Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Yanni Chen about the appellate court TikTok ruling for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (12/16/24)

Janine Jackson: As we record on December 18, we’ve heard that the Supreme Court will address TikTok’s challenge to the federal law that was set to ban the platform in the US on January 19, unless they divest from Chinese ownership. The New York Times yesterday noted:

Lawmakers said the app’s ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans, or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred.

A DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an earlier challenge from TikTok, ruling that the measure was justified by what were called “grave national security threats.” The judges, the Times reported, were united in accepting the US government’s arguments that “the Chinese government could exploit the site to gain access to users’ data to spread covert disinformation.”

Well, one can practically hear the buzzing in the heads of anyone who has used social media, ever: “Access to our data? No way! Disinformation? You don’t say.” We are in medias res, but what’s at stake, not even so much for TikTok as a company, as for its 170 million US users’—and really everyone’s—ability to access information we want and need, and our rights within those spheres?

Yanni Chen is policy counsel at the group Free Press, who’ve been working on this. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Yanni Chen.

Yanni Chen: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.

JJ: The fact that the rhetoric around the TikTok ban relies on phrases like “foreign adversary nation” doesn’t make it sound very 21st century, for a start, but the statement that we aren’t offered evidence that the thing being charged is happening, shouldn’t that at least raise questions about this move, and what else might be going on?

NPR (5/14/24)

YC: I think absolutely, and that’s one thing that we found pretty troubling about the opinion in general. The court goes through and says that either intermediate or strict scrutiny, which are the higher of the two levels of constitutional analysis that is afforded to constitutional claims, applies here. And they say the highest scrutiny that the court applies, strict scrutiny, this law passes that, and then they don’t cite any evidence that the government didn’t provide publicly. They don’t substantiate it.

And so I think one thing that we have trouble with is the idea that the court can find that a law passes strict scrutiny with a clearly viewpoint-based angle, and not provide even a shred of evidence. And this opens up the door for further precedent, for further laws to be put on the books without that kind of substantiation either.

JJ: I’m going to ask you about that viewpoint angle, but I just want to say it early, in case it gets missed: We lose by making this a solely Trump thing. It’s not that he’s not as weird and dangerous as he is, but this TikTok ban, this proposed ban, doesn’t just map neatly onto a Trump agenda, does it?

YC: No, this is a bipartisan bill that passed overwhelmingly on both sides, by both the House and the Senate. I think it was justified mostly by national security concerns, but the committee hearings were closed doors. So the public doesn’t really know exactly what there is.

And as we’ve discussed before, there isn’t much public information to substantiate anything that we’re talking about. There’s no public evidence of the kind of content manipulation that TikTok is being accused of participating in.

NBC (11/1/23)

JJ: I would just draw you out on that, because the Times report tells me that Judge Sri Srinivasan said, yes, Americans might lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income, but national security threats, blah blah blah. But then also:

Because the record reflects that Congress’s decision was considered consistent with longstanding regulatory practice and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, [therefore] we are not in a position to set it aside.

And I wanted to hear how you respond to the idea that this has nothing to do with suppressing viewpoints, and it’s consistent with longstanding practice.

YC: Yeah, I’ll take the last one first. What Judge Srinivasan was alluding to with longstanding regulatory history on foreign control in communications, he’s talking about the broadcast space and the FCC. But broadcast and the FCC is kind of a special realm within the First Amendment, justified by bandwidth scarcity, or the amount of waves that are available to be used. So it receives, actually, a different level of First Amendment protection than other fora. So that’s one distinction.

And then also, certainly, the government and regulators can put in place restrictions for foreign control, but that doesn’t mean that they can do it in any way possible. So just because the government has that power with respect to some broadcasting does not mean that they have the power here. Remind me of the first part of that question, too.

FAIR.org (12/6/24)

JJ: What do we make of Judge Srinivasan’s contention that this conclusion, this ruling, has nothing to do with an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas? Now I think we can all say that it will, in effect, suppress particular messages or ideas, but this is trying to say, well, that’s not what it’s trying to do, so we shouldn’t address it in that way.

YC: Yeah, I think that position requires ignoring a lot of the statements that lawmakers said themselves. You have lawmakers on the record making statements about the type of content that not only TikTok is pushing, but US users are creating, that they take issue with. So you have to ignore all of the statements of the people who wrote the law themselves to get to that position. It’s hard to really swallow.

JJ: The statement that we’re not being offered evidence, actually, that what is being charged is happening—that should raise questions. But also in this context of where, US listeners, we hear all about the free market, the market responds to what people want, so banning an outlet isn’t a thing that should go down easy, generally speaking. And wouldn’t the government need to show that its stated goals could not be achieved any other way, other than banning this outlet? Shouldn’t they have to show that?

Yanni Chen: “It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, ‘Congress picked this one.'”

YC: Yeah. So that’s actually the exact requirement of strict scrutiny, is that it needs to be the most tailored, or the narrowest restriction possible, to achieve the need that the government wishes to accomplish. So, yes, I think, formally and on the books, that is the requirement. And I think the application is where you see some problems.

And I think what you’re seeing, also, between the majority opinion’s application of strict scrutiny and Judge Srinivasan’s intermediate scrutiny dialogue, is that I think it is relatively clear that strict scrutiny does apply, because it is clearly a viewpoint-based restriction. It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, “Congress picked this one.” That’s the definition of speaker discrimination. So you have that, but then you kind of have to do a backend to make it fit strict scrutiny and pass strict scrutiny. So you’re seeing some mental gymnastics happen in that logic.

And then, the other side of that, you have Judge Srinivasan, who says, “No, no, no, this is intermediate scrutiny.” And I think one reason, at least, motivating this is that strict scrutiny is a very high bar to meet, and most laws should not really pass it, just by definition of what that test is. And so having a law on the books that passed strict scrutiny does create risk of that precedent I talked about earlier, of creating bad law, where a flimsy application of strict scrutiny could lead to more laws passing strict scrutiny where they shouldn’t.

So that is one justification for applying intermediate scrutiny, but then making the law fit such that intermediate scrutiny is the right application, or the right test, then it strikes people as odd too, because it doesn’t actually do that. It is a law that requires a strict scrutiny test.

JJ: And I think it’s just weird, as a layperson, to hear, “Oh, we’re not trying to ban TikTok, Tiktok’s fine, we just need them to sell to a buyer that the US approves of.” I just feel like that lands weird, in terms of common sense, to folks.

YC: And that is something that was brought up in the litigation too. TikTok did raise the issue that, functionally, this divestment requirement would be a ban, and it’s kind of dealt with relatively, in a flip manner, in the decision itself. So you have Judge Ginsburg saying, “270 days, there’s plenty of time to meet a divestment requirement.” We just bypass the idea that it is something that you can’t do.

And the court does say, “Well, we can’t let the Chinese government set the standards for our requirements as the US government.” But what we’re talking about is the First Amendment. And the First Amendment applies to what the US government can do to US entities, and its citizens and Americans more broadly.

Free Press (11/2/23)

JJ: It just lands so weird to folks who are accustomed, at this point in 2024, to consuming news from around the world, from not unfettered, but relatively open access to media outlets from different countries, from different perspectives. It just sounds strange.

But part of the reason that this maybe has more legs than it might is that people do see a problem with platforms collecting their data, with using algorithms to push certain messages and to hold back others. And the question has to do with whether a wholesale ban of one platform is really the way to address that, or really how should we address that? If we were really concerned about privacy and targeted disinformation, what are some other responses that we might be looking at?

YC: Yeah, so TikTok is, as you recognize, not the only platform that collects too much data. Meta, certainly Google, other companies track data; they use it, they sell it, they sell it abroad, they sell it here and they sell it to governments. So TikTok is not a unique case.

So I think one thing at Free Press that we advocate for is wholesale data privacy protection, across the market, rather than targeting a single platform, and not only targeting a single platform, but taking it off the market. Because even if your concern is data collection by the Chinese government, in TikTok’s case, the Chinese government can still buy US user data through other intermediaries. So it doesn’t really make sense to cut people off from access from this single source—particularly, as you mentioned, people’s livelihoods depend on this platform, people really generate a sense of community through it—instead of addressing that larger issue. So I think there have been plenty of advocates for federal privacy law that is broadsweeping, but we can’t seem to get congressional momentum on that, where we can on a law that is, in at least some part, rooted in xenophobia.

JJ: And sinophobia, absolutely, which I think we’re going to be dealing with, anti-China—not “going to be dealing with,” we already are. Everything China is bad. It has a very musty feel about it, and I feel we’re in for a lot more of it.

YC: Yeah.

JJ: Finally, it feels a little bit like flailing. It feels a little bit like closing the barn door after the horses are out.

I mean, technology allows us to find news sources. Humanity makes us care about people, even if they are designated “official enemies.” Curiosity impels us to learn about what’s going on beyond our shores, and judgment helps us see what is weird disinformation, and what is news we can use. So the moment feels like people are far out in front of corporations and politicians. And I just want to ask you, finally, what hopeful thoughts you have about this.

Free Press (YouTube, 12/17/24)

YC: Hopeful thoughts? I mean, I do think that what you mentioned about, from a layman’s standpoint, that this strikes as odd. I do have a lot of hope that it seems like people are understanding that there’s something not right with this decision, and not right with this law. There was something not transparent about it in the first place. This is targeting a specific company, and how it affects our dialogue and our community, so that gives me a lot of hope that people aren’t taking what the court has said here as a wholesale endorsement of the law, and taking it for what it’s worth.

I think that that’s been something that’s really heartening, and I think that it puts the power in the people, and that will be even more important moving forward, where, as you mentioned, information like this is important, and it has a democratic value. And in closing that off here, we put ourselves in line with some of the more repressive governments that do this, and we legitimize that further, as the United States doing this as an example for other countries. So having the civilians, and people who aren’t in government necessarily, sense that there’s something wrong here is definitely heartening.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Yanni Chen; she’s policy counsel at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net, and they also have a YouTube channel where you can find their recent webinar on this, breaking down the TikTok ban. Yanni Chen, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

YC: Thank you for having me.

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

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”)

– Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est“

Yes, it seems fitting that I am writing these words on November 11, Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, a day that began as Armistice Day to celebrate the ending of World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

That phrase has become a sardonic joke in the century that has followed as wars have piled up upon wars to create a permanent condition, and the censorship and propaganda that became acute with WW I have been exacerbated a hundredfold today. The number of dead soldiers and civilians in the century since numbs a mind intent on counting numbers, as courage, love, and innocence wails from skeletons sleeping deep in dirt everywhere. The minds of the living are ravished at the thought of so much death.

Almost a year ago I reviewed a film – Four Died Trying – about four American men who were assassinated by the U.S. government because they opposed the wars upon which their country had come to rely: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote of this documentary film, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, that it was powerful, riveting, and masterful, the opening 58 minute prologue to a film series meant to be released at intervals over a few years. This prologue was released at the end of 2023 to great applause.
I wrote of it:

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series of films, beginning with its first installment, will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, colonialism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Then in March of this year I wrote about the second film in the series, The World As It Was, that explores the very disturbing history of the 1950s in the U.S.A., a decade that lay the foundation of fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and from which we now are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

But I was hopeful that if enough people got see to see these illuminating and brilliantly done films, built on more than one hundred and twenty interviews over six years with key historical figures, including many family members of the four men, change was possible because more people would demand accountability. That the movies were also entertaining, despite their profoundly serious content, boded well for their reaching a wide audience.

Just recently, I was again asked by the filmmakers, as were others, to preview the third film, Jack Joins the Revolution, about John F. Kennedy, from his youth to the hope he inspired when he entered politics in 1947 until his death on November 22, 1963 and the shock and despair that overtook the nation and the world. This third film matched the brilliance of the first two, but I did wonder why there had been a lapse of more than six months between this one and the previous.

It seemed to me that this was the perfect time for these films to be released in quick succession to have a profound effect.

But having watched this third film, I discovered to my great surprise that it has not been released, nor, even more shockingly, has the second one that I previewed eight months ago. Why?  I do not know, but it is very odd, to put it mildly. I do know that by not releasing them now a significant opportunity is being lost. These films would be of great help to the country, because they depict what a truly populist presidency looks like and the malign forces that oppose him.  But alas, for reasons that are hard to fathom, the films are being suppressed by someone.  We can only hope that the filmmakers will be successful in their efforts to free the films in time for them to be of value at this crucial moment in our history.

It is well known that JFK was a naval war hero in WW II, but less well known that his war experience turned him fiercely against war, that to end all wars was a fundamental theme of his for the rest of his life.

Jack Joins the Revolution explores this and reminds the viewer that Kennedy was well acquainted with death, having almost died eight times before he was assassinated, something he knew was coming. He was courageous in the extreme. Thus my earlier reference to Veterans Day, for JFK was a veteran of exceptional courage who not only saved his comrades when their PT boat was sunk by the Japanese in the south Pacific, but tried to the end to save his country and the world from the madness of the endless wars that have followed his death at the hands of the CIA and the U.S. warfare state.

This film clearly shows why he became such an obstacle to the imperial war machine and the CIA that to this very day have a huge stake in suppressing the truth about the man. If the film (and the others) is not released, these forces will have been successful. It will be another posthumous assassination.

For what is most striking about this episode is the light it sheds on John Kennedy’s forceful, long-standing anti-colonial and anti-imperial convictions for which he was attacked by politicians of both parties. It is suggested, and I think rightly, that this grew out of his Irish roots, for Ireland’s long fight for independence from British colonial occupation was dear to his heart and also a fundamental inspiration in the following decades for anti-colonial freedom fighters everywhere. It still is.

To listen to the film’s clips of his speeches on these topics is a revelation for those unfamiliar, not only with his radical views for a politician, but to his passionate eloquence that is sorely missing today. Attacking the policies of support for dictators and the coups against foreign leaders under the Eisenhower administration and the CIA led by Allen Dulles, JFK called for freedom and independence for people’s everywhere and the end of colonialism supported by the U.S. and other nations. Algeria, Iran, Cuba, Latin America, Africa – it’s a long list.

Even before he became president, in 1957, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. and around the world. He came out in support of Algerian independence from France and African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism.

As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African and Asian independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He believed that continued support of colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they be.

That speech caused an international uproar, and in the U.S.A. Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded in Africa and the Third World.

Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign to raise his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systematized and Kennedy was removed through a public execution for al the world to see.

Many voices speak to this and other issues in the film: Oliver Stone, James W. Douglass, RFK, Jr., Robert Dallek, Monica Wiesak, his niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Peter Dale Scott, James Galbraith, his nephew Stephen Smith, David Talbot, Peter Janney, and others.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks about the 1953 U.S. coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh of Iran and of the approximately 72 CIA-led known coups the United States engineered between 1947 and 1989; author Stephen Schlesinger of the Dulles brothers’ work for the United Fruit Company and their subsequent involvement in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz who was instituting land reform that threatened United Fruit’s hold on so much of the country. In both cases, and many others, the U.S. supported vicious dictators and decades of terrible bloodshed and civil wars. We see a clip of JFK himself condemn the U.S. support of the Cuban dictator Batista, who was finally overthrow by Fidel Castro and his rebel compatriots, the Cuban Revolution that Kennedy understood and sympathized with.

All this just leading up to Kennedy’s presidency, which will be covered in the next film.

Watching this riveting documentary, one cannot but be deeply impressed with a side of John Kennedy few know – his hatred of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, war, and his love of freedom for all people. One comes away from the film knowing full well why the CIA had branded him an arch-enemy even before he took office, and then when in office he rattled their cage so much more in the cause of peace.

