“We were the first faces that they’d see,” said Nava-Cortez, a 23-year-old member of the California Emergency Response Corps, one of two AmeriCorps programs that sent 74 workers to the fires. He guided people to the resources they needed to secure emergency housing, navigate insurance claims, and go through the process of debris removal. He sometimes worked 11-hour, emotionally draining shifts, listening to stories of what survivors had lost. What kept him going was how grateful people were for his help.

Volunteers like Nava-Cortez have helped 47,000 households affected by the fires, according to California Volunteers, the state service commission under the governor’s office. But in late April, Nava-Cortez and his team at the California Emergency Response Corps were suddenly placed on leave. Another program helping with the recovery in L.A., the California AmeriCorps Disaster Team, also abruptly shut down as a result of cuts to AmeriCorps.

Both were casualties of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which has gutted the 30-year-old national service agency in a matter of weeks. In April, AmeriCorps placed 85 percent of its 500 staff on leave and canceled nearly $400 million in grants out of a $1 billion budget. The move effectively ended the service of an estimated 32,000 AmeriCorps workers across the country. The agency puts more than 200,000 people, young and old, in service roles every year.

Across California, the cuts meant that about a dozen programs working on climate change, conservation, and disaster response were forced to “reduce service projects, limit recruitment, and scale back support in high-need communities,” said Joyia Emard, the communications deputy director at California Volunteers.

That work is just a tiny slice of what AmeriCorps does across the country. DOGE’s attempt to dismantle the agency has unraveled all kinds of programs — tutoring centers in elementary schools, efforts to reduce poverty, and trail maintenance crews. If you saw a team of young people running an after-school program, helping out in a soup kitchen, or cleaning up after a hurricane, there’s a good chance it was connected to AmeriCorps in some way.

Most people “didn’t realize the degree to which it was everywhere and was doing so much good,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University’s School of International Service who studies how service programs can help communities respond to and recover from disasters, as well as prepare for future ones. Following floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, AmeriCorps volunteers have helped manage donation centers, clear out debris, and “muck and gut” buildings, often in coordination with other agencies and local nonprofits.

Fisher calls AmeriCorps the “connective tissue” that makes it easier to coordinate after disasters, thanks to its connections across the country. The agency boasts that it is “often the first to respond and the last to leave,” with members sometimes working months or years after a disaster strikes.

“This will be disastrous to communities,” Fisher said about the Trump administration’s gutting the program. “And the thing that’s really unfortunate is we won’t feel it until after disaster hits.”

Disaster preparedness is being weakened across the federal government, even as heat waves, flooding, and other extreme weather are becoming more extreme as the climate warms. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is operating at such diminished levels that experts are warning hurricane forecasts will be less accurate ahead of what’s predicted to be a brutal hurricane season. President Donald Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles relief and recovery after extreme weather.

The loss of staffing and programs at AmeriCorps is one more blow to the country’s ability to respond to and recover from disasters. In mid-April, AmeriCorps abruptly pulled teams of workers with its National Civilian Community Corps off their jobs rebuilding homes destroyed in storms, distributing supplies for hurricane recovery, and more. “People were very upset, very sad, and a lot of people just did not know what they were going to do, because this was our plan for our year,” said Rachel Suber, a 22-year-old member of FEMA Corps, an AmeriCorps NCCC program. Suber had been helping Pennsylvanians rebuild after Hurricane Debby last year.

At the end of April, two dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over the cuts to AmeriCorps, alleging that DOGE illegally gutted an agency that Congress created and funded. A separate lawsuit filed last week by AmeriCorps grant recipients is also trying to block the cuts. Nava-Cortez was told that the outcome of his program is up to the courts, so he’s waiting until the end of the month to see what happens. He’d been hoping to move to San Jose for school after his term ended this summer, but now he’s not even sure he can cover this month’s rent.

It’s a long tradition in the United States to provide low-paying service jobs for young people. “Your pay will be low; the conditions of your labor will often be difficult,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1964, when the first cohort of volunteers were sworn in with VISTA, a service program to alleviate poverty. “But you will have the satisfaction of leading a great national effort.” Congress established AmeriCorps in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, folding in VISTA and NCCC, and continued to expand the program with bipartisan support. 

AmeriCorps had expanded its environmental work by almost $160 million in recent years, Michael Smith, the former CEO of AmeriCorps, told Grist last year. Under the Biden administration, climate service work around the country was collected under the short-lived American Climate Corps, which was quietly ended in January ahead of Trump’s inauguration. 

Read Next

The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it?

Kate Yoder

After Trump took office, some programs had the opportunity to modify any wording in their grants that conflicted with the president’s executive orders, such as removing language about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or swapping the word “conservation” for “climate change,” said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps Network, a national association of service programs. She was told that some state commissions that distribute AmeriCorps funding did not allow their grant recipients the chance to rewrite their grants, which may explain why those programs have been hit especially hard by DOGE.

And there may be more cuts coming. “There are a lot of signs that the Trump administration is not done yet with AmeriCorps,” Fisher said. In more recent years, some Republicans have argued that AmeriCorps misspent money and that it had repeatedly failed to provide proper statements for audits. Yet a number of Republicans in Congress support AmeriCorps because of the impact it’s had in their districts, Sprenkel said. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, posted on social media that he objected to cutting AmeriCorps grants that support veterans and provide “crucial support after hurricanes.”

AmeriCorps workers receive what the agency calls a “modest living allowance” to pay for their basic expenses. The amount varies by program: VISTA members typically are paid about $2,000 a month, while NCCC and FEMA Corps members receive about $400 a month plus housing and money for food. In terms of bang for its buck, AmeriCorps pays for itself. Every dollar invested in environmental work generated many in return, according to an assessment from the agency’s Office of Research and Evaluation from December. The Montana Conservation Corps, for example, earned returns as high as $35.84 for each dollar spent.

“If it’s a financial decision to close AmeriCorps, then it doesn’t really make sense,” said Sky Hawk Bressette, 26, who had been working in the parks department for Bellingham, Washington. As part of the Washington Service Corps, he and his colleague taught 5th graders about native plants and coordinated volunteers who planted thousands of trees and removed invasive species — but much of that work is now on pause after funding cuts. “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with in our city alone, and just multiply that by every city that uses AmeriCorps around the country,” Bressette said.

Most organizations within The Corps Network rely on AmeriCorps for somewhere between 15 and 50 percent of their budget, according to Bobby Tillett, director of member services at the network. As they try to scrape together funding and continue the work they can, he said, they’re unsure what to tell the people accepted for summer programs that are supposed to start in June.

“All of those programs were part of this amazing network of service that basically gave nobody high-paying jobs, but gave so much back to communities,” Fisher said. “And all of that is being lost.”

Zoya Teirstein contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After disasters, AmeriCorps was everywhere. What happens when it’s gone? on May 15, 2025.

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

The post Eyes Everywhere: Tech Tyranny and the Profiteers of Control appeared first on Project Censored.

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

Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

Less than a week after President Trump boasted that he’d “brought back free speech,” government agents abducted a student protestor and are trying to deport him.

On March 8, without a warrant or charges, plainclothes Department of Homeland Security agents forced their way into Columbia University’s student housing and detained Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil. They then shipped him to an immigration jail in Louisiana, impeding his access to attorneys and visits from family.

Khalil is a lawful U.S. permanent resident who hasn’t been charged with any crime. His wife, Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant. “It feels like my husband was kidnapped from home, and at a time when we were supposed to be planning to welcome our first child into this world,” she said.

While a federal judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, Khalil’s fate — and the larger battle over the First Amendment — concerns all of us.

Over the past year and a half, Khalil has participated in Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia alongside students across racial, ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds who’ve demanded an end to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and U.S. complicity. He’s also served as a mediator between Columbia’s administration and its students.

Khalil has called these nationwide campus protests “a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.” They follow a long tradition of student-led demonstrations, like the 1960s Free Speech Movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

But repression of student activism has surged since October 2023. Khalil has faced doxxing, harassment, and smears from bigots who vilify any peaceful protests for Palestinian rights as “antisemitic” and “terrorism” — baseless slanders echoed by the Trump administration.

Many Jewish students at Columbia have joined in the protests and deny this false characterization of the movement and of Khalil, rejecting Trump’s weaponization of “antisemitism” as a justification for silencing speech critical of Israel.

Regardless of whether you agree with Khalil’s views or find them offensive, his speech is protected by the First Amendment. Political speech is at the very heart of the First Amendment, which applies to citizens and noncitizens alike.

Before assuming office, Trump made his disdain for pro-Palestinian student protestors well-known and promised his donors that he’d deport them. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump said on March 10. Another White House official called Khalil’s arrest a “blueprint for investigations against other students.”

To justify deporting Khalil, Secretary of State Marco Rubio cites a rarely used and vague provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which gives the secretary of state the power to deport someone whose presence is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

However, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. That INA provision doesn’t override constitutional safeguards like freedom of speech and the right to due process, which still apply to Khalil. Moreover, as Khalil’s attorneys have argued, the INA prohibits the secretary of state from deporting a noncitizen based on their “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations.”

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” Khalil warned in a letter from prison. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs… At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

Khalil’s warnings could prove prescient for all of us, given Trump’s retaliation against news organizations for their coverage and threats to withdraw federal funding from universities that allow “illegal” protests, as he calls them.

Left unchecked, anyone who opposes Trump — whether on Israel or on cuts to Medicaid and Social Security — could become a target. Khalil must be freed immediately if our cherished freedoms of speech and assembly are to have any meaning.

We must all strongly oppose this profound attack on our First Amendment rights. Otherwise, that next knock on the door could be for any of us.

The post The Persecution of Mahmoud Khalil is a Threat to Free Speech Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Farrah Hassen.

As the Israeli military continues its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, which have included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances and the killing of medical personnel, among other violations of international law, we speak to a doctor currently volunteering in Beirut. Dr. Bing Li is an emergency medicine physician and U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered at Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza earlier this year. Li recounts her experiences in Gaza, where “it feels like death is everywhere,” and warns that Israel’s latest forced evacuation, of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, is “essentially a death sentence” for patients, including children in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Now in Lebanon, Li describes how providers are scrambling to increase healthcare capacity in anticipation of additional attacks.

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

As a strategy, the net-zero target has been criticized by climate advocates; at its worst, it can be a vague, unenforceable greenwashing program. But global efforts are underway to write standards for what makes a good one — and hold the target-setters to them. The net-zero targets that have actually been adopted display a surprisingly wide variety in terms of their substance: some refer to all greenhouse gas emissions, and others only to carbon dioxide; the strongest include sector-specific implementation plans and credible near-term targets, and cover all three emissions scopes up and down the value chain.

On Monday, the Net Zero Tracker, a collaboration between four climate organizations, released its most recent “Net Zero Stocktake” — a survey of the world’s climate pledges, including evaluations of how serious the plans are to actually follow through on them. Since the group began publishing such reports annually since 2021, it has found that, at the national level, after years of more and more countries setting net-zero targets, the growth of such pledges has now leveled off, with 147 countries, as well as the European Union, having now set a target. They include most of the highest-emitting countries. China, the world’s largest emitter, committed to carbon neutrality by 2060 in 2020 at the UN General Assembly. A significant exception is Azerbaijan, the oil-rich, gas-leaking host of November’s COP29 UN climate change conference, which has no net-zero target.

But net-zero targets continue to proliferate in subnational governments, especially at the state and regional levels, and in the private sector. In the 18 months since the 2023 report was published, the number of companies with net-zero targets has increased by 23 percent, and local regions by 28 percent. (Cities’ pledges only increased by 8 percent.)

The growth of regional targets is important because local governments play an important role in helping countries actually achieve decarbonization. “Subnational regions have huge responsibility for realizing net zero on the global scale,” said Sybrig Smit, a coauthor of the report, in a press briefing, adding that, in countries that have adopted national targets, “the credibility of those net zero targets simply increases when also on lower levels of government this ambition level is shown.” In the U.S., 19 states have net-zero targets — and five of them aim for an earlier deadline than the federal goal of 2050.

