Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they earlier coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”.

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps.

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their “criticisms” of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.

As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The handwringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The West is still promoting phoney “debates”, entirely confected by Israel, about whether Hamas is stealing aid, what constitutes sufficient aid, and how that aid should be delivered.

It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, as the West has aided and abetted that genocide.

PR exercise

With stocks of food completely exhausted by Israel’s blockade, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday that some 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without immediate aid reaching them.

The longer-term prognosis is bleaker still.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to let in a trickle of aid, releasing five trucks, some containing baby formula, from the thousands of vehicles Israel has held up at entry points for nearly three months. That was less than one percent of the number of trucks experts say must enter daily just to keep deadly starvation at bay.

On Tuesday, as the clamour grew, the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza reportedly climbed to nearly 100 – or less than a fifth of the bare minimum. None of the aid was reported to have reached the enclave’s population by the time of writing.

Netanyahu was clear to the Israeli public – most of whom appear enthusiastic for the engineered starvation to continue – that he was not doing this out of any humanitarian impulse.

This was purely a public relations exercise to hold western capitals in check, he said. The goal was to ease the demands on these leaders from their own publics to penalise Israel and stop the continuing slaughter of Gaza’s population.

Or as Netanyahu put it: “Our best friends worldwide, the most pro-Israel senators [in the US] … they tell us they’re providing all the aid, weapons, support and protection in the UN Security Council, but they can’t support images of mass hunger.”

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even clearer: “On our way to destroying Hamas, we are destroying everything that’s left of the [Gaza] Strip.” He also spoke of “cleansing” the enclave.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

Western publics have been watching this destruction unfold for the past 19 months – or at least they’ve seen partial snapshots, when the West’s establishment media has bothered to report on the slaughter.

Israel has systematically eradicated everything necessary for the survival of Gaza’s people: their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, water systems and community kitchens.

Israel has finally implemented what it had been threatening for 20 years to do to the Palestinian people if they refused to be ethnically cleansed from their homeland. It has sent them “back to the Stone Age”.

A survey of the world’s leading genocide scholars published last week by the Dutch newspaper NRC found that all conclusively agreed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most think the genocide has reached its final stages.

This week, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s main centrist party and a former deputy head of the Israeli military, expressed the same sentiments in more graphic form. He accused the government of “killing babies as a hobby”. Predictably, Netanyahu accused Golan of “antisemitism”.

The joint statement from Starmer, Macron and Carney was far tamer, of course – and was greeted by Netanyahu with a relatively muted response that the three leaders were giving Hamas a “huge prize”.

Their statement noted: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” Presumably, until now, they have viewed the hellscape endured by Gaza’s Palestinians for a year and a half as “tolerable”.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary who in the midst of the genocide was happy to be photographed shaking hands with Netanyahu, opined in parliament this week that Gaza was facing a “dark new phase”.

That’s a convenient interpretation for him. In truth, it’s been midnight in Gaza for a very long time.

A senior European diplomatic source involved in the discussions between the three leaders told the BBC that their new tone reflected a “real sense of growing political anger at the humanitarian situation, of a line being crossed, and of this Israeli government appearing to act with impunity”.

This should serve as a reminder that until now, western capitals were fine with all the other lines crossed by Israel, including its destruction of most of Gaza’s homes; its eradication of Gaza’s hospitals and other essential humanitarian infrastructure; its herding of Palestinian civilians into “safe” zones, only to bomb them there; its slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children; and its active starvation of a population of more than two million.

Played for fools

The three western leaders are now threatening to take “further concrete actions” against Israel, including what they term “targeted sanctions”.

If that sounds positive, think again. The European Union and Britain have dithered for decades about whether and how to label goods imported from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The existence of these ever-expanding settlements, built on stolen Palestinian territory and blocking the creation of a Palestinian state, is a war crime; no country should be aiding them.

In 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that it must be made clear to European consumers which products come from Israel and which from the settlements.

In all that time, European officials never considered a ban on products from the settlements, let alone “targeted sanctions” on Israel, even though the illegality of the settlements is unambiguous. In fact, officials have readily smeared those calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as “Jew haters” and “antisemites”.

The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.

“Further concrete actions” suggest that there are already concrete actions imposed on Israel. That’s the same Israel that recently finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Protesters who call for Israel to be excluded from the competition – as Russia has been for invading Ukraine – are smeared and denounced.

When western leaders can’t even impose a meaningful symbolic penalty on Israel, why should we believe they are capable of taking substantive action against it?

No will for action

On Tuesday, it became clearer what the UK meant by “concrete actions”. The Israeli ambassador was called in for what we were told was a dressing down. She must be quaking.

And Britain suspended – that is, delayed – negotiations on a new free trade agreement, a proposed expansion of Britain’s already extensive trading ties with Israel. Those talks can doubtless wait a few months.

Meanwhile, 17 European Union members out of 27 voted to review the legal basis of the EU–Israel Association Agreement – providing Israel with special trading status – though a very unlikely consensus would be needed to actually revoke it.

Such a review to see if Israel is showing “respect for human rights and democratic principles” is simple time-wasting. Investigations last year showed it was committing widespread atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the British parliament, Lammy said: “The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”

There are plenty of far more serious “concrete actions” that Britain and other western capitals could take, and could have taken many months ago.

A flavour was provided by Britain and the EU on Tuesday when they announced sweeping additional sanctions on Russia – not for committing a genocide, but for hesitating over a ceasefire with Ukraine.

Ultimately, the West wants to punish Moscow for refusing to return the territories in Ukraine that it occupies – something western powers have never meaningfully required of Israel, even though Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades.

The new sanctions on Russia target entities supporting its military efforts and energy exports – on top of existing severe economic sanctions and an oil embargo. Nothing even vaguely comparable is being proposed for Israel.

The UK and Europe could have stopped providing Israel with the weapons to butcher Palestinian children in Gaza. Back in September, Starmer promised to cut arms sales to Israel by around eight percent – but his government actually sent more weapons to arm Israel’s genocide in the three months that followed than the Tories did in the entire period between 2020 and 2023.

Britain could also stop transporting other countries’ weapons and carrying out surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. Flight tracking information showed that on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus to Tel Aviv, and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in its slaughter.

Britain could, of course, take the “concrete action” of recognising the state of Palestine, as Ireland and Spain have already done – and it could do so at a moment’s notice.

The UK could impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers. It could declare its readiness to enforce Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, in line with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, if he visits Britain. And it could deny Israel access to sporting events, turning it into a pariah state, as was done to Russia.

It could announce that any Britons returning from military service in Gaza risk arrest and prosecution for war crimes.

And of course, the UK could impose sweeping economic sanctions on Israel, again as was done to Russia.

All of these “concrete actions”, and more, could be easily implemented. The truth is there is no political will to do it. There is simply a desire for better public relations, for putting a better gloss on Britain’s complicity in a genocide that can no longer be hidden.

Wolf exposed

The problem for the West is that Israel now stands stripped of the lamb’s clothing in which it has been adorned by western capitals for decades.

Israel is all too evidently a predatory wolf. Its brutal, colonial behaviours towards the Palestinian people are fully on show. There is no hiding place.

This is why Netanyahu and western leaders are now engaged in an increasingly difficult tango. The colonial, apartheid, genocidal project of Israel – the West’s militarised client-bully in the oil-rich Middle East – needs to be protected.

Until now, that had involved western leaders like Starmer deflecting criticism of Israel’s crimes, as well as British complicity. It involved endlessly and mindlessly reciting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, and the need to “eliminate Hamas”.

But the endgame of Israel’s genocide involves starving two million people to death – or forcing them out of Gaza, whichever comes first. Neither is compatible with the goals western politicians have been selling us.

So the new narrative must accentuate Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the carnage – as though the genocide is not the logical endpoint of everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for many decades.

Most Israelis are on board, too, with the genocide. The only meaningful voices of dissent are from the families of the Israeli hostages – and then chiefly because of the danger posed to their loved ones by Israel’s assault.

The aim of Starmer, Macron and Carney is to craft a new narrative, in which they claim to have only belatedly realised that Netanyahu has “gone too far” and that he needs to be reined in. They can then gradually up the noise against the Israeli prime minister, lobby Israel to change tack, and, when it resists or demurs, be seen to press Washington for “concrete action”.

The new narrative, unlike the worn-thin old one, can be spun out for yet more weeks or months – which may be just long enough to get the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza either over the finish line, or near enough as to make no difference.

That is the hope – yes, hope – in western capitals.

Blood on their hands

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s new make-believe narrative has several advantages. It washes Gaza’s blood from their hands. They were deceived. They were too charitable. Vital domestic struggles against antisemitism distracted them.

It lays the blame squarely at the feet of one man: Netanyahu.

Without him, a violent, highly militarised, apartheid state of Israel can continue as before, as though the genocide was an unfortunate misstep in Israel’s otherwise unblemished record.

New supposed “terror” threats – from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – can be hyped to draw us back into cheerleading narratives about a plucky western outpost of civilisation defending us from barbarians in the East.

The new narrative does not even require that Netanyahu face justice.

As news emerges of the true extent of the atrocities and death toll, a faux-remorseful Netanyahu can placate the West with revived talk of a two-state solution – a solution whose realisation has been avoided for decades and can continue to be avoided for decades more.

We will be subjected to yet more years of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” finally being about to turn a corner.

Even were a chastened Netanyahu forced to step down, he would pass the baton to one of the other Jewish supremacist, genocidal monsters waiting in the wings.

After Gaza’s destruction, the crushing of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will simply have to return to an earlier, slower pace – one that has allowed it to be kept off the western public’s radar for 58 years.

Will it really work out like this? Only in the imaginations of western elites. In truth, burying nearly two years of a genocide all too visible to large swaths of western publics will be a far trickier task.

Too many people in Europe and the US have had their eyes opened over the past 19 months. They cannot unsee what has been live-streamed to them, or ignore what it says about their own political and media classes.

Starmer and co will continue vigorously distancing themselves from the genocide in Gaza, but there will be no escape. Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.

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

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Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.

Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.

“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.

Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.

He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.

The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.

Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.

Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.

As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.

“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”

Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”

Investors also blame HomeVestors. For nearly two decades, Carrier used the company’s carefully cultivated brand as the “largest homebuyer in the United States” to gain investors’ trust. They accuse HomeVestors of failing to provide oversight that could have prevented the fraud, despite claiming to hold its franchises accountable for best business practices. In its answers to their lawsuits, HomeVestors has denied responsibility for Carrier’s actions, claiming its franchises are independently operated, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from Carrier’s business.

HomeVestors revoked Carrier’s franchise on Oct. 24, about the time interest payments stopped arriving in investors’ accounts. The company said it had received a tip on its ethics hotline — created in 2023, after ProPublica detailed predatory buying practices by multiple franchises. When confronted by HomeVestors, Carrier admitted that “he and his business had entered into debts that they could not pay,” a HomeVestors spokesperson said. The company reported him to the FBI. In May, HomeVestors filed suit against Carrier for trademark infringement and for not indemnifying it against these lawsuits.

“We take all allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously as demonstrated by our decisive action,” the spokesperson said. “It is truly disheartening for us that anyone who lent Mr. Carrier money was misled or harmed by his alleged fraudulent activity.”

Now, Carrier is under investigation by the Department of Justice, according to a recording of an April call between the lead prosecutor and potential victims. (The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.) A judge in one of the many lawsuits against Carrier has deemed allegations of fraudulent loans to be true because Carrier never answered the complaint. And the investors are in a race with one another to recoup even a small amount of what they lost, by either waiting for the DOJ to pay restitution, suing Carrier or trying to foreclose on properties still left in his portfolio.

Just months after learning they had lost all of their investments, and before any restitution could be paid, Carver’s father died.

In 2005, Carrier opened a HomeVestors franchise in Dallas, where HomeVestors is headquartered. In the early days, records show, he relied on a handful of institutional lenders to finance his house purchases. Soon, the Wharton School of Business MBA who had come to house-flipping following a career at Pepsi and a food service equipment company, started cultivating his wealthy friends for loans.

Carrier didn’t fit any stereotype of a glad-handing huckster with a bad loan to sell. Those who knew him describe him as a serious person, “cordial but very direct.” He always had files in front of him, constantly focusing on his business. It made him seem trustworthy, one investor said.

