Truthdig https://www.truthdig.com/ An Independent, Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Mon, 18 Mar 2024 22:50:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Truthdig https://www.truthdig.com/ 32 32 When ‘More Police Training’ Goes Wrong https://www.truthdig.com/articles/when-more-police-training-goes-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=when-more-police-training-goes-wrong https://www.truthdig.com/articles/when-more-police-training-goes-wrong/#respond Mon, 18 Mar 2024 20:04:46 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=294014 Why did New Jersey pay a racist ex-cop $75,000 to “educate” its officers on traffic stops?

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Street Cop is a private police training company that bills itself as being in the business of “properly educating police officers on what they CAN do.” According to a recent report by the New Jersey Comptroller, that list of can-do actions includes making sure camera-wielding citizens are “pepper sprayed, fucking tased, windows broken out, motherfucker,” in the words of the company’s founder, Dennis Benigno. This advice was delivered during a 2021 presentation to working cops that cost the State of New Jersey $75,000.

At the same talk, Benigno explained that there are too few pretexts currently being used for a traffic stop. New Jersey police were encouraged to stop and aggressively question drivers who are too nicely dressed while on a long trip; driving a minivan without a child seat; have allowed food wrappers to collect on the floor of the vehicle; have a lawyer’s business card visible; or who attempt to place calls to friends or family during a traffic stop. 

Last week, after the contents of the Street Cop talk became public, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin apologized, saying the conference taught inaccurate and offensive lessons. “I’ve made it very clear to all 38,000 sworn (New Jersey) officers and their leadership that no one should be attending Street Cop Training in the State of New Jersey,” he said, adding that the officers who’d attended the 2021 conference would undergo retraining.

The New Jersey controversy comes amid increased public scrutiny of police practices following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of police. In response to demands for more training, departments have turned to private training companies. As demonstrated by the Street Cop fiasco, however, the groups are not subject to regulations. 

“Some of this training is being provided to individual officers at a regional level at their own personal cost, indicating an appetite for more violence-centered and potentially discriminatory training by rank and file officers.”

“These private programs often evade the usual public scrutiny from local officials and independent watchdogs,” CUNY sociologist and policing expert Alex Vitale tells Truthdig. “In addition, some of this training is being provided to individual officers at a regional level at their own personal cost, indicating an appetite for more violence-centered and potentially discriminatory training by rank and file officers.”

This assessment aligns with the details of the Comptroller’s report on the Street Cop presentation, which found that the conference “included over 100 discriminatory and harassing remarks by speakers and instructors, with repeated references to speakers’ genitalia, lewd gestures, and demeaning quips about women and minorities.” 

One featured speaker, a sergeant, likened a Black man to a monkey. The presenters joked about anal cavity searches, an action banned in many departments and that fits the FBI definition of rape. The report observes that Street Cop promoted among police an “us-against-them” warrior mentality toward the civilians they are charged with protecting.

A CBS investigation, meanwhile, found that Benigno had been disciplined three times in five years while working as an officer in New Jersey, once for using a racial slur about a Black person.

The company appears to be going strong, despite the bad press. On March 18, an unknown number of officers in Albany, New York, paid $299 to hear Benigno lecture further on “Pro-Active Police Tactics.” The ad for the class was edited like an action-movie trailer, with dramatic music and video of explosions. It’s stamped at the end with the Street Cop logo of an eagle draped in the “thin blue line” flag and the Latin phrase Situs Vincere (“win, conquer, defeat.”) Electric guitar wails as the eagle drops and an amped up Benigno paces around an auditorium stage explaining all of the red flags they should be looking for during a traffic stop.

“He’s smoking! What did I tell you about smoking?”

“He’s rubbing his hands. Right? Nervous, he’s a wreck.”

“He’s left his windshield wipers on, even though it’s not raining anymore! These things just keep dragging back and forth across the windshield. WHY is this happening!?”

City and state police departments should be asking the same thing about the successful rise of groups like Street Cop.

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We Cannot Transition to Renewable Energy Without a Plan https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-cannot-transition-to-renewable-energy-without-a-plan/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=we-cannot-transition-to-renewable-energy-without-a-plan https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-cannot-transition-to-renewable-energy-without-a-plan/#respond Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:11:05 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293990 Radical societal transformation is inevitable; a plan could make a difference between catastrophe and progress.

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The transition to renewable energy is inevitable given the current climate crisis and the fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource. To make the shift, a detailed plan is required to indicate the first steps and anticipate challenges in allocating resources and the policies needed to achieve the outcome. Germany has arguably accomplished more toward the transition to renewable energy than any other nation, largely because it has such a plan—the “Energiewende,” which seeks a 60 percent reduction in all fossil fuel use by 2050 and a 50 percent reduction in primary energy use through efficiency in power generation, especially for buildings and the transport sector.

What follows are some components of a basic plan that can be adapted according to each country or state and adjusted for contingencies.

Level One: The ‘Easy’ Stuff

The easiest way to kick-start the transition is to switch to solar and wind power for electricity generation by building lots of panels and turbines, respectively, while phasing out coal. Distributing generation and storage of these energy sources (rooftop solar panels with home- or office-scale battery packs) will help. Replacing natural gas will be harder because gas-fired “peaking” plants are often used to buffer the intermittency of industrial-scale wind and solar inputs to the grid.

Electricity accounted for less than a quarter of all final energy used in the United States in 2022. Since solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal produce electricity, it makes sense to electrify even more of our energy usage—heating and cooling buildings with electric air-source heat pumps and cooking with electric induction stoves, for example.

The easiest way to kick-start the transition is to switch to solar and wind power for electricity generation by building lots of panels and turbines, respectively, while phasing out coal.

Transportation represents a large swath of energy consumption, mostly due to the growing number of personal cars. As of 2021, there were 250 million gasoline-fueled automobiles. While we are busy replacing these with electric vehicles, we can easily and cheaply promote walking, bicycling, and public transit.

Substantial retrofitting is needed for energy efficiency. Building codes should be strengthened to mandate net-zero or near-net-zero energy performance for new construction. Zoning codes and development policies should encourage infill development, multifamily buildings, and clustered mixed-use development. Using more energy-efficient appliances will also help.

The food system is a significant energy consumer. Increasing the market share of organic local foods can dramatically lower the amount of fossil fuels used to manufacture fertilizers as well as in food processing, and in transportation. We can also sequester enormous amounts of atmospheric carbon in topsoil by promoting farming and land management practices that build soil rather than deplete it.

By our calculations, these actions could reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent in 10 to 20 years.

Level Two: The Harder Stuff

Solar and wind technologies provide energy intermittently. When they become dominant, we must adapt to this with substantial amounts of grid-level energy storage and a major grid overhaul to get the electricity sector to 80 percent renewables. We’ll also need to time our energy usage to coincide with sunlight and wind energy availability.

The transport sector will require extensive and costly restructuring. Densified cities and suburbs can be reoriented to public transit, bicycling, and walking. All motorized human transport can be electric, with more public transit and intercity passenger rail links. Heavy trucks could run on fuel cells, but it would be better to minimize trucking by expanding freight rail. Sails would increase the fuel efficiency of shipping, but relocalization or deglobalization of manufacturing would be a necessary co-strategy to reduce the need for shipping.

Although much of the manufacturing sector runs on electricity, many raw materials used during the manufacturing processes either are fossil fuels or require fossil fuels for mining or transformation. By replacing fossil fuel-based materials and by increasing the recycling of nonrenewable materials, we can reduce dependency on mining.

If we do all this and build far more solar panels and wind turbines, we could, by our calculations, achieve roughly an 80 percent reduction in emissions.

Level Three: The Really Hard Stuff

Eliminating the last 20 percent of our current fossil fuel consumption will take even more time, research, investment, and behavioral adaptation. One example is that we currently use enormous amounts of cement in construction with concrete. Cement-making needs high heat, which could theoretically be supplied by sunlight, electricity, or hydrogen—but only with a complete redesign of the process.

This is the time to make all food production organic and to ensure that agriculture builds topsoil. Eliminating all fossil fuels will entail redesigning food systems to minimize processing, packaging, and transport.

Eliminating the last 20 percent of our current fossil fuel consumption will take even more time, research, investment, and behavioral adaptation.

The communications sector—which uses mining and high-heat processes to produce phones, computers, servers, wires, photo-optic cables, cell towers, and more—presents a challenge. The only good long-term solution here is to make devices that last and then repair, fully recycle, and remanufacture them only when absolutely needed. The internet could be maintained via low-tech, asynchronous networks now being pioneered in poor nations, using relatively little power.

In the transport sector, scrapping petroleum will require costly substitutes (fuel cells or biofuels). Global trade will inevitably shrink. With no ready substitute for aviation fuels, we may have to relegate aviation to a specialty transport mode. Planes running on hydrogen or biofuels are an expensive possibility, as are dirigibles filled with (nonrenewable) helium.

On land, paving and repairing roads without oil-based asphalt is possible, though it will require a complete redesign of processes and equipment.

If we can do all this, we can get beyond zero carbon emissions; with carbon sequestration in soils and forests, we could reduce atmospheric carbon each year.

Scale Is the Biggest Challenge

It is possible to design a renewable energy system that 1) has minimal environmental impacts, 2) is reliable, and 3) is affordable—as long as relatively modest amounts of energy are needed. Once current U.S. scales of energy production and usage are assumed, something has to give.

We sacrifice the environment (due to the vast tracts of land needed for siting wind turbines and solar panels) for the purposes of reliability (because solar and wind are intermittent) and affordability (because of the need for storage or capacity redundancy).

Power is another hurdle: massive ships and airplanes require energy-dense fuels. Renewable energy resources can supply the needed power, but scale is crucial. While building and operating a few hydrogen-powered airplanes for specialized purposes would be technically feasible, operating fleets of thousands of commercial planes with hydrogen fuel is daunting from both a technical and economic perspective.

It’s Not All About Solar and Wind

Solar and wind are the favored energy sources of the future; equipment prices are falling, the rate of installation continues to be high, and there is considerable potential for further growth. However, their inherent intermittency will pose increasing challenges as they become more dominant. Other renewable energy sources—hydropower, geothermal, and biomass—can more readily supply controllable baseload power, but these sources have much less opportunity for growth owing to limits on siting, geology, and supply.

Hopes for high levels of wind and solar energy supply are driven mainly by the assumption that industrial societies can and should maintain very high levels of energy use. The challenge is always scale: If energy usage in the United States could be scaled back significantly (70 to 90 percent), then a reliable all-renewable energy regime would become much easier to envision and cheaper to engineer.

We Must Adapt to Less Energy

Considering the speed and scale of emission reductions required to avert climate catastrophe, people in industrialized countries will have less energy than they are used to consuming.

Despite our understandable wish to maintain current levels of comfort and convenience, it’s worth keeping an ecological footprint analysis in mind.

Considering the speed and scale of emission reductions required to avert climate catastrophe, people in industrialized countries will have less energy than they are used to consuming.

According to calculations by the Global Footprint Network, the productive land and water available to each person on Earth to live sustainably in 2019 was 1.6 global hectares. Meanwhile, the per capita ecological footprint of the United States was 8.1 global hectares per capita in 2018 (if the entire world population lived at this footprint, it would require five planet Earths).

Clearly, we should aim for a sustainable energy and material consumption level, which, on average, is significantly lower than at present. If we don’t achieve this, we will eventually be caught short, with significant economic and political fallout.

What should we do to prepare for energy reduction? Look to California as a model: Since the 1970s, its economy has grown while its per capita electricity demand has not. The state has encouraged cooperation between research institutions, manufacturers, utilities, and regulators to determine how to keep demand from growing by changing how electricity is used.

Consumerism Is a Problem, Not a Solution

Conservation beats consumption in the dawning post-fossil fuel era. If it becomes more difficult and costly to produce and distribute goods, people will have to use them longer and repurpose, remanufacture, and recycle them wherever possible. The switch from consumerism to conservation will transform America’s culture, economy, and government policy.

If it becomes more difficult and costly to produce and distribute goods, people will have to use them longer and repurpose, remanufacture, and recycle them wherever possible.

The renewable economy will likely be slower and more local. Economic growth may reverse itself as per capita consumption shrinks. If we are to avert a financial crash, we may need a different economic organizing principle. In her 2014 book on climate change, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein asks whether capitalism can be preserved in the era of climate change. Although it probably can, in the absence of overall growth, profits for a few will have to come at a cost to everyone else, a situation we have seen in the years since the financial crash of 2008.

Population Growth Makes Everything Harder

Population is a climate and energy issue. If energy and materials are likely to dwindle in the decades ahead, population growth will mean even less consumption per capita. On a net basis (births minus deaths), we are gaining 83 million humans each year—according to a 2017 UN report—an unprecedented number, even if the percentage rate of growth is slowing.

Policymakers can help reduce the population by promoting family planning, public persuasion, raising the educational level of poor women, and giving women complete control over their reproductive rights. (For detailed recommendations, consult population organizations such as Population Institute and Population Media Center.)

Fossil Fuels Are Too Valuable to Allocate Solely Based on Market Forces

For non-energy purposes, industrial societies will need fossil fuels for some applications until the final stages of the energy transition—and possibly beyond. Crucially, we need fossil fuels for industrial processes and transportation to build and install renewable energy systems. We also need them for agriculture, manufacturing, and general transportation until robust renewable energy–based technologies are available. This poses several problems.

As the best of our remaining fossil fuels are depleted, we extract and burn ever lower grade and harder to get coal, oil, and natural gas. Virtually all new production prospects involve tight oil, tar sands, ultraheavy oil, deepwater oil, or Arctic oil—all of which entail high production costs and high environmental risk compared to conventional oil found and produced during the 20th century.

Refining heavier, dirtier fuels (in the case of tar sands) creates ever more co-pollutants, with disproportionate health impacts and burden on low-income communities. The fact that the fossil fuel industry will require ever-increasing levels of investment per unit of energy yielded has gloomy implications for the energy transition: the deteriorating fossil fuel sector will need a large chunk of society’s available capital to maintain current services, just as the build-out of renewables will require even more capital.

The danger is that fossil fuels will become so costly we’ll no longer be able to afford the transition project.

Industrial societies will need fossil fuels for some applications until the final stages of the energy transition—and possibly beyond.

But we cannot accelerate the transition too much. Rushing the transition will mean an overall increase in emissions—unless we reduce other current uses of fossil fuels. To fuel the transition without increasing overall greenhouse gas emissions, we may have to deprive some sectors of the economy of fossil fuels before adequate renewable substitutes are available. This would mean reducing overall energy consumption and the economic benefits of energy use while taking care to minimize the impact on already vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities.

We are entering a period of fossil fuel triage. Rather than allocating fossil fuels simply on a market basis (those who pay for them get them), it would be fairer to find ways to allocate fuels based on the strategic importance of the societal sectors dependent on them and on the relative ease and timeliness of transitioning these sectors to renewable substitutes.

Agriculture, for example, might be deemed the highest priority for continued fossil fuel allocations, with commercial air travel assuming a far lower priority. Perhaps we need not have just one price on carbon but different prices for different uses. Not only do we see scant discussion of this prospect in energy policy literature, but few governments even acknowledge the need for a carbon budget. The political center of gravity, particularly in the United States, will have to shift significantly before decision-makers can acknowledge the need for fossil fuel triage.

As fossil fuels become more costly to extract, there may be an ever greater temptation to use our available energy and investment capital merely to maintain existing consumption patterns, putting off any effort to effect the transition. If we procrastinate too much, we will reap the worst possible outcomes—climate chaos, a gutted economy, and no way to build a bridge to a renewable energy future.

Everything Is Connected

Throughout the energy transition, great attention will have to be given to the interdependent linkages and supply chains connecting various sectors (communications, mining, and transport knit together most of what we do in industrial societies). Some links in supply chains will be hard to substitute, and chains can be brittle: a problem with even one link can imperil the entire chain.

Consider, for example, the materials required to manufacture and operate a wind turbine. The components come from different manufacturing sectors in various places in the world.

Planning will need to take such interdependencies into account. As every ecologist knows, you can’t do just one thing.

This Really Changes Everything

Energy transitions change societies from bottom to top and from inside out. From a public relations standpoint, it may be helpful to give politicians or the public the impression that life will go on as before while we unplug coal power plants and plug-in solar panels. Still, the reality will probably be quite different.

During historic energy transitions, economies and political systems underwent profound metamorphoses. The agricultural revolution and the fossil-fueled industrial revolution constituted societal watersheds. We are on the cusp of a transformation that is every bit as decisive.

If the renewable energy transition is successful, we will achieve savings in ongoing energy expenditures needed for each increment of economic production, and we may be rewarded with a quality of life that is actually preferable to our current one.

We will enjoy a much more stable climate and greatly reduced health and environmental impacts from energy production activities. However, converting to 100 percent renewable energy will not solve other environmental issues such as deforestation, land degradation, and species extinctions.

The agricultural revolution and the fossil-fueled industrial revolution constituted societal watersheds. We are on the cusp of a transformation that is every bit as decisive.

Possibly, the most challenging aspect of this transition is its implication for economic growth. Whereas the cheap, abundant energy of fossil fuels enabled the development of a consumption-oriented growth economy, renewable energy will likely be unable to sustain such an economy.

Rather than planning for continued, unending expansion, policymakers must begin to imagine what a functional post-growth economy could look like. Among other things, the planned obsolescence of manufactured goods must end in favor of far more durable products that can be reused, repaired, remanufactured, or recycled indefinitely.

It seems wise to channel society’s efforts toward no-regrets strategies—efforts that shift expectations, emphasize quality of life over consumption, and reinforce community resilience. Even though it may be impossible to envision the end result of the renewable energy transition, we must seek to understand its scope and general direction.

Our descendants will inhabit a renewable world that works differently from ours. Whether it will be better or worse depends on our current decisions. The sooner we address the most obvious and pressing decisions (starting with a mandatory global cap on carbon emissions), the earlier we can anticipate the succeeding waves of problems and choices.

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One in Three Children Under Two in Northern Gaza Acutely Malnourished https://www.truthdig.com/articles/one-in-three-children-under-two-in-northern-gaza-acutely-malnourished/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=one-in-three-children-under-two-in-northern-gaza-acutely-malnourished https://www.truthdig.com/articles/one-in-three-children-under-two-in-northern-gaza-acutely-malnourished/#respond Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:01:42 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293982 Malnutrition among children is “reaching devastating and unprecedented levels in the Gaza Strip due to the war and restrictions on aid delivery," UNICEF said.

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Around one-third of children under two in northern Gaza are now suffering from acute malnutrition, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund announced on Friday.

That’s double the percentage of children under two who suffered from acute malnutrition in January, as the rate jumped from 15.6-31% in one month.

“The speed at which this catastrophic child malnutrition crisis in Gaza has unfolded is shocking, especially when desperately needed assistance has been at the ready just a few miles away,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.

The UNICEF data came from screenings it conducted with its partners in February. While the rates of malnutrition are higher in the north, no part of Gaza remains untouched. As a whole, the agency concluded that “malnutrition among children is spreading fast and reaching devastating and unprecedented levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the war and ongoing restrictions on aid delivery.”

“The speed at which this catastrophic child malnutrition crisis in Gaza has unfolded is shocking, especially when desperately needed assistance has been at the ready just a few miles away.”

A full 28% of children in Khan Younis in central Gaza have acute malnutrition, while in Rafah, around 10% suffered from acute malnutrition by the end of February. That was also double the 5% who suffered from acute malnutrition in January in the southern city. In the north, as many as 25% of children under five also suffer from acute malnutrition, up from 13%. The new figures come as humanitarian groups and U.N. agencies have been warning about potential famine in the Gaza Strip for months.

UNICEF also found in February that 4.5% of children in shelters and health centers in northern Gaza suffer from severe wasting, the most serious and potentially fatal form of malnutrition, for which the necessary treatment is not on hand. In Khan Younis, more than 10% of the malnourished children have severe wasting. Even in Rafah, the number of children under two with severe wasting more than quadrupled from 1% to over 4% between January and the end of February.

In total, at least 23 children have died from starvation or dehydration in northern Gaza in the last few weeks alone, UNICEF said. Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza has been particularly devastating for children as a whole, killing around 13,450 out of a total death toll of more than 31,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm that children will die due to malnutrition and disease since the beginning of the war,” Save the Children UK said on social media on Saturday. “Our worst fears have now come true. These man-made conditions continue to deteriorate toward famine and will continue to take innocent children’s lives.”

Lucia Elmi, UNICEF’s special representative in the Palestinian territories, toldThe New York Times that children were declining at such alarming rates because the available water, bread, and flour was not enough to provide the nutrition they need.