But the pledges vary widely in substance — and very few meet anything like a gold standard. “For all the subnational governments and companies, only a very small percentage of them actually meet all of the robustness or the integrity criteria” that were tracked in the report, said Takeshi Kuramochi, another of the report’s coauthors, in the briefing. For example, of the companies surveyed (the 2,000 largest in the world), only about half of those with net-zero targets covered all greenhouse gases, rather than just carbon dioxide. The metric that companies and governments alike scored worst on was clarity on the use of offsets: less than 10 percent of the net-zero targets set by companies, cities, and regions specify how much they will use offsets to achieve their goal.

While the overall landscape of net-zero targets appears plagued by insincerity, the report’s authors gave credit to those whose pledges were more substantive — and highlighted their role in leading by example, particularly as standards are formalized for net-zero targets. The report spotlights Costa Rica’s 2030 net-zero target, which covers all greenhouse gas emissions and includes sector-specific and interim targets. In the private sector, Google and the Volvo Group received special commendation in the report for covering all three emissions scopes — which means they can’t simply pass their emissions onto suppliers or ignore the footprint of their electricity usage. 

Giving credit where it’s due — in the hopes of incentivizing better performance through public scrutiny — is part of the theory of change according to which setting best practices for net-zero targets might actually be an effective mechanism for climate action. 

“Ultimately, a lot of things will need to be regulated, and that’s a positive thing,” said Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian environment minister who chaired a United Nations expert group on nonstate net-zero targets, in the briefing. “It creates a level playing field. It means there are consequences if you don’t do the work, and if you are doing the work then you can demonstrate that you are doing the work. We need to distinguish between those who are and those who aren’t, and [ensure] that the people who are doing the work feel really good.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Net-zero targets are everywhere. But to be effective, they need accountability. on Sep 25, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Gautama Mehta.

Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post War Forever, Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andrea Mazzarino.

Outside, temperatures hovered in the 90s, with a heat index — what the temperature feels like — of nearly 100. Just days earlier, a punishing heat wave had brought a string of days topping out in the mid-90s. With no air conditioning or ventilation, Broadway’s unit on the fifth floor of the prison had become a furnace.

“We live on the highest gallery in the cellhouse,” Mark, who lived next door to Broadway, told The Appeal over the prison’s messaging service. “It never cools off. Personal fans blow hot air. You have to sit still. Move and you are sweaty.”

(We are using an alias to protect Mark from retaliation.)

Mark and others on Broadway’s cellblock yelled for help, but a nurse didn’t come until more than 15 minutes later, according to a statement Broadway’s neighbor, Anthony Ehlers, provided to the law firm representing Broadway’s family.

“It’s too hot,” the nurse said, according to Ehlers. “I’m not going up there. Tell him to come down here.” 

Broadway was “holding his neck, gasping for breath,” said Ehlers. An officer radioed that Broadway couldn’t walk. By the time the nurse entered his cell, he had already lost consciousness, said Ehlers. She administered Narcan, and officers began chest compressions. Ehlers yelled out repeatedly that Broadway had asthma and did not use drugs.

The stretcher was broken, so Mark used his bed sheet to carry Broadway down five flights of stairs with the assistance of three staff members. Broadway was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

At the time of his death, Broadway was 51 years old. While incarcerated, he battled cancer, wrote a novel, and earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. An IDOC spokesperson said in an email that an investigation is ongoing.

“Mike was really special and he deserved better than to die from something so easily avoidable,” Ehlers wrote to The Appeal. 

As summers get hotter, conditions are becoming increasingly dangerous for the more than 1 million people locked up in state prisons, most of which do not have universal air conditioning. Even prisons in some of the hottest states, like Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia, are only partially air-conditioned, according to a survey of state corrections agencies conducted by The Appeal. For the six states that did not respond to the survey — Florida, Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada, Kansas, and West Virginia — we gathered information from news reports, including local reporting and a USA Today analysis of prison air conditioning published in 2022. 

According to our investigation: 

• Just over 80 percent of federal prisons have universal air conditioning. 
• Only five states provide air conditioning in all prison housing units. 
• In 22 states, most people are housed in air-conditioned units, which means more than 50 percent of state prisoners live in air-conditioned housing units; 
• In 17 states, some prison housing units are air-conditioned across multiple facilities.
• In five states, few housing units are air-conditioned — only a single facility and/or specialized units, like infirmaries, are cooled.
• Only one state, Alaska, has no air-conditioned housing units. 

Research has found that higher temperatures — and especially prolonged periods of extreme heat — are associated with higher death rates in prison. Despite the correlation between heat and mortality, the exact number of heat-related deaths remains unknown, as many prisons do not properly track or report them, prompting concern from advocates that officials are effectively hiding these fatalities behind other causes of death. 

In one high-profile case in California this July, Adrienne “Twin” Boulware died after collapsing at the Central California Women’s Facility during a heat wave, according to advocates. Boulware’s family has said prison staff told them she died from heat stroke, but a spokesperson for the state corrections agency said in an email that Boulware’s cause of death “appears to be an ongoing medical condition and not heat related.” The county coroner’s office will make the final determination, the spokesperson said.

For years, incarcerated people and advocates have demanded universal air conditioning and increased access to ice, cold water, and showers to help protect against the heat. But many prison systems continue to deny prisoners even the most basic accommodations, while lawmakers have offered, at most, piecemeal investments in AC installation. Incarcerated people often rely on small, personal fans to provide some degree of comfort, but previous reporting by The Appeal has revealed that these devices can be too expensive for many to afford, especially on paltry wages — if they’re paid at all. 

Without a radical departure from the status quo, the human-made crises of climate change and mass incarceration are on a collision course that will put more and more prisoners’ lives at risk. As extreme temperatures sweep across the country, the problem is expanding beyond historic hotbeds in the South and Southwest, bringing more intense and frequent heat waves to states with traditionally milder climates. 

Heat waves this summer have hit much of the country, including Washington State, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, and New Hampshire, all states that lack universal air conditioning in their prisons, according to our survey. Research suggests extreme heat can be particularly dangerous for people who are not acclimated to such high temperatures. 

Read Next

In California, climate chaos looms over prisons — and thousands of prisoners — in a lake bed

Susie Cagle

In New York, most of the state’s approximately 30,000 prisoners are confined to housing units without air conditioning. This summer, the heat index hovered around 100 degrees for several days back-to-back in areas where some state prisons are located. In New Hampshire, only one of the state’s three prisons, the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women, has air conditioning. Temperatures in Concord, where the New Hampshire State Prison for Men is located, broke records in July with 12 consecutive days that reached 90 degrees.

In New Jersey, the third-fastest warming U.S. state and the fastest in the Northeast, about 65 percent of housing units are air-conditioned.

Marsha’s son is incarcerated at Bayside State Prison, where most housing units are not air-conditioned. The prison is “suffocatingly hot,” she said. (We are using an alias for Marsha to protect her son from retaliation.) Last month, temperatures around Bayside hit the 90s on nine separate days. Marsha’s son told her they receive ice twice daily, but it “melts right away,” she said. 

To combat the heat, Marsha said her son bought a couple of fans from the commissary; one was sold at a discounted price. According to a state prison commissary list obtained by The Appeal last year, a 9-inch fan costs about $16.

A Department of Corrections spokesperson said in an email that people assigned to housing units without air conditioning may purchase one fan and one 28-quart cooler at a discounted price if they have not previously been provided one. 

Like much of the Northeast, Vermont is heating up at a troubling pace, making it one of the fastest-warming states in the country, according to the research group Climate Central.

Read Next

Extreme heat will take an unequal toll on tribal jails

Joseph Lee, Jessie Blaeser, & Chad Small

In June, the Vermont State Employees’ Association filed a complaint with the state on behalf of members who work at Southern State Correctional Facility. According to the complaint, an officer had developed heat stroke while he was working in the prison’s infirmary. Although this is the only unit in the facility with air conditioning, the complaint alleges it was not working properly at the time.

A spokesperson for the Vermont DOC told The Appeal in an email that Southern State is the next prison slated to receive universal air conditioning, a project that is set to be completed by 2027. Earlier this year, lawmakers approved funding for a fraction of what it will likely cost to install air conditioning in all of the state’s prisons, according to local news outlet Vermont Public. 

“The State is actively working to install HVAC across all correctional facilities,” a Vermont DOC spokesperson said in an email. “Investing in the physical infrastructure of our facilities, to include installing air conditioning, is a considerable priority for the Department to ensure a dignified and comfortable experience for those who live and work in Vermont correctional facilities.”

Only two out of Vermont’s six prisons are fully air-conditioned, which amounts to 29 percent of the state’s housing units, according to the DOC. The DOC spokesperson said that depending on the facility, staff may distribute free ice twice a day, place fans in common areas, use water misters, distribute popsicles, or set up water and shade stations in the yard. Prisoners can purchase a 6-inch desk fan for about $13 and an 8-inch fan for $42, almost twice as much as it costs at a local Lowe’s.

Prisoners’ rights advocate Timothy Burgess said he’s received reports from inside Southern State about the excessive heat. 

“People are cooking,” said Burgess, who is executive director of the Vermont chapter of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, an advocacy group known as CURE. “This summer, like last summer, is absolutely brutal.”

Read Next

Texas inmates are being ‘cooked to death’ in extreme heat, complaint alleges

Pooja Salhotra, The Texas Tribune & William Melhado, The Texas Tribune

Prisoners are often denied the most basic protections from the heat when they’re taken outside, like shade, water misters, and cold water. The stakes are particularly high for prisoners in the South and Southwest, where climate change is threatening to make notoriously blistering summers even more dangerous.

Richard, who’s incarcerated in Arizona’s Lewis Complex, said there’s little shade in the recreation yard, and jugs of provided ice water are finished quickly. (We are only using Richard’s first name to protect him from retaliation.) According to the state Department of Corrections’ HVAC Conversion Plan, air conditioning has been installed in five of the prison’s units, but installation in the remaining three is on hold pending funding. Richard says many prisoners rely on small, personal fans, which they can purchase from the commissary for about $23.

Temperatures around Lewis have reached at least 100 degrees every day since the end of May. The unrelenting heat takes a toll on people’s physical and mental health, said Richard. 

“We’ve had several people fall out, pass out in the chow hall, which has no fans or ventilation of any sort,” he said. “I personally have seen probably about five or six people pass out from heat exhaustion or heat stroke.”

Heat stroke can be deadly. Last July in Georgia, 27-year-old Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano died after being left outside in a cage at Telfair State Prison for approximately five hours without water, ice, or shade, according to a lawsuit filed by his family. A spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Corrections said in an email that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

On the day of Ramirez’s death, the heat index — what the temperature feels like accounting for humidity — had reached over 105 degrees. That morning, the warden warned staff about the dangerous temperatures and told them not to keep anyone on the recreation yard for extended periods, according to the complaint. 

Read Next

Study: Extreme heat is driving deaths in US prisons

Alleen Brown

At about 3:00 pm, security staff called for medical help. When the nurses arrived, Ramirez was lying naked on the concrete and had vomited and defecated. He was taken to the hospital, where he was found to have a body temperature of 107 degrees. DOC reported that Ramirez died of “natural causes,” according to the family’s legal team. 

In Louisiana, prisoners are engaged in a legal battle to temporarily halt work on the “Farm Line” when the heat index exceeds 88 degrees. In a July ruling, a federal judge stopped short of shutting down the program but ordered corrections officials to make changes to their heat-related policies. In response, the DOC told the court they now offer workers sunscreen, access to a pop-up tent to provide shade on breaks, and other protective measures. On Aug. 15, the judge lambasted the agency’s actions as “grossly insufficient.” 

Few protections exist for incarcerated people who are often forced to toil in extreme heat. This month, the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule that would require employers to implement certain protections for people working in high temperatures. An agency spokesperson said in an email that the rule does not “explicitly mention incarcerated laborers” and that “as a general rule, prisoners are not regarded as employees under federal labor and employment laws.” The spokesperson said the proposed rule would soon be available for public comment and encouraged “people with serious concerns” to “participate in the rule-making process.”

If the rule is adopted, individual states may choose to include incarcerated workers, according to the spokesperson. But there is little reason to believe they would. In California, the state’s safety board explicitly excluded prisons and jails from newly approved heat-related protections for people who work indoors, meaning both incarcerated laborers and prison staff are not covered.  

With the onset of climate change, outdoor conditions are also becoming harsher for incarcerated people in other parts of the country. A woman incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison wrote to The Appeal that during yard time, they have “to take our water bottles outside,” leaving them to drink “hot-as-piss water.”

