This is the fifth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week the Trump Rackets and Extortion Ring shook $15 million in protection money loose from ABC News and sued the Des Moines Register for not kissing Trump’s pinky ring in the polling run-up to the 2024 election.)

The 1809 Napoleonic battlefield of Wagram outside Vienna, Austria. The battle ended the European coalition aligned against the French emperor, who reigned supreme until his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

On my last day in Vienna, I decided to ride my bicycle around the Napoleonic battlefields of Aspern-Essling and Wagram, which are on the east side of the Danube River but still close to the Vienna suburbs. In the demented age of Trump, how bad can it be to study Napoleon?

From research before leaving my hotel, I got the feeling that not much would be open in Aspern-Essling (at least on the battlefield) but that there was more to see in Wagram, which has a Napoleonic museum and various memorials, such as those in the main square of Aderklaa, a nearby village.

In all, the ride would take about three hours, and I calculated that I could have a picnic in Wagram if I was able to leave early and didn’t linger at the Lion of Aspern (a famous Napoleonic memorial).

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By the time I was heading toward Wagram, I had been to numerous Napoleonic battlefields across Europe, although not because I am obsessive about the Corsican.

In college, during my junior year abroad, I went with my father to Waterloo on a weekend in Belgium. We visited the diorama and walked up the mound, but that had not started me out as a collector of either Napoleonic literature or figurines of the Little Corporal.

After moving to Europe, however, I began reading occasional Napoleon biographies, and when my son Charles was six or seven we (he would say I) picked Napoleon as the theme of his childhood travels.

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With each of my four children, when they were small, I picked out “a theme” for us to explore together around Europe. With our oldest daughter, Helen, the theme was the Roman Empire, and toward that end we tramped to such places as the Forum in Rome, Pompeii, and Carthage.

Our second daughter, Laura, and I worked down the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. (Alas, most of us cannot recite them all, and neither the Mall of America in Minneapolis nor Mar-a-Lago counts.)

Beginning in Olympia and ending at the Pyramids, we saw six of the seven Wonders, leaving off only the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in those days lost in the fog of W’s war against Iraq.

Henry, our older son, and I went around World War II battlefields, notably in Belgium (Bastogne) and the Netherlands (Arnhem). At the time, he was devoted to the Band of Brothers TV series, so we ended up, as did E Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, at Hitler’s Eagle Nest (where we discovered the Führer was scared of heights).

When it came time to pick a theme for Charles, eight years younger than Helen, I went with Napoleon, as he says, “because when I was six I watched one airline movie about the emperor.”

He could well be right, but as he drew the Napoleon straw, we spent slivers of his childhood in places such as Borodino (outside Moscow), Austerlitz (near Brno in the Czech Republic), Jena (once in East Germany), and Auerstadt (down the road from Jena), where over picnics in the gloom I could be heard to say: “God is usually on the side of the big battalions…”

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With all of our themes, I never thought I would turn Helen into a classics scholar or Charles into a Napoleonic officer, but I was looking for ways to reduce the sprawl of Europe into subjects that were manageable and easier to comprehend.

For example, classical Greek history can be daunting unless you are on a quest simply to find where the Colossus of Rhodes straddled the Mandraki harbor. (In case you’re wondering, most of the Wonders are long gone, usually dragged off as plunder.)

But even now, when the children are grown, I keep up with their themes—even on my own—much the way I continue to paste stamps into their albums and pump air into their soccer balls.

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By the time I was rolling toward Aspern-Essling, I had seen much of Napoleon’s known world, including many sites from his disastrous Russian campaign (even the Berezina Crossing, which is in Belarus), northern Italy (where he made his bones, in many ways), Leipzig (his Waterloo before Waterloo), and the so-called Hundred Days east of Paris (where he tried to protect his crumbling empire in 1814 from the oncoming allies, led by the Russian czar, Alexander I).

But I had never seen Wagram, because when Charles and I biked from Dresden to Vienna (detouring into “the sunshine to Austerlitz”—it’s phrase that refers to Napoleon’s luck), we ran out of time and energy to spend another day searching for more Napoleonic markers (which in some places can be hard to find). So on this occasion, I was filling in blanks.

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Even though I was relying on GPS to find Aspern-Essling, it wasn’t the easiest ride to get across the Danube. I rode east toward Ernst-Happel Stadion, but then poked around on a sidewalks and through parking lots until I found the dedicated bike paths on the bridges across the river.

The bridge paths were easy to follow but still a labyrinth of ramps and turns, and they dumped me out in an industrial quarter on the far side, where even following GPS I felt lost in a Escher painting.

There are war memorials to the battle of Aspern-Essling, which was fought in spring 1809, but mostly the fields of battle are now part of Vienna’s extended suburbs. I found the Lion and some other markers, but the small museum was only open on Sunday mornings in summer.

About all I could do to orient myself to the fighting was open the compass on my phone and imagine (where there are now rows of townhouses) where the Austrian forces had driven Napoleon back across the Danube. (Think of Aspern as a failed amphibious landing.)

Aspern especially was the biggest defeat for Napoleon in more than ten years (since Acre in 1797). He suffered some 20,000 casualties battering into the Austrian lines. But a month later, Napoleon recrossed the Danube and won a decisive victory at Wagram, which is about five miles northwest of Aspern-Essling.

Both battles were fought in response to the Austrian rising against Napoleonic hegemony in Europe (that which he imposed with the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit), and Europe remained a Napoleonic fief until 1812, when his endless ambition drove him to attack Russia. After sacking Moscow, it was mostly all downhill for Napoleon until he reached the end at Waterloo in 1815. (I am sure Trump’s knowledge of Waterloo is confined to the ABBA song, but you know there’s one in his future.)

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Despite GPS on my handlebars, Austrian road maps in my saddle bags, and extracts from the Napoleonic battlefield atlas in my pockets, I still struggled to ride from Aspern-Essling to Wagram. I ended up on a series of agricultural lanes, some of which were clogged with mud. At one point a marker on one of my maps directed me to ride around the contours of a damp field.

Then I had the problem of riding on roads with speeding cars and trying to cross mainline rail tracks that now cut through the general area of the Wagram battlefields.

In all, a ride of about fifteen kilometers across largely empty farmland took me well over two hours. When I got the town now called Deutsch-Wagram it was not only raining but I confirmed my fear that the museum was only open on summer Sundays.

I could still bike around the surrounding fields but in order to weigh the meaning of Wagram in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, I would be on my own, largely at the mercy of the books in my library.

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I like to think that I am not a Napoleonic disciple and that his career only interests me as a way to understand early 19th century European history. But then when I begin to look through my books about Napoleon, I realize that I am something more than a casual collector.

I have atlases about his battles, books of his letters, diaries of his officers, and biographies of his major opponents. Plus whenever I visit someplace such as Waterloo or Austerlitz, I come away with postcards, more battle maps, and illustrated guides.

The problem with many books about Napoleon is that they dwell on obscure aspects of his life or battles, and often at great length. I have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (set largely around the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino), and as much as I admire Tolstoy’s skills as a novelist, I confess I can bog down in some of his lengthy wartime descriptions. I sometimes think it is a book more about Tolstoy and less about Napoleon, reminiscent of Churchill’s World War I memoirs (about which a wag remarked: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis…”).

I own Georges Lefebvre’s well-regarded two-volume history of the Napoleonic Wars, which many would consider definitive, but I struggle with prose that can be a cascade of names, places, rivers, and crossings. (Leading up to Aspern, he writes: “Meanwhile, Lefebvre, seizing Salzburg, threw Jellachich back toward the Drave and could keep a watch on the Tyrol.”)

I liked a lot of Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon and Wellington, which is a comparative study of the two generals by a best-selling British author, but often his prose can lack felicity, as when he writes: “This dichotomy, of admiring Napoleon as a soldier while despising him for everything else and particularly his moral character, was the central feature of Wellington’s public attitude towards Napoleon.”

Many of my books about Napoleon came from my father, who even had Praeger’s A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars compiled from maps drawn at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It’s an oversized coffee table book that somehow survived my parents’ downsizings and came to me at some point.

In the frontispiece there is a Napoleon quote: “I am a fragment of rock thrown into space,” which is a touch less cynical than his well-worn: “Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend.”

The post Napoleon by Bike appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Tim Cooper

In his new Netflix special, entertainer Jamie Foxx shares that he suffered a debilitating stroke. The $4.5 trillion U.S. health care system at first failed to give him helpful treatment, which Foxx eventually received at a hospital in Atlanta.

Think about the class dimensions of his experience. Foxx is a multimillionaire who in his time of medical need got a cold shoulder from the American health care industry.

Where does that leave the majority of the U.S. working class who earn much, much less? Up a creek with no paddle is the short answer, financially speaking.

In fact, insurers denying necessary health care to patients with insurance is the business model of the industry. Much human suffering follows.

Meanwhile, money that insurers do not spend on patient care instead flows to the likes of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down in Manhattan recently. His murder is headline news, but the daily human toll from the industry’s business practices is not.

The contrast in press coverage is striking. Clearly, there are worthy and unworthy victims, as Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman detail in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).

Since Thompson’s killing, the practices of the industry have been in the spotlight.

Corporations such as UnitedHealthcare deny care as a matter of course.

Every dollar a health care corporation avoids spending on patient care is another greenback for executives and shareholders. This business model is harmful, shifting dollars away from patient care and health providers.

Let us not forget that the daily working conditions of health providers are also the healing situations of patients. Labor has that connection to health care.

Those providing and receiving medical treatment are sources of profits for health care corporations. That is how the industry operates.

How will the continued denial of health care play out in the political system? The answer to that question could prove momentous.

Currently there is bipartisan support for the health care status quo that profits the industry at the expense of the American public. Think about the impacts of that for working-class Democratic, independent and Republican voters.

They are the losers, in brief. However, losers do not have to keep losing, politically speaking.

Accordingly, there are shared class interests relative to health care in the lived experiences of tens of millions of working class Americans along a so-called political divide. The possibilities are intriguing, in my view.

I see an opening for a new political formation that focuses on changing health care from its current state of a cash cow for private interests to one of a public service to improve Americans’ lives. One thing seems certain.

Overcoming the current status quo for health care will require the active involvement of more and more of the American people. Of course that will not occur overnight.

Popular movements for social progress take effort and time. The revolution, as observed well before the term woke saturated the U.S., will not be televised.

On that note, vested interests in the American ruling class will by any means necessary work to derail a system change for health care. That response is understandable.

There is a record of ruling class co-optation and oppression against popular movements for social justice (think of Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives). Say what you will about the American ruling class of oligarchs and Empire, it is quite aware of its power and wealth and next steps to keep it.

The post An Emerging U.S. Health Care Politics? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Ten years ago, the U.S. and Cuba announced the start of normalization between our two countries. Americans and Cubans alike could see a bit of light through a crack in the wall of U.S. restrictions that, for six decades, have blocked normal interaction between close neighbors.

The brief opening was largely ceremonial — President Trump rolled much of it back in his first term. And only Congress can truly end the world’s longest running embargo.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, President-elect Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, embraces the same old Cold War playbook on the issue: punish Cuba, stoke chaos and civil unrest, and hope the government collapses. As far back as JFK, U.S. officials have been trapped in this irrational family feud that empowers hardliners in both governments while holding citizens here and there hostage to a bureaucratic status quo.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Two years of limited opening had a positive impact and was supported by a majority of Cuban Americans. Buoyed by Cuban government reforms and cash from families in the U.S., the island’s private sector boomed. Internet access increased and social media exploded with honest voices. American tourists flocked to the country.

Then Trump emphatically rolled this progress back — he even added Cuba to the list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” despite a complete lack of evidence.

Today, after a brief glimmer of hope, Cubans are suffering. Hardliners have stopped the economic reform process. Confusion plagues new leaders transitioning from the Castros’ dominance. The pandemic gutted tourism, while storms and flooding ravaged crops.

The results have been predictable: An exodus from Cuba has surpassed all migration since the imposition of the embargo in 1962. At least half a million have migrated since the end of Trump’s first term — and more are on the way. The island has lost around 10 percent of its population in recent years, a staggering total.

We need to break our addiction to this big government policy that displaces people and blocks the rest of us from engaging with our neighbors. Ending the embargo would also open doors for Cuban reformers, dissidents, human rights activists, and religious leaders alike by removing the Cuban government’s excuse for its failures.

A bipartisan majority in Congress could potentially back a full lifting of the embargo. Gulf Coast states who took the big hit in the 60s when they lost a top trading partner in Cuba could be especially delighted to renew those relations.

”In a scenario of unrestricted trade, the aggregate of food and medical exports alone could amount to $1.6 billion with 20,000 associated U.S. jobs,” former International Trade Commission Chair Paula Stern PhD found in a 2000 study presented to Congress. Those numbers could be much higher today.

There would be other benefits as well.

Companies like Roswell Park in Buffalo, who had to jump through hoops to bring a groundbreaking Cuban-developed lung cancer vaccine to people in the United States, and other health care companies would finally be able to economically partner with world-class Cuban scientists on new medical advances.

For Trump, the next steps should be obvious: Avoid bloodshed. Ease the pain. Light the way to a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations.

The post Bring Back Normalization With Cuba appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ally Financial Tower, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The good times — for America’s super wealthy — are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast.

Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.

But Musk’s good fortune hardly rates as unique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is sitting on a quarter-trillion personal fortune, and the Facebook-driven net worth of Mark Zuckerburg has jumped comfortably over $200 billion as well.

Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.

Amid the ranks of America’s up-and-coming ultra-rich, in other words, $100-billion fortunes have suddenly become eminently imaginable. For the rest of us, a personal fortune of a mere single billion remains utterly unimaginable. An American with a job annually paying $75,000 would have to labor over 13,000 years to amass enough pay stubs to equal that singular billion.

This past September, analysts at the London-based Informa research group predictedthat Elon Musk, based on his then-current wealth trajectory, would hit trillionaire status sometime in 2027. Three other Americans, the researchers added, would likely join the trillion-dollar club before 2030. All these numbers, with this fall’s personal fortune figures now almost all in, appear to make for a severe underestimate.

Numbers, of course, can only paint part of America’s top-heavy picture. Where the riches of our richest end up going tells an even more disturbing story.

In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate. Some $243 million of that total came from Elon Musk’s effort to elect Donald Trump. That huge outlay — the largest personal investment ever in a single American political campaign — amounted to a pin prick on Musk’s overall fortune.

Back in the old days — before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision in 2010 — America’s wealthiest faced restrictions on how much money they could invest in electing their political pals to office. Today those rich can essentially spend whatever they want on political campaigns.

Or on anything else. Take housing, for instance. In the first half of this year, elevated mortgage rates had U.S. home sales overall down 12.9 percent. But the luxury housing market has remained notably robust. Luxury sales rose 5.2 percent during this year’s first half — even in the face of a 14.2 percent rise in typical luxury home prices.

The post Ghastly Glimpses of America’s Most Rich-People-Friendly Year appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Howard Lutnick wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Then, he intends to eat your cake.

The post Trump is Stoking His Admininstration With Self-Dealing Billioinaires appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Photo: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Texas’ electrical grid made national headlines in the winter of 2021 when the state experienced statewide power outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power grid operator, was caught completely off-guard when a winter storm exposed the organization’s lack of severe weather preparedness. Embarrassed, ERCOT developed a roadmap to increase the reliabilityof its energy delivery system.

But guaranteeing a reliable flow of energy from the state’s generating plants to the homes and businesses of Texan residents has proven more difficult than expected. ERCOT recently announced that if a comparable storm were to hit the Lone Star State this winter, there is an 80 percent chance that they would again experience blackouts during peak hours.

Failure to resolve Texas’ power grid bottlenecks is perhaps not entirely ERCOT’s fault. Demand for energy in the state has ballooned in recent years thanks, in part, to the explosion and hype around artificial intelligence.

A significant expansion in the supply of data centers is needed to meet artificial intelligence demand because the systems rely on vast computational power. AI systems are energy hungry — for example, a query using ChatGPT takes ten times the energy of a traditional Google search.

There are approximately 342 data centers currently operating in Texas. Running these systems non-stop, daily, for twenty-four hours, requires a gargantuan amount of electricity. As a result, ERCOT has identified data centers as presenting a potential energy emergency alert risk at night and during early morning hours this winter. Data centers are currently consuming close to 9 percent of the energy produced in Texas and it is putting a significant strain on its power grid.

Texas is a microcosm of the threat artificial intelligence poses to the world — lack of energy security for households, an accelerating climate crisis, and the consolidation of corporate power.

The post How AI’s Energy Demands Fuel the Climate Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Sculpture, Wayne State University. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Cybernetic Society and the Descent of Dialectical Thought

We lack the tools to critically assess and interrogate our social institutions and our ways of thinking about and interacting with them. That is among the core claims of a new book by Michael J. Thompson, a professor of political theory at William Paterson University and a practicing psychoanalyst. In The Descent of the Dialectic, published earlier this year, Thompson argues that in our age of all-penetrating relativism and the “drastic decline of critical thought in Western culture,” we must attempt to put an objective ethics grounded in critical theory back on firm footing. Thompson wants to address the pervasive nihilism and “dull uniformity” he sees in Western culture, “with the logics of control, efficiency, consumption, and uniformity of all kinds” replacing the project of developing meaning and social values; these developments have tracked the observed decline in critical thinking.

Thompson’s goal, in part, is to address the separation between “objective rationality” and “a substantive and ontological account of human ethics.” Thompson’s book is an attempt to revive the dialectical method through an approach that unites and synthesizes “human value with objectivity rationality” in phronetic criticism. This idea is rooted in the concept of phronesis, which, in the philosophical tradition of the ancient Greeks, counsels a kind of prudence that recognizes the radical contingency and contextuality of life and decision-making. The dialectic recognizes our nature as “affine beings that are intrinsically related with others and shape and form our internal world via our relationality with others.” Students who have been trained in the dialectical approach will be more able to tap into, incorporate, and synthesize these two types of reason. “Increasingly,” writes Thompson, “modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness.” It is not enough for Thompson that we rely on deliberation or discussion within a nominally democratic process; this philosophical overreliance on process and dialogue, absent the reintroduction of “critical use of the dialogue,” leaves us stranded in social and political patterns that are not equipped to mount serious challenges to the status quo.

Dialectical thinking encourages us to confront and disrupt the orthodoxies of thought and practice that are “typical of one’s place in the world.” “Opposed to this,” argues Thompson, “is the passive acceptance of the basic structure of this world, of its categories that gradually come to shape our own.” Thompson associates these imperatives with an institutional and normative complex he calls “cybernetic society,” in which consciousness is increasingly absorbed in “this logic of efficiency and productivity.” The phase of cybernetic society we have entered has made it possible for the logics of capitalism “to colonize the deepest reaches of consciousness,” the self withering in a poisoned and atrophied social environment. Thompson returns to the idea of cybernetic society frequently throughout the book to describe a society in which the individual’s self-conception and way of life have been taken over and reconstituted by institutional imperatives and logics. Everything is quantifiable and trackable—your productivity and consumption patterns, your internet use and the ideological character of the content you consume, your personal relationships and connections, your physical location and movements, your biometric data and medical history, your finances and credit history. It is a world of measurable metadata in which very little is beyond the reach of the state and powerful corporations. And while the cybernetic society of the present stage of capitalism promises freedom and individual self-expression and self-realization, the psychological, material, and political conditions of real-life capitalism are profoundly unfree. As Thompson explains, “the subject is allowed to explore only that which can be delivered by the cybernetic society.” Thus, ways of expressing oneself in dress and appearance are increasingly tolerated and even imitated by the ruling class.^[1]

The objective, critical ethic Thompson hopes to revive draws heavily on the work of Karl Marx. Marx famously gave us new ways to think about the failures of philosophy to change the world, uniting philosophical interpretation on one side and action toward change on the other. Marx’s own career arguably follows this structure, with a divide between the philosophical early Marx and the political later Marx (debates about the merits of this distinction in his work are beyond the purview of this article). In The Descent of the Dialectic, Thompson is engaged with both, putting a critique of society as it is alongside the presentation of a philosophical approach capable of changing social reality. In discussing the dialectic as an approach to philosophy, it is important to point out that Hegel explicitly dismissed this way of conceiving his project. To Hegel, describing reality is hard enough without adding positive or prescriptive statements. The dialectic is not applied to phenomena from without, but is the attempt to follow and describe dynamics in reality in their immanent natures, to describe things in terms of the tensions that exist within and define reality. Hegel writes that “everything true, in so far as it is comprehended, can be thought of only speculatively,” a statement about the complexity and irreducibility of the world.

In dialectics, truth is associated with a process instead of being held as something fixed and objective one discovers. The goal is to begin to see reality not as a set of discrete facts, but as a complex of “interwoven tendencies.” Whereas the state’s schools teach obedience to various dogmas, a dialectical approach to education would instruct students to disrupt reified social concepts and categories, breaking them down into the component relationships from which they are composed. We can draw on the idea of emergence to help make sense of these relationships: the dialectic offers a way to think about the emergence of complex, unpredictable (and apparently non-deterministic) social patterns by analyzing them in terms of the conflicts and contradictions found within the overall system. By drilling down to these dynamics, we can develop a fuller and more accurate picture or model of the social ontological landscape; it takes seriously the role of power and structural inequalities in these tensions and dynamics. Rather than obscuring this role, the dialectic encourages students to probe the connections between social power and “the formation of our social world and the kinds of reality we experience.” Nothing in material reality is fixed in stasis, permanent, or unchanging. The world is in a state of ceaseless motion and change, right down to the elementary particles, themselves just ripples in energy fields. Dialectical reasoning attempts to take these facts about reality seriously by understanding things within their particular contexts. It is naturally resistant to permanent rules for all cases. It understands each social phenomenon as comprising a series of underlying relationships, which are themselves always in flux.

In practical terms, if there is any hope of a revival in dialectical approaches to social problem-solving, then it will necessarily depend on the way we educate children and introduce them to our social ontology. Key to Thompson’s ideas is his theory of social ontology, our understanding of the social world—its institutions, norms, centers of power, and their workings and patterns. A resurgence of the dialectical approach he articulates has special relevance to criticisms of the education system and efforts to make it more socially productive and responsive to students. Indeed, any serious rethinking of education seems to require the maintenance of the skeptical and critical posture recommended by dialectical reasoning. While it is not the focus of the book, Thompson acknowledges the connection between his project and our attitudes about the education system: social subsystems like education can only be grasped as “embedded in broader contexts of social reality.” He argues that “understanding how schools are organized is a function of the value or purpose that the broader society places on its function.”

