A new poll by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union shows that almost half of respondents oppose the Cook Islands having automatic New Zealand citizenship.

Thirty percent of the 1000-person sample supported Cook Islanders retaining citizenship, 46 percent were opposed and 24 percent were unsure.

• The Cook Islands government is pursuing closer strategic ties with China, ignoring New Zealand’s wishes and not consulting with the New Zealand government. Given this, should the Cook Islands continue to enjoy automatic access to New Zealand passports, citizenship, health care and education when its government pursues a foreign policy against the wishes of the New Zealand government?
• READ MORE: Other Cook Islands reports

Taxpayers’ Union head of communications Tory Relf said the framing of the question was “fair”.

“If the Cook Islands wants to continue enjoying a close relationship with New Zealand, then, of course, we will support that,” he said.

“However, if they are looking in a different direction, then I think it is entirely fair that taxpayers can have a right to say whether they want their money sent there or not.”

But New Zealand Labour Party deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni said it was a “leading question”.

‘Dead end’ assumption
“It asserts or assumes that we have hit a dead end here and that we cannot resolve the relationship issues that have unfolded between New Zealand and the Cook Islands,” Sepuloni said.

“We want a resolution. We do not want to assume or assert that it is all done and dusted and the relationship is broken.”

The two nations have been in free association since 1965.

Relf said that adding historical context of the two countries relationship would be a different question.

“We were polling on the Cook Islands current policy, asking about historic ties would introduce an emotive element that would influence the response.”

New Zealand has paused nearly $20 million in development assistance to the realm nation.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the decision was made because the Cook Islands failed to adequately inform his government about several agreements signed with Beijing in February.

‘An extreme response’
Sepuloni, who is also Labour’s Pacific Peoples spokesperson, said her party agreed with the government that the Cook Islands had acted outside of the free association agreement.

“[The aid pause is] an extreme response, however, in saying that we don’t have all of the information in front of us that the government have. I’m very mindful that in terms of pausing or stopping aid, the scenarios where I can recall that happening are scenarios like when Fiji was having their coup.”

In response to questions from Cook Islands News, Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said that, while he acknowledged the concerns raised in the recent poll, he believed it was important to place the discussion within the full context of Cook Islands’ longstanding and unique relationship with New Zealand.

“The Cook Islands and New Zealand share a deep, enduring constitutional bond underpinned by shared history, family ties, and mutual responsibility,” Brown told the Rarotonga-based newspaper.

“Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens not by privilege, but by right. A right rooted in decades of shared sacrifice, contribution, and identity.

“More than 100,000 Cook Islanders live in New Zealand, contributing to its economy, culture, and communities. In return, our people have always looked to New Zealand not just as a partner but as family.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Erin in the Morning‘s Erin Reed about transgender care “questions” for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Janine Jackson: Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was clear in saying that only certain ideological presuppositions would be acceptable from here on in, when the paper canceled a prepared endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, and canceled a cartoon critical of Donald Trump, and a number of other things. And that sound you heard was many people moving the Washington Post from one place to another in their brains.

But the Post is still the leading daily in the lawmaking place of this country, and what they say has influence on people who have influence. So when the Post editorial board described a report on trans healthcare from the Health and Human Services Department—now headed by Robert F. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me” Kennedy Jr.—as “thorough and careful,” that was going to have an impact.

The piece, headed “Good Questions About Transgender Care,” really raised deeper questions about corporate news media and their role in the world we have, and the world we need today.

Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. She joins us now by phone from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Welcome to CounterSpin, Erin Reed.

Erin Reed: Thank you so much for having me on.

Scientific American (5/12/22)

JJ: An idea can be utterly discredited—evidentially, scientifically—but can still have resonance for people who just feel like certain things are true. The Post, well, first they point out that this HHS report is “more than 400 pages, including appendixes,” so you’re supposed to sit up straight. But the message is that the HHS report is a review of the existing literature on best practices around healthcare, and that it’s “careful” and “thorough.”

I feel like when anti-trans media is cartoonish, it’s almost easier to bat away. But when something like this comes from a paper of record, it makes it more difficult. So let me just ask you, what are you making of this Post editorial?

ER: Yeah, so a little bit of background. This HHS report was produced specifically because the science on transgender healthcare has been so clear for so long. There’s been repeated study after study, coming out in the most prestigious journals, showing the positive impact of transgender healthcare on those who need it. And so the HHS report was put out in order to give cover to organizations that want to oppose transgender healthcare.

And that’s what we got with the Washington Post editorial page, where the editorial board basically endorses the report. It goes through the report and says that it’s a great report, essentially, and that it raises great questions about transgender healthcare and more.

Washington Post (5/1/25)

Whenever I read something like that from the Washington Post editorial board, though, and then I see how that same board and how that same paper treats everything else that RFK Jr.’s healthcare team puts out—for instance, vaccines, autism, fluoridation in water and more—there’s this double standard whenever it comes to transgender healthcare. The paper is willing to point out the lack of science behind this particular department’s positions under RFK Jr. for all of these other things, but it seemingly ignores that whenever it comes to transgender people.

JJ: And yet they refer to—they’re scientistic. They say that this report “concurs with other systematic reviews.” They give all the gesturing towards the idea that this is science here—and yet it’s not.

ER: And the report itself was anonymously written. They didn’t release any of the names of the people who worked on the report; however, they left the EXIF data in. And so you could actually see the person who compiled the report, and it was Alex Byrne, is the one who’s on the EXIF data in the PDF.

And what that says is that they’re not using experts here. Alex Byrne is a philosophy major. That’s not somebody who’s ever worked with gender-affirming healthcare, and not somebody who’s ever worked with transgender people.

Erin Reed: “What we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.”

We are seeing these attacks on transgender healthcare using these mechanisms, like the RFK Jr. healthcare department, trying to dictate what science is by fiat, trying to say that it doesn’t matter what the studies say, it doesn’t matter that all the medical organizations and the people that work with transgender people say that this healthcare is saving lives. We are going to dictate what is science and what is not.

I read the whole 400-page report. I read all of anything that comes out about transgender healthcare, because that’s my job; I’m a journalist covering this topic.

And the report, if you read it, it’s not a scientific document. It’s not something that has new information. It’s not something that studies transgender healthcare, it deadnames historical transgender figures, it calls transgender healthcare a “social contagion.” And it advocates for conversion therapy of transgender people, explicitly so, in many instances.

And so I don’t think that what we have is a good scientific document that raises important questions on transgender healthcare, like the Washington Post editorial board claims. Instead, what we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.

JJ: Part of that involves relabeling, and you just mentioned conversion therapy. And I think a lot of listeners will say, “Oh, I’ve learned about what that means. It involves telling queer people they’re not queer, they’re mentally ill.” But the Post has something to say about how—or maybe it’s the report itself—how, Oh, no, no, no, this isn’t conversion therapy. What’s going on there?

ER: Yeah, so the original report advocates for something known as “gender exploratory therapy.” And I have done a lot of investigations on this particular modality of therapy that’s being promoted by people on the anti-trans right.

Erin in the Morning (12/20/22)

So gender exploratory therapy, it sounds good. It sounds like something that we want. Like of course, if somebody is transitioning, we would love for them to have a good and open environment to explore their gender identity. And that is what we have right now.

But that’s not what gender exploratory therapy is. Gender exploratory therapy is a very kind-sounding name for a repackaged version of conversion therapy.

Essentially, what this modality of therapy does is, let’s say you’re a transgender youth. You’re 14, 15, 16 years old, and you are considering transitioning. What they will do is, they will take you, and they will try to blame your gender identity on anything other than being trans, repeatedly. They’ll go from thing to thing to thing to thing.

And the important point here is that these therapists will never approve your transition. They will never write a gender-affirming care letter for you. They explicitly won’t do that. If you go to the website of the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, you’ll find that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender bathroom usage in schools, or that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender participation in sports like darts. We see that this is not a neutral sort of modality.

The closest comparison that many of your listeners will probably understand is crisis pregnancy centers, where they’ve used this name “crisis pregnancy centers” to try to say that if you’re seeking an abortion, that this is a good clinic to go to. But if you know anything about crisis pregnancy centers, the way that they work is by delaying abortion until it’s no longer feasible. And that’s the exact same way that GETA works, and that’s what we see being promoted by this report.

JJ: Finally, in terms of media, who we know often or virtually always set things up in a “some say, others differ” framework, they’re quoting the Washington Post editorial and other outlets, acknowledging the place where they say ”critics have been scathing.”—this is the Post—”critics have been scathing about what they see as the report’s biases and shortcomings, but it makes a legitimate case for caution that policymakers need to wrestle with.”

And I would just ask you, finally, to talk about this media idea of somehow the truth is in the middle on issues. And then, also, Oh, all we’re asking for is caution. Who’s against caution? And, additionally, anyone who criticizes it is an activist and an interested party, other than these disinterested scientists and ethicists at the Washington Post.

ER: So I’m actually going to push back slightly and make an even broader point here.

JJ:  Please.

ER: “Both sides” coverage and “the truth is in the middle” coverage and “giving both sides a chance to make their point,” that would be an improvement for what we have right now, with transgender reporting and reporting on transgender healthcare.

JJ:  Absolutely.

Them (3/28/24)

ER: Because, let me tell you, whenever you look at the New York Times, whenever you look at the Washington Post, and the way that transgender healthcare is covered right now, the experts, the transgender people, the transgender journalists like myself, are not given the space to make their points. They’re not given the space to make the case for scientific healthcare, and for good treatment of LGBTQ people and transgender people.

But you’ll see the New York Times publish three-, four-page spreads attacking transgender healthcare, from people who have made it their job to attack transgender people. You’ll see the editorial board at the Washington Post explicitly advocate for a healthcare report done by the RFK Jr. healthcare team, targeting transgender people. And whenever it comes to the transgender people, and whenever it comes to the experts and the medical organizations and the Yale physicians, they’re written off as just activists.

And so this is not even “both sides” reporting. It’s not even “the truth is in the middle” reporting. These papers have taken a position on this, and it’s a position that’s not supported by the science. It’s a position that’s not being practiced, importantly, by the people who are giving out that transgender healthcare, who are treating transgender people, day in, day out, who see these patients and understand the impact that gender-affirming care has on their lives.

So I guess what I’m just really trying to say is, I wish they would platform transgender people. I wish they would platform the doctors. I wish they would platform the medical organizations, but they don’t.

JJ: It feels like you’re telling me what better reporting would look like, yeah?

ER: I’m trying.

JJ: Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. Thank you so much, Erin Reed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ER: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

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

In a letter to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 195 groups including Earthjustice, Sunrise Movement, and the American Association of Justice, pointed to past efforts from the fossil fuel industry to secure a liability waiver from Congress, as well as statements from President Trump, as reason to anticipate a new push to immunize polluters.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to pass some form of liability waiver and shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” the groups wrote. “That effort — no matter what form it takes — must not be allowed to succeed.”

Dozens of state, municipal, and tribal governments have filed lawsuits against major oil and gas companies to hold them accountable and make them pay for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. Several of those cases are advancing toward discovery and ultimately trial. Twice this year the U.S. Supreme Court has denied requests — most recently on Monday — aimed at shielding Big Oil companies from facing such lawsuits, even after industry allies targeted the justices with an unprecedented pressure campaign.

Separately, a growing number of state legislatures are advancing climate superfund bills that would compel major fossil fuel companies to contribute to funds supporting climate adaptation, infrastructure, and community rebuilding efforts based on their historical emissions. Vermont and New York passed first-of-their-kind climate superfund laws last year, both of which are now facing legal challenges from fossil fuel interests, and at least 10 additional states have introduced similar legislation in 2025.

The groups’ letter asks Schumer and Jeffries “to draw a line in the sand now — before fossil fuel industry allies divulge their specific plans — and unite your caucuses in firm opposition to any Congressional efforts to bail out climate polluters from facing legal and legislative consequences for their central role in the climate crisis.”

"Democrats need to be on guard so that Big Oil’s congressional allies can’t sneak immunity into a bill without it meeting fierce and vocal resistance,” said Aaron Regunberg, Director of Public Citizen’s climate accountability project. “No industry should be above the law — especially one whose criminal actions have fueled the greatest threat to human safety in history."

"Big Oil companies know they face massive liability, and we know they'll do everything they can to avoid facing the evidence of their climate deception in court,” said Richard Wiles, President of the Center for Climate Integrity. “Now that the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to bail out Big Oil, and lawsuits against the companies are getting closer to trial, members of Congress must not give the fossil fuel industry a 'get out of jail free card' for its fraudulent and destructive behavior."

“For decades, the fossil fuel industry has known the health and climate harms of its actions. Instead of addressing them, they have tried everything to insulate themselves from the catastrophes they cause,” said Earthjustice Action Vice President of Policy and Legislation Raúl García. “That’s not how fairness works, and it’s not how the law works. Just like anyone else, they need to be held accountable for the harms they perpetrate on people and communities. The last thing they deserve is a liability shield, and we urge Congress to oppose and block any effort to help these companies evade accountability for their actions.”

"The gun industry wrote this playbook years ago, and we've witnessed the tragic consequences when corporations secure legal shields from accountability. What's at stake here isn't just who pays for climate disasters – it's whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them,” said Cassidy DiPaola, Communications Director, Make Polluters Pay. “The fossil fuel industry spent decades burying climate science while their products fueled the crisis. Now that the bill is coming due, they want taxpayers to cover their tab. Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception.”

"As people around the country and world suffer from record-breaking global temperatures and unprecedented extreme weather events, the science is clear that burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of dangerous and deadly climate change,” said Kathy Mulvey, Climate Accountability Campaign Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Major oil and gas companies have understood for decades that their products could have catastrophic effects on people and the planet, yet they engaged in a long-term, deliberate disinformation campaign. Now, when there is growing momentum to make fossil fuel corporations begin to pay for the damage they have caused, policymakers must stand firm and protect their constituents against any attempts by the industry to evade accountability for its pollution, deception, and destruction."

"Working people are footing the bill for climate change. That's why a growing number of state and local governments are demanding that the oil and gas corporations that profit off causing the climate crisis — and mislead the public about it — start paying their fair share,” said Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay. “Congress needs to stand with working people — not Big Oil — and refuse to give immunity for oil and gas billionaires."

A copy of the letter is available here.

The 195 organizations that signed the letter are

• Adirondack Voters for Change
• ALIGN
• All Our Energy
• Allegheny County Clean Air Now
• Alliance for Justice
• Alliance of Maine Health Professionals for Climate Action
• American Association for Justice
• Americans for Financial Reform
• Arizona Health Professionals for Climate Action
• Better Future Project
• Big Reuse
• Bold Alliance
• Breathe Project
• Bronx River - Sound Shore Audubon
• California Environmental Voters
• Campaign for Renewable Energy
• Capital District Community Energy
• Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment
• Catholic Charities Tompkins/Tioga Justice & Peace Ministry
• Center for Biological Diversity
• Center for Climate Change and Health
• Center for Climate Integrity
• Center for Justice & Democracy
• Cherokee Concerned Citizens
• Chesapeake Climate Action Network
• Church Women United in New York State
• Citizen Action of New York
• Citizens Climate Lobby - Brooklyn
• Citizens Committee for Flood Relief
• Clean Water Action
• Clean, Healthy, Educated, Safe & Sustainable Community, Inc.
• Clean+Healthy
• Climate Changemakers
• Climate Code Blue
• Climate Equity Policy Center
• Climate Families NYC
• Climate Generation
• Climate Hawks Vote
• Climate Health Now
• Climate Reality Project Chicago Metro Chapter
• Coalition to SAVE the Menominee River, Inc.
• Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island
• Communitopia
• Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment
• Concerned Health Professionals of New York
• Consumer Federation of America
• Consumer Watchdog
• Corporate Accountability
• Courage California
• Damascus Citizens for Sustainability
• Deep Green Resistance NYC
• Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society
• Don't Gas the Meadowlands Coalition
• Earth Ethics, Inc.
• Earthjustice
• EcoEquity
• Elders Climate Action
• Elders Climate Action Mass
• Empower New Jersey
• Environmental Advocates NY
• Extinction Rebellion US
• Extreme Weather Survivors
• Food & Water Watch
• For Love of Water
• For the Many
• Fossil Free California
• Fossil Free Tompkins
• FrackBustersNY
• Friends of the Clearwater
• Friends of the Earth US
• Gas Free Seneca
• Gen-Z for Change
• Grassroots Environmental Education
• Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility
• Green Ossining
• GreenFaith
• GreenLatinos
• HabitatMap
• Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate
• Human Impact Partners
• Impact Fund
• Indivisible ADK/Saratoga
• Indivisible Harlem
• Indivisible Mohawk Valley Climate Crisis WG
• Inner City Green Team
• Jewish Climate Action Network, NYC
• Jewish Climate Action Network, MA
• Junta Comunitaria Pastillo Tibes Corp
• Long Island Progressive Coalition
• Maine Climate Action Now
• Make Polluters Pay
• Metro Justice
• Micah Six Eight Mission
• Michigan Climate Action Network
• Michigan Clinicians for Climate Action
• Middlefield Neighbors
• Missouri River Bird Observatory
• MN350
• Mothers Out Front
• Mothers* Rebellion Global
• National Association of Consumer Advocates
• National Consumers league
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• New Paltz Interfaith Earth Action
• New York Communities for Change
• New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
• New York Progressive Action Network
• New Yorkers for Clean Power
• North American Climate, Conservation and Environment
• North Country Earth Action
• North Shore Audubon Society
• North Star Fund
• NY Public Interest Research Group
• NY State Council of Churches
• NY-GEO
• NYCD16/15 Indivisible
• NYPAN Environmental Committee
• Oil and Gas Action Network
• Oil Change International
• Oregon League of Conservation Voters
• Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility
• Park County Environmental Council
• People for a Healthy Environment
• Peoples Climate Movement - NY
• Philadelphia Solar Energy Association
• Physicians for Social Responsibility, Colorado
• Physicians for Social Responsibility, Maine
• Physicians for Social Responsibility, Pennsylvania
• Physicians for Social Responsibility, Texas
• Progressive Schenectady
• Public Citizen
• Public Justice
• Quaker Action Mid Atlantic Region
• Ratepayer and Community Intervenors, Finger Lakes, NY
• Reach Out America
• ReAL Edgemere CLT
• Reclaim Our Power
• Regenerating Paradise
• Rise Economy
• Rising Sun Center for Opportunity
• Rivers & Mountains GreenFaith
• RPI Sunrise Movement
• San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility
• Sane Energy Project
• Seneca Lake Guardian
• Serpentine Art and Nature Commons
• Sierra Club
• Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
• Sisters of St Joseph of Rochester, Office of Justice and Care for Creation
• Sisters of St. Dominic of Blauvelt, NY
• Solarize Albany
• South Bronx Unite
• Stand.earth
• Staten Island Urban Center
• Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline
• Sunrise Movement
• SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force
• Sustainable Finger Lakes
• Take Action Advocacy Group
• TakeAction Minnesota
• The Climate Center
• The Climate Reality Project New York Chapters Coalition
• The Rachel Carson Council
• Third Act
• Third Act Lawyers
• Third Act Massachusetts
• Third Act Maryland
• Third Act NYC
• Third Act Upstate New York
• Third Act Virginia
• Three Rivers Waterkeeper
• TIAA-Divest!
• Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative
• Ulster Activist
• Union of Concerned Scientists
• United For Clean Energy
• United Muslim Alliance of Albany
• Upper Nyack Green Committee
• Vermont Natural Resources Council
• Vermont Public Interest Research Group
• Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action
• Virginia League of Conservation Voters
• Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility
• Weber Sustainability Consulting
• WESPAC Foundation, Inc.
• Westchester for Change
• Worcester Congregations for Climate and Environmental Justice
• 198 methods
• 350 Bay Area
• 350 Conejo / San Fernando Valley
• 350 Wisconsin
• 350Brooklyn
• 350Hawaii
• 350PDX

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

Scientists rallied nationwide last Friday in opposition to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts for scientific research and mass layoffs impacting numerous agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Thousands gathered at Stand Up for Science protests in over two dozen other cities. We air remarks from speakers in Washington, D.C., including former USAID official Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health.

“I study women’s health, and right now you’re not able to really put into proposals that you are studying women,” says Emma Courtney, Ph.D. candidate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-organizer of Stand Up for Science. She tells Democracy Now! it’s critical for federal policy to be “informed by science and rooted in evidence.”

