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In This Edition |
NASA has been involved in Earth-observation studies since 1960, capturing images like this one from the DSCOVR satellite.
  Follow @Uncle-Ernie Visit me on Face Book NASA's Back, And Just In Time Too! By Ernest Stewart "NASA technology fights climate change in all kinds of ways. Many of these innovations were pioneered for space travel and planetary exploration before anyone repurposed them for use on Earth. Others originated with longstanding programs to study our home planet or to improve commercial flight. And a few started with the agency's efforts to reduce its own environmental impacts." ~~~ NASA
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
NASA is best known for exploring other worlds, whether that's sending astronauts to the Moon or flying helicopters on Mars. But under President Joe Biden, the space agency intends to boost its reputation as a major player in studying Earth, especially with an eye towards fighting climate change. "Biden has made it clear that climate is a priority," says Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado. "There's a clear role for NASA to play in that," he says, given all the Earth-science research it funds and the Earth-observing satellites it launches. In recent months, NASA has signalled its intention to reinvigorate its role in informing US climate policy, by appointing its first climate adviser and ramping up work on key missions to study how Earth's climate is changing. The work is particularly crucial as climate change accelerates, agency officials say. "The demand for actionable information is going to increase pretty dramatically over the next decade or two," says Karen St. Germain, head of NASA's Earth-science division in Washington DC. Among the many US federal agencies that Biden has conscripted to curb climate change, NASA stands out because it is a leader in basic planetary discoveries. Its history of Earth observation stretches back to 1960, when it launched the TIROS-1 satellite to test the feasibility of monitoring weather from space. Over more than six decades, NASA has designed, built and launched spacecraft to observe Earth as it changes. Often working in concert with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has primary responsibility for national weather forecasting, NASA runs satellites that measure ice sheets melting and carbon dioxide flowing through the atmosphere. The agency also flies aeroplanes to gather data about planetary change and funds a broad array of fundamental climate research, such as climate-modelling studies. "Our central role is in understanding how the Earth system is changing," says St. Germain. You may recall that Lying Donald, whose policies favoured industry and downplayed climate change, repeatedly tried to cancel major NASA Earth-science missions, only to see them rescued by Congress. It was part of a broader pattern across the his administration of undercutting climate-change research and policy. NASA escaped the worst of those attacks by keeping most of its climate-change and Earth-science research below the radar of his officials. But it was a politically fraught time for the agency. Now, NASA is literally reclaiming its seat at the table. Biden initially left the agency off the high-level climate task force he established a week after taking office in January. Following some pointed phone calls, NASA muscled its way into that group, and is now represented alongside administration heavyweights such as the secretaries of the treasury and defence as they discuss the nation's climate strategy. "If you're going to make policy related to scientific questions, you need to have science at the table," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and the agency's new climate adviser. NASA's new administrator, former senator Bill Nelson, has said that he supports the agency's Earth-science research. "You can't mitigate climate change unless you measure it, and that's NASA's expertise," he said at his Senate confirmation hearing on 21 April. Among NASA's epic observations of climate change are a 29-year program recording global sea-level rise, measured precisely from space with French and other collaborators, and studies that began in 2002 to track ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica, done with German partners. Upcoming missions include a US-India radar satellite that will track planetary changes such as shifts in sea-ice cover, and a US-Canadian-French-UK spacecraft that will survey freshwater resources and ocean currents. Both are slated to launch in 2022.
Isn't it nice to have that awful feeling of angst, that Lying Donald brought, seemingly lifted away by things like this?
 08-05-1961 ~ 05-07-2021 Thanks for the film!
 11-08-1914 ~ 05-11-2021 Thanks for the film!
(c) 2021 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, philosopher, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter. |
  It Is Not Time For Progressives To Be Giving Joe Biden An 'A' Grade If we're going to get maximum reforms in this crucial period, President Biden needs focused pressure-not the highest rating. By Norman Solomon & Jeff Cohen It's the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything-good, bad and mixed. Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden's job performance. "I give him an 'A' so far," Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, "that doesn't mean that I agree with him on every single thing." Overall, the policies of the Biden administration have not come close to being consistently outstanding. Awarding an "A" to Biden is flatly unwarranted. It's also strategically wrongheaded. If we're going to get maximum reforms in this crucial period, President Biden needs focused pressure-not the highest rating-from progressives. In school, an "A" grade commonly means "excellent performance" or "outstanding achievement." Rendering such a verdict on Biden's presidency so far promotes a huge misconception and lowers the progressive bar. Biden does deserve credit for some strong high-level appointments (Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary jumps to mind), a number of important executive orders (many simply undoing four years of horrific Trumpism), and one crucial legislative achievement-the American Rescue Act. The proposed American Jobs Act (a small step toward a Green New Deal) and American Families Act (education/anti-poverty) are also quite progressive. But Biden has made several major appointments that overtly kowtowed to corporate America-for example, "Mr. Monsanto" Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture and former venture capitalist Gina Raimondo as Commerce Secretary. To mark Biden's first 100 days, the Revolving Door Project issued an overall grade of B- in its report card on how Biden had done in preventing "corporate capture" of the executive branch by industries such as fossil fuels, Big Pharma and Big Tech. In an improvement over the Obama era, the Biden administration earned a B/B+ in keeping Wall Streeters from dominating its economic and financial teams. On the other hand, as graded by the Revolving Door Project, Biden got a D- on limiting the power of the military-industrial complex over U.S. foreign policy: "We are particularly alarmed by Biden's hiring of several alumni of the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish think tank funded by weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman." Much as "personnel is policy" in the executive branch, the federal budget indicates actual priorities. Biden's budget reflects his continuing embrace of the military-industrial complex, a tight grip that squeezes many billions needed for vital social, economic and environmental programs. The administration recently disclosed its plan to increase the basic military budget to $753 billion, a $13 billion boost above the last bloated Trump budget. (All told, the annual total of U.S. military-related spending has been way above $1 trillion for years.) And Biden continues to ramp up spending for nuclear weapons, including ICBMs-which former Defense Secretary William Perry aptly says are "some of the most dangerous weapons in the world." Meanwhile, Biden is heightening the dangers of an unimaginably catastrophic war with Russia or China. In sharp contrast to his assertion on Feb. 4 that "diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy," Biden proceeded to undermine diplomacy with reckless rhetoric toward Russia and a confrontational approach to China. The effects have included blocking diplomatic channels and signaling military brinkmanship. Biden won praise when he announced plans for a not-quite-total U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he has not committed to ending the U.S. air war there-and some forms of on-the-ground military involvement are open-ended. Unfortunately, little attention has gone to the alarming realities of Biden's foreign policy and inflated budget for militarism. Domestic matters are in the spotlight, where-contrary to overblown praise-the overall picture is very mixed. While Biden has issued some executive orders improving social and regulatory policies, he has refused to issue many much-needed executive orders. Give him an "I" for incomplete, including on the issue of $1.7 trillion in student loan debt that undermines the economy and burdens 45 million debtors, especially people of color. Biden has not budged, even after non-progressive Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have pressed him to use his executive authority under existing legislation to excuse up to $50,000 in college debt per person. On the subject of healthcare reform, Biden has long been held back by his allegiance to corporate power-as Rep. Jayapal knows well, since she has tenaciously led the Medicare for All battle in the House. Biden has never disavowed his appalling comment in March 2020 that he might veto Medicare for All if it somehow passed both houses of Congress. During the traumatic 14 months of the pandemic since then, while millions have lost coverage because insurance is tied to employment, Biden's stance hardly improved. Candidate Biden had promised to lower the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60, but even that meager promise has disappeared. With wealth and income having gushed to the top in recent decades, and especially during COVID, Biden is proposing some tax increases on corporations and the very wealthy-quite popular with voters-to pay for infrastructure and social programs. For example, Biden proposes returning the top marginal tax bracket on the richest individuals from 37 percent to merely 39.6 percent, where it was in 2017 before Trump lowered it. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders campaigned on raising the top tax bracket to 52 percent, while AOC called for raising it to 70 percent, a popular approach according to polls. To put this all in perspective: When the U.S. economy and middle class boomed during the 1950s, the top tax bracket was over 90 percent under Republican President Eisenhower. We have no quarrel with those who seek to inspire optimism among progressives by pointing out that their activism has already achieved some great things. But activism should be grounded in candor and realism about where we are now-and how far we still need to go. (c) 2021 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."