And one is left asking: why then has this film (and its predecessor about the right-wing witch hunt and crackdown on dissent in the 1950s) not been released to the public at a time when nothing could be more timely?

It is a very strange kind of executive action, considering the brilliance and importance of these films for today – this very moment in history.

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

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

Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives.

Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighbourhood of Gaza.

For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, observed of the massacre that was actively assisted by the US: “The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”

Apparently, Israel’s decades of belligerent military occupation of the Palestinian territories, its 17-year blockade of Gaza denying its population the essentials of life, its intermittent destruction of the enclave by “mowing the lawn”, and now its carrying out of what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide” have nothing to do with the “sheer hell” the people of Gaza are suffering.

Those trying to win our consent to mass murder and the planned starvation of the people of Gaza by arguing that Hamas is using Palestinians in Gaza as human shields are engaged in the worst kind of bad-faith argument.

Let’s put back the context they are so keen to obscure:

1. Israel has been besieging the enclave of Gaza for decades. The tiny strip of land’s population comprises mostly Palestinian refugees who were long ago ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel and confined to Gaza. Their numbers have grown hugely since, to more than 2.3 million, within tightly-delimited “borders” policed – and blockaded – by Israel. Gaza is, in a true sense of the term, a giant concentration camp.

2. Gaza doesn’t have woods, mountains, caves in which Hamas fighters can hide or in which they can conceal their captives. It is not Afghanistan or Russia.

3. Gaza is almost entirely built-up – or it was until Israel destroyed most of its buildings over the past eight months. Small areas are open agricultural land or scrubland Israel will not allow Palestinians to develop – much of that has now been destroyed too. Watching over this tiny space 24/7 are armed Israeli drones. Move outside a building and you are being surveilled. You become a potential target for an assassination by Israel.

4. Hamas has two non-suicidal options for hiding the captives it seized in Israel on October 7. Either in a building, or underground in its tunnels, which were built precisely so parts of Gaza would be out of view of a hostile Israeli military. They are the nearest Hamas has to military bases. (Let us note here another hypocrisy: Israel’s military bases are often embedded in civilian communities inside Israel. Its defence ministry’s headquarters, the Kirya, is in the middle of built-up Tel Aviv.)

5. Hiding the captives above ground is the obviously more humanitarian option, as is clear from the images of those freed at the weekend. Given many months of captivity, they are reported to be in reasonable health.

6. After Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians at the weekend in Nuseirat camp, Hamas will now take all the hostages underground. That will be far worse for them, and it will make no difference to Israel’s wanton destruction of the buildings above. The overwhelming majority of the 70% of Gaza’s housing stock destroyed by Israel did not contain Israeli captives or Hamas fighters. It was targeted nonetheless because Israel’s military rampage has never been about getting the hostages back, or even about defeating Hamas, an impossible goal. It is about eradicating Gaza.

7. If Israel was really serious about bringing the captives home, it would be negotiating their release, not inducing a famine through an aid blockade that is starving everyone in Gaza: Hamas, Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages alike. The real human shields are the Israeli captives, pawns being sacrificed by Israel as it pursues its bigger war aims.

8. The truth is that Israel is waging a genocidal war on the Palestinian population to drive them out of Gaza. It needs to manufacture pretexts to avoid reaching a ceasefire deal that would bring the hostages home and bring the bloodshed to an end. The “rescue” of the Israeli captives by killing huge numbers of Palestinians provides ideal conditions for making negotiations impossible. That was the real success.

9. The jubilation – of Israelis, and western politicians and media – at the carnage of Palestinians in place of a ceasefire to end the bloodshed is the real problem. By continuing to treat Palestinians as sub-human, all are enabling the genocide to continue.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The vision

“I think science is the perfect way to solve this issue. Because a lot of innovation and invention happens in science, and technology is always changing. And so I think, if I really wanted to make a big impact, this would be the way to go.”

High schooler and science fair winner Victoria Ou

The spotlight

Last month, around 2,000 high school students from all over the world traveled to Los Angeles for the annual Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF. Reading the list of winning projects is … well, intimidating, even for a 30-year-old who technically has a degree in science. The top prize (of $75,000 — this is not the science fair from your high school gym) went to Grace Sun for her project “Novel Chemical Doping Strategy to Enhance N-Type Organic Electrochemical Transistors.” Another top award went to a project titled “Solving Second-Order Cone Programs in Matrix Multiplication Time.”

This year’s entrants included several climate-related projects as well: an AI approach to wildfire detection; a palm tree-inspired prototype for disaster-resilient building; a new energy-smart approach to optimizing indoor temperatures.

Youth climate activists get a lot of attention. We see them taking to the streets, demanding action, and holding policymakers accountable, and we believe their passion could change the world. But looking at these ISEF projects, it struck me that we often overlook this very different form of youth leadership.

These are not kids being pushed into crazy science projects by strict parents or overzealous teachers. They want to change the world, too — through research and innovation. And talking to them just confirms that.

“I want to help make sure that future generations can still have the same planet that we live on — that they don’t have to constantly worry about their health just because of what we have done in the past,” said Victoria Ou, another of this year’s top winners.

Victoria and Justin Huang, two 17-year-olds from The Woodlands College Park High School in Texas, designed a system that filters microplastic particles out of water using ultrasound waves. Their project received the Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations, which comes with a scholarship prize of $50,000.

Victoria and Justin pose with their award at ISEF. Society for Science / Lisa Fryklund

They’ve competed in science fairs before, starting in middle school. Justin notes that it’s a part of the culture in their school system — they both attend the Academy of Science and Technology within College Park High School. But this was their first time teaming up, and their first time going to ISEF. They’ve both been interested in environmental science for some time (Justin cites the Pixar movie WALL-E as an early influence) and constructed their device themselves, doing the research in their own homes.

In their experiments, the device they built was able to successfully trap up to 94 percent of the microplastic particles present in the system, letting clean water flow out the other side. They’re keen to continue working on the invention, refining the design and ultimately looking toward scaling it up. But in the meantime, they’re hopeful that their success can serve as an inspiration to other young scientists, or anyone wondering how they can make a difference on an issue as thorny as the microplastics crisis.

Talking to them was like talking to any passionate youngsters (if those youngsters used a lot of terminology you had to google on the side and also invented a device with the potential to change one of the biggest problems facing our planet). I spoke with them a couple weeks after their ISEF win about their project, their experiences at the science fair, and what they’ve learned along the way. Their responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. Do you want to start by telling me a little bit about yourselves, and your interest in science?

Victoria: OK, I can go first. I’m Victoria Ou, I’m a current junior — well, ongoing to senior, in high school. We’ve actually been in school together since elementary. So we had the same sixth-grade science teacher, and she was kind of our big inspiration for getting into science. She really showed a lot of passion for it. And she was the one who had us do a science project that was really similar to a science fair. For my project that year, I actually did plastic pollution, which is how this kind of all started. I first read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics that we’re getting into our water and our food. And I was like, This is definitely a huge problem.

Justin: Ms. Caldwell was really the first one who raised the issue about the environment, and how we have one Earth and what we’re doing to it is really not good. So moving forward into our future, we wanted to be able to help with this issue. That’s how we got involved with this environmental aspect of science. She was the big inspiration for both of us.

Q. I’m sure that must mean a lot to her. So tell me more about your research, and how you got started with this project.

Victoria: So, we know microplastics are a huge issue, right? They get into all of our food and water and produce a lot of harmful health issues. We were looking into some possible ways to filter them out of our water. And there are a lot of current methods that we were looking at, but they all have their own disadvantages. Some of them are too expensive or too slow to work. And some of them also added chemicals that could be harmful to our health, which we definitely don’t want.

We were thinking of a more noninvasive approach. And we came upon two main studies for this — the first showed how ultrasound could be used to get red blood cells within your bloodstream to clump together. And we thought, ”Oh, this is kind of a similar concept to microplastics in water.” So we kept digging a little more into that and found another study that showed how they could focus microplastics within the water. So you would have water flowing and the microplastics would gather into streams in the water. We used these two as a big inspiration for our own project.

Victoria and Justin hold up their invention in front of their booth at ISEF. While it looks a little like two pens taped together, it is not, in fact, two pens taped together. Why would you even think that. Society for Science / Chris Ayers Photography

Q: How exactly does your invention work (for a nonscience person)?

Victoria: So imagine you have your tube, and water’s flowing this way. We have a transducer [Editor’s note: That’s a device that converts energy into something else] attached to one section of the tube that’s producing ultrasound. So as water is going this way, the ultrasound produces a force that pushes microplastics back the opposite way, but the water is still able to get through. So at the end we have water coming out, but the microplastics, they all kind of get stuck in the upper half of the tube, and that’s where they eventually accumulate. And we can clean them out afterwards.

Justin: You can think of it as invisible filtration — because you can’t really see the sound waves. But the microplastics are still getting blocked within the system, within the tube itself.

One of the things that we thought of here was, if we’re looking at physical filters, they’re really easy to get clogged. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have the same problem. In our experimentation, we did tests with high concentrations of microplastics, like, thousands of times higher than what we would see in real life, as well as really high volumes of water. And our system was still able to work really well. In the end, the microplastics are clumped together in the entry part of the tube — and we would have to clean it out eventually, but it doesn’t really run into any of the problems that physical filters do.

Q. What was it like testing your device? How did you build the experiment?

Justin: So first, to create the system — there’s actually equipment out there to generate ultrasound, but it’s really expensive.

Victoria: We found that there are three main components, which are the signal generator [Ed: an electronic device that produces electrical signals, or currents], power amplifier [Ed: does what it sounds like], and piezoelectric transducers [Ed: basically, converting electricity into vibrations].

So the signal generator and power amplifier we were able to borrow from Electronics and Innovation [Ed. an equipment manufacturer in New York]. They were actually really generous because we emailed them, we were like, “Hey, could we maybe rent this for this amount of money?” But once they heard we were high school students trying to do research, they were like, “Actually, we can give you this old model for free.” And we were super blown away, definitely could not have done it without them. Once we had the signal generator and power amplifier, we could produce the electrical impulses needed for our transducers to convert into ultrasound.

Justin: How we collected our data was we had microplastic samples that we created, whether that be shavings of objects around the house that were plastic, or cutting up plastic straws or that kind of stuff. And then we would put it in water and then we would have a syringe pump that we could slowly push the water through. That’s how we tested the system. We collected the water at the end, and then we did some analysis to see how much we filtered.

Q. How do you envision your device being used in the real world?

Victoria: We were thinking of two main applications for our device. One would be in water-treatment plants, since that directly impacts us and the water we use. And we were also, based on previous studies in the field, thinking of using this for laundry machines, to clean up the synthetic textile particles that come out of the laundry machines. Because they actually contribute to around 35 percent of primary microplastics pollution. So being able to clean up the laundry water before it goes back into the environment would help a lot, since we cut them off at the source instead of having to continuously clean them up from the environment.

Q. What do you feel like you learned going through the process of inventing this device and then taking it to ISEF?

Justin: Definitely something that I would’ve liked to hear when I was back in eighth grade doing science fair for the first time, is to always stay curious. Because you never know if something that you’re going to learn now is going to be useful in the future. I remember when I was in fifth grade, I built some LED lights with my grandpa — and that engineering skill really translated over to actually building the system here. So just stay curious and don’t give up.

Victoria: I guess on that note, I could also add to not be afraid of failure. When I went to ISEF, I was actually super intimidated by everyone else. I’d talk to a person, they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to Harvard, I’m going to MIT,” and I was like, “Oh my gosh, how could I ever measure up to these people? They’ve probably been successful their whole lives.” And I think having gone through the whole ISEF process, I just never realized that they put in a lot of hard work, too. Everything you see is only just the surface, right? You don’t see all the late nights, hundreds of hours of hard work that everyone puts in, and you don’t see the parts where they fail, either. Because no one ever wants to talk about that. But I think going through failure at some point is super important, because we failed a lot of times throughout our project, and each time it helped us learn something that could help us achieve the next step of being able to reach our goal. So I think just don’t give up, and learn from your mistakes, but keep going.

Q. On the note of never giving up — does doing this work make you feel more hopeful about our future, and more empowered to act on big issues like pollution and the climate crisis?

Justin: Yeah, definitely. You always see these things on the internet or on TV about how so-and-so invented whatever, to cure some disease or to solve some environmental issue. It’s really surreal being the ones who were able to create this, because we thought it took like, decades and decades of research. And of course it does, and what we have is just kind of a small step in our journey. But being able to see how just two high schoolers, from their own home, without even a lab, could make a difference in the world — I feel like that was truly something that inspired us, that can inspire us to go even further in the future.

Victoria: For me, going to ISEF was already super fun and I think that was fulfilling enough. And for other people, they don’t necessarily have to feel like you have to win an award or do something super famous to make a difference. I volunteer with our township sometimes to clean up trash. And every time I do that, I still feel almost as fulfilled as standing on that stage, you know? So I think just seeing the little things in life also is super fulfilling, and seeing how you can help the people next to you.

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more about Justin and Victoria and their award-winning project (Fox 26 Houston)
• Read: recent Grist coverage on the ubiquity of microplastics and their effects on human health
• Read: about the advantages and drawbacks of bioplastic alternatives (BBC)
• Read: a few tips on how to avoid consuming microplastics as much as possible (Wirecutter)

A parting shot

In the U.K., environmental artist and activist Rob Arnold invented a filtration device (pictured here) that separates bits of plastic from sand and other natural detritus, using a filtering system that involves water flotation. He and other volunteers use the machine on beach cleanups to collect “nurdles,” tiny plastic pellets that are used to manufacture a range of plastic materials, but often end up as waste themselves.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Society for Science / Lisa Fryklund; Society for Science / Chris Ayers Photography

Parting shot: Ben Stansall / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A different kind of youth activist: Meet the high schoolers who invented a microplastics solution on Jun 5, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

I was radicalized really young because of my father—my father is a dope human and a Marxist and anti-colonial and raised me on Vandana Shiva and Noam Chomsky. I think that that gave me an exceptional understanding that capitalism was built against me.

And so I was rooted naturally in a revolutionary politics, even if I didn’t know what that meant as a teenager. I wanted to fight for people. And as I got older, I started to sort of put two and two together and I started to realize that I was a child sexual abuse survivor. And then that story has been the central focal point of my work in recent years, sitting with the grief of that reality and also sitting with the acknowledgement that I’ve never been normal and I don’t know what that is. I think having your agency taken away from you at such a young age makes you confront the reality that that can even happen. And so you are forced into a position of fighting for yourself to validate your story, and to be seen in a world that doesn’t want to see you on so many different levels.

What is the message that you have for other artists right now, in terms of the importance of political art?

I think the best and most interesting thinkers are people like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and people that talked about how art and political action go hand-in-hand because they’re the same vessel. Why make art if you have nothing to say? And why make art if you’re not going to respond to the world around you? Everyone’s implicated in this. Not only because of the US war machine, but because of the ways in which we’ve all played into this story. I’ve been involved in Palestinian organizing for almost two decades of my life, and that is also because of my father.

Something that I heard many times when I was growing up, this sort of question that people throw around in the playground. What would you do if a genocide happened? How would you act? These moral questions that we ask ourselves. I think that people think that they’re much better than they are. Artists have a lot of ego about what they do and who they are and how they function in this world. And I don’t think that you can be an artist of this world if you don’t have anything to say about it, and especially if you don’t have anything to say about the cruelty of it.

We owe it to the survivors of genocide, which my parents are, we owe it to people who have experienced this. We owe them our words, our language, our documentation, our resistance. I want people to understand that they owe resistance right now, we are all connected, we are all in this together, and that we are all responsible for one another. And I think that we keep going on this charade where we think that we are individualistic and that we are only here to live our lives to the fullest, or whatever corporate bullshit people want to tell themselves.