From Stateville prison in Illinois, Ehlers said there is no shade when they go out for recreation, and they’re not provided sunscreen. He said staff give prisoners a “small water cooler full of ice water, but it’s gone pretty quickly.” During the summer, Ehlers usually opts to skip recreation. 

“You’re stuck out there,” he wrote. “I’ve seen plenty of guys go down with heat stroke on the yard.”

Whether inside or outside, Ehlers said incarcerated people are given little protection against the heat. 

“The earth is getting hotter, and IDOC, and corrections, in general, is not adjusting, not doing anything to make sure that prisoners are safe,” he wrote. “We don’t have the ability to take care of ourselves, if we could, we would. We have to depend on the prison staff to take care of us, and they don’t care.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate change worsens, deadly prison heat is increasingly an everywhere problem on Aug 29, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, The Appeal.

Photograph Source: Nasser Nawaj’ah, B’Tselem – CC BY 4.0

I have a very intense relationship with water.  As a result of a long-term health condition, I am often feeling very thirsty and drained. I cannot go more than perhaps 15 minutes without having a sup of water until I start to feel uncomfortable. On average people in the UK use 149 litres of water per-day, and although there is poverty in this country, and the water system is privatised, access to water is seen as a fundamental human right and cannot, by law, be cut off to domestic residences, even if bills are not paid.

In comparison, in Gaza right now, there is a war on the people, and their access to water. The occupying state has systematically destroyed and dismantled access to water. An Oxfam report has laid out the catastrophic drop in the level of water access and quality since the genocide began:

“Since the Israeli offensive began following 7 October 2023, people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day for all uses including drinking, cooking, and washing, which is a dramatic 94% reduction in the amount of water available before. This is significantly below the internationally accepted minimum standard of 15 litres of water per person per day for basic survival in emergencies.”

The Palestinians in Gaza were already forced to rely on the occupation for much of their water supplies due to the illegal siege placed on them since 2006.  The apartheid state are now using this construct to weaponise water to such an extreme level that people are being dehydrated to death and preventable and deadly diseases are spreading throughout the population. The occupation announced their intentions to the world, very early and very clearly on, in the genocide. On 9^th October 2023, ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav Gallant said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”. This included the cutting off of the water supplies and has expanded to the bombing and destruction of every attempt by Palestinians to alleviate this. In July alone, the genocidal forces blew up over 30 water wells in Khan Younis and Rafah in the south of Gaza and have almost completely destroyed the sanitation and sewage system throughout Gaza.

This is all meticulously detailed in the Oxfam report:

“External supply from Israel’s national water company Mekorot fell by 78%. Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza.”

These are clear and defined wanton acts of genocide, being funded and supported to the hilt by the US, UK and other western countries who so dearly want us all to believe that they respect and value ‘human rights’.

We, the people of the UK, are supporting the building and operation of a water well in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza.  Please donate and share to support the Palestinian people to have access to this fundamental and basic necessity to survival and life. The well may be targeted and attacked, but we must support Palestinians to stay in place, on their land. The occupying and genocidal state will not destroy the Palestinians or create an inch of space between us in our steadfast support for them.

We as allies must listen to Palestinians and stand with them. We must continue to support Palestinians to support themselves and stand with them in lockstep until they win their full liberation, and we must believe that day is coming, because it is coming.

The post Water, Water, Everywhere, But Not for You, Palestinian appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonathan Woodrow Martin.

Image by Heather Mount.

Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.

Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.

The post Gun Violence and the Marketing of Militarism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald J. Trump is a pathological liar and a political predator, and once he realized on the debate stage that neither President Joe Biden nor the feckless CNN moderators would  offer any challenges to his lies or falsities, he went for the kill.  Biden’s tired voice and overall pathetic performance undoubtedly earned him no support from fence sitters or independents, but it is unlikely that Trump’s braggadocio won him any new adherents.  The MAGA minions are insufficient to return Trump to the White House, so now it is up to the Biden campaign to convince the American constituency that the president’s record and his overall decency are sufficient for reelection.

Jeb Bush had it right eight years ago, when he said that “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president.”  Trump’s first and second day as president were dispositive.  On the first day, there was an unusual acceptance speech that 

talked about “American Carnage.”  That turned out to be a prediction of the next four years, culminating in an attack on the Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election.  

On the second day, there was a brief and bizarre appearance at the Central Intelligence Agency, where Trump stood near the biblical inscription at the entrance to the Langley headquarters: “The Truth Shall Set You Free.”  He repeated his pathetic lies about the size of his inaugural crowd, and pandered to a command performance crowd by saying “I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”  This statement was uttered only several days after he compared CIA officers to Nazis.

It doesn’t take a professional to recognize Trump’s narcissistic personality, his self destructive behaviors, his toxicity.  Trump’s father told his son over and over again that “You need to be a killer and a king,” and Trump seems to have taken the admonition to conclude that there are two types of people in the world—the victors and the vanquished.  This trait was on full display in the debate; as Biden demonstrated weakness and uncertainty, Trump told greater lies about abortion, the insurrection, his legal troubles.  When it was clear that the moderators would not stop him and that Biden was not up to the task, Trump demonstrated the characteristics of a predator who would destroy his prey.  Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a respected historian, wrote six years ago that “Trump is no madman, he’s simply following the strongman playbook.”

As the debate wore on, Trump’s egotistical displays became more threatening and more boisterous.  For the past eight years, we have witnessed his impulsive need to make vengeful attacks on those who challenge him, particularly minorities, women, and immigrants.  His racist comments at the debate were unconscionable.  Trump’s combative stance demonstrated once again that he is incapable of holding a rational discussion or engaging in a considered exercise of power.  We learned a great deal from his three appointments to the Supreme Court, who are currently engaged in weakening executive and legislative power.  Trump’s overall appointments in a second term will be far more threatening and destructive than in the first time around, when somehow there were several adults in the room who had spent their careers in military service.

Only the American people and their votes can stop Trump at this point.  The Mueller investigation exposed various facets of Trump’s corruption, but it went nowhere.  Two impeachments exposed Trump’s venality and deceit, but they also went nowhere.  The trials regarding sexual assault and hush money payments were decided against Trump, but have done him no harm.  The trials that remain are far more serious, dealing with the insurrection of January 6th and the theft of sensitive intelligence documents, but they will not be held before the election.

It’s almost impossible to be optimistic about the election because too many nations around the world are electing and/or supporting authoritarian leaders.  Too many Americans appear to be believe that Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Netanyahu in Israel, Modi in India, and Erdogan in Turkey have served the interests of their constituencies, and that the United States needs its own aggressive and bellicose leader to stand up to the authoritarians that abound around the world.  Meanwhile, our friends and adversaries in the international community are focused on the November election, with friends fearing the worst and adversaries hoping for the election of Donald J. Trump.

The post Trump’s Debate: a Victory for Pathological Liars Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.

The post Misogyny and the Attacks on Bodily Autonomy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Image by Hany Osman.

As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well.

The post Divest from Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When I registered to attend last month’s United Nations conference in Canada, organizers insisted it would be a “plastic free meeting.” I wouldn’t even get a see-through sleeve for my name tag, they warned; I’d have to reuse an old lanyard.

After all, representatives from roughly 170 countries were gathering to tackle a crisis: The world churns out 400 million metric tons of plastic a year. It clogs landfills and oceans; its chemical trail seeps into our bodies. Delegates have been meeting since 2022 as part of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in hopes of ending this year with a treaty that addresses “the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.”

The challenge before delegates seemed daunting: How do you get hundreds of negotiators to agree on anything via live, group editing? Especially when representatives from fossil fuel and chemical companies would be vigorously working to shift the conversation away from what scientists say is the only solution to the crisis: curbing plastic production.

But when I got to the meeting, I discovered those industry reps were not the sideshow; they were welcomed into the main event.

They could watch closed-door sessions off limits to reporters. Some got high-level badges indistinguishable from those worn by country representatives negotiating the treaty. These badges allowed them access to exclusive discussions not open to some of the world’s leading health scientists.

In a setting that was supposed to level the inequalities among those present, I watched how country delegates and conference organizers did little to minimize them, making what was already going to be a challenging process needlessly opaque and avoidably contentious.

With such high stakes, I asked the INC Secretariat — the staff at the UN Environment Programme who facilitated the negotiations process — why they hadn’t set rules on conflict of interest or transparency. They told me that wasn’t their job, that it was up to countries to take the lead. But in some cases, countries pointed me right back to the UN.

Over five days, I would come to understand just how hard it will be to get meaningful action on plastics.

From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center.

Their message: Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. (I could almost see the marketing pitch: Think of the children!)

These plastics deliver water, read one, depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

I headed to the media registration desk and got my green-striped badge, which placed me at the lowest rung of the pecking order.

At the top were people on official delegations. Their red-striped badges opened the door to every meeting, from the large “plenaries” where rows of country representatives spoke into microphones, to smaller working groups where negotiators hashed out specifics like whether to ban certain chemicals used in plastic.

The majority of the attendees wore orange badges. This hodgepodge of so-called observers included scientists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and some industry reps, though the color code made no distinction among them.

Observers were allowed into certain working groups at the discretion of government delegates.

Reporters could attend only plenaries.

These huge, open sessions were like the UN equivalent of Senate floor speeches: declarations and repetition to get ideas into the public record.

Veteran observers tracked the real action in the margins, standing in the back of the ballroom to watch who was talking to whom. It was an art, they said: You want to stroll close enough to read the small print on name tags, but you have to be chill about it.

I was not chill about the lack of access, which prevented sources from talking about what happened behind closed-door proceedings. They were governed by rules that prohibited those present from recording the meetings or revealing who had said what.

Reporters trying to inform the public and hold governments accountable were completely shut out. Yet somehow the rules allowed the industry whose survival depends on more plastic production to dispatch reps to watch negotiators at work.

The rules follow the “norms when it comes to fundamentals of negotiating, multilateralism, and diplomacy amongst UN Member States,” said a statement from the INC Secretariat. These meetings are managed by the countries negotiating the treaty, the statement said; the countries set the rules.

But when I asked the U.S. State Department, which led the U.S. delegation in Ottawa, whether journalists should have more access, a spokesperson directed me back to the UN.

I heard about an exhibit at the nearby Westin hosted by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. It sounded like an environmental group, but an online search showed it was founded by corporations including Dow and ExxonMobil. Dow didn’t respond to a request for comment. ExxonMobil said it attended the conference “to be a resource, bring solutions to the table and listen to a broad range of views by all stakeholders.”

As I wandered through the ballroom stocked with refreshments, shiny videos and diagrams promoted the potential of “circularity,” a marketing term that’s often focused on recycling. Independent research shows pollution will skyrocket if companies don’t curb production, but the industry has, for decades, shifted attention from that with false promises about waste management.

“The work we do is not the whole solution,” the alliance later told me in an email.

But I could easily see someone leaving the exhibit with that impression.

The finer points of plastic science, from its toxic manufacturing process to the limits of recycling, are highly technical and complex.

While countries like the United States could afford to fly in multiple experts to inform government delegates, other countries could not.

Later that day, I met Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, who was among 60 independent, volunteer researchers who had traveled to Canada in hopes of bridging that gap in access to expertise.

As part of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, they shared fact sheets and peer-reviewed studies and made themselves available for questions. Carney Almroth said ensuring the integrity of the group was vital. Members must have a proven track record of researching plastic pollution and follow a conflict-of-interest policy to prevent bias.

“The human right to science,” she said, “includes the right to transparency.”

For the first two of these conferences, the INC Secretariat didn’t include the participants’ affiliations when they released the list of people who had registered for the event, making it hard to tell who worked for the industry. That has since changed, making it easier for advocacy groups to scour lists for fossil fuel and chemical company affiliations.

After the UN released the roster of the 4,000 people who had registered for Ottawa this year, the Center for International Environmental Law released its analysis of industry attendees. It found about 200 people with observer-level badges.

What’s more, the group said, 16 industry representatives had received the red badges usually reserved for government delegates. They were invited onto official delegations by China, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Uganda. I later learned an Indonesian delegate was listed as part of its Ministry of Industry; LinkedIn revealed him to be a director at a petrochemical firm.

I reached out to officials from all 10 countries. Most did not respond.

