans, then the only election of real consequence is the partisan primary election that nominates the candidate of the party that dominates that district. And those primaries usually have extremely low voter turnout, often around 20-25%, with the most motivated and hyper-partisan voters showing up. Consequently, a report from Unite America found that just 10% of eligible voters nationwide cast ballots in primaries in 2020 that effectively decided 83% of U.S. House races. That’s minority rule run amok.

US Senate. The structural bias in the upper chamber is even more severe than in the House. Because every state receives two senators, regardless of population, Wyoming with a half a million people has the same representation as California with 40 million. At our country's founding, this large state-small state bias was around 12 to 1, now it's closer to 80 to 1. Moreover, in the last few decades, the two parties have gradually undergone a dramatic urban-rural sorting that has made most low-population states reliably Republican.

Consequently, while the U.S. Senate is currently split 50-50 Senators for each party, the Democratic half won over 41 million more votes than the Republican half and represents 56% of the American people. Sixteen conservative states with a smaller combined population than California’s have a total of 32 Senate seats. GOP senators have not represented a majority of the population since 1999, yet Republicans have held a majority of Senate seats for most of the past 20 years, passing or blocking key legislation.

Making matters worse, today's Senate is about as representative as the UK's House of Lords. It is overwhelmingly a chamber of elderly white males, with only 24 female senators out of 100 and 11 racial minorities (six Latinos, two Asian-Americans and three African-Americans) in a nation that is 40% minority and over half female.

Now add the filibuster and other archaic Senate procedures like appointment holds, and minority rule goes berserk. With the filibuster, the current Democratic-controlled Senate needs a near super-majority of 60 votes, including 10 votes from Republicans, to move any legislation forward. That means 41 GOP Senators representing a mere 20 percent of the country can stop legislation favored by Senators representing the other 80 percent. The Republicans used the filibuster to kill a major voting rights bill and a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol (even though the latter won support from 56 Senators out of 100). This amounts to an extreme minority veto over public policy. The Senate is now the place where good legislation goes to die.

Presidential elections. With electoral votes awarded partly based on two Senators per state, presidential elections also are tilted towards Republican success. FiveThirtyEight estimates that a Democratic presidential winner must win the national popular vote by a margin of at least 3.5 points in order to win a bare majority of electoral votes. That's why Republicans have won the presidency twice in the last six elections while losing the popular vote. Showing the fragility of this unrepresentative method, if 22,000 voters in the states of Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia had changed their minds and voted for Trump over Biden, Trump would have tied Biden in the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House and electing Trump, even though he lost the national popular vote by over 7 million votes.

US Supreme Court. Because Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, that same low-population, conservative bias is also hardwired into the Supreme Court. It's no coincidence that currently the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, despite the Democrats winning a majority of voters nationwide for the presidency, the House and the Senate. The Republicans have been hugely successful at appointing conservative judges, with President Trump appointing 226 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices and as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight. Not bad, for a president who lost the popular vote, and for a GOP Senate that was elected by a minority of voters. Public confidence in the Supreme Court has shrunk to historic lows as its unpopular decisions reveal that it has become an unelected legislature of nine seats, where “five votes beats a reason any day.”

State legislatures. This GOP minoritarianism is not just baked into the federal government. Like in the US House, many states' legislative elections are skewed by Democrat voters' concentration in cities, making it easier to gerrymander Democrats into fewer districts. That has helped Republicans enormously to dominate the decennial redistricting process in state after state, following their success in winning control of the state legislatures which redraw the district lines. In four states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota -- GOP dominance of redistricting was so great that it controls majorities in those state-legislative chambers even though Democrats won the statewide popular votes. The GOP currently controls 67 state legislative chambers and the Democrats only 37.

In short, minority rule has metastasized like a cancer and is now pervasive throughout the US political system. It is like having a foot race in which one political party starts 10 meters ahead of the other. Numerous opinion polls about a range of issues show how governments at federal and state levels, as well as the US Supreme Court, are increasingly divorced from the policies that the public says it wants. The US is in danger of transmogrifying into a flailing "post-democracy," in which we will still hold elections but those democratic rituals will be increasingly less effective as a vehicle for resolving the nation's challenges. At what point might a critical mass of voters in a handful of battleground states cry out for a strongman who can "get things done"?

Despite appearances of the GOP's "shrinking tent," Republicans don't need to expand their support base in order to win back control of the federal government. The GOP has found that mobilizing its loyal base of white voters can be a winning strategy, even if that base constitutes a voting minority. And no one mobilizes that electoral constituency better than Donald Trump.