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

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, about 1,000 U.S. Army personnel and 500 Marines have been sent to the border, in addition to 2,500 National Guard members already there. Helicopter units are being sent along with U.S. Air Force C-17 and C- 130 aircraft; and Stars and Stripes reports that 20-ton Stryker armored combat vehicles may also be shipped. The number of U.S. military personnel on the U.S.-Mexico border may rise to as many as 10,000, according to the Defense One newsletter.

The use of active-duty military personnel for domestic policing operations is strictly forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act, and legal challenges are being mounted.  President Trump says he may invoke the Insurrection Act, which effectively overrides Posse Comitatus by allowing the Executive to declare a national emergency requiring the domestic deployment of US troops. But using the Insurrection Act to override the protections of the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy U.S. troops within the United States to investigate, detain, and remove illegal immigrants would be an unprecedented use of presidential power and misuse of the military, according to a recent report by the New York Bar.

What we have here is a U.S. president who is willing to engage thousands of U.S. military personnel in what appears – among other atrocities – to be a profit-making scheme based on a contrived border crisis.  According to Customs and Border Protection data, monthly migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2023 and December 2024 were reduced dramatically from 249,740 to 47,326 apprehensions. Nevertheless, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reportedly want to build four new detention centers with 10,000 beds each, along with 14 smaller facilities that each contain around 1,000 beds each. According to the American Immigration Counsel, “That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies,” at least one of whom, CoreCivic, donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.

Trump is also calling for 30,000 immigrants to be detained at the notorious US gulag at Guantanamo Bay, where U.S. laws and protections do not exist. This would also be another slap in the face of Cuba’s sovereignty over its own territory.

Tragically, this bogus campaign is terrifying, and profoundly disrupting the lives of millions of peaceful, extremely hard-working, tax-paying members of U.S. society. Even as the US government is complicit in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians from Gaza, it is now “cleansing” the US of immigrants, many of whom are indigenous to North America. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “border deterrence” policy – now being carried out with soldiers and Marines – causes the death of more than 2,500 migrants per year, as they are intentionally forced onto the most perilous routes.

These abuses of U.S. law and human rights put US military personnel in a very difficult position.  What can active-duty military and National Guard members do when they do not want to be used in an illegal and immoral campaign against their neighbors, or even their own families?

Veterans to GI’s:  We Will Support You When You Refuse Illegal or Immoral Orders

Just because the president says so does not make it legal. You swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.  You have the legal right and obligation to do so. Veterans For Peace supports U.S. military personnel who choose not to participate in the U.S.-Mexico border deployment, or in sending weapons to Gaza, or in other questionable military activities around the globe.  We will put you in touch with trained counselors and lawyers who can advise you of your legal rights.

You can start by calling the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487. You can legally contact your Congressional representatives to tell them your concerns by utilizing the Appeal for Redress. And be sure to check out the recently updated Know Your Rights guide from the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

As veterans of illegal, immoral US wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and too many other places, we understand that you are in a tough place.  But you do have options – you are still the boss of your own life.  When you follow your conscience and stand up for what is right, you will have the support of Veterans For Peace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Veterans for Peace.

The American Historical Association, the oldest learned society in the United States, has adopted the “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” condemning Israel’s “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system.” We speak to Sherene Seikaly and Barbara Weinstein, two scholars who supported the resolution and helped push for the groundbreaking vote. Seikaly, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, “This moment was one I never thought I would experience,” hailing the resolution as an opportunity for historians to “narrate our past and imagine our future.” Weinstein, who teaches at New York University and previously served as the president of the American Historical Association, adds, “Over the years it has become increasingly clear that we can’t have a narrow definition of what our roles are as historians.”

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

In response to the opening of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary Parliamentary Assembly in Montreal 1,500 protested Friday to “Block NATO”. The main banner at the front of the night march stated: “Block NATO: Reject Militarism, Imperialism & Colonialism”. For weeks my neighbourhood was plastered with posters saying “Bloquons L’OTAN”. The Convergence des Luttes anti-capitaliste (CLAC) also produced a sticker with that message and a 16-page anti-NATO paper.

The image at the centre of their material was a boot stepping on NATO. That image, CLAC’s militant history, starting the march at night and a large student strike led to a raucous march. Some protesters probably intended to break windows at the convention centre hosting the NATO meeting. The police initially blamed protesters for setting fires in two cars but it appears tear gas canisters fired by the police were responsible. They must have fired many canisters as I tasted tear gas two blocks away from where the conflict escalated. Beyond the chemical irritants ingested by protesters and passersby, the police injured a handful of protesters.

While I’ve generally been opposed or ambivalent towards property destruction at demonstrations, Friday’s window breaking drew significant attention to a message rarely heard in recent years. A Radio Canada headline after the night march read “Une manifestation pour le retrait du Canada de l’OTAN dégénère à Montréal” (A demonstration calling for Canada’s withdrawal from NATO degenerates in Montreal) while La Presse noted, “Une manifestation contre l’OTAN dérape au centre-ville de Montréal” (Anti-NATO demonstration goes off the rails in downtown Montreal). The Associated Press, Reuters, Aljazeera and other international media reported on the protests.

The Mouvement québécois pour la paix’s march planned for the next day received significant coverage. About 150 marched against the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on Saturday with a L’actualité headline noting “Une autre manifestation contre l’OTAN a eu lieu samedi” (Another demonstration against NATO took place on Saturday) and Global News stating, “Anti-NATO protesters in Montreal demand Canada withdraws from alliance”. The Globe and Mail, New York Post and many other outlets published stories about the NATO Assembly with photographs of banners or placards criticizing NATO.

On Sunday multiple media showed up to the counter summit organized by the Canada Wide Peace and Justice Network. Radio Canada’s flagship Téléjournal covered it with their blurb stating, “Demonstrations in opposition to NATO were numerous this weekend on the sidelines of its annual summit in Montreal. Several groups believe the Atlantic Alliance harms global security instead of strengthening it and urge Canada to leave NATO.”

The media attention is important. Despite the alliance being mentioned regularly, there’s almost no hint of criticism of NATO in the dominant media.

The scale and militancy of the protests was due to the fact they coincided with a major student strike for Palestine. Over 40 associations representing 85,000 students across Quebec voted to strike on Thursday and Friday to call on their institutions to end all relations with Israel. Many condemned NATO assistance for Israel and an Israeli delegation led by genocidal Likud Knesset member Boaz Bismuth at the Parliamentary Assembly. Israel has a longstanding partnership with the alliance.

Student strikers targeting NATO is an indication that the popular uprising against Israel’s genocide may be broadening its outlook towards challenging Canadian foreign policy and imperialism. Canada’s support for Israeli violence makes a mockery of Ottawa’s claims to advance human rights or international law. Is it believable that genocide Justin and Joe truly care about Ukrainian sovereignty or people?

One needn’t support Russian militarism to be troubled by NATO’s escalation. Providing logistical and intelligence support for Ukraine to fire NATO missiles deep into Russia is dangerous brinkmanship.

NATO is a belligerent alliance pushing Canada to increase its military spending. This weekend’s protests may not have “blocked NATO” but they definitely thrust opposition to the alliance into the spotlight.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

In response to the opening of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary Parliamentary Assembly in Montreal 1,500 protested Friday to “Block NATO”. The main banner at the front of the night march stated: “Block NATO: Reject Militarism, Imperialism & Colonialism”. For weeks my neighbourhood was plastered with posters saying “Bloquons L’OTAN”. The Convergence des Luttes anti-capitaliste (CLAC) also produced a sticker with that message and a 16-page anti-NATO paper.

The image at the centre of their material was a boot stepping on NATO. That image, CLAC’s militant history, starting the march at night and a large student strike led to a raucous march. Some protesters probably intended to break windows at the convention centre hosting the NATO meeting. The police initially blamed protesters for setting fires in two cars but it appears tear gas canisters fired by the police were responsible. They must have fired many canisters as I tasted tear gas two blocks away from where the conflict escalated. Beyond the chemical irritants ingested by protesters and passersby, the police injured a handful of protesters.

While I’ve generally been opposed or ambivalent towards property destruction at demonstrations, Friday’s window breaking drew significant attention to a message rarely heard in recent years. A Radio Canada headline after the night march read “Une manifestation pour le retrait du Canada de l’OTAN dégénère à Montréal” (A demonstration calling for Canada’s withdrawal from NATO degenerates in Montreal) while La Presse noted, “Une manifestation contre l’OTAN dérape au centre-ville de Montréal” (Anti-NATO demonstration goes off the rails in downtown Montreal). The Associated Press, Reuters, Aljazeera and other international media reported on the protests.

The Mouvement québécois pour la paix’s march planned for the next day received significant coverage. About 150 marched against the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on Saturday with a L’actualité headline noting “Une autre manifestation contre l’OTAN a eu lieu samedi” (Another demonstration against NATO took place on Saturday) and Global News stating, “Anti-NATO protesters in Montreal demand Canada withdraws from alliance”. The Globe and Mail, New York Post and many other outlets published stories about the NATO Assembly with photographs of banners or placards criticizing NATO.

On Sunday multiple media showed up to the counter summit organized by the Canada Wide Peace and Justice Network. Radio Canada’s flagship Téléjournal covered it with their blurb stating, “Demonstrations in opposition to NATO were numerous this weekend on the sidelines of its annual summit in Montreal. Several groups believe the Atlantic Alliance harms global security instead of strengthening it and urge Canada to leave NATO.”

The media attention is important. Despite the alliance being mentioned regularly, there’s almost no hint of criticism of NATO in the dominant media.

The scale and militancy of the protests was due to the fact they coincided with a major student strike for Palestine. Over 40 associations representing 85,000 students across Quebec voted to strike on Thursday and Friday to call on their institutions to end all relations with Israel. Many condemned NATO assistance for Israel and an Israeli delegation led by genocidal Likud Knesset member Boaz Bismuth at the Parliamentary Assembly. Israel has a longstanding partnership with the alliance.

Student strikers targeting NATO is an indication that the popular uprising against Israel’s genocide may be broadening its outlook towards challenging Canadian foreign policy and imperialism. Canada’s support for Israeli violence makes a mockery of Ottawa’s claims to advance human rights or international law. Is it believable that genocide Justin and Joe truly care about Ukrainian sovereignty or people?

One needn’t support Russian militarism to be troubled by NATO’s escalation. Providing logistical and intelligence support for Ukraine to fire NATO missiles deep into Russia is dangerous brinkmanship.

NATO is a belligerent alliance pushing Canada to increase its military spending. This weekend’s protests may not have “blocked NATO” but they definitely thrust opposition to the alliance into the spotlight.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

China, one of North Korea’s few traditional allies, has recently been under growing pressure to serve as a responsible stakeholder as the United States and its allies worry that the deployment of North Korean troops will dangerously escalate the Ukrainian war.

“We are seriously concerned about the deployment of the DPRK’s troops to Russia and their use on the battlefield against Ukraine … We urge countries with ties to Russia and the DPRK, including China, to uphold international law by opposing this dangerous expansion of the conflict and implementing all relevant UNSC resolutions,” foreign ministers of the Group of Seven said in a statement on Tuesday.

DPRK refers to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, while UNSC is short for the U. N. Security Council.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the increasing military cooperation between DPRK and Russia, including DPRK’s export and Russia’s procurement of North Korean ballistic missiles and munitions in direct violation of relevant UNSC Resolutions, as well as Russia’s use of these missiles and munitions against Ukraine,” they added.

Separately, NATO recommended its members discourage China through diplomacy from aiding Russia.

“It [the NATO Parliamentary Assembly] recommended employing diplomatic and economic levers to discourage China from aiding Russia,” the security bloc’s assembly said on Tuesday.

“The Assembly called for tightening sanctions on Russia and North Korea, citing Pyongyang’s growing military support for Moscow,” it added.

In a video message to the assembly, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sought support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and its allies.

“There’s war in Europe. We see China, Iran, North Korea and Russia joining forces to undermine us, and threats continue to transcend borders, from terrorism to cyber attacks. So it is vital that NATO becomes stronger, more capable and more agile,” Rutte said.

China has not commented on North Korea’s deployment except to say the development of relations between Russia and North Korea was solely for them to decide.

U.S. President Joe Biden, during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Peru on Nov. 16, condemned North Korea’s decision to send its troops to Russia to assist in the war against Ukraine, while expressing “deep concern over [China’s] continued support for Russia’s defense industrial base.”

At that time, Xi said that China’s position regarding the war had “always been fair and square,” adding Beijing would “not allow conflict and turmoil to happen on the Korean Peninsula” and that it would “not sit idly by” while its strategic interests are endangered.

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The U.S. and South Korea have said that North Korean troops had been fighting against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region, parts of which Ukrainian forces occupied in early August.

Washington has estimated more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers had been sent to Kursk and had begun combat operations alongside Russian forces.

Neither Russia nor North Korea have confirmed the presence of North Korean troops.

But South Korea’s main security agency confirmed on Monday that it had “specific intelligence” that North Korean forces in Russia had suffered casualties, though it gave no figures. Media reported that 500 North Koreans and one high-level North Korean official had been killed in a Ukrainian attack with British missiles last week.

Ukraine also said North Korea had sent more than 100 ballistic missiles to Russia, along with military specialists, to support its war with Ukraine.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

Donald Trump’s performance in the 2024 election surpassed expectations, with the candidate winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and picking up larger shares of more diverse segments of the electorate, including Black and Latino male voters. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, says the blame lies squarely on the Harris campaign, which refused to differentiate itself from unpopular incumbent President Joe Biden. “The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party,” adds John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. Nichols and Taylor discuss how Democrats “demobilized” young voters and grassroots organizers, to their electoral detriment. “Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to take horrific actions,” says Nichols. For those seeking to oppose him, says Taylor, “There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.”

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

“There can be no middle ground, not in this moment.” As the U.S. presidential race draws to a close, Bishop William Barber, the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School and co-author of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, explains why he is endorsing Kamala Harris for president in his personal capacity. In contrast to Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policies that will benefit the rich, Barber says “we see clearly Harris trying to unify.” He makes a theological argument for opposing Trump and also discusses voting rights and access in his home state of North Carolina.

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

“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

This article first appeared in The Progressive.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

ANALYSIS: By Denise Fisher

Monday night saw demonstrations by independence supporters in New Caledonia erupt into serious violence for the first time since the 1980s civil disturbances.

The mainly indigenous demonstrators were opposing President Emmanuel Macron’s imposition of constitutional change to widen voter eligibility unless discussions about the future begin soon.

The protests occurred the day before France’s National Assembly was to vote on the issue, and just after Macron had proposed new talks in Paris.

• READ MORE: New Caledonia unrest: Pro-independence calls for calm ‘to preserve peace’
• Curfew in New Caledonia after Kanak riots over French voting change plan
• ‘A lot of fire, violence’: Nouméa erupts as protests halt New Caledonia
• Independence for Kanaky: A media and political stalemate or a ‘three strikes’ Frexit challenge? – David Robie
• Other New Caledonia crisis reports

On Monday, May 13, in Noumea, as France’s National Assembly debated the constitutional change in Paris, their local counterparts in the New Caledonian Congress were debating a resolution calling for withdrawal of the legislation.

The debate was bitter, after months of deepening division between independence and loyalist parties and focusing as it did on one of the most sensitive issues to each side, that of voter eligibility. The resolution was passed, as independence parties secured the support of a small minority party to outnumber the loyalists.

Macron, in an eleventh hour bid to prompt all parties to participate in new discussions about the future, proposed on May 13 to hold talks in Paris, but only after the Assembly vote of May 14 (albeit before the next step in the constitutional amendment process, a meeting of both houses).

Independence party leaders had called on their supporters to demonstrate against the constitutional reform, to coincide with the National Assembly’s consideration of the issue. The evening of May 13 was marked by violence on a scale not seen in decades.

Burning of buildings, roadblocks
It included the burning of buildings and businesses, roadblocks preventing movement in and out of the capital, and the closure of airports and ports in some of the islands. Police were targeted with gunfire and stoning, resulting in 35 injured police.

As of yesterday, Tuesday May 14, people were being asked to stay at home, with a curfew imposed. France, which already had 700 police on the job in New Caledonia, has sent reinforcements to maintain order.

The violence immediately brought to the minds of leaders the bloodshed of the 1980s, termed “les événements”.

The French High Commissioner, or governor, suggested things were moving “towards an abyss” and cancelled some incoming flights to prevent complications from tourists being unable to access Noumea, while noting that the airport and main wharf remain open. He urged independence leaders to use their influence on the young to stop the violence.

The Mayor of Noumea, Sonia Lagarde, described the situation as “extremely well organised guerrilla warfare” involving “well-trained young people” and suggested “a sort of civil war” was approaching.

On the face of it, to an outsider, Macron’s plan to broaden voter eligibility to those with 10 years’ residence prior to any local election, unless discussions about the future begin, would seem reasonable.

He sees the three independence votes held from 2018–21 as legal, notwithstanding the largely indigenous boycott of the third. (Each referendum saw a vote to stay with France, although support was narrow, declining from 56.7% to 53.3% in the first two votes, but ballooning to 96.5% in the third vote boycotted by independence supporters.)

‘Radical’ for white Caledonians, ‘unconscionable’ for Kanaks
For New Caledonians, Macron’s positioning is radical. Loyalists see it as a vindication of their position.

But for independence parties, France’s stance has been unconscionable.  Independence leaders reject the result of the boycotted referendum and want another self-determination vote soon.

Some have refused to participate in discussions organised by France, although one of the most recalcitrant elements suggested some discussion would be possible just days before the violent demonstrations.

But they have all strongly opposed Macron’s imposing constitutional change to widen voter eligibility unilaterally from Paris. They were affronted by his appointment of a prominent loyalist MP as the rapporteur responsible for shepherding the issue through the Assembly.

They have instead been calling for a special mission led by an impartial figure to bring about dialogue.

More importantly, they see the highly sensitive voter eligibility issue as a central negotiating chip in discussions about the future. Confining voter eligibility only to those with longstanding residence on a fixed basis — not by a number of years prior to any local election as Macron is proposing — was fundamental to securing independence party acceptance of peace agreements over 30 years, after France had operated a policy of bringing in French nationals from elsewhere to outweigh local independence supporters who are primarily indigenous.

Differences have deepened
With the inconclusive end of these agreements, differences have only deepened.

Loyalist leaders have accused independence leaders of planning the violence. Whether it was planned or whether demonstrations degenerated, either way it is clear that emotions are running high among independence supporters, who feel their position is not being respected.

No sustainable solution for the governance of New Caledonia is possible without the cooperation of all parties.

It seems that, regardless of Macron’s evident intention of spurring parties to come to the discussion table, his plan has backfired. Discussions are unlikely to resume soon.

Denise Fisher is a visiting fellow at Australian National University’s Centre for European Studies. She was an Australian diplomat for 30 years, serving in Australian diplomatic missions as a political and economic policy analyst in many Australian missions in Asia, Europe and Africa, including as Australian Consul-General in Nouméa, New Caledonia (2001-2004). She is the author of France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics (2013). This article was first published by the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

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

Social media users also cited a clip, claiming that Spartz stated Russian President Vladimir Putin was not a dictator, unlike U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama. A review of the clip shows that Spartz made no mention of a dictator. 

The claim was shared on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo on April 22, 2024.

“Spartz, a Ukrainian-born U.S. Congressman, voted against aid to Ukraine … She also proposed 4 amendments to humiliate Ukraine,” the claim reads.

“She says: I grew up in the Soviet Union (not recognizing Ukraine’s independence) and I know what a dictatorship is. Putin is not [a dictator]. But Obama and Biden are,” it reads further.

The claim was shared alongside a 37-second clip that shows Spartz speaking at what appears to be the U.S. Congress. 

Victoria Spartz is a Ukrainian-American politician and businesswoman who is the representative for Indiana’s 5th congressional district. 

Spartz, a Republican and the first and only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, emerged early on as a natural advocate for supporting her native country in its war with Russia. 

The claim began to circulate online after the United States last week approved a US$61 billion military assistance package to help Ukraine in its defense against Russia, which invaded the country in 2022.

Similar claims were also shared on X and Threads. 

But the claims are misleading.

Spartz on the Ukraine aid bill

It is true that Spartz voted against the bill, but she noted that she was in favor of supporting Ukraine, and she proposed only one amendment.

“We have the false choice of either saying that Ukraine doesn’t matter to America or support Ukraine with no questions asked, with blank checks,” said Spartz on April 20, as cited by the official record of the congressional discussion preceding the passage of the bill.

“Both of these positions are not good in our national interests, and both of these positions are not good in the interests of the people of Ukraine. Unfortunately, this monopoly of a narrative is prevailing in our government, in our society, and in Congress,” she added. 