(c) 2021 Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He |
 Biden Administration Reportedly Blocking UN Cease-Fire Statement As Israel Bombards Gaza "The violence in Israel and Gaza must end," said U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman. "Congress and President Biden must act immediately. No one wins with war." By Jake Johnson The Biden administration is reportedly blocking the release of a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire as Israel continues its devastating assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Palestinians and injuring hundreds more. According to Reuters, which cited anonymous diplomats and sources familiar with the Biden administration's strategy, the United States is "delaying" the U.N. Security Council's "efforts to issue a public statement on escalating tensions between Israel and the Palestinians because it could be harmful to behind-the-scenes efforts to end the violence." One source told the outlet that the U.S. is "actively engaged in diplomacy behind the scenes with all parties to achieve a cease-fire," but the official did not specify how a U.N. Security Council joint statement-which must be agreed to by consensus-would undermine those talks. The Guardian confirmed Reuters' reporting, noting early Wednesday that the Biden administration "blocked a U.N. Security Council statement calling for a cease-fire" as horrifying footage of the situation on the ground in Gaza continues to emerge.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price repeatedly dodged when asked whether the Biden administration has dropped its opposition to the U.N. Security Council statement, which was first put forth by the Norwegian mission on Monday. "The provocations that we have seen have resulted in a lamentable, deeply lamentable, loss of life-of Israeli life and of Palestinian life," said Price, who a day earlier refused to condemn Israel's killing of children in airstrikes on Gaza. "Our message continues to be one of de-escalation. We do not want to see any actor, be it a government or be it an intergovernmental body, take an action that could serve to escalate rather than de-escalate." The U.N. Security Council is set to hold another emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the joint statement, a version of which reportedly calls on Israel to "cease settlement activities, demolitions, and evictions" in occupied East Jerusalem and elsewhere. On Tuesday, a U.N. spokesperson said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is "gravely concerned by the serious escalations in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel, including the latest escalation in Gaza, which add to the heightened tensions and violence in occupied East Jerusalem." "Israeli security forces must exercise maximum restraint and calibrate their use of force," the spokesperson added. "The indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars towards Israeli population centers is unacceptable. This spiraling escalation must cease immediately." As the Biden administration stands in the way of the U.N. Security Council statement, Israel is reportedly refusing to accept a cease-fire offer proposed by the U.N. and Egypt as the Netanyahu regime ramped up its bombardment of Gaza, killing civilians-including children-and destroying residential buildings in what observers are calling blatant war crimes. Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, The Jerusalem Post reported early Wednesday that "Israel will not negotiate a cease-fire before Hamas pays a price for its attacks." Hamas leaders, for their part, have said they are in contact with Egypt, Qatar, and other parties seeking to deescalate the deadly violence. "We clarified that the one who started this campaign and aggression is Israel and not us," Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas' political bureau, said in a speech Tuesday. "They are the ones who murdered and hurt women and children, and Israel is responsible. We are ready for an escalation and ready for calm, on the condition that they end the aggression." As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, the Biden administration is facing growing pressure from members of Congress to take action to halt Israel's latest attacks on Gaza, which have thus far killed more than 40 Palestinians and wounded 300-including at least 86 children. "The United States must call for an immediate cease-fire and an end to provocative and illegal settlement activity," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement Tuesday. "And we must also recommit to working with Israelis and Palestinians to finally end this conflict." Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) echoed that message, tweeting late Tuesday that the Biden administration "must broker a cease-fire." "The violence in Israel and Gaza must end," said Bowman. "The situation is escalating. People are sheltered, afraid to go to schools or houses of worship. The stories are heartbreaking. Congress and President Biden must act immediately. No one wins with war." (c) 2021 Jake Johnson is an author and staff writer for Common Dreams |
 We Must Push Politics Aside In the Global Race To Vaccinate The World Against Covid-19 The pandemic is truly a global threat that requires a global mobilization. By Jesse Jackson India is now ground zero for COVID-19. On Saturday, it suffered a record of more than 335,000 new infections and more than 4,000 deaths in one day. Hospitals are running out of oxygen and beds. Morgues and crematoria are overwhelmed. In total, a staggering 22.6 million people in India have been infected, with 246,116 deaths. With 1.3 billion people, India is the second most populous country in the world. From across the country and across the world, there are increasing demands that Prime Minister Narendra Modi order a lockdown of the country to help staunch the spread of the virus. This may be imperative, but one can understand the reluctance to do it. When Modi enforced a 21-day lockdown last year, it helped squelch the spread of the disease but caused a 24% economic contraction in the first quarter of 2020 and widespread desperation among India's large numbers of migrant workers. More recently, at the same time Modi put off another lockdown, he displayed Trumpian irresponsibility by holding a mass political rally with thousands of largely maskless people crowded together and refusing to halt the huge Hindu pilgrimage of millions to bathe in the Ganges River. To some extent, as The Lancet, a medical journal, noted, this is a "self-inflicted catastrophe." With India in distress and much of the world desperate for access to vaccine supplies, supplier nations have been slow to respond. China is by far the largest supplier of vaccines, having shipped more than 240 million doses to countries across the world, more than the rest of the world combined. China promises to ship 500 million more. China, fierce rival of India, immediately stepped in to promise to supply countries that India was forced to cut off to fight its own outbreak. China's vaccine is not as effective as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, but it surely is better than nothing. Last week, the Biden administration finally challenged the U.S. drug industry, announcing that the White House would support an international waiver of intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. This is a long overdue measure, but if the industry continues to resist, the negotiations are likely to take months that the world can ill afford. Though the companies benefited greatly from government subsidies and guaranteed purchases-and have seen their profits and stocks soar-they have a large stake in controlling production to ensure continued profits over time. The Biden administration decision-if aggressively enforced-will put public health over private profit. As the pandemic rages in India and Brazil, it poses a continued threat to the world. If it isn't brought under control everywhere, new variants will develop and most likely spread, even to countries that have succeeded in inoculating their populations. The pandemic is truly a global threat that requires a global mobilization. At the national level, global cooperation has been slow to develop. Instead, the surge to supply countries in need is propelled less from a unified global effort and more from a competitive national "vaccine diplomacy," with India, China, Russia and now the U.S. vying to win hearts and minds through vaccine supplies. Fighting the pandemic isn't just the responsibility of governments. This is a global, human tragedy. The pandemic spreads through the air, so no people are safe unless all are safe. We need at outpouring of citizen action - telethons by stars and musicians, increased donations from foundations, mobilization of volunteers, ramping up of production of supplies - to ensure that vaccines are available and citizens are mobilized to receive them. We need increased global efforts to get the vaccine into rural areas and into the poorest ghettos and barrios of the poorest nations. Joe Biden announced that he would rely on science for advice, but we can't rely on science or on government alone. Popular mobilization is essential. If we are to address common global threats such as contagions or climate change or nuclear war, we must develop a global perspective. Now it becomes ever more apparent that, as Dr. Martin Luther King taught long ago, "all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. ... As long as diseases are rampant ... no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America." In the global struggle to meet the threat of Covid-19, this basic truth is more important than ever. (c) 2021 Jesse Jackson is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH. |