We are facing mass death, we are facing ecocide. Scientists are telling us that we have gone beyond the tipping point. And is this the legacy that we are going to leave behind? That we as a society, allowed people to be subjugated to this kind of carnage. For the first time in the history of the world, we are actually being faced through mass documentation with what we’ve known has been happening for hundreds of years, through Western European imperialism. To me, it’s just like, what kind of art do you want to make, and what kind of artist do you want to be?

You have such a significant body of public-facing written work, what was the journey to establish all of that? Did you always feel emboldened to share your words on the world’s stage, or was it a process to feel ready to do that?

I never had anyone validate that it was okay or good. I didn’t have that teacher that saw me and was like, “I’m going to pluck you out and make you a star.” I don’t have that journey, and I was always seeking that. I have a really backward story because I didn’t go to school for writing, I didn’t finish a degree. I’m out here without formal education.

I’ve seen it as something that has held me back. Not having the right networking or feeling like I’m not understood as a writer, has kept me in my own way. I feel like I’m too emotional and I feel like I’m too feeling. And I think that those things are really disregarded in the writing world, or even just in the world. And my work is about initiating the practice of looking at the world around you and understanding that there’s just so much wisdom everywhere.

For me, the page is the place where I go to understand myself and to express myself. I grew up around a lot of rules, so I had to come home and that was it, and I couldn’t go out again. That confinement kind of forced me to delve deeper into learning and reading and seeking. And that, to me, is a very Muslim pursuit. My entire practice is trying to decode something that has been lost through colonization, I’m trying to decode an ancestral art. This is the person that I am, and I have to have a place to release it and allow it to exist. Like a Bird, my novel that came out a couple of years ago, I started writing it when I was 12 years old. I know now it was the only way that I could attempt to say these things happened to me. It was easier to do it through someone else’s story and just to let it be a story that I was writing.

The book is so much about my life story. It’s about a girl who gets gang raped and it’s by a family friend. I wanted to understand what happens to somebody when they are abandoned, and what happens when life feels hopeless. Is there a possibility of renewal? And I think my own life is a continuation of that question, really pushing my own boundaries to prove to myself that healing is possible. I look to someone like Frida Kahlo as a blueprint for somebody who just was very misunderstood, and probably a lot of people thought was a kooky weirdo. She just had to do what she had to do. You just have to release it somehow. The only access point to healing is being able to visit that side of trauma and find a way to exorcize it.

You’ve touched on this already, but can you expand more on how you cultivate hope in all sorts of different circumstances? Because it sounds like you’re very practiced in that.

I think when your whole life stops at a young age and what is good or normal is not accessible to you because you don’t have those things in your family structure, you don’t have the love of a mother, you have to learn external and internal methods and ways to believe in something more.

Maybe until October 2023, people might’ve thought that that was kind of delusional. I’ve seen that same belief that I’ve had to instill in myself in Palestinians. I’ve seen this extraordinary will, this believing that your life means something—even in death it means something. And that requires hope to go on another day. Like Refaat Alareer, we saw him break towards the end, but up until then, he had so much hopefulness. It says so much about the severity of the situation when people even in that situation begin to lose hope. But we can’t lose hope for them. It is actually our responsibility to not lose hope. It sounds like sort of this political catchphrase, but I think that it’s kind of how I feel about love.

I think that love is the most revolutionary act that any of us can do. This revolution requires more love than we can actually comprehend. You need to know that there’s something that you’re fighting for, that there’s something that you’re working towards. You can’t lose that sight, especially when you’re doing work like this.

The greatest of us, of artists, of writers, were people who hoped beyond despair. Someone like James Baldwin who experienced so much in his lifetime. He embodied and held so much hope and love for his people, and it’s a hope and love even for a country that has betrayed him. That takes a certain kind of hope. It takes a certain kind of person, it takes a certain kind of humility. I think hope is also about humility.

I’m curious to learn more about the grief studies course you are teaching, and hope you could tell me a bit more about your philosophy as an educator, and your intention in creating a course like this.

I’ve been grieving my whole life: for a life I didn’t get, for an experience that wasn’t mine, for love that I didn’t have. And I think that that is the product of being a survivor and also a child sexual abuse survivor. You’re stripped of so much that in order to choose life, you have to choose not to die. And that requires so much work, and that is also grief-stricken. As a body that needs to do all this work, as a body that has a chronic illness, I’m constantly feeling annoyed by myself and by the reality of my situation. I think that everybody goes about their days just through disassociation and performativity of niceties. And I didn’t come on this earth like that. I don’t know how to do small talk. I don’t want to learn how to do small talk.

Nikki Giovanni, she has this new documentary out on HBO, and I felt so seen [watching it]. She’s like, “I don’t like people. I love humanity, but I don’t really like people.” I really relate to that. Experiencing harm, experiencing traumatic events, being confused by other people, being confused by the stories people say about me, because being a public person, being a femme person, so much is thrown at you that you have to invisibly navigate. A lot of my experience is sort of stricken with grief, and I’m constantly trying to understand where to place it.

I feel safer in environments where I can speak deeply about things, where I can go to a place with somebody and they’re willing to go to that place with me. Teaching is one of those places where I can do that. And I think that that’s one of my key tools in the revolution.

I had to do so much to get here, and I wrote a whole book about it and that feeling wasn’t quenched or satiated, because the book didn’t become a bestseller. Nothing that I thought would happen with Who Is Wellness For? Nothing happened. I just was in this standstill for a year, experiencing so much depression because I talk about being an incest survivor and nothing changes. Everything remains the same.

So much happened in that process of putting this book out. I confronted my editor who was terrible, and it was just a really, really brutal experience. Once I was able to come out of that, I understood that maybe my work is more soft and noble and quieter, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to just teach for the rest of my life, and use the book as a blueprint of what I’m teaching, because I’m doing it myself and I’ve done it myself, and having that be something that’s worth my time. I had to reframe what success looked like and reframe what I want to be known for.

Of course I have wanted the validation that a lot of us seek as writers. The checklist of, “you’re in the New Yorker,” “you’re a bestseller,” all of the things. What if none of that happens? Is the work still valid? Am I nothing if I feel like nobody’s read this book? How do I find a way to channel my own grief of this experience, and alchemize it into something else that’s actually transformative and interesting to me? I get to see the fruits of my labor, and actually people being shifted by it in real time. And that just is so much more significant to me than getting the pat in the back that I’ve longed for from this industry.

At the end of the day, it’s a rigged game, and we know that. It really isn’t a value judgment. Being in this post-October landscape of seeing, if I am for Palestine, then that means I have to be willing to lose it all. And if I lose it all, where do I start? I have made a lot of enemies in the last couple of months, but I’ve also gained so much. And learning even more about the ways in which cultural institutions are being re-envisioned to prioritize and platform Palestinian writers and voices, acknowledging this is a liberatory resistance. Alongside Black liberation in the uprising of 2020, this is sort of one of the biggest movements that we’ve faced. To me, that says so much about what this moment means. I feel excited about all the things that are going to come from me burning the house down and just starting anew.

I think that that comraderie is actually way more significant, is going to give me way more sustenance to keep going than a fucking PEN Award ever would. And that is the real tea. The institutions know this as well. They are betting on our willingness to keep silent and to keep pretending as if this isn’t a genocide. I think a lot of people are feeling hopeless right now. I feel very hopeful. Because I’ve seen the ways that these political movements, regardless of the ways that the fascist governments confront us, I’ve seen this deep strengthening of our principles and our vision. Our vision is getting clearer, of what we want, of what we believe is responsible and true and utopic, even. That all of that is really vital right now.

If liberation is possible, what do we want it to look like? A prompt that I’ve been saying in class has been, what does a liberated and free Palestine look like to you? And using it as sort of this imaginative beginning of something that could become reality. When you want something, you can make it happen. There’s no other answer for my life. There’s no other reason that I am here, other than that at a very young age, I knew I had something to say. Nobody helped me get to the place that I wanted to get, so I knew I had to get myself there. My life is an act of liberation. I know it’s possible. And I think all of us are required to exercise that muscle. That hope is discipline. That ability to believe and hold that focus so acutely in our minds that there is liberation on the horizon, and to know what it feels like, to know what it tastes like, to know what it is. That, to me, is really exciting about this time, and we’re really getting to do that together.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

“Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said in an article on the Marion Record’s website. “But we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

The police action raised concerns among press freedom groups — including CPJ – and national news organizations about the possible violation of federal law limiting local law enforcement’s ability to search newsrooms.

In a letter sent to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody on Sunday, attorneys for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that, “under any circumstances, the raid and seizure appeared overbroad and unduly intrusive.” The letter was signed by CPJ along with more than 30 media outlets.

The use of search warrants against journalists remains rare in the United States, according to statistics maintained by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a CPJ partner. In 2019, San Francisco law enforcement and federal agents seized unreported source material from the home office of freelance video reporter Brian Carmody, who eventually won a settlement against the FBI.

Police Chief Cody told The Associated Press via email that, while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.” The report said that Cody did not provide further information about what the wrongdoing was.

Marion County police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emails and phone calls requesting comment.

To better understand the local context of the raid, CPJ spoke by phone with Sherman Smith, the editor in chief of the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news website focused on Kansas politics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why do you think that law enforcement used this dragnet, and highly questionable, approach? Isn’t there a state shield law in Kansas?

We really need the court to release the affidavit that supports the search warrant to get more clarity about why they thought this was necessary.

The exception to Kansas’ state shield law is only in matters of national security, and I think we can all agree that this does not rise to that level.

From the police statement on their Facebook page, they believed that this conduct [of the Marion County Record] amounted to identity theft and justified the raid. And I think the media everywhere would simply say they are wrong. If there were other motivations [they] are not exactly clear to me right now.

This is a small town of about 2,000 people, and so there is rampant potential for conflicts of interest with everybody involved. There’s a lot of small-town drama that we haven’t all clearly unpacked yet. Hopefully the affidavit will shine a light on that.

What message does this send to journalists working in Kansas?

I think it has this chilling effect on journalists in Kansas. If law enforcement is able to get away with this– and they appear now to have the support of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation– that means there’s open season on journalists everywhere in Kansas,

Police and prosecutors always want to know, who’s giving us [journalists] information? What do we know? How did we know it? And the ability of police to obtain our unreported information, and to identify our sources would prohibit us from doing our job; it would stop the flow of information; it would be a direct attack on democracy. And that’s why we’re all very interested in what happens here.

How has this event affected your thinking about protecting the Kansas Reflector’s unreported source material?

We’re just starting to have those conversations. One of the things that the raid underscores here is the importance of being able to back up information on the cloud in a way that we can continue to access it, if personal devices are taken.

We have to take great precautions to protect our sources, how we store the information on our personal devices and anywhere else.

We are eager for the legal outcome here, and [are hopeful that] it will send a clear signal to law enforcement that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

The first time we spoke in January 2022, it was about how Kansas lawmakers barred media from the Senate floor, stymieing newsgathering. Do you think that kind of state-level activity creates a permission structure for local law enforcement to infringe upon freedom of the press?

It shows that we can’t take our freedoms for granted. We have to constantly fight to preserve them. Part of this is the need to educate people about what we do, and why we do it, and the value that we, as journalists, bring.

There is a general misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, by the public about who we [journalists] are and what we do. And so we have to do a better job of going out and telling our story and making it clear that we [journalists] are people who are in these communities that are gathering information, vetting that information, trying to hold powerful people accountable, and trying to get information out that somebody doesn’t want to have disclosed. That this kind of work is at the heart of so much of what we do.

When we see an action like what happened in Marion County. You know, it’s very clearly a direct attack on newspapers saying things that [powerful people] don’t want the public to hear. 

What are the key takeaways for people outside of Kansas to understand about what’s happening in Marion County right now?

It’s important to push back on the narrative that police have put out there, which is that no reporter is above the law. The issue is not about a reporter being above the law, everybody understands that nobody’s above the law.

The question is whether police can act outside the law in this way and get away with it. What would the repercussions be?

I think there’s a lot still to understand about, for instance, why a judge would sign this in the first place, and also understanding the qualifications for a magistrate judge in Kansas. In this case, [the judge] is a licensed attorney, but under Kansas law, it doesn’t have to be. And so I think, in Kansas, and perhaps elsewhere, we should be looking at, you know, who is qualified to sign off on a search warrant? And are they really doing more than simply rubber stamping them?

Usually when there are these kinds of attacks on journalists, law enforcement try to pick off somebody who is a freelancer, or maybe a contributor of some kind, but not a full time employee for a news organization. And this case is a bit of an outlier: it’s a raid on [an] entire news organization that’s been in operation since the post-Civil War era. 

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

“Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said in an article on the Marion Record’s website. “But we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

The police action raised concerns among press freedom groups — including CPJ – and national news organizations about the possible violation of federal law limiting local law enforcement’s ability to search newsrooms.

In a letter sent to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody on Sunday, attorneys for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that, “under any circumstances, the raid and seizure appeared overbroad and unduly intrusive.” The letter was signed by CPJ along with more than 30 media outlets.

The use of search warrants against journalists remains rare in the United States, according to statistics maintained by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a CPJ partner. In 2019, San Francisco law enforcement and federal agents seized unreported source material from the home office of freelance video reporter Brian Carmody, who eventually won a settlement against the FBI.

Police Chief Cody told The Associated Press via email that, while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.” The report said that Cody did not provide further information about what the wrongdoing was.

Marion County police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emails and phone calls requesting comment.

To better understand the local context of the raid, CPJ spoke by phone with Sherman Smith, the editor in chief of the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news website focused on Kansas politics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why do you think that law enforcement used this dragnet, and highly questionable, approach? Isn’t there a state shield law in Kansas?

We really need the court to release the affidavit that supports the search warrant to get more clarity about why they thought this was necessary.

The exception to Kansas’ state shield law is only in matters of national security, and I think we can all agree that this does not rise to that level.

From the police statement on their Facebook page, they believed that this conduct [of the Marion County Record] amounted to identity theft and justified the raid. And I think the media everywhere would simply say they are wrong. If there were other motivations [they] are not exactly clear to me right now.

This is a small town of about 2,000 people, and so there is rampant potential for conflicts of interest with everybody involved. There’s a lot of small-town drama that we haven’t all clearly unpacked yet. Hopefully the affidavit will shine a light on that.

What message does this send to journalists working in Kansas?

I think it has this chilling effect on journalists in Kansas. If law enforcement is able to get away with this– and they appear now to have the support of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation– that means there’s open season on journalists everywhere in Kansas,

Police and prosecutors always want to know, who’s giving us [journalists] information? What do we know? How did we know it? And the ability of police to obtain our unreported information, and to identify our sources would prohibit us from doing our job; it would stop the flow of information; it would be a direct attack on democracy. And that’s why we’re all very interested in what happens here.

How has this event affected your thinking about protecting the Kansas Reflector’s unreported source material?

We’re just starting to have those conversations. One of the things that the raid underscores here is the importance of being able to back up information on the cloud in a way that we can continue to access it, if personal devices are taken.

We have to take great precautions to protect our sources, how we store the information on our personal devices and anywhere else.

We are eager for the legal outcome here, and [are hopeful that] it will send a clear signal to law enforcement that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

The first time we spoke in January 2022, it was about how Kansas lawmakers barred media from the Senate floor, stymieing newsgathering. Do you think that kind of state-level activity creates a permission structure for local law enforcement to infringe upon freedom of the press?