On April 20, four lawmakers were scheduled to propose amendments to the Ukraine aid bill. Spartz was just one of the proposers, suggesting an amendment to the bill’s sections “401, 402, 403, and 407,” which was intended to change the amount of aid increase to fund Ukraine. Her proposal was rejected in the end.

Besides Spartz’s, two of the other amendments proposed by Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida’s Kat Cammack were also rejected after discussion, while the third by Kevin Hern of Oklahoma was not brought up that day.

Spartz’s video

A reverse image search on Google found the video of Spartz shared in misleading social media posts published on YouTube on March 12, more than a month before the Ukraine aid bill was passed in the House.

A review of the clip shows that she made no mention of either Biden or Obama being a dictator, although she criticized them for “emboldening tyranny” in the United States. Additionally, she made no comments suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin was not a dictator.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke, Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alan Lu for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”

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

In a leaks probe, Giovanni Tizian, Nello Trocchia, and Stefano Vergine could face up to nine years in prison for articles they published in October 2022, based on confidential documents. Their reporting alleged a conflict of interest concerning Italy’s Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who filed a complaint with the aim of identifying the journalists’ source.

Read the full statement below:

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

Under an amendment adopted as part of RISAA, the government could, in effect, require American businesses, including individuals such as journalists, with no role in providing communications services, to assist with National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has itself noted the “persistent and widespread” abuses of Section 702, including backdoor searches of journalists. 

Read the full letter here:

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

If Congress really cares about the data abuse Americans are subject to because of surveillance capitalist business models, they should pass comprehensive privacy legislation that would stop all Big Tech companies from harvesting our data. Millions and millions of people use TikTok to connect with people, learn about current events, and support their families. A total ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights for all of these people, in addition to not solving the problem at hand. The data of Americans is already susceptible to bad actors, foreign and domestic, because Congress has waited so long to act. Censorship is not the answer, data privacy legislation is.

Fight for the Future has been helping young people and TikTok creators take action against each version of a TikTok ban for months, using DontBanTikTok.com to showcase their voices.

Fight for the Future has also joined other civil society groups, including the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and PEN America, in a letter to Congress opposing this bill for its unconstitutionality and threat to free speech.

“Banning or requiring divestiture of TikTok would also set an alarming global precedent for excessive government control over social media platforms,” the letter said. “The United States has rightfully condemned other countries when they have banned specific social media platforms, criticizing these efforts as infringing on the rights of their citizens. If the United States now bans a foreign-owned platform, that will invite copycat measures by other countries, banning American-owned speech intermediaries and companies from operating in their borders, with significant consequences for free expression globally.”

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

Image Source: NASA – Public Domain

Montanan’s 1972 Constitution is very direct about what it means when it comes to pollution.

The post Montanans Oppose Catbox Cleanups of Superfund Sites appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

The 70-year-old pipeline stretches from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, transporting up to 540,000 gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day. It’s part of a network of more than 3,000 miles of pipelines that the company operates throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota where hundreds of opponents were arrested or cited in 2021 for protesting construction, including citizens and members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and White Earth Band of Ojibwe. 

Now, Enbridge Energy, with the support of the Canadian government, is seeking approvals to build a new $500 million conduit to replace an underwater section of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac, while facing lawsuits backed by dozens of Indigenous nations as well as the state of Michigan.

A key concern is the aging pipeline’s risk to the Great Lakes, which represent more than a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Environmental concerns are so great that three years ago, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered Enbridge’s dual pipelines that run for 4 miles at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac to cease operations. 

“The state is revoking the easement for violation of the public trust doctrine, given the unreasonable risk that continued operation of the dual pipelines poses to the Great Lakes,” the governor’s office said at the time. 

The move came just a year after the Bad River Band tribal nation filed a lawsuit against Enbridge regarding another, separate section of Line 5 in Wisconsin located across 12 miles of the Bad River reservation. The pipeline had been installed in 1953 and, at the time, had received easements to do so from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

But the easements expired, and in a court filing, the tribal nation said the company “has continued to operate the pipeline as if it has an indefinite entitlement to do so,” despite federal law that bans the renewal of expired right-of-way permits on Indian land and would require Enbridge to obtain new permits and approvals from the Band. 

The Bad River won a key victory last summer when a Wisconsin judge ruled that the company must shut down the portion of its pipeline that trespasses on the reservation by 2026. 

Enbridge has resisted calls to cease Line 5 operations. Instead, the company contends that it has the right to continue operating there, citing a 1992 agreement with the Band, and is planning to reroute the pipeline while appealing the Wisconsin judge’s decision. The company also argues that building a new pipeline 100 feet below the lake bed through the Straits of Mackinac will virtually eliminate the chance of a spill.

“Line 5 poses little risk to natural and cultural resources, nor does it endanger the way of life of Indigenous communities,” company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said. “Line 5 is operated safely and placing the line in a tunnel well below the lake bed at the Straits of Mackinac will only serve to make a safe pipeline safer.”

To that end, Enbridge successfully appeared before the Michigan Public Service Commission, the state’s top energy regulator, this month and got permission to build a new concrete tunnel beneath the channel connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The commission cited the need for the light crude oil and natural gas liquids that the pipeline transports, and said other alternatives like driving, trucking or hauling by barge or rail would increase the risk of a spill. 

The commission’s approval contradicts Governor Whitmer’s efforts to shut down the pipeline. In the wake of the permit, the governor’s office told reporters the state commission is “independent.” Both of the governor’s appointees on the board voted in favor of the permit. 

The approval doesn’t mean that the project will proceed, but it is encouraging for the company as it seeks federal clearance. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of putting together a draft environmental impact statement for the project. That document isn’t expected to be published until spring 2025. 

In the meantime, Line 5 has gotten lots of support from the government of Canada, where Enbridge Energy is based. The government has repeatedly invoked a 1977 energy treaty between the U.S. and Canada to defend the pipeline.

That’s frustrating to Indigenous peoples who have seen their treaty rights repeatedly violated. 

“What we’re simply trying to continue to preserve and protect is an Indigenous way of life, which is the same thing our ancestors tried to preserve and protect when they first entered into those treaty negotiations,” said Whitney Gravelle, chairperson of the Bay Mills Indian Community, one of numerous tribal nations opposing Line 5. 

The Straits are also the site of Anishinaabe creation stories, the waters from which the Great Turtle emerged to create Turtle Island, what is currently called North America. Gravelle said that maintaining clean lakes where Indigenous people can fish is about more than just the right to fish. It’s about the continuation of culture.

“It’s about being able to learn from your parents and your elders about what fishing means to your people, whether it be in ceremony or in tradition or in oral storytelling, and then understanding the role that that fish plays in your community,” she said.  

Last summer, José Francisco Calí Tzay, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, called for suspending the pipeline’s operations “until the free, prior, and informed consent of the Indigenous Peoples affected is secured.” Free, prior, and informed consent is a right guaranteed to Indigenous Peoples under international law that says governments must consult Indigenous nations in good faith to obtain their consent before undertaking projects that affect their land and resources — consent that Bad River, for instance, has refused to give.

“Canada is advocating for the pipeline to continue operations, following the decision of a Parliamentary Committee that did not hear testimony from the affected Indigenous Peoples,” Calí Tzay wrote, adding the country’s support for the pipeline contradicts its international commitments to mitigate climate change in addition to the risk of a “catastrophic spill.”

Part of what makes Line 5 such a flashpoint is the importance of the Great Lakes and Enbridge’s spotty environmental record. As the Guardian reported last month, the Great Lakes “stretch out beyond horizons, collectively covering an area as large as the U.K. and providing drinking water for a third of all Canadians and one in 10 Americans.” 

In 2010, two separate pipelines run by Enbridge ruptured, spilling more than a million gallons of oil between them into rivers in Michigan and Illinois. The Environmental Protection Agency found that Enbridge was at fault not only for failing to upkeep the pipeline but also for restarting the pipeline after alarms went off without checking whether it failed. The company eventually reached a $177 million settlement with federal regulators over the disaster.

A 2017 National Wildlife Federation analysis found that Line 5 has leaked more than a million gallons on 29 separate occasions. The company said just five of these instances were outside of Enbridge facilities, and that no spills have occurred in the Straits of Mackinac or on the Bad River Reservation. Still, the section of the pipeline on the floor of the Straits of Mackinac has been dented by boat anchors dropped in the lakes, including from Enbridge-contracted vessels.

Despite Indigenous peoples’ concerns, Line 5 continues to gain momentum, in part because of the amount of energy it supplies to the U.S. and Canada and the countries’ continued dependence on fossil fuels. While the international community agreed to curb fossil fuels this month at COP28, there’s no agreed-upon timeline for actually doing so, and the consumer demand for affordable energy remains high, especially in light of inflation driving the prices of food and housing.

Meanwhile, more than 60 tribal nations, including every federally recognized tribe in Michigan, have said the pipeline poses “an unacceptable risk of an oil spill into the Great Lakes.” 

“The Straits of Mackinac are a sacred wellspring of life and culture for tribal nations in Michigan and beyond,” the nations wrote in an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit challenging the pipeline.

To Gravelle from the Bay Mills Indian Community, the issue is deeply personal and goes beyond maintaining access to clean water and the ability to fish safely. Fishing is deeply intertwined with her peoples’ culture. When a baby is born, their first meal is fish, and when her people hold traditional ceremonies, they serve fish. 

“Our traditions and who we are as a people are all wrapped up into what we do with fish,” Gravelle said. “Our relationship with the land and water is more important than any commercial value that could ever be realized from an oil pipeline.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why more than 60 Indigenous nations oppose the Line 5 oil pipeline on Dec 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

Today, over 100 organizations released a letter to Congress opposing the creation of a so-called “fiscal commission” designed to fast-track cuts to Social Security and Medicare behind closed doors.

Additionally, five former staff members of the 1983 Greenspan Commission released a statement opposing the commission. These staffers include individuals who worked for both Democrats and Republicans. The full statement is HERE and a two-page summary is HERE.

These statements are an urgent response to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has announced his intentions to form just such a commission. The Biden administration has accurately called this type of commission a “death panel” for Social Security and Medicare.

“Congress should address Social Security in the sunlight, through regular order, as it always has,” said Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works and former top assistant to Alan Greenspan on the 1983 commission. “The only reason to create a fast-track, closed door commission is to overthrow the will of the American people by cutting their hard-earned benefits. Anyone who supports this commission is supporting benefit cuts.”

The organizations opposed to Mike Johnson’s planned commission include labor unions, advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, women’s rights organizations, and more. The full list of organizations is below and the letter is HERE:

ACA Consumer Advocacy

AFL-CIO

AFSCME

AFT Washington Retiree Chapter 8045R

Alliance for Retired Americans

American Family Voices

American Federation of Government Employees

American Federation of Musicians

American Federation of Teachers

American Federation of Teachers, Washington

American Postal Workers Union

Arkansas Community Organizations

Beta Cell Action

Blue Future

BOWL PAC

California Alliance for Retired Americans

Campaign for America’s Future

Center for Common Ground

Center For Economic And Policy Research

Center for Popular Democracy

Church World Service

Citizen Action of New York

Coalition on Human Needs

Communications Workers of America

Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, U.S. Provinces

Consumer Action

District Eight National Alliance of Postal & Federal Employees

Doctors for America

Economic Opportunity Institute

Economic Policy Institute

Equality Federation

Foundation for Integrative AIDS Research

Generations United

Goddard Riverside-NYC

Health Care for America Now

Healthcare for All Minnesota

Healthcare is a Human Right – Washington

Indivisible

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees

International Brotherhood of Boilermakers

International Brotherhood of Teamsters

International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers

Justice for All Network

Justice in Aging

Labor Campaign for Single Payer

Long Beach Alliance for Clean Energy

Long Island Center for Independent Living, Inc.

Massachusetts Senior Action Council

Metro New York Health Care for All

Michigan People’s Campaign

Michigan United

Midtown South Community Council

MomsRising

MoveOn

National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd

National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare

National Employment Law Project

National Federation of Federal Employees

National LGBTQ Task Force

National Organization for Women

National Partnership for Women & Families

National Postal Mail Handlers Union

National Union of Healthcare Workers

National Women’s Law Center

NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice

New Mexico AFSCME Retirees

New Mexico Alliance for Retired Americans

North Seattle Progressives

Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition

NY Statewide Senior Action Council

NYS Alliance for Retired Americans

Office of Peace, Justice and Integrity of Creation, Sisters of Charity of New York

One Payer States

Our Revolution

P Street

Pacific Islander Health Board of WA

Painters and Allied Trades International Union

People’s Action

Physicians for a National Health Program

Physicians for a National Health Program – NY Metro Chapter

Physicians for a National Health Program – Washington

Progress America

Progressive Democrats of America

PSARA Education Fund

Public Citizen

Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action

Revolving Door Project

Rise Up WV

SEIU 521

Social Security Works

Strengthen Social Security Coalition

Swing Left Bakersfield, CA

Tennessee Health Care Campaign

The Other 98% Lab

The People United

Transportation Trades Department

U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph

United Mine Workers of America

Unity Fellowship of Christ Church-NYC

Upper East Side for Change

Upper West Side Action Group: MoveOn/Indivisible/SwingLeft

Utility Workers Union of America

VOCAL-NY

Washington CAN

We the 45 Million

West Virginia Citizen Action

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

Today, nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the agency to reconsider its recent decision to include several “conservation practices” that support factory farms and the proliferation of factory farm gas to its list of Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry practices that will be prioritized under the Inflation Reduction Act. The letter warns that nearly $2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to boost climate-smart agriculture could go to polluting factory farms. Its delivery comes hours before a USDA webinar touting the expanded climate-smart agriculture funding opportunities.

Groups, led by Food & Water Watch, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Campaign for Family Farms and The Environment, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Southern Environmental Law Center, urged USDA not to further subsidize factory farms under the guise of climate action. The push also comes as nearly 200,000 Friends of the Earth members have signed a petition to USDA demanding the agency end its support of the factory farm system.

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

As the letter states, factory farming and the production of factory farm gas are costly industrial practices that “will exacerbate climate change, waste taxpayer dollars, and harm Indigenous peoples and environmental justice communities. This directly contradicts the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act and the stated priorities of the Biden Administration.”

“EPA reporting is clear that factory farms are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ben Lilliston, Director of Climate Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “It makes no sense to spend valuable conservation dollars on high cost practices that subsidize this factory farm system at the expense of real conservation practices that can benefit farmers and the climate.”

“By prioritizing Inflation Reduction Act climate spending on factory farming-related practices, USDA is diverting valuable taxpayer dollars away from farmers and ranchers who are truly fighting climate change and instead rewarding Big Ag’s pollution,” said Molly Armus, Animal Agriculture Policy Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “Subsidizing expensive greenwashing practices like factory farm gas will further entrench industrial animal agriculture and allow for the unbridled polluting of rural communities to continue. This directly undermines the Biden Administration’s stated commitment to environmental justice. We urge USDA to change course and listen to the hundreds of organizations and 200,000 Friends of the Earth members asking it to stop subsidizing factory farms.”

As the letter points out, “according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, just seven anaerobic digesters in California used nearly $2 million in EQIP funding – enough to support the average cost of 238 farms planting cover crops.”

“Using public money to build digesters for factory farm manure isn’t climate-smart,” said Patty Lovera of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a coalition of state and national organizations working to change policies that prop up the factory farm system. “Independent family farms raising livestock sustainably have been shut out of conservation programs for years due to lack of funding, so it makes no sense to use new funding on expensive false solutions like factory farm gas.”

“Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should be reserved for true conservation practices that prioritize and advance sustainability, climate mitigation, and environmental protection,” said Alicia Prygoski, Strategic Legislative Affairs Manager at the Animal Legal Defense Fund. “The Animal Legal Defense Fund is extremely concerned to see that factory farms will be eligible to receive funding for practices that pollute our air and water, exacerbate the climate crisis, and harm animals – practices that directly contradict the goals of the IRA. We are proud to join nearly 200 other organizations in asking the USDA not to use conservation funding to prop up an industry that will further entrench us in an unsustainable animal agricultural farming system.”

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

Today, nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the agency to reconsider its recent decision to include several “conservation practices” that support factory farms and the proliferation of factory farm gas to its list of Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry practices that will be prioritized under the Inflation Reduction Act. The letter warns that nearly $2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to boost climate-smart agriculture could go to polluting factory farms. Its delivery comes hours before a USDA webinar touting the expanded climate-smart agriculture funding opportunities.

Groups, led by Food & Water Watch, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Campaign for Family Farms and The Environment, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Southern Environmental Law Center, urged USDA not to further subsidize factory farms under the guise of climate action. The push also comes as nearly 200,000 Friends of the Earth members have signed a petition to USDA demanding the agency end its support of the factory farm system.

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

As the letter states, factory farming and the production of factory farm gas are costly industrial practices that “will exacerbate climate change, waste taxpayer dollars, and harm Indigenous peoples and environmental justice communities. This directly contradicts the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act and the stated priorities of the Biden Administration.”

“EPA reporting is clear that factory farms are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ben Lilliston, Director of Climate Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “It makes no sense to spend valuable conservation dollars on high cost practices that subsidize this factory farm system at the expense of real conservation practices that can benefit farmers and the climate.”

“By prioritizing Inflation Reduction Act climate spending on factory farming-related practices, USDA is diverting valuable taxpayer dollars away from farmers and ranchers who are truly fighting climate change and instead rewarding Big Ag’s pollution,” said Molly Armus, Animal Agriculture Policy Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “Subsidizing expensive greenwashing practices like factory farm gas will further entrench industrial animal agriculture and allow for the unbridled polluting of rural communities to continue. This directly undermines the Biden Administration’s stated commitment to environmental justice. We urge USDA to change course and listen to the hundreds of organizations and 200,000 Friends of the Earth members asking it to stop subsidizing factory farms.”

As the letter points out, “according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, just seven anaerobic digesters in California used nearly $2 million in EQIP funding – enough to support the average cost of 238 farms planting cover crops.”

“Using public money to build digesters for factory farm manure isn’t climate-smart,” said Patty Lovera of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a coalition of state and national organizations working to change policies that prop up the factory farm system. “Independent family farms raising livestock sustainably have been shut out of conservation programs for years due to lack of funding, so it makes no sense to use new funding on expensive false solutions like factory farm gas.”

“Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should be reserved for true conservation practices that prioritize and advance sustainability, climate mitigation, and environmental protection,” said Alicia Prygoski, Strategic Legislative Affairs Manager at the Animal Legal Defense Fund. “The Animal Legal Defense Fund is extremely concerned to see that factory farms will be eligible to receive funding for practices that pollute our air and water, exacerbate the climate crisis, and harm animals – practices that directly contradict the goals of the IRA. We are proud to join nearly 200 other organizations in asking the USDA not to use conservation funding to prop up an industry that will further entrench us in an unsustainable animal agricultural farming system.”

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

Today, nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the agency to reconsider its recent decision to include several “conservation practices” that support factory farms and the proliferation of factory farm gas to its list of Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry practices that will be prioritized under the Inflation Reduction Act. The letter warns that nearly $2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to boost climate-smart agriculture could go to polluting factory farms. Its delivery comes hours before a USDA webinar touting the expanded climate-smart agriculture funding opportunities.

Groups, led by Food & Water Watch, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Campaign for Family Farms and The Environment, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Southern Environmental Law Center, urged USDA not to further subsidize factory farms under the guise of climate action. The push also comes as nearly 200,000 Friends of the Earth members have signed a petition to USDA demanding the agency end its support of the factory farm system.

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

As the letter states, factory farming and the production of factory farm gas are costly industrial practices that “will exacerbate climate change, waste taxpayer dollars, and harm Indigenous peoples and environmental justice communities. This directly contradicts the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act and the stated priorities of the Biden Administration.”

“EPA reporting is clear that factory farms are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ben Lilliston, Director of Climate Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “It makes no sense to spend valuable conservation dollars on high cost practices that subsidize this factory farm system at the expense of real conservation practices that can benefit farmers and the climate.”

“By prioritizing Inflation Reduction Act climate spending on factory farming-related practices, USDA is diverting valuable taxpayer dollars away from farmers and ranchers who are truly fighting climate change and instead rewarding Big Ag’s pollution,” said Molly Armus, Animal Agriculture Policy Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “Subsidizing expensive greenwashing practices like factory farm gas will further entrench industrial animal agriculture and allow for the unbridled polluting of rural communities to continue. This directly undermines the Biden Administration’s stated commitment to environmental justice. We urge USDA to change course and listen to the hundreds of organizations and 200,000 Friends of the Earth members asking it to stop subsidizing factory farms.”