A blueprint for better democracy: how to return the US to majority rule

There are solutions to these democratic threats, but in all honesty, they will be challenging to enact. An ambitious effort already is underway to adopt a national popular vote for president, utilizing interstate compacts instead of a constitutional amendment. A national presidential election should ensure that the winner has support from a popular majority. But even better than a French-style two round runoff system would be instant runoff voting, which allows voters to rank their favorite candidates and uses the rankings to elect a majority winner in a single election.

Congress also could change the method for electing the US House to “proportional ranked choice voting” in moderate-sized multi-seat districts (3 to 5 seats each), instead of the current "winner take all" single-seat districts. That would ensure broad representation in which a range of political parties would be able to win representation, and a majority of votes would always win a majority of seats. That also would give voters more choices and decrease some of the bitter partisanship.

The best example of the potency of such a change is illustrated by looking at U.S. House elections in southern states. For a number of years, polarized elections there have meant that white Republicans win the vast majority of seats, while black Democrats win a handful of urban-based seats. Partisanship has become racialized in dangerous ways. But instead of using single-seat districts, even so modest a change as combining three adjoining districts into one three-seat district elected by proportional ranked choice voting (where the mathematics works out to just over 25 percent of like-minded voters electing one seat), would advance fair and less polarized representation to an encouraging degree. And that representation schema would more accurately reflect the demographics of the southern electorate today.

A typical three-seat district likely would elect a white conservative Republican, a black liberal Democrat and a relatively centrist Republican or Democrat (usually white). Southern congressional moderates, once a mainstay of national stability and now an endangered species, would suddenly have new life. Such a plan would increase the number of African-Americans elected to the House without gerrymandering a single district. Some black Republicans might even get elected, as would more women. The resulting cross-fertilization in Democratic and Republican caucuses would lessen some of the ideological polarization and harsh partisan division that now infects the U.S. House. Such a “full representation” plan would also better represent white voters who currently live in opposition districts, and avoid costly redistricting lawsuits.

The Democratic-controlled Senate also should abolish the filibuster and toss it into the ash heap of history; or, to foster bipartisanship, use a process that gradually lowers the threshold from 60 votes to a final 51 vote majority.

The US also should depoliticize the appointment process for Supreme Court justices by using multiple appointing authorities and introducing reasonable term limits of 15 years, like many countries do. That would allow each president a chance to appoint a justice or two on a schedule.

Changing the representative structure of the U.S. Senate is going to be devilishly difficult, requiring a constitutional amendment, but we could elect the Senators by instant runoff voting to at least ensure a candidate wins with a majority. It would probably be better, however, to reduce the Senate’s powers, making it more limited like Germany's upper chamber, the Bundesrat, since perhaps such a constitutional amendment would win sufficient popular and bipartisan support.

Other important reforms include enacting universal/automatic voter registration, which would eliminate most of the partisan shenanigans involved in voter registration, and at the same time ensure our elections and voter rolls are more secure. This is a reform that the Democrats could pass in numerous states that they control, and there has been some recent progress in a few states, but generally Democrats are continuing continue to drag their feet on this crucial reform.

Public financing of campaigns also would ensure that traditionally under-funded candidates are able to compete in elections, and would undermine the “pyramid of money” that allows party leaders to exert control over their party’s caucus by directing PAC money to preferred candidates, which is especially pernicious in party primaries.

This is the blueprint for the political reforms that are needed. Will they be easy to pass? No, especially not at the federal level. However we can start at the state and local levels, where much progress already has been made. But make no mistake, we must focus our attention obsessively on these solutions, and keep our eyes on the prize. We have to recognize that we have no other choice but to remake and reclaim our representative democracy. An anti-democratic minoritarianism has been unleashed, just as founders James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had feared. The Republicans will never give it up because, as a structural minority party, their power depends on it. Yet minority dominance undermines the government's legitimacy, and pushes the US another step toward a future of post-democracy.

Our mudslide into post-democracy, if left unchecked, is more likely to unleash, not Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, but a government of, by and for the few—that is, tyranny.  But, ironically enough, elected tyranny, a historically unique phenomena. It will complete a tragic interment of the Spirit of 1776, and we are already seeing the first signs of it. Once the disintegration reaches critical mass, it may advance quicker than most Americans would have thought possible. This is the way our democracy will end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

However the US in the past has shown an impressive ability to adapt to a crisis and find solutions. During this time of growing national urgency, the inevitable necessity to reform our antiquated “minority rule” system demands our attention.