It shows that we can’t take our freedoms for granted. We have to constantly fight to preserve them. Part of this is the need to educate people about what we do, and why we do it, and the value that we, as journalists, bring.

There is a general misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, by the public about who we [journalists] are and what we do. And so we have to do a better job of going out and telling our story and making it clear that we [journalists] are people who are in these communities that are gathering information, vetting that information, trying to hold powerful people accountable, and trying to get information out that somebody doesn’t want to have disclosed. That this kind of work is at the heart of so much of what we do.

When we see an action like what happened in Marion County. You know, it’s very clearly a direct attack on newspapers saying things that [powerful people] don’t want the public to hear. 

What are the key takeaways for people outside of Kansas to understand about what’s happening in Marion County right now?

It’s important to push back on the narrative that police have put out there, which is that no reporter is above the law. The issue is not about a reporter being above the law, everybody understands that nobody’s above the law.

The question is whether police can act outside the law in this way and get away with it. What would the repercussions be?

I think there’s a lot still to understand about, for instance, why a judge would sign this in the first place, and also understanding the qualifications for a magistrate judge in Kansas. In this case, [the judge] is a licensed attorney, but under Kansas law, it doesn’t have to be. And so I think, in Kansas, and perhaps elsewhere, we should be looking at, you know, who is qualified to sign off on a search warrant? And are they really doing more than simply rubber stamping them?

Usually when there are these kinds of attacks on journalists, law enforcement try to pick off somebody who is a freelancer, or maybe a contributor of some kind, but not a full time employee for a news organization. And this case is a bit of an outlier: it’s a raid on [an] entire news organization that’s been in operation since the post-Civil War era. 

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

The Biden administration said the bill will help deliver on the president’s pledge to cut the United States’ emissions in half by 2030, and independent analyses estimated that it would help slash domestic emissions by 43 to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. Now, researchers have made an updated prediction. The Rhodium Group, an independent analytics firm that tracks greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. economy, published a report on Thursday that shows just how much climate progress the IRA will usher in — and where the legislation will fall flat. 

“Nearly one year after it passed, the IRA’s effects are coming into clearer focus,” a spokesperson for Rhodium Group said. 

The report, the ninth edition of Rhodium’s annual emissions assessment, found that the IRA and state-level climate bills that have been signed into law by governors across the country in recent years will drive emissions down between 29 and 42 percent in 2030, compared to 2005 levels. By 2035, greenhouse gas emissions will decrease between 32 and 51 percent. Prior to the IRA’s passage, the nation was on track to cut emissions by 26 to 41 percent by 2035, according to Rhodium’s estimate from 2022. Rhodium called the overall reductions “a meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations for the U.S. emissions trajectory.” 

Thanks to the IRA’s subsidies, solar and wind energy are already becoming a lot cheaper: solar by nearly 40 percent and wind by 55 percent. The legislation will also influence the speed with which electric vehicles replace gas-powered cars. In 2035, electric vehicles will comprise between one-third and two-thirds of all passenger car sales, the report said. That’s meaningful progress, but the emissions reductions aren’t steep enough to get the U.S. fully on track to meet its pledge to reduce emissions 50 to 52 percent by 2030 under the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international treaty on climate change that aims to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). 

That’s because federal policy levers are only one piece of the decarbonization puzzle. A number of other factors could influence the speed and extent to which renewable energy technologies replace oil, coal, and gas, including how the industrial sector behaves and whether states continue to pass ambitious climate policies.  

And because the IRA revolves around incentives for clean energy, rather than penalties for fossil fuel use, some of the factors impacting the speed with which the economy decarbonizes won’t be influenced by the federal legislation. 

For example, Rhodium projects that natural gas, which made up roughly 36 percent of the nation’s power mix in 2022, will comprise 6 to 29 percent of the power supply by 2035, depending on whether utilities take advantage of the incentives in the bill and what types of renewable energies are feasible in their markets. Natural gas, a cheap source of energy, surpassed coal as the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2016. Despite the incentives in the IRA, gas is still abundant, affordable, and here to stay for the foreseeable future. 

In New York City, a city that has positioned itself as a leader in the green transition and has vowed to reduce fossil fuel use 80 percent by 2050, environmental activists successfully lobbied for the closure of the nearby Indian Point Nuclear plant, which prompted the city to temporarily rely on natural gas-powered plants as it works to build infrastructure that can funnel hydropower from Canada to Queens. 

Over the course of the next decade, policymakers, regulators, and utility executives will weigh similar trade-offs between cost, climate impact, and public opinion across the country, and they won’t all choose the same path. That will result in a patchy network of green and dirty electricity. The ranges presented in the new Rhodium report account for that patchiness. 

But they also show that the IRA is making a difference. “Though there’s uncertainty on just how fast the U.S. scales up renewable energy on the grid or EVs on the road, those levels of deployment would be meaningfully lower than what we’re estimating in our modeling under otherwise the same conditions absent the IRA,” Ben King, lead author of the report, told Grist. 

In order to continue making progress on climate change, Congress will likely need to pass additional climate laws, including legislation directed at hastening the permitting process for new large-scale renewable energy projects, beefing up the green energy workforce, and resolving kinks in the supply chain that are hamstringing green technology deployment. That has become harder to do since Republicans retook control of the House of Representatives in January. 

The goals of the Paris Agreement are still within reach, the report reads, “but getting there won’t be easy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One year in, the Inflation Reduction Act is working — kind of on Jul 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

There’s sparkling water and beer for the drinkers and fruit, pretty much. We’ve been pretty into wafer cookies, so those are all also on it, Loacker Quadratinis. I’d recommend picking them up. The lemon is the best flavor.

Do you have a pre-show ritual of any sort?

On the last tour, I’ve been really drinking a lot of tea, like ginger lemon tea. So usually before the show, I eat right after soundcheck, and then I drink tea just right up until an hour before the show, and then I just sit around.

Do you drink a lot of water?

Yeah, I drink a lot of water, but then I have to cut it off an hour before so that I don’t have to pee for the entire set.

On the note of drinking, I know that recently, you’ve reached 1,000 days without alcohol, which is very hard. Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

It’s very inspiring. Have you noticed as far as writing process or just creating in general, has that changed any part of your process? Cutting it out completely?

Yeah, because it was, at a certain point, part of my creative process. I thought that drinking opened me up a little bit more to writing and it felt like the ideas would flow a little bit more naturally or quickly. After I stopped, it halted my writing, and I had a pretty decent amount of time feeling like I didn’t really know if it was going to be the same again.

What I’ve found is that with substances and writing, it felt like it was easy, but I think it was more of a hindrance where now that I have a more clear head, I can navigate the creative process easier, even if it maybe doesn’t feel like I’m getting on the same roll, or something that I would’ve felt like when I was intoxicated. It’s more of a feeling of chipping away at it, where I’m able to work on something and I’m able to see what’s working and what’s not working. Maybe it’s not as exciting as it was when it was a rollercoaster of like, “Will I finish this before I’m totally obliterated?”

But it’s more like, you’re making progress on something, and I treat it more as a long process now, where I chip away at it, and I set it down and I come back to it later and I chip away at it again. It’s a different process these days, but it is more efficient, and I think I’m having better results.

Was it hard to cope with that realization? Were you relying on it in any way to get through your process, or was it a slow, easy let go, like, “I can do this without it?”

I was definitely relying on it, so it did feel like a struggle to get back into it after I quit it. But it’s like almost everything—quitting drinking at first has felt daunting with socializing, or touring or really anything. You think, “How am I going to be able to do this without drinking or without that thing that was helping me?”

But as you get your footing again, you realize that there was a time when you could do all these things without drinking and without substances, and you just find yourself again. So it’s felt like that, where it feels natural again. That’s the tricky thing with alcohol and with whatever, it starts to make you think you can’t do things without it, but you are of course able to, and at a higher level, because you’re using your whole brain, and not just a slippery part of it.

How is it on tour when everybody else is doing their own thing, and are you like, “Oh, after the show, I’m going to be like, “Bye, guys. I’m going to go be by myself.”

It depends. It’s funny because touring with drinking, it’s like after every show, I would drink, whether that’s because we had a good show or because we had a bad show. It was just like, “The show’s done. I’m going to have a drink.” There are still people in the group that do that, and that’s whatever, doesn’t matter to me. But for me, it’s good show or bad show, these days, I’m like, “I’m going to go to bed soon.” It’s treating it more like it’s your day-to-day rather than every night’s a party.

Because it is a job and it’s a really cool job, but at the end of the show, I pack up my stuff, and then like any other day, it’s like, “It’s probably bedtime.” When it’s a big show and everybody’s celebrating and stuff, it’s nice to hang out and it’s good. But day-to-day in life for me, I am keeping to myself, and it translates to the road as well now. At first, it was a big adjustment because I had always viewed it as like, we’re out on the road and it’s a constant celebration.

It’s a challenging thing to do, waking up in a different place every day or driving to a different place every day, and it’s very tiring. I think when you’re treating it as a party, you’re not realizing how badly it’s just compounding the damage you’re doing to your body. And by the end of the tour, you’re so tired and it doesn’t have to be that way. Just by pacing yourself, you can have a good time, the whole time, and get home and not need to catch up on sleep.

You can be kind to your future self.

Yeah, exactly.

What have you been listening to lately?

That is a good question. I don’t really know if I’ve been listening too much. I listened to Frank Sinatra, Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I’ve listened to that record a few times. I really have been trying to read a lot, and that has been taking over my music listening time. Not that I really had music listening time before then, but if I’m listening to something, it’s probably like I’m letting Spotify just roll. My friend sent me a playlist. That’s what I’ve been listening to. And it’s just Spotify, I listen to that JD Beck and Domi record.

I let Spotify just go off of that, and it’s like new jazz, which is fun and it’s not really active listening, but I’ve been getting a little bit more into jazz. I’m interested in those melodies.

How do you feel about album cycling, dropping singles before? I guess you’ve been doing it for a while, but do you ever have more control about dropping singles, or which ones? Do you pretty much have full creative control over your project, for this one?

Most of my albums are narratives, but in the past, the label’s chosen or they’ve just decided which ones would work the best as singles. This time around with the story [on Norm], there were things that I didn’t want to give away at first.

So I thought that doing it chronologically would be the best way to do it, just starting the first single as the first song, then the second song, then the third song. I think it worked out okay, probably the label would’ve done something differently. But it’s just such a weird album, I didn’t want to end up giving away the end of the record with the first singles.

It’s such a different time for music and the way that people listen to music is so different, that dropping singles before the record is weird now.

I read up about how you have a disco album that you are in the works with, or were in the works?

I was working on a disco record before. It was the record that I was working on when COVID started. I kept working on it when everything shut down. It was just really not good. It wasn’t going well. I was drinking a lot, writing that record, the disco record, and it was going in a really weird direction.

I was really forcing a story over these four-on-the-floor disco beats, and it was just really terrible. I stopped drinking and I scrapped that record at the same-ish time, because I took a step back and saw it for what it was and was like, “I need to do something else.” But some of the songs I’ve repurposed. “Halloween Store” is a song from the Disco era. “Wasted On You” is just past the disco era. And then I’ve got another record with some guys from HOME, and I repurposed some stuff for that as well.

How do you piece your track transitions together? For the building of a concept record, do you put them together as you’re still writing all of the songs and just figure out your track listing while you’re writing, or do you at the end just re-sort everything?

It depends. On Norm, a lot of it is happy accidents where, when it would come to the end of the song, certain instruments, I would improvise something and just leave it how it was, and as I would continue, I would improvise something and layer it, harmonize it, and it would land in a certain spot. Once I had figured out what the order was going to be, I would see where it landed and where the next thing started.

Then I would tweak them, so that meant using the first half of the thing and then changing the second half so that it lands in a different spot, more appropriate to where the other one will start. A lot of the things landed correctly and I didn’t have to rewrite them.

It’s half lucky, and tweaking that lucky part. I really liked working on that, and it’s fun to try and write things so they move naturally, from one thing into another. I almost had more fun writing those than the songs.

At a certain point in the writing, you have the sessions, but you also have the ordering session, cascading track to track, and it’s like, something’s not quite working, where you’ll realize, “I want it to be a semi-tone down at the very end, so that it’ll pick up correctly.”

It’s just going back and forth from the ordering session to the song sessions and tweaking something and bouncing it back to the ordering session and listening through. You have to have that zoomed out view of the record if you want things to work together in that way. So it’s really helpful having it cascading through tracks as well, because then you can just bounce it and re-bounce it and put it in the session and put it back to where it was, and see how it works differently.

For this record, I read that you mainly start writing a song by sitting at the piano, but when you write on guitar, do you have a specific tuning that you always circle back to, and noodle around before you find chord progressions?

Yeah, with guitar, I don’t really venture out of standard, it’s mostly standard or drop D if I can’t get something to work in standard. I don’t really do other tunings, mostly because playing them live, it gets too complicated. It’s like, “Am I going to be playing a million guitars or tuning this one?” But that’s why I don’t write a ton on guitar these days. I really have a hard time straying from the things that I normally do.

My hands will go to the same chords and reach for the same changes. I mean, my writing process is really…I don’t know a ton of theory. I just write based on discovery and what I think sounds good. I mean, I have enough knowledge of theory to know what’s going on, but I’m not writing from a place of like, “Oh, well, this will do this.” And it’s the same with the song transitions, where it’s accidents and it’s repeating accidents.

With piano, having everything laid out in front of me, I can clunk my hands until I play something that piques my interest melodically. Just having everything laid out left to right makes it easy for me to find what I’m hearing—and mix that with accidental cords and accidental notes.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jordana Nye.

Hong Kong's Chinese-language newspaper of record, the Ming Pao, last week canceled  Zunzi’s regular comic strip following an onslaught of public criticism from government officials.

Staff at the paper expressed "regret and a sense of helplessness" over the move.

Cartoonist Huang Jijun, 68, who had cartoons in every edition of the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper for 26 years, told RFA Mandarin that the canceling of his column reflects the overall political climate in Hong Kong, where civil rights have been drastically rolled back under the 2020 national security law.

"Of course it was due to political pressure," he said. "It wasn't that my fee was so low that I couldn't keep doing the cartoons."

"It's clearly linked to the political situation: they wanted [the Ming Pao] to stop publishing my column," Huang told Radio Free Asia, after earlier declining to comment on the reasons for the move.

"The government sent a warning message to the newspaper, allowing them to deal with it flexibly," he said. "In times of tight [political] controls, when the accusations are flying around ... everything is under the microscope … anyone can be accused of a crime."

Books of Huang's political cartoons were also recently removed from public libraries in the city.

"They think these books will have a negative impact on society," he said. "They don't want the public to be influenced by them, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this. Every move they make is with one eye on its public impact."

Censorship growing

Huang said the national security law, imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party in 2020 to clamp down on public dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, makes it harder to predict just how far the authorities are willing to go with public censorship.

"It's hard to tell whether the current situation will lead to an even tighter crackdown by the authorities," he said.

Hong Kong is in the throes of a political censorship campaign targeting all forms of public expression, Huang said.

"This isn't about there being a problem with cartoons; the problem comes from the satire [they depict]," he said. "They want to keep to a minimum anything that is funny, or pokes fun at something."

"It's very hard for those in power to tolerate any kind of satire."

Huang, who has previously published a compendium of cartoons marking the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre, said he is unlikely to be producing any new work to mark this year's anniversary.

"Naturally, we used to do our best to mark the June 4 massacre before, but the risks are much higher now," he said. "Actually, my not producing a cartoon [for the anniversary] is a pretty good reflection of the way things are."