As the letter points out, “according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, just seven anaerobic digesters in California used nearly $2 million in EQIP funding – enough to support the average cost of 238 farms planting cover crops.”

“Using public money to build digesters for factory farm manure isn’t climate-smart,” said Patty Lovera of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a coalition of state and national organizations working to change policies that prop up the factory farm system. “Independent family farms raising livestock sustainably have been shut out of conservation programs for years due to lack of funding, so it makes no sense to use new funding on expensive false solutions like factory farm gas.”

“Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should be reserved for true conservation practices that prioritize and advance sustainability, climate mitigation, and environmental protection,” said Alicia Prygoski, Strategic Legislative Affairs Manager at the Animal Legal Defense Fund. “The Animal Legal Defense Fund is extremely concerned to see that factory farms will be eligible to receive funding for practices that pollute our air and water, exacerbate the climate crisis, and harm animals – practices that directly contradict the goals of the IRA. We are proud to join nearly 200 other organizations in asking the USDA not to use conservation funding to prop up an industry that will further entrench us in an unsustainable animal agricultural farming system.”

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

The post Why I Oppose the Pentagon Budget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

The post Why I Oppose the Pentagon Budget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

Scott Parkin: Welcome to the Silky Smooth Sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I’m your co-host Scott Parkin in San Francisco, California today, and I’m joined by…

Bob Buzzanco: Bob Buzzanco in Niles, Ohio.

Scott: There’s been a, a bit of a conversation going on in the mainstream and left media that we’re talking about today, which is around nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclear weapons.

The Green and Red Podcast is very decidedly anti-nuke, or no nukes, and we’re more than a little bothered about the of pro-nukes position that we’re hearing from other people who call themselves “leftists” and “socialists” and the like. So joining us today to talk about all of this and his book Atomic Days is Joshua Frank.

Welcome back to Green and Red, Josh.

Joshua Frank: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Scott: Josh is the managing editor of CounterPunch and he is the author of Atomic Days, the Untold Story of The Most Toxic Place in America. And maybe we could talk a little bit about that. The book talks a lot about the nuclear weapons production facility in Eastern Washington, in Hanford, Washington.

And, you know, just to kind of play off the title, Josh, why is it an untold story?

Joshua: Well, you know, the book has a lot of information in there that I don’t think is publicly available or wasn’t until we published the book. But more, it’s really just a kind of the peoples’ story of Hanford and of the weapons production site.

Maybe some of your listeners don’t know about Hanford was one of the three locations chosen during the Manhattan project and their job was to produce plutonium. The first commercial plutonium reactor was built in Hanford, the B reactor. The site produced plutonium for the first bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

And over the course of about four decades, it produced the majority of the plutonium that ended up in the atomic arsenal of the United States. But in, and that was mostly during the Cold War, at the end of the Cold War. It became a cleanup site almost overnight in the late 80s.

So a little bit about Hanford. Hanford’s in eastern Washington. It’s located along the Columbia River. It was chosen as a location because it was remote, it was sort of “out of sight, out of mind.” The Indigenous communities that were there and also some of the poor farm communities were easily removed. And it’s a very expansive area. It’s almost 600 square miles and it’s beautiful terrain, but it’s terrain that will never, in our lifetimes, unfortunately, be publicly accessible because it’s so toxic.

So when it was producing plutonium over the course of its lifetime, it also produced a ton of waste chemical waste, and obviously high-level radioactive waste. That much of that waste, the high-level radioactive waste in particular, is still out there. It’s sitting in these huge hulking underground tanks, 177 of them.

149 of those tanks are single-shelled tanks, and they still hold 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge. The problem, of course, is what to do with this stuff as we’ll talk about nuclear energy. It’s kind of the same problem with plutonium and other byproducts of the process of fission. But in the case of Hanford, we’re dealing with the aftermath of the U.S. war machine.

I like to say that the Cold War in many ways, it’s still bubbling out there. And these tanks, just to kind of talk about how perilous it is, the tanks really were only supposed to last a couple of decades. I mean, we’re going on a long time now. A lot of them were built in the 50s and 60s.

They’re only supposed to last until the early 80s at most. And, which I talk about a lot in the book. I mean, even early on, engineers were talking about that this is really a temporary solution for this problem that they did not have a long-term answer for. And of course, they don’t have a long-term answer to store nuclear waste anywhere.

But especially then, but of course, the quest to prop up the U.S. war machine and an atomic arsenal took precedence and was far more important than worrying about the aftermath. And so that waste out there is really in a bad situation. Two of the tanks right now are leaking into the groundwater supplies underneath them.

These tanks are six, seven miles from the Columbia River, so that groundwater will eventually reach the Columbia River, in many cases it already has. There were documented at least 67 leaks over the course, of Hanford’s lifetime. And then we had intentional releases of radiation.

We’ve had other accidents. I mean, it’s a horrible, horrible situation. And it is now the costliest environmental cleanup in world history. The price tag is at $677 billion right now. To put that in perspective, it was $450 billion, just a couple of years ago. So my guess is by the end of the decade it’ll be over a trillion dollars.

And not really any major work has been done. None of that high-level radioactive waste has been vitrified, which is what they’re planning on doing. And vitrification is really just like taking the stuff out of these tanks and turning it into glass so that it can be stored safely, or you know, as safely as it can be.

So it’s a really, really bad situation. And those two tanks that are leaking right now, the Department of Energy, which oversees the project, doesn’t have an answer for because there isn’t really good answers for this stuff, which is a huge problem. So the book really gets into all of this. It gets into the whistleblowers that are calling out the contractors and calling out the Department of Energy and also talking about the worst-case scenarios.

The leaking tanks are obviously a huge immediate problem. These tanks are producing hydrogen and they have to be continually off-gassed. Because if there’s a hydrogen buildup in one of these tanks and somehow there’s a spark that ignites it, or electricity goes down or something malfunctions, there’s a number of scenarios or could be an attack of some sort.

Several scenarios could lead to literally an atomic explosion. I mean, you have a hydrogen buildup in one of these tanks that explodes, and that radioactive material could spread far and wide. And not a lot of people know about this place. Even though we’re paying for it, a lot of people in the Northwest don’t really know what’s going on there.

So my hope is that that story that hasn’t really been told makes its way out with this book.

Scott: The efforts to clean it up are mostly actually being outsourced, correct? Right. Like there’s, there’s a lot of like Bechtel and, and others. I’m going to assume that’s part of the exorbitant cost.

Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. Bechtel really came up with this idea that’s now really central to all of the defense contracts and Department of Energy contracts called “cost-plus contracts.” And essentially, that is an open checkbook that the government has or that they have with the government.

You can kind of think about it if you’re remodeling your kitchen and the contractor gives you an estimate for $15,000, but it ends up being $25,000, well multiply that by billions and that’s essentially what has happened out at Hanford. The original estimates were reasonable compared to what they are now, and they really are getting paid to not get the job done in many cases.

And, and one whistleblower, Walter Tamosaitis, ended up being fired and sued and won [his lawsuit], and I wrote about his case about 10 years ago for Seattle Weekly. And he’s the central whistleblower calling Bechtel out and also the Department of Energy out for being complicit in this. And even more so on the technical side, the contractors kind of run the show out there.

The Department of Energy is just really understaffed. They don’t have the technical expertise to oversee every aspect of the cleanup. Because the Department of Energy’s underfunded, the money is being shelled out to the contractors but not to the Department of Energy. And the Department of Energy, much like the EPA and other agencies, especially under the Trump administration, were defunded.

It’s just making matters even worse.

Scott: And they put Rick Perry in charge of it. Which says a whole lot.

Joshua: Yeah, yeah, exactly. One scientist that I interviewed who goes on record is Donald Alexander who also I would consider a major whistleblower, at least from the Department of Energy side of things, talks about this.

He talks about how his staff, he’s now retired, but his staff really just didn’t have enough people to oversee all these aspects of the project. So, a lot of times, problems that arise could have been solved sooner, but they just didn’t have the mechanisms in place to catch it.

And it’s a problem that permeates the cleanup out there. And I think it’s important also to … I get this question a lot what does a “cleanup” look like? I mean, there are, aside from all that radioactive waste in those tanks, there are hundreds of billions of gallons of chemical waste that was literally dumped into the soil out there, during its process when it was making plutonium.

So, how do we remediate that? What does that look like? And I don’t think it’ll ever be cleaned up in the sense that it’s ever going to be what it once was, unfortunately. But cleanup to me means getting this to a place where we aren’t on the verge of a major radioactive accident. And right now, we are on the brink of that.

And every day that goes by it, it becomes greater.

Scott: Just thinking about the Columbia River, Portland is downstream from the Columbia River. This stuff leaks into the Columbia River then it’s a major metropolitan area that’s facing radioactive poisoning.

Joshua:. Yeah. And, and aside from that, I mean the, Columbia River there’s commercial fisheries.

The Columbia feeds tens of thousands of Northwest farmers. A major accident out there, aside from the slow leaking process that would build up over time … if we did have a major accident out there, the economy of the Northwest would just crumble.

And if this stuff were to go airborne, all bets are off. I think it could spread to the East Coast. Of course, just like when we have big fires in Northwest, there was smoke that covered Washington D.C. The radioactive particles would spread far and wide.

I think cities like Boise, Idaho, that are closer might become unlivable. The radioactive fallout could be so great. People don’t want to live there. I mean, it could be really devastating. And, of course, if there was an economic collapse in the Northwest, that would trigger a global economic crisis.

Not, and that’s just the economic side, right? I mean the environmental side and the toll on the environment and humans would be even greater. So yeah, it’s a scary situation.

Bob: I think, well, for a while now, especially since Three Mile Island, I think just the general public has been really concerned about nuclear power as well as nuclear weapons.

A big resistance to it, like “No Nukes,” but now it’s making a comeback. Even on the left or maybe especially on the left. And I just wonder why you think these folks like Jacobin and certain podcasts have gone all in. They’re portraying it as this kind of pro worker, anti-fossil fuel thing. But you know, I was raised in an era where no nukes was kind of a core value.

Joshua: Before I really get in, get into my sort of anger towards some of their positions, I do think that a lot of the younger generation on the left that haven’t been around long and don’t know a lot about the anti-nuke movement, they don’t understand the success of the anti-nuke movement of essentially putting the brakes on the proposals for hundreds of plants.

They don’t really understand Chernobyl, don’t understand Fukushima but are really, really frightened about climate change, rightfully so. And so, when the boosters of atomic energy come along and say, “oh, here’s an easy fix. This is a technology we’ve had forever,” and you believe the propaganda, right?

Which is that it, it’s safe, it’s reliable, it doesn’t produce CO2 emissions. All of these things are very attractive, I think, to some people that don’t hear the other side of it and the reality of atomic energy. I’d like to give some of them, at least, the benefit of the doubt that they haven’t been well informed.

But again, those people that are spewing propaganda are the ones that need to be challenged. And we all know who they are, and they are essentially mimicking the talking points that we’ve been hearing for decades. And they’re well-funded. And now using climate change as the scapegoat for pushing for “this is our future.”

I think we’re going to have to continue fighting. This propaganda that’s coming out of the pro-nuke left. And I think it’s very real. I think it’s dangerous and I think that, fortunately and unfortunately, if we see an accident at Zaporizhzhia. I mean, now in Ukraine, we’re learning that these nuke plants are tools of war and are forever going to be used as tools of war.

Putin set a very dangerous precedent there. What if there was an accident, an attack, if the backup generators fail? If several things happen, these conversations could change tomorrow. I mean, if you even believe all the rhetoric that we have an answer for the waste that uranium mining’s benign, they’re totally safe and reliable. No one, no one. Not even the biggest proponents of atomic energy are going to tell you that, these things are safe in a war zone. So, I mean there are just so many reasons to oppose this stuff.

Scott: Well, I have seen some of the propagandists actually saying that they are safe in a war zone.

Joshua: It’s momentary. They’ve said that the worst that can happen is that it can go offline. I think they are genuinely ignorant. Leigh Phillips said at one point to me that the worst that could happen at Zaporizhzhia was that the power could go offline. Yeah, I think there’s a lot more that could happen.

Scott: Back to the whistleblowers for a moment. some Indigenous activists have also been part of this sort of resistance to the lack of action on cleanup or whatever. Has there been any retaliation against some of the whistleblowers around Hanford?

Joshua: Oh yeah, yeah, big time. There’s been, you know when I was writing for Seattle Weekly and covering Hanford, there was a string of whistleblowers that each really faced different types of persecution.

Some of them in, in the case of Walter Tamosaitis, they silenced him by removing him from his post and then literally putting him in a basement office. And then he became an in-house consultant he would travel around the different sites. He worked for a contractor under Bechtel, a subcontract for Bechtel, and just ruined his life and ruined his career.

And he was just one example. Others were similarly silenced and reprimanded for speaking out. The DOE has gone after Bechtel for some of these things. They’ve paid fines. They’ve lost lawsuits and many times, you know, they do these payouts. They never have to admit guilt.

But the culture out there is very much the same. It’s still very secretive. And there’s just so much profit at stake. So these whistleblowers are a threat to that profit margin. And sometimes, getting the job done and meeting the deadlines on time is a disincentive because they don’t reach their benchmarks and get those extra payouts.

So the way these contracts are structured lend to an environment that is harsh towards whistleblowers, and that’s just sort of at the contractor level. The bigger level is, because the site operated like a covert military site for so long. That sort of secrecy around the whole cleanup still exists, and the government is good at, at keeping people in line, and they are constantly around managers and it’s really hard to get a grasp of what’s going on out there.

And that’s on purpose. So when you have some of these guys that are old-time engineers and scientists speaking out. We must listen to them. And they’re not always, you know, they’re not always progressives, these are mostly like conservative Republicans that are worried about taxpayer dollars and some of the things that we can agree on, you know?

And they’re also very worried about the safety at Hanford as well, and the risks that it poses. So, that’s the job of journalists, right? And others too, to try to get their stories out to the world because they certainly don’t make it easy to do.

Bob: Moving into this, this current resurgence in this, these, you know, kind of pro-nuclear arguments, it seems like what a lot of these people are saying, is this cleaner, it’s safe or it’s less expensive, and, and just wondered if you want to kind of give a, a brief description of what they’re saying and then we can kind of get into the larger issue of talking about what the reality is.

Joshua: Sure. Maybe I’ll put myself in their shoes for a second. Well, I think they focus on the CO2. Right? And I think that they downplay the risks that the waste poses as well. So what they’ll say is, “Look, we can it’s going to take tens of thousands of square miles of open space to put in solar panels.”

We could put a small plant. They call them SMRs now. Small modular reactors are all over the place and power everything endlessly. Wind power, solar power, that is really great when the wind’s blowing and the sun’s shining bit. What about at night? We need to have something that’s continuous.

And so we need something that compliments other renewable energies. And, nuclear is perfect for that. It’s also really safe. The accidents that have happened are really overblown. Chernobyl really didn’t kill as many people as they say Fukushima was avoidable. Not that big of a deal.

Three Mile Island didn’t hurt anybody. So, the accidents themselves are completely overrated, and it’s a lot of fear-mongering going on. Uranium mining, “yeah, it was really dirty and bad in the past and had some problems, but we can do it in a much better fashion, and mining for minerals that go into solar panels and wind turbines and everything else is also very impactful.”

Lithium mining has horrible effects too. So, we can’t ignore uranium mining. We should look at this whole picture here.

Scott: Jobs. Jobs, lots of jobs.

Joshua: Jobs, yeah. That’s right. And it’s jobs. Jobs for our plants are good, well-paying jobs.

Right. So yeah, I think those are a lot of the things that I hear consistently. And of course, this is, it’s a carbon-neutral energy source. There’s nothing better than that, right? So that’s, that’s, that’s the rhetoric that I hear a lot. Which, of course, can be debunked pretty easily. Uranium mining is, is horrible.

And, you know, I guess first to say that those of us that oppose nuclear energy don’t also see some of the negative impacts of renewables is ridiculous, right? I mean, of course we know that lithium mining can be horrendous, and we know all of these things and we probably are, hopefully, promoting de-growth and not just switching to other sources of energy.

And we understand the underpinnings of capitalism and how that plays into all of this and, of consumption, right? So to just think that like, oh, these people just because you well,  some of them are even more disingenuous, some of them will say, oh, you oppose atomic energy. That must mean you’re, you want coal energy everywhere. That kind of thing. And they’ll even go so far as they say that the anti-nuke movement was responsible for coal being as dominant as it is, which of course, is bullshit. Coal is dominant because it’s cheap. I mean, India was, and China continued to build coal plants because it’s really, really cheap, and it’s plentiful.

That’s why it’s happening, not because of the anti-nuke movement. But aside from that, when it comes to the climate change issue, there are a number of things that I think they are blatantly misrepresenting and ignoring. One is that it’s so much more expensive to promote atomic energy than it is to go and promote renewables.

Also, the timeframe for this stuff, if you believe the latest, like IPCC reports, we’ve gotta reduce by 2030 something like, I don’t even know what is it, 50% CO2 emissions. We can’t roll out nuke plants in time to meet those goals. It just isn’t feasible. And then, aside from that, it’s not reliable.

This is not a reliable energy source. I often look at France which they sort of put up on the pedestal as the perfect atomic nation in the world that it operates perfectly and everything’s great there. Well, that’s not true at all. Last summer, during the height of the European heatwave, half the plants in France were offline.

And they were offline because of corrosion issues, but a lot of them were offline because the rivers that they draw water from to cool down the reactors were too warm in some cases, too low to cool reactors down. So you have climate change, which is evaporating the rivers and making them too warm to cool down the reactors in the first place, so it’s not reliable.

And then, of course, the risks. And what the risks, and then of course, the waste. There’s no answer for the waste. None of them have an answer for permanently storing this waste safely for millennia. I don’t think a lot of people understand the dangers of plutonium and which I’ve learned a lot about in researching Hanford.

But this stuff sticks around. It’s radioactive for 250,000 years, so really, to keep it safely stored and if we had as many new plants as they want, thousands of them all over the world, we’re going to have so much plutonium. You’re going to have this stuff’s be around way after we’re gone, right?

And how are you going to keep that safe? How are you going to, even the ideas of putting it in tombs and storing it deep underground, what’s that going to look like in a hundred thousand years, you know, let alone 250,000 years. And then, on top of that, this stuff can be used in bombs. Once plutonium goes through the fission process, or uranium goes through the fission process, produces plutonium, you’re already one step closer to being able to use that in an atomic warhead. So proliferation is a huge, huge issue. And for anybody on the left that doesn’t see the connection between atomic energy and atomic bombs is completely ignorant or completely disingenuous financially.

They’re linked. They’re linked in France, they’re linked to the US, and they always will be. And then they’re, they’re linked scientifically. I mean, you can’t have one without the other. And the governments are always going to be in charge of this stuff because of the risk of proliferation. So you can’t separate those two issues, and there’s no other energy source that, poses these kind of problems.

And I, you know, I challenge anybody that’s proponent of this that also wants to de-escalate. It’s a threat of nuclear annihilation to address these issues and I haven’t seen anybody do it very well.

Bob: What’s striking is in the last few months we’ve had all these train derailments. And you know, what’s kind of proved the government does nothing to inspect these things and doesn’t have a solution to it.

In Texas, where I spend a lot of time, people froze to death, you know, during, during a cold snap. Why is there this sense that somehow nuclear energy is going to be regulated or made safe by the same people who can’t keep a railroad on the tracks?

Joshua: Yeah, and this isn’t to say, think about that waste when they’re transporting it.

Bob: I think one, wasn’t one of the derailments going to pick up nuclear waste?

Joshua: Yeah, one of them was right. Yeah. And this actually going back to Hanford back in the 80s and some of the Indigenous struggles there. Hanford at that time, along with Yucca, was being eyed as a depository repository for waste, high-level waste.

And the Yakima Nation led by Russell Jim, who I have a chapter about in the book, fought back against this. They said basically, “Hanford is toxic enough. We don’t need to shovel more radioactive waste into Hanford.” And part of that was also they were fighting railroads and transportation routes through Yakima Nation to Hanford.

And they knew back in the 80s; you can’t just put it on the truck and haul it around and think that it’s no, no risk of an accident. It’s a huge issue and they were able, they were successful and they blocked Hanford from receiving more waste. And, over that, during that fight the public was given tens of thousands of previously secret documents and we learned a lot about what had been going on at Hanford. But anyway, fast forwarding to the transportation of waste, I mean, that’s another issue. And there’s think if we had hundreds and hundreds of these plants that were all, even if they somehow approved Yucca Mountain and you have all these railroads and all these routes going in to, to Yucca, even if we believed that the storage would be safe, which it never would be.