 Are CEOs Really "Worth" Millions Of Dollars? By Jim Hightower These days, the haughty rich in our country have developed such an arrogant sense of self-entitlement that they've gone from being merely irritating to infuriating. Unsurprisingly, their plutocratic greed and rigging of the system has generated a political backlash, including a widely-popular push to tax the massive stashes of wealth the upper-upper class has amassed by stiffing the middle class and poor. Alarmed by this uprising, the rich have launched a major effort to defuse public anger - not by altering their own behavior, but by a semantical twist. Interestingly, since "The Rich" has become such a negative phrase, it is being dropped from the vocabularies of right-wing media, lawmakers, and other defenders of wealth concentration. Rather, they now glorify the millionaire/billionaire class as "high-earners" and "high net worth individuals." Both are awkward phrases, yet both serve to exalt the fortunate few as superior earners and worthy individuals. Words matter because they are powerful social constructs that share our culture's moral values. For example, even failed CEOs who preside over big losses still collect boodles of cash from the corporate hierarchy, while working stiffs who perform their jobs admirably at the same corporation get pay cuts or even get booted. Boeing, for instance, suffered $12 billion in losses last year, costing 30,000 workers their jobs, yet the top exec was rewarded with $21 million in pay. Other job crushing CEO failures include AT&T, Disney, GE, Hilton, T-Mobile, and Tenet Healthcare - yet each of those top executives were rewarded with at least $20 million in pay. In every case, the establishment media cloaked the greed of the chiefs by saying they "earned" millions and are now "worth" such-and-such. These aren't euphemisms - they're lies. To get the truth, the media might ask ousted workers how much they think the CEOs actually earned and are worth. (c) 2021 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates,"is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition. Jim writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. |
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While rewatching the third installment of Christopher Nolan's Dark Night Batman series this weekend, a moment jumped out with palpable familiarity. A well-armed junta under the command of arch-fiend Bane had taken control of the city of Gotham, setting up kangaroo courts where everyone is guilty the moment they set foot in the room. Even some of the bad guys find themselves facing judgment, with one sputtering, "But... but I'm one of you!"
Only two sentences were available in this court: death or exile. Death was straightforward. Exile involved being forced to cross the thin river ice that surrounded the winter-bound city. None survived exile; the ice devoured all comers. When Police Commissioner Jim Gordon is presented before this court, he defiantly chooses death rather than face the elongated humiliation of the river. The judge was nonplussed. "Death," he pronounced as he brought down the gavel, "by exile."
The parallel was instantly evident: Rep. Liz Cheney! A once-prominent member of the junta formerly known as the Republican Party, which is now controlled by a cult leader with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance against whomever and whatever presents itself, Cheney has found herself on the far side of those who once championed her squalid family name.
Her father, one of the more obvious war criminals in U.S. history and a force for decades within the party, has been equally excommunicated from the hearth of the faithful. Former Vice President Dick Cheney no longer holds elected office, however, while his daughter is currently the third-ranking GOP official in the House.
For now.
"The top Republican in the House on Sunday publicly endorsed the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from the party's leadership team," reports The Washington Post, "paving the way for Cheney's removal as early as this week and sending a clear message that allegiance to former president Donald Trump is a requirement to hold power in the GOP. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threw his support behind Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) to become the new Republican conference chair, the No. 3 job in GOP leadership."
Why? What would motivate the GOP to immolate the political career of one of its more prominent up-and-comers? Cheney has faithfully adhered to the ghastly codex of modern Republican morality with grim enthusiasm over the years, but in the age of Trump, the only loyalty that matters is your loyalty to him.
Because Cheney voted to impeach Trump after he incited his supporters to sack the Capitol, and because she refuses to peddle the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, Trump has commanded she tread the ice. She is not the only one who has aroused his ire, but at present, she is the entree in this festival of retribution.
If the reporting holds, Cheney's moment of "death or exile" is coming on Wednesday, when the House returns to session. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the more astonishing lickspittles in the annals of this age, is using Cheney as a meat shield to protect himself from the fact that he also denounced Trump after January 6, though he did not vote to impeach. That fact may be the only reason he still has a job.
Imagine living every day in fear that Trump might remember something about you, or be reminded of something about you by some aide with an ax to grind or a friend to promote. That's McCarthy's whole existence today, and it is altogether pathetic.
McCarthy hopes he will become speaker if the GOP retakes the House in '22, but 40 miles of bad road lie between this moment and that outcome. "Some advisers are urging Donald Trump not to support McCarthy for Speaker if Republicans flip control of the House next year," reports Politico. "Trump, who has been angry McCarthy helped defend Cheney's role as conference chair in late February, is interested by the idea."
Cheney's current plight stands as one of the more bizarre transmogrifications in the history of modern politics. For years, she was relentless in her pursuit of the worst elements of Republican "ideology:"
During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.
Unfortunately, Cheney and her allies won their earlier fight for the soul of the party. During the Obama era, the Republican Party became ever more hostile to the fundamental rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and ultimately chose Donald Trump, a man who attacked those rights as an existential threat to the nation, as its leader.
Cheney's courageous stand against the party of Trump is a stand against a party she helped build, a monster she helped create. The tragedy is not that she might suffer for her folly, but that American democracy will. Her latter-day epiphany is welcome, but it also comes far too late.
Even Maureen Dowd, The New York Times champion of D.C. insider snark, laid Cheney low in a blistering Saturday column: "Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it's done." Boom, thanks for playing, turn out the lights when you leave.
Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting. The fact that those forces have "Made By The Cheney Family" stamped on their bootheels is but an accent in the symphony of hypocrisy that is consuming the GOP.
The loss of her position within the party is all but a foregone conclusion. Cheney's next task will be to see if her district in Wyoming, long a Cheney-GOP stronghold, will vote her out of office entirely next year. By every indication, Trump intends to make retaining her seat as difficult as possible, as he moves to purge the ranks of any and all who dare to offer less than seamless fealty to the scattered, violent nihilism that is now his brand.