“They need protein, they need vitamins, they need fresh products, and they need micronutrients, and all of this has been completely missing,” Elmi said last week. “That’s why the deterioration has been so fast, so rapid, and at this scale.”

Dominic Allen, the United Nations Population Fund representative for Palestine, told reporters on Friday that everyone he spoke to Gaza was “gaunt, emaciated, hungry.”

“The situation is beyond catastrophic,” he said.

“Our worst fears have now come true. These man-made conditions continue to deteriorate toward famine and will continue to take innocent children’s lives.”

Russell said that UNICEF had not been able to acquire the supplies it needed to properly treat malnourished children. Humanitarian groups have criticized Israel for making aid deliveries more difficult by searching every truck that enters the strip and rejecting whole shipments because they contained items like children’s scissors or wooden instead of cardboard boxes for toys. In multiple instances, the Israeli military has fired on on aid convoys and on people gathering to receive aid, killing scores.

“We have repeatedly attempted to deliver additional aid and we have repeatedly called for the access challenges we have faced for months to be addressed. Instead, the situation for children is getting worse by each passing day. Our efforts in providing life-saving aid are being hampered by unnecessary restrictions, and those are costing children their lives,” Russell said.

Ultimately, Russell continued, the only way to properly feed and treat Gaza’s children is for Israel to stop its attack on the strip.

“An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering,” Russell concluded. “We also need multiple land border crossings that allow aid to be reliably delivered at scale, including to northern Gaza, along with the security assurances and unimpeded passage needed to distribute that aid, without delays or access impediments.”

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Big Pharma Dems Are Standing in the Way of Lower Drug Prices https://www.truthdig.com/articles/big-pharma-dems-are-standing-in-the-way-of-lower-drug-prices/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=big-pharma-dems-are-standing-in-the-way-of-lower-drug-prices https://www.truthdig.com/articles/big-pharma-dems-are-standing-in-the-way-of-lower-drug-prices/#respond Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:52:41 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293972 As Medicare drug-price negotiations take shape, Democrats in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry want to limit the number of medicines regulators can target.

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The following article was first reported and published by The Lever, a reader-supported investigative news outlet that holds the powerful accountable.

While President Joe Biden is using Medicare to lower the cost of a handful of overpriced drugs and wants to expand the practice to hundreds more, some of Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats are working to do the opposite. 

After the pharmaceutical industry unleashed a $1.5 million bipartisan donation blitz, members of Biden’s own party have joined with Republican lawmakers to try to limit the number of drugs regulators can cut prices for in the future — an initiative Donald Trump is actively campaigning on in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.

Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (Calif.), Wiley Nickel (N.C.), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) and Donald Davis (N.C.) are each co-sponsoring at least one of several proposed bills that would limit regulators’ ability to negotiate down prices of drugs covered by the Medicare government insurance program. The legislation would erode the drug-pricing reforms included in the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — efforts that PetersNickel, and Gottheimer supported. (Davis had not yet been elected to Congress.) 

The four, who all hail from states with a major biotech or drug-industry presence, have together raked in more than $300,000 from pharmaceutical and health-products interests during the 2023-2024 congressional session. Gottheimer is reportedly eyeing a 2025 gubernatorial run in New Jersey, home to the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co

The eleven Republicans signed onto the bills have received $1.2 million in total from the same industries.

One of the bills, the Optimizing Research Progress Hope and News (ORPHAN) Cures Act, would exclude critical drugs for rare diseases from these price negotiations. Two other bills, the Maintaining Investments in New Innovation (MINI) Act and the Ensuring Pathways to Innovative Cures (EPIC) Act, would delay the process for many other medications. 

The four, who all hail from states with a major biotech or drug-industry presence, have together raked in more than $300,000 from pharmaceutical and health-products interests during the 2023-2024 congressional session. 

If these bills pass, experts worry it would degrade the power of Biden’s drug price-negotiation efforts and lead to continued price gouging for life-saving medicines. 

“The price negotiations, in the grand scheme of things, will improve affordability and improve access for Medicare beneficiaries,” Jeromie Ballreich, a health economist at Johns Hopkins University, told The Lever. “[But] ultimately pharmaceutical companies recognize that price negotiation is going to reduce their prices, reduce their revenue, reduce their profit, and they are in the business of making money.” 

Biden is pushing to expand provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that targeted pharmaceutical companies’ long history of unregulated price hikes. While the current measure allows Medicare to negotiate the price of 160 drugs by 2034, Biden said in his State of the Union address that he wants regulators to increase that number to 500 drugs over the next decade. Trump, meanwhile, may try to weaken these reforms as part of his Project 2025 reelection plan to remake the executive office. 

Lawmakers and their industry backers argue that the number of drugs up for price negotiation should be limited, since such interventions will lead to lower profits for industry, which in turn will stifle innovation for essential drugs. This argument is particularly prevalent in the rare-disease space, because developing these complicated drugs requires risky investments. Yet experts counter that pharmaceutical manufacturers will continue to make billions from rare-disease drugs and other medications, even after price negotiations.

Powerful pharmaceutical companies are also taking to the courts to try to block current drug price negotiations. Drugmakers including Bristol Myers Squibb and Novartis have submitted lawsuits in New Jersey arguing that existing Medicare price negotiations, which currently involve 10 popular and costly drugs, violate the First, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution. 

Lobbying groups for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry spent a combined $36 million on lobbying on the Inflation Reduction Act and other matters last year, according to lobbying records. The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a lobbying group representing the biotech industry, lobbied specifically on the ORPHAN Cures Act and MINI Act, both of which were introduced in September 2023. 

Profits From Rare Diseases

To help encourage the sort of risky research and investments required for medicines that treat specific rare and intractable diseases, the Inflation Reduction Act exempted such “orphan drugs” from Medicare price negotiations — but only if the approved drug is designated to treat a single rare disease. 

Makers of rare-disease drugs receive major tax incentives, fee exemptions, and exclusivity deals thanks to the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 — but a loophole in the law allows them to keep such incentives even if the drugs are then approved for additional conditions shortly thereafter.

The new ORPHAN Cures Act would amend the Inflation Reduction Act to exclude all orphan drugs from price negotiations, including those that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to treat “one or more rare diseases or conditions” — meaning those that take advantage of the Orphan Drug Act loophole. 

Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), who introduced the bill, received a total of $94,600 from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023-2024 session, according to OpenSecrets. 

Democrats Peters, Nickel, Davis, and Gottheimer are co-sponsoring the bill, alongside four Republicans. 

Lobbying groups for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry spent a combined $36 million on lobbying on the Inflation Reduction Act and other matters last year, according to lobbying records.

Peters, who has long been considered one of Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats, received more than $133,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023-2024 session, positioning him among the top 20 congressional recipients from these industries. In the 2022 election cycle, he was among the top three recipients.

In that time period, Peters spearheaded a successful effort to stop a 2021 House bill that would have allowed the federal government to negotiate some drug prices, and immediately received nearly $20,000 from pharmaceutical executives and lobbyists. His wife is president and CEO of Cameron Holdings, an investment firm that owns equity in a company that provides manufacturing and packing for pharmaceutical companies. 

Peters, one of the wealthiest lawmakers in Congress, has refused to reject pharmaceutical industry donationstelling constituents, “I’m not going to unilaterally disarm and defund my campaign so that Republicans can win, I just think that’s a dumb thing to do.”

In response to a request for comment, Paul Iskajyan, Peters’ communications director, noted in an email, “Representative Peters strongly supports Medicare price negotiations; he in fact helped write the legislation included in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped prescription drug and insulin costs for seniors and allowed Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. Likewise, people dying from rare diseases need drugs to survive and many of those cures are being created in San Diego, which employs more than 70,000 people in life sciences.”

Peters’ Democratic co-sponsors, Nickel, Davis, and Gottheimer, received roughly $168,000 in total during the 2023-2024 session from the pharmaceutical and health products industries, according to OpenSecrets. 

Davis and Gottheimer did not respond to requests for comment.

Small Molecules, Big Profits

Legislators are also trying to increase the amount of time certain drugs must be on the market before they are even considered for price negotiations. The MINI Act, introduced by Nickel and co-sponsored by Davis and Peters, would increase the timeline of these negotiations for a class of “small-molecule drugs” that use genetically targeted technology from seven to 11 years, to coincide with the timeline for biologically derived medicines like vaccines and insulin, otherwise called biologics.  

Small-molecule drugs, chemically-derived medications that can easily enter cells, are used to treat a wide range of conditions from high cholesterol to allergies, and make up most drugs available on the market. In general, small-molecule drugs are considered less expensive to make and administer than biologics, hence the smaller window before regulators are allowed to start negotiating down their prices.

According to Nickel, small-molecule drugs that use genetically targeted technology to directly alter genes, often as part of rare-disease treatments, can be risky and costly, and therefore deserve the same extended timeframe as biologics before the government tries to cut their prices. 

“When we incentivize innovation into one type of drug and not the other, we are hurting the potential for cures and treatments in certain areas medically,” Rep. Nickel wrote in an email to The Lever. “The drugs targeted by MINI use gene-targeting technology to treat rare diseases, and over half of those drugs are targeting pediatric or young-adult populations.”

Peters’ Democratic co-sponsors, Nickel, Davis, and Gottheimer, received roughly $168,000 in total during the 2023-2024 session from the pharmaceutical and health products industries.

Nickel’s arguments are echoed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the powerful Washington drug lobby, who contend that the Inflation Reduction Act’s current drug price-negotiation provisions will “discourage the development of small-molecule medicines.” The lobbying group insists that “Companies should be able to make decisions based on patient needs and science, not on misguided government reimbursement policies.” 

Nickel, who represents North Carolina’s biotech hotbedreceived $41,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023-2024 session, according to OpenSecrets. 

When asked about these contributions, Matt Landini, Nickel’s press secretary and digital manager, responded: “As an official government office, we are prohibited from discussing political or campaign activities.” 

Seven other Republicans — including Joyce, who introduced the ORPHAN Cures Act — are sponsoring the bill. Rep. Bucshon (R-Ind.), one of the co-sponsors, has long been a pharmaceutical industry favorite, receiving $174,500 from the industries over the last session, putting him at number five of all congressional recipients of pharma money. 

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization spent $9 million lobbying on the MINI Act and other matters in 2023, according to lobbying records. 

Another bill, the EPIC Act, introduced this January by Rep. Gregory Murphy (R-N.C.) and co-sponsored by Davis, would exempt all small-molecule drugs from price negotiations until they have been on the market for 11 years. 

Murphy received almost $63,000 from the pharmaceutical and health product industries during the 2023-2024 session. Over that same time period, Davis received roughly $52,000 from these industries, including contributions from the political action committees for drug companies including Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Eli Lilly and Company.

Two of the EPIC Act’s other three Republican co-sponsors, Reps. Brett Guthrie (Ky.) and John Curtis (Utah), received $233,900 and $108,500, respectively, putting them both in the top 20 congressional recipients of pharma money during the 2023-2024 session. 

“It Seems A Little Bit Crazy”

Drugmakers funding these legislators insist that drug price negotiations as they exist now will hinder the development of new medical cures, particularly in the rare-disease space. Some rare-disease patients and advocates agree: Khrystal Davis, whose son has Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1, spoke at a recent House Health Subcommittee hearing about how the Inflation Reduction Act “jeopardizes continued research, development, and funding of orphan drugs.”

This argument leans on a 2021 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that concluded lower drug revenues would lead to “approximately 8 fewer drugs… introduced to the U.S. market over the 2020-2029 period and about 30 fewer drugs over the subsequent 10 years.” From 2013 to 2022, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, a branch of the FDA that regulates over-the-counter and prescription drugs, averaged 43 new drug approvals per year, or 430 per decade. 

A subsequent report from the Congressional Budget Office found that reducing profits of top drugs by 15 to 25 percent would be associated with a negligible drop in the number of new drugs introduced over the next decade.

Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says corporate interests and their congressional advocates use the threat of stifling drug innovation to hide their true incentives: defending companies’ incredibly high profit margins. 

“It seems a little bit crazy to me to say that all innovation is going to cease because of the Inflation Reduction Act Medicare negotiations, when there are already really substantial incentives that exist for profit in the pharmaceutical market,” Kesselheim said.    

Two of the EPIC Act’s other three Republican co-sponsors, Reps. Brett Guthrie (Ky.) and John Curtis (Utah), received $233,900 and $108,500, respectively.

Kesselheim and his colleagues found that from the time of their FDA approval to the second quarter of 2023, 16 rare-disease drugs brought in anywhere from $6.6 billion to $19.2 billion in global revenue for Big Pharma. Rare-disease medications are also becoming a huge portion of the drug market, accounting for 43 percent of new drugs approved in 2023

Kesselheim likewise argues that small-molecule drugs, including those that use genetically targeted technology, will still deliver massive profits to their developers, even with their current shorter timeframe before regulators start negotiating down their prices.

In testimony he provided to the House Health Subcommittee on the matter last month, Kesselheim noted that these small-molecule drugs “already generate substantial revenues and delaying Medicare price negotiation will have no effect on generating incentives for the discovery and development of these drugs.” He added that the government’s definition of “genetically targeted technology” is vague, making it hard to predict which of the small molecule drugs would qualify for this exemption. 

According to Kesselheim’s testimony, of the 10 current drugs currently selected for Medicare price negotiations, seven are small-molecule drugs. Global revenues for these seven medications ranged from $15 billion to $57 billion per drug in the first nine years following their FDA approval.

Kesselheim’s arguments are backed up by a 2019 analysis conducted by Ballreich at Johns Hopkins and the West Health Policy Center, a state and federal policy research organization. Ballreich and his colleagues found that “large pharmaceutical manufacturers could endure significant revenue reductions, including the reductions considered in legislative proposals, while maintaining current research investments and still achieve the highest returns of any market sector.” 

Kesselheim added that it’s important to remember that drugs are only eligible for Medicare price negotiations after they have been on the market for many years, thereby giving companies plenty of time to reap the rewards and invest in new medicines. From 2022 to 2023, Medicare paid $50.5 billion for beneficiaries’ use of the 10 prescription drugs currently selected for price negotiations. This expenditure came despite the fact the government and taxpayers heavily subsidized the development of each of these drugs, shelling out $11.7 billion on crucial research.  

At the same time, researchers have found that pharmaceutical companies are using far more of these profits to enrich shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends than they are on drug research and development.

Whether or not they actually need to, some drugmakers are already changing course on their development of vital medicines in order to fight drug reforms. 

Last year, a Swiss pharmaceutical company said they would delay research and development for an ovarian cancer drug to reduce the amount of time the medicine is subject to price negotiations. And this past October, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals paused clinical trials of a drug for Stargardt disease, a rare eye disorder, as they “evaluate the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act.”

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Plastics Are Being Funded by Your Tax Dollars https://www.truthdig.com/articles/plastics-are-being-funded-by-your-tax-dollars/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=plastics-are-being-funded-by-your-tax-dollars https://www.truthdig.com/articles/plastics-are-being-funded-by-your-tax-dollars/#respond Sat, 16 Mar 2024 17:52:34 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293899 Plastic manufacturers have received $9 billion in subsidies for new or bigger facilities since 2012.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

With demand for fossil fuels expected to decline as the world shifts toward electric vehicles and renewable energy, Big Oil is in the midst of an enormous pivot to plastic production. And taxpayers are helping them.

Petrochemical companies like Shell and Exxon Mobil have received nearly $9 billion in state and local tax breaks since 2012 to build or expand 50 plastics manufacturing facilities, according to a report the Environmental Integrity Project, or EIP, released today. Much of that activity occurred along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, often alongside marginalized communities. What’s more, 84 percent of the operations released more air pollutants than allowed during the past three years, despite their promises to protect public health and the environment, the nonprofit found.  

“Taxpayer subsidies are helping to fund dangerous and often illegal air pollution in communities of color,” Alexandra Shaykevich, EIP’s research manager and a co-author of the report, told Grist. She said the manufacturers should be held accountable for their environmental impact and those public funds redirected to beneficial projects like improving public schools. “If a company is breaking the law” she added, “it shouldn’t get taxpayer money.”

“Taxpayer subsidies are helping to fund dangerous and often illegal air pollution in communities of color.”

EIP examined 50 of the country’s 108 plastics plants, focusing only on those that have been built or expanded their production capacity since 2012. These facilities make the basic building blocks of all plastic — fossil fuel-derived substances like ethylene and propylene — that can be combined with other chemicals to create common polymers: polyethylene, for example, used in shampoo bottles and milk jugs, or polyvinyl chloride, used in pipes and window frames.

Demand for these substances is expected to surge in the coming years. The world produced 460 million metric tons of plastic in 2023, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development expects that number to reach more than 1.2 billion tons by midcentury if current growth trends continue. Recycling is unlikely to keep pace — to date, less than 10 percent of goods made with plastic has been turned into new products; the rest has been dumped into landfills, littered into the environment, or burned.

So why subsidize making more? In many cases, local and state officials offer tax breaks with the idea that new or expanded manufacturing will foster economic development. For example, a Louisiana program highlighted by EIP exempted manufacturers from 80 to 100 percent of all local taxes for 10 years and favored industrial applicants that promised to create or retain jobs. Since 2013, the program has subsidized a Dow petrochemical facility in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, with at least $230 million in tax breaks. A program in Texas discounted property taxes for petrochemical companies if they employed at least 10 people in rural areas or 25 in other areas.

It’s not clear whether the communities have seen any economic benefits — analyses from environmental groups suggest that new jobs have not materialized, or have come at a huge expense to local taxpayers by siphoning funds from schools, parks, roads, and other infrastructure. According to the nonprofit Together Louisiana, for example, every job the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program created cost the public more than half a million dollars. Another report, published last year by the nonprofit Ohio River Valley Institute, found that a Shell-owned plastics plant in Beaver County had virtually no impact on job growth and poverty reduction. 

“The truth of the matter is we don’t benefit from these industries. They don’t hire local people. And they don’t pay taxes,” Roishetta Ozane, a resident of southwest Louisiana, told EIP. 

What is clear, however, is that inviting new and bigger petrochemical facilities into an area brings significant health and environmental consequences. 

“The truth of the matter is we don’t benefit from these industries. They don’t hire local people. And they don’t pay taxes.”

As part of their routine operations, the plastic plants EIP analyzed release tens of millions of pounds of ozone-producing nitrogen oxide, respiratory irritants called volatile organic compounds, and carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride every year. That’s only the start, because facilities often do not report emissions from equipment failures, chronic leaks, and accidents — all of which are disturbingly common.

Indeed, EIP found evidence of more than 1,200 breakdowns, fires, explosions, and other accidents over the past five years at 94 percent of the facilities it analyzed. These events frequently released more air pollution than allowed under the facilities’ permits — and lax reporting requirements often kept nearby communities from finding out until days or weeks later. 

Rather than heavily fining these facilities, EIP found that regulators often treated them gently — either by issuing warning letters or by granting higher pollution permits. State environmental agencies have since 2012 bumped up those limits for one-third of the 50 plants that EIP analyzed.

“It’s outrageous, and it’s been going on for the 25 years that I’ve been doing this work,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the nonprofit Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “There’s this well-worn path toward petrochemicals in our state, and we’re so deep in those tracks that our elected officials aren’t even trying to drive out of them.” 

As EIP notes, the plastics plants in question are often alongside schools, playgrounds, athletic fields, homes, and other public places. They tend to be sited near marginalized communities with underfunded schools and services. Of the nearly 600,000 people living within three miles of the plastic plants analyzed by EIP, more than two-thirds are people of color. Many of these people, like those in the industrialized corridor of southwest Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, face far greater risks of cancer and other diseases than the national average.

The EIP report includes several examples of plastic plants falling short of their promises to be ”a positive influence” and to “meet or exceed all environmental regulations,” as chemical company Indorama put it in a 2016 brochure. Between 2016 and 2022, state and local regulators approved at least $73 million in tax breaks for Indorama to restart a decommissioned plastics plant in southwest Louisiana. Once running, the plant violated its state pollution permit and failed to hire the workers it promised to. Several accidents released tens of thousands of pounds of hazardous emissions and injuries to two employees. The state environmental agency sent Indorama 13 warning letters.

Indorama declined to comment, as did 14 of the 17 other companies Grist contacted. The others — Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips Chemical, and Westlake Corporation — would not respond to EIP’s findings but said they strive to protect public health and the environment.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality also did not respond to a request for comment. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said it would not comment because it had not yet reviewed the report. A spokesperson for Louisiana’s economic development agency said that “double-counting of some financial data” from its industrial tax exemption program by EIP “suggests a lack of academic rigor and discredits the entire analysis.” The agency did not elaborate on what data it believed was double-counted.