"If someone who used to produce a cartoon every year, like the [now-banned] candlelight vigil in Victoria Park where people used to go every year, suddenly stops, the world will pay attention," Huang said.

"Once the cartoons stop, you can count how many years it has been since the last cartoon about June 4," he said. "Time left blank leaves a clear historical record."

No plans to leave

But Huang said he still has no plans to leave Hong Kong, despite an ongoing exodus of middle-class professionals and wealthy families alike.

"I will stay in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been through dark times before, and people back then would have said they were the darkest of times," he said. "I don't necessarily think that Hong Kong today is living through the darkest times."

"People should try to go in the direction of the light ... and work together to make it not quite so dark," Huang said, citing his first political cartoon that riffed on political and social uncertainty in Hong Kong amid ongoing negotiations between Britain and China over the city's future.

When asked to reflect on the last four decades of his political cartoons, Huang likened Hong Kong to a paper kite tossed about in the wind, not knowing where it is headed, and with no say in the matter.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

As you may have heard, there's some big mob boss getting arraigned in New York for the first 34 of his bounteous crimes, sins, grifts and unholy transgressions, and as Biden likes to say, it's a big fucking deal. It seems law enforcement offered to do it quietly, but the mobster wanted it splashy. So it will be, with "law enforcement zoo," snipers, perp walk, shrieking zealots. Says one poor cop burdened with it, "It'll be a shitshow.”

Weirdly, Trump's arraignment comes even as more crimes continue to come to light, and as the stable genius we all know him to be keeps further incriminating himself. In one of four other criminal investigations, the DOJ and FBI reportedly have fresh evidence for Jack Smith's probe into the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-lago, with the focus on possible and seriously felonious obstruction of justice. To speed them along, Trump appeared on Hannity to discuss the documents while stubbornly resisting every effort by his Fox bestie to clear himself. Hannity: “I can’t imagine you ever saying: ‘Bring me some of the boxes we brought back from the White House. I’d like to look at them.’” Genius: "I would do that. I would definitely do that...I have the right to take stuff." Hannity: "Alright, let me move on.."

With Trump now moving on to Tuesday's arraignment, a law enforcement official told Rolling Stone that over weeks of negotiations between the D.A., Secret Service, NYPD et al and Trump's team of thugs and sycophants, law enforcement offered a quiet, night-time surrender, and Trump insisted on a circus: mid-day, big-crowd, ready-for-his-closeup booking at the Manhattan courthouse. "He wanted a perp walk, he wanted daylight hours," says the security official. "He wants to get out of the vehicle...He wants to greet the crowd...It's kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He's saying, ‘I’m absorbing all this pain (so) you don’t have to.’ His message is, 'If they can do this to me, they can do this to you" (if you've done enough bad things there are at least four ongoing criminal investigations into you and that doesn't include all the rapey stuff).

The result will be a circus-like array of law enforcement complete with counter-snipers on rooftops, courthouse floors above and below the arraignment secured, omnipresent NYPD in riot gear outside, 40 armed, dead-eyed Secret Service agents in suits and sunglasses circling the courthouse, Trump’s personal goon detail, known as “the shift,” inches away from him at all times, with hordes of media jostling for access. The arraignment is scheduled for 2:30 p.m; Trump, glowing orange, is expected to arrive around 11:30 a.m. He will be fingerprinted and processed, but not handcuffed: “Secret Service said absolutely not, no cuffs, no way.” The mug shot we've all long hungered for will be taken in the booking office; it will presumably be loudly celebrated by the 60% of Americans who, in a new poll, say "Lock Him Up."

Still, there are always the MAGA zombies, wrapped in flags, waving "Trump Or Death" banners, invited by the city's Young Republican Club to protest "Alvin Bragg's heinous attack" on Trump, though actually it's a jury of ordinary Americans' heinous attack: "New York, put your MAGA hats on!" The event features "Perjorie" Taylor Greene, who's already announced, "I reject any attempt and anyone who dresses in MAGA but incites violence (while) pretending to be one of us. You are not one of us, you are one of them." She also threw a fit when Mayor Eric Adams urged the crowd be "on your best behavior," which in Klan Mom-ese became the mayor "trying to intimidate, threaten, and stop me from using my 1st amendment rights" while he "should be more concerned about NY citizens and taxpayers being murdered, raped, robbed, and carjacked."

In the name of civic engagement, a patriot at Daily Kos offered Greene and her MAGA cohorts a warm welcome and some helpful hints for navigating the Big (blue) Apple: "The absolute best way to get around in New York is to drive, as there is little traffic here... Obvious attractions are the picturesque Lincoln and Holland Tunnels...Parking is a breeze!" They're also sure to find cheap hotels with spacious rooms, restaurants with only "good, familiar 'American' food," everyone is white and Trump is "truly beloved." Finally, if you're sick of hearing about "former fake president Donald Jessica Trump," it's suggested the media "take a tiny break from covering what Trump had for lunch" to see what's happening in Nashville, where kids are flooding the streets to demand an end to gun violence and insist, "We can't keep living and dying like this."

Grumpy Trumpy Felon from Jamaica in Queens! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parodywww.youtube.com

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

The changes, which go into effect from April, mean that men will again have to serve 10 or 11 years, reversing a 2021 decision that shortened their service time to seven or eight years. For women, instead of voluntarily serving five years, they will all now have to serve eight.

The additional years will not be spent firing rifles or marching long distances in preparation for war. Instead, the soldiers will pick up shovels and hoes to help farmers grow and harvest food.

“Under the revised regulations, soldiers are recognized as completing military service only after going to the rural area and working on farms for three years before being discharged,” a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The majority of military service is already spent doing hard labor. 

The North Korean government routinely uses soldiers for free labor on farms, in coal mines or on construction sites. Life as a soldier is harsh; living quarters are barren and food rations meager.

“The reality of the Korean People's Army these days is that young people avoid enlisting and there are many deserters due to poor diet and bad living conditions,” the source said. “Also they already thought the service time was too long.”

RFA was not able to confirm if soldiers who entered the service after the 2021 change and before April will have to extend their service time, or if women who elected not to serve will now have to enlist. But soldiers who were set to be discharged this year will instead be made to do an additional three years.

Giving up one’s youth

Young people are furious over the decision because it means they will have to spend most of their 20s in uniform doing hard labor, the source said.

“During their golden years of youth, men have to sacrifice 10 or 11 years and women for eight years, so those who are enlisting and their parents are angry, saying ‘Where else in the world is there this kind of slavery?’” the source said.

North Korea’s mandatory military service time is already much longer than in other nations. In neighboring South Korea, men must serve 18 months.

More young people are expected to do whatever they can to avoid enlisting, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

There are several ways to get out of serving. Generally people are exempt if they have unusual medical issues, family problems or are deemed security risks because they are related to people who have escaped the country. 

College is another way out, but the authorities are trying to close that loophole.

“They took measures to restrict the number of people recommended for university admission, except from those who went to gifted high schools,” the second source said.

The gifted schools are for students who excel in their studies. Because they are considered to be on the college track they are exempt from serving.

In addition to working on farms, the extension of service might be an attempt to repopulate the rural parts of the country, the second source speculated.

”Young soldiers in their late 20s will go out to the farms and will likely meet local women. Then they will likely start a family and stay in the rural areas,” she said. “This can help increase the number of farmers.” 

Translated by Leejin J. Chung and Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim for RFA Korean.

• Five women sue Texas after being denied abortions even though their lives were in danger
• Israeli raid in Jenin kills six Palestinians and wounds two dozen others
• United Nations agrees to a first of its kind treaty to protect the high seas
• Grim outlook for California salmon population as numbers drop to their lowest point in decades
• Warnings on high energy use and pollution arising from bitcoin

Image courtesy of Center for Reproductive Rights

The post First of its kind lawsuit against Texas by women whose lives were endangered by abortion ban; Another Israeli raid in Jenin kills six Palestinians; U.N. approves treaty to protect the high seas: The Pacifica Evening News March 7 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

With progressive lawmakers and rail workers condemning the profit-driven railway scheduling policies that employees say are to blame for the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, environmental advocates on Friday called on the U.S. Department of Transportation to reinstate safety rules to prevent similar crashes.

Representing Waterkeeper Alliance, Sierra Club, Riverkeeper, Washington Conservation Action, and Stand, environmental law group Earthjustice wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, demanding a response to an administrative appeal the organizations originally put forward in 2018, after the agency repealed electronic braking system requirements for trains carrying hazardous material.

After the Trump administration repealed the rule—with the strong support of rail companies including Norfolk Southern, the operator of the train that crashed in East Palestine—the groups warned that the Department of Transportation (DOT) had not conducted mandatory safety tests and did not allow the public to provide input into the change.

Following more than four years of "silence" from the federal government, including the Biden administration, the groups wrote, it has taken "a tragedy... to turn attention to this issue again."

"The Biden administration must do everything in its power to protect the people in East Palestine and other rail-adjacent communities from the devastating impacts of train accidents and explosions."

Two weeks after the disaster, the agency "has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology," reportedThe Lever last week.

"We seek an assurance that the department will provide an expeditious response, albeit long overdue, to our administrative appeal," wrote the groups. "If we do not hear from you with a timeline for such a response, we will consider taking legal action."

Earthjustice's original appeal of the DOT's braking system decision pertained specifically to trains that carry large amounts of crude oil, while the 150-car Norfolk Southern train that crashed in East Palestine, Ohio was carrying hazardous materials including vinyl chloride, which has been linked to liver cancer and other cancers.

During a "controlled release" of chemicals that officials began after the crash to prevent an explosion, the burning of the vinyl chloride sent into the air hydrogen chloride, which can irritate the throat, eyes, and skin; and phosgene, a colorless gas that can cause vomiting and difficulty breathing and was used as a weapon during World War I.

"Railroads crisscross the nation running along our waterfronts, bridging our rivers, and rolling through our neighborhoods," said Sean Dixon, executive director at Puget Soundkeeper. "Reliance on century-old braking technology is unacceptably negligent; the DOT cannot continue to delay modernization of this vital aspect of rail safety. Hazardous, flammable cargos of dangerous chemicals and volatile hydrocarbons present an undeniable threat to public health and the environment—a threat that must be mitigated, immediately."

Since the derailment, East Palestine residents—who have been told by officials that it's safe for them to return to their homes following a brief evacuation—have reported nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness, and headaches.

"It is not clear whether the Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous and cancer-causing chemicals in Ohio would have been covered by DOT's repealed brake system requirement," said Earthjustice. "What is clear, however, is that the agency has failed to require up-to-date, modern brake systems for most trains carrying explosively toxic materials."

As Common Dreamsreported Thursday, another train operated by Norfolk Southern derailed outside Detroit. The train was carrying liquid chlorine, but officials said the substance was not near the cars that overturned and a railroad representative told a local NBC affiliate that no hazardous materials were spilled.

"It's troubling that the revised safety regulations clearly do not go far enough to prevent such disasters, and the government's ability to respond and provide essential disclosures to the community is far from adequate," said Devorah Ancel, senior attorney at the Sierra Club. "The Biden administration must do everything in its power to protect the people in East Palestine and other rail-adjacent communities from the devastating impacts of train accidents and explosions."

Earthjustice demanded that Buttigieg take immediate action instead of waiting for yet another accident to endanger a community, where attorney Kristen Boyles noted residents have no control over what chemicals trains that pass through are carrying or what safety measures railroad companies are taking.

"It should not take another exploding train to get DOT's attention," said Boyles. "Communities can't keep trains out, can't get safety measures, can't know what trains are carrying, and yet are left with the human health and environmental problems when there's an accident."

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

Frustrated with the sluggish pace of climate action, protesters turned to disruptive tactics, risking arrest and widespread disapproval. Activists made people late for work; they delayed flights; they were accused of vandalism. Their actions weren’t popular, but they anticipated that.

“We’re going to be noisy. We’re going to be disruptive. We’re going to be unignorable. We’re going to be a pain in the ass until you listen to us,” Emma Brown, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, the coalition behind the museum protests, recently told PBS Newshour. The group hopes to persuade the U.K. government to put a stop to all new fossil fuel projects.

When a pair of activists with Just Stop Oil tossed tomato soup at the van Gogh painting in London’s National Gallery in October, it sparked a widespread debate about the effectiveness of such tactics. In a survey of more than 2,000 Americans conducted within a month of the protest, 46 percent said that “disruptive non-violent actions including shutting down morning commuter traffic and damaging pieces of art” decreased their support for efforts to address climate change. Only 13 percent said such actions increased their support.

The thing is, the public rarely approves of disruptive protests — unless they happened sometime in the past. Suffragettes actually slashed paintings, permanently damaging them, and then were remembered as heroes. Even peaceful marches, as they unfold, are sometimes seen as unhelpful. After Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech following the 1963 March on Washington, three-quarters of Americans said they thought mass demonstrations harmed the cause, according to Gallup polling. The following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

That doesn’t mean that throwing soup at famous paintings will bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but it does suggest that the public has a poor track record of guessing what makes social movements successful. Experts say that disruptive demonstrations play an important role in gathering attention for a cause and making tamer protests appear more acceptable by comparison. 

“Confrontational protests, violent or not, are part of all successful social movements,” said Oscar Berglund, who researches climate activism and civil disobedience at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

While climate protests are generally peaceful, fiery ones could raise the risk that things will get violent, depending on the circumstances. “The line between confrontational activism and violence is a very, very fuzzy line, particularly when you have law enforcement who may or may not be empowered to harm protesters,” said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has studied the effectiveness of climate activism for two decades. States have recently passed draconian laws with harsh penalties for blocking fossil fuel infrastructure.

Despite that, there’s a growing appetite for nonviolent climate demonstrations. One-fifth of Americans under 40 say they’d likely participate in civil disobedience — such as sit-ins, blockades, or trespassing — to support action on climate change if a friend asked them to, according to a survey conducted last September by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Fisher says that participation in civil disobedience appears to be on the rise, based on her surveys of AmeriCorps workers and climate organizers.

“There is potential here for a huge disruptive movement to arise quickly,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which backs nonviolent climate activism. Confrontational actions haven’t picked up speed in the United States as fast as they have in the United Kingdom, but there are signs that a wave may be starting here as well. 

In April this year, climate scientists chained themselves to a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles to protest the bank’s funding of fossil fuel projects. In the summer, drivers of SUVs and pickup trucks in New York, the Bay Area, and Chicago found their vehicles with tires deflated and a leaflet on their windshield: “Your gas guzzler kills.” It was the work of the Tyre Extinguishers, an international group aiming “to make it impossible” to own large personal vehicles in cities. Last month, protesters picketed at private airports in New Jersey, North Carolina, California, and Washington state to highlight the toll that private jets took on the planet.

Disruptive protests are, by their nature, uncomfortable. Salamon, who is also a clinical psychologist, says the public is living in a “state of mass delusion” with regard to the climate crisis, sleepwalking into catastrophe. The role of activists is to shake everyone awake.

“If you think about it from that perspective, it makes all the sense in the world why these activists would be unpopular. You know, they’re making people think about climate — they’re making people feel really painful feelings, because it’s such a tough reality,” Salamon said.

Confrontational tactics can draw criticism, anger, and even death threats. But many activists feel that more conventional means of protesting won’t bring results. A phenomenon called the “activist’s dilemma” illustrates the problem. Protesters often have to choose between moderate actions that are easily ignored or more extreme actions that might alienate the public.

“It isn’t fun: I hate disrupting people’s lives, and it’s upsetting that it’s come to this. But it has come to this,” an anonymous Tyre Extinguisher activist told Vice earlier this year. “We feel that nothing else will work — we don’t have any more time for letters or marches or waiting for more elections. We’ve had those strategies for 30 years and they’re not working. It’s time to shake things up.”