"History is watching," Cheney wrote in a recent opinion piece that still managed to single out "wokeness" as a threat commensurate to Trump. "Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be."
History has been watching for a while, Liz, and you are no hero. Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons. Nothing on Earth can compel me to root for a Cheney, but I will be watching to see what she can do to prevent the monstrous party she helped make from eating itself.
(c) 2021 William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co_written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.
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Ro Khanna, the dynamic progressive US representative from California, was inspired to enter politics by the legacy of his grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar (1901-1985), the legendary Indian trade unionist, independence campaigner, and parliamentarian. Though he was born and raised in the United States, Khanna traveled frequently to India as a youth, and he speaks movingly of how "our family's values come from my grandfather's embrace of a Gandhian worldview"-in particular, Mahatma Gandhi's belief "in the oneness not of merely all human life but in the oneness of all that lives."
In recent weeks, as India has been devastated by a coronavirus outbreak that has seen record-breaking levels of infection and death, Khanna has emerged as an advocate for global interventions to fight the surge-outlining strategies for the United States to send protective gear, oxygen, and vaccines, and leading the charge to get President Joe Biden's support to have the World Trade Organization approve a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver so that India and other countries can produce Covid-19 vaccines. After the Biden administration signaled that it would support the waiver of intellectual property protections, easing patent restrictions on the production of life-saving vaccines, I spoke with Khanna about the vital struggle to get vaccines to India.
John Nichols: Give me your sense of the severity of the Covid surge in India. How has it gotten so bad?
Ro Khanna: It's been the most horrific crisis there in my lifetime. My family knows people who have died because of a lack of oxygen, a lack of hospital beds. I don't think there's an Indian American family in this country that doesn't know someone who has been affected. So the scale is enormous.
There are several things that went wrong. One, a complete disregard for social distancing, and this idea of returning to normal [before widespread vaccination programs could be implemented], which obviously was a disaster.
Second, a lack of having the capacity on vaccines. Partly, that was because the TRIPS waiver should have been granted months earlier. There should have been more of a global manufacturing commitment. The last administration [under former president Donald Trump] did nothing on that. There should have been a greater effort in general, in these countries, to assist them with the development of the vaccine.
Third, I think this has exposed the failures of the Indian health care system. The health care system has a long way to go to be able to take care of the needs of people in crisis, and it shows the massive need for development.
JN: Let's focus on the vaccine issue. Clearly, we should have been thinking a year ago, as vaccines were being developed, about how to get this moment right. Why, when the United States and other countries clearly knew this was a global crisis, wasn't it?
RK: One issue is the "America first" foreign policy. There was no regard for what [the pandemic] means for the rest of the world.
Here it's important to distinguish a responsible and ultimately self-interested concern for people in other parts of the world from a rootless cosmopolitanism. No one is saying that we were wrong to prioritize Americans or to prioritize our communities. That's perfectly appropriate. Nations should do that.
What was totally shortsighted, morally wrong, and foolish is that there was no consideration after we prioritized our own nation of what we were going to do and what our responsibility was to the rest of the world.
We aren't an island. I mean, the disease is going to continue to come back to us.
We could have taken some very simple measures. We could have said, "We have a license for the vaccine"-meaning other countries pay for it, other countries compensate Pfizer or Moderna-"but we're going to at least license the vaccine formula." We could have set up a global manufacturing fund so that other countries would be manufacturing the vaccine without hurting our supply.
None of that was done. As a consequence, there are thousands of people dying around the world who shouldn't be and we're at much greater risk, because all these variants are coming back into the United States, making it harder for us to get past the disease.
JN: You believe that President Biden did the right thing, that the administration did the right thing, with their embrace of the TRIPS waiver.
RK: I would say they did more than the right thing. They did the courageous thing. This was a tough decision.
JN: How so?
RK: I heard it from Silicon Valley. The amount of people saying, "I'm disappointed. I'm never going to support you on a waiver on IP [intellectual property] law." The lobby for IP protection in this country goes beyond the pharmaceutical industry.
There are a lot of people in business who view that as the Holy Grail, something untouchable. They believe that you do not dilute IP rights. And I am sure, if I was facing that as a member of Congress, that must have been a hundredth of what the president was facing.
My understanding, having talked to people in the administration, is that a lot of people in the administration knew that this was the morally right thing to do and they were speaking up for that, and I give them credit, particularly people who were saying this is the right thing from a foreign policy perspective.
On the other side were all of the political forces, and some of it was hardball politics. Who knows what was said? But [it's likely there were expressions of] a concern that we need these pharmaceutical companies to do boosters for our nation, and we need them to continue to distribute to Americans and are they going to play hardball [when it comes to] doing what President Biden recognizes as the first priority, which is taking care of the American people?
That, I think, was really the intensity of the political pressure. For President Biden to make this decision, I think we ought to give him credit.
This president has done a lot of things that are more progressive than I thought we would see from him, which I'm glad about. But there are two places in particular where I would say he has shown tremendous courage: One, on Afghanistan, he has overruled his generals, literally the establishment. Two, on this TRIPS waiver, where he had to take on a lot of powerful economic interests.
JN: You were an especially outspoken advocate on this issue, but you weren't alone. The push for the waiver was amplified by advocacy groups and members of Congress in the days before Biden moved on it.
RK: Yes. Let me tell you, when I was running for Congress, I would always make the case that representation matters. When I was running, there was no Indian American in Congress other than [California Democrat] Ami Bera. At the same time that I ran, [Illinois Democrat] Raja Krishnamoorthi was running, [Washington Democrat] Pramila Jayapal was running, and we all ran the campaign saying representation matters.
That to me was theoretical at that time. This was the first time I felt, "Wow, representation matters," because when this [surge of Covid-19 cases in India] was taking place, Raja and myself and Pramila were on CNN, on the House floor, in touch with the administration to say, "We've got to do something," not because we have any heightened moral sense, but because we were hearing it firsthand.
You know, as a member of Congress, you're swamped. You've got a hundred different directions. But, on this, we were hearing it from constituent after constituent, how horrific it was, and I do think that voice made a difference.
JN: Are you satisfied with the administration's response? With Secretary of State Antony Blinken's response? Is there more that needs to be done?
RK: To the president's credit, and to Secretary Blinken's credit, they mobilized within a week. Their response on getting oxygen in was terrific. Their response on getting PPE in was terrific. Secretary Blinken was convening daily calls with all of these tech leaders seeing how we can mobilize our private sector. That was terrific. And then this TRIPS decision has been, like I said, courageous.
So they've done a lot right, and they've done a lot well, and I think it's going to deepen the India-US relationship. This is India's time of need, and President Biden and Blinken have been there for the country in a big way.
The only thing I think, going forward, that I'd like for them to continue to work on is helping with the global manufacturing capacity. The waiver is important, but unless we actually assist not just India but a hundred other countries with the manufacturing capability and the technical assistance, it's not going to scale.
JN: You spoke a moment ago about representation mattering. You have family ties to India. You've spoken to me often about your grandfather's legacy. Talk to me about your own sense of connection with India and how that influences you in this moment.
RK: It's on a personal level in a very immediate sense. Just yesterday, a cousin of mine texted that my dad's cousin had passed away. I hadn't seen that person for 25 years, but it brought back a flood of memories of when I would visit India as a child and met him.