This essay first appeared as part of Democracy SOS, a new project focused on providing in-depth analysis of U.S. democracy and the many urgent challenges it now faces.

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

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Dave Zirin.

Photograph Source: Kasra Kyanzadeh – CC BY 2.0

If 2022 were a normal year, one could watch the riveting Hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol with sympathy, understanding – and foreboding for the plight of democracy in America.

2022: a year of climate emergency and war

But 2022 is not a normal year. It is a year of climate chaos and war.

The dreadful predictions of the UN climate summit of last year have had no effect on politicians or businesses the world over. Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, minced no words in saying to the world’s rulers (presidents, prime ministers, billionaires, and fossil fuel company executives) that they have been setting the planet on fire.

No wonder 2022 is business as usual. The sky is full of airplanes and the asphalt streets are choked with millions of cars and trucks emitting climate offending fumes and gases.

War in Ukraine boosting the petroleum economy

And as if human irresponsibility needed another excuse to maintain the global warming economy of fossil fuels longer, Russia’s invasion and war in Ukraine was what the petroleum doctor ordered.

President Joe Biden gave up his flimsy efforts in convincing the Republican petroleum war party that the climate emergency demanded its cooperation. Instead, he grasped the Russian war in Ukraine like manna from the heavens. Suddenly, Republicans and Democrats embraced each other, agreeing with Biden in supporting Ukraine with $ 40 billion military “assistance.”

Biden’s rhetoric against Russia resembles the Cold War rhetoric of American presidents against the Soviet Union. His Secretary of Defense said something to the effect that American weapons and billions to Ukraine would teach Russia to mind its own business, not to pretend it’s a superpower like the United States. And the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said Russia must be defeated.

This war mongering becomes a cloud that covers up climate emergency, the epidemic of gun violence and the killing of children, the outrageous and undemocratic edicts of the Supreme Court, and the January 6, 2021 failed insurrection inspired and guided by former President Donald Trump.

The war in Ukraine has been a gigantic gift to fossil fuels domestic and global economy. Furthermore, it unleashed the barbaric hatred countries harbor against each other.

But the sudden American immersion in this deadly conflict, basically funding it with billions of dollars and tons of lethal weapons, not merely annihilates the climate emergency from people’s minds, but brings the world a step closer to nuclear war.

Trump’s crime against American democracy

So, yes, the House committee is revealing details of an evolving crime against American democracy. Members of Congress and some of the senior Trump administration officials conspired to bring down whatever stands between democracy and tyranny in America. Trump orchestrated this illegal effort to deny Biden his election victory. Trump wanted desperately to remain in his office. He pressured Justice Department officials to investigate voting “fraud.” But these officials, Republican appointees all, kept telling him there was no voter fraud and that he had lost the election.

Some of the Republican members of Congress who supported Trump’s allegations and wild schemes of abolishing democracy realized they had supported criminal activities. They pleaded with Trump for a presidential pardon.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said during the House select committee hearing.

Overall, the details of the House hearings are revealing of the dangerous political situation prevailing in America. The two parties no longer serve democracy or democratic aspirations. They are subservient to billionaires and religious ideologues trying to formally establish a Christian state in America.

Threats from the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s decision against women’s rights to abortion is part of this larger political ambition of ending the separation between church and state. And then arming all Americans with the right of displaying their guns is bringing the country back to its cowboy tradition that might is always right. Shoot and ask questions later.

The king of Florida

Some of the revelations of the House hearings are now floating in the ether. They appear incredible and fitting for a gangster Friday night movie.

Yet Trump is untouchable. He is the king of Florida, blessing his political followers and dismissing the Washington proceedings. In fact, he may be the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

Capitol insurrection almost annihilated American democracy

The testimony of a former Federal judge, J. Michael Luttig, captured the anxieties and dangers of the Capitol insurrection. He said to the committee and to all Americas that the country is facing a present and clear danger from Trump and his associates. He said:

“A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge.

“America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other — over our democracy…

“We Americans no longer agree on what is right or wrong, what is to be valued and what is not, what is acceptable behavior and not, and what is and is not tolerable discourse in civilized society. Let alone do we agree on how we want to be governed or by whom, or where we go from here and with what shared national ideals, values, beliefs, purposes, goals, and objectives — if any at all. ..