The model of education prevailing in the West grows out of a series of social and cultural trends, particularly during the nineteenth century, associated with the rise of nationalism and attendant efforts to centralize power and government functions. The compulsory school was critical to these efforts to construct a cohesive national identity and consolidate power in the growing nation-state. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), enormously influential on these social and political movements, argued in his Addresses to the German Nation that the student cannot merely be instructed, but must be deliberately fashioned—and “in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.” The goal of the system was to create a pliable subject. The idea was to weaken and ultimately eliminate the student’s capacity to think independently or critically, to make him a vessel for the worldview, values, and material interests of government power. The school would be responsible for the creation and perpetuation of a secular religion, a kind of cult of the nation-state. The paradigm is well captured in the words of William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, in a lecture he gave called “The Literature of Education”:

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in every civilized nation are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow prescribed custom. This is the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual under his species.

These ideas permeated the education movement in the United States, and the model they advanced was a rigid, authoritarian one characterized by discipline and uniformity, where the needs and interests of the student are ignored. Our society maintains a very strict order around its conceptions of learning and of what it means to be a student. This conceptual terrain is now carefully guarded, the site of enormous ruling class investment across government bodies, major corporations, and many NGOs. The federal government and global corporations know that fundamental changes in the education system could yield young adults who are insufficiently acquiescent. 

Education and Cultural Reproduction

Though we are uncomfortable with discussing the social function of the system of compulsory education, it is “the largest instrument in the modern state for telling people what to do.” The task of the education system is to inculcate a framing of the world that legitimizes the ruling class. Thus, history and social studies must be taught in a way that deifies the rich and powerful and all but ignores everyone else. But even more important than the subject matter is the school environment itself; this much more than any fact or theory consumed during a lecture is what is needed to reproduce the values of the ruling class and the systems that ensue from them. This is no small thing, as human beings are naturally critical, stubborn, smart, and sensitive to injustice—they are not easily corralled into authoritarian hierarchies. And contrary to the claims of oppressive rulers since time out of mind, such hierarchies are in no way “natural.”

The system begins with the forcible, mandatory confinement of the student’s physical body, a necessary precondition for the establishment of control over her mind. The student experiences everyday life as a morose exercise in abstention, repression, and humiliation, taught to believe that knowledge is transmitted in an unquestioned one-way stream from superiors. The vital feature of compulsory schooling today is alienation: the teacher, as a member of a special priestly class, has access to the truth, which the student must receive in the prescribed manner within the walls of the school.^[2] The radical tradition is brimful with incisive efforts to analogize the modern school to the prison; while these attempts have successfully demonstrated the many similarities between the school and prison as social institutions, it is time for critics of the education apparatus to reach beyond comparisons and accept that it is not merely that the school is like a prison. Rather, the school is a prison. The school calibrates the student to a state of mind and existence associated with the prison; she inhabits a “death-world,” “[a form] of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”^[3]

This institutional removal of the child from the household, the workplace, the city, and the public sphere more generally has catastrophic implications, both for the student and the broader society. The result is a student alienated from the processes of learning and intellectual development, a passive recipient of the dominant ideology, conditioned and destined to recreate it. The student is constructed socially not as an active participant and experimenter, but as a disembodied vehicle for an alien ideology—alien in the sense that the ideology does not reflect, but actively suppresses, the needs, desires, and values of the student. The training the student receives is training in unthinking compliance and in practical strategies for avoiding the discomfort that accompanies critical challenges to power. The primary goal of the school system is not to present arguments in favor of the status quo, or even to contradict through propaganda the claims of its critics, but to foreclose the possibility of argument itself by satisfying the student that no successful alternative to the status quo exists in the record or could exist in principle.

Education cannot mean merely preparing our children to recreate the ideologies and injustices of this system. The only legitimate remit of a system of education is to give children the tools to think critically about the natural and social world. Nothing can be placed beyond questioning, not even the institutional pillars of our own time and place. Dialectical thinking encourages students to adopt other perspectives and to challenge their own ideas by exploring the complex, internally contradictory nature of observed phenomena. Such a learning environment yields adults who approach society with an understanding of their own values rather than with trained skill in repeating the ideas and values of those in power. If we educate children to shore up ruling class power, we cannot hope to reclaim independence and autonomy as cultural values. When the dialectical process stops, inquiry comes to a dead end in concepts and institutions treated as unchallengeable and unalterable; this is reification at work.

Allowing dialectics into our approach to children and to pedagogy brings an openness that extends to other ways of life. New fields of possibility are opened to them; they are not beholden to particular worldview, religions, or ideologies. Thus a dialectical approach to education undermines the fundamental preconditions and standards of cultural reproduction. It gives society resilience because it teaches students to reflect on society anew and attend to injustices in real time. It threatens the ruling class, because the curious, self-respecting student cannot be expected to accept the answers we’ve so dutifully accepted. We also know that there are deep, measurable connections between student reports of mindfulness and unscripted experiences in adult society and in nature. In this mode of learning, the student is no longer the mere audience of a person in a position of authority; she is a participant in an improvisation, where the absorption of new information and the development of understanding are extemporaneous—and thus felt and remembered. As our ability to address these connections becomes more rigorous scientifically, anarchists’ ideas on education are increasingly vindicated. 

Alternative Models of Education

Radically anti-authoritarian education reformers have built alternatives to the dominant system alongside it and within its cracks. Whether they acknowledged it or said so explicitly, these anarchists and deschoolers were motivated by and encouraging a dialectical way of thinking. Anarchists in particular have centered the lives, experiences, and wellbeing of children in a way other movements have not, recognizing that the adult-child gap may be the deepest privilege divide in society. That important thinkers in the anarchist movement have taken such a keen interest in education says much about the anarchist worldview; among these thinkers, Colin Ward (1924-2010) stands out as presenting a bold and exciting criticism of education that reflects Thompson’s worries about the contemporary atrophy of critical thinking. Many of Ward’s most lasting contributions to the cultural dialogues on early education and the experiences of children are set forth in his 1978 book, The Child in the City. The book contends that “we have accepted the exclusion of children from real responsibilities and real functions in the life of the city,” condemning them to institutions and physical spaces that are unwelcoming and dangerous to them. In the prevailing model of education, obedience is the expectation, as students are prepared for successive rounds of standardized tests by rigid government-prescribed curricula. The school as we know it doesn’t take the child seriously as a fellow human being—its fundamental goals are incompatible with the dignity and autonomy of the child. Among the major social functions of the modern school is to preempt the child as an autonomous actor and creative force capable of imagining alternatives to the status quo. Part of Ward’s genius is that he attempts to adopt the perspective of the child; he has radical ideas about education and pedagogy because he has radical ideas about how society should conceptualize and honor children and childhood. Ward’s was a pragmatic and ecumenical anarchism informed by his observations of and respect for real-life liberatory practice—a “constructive antinomianism,” as one historian put it. Ward was notably much more comfortable than most of today’s mainstream with children engaging in productive work, and he believed that we should “make the whole environment accessible to them.” He held to the radical notion that if we want to help children grow into happy, socially competent, productive members of a healthy community, we must permit them more space within that community. “In the ideal city,” he wrote, “every school would be a productive workshop and every workshop an effective school.” Ward’s comfort and indeed enthusiasm for the employment of children should not be interpreted as an endorsement of full-time work for children. Quite to the contrary, he thought that they should spend most of their time engaged in free play and exploration. Confronted with the outside world—in particular, the natural world—students report more awe and excitement around learning, more sustained and authentic engagement, and better overall mental health. They are more likely to meet life’s challenges as puzzles to be solved and interesting opportunities to hone their skills. They appreciate that all patterns in nature are temporary. For these reasons, Ward’s vision was “schools without walls,” where the student is fully immersed in the broader social order.

The literary titan Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), an anarchist fellow traveler, was also deeply interested in building functional prototypes of new educational and pedagogical programs. An understanding of his approach to education requires a look at his worldview and motivating values. Part of what makes Tolstoy’s novels so captivating, heartfelt, and authentically human is his deep social criticism. But it is a criticism contained in Tolstoy’s unique ability to look at powerful institutions—social, economic, religious—in all of their many absurdities and contradictions. In Tolstoy, we find powerful leaders who are petty and misguided, driven by selfishness and vanity rather than commitment to the common good. His characters must try to appease various powerful and predatory institutions, and their best efforts often lead to puzzling, frustrating results. We identify with them both because Tolstoy paints them in fine detail, and because we still have to appease many of the same gods, even if their shapes have changed since his time.

Tolstoy’s political ideas are extremely radical, even by today’s standards. His non-resistance philosophy, much like that of the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (from whom he quotes at length in his The Kingdom of God Is Within You), does “not acknowledge allegiance to any human government” and opposes all uses of force, including even self-defense. Non-resistants like Garrison and Tolstoy abstained from voting and running for office; they refused to fight in wars or pledge loyalty to any state. They were devout Christians, but they held to a truer if more controversial picture of Jesus—as a deeply counter-cultural figure who infuriated the ruling classes by showing their self-contradictions. Like the historical Jesus, Tolstoy did not try to hide his contempt for the status quo.

Tolstoy saw education as an innate need to be met, with the adults helping to serve that need rather than dominating and punishing children. His approach to education put the students in the position of highest importance, their curiosities and interests driving the subject matter and process. Of a visit to a school in Germany, he wrote in his diary, “I was at school. Terrible. Prayer for the king, beatings. Everything by heart. Frightened, mutilated children.” He knew he had to try to formulate the child, education, and the school in a different, more socially responsible way. In 1862, describing the daily workings of his school, Tolstoy wrote,

They [the students] bring nothing with them no books and no copy-books. They are not required to study their lessons at home. Not only do they bring nothing in their hands, but nothing in their heads either. The scholar is not obliged to remember to-day anything he may have learned the evening before. The thought about his approaching lesson does not disturb him. He brings only himself, his receptive nature, and the conviction that school to-day will be just as jolly as it was the day before.

Tolstoy was an aristocrat, and for that reason, locals met his school with a level of mistrust, frequently well justified by lessons learned in interactions with predatory elites. He recalls the fear among parents that students “will be bundled into carts and carried off to Moscow.” This also reflects parents’ fears about the coincidence of interests between the education establishment and the government and military apparatus.

We hear echoes of Tolstoy’s remarkable libertarian voice in Emma Goldman (1869-1940), another anti-authoritarian defender of children and radical opponent of government education. In her essay “The Child and Its Enemies,” published in her anarchist journal Mother Earth in 1906, the first year of its publication, Goldman offers a radical alternative to the dominant institutional approach to education and the child’s education and development generally. Goldman believed that “every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself,” and that this self-denial and alienation led to social strife and antagonism. She anticipates later anarchists and radical critics of the state’s education system in seeing its primary goal and purpose as the creation of an unthinking, obedient conformist, “a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist.” Goodman argued that we should experiment with “different kinds of school” or “no school at open,” opening ourselves to a range of models including children and young people in everything from “practical apprenticeships” and community service to farm schools and the arts. Instead, he points out, we have seen sustained attacks on progressive educational models and adherence to the “mass belief” and “superstition” of the traditional, one-size-fits-all school.

Such radical visions of education open the way for a revival of a dialectical project to reincorporate critical thinking and serious challenges to increasingly oppressive cybernetic capitalism. Without a capacity to frame challenges to “our own beliefs and normative structures of thought,” in Thompson’s words, we are doomed to reproduce a destructive and manipulative system of intense alienation. Engagement with dialectical thought allows us to “free ourselves from pre-metabolized forms of meaning,” opening space for genuine creativity and liberatory practice. The school must be a key site for such critical interventions.

Notes.

^[1] If Thompson exaggerates here, his point is nonetheless valuable: “Corporate CEOs are now indistinguishable from those who work for them as well as those who serve them. All dress in standard street clothes, faces pierced with all forms of steely accoutrements, tattoos abound just as the dyed hair screaming for attentiveness from the depths of existential anonymity and a regressive adolescence takes hold of the self in what [W.H.] Auden refers to as our ‘jackass age.’”

^[2] In Anarchy in Action, Ward writes, “Bakunin made the same comparison as is made today by Everett Reimer and Ivan Illich between the teaching profession and a priestly caste, and he declared that ‘Like conditions, like causes, always produce like effects. It will, then, be the same with the professors of the modern school, divinely inspired and licensed by the State. They will necessarily become, some without knowing it, others with full knowledge of the cause, teachers of the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the State and to the profit of the privileged classes.’”

^[3] Nicholas Fesette, “Carceral Space-Times and The House That Herman Built” in Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Shane Vogel, eds., Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press 2020).

The post The State and the Schoolhouse: Reviving the Dialectic and Critical Pedagogy  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Jonathan Martin Pisfil

On December 18, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert banning drone flights over parts of New Jersey through next January 17 for unspecified “Special Security Reasons.”

The unspecified actual reason is lots of people getting creeped out because they believe they’re seeing lots of drones hovering over the state at night.

There’s an element of panic here, and panic tends to spread and get silly.

Former governor Larry Hogan took his panic public, only to get told that the “drones” he thought he saw over his house were probably, you know, stars — the constellation Orion.

New Jersey congressman Jeff Van Drew babbled about “circumstantial evidence that there’s an Iranian mothership off the East Coast of the United States, and that’s launching these drone incursions,” a claim Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh denied, probably right after spewing coffee all over her desk and rolling around on the floor unable to speak without laughing for awhile.

Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, so well-known for her calm demeanor and sharp analytical skills, announced that she’s ready to “shoot the drones down myself along with every other red blooded freedom loving American.”

Some otherwise non-politician normal (but I repeat myself) New Jerseyans apparently made it their whole lives without noticing that airplanes use the sky before seeing 737s on approach to Newark Liberty International and thinking “drones.”

But yeah, there are probably quite a few real drones involved at this point. Some of them may even be up to no good. But every drone hobbyist in the state is probably having a few good laughs at the panicked public every night over a few beers.

In a rare moment of calm and lucidity, president-elect Donald Trump tried to shut down the idea that the drones — real and imagined — are some kind of attack on the US. The government may not want to issue a clear statement on what’s happening, for some reason, he says, but “I can’t imagine it’s the enemy, because if it was the enemy they’d blast it.”

Maybe it’s just a bunch of civilian drones and a bunch of things being mistaken for drones.

Maybe the aliens are finally here in force, hoping to find and rescue their lost explorer, the Jersey Devil.

Maybe the Iranians or al Qaeda or the Judean People’s Front managed to build a “mothership,” park it off the eastern seaboard, and launch multiple large drone incursions, all  without attracting the notice of the world’s leading surveillance state.

Maybe it’s a US government operation of some kind — dangerous or harmless, necessary or pure money-waster — that’s “classified” because REASONS.

Who knows?

The only thing we can be sure of is that an FAA notice won’t put a  stop to it.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The justifications are always the same.  We are moving into territory for security reasons. We are creating a temporary buffer zone from which tactical advantage can be gained against potential dangers.  Then, over time, these buffers become strategic fixtures, de facto real estate seizures and annexations.  Israel now finds itself in what was a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights, and Turkey is established in parts of northern Syria, keeping a watchful eye on Kurdish militants.

Since October 7 last year, Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas has been one of sledgehammers and chisels, a conscious attempt to broaden the conflict beyond its Palestinian confines to targeting the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran.  In doing so, Israel has played an increasingly destructive role in Syria, where Hezbollah targets and Iranian supply lines have been struck with regularity.  The move is intended to cripple Teheran’s Axis of Resistance, a patchwork of Shia militias spanning Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria.

With the collapse of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israel intends further disruption.  This marks a departure from a policy it had maintained with Assad for some years, one that permitted him and the Syrian Arab Army to operate without molestation subject to one stern caveat: that Hezbollah and, by virtue of that Iran’s influence, could also be contained.  This point is made in documents recently unearthed by the New Lines magazine, one that directly involved a channel of communication between an Israeli operative code-named “Mousa” (Mosses) and the Syrian Defence Minister Lt. Gen. Ali Mahmoud Abbas.

A message dated May 17, 2023 outlines Israel’s indignation at an incident involving the firing of three rockets on Israel from the Golan Heights, an action purportedly instructed by Khaled Meshaal and Saleh al-Arouri of Hamas.  “Lately, because of Quds Day and Flag March, we are observing Palestinian activities on your land […] We warn you of the prospect of any activity of these parties on your territory and we demand you to stop any [Iranian] preparations for the use of these forces on your territory – you’re responsible for what is happening in Syria.”

The collapse of Assad’s rule, spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), has brought Israeli intentions to the fore.  The group’s leader, Mohammed al-Julani, has made previous mutterings favouring the Hamas October 7 attacks and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause.  Since then, al-Julani has expressed no desire to do battle “with Israel or anyone else and we will not let Syria be used as launchpad for attacks”, promised to protect minority rights and disband rebel groups for incorporation into the Ministry of Defence, and dissembled on whether the new administration would be focused on Islamic law.

On December 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made fairly redundant remarks that his government had no intention meddling in Syria’s internal affairs, only to warn Assad’s successors that any move allowing “Iran to re-establish itself in Syria or allows the transfer of Iranian weapons or any other weapons to Hezbollah, or attacks us – we will respond forcefully and we will exact a heavy price from it.”

Defence Minister Israel Katz similarly warned Syria’s triumphant rebel forces that “whoever follows in Assad’s footsteps will end up like Assad did.  We don’t allow an extremist Islamic terror entity to act against Israel from beyond its borders… we will do anything to remove the threat.”

Since Assad’s fleeing on December 7, Israel’s air force has made it a priority to destroy the military means of any successor regime in Damascus, citing concerns that material would fall into the hands of undesirable jihadists.  Over December 10 and 11, 350 strikes were conducted on anti-aircraft batteries, airfields, weapons production sites including chemical weapons, combat aircraft and missiles (Scud, cruise, coast-to-sea and air-defence varieties) in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia and Palmyra.  “I authorised the air force to bomb strategic military capabilities left by the Syrian army,” reasoned Netanyahu, “so that they would not fall into the hands of the jihadists.”

A bold estimate from the IDF about the operation described as “Bashan Arrow”, was that it had destroyed approximately 70-80% of the strategic military capabilities of Assad’s Syrian Arab Army.  As of December 16, the total number of strikes Israel has conducted on Syrian territory has reached 473.  For any advocate of stability, which would require some measure of military capability, this could hardly augur well.

Over the course of this glut of sorties, Israeli troops have militarised the demilitarised zone inside Syria created in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, including Mount Hermon, a site overlooking Damascus.  The menacing move on Syrian territory was sanitised by IDF military spokesperson Colonel Nadav Shoshani: “IDF forces are not advancing towards Damascus.  This is not something we are doing or pursuing in any way.”  Both the Beirut-based Mayadeen TV, and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have taken the gloss off such assessments, stating that the IDF has moved within 16 miles of the Syrian capital.

Crippling the infrastructure of the state that awaits the fledgling ruling parties in Syria, who can only count themselves as a ragtag transitional entity at this point, stirs an already turbulent, precarious situation.  The very scenario which Netanyahu and his planners wish to avoid, and Assad sought to prevent, may well be realised.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Dictionaries have selected enshittification, brain-rot and polarization as their 2024 Words of the Year. Each are depressingly apt reflections of the past 12 months. Roméo Dallaire’s latest book The Peace includes the words Ubumwe(Kinyarwanda), Ubuntu (Zulu) and Niw_hk_m_kanak (Cree) – which all convey more uplifting ways of being that were much needed in 2024.

The publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary selected brain-rot as their Word of the Year. Oxford University Press defined the noun as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

The selection committee noticed “that brain-rot gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.” They noted that “the term increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024.”

Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, said that “Brain-rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.” Grathwohl also said that “I find it fascinating that the term brain-rot has been adopted by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, those communities largely responsible for the use and creation of the digital content the term refers to. These communities have amplified the expression through social media channels, the very place said to cause brain-rot. It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.”

Australian English Dictionary Macquarie selected enshittification as their word of the year. The dictionary defined the colloquial noun as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” The selection committee commented that the term was a “very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable. This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”

The American Dialect Society also selected enshittification as their Word of the Year in 2023 and credited a blog post by Canadian author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow. In his 2023 blog “Tiktok’s enshittification“ Doctorow defined the term:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

This year, Merriam-Webster chose polarization as their Word of the Year. They defined the word as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” The U.S. dictionary company noted that political polarization was widespread and “cultural polarization” was becoming a pressing challenge in workplaces.

Enshittification, polarization, and brain-rot all are apt words for 2024. And they are all depressing. Roméo Dallaire’s latest book The Peace gives examples of more uplifting words.

Ubumwe is one of the words in the national motto of Rwanda. Dallaire’s very readable book has a lot to say about his time in Rwanda. The Kinyarwanda-language word means unity.

The Zulu word Ubuntu grew from the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Dallaire explains Ubuntu as meaning “A person is a person because of other people”.

Dallaire cited Metis professor Paul L.A.H. Chartrand, who explained that the Cree word Niw_hk_m_kanak means All My Relations and “encompasses all humans, including those who have passed on and those who are yet to be born, as well as all plants, animals and the earth itself.”

Here’s hoping to a new year with less brain-rot, less polarization, and less enshittification. May your 2025 have more Ubuntu, more Ubumwe and more thought to every being on this planet alive today and in future.

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Art by Sue Coe, American photo books, Breuer tables in apartment in Norwich, U.K. December 2024. Photo: The author.

Initial reconnaissance

I’m a recent expat, living in England. If I’m not envied now by my friends back in the states, I will be soon — after January 20. But I feel guilty, like I ran out of a restaurant without paying the bill.