At HomeVestors, he was held up as a model franchise operator. C&C Residential Properties routinely made the top volume and top closer lists and was even named franchise of the year. Carrier led training sessions at company conferences and described his business as “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States” — a claim that remained on the website for Carrier’s business through early May.

“Chas Carrier, for maybe 15 years, was one of the golden boys at HomeVestors,” said Ben Ahern, who over two decades worked for a HomeVestors franchise and later owned one before leaving the company in 2021. “Internally, it was like, ‘Do whatever Chas Carrier’s doing.’”

It isn’t unusual for HomeVestors franchises to rely on private investors to finance their house-flipping. Banks aren’t typically interested in house-flipping loans, which are often short-term and riskier than a standard mortgage. Because of that risk, investors who lend to house-flippers earn a substantially higher return.

To further minimize their risk and ensure they had a legitimate ownership stake in the house, savvy investors would verify the transaction with an independent title company to research whether there were other liens against the property and then record the deed with the county recorder. But many of Carrier’s investors, after years of consistent payments led them to trust him, let Carrier handle recording the deeds and did not confirm that he’d done so.

As Carrier grew his business, he began relying more on individual investors. ProPublica identified through public records at least 124 people who have lent money to Carrier since 2009. Not all of them have lost money.

Carrier’s search for new investors was aided by Robert Welborn, an investment adviser in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Dallas. Welborn had built a network of clients in Granbury, a city of about 12,000 people on the Brazos River, through church, friendships and referrals. Many of his clients were older and had modest nest eggs, which Welborn said were “well diversified.” He said he built a relationship with Carrier in 2012, after researching his background for about two months. That Carrier was a successful franchisee lent him credibility, Welborn said.

“I never imagined the No. 1 franchisee with a fast-growing franchise company, HomeVestors,” would defraud investors, he said.

At the time, Welborn also solicited new investors with invitations to steak dinners where they would hear his pitch. An investment in Carrier’s business, according to Welborn’s sales material, which also featured the HomeVestors caveman mascot, Ug, was both lucrative and secure. “Your investment is protected,” the sales material assured potential clients.

For loans he sent Carrier’s way, Welborn earned a 2% commission, he said. Welborn had at least two dozen clients who invested with Carrier, most of whom had multiple loans to him, according to a public records search. He would not comment on how many of his clients invested with Carrier.

Many investors were happy for years — in some cases, more than a decade. The interest payments came in like clockwork. A lot of Welborns’ clients relied on the payments for retirement income.

“I was real tickled with it,” said Tom Walls, 85, who said he lost $50,000 of his retirement savings by investing with Carrier.

Some investors noticed small problems — a payment that arrived a few days late or an error on the paperwork to secure the loan. But Carrier always fixed the problems promptly, investors said.

“When you have this 10-year continuous, pleasant and mutually beneficial relationship, you build up a great deal of trust,” said John Moses, who estimates he lost more than $1 million to Carrier.

Looking back, the investors who spoke with ProPublica said they wished they had taken those warning signs more seriously.

By fall 2024, Carrier’s payments to his lenders stopped. That’s when the house of cards fell.

Carrier had spent that summer scrambling for money. Not only did Carrier have to make loan payments to scores of investors, but he also needed to keep up with the HomeVestors franchise fees and advertising payments. The company requires its franchises to make regular reports on sales and to open their books for audits, to provide financial statements when requested, and to report all assets and liabilities. Any of those reports could have called into question Carrier’s ability to stay solvent. But, according to former franchise owners and employees, HomeVestors’ audits of its franchises are mostly geared toward ensuring they’re paying all their franchise fees, which are based on sales.

Before Carrier’s tangle of fraudulent loans collapsed and was exposed in court, there were signs of trouble.

In 2016, Carrier was fined by the Texas Real Estate Commission for managing properties without a license. The HomeVestors franchise agreement requires owners to follow all laws and regulations, particularly real estate regulations. In 2020, two title insurance companies issued special alerts on Carrier’s business, advising their title officers not to enter into transactions with him without further legal and underwriting review. Carrier hasn’t paid taxes on some of his properties since early 2023, according to court and public records, another violation of his franchise agreement. Despite the apparent violations, HomeVestors didn’t terminate Carrier’s franchise agreement.

“I don’t really think they do have much in place to prevent something like this,” Ahern, the former HomeVestors franchise owner, said of the company. “HomeVestors at the time didn’t seem to have an internal system policing how franchises finance buying properties.”

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company focuses on its franchise customers’ experiences selling their homes and does not “dictate” how franchises raise capital. “The more than 950 franchises of HomeVestors are independent businesses with a wide variety of finance options available to them,” the spokesperson said.

Last spring, Carrier began borrowing against his future receipts in exchange for cash advances with exorbitant fees and annualized interest rates that he later claimed ranged as high as 600%. Between May and October, he did this at least seven times, racking up more than $1.2 million in debt beyond what he owed his investors, exhibits included with court filings show. By fall, he owed more than $75,000 in payments a week, according to the original terms. Seven companies filed suit over the cash-advance agreements, accusing him of default. Carrier has denied the allegations of default and has countersued four of the companies, claiming he was charged unreasonably high interest rates.

The lending scheme appears to have fallen in a gray area for state and federal securities regulations. It’s unclear whether the promissory notes Carrier issued to investors meet the definition of a security, two experts told ProPublica.

In October, Carrier’s investors began to confront him about the missing payments, including Jeff Daly and Steve Needham, two of Carrier’s largest investors who had been lending him money for years. Carrier came clean to Daly, admitting he had been running a lending scheme for “several” years, according to a lawsuit Daly and Needham filed. He told Needham he had taken out multiple loans on individual properties without disclosing them to the investors, according to the lawsuit. The two men claimed in their lawsuit, which resulted in default judgments against Carrier, that combined they had lost $13.5 million to Carrier.

The investor who spoke to ProPublica and asked not to be named said in an interview that Carrier broke down in tears when confronted about losing more than $1 million of the investor’s money. Carrier admitted the loans paid for his operating expenses, not for buying and refurbishing houses, the investor said.

“He just pencil whipped those deeds at the end,” the investor said, explaining that Carrier drew up documents but didn’t record them. Because the deeds were never recorded, the investor had no lien on the properties and therefore no collateral. Some deeds were for houses that Carrier didn’t own or never bought, the investor said. “It was a complete fabrication.”

Welborn’s clients, who typically invested much smaller amounts with Carrier, also learned of the house-flipper’s collapse in the fall, when their payments stopped. Carver said that Welborn called him a couple of days after the October payment was due and said, “Hey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Chas has called me and admitted to fraud.”

Carver said he got in the car and drove to Welborn’s office, where he learned the nightmarish truth that all the money Carrier had taken was gone.

Investors are deploying a variety of strategies to get their money back — some of which pit bigger investors against smaller ones and early investors against more recent ones. Those who acted quickly are recovering some money through foreclosures and lawsuit settlements. Although Carrier is denying allegations in lawsuits brought by the cash-advance companies, he’s not fighting individual investors who are suing him. Three of their lawsuits have resulted in judgments against Carrier, and he has so far not defended himself against the others.

Welborn said he’s doing his best to help his clients recover their money by providing the necessary paperwork, connecting them with buyers for the houses used as collateral and researching lien histories on the homes. When he first learned of the scheme, Welborn tried to convince his clients to sign on with his lawyer to sue Carrier. The lawyer, Anthony Cuesta, hoped a court would seize Carrier’s assets to help recover the investors’ lost funds. But he quickly learned there were too many investors and not enough equity in the properties to fund the litigation. Now, many of Welborn’s clients are waiting for the FBI and DOJ to act, while wealthier investors are foreclosing on properties and making them ineligible to be used for restitution. Welborn said some of his clients have been paid restitution through a DOJ-appointed real estate agent’s sale of Carrier’s properties, but he declined to provide details.

Carver isn’t optimistic: “We are not going to get a dime.”

At least one investor went after Welborn individually. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, the claim was settled for $130,000. In his response to the SEC disclosure, Welborn denied breaching fiduciary duty to the client and said he “resolved the claim to avoid controversy.” Welborn told ProPublica that $120,000 of the settlement came from the sale of the house used as collateral for the family’s loan and he paid $10,000 for their attorney fees.

Welborn said he’s “devastated” by the loss of his clients’ money. “But every day I drag myself to work with God’s help and spend most of my day helping lenders with their own personal restitution battles,” he said.

Some investors said they will have to go back to work after having retired or are scrambling to find some way to replace their lost income.

Carver wishes he had paid more attention to red flags, like paperwork errors. But the monthly checks were so reliable, he didn’t listen to his gut. Or his wife.

“Every time I added money, my wife would say, ‘Don’t do it,’” Carver said. “My mother, too. She would push on my dad not to add any more. But he liked getting the monthly check.”

Carver’s dad, Larry, believed it was the best performing investment he had ever made. When the money disappeared, Carver went to work trying to recoup some of it. Maybe he could write it off on his taxes, he thought. He wanted to get at least something back for his dad. But Larry was in ill health, and in February, he died.

“My dad passed thinking he lost all of his money to this guy,” Carver said, adding he hopes Carrier “goes to jail for a very long time.”

The investor who asked not to be named said the loss was “a life-changing hit.” He had retired at 53, after sticking it out in a job he hated until his stock options vested. When he finally quit, he put the money into Carrier’s business and lived off of the monthly payments. He may have to go back to work.

“He was an arrogant son of a bitch,” the investor said. “It was gone before he told anyone there was a problem. That’s the unforgivable piece. He squandered it all away. And he had to get backed into a corner before he admitted it was all gone.”

Byard Duncan contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon.

Around him, tiny peach trees the size of pencils stand above the browning grass underneath their parent tree. Brown harvested around 200 peaches this year from his small orchard – enough for his family and neighbors – but he had competition: a fox has been poking around. “The animals know when the peaches are ripe quicker than I do,” Brown laughs. “They start coming in and stealing my peaches.”

Brown’s peaches aren’t your everyday peaches, they’re heirlooms: direct descendants of peach seeds brought across the continent on the Trail of Tears. Brown calls them “Indian peaches” while other Muscogees call them “Trail of Tears peaches”. There has been little research on this particular variety, and it’s unknown just how many genes they share with commercial peaches. While grocery store peaches are soft and fleshy, Indian peaches don’t get much bigger than a lemon and are extremely firm but sweet.

The Indian peach is threatened by climate change. Where hurricanes, flooding and higher temperatures have massive impacts on crops, including peaches, around the nation, heirloom varieties, like the Indian peach, are also threatened. This fruit, that crossed a planet, carried by traders and travelers, and eventually by a few Muscogees along The Trail before they found a new home outside Sapulpa, Oklahoma, is a connection to another time and place. 

“One of the greatest gifts Creator gave me is these peaches and the ability to share these trees with our community and everyone,” Brown said. 

There are only 50 Indian peach trees on the Muscogee reservation that Brown knows of – some grow in some peoples’ backyards, and some at a local daycare – and between climate-driven changes to growing cycles and high temperatures, they face a difficult future. Luckily, they have people like Brown working to protect them.

Peach cultivation is thought to have begun around 8,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China. One of the first mentions of peaches in literature appears in the fictional novel Journey to the West, written in 1592, that describes peaches as a fruit that could grant longevity and “make a man’s age equal to that of Heaven and Earth, the sun and the moon.”

From China, peaches made their way to Europe, then, to the Americas in the 1600’s on Spanish ships – the beginning of a kind-of crop exchange between the continents: potatoes and tomatoes from South and Central America went to Europe while peaches made their way to the Georgia coast, and quickly, into Indigenous diets. 

“Indigenous people were already caring for and managing forests and other kinds of tree foods,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz at Pennsylvania State University who studies archeology and ethnohistory. “That would have allowed them to adopt peaches super quickly and know really well how to create healthy peaches.”

Within a few decades, and with the help of a vast network of trade routes, peaches made their way across the continent, as far as the southwest, where tribes like the Navajo sun-dried and stewed them. 

Around 1780, thousands of peach trees tended by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes along the Finger Lakes in western New York State, were destroyed by President George Washington, in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Indigenous peoples from the region. Washington wrote in a letter to one of his generals the goal was, “to lay waste all the settlements.” He added, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears – a death march that forced around 60,000 Indigenous people to leave their homes and move west, across the Mississippi River, to Oklahoma. 