(The United States wasn’t on the list. “As a matter of policy, the United States does not include any industry or civil society representatives in our official delegation,” said a spokesperson from the State Department.)

There is “no such thing as conflict of interest in International negotiations,” the executive director of the Uganda National Environment Management Authority, Barirega Akankwasah, told me in a WhatsApp message. It’s “a matter of country positions and not individual positions,” he said, adding that the conference was “open and transparent” and stakeholders were “all welcome to participate.”

An official from the Dominican Republic, Claudia Taboada, told me that environmental groups and academic scientists had been consulted before the Ottawa conference and that the two industry reps on the country’s eight-member delegation had restricted privileges. They were barred from internal meetings where observers weren’t allowed, she said, and they couldn’t negotiate on behalf of the government.

Those industry reps weren’t trying to influence the government’s position, added Taboada, who is director for science, technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I found that hard to believe. Who would sit through days of bureaucratic meetings just to observe?

A red-striped badge provides tangible benefits, multiple attendees told me, like access to email lists and WhatsApp chats that are closed to observers. A university scientist who’s part of Fiji’s official delegation, Rufino Varea, said it’s easier to talk to official delegates from other countries when you have that badge. It shows only a person’s name and country, making it impossible to tell at a glance whether someone works for the government or for private interests.

A press release issued that day showed a counter-analysis of the entire list of attendees from the International Council of Chemical Associations, which said that industry observers were vastly outnumbered by more than 2,000 members from nongovernmental organizations like environmental advocacy groups.

Many of these groups are “incredibly well funded” and supported by billionaires, said a subsequent email from the American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest plastics lobby. It noted that at least eight countries had NGO representatives on their official delegations.

For every NGO with millions in the bank, there were others whose members couldn’t afford the trip to Ottawa. Many had to compete for limited travel funds from sources like the UN or larger advocacy groups.

I sat down with John Chweya, a friendly man in a leather jacket who makes a living as a waste picker in Kenya. A single salad at the conference cost more than a day’s pay.

As president of the Waste Pickers Association of Kenya, he wanted delegates to understand how plastic impacts the millions around the world who collect garbage and sort the recyclables they can sell in places without formal waste disposal. Toxic fumes from plastic burning in landfills make his fellow workers sick, he told me. They wake up with swollen necks, joints that don’t work and mysterious tumors. Chweya wants the world to make less plastic; he came to Ottawa to fight for protective gear and health care.

The specificity of his story brought home how the experiences of front-line communities could inform the understanding of the plastics crisis.

Others like Chweya tried to give voice to huge portions of the world’s populations that are suffering from every step in the plastic life cycle: residents of Indigenous communities and Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” breathing dangerous plant emissions; Pacific Islanders seeing their coral reefs entangled in abandoned fishing nets; activists from lower-income countries that are swimming in Americans’ discarded plastic.

I watched them trying to grab the attention of government officials with handwritten posters, events in cramped rooms and limited speaking slots during the plenary.

None of it matched the flash of the billboards I could not seem to avoid, which heralded their own impending health emergency.

These plastics save lives, one decreed, featuring a girl in a hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask.

Negotiators couldn’t even agree on setting voluntary reductions for plastic production, I thought. Nobody was proposing to eliminate enough plastic to cause hospital shortages.

Chweya called the prevalent ads “traitorous.”

UN officials had warned against the inequities playing out in Ottawa.

In November 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement during the first conference to negotiate the treaty, held in Uruguay.

Even though they weren’t hosting it, human rights officials had advice on how to proceed. “The plastic industry has disproportionate power and influence over policy relative to the general public,” they wrote. “Clear boundaries on conflict of interest should be established … drawing from existing good practices under international law.”

They recommended policies similar to those adopted by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a separate UN treaty. Government representatives meet every two years to evaluate results. Recognizing that the tobacco industry’s presence was fundamentally incompatible with protecting public health, the countries agreed to virtually ban Big Tobacco from those meetings.

“It is irresponsible and inaccurate to liken plastics to tobacco,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement in response to my questions about this comparison. “Unlike the tobacco industry, the plastics industry is playing a vital role in helping meet the UN’s sustainability goals by contributing to food safety, healthcare, renewable energy, telecommunications, clean drinking water, and much more. …

“Keeping plastic producers out means a less informed treaty,” the council said. “We are essential and constructive stakeholders in the global effort to prevent plastic pollution.”

Short of barring the plastics industry, many have wondered why the UN can’t start with smaller steps, like giving industry observers a different kind of badge.

The fossil fuel companies “that are manufacturing plastics” are “not coming to these negotiations with solutions,” Baskut Tuncak, a former UN special rapporteur for human rights and toxics, told me. They’re here “to throw a wrench in the process, or two, or three.”

When I asked if it intended to introduce conflict-of-interest controls, the INC Secretariat said it couldn’t impose rules unilaterally. Governments would have to decide for themselves.

Some U.S. and European politicians have requested such reforms. Negotiators should consider measures “to protect against undue influence of corporate actors with proven vested interests that contradict the goals of the global plastics treaty,” said a letter last month sent to President Joe Biden and the secretary-general of the United Nations.

It was signed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who’s often criticized the fossil fuel industry’s influence on public policy, along with 11 other members of Congress and a member of the European Parliament. Industry reps should be required to disclose lobbying records and campaign contributions, the letter suggested.

The UN isn’t powerless, said Tuncak and Ana Paula Souza, a UN human rights officer I met on my last day in Ottawa. There’s more the institution could do to raise the profile of the issue, they said. Souza said the UN could also increase funding to allow more of those most affected by plastic pollution to attend these meetings.

The Ottawa conference ended with limited progress. Negotiators have a long way to go to reach a final draft at the last scheduled conference this November in Busan, South Korea. Smaller groups of delegates will meet before then; it’s unclear how many observers will be able to attend.

It’s tempting to feel pessimistic. This could easily end up like the UN climate treaty — anemic, voluntary and dragging on forever.

And it’s not like a conflict-of-interest policy would magically solve everything. Countries with powerful plastics lobbies, including the United States, can still advocate for corporate interests.

But it’s worth stepping back to recognize the magnitude of what’s happening.

Nearly every government on Earth signed up for days of painstaking sessions on plastic as a global threat — even places confronting existential crises, like Haiti, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine. The world recognizes the importance of figuring this out. And despite all the industry influence, capping plastic production remains a possibility.

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lisa Song.

Australian Nuclear Free Alliance gathering, March 2024. Image by Ray Acheson.

AUKUS is the awkward-sounding acronym for “Australia-United Kingdom-United States”—a trilateral military alliance that stands poised to waste billions of dollars, proliferate high-level radioactive material and impose its safekeeping on First Nations communities for hundreds of thousands of years, increase global militarism and potentially provoke a nuclear war. If this doesn’t sound like a good investment to you, you’re not wrong. The deeper one digs into the details of this deal, the more one becomes flummoxed by cascading levels of absurdity. It is strikingly disadvantageous for Australia, yet other countries including Canada, Japan, and New Zealand/Aotearoa, have expressed interest in collaborating. Australian activists have been mobilizing to stop AUKUS for several years; it’s past time those living in other AUKUS states or those clamouring to partner with the alliance get informed and active, too.

The post Solidarity to Stop AUKUS appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

In reviving nuclear in the name of the struggle against global warming, the European Union has followed suit. Japan is promising new developments on the nuclear front. The US is experimenting with miniature reactors. China is building with gusto … All these ‘ionizing’ projects seem to indicate that fission-based nuclear power is in full swing.

In fact, it is to the contrary. A report of experts published in December 2023, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023 [549 p!], using data supplied by the International Atomic Energy Agency and national states, provides the evidence. The part of electricity generation due to nuclear power is the lowest in 30 years (9.2 percent), compared to near double that figure in the 1990s.

Over twenty years, the cost of a nuclear kilowatt hour has increased slightly, whereas the cost of solar and wind has plummeted (‘melted’), these days coming in at roughly half that of nuclear. In 2022, the report highlights, €35 billion has been invested in nuclear globally, compared to … €455 billion in renewables.

France is still trying to recover from an annus horribilis in 2022. In addition to higher costs associated with the war in Ukraine, reactor shutdowns have multiplied. In August 2023, 60 % of France’s 56 reactors were dysfunctional. During 2023, production has augmented, but it has stayed at the level of … 1995.

Showcases of French savoir-faire, the EPR reactors are not ‘making sparks’, accumulating shutdowns, delays (twelve years for Flamanville, on the English Channel, and thirteen years for Olkiluoto, in Finland) as well as cost blowouts (the bill multiplied by 1.7 [for now] at Hinkley Point, in Great Britain, by 3 at Olkiluoto and by 6 at Flamanville!).

During this time, plutonium (for which every gram is of fearsome toxicity), an essential fuel for these ‘toys’, piles up. The accumulated stock for France has reached an unprecedented level of 92 tonnes.

Small problem: how can EDF [Électricité de France], which has acquired a debt of €65 billion, finance the announced projects? This question doesn’t stop Brussels from supporting them – in spite of the industrial disaster on course. No matter that, for several years, within the EU, renewable energy (hydraulic, wind and solar) has generated the most electricity, ahead of nuclear, followed by gas and coal.

South Korea was formerly one of the principal international competitors of EDF for conquering foreign markets. These days South Korea shows itself more reluctant, especially after a calamitous 2022. Kepco, the national electrician, has lost more than €22 billion, adding to a debt of €131 billion – a record. Nuclear contributes 29.6 % to production, currently less than coal. But the promises – within ten years coal’s contribution is supposed to be cut in half and that of renewables tripled. As for nuclear, it will grow by … 5 %.

Japan only starts to pick up with the atom after the closure of several reactors following Fukushima. To the subsequent shortage of electricity add the financial dimension of the catastrophe: in 2021, the government estimated it at more than €200 billion. Thirteen years after the event, the Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, wants to rekindle nuclear (‘accelerate the particles’) but furnishes no details on new reactors.

Last year, production in Japan was at its lowest level (equivalent to that of the 1970s), and only 6 % of electricity was of nuclear origin. In spite of announcements, distrust persists, especially since the discovery of misrepresentations (modification of results of chemical analyses, falsification of measures of resistance of materials) of Japan Steel Works, manufacturer of components for reactors, selling them worldwide and notably to France.

China is the country most committed to the atom. Of 58 reactors currently under construction globally, 23 (40 %) are in the Middle Kingdom. However, if nuclear trots, renewables gallop flat out. Nuclear represents 5 % of electricity, whereas wind and solar furnish 15 %, progressing more quickly than coal, which remains far and away the main ‘source of the juice’. Another vexation: Beijing exports little of its savoir-faire. This is because the US, among others, have blacklisted Chinese enterprises, accused them of having siphoned American technology for its military ambitions. Slanderous!

The United States remains the champion of nuclear energy but its brainpower has not kept pace (‘their neutrons are not very quick’). In 2022, the contribution of nuclear to electricity generation has fallen to 18.2 % – the lowest rate since 1987 – less than coal and renewables, the latter passed for the first time to pole position. American reactors are on average the oldest in the world (42 years), and only two reactors have been brought into service in the last twenty-five years.

And what a debut! The AP1000 (variation of the EPR) of Vogtle (Georgia) began operation in March 2023, eight years later than planned and at an estimated cost of €28.5 billion — more than double the initial estimate. [The French business newspaper] Les Echos (25/1/22) has cheekily described the feat as a local ‘Flamanville’. This financial debacle has much contributed to the failure of Westinghouse, a giant of nuclear reactor manufacturing. The event has also provoked the shutdown of the construction site (nine years of work) and of two other AP1000s in South Carolina. Living fossils!

As a consequence, the US is paying more attention to mini reactors, or SMR [small modular reactors]. Save that NuScale, the champion of the type, last November, cancelled a vast construction program of six of these miniatures, for which the budget had almost tripled …

Russia is the veritable world champion of the ‘civil atom’. That said, however, it produces only 20 % of the country’s electricity. Rosatom, the Russian EDF, foreshadows a small increase to 25 %, but in … 2045. It is overseas where business is booming. Russia, a nation at war, is building reactors in countries as peaceful as Iran, Egypt, India and Türkiye. Without forgetting China, one of Russia’s best customers.