It wasn’t, however, a sudden departure. I’ve been preparing for eight years, if you put aside the decades of fantasies — generally following U.S. presidential elections — about moving to Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Cuba or New Zealand. In the wake of Trump’s election in 2016, and during a sabbatical from Northwestern University, my English wife Harriet and I took a long holiday that was in fact a reconnaissance mission. Our goal? Find a rural retreat – a “bolt hole” in British parlance – that could serve as either a modest, second home or a primary residence if conditions in the U.S. went sideways. We limited our choice of destination to the United Kingdom because of Harriet’s nationality. A spouse has presumptive right to obtain “Permission to Remain” and eventually, British citizenship. Even a vegan, Marxist, atheist Jew of retirement age.

In most circumstances, migration to another country is arduous to say the least. The unspoken rule of neoliberalism is free trade in everything but people. Depending upon your choice of destination, you’ll need a lucrative job offer, a close family connection, a large bank account, or some combination of the three. The exception is migrant laborers, but along with permission to enter, they receive bad pay, poor housing, physical abuse, and only seasonal residence. There’s an International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers administered by the U.N., but many nations are in breach of its rules. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is not signatory to the convention.

New Zealand bars almost all immigrants except “Active Investors” – people who provide at least $3 million in NZ capital investment. Many other countries too have so-called “golden visa” programs, including Greece, Portugal, Spain, Canda, and most Caribbean Island nations. But while my wife and I are comfortable, we are not golden. So, other than the U.K., the only plausible destination for us was Romania. One of my grandmothers, Bess Berkowitz, was a Romanian Jew – born in Iași, in 1890. (At the time, the city had a population of about 90,000, half of which was Jewish. Today there are only about 300 Jews in the city.) That would have been basis enough for us to emigrate and obtain citizenship. If we moved to Iași, or perhaps picturesque Sibiu, the oldest city in Transylvania, we’d have full access to EU citizenship and could move to my preferred Netherlands or Finland. Prospective migrants to Romania beware, however: politics there are turning sour. The far-right, crypto-fascist Calin Georgescu finished first in the recent presidential election; he’s favored in the upcoming runoff.

Even migration to the U.K. for someone with a close family tie is challenging and expensive. Application for “Permission to Remain” costs about $2,500. Then there is the mandatory Immigration Health Surcharge – basically access to the NHS – another $4,500. If you need legal help with all this (and you will) that’s $1,000 at least. Those costs only cover you for the first 33 months; after that, you must do it all again, before applying for citizenship – that’s $2,000 more, plus legal costs. The online U.K. migration application site is notoriously balky – it was long ago privatized by the Tories; it made us pay twice and then apply for a refund. Finally, before naturalization, you must pass a UK citizenship test. Here’s three sample questions (and answers):

Who was the tribal leader who fought against the Romans? (Boudicca)

The Scottish Parliament made Roman Catholic service illegal in which year? (1560)

What flower is associated with Wales? (Daffodil)

I missed all three, but if you are over 65, like me, you don’t have to take the test. I don’t know if the rationale is that older people are ineducable or beyond assimilation.

Then there is the cost of moving itself. If you have an average sized household of goods, transport to the U.K. from the east coast of the U.S. is at least $15,000. I own a bunch of art and a lot of books (as do most professors of art history), so that added another $5,000 or so. On top of all that, we needed a car in the U.K. to visit parents and kids – another $25,000. Then, there is the matter of real estate.

“The Hunt”

Harriet’s family members in the U.K. are like billiard balls scattered by a break; her elderly parents, Sally and Michael, live on the North Norfolk coast; her brother Simon, is in London; one daughter, Daisy, lives in Brighton on the English Channel, and a second daughter, Molly, far to the west on the island of Anglesey in Wales. We therefore decided to cast a wide net in our search for a new home. My online quest became an obsession – real estate porn is a recognized addiction — but it was only when we hit the road in a rented Vauxhall saloon (sedan) that we got serious. In the spirit of the New York Times popular real estate column, The Hunt, I’ll share three of our favorite houses, and let you decide which we chose. Our budget limit at the time (2017) was about 300,000 GBP ($380,000). Today, the same house would cost about 425,000 GBP.

A cottage in the Shropshire hills

The first house we liked was a secluded, three-bedroom cottage near Brockton, close to the Welsh border. Named Hampton Lodge, it was architect designed and set on a slope with views of the Shropshire Hills. The sales brochure accurately described a “burbling brook” dissecting the woodland across the road. The interior of the house had vaulted ceilings held up by bleached oak beams, a kitchen with a giant, Aga stove that heated the adjacent dining room, and a wood burner in the living room. This would be an ideal place, I thought, to grow old and think about the foolishness of youth. I’d imagine I was raised a Shropshire lad.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

(A.E. Houseman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896).

Hampton Lodge, near Brocton Shropshire, photographer unknown: August 2017.

Because of its remoteness, the house was surprisingly cheap, but Harriet noticed there wasn’t much level terrain to plant a garden. In addition, the nearest significant town, Shrewsbury was almost 20 miles away via a narrow and twisting road that often saw snow in winter. The closest pub was five miles distant.

Fferm Buarth, Lôn y Buarth, Upper Llandwrog, Caernarfon, Wales. Photo: The author, August 2017.

A quaint cottage on three acres (with sheep)

The next candidate was a small, 17^th C white-washed farmhouse on a hill in Wales with an ocean view. To pronounce or understand its name and address would require a course in the Welsh language: Fferm Buarth, Lôn y Buarth, Upper Llandwrog, Caernarfon. It had walls two feet thick, a slate roof, stone floors, and plenty of land – three acres with grazing sheep. But an American and an Englishwoman would have been unwelcome intruders in an insular, Welsh farming village. Our intention was to deliver the sheep to a sanctuary (along with a retirement annuity), and re-wild the land.

A beached ocean liner in St. Leonards-on-Sea

Thinking we might have gotten things wrong way around, we considered whether the safest bet for a happy, self-imposed exile was urban. First, we looked at a one-bedroom, Victorian-era flat in Battersea in London, but it was dark, depressing, noisy and above our budget. Giving up on London, we headed south to the harbor and resort town of St. Leonards-on-Sea, where we found an inexpensive two-bedroom flat in the famous Marine Court apartments. The massive, Art Deco building, which was inspired by the ocean liner, the Queen Mary, dominates the waterfront. When it was completed in 1938, it was, at 14-storys, the largest apartment block in the U.K. The flat we were considering had preserved Moderne details, including metal casement windows, portholes, and a galley kitchen. It also had a west-facing wrap-around balcony like the promenade deck of an ocean liner. We could watch the sunset from the ship’s prow.

Kenneth Dalgleish and Roger Pullen, arch., Marine Court, St. Leonards-on-Sea, 1938: Photographer unknown.

Marine Court was never a commercial success. A year after it opened, the war started, and fashionable design felt unpatriotic. For a while, RAF fliers were billeted there. That may have been the reason it was targeted by the German Luftwaffe on May 23, 1943. The raid killed Ethel Twist, age 28, who was visiting Marine Court’s two-story night club that night. Was a big band playing “We’ll Meet Again” when the bomb landed? In the 1960s and early 70s, the same club saw performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and David Bowie among others. Did Bowie sing Kurt Weil’s “Alabama Song?” (1978). Today, Marine Court is under almost constant restoration and repair, and monthly maintenance fees are therefore high.

What did we buy?

We rejected the Shropshire cottage and Welsh sheep farm because they were simply too remote from the family billiard balls – at least a five-hour drive to any of them. We almost bought the historic Marine Court apartment but didn’t because of a “Gift of the Magi” misunderstanding. After a second showing of the flat, Harriet and I retreated to a nearby pub to decide. Careful not to prejudice each other, we discretely wrote down our decisions on folded pieces of paper and opened them at the same time. I wrote “yes” and Harriet wrote “no.” I immediately acceded to her choice. Only months later did we exchange the information that I wrote “yes” because it’s what I thought she wanted; and she wrote “no” because it’s what she thought I wanted. In fact, we both wanted to buy the place!

By that time, however, it was clear that Donald Trump’s incompetence, combined with Democrats retaking the House in the 2018 midterm elections (the “blue wave”) meant that our worst fears of an emergent American fascism were premature. On a whim, we bought a one-acre lot in the town of Micanopy (pop. 650) in north-central Florida, and built a small, modern house surrounded by a garden with native plants. (It was cheaper than any of the houses we looked at in the U.K.) Our pond attracted passing alligators and tortoises; our small lawn was a landing strip for sandhill cranes. For the next five years, we cherished “the idiocy of rural life” – gardening, attending Town Commission meetings, having lunch among the tourists at Coffee and Cream, and trying to avert our gazes from the rightward slide of state politics — though I bought a shotgun and kept loaded, under my bed, just in case. I later sold it to a cheerful young man with a beard who said he had a wife, four children and five other guns, but no shotgun.

House and garden in Micanopy, Florida, Spring 2024. Photo: The author.

In 2018, Florida was a purple state with competitive elections, an increasingly diverse population, and a top university system. Cities and town enjoyed considerable local autonomy — freedom to pass laws more liberal or more restrictive than state legislation. And of course, abortion was legal. But after the election of Ron DeSantis in 2018, and the onset of the pandemic two years later, there came into the state a flood of conservative retirees from the Midwest and East, plus young libertarians seeking a mask and vaccine-free sanctuary. I recall our gentle friend and sometimes gardener Shawn (aka Bubba) telling us about the marijuana and ayahuasca fueled gatherings he attended in which unemployed and uninsured young men — self-styled entrepreneurs – sat around campfires getting stoned and bemoaning the heavy hand of the bureaucratic state. How dare it mandate masks, close schools, and shutter bars? This was at a time when as many as 400 Covid deaths per day were being reported in Florida.

It was then that Governor DeSantis, formerly the state’s self-appointed Covid czar, became its anti-mask liberator. “Floridians,” he might have exclaimed, “you have nothing to lose but your masks!” Upon this crusade, he piggybacked his “war on woke” (empowerment of bigots), shuttering whole university departments and transforming New Collage, a highly regarded liberal arts institution in Sarasota, into a bastion of Christian nationalism. Then came the raft of obnoxious laws – “don’t say gay”, school library restrictions, anti-trans legislation, and the six-week abortion ban. In addition, the state legislature in Tallahassee began to restrict home rule. Liberal Alachua County, home of the 60,000 student University of Florida campus in Gainesville, was politically hamstrung. In nearby Micanopy, we couldn’t even legally pass an ordinance protecting our ancient trees.

Day-to-day life in Micanopy wasn’t obviously impacted by the reactionary turn in state politics. If anything, our town was a sanctuary for odd bits and misfits. Surrounded by thousands of acres of state or county nature refuges, it was easy to forget there was a state or federal government at all. Businesses in the historic downtown continued to muddle along – supported by the tourist trade – and the live oaks still draped Spanish moss over cracked asphalt and dirt roads. Our house too was a refuge – a two-bedroom glass box nestled in a one-acre, native garden. But however gilded your surroundings, rot still stinks. My neighbor’s permanent Trump banner, Gadsden flag (”don’t tread on me”) and state flag drove me to distraction. The Florida banner, with its diagonal red saltire, increasingly resembled to my eye, the similar Confederate flag. In all places where the latter would have been flown, the former now waved. Though we had a small grove of orange trees on our property, it wasn’t any longer their sweetness I tasted in the air; instead it was the rank smell of a blossoming hatred: toward queers, liberals, Blacks, immigrants, Jews and women.

By late 2023, the “trump of doomsday”, to quote Housman again, was impossible to deny. Anxiety about the coming presidential election, combined with my parents-in-law’s increasing frailty, persuaded us that emigration was the best choice after all. Less than a year later, we settled on a new flat in the cathedral city of Norwich, just 35 miles from Harriet’s parents in Burnham-Overy-Staithe. I wrote a bit about Norwich in an earlier essay, and will return to it in a later column. Let me just say for now, that I’m doing my best to become an Englishman, but I hope without chauvinism.

For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an!
Or perhaps Itali-an!

For in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
He remains an Englishman!

(Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878)

I recently bought a waxed, Barbour jacket to protect against the cold and damp, and a newsboy cap, though I refuse to wear Wellington boots (Wellies”) for walking through muddy fields. I still prefer coffee, but tea is growing on me. I like Marmite, crumpets and (vegan) sausage rolls. I have yet to try a “chip butty” (a sandwich made of French fries and butter between slices of white bread), but what’s not to like? I’m a regular listener of BBC4 and enjoy The Archers, a radio soap that has the distinction of being the world’s longest running drama – more than 20,000 episodes since 1951. I’ve been trying to master British words and idioms. On the road, there are lorries, boots, kerbs, drives, car parks, and lay-bys. In the market, there’s aubergine, rocket, courgette, and swede, and in the caffs, bangers, chips, crisps, and baps. (The last term also means women’s breasts – pay attention to context!) In the bedroom, you remove your pants or knickers to expose johnnies and fannies, and if all goes well, have a shag. Much of this is working-class slang, which I would never, ever attempt in public, though it is hard to resist words like gobsmacked, shite, knackered, wanker, and the two essential b’s: bloody and bollocks.

Norwich, I have discovered, is a congenial place for retired academics. There’s an outstanding uni, the University of East Anglia, which like everything else of quality in the U.K., is badly underfunded. There are also art museums, bookshops, coffee houses and many, many pubs. I have visited the local NHS surgery (no surgeries are performed in a surgery) on several occasions and found them kind and caring. But forced economies create peculiar policies. For example, NHS patients are more of less limited to one ailment per visit. Have a rash? That’s fine, but the nurse (rarely a doctor) won’t look at it if your appointment was for a raspy throat. Sore shoulder? Ok, but the specialist can’t examine it and your bad knee at the same time – you’ll need to make another appointment. The new Labor government says it’s going to fix the NEH – some of its hospitals are literally crumbling – but are disinclined to spend anything close to the money required. That would entail new taxes on the rich, and the investor class simply will not have it.

William Cobbet’s description of England in Rural Rides (1822), “rich land, poor people” is as true now as 200 years ago. Nearly 30% of children live in poverty. Incomes of the poor continue to fall and those of the rich to rise. The statistics are slightly better in the U.S., but the poverty threshold is lower. The U.K. appears for the moment to be trepidatiously edging away from fascism, not rushing towards it. So, for at least the time being, I’m glad to be where I am. If things go as Trump plans, I can expect to have some new, American neighbors.

The post Leaving Trumpsylvania appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Approaching the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, it is a time for reflection. These are the darkest days of the year, but the light will return in the inevitable cycle of the seasons. This is a good thought to hold as we head into some pretty dark times. In the cycle of life, the interplay of opposites yields movement. I am confident that the dark times we are about to witness will yield a movement to the light. Where will it come from? The very contradictions in which we are entangled.

We are seeing the national government of the United States take a hard right turn. For some years, those of us who value justice, peace and the health of nature on which we all depend will be in a defensive mode vis-à-vis the federal administration. This will drive us to a new level of political and cultural creativity, one already evidenced at the grassroots.

When I look across the landscape I am heartened at the ferment I see in cities and states, communities and bioregions. People taking matters in hand to work for practical solutions to the real problems people face. Movements for public banking, social housing, single-payer health insurance. Experiments in basic income. Ecological restoration efforts resulting in dam removals and restoration of fish runs. Climate action plans in states and cities. People building solidarity economies, turning businesses into worker coops, forming cooperative housing communities, moving money out of banks into credit unions, creating community supported agriculture networks. People are thinking creatively about alternatives to current growth-centered economic models to ones that focus on common well-being. Here’s a recent example.

I could go on, but the point is that the picture of reversal at the federal level is in sharp contrast to progressive forward motion at the grassroots where people live and are together working for practical solutions. Over the coming year, I’ll be devoting more attention to these efforts, and how we might weave them together into a new political movement that results in change at all levels.

Looking to history, for many decades before the 1930s depression, ideas for social reform were percolating such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, legal protection for labor organizing, minimum wages and maximum work hours major public infrastructure investments, and regulation of financial institutions. They were long advocated by progressive movements, but had a hard time gaining traction at the national level until the crisis of the depression when they all came to fruition.

Everything seems to indicate we are heading into another time of crisis, when multiple economic bubbles burst while the impacts of climate disruption intensify and social conflict increases. Out of these contradictions change will emerge. I believe the groundwork is being laid at the grassroots, in those movements of political organizing and cultural innovation, and efforts to conceive new economic and social models. The root meaning of crisis is a turning point. We are heading into a big crisis that will produce a major turning when the old models are discredited and people look for new models that work. That is what is being pioneered at the grassroots. At some point these efforts will gain critical mass, spurred on by crisis.

Thus, at this moment of the solstice, when the light begins to return and the days begin to grow longer, it is not a time to sink into despair, but to regard the very circumstances that might cause it as a summons to action. As people we are not powerless. We have many avenues to act. The coming years will challenge us. Let us rise to those challenges with the belief we can build a better world. That out of the darkness will come the light. The ferment at the grassroots says we have it in us. We can do it if we come together to make it happen. Let us find the ways to make it so.

This first appeared in The Raven..

The post A Solstice Meditation: Out of the Darkness Comes the Light appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim

The bombardment of Gaza is relentless, indiscriminate and all encompassing, and whilst weak Western governments refuse to condemn Israel and cut all military aid the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) continues to slaughter Palestinian civilians and obliterate what remains of Gaza.

Nobody and nowhere is off limits to Israel, even designated humanitarian zones, camps and informal settlements where displaced Palestinians shelter (75% of the population has been displaced), are targeted.

At least 44,502 Palestinians have been killed since 8 October 2023 (70% are women and children), tens of thousands more lie buried under the rubble; over 100,000 are injured in Gaza and a further 5,500 in the West Bank; 152 journalists and media workers have been killed; 333 humanitarian aid workers killed – most were staff members of UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), a compassionate thorn in Israels side for years.

Every school in Gaza has been destroyed, the healthcare system has been decimated, with the United Nations relate, more than “500 attacks on health care” facilities recorded in Gaza. The Red Cross warn that, “Gaza is now at risk of a complete medical shutdown,” and the UN report that, “all 2.1 million residents [are] in urgent need of food and livelihood assistance.” If it is not officially the case now, widespread famine is, the UN make clear, imminent.

Placed against the legal definition of genocide it is clear that this brutal onslaught by Israel on defenceless Palestinians constitutes genocide; genocide that is being facilitated by the US and other western allies of Israel.

Whether genocide is being committed, in this case by the rogue state Israel, is not a matter of opinion, it is a question of law. International law administered by the

International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not something that a State can choose to accept or agree with. When States disregard the ruling or findings of such global institutions and publicly condemn them as the US and others have done over the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his chief henchman Yoav Gallant, the underlying global order is weakened.

Threatening the ICC with sanctions “as if it was a terrorist organisation,”, said the President of the court, Tomoko Akane,  is shocking. US politicians (as well as Israel’s leaders) seem to believe they inhabit a sphere beyond the rest of the world, and can selectively abide by and acknowledge the rulings of the worlds highest courts.

The word genocide comes from the Greek genes, meaning tribe or race and the Latin suffix side, which means killing – so killing a race, or members of a race.

Genocide was recognised as a crime under international law in 1946. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) is part of international law, which means that even if a country has not ratified the convention (153 countries have, including Israel and the US), it is bound by its articles.

Article II lays out the definition: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. As such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group;

So, if any of these have been committed by Israel against the Palestinians, then Israel is carrying out a genocide, in a addition, the US and Co., are complicit, because without the ongoing supply of US arms Israel could not continue its barbarism.

In relation to Palestinians, Israel is guilty on all counts.

It is Genocide

Amidst the numerous voices condemning Israel the UN Special Rapporteur On The Situation Of Human Rights In The Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese stands out as one of the clearest, strongest and most courageous. She is a fearless legal warrior on a mission to reveal the truth of what Israel has done and is still doing in Gaza and the West Bank.

In her report ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, she finds that, “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.” She makes clear that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians by: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The Special Rapporteur goes on to say that, such “genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.”

Inflammatory statements like those made by Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who on 9 October 2023 said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly….we will eliminate everything – they will regret it.” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, who heads the Israeli army’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories (COGAT) threatened Palestinians, “There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israels Prime-Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has referred to Palestinians as “wild beasts, predators”. Such comments are not new, Israeli leaders have for decades used insulting language as they sought to dehumanise Palestinians.

Among other steps, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls on states to act, firstly to immediately “implement [of] an arms embargo on Israel” as it has “failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024.” As well as economic sanctions against Israel.

She is not alone in concluding genocide is being committed, notably, Amnesty International (AI) recently released a detailed report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. In the damning text Amnesty states that, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”

AI Secretary General Agnès Callamard, points out that the report, “Demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”

Israel is committing genocide in defence of its colonial occupation and apartheid state. is unbelievable what the Israeli men of war have done and are doing, truly horrific. And they are not acting alone of course.

Its genocidal campaign is dependent on the unconditional military and political support provided by the US, the US is therefore complicit. Military hardware, provided by US companies that are making millions of US$ out of genocide, is annihilating Palestinians.

The report from AI and those produced by the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese are unequivocal: Israel is carrying out a genocidal campaign in Gaza, and as Agnès Callamard said, “It must stop now”, and those responsible, the Israeli politicians and military chiefs, must face justice.

The post The Annihilation of a Nation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

This summer, the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling made it much easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Since then, cities and states across the country have stepped up their harassment of people for the “crime” of not having a place to live.

The post Sweeps Don’t Solve Homelessness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Aidan Bartos.

Post-election America finds itself in a panic. Voices from across a wide political spectrum warn that the country stands on the precipice of a potentially unprecedented and chaotic disregard for the laws, norms, and policies upon which its stability and security have traditionally relied. Some fear that the “new” president, Donald Trump, is likely to declare a national emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, unleashing the U.S. military for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and for “retribution against” the “enemy from within” as well as “radical left lunatics.” As the New Republic‘s editor Michael Tomasky notes, writing about the nomination of Kash Patel for the post of director of the FBI, “We’re entering a world where the rule of law is turned inside out.”

The blame game for such doomsday fears ranges far and wide. Many pinpoint the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to grant immunity to presidents for their core official acts, essentially removing any restraints on Trump’s agenda of retribution and revenge. Some, like Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, see loopholes in the law as the basis for their concern about the future and are urging Congress to pass legislation that will place additional constraints on the deployment of the military on American soil. Others argue that the Constitution itself is the problem. In his new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky even suggests that it may be time for a new constitution.