To mitigate pollution from plastics facilities, EIP is calling for stricter air emissions standards and better enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act. Rather than telling communities about “emission events” after they’ve happened, Shaykevich said, pollution data should be shared publicly in real time. “It does folks very little good to be notified two weeks after” an incident, she told Grist.

To mitigate pollution from plastics facilities, EIP is calling for stricter air emissions standards and better enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act.

Some of these reforms could be coming. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is considering rules that would reduce hazardous air pollution from chemical plants, including ethylene oxide, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, and vinyl chloride. Under the proposal, industrial facilities would have to monitor concentrations of these pollutants “at the fenceline,” meaning at their property lines, and the EPA would make the monitoring data available online. Pollution levels above a certain threshold would require facility operators to fix the problem.

The EPA is expected to finalize the rules later this year. EIP estimates they would affect about half of the facilities studied in its report.

EIP is also calling for a dramatic reduction in public funding for plastics manufacturers. While some plastic items — like medical devices or contact lenses — are clearly useful, the organization says subsidies to produce them should be tied to environmental performance. “If companies can’t comply” with their permits, “they should be forced to reimburse taxpayers,” Shaykevich told reporters during a press conference on Thursday. 

Other types of plastic production, she added, aren’t worth the trouble they cause. Nonessential, single-use items including bags, bottles, utensils, and packaging make up some 40 percent  of plastic production and are virtually impossible to recycle. “We don’t think it’s OK to offer taxpayer support for single-use plastics,” Shaykevich told Grist. Such things, like the money that subsidizes them, are too often just thrown away.

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‘Fatherland’: Insurrectionists and Oedipus Trump https://www.truthdig.com/articles/fatherland-insurrectionists-and-oedipus-trump/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fatherland-insurrectionists-and-oedipus-trump https://www.truthdig.com/articles/fatherland-insurrectionists-and-oedipus-trump/#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2024 19:00:31 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293954 Stephen Sachs’ “Fatherland” is the first work of live theater to dramatize the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A politically engaged family tragedy, it tells the real-life story of Jan. 6 insurrectionist Guy Reffitt, whose teenage son turned him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is a tale of treachery playing out […]

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Stephen Sachs’ “Fatherland” is the first work of live theater to dramatize the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A politically engaged family tragedy, it tells the real-life story of Jan. 6 insurrectionist Guy Reffitt, whose teenage son turned him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is a tale of treachery playing out on planes personal and political — Eugene O’Neill colliding with Bertolt Brecht.

But “Fatherland” has a twist: A  type of docudrama known as “verbatim theater, every word of dialogue is taken from public records. Sachs organizes the story with a veteran dramatist’s care in a series of mise-en-scène that moves fluidly, even cinematically, from one vignette to another, from the Reffitts’ Texas home, to the Capitol Building’s steps, to a federal courthouse. Its thematic sweep places it in a long tradition encompassing Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” but in modern times chimes most closely with Charlie Chaplin’s 1957 “A King of New York”, in which a little boy, Rupert Macabee, is pressured by U.S. authorities to inform on his parents. 

I spoke with Sachs on March 4 in Los Angeles, where the play has been extended through May 26 at The Fountain Theatre.

TD: How and when did “Fatherland” come about?

SACHS: I first learned about this case in 2022 when the trial happened. It hit the headlines and became national news. This 19-year-old son turning in his father to the FBI—what a fascinating story it was. It sounded mythic, going back to the ancient Greeks or Shakespeare. I tucked it away in the back of my head.

Then last year, I was thinking about wanting The Fountain Theatre to have a voice in this crucial election. I was just racking my brain, thinking of what play we could do that could speak out on this issue. Then I remembered: Oh yes, there was this story about a kid who turns in his dad. I read the court transcripts and the testimony of the son testifying against his father and being cross-examined by the two attorneys. And I just thought to myself: “There’s a play here.” 

TD: Tell us about the fact-based story of “Fatherland.” 

SACHS: It’s a story of a family in a small town in Texas. They’re a family who has traveled around the world. The father worked as an oil worker. Then one day, the oil industry collapsed and suddenly the father was out of work. They suddenly had no money. The father fell into a chasm of depression and then the pandemic hit and he was in isolation a lot. He was adrift. 

It’s about the son realizing that his father was there at the U.S. Capitol and coming to the tortured decision of turning his father in to the FBI.

In my mind, he was a previously decent man who had fallen from grace. In an effort to attach himself to something greater than himself, he began this delusional attachment to Donald Trump, trying to pull himself out of this abyss and connect to something which he felt was greater than himself. He joined a far-right militia called the Three Percenters. He began to go to Trump rallies and attend these meetings. He was always a gun owner, but now he’s carrying a pistol on his hip and he has an AR-15.

His son just slowly began to see his father disappear from him and this new creature emerge. He was a heavy drinker and abusing his wife. When Trump sent out that Tweet [on Dec. 19, 2020] saying everyone needs to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6, it “will be wild!” like so many men and women across the country, this man took it as a call to arms. He drove [so he could bring firearms] all the way from Texas to Washington, D.C. to attend the rally and attack the Capitol. 

It’s about the son realizing that his father was there at the U.S. Capitol and coming to the tortured decision of turning his father in to the FBI. For his own good. For the sake of his family and his father’s well-being. Having to pay the price by having to actually testify against his own father in federal court. 

TD: When the family returned to Texas the father was unemployed. How could he afford a whole armory?

SACHS: I don’t know the answer. When they came back to Texas, he tried to start his own business. He worked as an engineer with a home construction company. They sold sunroofs and things. He never quite got back on his feet. He never returned to the oil industry. When he was arrested and brought before the judge, the court determined that he could not afford his own attorney, to pay for his own attorney. That he was destitute. An attorney was appointed for him by the court.

TD: What other far-right extremist groups did the father belong to?  

SACHS: He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He had an Oath Keeper T-shirt that he used to wear. I think he was actually wearing it on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. [On May 25, 2023, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 58, of Texas, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, and Kelly Meggs, 54, leader of the group’s Florida chapter, were sentenced for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.]

TD: What role did Guy Reffitt play in the storming of the Capitol Building?

SACHS: When the crowd began to storm the front of the Capitol, on the front steps, there was a big marble stairway on the right-hand side that they were trying to climb up. And this man, Guy Reffitt, he climbed up on top of the railing, this wide marble railing, and led the way up this stairway. He went by himself and challenged the Capitol Police officers. Behind him, this crowd of protesters were standing by and waiting. He went forward and confronted [the officers]. They shot him with pepper spray and rubber bullets, but that did not deter him. Then he gestured for the rioters behind him to follow him and pass him by and go inside.

So, Guy Reffitt did not actually ever make it. Which is part of the pathos of his story. He did not ever make it into the Capitol himself. He remained outside.

TD: I think he was hit by bear spray. 

SACHS: Exactly. He was hit by a number of things: Rubber bullets; pepper spray; and then finally bear spray, which is what brought him down.  

TD: Can you describe the technique you used to write the script?  

SACHS: It’s called “verbatim theater.” There’s a history of this kind of work. To me, the spirit of it goes back to The Living Newspaper of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, when fascism was rising in Germany. In this country, The Living Newspaper was a company here that would take stories and newspaper articles and turn them into plays. So “Fatherland” comes from that same spirit. I even went back and looked at some of those old Living Newspaper plays when I was hunting for material, because in my mind, what’s happening, the rise of fascism, the threat of fascism in this country, echoes what was happening in Germany during the rise of Nazism there. The legacy links back to that.

What I did was I took the court transcripts and began to cobble them together and created a piece. Some of the exchanges in the courtroom, I would just use verbatim what they would say. And the challenge of the work was to then create scenes. For that I’d use language from the trial and then I also found interviews that the son had done and were publicly shared. I also got ahold of transcripts of some of the recordings the son did between him and his father on his phone, and I was able to use them in the play as well.

TD: Is this style similar to what Truman Capote called “the nonfiction novel”?

SACHS: In my mind it is. It’s like a nonfiction play. It’s a true play, which is not an oxymoron but sort of a hybrid piece that takes real-life dialogue and — it doesn’t transform it, because it leaves it intact — and performs it in front of an audience. There are examples of it, more recently [Moisés Kaufman’s]”The Laramie Project” [dealing with the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming gay student]. There was a play performed in New York a couple of years ago called “Is This a Room” [by Tina Satter], which was a dramatization of a person [whistleblower Reality Winner] under interrogation. They used the verbatim transcript of her interrogation and performed it live onstage. There’s a history of this kind of work.   

TD: In your play, the son described himself as “a socialist” who voted for Bernie Sanders for president. 

SACHS: Yeah. He’s a liberal thinker, a progressive, who believes that government’s role is to see that all citizens are treated equally and fairly. The father was never really political himself, until Trump. His wife, the mother, says he was never politically minded at all. It wasn’t until his own life had shattered, then he read “The Art of the Deal”, and he was swept up into the cult of this man.  

TD: What other media did he consume? 

SACHS: He watched lots of TV, for hours and hours and hours. He’d watch Newsmax and Fox News, Tucker Carlson. He and his son went to the [2016 Oliver Stone] movie “Snowden” [about the NSA whistleblower] and they both liked it, a lot. I know he consumed a lot of Trump’s books and would watch Fox News, sequester himself in front of the television, consuming all of that material.  

TD: Watching the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, I kept wondering to myself, “Why didn’t the Capitol Police open fire on the protesters to repel them?” Your play seems to have an answer: Rioters like Reffitt were carrying firearms. And if the Capitol Police had opened fire, a number of the protesters might have followed suit and returned fire. 

SACHS: Absolutely correct. As part of my research, I saw the [2022] documentary, “January 6th” focused on the Capitol Police. An interview with an officer who was part of the small squad of 25, 30 officers who were down… at the foot of the Capitol, plugging a hole. They had thousands of rioters pushing and beating them in, trying to get into this tunnel, and this little squad of Capitol Police officers were fighting them off for hours. And they were just exhausted. They were being beaten on, spit on, assaulted, and physically, spiritually broken …

They were very tempted to fire on the [rioters]. But they realized that if they did that, there were thousands of arms in the crowd, this mad mob was fully armed. If one Capitol Police officer had fired into that crowd, or even above the crowd, it would have unleashed a fusillade of shooting that would have been a massacre, a historic bloodbath on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It just took enormous restraint by the Capitol Police not to do that.

TD: You’ve been at the helm of LA’s Fountain Theatre for more than a third of a century. How does “Fatherland’ fit in with its mission statement of “creating, developing, and producing plays that dramatize urgent issues and matters of the heart, reflecting the diversity of LA and the nation.”

SACHS: The play is dramatizing an urgent and political issue that’s facing LA and the country. It was imperative to me that “Fatherland” open before Super Tuesday.  Not that this small play is going to change the outcome of the election, but it was essential to me that we speak out as an artistic organization on what’s happening in our country today. The fact that “Fatherland” is an original piece of theater that was created by us for our community and country, addressing, dramatizing issues that are pertinent to this time reflects that it’s a perfect example of what and who we are about. 

TD: You’ve announced that after 34 years as The Fountain’s co-founder and artistic director, you’ll be leaving your post by the end of 2024. Why? And what’s next? 

SACHS: I’ve reached a time in my life — I turned 65 this year — where I’m asking myself, “How do I want to spend my remaining years?” Thirty-four years running a nonprofit theater is enough for me. We’ve done excellent work for a long time. I’m ready now to explore other things, opportunities, that life has to offer. I’m really looking forward to spending more time with my family and traveling with my wife. I’ve written a novel, so I plan to turn my writing now toward literature, rather than play-writing.  I’m proud that “Fatherland” is the final play I’ve created and directed at The Fountain because for me it epitomizes what I’m about as an artist. It’s theatrically bold, tells a human story, and dramatizes an urgent political and social issue that is relevant to our time. For me, that’s always been the mission of our organization and my calling as an artist.

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Allen Ginsberg Muses on His Role in the Birth of LSD Research https://www.truthdig.com/articles/allen-ginsberg-muses-on-his-role-in-the-birth-of-lsd-research/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=allen-ginsberg-muses-on-his-role-in-the-birth-of-lsd-research https://www.truthdig.com/articles/allen-ginsberg-muses-on-his-role-in-the-birth-of-lsd-research/#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:33:31 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293898 Below you’ll find an excerpt of my book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science about the origins of psychedelic science in 1930s through 1960s. By drawing on understudied archives and original interviews, it restores key players in the field’s origin — many of them women — to their […]

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Below you’ll find an excerpt of my book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science about the origins of psychedelic science in 1930s through 1960s. By drawing on understudied archives and original interviews, it restores key players in the field’s origin — many of them women — to their rightful place alongside more familiar names like Timothy Leary. (The New Yorker‘s recent review of the book does a wonderful job summarizing the overall argument). This excerpt captures a crucial moment of transition as psychedelics begin their march toward illegality. The key historical source here is a tape recording made by the poet Allen Ginsberg in which he speaks to a little-known pioneer of psychedelic therapy named Joe K. Adams. Working at Palo Alto’s Mental Research Institute in 1959, Adams was the psychiatrist who oversaw Allen Ginsberg’s first LSD trip. That year was, with hindsight, a pivotal one not just for both men, but for the history of psychedelics as a whole.

Excerpt from the chapter “Dialectics of Liberation”

It is the evening of December 12, 1965, and Allen Ginsberg is backstage during the intermission of Bob Dylan’s concert in San Jose, California. He is chatting with Dylan about Ginsberg’s new portable tape recorder. “It looks groovy,” says Dylan. “Is it worth it?” 

“Oh yeah, it’s an absolutely beautiful precision machine,” Ginsberg boasts. “It can do anything.” 

Dylan is close to the recorder, and the mic picks him up clearly as he contemplates the rotating wheels of magnetic tape. “I don’t know why the fuck I don’t get one of those,” he murmurs. A few minutes later, he and Ginsberg start gossiping about Marlon Brando. 

Later that night, the same tape recorder captured another conversation— one between Ginsberg and Joe K. Adams, the Texas-born psychiatrist who had worked alongside Gregory Bateson and Don Jackson at Palo Alto’s Mental Research Institute. By this time, Adams had quit science. Secure in the Big Sur campground he now owned, he dedicated himself to baking whole wheat bread, maintaining his vacation cabins, and writing playful essays about sexuality, consciousness, and the harms of psychiatric care. He no longer saw himself as a mental health professional with a Stanford affiliation. Instead, he was part of the psychedelic counterculture. As a contributing editor of a new journal, the Psychedelic Review, Adams shared duties with fellow editors Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Alan Watts. He was also a core member of the Esalen Institute community, leading seminars and mingling with the institute’s newly fashionable clientele. And, as happened to be the case on this night, hosting Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, for a cup of tea. 

“It was in January [1960] when I had my reaction,” he remembers. “And I was high. For. Months…I was really crazy. I took my clothes off and started runnin’ around the driveway.”

On the tape, Adams has a friendly voice with a molasses-thick East Texas lilt. Ginsberg begins showing Adams his new gadget—how the recorder can be plugged into loudspeakers, radios, guitar amps, capturing everything like a roving electric consciousness. The thought brings Ginsberg back to six years earlier, to his first LSD trip at the MRI—the trip that inspired a poem called “Lysergic Acid” about feeling as if he were plugged into a vast electronic machine. The trip that Gregory Bateson had organized and Joe Adams had overseen. 

“Hey, whatever happened to the tapes you made when I was high?” Ginsberg asks. “Was there anything interesting on them?” 

“Well, I’m not sure if I have those tapes, or if they’re back at the Mental Research Institute,” Adams replies. “I would have to go through all my tapes and see.” 

They move on to other topics. But Ginsberg keeps circling back to the events of 1959 and 1960. At the poet’s prompting, Adams recounts his catastrophic LSD trip, the one that contributed to the fracturing of the Mental Research Institute. “It was in January [1960] when I had my reaction,” he remembers. “And I was high. For. Months…I was really crazy. I took my clothes off and started runnin’ around the driveway.” 

“Here?” Ginsberg asks. 

“No, no, nooo…it was in Menlo Park!” Adams says to sympathetic laughter from Ginsberg and Orlovsky. “A nice, suburban neighborhood. And I was intercepted by a psychiatrist in the driveway. My wife had called them.” His voice is amused and detached, as if he’s describing a scene from a play. “Three uniformed men came and tied me down on a stretcher and took me to the mental hospital.” In his delusional state, Adams found himself dwelling on mass manipulation, psychological warfare, and World War II. “I realized how horrible this was,” he explained, apparently referring to his experience of psychiatry during the 1940s and 1950s. He concluded that he was trapped in a sinister Cold War plot: “I tried to escape there and ran out and climbed over a fence and I yelled, ‘This is not a hospital!’…You see, there were two shifts of aides, and I thought there was a U.S. shift and a Russian shift. I thought it was a big experiment of some kind and I was a guinea pig. And the whole place—I thought the whole place had microphones in it. And, oh, well…it was very complex.” 

“What led you up to that?” Ginsberg asks, fascinated. “You know, very oddly, the first time I had LSD with you, I suspected that you were a Russian agent, a Russian spy. Remember that? Remember I mentioned that I thought it was a Russian plot? I knew it was involved in the Cold War somehow.” 

Adams laughs warmly. “No, no, I don’t remember that,” he says. “That’s . . . uh . . . huh.” He doesn’t elaborate further. 

The two men had been brought together by Gregory Bateson at the end of the 1950s, during the height of psychedelic science’s cultural prestige. Adams had once been a true believer. Ginsberg, in a sense, still was. It was this shared utopian sensibility, this deep idealism, that sparked their friendship. 

When Ginsberg labeled the tape of his conversation with Adams, he gave it an ironic title: “Acid Test.” One of the first acid tests—the name Ken Kesey and his followers gave to their parties—was in fact happening about three hours’ drive north of Adams’s cabin at the moment that they were discussing the strange events at the Mental Research Institute. Ginsberg’s name was even on the poster. But he didn’t show. Far more than his peers in the emerging psychedelic counterculture, Ginsberg was intrigued by the scientists, not the partiers. More than anyone else in the world in 1965, perhaps, Ginsberg was uniquely placed to understand the worlds both of psychedelic science and of the psychedelic counterculture. But as the winter of 1965 became the spring and summer of 1966, the poet grew increasingly disquieted by both worlds. He could not shake his sense that, as he put it, the psychedelic experiments at the MRI and elsewhere “had something to do with the Cold War.” And he also believed that the new American messiahs of psychedelic spirituality were getting something fundamentally wrong. 

Far more than his peers in the emerging psychedelic counterculture, Ginsberg was intrigued by the scientists, not the partiers.

Psychedelic science had always been a global project, winning adherents in places like Prague, Zurich, London, and even Baghdad years before it reached relative latecomers like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. The psychedelic counter-culture was, at least at first, no less global. In Brazil, artist Hélio Oiticica created overtly “trippy” interactive artworks, inspiring a generation-defining cultural movement known as Tropicália. In Santiago, Chile, a young physician named Claudio Naranjo returned from a Fulbright scholarship at Harvard, where he took mushrooms with Frank Barron, believing psychedelics were tools for “a collective transformation of consciousness.” And ancient psychedelic traditions, such as the use of ayahuasca, a potion made from two Amazonian jungle plants, found new followers amid rapid urbanization across the Amazon basin. 

Stateside, however, the vivid diversity of global psychedelic culture was becoming monochrome in a distinctly midcentury American way. Mead had long called for a truly diverse and broad-based global cultural change. Yet while the psychedelic counterculture embraced “non-Western spirituality,” it did so in a superficial and romanticized way that did not truly challenge Western cultural norms. Tom Wolfe memorably described Stewart Brand (who drives the Merry Pranksters’ bus through the opening pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) as wearing “just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.” Underneath the costumes, however, were bodies that were almost invariably American, white, middle class, and male. And in the new psychedelic spaces that emerged across the United States, from Esalen to Greenwich Village, it did not take long for all the usual ills of twentieth-century American life—alcoholism, political polarization, racism, greed—to reassert themselves. 

“We are seeing accidents happen,” Sidney Cohen lamented in March 1966. “We are frightening the public. We are getting laws passed [banning the drug]. We are not using the anthropological approach of insinuating a valuable drug of this sort into our culture” by “gradually demonstrating the goodness of the thing.” For Cohen, “the anthropological approach” meant a science built on and with the cultural patterns of other societies, not an attempt to invent them from scratch—Margaret Mead’s approach, in other words. But now, Cohen complained, the anthropological approach to drugs was being abandoned in favor of reckless experimentation—“these Acid Tests that go on with these bizarre individuals.” 

A few weeks later, on May 24, 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy sat down at a large table in the New Senate Office Building to convene a congressional investigation of LSD. “Here is a drug which has been available for well over 20 years,” the senator said. “Yet suddenly, almost overnight, irresponsible and unsupervised use of LSD for nonscientific, nonmedical purposes has risen markedly.” The dangers had, too. Kennedy feared that “without careful psychological screening, the drug will be used by some who suffer permanent damage as a result.” In other words, “what was an experimental drug has become a social problem.” 