My aunts and cousins are still there. There's still this sense that this is affecting a lot of people who were, at the very least, close to my parents, and people whom I had met.
Then there's a deeper connection with my grandfather, because he really is the inspiration behind my desire to go into public service. He is someone who spent four years in jail in the 1940s in Gandhi's "Quit India" movement, who becomes part of India's first parliament, who is an advocate for human rights and an advocate for pluralism and an advocate for democracy and tolerance.
Those values are ones that helped shape me and shape the things that I believe are right and just. So that in part gives me a sense of wanting to see an India that is true to those Gandhian ideals-and obviously, that hasn't been the case in a number of instances. But, more than that, it gives me a sense of wanting to always be proud of that spiritual foundation, as I continue my public service career.
I'll end with this, because it's on my mind. I was reading recently "The Composite Nation," by Frederick Douglass. One of the things that I found so moving about [that speech] is that Douglass views America, at its best, as this rich composite of deep traditions and movements from around the world. I think that for me, the movement my grandfather was part of is something that I believe can enrich, as part of the contribution to, the American whole-what Douglass calls the "composite nation."
It's taken me a long time to get to that point personally, because I was so proud-I am so proud-of being American, so proud of all of the traditions. And yet to see that my heritage, my grandfather's story, my ties to India, are additives to the American story, part of the American story, I think that's part of what makes me able to make a unique contribution.
(c) 2021 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.
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During my years as a news reporter, we word jockeys collected editorial mistakes (mostly from other papers) in headlines that often had double meanings, or were written by tired editors who obviously were not thinking. Thus they became extremely funny guffaws.
We always had long lists of those things hanging on the office bulletin board. Examples of actual headlines, which occur more frequently than you might believe, are as follows:  Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons Statistics Show Teen Pregnancy Drops Significantly After 25 Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case Tiger Woods Plays With Own Balls Nike Says Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft  Kids Make Nutritious Snacks Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors Deer Kill 17,000 Stud Tires Out Is There A Ring Of Debris Around Uranus? Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim  An ad in one newspaper promoted: Golden, Ripe Boneless Bananas. Most Lies About Blondes Are False. Dr. Ruth to talk about sex with newspaper editors Organ festival ends in smashing climax Grandmother of eight makes hole in one If strike isn't settled quickly it may last a while "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese," (a quote by the late French President Charles DeGaulle.) "The world is more like it is now then it ever has before," (quote by late President Dwight Eisenhower.) "It it weren't for electricity we'd all be watching television by candlelight," (quote by comedian George Gobel.) "Permitted vehicles not allowed," road sign on US-27. (c) 2021 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. |
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If you've chosen to read this, it's a fair bet you're been aware for quite some time that the Republican Party has gone completely insane-especially if you agree with that classic definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Time and again the GOP and their scarecrow leader Donald Trump have proven the wisdom of that definition. Although all 50 states officially confirmed the results, for more than half a year, Republicans have challenged ad nauseum last November's legitimate election of Joe Biden. Dozens of their frivolous lawsuits have been thrown out of courts. Currently, a ridiculous and baseless recount by QAnon aficionados in Maricopa County, Arizona, goes on and on-their latest ploy examining some 40,000 ballots for traces of bamboo, which would indicate these votes were fakes sent from China (!)
I'm not making this up.
And of course, throughout, there's the endless braying via social media and right-wing radio and TV of unfounded claims that the vote was manipulated. Trump is our one true president, they shout (and so does he), a deranged notion that makes me cold and clammy all over.
The prize for the wackiest quote of the past week or so goes to Debra Ell, a Michigan Republican organizer, who told Ashley Parker and Marianna Sotomayor of The Washington Post, "I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we've learned to trust when he says something, that he's not just going to spew something out there that's wrong and not verified."
Now then, she continued, please leave me be so I can await the weekly saucer that whisks me to my timeshare on the Planet Mongo.
Okay, that part I made up. Fake news.
This all would be funny (and yes, some of it is, for sure), but for the fact that belief in this fantasy is screwing up the rest of the country, a land already reeling from more than a year's worth of death and disease and the four plague years of the Trump White House. It has become the litmus test for membership in the GOP; you either buy this patently false canard or you get out of their party. Those few Republicans who have upheld the accuracy and legality of the election have been censured or fired-the aforementioned Ms. Ell, for example, is involved in an effort to remove the Michigan Republican Party's executive director just because he said "the election wasn't stolen" and that the loss was Trump's fault. Blasphemy! Unclean!
You see what's happening to Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney from Wyoming. Third in the GOP House leadership, daughter of the former vice president, this arch conservative had the temerity not only to suggest that the election was honest but also to condemn Trump's incitement of the January 6 deadly assault on the Capitol.
Last Monday, during an American Enterprise Institute conference at Sea Island, Georgia, she told attendees, "We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."
She followed up with an op-ed in The Washington Post: "Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work -- confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law...
As a result, she's losing her job as House Republican conference chair to the ambitious and opportunistic Rep. Elise Stefanik of upstate New York, who has attached herself to Donald Trump like a limpet on a big dumb ocean rock.
This, even though Cheney consistently voted for almost everything Trump wanted when he was president-more so than Stefanik (92 percent vs. 77 percent)-and she still sides with the far right and votes no, no, never on almost anything significant from Democrats on the other side of the aisle.
Nonetheless, by calling out the danger and speaking truth about the election and Trump's perfidy, for her loyalty to country and Constitution, she must be expelled. The once-upon-a-time party of Honest Abe has decided that reality is a worn-out concept that just gets in the way of their obeisance to the "say anything" madness of Trump.
They see him as the key to electoral success and political power, despite his and their losses. This is one reason they keep claiming victory in the presidential election in direct contradiction of the facts -- now including internal polling data Republican leadership have been sitting on that demonstrate Trump's toxicity in swing districts. As per The Post, "Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one."
"Right now, it's basically the Titanic," dissident Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger said of his party Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation". "We're in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it's fine. And meanwhile, Donald Trump's running around trying to find women's clothing and get on the first lifeboat."
Still, there's method to this madness. It's a distraction, yes, like the nonsensical culture wars of hamburgers and Mr. Potato Head, but more important, the claims of fraud and an illegitimate presidency are being used to barrage and undermine every single piece of policy Joe Biden and his team are attempting to implement. Last week, his "Grim Reaper" identity intact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a press conference back in his home state of Kentucky that, "One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration." (He'd do himself and the GOP a favor by shifting a little of that focus to Biden's 64% job approval rating and asking why.)
What's more, the steady din of Republican allegations, no matter how absurd, serves not only to reinforce the Big Lie about the elections, it also emboldens the forces of voter suppression that use these deceits to justify legislation that further denies the ballot to anyone who doesn't pass the GOP test for what it means to be an American. That would imit suffrage to those who are white, Christian, conservative, filled with anger, suspicion and fearful of change that's inevitable.
Increasingly, Republicans in Congress also are using it to justify the fatal insurrection of January 6 that sought to overthrow the results of the Electoral College and attack elected officials. Many on the Hill actively are working to prevent a thorough investigation of what really happened-and who was involved.