But those involved in the fear and blame game might do well to take a step back and reflect for a moment on how we got here. Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

“Quaint” and “Obsolete”

It was January 2002 when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales used the two words “quaint and obsolete,” whose echoes remain eerily with us to this very day (and seemingly beyond). The occasion was a debate taking place at the highest levels of the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By then, this country had invaded Afghanistan and authorized the opening of a new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ominously offshore of American justice, for captives of what already was being called the Global War on Terror. Two weeks after the first prisoners arrived at that prison camp on January 11th, administration officials were already wondering which, if any, laws should apply when it came to the treatment of such prisoners.

Gonzales, who was to become the attorney general in Bush’s second term, laid out the options for the president. At issue was whether the Geneva Conventions — a set of treaties established in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War — applied to the United States in its treatment of any prisoners from its war on terror.

In a memo to President Bush, Gonzales noted that Department of Justice lawyers had already concluded, when it came to al-Qaeda and Taliban (Afghan insurgents in 2001, now in charge of the country) captives, the answer was no. Gonzales agreed, stating that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.” The laws of war, he told the president, were “obsolete” in the current context and the laws and norms requiring humane treatment for enemy prisoners had been “render[ed] quaint,” given this new kind of war.  Accordingly, the Bush administration took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners they had already captured. As a result, in the years to come, the indefinite and arbitrary detention of about 780 men would be institutionalized and disregard for the law would become a regular, if secret, part of the war on terror — an approach that would lead to the practice of torture at what came to be known as CIA “black sites” globally.

Nor would that be the only situation in which old laws were deemed outdated on national security grounds.

The Wider Framework

At the heart of such a rejection of the law was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has put it, top Bush administration officials “claimed that executive power was essential to fighting the war.” Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. One week after 9/11, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Subsequently, other laws were bent, bypassed, or even broken in the name of keeping the nation safe. Congress also further enhanced the powers of the executive by passing the USA Patriot Act which, among other things, weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against the surveillance of American citizens. Prior to 9/11, such protections had remained strong. After 9/11, as Brown’s Costs of War Project reports, “These mass surveillance programs allow[ed] the U.S. government to warrantlessly and ‘incidentally’ vacuum up Americans’ communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories,” sacrificing standing protections in the name of greater security.

Nor would that be the end of the matter. In the name of national security, the country’s law enforcement entities would also turn their backs on prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin as laid out, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a Costs of War Project report summed it up, the “Special Registration” requirement “announced in 2002 required all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries [to] report to the government to register and be fingerprinted.” According to the ACLU, that program (known as NSEERS) would end up affecting foreign nationals from 25 countries.

Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. Although President Barack Obama would issue an executive order restoring adherence to the laws banning torture and end the NSEERS program (which, the ACLU noted, “did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction” despite “tens of thousands of people having been forced to register”), there were other key areas in which his administration did not reverse past policy — anything but, in fact. “Early in [President Obama’s] administration,” as historian Kathryn Olmstead notes, “the new president signaled his intention to continue Bush’s surveillance policies.” Though “surprised by the extent of the spying” in the domestic intelligence program, Obama’s team nonetheless “quickly agreed to continue Bush’s mass surveillance program.”

In addition, by escalating a global drone program of “targeted killings,” the Obama administration would forge its own path toward weakening legal protections in the name of national security. During the Obama years, on what came to be known as “Terror Tuesdays,” national security officials presented the president with a list of names, all potential targets to be captured or killed. (It would come to be known in the media as “the kill list.”) As NPR summed it up, Obama, “wishing to be seen as a restraining influence,” would weigh in on the final list of names. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.”

Leaving those programs on the table for the next president would be — and remains — a prescription for disaster.

Trump and the Tactics of the War on Terror

Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Though it was little noted then, he launched an unprecedented number of drone strikes, tripling Obama’s numbers by 2022, including the targeted assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Soleimani. Political scientist Micah Zenko noted that, despite his claims of being non-interventionist, Trump proved to be “more interventionist than Obama: in authorizing drone strikes and special operations raids in non-battlefield settings (namely, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia).”

The 45th president’s disregard for legal restraints took other war-on-terror policies to a new level. Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump had issued an executive order that came to be known as “the Muslim Ban,” forbidding citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry to the United States. And like his predecessor, he showed little interest in sunsetting the expansive surveillance authority he had inherited.

In fact, Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo: “…[W]e are keeping [Guantanamo] open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” Wondering who those “bad dudes” would be, NPR noted that captives in the war on terror were mostly a thing of the past and reminded listeners of an interview in which Trump had said such suspects should be tried by military commissions, the fraught trial system already in place there.

When Joe Biden became president, he curtailed a number of the excesses of the war on terror from the Trump years, even issuing a proclamation revoking the Muslim ban. When it came to drone strikes, he lessened them substantially, leaving them “far from their peaks under the Obama and Trump administrations.”  In addition, he put new limits on their use going forward. In a striking gesture, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to “promote transparency” in place of the excessive secrecy that had underpinned the torture program, surveillance abuses, and the targeted-killing program. Still, all too much remained ongoing or fully capable of being revived in the new Trump years.

Bringing It All Back Home

Which brings us to expectations — or fears — of what will happen in a second Trump presidency. When it comes to the use of force, detention, discrimination, and the erasure of constitutional protections, Trump has already promised to bring the broad counterterrorism authority of earlier in this century to bear on the home front.

Let’s begin with his promises to institute discriminatory policies based on race and national origin. As of today, the incoming administration has pledged to round up, put in camps, and oversee the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America in particular, potentially combining a detention nightmare (lacking due process and underpinned by massive discrimination) with suspicion often based on national origin rather than specific evidence of criminal behavior — an echo of the war on terror’s early years.

In place of national security, Trump has promised to substitute, in the words of the 2024 Republican platform, the “threat to our very way of life,” a term that expands the vagueness encapsulated in “terror” and “terrorism” to a new level. Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration. When candidate Trump promised to use the military to counter “the enemy from within,” a spokesperson clarified the meaning for the press. As the Washington Post reported at the time, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung acknowledged the way the candidate was linking his political enemies to terrorists. Trump, he explained, was “equat[ing] the prospect of unspecified efforts by the left during the elections with the recent arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma, who is accused of plotting an Election Day attack in the United States in the name of the Islamic State group.” Cheung then furthered the analogy by adding, “President Trump is 100% correct — those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”

Where Are We Today?

While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril. Surveillance powers remain remarkably broad. Drone-strike authorities remain in place, even if, in the wake of the Biden years, curtailed for now. And the prospect of indefinite detention as a codified element of American policy remains possible not only at Guantanamo but for migrants across the United States. And to top it all off, Congress continues to be unwilling to restrict a president’s war powers in any significant way, having repeatedly refused to repeal or replace that original 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in which neither time, nor geographical limits, nor even precise limits on the definition of the enemy exist.

If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future. Sadly, despite the dangers that may lie ahead, it’s not just partisan politics, or economic disarray, or the fragile state of the world that has brought us to this point. It’s our own negligence in accepting the dismantling of the laws and norms that had guided us prior to 9/11 and refusing ever since to restore our once-upon-a-time respect for the rule of law and for one another.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post The Never-Ending Legacy of the War on Terror appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Mika Baumeister.

The definition of alarm: “A warning of danger” (Merriam-Webster) according to The State of the Climate Report 2024, 25 of 35 vital signs are at record extremes. By all accounts, this is an over-the-top alarm that’s setting off bells and whistles for knowledgeable scientists throughout the world. Two-thirds of vital signs at “record extremes” amounts to a strong mandate for trouble dead ahead. An alarm is warranted.

Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is on the Trump administration’s chopping block. According to Project 2025: “The preponderance of climate-change research should be disbanded.”

That’s a very strong statement to make about a 50-year-old institution that the world depends upon for accurate measurements. NOAA scientists were ranked in the World’s Best Scientists List of 2023.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict the changing environment, from the deep sea to outer space, and to manage and conserve America’s coastal and marine resources, a federal agency that provides science, information, and services to protect lives and property, and to support the economy. It was founded in 1970 by Richard Nixon.

More specifically, Project 2025 wants the weather forecasting division privatized and other functions downsized. One of Trump’s incoming appointees referred to NOAA as a voice for the climate change alarm industry. Well, frankly, yes, it is true, it is a sounding board for “alarm” and for very good reason. The public needs to be awakened to the alarming facts of disintegrating life-support ecosystems caused by too much CO2 from burning too much fossil fuel. Yes “alarm” is the proper noun.

Speaking of alarming situations: (1) A 2023 report (The Lancet) estimates that China lost 50,000 heatwave deaths in central regions, like Henan (2) northwestern Europe had 107,000 heat-related deaths in 2022-23 (3) the British Columbia heatwave of 2021 killed 619 people (4) a Nature article d/d 2024 claims roughly 50,000 heat-related deaths have occurred in Brazilian urban areas (5) the 2024 Haji pilgrimage in Mecca had 1301 heatwave deaths.

Heat-related deaths are challenging the numbers of wartime deaths with 489,000 heat-related deaths worldwide per year. This is a “new normal.” It is alarming. Heat-related deaths globally from 1990-2019 averaged 153,078 per warm season (WHO). The planet is obviously heating up.

The following scenarios depict “alarming situations” beyond the scope of nature acting on its own, perfect examples of why expressing ‘alarm’ is so important for a truthful public understanding of what’s really happening to the planet and hopefully incentivize people to demand a different socio/politico/economic system:

(1) ‘Intense’ Drought, Fires Pummel Amazon, Conservation.org, Sept. 11, 2024

(2) So-called Doomsday Glacier is ‘in Trouble; Scientists Say After Finding Surprising Formations Under Ice Shelf, CNN World, Feb. 15, 2023

(3) Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return, Inside Climate News, Aug. 15, 2020 94)

(4) Thawing Permafrost Poses Environmental Threat to Thousands of Sites with Legacy Industrial Contamination, Nature Communications, march 28, 2023.

(5) Europe’s Rivers Run Dry as Scientists Warn Drought Could be Worst in 500 Years, The Guardian, August 13, 2022.

(6) China’s Historic Heatwave Turns Deadly Amid Power Crunch Fears, Asia Financial, August 8, 2024

(7) Extreme Heat is Now Making Cities Unlivable. How Can We Survive It, New Scientist, Nov. 20, 2024.

(8) The AMOC Might Be Way More Unstable Than We Thought, PBS Terra, Dec.18, 2024. This alone is a horrific game-changer that hits every ‘alarm button’ with all arrows pointing at the human footprint.

“Alarm” describes each of the above-listed situations happening outside of the scope of nature acting on its own. The list of 8 could easily be expanded to 80. In all cases, the human footprint predominates.

According to Project 2025 as described in the LA Times: “Break up NOAA,’ the document says, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its six main offices, including the 154-year-old National Weather Service. Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,’ the document says.” (Source: Project 2025 Calls for Demolition of NOAA and National Weather Service, LA Times, July 28, 2024)

Really??? Warning society of deteriorating ecosystems that are key to life support is harmful to future U.S. prosperity?? Really? Frankly, the opposite has much more cachet, meaning failure to expose the dangers of climate change is 100% guaranteed to be harmful to future U.S. prosperity.

Meanwhile, if the National Weather Service is privatized, somebody pays for the service. Public taxes will no longer support the weather network infrastructure, including satellites, currently-in-orbit 322 earth observation satellites, 23 are geostationary and 223 polar-orbiting. Privatization means everyone pays (per person) for weather services, maybe on a subscription basis, for example, $19.95/month for the basic service or $295.95/month for premier service, including detailed reports of ski conditions in Aspen.

Specifically, according to Project 2025, the National Weather Service (NWS) should become a “performance-based organization.” This is ‘market talk’ or how the free-market values stocks and bonds and all sorts of investments. Maybe NWS will go public via an IPO. Just imagine shareholders cheering for more massive wildfires burning structures, super-charged hurricanes leveling entire communities, destructive lightning storms, and golf ball-sized hail to juice up the listed shares of NWS stock with all eyes focused on storm map configurations online and on TV with the NWS stock symbol proudly displayed in big red letters for super-hot intense heat days. And, maybe add the impact of AI to crank the stock up to the moon.

Looking ahead, it appears there won’t be regular free weather forecasts. Under the new administration, a profit is essential for essential services. While they’re at it, how about an IPO for Planet Earth?

According to Project 2025: “Investing in commercial partners will increase competition for weather service.”

Seriously? “Competitive weather service” Yes, evidently only a dog-eat-dog commercial enterprise competition can improve weather service, as competition nips at the heels of the staid ole dog-eared NWS that’s faithfully providing 154 years of excellent service.

In all, caution should be the watchword for privatization of public assets. For example, according to Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest? (Harvard Business Review) “Private sector managers may have no compunction about adopting profit-making strategies or corporate practices that make essential services unaffordable or unavailable to large segments of the population.”

And larger issues are at play when privatizing public assets: “Many reject privatization for the distributional consequences. The deeper problem is that it threatens the very foundation of political legitimacy.” (Source: Why Privatization Is Wrong, Boston Review, Nov. 24, 2020) If private actors are morphing into government, can they act with the legitimacy that government claims? And can a government morphed into a network of private actors still govern those subjected to its rules legitimately?

“The private sector’s central goal is to maximize profit, not deliver necessary services. It has proven impossible to ensure that private providers’ incentives match public interest in these arrangements. Too often, contracted companies generate more income by exploiting workers, cutting corners on quality, charging high prices to users, and/or excluding certain groups from service—not by increasing efficiency.” (Source: The Harms of Infrastructure Privatization: A Step Backward in Progressive Policymaking, Roosevelt Institute, July 28, 2021)

Nevertheless, Pay-for-Weather is likely coming. If privatized, the money must come from somewhere. Does it appear truly legitimate? Will it cut corners to achieve a big profit; will it anticipate the arrival of 2C above pre-industrial in time to forewarn coastal cities to build seawalls? A thousand questions come to mind. Will NOAA’s high standards continue? What if consumers refuse to pay for weather reports? Will local TV stations be able to afford weather reports? Or will NWS go bankrupt?

And, finally, will ‘private NWS’ level with the public, forewarn alarming weather conditions that kill people, for example: The ‘wet-bulb’ set to kill hundreds of thousands of people if temperatures and humidity levels continue to rise, Intellinews, April 22, 2024: “The hottest city on earth’, Jacobabad in Pakistan, has passed the wet-bulb threshold four times and La Paz, Mexico, Port Hedland, Australia, and Abu Dhabi, UAE have also breached the limit, according to the 2020 study,” Ibid.

In that regard, NOAA is responsible for keeping the public informed about life-threatening global warming issues that are spreading around the world, and certain portions of the U.S. are getting very close to wet-bulb conditions, especially the Gulf Coast. See – ‘Extreme Threat’: Large Swathe of Southern US at Dangerous ‘Wet Bulb Temperature’, The Hill, June 29, 2023.

NOAA’s responsibilities are about to get very, very heavy.

The post Dismantling the ‘Climate Alarm Industry’ Per Project 2025 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This fall, shortly after the election, the House passed a dangerous piece of legislation that many are calling the “nonprofit killer” bill.

The bill has an incongruous title: the “Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.”

Among other things, it would give the Treasury Department the authority to unilaterally accuse nonprofit organizations of supporting “terrorism” — and revoke their nonprofit status. Critics like the ACLU say it’s a blank check for presidents to shut down organizations that criticize them.

When the bill was introduced in the spring, it was largely viewed as an effort to silence pro-Palestinian activism. At the time, dozens of House Democrats supported it alongside most Republicans. But after Donald Trump’s White House win, amid fears that the incoming president would use it as a tool to bludgeon his perceived enemies, it passed with significantly less Democratic support.

But really, it should never have been introduced or passed to begin with, no matter the political winds. The bill is considered unlikely to pass the Senate this year, but could be reintroduced next year and signed by President Trump.

This would have a dangerous chilling effect on speech.

Consider the Florida woman Briana Boston, who recently said “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next,” during a phone call with a health insurance representative after her coverage was denied. It was a reference to what the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson wrote on bullet casings in a now-infamous targeted assassination.

Boston has no history of violence, nor does she own firearms. But she wasn’t only arrested — she was charged with threatening to commit an act of terrorism.

What she was really guilty of was expressing vitriol against corporate CEOs for an inhumane business model. It’s not hard to imagine such a scenario applied to nonprofits in the coming years either.

Nonprofits are effectively the voice of civil society in the United States. And even without HR 9495, they already have severe limits on their speech. In order to keep their nonprofit status, groups have to follow strict guidelines published by the Internal Revenue Service when speaking about elections.

As a journalist who works in the nonprofit world, I’ve seen the resulting self-censorship first hand. Many journalists and nonprofit leaders feared compromising their institutions if they warned about Donald Trump’s fascism, or even criticized Joe Biden over Gaza, ahead of the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, for-profit industries have enjoyed continuous and ever-growing impunity to advocate for whatever they want, no matter how destructive.

For example, the health insurance and fossil fuel industries play with people’s lives by denying coverage and spewing carbon, respectively, but have been given the right to spend enormous amounts of their ill-gotten gains in campaign contributions, putting an outsize thumb on the democratic scale.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they have greater means to make anonymous donations to Political Action Committees to lobby government and help elect politicians.

The Supreme Court has long considered corporations to be, in a legal sense, people. In contrast to such abstract entities, we humans can be jailed, silenced, or even killed by corporate-controlled systems — and the nonprofits representing our interests can be officially sanctioned for “political speech.”

Today, not only do corporations have greater means to speak more freely than the rest of us do, they are increasingly grabbing political power to cement their stranglehold.

Trump’s incoming cabinet will likely be filled with billionaires. And his proposed Treasury Secretary pick — who would ostensibly oversee the department making determinations under HR 9495 — is a longtime hedge fund  investment manager named Scott Bessent. Trump has also openly promised to bend regulations for billionaire investors.

Seen within this context, HR 9495 is not only a danger to civil society’s right to speech — it is a serious escalation in favor of corporations.

The post Kill the Non-Profit Killer Bill appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Leslie Angeline.

When Northern Gaza was placed under a complete siege, the Biden Administration issued a warning that if conditions didn’t improve within 30 days, he would stop weapons shipments to Israel. At the time of the announcement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians faced imminent starvation because the Israeli military was blocking trucks of humanitarian aid from entering Northern Gaza. As children and their parents either starved to death or suffocated under the rubble of their homes that were deliberately bombed – Biden told them to wait thirty days. When the thirty days were up, Israel correctly called Biden’s bluff. They knew he wasn’t going to stop sending weapons, and they were right.

I began this hunger strike to demand that my government end the siege on Gaza. It’s clear to the entire world that Israel acts with full backing from the United States and both governments are responsible for the death and human suffering happening in Palestine.

The people of Gaza were starving before Biden’s 30 day warning. They faced famine even before October 7th. People who defend this genocide will often note that there was peace on October 6th, 2023. But on October 6th, there was an Israeli imposed blockade that only allowed in the minimal calorie intake per Palestinian every single day – with no intention of making sure it reached each of the two million people that resided in Gaza. On top of that deprivation, Israel waged sporadic wars on the people of Gaza every few years. Nearly a month has gone by since Israel called Biden’s bluff – the arms are still flowing into Tel Aviv with American flags stamped into the bomb casings and the people of Gaza are still starving to death. When the very few aid trucks do arrive to feed the starving population, Israel kills them while they stand in line for food.

I want to tell you what 30 days with no food does to a person, and my experience is made easier by the fact that I have a roof over my head, access to clean water, and a certainty that I won’t have to flee my home at any moment depending on the whim of the IOF evacuation orders. The women my age in Gaza are not given the same luxuries. I’m an Elder, a mother and a long time Peace and Social Justice activist. I’ve lived in California for over forty years, mostly in Sonoma County, but also in San Francisco and presently in Marin County.

In the first days of my hunger strike, I felt really tired and the hunger pangs were intense. Now they occur only several times a day. My body aches and as of today I’ve lost seventeen pounds. I’m constantly cold and my resistance and immunity are low. I learned yesterday from a dear friend and sister Palestinian Activist — something I didn’t know about hunger strikes— that after days of starvation, beginning to eat food again could kill you. Your body isn’t used to processing even a little bit of food. My friend Hazami, who ended her hunger strike this week, ended up in the hospital. So, I wonder what would happen to a person who hasn’t had enough food for months and months? What happens to them when they have no hospital to go to? What happens when the remaining hospital they do find gets bombed? Or when their doctors get executed? I know I will be able to eat again, but what if I was a child and I had no idea when food might be coming? How scared would I be? Hunger isn’t just hunger in Gaza, it’s grief and suffering compounded a hundred times. It’s a form of torture.

I feel I’ve been living in a traumatized state for over a year. I cry everyday, multiple times a day, my heart is beyond broken, it’s shattered. I wake up each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government this couldn’t continue. Our government is sending billions upon billions of our tax dollars to slaughter innocent children, mothers and fathers, entire families with bombs and artillery funded by our country.

I understand that “my trauma” is nothing compared to what the people of Gaza must be suffering. I can’t even imagine the horrors they’re being forced to live through or die from.

I’d gone to Washington DC on Oct 3rd wanting to work for diplomacy in the war in Ukraine. When Oct 7th happened, I decided to stay until we had a ceasefire in Gaza. I was there for seven long months, going to Capitol Hill, the White House and the State Department everyday trying and failing to get a Ceasefire. I came home broken. Last summer I joined the Handala in Lisbon, part of the Freedom Flotilla that is trying to break the Siege of Gaza. There are ships with 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid stuck in Istanbul, because the Turkish government has succumbed to Israeli and US pressure not to allow the ships to sail! The US government is not allowing much needed humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, but then spends millions on building a port that was never going to work. Our government’s hypocrisy is soul crushing.

I was desperate for this genocide and ethnic cleaning of Palestine to end, so I took a stand and put my body on the line. Today, Thursday Dec. 19th, is the beginning of the 31st day of my hunger strike/fast for Gaza. Even now my Representative in Congress, Jared Huffman, refuses to sign onto Representative Casar’s letter for an arms embargo against Israel. I asked for a meeting with him on the 25th day of my hunger strike/fast and was told he was unavailable to meet with me. Since it’s clear Rep. Huffman doesn’t care about Palestinians or his constituent’s lives and he seems to be indifferent to our collective suffering, I’m ending my hunger strike/fast for Gaza with my dear friends and colleagues at the press conference at a press conference today and saving my energy to sue the ******.