“The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on January 6 was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America. It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead. Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost…

“Our democracy has never been tested like it was on that day and it will never be tested again as it was then if we learn the lessons of that fateful day. On the other hand, if we fail to learn the lessons that are there to be learned, or worse, deny even that there are lessons there to be learned, we will consign ourselves to another January 6 in the not-too-distant future, and another after that, and another after that. While for some, that is their wish, that cannot be our wish for America…

“America finds itself in desperate need of either a reawakening and quickening to the vision, truths, values, principles, beliefs, hopes, and dreams upon which the country was founded and that have made America the greatest nation in the world — a revival of America and the American spirit.”

Back to democracy

Judge Luttig is a rare American thinker and patriot. He is warning Trump and the Republicans to abandon their plutocratic politics. Otherwise, they are drugging the country to a potential civil war.

But President Joe Biden is not innocent in this evolving tragedy. His plunging into a subversive war against nuclear-armed Russia is another way of destroying democracy at home, undermining our purpose to fight climate chaos – an existential danger.

This country, Judge Luttig said, needs a new vision similar to the ideals that brought it into being. I agree. What better than the Greek vision of Thomas Jefferson? Democracy, “We the People,” was the core Greek idea Jefferson brought to the table in the constitutional construction of the American republic.

Biden should talk to Judge Luttig. But get out of the war in Ukraine, telling the NATO allies to mind their own business. The key to survival in America is to cease the internal war and embrace democracy, getting it away from the knife’s edge.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes a crime of aggression under international law. Putin's regime launched an attack on a sovereign country that posed no direct threat to the Russian Federation. Russian forces have pounded cities into submission, thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions have fled as refugees.   

Concerned citizens worldwide must embrace wholeheartedly theGlobal Green New Deal project. There is no other viable alternative for a sustainable future.   

The war on Ukraine has also fueled a food crisis in developing countries across the world and added to the widespread inflation in food prices. Russia and Ukraine export more than a quarter of the world's wheat. But blockades and sanctions are causing wheat shortages in many Middle East and African countries. 

However, the business of war is profitable. Putin's war in Ukraine, which could last for years, is in fact an absolute godsent to the most destructive forces on the planet, namely the arms industry and the fossil fuel companies.     

Military expenditure, which reached an all-time high of $2.1 trillion in 2021, will surely rise much further as several European countries have already made plans to beef up their armed forces in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In a historic vote, the German parliament voted for a constitutional amendment to create a $100 billion euro ($112 billion) fund to modernize the country's armed forces. The bulk of the money will go toward the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets. German chancellor Olaf Scholtz also promised that Germany would spend more than 2 percent of its gross national product on the military.  In real terms, Germany's annual defense spending would increase by 50 percent in 2022 alone," according to Alexandra Marksteiner, researcher at the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program. "This would catapult Germany towards the top of the list of the world's largest military spenders. All else being equal, Germany would rank third—up from seventh in 2020—behind the United States and China and ahead of India and Russia."

Belgium, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Sweden have also announced a boost to their defense spendings. Indeed, Putin's invasion of Ukraine has managed to revive a "brain-dead" NATO. Even Nordic states with a long history of neutrality are now eager to join the transatlantic alliance.

In the US, where annual increases to the defense budget are routine, the war in Ukraine has created strong bipartisan support for more military spending. The Senate Armed Services Committee on June 16 voted 23-3 to boost funding for military spending by $45 billion over the Biden administration's budget request. If accepted, the bill would raise the defense budget for the fiscal year 2023 to over $817 billion.

The war in Ukraine has also reinvigorated the fossil fuel industry and put climate action and clean energy on the back burner. With gas prices going through the roof, the Biden administration is doing everything possible to boost domestic oil production, which includes issuing drilling permits on federal lands and ordering an unprecedented release of oil from US reserves.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden had also urged OPEC and its allies to boost oil output in an effort to curb soaring gasoline prices. Biden's plea fell on deaf ears, but his plan to visit the Middle East next month seems to have produced a change of heart for OPEC as it has just announced a hike in oil production. 

Europe's response to the energy impacts of the war in Ukraine is also shortsighted. Instead of boosting investments on clean energy as part of its goal to break free from Russian fossil fuels, the European Union simply opted to pursue new energy arrangements such as increasing imports of gas from Norway, importing liquified natural gas (LNG) from places like Australia, Qatar, and the United States, and building more LNG terminals. Natural gas may be producing less greenhouse gases than oil and coal, but it is not environmentally friendly.

Worse still, Europe has decided to turn to coal for power generation after Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom decided to curb gas supplies to several European Union countries, including Germany. 