All that transportation poses its own risks. I mean, there are just so many problems around all of these issues around this technology that it’s like a no-brainer. I feel like for those of us that are concerned about the future of the planet, if it somehow was even carbon neutral, which of uranium mining is not carbon neutral? It’s very carbon intensive, but let’s say that it was, let’s say that everything’s carbon neutral. You still have all these other problems. And if the concern is about the future health of the planet, how can you ignore the rest of this stuff? I just find it mind-boggling.

Scott: There’s the amount of time that it would take. We have a timeline around climate urgency. 20 years, 50 years, what have you. And so, a return to nuclear energy in the U.S. You’re not going to be able to meet those timelines. But then also there’s the cost. My understanding is that Wall Street doesn’t actually have any interest in funding it.

No. The nuclear buildout, a new nuclear buildout doesn’t seem like the government wants to do it. And then I’m not quite sure if international financial institutions like the World Bank want to make loans to do that anywhere. It’s probably not in the US And so I’m kind of curious where they also think this is going to be funded from.

Joshua: Yeah. Well, I mean, they always point to the funding going into renewables and that there are subsidies for that and tax breaks. They look at Biden’s last big bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was $480 billion to renewables, but tucked into that is the ability to keep existing nuke plants open.

I don’t know what their answer is for that. Ultimately, I think that they don’t care about the price tag, and I think that they think that this is worth every penny that’s poured into it, and they don’t see it taking away from existing renewables. They see it as complimenting that which, of course it’s not.

It’s totally taking away from other things that we could be doing. But I think it’s also having this discussion about one versus the other, at least on the left. And from an environmental perspective. In my view, it takes away from some of the bigger, probably even more challenging conversations that we need to be having about our lifestyle and our society in general, and our consumptive nature and how we should be thinking about restructuring our cities, restructuring our transportation the way we grow food and how we travel.

You know, all of these things need to be part of the conversation and not just how do we switch from coal to nuclear or natural gas to solar. I mean, I think that there’s a bigger conversation that needs to go on, and I think it’s our duty on the left and as environmentalists to talk about this.

And I don’t think that they want to address that. I mean, a lot of these so-called leftists that are pro-nukers have no problem with it. They are pro-growth. They’re pro-consumption. They’re not that different, ultimately from the capitalist class, and I think that needs to be challenged as well.

Bob: Pro-air conditioning and all this other kind of stuff. Right. I guess that’s, that’s one thing that’s been striking because I’ve talked to MSNBC liberals who are pro. But also plenty of people I know who are like DSA folks who have jumped on the bandwagon and as you pointed out, invoke France as the template for what the US could do.

And, and you’ve just talked about safety, but aren’t there health concerns as well? I think you mentioned some of these that were cancer rates spiked and the groundwater’s, polluted, toxic.

Joshua: Oh, oh, absolutely. I mean, if you could even just follow some of the regulatory agencies and the watchdogs and the things that are happening. I mean, there’s every day, there’s another issue with some of these plants. The existing plants in the US in particular, are old. And they constantly need to be fixed. There’s constantly problems.

Even here in California, Gavin Newsom has kept Diablo Canyon open. But meanwhile, Diablo is a huge, huge risk, right? It’s on a fault line. It’s way past its lifespan. It sits right on the ocean. There are so many problems in and around that area, even down close to where I am at San Onofre, the waste that’s there, it’s just sitting there.

So you have these, you have these big old tanks that are holding this waste. In dry casks many, many times near water sources. If the electricity goes down, somehow, if there’s an earthquake, the people in and around that area are gonna be immediately impacted. And that’s the same case with the San Louis Obispo folks up around that area are going to be immediately impacted, up in Oregon the Trojan plant that was shut down about 20 years ago.

That the waste from that plant is still sitting there in these dry casks. Well, there’s a big plan to roll out these small modular reactors up and down the Columbia River downstream from Hanford. It’s just bonkers stuff. But each one of those facilities would also produce waste, which would then go over and be stored at where the waste from Trojan is stored.

And this is close to the mouth of the Columbia River. And this stuff, geologically speaking, is going to last a long time. Well, it also sits in a subjection zone. There’s going to be a huge earthquake there at some point. It could be tomorrow; it could be 10,000 years or a hundred thousand years.

But it’s going to happen eventually, and that radioactive material in those tanks is going just to be gone. If you live near a plant and there are higher rates of thyroid cancers and things like that, there’s all also this other problem with this waste and, and then, the radiation that’s in and around it and the inability to keep it safe forever.

It’s just an impossibility, and there’s no answer for it.

Scott: We’ve talked on this some already but on the extraction side. I follow left media and left podcasts and there’s lot of stuff they talk about that I agree with. When it comes to extraction around fossil fuels and Standing Rock or Line 3,they were all in, they were very supportive of that.

Yeah. And it’s just, it’s amazing to me when we, when we get into talking about new uranium extraction, All of a sudden becomes it’s jobs for Indigenous people and it’s safe. And I find that really troubling how easy it is to just flip that switch. You know? I think that, that one particular pro-nuke propagandist, Lee Phillips was actually talking about how First Nations people in Ontario, who were working in uranium mines. The tribal government supported it and voted for it and it was jobs and they were all safe and they were happy about it.

The tribal governments are often very much aligned with the actual government. They are run by corporate lobbyists. It’s just amazing to me that this sort of issue, particularly around exploitation of Indigenous folks and even just workers in general is has a blind eye turned to it.

Joshua: Yeah. And they also ignore the history of it. Yeah. The Navajo, the Dine’ here in the U.S. and the Southwest is so well-documented the impacts that uranium mining had on Indigenous laborers for decades. The high rates of lung disease, the heart attacks were greater than the population that didn’t work in the minds that smoked cigarettes.

I mean, they’re so much epidemiological evidence of how horrific these mining incidents were. And then, then of course, there’s the accidents that happen in the mines. It’s, it was a brutal, brutal enterprise and they ignore the nuclear colonialism aspect of atomic energy and atomic production in general.

And that’s troubling. And of course, if they were to have their way, all of these Indigenous lands would be completely exploited for uranium mining. And that in and of itself should be a non-starter for all of us, right? But for them, it’s like a game on and they mask it as creating jobs.

Well, does that mean that we should completely support all extractive industries because it creates jobs? No, obviously, but in their minds, I guess, you know, they’re propaganda. I think that the best way to counter that is to tell the stories and tell this history, especially among the younger, like DSA-type folks, because I don’t think a lot of these kids and the ones I’ve talked to that are in their twenties, don’t know about this stuff because it’s never been taught to them and never, never read about it.

And of course, Leigh Phillips and the rest of the Jacobin crowd aren’t going to write much about this or talk about it or interview those on the ground that are impacted by it or talk to those who’ve had a relative die of thyroid cancers, and they’re not going to like really address this stuff. So, I think it’s our job to put this information out there, and I’m glad you’re all doing it.

Because it’s unfortunately now the battles that are still being fought. I think that we thought we won a lot of these battles. But, they’re being resurrected again, all to fight climate change. And it’s really disheartening to see.

Bob: About what percentage of Americans, if you know, have access to some kind of energy plan with solar, wind power available

Joshua: To them? You mean just like on a local municipal?

Bob: Yeah, just a rough ballpark. How widespread is it? Because we hear a lot of public relations about this shift to renewables, and you see corporations with commercials, you know, all the time talking about how green they are.

And the whole green idea has been commodified.

Joshua: But yeah, how many Americans actually could do that? Choose that a lot. You know, it gets really muddy because of how we define renewables. Aside from taking all the atomic energy aspect out of it, which sometimes gets lumped in renewables and sometimes it doesn’t.

But things like dams, right? I mean, dams are, believe it or not, the number one renewable energy in the world as far as power generation goes. But as, Scott will talk about, I mean, the dams are not renewable in the sense that they usually require huge logging. They require a complete reconfiguration of rivers.

In the case of the huge Three Gorgeous dam in China that displaced millions of people they’ve had horrific flooding. They had to cut down native redwood forests. I mean, but it’s considered renewable. So I don’t know. So when we talk about renewable in that sense, I think it’s difficult.

So I guess to answer your question, it’s a difficult question to answer because of how we define renewables now as far as gets to like local subsidies and things for like solar panels in places like California, which was a long, long time leader in solar installations on rooftops, Newsom and the electric lobby here has pushed against that because ultimately, putting solar on your roof is fighting against the dominant grid.

And so when these SoCal Edison and the and PG&E lose their power essentially, they don’t control the grid. That’s a big threat to their profit margins. And they don’t want us having solar on our rooftops. And they’ve made it harder to do so in the state. It’s happened in Arizona, it’s happened elsewhere.

So there’s been a real pushback against rooftop solar in particular, which has been a horrible thing because PG&E and others would rather see investments going into huge solar plantations out in the Mojave Desert, eating up public lands and destroying habitat for tortoises and all kinds of plants, Joshua trees, and everything else.

But that doesn’t change the structure of how their profit margins are inflated because they still will control the flow of energy. They don’t want us producing energy. So, you know, getting into this conversation about decentralizing the grid is another one that even the pro-nuke folks don’t want to have.

But it’s central to the future if we’re if we’re gonna fight climate change.

Bob: Someone I know in Arizona has solar and the state imposes a fairly hefty user fee every month on them.

Joshua: Yeah, we have solar on our house. I don’t have a battery or anything, but it’s we’re sort of now going to be grandfathered in with our power during the day when we produce more than we use goes back onto the grid.

And traditionally, we would get credits for that paid for by the power company. And then at the end of the cycle, are essentially we at night when we’re pulling off the grid. We usually zero out. We’ve usually produced enough during the day to compensate for what we use at night, but that’s going to be harder to do now for new construction or people that are putting solar on their homes.

Here, they’re not going to get those, those same rates, which is a disincentive to put solar on your roof in the first place, which is the whole point of why they’re going after this. And there, they’ve mimicked the legislation, in California after the legislation in Arizona and used those same tactics to push back against rooftop solar.

So Gavin Newsom is keeping Diablo open and making it harder to put solar on, on your roof. You can see where who’s putting butter on his bread.

Scott: With Gavin, we can also talk about how he talks a big game on not approving permits for fracking and or extraction in different parts of the state and offshore, and yet, still picks a lot of money from the Western State Petroleum Association. Even though it’s liberal green, California, it’s still run by the oil and gas lobby in Sacramento in many ways.

Joshua: Oh, absolutely.

Bob: I have one final thing. This is just brief. If you’re talking to someone who would consider him or herself a socialist or a leftist and who’s just heard Lee Phillips go on this Ad campaign for nuclear power, how would you briefly tell them that they’re wrong?

What would you briefly say to them to make an argument? Part of this is for me, because I’m seeing this a lot lately, where people who I trust and respect on this issue, you know, really kind of gone over.

Joshua: Yeah, well, they probably have watched the Oliver Stone documentary or something. I would say that there’s two things going on. There’s one of the sort of the hypotheticals of atomic energy, which I think a lot of the people that support it are on that side of things about in this hypothetical camp.

And then there’s the realistic camp, which I think is the one that we all should be in, which is understanding the history of atomic energy, the risks that it poses, and also the reality that it is connected to nuclear weapons. So if you’re worried about proliferation, you have also to oppose atomic energy. I use the analogy that you can’t oppose the war on terror but support Pentagon spending. Right? It doesn’t, that’s not how it works in the real world. And that’s very much the same thing when we were talking about energy versus weapons in France, the biggest holder of the biggest nuclear arsenal in Europe, in the United States, the biggest one in the world.

Both industries are deeply connected. There’s a reason why that is, of course, because the stuff that goes into making these weapons, making these reactors and the waste that they produce, they’re all connected to the weapons industry. The same contractors are building the same reactors for plutonium-grade fuels.

What, we don’t have to produce any more plutonium in this country because we’ve made so much of it at Hanford. But that’s why it’s controlled by those same industries. So, if you’re worried about proliferation, you should also be worried about, how atomic energy feeds into that and the potential for this getting into the wrong hands, right?

They would like to see these plants all over the world. Well, who can say that what’s going to be like in a hundred years if there’s all this plutonium sitting around, and who gets their hands on it? I mean, that, to me, is a real danger. That’s the first thing I would say to someone on the left.

The second thing I would say is there’s no answer for this waste. How how can you ever support an industry that’s going to produce something that’s dangerous for 250,000 years that we don’t have an answer for? We don’t have a permanent repository for this stuff now in this country. And most of the waste that these plants produce is still sitting there on site where all these plants exist.

So you don’t have an answer for what to do with this waste. And that’s a huge problem. And the risks are, are really great. And so I think those, to me, those are the two things that I like to at least bring up as issues. And then, of course, the other one is uranium mining, because, they often come at us with, “this is a carbon neutral energy source.”

Well then how can you justify, first of all, it’s not, when you look at the whole life cycle of a nuclear plant and how much fossil fuels are burned in construction of these facilities, let alone what’s going on in with the mining operations. I mean, the, the denser the uranium ore is the more carbon is needed to extract the uranium from that ore.

It’s a very, very carbon-intensive process. And you can’t deny that, and there’s no getting around that. So, you know, I think that’s another issue that some at least might be receptive to because they’re, they’re greatly concerned about climate change. So those are the three things I would talk about.

And then of course, just the reality that, you know, yeah, hypothetically we could get this all done quickly if we had all this money. We only focused on atomic energy. But in reality, this is never going to happen in time. Even if we were to believe all the propaganda, it’s never going to happen in time to make a difference when it comes to the climate.

And that’s another big one as well.

Bob: Yeah. I’ve been telling people to watch The Simpsons and ask if they want, Homer is their safety inspectorl He might be better than some of them out there if they were allowed to do this.

Joshua: Yeah. And then, lastly, I don’t want to downplay the risks of these plants in war zones.

Of course, Ukraine is the prime example, right? But Taiwan, they have nuke plants, and that may be a battleground between China and the US in the coming years. And who’s to say that those plants aren’t going to be used as tools of war? And we have plants in the Middle East. I mean, all these plants pose risks beyond any kind of comprehension because they’ve never been used like this before.

They’ve never been in a war zone, an active plant, in a war zone like this. So, if we had, think, if we had thousands of these plants all over the place, and how that could even be monitored and controlled is, you know, it’s impossible. So that’s another thing that I would bring up when talking about them.

I mean, even the worst of fossil fuels as imposed the same risks in a war zone. It’s, and, and no one would argue otherwise.

Scott: Yeah. The other thing I like to talk about too is, and because I’m a bit of a movement historian and an organizer is that some of the best organizing that happened in the US in the last half century was the anti-nukes movement.

As an organizer in the anti-fossil fuel movement, whether it’s extraction or it’s plants or other infrastructure, was like very much modeled on like what we saw at Seabrook, New Hampshire in the seventies. Diablo Canyon, Rocky Mountain Flats. Places like that.

And a lot of my mentors were those organizers who took big risks as some of the first SLAPP suits, (strategic litigation against public participation). Civil suits were against anti-nuke activists at Diablo Canyon.

The was a powerful movement and the disingenuous way in which some of the pro-nuke left people in particular I expected from the industry, but the way in which they sort of attack and just, you know, disregard that, that powerful in history is very troubling.

Joshua: Yeah. I mean, I’ve long thought that it’s our duty on the left to build on the successes of the past, not tear them down. Right? And that’s exactly what they’re doing. But maybe it is because those movements were so successful that they’re so threatened by them even to this day, right? That those of us that don’t buy into it are going to continue that legacy. And that’s a big threat to them. And I think that’s great.

I think they should be afraid because we’re not going anywhere.

Scott: Josh, it’s been great talking to you.

Joshua: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been awesome.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bob Buzzanco - Scott Parkin.

Steve Milloy, a longtime lobbyist for polluting industries from tobacco to coal to oil and gas, is back in the news thanks to the wildfire smoke that recently blanketed the U.S. East Coast. Milloy appeared on Fox News to tell people that there are “no negative health impacts” from breathing in wildfire smoke. It’s the latest salvo in a war he’s been waging against air pollution regulation since the 1980s.

For industry operatives like Milloy, air pollution, especially the regulation of particulate matter, has long been a greater concern than climate policy. Regulations on PM2.5 —fine inhalable particles generally smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — would require many of the same reductions in the combustion of fossil fuels that climate policy would, but without any of the politicization that has obstructed climate action for decades. It’s never been easy for politicians to publicly fight against clean air and water, and it’s doubly hard when the country’s largest city is wrapped in smoke. So Milloy took to the conservative airways to dismiss concerns about wildfire smoke, which peer-reviewed public health research has linked to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and emergency respiratory and immune responses.

That research means little to Milloy, who claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.

In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”

Trump’s EPA declined to tighten air pollution standards, rolled back mercury regulations, and disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, or as Milloy put it: “blowing out that particulate matter sub-panel, another huge win.” Plus he finally got to introduce an idea he’d been trying to get into the EPA regulatory framework since the 1990s: the so-called secret science proposal. It would lend more weight to studies that make data available to the government and other researchers, which sounds good but would have the effect of discrediting most epidemiological studies because they include human test subjects and are subject to privacy laws. “I’ve got huge wins under my belt,” Milloy told me in a 2020 interview. “It’s been tremendously satisfying for me.”

That’s a lot of policy shifts coming from someone whose ideas have often been considered fringe by his fellow conservatives. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Milloy called public health officials “COVID creeps” and likened quarantine to communism. He criticizes oil companies for pandering to climate activists, whom he calls “bedwetters” or “watermelons”: green on the outside but “red” on the inside. In a 2017 presentation at the annual Heartland Institute climate conference, he compared the EPA to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

But the Trump EPA normalized a lot of previously fringe ideas, and Milloy was an adviser on the transition team. “I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” he said. That meant he had real influence on environmental policy. And that influence is likely to grow if Republicans retake control of the government. In the meantime, Milloy works for Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm leading the charge against renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the secret science proposal didn’t make it through the final approval process before Trump left office. When I asked Milloy if he thought a Republican-led EPA would take up the proposal again, he replied, “That is on my agenda.”

Also on the agenda: defunding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. But most of all, reclaiming his Trump-era wins on air pollution, particularly stalling or rolling back regulations on PM2.5. Those regulations are all the more critical to the climate fight today given the legal attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions are mostly generated by the same activity — the combustion of fossil fuels — so if the agency can’t regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it can accomplish similar goals by tightening restrictions on particulate matter, something Milloy has been pointing out to conservatives for decades.

After Trump left office, the EPA’s disbanded Particulate Matter Review Panel went ahead and published their work in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they wrote. Under President Joe Biden, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agreed, and the EPA is in the process of strengthening the standards.

“It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed.”

Milloy is hoping a lawsuit before the D.C. District Court will roll those efforts back. His latest battle against air pollution regulations is happening amid not only an endless respiratory health pandemic, but also a steady stream of studies pointing to the millions of people around the world still dying early thanks to air pollution. According to Milloy, it’s all fraud.

“What I think the right wing has done is try to saw the legs off the infrastructure that holds up environmental decision-making,” Eric Schaeffer, an EPA employee-turned-whistleblower and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said. “It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed. … We’re seeing right now the impacts of a decades-long campaign to undermine science.”

Steve Milloy appears on C-SPAN on March 2, 2013.

Credit: C-Span

From Tobacco to Wildfire Smoke

Like many of the folks who went on to battle climate regulation, Milloy got his start working for the tobacco industry in the 1990s, particularly dealing with the issue of secondhand smoke. He ran the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, a front group for Philip Morris that worked to counteract efforts to regulate air pollution. Memos outlining the creation of TASCC could pass as mission statements for Milloy’s enterprise today.

TASCC operated under the principle that if an economic argument can’t keep regulation at bay, the next best move is to undermine the science that regulation is based on. Almost as soon as he started working on air pollution, Milloy had new science to contend with: a 1993 epidemiological study that looked at 8,000 people across six American cities and found that exposure to fine particulate matter — PM2.5, or soot — was correlated to reduced life expectancy. Not what you want to hear when the companies you work for sell the products that produce PM2.5: cigarettes, cars, coal, oil.

Milloy started by picking apart the methodology: The subject group was too small, researchers hadn’t controlled for other factors, and epidemiology’s reliance on observational data made it suspect. He manufactured controversy around the researchers keeping their data private, producing a paper that would become the basis for the secret science proposal. And he targeted the scientists themselves, particularly lead researcher Steven Dockery and one of the statisticians involved, C. Arden Pope.