Given the decades of prohibition that began later—decades in which LSD and other psychedelic drugs would be lumped together with heroin as Schedule 1 drugs of abuse, and tens of thousands would spend years in jail for possession of psychedelic drugs—it is tempting to see Robert F. Kennedy’s statement as an early salvo of what Richard Nixon, five years later, would label the “war on drugs.” But 1966 was not 1971, and the future was not yet written. Senator Kennedy concluded his opening statement by describing the benefits of psychedelic therapy. “Experiments indicate that LSD may be useful in treating alcoholics—one of the largest groups of the handicapped,” noted the man whose own family struggled with addiction. The “loss to the Nation if LSD were to be banned,” Kennedy warned, “would be serious indeed.” 

He could not shake his sense that, as he put it, the psychedelic experiments at the MRI and elsewhere “had something to do with the Cold War.”

This balanced tone was, however, already being drowned out by polarized commentary from both sides. In a parallel series of Senate hearings held the same month, a succession of narcotics officers and antidrug doctors shared horror stories about trips gone wrong. A jarring note of positivity came amid the scaremongering when one narcotics detective quoted an interview with Cary Grant in which the Hollywood actor credited LSD with improving his life and allowing him to “truly give a woman love for the first time.” The thought seemed to disconcert one of the senators present, Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. “I think in fairness to Cary Grant,” Senator Dodd ventured, “we do not know that he ever said any such thing.” The detective agreed. The point he was making, he reassured the senator, was simply that the media was lying about psychedelics in such a way as to make the drug “attractive to our teenagers and our youth of today.” 

Allen Ginsberg spoke at the hearings, too. But the bearded poet did not exactly inspire confidence. “I don’t think it is necessarily frightful or dangerous. It could be dangerous if we react dangerously to it,” he told the senators. “But it is very hard to say yes, let the high school kids get it, because it scares everybody. The problem is not to scare everybody.” Ginsberg tried to cite the members of the Macy circle as illustrious proponents of psychedelic therapy, but the details eluded him (Ginsberg cited the research of “Dr. Harold Abramson of New York, who is a very considerable figure, the head of some hospital or other”). 

And, worst of all, he lumped these distinguished scientists in with Timothy Leary. Because, when Leary himself rose to speak, the ex–Harvard lecturer informed the subcommittee that “the so-called peril of LSD resides precisely in its eerie power to release ancient, wise, and I would even say at times holy sources of energy which reside inside the human brain.” Under its influence, he added, “you definitely go out of your mind, there is no question of that. To some people this is ominous.” Leary’s remarks were widely quoted and misquoted in newspapers. 

The senators were unimpressed. “I am trying to follow the best I possibly can,” Robert F. Kennedy said to Leary, interrupting his rambling testimony. “And I find that I am completely unable to do so.” 

By November, even Allen Ginsberg felt disenchanted. In a speech in Boston that month, he encouraged his audience to “try the chemical LSD at least once.” But he also expressed fear of a “chemical dictatorship”—an allusion to the era’s ever-present fear of brainwashing and mass mind control—and urged those in attendance not to assume that psychedelics were a solution for anything. They were simply one way of understanding the problem: “anger and control of anger.”

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House Vote to Ban TikTok Risks Renewed Cold War With China https://www.truthdig.com/articles/house-vote-to-ban-tiktok-risks-renewed-cold-war-with-china/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=house-vote-to-ban-tiktok-risks-renewed-cold-war-with-china https://www.truthdig.com/articles/house-vote-to-ban-tiktok-risks-renewed-cold-war-with-china/#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:21:39 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293911 The recent push to effectively ban TikTok has little to do with security concerns and everything to do with a neo-McCarthyite view of China.

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A bipartisan effort to effectively ban the social media network TikTok in the United States has taken a great leap forward. The House of Representatives voted 352–65 that the network’s parent company ByteDance must divest itself from Chinese ownership.

Lawmakers contend that “TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a national security risk because Beijing could use the app to gain access to Americans’ data or run a disinformation campaign” (New York Times, 3/13/24). While proponents of the legislation say this is only a restriction on Chinese government control, critics of the bill say this constitutes an effective ban.

The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. That doesn’t make its passage in the House any less chilling, especially when President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law if it reaches his desk (Boston Herald, 3/13/24).

‘Profound implications’

I have written for almost four years (FAIR.org, 8/5/205/25/2311/13/23) about how the US government campaign against TikTok has very little to do with user privacy, and everything to do with McCarthyism and neo–Cold War fervor. Before the vote, a US government report (Politico, 3/11/24) said that the “Chinese government is using TikTok to expand its global influence operations to promote pro-China narratives and undermine US democracy.”

Sounds scary, but fears about TikTok‘s user surveillance, or platforming pernicious content or disinformation, apply to all forms of social media—including US-based Twitter (now known as X) and Facebook, which let political misinformation flow about the US elections (Time, 3/23/21; New York Times, 1/25/24). And the Chinese government point of view flows freely on Twitter: Chinese state media outlets CGTN and Xinhua have respectively 12.9 and 11.9 million followers on the network owned by Elon Musk.

The Global Times (3/8/24), owned by China’s Communist Party, predictably called the legislation a “hysterical move” against Chinese companies. But the American Civil Liberties Union (3/5/24) was also alarmed:

The ACLU has repeatedly explained that banning TikTok would have profound implications for our constitutional right to free speech and free expression, because millions of Americans rely on the app every day for information, communication, advocacy and entertainment. And the courts have agreed. In November 2023, a federal district court in Montana ruled that the state’s attempted ban would violate Montanans’ free speech rights and blocked it from going into effect.

Bipartisan support

We can’t write this off as MAGA extremist paranoia. In fact, 155 Democrats voted for the bill (AP, 3/13/24), joining 197 Republicans. Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres  (Twitter, 3/12/24) said TikTok “poses significant threats to our national security,” and that the “entire intelligence community agrees.” While the bill may not pass the Senate, it does enjoy some bipartisan support in the upper house (NBC, 3/13/24).

Former Trump Treasury Secretary Seth Mnuchin is enthusiastic about the bill, however—because he hopes to be TikTok‘s new owner.

Former President Donald Trump reversed course, and now opposes new restrictions on TikTok (Washington Post, 3/12/24), in part because of his hostility toward TikTok competitor Facebook, which would benefit from a TikTok ban. Trump might have been hyperbolic in calling Facebook “the enemy of the people,” but it is true that Facebook owner Meta is behind the political push against its competitor (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

Former Trump Treasury Secretary Seth Mnuchin is enthusiastic about the bill, however—because he hopes to be TikTok‘s new owner. “I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s Squawk Box (3/14/24). “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

Mainstream conservative outlets like the Economist (3/12/24) and Wall Street Journal, at least, have united signed on to the crusade. The Journal editorial board (3/11/24) wrote:

Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s US offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”

The Journal’s editors (3/14/24) followed up to celebrate the House bill’s passage. “Beijing treats TikTok algorithms as tantamount to a state secret,” it wrote. This is another way that TikTok resembles US-based social media platforms, of course—but for the Journal, it’s “another reason not to believe TikTok’s denials that its algorithms promote anti-American and politically divisive content.”

In other words, while the US government can’t legally block content it deems politically questionable on Facebook and Twitter, it can use TikTok’s foreign ownership as means to attack “anti-American” content. The paper ignored the issue of censorship and anti-Chinese fearmongering, and denounced “no” votes as either fringe Republicans swayed by Trump, or left-wingers whose political base is younger people who simply love fun apps.

The National Review‘s Jim Geraghty (3/3/23) earlier scoffed at Democratic lawmakers who continue to engage with TikTok:

Way to go, members of Congress. This thing is too dangerous to carry into the Pentagon, but you’re keeping it on your personal phone because you’re afraid you might miss the latest dance craze that’s going viral. And if the last three years of our lives have taught us anything, hasn’t it been that anything that comes to us from China and “goes viral” probably isn’t good for us?

Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, a major backer of the legislation, took to Fox News (3/12/24) to say that Chinese ownership of TikTok was a “cancer” that could be removed, that the problem wasn’t the app itself but “foreign adversary control.”

Vehicle for anti-Chinese fervor

This anger toward TikTok—which, just like other social media networks, is full of brain-numbing content, but has also been used as a platform for social and economic justice (NPR, 6/7/20; Wired, 4/20/22; TechCrunch, 7/19/23)—is not about TikTok, but is rather a vehicle for the anti-Chinese fervor that infects the US government.

That fear is already potent enough to bring together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to line up against the First Amendment.

Think, for example, how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) embarrassed himself by repeatedly asking TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a Senate hearing if he had ties to China’s Communist Party—despite repeated reminders that Chew is Singaporean, not Chinese (NBC, 2/1/24). Is Cotton ignorant enough to think Singapore is a part of China? Or was the lawmaker using his national platform to make race-based political insinuations, in hopes of bolstering the fear that Chinese government agents are simply everywhere (and all look alike)?

That fear is already potent enough to bring together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to line up against the First Amendment. are doing just that, using a social media app to ramp up a Cold War with China. The targeting TikTok is an attack on free speech and the free flow of information, as the ACLU has argued, but it’s also part of a drumbeat for a dangerous confrontation between nuclear powers.

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‘Traumatizing’: What It’s Like to Be Unhoused in Rural America https://www.truthdig.com/articles/traumatizing-what-its-like-to-be-unhoused-in-rural-america/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=traumatizing-what-its-like-to-be-unhoused-in-rural-america https://www.truthdig.com/articles/traumatizing-what-its-like-to-be-unhoused-in-rural-america/#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:10:44 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293922 The lessons learned after spending months embedded with unhoused communities in Oregon.

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This story was originally published by High Country News.

Though it’s often less visible and rarely discussed, rural homelessness is rising six times faster than homelessness overall. One person who’s been sounding the alarm for years is Julie Akins, a veteran journalist and former mayor of Ashland, Oregon, who now serves as senior housing director at AllCare Health

Her latest report on rural homelessness, which came out last month, is based on hundreds of conversations throughout southern Oregon over a six-month period. At times, Akins has even embedded with the people she interviewed: sleeping in her car or a tent, enduring scabies and head lice. We called her up to ask what she’d learned — and what the lessons might be for the rest of the rural West. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: In your latest report, you noted that people in rural areas often deal with lower pay and a more limited housing stock than those in urban areas. How else does rural homelessness differ?

Julie Akins: Urban homelessness looks like a bunch of tents in a centralized space, because people are trying to access transportation and services. In the rural West, services are spread out, and sometimes it can take people hours to walk from one part of their community to another. 

In rural communities, you see people trying to tuck away in places where they can be unseen. I interviewed people living at rest stops. Families in their cars, driving all night with the heat on to keep their kids warm. Grandmothers and grandfathers, walking with walkers to rundown RVs where they don’t have hot water. A woman living under the crawl space of an Airbnb that she cleaned. People on Bureau of Land Management land, trying to hide out in a vehicle. It’s scattered and pervasive. 

HCN: There are many stigmas surrounding homelessness: that everyone experiencing it is lazy or has issues with substance abuse or mental health. What did you find? 

JA: That was the main thing people asked me to do: They spoke to me in exchange for reporting that they are not a “bum,” a “drug addict” or mentally ill. Breaking through the concept that if you don’t have enough money, you’re somehow a failure and don’t deserve a hand up is really the hardest point to drive home, right? Because those stereotypes exist. 

HCN: A “living wage” is the amount an individual needs to earn to cover their basic needs. In Oregon, it’s $24 an hour. Readers may be surprised to learn that 60% of the people you spoke to were employed. Can you break down the math of poverty? 

JA: Well, Taco Bell pays $15 an hour. You could work there full- time and have another part-time job and still not have a roof over your head. 

In rural communities, you see people trying to tuck away in places where they can be unseen.

I met this young man, very smart. Halfway through college, he started having seizures; he discovered he had epilepsy. So he had to quit school, he couldn’t drive anymore. (He and his mother) were living in an RV. He wound up working at Taco Bell, but he can only work a certain number of hours. Because if he gets over a threshold, then he no longer is qualified for Medicaid. And without Medicaid, he couldn’t afford his anti-seizure medicine. The way we have it set up, you kind of have to stay in poverty if you have an illness. 

At what point do we accept that? That you can be a working person and still homeless? That you can be a retiree who worked your entire life — and now you’re unhoused because your wife died, and only one Social Security benefit is not enough? At what point can we say the American dream has become a nightmare? 

HCN: According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “a chronically homeless person costs the taxpayer an average of $35,578 per year.” When that person is placed in supportive housing, those costs are cut nearly in half. Can you talk about the cost of homelessness?

JA: I’ll use Susan as an example. She’s 71 now. She had a blister on her calf; she couldn’t keep it clean and dry because she was spending an Oregon winter in her truck. So this wound got worse and worse, to the point where it was so badly infected it was filled with maggots. She wound up in the intensive care unit for, I believe, eight days. The expense of that is astronomical: $3,000 a day. I mean, you could have housed her for how long for that kind of money? 

HCN: What has changed since your first reporting trip in 2016? 

JA: There seems to be a marked loss of hope. When I first went out, people seemed to believe it was a blip. There was some sort of optimism. Now they’re looking around and realizing it’s mathematically impossible to pull yourself out of homelessness without help. That’s very discouraging. People want to be independent, to be proud of themselves. They want a good job, a place to live; they want to progress in their life. And when you do everything you can and that still doesn’t happen, how can you avoid losing hope?

HCN: What are the solutions?  

JA: Homelessness is a housing problem. When you’re hungry, you don’t sit around and think: Hmm, what would be a cure for hunger? You’re like, I’m hungry, I’m going to eat something. I’m unhoused, I need a place to live — it’s really that direct.

HCN: How has this reporting changed you? 

JA: I don’t think I can ever not be grateful that I can lock my door and get in my bed and pull the covers up and drift off to sleep. It’s such a small thing, but it’s also a huge thing. 

Until you’re (sleeping in your car), you don’t understand how terrifying it is. Even in small towns, there’s a lot of commotion at night that you might not ever know about if you live in a house. There’s the terror of: What if I have to go to the bathroom? And then just the general sense of being so out of touch with what you think of as normal life.

Now, I am really aware of what being ostracized in society can do to you from a psychosocial perspective. It’s so traumatizing. And this is what it’s like for people (experiencing homelessness) day in and day out. That is a moral failing. And it’s not the moral failing of the people who are unhoused; it’s the moral failing of this country. 

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The Madness of the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-madness-of-the-race-to-build-artificial-general-intelligence/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-madness-of-the-race-to-build-artificial-general-intelligence https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-madness-of-the-race-to-build-artificial-general-intelligence/#respond Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:08:26 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293715 The people plunging us all toward AGI are saying some very scary things. We’d be wise to pay them heed.

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A few weeks ago, I was having a chat with my neighbor Tom, an amateur chemist who conducts experiments in his apartment. I have a longtime fascination with chemistry, and always enjoy talking with him. But this conversation was scary. If his latest experiment was successful, he informed me, it might “have some part to play in curing cancer.” If it was a failure, however, there was a reasonable chance, according to his calculations, that the experiment would trigger “an explosion that levels the entire apartment complex.”

Perhaps Tom was lying, or maybe he’s delusional. But what if he really was just one test tube clink away from blowing me and dozens of our fellow building residents sky high? What should one do in this situation? After a brief deliberation, I decided to call 911. The police rushed over, searched his apartment and decided after an investigation to confiscate all of his chemistry equipment and bring him in for questioning. 

The above scenario is a thought experiment. As far as I know, no one in my apartment complex is an amateur chemist experimenting with highly combustible compounds. I’ve spun this fictional tale because it’s a perfect illustration of the situation that we — all of us — are in with respect to the AI companies trying to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The list of such companies includes DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, all of which are backed by billions of dollars. Many leading figures at these very companies have claimed, in public, while standing in front of microphones, that one possible outcome of the technology they are explicitly trying to build is that everyone on Earth dies. The only sane response to this is to immediately call 911 and report them to the authorities. They are saying that their own technology might kill you, me, our family members and friends — the entire human population. And almost no one is freaking out about this.

It’s crucial to note that you don’t have to believe that AGI will actually kill everyone on Earth to be alarmed. I myself am skeptical of these claims. Even if one suspects Tom of lying about his chemistry experiments, the fact of his telling me that his actions could kill everyone in our apartment complex is enough to justify dialing 911.

One doesn’t need to accept this line of reasoning to be alarmed when the CEO of the most powerful AI company that’s trying to build AGI says that superintelligent machines might kill us. 

What exactly are AI companies saying about the potential dangers of AGI? During a 2023 talk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked about whether AGI could destroy humanity, and he responded, “the bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us.” In some earlier interviews, he declared that “I think AI will…most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning,” and “probably AI will kill us all, but until then we’re going to turn out a lot of great students.” The audience laughed at this. But was he joking? If he was, he was also serious: the OpenAI website itself states in a 2023 article that the risks of AGI may be “existential,” meaning — roughly — that they could wipe out the entire human species. Another article on their website affirms that “a misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world.”

In a 2015 post on his personal blog, Altman wrote that “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” Whereas “AGI” refers to any artificial system that is at least as competent as humans in every cognitive domain of importance, such as science, mathematics, social manipulation and creativity, a “SMI” is a type of AGI that is superhuman in its capabilities. Many researchers in the field of “AI safety” believe that once we have AGI, we will have superintelligent machines very shortly after. The reason is that designing increasingly capable machines is an intellectual task, so the “smarter” these systems become, the better able they’ll become at designing even “smarter” systems. Hence, the first AGIs will design the next generation of even “smarter” AGIs, until those systems reach “superhuman” levels.

Again, one doesn’t need to accept this line of reasoning to be alarmed when the CEO of the most powerful AI company that’s trying to build AGI says that superintelligent machines might kill us. 

Just the other day, an employee at OpenAI who goes by “roon” on Twitter/X, tweeted that “things are accelerating. Pretty much nothing needs to change course to achieve AGI … Worrying about timelines” — that is, worrying about whether AGI will be built later this year or 10 years from now — “is idle anxiety, outside your control. You should be anxious about stupid mortal things instead. Do your parents hate you? Does your wife love you?” In other words, AGI is right around the corner and its development cannot be stopped. Once created, it will bring about the end of the world as we know it, perhaps by killing everyone on the planet. Hence, you should be thinking not so much about when exactly this might happen, but on more mundane things that are meaningful to us humans: Do we have our lives in order? Are we on good terms with our friends, family and partners? When you’re flying on a plane and it begins to nosedive toward the ground, most people turn to their partner and say “I love you” or try to send a few last text messages to loved ones to say goodbye. That is, according to someone at OpenAI, what we should be doing right now.

A similar sentiment has been echoed by other notable figures at OpenAI, such as Altman’s co-founder, Ilya Sutskever. “The future is going to be good for the AIs regardless,” he said in 2019. “It would be nice if it would be good for humans as well.” He adds, ominously, that “I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers” once we create AGI, referencing the idea that AGI is dangerous partly because it will seek to harness every resource it can. In the process, humanity could be destroyed as an unintended side effect. Indeed, Sutskever tells us that the AGI his own company is trying to build probably isn’t,

going to actively hate humans and want to harm them, but it’s just going to be too powerful, and I think a good analogy would be the way humans treat animals. It’s not that we hate animals. I think humans love animals and have a lot of affection for them, but when the time comes to build a highway between two cities, we are not asking the animals for permission. We just do it because it’s important for us. And I think by default that’s the kind of relationship that’s going to be between us and AGIs, which are truly autonomous and operating on their own behalf.

The good folks — by which I mean quasi-homicidal folks — at OpenAI aren’t the only ones being honest about how their work could lead to the annihilation of our species. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, which recently received $4 billion in funding from Amazon, said in 2017 that “there’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen” after building AGI. “I think at the extreme end is the … fear that an AGI could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason in principle why that couldn’t happen.” Similarly, Elon Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI who recently started his own company to build AGI, named xAI, declared in 2023 that “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI,” and has previously said that, being “very close to the cutting edge in AI … scares the hell out of me.” Why? Because advanced AI is “capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Even the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, told Sky News last year that advanced AI “can be very harmful if deployed wrongly,” and that with respect to safety issues, “we don’t have all the answers there yet, and the technology is moving fast. … So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely.”