It is probably still not too late to rescue the planet. But time is surely running out, and no one should expect politicians and bureaucrats to do what must be done to save humanity from climate doom. We can still rescue this planet from global warming through the power that citizens united can have in forcing change.

At this historic juncture, and while we need to end the brutal war in Ukraine without any further delay, concerned citizens worldwide must embrace wholeheartedly the Global Green New Deal project. There is no other viable alternative for a sustainable future.

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

Image: Wild Earth Guardians.

On April 1, Roxy’s Law—a ban on trapping on New Mexico public lands more than a decade in the making—goes into effect after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed it last year. Nearly 32 million acres of public lands, including state-owned parcels, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management holdings will be free not only of cruel leghold traps, which can amputate and maim, but also from strangulation snares, body-crushing traps, and deadly poisons like sodium cyanide bombs. From the beautiful Latir Peak Wilderness to the incredible Florida Mountains, vast amounts of New Mexico will be safer for people, pups, and wildlife alike.

Along with Roxy’s Law, New Mexico has recently taken other meaningful steps toward protecting wildlife. In 2019, the state banned gruesome coyote-killing contests, events that reward indiscriminate and senseless massacres. Currently, the state is rolling out its plan for projects to protect wildlife from vehicle collisions along heavily used movement and migration corridors.

These are signs of a new era across the Land of Enchantment. An era in which coexistence is the norm, exploitation and cruelty are waning, and native foxes, bobcats, beavers, badgers, and wolves are revered for their ecological roles and honored for their intrinsic value, not persecuted as inconveniences. We are leaving behind nearly two hundred years of primarily viewing wildlife as merely something to slaughter and sell.

Still, New Mexico isn’t yet the beacon of wildlife management that it should be:

+ A memorial urging the federal government to tackle the biodiversity crisis died without a vote on the state Senate floor last month.

+ Our Game Commission has been a merry-go-round as the governor appoints and fires commissioners at her whim. Yet she has let a year elapse since the tragic passing of David Soules without appointing anyone to the conservation position on the commission. Without stability on the commission, it’s unclear where needed leadership will come from.

+ The state is still on record opposing Mexican wolf restoration in the Southern Rockies, where lobos belong and where scientists say they need to live in order to fully recover.

Congress seems poised to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (“RAWA,” co-sponsored by Sen. Heinrich), which could provide funding to states to protect nongame wildlife. But our wildlife agency doesn’t even have the authority to manage or protect many species, including the Gunnison’s prairie dog, the Rio Grande sucker, and 23 of New Mexico’s 26 bat species, just to name a few. And they don’t want that responsibility; they want to continue to focus on the fraction of animals that are pursued and killed by sportsmen.

RAWA could be the inflection point New Mexico needs. Bold leadership is required to modernize the Department of Game and Fish. So, let’s remember there’s a lot of work still to do and progress to be made:

+ We need a comprehensive state wildlife agency more invested in protecting all wildlife, not focused only on game species like elk and nonnative rainbow trout.

+ We need a wildlife agency that sees all New Mexicans as stakeholders, not one that caters only to the minority of New Mexicans, who, like me, buy hunting and fishing licenses.

+ We need a wildlife agency with the authority, will, and revenue to manage and protect the many wildlife species in our state.

Roxy’s Law alone is worth celebrating, of course. But it also represents a critical marker on New Mexico’s path to reimagining how we perceive and live with the wildlife that makes this place special. Let’s take the next step and push for a state wildlife agency that serves all the people and wildlife of New Mexico.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Smith.

East Antarctica, often times referred to as “the final frontier of global warming,” is making headlines once again.

A few weeks ago East Antarctica’s temperatures soared by 50F to 90F above normal. ¹

A couple of weeks later East Antarctica’s Conger Ice Shelf (1,200 sq km) completely collapsed and two additional calving events occurred at other glaciers, all in the same week.

This prompts an interesting dilemma.  According to David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne: Early IPCC reports said Antarctica would be stable for a thousand years. Then, in 2007 Richard Alley (Penn State) said it was already melting 100 years ahead of schedule.

Is it ahead of schedule once again?

Indeed, if Antarctica continues beating climate models by first lopping off a few centuries and then lopping off decades, and now who knows what the outcome will be or when it’ll happen.

East Antarctica, as distinguished from its far more vulnerable first cousins West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, has always been characterized as solid, a rock-solid 1-to-3-mile thick ice sheet the size of the United States that does not budge. Now, it’s budging.