Russia’s commercial secret? Its discounted prices, its turnkey packages and, above all, its control of the indispensable enriched uranium. Russia furnishes much of the latter to Europe but also to the US, 31 % of its supplies coming from Russia. All this while imposing sanctions on Putin’s country, which toys with the nuclear threat, going so far as to bomb the vicinity of Ukraine’s nuclear reactor at Zaporizhzhia [Why would Russia bomb a nuclear power plant that it has been in control of since 2022? Also: “Jeffrey Sachs: Biden Needs to Tell Ukraine to Stop Bombing the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant or Face Real Armageddon” — DV ed] – the largest such in Europe.

Business is business.

• This article appeared in the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné, 24 January 2024, under the title “Partout dans le monde, l‘énergie nucléaire coûte un pognon de dingue!” It has been translated by Evan Jones and is reproduced with permission.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-François Julliard.

Deadly Connections in the Desert

Image by Ray Acheson.

Last month, organizers and activists from around the United States gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a nationwide summit to Stop Cop City—or, more accurately, Cop Cities. As new research has revealed, there are at least 69 militarized police training facilities in the works across the country. Each was put in motion in or after 2020, clearly a direct response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings that dominated city streets for months to condemn racialised police violence and demand the defunding of police.

To read this article, log in here or subscribe here.
If you are logged in but can't read CP+ articles, check the status of your access here
In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Image by mohammed al bardawil.

The post ICJ’s Order to Prevent Genocide Applies to the Governments Arming Israel, Too appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Image credit to Earth Liberation Studio.

As bombs continue to pummel Gaza, destroying hospitals and homes, leaving thousands of Palestinians dead and millions displaced, global action to stop the supply of weapons to Israel is an urgent imperative. Fighter jets, missiles, and thousands of bombs are amounting to a devastating level of explosive violence in the densely populated area of the Gaza Strip.

These weapons are instrumental in Israel’s genocidal actions; thus, the governments supplying them are complicit in genocide and other war crimes. And right now, while these same governments continue to pledge support to Israel’s alleged but unlawful “right to self-defence,” ordinary people are undertaking incredible actions to block the production and shipment of weapons.

The post Stop Arming Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

“It’s not a stretch when looking at an early photo of military officers sitting in a circle with Indians having council or “pow-wow” over some grievance; just as we have seen young officers doing in Afghanistan with the local tribal elders. The times, places, names and combatants are different, but the human nature of the conduct of insurgent war remains the same… the Indian Wars in general can provide us with many lessons learned to help in the fight against insurgents of the 21st Century” [1]

The writer proposes a striking visual continuity: the frontier soldier transplanted to the mountains of Central Asia, dual images that evoke the colonial nostalgia of continental expansion and the imperial ambitions of the War on Terror. This has proven to be an attractive comparison, one that many US soldiers, strategists, and historians have made in the years since the terror attacks of September 11^th, 2001, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As soldiers scrambled to relearn and update the counterinsurgency tactics often relegated to the fringes of US military doctrine, the Indian Wars emerged as a historical “success,” an example on which to draw. The Indian Wars have always exercised a powerful cultural hold in the United States, particularly in the military. Enemy territory has often been “Indian Country,” and soldiers have imagined their enemies as “Indians” and themselves as “Indian/fighters,” inheritors of what my recently published book refers to as the “shadow doctrines” that continually drive US imperial power. But during the 21^st century “Indian Country” went beyond a series of discursive resonances as soldiers offered recommendations for the War on Terror that attempted to draw strategic lessons from wars with Native peoples. The contemporary military discourse on counterinsurgency and other forms of irregular warfare now often situates continental expansion as the earliest, and one of the most effective, examples of this form of warfare.

It remains unclear where American warfare is headed. It is possible the strategies championed by the Counterinsurgency Field Manual will fade away in the face of technological advances and “great power” rivalries. However, similar arguments were made in the 1990’s, and that did not prevent the US military from deploying large numbers of troops to sustained occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Regardless, given the violence against protesters enacted in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the continued repression of indigenous Water Protectors, perhaps we know exactly where the long history of US irregular warfare is headed: once more into Indian Country, into the police departments of American cities, and into the ranks of private security firms promoting the interests of capital, empire, and resource extraction.

This first appeared on the University of California Press blog.

The post Indian Wars Everywhere? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stefan Aune.

In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter issued the following statement:

“The only way to meaningfully combat the climate crisis is by stopping new fossil fuel projects. The Biden administration is right to stop these egregious drilling plans – and they must apply the same standard to all other oil drilling and fracking operations in the country. President Biden campaigned on a pledge to stop fracking on public lands, but in his first two years in office approved more oil and gas permits than Donald Trump.

“Today’s action is a reminder that the White House has considerable authority to rein in fossil fuels. It’s time for the President to act on those powers. Thousands of people will be marching in New York later this month to make it clear that moving off fossil fuels must be an urgent priority.”

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

The post Medicine Residue Is Everywhere in Our Rivers and Lakes—and Fish Are Behaving Strangely appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Ross.

The post Medicine Residue Is Everywhere in Our Rivers and Lakes—and Fish Are Behaving Strangely appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Ross.

The post Josh Hawley’s New Book on Manhood is Wrong on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Okun.

Ideas about men and manhood have been evolving for more than 50 years, but Sen. Josh Hawley has not gotten the message.

Like so many others working to protect white male supremacy (see Carlson, Tucker; McCarthy, Kevin), he’s driving a gas-guzzling Cadillac on a road increasingly filled with EVs. Just as women are vigorously resisting returning to a pre-Roe v. Wade America, men aren’t going back either. Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.

The book—titled Manhood: Finding Purpose in Faith, Family, and—is a call for American men to “stand up and embrace their God-given responsibility as husbands, fathers, and citizens,” according to Regency, Hawley’s far-right publisher. If you want to know what not to embrace in considering American manhood, it’s all in the 256 pages of this book. Claiming that our country’s all-male founders believed that the U.S. “depends” on certain masculine virtues, ignores the realities of today. There is much to appreciate about men; still, we’d be much better off if we talked about positive changes—embracing gender equality and rejecting white male supremacy.

Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.

Calling men out as unemployed whiners, and trash-talking women while playing video games and watching pornography, misses the mark. Examples of new expressions of masculinity abound, from stay-at-home dads to younger men becoming curious about feminism.

Hawley’s thesis—that men are in crisis—does have a kernel of truth; there are men floundering, but that is not where the majority of younger men are headed. More and more men are abandoning expressions of masculine culture based on oppressing anyone not white or male. Sure, we still have a ways to go, but support among younger men for women’s reproductive rights, gay and trans rights, and voting rights, is on the rise.

There are organizations around the country and across the globe promoting gender equality; challenging men’s violence; and encouraging involved fatherhood—all while rejecting men as “Top Dog” at home, work, and houses of worship.

Danger does exist; just not what Hawley is concerned about. It’s in young men enamored of gun culture, sucked into social media echo chambers of hate. To see how out of touch Hawley is, there’s nothing in his book about perpetrators of mass shooting massacres—primarily young men.

“Ever since the January 6 committee showed the video of Sen. Hawley running from the insurrectionist mob he’d earlier encouraged with a fist in the air, we’ve all had a good laugh at his expense,” Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post.

Although caricatured as a “manhood-obsessed hypocrite,” make no mistake: Hawley is dangerous precisely because, as Capehart noted, “He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness.” His message may still resonate with older white men, but younger men, even those who may enjoy watching Ultimate Fighting, are tolerant, accepting of their gay and trans coworkers, and are supportive of colleagues who have had an abortion.

The future is not white male supremacy, in part because patriarchy is dangerous for men.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rob Okun.

However, in recent decades the symbolism of St Patrick’s Day has changed dramatically and promotes negative stereotypes (e.g., leprechauns) of the Irish people to a world audience. This is not good for Ireland or the Irish people.

It must also be noted that St Patrick is seen as the patron saint of Ireland because he defeated pagan ideology in favour of Christianity. However, pagan ideology had a strong connection with nature and the cycles of nature that resulted in seasonal festivals such as Beltaine (1 May), Lughnasadh (1 August), Samhain (1 November) and Imbolc (1 February).

St Patrick

Not a lot is known about Saint Patrick except he is believed to have been a Romano-British Christian missionary who was kidnapped by Irish raiders and brought to Ireland as a slave. After six years as a shepherd he went home and became a priest. He then returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. He is famously believed to have driven the snakes out of Ireland despite the fact there is no record that Ireland ever had snakes.

It is more likely that the snakes refer to the pagans themselves:

Scholars suggest the tale is allegorical. Serpents are symbols of evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition—the Bible, for example, portrays a snake as the hissing agent of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. The animals were also linked to heathen practices—so St. Patrick’s dramatic act of snake eradication can be seen as a metaphor for his Christianizing influence.

It is believed that he died on 17 March and was buried at Downpatrick. It is also believed that the date is suspiciously close to Ostara, a pagan holiday:

It wasn’t arbitrary that the day honoring Saint Patrick was placed on the 17th of March. The festival was designed to coincide, and, it was hoped, to replace the Pagan holiday known as Ostara; the second spring festival which occurs each year, which celebrates the rebirth of nature, the balance of the universe when the day and night are equal in length, and which takes place at the Spring Equinox (March 22nd this year). In other words, Saint Patrick’s Day is yet another Christian replacement for a much older, ancient Pagan holiday; although generally speaking Ostara was most prominently replaced by the Christian celebration of Easter (the eggs and the bunny come from Ostara traditions, and the name “Easter” comes from the Pagan goddess Eostre).

St Patrick’s Day Parade

As a child I remember being brought to the parade and seeing a very dignified parade of marching pipe bands and symbols of the Irish state and nation such as the Irish army. By the 1980s it had been reduced to low levels of commercialisation (such as multiple floats advertising a major security firm). Later, the influence of Macnas took over and a kind of Celtic primitivism became very influential.

Films, television cartoons and advertising have popularised a specific image of leprechauns which bears little resemblance to anything found in the cycles of Irish folklore. It has been argued that the popularised image of a leprechaun is little more than a series of stereotypes based on derogatory 19th-century caricatures.

Along with this negative stereotype came a change in terminology as St Patrick’s day became known as Paddy’s Day, a derogatory term for Irish people (Paddy). The festival has become an excuse for all-day drinking and riotous behaviour, feeding into the negative stereotypes of ‘drunken paddys’.

Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal. This is what is really needed now, the rebirth of the politics of social justice, and the renewal of our deep connection with nature and life – a movement away from the theology of death.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The horrific February 6 earthquake in Southern Turkey and northern Syria has shined a spotlight on the broad-based economic sanctions that the US has imposed on  countries with supposedly “hostile” governments. It is not a pretty picture.

In Syria, the US has been promoting regime change for decades. Since 2012 it has spent $billions to arm opposition forces, often including Islamic militants who are otherwise the enemies of the US and its allies as well as the Syrian government. The US has imposed brutal economic sanctions on Syria, which have further immiserated a population which was already reeling from 10 years of proxy war imposed on the country. At the same time, the US military and its allies occupy broad swaths of Syrian territory in the east and south, denying Syrians access to crucial oil and wheat resources. Turkey and local Syrians who are now effectively Turkish mercenaries illegally occupy much of northern Syria. And Turkish troops protect a NW Syrian enclave in the province of Idlib which is ruled by Al-Qaeda and its allies.

Sanctions are claimed to support the Syrian people – which would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic for the lives of millions in Syria. The openly-stated US policy is to prevent any reconstruction in Syria as long as it continues to be governed by a regime which our elites disapprove. This has nothing to do with democracy, rather it is because Syria opposes and resists US hegemony in the Middle East and is hostile to Israel’s attempts to dominate the region.

Recent events have also exposed the lie that Syrian humanitarian relief has been exempt from the US sanctions all along. After the recent earthquake, the US announced a temporary loosening of Syria sanctions to allow rescue supplies and funds to enter the country without triggering US retaliation. Before that, countries and organizations wishing to provide humanitarian relief to Syrians faced the daunting task of trying to obtain licenses from the US State Department, which was costly, uncertain and time consuming.

Most international banks simply refused to allow transactions relating to Syria out of fear of US sanctions, even for humanitarian purposes. As one report states:

“While sanctions do not formally prevent humanitarian aid, they do prevent certain financial transactions leading to issues of over-compliance and the so-called ‘chilling effect’ both of which have consequences on the humanitarian sector” (more details here).