The post My Hunger Strike for Gaza: A 31 Day Experience appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.

What will happen if far-right Alternative for Deutschland sweeps the early German elections in February, or if far-left France Insoumise does the same in France? Will the U.S. through its NATO and EU tentacles annul those votes? Don’t think it won’t try. And Washington doesn’t even have to give the order, because its European puppets know exactly what’s expected of them. Granted, the Romanian front-runner, so feared by NATO, Calin Georgescu, was far right. But so what? Besides, I doubt that’s what led to the constitutional court vacating the vote. More likely it was his opposition to the Ukraine War – hence the court citing “foreign influence” (translation: Russian) via TikTok as its flimsy basis for negating the election. Incidentally, reports are coming in that the heat and internet to Georgescu’s house have been cut off, and, surprise! he can’t get anyone on the phone to help with this.

But you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election. In other words, democracy is dying in the west. It’s kicking the bucket in Europe – and if Trump ends the Ukraine War (provided Biden doesn’t utterly sabotage his peace efforts before he takes office) or gets us out of the NATO sinkhole, you can bet your paycheck the 2028 establishment campaign will dust off the 2016 playbook and get right to work.

In western media, Georgescu has been portrayed as an unknown. This is false. He is well-known in Romania and had a diplomatic career. But he is also a religious nationalist, and that’s verboten in the EU; worse yet, the U.S., aka NATO, built its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country. It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.

 As for Georgia, there the electorate proved itself most unreliable to the Exceptional Empire. It voted in a government that actually dares to require foreign NGOs to register as such – you know, the way we do, here in the United States. But here, those NGOs don’t aim to overthrow the government, like they do in Georgia, in order for Tbilisi to open a second front against Moscow. Indeed, the vast majority of rioters against the Georgian government, who were arrested, were – I’m shocked! Shocked! – foreign, i.e. European. The icing on the cake is that the French president of Georgia refused to leave office when her term expired – a president with French and Georgian passports, who boasts Nazis in her family tree.

The EU finagled things more successfully in Moldova. That nation’s October 20 referendum on joining the EU won – kinda. In country, the Moldovan government only snagged 50 percent of the vote, but Moldovan expats in Europe gave it a boost, while the 400,000 Moldovans living in Russia found, to their dismay, only two polling stations open for them, by their government, in Moscow. That meant as few as 10,000 of them got to vote. And as East European expert and political scientist Ivan Katchanovski tweeted October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote. So all in all, the Moldovan referendum was a sorry excuse for a democratic exercise. Then there was also Moldova’s presidential election, equally compromised. But hey, Washington’s EU vassal got to lure a country out of Russia’s orbit, and that’s all that counts, not mere democracy, right? After all, Washington doesn’t stand for democracy. It stands for and has long stood for something quite different – power. Just look at it backing a terrorist takeover of Syria, among them a ruler on whose head Washington has a $10,000,000 bounty. Let that sink in. One American hand posts a huge reward for a terrorist, while the other hand paves his way to power. The obvious conclusion (also obvious to any student of American-backed coups and regime changes abroad going back at least 70 years) is that U.S. doesn’t stand for anything besides power (certainly not anything as antiquated and nettlesome as international law). That’s the definition of a gangster state.

If you doubt that, just peek at South Korea, where the CIA’s man, president Yoon Suk Yeol, faced a grim electoral future. The voters were unlikely to support him in the next election, given that they mostly back the opposition. And that opposition, per Col. Douglas Macgregor, wants a Korean four-star general, not an American one, to head the roughly 500,000 Korean armed forces and also wants to boot the 30,000 U.S. troops off the peninsula. This, of course, goes over in Washington with all the joy of a root canal.

So what to do? Yoon took the bull by the horns December 3 with martial law. During the few hours when it looked like our man in Seoul had pulled off a coup, the Biden gang was coyly silent. But there is nothing enduring in this world, as Gogol noted, and even the most brazen attempts at subverting democracy occasionally fail. The opposition gathered and voted against Yoon. His defense minister was deposed, jailed and attempted suicide, and Yoon’s own tenure came now, ahem, under a cloud, to say the least, as insurrection charges loomed, and he was impeached and suspended from office.

And don’t forget France, where Macron, affronted by an EU parliament vote last summer that installed many anti-Ukraine War representatives, totally lost it and, quite idiotically and hubristically, called snap elections. He promptly lost those to the left, but then snubbed the voters by breaking with tradition and refusing to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Surprising no one, the center-rightist he chose received a vote of no confidence, and Macron’s government looked likely to fall. That was temporarily forestalled by the appointment, December 13, of a centrist prime minister. But if his government does ultimately crash, expect Macron to do something really stupid, like suspend the legislature, call a national emergency or, a la Yoon, declare martial law.

Lastly of course we have Ukraine, that shining example of democracy, where its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds. This is the tyranny upon which Biden bestows hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s not even supported by Ukrainians, most of whom, according to recent polls, want the war over. But Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, in his crazed enthusiasm for Ukrainian combat, just won’t stop. On December 11, Ukraine fired six ATACAMS into Russia. We can all thank God they did little damage, since the Russians shot two down and diverted four with electronic warfare. Had they inflicted real harm, we in the west might very well have had worse troubles than the death of democracy, namely death itself. Biden appears oblivious to this reality. For us, what’s at stake is life itself, and the whole, wondrous human and natural world. For him, it appears to be just another step on the path of endless war, another day, another dollar.

The post The West’s Romance With Elections Is Dead…the Rules-Based Order Killed It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Putin meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Valery Sharifulin, TASS.

The lightning collapse of the Assad government in Syria in recent weeks made it clear that pretty much no one, inside Syria or out, considered this to be a state worth fighting for. It also seemed pretty clear that Turkey (with the probable backing of Israel and the US) had taken the opportunity to use the forces it had been training in Idlib for some years to make a serious power play. The west have long sought to turn Syria into a ‘failed state’ on the Iraq-Libya model, and the new situation has allowed Israel to destroy, almost overnight, the vast bulk of the country’s military installations, and expand its occupation in the South. This is what they have all been working for for thirteen years. What is less clear is the extent to which Russia was in on this move.

The mainstream interpretation is essentially that the latest turn of events is a major blow to Russia. Syria was Russia’s only solid Arab ally, home to its only warm-water naval base (Tartus) as well as a huge airbase (Hmeimim) crucial for its operations in Africa in particular. The ‘loss’ of Syria was therefore a crippling blow to Moscow; a consequence, supposedly, of the Russian army being bogged down in Ukraine and thus unable to commit the necessary military resources to put down the insurrection in Syria.

Combined with the fact that Iran and Hezbollah were also both recovering from Israeli attacks, this created a window of opportunity for the insurgents and their backers to make their move. And it was a window that might have been very brief: Hezbollah could regroup quickly and, if Trump were to honour his promise to immediately impose a peace deal on Ukraine on coming to office, large numbers of Russian forces could be again free to operate in Syria, perhaps within a couple of months.

This is obviously part of the picture. Russia’s options were clearly limited. Any deal it cut would have been made from a position of weakness, at least relative to its position in, say, 2018. But that doesn’t mean no deal was made at all. It is incredibly unlikely, in my view, that Putin would not have been consulted in advance.

Firstly, the risk of large swathes of Turkey’s carefully groomed insurgents being simply wiped out by Russian airstrikes was serious, and both Erdogan and HTS would have sought to avoid this eventuality if at all possible. Even if Putin lacked the capacity to ultimately defeat the uprising, they would certainly have attempted to convince him not to try rather than simply cross their fingers and hope that he didn’t.

Secondly, although it is easy to say in hindsight, this takeover was clearly in the cards for some time. All the fighters from former opposition-held territories retaken by government forces during the war had been pushed into Idlib. There they were joined, in March 2020, by over 20,000 Turkish troops, including special forces, armoured units and light infantry including the 5th Commando Brigade which specialises in paramilitary operations and mountain warfare. They were not there for a picnic; for four years they have been, in plain sight, training and consolidating the insurgent forces to relaunch their insurrection. Russia was obviously aware of this and would have planned for it.

Furthermore, although Russia might have found it difficult to commit large numbers of its own troops to Syria, it could certainly have subsidised the salaries of Syrian army soldiers, which could well have gone some way to mitigating the mundane bread-and-butter defections and passivity within the Syrian army. It chose not to do so, presumably for a reason.

This does not mean, of course, that the whole thing was a Kremlin plot all along, as some are now trying to suggest. One theory claims that Putin, by allowing the Syrian government to fall, has cunningly set a trap for the west, who will now be bogged down trying to stabilise Syria for years to come, just as the Soviets were bogged down in 1980s Afghanistan. But this suggestion makes no sense – the transformation of Syria into a ‘failed state’ has always been the west’s aim, which is why they have backed the most sectarian forces to accomplish it. They achieved this in Libya without getting ‘bogged down;’ they hoped to repeat their success in Syria, and they have now done so. This theory seems to be a desperate clutching of straws by people who simply cannot interpret any event as anything other than a genius plan by the Grand Master.

The truth, I suspect, is rather more nuanced. Here is a  working hypothesis: the basic parameters of the HTS takeover of Syria were worked out and agreed in advance by Erdogan, Netanyahu, Putin and Trump. I suspect Trump offered Putin a straight swap – Syria for eastern Ukraine; with the caveat that Russia could keep its Syrian bases. This was acceptable to Putin for several reasons.

Firstly, obviously, eastern Ukraine is his priority. Secondly, his only real concern in Syria was those bases, anyway. He may well have come round to the west’s ‘Divide and Ruin’ strategy – essentially, that it is easier and cheaper to secure your specific assets (bases, mines, oil wells etc) in a failed state using local militias, private security and/or your own armed forces than it is to secure an entire state to do so for you. Thirdly, Assad had, by all accounts, not been fully playing ball with Russia, and had been unwilling to turn Syria into the pure vassal state that Putin was demanding, making himself less valuable and more expendable in so doing. Fourth, Russia’s ultimate goal to take over patronage from the US of its Middle East client states can only be done by demonstrating Russia’s usefulness to Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In facilitating the fruition of those states’ thirteen-year regime-change operation in Syria, he has certainly done that, paving the way for (and perhaps already part of) future collaborations and deepening alliances. Fifth, just because Iran is an ‘ally’ of Russia, does not mean Russia wants it to be strong and autonomous. Quite the opposite. Like any imperial power, what Russia seeks are not allies, but dependencies. This latest move has gone a long way to transforming Iran from a Russian ally to a Russian dependency.

Cutting off Iran from the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza is no bad thing from Russia’s point of view: partly because Iran’s patronage of those groups acts as a source of power and autonomy for Iran, giving it some kind of ‘deterrence’ independent of the Russian defensive umbrella. If the resistance is cut off and neutered, Iran’s only source of deterrence (other than its own, admittedly formidable but nonetheless heavily Russian-reliant, defences) is Russia. And popular, autonomous, working-class resistance militias (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) are a nuisance for any imperial power anyway, a constant potential spanner-in-the-works to any colonial carve-up agreed by the Big Men.

And finally, of course, as discussed above, Putin’s options were limited; he could certainly have slowed the rebel advance but it is unclear whether he could have defeated it, and even the attempt to do so would have entailed some, potentially quite significant, diversion of manpower from the war on Ukraine. With limited options available, a deal that allowed him to keep eastern Ukraine and his Syrian bases would have likely seemed like the best available.

Claims that the latest events are a huge blow to Russia are therefore overstated. In strategic terms, if the bases are maintained, nothing has really been lost, other than a tedious responsibility to maintain an unpopular and disobedient client. And, in the longer-term, regional picture, much may have been gained, as suggested above.

The other argument often made is that this is a blow to Russian ‘prestige,’ that its ‘stock’ as a power willing and able to defend its allies will have been reduced significantly. A report from the Institute for the Study of War published shortly before the fall of Damascus, for example, claims that “Assad’s collapse would damage the global perception of Russia as an effective partner and protector, potentially threatening Russia’s partnerships with African autocrats and its resulting economic, military, and political influence in Africa.”

That’s possible, of course. But Putin’s ditching of Assad might in fact send a different message to Putin’s new African friends: “Don’t think you can just do whatever you want and still expect to be protected. Remember you are expendable. We can throw you to the dogs at any moment. And without our support, you won’t last five minutes. Never forget you are not an ally, but a client.” African leaders contemplating any resistance to the full integration of their armies under Russian tutelage may well be chastened by this message, and in a way entirely beneficial to Russian interests.

And whilst it is true that EU leaders are now demanding that HTS kick out the Russians, the truth is that it is not really the EU’s opinion that matters, but Trump’s. Let’s see what he says on the matter; and more importantly, what he does.

The post Did Putin Make a Deal Over Syria? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph of Silky Shah (left) and Eman Abdelhadi (right)

On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Silky Shah and Eman Abdelhadi join Joshua Frank and Erik Wallenberg to discuss how we should gear up to take on the Trump administration, and the best way to empower our movements going forward, from immigration to Palestine.

The post Silky Shah & Eman Abdelhadi: The Battles Ahead appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Industrial plants, Port of Longview. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

2024 will be the warmest year on record, the year warming topped 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s the year the US set new oil and gas production records, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It’s a year that saw the US re-elect a climate denier who vows to double US oil production over these record levels, assuming that’s even possible.  

It’s a year that saw two of the most destructive hurricanes in US history roar back across the Gulf Coast. It’s the year a tropical cyclone demolished the French colony of Mayotte, killing as many as 10,000 people. In 2024, the temperature in Death Valley hit 130.1; Tepache, Mexico, 125.6; Aswan, Egypt, 121; Las Vegas, 120; and Redding, California, 118. Van Buren, Missouri topped 90 in February. It was the year arid regions like Valencia, Spain, the UAE, Morocco and Algeria, Roswell, New Mexico, and Moab, Utah experienced devastating floods. Storm Boris unleashed a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours on much of Europe. Meanwhile, much of the mid-Atlantic region in the US went more than a month without rain this fall. 

It’s the year the UN climate conference, held in the oil city of Baku, failed to reach an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels and committed to providing less than a third of the annual climate funding needed for developing nations to transition from fossil fuels. It’s the year when CO2 levels hit 425.01 PPM, nearly 3 PPM more than last year’s record high. It’s the year when wildfires in Canada burned all year long.

January

+ CO2 reading for Jan. 1, 2024: 422.23 ppm

+ It’s now official: 2023 was the warmest year on record at 1.43C above preindustrial levels, beating the prior record set in 2016 by 0.14C. This continues a rapid warming trend that’s seen global temperatures rise around 1C since 1970.

+ December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021.

+ A new study in Nature estimates that even under an optimistic scenario “the global North would overshoot its share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by a factor of three, appropriating half of the global South’s share in the process.”

+ The Great Lakes typically have an ice coverage of 55% during the winter months, causing at least half of their surfaces to freeze. As of January 1, they had a combined ice cover of just 0.2%. Lake Superior 0.5%, Lake Michigan 0%, Lake Huron 0%, Lake Erie 0%, Lake Ontario 0%…

+ James Hansen: “When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed.”

+ After an 8-year battle, Judge Ann Aiken has dismissed all of the US government’s motions to dismiss and further stall the so-called youth climate constitutional case Juliana v. US. The case is now bound for trial. In her 49-page opinion, Judge Aiken wrote: “This catastrophe is the great emergency of our time and compels urgent action. As this lawsuit demonstrates, young people—too young to vote and effect change through the political process—are exercising the institutional procedure available to plead with their government to change course.”

+ Leaders at COP28 agreed to a “historic” $700 million in loss and damage funding.  Meanwhile, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies are about to reward their investors with record payouts of more than $100 billion.

+ In the last twenty years, southern New England has experienced nearly 30 fewer snow days a year.

+ The snowpack at the base of our local strato-volcano, Mt. Hood, sits nearly 50 inches below the normal amount for this time of year.

+++

+ You scour the headlines for little rays of hope and, instead, just keep finding shit like the bracing results from this recent AP survey on American attitudes about climate change: “Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year…This increased doubt was just as significant for someone who graduated from college as someone who has a high school diploma or less (11 percentage point drop) and was more pronounced for younger Americans (17 percentage point drop for those ages 18-29 vs. 9 percentage point drop for the 60+ age group)…Democrats and independents are becoming less convinced that climate change is caused mostly by humans, while Republican attitudes remain stable.”

+ According to Berkeley Earth’s 2023 Global Temperature Report 2023 was by far the hottest year since direct observations began: 2023 was 1.54 ± 0.06 °C (2.77 ± 0.11 °F) above the 1850-1900 average, the first year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).

+ The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is accelerating rapidly. A new study published in Nature estimates that Greenland is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour–20% more than was previously thought. The torrents of freshwater flushing into the Atlantic are expected to speed the collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), the consequences of which will be dire.

+ There’s been a big leak in a pipeline on Alaska’s North Slope, very close to the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The leak started on Saturday evening and the preliminary estimate is 11,550 gallons (275 barrels) of natural gas condensate, also known as “light oil.”

+ Modi’s climate two-step…

Dec 11: India announces plan to double coal production by 2030

Dec 13: India signs off on “transitioning away from fossil fuels at COP28

Dec 22: India lays out plans to build 88 GW of coal power plants

+ A piece in the Financial Times predicts that the countries in the global south expected to experience the most extreme climate disasters “face a massive financing gap: they need $4.3 trillion by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

+ Thousands of U.S. homes have flooded over and over again: “The bottom line is that the risk and the damages are increasing faster than we are dealing with them.”

+ Recently reclassified as a ‘humid subtropical’ climate, New York City, experienced nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall.

+++

+ Let’s check the scoreboard for how the Climate Prez is doing: the United States is now producing more oil than any country in history:  13 million barrels per day (International Energy Agency). The US now produces one-in-five barrels of global oil production.

+ Since 1970, the Greenland ice sheet has lost over 6 trillion metric tons of ice, which is more than 700 tonnes lost per person for every person on the planet today.

+ A new report says that climate change, not El Niño, was the main driver of the Amazon drought in 2023. The study concluded that climate change made the agricultural Amazon drought 30 times more likely from June to November.  In Amazonas state, 59 out of 62 municipalities are facing drought and 15 of them are in an emergency situation, according to the Amazon Working Group. Rivers in some regions have fallen to their lowest levels in more than 120 years. The drought has increased the spread of wildfire and caused mass die-offs of fish and dolphins.

+ Because climate change isn’t producing the expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions, according to a study from the National Science Foundation: “We could be facing higher risks than what’s been projected for arid regions like the SW, which has already been affected by water shortages and extreme wildfire…”

+ In most parts of the country, charging an EV is equivalent to a gasoline price of $1 to $2 per gallon. The national average is $1.41 per eGallon, which is less than half the current gasoline price of $3.07 (as of Jan. 16, 2024)

+ On one of the coldest days of the year in Texas, solar output hit a record high of more than 14,000 megawatts of production, contributing about 20% of the total production of the ERCOT power grid.

+ Officials in southern Portugal’s Algarve region are planning to cut the water allocation for agricultural use by 70% and for households by 15% this year. But the region’s reservoirs are still likely to run dry by summer. An official said, “The situation is becoming catastrophic.”

+ In the last three years, renewable energy cut over $1 trillion from the fuel bill of the electricity sector worldwide.

+ The EU announced it will ban diesel trucks by 2040. Medium and heavy-duty trucks constitute about 3% of the vehicles on the road but they account for 30% of the pollution.

+ A new analysis projects that ammonia-fueled ships can prove cheaper to run than a fossil-fueled fleet and cut emissions by nearly 80%.

+ Just one of the 23 planned LNG facilities could lead to as much greenhouse gas being emitted over the course of its expected operating life, as the EPA’s new methane rule is projected to save in total over the next 15 years.

February 2024

+ During the deluge that submerged much of California this week, a weather station on the UCLA campus recorded nearly 12 inches of rain in 24 hours, a one-in-1000-year rainfall event for Westwood. (Probably happen five more times in the next ten years.)

+ January 2024 was the warmest January on record according to the recently released ERA5 reanalysis. This is the 8th consecutive monthly record.

+ Global sea surface temperatures hit another record high on Tuesday, reaching 21.13°C for the first time in recorded history.

+ Of the world’s three largest tropical rainforest regions, the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and the Congo, only Congo has enough standing forest to remain a strong net carbon sink.

+ Describing the current classification system as inadequate, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for adding a Category 6 to the hurricane scale, as climate change intensifies the destructive power of hurricanes.

+ More than 110 people were killed in wildfires on the urban/rural interface near Valparaiso, Chile. Hundreds are still missing, making these the deadliest wildfires in South American history. Many of the fires burned in monocultural plantations.

+ In the past 10 years, 183 counties in the US saw their first wind project come online. However, according to an analysis by USA Today, over the same period, nearly 375 counties passed measures blocking new wind developments.

+ The Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming more than 2 percent of the US’s electricity.”

+++

+ It’s February and Alberta just declared an early opening to “fire season.” There are a total of 54 new fires and dozens remaining from last year that continue to burn.

+ Still Unsafe at Any Speed: According to a study of the harm done by cars published in Science Direct, one in 36 deaths (1.36 million deaths a year) has been linked to “automobility.” Globally, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. 

+ Can’t wait to see how the Sierra Club and the rest of GangGreen rationalize Biden’s latest retreat on his environmental pledges. This time he’s instructed EPA to back off its strict new tailpipe emission standards, in order to slow the transition to Electric Vehicles, where US automakers continue to lag far behind both China and Europe…

+ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, once the most progressive court in the country, just struck down a moratorium on the export of coal mined from federal lands. The Associated Press described the ruling as “a setback for Dems and environmentalists.” Not to mention a rapidly warming planet. Northern Cheyenne Tribal Administrator William Walksalong: “We need the Biden administration to step up & live up to its promises to protect our climate, conduct a long overdue review of the federal coal leasing program and make thoughtful plans for the future of public lands.”