On or about March 15th Conger Ice Shelf, East Antarctica completely collapsed. This collapse followed record temperatures of 40C+ warmer than seasonal norms only a week previous.

According to Helen Amanda Fricker, professor of glaciology at Scripps Polar Center, three calving events occurred in East Antarctica in the month of March: (1) Conger Ice Shelf (2) Glenzer Ice Shelf (3) a smaller event at the enormous Totten glacier. “Much of East Antarctica is restrained by buttressing ice shelves, so we need to keep an eye on all the ice shelves there.”²

Moreover, according to Peter Neff, glaciologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, even a small ice shelf collapse (Conger) in East Antarctica was a surprise, in fact: “We still treat East Antarctica like this massive, high, dry, cold and immovable ice cube.”³

In February 2019, John Englander, oceanographer and world-renown sea level expert, spoke at The Royal Institution, London. He discussed sea level rise. The ice shelves are the buttresses that hold back rapid flow of glacial ice from flowing to the sea.

Englander said: When warming cycles happen, sea level rise usually takes centuries and centuries to increase. For example, 14,000 years ago an increase in temperatures took seas up 65 feet over 400 years.

Accordingly, that’s 1.5 feet per decade, which calculation led John Englander to factor into an assumption that today’s sea level rise will be 1-2-3 feet by mid 21st century. In turn, that would be a real shocker, especially to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with its median expectation of one-half a meter or 1.6 feet by 2100. The IPCC’s absolute “worst-case” guesstimate is 32 inches by 2100, but a footnote hidden in fine print says the IPCC does not factor Antarctica into their calculations. Hmm.

At that speech three years ago Englander gave his best guesstimate: By mid century, we could get a couple of feet of sea level rise. A big takeaway from Englander’s speech, with emphasis, he said: “Reduce emissions immediately!”

Oops, that suggestion has not panned out. When Englander spoke CO2 in the atmosphere was 407.9 ppm versus 419.28 ppm in February 2022. That rate of increase over the past three years makes the annual rate of increase from 1950 to 2000 look like a cakewalk.

Prof Matt King, who leads the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, said because ice shelves are already floating, the Conger ice shelf’s break-up would not impact sea level much. He said that fortunately the glacier behind the Conger ice shelf is small, so it’ll have a “tiny impact on sea level in the future”.

“We will see more ice shelves break up in the future with climate warming,” King said. “We will see massive ice shelves – way bigger than this one – break up. And those will hold back a lot of ice – enough to seriously drive up global sea levels… The speed of the breakup of [the Conger] ice shelf reminds us that things can change quickly… Our carbon emissions will have an impact in Antarctica, and Antarctica will come back to bite the rest of the world’s coastlines and it may happen faster than we think.” ³

“Reduce emissions immediately”. ⁴

1. “Antarctica Crushes Records“, Dissident Voice, March 23, 2022.
2. “Satellite Date Shows Entire Conger Ice Shelf Has Collapsed in Antarctica”, The Guardian, March 24, 2022.
3. Ibid.
4. John Englander speech at The Royal Institution, London, 2019.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

The post Antarctica on Edge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events.  I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war.  I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy.  My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight.  And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable.  In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.¹

Putin is absolutely correct.  It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert.   Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager.  The same feelings return.  Dread.  Anxiety.  Breathlessness.  I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied.  The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated.  As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level.  Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And, of course, there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.)  Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct.  He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence.  Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgen of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated.  Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted.  He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA.  These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously.  Today very few do.  It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced.  Nuclear weapons were real.  So, too, was the prospect of peace.  Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.

Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial.  Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy.  Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game.  It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot.  And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine.  It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the lead up to this tragedy.  All the current wringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.

The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime.  Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

“Engulfed” is an appropriate word.  Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.”  He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science.  For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades-long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs.  RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.  It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government.  To put it clearly: these media are the CIA.  And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.

In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine.  All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc.  It’s one piece.

Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11.  The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.  It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments.  He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further.  He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists.  Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was, of course, a victim of it as well.  Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees.  It’s all one piece.

Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire.  She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,”  a “humane” cover for imperialism.  Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world.  It’s all one piece.

The merry-go-round goes round and round.

I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare.  They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there.  So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.

I hope my fears are unfounded.  I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground.  This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways.  People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies.  They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.

The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.

I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above.  Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.)  Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one  and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years.  He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.

But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae picks up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today.  It says:

Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss.

1. Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The post Earth on the Edge appeared first on Project Censored.

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