Vernon Courtwright grew up eating Indian peaches. Now 75 years old, the Muscogee elder and veteran says his family brought Indian peach seeds and planted them when they were done walking The Trail. “That was the beginning of our life and the peaches’ life in Oklahoma,” he said. When he was a child, his grandmother, Emma Bruner, was the one who taught him about how to grow and tend to the fruit. “We grew up eating these peaches.”

Courtwright says in the 1970’s he began to see Indian peaches disappear. With each passing year, there was less on the landscape. “I just knew that our orchard had to be taken care of,” he said. When his grandparents passed, he took on the work of caring for the trees, and eventually, met John John Brown who helped cultivate seeds and saplings to give out to other Muscogees.

“It’s our legacy,” said Courtwright. “It’s my family’s legacy to the tribe.”

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Georgia, the Peach State, produces nearly 25,000 tons of peaches every year, but falls far behind California, which produces nearly 475,000 tons each year. Globally, nearly 24 million tons of peaches are grown each year with most coming from China.

Climate change is having a big impact on those numbers though. One of the biggest threats to the peach industry is rising temperatures. Peaches need “peach chill” – a certain amount of time in temperatures that are under 45 degrees fahrenheit. Without adequate peach chill, peach trees won’t produce, and with rising temperatures, blooms will sprout too early. In 2017, around 70 percent of peach losses could be attributed to lack of peach chill. “Lack of chill is something that we think is going to be the biggest issue for us and our industry,” said Dario Chavez, a peach geneticist at the University of Georgia. “If you are in a northern climate, you don’t worry too much about the chill. But I think they’re starting to see the physiological responses to issues with chill.”

Then there are extreme weather events supercharged by climate change that can inflict immediate, wide-spread damage. This year, Hurricane Helene killed at least 226 people. It also devastated Georgia’s agricultural economy to the tune of nearly $6.5 billion dollars.

But Helene’s path was only the beginning. Hurricanes bring flooding, which is especially bad for peaches – peach trees don’t like to be too wet and can prematurely drop fruit if under water. They’re also susceptible to diseases like brown rot which can be triggered after heavy storms.

For the Indian peach, peach chill and extreme weather aren’t as big a threat as they are in the south. However, Oklahoma is expected to become around two and a half degrees hotter in the next twenty years. Even though the peach is a resilient plant, peach chill will become an issue. Natural disasters like floods become more of a threat to the lives and livelihoods of tribal members– tribal lands in Oklahoma are the most prone to flooding in the state. 

But to protect Indian peaches, and a little part of tribal history, John John Brown has been giving out saplings for the better part of a decade to anyone interested in growing them.

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Brown regularly travels to Georgia and Alabama to visit the proposed Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve– located on Muscogee homelands. On his drives, he often passes peach orchards filled with the variety most Americans are used to. “You don’t think they would be able to produce peaches,” he says as he eyes the tightly-pruned rows. “They cut ‘em back real small.” 

He goes down to the homelands to remind settlers in the area that the Muscogee survived despite the United States attempts at genocide and demos making canoes and bows the traditional way out of local wood during the annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. To Brown the peaches are a symbol of resilience. 

“When our ancestors brought these peaches up from the south you think about how devastating it was, to lose loved ones, and not know if the seeds will sprout,” he said. “I do this to honor them, and their strength.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Meet the peach that traveled the Trail of Tears and the elders working to save it on Nov 20, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

“I cried a lot on Wednesday, and I’ve been crying a lot [since],” she told RFA.

Earlier that day, Yuanjun Tang, a well-known Chinese dissident in New York who had been married to Salen until June of this year, had been arrested on charges of secretly spying for Beijing.

Salen, 55, is not named in the filings against him and is not accused of any wrongdoing.

But there was a complication: throughout their marriage, she has worked for the Congressional Executive Committee on China, or CECC. 

The commission organizes hearings and publishes annual reports advising Congress and the White House on human rights and rule of law issues in China. 

The FBI had questions. 

Salen said that she had spoken to the FBI for the first time on Wednesday, and that she had been placed on a paid leave by the CECC two days after Tang’s arrest. By Monday, the laptop she used to do her work sat inert on her desk, switched off and awaiting to be sent back to the U.S. government.

Despite the dizzying turn of events, Salen told RFA: “You can certainly say that I still care very deeply about him,” adding that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.

Indeed, in speaking to over a dozen sources close to the case, what emerges is a deeply paradoxical and tragic story of murky allegiances and personal betrayals.

But the revelation of Tang’s family ties to the U.S. government, as well as allegations that he was directed by Chinese agents to keep close tabs on specific U.S. political goings-on, raises uncomfortable questions about how deeply Chinese intelligence can penetrate American democracy. 

When first contacted by RFA last week and asked if she was concerned that her work for the government could have been compromised by Tang, Salen gave a long pause before declining to answer.

A shock arrest

On Aug. 21, Tang was arrested at his office in Flushing, New York, after being charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent, conspiracy and making false statements.

According to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Tang – who had been an active participant in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests – had been passing sensitive information on U.S.-based dissidents as well as a U.S. congressional candidate to a handler at the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, from 2018 until 2023. He was questioned by the FBI last July.

Tang and Salen were married from March 2012 to June 2024, though they only lived together during parts of that time, according to Salen and public records of their registered addresses.

Repeated calls to Tang’s lawyer were not answered. Tang declined to be interviewed but clarified to RFA through an intermediary that he never informed his then-wife of his alleged contacts with the MSS.

Although work done by the CECC does not involve classified information, and Salen would not have had access to government papers deemed classified or confidential, access to contacts and knowledge of its working would still be of value to Beijing.

Staffers often interact with members of the Chinese diaspora, and the commission organizes hearings and meetings that put government officials, Chinese dissidents and civil society members together, sometimes behind closed doors.

RFA gave CECC a detailed list of questions, including when it became aware of the situation regarding Tang, how this could affect the work Salen was doing for the commission, what security protocols were in place, and what was being done to fairly protect staff and sources for the CECC, as well as Salen.

A spokesperson for the commission said in an email: “While this is a confidential personnel matter, and law enforcement has given us no indication that our staffer was involved in, or had knowledge of, Mr. Tang's alleged activity, the extraordinary circumstances, and nature of the allegations regarding Mr. Tang lead us, out of an abundance of caution, to take appropriate measures to ensure the safety of the Commission’s data and the privacy of its staff. We continue to work with the appropriate entities in their investigations and for the protection of the CECC's mission.”

They said the commission only became aware of the situation after Tang’s arrest. 

That “abundance of caution” appears to be warranted.

In an earlier interview discussing the verdict of another recent Chinese spy case, Peter Mattis, who was staff director at the CECC from 2019 to 2021, told RFA: “We need to think about intelligence not as being the collection of classified information. Intelligence is information to inform decision making, and not all decisions are about national defense and national security, right?”

“Some of them are, at least in the CCP. They're about political control. They're about controlling thought. They're about controlling overseas diaspora communities or being able to mobilize them effectively in support of national objectives.” (The case he was referring to also involved a dissident secretly spying for Beijing)

Mattis, who is now head of the non-profit Jamestown Foundation and no longer works in U.S. government, said he also only learned of Tang’s alleged activities after his arrest. 

Political interests 

Among the other allegations made by U.S. prosecutors is that Tang had transmitted photographs of a congressional candidate, information about a campaign strategy meeting for the candidate, and photos of members of Congress to the MSS through one of six phones seized by the FBI. 

One of these phones appeared to have surveillance software installed onto it, the complaint said. 

Although he is not named in the complaint against Tang, the congressional candidate he allegedly surveilled is Yan Xiong, a dissident who ran in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th congressional district in 2022. 

Xiong told RFA: “That’s me in the complaint — the 'congressional candidate' Tang allegedly passed information [about] to the MSS.” He said that although the FBI never contacted him, he recognized himself from the details and descriptions in the complaint.

Xiong faced significant harassment during his 2022 campaign, including fake claims of child pornography and tax evasion. He noted that he faced harassment during the  campaign and that it placed a significant strain on his family. “I am still suffering from the consequences,” he said. He has no plans to return to politics.

He said he had no suspicions about Tang at the time. “Campaigns require a lot of help, so I asked him to assist. I was never suspicious of him.”

Xiong learned of Tang’s arrest from the news and was surprised by the details. “I trust the U.S. Department of Justice, but I also believe Tang’s story is a tragedy. He broke the law, but he is also a victim of the CCP,” he said, adding: “I'll still pray for him.”

Betrayals and understandings

The arrest has sent shockwaves through the U.S.-based Chinese pro-democracy community – a tight-knit group of dissidents, many of whom were participants or leaders in the 1989 protest that triggered a global outcry and an exodus of young intellectuals and liberals from China. 

The protest likewise shaped the views of a generation of young people in the West. “You know, in some ways, I'm also of the 1989 generation,” Salen (who is not of Asian descent herself) told RFA. 

“I was a sophomore in college. I had just started taking Chinese history classes, and what happened in China in 1989 was part of my motivation to eventually study Chinese language and clearly feel that people have the right to freedom of expression, to publish with what they think … have their own right to religious belief, all those things that we take for granted here.”

Sources who spoke to RFA universally said they admired Salen’s commitment to promoting Chinese democracy and the dissident community, through which she met Tang at a dumpling-making party in the mid-2000s. 

Tang, now 67, was a young factory worker at the time of the Tiananmen protests. He later defected by swimming to Taiwan from a Chinese fishing boat. He eventually came to the U.S. and was granted asylum.

Another dissident, who asked for anonymity to speak openly about a sensitive issue, recalled meeting him some 20 years ago when he first arrived. “He was a spirited young man, full of ideals. You know, he had been imprisoned in China, then fled to Taiwan, and later came to the U.S.,” they said. 

Despite meeting his wife and settling in the U.S., Tang had a difficult time and exile had been “a very, very painful experience” for him, the person said. 

“He was very filial, and he cared deeply about his mother. We all knew he wanted to return to China in 2018 (when she fell ill). His brother is disabled. Later, his mother and brother both passed away.

“I later saw him a few times in Flushing, sometimes on the street. He looked very down and out,” the person told RFA.

Prosecutors allege that Tang began working for the MSS in 2018 in exchange for being allowed to go back to China to visit his family. His orders included taking pictures and videos of people of interest to the intelligence service and passing information about their whereabouts to a handler. The MSS paid Tang’s family in mainland China, prosecutors said.

He is also alleged to have invited an MSS agent to a chat group he set up for dissidents – including some seeking asylum in the U.S. –  and to have passed information about asylum-seeking to a handler. 

Younger dissidents close to Tang – some of whom were recently arrived from China – told RFA they had looked up to him as almost a mentor figure who regaled them with tales of being jailed by the Chinese government and promised to help them navigate the U.S. asylum process.

His arrest has left them worried, said Chao Xu, 32, who came to the United States in the summer of 2023. 

"I'm really worried now because every time we went to protests or demonstrations against the CCP, Tang would take photos and videos of us up close. China could use facial recognition to quickly identify us and our families back home. Of course, I'm scared," he said. 

Another dissident, Kuijun Wu, 30, who also arrived in the U.S. last year, told RFA that there is widespread panic among a group of over 50 newcomers. They had provided Tang with their personal information, including their addresses in China, when they joined the party he led. 

"We risked our lives to come to the U.S., and now our leader is a spy. What are we supposed to do?" he said.

Tang has been under house arrest since being released on an unsecured $100,000 bond. Since then, he has privately expressed remorse to friends, telling close associates that he was sorry for letting America down and particularly regretted affecting his former partner, several sources told RFA.

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Salen referred most of RFA’s questions about Tang to his lawyer, but did offer a thought on one matter.

“I noticed that a lot of reports on him are saying he was ‘a former democracy activist.’ I think ‘former’ is incorrect. He still is a democracy activist,” she said. “I think the [Chinese] exile community is very complex. Everyone knows the exile community is very complex, and also there's a lot of debate and dissension.”

Nick Eftimiades, a former CIA analyst who has worked extensively on Chinese intelligence cases, told RFA that while it remains to be seen whether there is wider cause for concern given Tang’s family tie to U.S. government work, the extent of China’s reach could be likened to the Stasi in East Germany, where a third of the population was pressed into this kind of service. 

“It destroyed families and relationships as people were recruited to spy on each other and other targets of the regime. I think we’re seeing the same thing here,” he said.  “The question now is, can the United States and so many European countries keep their populations safe from the CCP, which strikes at the very heart of their sovereignty?”