+ Biden’s Bureau of Land Management is reviewing a sprawling carbon storage project proposed by ExxonMobil for federal lands in eastern Montana. Apparently, even if we succeed in transitioning from oil, we’ll never rid ourselves of the oil companies…

+ A study published last week in the journal Science Advances is the first to show a strong link between large-scale locust swarms and climate change: ‘Heavy wind & rain may be triggering widespread, synchronized desert locust outbreaks in key breadbasket regions of the world, new research shows. And the range of these ravenous, crop-stripping locusts could expand up to 25% due to climate change.’

+ Of the nearly 1,200 migratory species monitored by the U.N. – including whales, sea turtles, apes, songbirds and others – more than one-fifth are now threatened with extinction.

+ In Okinawa, the water levels of its reservoirs are so low they’ve been forced to switch to using water from Chubu, which has been deemed unsafe for drinking water because of high levels of PFAS contamination.

+ January 2024 was the eighth consecutive month where monthly global temperatures hit a record high. It was also the planet’s second-wettest January on record, according to NOAA.

+ Don’t blame El Nino. Historically, the temperatures of El Nino winters are about the same as La Nina winters.

+ The development of 10 Amazon data centers in two rural counties (Morrow and Umatilla) has turned one of Oregon’s smallest utilities (Umatilla Electric Cooperative) into one of the state’s biggest polluters. Umatilla Electric, which has only 16,000 customers, now generates 1,812,263 metric tons of CO2 a year. Compare that to the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) which serves 97,060 customers and generates only 82,570 metric tons of CO2 a year.

March

+ Given the record temperature in the Atlantic basin, hurricane season may start early and end late this year…

+ Fifteen years before it was predicted, the average global temperature has breached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period.

+ Oil and gas profits have tripled under Biden, but still the industry wants to evict him in favor of Trump. It’s a lesson Biden still hasn’t learned after five decades in politics.

+ For the third year in a row Atlantic sea ice reached a new low, signaling that the continent’s sea ice has undergone an ‘abrupt critical transition.’”

+ The Smokehouse Creek fire in West Texas began a week ago Monday, spread more than 80 miles in the space of a few hours and at some points was growing as much as 150 football fields every minute. By Thursday, it had become the second-largest burn in modern American history and is now larger than any California wildfire on record.

“According to the National Interagency Fire Center, Minnesota & Wisconsin will see an above-normal wildfire risk starting as soon as March.”

+ By March 1st, 2024, the fire season had already burned 1.5 million acres–more than 50% of all acres burned last year nationally.

+ With global temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion in 2022.

+ After years of funding climate denial, Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods told Fortune magazine this week that the public was to blame for climate change, not the fossil fuel industry: “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it. The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

+ With at least 150 so-called zombie fires from last year still burning under snow-covered ground, Canada is bracing for another “This year’s fire season may be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when 1000s of fires burned 48 million acres million acres. ‘There’s no historical analog to what we’re seeing right now,” said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. “Most years they’re not a big deal. But now a lot of these fires have the potential that when the snow melts and it gets warm, dry and windy to actually grow again. So it is a serious issue.”

+ It snowed here in the Willamette Valley on the opening days of meteorological spring, but as for winter…28% of the lower 48 states experienced temperatures at least 5 degrees above normal for the entire season.

+ A new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment projects that under all future emissions scenarios, the Arctic Ocean will likely become ice-free for the first time on a late August or early September day within the next 10 to 15 years.

+ The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record warm levels for an entire year now, setting daily record highs every day for 365 consecutive days and counting.

+ Following France, Spain is banning some short-haul domestic flights, and possibly private jets as well, as part of its plan to reduce carbon emissions. The restrictions would apply to most flights with a rail alternative that take less than two and a half hours.

+ New study in Nature: “Almost the entire vegetated land surface [of the planet] will be subject to substantial changes in how climate supports the plants that define terrestrial ecosystems…A profound transformation of the biosphere is underway.”

+++

+ The world’s five biggest fossil fuel companies (Total, Chevron, Shell, BP and Exxon/Mobil) are expected to add 51 billion tonnes of C02 emissions to the atmosphere between now and 2050. A new study by Global Witness finds that the planned fossil fuel production from these “5 majors” will kill 11.5 million people by 2100.

+ The annual atmospheric increase in CO2 was a staggering 3.4 parts per million (ppm) in 2023.

+ A million tons: the amount of ice Greenland loses every two minutes.

+ Every day for the last 12 months, global sea surface temperatures have broken records.

+ Phoenix, the US’s hottest city, experienced a record 645 deaths related to high temperatures in 2023–50% higher than the number of heat-related deaths in 2022.

+ In 1993, the US Forest Service fought wildfires on 1.79 million acres.  By 2021, the number of burned acres had more than quadrupled.

+ This week State Farm announced plans to not renew around 72,000 property and commercial apartment policies in California starting this summer, largely because of the increased risk of climate-driven wildfires. State Farm is California’s largest property insurer.

+ According to a report from the Royal Society, Giant Sequoias are now much more numerous and in better condition in the UK than they are across their native range in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

+ Desert ecosystems are much more sensitive to climate changes than previously believed. Research in the Sonoran desert has found a sharp decline in vegetation cover, especially in drier areas, mostly attributed to rising temperatures and less rain.

+ China, the world’s leading solar supplier, doubled production capacity last year and now produces nearly three times more panels than global demand. Global prices for panels have fallen 50% in the past year to as low as 10 cents a watt.

+ China’s global share of EV sales hit 48.2% last week and will pass 50% within 3 months predicted Wang Chuanfu, CEO of China’s leading EV-maker BYD.

+ In 2019, 149 million people worldwide were classified as ‘acutely food insecure’ – meaning they did not have enough food to meet their daily nutritional needs. Only four years later, that number has more than doubled to 333 million. One leading cause has been droughts and crop failures attributed to climate change.

+ In the first two-and-a-half months of 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have burned across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, according to real-time satellite monitoring, a record number for this early in the year.

+ In 2023, carbon emissions in the UK fell to their lowest level since 1897.

+ Lula has made lofty pledges to address climate change and protect the environment, goals that will prove very challenging to meet if Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, goes forward with its plans to significantly boost oil production, with the goal of becoming the world’s third-largest oil producer by 2030.

+ The scheduled delays in retiring South Africa’s remaining coal plants could cause 32,000 excess deaths from air pollution, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea).

+ According to a study out of MIT: “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 TWh annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

+ The Biden Administration isn’t just permitting the destruction of Thacker Pass, it’s subsidizing the massive lithium mine slated for the Oregon/Nevada border to the tune of $2.26 billion…

+++

+ In 2020, one in 25 cars sold worldwide was electric; by 2023, it was one in five.

+ UN emissions data is so out of date and incomplete that no one really knows how close most countries are to meeting their emissions targets.

+ People who live in France now produce 7% less carbon than the average person on Earth.

+ A study in Nature reports that fire suppression may be a more important factor in driving the intensity of wildfires than fuel accumulation.

+ This week ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic reached levels not normally found until June 3.

+ Hundreds of gray whales have starved to death off the Pacific Coast, owing to a sharp decline in food availability in their Arctic and sub-Arctic feeding grounds attributable to warming oceans…

+ Several of the largest new oil and gas field discoveries since 2021 have been made by companies with net-zero emissions pledges.

+ Agriculture accounts for 74% of the water diverted from the Colorado River, roughly three times as much as the amount of water consumed by cities. Nearly half (46%) of the Colorado River’s water is used to grow alfalfa and other hay crops for cattle.

April

+ Nine of the 10 hottest years have been recorded in the past 10 years and all 10 since 2005.

+ Under Biden, the Climate prez, US LNG exports are at record highs (almost 16 billion cubic feet per day) and are projected to keep on growing. In 2016, LNG exports from the US were nearly zero.

+ UN climate chief, Simon Stiell: ’It’s blazingly obvious that finance is the make-or-break factor in the world’s climate fight.’”

+ A new “rapid analysis” study shows that the “dangerous humid heat” that oppressed western Africa in mid-February was made 10 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

+ Summer temperatures across much of Western Europe have risen three times faster than the global mean warming since 1980.

+ Around 77% of Texas’ electricity is now powered by solar, wind and nuclear.

+ A recent study by Australia National University predicts that Australia is facing 20-year-long megadroughts.

+ Marine protection areas in the Caribbean haven’t helped to revive failing fish populations.

+ Most nuclear plants in the US are unprepared for climate-driven disasters, such as wildfires and floods, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nearly 60% of the country’s nuclear power capacity is directly threatened.

+ The Economist: “About a tenth of the world’s residential property by value is under threat from global warming—including many houses that are nowhere near the coast.”

+ Around 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have experienced heat stress high enough to cause bleaching, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch. The bleaching is increasing at a rate of 1 percent a week.

+ On April 6th, the low temperature in Biarritz was +72.5°F, which was the highest minimum temperature ever recorded in France for the month of April. In fact, +72.5°F was one of the highest minimum temperatures ever measured in Biarritz (for any month).

+ The European Court of Human Rights last week ruled that the Swiss government had violated the human rights of 2,000 women over the age of 64, known as KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, their government’s failure to combat climate change put them at a higher risk of dying in heatwaves. The women argued they could not leave their homes and suffered ill-health during frequent record hot spells. The landmark ruling forces Switzerland to take aggressive steps to reduce carbon emissions, in line with targets to keep warming to below a global 1.5 C rise.

The diminishing snowpack on the southern slopes of  Mount St. Helens, mid-April, 2024. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ With another dry summer forecast for the Pacific Northwest and the snowpack in the Cascade Range at the lowest level in at least a decade, Washington officials have declared a statewide drought emergency.

+ CO 2 levels for April 26: 428.63 ppm, a record high.

May

+ A new study in Nature: “Using an empirical approach… the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.”

+ Temperatures every month between July and December of 2023 beat the prior record by at least 0.3C. And September shattered the previous record by 0.5C.

+ A UN labor agency report warns of the rising threat of excess heat, and climate change on the world’s workers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over 2.4 billion workers — more than 70% of the global workforce — are likely to face excessive heat as part of their jobs at some point, according to the most recent figures available, from 2020. That’s up from over 65% in 2000.

+ The two families (Ferrero and Mars) who own the biggest chocolate corporations have more wealth than the combined GDP of the two countries (Ghana and Ivory Coast), which supply the most cocoa beans.

+ In the last ten, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the prior decade. High winds, rains, winter storms, tornadoes and hurricanes, accounted for 80% of all power interruptions over the last 20 years.

+ This has the flavor of a BP ad after Deepwater Horizon…The US is producing more oil (13 million barrels on average every day in 2023) and exporting more LNG than at any time in history.

+ Last year was by far the most destructive wildfire season on record in Canada. But the total burn area so far in 2024 is 20 times what it was by this time lie 2023.

+ Florida’s coral reefs have experienced a 90 percent decline in the past 40 years, largely due to warming oceans.

+ The recent storms that flooded Dubai were made 40% more intense by climate change.

+ Taxing big fossil fuel firms could raise $900 billion for climate finance by 2030.

+ According to Consumer Reports, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.

+ Since 1976, more than 4 billion solar panels have been manufactured worldwide and the cost per panel has declined by 96 percent.

+ US emissions declined by 3% last year, almost all of it in the power generation sector, as emissions continued to climb in the transportation, industrial and agricultural sectors.

+ Mashable: “The last time CO2 levels were as high as today, ocean waters drowned the lands where metropolises like Houston, Miami, and New York City now exist.”

June

+ You can believe whatever you want to but …. the two-year increase in the Keeling Curve of peak carbon dioxide levels is the largest on record.

+ Why are CO2 levels continuing to soar? Because industrial nations are still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, last year the global consumption of fossil fuels hit a record high last year, producing emissions to more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time, according to a report by the the Energy Institute.

+ More than 1000 people have died of heat-related causes during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, where temperatures in Mecca hit 51.8°C (125°F).

+ Here in the US, an Associated Press investigation calculated that there were 2,300 heat deaths last summer, a new record, and the report admitted that the number was almost certainly a dramatic undercount of the actual number of heat-related deaths.

+ A study of the 1995 Chicago heatwave showed that 28% of those admitted to hospital for heatstroke died within a year. Most of the rest had ongoing organ dysfunction and brain damage.

+ India last week, Florida in July: “At the SMS hospital in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, so many bodies of casualties of the heat have arrived at the mortuary that its capacity has been exceeded. Police in the city say many of the victims are poor laborers, who have no choice but to work outside, and homeless people.”

+ A new study finds tiny particles emitted by wildfire smoke may have contributed to at least 52,000 premature deaths in California over a decade. By 2050, cumulative excess deaths from exposure to wildfire smoke globally could exceed 700,000, a two-thirds increase over current numbers.

+ From a study on the environmental impacts of wildfire smoke on lake ecosystems published in Global Change Biology: “From 2019 to 2021, we found that 99.3% of North America was covered by smoke. An incredible 98.9% of lakes experienced at least 10 smoke-days a year, with 89.6% of lakes receiving 30 smoke-days, and some lakes experiencing up to four months of smoke.” We’re fucked, might be the phrase you’re looking for…

+ A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows that average homeowners insurance premiums have increased by 33%from 2020 to 2023, largely driven by climate-related disaster risks.

+ The record rainfall in south Florida last week, which dumped as much as 15 inches of rain in 24 hours on parts of Sarasota, Naples and Miami, normally occurs only once every 500 to 1,000 years.

+ Mario Ariza: “Eventually, Florida’s policies of agnostic adaptation will have to deal with this looming reality, where adaptation is clearly impossible, and retreat may be the only option left.”

+ According to Swiss Re, one of Europe’s largest reinsurers, insurers have dramatically underestimated the annual damages from climate-related disasters and warned that some areas of the continent may become “uninsurable.” Lloyd’s of London’s John Neal: “You’ll never find an insurer saying, ‘I don’t believe in climate change.’”

+ India’s monsoon season delivered 20% less rainfall than usual, especially concerning given the extended heat wave that has gripped the sub-continent.

+ The use of swimming pools and video games in California consume more energy than some entire countries.

+ China’s solar module production, which has tripled since 2021, hit 1,000 GWlast year, nearly five times the rest of the world combined.

+ Worldwide the average price for photovoltaic panels is 11 cents per watt, a global price largely based on the market of the leading producer, China. The average price for panels in the United States was 31 cents per watt.

+ Nearly one-third of all oceangoing ships are carrying fossil fuels.

+ Average CO2 levels for June: 426.91 ppm, a record high

July

+ Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. Monday was even hotter.

+ Bidenmentalism in Action: “No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years.” Will Harris stop the drilling?

+ Oil production in the US has more than doubled in less than a decade.

+ Since the world started to get “serious” about global warming, coal demand has only increased–rising by 75% since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and by nearly 15% since the Paris Agreement in 2015.

+ Every six hours the world burns enough coal to build a new replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

+ On July 15, Chicago issued 16 tornado warnings, the most sent on a single day since 2004. In an average year, Illinois only experiences 50 tornadoes. This year it’s been hit more than 100, already.

+ The Park Fire outside Chico grew by 100,000 acres in a mere 24 hours. It ignited when someone lit a car on fire and rolled it into a forested ravine, but it blew up because the forest is parched bone-dry by year after year of searing summer heat.

+ Here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley we tied a record for the most consecutive 100F-degree days, which, sandwiched between an even longer string of 90+ days, prompted a “flash drought,” pushing the wildfire danger from “low” to “high” in the span of a few days. Oregon has effectively dried out. There are currently at least 27 wildfires burning in Oregon across more than 256,500 acres of land.

August

+ In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned the border seven times, while saying “climate change” and “health care” only once each. 

+ Harris in 2019: “We should do something about the actual emergencies that plague our nation — like climate change or health care access — not playing politics in order to build a wasteful border wall.” Harris is turning flip-flopping into an Olympic sport, just in time for LA to host the next summer games.

On Tuesday, southern Iran recorded a heat index of 82.2°C and a dew point of 36.1°C, provisionally the highest ever globally. The extreme “feels like” temperature is not compatible with life…

+ A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that heat-related deaths in the US have increased by 117% since 1999. “As temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue,” the researchers wrote. “Local authorities in high-risk areas should consider investing in the expansion of access to hydration centers and public cooling centers or other buildings with air conditioning.” From 1999 to 2023, there have been at least 21,500 heat-related deaths in the US. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers found that 1,069 deaths were heat-related in 1999, compared with 2,325 in 2023, the most ever recorded.

+ Trump has spent the last few months mocking the idea of rising sea levels, claiming oceans will only rise “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Wrong. A new UN reportwarns that rising seas are already causing more frequent coastal flooding and that for some Pacific nations coastal flooding will go from the average of fewer than five days a year between 1980 through the 2010s to once every two weeks by 2050 and once every 2 to 3 days in a worst case scenario.

+ For some Pacific nations, floods will go from fewer than 5 days a year in 1980-2010s, to once a fortnight on average by 2050, and every 2-3 days in a worst-case scenario.

+ Warming ocean currents are undermining the massive Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. The collapse of the so-called Doomsday Glacier could raise sea levels by as much as 7 feet.

+ In only five days last week, Canada’s total wildfire area for the year has grown by more than 700,000 hectares. 2024 is now the *fourth* worst fire season in Canadian history record. If another 406,000 hectares burn it will move into third place, making 2024 the fourth worst fire season on record with another two months left in the fire season. If another 406,000 hectares burn it will move into third place.

+ According to NOAA’s newly released State of the Climate report for 2023, 

* the concentration of greenhouse gasses was the highest on record

* El Niño conditions contributed to record-high sea surface temperatures

* Ocean heat and global sea levels were the highest on record

* The Arctic was warm and navigable

* Antarctic sea ice was at record lows throughout the year.

* Heatwaves and droughts contributed to massive wildfires around the world

+ If you want proof, all you have to do is look at the daily atmospheric CO2 readings from Mauna Loa since Kyoto and Paris…

+ The more than 500,000 trees logged off to make way for Musk’s new Tesla factory in Germany increased carbon emissions by 13,000 tons, the equivalent of driving 33 million miles in a combustion car.

+ On Monday, Yampi Sound experienced its hottest winter day ever recorded in Australia, hitting 106.8°F (41.6°C).

+ A new report from CoreLogic found that 2.6 million homes across 14 western states are at risk from wildfires, led by California with more than 1,258,748 homes in danger, followed by Colorado with 321,294) and Texas with 244,617.

+ Exxon is warning of an “oil shock” if suppliers conclude that oil demand will fall by 2050.

September

+ Bidenmentalism in a nutshell: “On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs – without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.” Sorry, Joe, you haven’t and you can’t…

+ The Global temperature in August 2024 tied with August 2023 for the warmest of any August on record. Up in Svalbard at 78° north latitude in the Arctic Ocean, the average temperature for August was a hitherto unfathomable 51.8 F (11 C)…

+ For three months, the temperature in Phoenix averaged 99F…On Wednesday, the temperature in Phoenix reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a record 100th straight day.

+ US gasoline demand, the world’s single largest pool of oil consumption, has almost certainly peaked for good, according to a report in Bloomberg.

+ Meanwhile, solar prices are falling. Solar module price falls to a record low of $0.096/W, according to Bloomberg’s Global Solar Market Report. The record low prices drove global installations to a new high in 2024.  The report says 592 GW will be installed in 2024, an increase of 33% from last year’s record high.

+ A study out of UC Davis shows that ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are luring people from using more sustainable modes of travel, like walking, cycling and public transport: “More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles.”

+ Since 2004, Saudi Arabia’s oil production has fallen and America’s has more than doubled.

+ The Energy Information Agency estimates that North America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity will more than double between 2024 and 2028, from 11.4 billion cubic feet per day in 2023 to 24.4 Bcf/d in 2028, if projects currently under construction begin operations as planned.

+ In the first half of 2024, 80% of new electricity capacity in the US came from solar and batteries.

+ Only 15 countries account for more the 98.5% of the world’s new coal power generation. But two of those 15 countries, China and India, are responsible for 86% of that capacity.

+ A decade ago, nearly 40% of UK electricity came from coal. Today the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station is Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire, England, which is itself slated to close at the end of September.

+ The hotter the temperature, the less well students do on exams. Over 13 years in NYC alone, “upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions.” The study published in the estimates that these failed exams delayed or stopped around 90,000 graduations.

+ The ocean heat content of the Gulf of Mexico has smashed previous all-time record highs and this week stands at 126% of the average for the date.

+ A study from the World Bank predicts that climate change will exacerbate tensions around access to water. The report says that the global supply of fresh water per person will fall by 29% between 2000 and 2099. But all regions will not be equally affected. For example, Africa’s water supply could drop by 67%, while Europe’s could increase by 28%.

+ South Korea’s top court ruled last week that the country’s measures to fight climate change were insufficient to protect the rights of its citizens. This is the first climate litigation ruling of its kind in Asia.

+ Norm Schilling, a horticulturist in Las Vegas, on the damage to desert plants from this summer’s extreme heat: “We saw damage to plants this summer that had never shown heat stress before…The heat we’re seeing now is a new paradigm. It’s like the ground is shifting beneath our feet.’”

+ More than 20% of the Amazonian rainforest is already gone and much of what remains–dried out by a mega-drought and seared by extreme heat–is going up in flames…

+ It was 100F here in Greater Stumptown yesterday and heading toward 95F today with thick bands of smoke. And where’s there’s smoke…

+++

+ So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian, or humanist.

+ With Harris, it sounds like we will get Cheney’s foreign policy, AIPAC’s Middle East policy, Goldman Sachs’ economic policy, and Exxon’s climate policy.

+ Fires are burning down towns and resorts in California, Texas is running out of water, and a hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana once again. Yet, neither candidate advanced a position on climate change last night that went much beyond drill, drill, drill and frack, frack, frack…

+ Harris is fighting climate change by, checks notes, expanding fracking, boosting oil and gas production and building new factories!

+ Can’t we all now agree that the Democrats are objectively worse than the Republicans on climate change? The Republicans don’t believe in climate change and do nothing about it. The Democrats say they believe in climate change and still do nothing about it.

+ Move along, nothing to see here…

+ The US is adding more gas-powered plants than it has in more than a decade, mainly to keep up with the energy demands created by big tech data centers and the AI boom.

+ Emissions from data centers are likely 662% higher than big tech claims. Last year, data centers consumed a fifth of Ireland’s electricity, more than all the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities combined.