Phoebe Plummer, one of the soup throwers with Just Stop Oil, admitted that their action was, in their own words, “slightly ridiculous,” but argued that the absurdity of the protest was what got the conversation on climate action going. In the months preceding the “Sunflowers” incident, Just Stop Oil had attacked a more logical target: oil terminals. Activists blocked so much oil infrastructure in April that they forced one in three gas stations in southern England to close. But they received little international attention.

Disruptive protests play a role in setting the agenda by opening up space for issues that might otherwise not get discussed. Take Insulate Britain, a group that began blocking roads in the United Kingdom last September, demanding that the government retrofit all U.K. homes to make them more energy-efficient. The group was widely unpopular, with only 16 percent of people surveyed viewing them favorably one month later. 

But in the month after the protests began, the number of times that print newspapers in the United Kingdom mentioned “insulation” had doubled (not including references to “Insulate,” part of the group’s name). By June this year, the issue had risen on the policy agenda, with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson drawing up plans to insulate thousands of homes before winter struck. At the time, one official suggested that the policy could be called — wait for it — “insulate Britain.”

It’s hard to draw a straight line from protest to policy change, but experts say disruptive demonstrations may be more helpful than many people believe. “The fact that it’s unpopular doesn’t mean that it’s ineffective,” Berglund said, referring to Insulate Britain. “Ultimately, even if people dislike what protesters do, it doesn’t automatically turn them against the course that those protesters are fighting for.”

Of course, such protests are not great for building broad movements. They’re probably not going to change the minds of the minority of Americans who oppose climate policies. “These activists and the groups that are organizing these kinds of activism are acutely aware that they’re not speaking to those people,” Fisher said. Instead, they’re trying to mobilize people who are already sympathetic. Polarizing the public has the effect of forcing people to take a stance on something they might not be thinking about otherwise.

And by some measures, the strategy might already be working. Fisher said that the soup incident was “through-the-roof effective” by many of the short-term goals activists use to judge effectiveness, such as media coverage, even if it’s unclear what effect the action will have in the long run. According to Just Stop Oil’s organizers, the attention-grabbing protest made it easier to recruit new people.

In the recent past, civil disobedience was seen by climate organizers as “a bad tool,” Fisher said. “But there’s no question that the young generation of climate activists absolutely include that as one of their tools now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate activists’ new, confrontational tactics aren’t popular. That’s kind of the point. on Dec 21, 2022.

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

Survivors of last month's deadly shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, will be among those testifying this week when federal lawmakers hold a hearing on how a surge in bigoted legislation pushed by Republicans has been linked to an uptick in violent attacks on LGBTQ+ communities.

"The rise in anti-LGBTQI+ extremism and the despicable policies that Republicans at every level of government are advancing... are harming the LGBTQI+ community."

The U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), will convene the hearing on Wednesday morning, examining a number of Republican proposals as well as recent incidents of violence.

"From Colorado Springs to my own district in New York City, communities across the country are facing a terrifying rise of anti-LGBTQI+ violence and extremism," said Maloney in a statement. "Make no mistake, the rise in anti-LGBTQI+ extremism and the despicable policies that Republicans at every level of government are advancing to attack the health and safety of LGBTQI+ people are harming the LGBTQI+ community and contributing to tragedies like what we saw at Club Q."

The hearing comes less than a month after a shooter armed with an AR-15 style rifle entered Club Q and immediately began shooting, killing five people and injuring more than a dozen others.

Authorities have not yet publicly identified a motive, but the shooting has been investigated as a hate crime and the suspect has been charged with 305 criminal counts, including first-degree murder and bias-motivated crimes.

The committee will hear testimony from Michael Anderson, a bartender at Club Q, and James Slaught, a patron, as well as co-owner Michael Haynes.

"These attacks like the one at Club Q are designed to scare us from living authentically and honestly," Anderson told NBC News. "But to our community and to the world, just know this: We are not afraid, we are empowered, we are strong, and we are proud. Love will win."

The shooting intensified condemnation of Republicans who have pushed anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). The congresswoman offered "prayers" to the victims, survivors, and their families after the attack, leading progressives to point out that she has aggressively promoted the loosening of gun control laws and has accused LGBTQ+ teachers, transgender people, and drag performers of "grooming" children throughout her political career.

One proponent of Boebert's "grooming" narrative, Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Mitchell, told FOX News host Tucker Carlson that shootings like the one at Club Q will not "stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children."

Republican state lawmakers last year introduced more than 340 pieces of legislation seeking to limit LGBTQ+ people's rights, including proposals to force transgender or gender non-conforming students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that correspond with their sex assigned at birth instead of their gender, to bar doctors from providing gender-affirming medical care to young transgender people, and to ban classroom discussions related to gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools.

Since Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his state's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill into law earlier this year, social media posts accusing LGBTQ+ people of being "groomers" went up by more than 400%, the House Oversight Committee reported.

At this week's hearing, Maloney said, "Republicans on my committee and across the country will be forced to face the real-life impact of their dangerous agenda. I hope LGBTQI+ individuals across the country will see that Democrats in Congress are fighting for them and will continue to push for policies that protect and expand their ability to live authentically and safely."

The Hill reported that the hearing will be the "first of its kind." While Congress held hearings decades ago in support of anti-LGBTQ+ measures, said author and researcher Jason Colavito, Maloney's will be the first to call for protections for these communities.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

Jim Hightower is a syndicated columnist, national radio commentator, and America’s Number One populist.  He has written many books including Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Mr. Hightower is a board member of Public Citizen. He is also a founding member of Our Revolution, an organization inspired by the issues brought up in the Bernie Sanders campaign. Along with that, he writes a monthly newsletter called the Hightower Lowdown.

Shakespeare said “First, kill all the lawyers,” but I think first, kill all the consultants.

Jim Hightower

[To see what’s gone wrong], you’ve got to go back… to when the Democratic Party didn’t just abandon Texas, they abandoned grassroots politics. They went with the money.

Jim Hightower

If you don’t show up, you’re not gonna win. And we’re not going to win just by going to cities and the inner suburbs. Yes, we have to be strongly active there. Yes, we have to be totally committed to women’s right to control their own bodies. All of that is a given. But you’ve got to have something in addition to that.

Jim Hightower

Republican attorneys general, Republican congressional leaders when they’re in charge, they use power. And they use it to change the structure of the system… And we tend to fumble around with it and say we’ve got to be cautious, we don’t want to offend anybody, and we need to pursue the law carefully. That’s why we have to have grassroots movements that build power at a local level.

Jim Hightower

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Janine Jackson interviewed Prison Radio‘s Noelle Hanrahan for a Mumia Abu-Jamal update for the October 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: TV snake oil salesman and Republican Pennsylvania candidate Mehmet Oz began a recent debate with opponent John Fetterman with reference to Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Fetterman, Oz claimed,

has been trying to get as many murderers convicted and sentenced to life in prison out of jail as possible, including people who are similar to the man who murdered her husband.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

You could live in a cave and understand what Oz was trying to do there, but not everyone may recognize the particular dog whistle that is the reference to Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of fatally shooting Daniel Faulkner in 1983. (That was the conviction.)

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction turned importantly on unreliable and conflicting testimony. It was significant that in taking up the case, elite news media went along for the ride, and sometimes drove the car—encouraging acceptance, for instance, of the fact that, though the guard assigned to Mumia immediately after his arrest reported “the negro male made no statements,” more to be believed was the other officer who subsequently came forward to say that, actually, from his hospital bed, Mumia had declared, “I shot the motherfucker  and I hope he dies.”

Neither witness recantations or shifting accounts or evidence of jury-purging in Mumia’s case, nor the ever-expanding evidence of the terrible harms and injustices of the US prison system generally, seem to be enough to shake some media from their investment in the narrative of the “convicted cop killer,” and the need to keep him not just behind bars, but also to keep him and people “similar to” him quiet, to keep their voices and their lives out of public conversation and consideration.

Noelle Hanrahan is legal director at Prison Radio, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is lead correspondent. She joins us now by phone from Pennsylvania. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Noelle Hanrahan.

Noelle Hanrahan: Thank you for having me.

JJ: We can fill in context as we go, but please go ahead and start with what’s uppermost. What is the latest legal development here?

Guardian (10/26/22)

NH: When a defendant is trying to overturn their conviction—and Mumia has been in for 42 years—when they protest their innocence, they have to go to the local trial court. That, in Philadelphia, is the Common Pleas court. Mumia had fantastic new critical evidence that was just discovered two years ago.

There was a note in the prosecutor’s files that said, “Where was my money?” from one of the key [witnesses], and this happened right after the trial, implying that he was paid for his testimony.

There were also notes saying that the other key witness, their cases were being tracked, and that none of the outstanding charges pending against this witness were ever prosecuted.

The most dramatic evidence was evidence of taking Blacks off of the jury, and marks on the prosecutor’s notes about the racial composition of the jury, and also what was good and bad about which juror was selected, a white or a Black juror.

These were critical documents that many other people have gotten relief on. The jury notes are called Batson claims, the US constitutional claim. The suppression of evidence by the prosecution, burying evidence for 40 years, is called a Brady claim. These have gotten relief for many other defendants.

So now 42 years later, Mumia Abu-Jamal was before Judge Lucretia Clemons in the Common Pleas court, and yesterday she denied all of his claims.

She denied them procedurally. She refused to look at the merits of the body of evidence, and specifically this new evidence, and she denied it based on time bar waiver, due diligence.

And it’s just the Post-Conviction Relief Act, which is there only to deny inmates access to the court.

So I was Mumia’s producer. I’ve worked on Mumia with many of his books, including his latest trilogy, Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny. We published those materials.

About five years ago, I went to law school. I passed the bar in Pennsylvania, and it’s unbelievable to see the level of stiff-arming accountability to the Frank Rizzo, Ed Rendell, Ron Castille era of literal torture of defendants and witnesses—literally torture, not figuratively. Literally. Think Jon Burge in Chicago. Think of the types of torture that have happened. That is typically what happened in the cases that I now investigate. Innocence cases, prosecutorial misconduct cases, cases where this kind of information is available to these judges.

I’ll give you one clear example. One of the key witnesses, Robert Chobert, was a cab driver who was driving without a license. He was on probation. He had thrown a Molotov cocktail into a school for pay. None of that material was before the jury.

There were pictures. He said he was right behind the police car and saw—yesterday, the district attorney in this case, Grady Gervino, on the other side, said, “Robert Chobert looked up from his cab and saw Mumia shoot the officer.”

Photo © Pedro P. Polakoff III.

There are pictures that just came out a few years ago from the Philadelphia Bulletin, that were taken 10 minutes after the shooting, that prove that Robert Chobert wasn’t there. His cab was not behind the police car.

Those photographs, the Polakoff photos, were denied into evidence. They were prevented from being put into the record.

So we have Robert Chobert being presumed to be this amazing witness with no problems… Literally the photos prove he wasn’t there, and nobody was able to be told in the jury that he was on probation for throwing a Molotov cocktail into a school for pay.

He came back to [county prosecutor Joseph] McGill, and asked, could he get his cab driver’s license reinstated? No promise—McGill said there was “no promise” of favoritism.

Then we discovered, two years ago, his note in the prosecutor’s files: “Where is my money for testifying?”

So the context, right? So that’s zooming in right now on what happened in court. The context, the things that haven’t been given to the court before, that haven’t been considered today?

We have a court reporter, Terri Maurer-Carter, saying, in front of another judge, Richard Klein, that [Judge] Albert Sabo said, “I’m gonna help them fry the N-word.” He said this in the first week of the trial.

JJ: Yeah.

NH: So this is America. That’s the kind of trial that Mumia Abu-Jamal had, where his original trial judge Albert “I’m gonna help them fry the N-word” Sabo presided.

And so we have a judge now who is saying none of this matters. He doesn’t get relief.

JJ: And you have to wonder what would be lost, on the part of journalists, to reexamine that, including reexamining their own role. What is it that they feel they’re going to lose?

There were many voices at the time calling out corporate media’s dereliction of duty; FAIR was one of them. But it was really remarkable.

Philadelphia Daily News (7/19/95)

NH: When Albert Sabo was presiding over the 1995 evidentiary hearing, the Philadelphia [Daily News]’ headline was, “Sabo Must Go.” He’s going to let Mumia off because he’s so blatantly racist. The headline was “Sabo Must Go.”

People know it. People know it. The daily news people know it. The courts know it. I interviewed Barbara McDermott, a criminal judge in the homicide division. She said Judge Sabo was the most racist, sexist and homophobic judge she’d ever met.

Everyone knows. It’s not unclear. They all know. They are preserving the system.

So [Philadelphia DA] Larry Krasner, in an appeal four years ago, said if they undid all of Ron Castille, a racist DA’s, opinions and judgments, it would question the entire system.

So they wanted to narrow it to a class of individuals, smaller class, that Mumia wasn’t included in.

Now this is a system, you have to remember, this is a system that is built on Black bodies. There’s an assembly line of Black bodies, through the Juanita Kidd Injustice Center, that is paying for the Fraternal Order of Police overtime.

Larry Krasner said it in an Atlantic article: It’s the linchpin. The majority white police force of 6,500 police officers, 6,500 retired officers, it is their pensions and it is their overtime to pay their Jersey mortgages.

This is not me saying “Jersey mortgages.” This is the legal director of Kenyatta Johnson’s office telling me, “Oh yeah, we know why we can’t do that. We know why we can’t fix the potholes, because the police overtime is out of control. But you know, they have to pay their Jersey mortgages.”

And really, at the last bump, when they need to go for their pension, that’s when all the overtime racks up, $50 million of overtime each year. That’s the linchpin, that’s the dynamic. It’s commodifying poor people of color for the service of the white, marginally working-class, middle-class police officers.

WHYY (4/24/21)

JJ: And let me ask you about part of how they sell that narrative, which does have to do with news media. Folks who remember coverage of Mumia’s original trial will remember how hard elite media went in on the idea, not just of accepting all of the malfeasance and problems and craziness around his case, but also there was a big overarching storyline about the idea that anybody who was incarcerated who was deemed political, anybody who was incarcerated who people on the outside were taking an interest in, was to be silenced, right?

And so even a sympathetic piece from Philly’s public TV station WHYY last year, around protests around Mumia, they led with the idea that the case “pitted…supporters, including a long list of national and international celebrities…against police and their supporters, who resent the attention” to the case.

So media have tried to turn it into not the particular information about this case, which, as you’ve said, the kind of information that has come out would lead to freedom, or to overturning of convictions, in other cases, they’ve made it a kind of litmus test about celebrity interest in incarcerated people, or about incarcerated people as issue, rather than as human beings.

NH: Let me just say, that’s like Inquirer-lite. The real issue here, and I live in Philadelphia, is fear. Fear of the police. William Marinmow knows better. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who live in this city, who have covered this city, they know and they are afraid. They are literally afraid.

People don’t realize that we have a classical radio station, WRTI, in Philadelphia, associated with Temple, for one reason: because overnight, they switched the switch and took off general public interest programming, led by Democracy Now!, one day, overnight, changed it to a classical radio station. That’s why we have classical radio here in Philadelphia.

So they do it, and they punish us. They punish the producers, they punish the journalists.

Linn Washington can tell you. Everyone knows. That’s the thing, is the courts know. The journalists know. They know that this is a scandal, a scheme. They know that the police threats of violence are exactly what keeps people in line. They threaten your job and they threaten your life.

Imagine if I had a news van and I painted it “Free Mumia” and I parked it on the streets of Philadelphia. It would be like a cop magnet to get destroyed, blown up, torched. All my tires would be slashed.