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case. 

Edited by Boer Deng 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jane Tang for RFA Investigative.

The Democratic National Committee is moving ahead with a plan to virtually nominate Joe Biden ahead of the Democratic convention in Chicago despite growing calls for him to step aside and as a new Associated Press poll shows nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the race following his disastrous debate with Donald Trump. Top Democrats including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are reportedly privately lobbying for Biden to step aside. With Biden as the presidential candidate, “Democrats have a vanishingly thin chance of recapturing the House,” says Chris Lehmann, who rejoins us to discuss the “unprecedented” and contentious fight over Biden’s reelectability occurring within the Democratic Party ahead of its convention next month.

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

My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.

If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.

When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.

When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.

We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.

Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.

And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.

We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.

It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.

When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.

So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.

In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.

In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.

Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.

When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.

This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.

Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:

“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”

Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.

In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.

In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.

In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.

The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.

Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.

Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?

Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.

At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.

The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.

But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.

These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:

“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”

Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.

Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.

The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.

France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.

Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.

The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?

And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.

Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada.  We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.

“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:

Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.

And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.

In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.

And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.

The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.

Linda Pentz Gunter’s forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.

This first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International.

The post The Forgotten Faces on the Uranium Trail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Linda Pentz Gunter.

In the early hours of ANZAC Day, aerial photographs captured an impressive gathering of Australians and Papua New Guineans at Isurava in the Northern (Oro) Province.

The solemn dawn service yesterday was held at a site steeped in history, where some of the fiercest battles of World War II unfolded along the Kokoda Trail in 1942.

The ceremony, marked by deep reflection and remembrance, was attended by notable dignitaries including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape.

The presence of both leaders underscored the enduring camaraderie and shared history between the two nations, as participants paid homage to the valour and sacrifices of those who fought on these grounds.

This year’s ANZAC Day observances at Isurava not only commemorated the past but also reinforced the bonds of friendship and mutual respect that continue to flourish between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Marape commends Biage people over WWII

Prime Minister James Marape commended the Biage people of Northern Province for the significant role they played in World War II until today.

He said this at an emotional ANZAC Day dawn service at Isurava along the Kokoda Trail attended by the Biage people, Australian Prime Minister Albanese, Northern Governor Garry Juffa, Australian High Commissioner John Feakes, members of the Australian and Papua New Guinea defence forces, Australian and PNG officials, alongside 200 Australian trekkers making a pilgrimage and their porters.

The dawn service was the highlight of a two-day trek by the two prime ministers from Kokoda to Isurava and was the first time ever for the Biage people to see two prime ministers together at the same time.

Prime Minister Marape said the Biage people were a peaceful people forced into a war that was not their doing and greatly assisted Australia forces during the dark days of WWII.

Governor Juffa also spoke about the remarkable role of the Biage people, who he said formed the bulk of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”, during WWII.

The Biage people continue to show their peacefulness and hospitality by being guides and porters in the lucrative Kokoda trekking industry, PNG’s biggest tourism product.

Republished with permission.

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

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has arrived at Kokoda Station, Northern province, at the start of his state visit to Papua New Guinea.

Both Albanese and Prime Minister James Marape will meet with the locals and the Northern Provincial government before they begin their walk along the historic 96km Kokoda Trail.

Both men were “excited” with Marape saying “he was there to lend a hand to his brother PM”.

• READ MORE: Kingsbury and the perilous fight in Kokoda
• Australian PM Albanese to walk historic Kokoda track with PNG PM Marape

Meanwhile, the heroism of Australian soldier Private Bruce Steel Kingsbury is being remembered in advance of ANZAC Day.

Knowing his platoon would not last long with the continuous attack by the Japanese and suffering severe losses during World War Two, Private Kingsbury made the heroic decision to move against the continuous firing and attacked the enemy which cost his life on 29 August 1942.

The battle took place at Isurava, Kokoda. Where Private Kingsbury fell is a memorial which is known as “Kingsbury Rock” beside the Isurava Memorial which Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will visit for the ANZAC Dawn service.

Private Kingsbury’s sacrifice earned him a Victoria Cross. He is buried at the Bomana War Cemetery outside Port Moresby and is one of 625 Australians who were killed in action along the Kokoda track, another 1055 were wounded.

Battle for PNG
The battle to protect Papua and New Guinea, as it was known back then, took about 9000 lives and the remnants of war still remain in the jungles of PNG with more men still missing in action.

Prime ministers Marape and Albanese will walk a section of the Kokoda track to honour the shared history and enduring bond between the two nations.

“The visit of Prime Minister Albanese underscores the close relationships between our countries,” said Prime Minister Marape.

“I’ll be joining him for a walk along the Kokoda Trail.”

Albanese is set to be the first sitting prime minister to walk part of the famous 96km track.

Kevin Rudd walked the Kokoda Track in 2006 while he was opposition leader while former prime minister Scott Morrison also hiked the track in 2009 during his time as a backbench MP.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

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

A premium subscribed X user @kunal492001 tweeted the above-mentioned video on April 4 with a caption in Hindi that can be translated to: “Big news: After getting down from the helicopter, Dilawar Khan’s (Dharmendra) wife Ayesha Begum aka Hema Malini refused to sit in a small car to go to harvest wheat, insisted to sit in the Fortuner car.

The worker was also rebuked and asked to move his seat back”. (Archive)

The tweet received over 1.7 Lakh views and has been retweeted over 1000 times.

बड़ी खबर: हेलीकॉप्टर से उतरते ही दिलावर खां (धर्मेंद्र) की पत्नी आयशा बेगम उर्फ हेमा मालिनी द्वारा गेंहू काटने जाने के लिए छोटी गाड़ी में बैठने से किया इंकार,फार्च्यूनर गाड़ी में बैठने के लिए अड़ी..

कार्यकर्ता को सीट पीछे करने के लिये भी धमकाया pic.twitter.com/zrY02ZptAF

— Kunal Shukla (@kunal492001) April 4, 2024

Another user, Ravish Kumar ᴾᵃʳᵒᵈʸ © (@SirRavishFC), shared the same video with the following caption in Hindi: “Look at their arrogance! Look at the arrogance! Listen to the language! She will serve the public!!
She may have been a great actress but she is nothing in the name of a human being. It is unfortunate for Mathura that it has got an MP like Ayesha alias Hema Malini.”

इनका घमंड देखिए! अकड़ देखिए! भाषा सुनिए! ये सेवा करेंगी जनता की!!
ये रही होंगी बहुत बड़ी अदाकारा लेकिन इंसान के नाम पर ये शून्य हैं। मथुरा का दुर्भाग्य है कि उसे आयशा उर्फ हेमा मालिनी जैसा सांसद मिला है। pic.twitter.com/W9cTzRGQ0K

— Ravish Kumar ᴾᵃʳᵒᵈʸ © (@SirRavishFC) April 4, 2024

Several other users on X, including media outlets @IBC24News and @Bharat24Liv, shared the same video.

Fact Check

Taking a cue from the content of the video, we ran a relevant keyword search. This led us to a Facebook video shared on October 9, 2014. So it is clear that the viral clip is not recent.

Additionally, we found a Hindustan Times report from October 19, 2014, on the viral video. In the report, it has been mentioned that the video surfaced three days ago. It also noted that Hema Malini clarified her side of the story after the video had gone viral. She mentioned that it was a legitimate reason and not a tantrum. The report referred to a series of tweets made by her on this matter.

We found the tweets by the BJP leader regarding the video on October 17, 2014. In the following series of tweets she clarified that she had asked for a bigger car as that allowed her to interact better with the public. She also cited security reasons.

Therefore, from the above findings, it is clear that the viral video featuring Hema Malini is not recent, but 10-year old.

The post Old video of BJP MP Hema Malini demanding a bigger car on campaign trail shared as recent incident appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

just for a few hours: out of the insanity of the insane and dementia patients and psychopaths ruling the world, inside and outside of government

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

In the late 1820s, while serving as the first ambassador from the U.S. to Mexico, Poinsett clipped samples of the plant known in Spanish as the “flor de nochebuena,” or flower of Christmas Eve, from the Mexican state of Guerrero. He then introduced it to the U.S. on a trip home from Mexico.

The plant has been named poinsettia ever since.

But much like the history of the U.S., Poinsett had a complex and troubling past.

An ambitious politician, financial investor and enslaver, Poinsett was a secret agent for the U.S. government in South America who fought for the Chilean army against Spain during Chile’s War for Independence in the early 1800s.

A confidant of President Andrew Jackson, Poinsett also served as U.S. secretary of war under President Martin Van Buren and oversaw the ignominy of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation and deadly march of Cherokee people from the South to reservations in the West during the 1830s.

And yet Poinsett, an avid botanist who brought scores of other plants to the U.S., also helped found an organization that led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

A privileged life

I came across his history almost by accident. I am a historian of capitalism in early America, and while I was on a research fellowship for my first book, “Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry,” another researcher suggested I go to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to check out the papers of a few War Department officials. Poinsett was one of those officials.

There, I found a large collection of his letters and other personal papers that spanned five decades of his life. I became so fascinated with his life that I decided to write a book about him. I detail his complicated life in another book, “Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism.”

Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 2, 1779, Poinsett was the son of a wealthy doctor and lived a life of privilege. He traveled throughout Europe and Russia in his early 20s before starting a military career.

In the 1810s, Poinsett traveled around South America as a secret agent of the U.S. State Department. His intelligence reports led in part to the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine.

That doctrine, written by Secretary of State John Adams and buried in President James Monroe’s address to Congress on Dec. 2, 1823, sought to prevent European colonization in South America and, in essence, claimed the entire Western Hemisphere for the U.S.

The doctrine also set the stage for two centuries of rocky relations between the U.S and Latin America.

In 1825, the Monroe administration appointed Poinsett as the nation’s first ambassador to Mexico. He arrived there in the spring of that year and almost immediately instigated a general distrust of American interference. He used his connections to secure favorable plots of land for himself and his friends and established a U.S.-based mining company to exploit Mexican resources for his own benefit.

It was on a trip to assess the profitability of some mines, in fact, that Poinsett admired the red and green plant and cut clippings to send to horticulturalists in the U.S. Exactly where and how these clippings were made and sent is not quite clear, but he remarked on the beauty of the plants he saw, which Franciscan friars in Mexico had been displaying at Christmas since the 1600s.

Several prominent horticulturalists in the United States later reported that Poinsett sent them plant samples. By the mid-1830s, agricultural reports described a plant with brilliant scarlet foliage, “lately referred to as the poinsettia,” as having been introduced by Poinsett in 1828.

Poinsett’s Latin America meddling

That same year, Poinsett also supported a coup in Mexico City.

During the Mexican presidential campaign in 1829, Poinsett supported Vicente Guerrero, whom he saw as more amenable to his and U.S. financial interests. When Guerrero lost to moderate Manuel Gómez Pedraza, Guerrero staged a coup with Poinsett’s approval that forced Gómez Pedraza to flee Mexico.

Because of Poinsett’s poor conduct during the election, the Mexican government requested Poinsett’s removal from his post. President Andrew Jackson instead allowed Poinsett to resign.

Poinsett left Mexico and went back home to South Carolina.

On Oct. 24, 1833, at 54 years old, Poinsett married a 52-year-old, wealthy widow from South Carolina who owned a rice plantation and almost 100 enslaved people.

Though he wrote that he enjoyed married plantation life, he was not done with politics or the military.

In 1837, Poinsett was named U.S. secretary of war and oversaw the execution of Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act that the Cherokee people referred to as the Trail of Tears. That act saw the violent displacement of members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their homelands in the South to reservations in the West.

The creation of the Smithsonian

Based on his travels and experiences around the world, Poinsett believed that the U.S. should have a national museum to conduct scientific research and display the expanding government collections, including plant specimens.

In his retirement, Poinsett helped found in 1840 and became president of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts.

That organization later became part of the Smithsonian Institution, whose gardens now showcase thousands of poinsettias during the Christmas season.

Poinsett died on Dec. 12, 1851.

It remains unclear how long the plant that bears his name will remain known as the poinsettia. After years of controversy, the American Ornithological Society announced that it was going to remove all human names from as many as 152 bird species, including those linked to people with racist histories or people who have done violence to Indigenous communities.