Google currently owns DeepMind, which was cofounded in 2010 by a computer scientist named Shane Legg. During a talk one year before DeepMind was founded, Legg claimed that “if we can build human level” AI, then “we can almost certainly scale up to well above human level. A machine well above human level will understand its design and be able to design even more powerful machines,” which gestures back at the idea that AGI could take over the job of designing even more advanced AI systems than itself. “We have almost no idea how to deal with this,” he adds. During the same talk, Legg said that we aren’t going to develop a theory about how to keep AGI safe before AGI is developed. “I’ve spoken to a bunch of people,” he reports, “none of them, that I’ve ever spoken to, think they will have a practical theory of friendly artificial intelligence in about 10 years time. We have no idea how to solve this problem.”

Either these AI companies need to show, right now, that the systems they’re building are completely safe, or they need to stop, right now.

That’s worrying because many researchers at the major AI companies argue that — as “roon” suggested — AGI may be just around the corner. In a recent interview, Demis Hassabis, another co-founder of DeepMind, says that “when we started DeepMind back in 2010, we thought of it as a 20-year project, and actually I think we’re on track. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had AGI-like systems within the next decade.” When asked what it would take to make sure that an AGI that’s “smarter than a human” is safe, his answer was, as one commentator put it, a “grab bag of half-baked ideas.” Maybe, he says, we can use less capable AIs to help us keep the AGIs in check. But maybe that won’t work — who knows? Either way, DeepMind and the other AI companies are plowing ahead with their efforts to build AGI, while simultaneously acknowledging, in public, on record, that their products could destroy the entire world.

This is, in a word, madness. If you’re driving in a car with me, and I tell you that earlier today I attached a bomb to the bottom of the car, and it might — or might not! — go off if we hit a pothole, then whether or not you believe me, you should be extremely alarmed. That is a very scary thing to hear someone say at 60 miles an hour on a highway. You should, indeed, turn to me and scream, “Stop this damn car right now. Let me out immediately — I don’t want to ride with you anymore!”

Right now, we’re in that car with these AI companies driving. They have turned to us on numerous occasions over the past decade and a half and admitted that they’ve attached a bomb to the car, and that it might — or might not! — explode in the near future, killing everyone inside. That’s an outrageous situation to be in, and more people should be screaming at them to stop what they’re doing immediately. More people should be dialing 911 and reporting the incident to the authorities, as I did with Tom in the fictional scenario above. 

I do not know if AGI will kill everyone on Earth — I’m more focused on the profound harms that these AI companies have already caused through worker exploitation, massive intellectual property theft, algorithmic bias and so on. The point is that it is completely unacceptable that the people leading or working for these AI companies believe that what they’re doing could kill you, your family, your friends and even your pets (who will feed your fluffy companions if you cease to exist?) — yet continue to do it anyway. One doesn’t need to completely buy-into the “AGI might destroy humanity” claim to see that someone who says their work might destroy humanity should not be doing whatever it is they’re doing. As I’ve shown before, there have been several episodes in recent human history where scientists have declared that we’re on the verge of creating a technology that would destroy the world — and nothing came of it. But that’s irrelevant. If someone tells you that they have a gun and might shoot you, that should be more than enough to sound the alarm even if you believe that they don’t, in fact, have a gun hidden under their bed.

Either these AI companies need to show, right now, that the systems they’re building are completely safe, or they need to stop, right now, trying to build those systems. Something needs to change about the situation — immediately.

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Cash Bail Violates Due Process and Needs to End https://www.truthdig.com/articles/cash-bail-violates-due-process-and-needs-to-end/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cash-bail-violates-due-process-and-needs-to-end https://www.truthdig.com/articles/cash-bail-violates-due-process-and-needs-to-end/#respond Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:52:37 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293847 Poor people await trial behind bars while the rich go free.

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Many Americans haven’t heard of cash bail. But the idea is central to an election year battle over racism, policing, and mass incarceration.

When arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, everyone in the United States has the right to due process and to defend themselves in court. But in a cash bail system, when judges set bail amounts, those who cannot pay the full amount remain jailed indefinitely — a clear violation of their due process rights — while the rich can pay their way out of jail.

A 2022 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined the impact of cash bail and found that between 1970 and 2015, the number of people jailed before trial increased by a whopping 433 percent.

There are currently about half a million such people stuck in jails across the nation who haven’t been tried or convicted of any crimes. The report also found “stark disparities with regards to race,” with Black and brown men most often subject to higher bail amounts.

Thankfully, many states and cities are moving to reform this unfair practice.

In 2023, Illinois became the first state to entirely abolish cash bail. Other states, such as New Mexico, New Jersey, and Kentucky, have almost entirely ended cash bail requirements in recent years. In California, Los Angeles County has also similarly eliminated cash bail for all crimes except the most serious ones.

But in this election year, Republicans are rolling back these efforts — most recently in Georgia.

There are currently about half a million such people stuck in jails across the nation who haven’t been tried or convicted of any crimes.

The state recently passed a bill expanding cash bail for 30 new crimes, some of which appear to be aimed at protesters, such as unlawful assembly. Further, it criminalizes charitable bail funds — and even individuals — that bail out people who can’t afford to bail out themselves.

Marlon Kautz, who runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, called cash bail “a loophole” in the criminal justice system, allowing courts to indefinitely jail people without charges if they cannot pay exorbitant bail amounts.

“Police, prosecutors, and politicians want a bail system that allows them to punish their political enemies, poor people, and people of color without trial,” said Kautz, whose fund has bailed out people protesting a massive new police training facility opponents call “Cop City.” Kautz was one of three people affiliated with the fund to be arrested on apparently politicized charges last year.

Reversing progress on bail reform is a new flashpoint in the GOP’s culture wars. “It could be a sign that Republicans intend to bash their Democratic opponents as soft on crime,” the Associated Press reported. Alongside Georgia, Republicans in Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin have introduced numerous bills expanding the use of cash bail.

Expanding the racist criminal justice system is a cynical GOP election-era ploy, one that has little to do with public safety.

“It is exceedingly rare for someone who’s released pretrial to be arrested and accused of a new offense that involves violence against another person,” said Sharlyn Grace, an official at the Cook County Public Defender’s office in Illinois. “Fears about public safety are in many ways greatly overblown and misplaced.”

“National studies contradict” the claim, the AP adds, that people are any less likely to show up for a court date if they’re released without bail.

Election years are a scary time for people of color in the U.S. They are marked by race-based voter suppression efforts, a rise in racist political rhetoric, and even a surge in racist hate crimes. The expansion of cash bail laws is yet another attack on Black and brown communities — one that must be exposed and confronted.

We shouldn’t let reform efforts fall victim to election year politics.

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COVID Made Us All a Little Insane https://www.truthdig.com/articles/covid-made-us-all-a-little-insane/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=covid-made-us-all-a-little-insane https://www.truthdig.com/articles/covid-made-us-all-a-little-insane/#respond Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:50:12 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293839 A grudging acknowledgment that public health officials got some things wrong would benefit us in the long run.

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The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

I guess you would say that, in the context of 2024, I’m a Covid hawk. Maybe? It’s hard to say. I’m four-times vaccinated. (Pfizer, if you’re curious.) I have never regretted those decisions for a moment, in part because I’m willing to read the data and I’m not a deranged conspiracy theorist. I believed that the lockdowns were an appropriate temporary measure given the state of things at the time. I was perfectly happy to wear a mask during mask mandates, though I felt it was kind of nutty that some people insisted on masking outdoors or when they were alone in their own private car. In hindsight we perhaps should not have pushed vaccine mandates on the young and healthy, given what we now know about their risk profile, but public officials were making difficult decisions in the middle of a disaster. I think Covid was obviously a very deadly disease, even though it only killed a very small portion of the people who got it, and I agree with those that say there’s been a disturbing memory-holing going on with regards to a global pandemic that killed millions. It was a very big deal. I do, however, think it’s “was” and not “is.” Because the data tell us the pandemic is a past-tense phenomenon. And I think it’s crazy to suggest that that’s offensive to say.

I guess I should say that I’m part of the very slim portion of the population that believes that the world’s establishment governments and the United States specifically did a pretty good job managing an unprecedented pandemic. On one side, increasingly emboldened, are the hordes of right-leaning people who insist that Covid was a minor illness, that the vaccines were poisons ginned up by Bill Gates and Big Pharma to defraud the public, and that various restrictions on movement and behavior were simply a tool of leftist control. They think every death that occurs, anywhere, ever, is proof of the danger of the vaccines. On the other, increasingly obstinate, are the Covid dead-enders, the left-leaning types who have not been in a public place since March of 2020, who continue to douse their houses with anti-bacterial soap, who believe that the next big outbreak is mere days and way and who (and I am not exaggerating) think that we should today, in 2024, have lockdown policies in place as aggressive as those under China’s Zero Covid policy. (If you think I exaggerate, take five minutes to look around in the online spaces of the Covid ultra-hawks and see for yourself.)

It was a very big deal. I do, however, think it’s “was” and not “is.” Because the data tell us the pandemic is a past-tense phenomenon.

At some point in the blogosphere days, “both sides” constructions became so thoroughly satirized that employing one is now déclassée, but I must: it is indeed the case that when it comes to Covid, there are crazies on either side of our culture war divide. I invite you to peruse the subreddits for people with ongoing extreme fear of Covid. I feel sympathy for those people, but it’s a sympathy derived from the fact that many of them seem to clearly be mentally ill.

I’m not suggesting that each side is equally destructive, nothing so crude. For one thing, there’s simply far more of the right-wing Covid skeptics than the left-wing Covid shut-ins; after all, there’s a greater personal cost to actually living the extreme Covid-avoidant lifestyle than there is to yelling on the internet about “the jab.” And the conspiracism surrounding the vaccines has become positively surreal, to the point that I fear it’s created the same kind of charged atmosphere that led someone to bring an assault rifle to Comet Ping Pong. The belief that the vaccines have killed vast hordes of people, thanks to guys like the addled omni-conspiracist Brett Weinstein, has grown despite the utter lack of evidence that any such thing has occurred. I had a particularly persistent emailer who kept insisting that I write about this supposed conspiracy, to whom I would just as consistently ask for evidence. His response was always to send me links to obituaries for individual people who had (supposedly) died of cardiac issues, with no proof whatsoever that those deaths were caused by the vaccine. Eventually he produced a crowdsourced spreadsheet, but it was more of the same – these people had named hundreds who had died of various cardiac issues, but not a single one I found could be responsibly attributed to the Covid vaccines.

There have been a few cases of myocarditis that have been linked to the vaccines, but every piece of responsible evidence suggests that they’re incredibly rare. The M.O. of the anti-vaccine cranks, meanwhile, amounts to “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” and to attributing any heart-related death to vaccines, despite the fact that cardiac issues have been the number one cause of death for as long as I’ve been alive. I saw an Instagram post recently that shared the news that former baseball superstar Darryl Strawberry had suffered a heart attack; predictably, many of the top comments suggested that this was the result of “the jab.” Darryl Strawberry is 62 years old; he’s Black, which carries with it higher risks of cardiac disorders; he has by his own admission lived a life filled with substance abuse and general hard living, which raises the risk of heart attack. But, nope – Covid vaccines exist, Darry Strawberry maybe(?) got one, like 800,000+ other Americans every year he suffered a heart attack, ergo he must have been the victim of the vaccines. If there are vaccine skeptics who are more responsible than this, they sure seem uninterested in combatting this kind of absurd reasoning. Nobody in that “movement” seems to have any interest in policing the relentless assertions of death-by-vaccine that crop up without a shred of evidence.

It’s true, though, that there’s also an ongoing kind of liberal denialism about Covid, an addiction to being the only serious people in class, that depends on a refusal to acknowledge that Covid is no longer a pandemic, that we are in most important ways in a post-Covid era. It’s an addiction not just to the fear of Covid but to the purity of the culture war of the height of the coronavirus, when everyone had nothing but time, time in which to yell on Twitter from the usual battle stations. You can see those problems clearly in this newsletter missive from Tom Scocca.

I must: it is indeed the case that when it comes to Covid, there are crazies on either side of our culture war divide.

Scocca, probably best known for his work at (original flavor) Gawker, is obviously very talented, and I recommend his book to people all the time. Beijing Welcomes You is a kind of cultural-immersion nonfiction that’s remarkably easy to get wrong, a book that he could have sold on the premise alone and then turned into a low-effort “Beijing is a land of contrasts” say-nothing snooze for readers who just want to be told that the Chinese are just like you and me, except in the ways that they aren’t. Scocca’s book, which was published in 2011 and describes the city’s furious efforts to prepare for the 2008 Olympic games, is consistently deft, and pulls off the rare feat of never exoticizing a foreign population while also never letting you forget that they are indeed foreign, not like us in real ways. The temptation to blatantly exoticize is pecuniary; the temptation to wave away human difference is self-defensive. The book avoids both. I also always liked his weather reviews at the Awl and I subscribe to his newsletter. He is Not A Fan of Mine, but this is always to be assumed. I do think though that this essay of his reveals not just a resistance to paying attention to epidemiological evidence among the left-leaning but also some inherent weaknesses of the social and professional culture he’s belonged to – the cult of the endlessly superior who ruled media from the mid-2000s until quite recently.

Scocca’s target is this piece by Malaka Gharib, in which she (to use the headline’s term) wrestles with her husband’s fears of being reinfected with Covid. I personally thought that it was an unobjectionable example of what’s become a large genre, but Scocca, himself immunocompromised, finds Gharib lacking in empathy for her own spouse.

Right away, the focus was slipping. Was the problem that her husband is afraid of Covid, or was it that her husband and his doctors have decided that he will be vulnerable to extra harm if he catches another case of Covid? For the purposes of the essay, the real problem was how all of this affected Gharib. “I want to keep my husband safe and healthy,” she wrote. “But I also want our old life back.” …

Gharib was airing out her unexamined unhappiness. Her guilty feeling, here in 2024, was that she wanted her pre-Covid life back. Wonderful. Guess what? Everyone wants their pre-Covid life back! I wrote about this myself less than a week ago. Movies! Restaurants! Oysters! Crowded bars with friends! I want all of these things again. But since I’m also someone with an autoimmune problem complicated by Covid, people like Gharib are helping to make that impossible. 

The first thing that we have to attend to is this ineradicable liberal assumption that Covid was, somehow, a choice – that we could have simply chosen not to have a pandemic in the first place if only our feckless leaders/Trump specifically/those idiot conservatives/that bitch I hate in accounting had been Serious about it all. I remember when Covid deaths were at their peak, how often I saw liberals saying some version of “Why are they letting this happen?!?” There were no doubt some steps that could have been taken that would have reduced deaths, some mistakes that could have been avoided. But as I felt moved to say constantly during the pandemic, nobody was “letting” Covid happened; Covid killed millions of people because it is a highly-transmissible respiratory infection that spreads effortlessly through our incredibly interconnected world. That’s why Covid happened, because the world is indifferent, life isn’t fair, and epidemics arise from the ether to kill people; they always have, they always will. By all means, get mad at the missteps. But in contemporary times there’s this intense progressive attachment to the notion that we could be living in a perfect world, if only there was no such thing as a Republican. It’s born of privilege and of a false understanding of what socialism promises and of our journalist class being made up of dreamers. Sadly, in real life, bad things happen for no reason every single day, and sometimes they happen at global scale.

And so you see this with Scocca here. “People like Gharib are helping to make [returning to normal] impossible,” he says. But how? Where’s the evidence? I see this suggestion all the time, that the immunocompromised could be living lives of freedom and confidence if the rest of us committed to (generally vague) additional Covid measures. But these claims seem both insufficiently specific about what behaviors are demanded of the rest of us and insufficiently supported in terms of providing responsible scientific evidence to prove their efficacy. Let’s say that ordinary people would consent to masking everywhere again, to universal vaccine mandates for public spaces, to the (dubious, to say the least) practice of “social distancing.” I don’t think most people would consent to that, which is a whole other wing of this discussion, not what’s ideal but what’s achievable. But setting that aside, would the immunocompromised feel safe to leave the house then? I guess Scocca is suggesting he would. But given the extravagant level of safety many people demand from Covid, I doubt most would return to anything like ordinary life. Indeed, it has always seemed plain to me that there are some people who do not want to return to ordinary life and thus are Covid extremists, not the other way around; I apologize if that’s not polite but it seems to clearly be the case when you look at communities like that subreddit. Either way, you can’t just wave vaguely at some higher standard of behavior that the rest of us should follow to make the world safer. You have to actually express what behaviors, specifically, enforced how, and based on which evidence. I don’t see that very often.

There’s also an ongoing kind of liberal denialism about Covid, an addiction to being the only serious people in class, that depends on a refusal to acknowledge that Covid is no longer a pandemic.

There are, of course, those who are so immunocompromised that they were already forced to take extreme measures to avoid getting sick before Covid. They’ll presumably be forced to do so not until the public makes some sort of ill-defined commitment to caring for them but when better medical solutions arrive. Scocca has described his own health battles which, I’m assuming, explain his need for extra protections against the virus. But with the question of the immunocompromised in general, I think the conversation became something very much like one we had (or really, didn’t) about PTSD.

In the mid-2010s, when the demand for trigger warnings1 and other forms of luxurious emotional protection were moving busily from academia to the rest of adult life – a movement I was told again and again in the late 2000s and early 2010s, by people like Scocca, would never take place – the rhetorical role of post-traumatic stress disorder took on a curious kind of prominence. The “trigger” in trigger warning stemmed originally from the concept of a PTSD trigger, a sense impression or experience that prompts panic and fear in those who suffer from PTSD. (In actual PTSD medicine, it’s widely acknowledged that triggers are rarely things like references to slavery or the word “hysteria” but instead uncontrolled sensory inputs like patterns of sounds, specific smells, or a particular play of light, but nevertheless.) The invocation of PTSD lent trigger warning discourse the imprimatur of medical necessity. If you didn’t support trigger warnings, you hated people with PTSD! This was nonsense for a variety of reasons. But it also inspired what I thought was a sensible question: when on earth did so many college students start suffering from PTSD? I didn’t see any evidence to explain a sudden, incredible explosion in what has been a rare disorder, particularly among students at our nation’s elite colleges, who are in general a very privileged class. PTSD was once associated with combat veterans, war orphans, refugees. (In fact some believe that what we think of as PTSD is actually a form of post-concussive syndrome driven by the proximity to repeated explosions). Now suddenly everyone was taking as given that the average college student suffered from the disorder; otherwise the stated rationale for universal trigger warnings makes little sense. So I started asking, uh, why do you all think that is true? Got a study?

My efforts were swiftly corrected: it was offensive to ask what percentage of America’s college students had PTSD, I was repeatedly told. I was rejecting their lived experience; I was calling them liars; I was invading their medical privacy. Never mind that I had never questioned any individual person’s diagnosis, but instead asked about a supposed sudden explosion in a complicated disorder that had, until recently, been broadly understood in the medical world to be rare. But it wasn’t to be countenanced. The scenario we were in was that an asserted epidemiological fact (that PTSD is epidemic on college campuses) had great argumentative force, was in fact core to the whole debate, but was not subject to questioning, no matter how respectfully voiced. You had to accept any claim to PTSD at face value, even if the disorder was invoked as a purely argumentative move. People would move very swiftly to saying that actually, trigger warnings are for all kinds of students, not just those with PTSD, but it was the medical argument that was the real club that people liked to wield. And this was all very handy for social justice types, who had developed an iron-fisted attachment to trigger warning for pure culture war reasons. Which, to complete this overly long analogy, was very similar to Covid, in that I regularly grappled with this question: When the fuck did everybody become immunocompromised?

I think the conversation became something very much like one we had (or really, didn’t) about PTSD.

I think it’s really essential, in both of these cases, to clearly separate respect from people who do suffer from a condition (PTSD, being immunocompromised) with asking for evidence of the prevalence of that condition generally. We need to practice the former, to be fair and kind; we need to be able to practice the latter, to make good public policy. And I became regularly frustrated with the hand-waving insistence, from political progressives, that our country was absolutely stuffed full of people with severely compromised immune systems, a novel and unsupported claim of fact which was then used as a cudgel to beat those who resisted particular policies. But knowing how many people are actually immunocompromised, as diagnosed by medical professionals instead of self-assessed, is essential to making sound public health decisions. The larger that population, the more likely public policy is to bend to meet their needs at the cost of the needs of the general population. I’m sorry if this offends anyone’s sense of justice, but we constantly make decisions in society that favor the desires of the majority over the health of small minorities. Some people are alcoholics, but we don’t reinstitute Prohibition to support their sobriety. Some people are allergic to peanuts2, but you can still buy them at Trader Joe’s. Some people (like, a very very few) have photosensitive epilepsy, and though warnings are now becoming ubiquitous, we don’t ban shows, games, or movies from having strobing effects, because the impediment to artistic expression for all is too great to be offset by the health benefits of a small few.