Back in the 1950s, many in the Republican Party embraced the anti-Communist witch hunts of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, false allegations that destroyed the lives of many innocent men and women. It was not until other members of the party demonstrated the courage and integrity to stand up and speak out against him, ultimately bringing him and his deranged cruelty to an end.
That version of the Republican Party is long gone. Instead, we see an assemblage of mad grievance hollowed out at the core, lacking morality or grace. Yet another man named McCarthy chooses to be a leader of it, to use the currents of hate to become Speaker of the House and reverse-engineer us back to our recent Trump years of malfeasance, corruption, and governmental inertia. And all of it without a trace of decency or genuine concern for the needs of the American people. (This despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot, Kevin McCarthy loudly attacked Trump for his involvement. Now, he has flipped in spectacular fashion, executing a neat jacknife with somersault into the Mar-a-Lgo swimming pool. Trump good, he says.)
While expressing perplexity at these goings on, Biden presses ahead, rooting for his proposals, attempting to enlist a modicum of Republican participation while knowing it may be useless. Slowly, history will reveal the full extent of the egregious acts the GOP has committed and lead us to what we must believe will be their ultimate defeat and humiliation. For now, we must continue to hammer back against their lies, support good and sincere governance as we now see it occurring once again, and not allow the Trumpistas to seize power as they did before, either at the election box or through an underhanded conspiracy to overthrow democracy. To stop resisting their falsehoods and schemes would really be, what's the word? Oh yeah, insane!
(c) 2021 Michael Winship is the Schumann Senior Writing Fellow for Common Dreams. Previously, he was the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, a past senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos and former president of the Writers Guild of America East. Follow him on twitter:@MichaelWinship
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 From Desert To Dessert: No Mow May Gains Momentum By David Suzuki As May brings sunnier weather to Canada, many will mark the season by firing up their lawn mowers. Before you dutifully join the grass-cutting hordes, I encourage you to take heed of the No Mow May movement, which encourages a month-long pause in this well-intentioned yardwork for the sake of insects like bees and butterflies. Although social pressure might drive you to keep your turfgrass tidy, researchers have found that regular mowing, especially early in spring, has unintended ecological consequences. Mowing less is a simple way to help insects and boost local ecology. That's important. Insects pollinate plants, provide food for other life and help naturally recycle waste. But many insects, especially native bees and butterflies, are in trouble because of pesticides, light pollution, habitat destruction, climate disruption and more. Insects benefit from flowering plants that bloom in lawnscapes left to grow. Nectar sources can be scarce in early spring, so a flower-filled lawn can provide a much-needed May buffet. The U.K.-based charity Plantlife, which started the No Mow May movement, estimates past participants' lawns can have five times more bees and three times more bee species than regularly mowed turf in the same neighbourhood. An added bonus of a less-is-more approach to lawn care is that more mowing can be associated with increased pests and allergy-causing plants like ragweed. So instead of splitting your precious free time between mowing and trips to the pharmacy to deal with seasonal allergies, perhaps this spring you can relax and enjoy a cold beer (or a nice glass of rose or iced tea) while enjoying the buzzing and flittering critters in your yard. Though turfgrass has a long history in Canada, most grass species in lawns here are from far-off places like northern Europe, where the climate is cooler and wetter. This includes Kentucky bluegrass, which is neither blue nor hails from the "bluegrass state." It explains why most of our lawns look like they're on life support throughout much of the summer, as thirsty grass is plied with vast amounts of municipal drinking water - nearly one-third of all residential water use each year. While mowing less can be beneficial for bugs and save time, it's even better if you can carve out a bit more turf specifically for insects. It doesn't take much space to contribute. The influential U.S. National Academy of the Sciences suggests that converting as little as 10 per cent of residential lawns and public green space to minimally disturbed natural vegetation could significantly aid insect conservation and simultaneously lower the cost of lawn maintenance by more than one-third. If you're considering alternatives to traditional turfgrass, get in touch with native plant nurseries and garden centres that specialize in locally sourced wildflowers and grasses. Choose native species that have adapted to the local climate and soil, and co-evolved with local wildlife and insects. They tend to be more drought-tolerant and require less maintenance once established. One of the most fruitful (and fantastic) species you can choose is wild strawberry, which produces lovely white flowers in May, little berries in June and low-lying, hardy ground cover the rest of the year. (Be sure to find species local to your region.) If you're keen to join this growing movement, let your neighbours know what you're up to. In Canada, we have a collective cultural association with uncut and seemingly unkempt lawns being a sign of negligence. There's no better way to signal the intent behind your lawn's transformation from ecological desert to ecological dessert than a clever garden sign. Many groups offer signs, including the David Suzuki Foundation's Butterflyway Project. Or make your own. Anything involving bees tends to be great fodder for clever, pun-filled signs. Lawns haven't historically been the target of ambitious conservation campaigns. But they're one of the landscapes of greatest opportunity, especially during pandemic times when we're all spending more time at home and gardening has hit unprecedented levels of interest. Lawns are North America's largest irrigated crop. There are over six million yards in Canada, making up about half the space in our towns and cities. Imagine the potential of transforming a corner of each of those into flower-filled bee and butterfly landing strips. Strawberry fields forever? Kick back and enjoy the buzz. (c) 2021 Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. |
 The Fish Had Two Tails Another alleged victim of the United States' use of Agent Orange in Vietnam saw her lawsuit thrown out, this time in a French court. By Charles P. Pierce Something akin to the defense strategy in the West Virginia opioid trial succeeded in a French court on Monday. A Vietnamese woman named Tran To Nga brought suit against 14 chemical companies, including Monsanto and Dow, for providing the U.S. military with the makings of Agent Orange, the defoliant with which the U.S. soaked the jungles of Southeast Asia. Tran claimed that she had been sentenced to a lifetime of illness because of exposure to the noxious brew. However, on Monday, the French court threw out Tran's lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds. From Reuters: The multinationals had argued they could not be held responsible for use the U.S. military made of their product. The court ruled it did not have jurisdiction to judge a case involving the U.S. government's wartime actions, Agence France Presse reported. Reuters could not immediately see the ruling...In a statement, Bayer said it welcomed the court's decision while saying it had "great sympathy for Ms. Tran To Nga and all those who suffered during the Vietnam war." But it said it had been "well-established by courts for many years that wartime contractors like the nine former manufacturers, operating at the behest of the U.S. government, are not responsible for the alleged damage claims associated with the government's use of such product during wartime."Just as the opioid distributors are telling the court in West Virginia that they had no control over what happened with the drugs they were pumping into that state, the chemical companies are saying they cannot be held responsible for the use to which the U.S. military put their products. As nearly as I can tell, the court ruled correctly on the jurisdictional question, although Tran's lawyers said she will appeal, and that the court relied on an obsolete interpretation of the relevant statutes in dismissing her case. But there's an interesting history behind Agent Orange litigation. So far, only military veterans from the United States and other countries involved in the war have won compensation over Agent Orange. In 2008, a U.S. federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a civil lawsuit against major U.S. chemical companies brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs. The United States has maintained there is no scientifically proven link between the wartime spraying and the claims of dioxin poisoning of many Vietnamese.First of all, the military and its contractors fought the claims of American veterans concerning Agent Orange from hell to breakfast. But what this decision, and others, have made clear is that the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange have no recourse in the courts of the nations that made war in their country. It is the position of the United States government that Agent Orange's deleterious effects on American personnel were serious enough to force settlements, but that its effects on the Vietnamese who live with it still are still not scientifically proven. This makes no sense whatsoever. At the end of April, when Tran's lawsuit was still hanging fire, novelist Nguyen Phan Que Mai, who grew up in Vietnam, wrote in the New York Times about growing up surrounded by the poisonous legacy of what the Vietnamese call, "The American War." She wrote of a poisoned landscape and two-headed fish. The first time I heard of Agent Orange was in 1980 when I was 7 years old and living in South Vietnam. A neighbor was standing in our kitchen, pointing at a fish we had caught in a stream close to home. The fish was a great catch, but it had two tails and a gigantic, deformed head. "Don't eat that fish," the neighbor told us, "it has been contaminated by chat doc da cam."The fish had two tails. I know which way I'm betting. (c) 2021 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.