But it’s hard to discredit scientists who are cautious about the implications of their own findings. “It was a bit bigger than we expected, and we were a bit concerned about it,” Pope said of the correlation between exposure to PM2.5 and premature death. That led the scientists to ask the American Cancer Society to rerun the analysis with an independently collected cohort of subjects. The cancer society got similar results, as did the Health Effects Institute, an organization half-funded by the EPA and half-funded by the automotive industry. Milloy kept fighting, but nothing worked. In 1997, the EPA passed its first regulation on particulate matter. It tightened those regulations every eight years or so right up until Scott Pruitt became administrator of the agency under Trump. Milloy said he put the old secret science paper “in the transition plan and talked with Pruitt about it.”

It wasn’t new science or a new strategy that handed Milloy a win after 25 years; it was just access. Being on Trump’s EPA transition team enabled him to smuggle in all sorts of ideas from his pals, including James Enstrom, a tobacco industry-funded scientist who published one of the few studies contradicting the Six Cities data. While Milloy points to Enstrom’s study as proof that Pope et al. are peddlers of “junk science,” Pope points to the 25 years’ worth of additional studies that have consistently replicated the Six Cities result.

The obscure journal that put out Enstrom’s paper in 2017 is published by another friend of Milloy’s, toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose research focuses on the idea that a little bit of pollution and radiation are actually good for you. When Pruitt announced in 2018 that the EPA would not strengthen the regulations on particulate matter, he cited Enstrom’s study as evidence that the science on PM2.5 was “too uncertain” to act upon.

A man talks on his phone as he looks through the haze at the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, N.J., on June 7, 2023.

Photo: Seth Wenig

Regulating Air Pollution

Almost as soon as the U.S. government began to mandate quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Milloy took to Twitter to take aim at one of his favorite scientific targets, epidemiology, and warn that Covid lockdown would lead to climate lockdown. Aside from political ideology, there’s also a PM2.5 connection with Covid. Studies have found that both chronic exposure to particulate matter and short-term exposure are Covid-19 risk factors.

Milloy’s wins on PM2.5 under Trump illustrate just how much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus the administration was able to dismantle in a short amount of time, but they’re an indicator of something else too: a willingness to go further than conservatives ever have in the battle against environmental regulation, to actually attack clean air and water. Why? In a word, climate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the EPA’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to regulating the emissions of power plants. One of the few remaining ways the agency can target CO2 is by regulating particulate matter, since both are emitted via fossil fuel combustion. As Milloy put it to me recently: “PM2.5 is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions.”

As New York and D.C. residents choked on wildfire smoke from Canada, many saw in the apocalyptic landscape a window into a climate-changed future. The link between climate change and wildfire is nuanced: Climate change doesn’t “cause” wildfires, but it does create the low-moisture, high-heat conditions that make fires more likely and keeps them burning longer. Irregular plant growth driven by climate change can also result in excess fuel for those fires, but forest management and building development choices matter too. The data is unclear on which of these factors played the largest role in Canada’s fires, but it is very clear that climate change will bring bigger fires more frequently in the future.

For Milloy, though, no matter what the data says, there can be no lines drawn between climate change and fire or smoke and respiratory illness. Such a connection would make his clients liable for tens of millions of dollars in health costs, and then they couldn’t afford to fund him anymore.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Amy Westervelt.

More than 450 North Carolina healthcare professionals in recent days have signed an open letter condemning a proposed state ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, legislation the signatories decried as a "dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine."

"As North Carolina healthcare professionals deeply committed to protecting our patients and preserving the trusting and informed relationship between patient and provider, we adamantly oppose any bans or restrictions on access to and provision of lifesaving, gender-affirming care," the doctors, nurses, therapists, and other medical professionals wrote in the letter to state lawmakers.

Among the anti-LGBTQ+ bills recently introduced in North Carolina's Republican-led Legislature is the so-called Youth Health Protection Act, which if passed will ban doctors from providing hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and other gender-affirming care. Violators would lose their medical licenses and be fined $1,000.

The letter continues:

Any legislation restricting or banning lifesaving care represents dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine and will be detrimental to the health of transgender and gender-diverse North Carolinians, including youth. The decision of whether and when to seek gender-affirming care, which can include mental and physical health interventions, is personal and involves careful consideration by each patient and their family, along with guidance from their medical providers. These decisions should not be made by politicians or the government. This extreme intrusion will not only disrupt the patient-provider relationship, but will discourage talented healthcare providers from staying and providing all manner of healthcare within North Carolina.

"We applaud healthcare providers for taking a stand for trans youth and the LGBTQ+ community. Their voices are a powerful force against the hateful attacks on trans kids," Kendra Johnson, executive director at the advocacy group Equality NC, said in a statement praising the letter. "Legislators need to stay out of our private lives and let healthcare providers do their jobs."

Allison Scott, director of impact and innovation at the Campaign for Southern Equality, said that "we're grateful to see this overwhelming chorus of medical providers calling this legislation out for what it is—extreme overreach of government into private citizens' medical care, with no concern for facts or medical best practices."

"North Carolina's leading medical experts are demanding that lawmakers listen to their concerns, and accepted medical best practices, before rushing through this dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ agenda," Scott added.

The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are among the many medical groups supporting gender-affirming care for minors. A study published last year by the University of Washington found that youth who received such healthcare were 73% less likely to experience suicidality and 60% less likely to suffer from depression than minors who did not get care.

Yet GOP-led state legislatures in 2023 have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at banning or severely limiting gender-affirming healthcare for minors, according to the ACLU, and more than a dozen states have passed laws outlawing such care.

"Each time our legislators propose laws targeting our LGBTQ+ community, they hurt our family and thousands of other families," Sarah Eyssen, a North Carolina mother of a transgender daughter, wrote in a recent Charlotte Observer opinion piece. "These bills communicate to everyone that it's okay to treat members of the LGBTQ+ community differently. It's okay to discriminate, even against a child."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Over 8,000 opponents of a new motorway in southern France demonstrated near the village of Saix on Saturday to prevent the project, building a wall of people and then one from actual cement blocks as they vowed to defend local farm land and biodiversity in the area.

According toAgence France-Presse:

The demonstration in the Tarn region against the proposed A69 motorway drew in 8,200 protesters according to organisers; 4,500 according to the local authority.

They marched under intermittent rain along the route of the proposed highway, which would link the southern cities of Toulouse and Castres, carrying placards that read “Less energy, fewer cars and less tarmac” and other green messages.

The localized protest took place as many around the world observed Earth Day and the large-scale climate demonstrations known as 'The Big One' took place in London.

One progressive observer in the U.S. said people outside of France could learn a lot from the creative and ambitious form of direct action:

Greens MP Sandrine Rousseau, who attended Saturday's protest, told a reporter that the project represents thinking that dates back 30 years or more, when new roads for automobiles were seen as the smartest infrastucture investment.

Especially in the face of the climate crisis, "there is really no need of another motorway," said Rousseau who also called the A69 "a project from another time."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

Civil and digital rights groups this week joined a trio of progressive U.S. lawmakers in opposing bipartisan proposals to ban the social media platform TikTok, arguing that such efforts are rooted in "anti-China" motives and do not adequately address the privacy concerns purportedly behind the legislation.

The ACLU argues that, if passed, legislation recently introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate "sets the stage for the government to ban TikTok," which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance and is used by more than 1 in 3 Americans. The Senate bill would grant the U.S. Department of Commerce power to prohibit people in the United States from using apps and products made by companies "subject to the jurisdiction of China" and other "foreign adversaries."

"The government shouldn't be able to tell us what social media apps we can and can't use."

"The government shouldn't be able to tell us what social media apps we can and can't use," the ACLU asserted via Twitter. "We have a right to free speech."

In a Wednesday letter led by the free expression advocacy group PEN America, 16 organizations including the ACLU argued that "proposals to ban TikTok risk violating First Amendment rights and setting a dangerous global precedent for the restriction of speech."

"More effective, rights-respecting solutions are available and provide a viable alternative to meet the serious concerns raised by TikTok," the groups contended, pointing to a February proposal by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) to expedite a probe of the company by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States as a possible way "to mitigate security risks without denying users access to the platform."

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) has emerged as the leading congressional voice against banning TikTok, saying Wednesday that he fears the platform is being singled out due in significant part to "xenophobic anti-China rhetoric."

"Why the hell are we whipping ourselves into a hysteria to scapegoat TikTok?" Bowman asked in a phone interview with The New York Times while he traveled by train to Washington, D.C. to speak at a #KeepTikTok rally, where content creators, entrepreneurs, users, and activists gathered to defend the platform.

In his speech, Bowman noted that "TikTok as a platform has created a community and a space for free speech for 150 million Americans and counting," and is a place where "5 million small businesses are selling their products and services and making a living... at a time when our economy is struggling in so many ways."

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, concurred with Bowman, tweeting Thursday that "if you think the U.S. needs a TikTok ban and not a comprehensive privacy law regulating data brokers, you don't care about privacy, you just hate that a Chinese company has built a dominant social media platform."

Two other House Democrats—Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and California's Robert Garcia—joined Bowman in addressing Wednesday's rally.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel before his speech, Pocan acknowledged "valid concerns when it comes to social media disinformation and all the rest."

"But to say that a single platform is the problem largely because it's Chinese-owned honestly, I think, borders more on xenophobia than addressing that core issue," he stressed.

Garcia, a self-described TikTok "super-consumer," asserted on MSNBC Thursday morning that "before we ban it, I think we should work on the privacy concerns first."

TikTok "speaks to the next generation... LGBTQ+ folks are coming out, people are being educated on topics, I think we need to be a little more thoughtful and not ban TikTok," the gay lawmaker added.

Wednesday's rally came a day before TikTok CEO Zi Chew testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, some of whose members expressed open hostility toward the Chinese government.

"To the American people watching today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you and manipulate what you see and exploit for future generations," said committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.).

Chew—who committed to a number of reforms including prioritizing safety for young users, firewall protection for U.S. user data, and greater corporate transparency—took exception to some of the lawmakers' assertions.

"I don't think ownership is the issue here," he said. "With a lot of respect, American social companies don't have a good track record with data privacy and user security."

"I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica—just one example," Chew added, referring to the British political consulting firm that harvested the data of tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users without their consent to aid 2016 Republican campaigns including former President Donald Trump's.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The Tibetan Buddhist Institute in Sichuan province has made abiding by the CCP’s ideology and opposing those who advocate splitting the Tibet Autonomous Region from the rest of China conditions for being admitted to the school, which educates Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. 

“Though the institute claims that its aim is to provide an opportunity to study Tibetan Buddhism, in reality, the Chinese government is using such institutions as a tool to Sinicize Tibetan Buddhism,” said Pema Gyal, a researcher at London–based Tibet Watch, a rights group.  

“So, from a human rights perspective, this is a violation of basic rights to education and determination.” 

 China maintains a tight grip on Tibet, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity as Buddhists. Tibetans frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at wiping out their national and cultural identity.

“These days the Chinese Communist government has started implementing these kinds of despotic guidelines in not just high schools, but also for those in middle and elementary schools,” Gyal said. “It’s obvious their intention is to forcibly Sinicize Tibetans.”

Additionally, imposing Tibetan monks and nuns to follow and respect communist ideology is against the customs of Buddhism and the law of causality that Buddhists follow, said Tibetan rights analyst Sangey Kyap, who lives in Spain. 

“And whatsoever it is, these requirements basically are intended to force Tibetans to disrespect the Dalai Lama,” he said, referring to the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists who resides in Dharamsala, India, with members of the Tibet government-in-exile.

The Sichuan Tibetan Buddhist Institute was founded in 1984, though it was initially situated in the Tibetan town of Kardze and later moved to Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, in 2017. It offers religious instruction as well as instruction in Chinese socialist tradition and China’s history.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok for RFA Tibetan.

A little over a week after taking ownership of PNP "under the false pretense of decommissioning it," Holtec secretly applied for funding from the DOE's Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) program in early July to reopen the plant, the coalition explained in a statement. The company's application—supported by Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who had been advocating for a "dangerous 'zombie reactor' bailout and restart scheme at Palisades" since April 2022—was made public in early September.

Thanks in part to opposition from the coalition, which sent its first letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in September, the DOE rejected Holtec's first funding request in mid-November. The following month, however, Holtec announced it would apply for federal funding during a second round of allocations, prompting a second letter of opposition from the coalition.

As The Holland Sentinelreported earlier this month: "Holtec is taking a different route with its second attempt at funding. Rather than applying through the CNC program, the company applied for funds from the U.S. Department of Energy loan office."

Terry Lodge, legal counsel for the coalition's lead groups, Beyond Nuclear and Don't Waste Michigan, wrote in Wednesday's letter that "DOE's recently issued amended 'guidance,' which was specifically rewritten to enable Holtec to apply for $1.2 billion of federal taxpayer funds, is not legal under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)."

"We understand that Holtec... may be applying to DOE for a subsidized loan under a different law, with the intention of using funds from the IIJA to pay off the loan," wrote Lodge. "We question whether such a combined transaction would be lawful under the IIJA. Even if it is, IIJA credits may not be used to support Palisades. Congress intended the IIJA to support only currently operating commercial nuclear reactors that face termination of operations for economic reasons. Palisades does not meet any criteria for eligibility."

The coalition once again asked Granholm—a former Democratic governor and attorney general of Michigan—and other high-ranking officials at the DOE to deny Holtec's request that the non-operational PNP be certified to receive such federal funding.

Most importantly, PNP is unable "to operate safely due to a litany of chronic and acute problems associated with age-related degradation and neglected maintenance on safety-significant systems, structures, and components," the coalition argued in its statement. "This includes the worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country and perhaps the world, at risk of pressurized thermal shock through-wall fracture, which would lead to reactor core meltdown."

"But additional pathways to catastrophic meltdown include a reactor lid, as well as steam generators, that have needed replacement for 17 years or longer," the coalition continued. "Palisades' control rod drive mechanism seal leaks have been uniquely bad in all of industry, for more than a half-century. Now added to this long list is Holtec's neglect of vital maintenance, such as of the turbo-generator, bending under its own immense weight, as well as the steam generators, to name but two examples."

Holtec has "applied to DOE for a billion dollar federal taxpayer-backed nuclear loan guarantee under the Inflation Reduction Act, which it would use to promote the reactor restart scheme, hoping to pay it back over time with the CNC program bailout," said the coalition. In addition, Holtec is "seeking a more than billion dollar subsidy from the state of Michigan, as well as yet another lucrative, above-market rate power purchase agreement with an unnamed utility company in the area. Also, Holtec has applied to DOE for $7.4 billion in federal nuclear loan guarantees, authorized under the 2005 Energy Policy Act and congressionally appropriated on December 23, 2007, for the design certification, construction, and operation of four small modular (nuclear) reactors, more than one of which would also be located at the Palisades site."

In the words of Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear and board member of Don't Waste Michigan, "This more than $10 billion in ratepayer and taxpayer robbery would merely fund an insanely high-risk game of radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shoreline."

"Both extremes of the risk spectrum would be co-located at the Palisades site, if Holtec gets its way," said Kamps. "The ever-worsening breakdown phase risks at the old reactor would exist alongside the break-in phase risks of the new reactors, risking a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe, with the potential for Fukushima-style, domino-effect, multiple meltdowns."

According to The Holland Sentinel: "Holtec has acknowledged there will be 'a number of hurdles' to reopening the plant even if funding is secured. Those include financial commitment from the state, procuring a power purchasing agreement, upgrading the switchyard, partnering with a licensed operator for the restart, rehiring qualified and trained staff, and maintenance and delayed capital improvements of the facility—the plant closed earlier than planned due to failure of a control rod drive seal."

Citing comments a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission official made during a public meeting on Monday, MLivereported this week that PNP "would be the first plant to enter the decommissioning phase and then try to restart."

During the meeting, Kamps declared, "Over my dead body are you all going to get away with this."

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

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Join us March 2 for a live virtual event, “Post-Roe: Today’s Abortion Landscape.”

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene.

At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care.

Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” Will Brewer, who represents the local affiliate of the anti-abortion organization National Right to Life, told a majority-male panel of lawmakers Feb. 14. When faced with a patient’s high-risk condition, doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”

Top Republicans like Gov. Bill Lee have defended the state’s abortion law, one of the strictest in the country, as providing “maximum protection possible for both mother and child.” But currently, the ban has no explicit exceptions, not even for the pregnant patient’s health.

It only includes an “affirmative defense” for emergencies, a rare legal mechanism that means the burden is on the doctor to prove abortion care was necessary because the patient risked death or irreversible impairment to a major bodily function.

The penalties for getting it wrong are three to 10 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines. Doctors could expect to lose their medical license just for being charged. Concern over how the unprecedented law will be interpreted by prosecutors and the courts has already resulted in patients with high-risk conditions having to rush across state lines for care.

Some Republicans are proposing a modest change. An amendment to the law introduced in the House Population Health Subcommittee last week would remove the affirmative defense and clarify that it is not a crime to terminate a pregnancy to prevent an emergency that threatens the pregnant patient’s life or health, among other provisions.

“No one wants to tell their spouse, child or loved one that their life is not important in a medical emergency as you watch them die when they could have been saved,” said Republican Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, a nurse and the bill’s sponsor.

But the word “prevent” is a sticking point for the anti-abortion groups who wrote the law.

“That would mean that the emergency hasn’t even occurred yet,” Brewer told the committee. He made a distinction between immediate, urgent emergencies — “A patient comes into the ER bleeding out” — and what he calls “quasi-elective” abortions.

Brewer, who has no medical experience, defined those as “abortions that aren’t necessary to be done in the moment but are still performed in an effort to prevent a future medical emergency.” He called for an “objective” standard.

When reached for comment, Brewer said his statements as summarized by ProPublica had been mischaracterized but did not provide additional details. “Ending the life of the baby should not be used as treatment for non-life-threatening conditions or to prevent some unknown possibility in the future,” he said. He did not respond to follow-up questions seeking clarification.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said laws that try to limit or define medical exceptions are dangerous because they interfere with a doctor’s ability to assess fast-moving health indicators in unpredictable situations and don’t account for people’s different thresholds for risk.

Kim Fortner, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist practicing in Tennessee for more than 20 years, testified to the committee and pushed back on Brewer’s characterizations. She described a patient she saw recently whose water broke too early — the fetus still had a heartbeat, but there was virtually no chance it would survive and a very high risk the patient would get an infection.

But because of the law, the woman was sent home without the option of abortion care. She came back with emergency bleeding and sepsis, a life-threatening infection.

“It is not always so clear, and things don’t always just work themselves out,” Fortner said. “It is a significant, in my mind, misuse of resources, if she did not need to have six units of blood that could have gone to the trauma victim or the gunshot wound. Blood is a limited resource. Just because she can wait and come back in and she still lives to talk about it today — one, that won’t always happen, and two, it also is a significant misuse of an ICU bed. It is a preventable occurrence.”

Andy Farmer, a Republican state representative, agreed with her.

“These things need to be addressed early on,” he said, adding that he didn’t want doctors to feel they needed to consult a lawyer before offering care that could stop a condition from progressing into an emergency.

Brewer, however, said he believed giving doctors that kind of power would be too subjective. “Once one doctor is let off the hook in a criminal trial, it would be open season for other doctors who wanted to perform bad faith terminations,” he said.

Brewer’s position appears to be out of step with public opinion on abortion, even in a deeply red state. A recent poll found about 75% of Tennesseans support abortion exceptions, including for pregnancies caused by rape and incest.

Yet his organization exerts outsize influence on Republican state politics. Tennessee Right to Life issues an annual scorecard rating lawmakers on their fealty to “pro-life” positions and plows money into primary campaigns to unseat candidates viewed as insufficiently loyal. Already, they retracted the endorsement of one Republican lawmaker who publicly advocated for clear medical exceptions.

Signs of frustration emerged over the course of the hearing as lawmakers grilled Brewer on how his preferred positions may harm pregnant patients and accused him of trying to intimidate legislators.

“You’ve made a statement that you are fine with the current trigger law as it is, and nothing more needs to be done,” said Republican state Rep. Sabi Kumar, a retired surgeon, referring to the state’s abortion ban. “Did you believe that?”

Brewer responded: “That is our most preferential position, although we would accept an objective standard.”

Kumar said he was surprised Brewer did not appear to be taking into account other changes the bill addresses that are not in the current law, such as exceptions for cases of fatal fetal anomalies, where a baby is not expected to survive, and ectopic pregnancies, which implant outside the uterine cavity, are non-viable and can lead to rupture and death.