That might sound insensitive, but that is just literally what public health policy is, a weighing of interests. And we can’t do that when you’re not allowed to ask how many people are actually immunocompromised. When that information is sought out, though, the person asking for it is often told that they’re guilty of “eugenics,” which has no earthly connection to public health data about the actual rate of being immunocompromised but does sound like a big important word. Sadly, you can’t do an end run around the various forms of public health calculus that we are inevitably forced to perform when an epidemic rears its head. Saying that a vulnerable population exists cannot imply the need for a given policy, certainly not without a) a firm grasp on whether a given intervention will actually help that vulnerable population, b) that population’s actual relative risk, and c) the size of that population as a portion of the whole. So much of Scocca’s essay proceeds from this same incorrect thinking – that the existence of immunocompromised people, in and of itself, dictates a particular Covid policy. But, for one thing, we really, genuinely do not know how effective the NPIs were, even lockdowns, for the immunocompromised or anyone else. More broadly, it was just always going to be true that governments would make calculations about what to do, and when, that drew in part on a sense of the size of various vulnerable groups.

Nothing is going to bring Gharib’s old life back. More than a million people are dead in the United States. Her husband suffered a life-changing injury to his health. Also—she has a two-year-old child around the house? “My husband and I used to host big parties, go to concerts, travel on a whim,” she wrote. Ma’am. Parents of toddlers were writing that essay years and years before the spike protein ever mutated. 

More than a million dead is tragic, but many or most people have returned to lives that are indistinguishable from their old lives before the pandemic, at no personal cost to themselves. Gharib’s entire essay is about working through her feelings about balancing her husband’s health needs with her perfectly-understandable desire to live a normal life, and fair or unfair watching the rest of the world move on is going to affect the emotions that she is explicitly writing about in that piece. I think the notion that not writing such a piece for fear of hurting feelings is not a productive approach to these very common personal crisis. And, yes, children change your life. But we aren’t talking about that right now, are we?

Right—you do those things because you don’t want your husband to catch Covid. For your husband, it is still 2020, which was actually 2021, since the vaccines weren’t out to the public until the spring of that year. His risk profile is not the same as the risk profile for the general public (although there are a lot of people like him—like me—in the public). 

But how on earth does Scocca know that? There is no such thing as a unitary immunocompromised state, and every body reacts differently to different epidemiological conditions. We don’t know how Gharib’s husband’s immunodeficiency actually functions, other than the information that it stems from an autoimmune disorder. We don’t know if more people taking Covid tests and constantly measuring CO₂, Scocca’s preferred practices, would actually result in a world that would be safer for him. There are vast spectra of immunodeficiency, and to speak about a stranger as though we know what would or won’t work for him doesn’t help anyone.

Yet the entire essay was dedicated to the premise that risk management is really a matter of managing one’s emotions and expectations. For expert insight into her situation, Gharib brought her complaints about her husband not to infectious-disease specialists but to various psychologists, who told her the couple needed to work on compromise and communication. One of them informed her, she wrote, that ‘the main problem area he sees with couples in this situation is their individual assessment of risk.’

This strikes me as the key bit, really: Scocca is mad that Gharib sees the assessment of Covid risk “as a matter of managing one’s emotions and expectations.” But of course a whole other set of people would argue that Scocca is doing the same and simply coming to different conclusions, and not all of them are rabid conservatives. Take a look at the graph at the top. It charts excess deaths, which is to say, the amount of deaths above that which would be expected given otherwise normal mortality conditions. That huge spike is Covid, and it’s a tragedy. The way that some people have decided to minimize what that awful graph means is indeed unfortunate, and constant “Intellectual Dark Web” suggestions that the risks of the vaccines outweigh the risks graphed above are not just wrong, they’re despicable. But you can also see that the number of confirmed Covid deaths has reached near-zero and been there for some time. And you can see that the confidence intervals for excess deaths represented on the graph include zero – that is to say, we are incapable of saying from current evidence that excess deaths are not zero. Put another way, they are statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Which is exactly what we should expect in 2024! The single most important epidemiological factor here is the level of communal prophylactic exposure to the virus, whether through vaccination or prior infection. And almost everyone has such exposure now. Combine that with the fact that the risk to those who were not old or sick was always very low, that the CDC said from the beginning that the vast majority of people who caught the virus would either be asymptomatic or have mild cases, that Paxlovid and various other treatments now amount to effective cures for the illness…. Well, most Americans appear to have responded to all of that by resuming normal life entirely. And it’s really difficult for me to say that they’re wrong to do so. Because as an excess death event, Covid is over and has been for a year. I know – conservatives were quick to move on and declare Covid over, we are the not-conservatives, therefore we must never say anything that suggests that Covid is over. But for those who have healthy immune systems (which, based on all available medical data rather than Twitter posturing, is almost everyone) the risks of Covid are now not worth major behavioral changes. Sorry if that all sounds a little Joe Rogan Experience to you, but for most people it appears to be pretty simply math. To quote Tom Scocca, “Risks aren’t feelings. They’re probabilities based on facts.”

More than a million dead is tragic, but many or most people have returned to lives that are indistinguishable from their old lives before the pandemic, at no personal cost to themselves.

Scocca and anyone else who’s immunocompromised has every right to be mad about the degree to which society accommodates their needs, and every right to advocate for change. I would probably help, if I could, depending on the details. But I would suggest a few things. The first is that what they’re really asking for now is not to have our relationship to the immunocompromised change in an emergency Covid setting, but outside of that setting, simply in the flow of day-to-day life, as a part of normal operating procedure. I honestly think that, politically and rhetorically, Scocca and people like him would benefit from decoupling their call for more accommodation for the immunocompromised from Covid, which is not only hopelessly partisan and polarized but also something even many liberals would prefer to no longer think about. I find it hard to believe that most Americans would consent to sticking something up their nose every time they want to go to a public place, as Scocca calls for, but if I was convinced that there was a strong scientific evidence that doing so would help a vulnerable population, I would. I do dearly wish that we would invest more in overhauling HVAC systems in a way that reduces exposure. And we always must hope for better medical choices in general.

But I also think that liberals really poisoned the well when they decided to wage war against anyone who dared to make any public health calculations during the pandemic, despite the fact that such calculations were inevitable and necessary. The relentless braying about “eugenics,” the insistence that anyone who was not an NPI maximalist hated the disabled and wanted them to die, contributed directly to the backlash that has resulted in so much Covid conspiracy insanity. And this gets to the unhealthy media culture I discussed at the top. It turned out that the height of the Covid era coincided with the last days of the dominance of a particular vision of ultra-confident left-leaning media pose, one that Scocca and the rest of the ex-Gawker crew exemplified but which was much larger than them. If you went anywhere near Twitter from 2008ish to 2022ish, you know what I mean, that kind of relentlessly uncompromising, self-satisfied type of engagement, “irony” run through the photocopier a hundred times until it was a dim impression of what irony is and is for. I’ve read Scocca faithfully for over a decade, and liked a lot of what I’ve read, but I can’t say I remember ever seeing him just take an L, admit fault and give it up to someone he had disagreed with and moved on. In that he was much like most of the people in this profession for a solid ten years.

Now, a “vibe shift” that’s wrestled some control of culture away from social justice liberals, relentless media layoffs, and the death of Twitter have ended the discursive conditions under which that approach flourished. And maybe now is a good time to get used to occasionally, very occasionally, admitting that the other side might have a point, that social justice liberalism actually does have some deeply unhealthy aspects, and that our grudging acknowledgments that (for example) public health officials got some major things wrong would benefit us in the long run. But it’s like the trigger warning thing; a lot of liberals seem vaguely embarrassed about how hard they went to bat for such things, but can’t ever bring themselves to suggest that maybe they were on the wrong side. They seem to think that such behavior would only give succor to the enemy. Anyway – yes, conservative Covid conspiracism and the endless latitude it’s been given by the “dissident” media is much worse, has much greater negative consequences. Then again, to fight back, we must be relentlessly self-critical.

As for Scocca, well, I hope better health is ahead. We shall see how public health develops, although given the paucity of investment in overhauling various parts of our society to be more epidemic-resistant, I’m pessimistic. The broader question, of who to blame, will always been enflamed. Scocca says, “Society had given up on protecting Gharib’s husband, so now she felt left out of society. And she looked for a way to blame her husband for it.” Perhaps. Perhaps. But this looks like projection, to me – when you read Scocca’s essay, do you think, even for a minute, that it’s really Gharib’s essay that’s made him so mad? 

  1. For the record, the constant liberal insistence that trigger warnings “are just warnings” is demonstrably false; at both UC-Santa Barbara and Brown, for example, students pushed hard for policies that would allow them to skip any material they deemed triggering, at any time, as many times as they felt appropriate, without penalty. ↩
  2. There are compelling arguments that food allergy rates are dramatically exaggerated in this country, for a variety of reasons. The biggest is, simply, incentives – a doctor who says that you do have an allergy when you don’t will never face any kind of negative repercussions from that mistake, while a doctor who says you don’t have an allergy when you do faces potentially back-breaking malpractice liability. When a false positive is so much less costly than a false negative, you can assume that you’re going to get a lot of the former. ↩

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The WSJ Wants to Delegitimize Democratic Opposition to Violence https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-wsj-wants-to-delegitimize-democratic-opposition-to-violence/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-wsj-wants-to-delegitimize-democratic-opposition-to-violence https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-wsj-wants-to-delegitimize-democratic-opposition-to-violence/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:34:33 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293827 The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) is concerned that they live among us. They are Arab Americans. And what are they doing to threaten the United States? Voting.The Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm in response to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American and a member of the left-wing voting bloc known as the Squad, calling for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in […]

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The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) is concerned that they live among us. They are Arab Americans. And what are they doing to threaten the United States? Voting.

The Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm in response to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American and a member of the left-wing voting bloc known as the Squad, calling for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan presidential primary. “Will Dearborn, Michigan, Determine US Israel Policy?” the headline wondered ominously. The subhead explained: “The pro-Palestinian Democratic left wants to force Biden to stop the war in Gaza against Hamas.”

At issue was that Tlaib’s mobilization of the large Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan, against Biden’s pro-Israel stance could put Michigan in play in the 2024 presidential election, thus potentially swaying the incumbent to be more critical of Israel.

Voting as subversion

Expressing alarm at the idea of a president adjusting policy in response to democratic pressure, the Journal warned that the “left’s threats are already influencing Mr. Biden’s foreign policy”: As “domestic criticism of Mr. Biden’s support for Israel has increased…Mr. Biden has become much more critical of Israel.”

The editorial board continued:

The problem is that if the Arab Americans in and around Dearborn begin to set US policy, Hamas and Iran will be the beneficiaries. Ms. Tlaib and others claim not to support Hamas or the October 7 massacre, but the ceasefire they want would have the effect of leaving its fighters alive and free to rebuild their terror state. The suffering in Gaza is terrible, but the main cause is Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.

What the financial class’s top paper is saying is that an ethnic voting bloc in Dearborn might “claim” not to be a Fifth Column—but in fact they are at best unwitting stooges, and at worst lying traitors, effectively supporting official enemies of the US government. (The Journal‘s logic would delegitimize virtually all opposition to US violence—since ending such violence would no doubt be welcomed by its ostensible targets, who are by definition enemies.)

Of course, opposition in Michigan to Biden’s Israel policy extends well beyond Arab Americans (or Muslims). A recent poll of likely voters found that nearly 74% of Michigan Democrats favored a unilateral ceasefire. And voters yesterday in Minnesota—a state with no sizable Arab-American population—cast “uncommitted” votes in such high numbers that it has stunned political analysts and raised alarms about the president’s viability in the general election (Reuters3/6/24NBC3/6/24). A “no preference” campaign did surprisingly well in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts (WBUR3/6/24).

Arab Americans in Michigan do have a small degree of political power now, because Michigan is a critical swing state. But that’s not a unique position for an ethnic enclave in American politics. Does the Journal also have a problem with the outsized role South Florida’s Cuban-American population plays in a state with so many electoral votes (Politico11/4/20)? Is the Journal concerned with the influence Hasidic voting blocs have on New York City’s politics (New York Times10/30/22)?

The uncommitted vote was successful; the AP (2/28/24) called it a “victory for Biden’s anti-war opponents,” reporting that the state will send two uncommitted delegates.

‘America’s jihad capital’

This editorial came just a few short weeks after the paper ran an op-ed (2/2/24) by Steven Stalinsky of the pro-Israel group MEMRI. Stalinsky declared Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital,” reaching back to stale 9/11 hysteria:

Support for terrorism in southern Michigan has long been a concern for US counterterrorism officials. A 2001 Michigan State Police assessment submitted to the Justice Department after 9/11 called Dearborn “a major financial support center” and a “recruiting area and potential support base” for international terror groups, including possible sleeper cells.

That piece claimed that the problem in Dearborn was that its Arab-American residents were would-be criminals. “What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats,” Stalinksy said. “It’s potentially a national security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.”

The fallout from the op-ed was immense. Fox News (2/5/24), which like the Journal is a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, reported that Dearborn’s mayor said that “city police increased security at places of worship and major infrastructure points as a ‘direct result’” of the article. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (2/3/24) tweeted that the op-ed “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” Biden, along with Michigan elected officials and Arab-American community leaders, condemned the article (Detroit News2/5/24).

State Rep. Alabas Farhat (AP2/6/24) co-sponsored a resolution demanding a retraction and public apology, saying the piece “fanned the flames of hatred and division in our country during a time when hate crimes are on the rise.” He added, “It makes it so that it’s normal to question how patriotic your neighbor is.”

The Journal editorial board doubled down with its own racist, Islamophobic tirade. This vilification of Arab-Americans is the same kind of thinking that led this country to force Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the face of a war against Japan. Enlightened society would like to think that times like that have been relegated to the dustbin of history, but the fact that we’re seeing this today in the Journal is proof that scary times are here again.

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How a CEO Salary Cap Act Would Help Green the Economy https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-a-ceo-salary-cap-act-would-help-green-the-economy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-a-ceo-salary-cap-act-would-help-green-the-economy https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-a-ceo-salary-cap-act-would-help-green-the-economy/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:05:19 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293797 We can cite many reasons for opposing large discrepancies in pay within enterprises, everything from the depressing impact of these discrepancies on employee morale to diminished firm productivity and widened gender and racial disparities.But another reason for opposing corporate pay discrepancies is becoming increasingly evident: the impact of this pay inequality on our environment. Wide pay […]

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We can cite many reasons for opposing large discrepancies in pay within enterprises, everything from the depressing impact of these discrepancies on employee morale to diminished firm productivity and widened gender and racial disparities.

But another reason for opposing corporate pay discrepancies is becoming increasingly evident: the impact of this pay inequality on our environment. Wide pay gaps tend to increase adverse environmental impacts. And high pay — particularly high CEO pay — is incentivizing the kind of unsustainable economic growth that’s feeding our ongoing social and environmental crises.

Many corporate CEO pay packages, for instance, include generous grants of stock and stock options. These sweeteners motivate CEOs to strive for ever more corporate growth no matter how ecologically destructive —  then use the resulting profits to buy back their company stock, a move that raises corporate share prices and enriches CEOs even further.

The Salary Cap Act would essentially make it a crime for corporate employers to pay out exorbitant salaries.

The compensation of oil company top executives, for instance, links intimately to exploring for new fossil-fuel fields, extracting ever more oil, and promoting still more carbon consumption. Top Big Oil corporate chiefs, as Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute observes, “have personal ownership of tens or hundreds of thousands of shares” and that “creates an unacknowledged personal desire to explore, extract, and sell fossil fuels.”

Stock and bonus-based CEO compensation also encourages companies to take speculative and short-term perspectives. Chief execs demand that their firms make risky corporate maneuvers to quickly boost their stock prices. The Enron scandal, for example, involved CEOs trying to rapidly raise their share prices in a reckless pursuit of higher personal bonuses.

Selfish and short-sighted corporate decisions like these are taking a serious environmental toll and come — disastrously — at a time when companies should be committed instead to the long-term health of our planet.

To counter inequality in the USA, the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy is now proposing the adoption of a new Salary Cap Act. This model legislation would create salary caps in all our major occupational sectors, as Brian Czech has proposed in his book Supply Shock. The Salary Cap Act would essentially make it a crime for corporate employers to pay out exorbitant salaries.

This proposed legislation defines “salaries” as wages, bonuses, and other forms of compensation specified under Section 3401(a) of the Internal Revenue Code. This broad definition would encompass forms of compensation — like corporate stock options — not traditionally classified as “salary.”

Section 4 of the Salary Cap Act describes how we could be capping top executive pay. Under the legislation, the U.S. secretary of labor would set pay caps for each of the 23 major occupational groupings in the Standard Occupational Classification Codes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains. These annually updated caps would correspond to 1.8 times the compensation of the 90th percentile of employees in each major occupational grouping.

This legislation would help apply brakes on the executive pay incentives now driving our largest corporations to grow the economy well beyond our planet’s carrying capacity.

In other words, the maximum compensation in each occupational grouping would be no more than 80 percent higher than the pay that 90 percent of the employees in that grouping are making.

Why this 1.8 times multiple? This maximum pay multiple reflects a simple reality. The president of the United States is currently making 1.8 times the 90th percentile of CEO salaries. At the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, we do not believe that any CEO deserves to be paid more than the president of the United States. The Salary Cap Act’s maximum salary formula offers more than ample room to reward superior performance while curbing the social and environmental distortions that our most exorbitant pay packages bring.

The Salary Cap Act’s fifth section describes how the Office of Labor-Management Standards in the Department of Labor would enforce the legislation. This office would have the power to petition the courts when it believes companies are violating the Salary Cap Act. Companies found guilty would face criminal penalties of up to $100 million. Their top executives could also face up to ten years in prison.

Those of us involved in preparing the Salary Cap Act have designed this legislation as both a stand-alone bill and a component of a larger Steady State Economy Act. The Salary Cap Act would not, by itself, end wealth inequality or ecological overshooting. But the legislation would help apply brakes on the executive pay incentives now driving our largest corporations to grow the economy well beyond our planet’s carrying capacity.

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In Canada, Fossil Fuel Industry Funds Discord Among Native Groups https://www.truthdig.com/articles/in-canada-fossil-fuel-industry-funds-discord-among-native-groups/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-canada-fossil-fuel-industry-funds-discord-among-native-groups https://www.truthdig.com/articles/in-canada-fossil-fuel-industry-funds-discord-among-native-groups/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:03:32 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293806 After NDP member of Parliament Charlie Angus introduced a bill in February proposing to ban misleading fossil fuel advertising in Canada, the oil and gas advocate Stephen Buffalo wrote an incendiary National Post column attacking the legislation.Buffalo, a member of the Samson Cree Nation, called Bill C-372 the “most egregious attack on civil liberties in recent Canadian history” and “a direct […]

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After NDP member of Parliament Charlie Angus introduced a bill in February proposing to ban misleading fossil fuel advertising in Canada, the oil and gas advocate Stephen Buffalo wrote an incendiary National Post column attacking the legislation.

Buffalo, a member of the Samson Cree Nation, called Bill C-372 the “most egregious attack on civil liberties in recent Canadian history” and “a direct assault on Indigenous peoples.” He compared it to the Indian Act of 1876, a notorious federal law that attempted to erase the culture of First Nations peoples. His column ricocheted across the internet, where it was shared or referenced by industry groups, conservative columnists and rightwing politicians, including federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. 

Stephen Buffalo leads the Indian Resource Council, which received $450,000 from CNRL in recent years. Credit: IRC YouTube

But Buffalo is not a disinterested player in this debate. He is president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council, an Alberta-based group that in recent years has quietly received $450,000 in contributions from Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL), one of the country’s top oil and gas producers, according to federal disclosures newly reviewed by DeSmog.  

Buffalo’s column called the false advertising bill ‘a direct assault on Indigenous peoples.’ Credit: Facebook

On a recent webinar hosted by an industry organization called the First Nations LNG Alliance, whose affiliate members include Shell Canada and pipeline builder TC Energy, Buffalo appeared to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change, stating that “we still can’t say if CO2 is a pollution…Definitely there’s a lot of fear mongering on what CO2 is and what it does.”

The contributions from CNRL haven’t been made public by the Indian Resource Council, which says it is comprised “of First Nations across Canada that have oil and gas production on their land including those that have the potential for production.” DeSmog previously reported that Buffalo’s group received $200,000 from CNRL between 2020 and 2022. 

More recent disclosures on a federal database created via the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act, which requires companies to report payments to governments and other groups, shows CNRL gave an additional $250,000 to the Indian Resource Council in 2022.

The IRC received $250,000 from CNRL in 2022 alone. Credit: CNRL disclosures

Neither Buffalo’s organization nor CNRL responded to detailed questions about the financial contribution. 