You could just prove it and do it. It would happen. Everyone knows it. They are terrified. People here are terrified of the police, and people who have jobs, who have comfortable livings, will not push the envelope. And that includes the editors of our major newspapers, and the staff at WHYY.

They will not challenge the status quo. They will not air Mumia’s voice, because there will be direct, both physical and economic penalties.

JJ: And let me just spell out for listeners who don’t remember: In 1994, NPR had plans to run a series of commentaries from Mumia, who was, after all, a journalist, a former head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

They canceled that series. They said it was because he was so controversial and such a big story, such a big story that they then proceeded to do zero coverage for the following year.

And then, as you’ve just said, when Democracy Now! was going to air those commentaries, Philadelphia’s KRTI canceled not just Democracy Now!, but all of Pacifica News, with the person in charge saying, “What’s good enough for NPR is good enough for me.”

NH: I was in Ellen Weiss’s office, the executive director of All Things Considered, when she looked out the window, and you could see the capitol, because her NPR office was right there, and she said, “I never thought I would look to the capitol and be censored. Yesterday, Bob Dole got up on the Senate floor and threatened our entire budget if we dared air this commentary.” And she then turned to me and said, “Can you bring me a more acceptable commentator?”

JJ: You know, folks don’t know what happens behind the scenes, and I’m really appreciating this exposure. Some folks, I imagine, think that journalists make a decision, who do we want to air? They put that person on, and then they deal with it. And it’s not at all how it happens.

But I want to bring us, for the final part of our conversation, to the other piece of that, because the efforts to silence, not just Mumia, the efforts to silence and close off all of the perspectives of people who are incarcerated speak to the power of those perspectives, right? It speaks to why we emphatically need to hear them.

And I just want to say, despite the name, Prison Radio is a multimedia production studio. And the whole point is to add the voices of people most impacted by the prison industrial complex to our public conversation.

And Mumia’s case is an especially emphatic example of the lengths that powers that be— legal, political and media—will go to to squelch those voices.

But we have work resisting that and countering that, and Prison Radio is part of that. And I just wonder if you’d like to talk a little bit about the project and why you do it.

Noelle Hanrahan: “The culture of imprisonment tells a deeper story about America. We’re not going to get it if we don’t go to the prisons and get those voices out.”

NH: I first began recording Mumia, and I first heard a scratchy tape of his voice, when we were covering the Robert Alton Harris execution in 1992 in California. And we were trying to get people on death row—there were 600 at the time—trying to get their voices into the mix.

Look, if you can hear their last words stated by the warden, you can interview them. If we’re going to kill them, they have to be part of the story.

And so I went and tried to get somebody from San Quentin, and I couldn’t. But I had heard Mumia, he was in Pennsylvania. I went and I got him.

Now, Mumia is especially difficult for the mainstream media to grasp. He’s incredibly fluent in the king’s English. He’s actually fluent in French and German, and conversational in Spanish. He’s an incredible intellect and he was trained in the Black newsroom.

If America is going to incarcerate 2.3 million—one out of every 100 US citizens is in prison—that needs to be part of the story.

And I have dedicated Prison Radio’s work to bringing those voices, on every topic, into the public debate and dialogue, and we feel like it’s critical that those voices are heard.

As a journalist, if you’re covering prisons, you really can’t cover the story without that first person, without talking to the people that it directly impacts.

A lot of times, even my own stations at Pacifica would say, “No, we’re not going to touch that. No, we’re not going to talk to homeless people.” You’ve got to talk to prisoners. You have to give them agency. Because a lot of the prisoners, and a lot of the culture of imprisonment, tells a deeper story about America.

We’re not going to get it if we don’t go to the prisons and get those voices out. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I became a lawyer and an investigator because it’s not enough to just broadcast people’s voices. We have to bring them home.

JJ: I’m going end on that human note. We’ve been speaking with Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio. You can find their work online at PrisonRadio.org. Noelle Hanrahan, thank you very much for joining us this week on CountersSpin.

NH: You’re welcome.

The post ‘This Is America. That’s the Kind of Trial Mumia Abu-Jamal Had.’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Center for Popular Democracy’s Julio López Varona about Puerto Rico colonialism for the  September 30, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Puerto Rico is in dire need of fuel for generators as they deal with the devastation of Hurricane Fiona. But a ship carrying fuel has been idling offshore, unable to enter a port, because it’s Puerto Rico, where the Jones Act—requiring that all goods be brought in on a US-built ship, owned and crewed by US citizens, and flying the US flag—makes critical goods more expensive, or in this case, out of reach. (The White House has just announced it will temporarily waive the Jones Act.)

Bloomberg (9/28/22)

Investment firms in mainland states can’t act as advisors to the government in the issue of bonds while at the same time marketing those bonds to investors—but they can in Puerto Rico.

In Puerto Rico, you can get tax breaks, including zero income tax on capital gains—unless, that is, you were born on the island. Only non–Puerto Ricans qualify.

Puerto Ricans themselves are ineligible for Supplemental Security Income, even though they pay payroll taxes.

All of which is to suggest that the story of Puerto Rico’s ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from natural disasters starts long before the storm.

We’re joined now by Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. He joins us by phone from San Juan. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Julio López Varona.

Julio López Varona: Thank you for having me.

JJ: There are a number of ways you could illustrate the tangle of predatory policy and political disempowerment and just exploitation that are the ongoing crisis for Puerto Rico, before and after any natural disasters.

Center for Popular Democracy (8/22)

But I know that you worked recently looking at how that all plays out in one very important sector: pharmaceuticals. What did that research show about how things work in Puerto Rico?

JLV: We have been interested in looking at how the colonial economy of Puerto Rico plays out in different sectors for a while.

We’ve been specifically interested in thinking about how pharmaceutical companies are, in many ways, doing what they said they would do with the billions of dollars that we give them every year through tax exemptions.

This is part of a decades-old practice to give billions of dollars of tax exemptions to pharma, which have phased out, in many cases, because of changes in our economy, but still remain.

And we were interested in thinking through how these tax exemptions were actually helping communities have a good life, how they were allowing people to actually have a dignified salary, and all those things.

And when we dug in, we started talking to workers in the security and cleaning space, and in those cases, we found thousands of workers that, in many cases, were subcontracted by pharmaceutical companies, and were getting paid minimum wage, had the baseline of benefits that Puerto Ricans get.

And it was really interesting for us, because the pharmaceutical company for a long time had been sold as, what I say parallels to the “American dream,” the “Puerto Rican dream”: This is how you get out of poverty. This is how you have a family. But we find these thousands of workers that are actually not doing that.

And it brings about the question what is the economy? And why are we providing these tax exemptions when they are not benefiting Puerto Ricans? And, more importantly, who are they benefiting?

Emisférica (2018)

Why are we continuing to do this, and why are we not being able to take advantage of the billions of dollars that could be put for our economy, and more in moments like this, one where we have hurricanes happening, and where we have people struggling with issues with relocation, issues with droughts and flooding.

In the case of Hurricane Fiona specifically, we have workers that we’ve been talking to that lost their homes while working [for] these pharma companies, that say that they’ve been the first ones to step up after other hurricanes.

So we have a really interesting moment, where pharma says it’s ready, but we have thousands of thousands of workers that are struggling in a moment of crisis.

JJ: In some ways, it sounds very familiar to the kind of promises that companies make here on the mainland as well, that, you know, “Give us these tax breaks and we’ll create all these good jobs that will lift people out of poverty.”

And there’s often very little follow-up to see whether they’re actually creating that many jobs to begin with, before you even get to whether their wages are actually really lifting people out of poverty.

Politico (9/19/22)

JLV: Yeah. We often say that Puerto Rico has become a microcosm for the worst kind of experiment on capitalist ideas. We’ve seen those ideas be translated into extreme privatization, like what’s happening right now with the electrical grid, which still is not able to provide electricity to all Puerto Rican families, like 12 or 13 days after Hurricane Fiona.

We’ve seen the impact of what you were referring a little bit earlier around tax exemptions for the rich, and this idea of trickle-down economics—like the rich come, and everybody’s better.

And then we’ve seen what’s happening with all of these corporations. Pharma is a great example, but we also know that Puerto Rico has the highest density of Walmarts and Walgreens, and those companies are also displacing Puerto Rican local companies.

So all of the things that neoliberalism has preached for a long time, that are the way in which you make capitalism flourish, are happening in Puerto Rico, and in many ways the agenda is one that has been accomplished successfully.

It’s really good if you have money. It’s really, really bad if you’re a person that doesn’t have money, and isn’t able to take advantage of all the programs that benefit the wealthy.

CNN (9/24/22)

JJ: And isn’t able to jet away to your second home when a hurricane comes.

Part of the “Misery, Yet Again, for Puerto Ricans,” which was part of a CNN headline, part of that narrative is Puerto Ricans are in such a perennial hole because they can’t pay off their debt.

Now, we can’t do the long version of this, necessarily, but I just don’t know that you could get into an elite media conversation by explaining that, in reality, Puerto Rico has paid any debt that it rightfully owed long ago, yeah?

JLV: I would even say, if we simplified very much, there is a historical reason why Puerto Rico was in its debt crisis, and it is at the center of it because of colonialism.

Puerto Ricans, like Puerto Rico’s economy, have been controlled by the US since the US came to Puerto Rico.

If you look at the change in the way in which we went from our own currency to US currency, that’s benefited people from the US. When we see the changes that happen when it came to the crops that were used in the ’20s. And then when we looked at pharma and the companies that came, or the military invasion, there are many examples of how the Puerto Rican economy has been driven by the interests of the US.

So even if we argue that the final result of this was that there was a debt crisis that was made in Puerto Rico, that would not tell the whole story.

New York (4/17/19)

And even if you told that story, you should also account for the fact that this debt, in many cases, was illegal.

This debt that, in many cases, as you said, was already paid. And that the people that are currently negotiating that debt are the same people that, in some cases, make money out of it.

So it’s a very, very complex situation that at the end has to do with colonialism, economic control of Puerto Ricans’ future, and greed. Greed in the worst way possible. Greed when it comes to hedge funds that decided to come to Puerto Rico, knowing that Puerto Rico would default, and extract as much wealth as they could. And greed when it came to the people that were running Puerto Rico, and decided that they wanted to move forward with an agenda that, at the end of the day, was extremely good for those that had money—which is kind of a theme in this conversation—and really, really dire for people that live here, and in some cases have been driven out of Puerto Rico because of those economic conditions.

JJ: Finally, when we’ve spoken before, it seems we always come around to talking about dignity, to talking about leading with the dignity of human beings in the policies that we make.

And I just wanted to add, there is, when you learn about what’s happening in Puerto Rico, you see that there is, beyond pushback to each new indignity, there is long-term organizing and growing happening that provides a way to at least look forward. Isn’t that true?

Julio López Varona: “What Puerto Ricans want and deserve is respect. They deserve a voice in the decisions that are made about their economy and their future.”

JLV: Yeah. Five years ago, when Hurricane Maria happened, everybody talked about Puerto Rico se levanta, “Puerto Rico rises up.” This time, after Hurricane Fiona, people are talking about solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. So “only the people save the people.”

People understand that what’s happening in Puerto Rico is wrong. People understand that we cannot trust the government anymore, and that we need to organize and support each other.

We’ve also gotten to the point where “resiliency” is not a good word. “Resiliency” is actually a bad word. What Puerto Ricans want and deserve is respect. They deserve a voice in the decisions that are made about their economy and their future.

And they deserve, in many cases, reparations. They deserve that the people that have put us in this position step up and actually allow us to have the resources we need so that we can rebuild ourself, without the oversight of anybody, but with the power of the people at the center of the conversation and the actions taken.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. They’re online at PopularDemocracy.org. Julio López Varona, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

JLV: Thank you for having me.

The post ‘Puerto Rico Has Become a Microcosm for the Worst Kind of Capitalist Ideas’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• U.N. Security Council debates Russian war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine
• Senate Republicans filibuster Disclose Act which aimed to shine a light on dark money in politics
• President Biden promises federal aid to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Fiona
• Donald Trump claims presidents can declassify documents by thinking about it
• Sonoma teens urge mental health support for young people confronted by wildfires and other climate disasters

Image: justflix, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The post Russia could be headed to International Criminal Court for war crimes in Ukraine; Senate Republicans block bill to eliminate dark money in politics; Attorney General Bonta launches first of its kind state gun violence prevention program: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – September 22, 2022 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Laura Clancy.

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Today, whether it’s Biden, Boris Johnson, Macron, Trudeau, or the EU’s Ursula von der “Crazy” (peripatetic Cypriot commentator Alex Christoforou’s coinage for von der Leyen), the Collective West’s reaction to Putin’s “Special Military Operation” has been a spectacular failure.  This really is a gang that can’t shoot straight unless, of course, they are shooting themselves in their Collective foot.  “Sanctions and Arms!” “Sanctions and Arms!” they all shouted with self-righteous indignation when Putin finally struck, as if “Sanctions and Arms!” would bring the Russian Bear to its knees, exposing Putin’s folly and crushing his regime…

Well, 3+ months into this horrific conflict, it appears that the TransAtlanticans’ policy of “Sanctions and Arms!” has proven ineffective, not to mention entirely delusional.  On the “Sanctions” front, this economic weapon has completely back-fired, with soaring fuel prices and open talk of looming food shortages — in the West!  Counter-intuitively, it seems as if Western leaders have declared war on their own citizens as much as the Russians.  Who could have foreseen that “Gas-for-Rubles” would become a catchphrase in 2022?

With reference to the massive “Arms!” transfers to AmericaNATOstan’s Ukrainian proxy forces:  How many more dead or surrendered Ukrainians will it take to show incontrovertibly both the cruelty and imbecility of this “More Weapons!” policy?  The mid-May mass surrender of the cornered Ukrainian troops in the Azovstal Steel Works — AzovStalingrad? — in Mariupol provides one clue; the current Russian rolling-up of the Donbass will be the next.  In other words:  if NATO wants to fight Russia in Ukraine, they are going to have to do it themselves.

The good news so far on this possible development is that the Death Star, or Pentagon, has no appetite for going “toe-to-toe with the Rooskie!” (Quote, if I recall it correctly, from General Buck “Bucky” Turdgeson in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, although George C. Scott’s excitably nihilist character is actually advocating for fighting directly with “the Rooskie!” in the movie). In fact, the Pentagon has been far more sober in its assessments than either the US State Department or the American Congress (not to mention our rabid Blue-and-Yellow Press), which mindlessly voted $40 billion more for the “Ukrainian” war.

So, the Ukraine Flag imogee crowd continues to maintain its “Stand by Ukraine!” Potemkin Village idiot mentality.  Of course, the Western Corporate Press is still leading the daily Cheers and “Rahs!” for Ukraine, painting a false narrative of constant Ukrainian victory — but only if we can get Zelensly a few more howitzers, tanks, planes, drones, Javelins, Harpoons (NATO boots-on-the-ground, perchance?), and bullets.  Oh, and maybe we can donate a Ouija board to President Comedian so he can summon back the “Ghost of Kyiv”?  That would truly clear the Ukrainian skies of the Russian invader this time, right?

The Potemkin Village: a Historical Snap Shot

“Potemkin spared no effort or expense in showcasing Russia’s power and resources.  He even surprised the Empress with a battalion of ‘Amazons’–100 Greek women dressed in crimson skirts and gold-trimmed jackets (spencers) topped by gold-spangled turbans with ostrich feathers.” ¹

Many things are meant, or possibly indicated, by the phrase “Potemkin Village,” which is generally understood as a kind of decorative front overlaid upon a particularly squalid or sordid reality so as to deceive the viewer as to the true state of affairs.  Today, we might call it a form of “disinformation,” whereas in times past the term “deception” would have adequately described this phenomenon.