Though no attempts as yet have emerged to rename plants, it’s my belief that Poinsett’s poinsettia may be the first.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele.

The Dann sisters on their ranch. Photos ©Ilka Hartmann/IlkaHartmann.com

In the world of anti-nuclear activism — against both nuclear power and nuclear weapons — hope can sometimes feel illusory; victories almost impossible. A moment of glory, such as the passage of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, is tempered by the recognition that the nuclear powers won’t sign it. Worse, they work actively to derail it.

We sound the warnings about the dire risks of a nuclear power plant embroiled in the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the UN watchdog agency seemingly intent on preventing a nuclear disaster there, is at the same time assuring its certainty, in Ukraine or elsewhere, by continuing to promote nuclear power.

Those battling the stubborn resistance to do the right thing on global warming must confront — and overcome — “climate despair”. We face a similar challenge to our wellbeing and psyche, perpetual Cassandras who can foresee the Armageddon of nuclear war or the looming catastrophe of another Chornobyl, but who are unable to shake our leaders awake to avert such outcomes.

The Dann sisters on their ranch. Photos ©Ilka Hartmann/IlkaHartmann.com

But, miraculously, one thing remains immutable in our movement — the steadfast dedication of its members to avert the worst. We fail to mention them enough. When we do get a win, we sometimes forget to celebrate.

While our movement has won the Nobel Peace Prize, twice, (IPPNW in 1985, ICAN in 2017) we must also fete our own. So we have the Nuclear-Free Future Awards, established in 1998 and whose 2023 winners you can read about here.

And there is the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “alternative Nobel.” Our people have won that one, too. The Award “honors courageous change makers” and “the actions of brave visionaries working for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world for all.”

Some of the Right Livelihood winners who have worked for a nuclear-free world include Vladimir Slivyak, Tony de Brum, Paul Walker, Alyn Ware, David Suzuki, Daniel Ellsberg, Chico Whitaker Ferreira, Mycle Schneider, Hans-Peter Dürr, John Gofman, Alice Stewart and Rosalie Bertell.

In 1993, the Right Livelihood Award was given to sisters, Mary and Carrie Dann. Mary died in 2005, and Carrie in 2021.

The Dann sisters campaigned to assert the rights of their Indigenous Western Shoshone people, committing themselves to a political and legal battle to retain their ancestral lands, harmed by nuclear tests carried out by the US government, then threatened with the deep geological radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain (for the time being defeated).

The Dann sisters also worked for the preservation of the traditional way of life of the Shoshone people, fighting against repeated attempts by the US government to impound their livestock grazing on Western Shoshone territory.

With the recent announcement of the 2023 Right Livelihood Award winners —Eunice Brookman-Amissah, Mother Nature Cambodia, SOS MEDITERRANEE and Phyllis Omido — the time seemed right to revisit what Carrie Dann had to say in her 1993 acceptance speech, in which she reminded us of the importance of stewardship, of living in balance and harmony with Nature. Hers are lessons that still resonate today and are still needed, now more than ever. If we love Mother Earth, now is the time to act.

Said Carrie in 1993:

“I am from the Indigenous nation of the Western Shoshone People, the heartland of the Great Basin, also known as Nevada. I was born and raised there in our traditional ways. I am a hard working person raising livestock on the Western Shoshone land. I have spent most of my life around livestock and crops.

“We, the human children of this Earth, all have our own cultures and traditions, languages, and we all like to keep them, as they identify us as one of the many kinds of peoples of the Earth.

“The Indigenous people believed that this earth (land) is our Mother, as Sweden, a small part of Europe, is your Mother. Our Mother, the Earth, gives us all the necessities of life. It feeds us, gives us clothes, shelter, and cradles us.”

Those ways were, of course, quickly destroyed, as Carrie described it, by people who also came from “oppressive communities to join in a supposed nation built around constitutional rights and humanity.”

That was not the way things turned out.

“We, the Indigenous People, have withstood wave after wave of foreigners, starting with the Spanish, English, Dutch, French and most nations of the world, coming to our country. They called it a New World. However, it was – and still is – populated by Indigenous people. People that had a civilization, lived in harmony with the natural surroundings, with respect towards all forms of life.”

Instead, she went on, “To most Indigenous thinking people, the United States is not a melting pot; it is a boiling mess. No longer do we have the clear blue skies, but acid rain, maybe soon cyanide and nuclear rain, destroying life on land and water. No longer clear cool waters, but outrageous pollution destroying all forms of water life – believe it or not folks, if we cannot drink our once clear blue waters, we are the next to go! The nuclear test site will be contaminated by the nuclear testing for thousands of years. To my way of thinking nuclear testing is not national security, but a national death sentence for us, our children, the unborn and to all that we know as life.”

Two of the earliest winners of the Right Livelihood Award, which began in 1980, were also a couple of pioneering women, researchers, Alice Stewart and Rosalie Bertell, who won in 1986. Women in a man’s world, they sought the truth about exposure to low-level radiation and were early on ridiculed for their work. But they were right of course (Stewart’s findings halted the taking of x-rays for pregnant women).

“The Earth gives us all the necessities of life,” said Carrie Dann. Life; something surely better treasured, respected and preserved, rather than, as too many seem intent on doing, wantonly destroying it.

This story first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International. 

The post The Dann Aisters Blazed an Anti-Nuclear Trail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Linda Pentz Gunter.

Palestinians flee Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza to the southern areas amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the region, on Nov. 11, 2023.

It was Thursday night when we started to negotiate. Do we need to evacuate to the south or not? The F-16s did not leave the sky, the bombing did not stop, the live ammunition was very close. The sky was foggy, gas bombs and white phosphorus filled the sky. It was hard for us to even breathe.

Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave? For hours, we asked the question. I had a headache from overthinking. 

“What if they kill us? What if they arrest us?” one guy asked. 

“I am not leaving, I prefer dying here,” another said. 

“We should leave, we have kids and families.”

“We did everything we can. We reported everything.” 

Despite the sound of the bombs, I urged myself to sleep. I wondered if this might be my last night in the office, my last night in the city.

Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave?

We had evacuated from the office three times in 30 days. We evacuated from the office to Roots Hotel, but journalists there were targeted, so we evacuated to Al Shifa Hospital. After the threats the hospital received, we chose to risk it and go back to our three-room office in the Al Rimal area, near Al Saraya. 

I used to live on a mat on the floor in the office. I had a private bathroom. 

The 11th floor office had the best view of Gaza. It was home when we were displaced. It was our tiny home. 

I slept as my colleagues were still debating.

It was 6:30 when my colleague Ali woke me up. “Get ready, we are leaving,” he said hurriedly.

“Go where? Nowhere,” I told him. “Let’s find another place to go. I do not want to leave.”

“Hind, yalla, no time to negotiate, we do not have a lot of time,” he stressed while he was packing his cameras in his backpack.

I stood up from the mat. Everyone was packing, searching for their stuff. I realized that I do have ADHD, as I’ve always suspected, because I had no idea where to start.

It was less of a problem because I barely have clothes anyway — a couple of dirty sweaters, my laptop, and my camera. I have been displaced since October 9.

I grabbed my bag and hurried with Ali to pick up his injured mom and my cousin. Ali drove so fast. We parked away from the Al Shifa entrance. The entrance to a hospital has become a danger zone, with several having been bombed recently.

We started walking so fast trying to enter the hospital. It was crowded, people were rushing out.

We started pushing people. It took us more than 10 minutes to reach the building from the entrance, a distance that normally takes just a minute or less to cross.

I went to find my cousin, Sara. She works as a surgeon and has been in Al Shifa hospital since day one. Ali went to get his injured mom and sister.

I started knocking on the door. “Sara, open the door. It’s me, Hind.”

I kept knocking for three minutes until another doctor opened the door. Sara was sleeping.

I woke her. “Hurry up, we are leaving,” I told her.

She gave no reaction. She began packing her clothes.

Ali took his mother in a wheelchair. I took my cousin with a couple of doctors.

My cousin Dr. Sara waiting during the exodus on Nov. 10, 2023, in Gaza.

The corridors were becoming empty, everyone in a rush. Even patients were evacuating.

By now, we were far too many to fit in the car, so we began to walk. We walked with thousands of other civilians. I even saw a hospital bed being pushed along the way.

Children, people in wheelchairs, the elderly, babies — everyone was carrying their backpacks, pillows, and mats.

We waited at the intersection for 40 minutes until Ali met us. Together, we walked. 

I studied the looks on people’s faces. Terrified, they were holding white flags.

A truck that normally carried cows was packed with people. Another truck that used to transport gas canisters took people to the south.

People crying, angry, sad, eyes filled with fear.

My emotions were blocked. All I could think was that I do not want to leave, that it was wrong to leave, that I must not leave.

Everything was destroyed. Even the streets were damaged and destroyed. My eyes were trying to document everything, I tried my best to capture everything in my eyes. I wanted to cry my tears out, but I held them inside me.

It’s not time to cry, I will cry later, I told myself.

We started walking from the “Doula Square” — the launching point.

We found donkey carts. They called out that they would take us as far as the Israeli tanks.

We reserved two carts. The owner was in a hurry; he charged us 20 NIS — around $5 — for a 10-minute donkey ride. Some could not afford it, so they walked on foot.

I saw people carrying cats, carrying their birds in their cage, holding their bags, taking as much as they could.

We reached the area scraped flat by bulldozers. I saw one bulldozer, two tanks, and a dozen soldiers. 

This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.

The owner of the donkey carts told us that this was as far as he could take us. All the people started holding out their green IDs, raised their hands and their white flags. Everyone was terrified. This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.

I saw Israeli soldiers in 2016 when I left the Gaza Strip through Erez, the fortified border in the north. I was not scared.

We were still walking. I was holding two bags, one on each shoulder. Ali’s injured sister was leaning on me all the way. She got shrapnel in her leg when the Israelis targeted the Al Shifa hospital entrance.

As I was walking with the crowd, I was looking toward the ground. I saw baby blankets, baby slippers. I saw clothes, toys, bags. I’m sure people were too scared to go back and pick up the stuff they dropped.

We walked over dead, decomposing bodies.

We were thousands of us pushing each other on this one-way road. We wanted this to end. To our left was a tank and soldiers holding their rifles, watching us through binoculars on a sand hill. To our right were four soldiers standing in front a bombed-out building, posing and taking selfies on the rubble.

Our group was stopped more than four times (for no reason) — and let go for no reason.

As we approached the soldiers, I saw a naked man standing in front of the sand hill alongside three other men with their heads down.

Another man with a yellow five-gallon water jug and a blond child were called over by the soldiers. They asked the small boy to step closer without his father. The boy was terrified. Those of us walking past worried the boy would be taken. 

The soldier told him there was nothing wrong, he just liked blond kids.

We kept walking. As we walked, pushing each other, we saw bombed cars and dead bodies inside the cars.

Flies filled the cars, feasting on the blood and the bodies inside.  

A newborn in front of me was crying. The mom was trying to make food for her as we were walking. She started nursing her without stopping the walk. Another mom was pulling her kids in their baby seats with a rope.

A man pushed an injured woman in her wheelchair. It kept getting stuck in the sand.

We kept walking, stopping, then walking, the soldiers a constant threat.

It felt like years of walking, though it was only hours. It was packed, and we constantly looked between the crowds for each other. On the other side were people who were already in the south and came to pick us up. People in the south were searching for us, for people coming from the city. Everyone was tired. Everyone was thirsty.

I had lost my cousin in the crowd of thousands, but found her at the end. She was crying, her leg had given out. She was in intense pain. We helped her keep moving until we could find a car.

I can’t describe the sadness. We escaped from being killed or injured, but I did not want to leave — and did not want to leave the city.

As we walked closer to where the cars were stationed, people started distributing water to us. They told us we were welcome and that their homes were open to us.

We were so tired. I could not feel my shoulders or my legs.

Everyone was happy we evacuated; everyone was hugging us. We had safely made it.

But I did not feel the same. A piece of my heart was left in the city, and I may never be able to go back to get it. It is impossible for me to imagine I abandoned my father’s house, left it alone. He built that home with his own hands, and when he died in 2012, it stayed with the family. Our house in my family is something so precious to us. We do not know if our house is still standing or not, but we know that we are not in it.

Fifteen minutes after we arrived, the people walking behind us were bombed.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Hind Khoudary.