“I definitely respect his right as an Indigenous person to have his own perspective,” Tara Marsden, sustainability director for the Wilp, or house clans, of the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, said of Buffalo. “But he’s just one perspective.” 

In British Columbia where Marsden is based, misleading oil and gas advertising is rampant, she said, including ads falsely claiming that liquefied natural gas is a climate solution. 

Other ads suggest that all Indigenous people are on board with fossil fuel development, when in reality there is a wide spectrum of opinion within First Nations communities. “We are very diverse in terms of our approaches to self-determination and environmental risk,” Marsden told DeSmog. The Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, for example, warned in an open letter last month about the climate impacts of an LNG project proposed by the Nisga’a First Nation. 

The Gitanyow First Nation supports the fossil fuel ad ban proposed by Angus, saying that a deluge of factually inaccurate oil and gas advertising obscures the dire consequences of continuing to burn oil and gas — including what could be another devastating wildfire season this year due to usually warm and dry conditions caused by rising global temperatures.

“False ads pose a direct threat to climate progress, and we must have the ability to make informed decisions and mitigate climate impacts,” Marsden said last month

A recent Facebook ad claims LNG is a climate solution and ‘a great step toward economic reconciliation.’ Credit: Meta Ad Library

Angus’ legislation draws inspiration from a 1997 law restricting tobacco marketing. The private member’s bill proposes to outlaw advertising downplaying the dire climate and health impacts of burning oil and gas, as well as overstating the benefits of fossil fuel development to Indigenous communities, which is a common public relations strategy these days. 

It predictably triggered outrage among conservatives, as DeSmog previously reported, with politicians like Alberta premier Danielle Smith calling it “lunacy.” But it was Buffalo’s op-ed in the National Post that seemed to gain the most traction. Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid called it “the most damaging criticism.” 

The op-ed was referenced in Parliament by Conservative MP Laila Goodridge, boosted online by Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz and mentioned prominently by the oil and gas advocacy group Resource Works. Cody Battershill, founder of the group Canada Action, which has received $200,000 from the gas company ARC Resources, said during a recent radio debate about the proposed fossil fuel ad ban that “there was an Indigenous leader who compared it to the Indian Act,” an apparent reference to Buffalo’s column.

Marsden said she doesn’t “have any issue” with Buffalo’s Indian Resource Council receiving funding from CNRL. “He’ll go out and find resources to support his work, and if that comes from the oil and gas industry then that’s an alignment of perspectives,” she said. 

But Marsden argues it’s false to assume that Buffalo speaks on behalf of all Indigenous people in Canada in his heated attacks against the fossil fuel ad ban. “It’s a disproportionate reaction,” she said. “Let’s tone down the outrage maybe a little.” 

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Donald Trump Isn’t Done Transforming the Supreme Court https://www.truthdig.com/articles/donald-trump-isnt-done-transforming-the-supreme-court/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=donald-trump-isnt-done-transforming-the-supreme-court https://www.truthdig.com/articles/donald-trump-isnt-done-transforming-the-supreme-court/#respond Tue, 12 Mar 2024 17:18:47 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293782 If re-elected, he could nominate James Ho, perhaps the country’s most reactionary federal appellate judge.

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This article first appeared in The Progressive.

Donald Trump’s greatest presidential achievement was remaking the U.S. Supreme Court. By appointing three young and doctrinaire judicial “originalists” to the bench—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—Trump ensured that the Court would be dominated by a six-three conservative supermajority for years to come. 

The right’s capture of the high court is the result of a longstanding crusade that some commentators date to a confidential 1971 memo authored by the late Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” Drafted on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce while Powell was a well-connected partner in a blue-chip law firm in Richmond, Virginia, the memo urged corporations to “recruit” lawyers of “the greatest skill” to represent their interests before the Supreme Court, which had moved steadily leftward under the stewardship of Chief Justice Earl Warren.  

The memo was breathtaking in its scope and ambition. In it, Powell argued that “Under our constitutional system . . . the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” It was imperative, in Powell’s view, for the Supreme Court to change course. As writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article published by CounterPunch, the memo was “A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down.”

The right’s capture of the high court is the result of a longstanding crusade.

It was only a matter of time until the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, and The Federalist Society, formed in 1982, heeded the call and began to compile lists of acceptable conservative candidates for appointment to the Supreme Court. Both groups were especially active in proposing candidate rosters for Trump, a process that culminated in him choosing Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

But if you think that Trump is finished remaking the Supreme Court, think again. Supreme Court justices are human, and while they serve for an average of twenty-six long years, they are mortal, just like the rest of us. 

Of all the court’s current members, Clarence Thomas is the oldest and the most likely to step down. Nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1991, Thomas will turn seventy-six in June. And he may not be in tip-top medical condition, having been hospitalized for a week with an undisclosed infection in 2022. Thomas isn’t the type to retire early, but if Trump is reelected and is able to nominate his successor, he may just decide the time is right to ride off down Interstate 80 with his wife Ginni in the luxury RV he purchased with a since-forgiven loan from one of his many uber-wealthy benefactors

If Thomas decides to leave, a worthy successor is waiting in the wings—Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ho, who may just be the most reactionary federal appellate judge in the country. In the words of Vox senior legal correspondent Ian Millhiser, “If you could breathe life into 4chan, the dark corner of the Internet where shitposters, edgelords, Groypers, and trolls of all kinds thrive, and then appoint this new lifeform to the federal bench, you would have created Judge James Ho.”

Just fifty-one years old, a youngster by Supreme Court standards, Ho was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States as a child. He grew up in San Marino, California, an upscale suburban community east of Los Angeles. He received his B.A. from Stanford and his law degree from the University of Chicago. 

As an attorney, he logged short stints with the U.S. Department of Justice and served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee before clerking for Thomas at the Supreme Court from 2005 to 2006. In 2008, Texas Governor Greg Abbott nominated him to replace Ted Cruz as that state’s Solicitor General. Ho held the position until 2010.

In 2017, Trump named Ho to the Fifth Circuit, widely regarded as the country’s most conservative appellate court. He was confirmed by the Senate and was sworn in by Thomas himself in a closed ceremony in 2018 at the Texas mansion of billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. 

Since then, Ho has carved out a reputation as an unflagging extremist. In a lecture last year at a Heritage Foundation conference in Washington, D.C., he encouraged his judicial colleagues to avoid “fair-weather originalism,” and to steel themselves from the “harsh criticism” they could expect from “elites” displeased by their interpretation of the Constitution’s original meaning. “If you’re an originalist only when elites won’t be upset with you, if you’re an originalist only when it’s easy,” he said, “that’s not principled judging.” 

In his first opinion on the bench, a 2018 dissent, he argued that all laws limiting donations to political candidates and campaigns violate the First Amendment. In 2019, he wrote a concurring opinion validating Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which subsequently went to the Supreme Court and resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade

In 1993, Clarence Thomas told two of his law clerks that he planned to do his utmost to make the lives of liberals “miserable.”

A Second Amendment absolutist, he penned another concurrence last year, upholding the right of individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders to own guns. The case, United States v. Rahimi, was argued in November 2023 and is currently before the Supreme Court.

Ho was also part of a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel last August that curtailed the use of the abortion pill mifepristone. The case, Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, will be argued before the Supreme Court on March 24, and will have dramatic effects on the rights of women and pregnant people to reproductive freedom.

Outside of court, Ho has been an equally unflagging activist, writing law review articles and lecturing at law schools about the evils of “cancel culture.”  

In 1993, Clarence Thomas told two of his law clerks that he planned to do his utmost to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” No doubt he has succeeded, perhaps beyond his wildest expectations. In any event, if Trump is reelected, Thomas will be able to rest assured that his legacy will live on with the appointment of James Ho, whom Trump named to his last Supreme Court shortlist in 2020, and, from all appearances, is auditioning to have his name called if the opportunity arises.

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There’s Nothing Wrong With a Little Nauseous Optimism https://www.truthdig.com/articles/theres-nothing-wrong-with-a-little-nauseous-optimism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=theres-nothing-wrong-with-a-little-nauseous-optimism https://www.truthdig.com/articles/theres-nothing-wrong-with-a-little-nauseous-optimism/#respond Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:41:44 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293769 There is plenty to be concerned about in November, but there's no reason to dwell in despair.

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I chose the word nauseous over cautious because my stomach is churning at the very possibility Trump could get a second term. But I don’t believe that will happen. The progressive forces in America are overtaking the regressive.

I’m not paying attention to polls. It’s way too early to worry about them. Most of the public hasn’t even focused on the upcoming election.

Biden gave a powerful State of the Union address last Thursday evening — feisty, bold, energetic, and upbeat. He was combative — taking on Trump with gusto, even besting Republican hecklers like MTG. I’m convinced he’s equipped to win reelection.

The broad American public is starting to see just how weird MAGA Republicans really are. Republicans comprise only 28 percent of voting Americans. More than 40 percent of voters consider themselves independent, unaffiliated with either party. Most of these independents don’t want the unhinged running the government.

During the State of the Union, Americans saw Republicans heckle and boo Biden and then sit on their hands when Biden declared that “No child should go hungry in this country.” Hello?

Republicans comprise only 28 percent of voting Americans. More than 40 percent of voters consider themselves independent, unaffiliated with either party.

The Republican response to Biden’s speech by Alabama Senator Katie Britt was, to say the least, bizarre. Delivered from her kitchen, it vacillated from wholesome to horrific.

The centerpiece of her attack on Biden’s border policies was a story about a 12-year-old Mexican girl who was sex trafficked and raped multiple times a day at the hands of cartels before escaping. But the girl was not, in fact, trafficked across the U.S. border; she never sought asylum in America; and her terrifying experience occurred when George W. Bush was in the White House.

Britt’s oddball performance baffled even fellow right-wingers. “What the hell am I watching right now?” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. “One of our biggest disasters ever,” a Republican strategist told The Daily Beast.

The GOP is so out of touch with American values that it’s putting up outspoken bigots for major offices.

Case in point: Mark Robinson, who won the GOP nomination for governor of North Carolina last Tuesday night, has hurled hateful remarks at everyone from Michelle Obama to the survivors of the Parkland school shooting. He’s called the LGBTQ+ community “filth,” wants to outlaw all abortions, and wants to return to a time when women couldn’t vote. He’s also ridiculed the #MeToo movementwomen generally, and climate change.

Oh, and he’s a Holocaust denier with a history of antisemitic remarks. He’s suggested that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that the music industry is run by Satan, and that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros orchestrated the Boko Haram kidnappings of school girls in 2014.

Robinson isn’t the only gonzo Republican nominee, but he typifies the grotesque values of MAGA leaders, including those of its likely presidential candidate.

The reason these bigots and haters are fighting so hard to defeat us is they know progressives are the future of America.

Neither their filibusters, nor their gerrymanders, nor their attempts at voter suppression can stop our rise. Nor can their absurd “great replacement theory,” or even their Supreme Court majority.

I’ve been at this game for almost three-quarters of a century. It’s a long game, and America still has a long way to go. But apart from Trump fanatics, the nation is in many ways better and stronger now than it has ever been — more inclusive, more tolerant, more diverse, more accepting, more dynamic. And it will be far better and stronger years from now, because we are rising.

The GOP is so out of touch with American values that it’s putting up outspoken bigots for major offices.

Sure, we must do better at organizing, mobilizing, and energizing. And get elected lawmakers, along with judges and Supreme Court justices, who reflect our beliefs and values. The Democratic Party must be bolder at countering the power of big corporations and big money. And more aggressive in recruiting and supporting a new generation of progressive leaders in electoral politics.

All of us must become a pro-democracy movement — with all the passion and tenacity that movements require.

Even so, I see a new progressive era dawning in America, and I don’t believe Trump Republicans can hold back the tide.

I see the strongest support for unions since the 1960s. Last year, at least 457,000 workers participated in a record 315 strikes in the United States — and won most with contracts providing higher wages and better benefits.

Over the past 18 months, graduate student teachers and research assistants at Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech have voted overwhelmingly to unionize. The United Auto Workers has scored signal victories for autoworkers. As has the Teamsters for UPS workers. Hell, even Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team has voted to unionize.

Microsoft just agreed not to oppose unionization efforts. Starbucks — which has spent the last two-and-a-half years intimidating baristas, employing union-busting attorneys, and refusing to bargain with any of the roughly 400 outlets that have voted to go union — has just agreed to do the same.

Here’s the bottom line: The majority of Americans view today’s record-breaking inequalities of income and wealth as dangerous. They believe government has no business forcing women to give birth or telling consenting adults how to conduct the most intimate aspects of their lives.

They want to limit access to guns. They see climate change is an existential threat to the nation and the world. They want to act against systemic racism. They don’t want innocent civilians killed, whether on our streets or in Gaza. They don’t want to give Putin a free hand. They want to protect American democracy from authoritarianism.

The giant Millennial generation — a larger cohort than the Boomers — is the most progressive cohort in recent history. They’ve faced an inequitable economic system, a runaway climate crisis, and the herculean costs of trying to have a family — including everything from unaffordable child care to wildly unaffordable housing. They’re demanding a more equitable and sustainable society because they desperately need one.

Young women have become significantly more progressive over the past decade (even if young men have remained largely unchanged). They’re more likely than ever to support LGBTQ+ rights, gay or lesbian couples as parents, men staying home with children, and women serving in the military. And more likely to loathe Donald Trump and any politician who emulates him.

Over the next two decades, young women will be moving into positions of greater power and leadership. They now compose a remarkable 60 percent of college undergraduates.

Meanwhile, the United States is projected to become a majority-minority nation within the next two decades.

The majority of Americans view today’s record-breaking inequalities of income and wealth as dangerous.

Not all people of color believe in all the progressive values I mention above, of course. A sizable share of Black voters are uneasy with LGBTQ+ rights. Yet overall, people of color are deeply concerned about the nation’s widening inequalities. They’re committed to social justice. They want to act against systemic racism, and they want to protect American democracy.

Unsurprisingly, these trends have ignited a backlash — especially among Americans who are older, whiter, straighter, without college degrees, and male. These Americans have become susceptible to an authoritarian strongman peddling conspiracy theories and stoking hatred.

Trump Republicans want us to be discouraged. They want us to despair. That’s part of their strategy. They figure that if we’re pessimistic enough, we won’t even fight — and they’ll win everything.

But I believe their backlash is doomed. The Republican Party has become a regressive cesspool, headed by increasingly unmoored people who are utterly out of touch with the dominant and emerging values of America. And most Americans are catching on.

I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna. We’re in the fight of our lives. It will demand a great deal of our energy, our time, and our courage. But this fight is critical and noble. It will set the course for America and the world for decades. And it is winnable.

The point is: It’s appropriate to be nauseously optimistic.

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Why ‘Treeconomics’ Is Better Than a Profit-Hungry ‘Heartless’ Machine https://www.truthdig.com/articles/why-treeconomics-is-better-than-a-profit-hungry-heartless-machine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-treeconomics-is-better-than-a-profit-hungry-heartless-machine https://www.truthdig.com/articles/why-treeconomics-is-better-than-a-profit-hungry-heartless-machine/#respond Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:31:05 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293776 If we are to maintain a habitable planet, we must frame economics with metaphors borrowed from the living world.

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Carpet manufacturer Interface’s now-classic ‘Mission Zero’ is arguably the most well-known example of a bold move towards (truly) circular business models. Along with a few other pioneers, Interface remains a point of reference of a company leaping toward reducing fossil fuel emissions, while also becoming a zero-waste, 100 percent recycled-fiber carpet enterprise, where the output of one cycle becomes the input of another.

When former CEO Ray Anderson sought to undertake this journey to heal and overturn his petroleum-intensive carpet company, he experienced important realizations—ones which have turned Interface into the archetypal carpet manufacturer in today’s global market. However, the superior heights reached with Interface’s magic carpets did not come about by consulting a technological genie in a machine-made plastic bottle.

The shift away from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ model of production, toward a cyclical and restorative one, was grounded in a desire to respect and learn from nature’s patterns.

For one, in his 2009 TED Talk, Anderson came to admit that “business is the greatest culprit” and that he had been “plundering” the Earth and his children’s future (a necessary confession often bypassed even by some of the best-intentioned sustainability practitioners). “We don’t believe anybody (ourselves included) can make a green product in a brown company.”

Most tellingly, the superior heights reached with Interface’s magic carpets came about after its CEO experienced deeper realizations. The shift away from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ model of production, toward a cyclical and restorative one, was grounded in a desire to respect and learn from nature’s patterns. Interface’s flooring solutions have since been inspired by biophilic, cradle-to-cradle design. Reorienting his company to reach the summit of what Anderson called “Mount Sustainability” has since translated into flooring solutions modelled on the patterns of the natural world. And the leap was nurtured, not least, by allowing the living world to provide the metaphors.

A ‘Clockwork’ Universe

In contrast, a good deal of today’s (standard) business practices continue to be informed by (standard) management theories. These we have inherited from a four-hundred-year-old view of the world, whereby the non-human world is perceived as an inert thing to be managed and controlled by us humans through science and technology.

One of the architects of this worldview was a British writer by the name of Francis Bacon, who believed (and has made many believe) that the living world exists solely for the sake of humanity. Bacon argued that, through science, humanity could put nature on a rack and “torture secrets out of her”. As such, he aspired “to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds.” And he went as far as urging his contemporaries to “bind nature to our service and make her our slave.” (FOI, Bacon is also the architect of the famous dictum ‘knowledge is power’.)

The result? A ‘clockwork’ universe: a machine-like ‘great scheme of things’ whereby animals, trees, rocks, and even people have come to be seen as inert clogs of a big mechanism. Proponents like Bacon have since fashioned the cultural push and the (now-unspoken) ‘minds maps’ that eventually gave the West full license to set itself over and above the rest of the living world—nowadays at full speed.

Business Betrayed (by Business ‘Gurus’)?

Today, such ‘mechanistic’ mind maps still govern much of our thinking and our acting. Even if many business people pay lip service to protecting the environment, a good majority still operate under this scheme of domination.

Consider a few examples. In the 1990s, Harvard professor of leadership development Robert Kaplan and business consultant David Norton encouraged us to think of organizations as “airplanes” with “balanced scorecards” functioning as instrument panels in the cockpit. Harvard’s guru Michael Porter proponed “shared value”, viewing it as a new “key” to “unlock” and “drive” business growth. Israeli business consultant Eliyahu M. Goldratt popularized a revolutionary management philosophy that applied the theory of constraints to maximize economic and material throughput. “Adopting ‘making money’ as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption,” he said. Hence the title of his famous book, The Goal, where Goldratt proponed the productive process as an uneven “chain” requiring optimization.

Even if many business people pay lip service to protecting the environment, a good majority still operate under this scheme of domination.

This ‘techno-centric’ and ‘nature-as-machine’ scheme of things that continues to shape most of our modern world has been thrust forward by more than 250 years of influence of industrialization. And it begs the questions: Have the metaphors betrayed us? And, in doing so, have the images hold us captive without notice?

In our increasingly urban and virtual contexts, it is no news that our imaginations have grown used to seeing the world through artificial grids. Today, we believe that Wall Street, Hollywood, and the Pentagon ‘call the shots’; that the economy as an objectified reality and business as (heart-less?) ‘machine’ steered from a profit-hungry ‘cockpit’; that the ‘environment’ is something ‘out there’, purportedly external to us, enrobing us, as if we did not depend on it entirely for our very existence; that we are mere human ‘resources’ in an increasingly disposable ‘labor market’; and so on. “If the only tool one has is a hammer, one treats everything like a nail,” recognized Abraham Maslow long ago in his Psychology of Science

Yet, if our ecological track record were to speak for itself, are these labels to be proven wrong? And they beg the question of whether economics and technology should continue to be our masters, and of whether minerals and fossil fuels should be endlessly extracted to keep turning our one and only living planet Earth into a hyped-up version of George Lucas’s Death Star.

Liberating the Imagination

In contrast, increasing numbers of practitioners of biomimicry, the natural step, permaculture, and ecological economics have been recovering organic metaphors to liberate and heal the way we perceive and interact with the living world.

Ponder on a forest. Forests breathe-in polluting gases to release oxygen; they grow at a gradual pace, taking in only what they need; they filter and recycle water and in doing so protect soils from run-off and erosion. Forests host myriads of birds, mammals, and insects. Trees themselves live in community, sharing both air and nutrients, putting down roots and stretching their arms wide open to sun and rain alike. Trees live and, in doing so, allow others to live as well. Not surprisingly, trees have lived sustainably for at least 300 million years since they evolved through equitable trading practices< that permit them to reach relatively similar heights. Ecuadorians put it best: forests don’t need ‘development’; forests are developed.

Can trees and forests serve as a metaphor for the business world? Can trees and forest lead us into ‘Treeconomics’?