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 By Supporting Trump's Move Of The US Embassy To Jerusalem, Biden Enabled Israeli Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestinians The Biden administration gives lip service to a negotiated settlement and a two state solution. But Washington has done nothing at all to prevent the gradual colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. By Juan Cole The post of U.S. ambassador to Israel is still vacant, but the charge d'affaires, Jonathan Shrier, sent over some objections to caretaker Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last month complaining about the Israeli construction of squatter settlements on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. The "Green Line" that separates Israel within 1948 borders from the Occupied Palestinian territories Israel illegally grabbed by military conquest in 1967 runs through Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government approved 450 housing units in the Har Homa district in the east of the city, and the Biden administration objected that Israel should not be building beyond the Green Zone. The planting of more and more squatter settlements on land owned by Palestinian families is among the actions that produced massive unrest in Jerusalem on Friday and Saturday. In particular, the Israeli plan to make dozens of families homeless in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood has raised tensions to a fever pitch. The Israeli government pretends not to recognize the property titles of many families there, and prevents them from making additions to their homes. When they do so anyway, the Israelis schedule them for demolition. This behavior is among the reasons that Human Rights Watch has just branded Israel an Apartheid state. There were further Palestinian protests Sunday night in Jerusalem, as far right wing groups (the Israeli equivalent of Q-Anon) planned to parade through Palestinian neighborhoods waving Israeli flags, just to make it clear who is in control of people's lives there. Palestinians are not allowed to protest, and the Israeli commandos come in to break heads and throw stun grenades. For a Palestinian to wave a Palestine flag is a crime that could result in long years in jail. That is what the US press calls "clashes" or "skirmishes," managing to avoid naming Israeli repression. The Biden administration has revived the old, phony, language about a "two-state" solution. Since Israel is unimpeded in building throughout the West Bank, 60% of which is under direct Israeli military occupation and 40% of which is under indirect Israeli military occupation, no two-state solution has been plausible for at least a decade and maybe more. Speaking of two states that can never materialize is just a way of, in Mitt Romney's words, "kicking the can down the road." So the new construction in Palestinian East Jerusalem was denounced by Washington. But the denunciation is toothless. Netanyahu knows that it is toothless, and engaged in one of his favorite sports, owning the Libs in Washington. Jerusalem, he said, "is not a settlement," it is the capital of Israel. The Biden administration says that the ultimate disposition of East Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. So Washington disagrees, at the moment, with Netanyahu. But President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken don't have a leg to stand on in rejecting, Netanyahu's position, since they decided to ratify the decision of the odious Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Only a handful of countries has agreed to recognize undivided Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a recognition that forestalls final status negotiations. Trump symbolically acquiesced in Netanyahu's claims. Biden let the symbolism stand. Although Israelis often attempt to use the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan as a charter of legitimacy, it isn't. It was never ratified by the UN executive branch, which is the Security Council, and so has no force of law. Moreover, Israeli leaders such as Ben Gurion only paid lip service to it, ignoring it when they could seize further territory by main force. But even that very pro-Zionist 1947 plan did not award Jerusalem to Israel. The city, given its importance to Jews, Christians and Muslims, was to be under an international regime. But in the 1948 War, Israel captured the west of the city, while Jordanian troops held the east. In 1967, even though Palestinian played no appreciable role in the Six Day War, Israel overran East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The General Assembly had not awarded those to Israel because there were virtually no Jews there. The Israelis annexed East Jerusalem and other Palestinian West Bank territory, which is an egregious violation of the United Nations charter, which forbids the acquisition of territory by military force. Israel is a signatory. Then the Israeli government began flooding Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. This transfer of population from the Occupying power to militarily occupied territory is a severe violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied populations. The Fourth Geneva Convention was aimed at preventing a repeat of Axis war crimes, as with the attempt of the Nazis to settle occupied Poland with ethnic Germans and to ethnically cleanse Poles from their own country to make way for Germanization. Today, 370,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, and the Israelis have managed to plant over 200,000 Israelis in squatter settlements on land owned by Palestinians. The goal of the Israeli Right is to evict the Palestinians slowly and gradually (so as to avoid a backlash from the rest of the world) and to replace them with Israeli settlers, so as to create a monochrome Israeli Jerusalem. Currently, the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and being turned into cantons surrounded by Israeli squatter settlements and sometimes cut off from other Palestinians, and they are all heavily surveiled and patrolled by Israeli security forces. The 5 million Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank view East Jerusalem as their future capital, and Netanyahu's purpose in life is to prevent that scenario from ever occurring. The Biden administration gives lip service to a negotiated settlement and a two state solution. But Washington has done nothing at all to prevent the gradual colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by the Israelis over the past for the past 54 years, and so will just go only sending over memos. Sending the memos from Jerusalem is a way of telegraphing that they are not serious. (c) 2021 Juan R.I. Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. |
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America prefers to look forward rather than back. We're a land of second acts. We move on.
This can be a strength. We don't get bogged down in outmoded traditions, old grudges, obsolete ways of thinking. We constantly reinvent. We love innovation and disruption.
Trump is consolidating his power over the Republican Party, based on his big lie.
The downside is a collective amnesia about what we've been though, and a corresponding reluctance to do anything about it or hold anyone accountable.
Now, with Covid receding and the economy starting to rebound-and the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol behind us-the future looks bright.
But at the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, let me remind you:
We have lost more than 580,000 people to COVID-19. One big reason that number is so high is our former president lied about the virus and ordered his administration to minimize its danger.
He also lied about the results of the last election. And then-you remember, don't you?-he tried to overturn the results.
He twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.
Several Republican members of Congress joined him in the big lie and refused to certify the election. They thereby encouraged the attempted coup.
This was just over four months ago, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our collective memory.
Last Tuesday, the Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before they attacked.
But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley's new book on the "tyranny of big tech." It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley's sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation "for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers," and as "a fierce defender of the Constitution."
Last week, "CBS This Morning" interviewed Florida Republican senator Rick Scott, another of the senators who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of any of his sedition. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden's spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.
Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election.
What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? At the least, if they must appear, ask them if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why.
Pretending nothing happened promotes America's dangerous amnesia, which invites more attempts to distort the truth.