Still from Walid.

Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn reputedly once snarked: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union!” But one way socially conscious filmmakers can cleverly “sneak” messages into movies is by sandwiching their ideas into popular genres that audiences are familiar with. Film Noir and murder mysteries are good examples: Author Dashiell Hammett was a Communist Party member who put anti-capitalist notions about greed and obsession with money into works such as The Maltese Falcon. While the content of leftist filmmaker Costa-Gavras’ 1969 Oscar-winning Z depicts political assassination and the colonels’ coup in Greece, it is in form a whodunit: Who killed the Greek peace candidate?

In a similar way, inspired by news reports about child trafficking, award-winning Malaysian co-writer/co-producer/director Areel Abu Bakar has created a work about a child abduction ring and border issues in Malaysia under the guise of being a martial arts movie. The first half of the almost two-hour Walid is a drama, with only a few brief fight scenes. The titular character teaches informal classes in northern Malaysia near the border with Thailand. Walid (Megat Sharizal, a veteran actor with many screen credits) notices a shy, poor but pretty, little girl named Aisha (Putri Qaseh, who has been acting since 2019) hanging around his informal classroom. As Aisha clearly has a thirst for knowledge, Walid – whose son has disappeared – takes the impoverished lass under his wing.

After Aisha also vanishes, Walid intrepidly embarks on a search for his pupil and the “Silat” hits the fan when the martial arts literally kicks in. Joined by police also hot on the trail of the traffickers, an hour-long frenzy of fisticuffs, chops, leaps, violent footwork, axes, long machetes, tosses, turns and some gunplay erupts as Walid and his allies track down the kidnappers who imprison Aisha and other children in squalid conditions, as the black market syndicate seeks to sell them, possibly abroad, into servitude. Most of the epic combat between the good guys (plus a gal or two) and child snatchers is fought using Silat, the traditional Malaysian self-defense technique.

According to Areel Abu Bakar, who spoke in a Q&A after the LA premiere of Walid with star Megat Sharizal translating from Malay into English, the director allowed the cast members, who were mostly versed in martial arts, to improvise and be spontaneous while their fight sequences (which are often intercut with other pairs of fighters) were being shot. This in part accounts for why the donnybrook lasts so long on the screen. Areel’s reel is really graphic and the director hopes his battle royale will inspire action-loving theatergoers to buy tickets to a movie about child trafficking they might otherwise not go see.

Areel said he expects his film to be “controversial” in Malaysia when it is released there next month. Some of the flick’s traffickers speak Thai, as Walid raises questions about Kuala Lumpur’s international relations, especially at the northern border region, which is a touchy subject.

The filmmaker’s previous action-packed movie, 2019’s Silat Warriors: Deed of Death, won an “Excellence in Action Cinema Award” at the New York Asian Film Festival and a Special Jury Award at the Malaysian Film Festival, where it was also nominated for Best Film and in three other categories. Areel, who has been in Malaysia’s motion picture industry since at least 2011, has said: “As action films have become a favorite genre of viewers not only in Malaysia, but worldwide, this is one of the ways to introduce our culture and heritage to the international level. We are trying to provide an opportunity for martial arts activists to join the film industry.”

Walid is being billed as a “Social Action Thriller.” The first hour emphasizes the importance of education and thoughtfully dramatizes the problem of the commodification of children and their abductions in the Third World. Those concerned with the issues of trafficking and immigration issues will likely find it to be of interest. The film is well-acted and offers glimpses of what life is like at the southeast Asian nation of Malaysia. Viewers who are fights fans, in particular, martial arts aficionados, will probably relish and hoot and holler for the heroes during the extended ultra-violent Silat struggle for survival of the fittest, although this endless bloody brawl lasting around an hour isn’t exactly the cup of tea for pacifists.

Walid is in Malay with some Thai and in English subtitles and was theatrically released July 28 at the Cinema Village in N.Y. and on August 11 at the Laemmle Glendale in L.A. In the Fall Walid will be available on VOD.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

The post On the Migrant Trail: A Reflection on Border Deaths, Policy, and Transformation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Todd Miller.

The post Campaign Trail: Where DeSantis May Go to Die appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

With Chicago's closely watched mayoral runoff just two days away, the campaign of progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson debuted an ad on Sunday featuring expert and parent testimony on conservative candidate Paul Vallas' education record, including his stints managing school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

The picture they painted was not flattering. One New Orleans parent, identified as Kevin G., said that "Paul Vallas has left a trail of destruction, everywhere he goes."

"We've literally seen this man destroy public education, sadly for Black and Brown children," he added.

Kendra Brooks, a Philadelphia parent and city councilmember, offered a similarly scathing assessment during her appearance in the ad, which the Johnson campaign said will air on broadcast and cable across Chicago until Tuesday's runoff.

"I think folks in Chicago should look at the destruction that he has left behind," said Brooks. "Money was being spent carelessly. Millions of dollars are missing, at the loss of Black and Brown communities."

Watch the two-minute spot:

Vallas' is an ardent school privatization advocate who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001 before moving on to head the School District of Philadelphia and the Recovery School District of Louisiana.

As The TRiiBE's Jim Daley wrote in a detailed examination of Vallas' record:

In each city, he opened charter schools, promoted military schools, and expanded standardized testing and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. He also ran school districts in Haiti and Chile between 2010 and 2012...

Under Vallas' tenure, Philadelphia underwent what was then the largest privatization of a public school system anywhere in the country. He opened 15 new charter schools over the protests of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, who called for a moratorium on new charters in 2006.

In New Orleans, Daley continued, Vallas "immediately set to work opening more charter schools, and the trend continued after he left."

"New Orleans is now the only city in America with a school district that is entirely made up of charters," Daley noted, "something Vallas also took credit for: he wrote that he 'implemented reforms that created the nation's first 100% parental choice district, with all schools public, non-selective, and nonprofit.'"

Reshansa W., a New Orleans parent and education policy expert featured in Johnson's new ad, said that "everything about education in New Orleans is suffering" due to Vallas' reforms.

"It decimated our middle class," Reshansa added. "He wasn't right for New Orleans. He wasn't right for Philly. He will not be right for Chicago."

The contrasts between Vallas and Johnson on education policy have become central to the April 4 contest—which, if polling is any guide, is set to be razor-close.

Despite mounting criticism of his record, Vallas has pledged to expand charter schools if elected mayor—a promise that may help explain why a super PAC with ties to school privatization zealot Betsy DeVos recently spent $60,000 in support of his campaign.

Vallas' campaign is also backed by rich investors—a class he catered to during his tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

Johnson, a former public school teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, has pledged to prioritize strengthening Chicago's public schools, which have long been badly underfunded.

ChalkBeat Chicagoreported late last month that "if voters pick Johnson, his election would be the crowning achievement in a decade-long grassroots battle waged by the Chicago Teachers Union against mayoral control and many of the controversial policies that came with it, like school closures and charter expansion."

"Johnson opposes adding charter schools and closing small district schools, of which Chicago has a growing number," the outlet noted. "Johnson has talked about getting state lawmakers to ramp up funding increases to the state’s funding formula so Chicago and all districts get to so-called 'adequate funding' more quickly. He—and district officials—have also suggested pushing the state to kick in more for Chicago teachers' pensions, which have been underfunded since the mid- to late-2000s."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Paul Blount started small. When he set up a semiconductor chip company in his basement in 2006, he was the only employee. He had spent a decade at the chip behemoth Hittite Microwave Corporation, and he saw room in the market for a boutique design outfit.

About a decade later, a man named Haoyang Yu did almost exactly the same thing, setting up his own lean chip company, Tricon, in Lexington, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from Blount’s home. A tipster, whom Blount would later acknowledge was linked to his company, went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, writing that their new competitor “smells a bit fishy.”

The tipster said it was suspicious that no one in their orbit had heard of Yu. “None of us here know this person or this company and there is 100% no way that they could come up with this product line in 6 months,” wrote the tipster. Both Yu and Blount marketed tiny, mass-produced chips called monolithic microwave integrated circuits, or MMICS, which can be used in everything from cellphones to military radar systems. Some MMICs are under export controls, which means that they can only be sent to certain end users and destinations with a license from the Commerce Department. Without evidence, the tipster hinted that Tricon might be violating export control regulations. “They are most likely reselling someone else’s part and what makes me nervous is that at least one is 3A001.b.2.d part,” the tipster wrote, referring to an export control classification number covering certain MMIC chips.

Yu, who also goes by Jack, was in fact no stranger to the industry. He had moved to Amherst in 2002 to study engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After graduation he stayed in New England, eventually settling in Lexington with his wife and two young children. He worked at Hittite after Blount left, staying on after the company was acquired by Analog Devices in 2014. The year Yu started Tricon, he left Analog to work as a software engineer at a company that counts MMIC makers among its clients. At one point, he had even visited Blount’s company, Custom MMIC, to demonstrate software to a group that included Blount.

Nonetheless, the tip to the FBI set off a cascade of events that would upturn Yu’s world. Investigators came to see him as a national security threat, zeroing in on what they imagined were unsavory links to China, where Yu, now a U.S. citizen, was born. They mounted a secret camera on a pole outside his house and enlisted the local trash company to set aside his family’s garbage after collecting it so agents could covertly rifle through it. In May, after spending five nights in jail, three months with a clunky ankle bracelet tracking his movements, and over two and a half years in legal limbo, he stood trial for a slew of felonies, including export control violations, immigration fraud, and wire fraud. Prosecutors also accused Yu’s wife, Yanzhi Chen, of wire fraud after she refused to cooperate.

Then, just as quickly as it had come together, the case against the couple seemed to unravel. The U.S. government largely failed to convince a Boston jury, which in June acquitted Yu on 18 of 19 counts. Shortly after the trial, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins dropped all charges against Chen, saying in a statement that the decision was a result of a “continuing assessment of the evidence.”

Early on in the investigation, a Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency agent labeled Haoyang Yu as a national security threat.

Screenshot: The Intercept/United States District Court

“The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat.”

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Haoyang Yu at the Boston Veterans Parade in November 2022.

Photo: Courtesy of Yanzhi Chen

Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy.

“It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”

Then-U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, center, speaks outside federal court on Jan. 23, 2020, in Boston.

Photo: Charles Krupa/AP

A detail shot of the semiconductor chip that was developed for use in car radar systems. Photos taken at Analog Devices in Wilmington, Mass., on July 5, 2011.

Photo: Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

If Yu had been white, his attorneys contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Mara Hvistendahl.

The post The Lizard’s Trail on the Liverpool Docks appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bryan D. Palmer.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Yearsley.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman announced Friday that his U.S. Senate campaign has received one million individual donations, highlighting the progressive candidate's strong grassroots support.

Fetterman posted a video of himself and his family thanking his supporters for their contributions, which totaled a record-breaking $11 million in the second quarter of 2022 and which averaged less than $30 per donation.

"The total number of contributions is a major milestone that demonstrates Fetterman's unmatched and steady grassroots support across the commonwealth," said the campaign in a statement.

The campaign marked the milestone as it announced Fetterman will hold his first public event since he suffered a stroke in May, with a rally planned for next Friday, August 12.

Fetterman will address supporters in Erie, which he said is in the state's "most important bellwether county."

The lieutenant governor won Erie County by more than 65% of the vote in the primary, which took place just days after his stroke. Former President Donald Trump won the county in 2016 and President Joe Biden won it in 2020.

"Before the 2020 election, I said that if I could know one single fact about the results, I could tell you who was going to win Pennsylvania. Whoever wins Erie County will win Pennsylvania," Fetterman said Friday. "I've visited Erie dozens and dozens of times in the past, and I am honored and proud to be returning to the campaign trail here."

Fetterman is facing Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor, in the general election.

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

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman announced Friday that his U.S. Senate campaign has received one million individual donations, highlighting the progressive candidate's strong grassroots support.

Fetterman posted a video of himself and his family thanking his supporters for their contributions, which totaled a record-breaking $11 million in the second quarter of 2022 and which averaged less than $30 per donation.

"The total number of contributions is a major milestone that demonstrates Fetterman's unmatched and steady grassroots support across the commonwealth," said the campaign in a statement.

The campaign marked the milestone as it announced Fetterman will hold his first public event since he suffered a stroke in May, with a rally planned for next Friday, August 12.

Fetterman will address supporters in Erie, which he said is in the state's "most important bellwether county."