Even before the earthquake, US-imposed sanctions had been severely punishing ordinary Syrians. According to UN statistics, food insecurity affects at least 12 million people in Syria, with an estimated 90% of the population now living in poverty. Fuel shortages, exacerbated by the US occupation and control of Syrian oil fields, have meant that most Syrians can expect no more than an hour or two of electricity per day, while people are forced to shiver in most homes without wintertime heat. The sanctions have also caused the Syrian currency to freefall, further undermining peoples’ access to vital supplies.

Syria’s public healthcare system, which was once the envy of the region, has been especially hard-hit and is now near collapse:

“Diagnostic equipment, such as MRI and CT scanners, are failing or missing vital parts. Ventilators and laboratory equipment are lacking. Cardiologists told me that endoscopes, cardiac catheters and coronary stents, along with renal dialysis facilities, are all suffering due to sanctions. Even private hospitals that can afford repairs cannot get them, as companies do not want to sell them the required equipment for fear of repercussions. Essential equipment and medicines are affected by sanctions in terms of supply, manufacturing and importing. Banks are refusing to open credit for importing urgently needed healthcare goods amid fears that sanctions may affect their business.”

Vital medicines, and treatments, which were once free in Syria, are now either unavailable or priced out of reach for most people. Tragically, the recent earthquake threatens to totally overwhelm a medical system already weakened by years of US sanctions.

(I reported first-hand on some of the consequences of US sanctions against Syria during visits in 2018 and 2022, long before the earthquake.)

The claim that the punishment of Syria has anything to do with promoting democracy is transparently bogus. US allies in destabilizing Syria include authoritarian Turkey and the Gulf monarchy-dictatorships — as well as Israel which, in defiance of international law and numerous UN resolutions, rules millions of Palestinians who have no rights whatsoever. These same governments have been allowed to purchase tens of $billions in US armaments, or in the case of Israel, weaponry is given free of charge amounting to hundreds of $billions over the years.

The unrelenting sanctions on Syria would be bad enough, but the US also imposes punishing unilateral economic sanctions on numerous other countries. Accompanied by frequent direct or indirect military interventions, economic sanctions have long been the knee-jerk US policy around the world. Current targets include Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Russia. Narrower sanctions have been imposed on persons or groups in a dozen or more other countries. These US sanctions are even more insidious because the centrality of the dollar and US financial institutions in the world economy allows Washington to threaten and intimidate third party countries from trading with targeted nations, even if they themselves have imposed no sanctions.

Even if one allowed, for argument’s sake, that the human cost of unilateral US sanctions to pressure foreign countries were justified by some legitimate policy purpose, history shows that sanctions are ineffective in promoting democracy or even achieving regime change. Instead, they are a form of punishment against populations who happen to reside in countries whose governments are not subservient to US interests.

Cuba still survives – though at a steep cost – after 60 years of US sanctions.  The Venezuelan government maintains its legitimacy with most of its population and the international community.  The Islamic Republic of Iran has remained (for better or worse) intact as a US and Israeli adversary since 1979.

The sadistic intent of US economic sanctions were perhaps most vividly exposed when the US imposed a near total blockade against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the first Gulf War in the 1990’s. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, when confronted with UN statistics which showed that perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children perished as a result of US sanctions, responded simply and brutally that “It was worth it.”

Sanctions do not work, even as intended, unless perhaps as a warning to people in countries likely to be targeted by the US in the future. Otherwise, they are nothing more than sheer cruelty masquerading as policy. Even if sanctions are nominally aimed at alleged or actual bad governmental actors, it is innocent multitudes in their countries who are made to suffer and die from the economic punishments imposed by the US. How many more millions will be victimized by these immoral sanctions? That is up to us and all the citizens of conscience in the US.

Demand and end to US sanctions against Syria and the removal of US troops by using our easy tool to contact Congress.

For further background on the situation in Syria you can watch webinars Jeff Klein presented for MAPA in 2021, early 2022 and six months ago.

People of good will who want to donate to Syrian earthquake relief without political restrictions, including in government controlled areas of the country, can donate to the Syrian Red Crescent or support the work of Oxfam in Syria. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeff Klein.

Lo Man-tuen, vice-chairman of All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, wrote in Hong Kong's Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper that planned legislation setting out further bans on behavior deemed "subversive" or "seditious" should be paused for the whole of this year.

Otherwise, Tsai's ruling Democratic Progressive Party could use the move to bolster its campaign ahead of next year's presidential race, Lo, who is also a member of the pro-China Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, warned.

"Hong Kong's most urgent mission ... should be to race against time to regain lost opportunities," Lo wrote. "Controversial matters should be set aside."

The city's government announced in October 2022 that it would temporarily shelve Article 23 legislation, which sparked mass demonstrations on the first attempt to table it in 2003, prompting the early departure of then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa.

The announcement came after incoming chief executive John Lee said he wanted to enact the new law – which Beijing says is compulsory under Hong Kong's Basic Law – by the end of 2024 at the latest.

But the move appears to be more concerned with optics than in easing back in the ongoing crackdown on political dissent and public criticism of the authorities.

The most high-profile political trial so far under the draconian National Security Law, which was imposed on Hong Kong by the ruling Chinese Communist Party as a response to the 2019 protest movement, is currently underway, with 47 former opposition politicians and activists facing possible life imprisonment for taking part in a democratic primary election.

And the government recently started adding clauses to procurement and tender processes, including land auction approvals and tenancy agreements, to debar anyone believed to have breached the law, which bans speech or actions anywhere in the world deemed to "incite hatred" of the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities.

National security clauses

Documents issued by the city's Lands Department since November 2022 now show clauses allowing the government to disqualify potential bidders at land auctions and to terminate leases on national security grounds, the Ming Pao reported this week.

According to the Hong Kong Economic Times, such clauses were first included in a government tender for a site at the former airport site at Kai Tak in November. 

Virtually all land in Hong Kong is owned by the People’s Republic of China, with the city government disposing of land by granting leases, generally with a 50-year term, the specialist property site Mingtiandi reported on Wednesday.

The language in the Kai Tak tender said a bidder can be disqualified who “has engaged, is engaging, or is reasonably believed to have engaged or be engaging in any acts or activities that are likely to cause or constitute the occurrence of offenses endangering national security.”

Bidders can also be disqualified “in the interest of national security, or [if deemed] necessary to protect the public interest of Hong Kong, public morals, public order or public safety," the report said.

Foreign Correspondents’ Club

Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club president Keith Richburg, who is also on Radio Free Asia’s board of directors, said in a statement on Nov. 30 that national security clauses had been added to the lease for its clubhouse, which will now run for a further three years from Jan. 2, 2023 to Jan. 1, 2026.

The club ran afoul of the government in August 2018 after it invited independence activist Andy Chan as a speaker, prompting former leader Leung Chun-ying to issue a veiled threat regarding the renewal of its lease.

Advocating independence for Hong Kong was banned under the national security law in 2020, with judges typically taking a very broad view of what constitutes pro-independence speech.

"The lease contains other provisions that are now standard in all government leases, including allowing the Government to terminate the lease at any time with 3 months notice, or immediately if in the interest of national security," Richburg said in a statement on the Club’s website last month.

‘Contradictory messages’

Financial commentator Yim Po-kung told Radio Free Asia that he wasn't surprised by the inclusion of "national security" clauses in day-to-day business transactions.

"This means that land could be seized from companies, whether they are from Hong Kong or headquartered overseas, if they are deemed to have endangered national security," Yim said. "The government says it wants to attract foreign capital [back to Hong Kong after the zero-COVID travel bans]. Will it be adding national security clauses to their preferential terms?"

"For example, if they approve a Google data center, will it have national security clauses in the agreement?"

Yim said the government appears to be sending out "contradictory" messages.

"All of this will make it harder to get back to normal," he said, in a reference to the government's bid to reboot the city's international image as a financial center and recruit global talent in the wake of pandemic restrictions.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Yuk Yue for RFA Cantonese.

Forever Chemicals are found everywhere from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the mountaintop of Mt. Everest. Following 80 years of manufacturing various PFAS chemicals, the world is swimming in chemical permanence. And yes, it is a toxic price society pays for modern-day conveniences — made easy!

But maybe it would be better if “products made easy by PFASs” were made the old-fashioned way, pre-1940 sans dangerous chemicals. After all, several civilizations of the world got along just fine over thousands of years without PFAS chemicals. For example, the BBC documentary: The Story of India by Michael Wood: Archeological discoveries have revealed advanced technological artifacts found at Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley site 8,000-years-old. Indus cities had elaborate planning for drainage systems, housebuilding, and street construction with plentiful evidence of transcendent cultural affairs.

According to the United States EPA:

PFAS are a group of manufactured chemicals that have been used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s because of their useful properties. There are thousands of different PFAS, some of which have been more widely used and studied than others… PFAS can be present in our water, soil, air, and food as well as in materials found in our homes or workplaces.

Yet, undeniably, PFASs have created a worldwide toxic stew that’s extremely messy and unquestionably deadly in some instances.

A new study by Environmental Working Group (EWG) scientists uncovered very disturbing levels of PFASs in America’s freshwater fish found throughout the country from coast-to-coast with levels of chemicals “that may be harmful” according to EWG’s polite way of saying: “Stop and beware of what you put into your mouth.” (Source: The Environmental Working Group, “Forever Chemicals in Every River in the US,” DGR News Service, January 27, 2023)

What are the risks?

Like nuclear radiation isotopes, PFAS chemicals last forever and ever, and ever. Over time these human genome terrorists accumulate in human tissue, showing up years later potentially as testicular, kidney, or pancreatic cancer, weakened immune systems, decreased fertility, endocrine disruption, elevated cholesterol, increased risk of asthma, thyroid disease, and puzzling weight gain.

It’s claimed that PFAS chemicals have contaminated drinking water for nearly one-half of America’s population. Interestingly enough, American cases of chronic illnesses at nearly 50% of the general population seems to support that statement, more on this later.

The US EPA website lists the hazards of PFASs at risks of various levels based upon peer-reviewed scientific studies with a stated caveat, depending upon “exposure to certain levels of PFAS.” Certain levels are two catchwords that leave a person uncertain as to… what and how much is dangerous?

Meanwhile, chronic illness in the U.S., which is likely a result of excessive PFAS exposure, is rampant. According to The Commonwealth Fund (founded in 1918): “U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes,” January 30, 2020: “The U.S. has the highest chronic disease burden… and an obesity rate that is two times higher than the OECD average.” But it spends more on health care than any other country. Ouch!

Thankfully and importantly, EWG offers a free Guide to “Avoiding PFAS Chemicals.”

The EWG study discovered alarming off-the-charts levels of PFAS chemicals throughout America: “EWG found that median amount of PFAS in freshwater fish were an astounding 280 times greater than forever chemicals detected in some commercially caught and sold fish,” Ibid.

According to David Andrews Ph.D. EWG senior scientist: “People who consume freshwater fish, especially those who catch and eat fish regularly, are at risk of alarming levels of PFAS in their bodies,” Ibid.

And according to Scott Faber, EWG Senior VP for Government Affairs: “These test results are breathtaking… Eating one bass is equivalent to drinking PFOS-tainted water for a month,” Ibid.

EWG discovered: “The extent of contaminated fish to be staggering.” Test results show PFAS contamination across the country from Oregon to Maine. EWG claims there may be more than forty thousand (40,000) industrial polluters of PFAS in the United States alone: “For decades, polluters have dumped as much PFAS as they wanted into our rivers, streams, lakes and bays with impunity We must turn off the tap of PFAS pollution from industrial discharges, which affect more and more Americans every day.” (EWG)

In contrast to a frustrating ongoing procrastination in America, Europeans are taking a much stronger stance on PFAS Chemicals. Forty-six (46) European civil society organizations have demanded an urgent banning by the EU of all PFAS consumer products by 2025 and “across all uses by 2030.” (Source: “Civil Society Groups Urge the EU to Keep Their Promises to Ban ‘Forever Chemicals’ PFAS,” Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), October 2022)

A statement by the Health and Environment Alliance/Europe: “PFAS pollution is out of control and exposure to several forever chemicals have been linked to an array of adverse health impacts, from liver damage to reduced response to routine vaccination by children and certain cancers. PFASs have contaminated the entire planet and are found in the bodies of most people around the globe.”