Trump is consolidating his power over the Republican Party, based on his big lie. The GOP is about to purge one of its leaders, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth.
The big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new laws to restrict voting. On Thursday, hours after Florida installed a rash of new voting restrictions, Texas's Republican-led Legislature pushed ahead with its a bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.
The Republican-controlled Arizona senate is mounting a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County-farming out 2.1 million ballots to GOP partisans, including at least one who participated in the January 6 raid on the Capitol.
Last Monday, Trump even lied about his big lie, issuing a "proclamation" to co-opt the language of those criticizing the lie. "The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the BIG LIE!" he wrote.
Most Republican voters believe him.
It is natural to want to put all this unpleasantness behind us. We are finally turning the corner on the pandemic and the economy.
Why look back to the trauma of the 2020 election? Because we cannot put it behind us. Trump's big lie and all that it has provoked are still with us. If we forget what has occurred the trauma will return, perhaps in even more terrifying form.
(c) 2021 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.
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There's been a lot of talk lately about fascism, generally in the context of Republicans denying people their right to vote or Donald Trump sending an armed mob to murder five people at the U.S. Capitol to try to install him as America's first strongman dictator.
Indeed, authoritarian governance is a major aspect of fascism. But there's another piece to the puzzle, and it is playing out right now across America, and getting almost no coverage whatsoever.
It's when giant corporations are able to control government and thus stop things like a national healthcare system, rational gun control laws, free college, or even the tiniest tax on carbon. When they're able to push through "criminal justice reform" that makes it nearly impossible to prosecute corporate CEOs when their companies kill workers, consumers, or even poison entire communities.
It's when they don't do it through presenting strong and defendable ideas in the public realm and before Congress, but by pouring cash into the pockets of individual politicians and their parties.
It's when corporations and the very rich have seized control of the political process through the use of their considerable economic power, after having used that power to change laws so they can legally buy politicians.
When government gives corporations this core power to write laws, and, in exchange, corporations facilitate government power to suppress dissent and marginalize non-fascist political parties, a country finds itself on the edge of classical fascism.
The word fascism comes from the Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks with a rope around it, typically adorned with a hatchet on the top. There's one carved into the podium in the United States Senate, an homage to the ancient Roman Republic which originated it and partly inspired our Constitution.
The idea is that a single stick can easily be broken, but a bundle of sticks is almost impossible to break. Similarly, a single state may be vulnerable, but a collection of states, united together, is unbreakable.
But the Roman fasces, although that symbol was used throughout history as a symbol of the ancient Roman Republic, took on a completely different meaning in the late 1920s when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini derived from it the word fascism.
To him, fascism met something quite different than just the strength of a united country. It meant the literal merger of corporate and state interests, ultimately facilitating a strongman authoritarian government. Corporations and the government becoming interpenetrated and intertwined, ruling the country together, with a "tough guy" in charge.
The "tough guy" or authoritarian leader would then shower his own beneficence on the corporations that funded his political power.
Mussolini was so enthusiastic about this that he declared the essential merger of state and corporate power. As he said in The Labour Charter (Promulgated by the Grand Council of Fascism on April 21, 1927, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, April 3, 1927, p. 133):
Today, as a substantial number of Republican politicians are actively working to subvert democracy and establish a merger of corporate and strongman rule, what Mussolini called fascism, those politicians are also being supported and encouraged by large numbers of major American corporations.
In exchange for that support, particularly during the Trump administration but also on a state-by-state basis where Republicans control state governments, those corporations get everything from tax cuts to assistance in avoiding unions to a pass on pollution or even corporate malfeasance that kills people, like we just saw with the for-profit corporate power grid in Texas.
We are moving from the early technical dimensions of fascism to the true realization of Mussolini's vision.
If these Republican politicians and the corporations supporting them are successful, and a Republican strongman like Trump or his imitators (Scott, Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, etc.) again achieves the presidency, we will fully enter an American version of that which Mussolini created in Italy in 1927.
Over 120 American corporations vowed, after the January 6 insurrection, that they would no longer make campaign contributions to those Republicans who fought certifying the 2020 election.
But the lure of fascism for a corporation is extraordinary.
The benefits of fascism include huge profits for the company and its stockholders; massive payouts to senior executives and members of the board of directors; not just tax breaks but actual subsidies with taxpayer's dollars of a whole variety of activities including R&D and even free land; complete immunity for the executives when their decisions destroy communities or even kill people; and a steady flow, back-and-forth, between government regulatory agencies and the very corporations regulated by them.
It shouldn't surprise us, therefore, that as long as Republicans are offering this fantastic dream world to America's corporations, those companies might toss out a few news releases saying they're not going to support fascistic Republican politicians, but that that seemingly moral stand would collapse almost instantly.
As Daily Beast investigative reporting found, corroborating the groundbreaking reporting that Judd Legum has been doing for weeks on his popular.info website, at the very least AT&T, CIGNA Health, Ford Motor, and Pfizer have broken their commitment not to support insurrectionists.
More will, no doubt, follow soon.
But how could they do otherwise? Modern corporations are an altogether different animal from those in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s when corporations went out of their way to be, or to at least seem to be, good citizens of the community and the nation.
The Reagan administration in the 1980s essentially re-wrote the rules of corporate governance.
It used to be the corporations had a responsibility to their local community, to their workers, to their shareholders, and to their customers. Their senior executives and Board of Directors had a responsibility to the institution of the company itself. Prior to 1980, the average CEO in a large American corporation had worked in that company for about 30 years, typically climbing from the bottom to the top. And the average CEO only earned 30 times what the most poorly paid employee made.
That was the norm in America up until the 1980s. But the Reagan administration, through a series of administrative law changes, re-wrote those rules.
They adopted an idea that had been kicking around among rightwing cranks like Robert Bork and Milton Friedman for years, that had been scorned by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and even President Richard Nixon.
It was that a corporation has only one, single obligation to only one, single entity: to increase profits and thus dividends and its share price for its shareholders.
The Supreme Court, stacked with corporate shills by bought-off politicians, has since ratified that new perspective in a series of decisions peripheral to it, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
So now corporations don't have to answer to their communities, their employees, their customers or even the idea of the permanence of the institution. All they have to answer to is profits for stockholders.
And the stockholders frankly don't give a rat's ass about how the corporation is run or what it does, so long as it keeps cranking out cash every quarter so the dividend checks continue to arrive. Which is why corporate CEOs now make over 300 times what their lowest-paid employee makes, and in some sectors it's thousands of times more.
As many of us pointed out back in the 1980s, and I wrote about at length in my book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People, this was almost certain to cause American business and the American government to reconfigure themselves along the lines of the classical, Mussolini definition of fascism. It would lead to the merger of corporate and state interests, and the end of electoral democracy.
America does have a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, or Tom Cotton. It goes deep, now, into the very structure of corporate America.
If America is to survive as a democratic republic, we not only must repudiate strongman authoritarianism; we also must change federal rules regarding corporate governance to repudiate shareholder primacy, block fascism, and thus restore corporate behavior to something resembling sanity and responsibility.
(c) 2021 Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
~~~ Bas van der Schot ~~~  |
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Parting Shots-
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