As a recovering industrial engineer, prone as I am to simplifying the complexity of the world by fitting everything into tidy boxes and diagrams,  I experienced an inspiring echo of this shift in perception while serving as a business consultant for JustWork, a former faith-based social enterprise in Vancouver, the traditional Coast Salish territories of Canada.

From a Stool to a Tree

Seeking to open a space for dignified employment for people with mental illnesses or physical impairments, JustWork’s management team needed to communicate its purpose to a wider audience. “We’re like a three-legged stool: one leg represents our faith tradition, the second leg our social mandate, the third one our business model.”

Can trees and forests serve as a metaphor for the business world? Can trees and forest lead us into ‘Treeconomics’?

But a stool is—well—a stool. A sudden insight grasped me during a strategic ideation session. Inspired and challenged by folk like Ray Anderson, the necessity became clear: “We need a different metaphor… an organic metaphor”. And the metaphor was, of course, a tree: the faith-values were the root system providing nourishment and inspiration, the business enterprise was the trunk, and the employees were the branches whose labor bore the fruit of good products and services for customers.

The metaphor eventually germinated unexpectedly. With the aim of multiplying the social enterprise model, JustWork was then championed by World Vision Canada and by Enterprising Non-Profits, an organization in Vancouver supporting non-profits to become more entrepreneurial. However, scalability was not perceived in a business-as-usual way, whereby some massive companies are often referred to as ‘monsters’. (Who wants monsters, anyways?) Instead, JustWork has avoided impersonal bureaucracies by keeping things on a more relational level—‘small’ and ‘beautiful’ as Oxford economist E.F. Schumacher championed already in the 1970s. Instead of becoming a gigantic tree outgrowing and overshadowing all others, JustWork has seen itself merely as one healthy tree with the mandate of spreading its story so that other—different—social enterprises may sprout and flourish elsewhere.

Surely JustWork is not the first or the only company to have made this shift. The living world has also shaped the vision and practices of the archetypical outdoor clothing company Patagonia. When interviewed at Yale University, and asked to compare his company’s priorities with the imperative of fast and endless growth in today’s business world, founder and former CEO Yvon Chouinard pointed to how Patagonia is modelled on the slow, gradual rhythm of trees growing in a forest until they mature and stabilize. Not too fast, not too much, but only one ring at a time. “Our advertising budget is less than half of one percent of our sales.” (Chouinard also advocated for labor-intensive, organic agriculture; although that’s a story for another occasion.)

Sacred wisdom for an accelerated age?

In our monochromatic world, where the same burger restaurants and coffee shops are being endlessly replicated in every corner (boring!), ‘treeconomics’ may speak volumes. And it may be a pathway towards business biodiversity; a move away from ‘empire’ towards ‘earth community’, as Vandana Shiva, David Korten, and many others have been calling for.

Towards the Garden-City

Surely some will be quick to object that lions or sharks could serve as natural metaphors too. In fact, some managers and business leaders selectively praise these predators by highlighting them as exemplary creatures that hunt voraciously after their prey. But in doing so, such people ignore that lions and sharks only kill for need, not for greed—and certainly not for sport.

The quest for sustainable metaphors could also make us believe that we need to revert back to a purportedly ‘pristine’ state of nature. But that is both impossible and illusory. For one, nature itself is bound to patterns of violence, darkness, and death—patterns which some ancient witnesses declared to have been mysteriously undertaken and transcended by a marginalized Mediterranean peasant a little less than two thousand years ago. (Another story for yet another time.) For another, we simply cannot do away with our 10,000-year-old experiment in building villages and cities. The progress we’ve made, as Cambridge anthropologist Ronald Wright remarked, has destroyed the lower rungs of history’s ladder and we’ve reached the point of no return. We must take off from where we are.

The quest calls for the living world to repopulate our cities, our businesses, and to heal our mental landscapes and desires.

Instead, the summons before us is for nature and culture to coexist in much greater reciprocity, always giving priority to the living world to provide the blueprints—and the pace. The quest calls for the living world to repopulate our cities, our businesses, and to heal our mental landscapes and desires. It calls for a new world to be born out of the old—for swords to be transformed into ploughshares and for synthetic waste dumps to be turned into infinitely revolving magic carpets, in the likes of Interface and other forward-leaping companies.

And it calls, not least, for rediscovering the forgotten horizons of significance that have been obscured by the smokescreens of the various Industrial Revolutions. For centuries, Western culture was guided by a blazing image: one of a city with a clean river flowing down its middle and an ancient tree with roots on both sides, shedding leaves and bearing fruit for the healing of all nations.

Just as Ray Anderson was illumined by a realization that made him change course, perhaps we too require—not only fresh eyes—but different images altogether. As we seek to journey into an enduring, life-sustaining civilization, is it the case that only fresh metaphors will be able to guide and sustain us along the way? The time has never been riper to reach the heights of Mount Sustainability, and once there, plant trees under whose shade we can take wonder at the wide view in front of us. Perhaps then we’ll cease to behave as masters and start living as guests, treading lightly in a world that has been here long before us—one that’s certainly not of our own making.

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The Rise and Fall of a Honduran Narco-Regime Is an American Story https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-honduran-narco-regime-is-an-american-story/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-rise-and-fall-of-a-honduran-narco-regime-is-an-american-story https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-honduran-narco-regime-is-an-american-story/#respond Mon, 11 Mar 2024 22:00:58 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293737 NEW YORK — On Friday, Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras and a longtime U.S. ally, was convicted in a New York federal courtroom on three counts of narcotics trafficking and related weapons offenses. True to form, the mainstream American media’s coverage of the verdict was sketchy, limited to brief reports that barely mentioned […]

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NEW YORK — On Friday, Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras and a longtime U.S. ally, was convicted in a New York federal courtroom on three counts of narcotics trafficking and related weapons offenses. True to form, the mainstream American media’s coverage of the verdict was sketchy, limited to brief reports that barely mentioned his significant connections to the U.S. government. By hiding America’s long-running complicity in Hernández’s crimes, the media completely missed the most shocking element of the story.     

If the U.S. media had listened to the scores of enraged Hondurans and Honduran-Americans who jammed the spectator sections of the courtroom and noisily demonstrated outside throughout the trial, they would have understood that, in the words of one protester, “the gringos were protecting JOH.” (In Honduras, Hernández is known by his initials.) 

U.S. complicity in Hernández’s crimes dates to June 2009, when Hillary Clinton’s State Department recognized an illegal military coup against the elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya. In her compelling book, ”The Long Honduran Night,” the American academic Dana Frank describes that the Obama administration decided to validate “the first successful Latin American military coup in [two] decades” because doing otherwise would have legally required the U.S. “to stop almost all foreign aid to Honduras immediately.” Not only did that aid continue, but the State Department would tacitly endorse the illegal maneuvering behind the election of Hernández in 2013 and his reelection in 2017. 

“Without U.S. support for his military, the ongoing American legitimation of his rule, and the money he was getting from the narcotics traffickers, he could not have survived as president for a single day.”

According to Frank, the U.S. government must have been aware from the very start of Hernández’s connections to drug traffickers. “The U.S. has immense monitoring resources, including sophisticated defense intelligence systems,” she tells Truthdig. “It’s preposterous to think that the U.S. didn’t know about him from Day One. They chose to work with him because he served U.S. military and geo-strategic interests, including maintaining the big American military base in Honduras.”

The permanent U.S. base at Soto Cano, in south central Honduras, stations between 1,200 and 1,500 American Air Force and Army personnel at any one time. Hernández could not have stayed in power for eight years without continued U.S. support, Frank says.

“Millions of U.S. aid dollars were pouring into the Honduran police and military — for training, helicopters, intelligence capabilities,” she explained. “American diplomats were publicly celebrating him and other members of his corrupt circle. Without U.S. support for his military, the ongoing American legitimation of his rule, and the money he was getting from the narcotics traffickers, he could not have survived as president for a single day.”

So far, the mainstream American press has either not reported the verdict, or chosen to mostly ignore the U.S. government complicity angle. In The New York Times article, the U.S. role received not a single mention. The Washington Post and National Public Radio offered only the briefest of hints. NPR, for example, fleetingly observed that “both the Obama and Trump administrations saw Hernández as a reliable ally.” So far, CNN and the PBS NewsHour have not reported on the trial or verdict.

Fortunately for justice, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York ignored the U.S. State and Defense Departments preferences, and ordered Hernández’s extradition and trial in 2022. During the two-week trial — centered by a charge that Hernández trafficked 500 tons of cocaine to the U.S. — Hondurans filled the 85 spectator seats inside Judge P. Kevin Castel’s wood-paneled courtroom, and an overflow crowd watched on closed circuit TV from another room. Outside, on Pearl Street, dozens more held up posters, placards and photographs of their countrymen who had been murdered by the narcotics smuggling network. When the jury’s verdict was announced on the afternoon of March 8, they erupted in cheers and sang the Honduran national anthem. Among them was Jorge Manríquez, a former Honduran government employee in his fifties who now lives in the U.S. “My mother always said that the only thing you can do with a rabid dog is to kill it,” Manríquez told me upon hearing the verdict. 

Manríquez’s personal experience illustrates how the narcotics trade can injure an entire nation. Hernández used the millions he got from partnering with the drug smugglers to win two elections, then imposed a number of unpopular policies, including privatizing government agencies such as Manríquez’s workplace. “They said we could no longer have a union to protect our rights,” he remembered. “I fought back, and they fired me.”

Widespread violence and corruption contributed to the exodus of Hondurans northward toward safety.

As corruption spread through the Honduran police and army, the narco network’s lower level members allied with gangs to establish widespread extortion rackets. Anyone who visited Honduras during Hernández’s rule quickly learned that every taxi and bus driver had to make weekly payments to the gangs or be murdered. 

Widespread violence and corruption contributed to the exodus of Hondurans northward toward safety. Many of the migrant refugee caravans that dominated U.S. headlines starting in 2017 mostly originated in northern Honduras. In 2021, Hondurans constituted the second-largest single nationality among the 1.6 million “encounters” that U.S. authorities had with desperate people arriving at our southern border. 

The big mystery is why Juan Orlando Hernández did not flee the country once he could see the writing on the wall. Two ex-presidents from neighboring El Salvador had also faced accusations of corruption, but chose to escape; both now live in Nicaraguan exile under the protection of the Ortega/Murillo regime. After Hernández’s candidate decisively lost the November 2021 presidential election, however, he chose to remain in Honduras. Why? 

One theory is that Hernández had gotten so smug and arrogant under the protection of three U.S. administrations, he figured a different branch of the American government would never come after him.

The U.S. media will have a chance to redeem itself when Hernández is sentenced on June 26. He faces a possible life term and a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years. Instead of narrowly reporting Judge Castel’s decision, the press should listen to those Hondurans outside the courtroom who will be holding vigil and demanding justice. The media could also try interviewing people in Honduras, where the sentencing will also be celebrated widely. Arguably most important, they should approach sources at the U.S. State and Defense departments and ask why our government protected a criminal president for years, and to name those American officials to blame for the immoral policy. 

The U.S. media has an obligation to remember and report that Hernández spread misery in both countries. “JOH not only turned my country into a narco state,” said Manríquez outside the courthouse, “he also sent tons of poison up to the United States.”

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Losses Go Deep in the Fight for Better Health Care https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-never-ending-losses-in-the-battle-for-healthcare-in-america/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-never-ending-losses-in-the-battle-for-healthcare-in-america https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-never-ending-losses-in-the-battle-for-healthcare-in-america/#respond Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:32:42 +0000 https://www.truthdig.com/?p=293704 The "unwinding" of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs highlights the acute need for a better path forward on health insurance.

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The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing.

Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.

Since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years.

This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance corporations are making record profits has been termed “the great unwinding.” And it couldn’t be more cruelly ironic. After all, states have the power and authority to expand healthcare to all their residents; the federal government could similarly extend the declaration of a public health emergency that would let so many of us keep distinctly life-protecting access to healthcare. Yet millions have instead been pushed violently and rapidly from such life-saving care.

Some states are feeling the impact especially strongly. In Georgia, for instance, more than 149,000 children lost their pandemic Medicaid enrollment in just six months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Texas is the epicenter of Medicaid’s unwinding. There, more than two million Americans have been removed from the state’s Medicaid program since federal pandemic-era coverage protections were lifted last April. As Axios reported, new state data indicates “that’s the most of any state and nearly equivalent to all of Houston — Texas’ most populous city, with 2.3 million residents — losing coverage in less than a year.” In fact, 61% of enrollees in Texas have lost Medicaid since last April.

Death by Poverty and the Lack of Healthcare

In my home state, policy analysts predict that more than 1.1 million New Yorkers will be pushed off Medicaid roles in this same unwinding. Fortunately, people are organizing in response, calling for the right to healthcare, living wages, the abolition of poverty, and more. 

On Saturday, March 2nd, I stood next to Becca Forsyth of Elmira, New York, at the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Poor People and Low Wage Workers Statehouse Assembly in Albany, New York. Becca was one of dozens of low-income people who testified at simultaneous assemblies held in 31 state capitals and Washington, D.C. These assemblies launched 40 weeks of the mobilizing and organizing of poor and low-income eligible voters in the lead-up to the 2024 elections, while challenging those running for office, as well as elected officials, to confront poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in America. Becca was not the only speaker to touch on the crisis of healthcare (and its connection to poverty and death), but her words stuck with me:

“Just since December 19th, I have lost more than a dozen people I loved dearly. In 74 days, I’ve watched as people I’ve known most of my life were literally squeezed to death by poverty and the catastrophic impact it has on our entire lives. People like Missy, a 47-year-old woman who was found lying beside the railroad tracks, dead… Or Gary, who died at the hands of the police while in a hospital for a mental breakdown. Or Loretta, a friend who was a friend before I even knew what the word friend meant, who is no longer with us because my community won’t spend money on substance-use treatment. Chemung County leads this state in way too many negative ways. We rank 59 out of the 62 counties in New York for health outcomes. We have outrageous homelessness, food insecurity, premature death rates, and lead poisoning. Our chances for getting out of poverty are extinguished before we even have a chance!”

Just two days before I stood with Becca in Albany, the state capital, demanding the right to thrive and not just barely survive, I rallied with healthcare workers and community members at SUNY Downstate Hospital. With the support of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, SUNY Chancellor John King recently announced that his outfit may close SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, one of the few remaining public-safety-net hospitals in the state.

At that rally, community members, hospital workers, local politicians, and faith leaders shared information about the crucial role that hospital has played in the community. It served as a Covid refuge where thousands of lives were saved in the heat of the pandemic, as a critically safe birthing place for Black moms (crucial given the maternal health outcomes for so many women of color), as the only kidney transplant hospital in Brooklyn, and as one of the only remaining teaching hospitals in the area after the closure of such facilities, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods, across Brooklyn and the rest of New York.

Sadly, closing down hospitals or reducing their services in poorer neighborhoods is becoming all too typical of this nation. Big conglomerates are buying up chains of them and making decisions based only on their bottom lines, not the needs of our communities. In fact, more than 600 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing due to financial instability and that’s more than 30% of America’s rural facilities. For half of them, the possibility of closure is immediate, according to a new report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR).

Our Unwinding Health

Such Medicaid cuts and hospital closures are but two manifestations of a far larger attack on American health and healthcare in what’s fast being transformed into a death-dealing nation. They are but harbingers of an even larger “unwinding” of our health as a nation. Before the pandemic and the most recent cuts, 87 million Americans were already uninsured or underinsured. We’re talking about people sharing heart-attack medicine because they can’t afford their own prescriptions, burying their children for lack of healthcare, and relying on emergency rooms rather than preventative care, while going bankrupt in the process.

It’s simple enough. All too many of us are skipping needed care. In 2022, more than one of every four adults (28% of us) reported delaying or going without some combination of medical care, prescription drugs, mental healthcare, or dental care simply because they lacked the ability to pay.

It’s simple enough. All too many of us are skipping needed care.

Meanwhile, medical debt is growing all too rapidly. A Census Bureau analysis of such debt found that, in 2021, 15% of all American households owed medical debt — or 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults). Indeed, the SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation) survey suggests that, in total, Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, the biggest source of bankruptcy in the nation.

And of course, as I’ve written before, this is all connected to another reality: that life expectancy is down for everyone, while the poor can expect to die, on average, 12 to 13 years earlier than rich people. Worse yet, the death-rate gap between rich and poor in this country has risen by a staggering 570% since 1980. As the Washington Post reported, “America is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, measured not just by bank accounts and property values but also by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely has become the most telling measure of the nation’s growing inequality.”

Poor Health

In the face of all of this, you might wonder how things could get any worse. Recently, Congress announced potential cuts to another crucial food and health program for the poor. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC) is at risk of a $1 billion shortfall, essentially guaranteeing harmful cuts to that lifeline for low-income families and children. If Congress refuses to fully fund the program, current funding levels simply won’t cover all eligible participants.

In fact, the $1 billion shortfall now slated to occur equals 1.5 months of benefits for all program beneficiaries or six months of benefits for all pregnant women and infants participating in WIC. House Republicans are currently refusing to approve the budget for this vital program that helps mothers and children up to age five access staples like fruit, vegetables, and infant formula, and connects them to healthcare resources.

In a statement to NBC News, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called WIC, “one of the most consequential, evidence-based public health programs available.” He implored Congress to fully fund the program, which provides “life-changing benefits and services” to its participants.

And Vilsack is anything but wrong when he speaks of the importance of that pro-poor, pro-health program. An abundance of research suggests the critical role that WIC plays in “supporting maternal health and child development. WIC participation during pregnancy is associated with lower risk of preterm birth, lower risk of low birth weight, and lower risk of infant mortality.” Children on WIC are more likely to consume a healthier diet, and this impact only grows the longer a child stays in the program, which also has a significant reach. As the Department of Agriculture reports, “Nearly 40 percent of America’s infants participate in WIC, which is available only to pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and children who meet income guidelines and are determined to be at nutritional risk by a health professional.”

So Much More Is Needed

But as such programs are cut to the bone and more people experience a plethora of problems already plaguing the health of the nation, many are likely to give up entirely, assuming there’s nothing to be done and that it’s just too costly to address inequality and poor health. As someone who has been organizing among the poor for more than 30 years, however, I want to suggest that, as a nation, this just can’t be as “good” as it gets.

Across the span of my lifetime, there have been debates about how to address the larger health crisis in American society. When I was in high school, there was already debate about the effectiveness of establishing a national healthcare program, as President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton campaigned on expanding healthcare and actually proposed a new plan for it in 1993. At the time, I remember hearing criticism of the Canadian system of nationalized healthcare. People there, it was said, experienced long lines, way too much paperwork, and a lack of options for patients.

Today, considering the way our healthcare system is unwinding, I could almost laugh (however grimly) at what it would mean to have that Canadian system of years past. All too sadly, however, that country has followed the United States in cutting and privatizing its healthcare system.

What this nation truly needs is a complete overhaul of its healthcare system.

Many consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA) one of the most important policies adopted under the presidency of Barack Obama, given that more than 20 million people gained health coverage through it and the ACA’s policies made it easier for eligible people to enroll in Medicaid. In particular, the ACA expanded Medicaid coverage to nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level ($20,783 in 2024) and helped states with matching federal dollars expand Medicaid to more of their residents. Yet the ACA didn’t go nearly far enough. To date, 40 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted Medicaid expansion, while 10 states have not. Even in states with Medicaid expansion, too many of us are still not covered. And now we’re witnessing one of the greatest attacks on health and healthcare in decades (and just imagine what we’re likely to face if Donald Trump becomes our next president and/or the MAGA Republicans take Congress).

What this nation truly needs is a complete overhaul of its healthcare system. As a start, Medicaid needs to be expanded, extended, and built into a single-payer, universal healthcare plan. Workers need the right to living-wage jobs with generous benefits, including guaranteed paid family sick leave. Social welfare programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, WIC, and the Child Tax Credit need to be strengthened so that the abundance of this society is experienced by everyone. Household and medical debt would have to be cancelled, while drug-recovery programs would need to be fully funded. And parks and recreation centers, as well as grocery stores with quality, affordable food, would have to proliferate, starting in poor communities.

It’s not enough to protest the unwinding of pandemic Medicaid programs. Even that classic protest chant — “They say cut back, we say fight back!” — doesn’t go far enough. Instead, the 135 million poor and low-income Americans, and for that matter, the rest of us, must make healthcare and so much more into basic human rights.

Let me end then not with words of mine but with Becca Forsyth’s challenge to Americans in her Poor People’s Campaign testimony that day in Albany. “We must stop this raging storm of policy violence that is killing our friends and neighbors,” she said movingly. “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can wield our votes as powerful demands. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over. We have to move forward together like our lives depend on it… the lives of our children! Because they do!!”

How right she is!

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