“We’re talking about a group of entirely human-made chemicals that didn’t exist on the planet a century ago and have now contaminated every single corner. No one gave their consent to be exposed to these harmful chemicals, we haven’t had the choice to opt out and now we have to live with this toxic legacy for decades to come. The very least we can do is to stop adding to this toxic burden by banning PFAS use and production now,” Dr. Julie Schneider, PFAS campaigner at CHEM Trust. (HEAL)

So far efforts to diminish/control/ban PFASs in the United States have been haphazard and limited in scope. Manufacturing of PFAS has mostly moved offshore, so it now comes back in products from abroad. According to EWG: “There may be more than forty thousand (40,000) industrial polluters of PFAS in the United States.” (Source: The Environmental Working Group, “Forever Chemicals in Every River in the US,” DGR News Service, January 27, 2023)

Some states have legislated limited restrictions, e.g., PFASs were detected by the Department of Health in Honolulu’s drinking water in 2021. Posthaste, Hawaii House Bill 1644 (2022) was enacted to prohibit manufacture and sale of certain items that contain PFAS such as wraps, liners, plates, food boats, and pizza boxes. Additionally, the bill bans PFAS in products that already have established alternatives. A few other states are also limiting PFAS chemicals.

Patrick Byrne, an environmental pollution researcher at the U.K.’s Liverpool John Moores University (a public research university est. 1823), who was not involved in the EWG research: “PFAS are probably the greatest chemical threat the human race is facing in the 21st Century.” (Source: “Eating One Fish from U.S. Lakes or Rivers Likened to Drinking Months’ Worth of Contaminated Water,” CBS News, January 17, 2023)

Not surprisingly, in the face of an epidemic of PFAS chemicals soaked into the fabric of America, the country ranks high in the world for cases of chronic diseases, including, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, respiratory diseases, arthritis, obesity, and oral diseases. Forty-five percent (45%) of America’s population, or roughly 133 million Americans, have at least one chronic disease. (Source: National Center for Biotechnology – Information/National Library of Medicine)

Forty-five percent is a weighty number.

What can be done?

Is the EPA up to the task?

Answer: No, not even close.

The EPA is overwhelmed, understaffed, underfunded and outlawyered at every crossing. Despite 100+ pages of statutory text in the Toxic Substances Control Act, chemical manufacturers have no legal obligation to test or to assess the toxicity of manufactured chemicals. America’s main line of defense against toxic chemicals is an understaffed, horribly underfunded EPA. They must dig through tens of thousands of scientific data to determine what’s good and what’s bad. But without enough bodies on hand to keep turning the pages. Moreover, many chemical compositions are shielded behind “trade secrets.”

“The EPA has only banned a handful of chemicals in over 40 years.” (Source: “Industrial Chemical Polluters are Almost Unregulated in the US,” Massive Science, May 13, 2020).

According to the article, “Congressional Lack of Funding Continues to Jeopardize EPA Operations,” EHS Administration, Wastewater, May 18, 2022: “The EPA has been substantially ‘hollowed out’ for inadequate resources that have long been dangerously declining to a point where EPA is spending, in real dollars, less than half what the agency spent in 1980.”

Therefore, in the face of tens of thousands of potentially toxic chemicals slushing about in rivers, lakes, marshes, farmland, city drainage systems, in fact throughout the country, the EPA’s wherewithal is embarrassingly scandalously weak and a sure signal of a failing society. According to sources, the recent appropriations bill rejected a piddly $10 million budget increase to address polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Evidently, Congress is not at all serious about one of the country’s most serious threats to citizens of every congressional district. They don’t care! Can’t even commit to a lousy $10M increase.

All of that on top of 4 years of Trump administration hatchet jobs on the EPA: “Trump’s environmental record is such a toxic disaster it should be declared a Superfund site.” (Source: Carol Browner, head of EPA during Clinton Administration). Trump’s fiscal 2021 prop0sed budget called for a 26% hit to EPA. This after a few years of a hatchet job on environmental departments of the federal government, chasing senior scientists out, many went to France where Macron greeted them with open arms. Just imagine Trump back in the White House! Whew!

Somewhat timidly, the EPA has been studying the PFAS issue and has taken some preventative measures, but sources wonder if it is even remotely close to adequate. With 40,000 industrial PFAS polluters in America, even though there’s no manufacturing of PFASs in the U.S. any longer, the question arises: Who’s watching the store? PFASs that are prohibited from manufacturing in America are okay elsewhere and end up in products exported to America which, via various manufacturing processes, end up in the environment.

What does it take?

Does it take a mean-spirited maddened consortium of angry pissed-off civic groups like the European HEAL campaign, which has demanded an urgent banning by the EU of all PFAS consumer products by 2025 and across all uses by 2030, in order to move the needle to control/ban/restrict PFAS chemicals?

Otherwise, putting it bluntly, we are blindly, indiscriminately poisoning ourselves.

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

The post Forever Chemicals, Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

"It remains unclear when House Republicans will bring the Omar resolution to the floor for debate and a final vote," The Hillreported. "Democrats still need to formally submit a separate resolution with their roster for the Foreign Affairs Committee." That is expected to happen by Thursday.

The GOP has sought for years to remove Omar, a principled critic of Israeli apartheid and Washington's role in perpetuating it, from the HFAC. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has unilateral authority to boot any lawmaker from a select committee, but because the HFAC is a standing committee, removing a member from it requires a full House vote.

On Tuesday night, after Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) introduced the measure to remove Omar from the HFAC over supposedly "antisemitic" remarks, the progressive lawmaker tweeted that "there is nothing objectively true in this resolution."

In response to Miller's argument that "Omar clearly cannot be an objective decision-maker on the Foreign Affairs Committee given her biases against Israel and against the Jewish people"—a contention that wrongfully equates criticism of Israel's colonization of Palestine with criticism of Jewish people—the Minnesota Democrat said that "if not being objective is a reason to not serve on committees, no one would be on committees."

In a Wednesday statement, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the House GOP's pending vote against Omar "the latest racist attack by the far-right to silence progressives in Congress who speak up for a human rights-centered foreign policy, including Palestinian human rights."

"Anti-Palestinian politicians and organizations" have long tried "to censor the Congresswoman's consistent calls for accountability for the Israeli government's apartheid and human rights violations against Palestinians," said JVP. "Sadly, these Republican attempts to attack Congresswoman Omar have been buoyed in the past by attacks on Palestinian rights advocates within the Democratic party."

According to Beth Miller, political director of JVP Action: "These attacks are happening because Congresswoman Omar is effective. Because she is a progressive. Because she is a Black Muslim woman. Because her values are universal and include fighting for Palestinians."

"The GOP is riddled with white nationalists and antisemites," said Miller. "It is infuriating and absurd that they are trying to distract from the bigoted hatred in their own party by attacking a progressive woman of color. Congresswoman Omar consistently calls for the Israeli government to be held accountable for its crimes—crimes the GOP would rather cover up."

Meanwhile, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Monday that the CPC "stands fully behind our deputy chair."

"Omar is a valued member of the Democratic caucus and of this Congress," said Jayapal. "Throughout her service in Congress and on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she has brought her essential and unique voice and lived experience to bear: as a refugee, war survivor, and soon, as the first African-born ranking member on the Africa Subcommittee."

"You cannot remove a member of Congress from a committee simply because you do not agree with their views," Jayapal continued. "This is both ludicrous and dangerous. In the last Congress, Republican members were moved from committees with a bipartisan vote for endangering the safety of their colleagues. Speaker McCarthy is attempting to take revenge and draw false comparisons."

Jayapal praised the few Republicans "who have already rejected this idea" and expressed hope that "more will join them to state their opposition so it is not brought to the floor, or vote against it should it be brought to the floor."

As The Washington Post reported Wednesday:

Republican leaders have worked for weeks to ensure that there were enough votes to pass a resolution removing Omar from the committee through their razor-thin majority margin, which stands at three as Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) remains away from Washington recuperating from a traumatic fall. Opposition to the effort emerged last month as four lawmakers signaled that they wouldn't support the measure, citing concerns that it would continue a precedent set by former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

But the inclusion of a provision in the four-page resolution, that Republicans argue provides due process to Omar, seems to have appeased at least one crucial voter, as Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) announced Tuesday that she would now support the measure. Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have publicly suggested that they would vote against it before the resolution's text was released Tuesday, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has said he remained undecided. Republican leadership aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to outline private whip counts, said they have the votes to pass the measure whenever Democrats formally appoint Omar to her committee.

Jayapal affirmed earlier this week that Democrats "will stand strongly with Rep. Omar: an esteemed and invaluable legislator, a respectful and kind colleague, and a courageous progressive leader."

On Sunday, Omar argued that House Republicans are trying to oust her from the HFAC because they disapprove of having a Muslim refugee from Somalia on the panel, as Common Dreamsreported.

Omar has been the frequent target of Islamophobic bigotry, including from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which paid Facebook to host attack ads that endangered the lawmaker's life. Due to credible death threats, the Minnesota Democrat is often assigned security by the U.S. Capitol Police.

In her Sunday conversation with CNN's Dana Bash, Omar acknowledged that she apologized for the wording of her February 2019 tweets tying U.S. lawmakers' support for Israel to money from lobbyists—at the time, she specifically called out AIPAC, which has given millions of dollars to members of Congress.

The GOP's campaign to expel her from the HFAC "is politically motivated," Omar said. "In some cases, it's motivated by the fact that many of these members don't believe a Muslim, a refugee, an African should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee."

On Monday, Omar asserted that her work on the HFAC has contributed positively to "advancing human rights, holding government officials accountable for past harms, and advancing a more just and peaceful foreign policy."

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) concurred, tweeting Monday that Omar's work on the panel "matters deeply and Republicans' cowardly efforts to remove and silence her are a disgrace."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) echoed Pressley, writing on social media: "It's shameful that Republicans are trying to remove her [from the HFAC] after smearing her for years. We need her voice, values, and expertise on the committee."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, noted that "Omar is once again facing ugly personal and political attacks with incredible courage and dignity."

"It is outrageous that the House leadership wants to boot her off the Foreign Affairs Committee," Sanders tweeted. "Fair-minded Republicans must join Democrats in preventing that from happening."

This article has been updated to include a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace.

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

The entire state of Florida, home to 22 million people, is currently being run as a giant Fox News campaign ad for the Ron DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign. As a method of crafting responsible public policy, this approach has a number of drawbacks. Yet when you set aside the politically archaic concept of “good governing,” it becomes clear that the DeSantis culture war strategy is highly effective air cover for the more substantive Republican project of class war. As he waves his hands and dazzles us with soundbites, he is trying to break the back of the Florida teachers union, which would rank as one of the most profoundly damaging blows to the labor movement in recent years. If the state’s incompetent Democratic Party can’t rally itself to cut through the torrent of performative bullshit and bigotry, we will soon wake up and find that this whiny, bullet-headed ex-jock has done to Florida’s workers what former Republican Gov. Scott Walker did to Wisconsin’s.

This week, DeSantis announced that he is proposing legislation designed to decimate the power of Florida’s teachers unions. It would prohibit dues checkoff, making it excruciating for the unions to collect dues, and outlaw teachers doing union work or handing out union materials on the job. He is also trying to undermine collective bargaining by creating a pot of money dedicated to giving raises to teachers — but setting an expiration date on it, and then claiming that unions fighting for better contracts are placing their members at risk of losing access to that money altogether. It’s not hard to see the logic. In a state where less than 5% of workers are union members, the teachers union is one of the only real bastions of Democratic-leaning labor power. As is always the case when Republicans howl about teachers unions, the pious pose of caring about parents is cover for a deliberate plan to destroy one of the few types of unions that are able to carry influence, even in red states. All of that studied concern for parents never seems to extend to the issue of providing a well-funded public education system for their kids.

People in Florida of all political persuasions often talk of Ron DeSantis as if he is a formidable juggernaut that Democrats can’t hope to restrain. This is false. He is a half-smart, washed up Ivy League baseball player whose defining characteristic is not cleverness or likeability, but overweening ambition. He has a goofy squeaky voice and palpable absence of warmth that will not translate well to the national stage. He is just as immoral as his rivals, but he lacks the polished presentation of Ted Cruz and the magnetic insanity of Donald Trump. Though, as a rule, I do not make electoral predictions, it would not be surprising to see him crash and burn when faced with a presidential campaign that depends, above all, on charisma. It is easy to imagine him as the latest in a long line of media-hyped red state governors whose self-importance crashed and sunk against the rocks of a competitive primary.