The lieutenant governor won Erie County by more than 65% of the vote in the primary, which took place just days after his stroke. Former President Donald Trump won the county in 2016 and President Joe Biden won it in 2020.

"Before the 2020 election, I said that if I could know one single fact about the results, I could tell you who was going to win Pennsylvania. Whoever wins Erie County will win Pennsylvania," Fetterman said Friday. "I've visited Erie dozens and dozens of times in the past, and I am honored and proud to be returning to the campaign trail here."

Fetterman is facing Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor, in the general election.

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

Image by Isai Ramos.

Bob Baer served 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency at the Middle East and beyond, and was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. After leaving the CIA Baer became one of the Company’s most stinging, trenchant critics. His book See No Evil was adapted by writer/director Steven Gaghan for the 2005 movie Syriana, wherein George Clooney depicted a character based on Baer, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

Image by Isai Ramos.

Bob Baer served 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency at the Middle East and beyond, and was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. After leaving the CIA Baer became one of the Company’s most stinging, trenchant critics. His book See No Evil was adapted by writer/director Steven Gaghan for the 2005 movie Syriana, wherein George Clooney depicted a character based on Baer, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe.

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Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

Image by Isai Ramos.

Bob Baer served 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency at the Middle East and beyond, and was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. After leaving the CIA Baer became one of the Company’s most stinging, trenchant critics. His book See No Evil was adapted by writer/director Steven Gaghan for the 2005 movie Syriana, wherein George Clooney depicted a character based on Baer, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe.

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

Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

This is a developing news story... Check back for possible updates...

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was fatally shot Friday as he delivered a campaign speech on behalf of a member of his party just days ahead of the country's parliamentary elections.

Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, was rushed to a hospital with wounds to his neck and left collarbone, apparently inflicted by a blast from a homemade shotgun. Hours later, news broke of Abe's passing.

Police arrested the suspected gunman on the scene.

"I am greatly shocked to hear that former Prime Minister Abe was shot today," said Takayoshi Yokoyama, a climate campaigner with 350 Japan. "Such violence is unacceptable. 350 Japan condemns any forms of violence, and we seek solutions to the climate crisis through peaceful, non-violent citizen action."

The shooting prompted expressions of outrage and grief from world leaders.

Iran's Foreign Ministry dubbed the assassination "an act of terrorism" and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez offered his "resounding condemnation of this cowardly attack."

"Spain stands in solidarity with the Japanese people in these difficult times," Sánchez wrote in a Twitter post.

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

Sitiveni Rabuka is infamous for making Fiji a republic after carrying out a military coup 35 years ago by overthrowing an Indo-Fijian dominated government to help maintain indigenous supremacy.

Rabuka has been a central figure in Fijian politics since 1987 — as the nation’s first coup maker, a former prime minister, most recently the leader of opposition, and now a reformed Christian and politician, and the leader of the People’s Alliance Party.

The former military strongman has positioned himself as the chief rival of the country’s incumbent Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama — a former military commander and coup leader himself — as Fijians prepare to head to the polls at some stage later this year.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES:  Sitiveni Rabuka’s vision on Fiji’s future
• The media and the coup leader: Sitiveni Rabuka – Pacific Journalism Review
• Other Fiji election reports

Rabuka, now 73, is on a campaign trail in Aotearoa New Zealand on a mission — to share with the Fijian diaspora how “politics will affect their relatives” back at home and raise funds for his campaign to topple Bainimarama’s FijiFirst government.

In an exclusive interview with RNZ Pacific’s senior journalist Koroi Hawkins, he spoke about his vision for a better Fiji, raising the living standards of the Fijian people, and why he is the man to return the country back to “the way the world should be.”

“I’m here to talk to the supporters who are here,” Rabuka said.

“We do not have a branch in New Zealand so most of our supporters here have not formed themselves into a branch or into a chapter and I’m just out here to talk to them. They’ve been very supportive on this journey and that’s why I’m here.”

Koroi Hawkins: Why is it important to be talking to people outside of Fiji for the elections?

Rabuka: It is very important to speak to the diaspora. Some of them are now [New Zealand] citizens and may not vote. But they have relatives in Fiji and politics will affect their relatives. It is good for them to know how things are, and how things could turn out if we do not have the change that we advocate.

KH: Is there a fundraising aspect to this overseas election campaigning as well?

Rabuka: That is also the case. Fiji is feeling the impacts of covid-19 and also the rising food prices and the reduction of employment opportunities, hours at work and things like that, has reduced our income earning capacities and so many of us have been relying on government handouts, which is not healthy for a nation. We would like to encourage people to find out their own alternative methods of coping with the crisis that we are now facing, health and economic, and also to communicate those back to those at home.

We are also here to thank the people for the remittances of $1.5 billion [that] came into Fiji over the last two years, and a lot of that came from New Zealand, Australia and America. We were grateful to the three governments of the United States of Australia and New Zealand for hosting the diaspora.

KH: One of your strongest campaign messages has been about poverty with estimates around almost 50 percent of Fijians are now living in hardship. How do you propose to deliver on this promise?

Rabuka: Those are universal metres that I applied and for Fiji it can be effectively much lower if we were to revert to our own traditional and customary ways of living. Unfortunately, many of the formerly rural dwellers have moved to the urban centres where you must be earning to be able to maintain a respectable and acceptable way of life and living standards and so on.

Those surveys and the questions were put out to mostly those in the informal settlement areas where the figures are very high. It is true that according to universal metres and measures, yes, we are going through very difficult times. And the only way to do that is to give them opportunities to earn more. Those that are living in the villages now can earn a lot more. Somebody sent out a message this morning, calculating the income per tonne of cassava and dalo; it is way more than what we get from sugar in the international market.

KH: This pandemic, it’s really exposed how dependent Fiji is on tourism. This really hit Fiji hard. What is your economic vision for Fiji?

Rabuka: We just don’t want to be relying totally on one cow providing the milk. We will need to be looking at other areas. We have to diversify our economy to be able to weather these economic storms when they come because we cannot foresee them. But what we can do is have something that can weather whatever happens. Whether it is straightforward health or effects of wars and crises in other parts of the world. Agriculture and fisheries and forestry, when you talk about these things it also reminds us of our responsibilities towards climate change. We have to have sustainable policies to make sure these areas we want to diversify into do not unfairly hurt the areas that we are trying to save and sustainably used when we consider climate change.

KH: Talking about agriculture, the goal seems to be always import substitution and attempts to do that so far have been mild. Even downstream processing also seems problematic. Are there any specific ways you see food for agriculture other than the things that have been tried not just in Fiji, but around the region that are not really taking a hold in a lot of Pacific countries?

Rabuka: I think it is the choices we have made. There is a big opportunity for us to go into downstream processing of our agricultural produce and use those to substitute for the imports we get. If you look at the impact on the grain market in the world as a result of the Ukrainian war. What else can we have in Fiji now or in other countries that can substitute the grain input into the diet. So those are the things that we need really need to be doing now.

There has been a lot of research done at the Koronivia Research Station and they are laying there in files stored away in the libraries and the archives. We need to go back to those and see what has been done. Very interesting story about the former the late president Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau when he went to Indonesia and he found a very big coconut. He wanted to bring that back to go and plant in Fiji and the people were so embarrassed to tell him that this thing was a result of research carried out in Fiji.

KH: Another big issue is education. We have heard a lot about student loans. You have talked about converting student loans to scholarships and forgiving student debt. Can you maybe speak a little bit more about that that promise? What exactly is that?

Rabuka: We would like to go back to the scholarships concept, enhance the education opportunities for those that are that are capable of furthering the education and also branching out or branching back into what has been dormant for some time now that TVET, technical and vocational education and training. Those are the things that we really need to be doing. Lately, there have been labour movement from Fiji to Australia, New Zealand, for basic agricultural processes of just picking up nuts and fruit and routes.

Those people who are coming out are capable of moving on in education to being engineers and carpenters and block layers and if they had the opportunity to further to go along those streams in in the education system. There is no need for them to be paying. The government really should be taking over those things that we did in the past. We cannot all be lawyers and accountants and auditors and doctors and pilots and so on. But there is so many, the bigger portion of the workforce goes into the practical work that is done daily.

KH: Just going back to the current student debt that is there. Would your policy be to forgive that debt? Or would you still be working out a way to recover it?

Rabuka: That would be part of our manifesto and we are not allowed to announce those areas of our manifesto without giving the financial and budgetary impacts of those.

KH: If you did become prime minister, you would be inheriting a country with the highest debt to GDP ratio that Fiji has ever seen is what the experts are saying. What would be your thoughts coming into that kind of a problematic situation?

Rabuka: We would have to find out how much is owed at the moment and if we were to forgive that, what does forgiving that mean? It means you forego your revenue that you are going to get from these students who are already qualified to do work and for them it means getting reduced salaries when they start working so that they can pay off loans. We have to look at all the combinations and find out which is the most, or the least painful way, of doing it.

It is not their fault. It is what the new government will inherit from the predecessors. Everybody will have to be called upon to tighten their belt, understand the situation, everybody getting a very high per capita burden of the national debt and tell them just how it is. [This is] where we are, this is how we have to get out of it and everybody needs to work together. That is why we need a very popular government. And that is why all the political parties are working very hard to get that support from the people.

KH: Turning to the politics. In 2018, you came within a millimetre of that finish line. Since then, a lot has changed. You ran with the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa) at the time. You have now formed your own party, the People’s Alliance. How confident are you about this election race given all those changes?

Rabuka: I think I am confident because there is a universal cry in Fiji for change. The people are looking for their best options on who is to bring the change, what sort of combinations, who are the people behind the brand, people with records in the private sector, also in politics and in the public sector, people who are who are determined to stay on Fiji and do what needs to be done.

There are so many overseas now who love Fiji so much. So many other people who could have been there in Fiji with us running the campaign in order to create a better Fiji, who are overseas. They have not been able to come freely back and with those in mind, we are determined to be the change and bring the change.

KH: One of the things you have talked about is reforming the Fiji Police Force. There has been documented history of problems within the police force. How would you plan to achieve that?

Rabuka: Just bring back the police in Fiji to be the professional body of law enforcement agencies that they had been in the past. We have the capacity, we have the people, we have the natural attributes to be good policemen and women. Get them back to that and avoid the influence of policing in non-democratic societies or the baton charge in every situation, putting it in an extreme term. But that is the sort of thing that we are beginning to see.

We have to reconsider where we send our police officers for training. They must be trained in regimes, in cities, and in countries and governments where we share the same values about law and order, about respecting the rights of citizens, having freedoms. Nobody is punished until they have been through the whole judicial system. You cannot punish somebody when you are arresting them.

KH: There has been a lot of work to try and improve things in policing in the Pacific. But there is a culture that persists, that this history of sort of brutality and “us and them” kind of mentality. How would we get past that in our policing?

Rabuka: We are still coming out of that culture. That was our native culture. We still have to get away from it into modern policing. You look at the way the tribal rules were carried out from that. Somebody’s offended the tribal laws, tribal chiefs, one solution: club them. We have to get away from that. And when we don’t concentrate on moving forward, we very easily fall back.

KH: What [would] a coalition with the National Federation Party look like?

Rabuka: We are going to form a coalition. It will be a two-party government. The Prime Minister is free to pick his ministers from both parties and the best qualified will be picked.

KH: Looking at your own political journey. It started very strongly pro-indigenous Fijian focus. Even with your evolution to your current standing, there are some non-indigenous Fijian voters who are unsure what the future would look like with you as prime minister. What is your message to these people about what Fiji will be like for them and under your prime ministership?

Rabuka: Well, it is like you see the cover of the book and now you are reading the book. I have a dream of what the Pope [John Paul II] saw when he came to Fiji; the way the world should be, a multiracial, vibrant society, where everybody is welcome, where everybody is contributing, everybody is going by their own thing and even unknowingly contributing to a very vibrant economy that will grow and grow and grow so that we are equal partners in the region with Australia, New Zealand, and a very significant part of the global economy.

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.

Two days before Berta Cáceres was killed in Honduras, a bank in the Netherlands released just over $1.7 million to a concrete company through an offshore account.

Two years earlier, the Dutch-state-owned bank FMO had signed on to finance the controversial Honduran Agua Zarca dam project. Led by a company called Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima, or DESA, the dam was the joint effort of David Castillo and Daniel Atala Midence, the company’s respective CEO and CFO. Cáceres, a renowned environmental activist and leader in the Indigenous Lenca community, was the driving force behind the protests against it.