“Those things need to be corrected,” he said. “In the face of that, it is difficult for you to say that that is your preferential thing.”

Kumar also asked Brewer to consider the plight of doctors. Physicians carry malpractice insurance, but Kumar noted it doesn’t cover costs associated with criminal charges, which can be financially ruinous. Kumar didn’t think they should be threatened with prison time for acting to avoid an emergency.

“I would have liked to see you, as a friend, be as concerned about a physician who was under that degree of emotional stress and pressure, trying to save the life of a baby and worried about being prosecuted,” he said. “I would have liked you to be gushing with sympathy for that.”

He and others pointed out that the bill’s changes would not affect the vast majority of pregnancies, where abortion would continue to be outlawed. The bill explicitly states abortions are prohibited for mental health reasons, such as a patient threatening suicide, and it has no provisions allowing abortion for pregnancies due to rape or incest.

But Brewer suggested that lawmakers who vote in support of the bill might stand to lose the endorsement of Tennessee Right to Life.

“I would not consider this a pro-life law,” Brewer said. “And in discussions with our [political action committee], they have informed me that they would score this negatively for those members that wish to vote for it.”

Brewer’s invocation of the anti-abortion group’s scorecard provoked a strong response. As the hearing wrapped up, Tennessee’s House speaker, Cameron Sexton, appeared in the chamber.

“Something happened that I’ve never experienced in my time down here, which was somebody on a committee testifying tried to intimidate our members by telling them they’re gonna score them a vote,” he said. “You can have those conversations in your room, you can have those conversations in email. But to do it in the committee — to try to intimidate this committee to go a certain direction — is uncalled for.”

The rare public rebuke of an anti-abortion activist by a top Republican lawmaker may be a sign of growing GOP support for the modest amendments to the law. However, the bill’s path is not guaranteed. It will need to pass in three more committees before reaching final votes in the state’s House and Senate.

Republican state Rep. Bryan Terry’s reaction provided a preview of potential challenges ahead. He was the only member of the committee to vote against the amendment, and he leads the House Health Subcommittee, where the bill is headed next week.

In an email to ProPublica, Terry said that he does want to see changes to the law, but that the word “prevent” would need to be removed or redefined in the measure before he could consider voting for it.

“There are a multitude of medical emergencies that can occur during a pregnancy, but they usually never materialize,” Terry, who is an anesthesiologist, said. “A concern with the current amendment language is that an abortion could be performed in an instance when it wasn’t ‘medically necessary treatment.’”

ProPublica followed up to ask if he would consider conditions such as premature rupture of membranes, preeclampsia, cancer or heart conditions “medically necessary” reasons for abortions. He did not respond.

Three days after the hearing, Tennessee Right to Life sent a “legislative alert” obtained by ProPublica to its members, calling on them to oppose the bill at the next hearing.

The email described changes in the bill as “loopholes” making the current law “unenforceable.”

“Tragically, some pro-life legislators are currently supporting this bill,” the email read. Below, it listed the nine lawmakers who voted in favor of it.

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Kavitha Surana.

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Over three dozen groups on Monday pressured three Democratic West Coast governors to "voice your opposition to the plan to increase the amount of fracked gas flowing through your states" ahead of a decision by federal regulators expected early next year.

"We need our governors to stand with us and send a strong message to the federal government to stop rubber-stamping pipeline expansions."

"The urgency of the climate crisis demands action from your administrations," even before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) weighs in, the organizations wrote to Govs. Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Insee of Washington, and Gavin Newsom of California.

The letter explains that "Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) is seeking approval from FERC to increase the capacity of its 1,354-mile fracked gas pipeline that runs from British Columbia, through Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, and down to California."

"FERC estimates the expansion will result in 3.24 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, even without considering the upstream methane leakage," which is "the same annual carbon pollution as eight new gas-fired power plants," the letter notes.

The groups praised Brown, Inslee, and Newsom for their "strong efforts to tackle the climate crisis" so far and argued that the expansion project, known as GTN XPress, "would go against these commitments by locking in the region's reliance on fracked gas for at least another 30 years, subsidized by ratepayers."

"We urge you to carefully weigh the climate impacts of increasing gas capacity, and consider how the GTN XPress project is inconsistent with Washington, Oregon, and California's efforts to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions," the letter concludes. "As our state leaders, we ask you to make your opposition to the proposal loud and clear."

Representatives from groups that signed on to the letter also stressed local opposition.

"There are over 30 organizations with a range of climate, social justice, health, and place-based goals that fiercely oppose this project," noted Columbia Riverkeeper staff attorney Audrey Leonard.

Maig Tinnin, Rogue Valley coordinator for Rogue Climate, highlighted that "Northwest communities have organized to win strong climate goals in our states and this project threatens our ability to meet those emission reductions."

"Over the last five years, while many worked to defeat new pipelines like Jordan Cove LNG, FERC approved more than a dozen pipeline expansion projects across the country," Tinnin added. "We need our governors to stand with us and send a strong message to the federal government to stop rubber-stamping pipeline expansions."

Though Republican Gov. Brad Little of Idaho did not receive the letter, some organizations in his state also supported it.

"Like our West Coast neighbors, concerned Idahoans oppose any new or expanded fossil fuels extraction, transportation, and infrastructure projects," said Wild Idaho Rising Tide organizer Helen Yost. "We encourage California, Oregon, and Washington governors to further consider the broad climate impacts of their public actions and decisions, especially for under-represented, rural communities."

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

October 17th, 2022.

We join with Haiti’s popular movement to strongly condemn the call for an expanded foreign military occupation of Haiti made on October 7th by US/ UN occupation-imposed prime minister Ariel Henry. Henry obediently followed calls made by the UN Integrated Office in Port-au-Prince the day before for an expanded UN occupation of Haiti and by OAS General Luis Almagro who tweeted that Haiti “must request urgent assistance from the international community to help resolve security crises, determine the characteristics of an international security force.”

We strongly condemn the letter submitted on October 9th by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the UN Security Council, proposing the deployment of a foreign, armed occupation force to Haiti. And we denounce theBiden Administration’s drafting of a UN Security Council Resolution calling for the immediate deployment of a foreign “rapid action force” in Haiti, as reported on October 15th.

Turning to the UN Security Council, the OAS, and the US government to “stabilize” the crisis in Haiti today is akin to pleading with the arsonists to quell the fire they have unleashed.

For more than 18 years now, ever since the US-backed coup d’etat in 2004 against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has been under US/ UN occupation, an occupation that has perpetrated gross human rights abuses including rape and other forms of sexual abuse, an occupation that has brought cholera to Haiti and that has systematically destroyed Haiti’s institutions while increasing ​​hunger and misery.

Courageously facing police and paramilitary attacks, the population of Haiti has taken to the streets in ever-growing numbers, demanding their basic human rights and democracy, along with an end to corruption and to the plunder of public resources. They demand an end to US/UN occupation, and an end to the right-wing Haitian Tét Kale Party(PHTK) regime headed by Ariel Henry. They are demanding a transitional government of public safety (Sali Piblik) to create a foundation for free and fair elections and a return to democratic rule. They are demanding an end to IMF-imposed austerity, soaring prices of basic necessities, and declining real wages. Instead, they are demanding that their tax money be invested in education, healthcare, sanitation, clean drinking water, and support for Haiti’s peasant farmers who have been the backbone of local food production.

Moreover, the people are demanding an end to the terror inflicted by the Haitian National Police and paramilitaries, including the G-9 death squad led by ex-police officer Jimmy Cherizier, working with the PHTK regime. They are demanding an end to the proliferation of kidnappings, rape, police killings, and massacres throughout the country, such as the horrific Lasalin massacre. For further testimony regarding this massacre, view this powerful video. The people are protesting the atrocious conditions in Haiti’s prisons and the  skyrocketing rate of prisoner deaths due to starvation, overcrowding, medical neglect and other abuses. All of these injustices have been occurring with total impunity, under the authority of the US/UN occupation.

The US government’s financing of the repressive Haitian National Police (HNP), which has escalated its attacks against unarmed protestors, has been extensive, increasing in correlation with the police’s documented collaboration with paramilitary death squads.  As noted recently, from “2010 to 2020, Washington pumped in $312 million for weapons and training. In 2021, the White House and State Department sent a combined $20 million. In July 2022, the State Department bolstered the SWAT training program with a $48 million package.” All the while, HNP police killings of unarmed Haitians have continued with impunity.

Neither the major, international human rights organizations nor the UN Human Rights Commission are keeping track of the thousands of unarmed Haitians who have been killed and are being killed by the US-imposed PHTK regime’s police and paramilitary affiliates over the last 5 years. This past July alone, more than 500 people were killed in the impoverished neighborhood of Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince. In a rare development, the US corporate media acknowledged this most recent killing spree, but attributed it to “gang violence”, fitting the convenient racist narrative about Haitians in particular and people of African descent in general. Here are but 3 examples, among hundreds, of recent victims this year who do not exist within the media universe defined by CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc.:

+ This past September 15th, as widely reported inside of Haiti, Widney Véron Joseph, a nationally esteemed student and second winner of the new secondary exams for the western department, was killed on the road to the airport. The father of the victim believes that this act was committed by agents of the National Police of Haiti. “After shooting my son, they burned him alive. I begged the police in vain to allow me to take him to the hospital, they categorically refused,” said the 21-year-old boy’s father in tears on Radio Caraïbes. Widney Véron Joseph was about to go to a friend’s house to charge his laptop and phone when he was murdered, his father said, adding that his son would have gone to Canada next October for medical studies.

+ Two days later, on September 17th, following a day of massive protest mobilization, the Haitian National Police (HNP) approached a barricade established by protesters in Delmas 47, a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. The police opened fire on the protesters. Reportedly, according to a community witness, about 4 people were killed. One community resident, known by her nickname as Doudouce, was hit by police fire, but was not killed. She was screaming for help, but when community members tried to intervene to help her, the police forced them to disperse. Then, according to the witness, a police-operated heavy machine, like a garbage truck, scooped up the bodies of the victims, including Doudouce who was still alive and screaming. The machine then dumped her and the other bodies into the trash compartment, then dumping atop of them the burning barricades.

+ Also on September 17th, but in the southern city of Okay, police went to the home of a young activist named Dimmy Samedi. They shot him in his home, then dragged him out still alive, and shot him again outside, killing him.

We denounce the arrogance of the UN, OAS, the US government, and the Core Group of imperial powers claimingthe role of guardians of the people of Haiti while they fan the flames of repression and violence.

The Haitian people are not fooled by this tragedy and farce; they recognize clearly that arsonists cannot be the firefighters. Only the organized power of the Haitian popular movement can put out the fires ignited by the 2004-coup d’etat and ensuing US/UN occupation.

We call upon people to condemn all foreign intervention in Haiti and to stand in solidarity with the Haitian popular movement in this vital moment.

For readers who live in the Bay Area of California, come out to protest on October 26th, 4 PM, in front of the San Francisco Federal Building (90  7th St., San Francisco).  All readers are encouraged to voice opposition to the US/ UN invasion and occupation of Haiti by doing the following:

Contact the office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at ph: (212) 963-7160

Contact Your House Representative in Congress

Contact Your Senator in Congress

Contact the White House at ph: (202)-456-1111

Tell US officials in particular to:

+ Oppose US-financing/training of the Haitian National Police!

+ Stop US support for the Ariel Henry dictatorship!

+ Stop the Deportations of all Haitians!

Support Haiti’s Popular Movement with a donation to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Haiti Action Committee.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan may not be full forgiveness, but it can still have a life-changing impact on millions of people. Almost 20 million may see their debts wiped clean, and more than 40 million are directly affected. The plan is a step forward for debtors and activists who have spent decades struggling to abolish student debt and make higher education, long promised as the path out of poverty, affordable for everyone.

It represents an opportunity for America’s poor to imagine futures without instrumentalized and alienated labor. Without diseases of despair. Unpunished by debt. A future America’s ruling class has worked hard to prevent.

Bloomberg (8/22/22)

So, naturally, corporate media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (8/23/22), Financial Times (8/25/22), CNBC (8/24/22), Vox (8/25/22), CNN (8/24/22, 8/25/22), CBS (8/25/22) and Bloomberg (8/22/22) have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it, trying to convince their audience there’s not enough to go around. Their primary weapon: the inflation bogeyman.

Regurgitating the views of conservative economists and politicians, corporate media are warning debt relief is inflationary, and even that it will transfer wealth upwards. These arguments are another example of how news media use the specter of inflation as a rationale for disciplining workers: Sorry, that’s it. There’s nothing left. No surplus. So how much are you willing to share? Don’t look over here at my huge pile of cash. The arguments trafficked by much of the corporate media in the aftermath of Biden’s debt relief announcement expose a reflexive hostility to social progress, and the use of government to improve the lives of ordinary people instead of benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals.

‘Inflation Expansion Act’

Wall Street Journal (8/23/22)

From headlines decrying Biden’s debt relief plans as pouring gas on an “inflationary fire” (Financial Times, 8/25/22) and dubbing the policy an “Inflation Expansion Act” (Wall Street Journal, 8/23/22), to citing manipulative studies by pro-austerity think tanks, the corporate media response to debt relief has stoked fears that providing much-needed relief to student debtors would increase demand, thereby exacerbating inflation.

If gains for working people will necessarily be nullified by corporate price hikes, maybe media should be questioning whether an economy where that’s the case should be reshaped. But media’s claims haven’t even been consistent on their own terms. Debt relief is not nearly as inflationary as media rhetoric suggests, even by the estimations of their most hawkish sources.

For example, the Financial Times, CNBC, Vox, CNN, CBS and The Hill (8/24/22) all cited “America’s foremost pro-austerity think tank” (American Prospect, 8/26/22), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which estimates Biden’s cancellation could cost the federal government $360 billion over ten years, driving spending and increasing inflation. Marc Goldwien, senior policy director at CRFB and “America’s foremost spending scold” (American Prospect, 8/26/22), made the rounds across the corporate news media to share this estimate.

Max Moran (American Prospect, 8/26/22): “According to Goldwein, we couldn’t cancel student loans in 2020 because the boost to the economy would be a paltry $115–$360 billion. But we also can’t cancel student loans in 2022 because the boost to the economy would be a whopping, inflationary (gasp!) $70–$95 billion!”

Biden’s student debt relief plan “is going to worsen inflation and it is going to eat up all the deflationary impact of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Goldwien claimed in the Financial Times (8/25/22). Vox (8/25/22) quoted Goldwien saying Biden’s plan will “raise prices on everything from clothing to gasoline to furniture to housing.” Assuming that CRFB’s estimate is accurate—even though there is much reason not to think so—what the estimate actually says is a far cry from Goldwien’s claim that prices will increase.

Economists like Paul Krugman, far from a hero of the left, as well as Mike Konczal and Alí Bustamante of the Roosevelt Institute, pointed out how even CRFB’s estimate shows at most a 0.3% increase in inflation, which wouldn’t “reverse” or even “dent” larger deflationary trends like the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, or even restarting student debt payments, as Biden intends to do at the start of the new year. Krugman explains that given the “fire-and-brimstone” inflation fearmongering, like the talk of “throwing gasoline on the fire” in the Financial Times (8/25/22), the reader might assume debt relief could cause another “major bout of inflation.” Even according to their own sources, this is far from true.

On top of this, the central argument in Goldwien’s case and across corporate media—that debt relief will spur demand—rests on the assumption that canceling people’s debt will incentivize them to buy things for which there is not enough supply to keep prices stable. Heidi Shierholtz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, took to Twitter (5/12/22) to shut this argument down:

The latest version of the claim “we can’t have nice things because inflation” is the idea that we can’t cancel federal student debt.… But folks, there is currently a pause on federal student loan repayments, which means that people with this debt don’t currently have debt payments. So even if somebody’s debt is entirely canceled under a new policy, their monthly costs won’t decrease relative to what they currently are. This will dramatically limit any impact on new spending and hence provide no upward inflation pressure relative to the status quo.

That corporate media would boost bad-faith arguments against a policy that represents such a sea change in people’s lives, as well as in the government’s role of helping working people, demonstrates a deep adherence to frameworks of austerity and neoliberalism. As Krugman pointed out in a separate Twitter thread (8/29/22), “what we’re seeing looks more like a visceral response looking for a rationale than a reasoned critique.”

Moreover, these arguments ignore evidence that current inflation is not a result of too much demand, but rather of corporate greed. As FAIR (4/21/22) has previously documented, corporate media have a penchant for putting “far more emphasis” on the contributions to inflation by policies that improve working people’s lives than on “the role of corporate profit-taking.” Despite troves of evidence that corporate monopolies are purposely exacerbating inflation by using the pandemic-related supply chain crisis as cover to needlessly raise costs on consumers—and make record profits doing it—corporate media have once again elected to opine on the inflationary effect of social spending.

‘Take from working class’

That student debt relief is inflationary is not the only argument corporate news outlets have peddled since Biden announced his plan. Critics of student debt relief have also framed the plan as a regressive giveaway to the wealthy, as well as unfair to those who have already paid off their debts.

The same Financial Times article (8/25/22) reported, “Canceling debt is not wholly progressive, given the poorest members of society are less likely to have gone to university.” CBS (8/25/22) noted Sen. Ted Cruz’s view that “what President Biden has in effect decided to do is to take from working-class people.” The New York Times’ morning newsletter (8/25/22) claimed student debt relief “resembles a tax cut that flows mostly to the affluent.”

Contrary to Newsweek‘s headline (8/24/22), polling finds a majority of past student borrowers support forgiveness of at least some student debt.

Never mind that if forgiving student loan debt were truly regressive, Cruz would be all for it. The reality is that student debt disproportionately impacts Black and brown and low-income borrowers (Roosevelt Institute, 9/29/21). Cancelation would go a long way towards addressing the racial wealth gap and addressing wealth inequality.

A Newsweek headline (8/24/22) reported that “Borrowers With Paid-Off Debt Feel Punished for Doing ‘Right Thing.’” The Wall Street Journal (8/23/22) claimed debt relief “insults the millions who paid their loans back.”

Astra Taylor, an organizer with the Debt Collective, told Democracy Now! (8/25/22) that this criticism was “so cynical”:

First off, I am one of the millions of people who did have to pay their debts. I paid it in full. I do not want anyone else to have to suffer just because I did. Social progress means that other people do not have to suffer through something that previous generations did. And the fact is, polling shows that most people have that attitude.

Student debt was designed as a barrier to keep Black, brown and low-income people from attaining a college education (Intercept, 8/25/22; Boston Review, 9/1/17). Partial debt relief makes self-determination for America’s most oppressed and exploited groups that much more possible. By trying to convince voters that debt relief will cost them, and that a more egalitarian society is impossible, corporate media are defending America’s ruling class from an educated working class.

The post Media Summon Inflation Specter to Oppose Student Debt Forgiveness appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

The post How About a Civic Group to Oppose a Cashless Society? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

So long as you have a credit card and a credit score, you’re in a world of easy credit (no down payments, etc.), and high interest rates, especially on unpaid monthly balances. All it takes is swiping your card and pushing buttons at retail establishments or online to make a purchase.

If you are in the lower 20% of the income scale, unbanked and outside the Gulag, consumer protections are really weak. Rip-off practices such as pay-day loan rackets and check cashing gouges proliferate.

For over a decade the screws have been tightening to coerce people into the credit-debt economy. Both the corporations and the government are to blame.

Try renting a car or getting home insurance without a credit card and credit history. Try using FedEx or UPS without a credit card. More retail outlets are experimenting with cashless transactions, even in places like the District of Columbia where a law barring discrimination against cash purchases goes unenforced.

“Cash” is defined for this article as paper money, checks and money orders. Many state laws define cash as only paper money.

The government, for example, is turning the screws by forcing Social Security recipients into receiving electronic monthly direct deposits or prepaid debit cards instead of receiving a check in the mail. This started in 2010. If you don’t have an “E-ZPass” on the Massachusetts Turnpike, an electronic camera catches your license plate and bills you with an added fee, even though you were willing to pay cash for which there is no toll gate.

Last month, the city of Newburgh, New York, converted its coin-only parking meters to cashless meters on the city’s business corridor streets. According to Blaise Gomez of “News12 Hudson Valley,” florist Christine Bello said the city is out of touch with its largely low-income demographic. “They eliminated an entire portion of my customer base by making this strictly cards,” she related. “So many of my customers do not have credit cards. They don’t have bank accounts. They don’t have smartphones. What were they thinking?”