+ Microsoft’s AI data centers consume so much energy they’re spending $1.6 billion to reboot the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power it.

+ What could go wrong?

+ Canada has made real progress in adding renewables to its electric power sector. But these gains have been wiped out by significant increases in oil and gas production, which now account for 31% of its national emissions.

+ The unnamed storm that smashed into North Carolina last week unloaded as much as 20 inches of rain in 12 hours and inflicted $7 billion in damage. There have now been more than 20 extreme-weather events in the US so far this year that have each wreaked $1 billion or more in damages.

+ Over the last 30 years, the average gas tax in France has been around eight times higher than in the United States.

+ Toxicologist George Thompson on the lingering poisonous fallout from the chemicals spilled by the Northfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio: “‘I’ve been a toxicologist for 55 years, and this is the worst event I’ve ever seen. And I’m talking about worldwide. None are as dangerous.’”

+ Nearly 200 environmental defenders were killed last year, most of them by the mining industry in Latin America.

+ Bidenmentalism in Action: A month before the elections, the Biden-Harris administration, which has been dismal on the environment, is moving to strip protections for gray wolves. They seem confident the enviros will vote for them no matter what they do and they’re likely correct…

+ A new report in Nature argues that most climate change models significantly underestimate the risk, severity, and duration of droughts, particularly in North America and Southern Africa. The report says that by 2100, the average most extended periods of drought could be ten days longer than previously projected.

+ Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) explained his opposition to solar energy: “At night, it just doesn’t work.” Crenshaw’s own state is second only to California in solar power generation (31,700 GWh), and solar power has repeatedly saved the ERCOT power grid from collapsing during recent power surges.

October

+ As for climate change, even amid the carnage inflicted by Hurricane Helene, Vance accepted the premise that there is a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change only “for the sake of argument, while Walz weirdly bragged about Biden-Harris turning the US into “an energy superpower.”

+ Here’s the extent of the stultifyingly simplistic back-and-forth on climate change and Hurricane Helene: Walz talks mainly about jobs and increasing oil and gas production, and Vance complains that most solar panels used in the US are made in China (they aren’t)…

Nora O’Donnell: Let’s turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change? I’ll give you two minutes.

JDV: Sure. So first of all, let’s start with the hurricane because it’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy. I just saw today, actually, a photograph of two grandparents on a roof with a six-year-old child, and it was the last photograph ever taken of them because the roof collapsed, and those innocent people lost their lives. And I’m sure Governor Walz joins me in saying our hearts go out to those innocent people, our prayers go out to them. And we want as robust and aggressive as a federal response as we can get to save as many lives as possible. And then, of course, afterward, to help the people in those communities rebuild. I mean, these are communities that I love, some of them I know very personally. In Appalachia, all across the Southeast, they need their government to do their job. And I commit that when Donald Trump is president again, the government will put the citizens of this country first when they suffer from a disaster. And Norah, you asked about climate change. I think this is a very important issue. Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions. This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world. What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world. When I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output. So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people. And unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.

Nora O’Donnell: Governor Walz, you have two minutes to respond.

TW: Well, we got close to an agreement because all those things are happening. Look, first of all, it is a horrific tragedy with this hurricane, and my heart goes out to the folks that are down there in contact with the Governors. I serve as co-chair of the council of governors as we work together on these emergency managements. Governors know no partisanship. They work together to… all of the Governors and the emergency responders are on the ground. Those happen on the front end. The federal government comes in, makes sure they’re there, that we recover. But we’re still in that phase where we need to make sure that they’re staying there, staying focused.

Now, look, coming back to the climate change issue, there’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen. Senator Vance has said that there’s a climate problem in the past; Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in. What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden Harris administration is, we’ve seen this investment, we’ve seen massive investments, the biggest in global history that we’ve seen in the Inflation Reduction Act, has created jobs all across the country. Two thousand in Jeffersonville, Ohio. Taking the EV technology that we invented and making it here. Two hundred thousand jobs across the country. The largest solar manufacturing plant in North America sits in Minnesota. But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, “Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybean, and I harvest wind.” We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward, that climate change is real. Reducing our impact is absolutely critical. But this is not a false choice. You can do that at the same time you’re creating the jobs that we’re seeing all across the country. That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current. And that’s what absolutely makes sense. And then we start thinking about, “How do we mitigate these disasters?”

Nora O’Donnell: Thank you, Senator. I want to give you an opportunity to respond there. The Governor mentioned that President Trump has called climate change a hoax. Do you agree?

JDV: Well, look, what the President has said is that if the Democrats, in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that’s not what they’re doing. So clearly, Kamala Harris herself doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies. Now, something Governor Walz said, I think is important to touch upon, because when we talk about “clean energy,” I think that’s a slogan that often the Democrats will use here. I’m talking, of course, about the Democratic leadership. And the real issue is that if you’re spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China, number one, you’re going to make the economy dirtier. We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States of America.

TW: We are in Minnesota.

JDV: Some of them are, Tim, but a lot of them are being made overseas in China, especially the components that go into those solar panels. So, if you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We haven’t built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years. Natural gas. We have got to invest more in it. Kamala Harris has done the opposite. That’s raised energy prices and also meant that we’re doing worse by the climate.

Nora O’Donnell: Senator, your time is up.  Governor, would you like to respond?

TW: Well, look, we’re producing more natural gas than we ever have. There’s no moratorium on that. We’re producing more oil. But the folks know, and my… like I said, again, these are not liberal folks. These are not folks that are green, new deal folks. These are farmers that have been in drought one year and massive flooding the next year. They understand that it makes sense. Look, our number one export cannot be topsoil from erosion from these massive storms. We saw it in Minnesota this summer. And thinking about, “How do we respond to that?” we’re thinking ahead on this and what Kamala Harris has been able to do in Minnesota, we’re starting to weatherproof some of these things. The infrastructure law that was passed allows us to think about mitigation in the future. How do we make sure that we’re protecting by burying our power lines? How do we make sure that we’re protecting lakefronts and things that we’re seeing more and more of? But to call it a hoax and to take the oil company executives to Mar-a-Lago, say, give me money for my campaign and I’ll let you do whatever you want. We can be smarter about that. And an all of the above energy policy is exactly what she’s doing, creating those jobs right here.

+ Trump on climate change: “The planet has actually gotten a little bit cooler recently. Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.”

+ Meanwhile, the Desert Southwest experienced the most extreme high temperatures ever recorded in October.

+ Trump on the Green New Deal, getting more and more insane: “They wanted to rip down all the buildings in Manhattan and they wanted to rebuild them without windows. Take a look; you have to see the bathrooms. Basically, water-free bathrooms, no water. It’s so gross.”

+ What kind of anti-social personality type is still watching this debate, I ask myself, while watching the debate…

+++

Milton from the International Space Station. Photo: NASA.

+ Two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Florida panhandle and left a trail of destruction into the Appalachians and beyond, the Atlantic brewed up three more hurricanes, Kirk, Leslie and Milton: the first time three such storms have been swirling simultaneously after September.

+ Helene killed at least 238 people (with hundreds more still missing) in six states (Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia), making it the second-deadliest hurricane to strike the United States mainland in the past 50 years, after Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,833 people in 2005. 

+ More than half of Helene’s deaths took place in North Carolina.

+ Only eight hurricanes have killed more than 100 people since 1950. The last time a storm near as deadly as Helene hit the US was Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which killed 103 people after making landfall near Houston.

+ The initial estimates put Helene’s economic impact at $200 billion, making it the costliest storm in U.S. history.

+ Fueled by record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, Helene went from a tropical storm into a category 4 hurricane in only two days.

+ Weather Channel depiction of what a 9-foot storm surge in a coastal Florida town would look like.

+ 15 feet: Helene’s storm surge when it swamped the coastal towns of Keaton Beach and Steinhatchee.

+ 12 feet: Milton’s storm surge at Sarasota.

+ Total rainfall east of the Mississippi during Hurricane Helene:  over 40 Trillion gallons. More than 20 Trillion gallons fell across Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, especially over mountainous terrain.

+ Over three days, Helene unleashed more than 30 inches of rain over parts of North Carolina.

+ Human-caused climate change boosted Hurricane Helene’s rainfall by about 10% and intensified its winds by about 11%, scientists said in a new flash study released just as Hurricane Milton threatened the Florida coast less than two weeks later.

+ The Gulf of Mexico has warmed at a rate of 0.34 °F (0.19 °C) per decade since 1970, more than twice the rate of the oceans at large. 

+ Upper ocean heat content in the Atlantic during the last 66 years…

+ The destruction inflicted by Hurricane Helene forced the Federal Government’s largest repository of climate and weather data, including all historical billion-dollar storms, offline.

+ Chevron is sponsoring articles about Hurricane Helene as part of a PR blitz to convince people that its new ultra-high-pressure offshore deep-drilling project, Anchor, is climate-friendly.

+ Trump Hurricane Helene: “She [Harris] didn’t send anything or anyone at all, days passed, no help as men, women, and children drowned. North Carolina has eight military bases. Fort Bragg. They changed the name. We won two wars from Fort Bragg.”

+ More than 5,000 National Guard troops from at least nine states were dispatched to help with Hurricane Helene relief efforts, including soldiers from Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has sent personnel to Georgia, as well as dam, levee, and bridge inspection specialists to Tennessee and Kentucky, while others are working to restore temporary power to North Carolina.

+ After the wreckage left by Helene, Florida’s largest property insurer announced it was cutting policies for more than 600,000 homeowners in the state.

+ Milton is the only Category 5 hurricane in Atlantic records (HURDATv2, 1851-present) to exhibit any southeasterly motion vector.

+ According to US Stormwatch, the blue in this image is of birds caught in the Eye of Milton.

+ Most intense Atlantic hurricanes in history by minimum barometric pressure:

1. Wilma (2005) – 882 mb
2. Gilbert (1988) – 888 mb
3. “Labor Day” Hurricane (1935) – 892 mb
4. Rita (2005) – 895 mb
5. Allen (1980) – 899 mb
6. Camille (1969) – 900 mb
7. Katrina (2005) – 902 mb
8. Milton (2024); Dean (2007); Mitch (1998) – 905 mb

+ St. Petersburg reported nearly seven inches of rain in an hour and 10 inches over 3 hours, more of a drenching than a thousand-year rain event. Thresholds for 1,000-year rain in South Florida:

5.56”/1 hour
7.16”/2 hours
8.50”/3 hours

+ Milton generated more than 130 tornado warnings in South Florida as the storm neared the coast, a new record for Florida…

+ Only seven hurricanes have gone from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours or less. Milton is now the second fastest to do so…

+ The “free” Starlink service Elon Musk offered for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene is not free. It’s just the ordinary 30-day trial, and you must buy the hardware.

+ Trump: “I don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government and the Democrat Governor of the State going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”

+ Recall that Trump blocked $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 people and knocked out electricity on the island for 11 months.

+ There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…

+ The State of Florida refused to evacuate more than 1,200 people from the Manatee and Lee county jails, which were directly in the path of Hurricane Milton. (During Katrina, the people who ran the jails of New Orleans decided that 6,500 incarcerated people, some as young as ten years old, would remain “where they belong.”)

+ This was the second warmest September on record (2023). Nearly 15% of the globe had their single warmest September.

+ Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year,  found, spiking from $1.2 billion in 2021 to $5.4billin in 2022. Meanwhile, clean energy projects received only one percent of total foreign aid, according to a report from the Clean Air Fund.

+ Helene and Milton have given rise to a new grift: Hurricane Conspiracies….

+ “Yes, they can control the weather,” Marjorie Greene Tweeted on X.  “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done…Climate change is the new Covid. Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”

+ Trump: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country…They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”

+ Of the many false claims about Hurricane Helene, one asserted that North Carolina state police had begun arresting FEMA workers. It was planted on social media by a “mid-level” organizer from the Bundy Ranch standoff.

+ According to Wired, “the weather conspiracies, in particular, ramped up significantly after 2011 when a member of the Rothschild family acquired a controlling stake in Weather Central, a company that provides weather data to media companies.”

+ Give MAGA credit. Their conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds (one of them apparently invested in Weather Central) summoning up pre-election hurricanes out of the Gulf and aiming at red states is at least an admission of human-caused climate change. You’ve come a long way, baby.

+ If you want to make it big on the Net, you must have a theory of why what happened didn’t happen.

+ The Helene Conspiracies spread so broadly across his district that Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards felt obliged to issue this extraordinary press release, which is worth reprinting in its entirety as evidence of just how “weird” things have become…

Debunking Helene Response Myths

October 8, 2024

Press Release

Dear Friend,

Over the past 10 days, I have been proud of how our mountain communities have come together to help one another. We have seen a level of support that is unmatched by most any other disaster nationwide; but amidst all of the support, we have also seen an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts across our mountains.

While it is true, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene has had its shortfalls, I’m here to dispel the outrageous rumors that have been circulated online:

1. Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.

Nobody can control the weather.

Charles Konrad, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Regional Climate Center, has confirmed that no one has the technology or ability to geoengineer a hurricane.

Current geoengineering technology can serve as a large-scale intervention to mitigate the negative consequences of naturally occurring weather phenomena, but it cannot be used to create or manipulate hurricanes.

2. Local officials have confirmed the government is NOT seizing Chimney Rock.

There was no “special meeting” held in Chimney Rock between federal, state, or local governments about seizing the town.

3. Local officials are NOT abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze over Chimney Rock.

4. Chimney Rock is NOT being bulldozed over.

Rutherford County emergency services personnel are going to extensive lengths to search for missing people, including in debris by using cadaver dogs to locate any remains of individuals trapped in the debris.

Just as every other community in Western North Carolina, Chimney Rock officials are focused first and foremost on recovery efforts, followed by plans to rebuild in the future.

5. FEMA is NOT stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating or seizing supplies, or otherwise turning away donations.

FEMA does not conduct vehicle stops or handle road closures with armed guards—all road closures are managed by local law enforcement, who prioritize getting resources to their fellow community members.

6. FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid.

Disaster response efforts and individual assistance are funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts.

FEMA’s non-disaster related presence at the border has always been of major concern to me, even before Hurricane Helene, and I will continue to condemn their deployment of personnel to the southern border, but we must separate the two issues.

7. FEMA is NOT going to run out of money.

FEMA officials have repeatedly affirmed that the agency has enough money for immediate response and recovery needs over the next few months.

Secretary Mayorkas’ statement indicating otherwise was an irresponsible attempt to politicize a tragedy for personal gain.

In the coming months, Western North Carolina is going to need more disaster relief funding than is currently available to assist with recovery efforts.

I’m confident that supplemental disaster relief funding, which I am already involved in the process of creating, will be considered in the House once we return to session in mid-November.

8. FEMA cannot seize your property or land.

Applying for disaster assistance does not grant FEMA or the federal government authority or ownership of your property or land.

9. The FAA is NOT restricting access to airspace for Helene rescue and recovery operations.

The FAA or North Carolina Emergency Management will not prohibit anyone from flying resources into Western North Carolina as long as they coordinate their efforts with NC Aviation.

If you are looking to conduct an airdrop of resources but don’t know who to contact for approval, please reach out to my office and we will share that information with you.

10. FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.

The initial $750 provided to disaster survivors is an immediate type of assistance called Serious Needs Assistance that may be made to individuals in need as soon as they apply for FEMA assistance.

The $750 is an upfront, flexible payment to help cover essential items like food, water, baby formula and medication while FEMA assesses the applicant’s eligibility for additional funds.

This award is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.

As an application moves through the review process, individuals are eligible to receive additional forms of assistance for other needs such as temporary housing, personal property and home repair costs, etc.

I encourage you to remember that everything you see on Facebook, X, or any other social media platform is not always fact. Please make sure you are fact checking what you read online with a reputable source.

With my warmest regards,

Chuck Edwards
Member of Congress

+ Before Florida went MAGA, hurricanes that hit Florida were God’s punishment for the sodomy Pat Robertson believed was rampant in Miami…

+ Exxon knew better in 1990, according to its own internal memos…

+ Biden to FEMA Director Deanne Criswell: “Deanne, you’re doing a helluva job.” As our friend Jesse Walker said, “Saying this to a FEMA director is like taunting the gods.”

+ Feeling a little schadenfreude, Michael Brown?

+ Floridian Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which was set in St Marks National Wildlife Refuge: “Very little has been learned or implemented since Hurricane Ian, which I co-wrote about for The Nation at the time. With Milton potentially hitting the same area. FL gov needs to get its act together, beyond just getting better about evacuation orders. Florida politicians have failed us while dismantling regulations and pandering to developers. This has made all of us less safe. You simply CANNOT build in parts of Florida without severe repercussions, but the legislature and developers have done so anyway…I want to emphasize this: Florida was more prepared for hurricanes fifteen years ago with much better regulation and land use ordinances than today. Developers have left us much more vulnerable by building in places they shouldn’t have, aided and abetted by Republican governors.”

+ Tim Barker: “My parents live in the Tampa Bay area. I am glad they are allowed to evacuate to safety. I am furious at my own government for denying this right to people in Gaza, which thanks to the US and Israel has become “a mass death trap” (per NYT). The moral stain will be indelible.”

+ As Hurricane Milton raged across the Gulf, Bobby Lindamood, mayor of Colleyville, Texas, suggested nuking the hurricane to “stop its rotation.”

+++

+ Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf on the coming collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation currents:  “So my risk assessment has really changed. I am now very concerned that we may push Amoc over this tipping point in the next decades. If you ask me my gut feeling, I would say the risk that we cross the tipping point this century is about 50/50.”

+ A new study in Nature reveals that climate change was a key driver behind the extreme #drought in Europe in 2022. The paper reports that human-induced global warming contributed to 31% of the intensity, with 14–41% of such contribution due to warming-driven soil drying that occurred before 2022.

+ Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s top climate scientist, said, “We are going to get to 1.5 degrees a little faster than we anticipated even four years ago. I think this year it’s about 50-50 whether we will reach 1.5 degrees in the [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies] temperature record.”

Flooding in Roswell, NM. Image: Still from a video on X.

+ On the historic rain event in Roswell, New Mexico, on Sunday: A total of 5.78″ of rain, making it Roswell’s wettest day ever. This is 1/2 their average yearly rain (11.63″).  2.70″ was recorded in one hour between 8 and 9 PM, more than the average for October, November, and December (2.34”).

+ Electric Vehicle Growth Rates for 2024

China: +32%
USA: +9%
Europe: +2% (dragged down by Germany)
Germany: -16% (following the end of an incentive program)
Japan: -12%

+ China buys more EVs than all other markets combined.

+  Development Reimagined estimates that China could install “more than 224GW of clean energy in Africa by 2030, meaning its participation in Africa’s energy transition will be crucial for the continent to meet its target of 300GW by 2030.”

+ An analysis in Nature: Communications Earth & Environment finds that global sea-level rise has doubled in the last 30 years: “Global mean sea level rise amounted to 4.5 mm per year as a result of #warming oceans and melting land ice, more than twice the rate of 2.1 mm/year observed at the start of satellite data in 1993.”

+ Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.

+ The world’s natural carbon sinks are beginning to fail: “In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil–as a net category–absorbed almost no carbon.”

+ The institution of flat-rate train tickets reduced Germany’s transportation emissions by five percent in their first year of use.

+ An analysis by First Street reveals that financial losses from hurricanes are rising mainly because Americans continue to build in high-risk zones and floodplains, especially in Florida: “Nationally, 290,000 new properties were built in high-risk flood areas from 2019 through 2023, almost one in five of the 1.6 million built in total during that period.”

+ It now requires about 1/8th as much silicon to make a single solar panel as 20 years ago.

+ Over the last 50 years, global wildlife populations have fallen by nearly three-quarters. The sharpest declines have occurred in the Caribbean and Latin America, where wildlife populations have collapsed by as much as 95 percent since 1974.

+ About 77% of the world’s coral reef area has experienced “bleaching-level heat stress” between Jan. 1, 2023, and Oct. 10 of this year.

+ According to the Financial Times, “Over the past five years, renewable energy generation has grown at a compound annual rate of 23 percent in the global south, versus 11 percent in the world’s richest economies.”

+ A study in Science concludes that human-driven extinctions of hundreds of bird species over the past 130,000 years have “significantly reduced avian functional diversity and led to the loss of around 3 billion years of unique evolutionary history.”

November

+ Valencia, Spain experienced 491.2 mm of rain in 8 hours.  The average annual precipitation is less than 454 mm. The floods have killed more than 158 people with nearly 2000 still missing.

2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record, with temperatures above the 1.5C warming threshold.

+ Carbon dioxide concentration has increased by more than 10% in just two decades, reports the World Meteorological Organization…

According to Oxfam, around $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for.

+ In a span of only two decades, India lost one-fifth of its native wildlife species.

+ Amazon is funding the construction of four nuclear reactors along the Columbia River to power its AI data processing plants. They never asked us if we wanted AI, never mind the nuclear reactors needed to power it…

+++

The Earth endured its second warmest October in the last 175 years and is on its way to its warmest year on record.

+ Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, which is hosting the latest global climate conference (CO29), called reports of his country’s soaring carbon emissions “fake news” and said that nations should not be blamed for developing and using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, which Aliyev said were “God’s gifts.” At least Aliyev showed up, unlike some of the leaders of the world’s biggest emitters, including Biden, Macron and Modi.

+ Mark this ignominious distinction down on the Biden-Harris legacy: Despite the lofty pledges by Western nations at COP28 last year, global carbon emissions have hit new highs, and there is no sign of a transition away from fossil fuels.

+ According to a new study in Nature, the emissions from private flights by rich people increased by 46% between 2019 and 2023: 70% of these flights came from the US, and half were shorter than 500 kilometers–in other words, the Democrats’ new base…

+++

Biden in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo: White House.

+ When Biden showed up in Amazonia this week bragging about how he’d proved that you could maximize oil production and still protect the environment, his message was somewhat undermined by the fact that he looked like the leader of a Central American death squad, who had been trained in techniques of mass-killing at the School of the Americas…

+ Life expectancy in Delhi is almost 12 years shorter on average than it would be if the air quality met WHO standards: “In several areas of the city, pollution levels were more than 50 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended safe limit.”