A trove of Dutch and U.S. legal and financial documents shared with The Intercept reveal, for the first time, the flow of international funding in the days leading up to March 2, 2016, when a hit squad broke into Cáceres’s house and killed her. The bank provided the documents to two Dutch human rights lawyers, Wout Albers and Ron Rosenhart Rodriguez, who have spent the past two years representing Cáceres’s family and COPINH, the organization she co-founded, in a civil lawsuit that seeks to hold FMO accountable for its role in the Agua Zarca project. (The suit was first filed in the Netherlands in 2018; Albers and Rosenhart came on in 2020.)

In at least four instances, according to the records, the bank released funding to a company affiliated with Castillo and Atala that did not match the stated payee, routing the money through an offshore account with Deutsche Bank in New York City.

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An Indigenous leader prays during a spiritual ceremony before the start of a trial against one of the alleged masterminds of the killing of Berta Cáceres, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on April 5, 2021.

Photo: Elmer Martinez/AP

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, center, visits a workshop of the “Fempower Your Growth Program” at the Dutch development bank FMO in The Hague on Sept. 11, 2019.

Photo: Wesley de Wit/AFP via Getty Images

Berta Zúñiga Cáceres, daughter of the slain environmental activist Berta Cáceres, addresses a crowd after testifying at the Organization of American States on April 5, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Members of the Military Police escort David Castillo — president of Desarrollos Energeticos S.A, or DESA — to court to listen to his sentencing for murder of Honduran environmentalist and Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on July 5, 2021.

Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images

They forgave the loan on their way out, essentially gifting the dam effort with over $6.1 million dollars.

An exterior view of Deutsche Bank U.S. headquarters, seen on July 8, 2019, in New York City.

Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

The forces behind Agua Zarca belong to a broad network that encompasses some of the wealthiest people in Honduras.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jared Olson.

An anthropologist by training (Ph.D., Columbia), I found my interests (largely psychoanalytic) disparaged in the then-ideologically confused climate of academic rivalries.  I wrote two books, but to my surprise found teaching more satisfying.  As an adjunct at several universities, I was free to teach in my own way–without the usual harassment of departmental committees, departmental factionalism, and the customary low-profile cowering that precedes the award of tenure.  As an unexpected benefit (since adjuncts receive no material benefit-coverage), I found my intellectual horizons continually broadening and deepening as I volunteered to teach classical sociological theory, sociology of religion, “social problems,” and interdisciplnary Core courses which  included Plato, Montaigne, Huxley, Kafka, Camus, Buber, and Annie Dillard–just to name a few.

But my enthusiasm was eventually worn down by the ridiculously low-wages (nowadays well-documented by innumerable good books, as well as successful union representation).  Living in New Jersey was expensive.  I taught at least 15 courses per year, and was “lucky” to make $30,000.  I decided to move to the northwest corner of the state, the New Jersey Highlands, where my beloved Appalachian Trail stretched across ridges from the Delaware Water Gap to a cliff offering a panoramic vista of the 10-mile long Greenwood Lake (the “Grand View”).  (Standing at that spot the day after 9/11, I saw giant plumes of smoke drifting upward from a pile of debris.)  So, up on the Bearfort Ridge (where bears were a not uncommon sight), surrounded on all sides by forest and ascending trails, 100 yards from the AT, I rented a small, non-insulated house (where I nonetheless survived the snowbound winter).  Wildlife encounters were frequent and fascinating: not only bears, but foxes, turkeys, porcupines, and timber rattlers.

I greeted every day with a quick climb up a ridge trail, which ascended even further to a remote lake which overlooked many towns and distant highways.  Not unlike Thoreau, I found a sufficient variety of trails, some rarely frequented, to make my afternoon treks full of the unexpected.  In those days, physically well-conditioned, I often felt a peace-of-mind and sense of freedom on those hikes which I now find sadly elusive.

True, on most days, I was still teaching–traveling congested interstates to my courses, which were becoming more frustrating and less satisfying.

After 15-plus years of “earning my living” in this manner, I had come to a reckoning.  I resolved to resign, leave New Jersey, and try a year of “conscientious non-participation” from the mindless consumerism and vulgar careerism I despised.  A year for open-air, daily expeditions, mostly on different sections of the AT, was what I envisaged.  I had $10,000 to work with.  Could I live for a year on that?

Selling off my few sticks of furniture and packing my voluminous supply of books and CDs, I headed South.  My destination? Damascus, Virginia, little more than a hamlet of 900 folks, nestled in the southwest edge of the state, on the southern flank of the Blue Ridge.  “Trail-town USA”, former thru-hikers had chosen this pleasant little town as an annual meeting-place, a couple of days to renew acquaintances and share reminiscences.  The town itself is little more than a short main street, occupied by small businesses and small churches (as well as a few bungalows reinvented as “B-and-Bs” for the hikers).  I rented a tiny house where, stepping outside every morning, I could cross the rickety Beaver Dam bridge and instantly find myself climbing the steep, winding trail of Holston Mountain, which led to a gently ascending ridge which followed the AT all the way to the Tennessee state-line (about 4 and ½ miles).  Resting on a log and eating apples, I reveled in the peaceful silence, mountain breezes, and distant views of cows grazing languidly across vast open pastures.

Hikers descending from Tennessee into the town found that the AT followed the main street, where they could stop to eat as well as buy any needed gear at the trail-goods store.  Then continuing, they would quickly climb a rickety, wooden staircase back into the forest–many relentless in their quest to make it all the way to the end-point at Mt. Katahdin, Maine. On very hot days, I would drive up the adjacent steep, winding highway of what is known as the Mt. Rogers Recreation Area (Jefferson National Forest), said to include some 400 miles of hiking trails.  It was not only much cooler up at 4500’, but the mountain top was a “bald” — a vast, sprawling grassland where wild ponies of unknown origins were sometimes sighted.

After several months, I decided to move some 50 miles northeast, where the Roanoke area converged with some of the most scenic stretches of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Appalachia.  I rented the top floor of a long-defunct college building, drafty but solid granite.  In the 1970s, a young Annie Dillard, recent grad of nearby Hollins College and something of a nature-poet, effectively captured moments of wondrous observation, often on the micro-level of the local creek.  Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, and, teaching a literature course for many years, it was a book I regularly assigned.  Now here I was, serendipitously, looking down at the gently flowing Tinker Creek from my third-floor window.  (It constituted the boundary of the backyard.)  Looking straight ahead, I could see the sprawling Tinker Mountain–since Dillard’s time, defaced by cell towers–which is really an AT ridge trail linking the Blue Ridge with the Alleghenies some 20 miles away.  (Macafee Knob, a flat-rock overlook of the valley below, was the spot where Redford and Nolte ate lunch in the movie Walk in the Woods, based on Bill Bryson’s humorous if somewhat sophomoric book.)  I tried to find the approximate spot where Dillard had lived in those days–some small house, in the backwoods between Hollins and Daleville–but found the general locale now heavily suburbanized with houses.

On some days, driving down the abandoned US 11 (replaced by the interstate), I would venture onto gravel or dirt side roads, some of which went nowhere and some of which ended in tiny settlements of simple shanties, collapsed barns, and decaying 1940s roadsters which no one had bothered to remove.  Other times, studying old ordnance maps, I would try to pinpoint remote, forgotten trailheads which, with some strenuous climbing, might lead to the top of the Blue Ridge (generally 3000’ to 4000’ elevation).  Instead, I ended up driving the roadway which led up to the Parkway–which, on weekdays, was empty of car traffic.  The AT followed alongside for dozens of miles, affording pleasant day-hikes with 360-degree panoramas of checkerboard farmland stretching into the far distance below.

My year had ended.  Thoreau, visiting Concord and his mother for a fresh-cooked meal almost daily, did not noticeably suffer loneliness.  But his Walden, inspirational and exhortatory, remains surprisingly relevant in its critique of unnecessary “business” and the consequent loss of a pantheistic (eco-psychological) sensibility.  In my own way, I had tried to live an open-air life, exuberantly affirming the free play of nature in the wild.  I sought escape, not only from a crass, exploitative system of daily “spiritual pollution” (especially the media), but from my own self-obsessed “problems.”  My delightful, ever-varied observations of wildlife in the Appalachian mountains and forest constituted, I believe, a consciousness transcending the daily detritus of human folly and deluded desperation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ – CC BY-SA 2.0

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of CBS News have unleashed a fury of renewed interest in the work of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Last Thursday, Woodward and Costa set off a political firestorm when they released the contents of emails that Ginni Thomas, wife of the sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, had sent to President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in 2020, urging him to overturn the Biden election win and attempting to steer his efforts in that regard.

A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through January 20, 2021 when Biden was sworn in.

Much of the current news debate around the emails is focusing on whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving groups with which his wife is involved and whether the Select Committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas to testify. While those are certainly important issues, what has thus far been ignored is the smoking gun trail that leads directly to the doorstep of billionaire and right-wing Republican political mastermind, Charles Koch, the Chairman, CEO (and majority owner with the heirs of his deceased brother David) of the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries.

Wall Street On Parade has previously documented that at least three of the front groups that fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump and that actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event at the Capitol, were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.

The smoking gun in the Ginni Thomas email thread occurs in an email dated November 10, 2020 when she tells Meadows to “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta.” Thomas is clearly referring to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, and lawyer, Cleta Mitchell.

Cleta Mitchell is best known in the Trump election saga as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him this: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call made the news cycle.)

But Cleta Mitchell’s relationship with Ginni Thomas dates back at least a decade earlier – and not in a good way.

Cleta Mitchell had filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.

Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas. Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc. on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.

On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.

Liberty Central had the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.

Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.

Mitchell, herself, was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

Mitchell is listed on the 2018 federal tax filing for Steve Bannon’s charity, Citizens of the American Republic, as an officer of the organization, holding the position of Secretary. Bannon and others were charged in August of 2021 by the Department of Justice with bilking donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through that charity.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, was one of those pushing the narrative on television that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lawyers and staff of Foley & Lardner were the third largest donor to Johnson’s campaign committees since 2015. Employees and officials of Koch Industries ranked fifth.

There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. Those Republican Senators were: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.

Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, whom Ginni Thomas enlisted in the White House to help overturn Biden’s election win, was previously a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina from 2013 to 2020. He also received campaign funding from the Koch Industries PAC throughout his time in Congress.

Charles Koch is usually very careful in keeping an arm’s length relationship between himself and his political operations. But on at least one occasion Koch conducted a dinner meeting directly with sitting Justice Clarence Thomas at a private club in California.

In January 2008, Justice Thomas attended an all-expenses-paid, four-day trip to the Koch brothers’ semi-annual political gathering in the Palm Springs area of California. (According to his 2008 disclosure form and the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas’ expenses for that trip were paid by the Federalist Society, a conservative nonprofit that Koch foundations have generously supported.)

Justice Thomas’ trip to the Koch event occurred in the same year that the Citizens Unitedcase was accepted by the Supreme Court.  The Court accepts less than two percent of all cases appealed to it.

Wall Street On Parade was previously able to confirm with Scott Markley, Public Information Specialist at the Supreme Court, that during that January 2008 visit to the Koch political gathering, Justice Thomas was hosted by Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club where Charles Koch is a member.

The Citizens United decision did not pass the smell test when it was approved in a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices wrote a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior, writing that the majority had ruled on issues that were not even legally before the court.

The money that the Koch political machine pumped into putting Trump in the Oval Office quickly paid big dividends in his first term (and made it clear as to why Charles Koch would have wanted to see a second Trump term).

Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since sacked the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.

Once Trump was settled in the Oval Office, a Koch front group, then known as Freedom Partners, mapped out the agenda it expected Trump to march to. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the group listed the laws and regulations it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. The Trump administration dutifully marched to the beat. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord – done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy – done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency – done.

By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. Freedom Partners has since disbanded but when we last took a look at the nonprofit in July 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries.

It’s time for the House Select Committee to subpoena not just Ginni Thomas and Cleta Mitchell. It’s time to hear from Charles Koch directly on how so much money bearing his fingerprints ended up fomenting the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

There will never be a better time than now for the American people to finally get at the truth.

This originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pam Martens - Russ Martens.