[DeSantis] is just as immoral as his rivals, but he lacks the polished presentation of Ted Cruz and the magnetic insanity of Donald Trump.

Nor is he some sort of king whose hold on Florida should be taken for granted. Florida is, in essence, a 50/50 state that should be extremely competitive in every election. So why did DeSantis win reelection last year by 20 points? Because Democratic turnout in the state plummeted by 20 points compared to the 2018 election, while Republican turnout increased. In 2018, Democrats ran Andrew Gillum, a progressive, younger candidate of color for governor, and almost won; in 2022, they ran a tepid old former Republican, and got whipped. When you don’t give people anything exciting to vote for, they don’t turn out to vote.

Like partisan redistricting, gerrymandering, and showy acts of racist voter suppression, DeSantis’s new salvo against teachers unions is an effort to turn a narrow, temporary advantage into a permanent one. Disenfranchise some Democrats, demoralize the rest, and demolish the few institutions that can sustain their statewide power. This is the DeSantis plan, and he isn’t shy about it. He doesn’t need to be. His base revels in it, and his opposition is weak, scared, and seemingly without a plan.

In Florida, all of the most important macro-issues of American politics are screaming out as we speak. The proud fascism that DeSantis embodies must be met with radicalism. Clinton-esque Democratic attempts to triangulate their way out of the problem are doomed to fail, and will only serve to drive home the untrue impression that Florida is a red state. You can’t equivocate with DeSantis. He puts Black people in jail at gunpoint for voting; he bans books and outlaws Black history teaching with a bluntness that would make George Orwell blush; he demonizes trans kids, perfectly happy to drive a few young people to suicide if it helps him solidify his own position. This guy is not some sophisticated mastermind — he’s an asshole. He is the embodiment of the worst 30% of Floridians, the ones who make the state a national punchline. And those who roll over for him, like the dozens of college presidents who publicly kowtow to his backwards “vision,” are cowards who will find themselves on the wrong side of history when the uncensored textbooks eventually get written.

That is one thing Florida proves: The absolute need for the Democrats to stop being weak and afraid of their own convictions. The second thing it proves is the absolute centrality of organized labor as a path out of the political quandary that afflicts America. Inequality has killed public faith in institutions, and modern media has entrenched national partisanship to a degree that some perceive as hopeless. Unions can roll back inequality. Unions can bring people of different political persuasions together in common cause in the workplace. Unions can show people an actual functioning democracy. Unions can lead regular people to political activism based on principles they learn by fighting for fair treatment for themselves. Unions can be strong enough to serve as a wall that stops the predations of opportunistic, hateful politicians like Ron DeSantis.

But all of that can only happen if many people are in unions. In Florida, as in the rest of the South, they’re mostly not. Unions need to spend much more money to organize new workers. Unions need to spend much more money organizing in the South. The Democratic Party needs to prioritize and enable this to a much larger degree — out of self-interest, if nothing else. Unions can change people, and they can change Florida, and they can change the country. But only if they rouse themselves out of their stupor and organize millions of people.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Hamilton Nolan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has unilaterally declared a 36-hour ceasefire in Ukraine to mark Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 7. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected Putin’s overture, however, saying that Russia wants to use Christmas as a pretext to stop Ukrainian advances in the Russian-occupied Donbas region. Putin’s declaration comes after about 1,000 U.S. faith leaders called in an open letter last month for a ceasefire during the holidays, inspired by the Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I, arguing that a pause in the fighting could create room for negotiations to peacefully end the conflict. We air a recent sermon by Bishop William Barber, one of the signatories, in which he discussed the need for a Christmas truce. “We need a ceasefire to interrupt this warring madness,” Barber said. “A ceasefire doesn’t mean both sides are equally culpable for starting the war, but it can have the impact of stopping the massive, massive killing on both sides.”

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

We look at the high stakes of the midterm elections for workers, including in key battleground states. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, says they are campaigning to empower working people, especially infrequent voters of color and new immigrants, to vote in their best interests. “We have got to make our votes a demand, and not a show of support for candidates that are with us one day and against us the next,” says Henry.

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

When real estate giant Redfin issued its monthly rental report in June, it noted that, for the first time in history, the median monthly rent in the U.S. had surpassed $2,000, a 15 percent bump from the previous year. 

Austin saw the largest increase of any metropolitan area, with rents over the past year surging by 48 percent to a median of $2,707 a month. But regardless of whether you're a tenant in Anaheim (median: $3,400); Boston (median: $3,970); Chicago (median: $2,454); Fort Lauderdale (median: $3,157); Los Angeles (median: $3,400); Miami (median: $3,157); Newark (median: $4,008) or Seattle (median: $3,097), rents are skyrocketing everywhere. 

While the affordable housing crisis is clearly worsening, tenant activists are quick to say that nothing about this crisis is new.

Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, calls it "a massive housing emergency." 

Coupled with the ongoing pandemic and ever-increasing food and fuel prices, low and moderate-income people in every corner of the country are suffering—and many are losing their homes.

According to the Eviction Lab, a Princeton University-based think tank that creates data and conducts research on the domestic rental housing crisis, in a typical year, property owners file 3.6 million eviction cases. In 2018, the last year for which statistics are available, 6 percent of all renters across the country were impacted; approximately one million lost their homes. 

"Evictions fell at the onset of the pandemic," the Eviction Lab reports, "but increased in the latter months of 2020." That trend has continued.

"The real estate industry is pushing back hard against eviction moratoriums and strengthened tenant protections won by the growing housing justice movement," Sumathy Kumar, campaign organizer at Housing Justice for All, a New York state coalition working to promote housing as a human right, told The Progressive. 

"The tenant movement has been trying to chip away at landlord control for decades and has had some victories," she says. "In response, the real estate industry is not only jacking up rents, it is spending millions on lobbying and electoral campaigns to secure its dominance. This is a national trend. Rents are going up, the cost of living is going up, and the federal government is not stepping in to do anything about it." 

The upshot, Kumar continues, is a predictable rise in homelessness, something that even the normally staid Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged. Indeed, a 2020 GAO report notes that whenever there's a $100 increase in the median rent, a whopping 9 percent increase in homelessness follows. 

But while the affordable housing crisis is clearly worsening, tenant activists are quick to say that nothing about this crisis is new.

"Well before the pandemic, there was not enough housing for people at the lowest incomes," Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told The Progressive. "Nationwide, we need at least seven million more units for people whose incomes are below $20,000 a year. We also need to expand the rental assistance program because only one in four people who are currently eligible for Section 8 rent vouchers actually get them."

Still, Saadian continues, even if millions of affordable apartments and rent vouchers magically became available, at the core of the crisis there's a "fundamental power imbalance between landlords and renters." This, she says, needs to be disrupted so that robust tenant protections can be enacted and enforced.

The Poor People's Campaign also sees solving the rent crisis as imperative, and its policy recommendations include expanding public housing and rental assistance programs; suspending foreclosures and evictions; and freezing rents.

"We have to win the resolve of those in power to be interested in ending poverty so that we can solve problems and not keep lining the pockets of Wall Street," Theoharis says. 

At the core of the crisis there's a fundamental power imbalance between landlords and renters.

To get that ball rolling, she and a wide array of housing and anti-poverty activists are supporting the Stable Families Act, which was introduced in the House by Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, and Representative Jimmy Gomez, Democrat of California, in early July. A Senate version, called the Eviction Crisis Act, was introduced by Senators Michael Bennett, Democrat of Colorado, and Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio. The act, if passed, would establish an annual fund of $3 billion to help low-income households stay in their homes by paying their rent arrears when they are threatened with eviction. 

This is not the only legislative fix that advocates are pushing for. Other priorities include national anti-rent gouging laws to regulate the percentage that rents can be raised, and "good cause eviction" safeguards to protect tenants from arbitrary removal. 

In addition, Diane Nilan, founder of HEAR US: Voices and Visibility for Homeless Children, suggests several additional policy changes to benefit low-income renters. "There is often a $100 non-refundable fee to apply for subsidized apartments," she explains. "The families who need this housing—who are desperate for this housing—can barely afford anything and if they manage to scrape together the $100 deposit, it's unconscionable for them not to get it back if their application is denied." 

What's more, Nilan continues, families are typically not told the reasons they were rejected. Most commonly, it comes down to bad credit, an arrest history, or a prior eviction. "Unless these policies are stopped, and people stop being punished for being poor, greedy property owners will continue to rake in money unabated," she says. "It's obscene."    

Housing Justice for All's Kumar agrees. "We need to create publicly-owned social housing. We need to fix the public housing that still exists and we need to pass strong tenant protections. All of these things are possible. This crisis can be an opportunity, a chance to invest in real solutions."

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

The post Water, Water, No Longer Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

The post Let’s Re-house Climate Displaced Families Everywhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Leckie.

As I write this, BBC reports that UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is “urgently” investigating reports of a chemical weapons attack in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The US Department of Defense finds the reports “deeply concerning.”

Usually when the western governments start quacking about “chemical attacks,” it means they’re planning to take action of some kind — airstrikes in Syria, sanctions on Russia, what have you — and are looking for an excuse.

This doesn’t look like an exception to that rule: Further down in the story, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar identifies the likely weapon as “phosphorous ammunition.”

That would most likely be white phosphorous, an element not classed as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It’s used as a component in smoke, illumination, incendiary, and tracer rounds for everything from small arms to large artillery, as well as in grenades, by most major militaries on Earth.

In theory, it’s illegal to use white phosphorous to attack “personnel,” but acceptable to use it on “equipment.”

That’s a pretty big loophole. As an 81mm mortarman in the US Marine Corps, I often trained on what we called “shake and bake” missions, involving a mix of white phosphorous and high explosive rounds. The justification? We would be firing at the enemy’s “equipment.” That would include their uniforms, canteens, etc. If they chose to stay with that “equipment,” well, that was their problem.

If the weapon in question is indeed white phosphorous, calling the incident a “chemical” attack is neither legally accurate nor novel. It’s nasty stuff — it burns incredibly hot and water won’t put it out — but it’s been in wide use since World War One. Including, probably, by both sides in the Ukrainian conflict.

In truth, chemical weapons aren’t especially useful on the modern battlefield. Soldiers of all nations carry, and are trained to use, protective gear. Such weapons have some utility in short-term “territory denial” — making the enemy not want to enter a given space for fear of exposure. They’re not a game-changer, though. And, with one exception, most regimes won’t use them precisely because the effects aren’t worth the negative reactions.

That exception is CS, commonly known as “tear gas.”

Unlike white phosphorous, “tear gas” IS banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can’t legally be used on the battlefields of international conflicts.

But most regimes, including the US government, freely use it on “their own people” (another phrase often used in pre-escalation propaganda) to break up protests, flush out suspects in standoffs with police, etc.

CS, which is highly flammable, was the agent used in the US government’s fiery 1993 massacre of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, near Waco, Texas.

The US also retains stockpiles of deadlier agents, which it agreed by treaty in 1997 to destroy by 2007. What’s the holdup?

Given the American government’s own retention of several actual chemical weapons and frequent, even casual, use of another,  calling a supposed white phosphorous attack in a war zone “deeply concerning” comes off as, at best, insincere and opportunistic.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

You’d need a heart made of granite not to be moved by Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian television producer who on Monday jumped onto the set of the state-run network Channel One during a live broadcast and shouted, “Stop the war, no to war!”

Perhaps the most touching aspect of Ovsyannikova’s action was the nature of the sign she held, which featured small Ukrainian and Russian flags and the words “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”

It wasn’t a slickly designed placard, produced by graphic designers paid by an NGO funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Instead, it was hand-drawn, with some letters getting narrower near the right margin as she realized she was running out of space. Did she make this at home on her dining room table? Did she have an office at work with a door she could lock? At some point the paper had clearly been rolled up in a tube because as Ovsyannikova held it up, it was trying to curl back on itself.

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

The post In the Ukraine War, We Can Make Oligarchs — Everywhere — the Big Losers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.