Ms. Bello is speaking for tens of millions of poorer Americans who are being denied, excluded, penalized and harassed simply because they want to use paper cash which is “legal tender.” Isn’t that what 31 U.S.C. 5103 stipulates – that “United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes and dues”? Except for the loophole, which is that vendors can give you notice that they don’t accept cash, unless you are in one of the few states with laws declaring cash must be accepted.

There are many inducements for vendors getting you into the credit-card economy. First, you lose control over your money. The ever-tightening tentacles of their fine-print contracts dictate the terms of their grip over you and any remedies you may have to challenge abuses. While losing your bargaining power under this consumer servitude, you also are losing your privacy big time, compared to buying with cash. “Data mining” takes over and sends your purchase history and profiles to anyone in the world willing to pay or anyone able to hack. Corporate Big Brother – Equifax and Facebook – are profiting from your personal data.

With credit, you are more likely to make impulsive purchases and not be able to control your children’s buying escapades. Debt, high interest payments, and maybe harassment by bill collectors enter your life. Some who live beyond their means are seduced by the gambling industry’s lure of riches.

A new Gallup Poll reports that 64% of respondents say it is “likely the U.S. will be cashless in their lifetime!” Other countries are moving to cashless faster – some for authoritarian motivations. Just try being a tourist in Europe without a credit card.

There is a class stratification in the poll. The lower people’s income, the more likely they use cash for most purchases. The higher income and the younger they are, the more likely they use credit/debit cards or other digital payment systems. Interestingly, however, far more U.S. adults say they would be “upset” if the U.S. becomes a cashless society (46%) than the ones who say they would be “happy” with such an outcome (only 9%).

A majority (56%) of Americans, Gallup finds, say they “like to have cash with them at all times when they are outside their home.”

The poll registers a sharp partisan difference: “Republicans are most resistant to a shift to a cashless economy, with 60% saying they would not like it. Independents register 45% and Democrats register 28% taking that rejectionist position.

While the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to the shift from cash, all the corporate pressures and extreme surveillance capitalism are in that direction. Even the union-owned Amalgamated Bank recently announced that its Washington, D.C. branch is now “a cashless bank.” Imagine “a cashless bank” so you can no longer cash a check or get money for petty cash!

The ever-increasing loss of consumer freedom is a daily work in regress by the fine-print commercial planners of growing consumer peonage. They have corporate contract attorneys who brag about each step they originate, including blocking you from going to court for your grievances and relinquishing other rights.

There is no time to lose. Consumers need an all-American advocacy organization to protect and defend the use of paper cash, checks and money orders for the consumers’ control, freedom and the privacy these payment systems enable. We invite people interested in helping to create such an organization to write to Protect Cash, P.O. Box 19367, Washington DC 20036, or send an email to gro.lrscnull@ofni.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Lee Fang.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overrule Roe v. Wade and strip away abortion rights for millions of women has left the majority of Americans opposing the ruling and fearing what the high court will do next.

Fifty-six percent of respondents in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken after Friday's ruling said they disagreed with the court's decision, including 45% who said they strongly disagreed with it.

"What the court did is clearly outside the mainstream of public opinion."

Nine out of 10 Democrats and more than half of independent voters said they oppose the ruling, while only 20% of Republicans opposed it.

"What the court did is clearly outside the mainstream of public opinion, and that is reflected again in the NPR poll," wrote Domenico Montanaro at NPR.

The poll of 941 people, which had a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points, found that only 39% of respondents were left feeling confident in the court after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling—a new low for the survey. As Common Dreams reported last week, a separate poll by Gallup taken just before the ruling found that only 25% of Americans had confidence in the court.

A majority of respondents expressed concern over possible rulings that could be in the court's future as the right-wing majority appears ready to overturn more of Americans' fundamental rights.

Fifty-six percent of people said they were concerned that the court will now reconsider the rulings that affirmed gay Americans have the right to marriage equality, that people can obtain contraceptives, and that state laws banning same-sex relationships are unconstitutional.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Dobbs that the ruling should not "cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion," a statement Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with before saying in his concurring opinion that the court should now reconsider those precedents.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said the right-wing majority ruled against Roe as a matter of politics, not out of respect for the rule of law.

The poll found that 48% of Americans are more likely to vote for Democrats in congressional races in November, while 41% said they would favor Republicans. The survey asked the same question of voters in April, before the ruling and the hearings on the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and found that more respondents favored the GOP.

Just over half of respondents said they would back a candidate who would support a federal law codifying the right to abortion care.

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

Deng's personal mantra

Incidentally, some details did emerge from the standing committee meeting called by Deng. I was told to be careful not to leak anything when I drafted Zhao's letter of resignation.

"That's easy," I said. "I never leaked a secret in my life."

"Someone is saying that you did," Zhao replied.

"That's got to be Li Peng, because the others would never say something so irresponsible," I said in anger.

"They're saying you have already leaked something," Zhao said.

I replied that there has to be some basis for such claims under the rule of law.

He said "I have a basis, but I won't talk about that until it's really necessary."

I finally found out that Li Peng had registered a complaint with the State Council that I, Bao Tong, had leaked details of a classified military decision made by the Central Committee's Politburo standing committee to the 13 researchers at the Central Political System Reform Research Group. In actual fact, those 13 people all testified that I had made no mention whatsoever of martial law, but instead had said I would be subjected to censorship, and asked them to abide by party discipline and keep quiet.

The stupid thing was that Li Peng himself had already leaked those particular military secrets to me himself on the afternoon of May 17, and would go on to use this as "evidence" that I was a bad guy. Indeed, "Bao Tong is a bad guy" was to become a personal mantra of Deng Xiaoping's.

But none of that made it into the official record. All it can do is serve as a joke on the Chinese Communist Party.  

Moving on, I can be very sure of a few things, based on what Zhao Ziyang said to me and to Zhang Yueqi at the time.

Firstly, there was no mention of Zhao Ziyang throwing Deng Xiaoping under the bus in his meeting with Gorbachev, as has been widely supposed. Because Zhao's famous remark that "Deng Xiaoping may have retired from the Politburo standing committee, but he is still the supreme leader of the CCP" was a formal part of party policy. It was formalized in a resolution made by Li Peng on July 7, 1987. Li had already outed Deng and his role in party governance two years earlier, so how could Zhao have outed him a second time on May 16, 1989?

Secondly, the main attack dog, Yao Yilin, had clearly been selected and trained by Deng Xiaoping himself. Yao Yilin was in a difficult position. Deng Xiaoping had called him in to deal with Zhao on May 17 after boxing his ears over something that happened on May 8.

Yao Yilin rarely called anything good, but he did call Zhao Ziyang's May 7 Asian Development Bank speech good, because it truly was impeccable.

On May 8, before the Politburo standing committee had formally convened and people were just chatting, Yang Shangkun told Zhao: "Great speech yesterday, Ziyang!"  

Yao Yilin was the first to chime in, adding: "Nice speech, nice speech!"  

Li Peng, not to be outdone, said: "I was with a foreign guest recently who said the same thing."

We could probably have looked all of this up, had the Politburo standing committee records for May 8 not been destroyed.

The standing committee under Yang Shangkun, were unanimous on May 8 in approving of Zhao Ziyang's alternative voice. But by the time we get to May 17, under the personal chairmanship and core leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the majority were denouncing him.

How to explain this? This is how it goes under the supreme leadership of the CCP Central Committee.

Well, that's nearly all, folks. There are just a couple more important questions I need to address.

The first question is "was it wrong of the students to gather in large numbers to express their ideas?"  

I can tell you with a clear conscience that it definitely wasn't. Their rights should have been protected by the state and government, and by the army and police, not suppressed or destroyed by them. I will die on this hill, and I'm not going to change my view, whether it gains any traction or not. The student-led mass popular protests of 1989 are the thing I am most proud to have experienced in my entire life. A power struggle is just that -- a struggle for power. To succeed is to be defeated. Good and evil, right and wrong, are another matter. Power gained by evil means is still evil. And just demands that result in a massacre are still just.  

The second question, and it's a very good one, is this: "Had Zhao Ziyang appeased Deng Xiaoping, could the massacre have been averted, or losses reduced?

It seems to me that if Zhao had given in to Deng, then instead of a massacre ordered by Deng Xiaoping, we would have had a massacre ordered by Zhao Ziyang. History would have been rewritten, people's suffering would have been made comprehensible, and less damage would have been done to the progress of reform. But Zhao Ziyang was always destined to lose in any power struggle. His ouster was entirely in keeping with Mao Zedong's moves against Liu Shaoqi. Anyone leaning to the right was accused of appeasing the capitalists. Too far to the left, and they were acting like a leftist to hide their rightist views. Liu was told to instigate the Cultural Revolution in universities. If he didn't send a team, he was enabling student attacks to impinge on the party. If he did, he was told that no good would come of suppressing them. They'll rectify you to death in this party. This is the legacy of Mao Zedong. Deng was merely an apprentice of Mao's.

And another important thing: a close friend of mine told me that in early 1989, Wang Feng, then United Front Work minister under the CCP Central Committee, told some prominent democrats that Deng was planning to have the "four insists" deleted from the Constitution. I can personally attest that Deng Xiaoping really was saying such things at that time.

I have concrete evidence of it. In early 1989, Marxist philosopher Hu Qiaomu deliberately disclosed this good news not only to Zhao Ziyang, but also to me. I have absolutely no doubt that Deng Xiaoping said these words to Hu Qiaomu, Wang Feng and others in early 1989, just as I have no doubt that Deng Xiaoping still swore that everything in the [reform-minded] 13th Party Congress work report still stood, even after the Tiananmen massacre.

As for how reliable a source Li Peng's diary is, the fact that it was banned from publication in China by the Central Committee is enough to confirm that it was actually written by Li, that it is genuine, and not a fake.  

All of the above pales into insignificance when compared with the events of June 4, 1989. The blatant deployment of 200,000 uniformed national defense troops armed with tanks and machine guns to crush and rake peaceful student and citizen demonstrators was an unprecedented achievement for Deng Xiaoping at the helm of the CCP. It set a new and historic low for human behavior. It gave the bloody lie to Mao's claim that no good can ever come of suppressing students. And it has even garnered a certain amount of praise, both inside China and overseas.

The Tiananmen massacre was a groundbreaking moment in history. It ushered in a new era of absolute impunity and the total loss of civil rights. The massacre helped to found the current "core" system in which everyone is expected to be of one mind, in the world's most populous country.

To use Deng's own words: "When Mao was alive, what he said went. Now he's dead, what I say goes. In future, it'll be [Jiang Zemin]."  

It's how the current system was set up. The massacre paved the way for countless layers of CCP control, from national government to the urban police, or chengguan, and the auxiliary police, to ordinary people and dissidents governed as "special households," and for the mantra "Follow the party and prosper: oppose it and die" to be encoded into the minds of all Chinese citizens.

Mao's ideal was to transform the country into a military camp that directs all operations. But the June 4, 1989 massacre meant that there was no longer any need to direct anyone. Everyone was transformed into a self-disciplined and self-aware, battle-ready army and industrial workforce, in perfect step with the party. Who could withstand 1.4 billion people of one mind? Since then, the CCP's sickle has risen to lead the world in prosperity, wealth and power. Yet leeks [ordinary, powerless citizens] are also growing and spreading everywhere. As China grows greater and mightier still, the lead conspirator behind the Tiananmen massacre is honored as "Grandfather Deng."  

This isn't a dream. It's a delectable reality, reaching out to admirers all over the world.  

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by A commentary by Bao Tong.

It’s workers’ day, working people’s day, working people’s international solidarity day. All divisive, sectarian, supremacist ideology and politics is opposed by the working people all around the world. On this day, this position is reiterated by the working people.

Today, this task – oppose divisive, sectarian, supremacist politics – is much urgent, much immediate, as imperialism is making onslaught in many forms, in direct and indirect ways, in concealed methods and forms, in lands after lands. Imperialism is today pushing one part of the people to oppose other parts. Imperialism is carrying out its nefarious act with nice slogans telling about its freedom and its democracy, slogans that hide class struggle, the struggle between the exploited and the exploiters. Imperialism is doing this dirty work by hiding the struggle between labor and capital.

But, the working people can’t be hoodwinked, can’t be confused, can’t be made pawn to capital; the working people can’t be pulled to the camp of capital; and today, imperialism, as the highest form, the most dangerous form of capital, can’t be ally of the working classes in no country. With long experience, expertise, enormous resources, command over natural and social sciences and over technology, owning the most powerful political-military-diplomatic-propaganda machine, having worldwide networks in many forms, imperialism today stands as the most dangerous class-force against all the peoples, all the working people of the world.

Today’s May Day, therefore, is the day to raise this slogan: Down with imperialism, oppose imperialism, oppose imperialist political-geopolitical-war machinations and acts, its war plans and wars in all forms: direct invasion and aggression, proxy war, subversion, psychological-ideological-political acts.

Opposing imperialism by the working class is an imperative, as this is the leading and most powerful class-force (i) defending the exploitative world order, and the exploitative political-economic systems in countries, (ii) subjugating and destructing life and ecological systems on the entire planet, (iii) backing exploiting-reactionary classes all over the world, (iv) expropriating all resources-all the commons that peoples own in continents and oceans, (v) waging wars in many forms, wasting resources by waging imperialist wars while peoples in lands pass deprived life, and pay for imperialism’s wars. Imperialism is the leading and guiding global political force opposing the working classes, and subjugating and slaughtering the working classes in different forms including the wars imperialism organizes in lands. Imperialism is the leading and guiding political force that organizes, backs and carries on conspiracies, provocations and activities against all political struggles the working peoples in lands organize for emancipation.

So, on this May Day, one of the slogans is: Down with imperialism, oppose all imperialist wars and machinations.

Today, with the background of imperialist war in Ukraine, war-residues and encumbrances over Europe and countries across oceans, with possibilities of expanding of fire-spewing war to countries in Europe, even spreading to some other continents, opposing imperialism, opposing imperialist war-armaments activities is one of the immediate and urgent tasks of the working people all over the world, as a dark cloud of continents-wide imperialist war is spreading its wings. The war-cloud is getting dense and darker, as imperialists are making full-throttled war preparation, which began much earlier than the Russian forces stepped into Ukraine, as imperialist legislative documents show.

Already peoples in countries have begun making payment for the on-going imperialist war in Ukraine. Now, the people of Europe are making the most of this payment. The war-payment by peoples is widening gradually. Imperialism is socializing the war-cost – putting the burden of war on entire societies. Report by The New York Times “Governments tighten grip on global food stocks, sending prices higher” (April 30, 2022), and the World Bank’s April Commodity Markets Outlook report are only two among a number of international reports on the issue released over the last few weeks that tell the looming precarious situation. The WB warns: Global energy prices are projected to rise dramatically, culminating in the biggest price jump in commodities in nearly half a century. Global energy prices that already have seen a dramatic surge due to the pandemic lockdowns in China and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, are expected to surge by 50.5% in 2022. Indermit Gill, the WB’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, said in a statement accompanying the report: “This amounts to the largest commodity shock we’ve experienced since the 1970s. As was the case then, the shock is being aggravated by a surge in restrictions in trade of food, fuel and fertilizers. A recent estimate by the Food and Agricultural Organization has found: The Ukraine crisis would push up to 12 million people into hunger worldwide. This is in part because, as the FAO estimates, one‑third of Ukraine’s crops and agricultural land may not be harvested or cultivated this year, which will lead to a loss of one fifth of Ukraine’s wheat supply. Future harvests are in jeopardy also, as next season’s crop is unlikely to be planted amidst war-conditions. Simultaneously, sanctions on Russia, the world’s largest producer of wheat, have further reduced global supplies.

The question is: Who has imposed this war in Ukraine? Who has organized this war? Who is fuelling this war by supplying arms to the Ukraine proxy soldiers? Who is organizing trainings in other countries for the Ukraine foot soldiers? Since when was this war organized? No plan for such a war can be organized overnight.

On the opposite, the war industry is making profit. Armaments of billions of dollars have already been spent, and billions of dollars are in the pipeline. The war is now a daily business of the imperialist powers. The Frontier (Kolkata, India) comment “Arms Merchants’ Boon Day” is a small part of the full info on arms business backed by the Ukraine War: “Arms merchants are super-happy with a boon day while a NATO proxy – the ruling regime in Kiev – is playing a bloody game of war in Ukraine.” Lockheed Martin’s stock prices surged 25% since beginning of 2022, and Raytheon’s 17%. Alessandro Profumo, Chief Executive of Italian defence group Leonardo, said in March its free cash flow would be more than double this year compared with 2021. Profumo expects NATO countries to ramp up military spending to reach 2% of GDP over time. This means increased profit.

Sanctions, now being used without precedent in the world history, by the imperialist camp are taking its toll from the peoples in countries the warring imperialist capitals control. It’s the people that will pay most, pay first in this sanction-war, which is itself a nullifying act of the market mechanism that the dominating capitals propagate, utter as its hymn.

The on-going imperialist fire-spewing war in Europe is being expanded gradually, and it’s apprehended that it’ll be expanded – geographically, and in terms of intensity, which means a more bloody war, a more destructive war, which is people are going to pay with more blood and life, livelihood. The New York Times report “Fears are mounting that Ukraine War will spill across borders” (April 28, 2022) is not a single report expressing this hunch of spill over of the war. A few more analyses having similar dread are there also. The NYT report said: “Now, the fear in Washington and European capitals is that the conflict may soon escalate into a wider war — spreading to neighboring states, to cyberspace and to NATO countries suddenly facing a Russian cutoff of gas. Over the long term, such an expansion could evolve into a more direct conflict between Washington and Moscow reminiscent of the Cold War, as each seeks to sap the other’s power.”

In ultimate analysis, it’s the working classes, it’s the labor that makes the payment, as only labor produces surplus value, and that value is appropriated first from labor.

Here, today, on this May Day, the working people’s slogan is: No to imperialist war; oppose all war activities, oppose all war allocations, oppose all sanctions, oppose all propaganda war.

Imperialism’s war venture is pushing behind the working peoples’ fundamental questions of wage, democratic rights, access to info., participation in all areas of planning and decision-making. There are attempts to organize imperialist war-jingoism.

The questions of wage, democratic rights, access to info., participation in all areas of planning and decision-making are political questions; and political questions are to be resolved with political struggles, not with adventurism, anarchism and terrorism. It shouldn’t be forgotten that adventurism, anarchism and terrorism are ultimately capitals’ ally, serve capital, serve powers of exploiting class dominance. Today’s May Day reminds the working classes to organize these political struggles for rights and wages.

This May Day reminds not to forget class struggle. The working classes have to intensify class struggle, and sharpen tools of class struggle, wherever possible – organize strikes, stoppages, mobilizations, publicity and press, discussions. Intensifying class struggle with the gathering cloud of continents-wide imperialist war in the background is a difficult and complex task; but, there’s no scope to forget and ignore this task; there’s no scope to ignore the dominating warring classes cheating and blooding peoples in countries.

Immortal martyrs of May, martyrs from the ranks of the working classes, martyrs from the people’s camp remain alive forever with these struggles against capital, against imperialist capital, against exploitation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Farooque Chowdhury.

The United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday, a resolution that accused Russia of committing human rights abuses in Ukraine. We speak with human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck about the apparent double standards and weaknesses in the current international criminal justice system in light of the U.S. committing similar crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nations like the U.S. have refused to submit themselves to any kind of international jurisdiction because “they want to lead their wars,” says Kaleck. “The International Criminal Court will only get off the ground in the near future if Western states agree to apply universal standards.”

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

Image by Michal Lis.

Recently I wrote about the faulty logic of the pro-nuke Left; those among us that support nuclear power as an answer to climate change. But, as I argued, supporting atomic technology will end up doing more harm than good. Then came Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine which has also demonstrated that the threat of nuclear war is not solely dependent on the detonation of atomic weapons, providing one more reason nuclear power should be opposed and not embraced.

As Russia’s invasion so clearly demonstrated, the threat of nuclear war is not solely dependent on the detonation of atomic weapons. Nuclear power plants, when located in contested regions or on active battlefields, also pose a grave risk. If hit by artillery or missile fire, an unforeseen tragedy could quickly unfold. One such frightful scenario nearly occurred as Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia power plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Enerhodar in late February 2022. As blasts occurred around the facility, a fire erupted in a nearby building and was later extinguished. Reports claimed no radioactivity was released during the blaze, but given the nature of the conflict, no independent investigation was conducted to ensure its safety.

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The post One More Reason to Oppose Nuclear Technology appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ilya Matveev, Ilya Budraitskis.