Roundabout 1775, Russian Empress Catherine the Second (aka “the Great,” who ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796, or rather a long run…) appointed her “flamboyant favorite,” courtier Grigory Potemkin, to the office of Governor-General over most of what is now known as “Ukraine.”  At that time, the newly acquired Russian imperial lands were known as “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” in accordance with a “new”-naming fad popular amongst the prevailing European imperial powers.  In 1787, to commemorate her 25th year upon the Muscovite throne, Catherine embarked upon a 6 month journey through Novorossiya to Crimea, an extravagant political vacation with Lots of FireWorks!

Legend has it that Potemkin conspired to erect fake villages staffed by Walt Disney Peasants in order to impress the Empress with touristic delight during her voyage down the Dnieper.  This story is generally considered to be a wild exaggeration, although obviously World leaders, even today, are typically not treated to the most derelict of places they visit; quite the contrary.  U2, or the half of U2 that recently played a dolled-up underground subway stop in Kiev (or Kyiv, and I have to ask the math-musical question here:  Does one half of U2=”U1″?) certainly got the “Catherine 2,” or “Potemkin,” treatment in the Ukrainian capital.

However, there is a wholly other layer of irony to the “Potemkin Village” myth, namely:  Potemkin quite literally founded several villages that would go on to become key cities in what is now — at least for the moment — known as Ukraine, including Nikolayev, Dnipro, and Kherson.  Kherson, of course, was the first large city that Russia captured, way back in March, to little fanfare.  The Zelensky-fawning Western Blue-and-Yellow Press was strictly printing stories of heroic Ukrainian resistance then, so Russia taking a major Black Sea Ukrainian littoral town didn’t make the cut, and especially didn’t fit the “Potemkin” Narrative of plucky little neo-Nazi infested Ukraine beating the Big Bad Bear.  But:  “What about Snake Island?”  What about, indeed?  Potemkin Island would be a good title for any documentary about this conflict, or even The Ghost of Potemkin Island…

If the “Mainstream” were anywhere near the Reality Stream, many a red — and not merely “false” — flag should have been raised over the issue of “something rotten in the state of” — Ukraine.  A “Democracy” run by oligarchs with a President whose chief qualification for the job was having played the “President of Ukraine” in a comedy TV skit might have topped the list, especially after the “Trumpman Show” in the US.  Then there’s the bit about Trump’s successor, Joe “Bidenopolous” and Son’s wanton corruption in Ukraine during Obama’s reign:  What to make of that?  What to make of the Western-styled “Potemkin Village” of Democracy that is Ukraine?  How about some more “Sanctions!”, and surely more “Weapons!”

Truly, the propaganda scaffolding around this “Potemkin Village” Ukraine has been so preposterously poor that one wonders if the Covid-19 phenomenon had not only cooked, but then also eaten, the brains of the Western Elite Establishment?  Blinken blinks, absently; Nuland “Coup”-lands, hesitantly, as she describes Bio-Research Labs in Ukraine connected to the U$ under oath in a Senate hearing; and Jake Sullivan evokes an even paler shade of Jared Kushner every time he appears, which sometimes includes an MbS tantrum (although apparently pale Sullivan took Mohammed “Bone-saw” Salman’s tongue-lashing like a good boy…).

Clearly, there is a crisis of political leadership in the West, to the tune of:  These people are not fit to rule.  Instead of “isolating” Putin’s Russia as a harsh consequence for “Operation Z,” as they have all so imperiously claimed, these incompetent Western overlords have only managed to further isolate themselves from the rest of the World which everyone knows that they, the AmericaNATOstanis, view with absolute contempt.  Indeed, a mere modicum of respect for Russia and the Minsk Accords could have averted this catastrophic war that is destroying Ukraine.  In a very real-world sense, then, the Ukrainian war is certainly a “political tragedy.”

1. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend, John T. Alexander, 1989, p. 260.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Todd Smith.

Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge’s ruling.

I’ve traveled domestically and internationally many times since the start of the pandemic and I hate the mask as much as anyone. It makes me sneeze and it tickles. After 10 hours on long hauls, I can indeed feel like I’m suffocating. It can be almost unbearable. But after two years of obediently masking up to enter airports and planes around the world, I found my first unmasked travel experience jarring indeed, even though I kept mine on. I was not the only masked person on that American Airlines flight, but I was definitely in the minority.

Writing a book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, about the politics and science of our Covid-19 experience, I came to know and trust public-health policy experts and vaccine scientists. I learned enough about the mRNA vaccines so many (but not enough) of us have received that I regard them as a major medical milestone well worth celebrating. I also accept that scientific understanding is based on uncertainty and the advice of our health authorities is only as good as the latest peer-reviewed article.

So I’ve maintained faith in science, even while understanding its limits. And I also understand the frustration of so many Americans. Who among us didn’t chafe at the pandemic restrictions? Who wasn’t going mad trying to work from a home or apartment reverberating with restless children locked out of their schools?

In March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I thought the crisis might provoke wider support for a more universal health-care system. Nothing of the sort materialized, of course, although the rapid, government-financed development and delivery of free and effective vaccines — to those who wanted them — was indeed a success story.

Now, in the pandemic’s third year, people are ripping off their masks everywhere as Greek-letter Covid mutations continue to waft through the air.

The viral joy of that unmasking, the giving of the proverbial finger to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), begs the question: Did the pandemic make average Americans more anti-government?  Did it bring us closer to what decades of rightwing propaganda had not quite succeeded in doing — generating widespread public support for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (a phrase favored by Trump crony Steve Bannon)?

Government activity during the first two pandemic years was certainly intense. Trillions of dollars in business loans and unemployment money washed through the economy. At different points, the government even activated the military and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). States also instituted widespread lockdowns and closed schools. The panic, the isolation, and the quotidian inconveniences made some people barking mad.

Of course, a lot of us listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci. We trusted our public health authorities and their recommendations. To many of us, their intentions seemed good, their asks reasonable.

Federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, however, thought otherwise.  Just 35 when Donald Trump appointed her a district judge, she had never actually tried a case. The American Bar Association had rejected her confirmation due to her inexperience, but like many Trump judges, she was a Federalist Society-approved ideologue and the Republican Senate confirmed her anyway to a district that, by design, has become a nest of extreme antigovernment judges.

The anti-maskers could have brought their case in any jurisdiction. Choosing Tampa was a clear case of legal venue shopping. Other judges in the district had consistently ruled against government Covid restrictions on cruise ships and against mandatory vaccinations. The plaintiffs couldn’t actually select Judge Mizelle, but their chances of getting an antigovernment ruling in Tampa were high indeed.

As it happened, the plaintiffs got her and she relied on definitions of “sanitation” in mid-twentieth century English dictionaries to overturn the statute that allowed the mask mandate. None of them explicitly included the word “mask” in their definitions. So, she revoked it.

The ruling horrified public-health policy experts, although the Biden administration — probably with the coming midterm elections and those viral videos of mask-free joy in mind — decided not to challenge the decision directly. “The continuing concern throughout the pandemic has been the politicization of these public-health measures,” Dr. Bruce Lee, a public-health policy expert at the City University of New York, told me. “We know that throughout history during public-health crises there has been a need to enact regulations. The big concern with this mask decision is you basically have a scientific or public-health decision made by a single judge.”

It took that judge just 18 days after arguments — a nanosecond in judicial time — to side with two women who said airplane masks gave them panic attacks and anxiety and so unlawfully prevented them from traveling. They were joined by an organization called the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

Using the Virus to Seed Fresh Political Astroturf

The Fund, based in Sandpoint, Idaho, is run by Leslie Manookian, a wellness blogger and antivaccine activist who, after having a child in 2003, left a career in international finance with Goldman Sachs to become, as she describes herself, “a qualified homeopath, nutrition and wellbeing junky” and “a health freedom advocate.”

Manookian has declined to provide information about the sources of funding for her organization, to which the Internal Revenue Service granted nonprofit status in 2021. It’s likely, however, to be just another green swath on the great field of rightwing Astroturf. While social democrats like me imagined that the pandemic might provoke a more equitable health-care system, the crew on the right had other plans for how to manipulate the crisis.

Politicians, strategists, and chaos agents ranging from Donald Trump to Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, sometimes backed by dark money, have used the public-health restrictions to fuel their demands for more “freedom” from government. The definition of freedom among this crowd is primarily understood to be low or no taxes, with access to guns thrown in for good measure. In the spring of 2020, for instance, the billionaire Koch Brothers, who once funded the Tea Party largely to crush Obamacare, were among the conservative megadonors who helped activate the network behind the lockdown “drive-bys” of state capitols. Those initial lockdown protests would later devolve into Y’all-Qaeda-style pro-Trump pickup convoys. In Lansing, Michigan, a protest even ended with armed men entering the State Capitol. Among the intruderswere members of a clan of gun-loving militiamen who would eventually plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan for restricting their freedom.

The pandemic seeded new Astroturf for the right. America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), for example, was formed during the early months of the pandemic to challenge public-health policy in favor of keeping the economy rolling. Besides promoting antivaccine misinformation, AFLDS referred more than 255,000 people to a website created by Jerome Corsi, an author and longtime political agitator, called SpeakwithanMD.com. The site charged for consultations with “AFLDS-approved physicians” about the Covid “cures” ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that President Trump and his fans so loved.

The messages of such groups (eventually including just about the whole Republican Party) were, of course, amplified by the usual rightwing media outlets — One America News Network, Newsmax, and above all Fox News — that started out by calling the pandemic virus a hoax. When Covid-19 was undeniably killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the messaging shifted to equating lockdowns, vaccines, and mask mandates with totalitarianism.

Globally, there’s no doubt that the pandemic did indeed release the worst instincts of authoritarian governments. Real autocracies unleashed real abuses of power on vulnerable people in the name of Covid-19. Some of these were catalogued early in the pandemic by the democracy and human-rights organization Freedom House.  In October 2020, it found that, in 59 of 192 countries, violence or abuses of power took place in the name of pandemic safety. It reported, for example, that the government of Zimbabwe was using “Covid-19 restrictions as an excuse for a widespread campaign of threats, harassment, and physical assault” on the political opposition there.

In terms of hubris and scale, though, the totalitarian dystopia to beat has been China. Exiled Chinese writer Liao Wiyu published a vivid book earlier this year describing how the authorities there disappeared doctors, silenced the citizenry; and in a harrowing fashion nailed the doors of homes and apartment buildings shut, marking them with red banners to identify contagious inhabitants. The images were straight out of Daniel Defoe’s novel about the bubonic plague in seventeenth-century London, A Journal of the Plague Year, updated with modern gadgetry like biosurveillance.

China’s “zero Covid” response has included epic crackdowns on freedom of movement. Forty-six cities and 343 million residents have recently been under strict lockdown. Some residents of Shanghai, forbidden to leave their apartments, have been running short of food and medicine. Videos of dogs being lowered by ropes and pulleys from apartment windows for daily walks only added an element of macabre hilarity to the scene.

In the U.S., rather than increasing trust in government, the relatively mild pandemic public-health measures instituted by the CDC and state governments only inflamed America’s “freedom” fetish. Claiming that mask and vaccine mandates were the slippery slope to Chinese totalitarianism was certainly a stretch, but one that many on the right have been all too eager to promote. For years, the right-wing echo chamber has been priming the info-siloed and mentally vulnerable with warnings about “FEMA camps” for Christians and conservatives (and, of course, while they were at it, the feds were always coming to get your guns, too).

As it happened, though, the pandemic also triggered anti-government sentiment outside the usual quarters. Take Jennifer Sey, a self-described Elizabeth Warren Democrat and San Francisco liberal, who was forced out of her job at Levi Strauss & Co., when she started advocating against restrictive school closings. The mother of four and the company’s chief marketing officer, she found it increasingly hard to understand why her children couldn’t go back to school after the first Covid surge in 2020. Irritation and frustration led to public outrage, which led (of course!) to a social-media following. She became an online leader of parents for reopening schools. Her employer didn’t like it and soon banished her.

The Anti-Government Infection as a Symptom of “Long Covid”

Public-health policy expert Dr. Lee finds it less than surprising that even Americans like Sey rebelled. He mostly blames the way science was miscommunicated and politicized in public debate in this increasingly Trumpified country. “There needed to be consistency. Once you start straying from science and becoming inconsistent, people get confused. We saw people talking about school closures, and many of them were off in different directions. School closings were not a long-term solution. The increased politicization of science and public-health policy is largely a result of certain political leaders and certain TV personalities and anonymous social media accounts. What it does is, it damages — it causes chaos. You hear people saying, oh, they don’t know what to believe anymore.”

The question is: Where are we now? Along with the ongoing pandemic, are we experiencing a full-blown anti-government infection and is that, too, a symptom of “long Covid”? Or is the resistance to government mandates and vaccines simply a response to the Astroturfing of the rightwing echo chamber?

Or, in fact, both?

Conservatives have been smacking their lips over what they regard as signs of a resurgence of the flinty libertarian.  “A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back,” a Cato Institute commentary proclaimed earlier this year. “Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the state’s activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and… kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism.” (Of course, that’s putting it in an all too kindly fashion.  Substitute, say, fascism and that statement feels quite different.)

Conservative commentator Sam Goldman, writing in the Week, hit the same note:

“As the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci.”

It’s not clear that this represents a lasting trend. An October 2021 Gallup poll found that American’s attitudes reverted from a desire for more government intervention at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 to essentially where they had been when Donald Trump was elected in 2016.  Since the 1990s, Gallup has been polling American preferences when it comes to the role of government in our lives. The long-term graph shows regular mood swings, although those between 2020 and 2021 were unusually steep.

Note as well that the American response to pandemic regulations differed strikingly from the European one. A study published earlier this year in the European Journal of Political Research explored attitudes in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, specifically the role of emotions in the way people responded to restricted civil liberties during the pandemic years (including restricted movement through Covid phone apps and army-patrolled curfews). Fear of contagion, not surprisingly, was the chief emotion and that fear led to a striking willingness to accept more government restrictions on civil liberties.

In Europe, safety won. In this country, it seems not. I haven’t seen similar research here (though there has been some suggesting that, in the Trump era, fear has been the driving emotion in individuals who lean right).  It certainly seems as if the American response to the pandemic wasn’t to accept more restrictions on civil liberties, not at least when it came to masks and vaccine mandates.

But look more closely and you’ll see something else, something far more deeply unnerving. In these last months, even as masks have come off and booster shots have gone in all too few arms, there has been an unprecedented assault on other civil liberties. Red-state lawmakers are attacking the civil rights of women, gays, and minorities with unprecedented ferocity.  In its landmark upcoming ruling that will, it seems, overturn Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court driven rightward by three Trump appointees has now apparently agreed that there is no right to privacy either.

As political journalist Ron Brownstein pointed out recently, conservative statehouses in red states “are remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speed — and with little national attention to their cumulative effect.” In the process, they are setting back the civil-liberties clock in America to the years before what legal scholars called the “rights revolution” of the 1960s.

The speed and urgency with which right-wing judges and legislators are embracing a historic anti-liberty enterprise suggests panic and fear. This anti-freedom movement, ultimately, is not a response to the actions of the federal government or the CDC. It emanates from the frightened souls of the very people who have been shrieking about totalitarianism whenever they see a mask.

Now, excuse me for a moment, while I put my mask on and face an American world in which the dangers, both pandemic and political, are rising once again.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

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