+ Carbon Brief has put together an interactive summary of 750 extreme weather events, documenting the probable contribution of global warming. Finding: “74% were made more likely or severe because of climate change.”

+ According to the latest USDA survey, over 30% of California’s dairy herds are confirmed to be infected with H5N1 avian influenza. This situation is going to get much worse. Over to you, RFK, Jr.: An analysis of the avian flu virus taken from a hospitalized teenager in Vancouver, Canada, shows mutations that could help the virus spread more easily in humans.

+ The Biden administration has retreated from its previous position that a UN treaty should cap global plastic production. Environmental groups have characterized the reversal as “absolutely devastating.”

+ Indonesia, one of the planet’s most rapacious coal consumers, vowed this week to retire all of its currently operating coal plants within the next 15 years.

+ Poll of Canadians on climate change…

“Global warming is…”

Fact/caused by humans: 61%
Fact/caused by nature: 25%
Not real: 10%

December

+ November 2024 was the second warmest November on record in the Copernicus ERA5 dataset, at 1.62C above preindustrial levels. It was second only to November 2023, which was 1.75C above preindustrial.

+ A new study reported in Oceanographic Magazine suggests that plankton may not survive global warming. The effects on the oceans’ biotic life are described as “devasting.”

+ Once an infrequent event, there is now an open water passage in the Arctic Ocean for nearly 40 days a year.

+ The small North Carolina town of Carrboro (pop. 21,103) has launched the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility. The suit alleges that Duke Energy has run a decades-long ‘deception campaign’ about fossil fuels.

+ Brazil has become the sixth nation in the World to surpass the 50 GW mark in solar energy production. Solar now provides 20% of Brazil’s electricity. This year alone, 189 solar energy plants were built.

+ Instead of setting aside more acreage for threatened wildlife in advance of the rapacious team that will soon be running the Interior Department, Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, Deb Halland, announced last week she’s cutting the critical habitat protection for the imperiled Canada Lynx by more than 88 percent in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Mike Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies: “It appears that the FWS’ strategy is to cause lynx to go extinct in the lower 48 states so they no longer have to pretend to protect habitat for lynx.”

+ There are now more than 280 million electric bikes and mopeds, which are reducing carbon emissions and the demand for oil by more than all other electric vehicles combined.

+++

+ A new assessment published in Environmental Research estimates that all regions on the planet will hit the 1.5 °C warning threshold by 2040 or earlier and that 31 out of 34 regions will reach the 2.0 °C threshold by 2040. For 3.0 °C, 26 out of 34 regions are predicted to reach the threshold by 2060.

+ Once one of the planet’s top carbon sinks, the Arctic is becoming a carbon emitter as its permafrost melts.

+ According to a new study published in Science, warming ocean waters killed about half of the common murres off Alaska’s coast (more than four million birds) and have shown no signs of recovery.

+ Carbon markets don’t work to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the damning conclusion of a new report published in Nature. Even so, the World Bank, US Treasury, IMF and the UN keep pushing them as a decarbonizing solution for the Global South.

+ The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean may arrive before 2030.

+ According to a new report from the UN, more than three-quarters (77.6%) of Earth’s surface has become permanently drier in the last 30 years.

+ The nine largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2017, including three of the five deadliest.

+ Big Tech’s AI boom is generating a natural gas infrastructure boom. Scott Strazik, the CEO of GE Vernova, maker of gas turbines, told investors: ” “They’re not building those data centers with an assumption for anything other than 24/7 power. Gas is well suited for that…I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now.”

+ Meanwhile, Alberta is trying to lure tech companies to build huge, power-hungry AI data centers in the province and run them on natural gas instead of solar or hydro. This will give the oil and gas industry a fresh market for its planet-killing product.

+ The persistent drought in Brazil has driven the price of Arabica coffee to a record high, topping the peak set in 1977.

+ The journal Nature reported that “On 18 November this year, Delhi’s Air Quality Index soared to 1,700 — far exceeding the safe limit of 50 set by the World Health Organization (WHO). Lahore in Pakistan had recorded a value of 1,100 a few days earlier.”

+ Global oil and gas production has increased by 14% since 2013.

+ A study from U-Mass Amherst found that the US is the top beneficiary of the recent surge in global fossil fuel prices, capturing $301 billion in profit and overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.

From “Distributional implications and share ownership of record oil and gas profits.”

+ Tropical cyclone Cyclone Chido, a Category 4 storm which roared across the French territory of Mayotte off the coast of Mozambique on December 15, flattening entire villages, may have killed TENS of thousands of people.

+ With minimum night temperatures above 31 C (87.8 F) in the Canary Islands and 29.6 (85.3) in Puerto de La Cruz, Tenerife, December 15 was the hottest December night ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere.

+ For Christmas week, Hudson Bay is forecast to be +20°C (68°F) warmer than the 1979-2000 average.

+ Average CO2 level for 2024: 422.5, a new record.

The post Hell and High Water: the Year in Climate Chaos appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Lake Toronto in central south Chihuahua. If you look closely you can see the water line on the embankment and just how far it’s gone down. Photo: Todd Miller.

When I first meet the fisherman Gerardo Delgado, he is sitting in his boat, surrounded by pelicans, off the shore of Lake Toronto, in central south Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps the pelicans are waiting for Delgado to toss a fillet, but his catch is, yet again, meager. In the last couple of years, it’s been hard to make a living from fishing on the lake. I am with another fisherman, Alonso Montañes, and we approach Delgado on a motorboat.

Across the lake I can see Delgado’s town, El Toro, on top of a large embankment, about two stories high. Montañes tells me the embankment used to be the floor of the lake, which once reached the houses of El Toro. The lake—which is a reservoir created when the Boquilla Dam was constructed in 1916—is quickly receding. It is at 15 percent of its capacity, Montañes tells me. Never has it been so low.

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado shows me his catch on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller).

Delgado is in a blue motorboat. I ask how many fish he has caught, and he shows me his plastic orange container with about five fillets scrunched in a corner. “This will probably earn me 60 pesos,” he tells me, adding that so far today, after about six hours, he has spent 350 pesos on gas. “So you are going to lose money?” I ask. “Every day,” he says.

Two years ago, Delgado tells me, El Toro’s community well went dry. Now to get water, they have to buy it from expensive “pipa” trucks that come from out of town. There used to be 40 families in El Toro. Now there are 17. Two of Delgado’s sisters are already in the United States.

It takes a bit for it to set in, but I finally realize that I am in a climate-change hot spot. I’m reminded of Marinduque, Philippines, which I visited in 2015. There, I saw water lapping into a destroyed house like it was a carcass. For me, in that moment, climate change went from abstract to raw and real. On Lake Toronto there is also this palpable sense of violence with the drought. Throughout the day, as we cruise the lake, Montañes tells me an “ecocide” is happening before our very eyes.

Fisherman Alonso Montañes driving his boat on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.

I am there because I am working on a book about climate change, water, and the border. And being there on the cusp of 2025 is significant for two reasons. One, of course, is the change in presidential power in the United States and the uncertainty that brings. But also 2025 is the year that Mexico, as stipulated by a 1944 treaty, is obligated to pay a water debt to the United States. Every five years Mexico has to pay the United States 1.75 million acre-feet of water, and in March it had supplied only 382,000. Farmers in Texas’s faraway Rio Grande Valley also depend on this reservoir’s water, which will flow north in the Rio Conchos and become the Rio Grande after Presidio, Texas. In other words, on Lake Toronto we are floating on the water that will become the U.S.-Mexico border. In May, Texas congresswoman Monica de la Cruz stood before the U.S. House and said, “We need to use every tool that we have available to force Mexico to abide by the treaty. We want our water. We demand our water!”

“Está cabrón,” another fisherman named Jesús Chávez tells me on the shores of Lake Toronto, a few miles from where Delgado was. He is not referring to de la Cruz’s words, nor to the United States’ demands. He is referring to having caught “nothing” after putting out his nets and traps the night before. At his feet are discarded watermelon rinds. He tried to grow the crop to supplement his income but couldn’t sell it for a good price. “Do you want a slice?” he asks me.

“Está cabrón,” he tells me as I eat the watermelon, meaning “it’s fucked up.” “Should be the title of your book.”

Fisherman Jesús Chávez on the shores of Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.

Later at dusk in the small town of Camargo, where I am staying, I get a coffee at a small stand in the town’s central plaza and sit on a wrought-iron bench. All around are holiday lights. All around are people out and about, kids on scooters and tricycles. I see Christmas trees decorated with large ornaments in the storefronts. December into the holidays is my favorite time of the year. Even with a dire forecast for next year, life always slows down, becomes more reflective, more present. There are indeed many things to worry about. But there is something about this plaza here in Mexico, where I can find a calm joy, at least for now.

As I sit, I read the late Irish poet John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. I think about my day on the water as the poet contends that the violation of beauty is a fundamental element of today’s global crisis. “When we awaken to the call of beauty,” O’Donohue writes, “we become aware of new ways of being in the world.” Soon it is dusk, and the sky has clouds blazing across it, and there are even a few surprising raindrops. Across from me a group of women have gathered, two sitting on another wrought-iron bench, but several others have brought chairs from their homes as if the plaza were their living room. I come to understand, over the next few days, that this is a nightly ritual. Each time I see it, I think how much I love Mexico. And how imperative it is to think about things globally, not territorially, especially when it comes to environmental chaos.

Maybe 2025 could be the year to discard artificial borders—not necessarily the physical, militarized ones, which won’t be budging for a while, but the more easily movable ones, the psychological ones. Maybe 2025 could be a year that focuses on interconnectedness between people and peoples—like underground mycelia networks—rather than the brute territorial divisiveness that will surely emanate from Washington. I am, indeed, searching for new ways of being.

The Rio Conchos in central south Chihuahua. It is feared that the river will dry up considerably in 2025 threatening the water supply of the town of Camargo. Photo: Todd Miller.

The next day I visit a rancho. It consists mainly of a pecan grove, but also has a drying alfalfa field. There, I meet with a farmer named Miguel. “What do you think about the incoming president?” he asks, referring, of course, to Donald Trump. At this point we have been talking for about 15 minutes. We are walking under the pecan trees on dry cracked soil near Camargo. The soil tells the story of 2024: it hasn’t rained. There isn’t enough water in the reservoir to irrigate this year, and Miguel knows this.

We are just a few miles away from the Boquilla Dam, which was commandeeredby the Mexican military in 2020. The military tried to open the valves to pay the United States with what was going to be irrigation water. What resulted was a serious water battle. Thousands of farmers converged around the dam and, after many clashes, forced the military out. The farmers shut down the valves. This time, when I ask if people thought the military would come for the water again, the response has been “what water?”

Miguel walks through the pecan trees. Photo: Todd Miller.

Miguel tells me he asked about Trump because before he came to this farm 15 years ago (he is an employee), he had lived in the United States for decades. He worked the corn harvests near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He picked grapes and chiles. If there is no water to irrigate here, Miguel tells me, there could be a lot of migration north. And if there is a mass deportation, he tells me, “there’s going to be a lot of problems.” He goes on, “I know because I worked the fields there. What are they going to do with the fields? The agriculture? Undocumented people are the ones who work there. Are they going to deport them here?”

And here, he says, “va a correr sangre antes de correr agua”: blood will flow before water does.

He asks what I think they should do, since I come here commissioned by the United States. I tell him I am not commissioned by the United States; I’m an independent journalist. I tell him I came here because the world seems to be at a crossroads, a crucial moment, and things like borders and water are at the center of that. I think about Alonso Montañes, on Lake Toronto, Gerardo Delgado showing me his meager catch, and Jesús Chávez saying “está cabrón.” I think about the women in the central plaza meeting up every night, even as the threat of water running out in Camargo looms for 2025. Would these people be the guides to a new way of being? I think that’s likely. That’s why I’m here, I tell Miguel. That’s why I’m talking to you, because you are the person who knows.

This originally appeared in The Border Chronicle.

The post “Está Cabrón”: An End-of-Year Reflection on a World at the Crossroads appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping in Woodside, California, November 15, 2023. Photo: US State Department.

U.S. presidents nearing the end of theIr terms typically try to resolve policy challenges at the last minute in order to bolster their legacies.  For President Bill Clinton, it was a belated effort to solve the North Korean problem, which received insufficient attention during his eight years in the White House.  For President George W. Bush, it was a belated attempt to improve the bilateral relationship with Russia, but there was too much personal animosity between Bush and President Vladimir Putin because of the expansion of NATO.  For President Barack Obama, the Middle East became central to the policy process, but the region was out of control and no Democratic administration ever puts pressure on Israel to achieve stability in the area.

President Joe Biden is no exception to the rule regarding late-stage policymaking in extremely difficult areas, and he has picked the most difficult and important challenge of all: the bilateral relationship with China.  Unfortunately, Biden and his national security team believe they can “contain” China; they can’t.  The U.S.-China relationship is important in all policy areas: political, economic, environmental, and military.  The United States and China have the two largest economies in the world, and are the world’s two greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses.  China leads the world in the production of solar cells and panels, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles; the United States is far behind in these areas and the promotion of increased tariffs on these items will not help the deteriorating environmental situation.  The environmental challenge cannot be resolved without Sino-American cooperation.

The United States has tried to limit China’s access to the most advanced types of semiconductors because of national security concerns, but China has successfully produced older types of semiconductor chips that are essential for smartphones, cars, telecommunications networks, and weaponry.  China has been subsidizing these chips, and it appears that Washington’s sanctions and tariffs have only forced the Chinese to become more self-sufficient.  According to the New York Times, China is projected to add half of the world’s new factory capacity for legacy chips in the next several years.  China’s overall manufacturing capabilities exceed the manufacturing output of the United States, all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

Biden’s feckless efforts to “contain” China include the Federal Communications Commission’s revocation of all licenses for China Telecom American to provide ordinary phone services in the United States, which did nothing to stop Beijing from placing malicious code in the electric grid and water and gas pipeline networks in the United States.  Even worse, Chinese hackers have worked their way into the networks of major U.S. telecommunications firms, including the two largest, Verizon and AT&T.  There is little discussion of U.S. efforts to exploit weaknesses in China’s telecommunications systems, which former N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden exposed ten years ago.

The most ludicrous aspect of the Sino-American Cold War is the effort to shut down the TikTok social media platform unless the company divests itself from Chinese ownership.  The Supreme Court actually added a special hearing to its calendar for oral argument.  The Cold War has gotten so intense that the United States seems prepared to drop its insistence on access to a social media cite that would mean dropping its commitment to the First Amendment and denying access to 170 million Americans, including most of my 13 grandchildren who believe the U.S. threat is bananas.

The incoming Trump administration probably will not lead to any improvement in Sino-American relations in view of Trump’s stocking the bureaucratic shelves with fervent “China Hawks.”  Trump and his national security team, including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and Mike Waltz, favor greater tariffs and sanctions against China, although China’s share of the world economy is shrinking in view of restrictions imposed during the COVID crisis as well as the collapse of the property sector in China.  If Trump pursues a policy of economic disruption, China will certainly reciprocate.  Moreover, Trump and his minions do not believe there is are environmental and energy problems that demand a workable relationship with Beijing.

An arms race will most likely be the immediate outcome of any worsening in Sino-American relations.  The United States is committed to a long-term modernization of its strategic forces, and China is maintaining rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal.  The United States has 1,550 strategic weapons deployed under the START agreement that expires in 2026.  The Pentagon believes that China will have 1,000 strategic warheads by 2030, but the Pentagon is also known for worst-case sensitive intelligence issues.  The force moderation programs of the United States, China, and Russia must be addressed.  It’s long past time to place arms control and disarmament at the top of the superpower agenda.

Politicians and pundits are devoting too much attention to the so-called “Quartet of Chaos” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea), and not enough time to the Sino-American bilateral relationship.  Trump and his appointees thus far are too preoccupied with obtuse notions of a “woke” Pentagon as well as with the potential use of the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty American troops into the streets.  Meanwhile, the traditional geopolitical problems associated with Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific are worsening in terms of U.S. interests.

For far too long, the United States has been wasting precious budgetary resources on old-fashioned military policies that have brought no advantages to the American people.  Our national security policies have been ineffectual and irrelevant to the genuine threats we face today regarding energy and the environment.  There is little discussion or attention given to the commonality we face with China on these national security issues.

The post US China Policy: Too Late, Too Little to Offer appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, news coverage by the most prominent US outlets of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants has provided more propaganda than information, leaving the public bereft of even the most fundamental facts. Corporate media have eschewed narratives necessary for understanding the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians and the long genesis of the conflict, what historian Rashid Khalidi has called The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Media bias in favor of Israel may have been obvious from the start, but how do we identify it and verify—or dispute—the claims made in corporate news coverage? Doing so involves examination of what Peter Phillips, in 2002, called News Abuse, news coverage of genuinely important stories that, nevertheless, obscures or distorts those stories’ most important points. As the director of Project Censored at the time, Phillips recognized the need to look closely at news about the most serious topics in order to identify specific ways that coverage of them deflects criticism of the status quo and ultimately reinforces systems of injustice. Tracking patterns of language use and framing in the corporate news media’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza exposes how that coverage exemplifies what Project Censored means by news abuse.

Examining three of the most influential US newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—Adam Johnson and Othman Ali of The Intercept analyzed more than 1,100 articles from the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza. They identified the key terms used by the papers to describe those killed. In addition, they recorded the context of those terms’ use. They found that the papers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths, which were reported sixteen times more frequently than those of Palestinians. Of course, this was a complete reversal of the actual proportions of Israeli and Palestinian casualties, with much larger numbers of Palestinians killed than Israelis. This slanted coverage also explains the public’s misunderstanding of the disproportionate nature of the killing.

Moreover, the papers reserved outrage and apathy for Israeli casualties. Israeli victims were “slaughtered” and “massacred” by Hamas, and their deaths were “horrific.” But Palestinian victims were reported without emotion, often in the language of abstract numbers, through body counts. In addition, Palestinians were rarely “killed” and certainly never “murdered.” Most often, they simply “died,” and journalists infrequently identified the Israeli military as the perpetrator.

These findings were confirmed in another content analysis done by University of California researcher Holly Jackson, who also cited the marked difference in newspaper language and tone. One murdered Palestinian was referred to as the “bloodied corpse of a presumed terrorist.” By contrast, Israeli victims were humanized, frequently named, and described in relationship to family members and professions, while Palestinians remained anonymous. Overall, research has found that newspaper reporting heavily favored Israel.

Only later would evidence emerge that the double standard in coverage at the New York Times was produced by design. In April 2024, The Intercept published an internal memo leaked by a Times journalist that confirmed the paper had been directing journalists to blatantly skew reporting on Gaza. Written by Standards Editor Susan Wessling, with the help of International Editor Philip Pan and their deputies, the New York Times memo laid out rules listing which words were to be used and which were not acceptable. Staff frequently updated these directives. The words “carnage,” “slaughter,” and “massacre” were deemed too emotive for reporting on Palestinians deaths. Such terms, the memo advised, were used to “convey more emotion than information.”

Leadership at the New York Times couched the rules as the best way to present the conflict fairly, but what the list exposed, instead, was the paper’s lack of fairness and egregious imbalances in its coverage. Looking more closely at the Times’s reporting between October 7 and November 14, the newspaper used the word “massacre” fifty-three times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians but only once to refer to Palestinians killed by Israel. The word slaughter is another example, used to describe Palestinian attacks on Israelis, but not Palestinians killed by the IDF, by a ratio of 22 to 1. By that time, nearly fifteen thousand Palestinians had perished from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera reported. In the “Cruelty of Language,” journalist Ramzy Baroud lamented the lost “humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians” who did not figure in the “calculating” agendas of the US news media.

A separate study produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) examined bias in use of terms such as “brutal” and “terrorist” in coverage by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. For example, FAIR found that reporters overwhelmingly used “brutal” to describe violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. By doing so, FAIR reported, journalists at those prominent newspapers “helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism.”

Previously, in January 2024, a CNN directive had also been leaked to The Intercept. This one revealed the role Israel Defense Forces (IDF) played in shaping the US network’s coverage of the IDF’s war on Gaza. The internal CNN directive disclosed that all the network’s news on Gaza and Israel was being sent to CNN’s Jerusalem bureau, where it was being shaped by IDF personnel. Quoting a CNN staff member who called it “journalistic malpractice” (another term used for News Abuse), the Guardian wrote that CNN was “facing a backlash from its own staff ” over the policies that had led to “a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda” and the silencing of Palestinian voices and perspectives in the network’s coverage of Gaza. Pressure from the top had resulted in the uncritical acceptance of Israeli claims and a “pro-Israel slant” in coverage.

Though one CNN spokesperson downplayed the revelations, asserting that CNN “does not share news copy with the censor” and that its interactions with the IDF were “minimal,” another CNN staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that “every single Israel-Palestine-related line” was subjected to approval from the Jerusalem bureau. In the aftermath of October 7, CNN also hired a soldier from the official IDF Spokesperson Unit to assist in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, The Intercept reported. The terms “war crime” and “genocide” were considered “taboo,” and reporters were under intense pressure to question anything they learned from Palestinian sources. As David Lindsay, CNN’s director of news standards and practices, told journalists in a November 2 memo, “Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda . . . We should be careful not to give it a platform.”

Additionally, as civilians were killed indiscriminately by Israeli saturation bombing, the IDF insisted that CNN report Israeli bombs as “blasts” attributed to nobody until the Israeli military weighed in “to either accept or deny responsibility.” Across the media spectrum, newspapers and broadcasters used the passive voice to conceal where the bombs were coming from and who was dropping them. These revelations confirmed what independent journalists and many others had noticed—that Israel was controlling the war’s narrative, especially as it was being presented to the American public by the nation’s most prominent news outlets. As Professor Sunny Singh at London Metropolitan University pointed out, “Western media—not just CNN—has been pushing Israeli propaganda all through” Israel’s attacks.

By sharp contrast, international and independent news outlets treated a wider range of sources as newsworthy. After Israeli forces bombed the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023, for example, Al Jazeera and Common Dreams quoted Aicha Elbasri, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies, who said, “What we are watching today is one of the darkest hours of our time . . . We are watching genocide live.”

In late December, as South Africa was filing charges at the ICJ in the Hague, the New York Times bolstered its atrocity reporting, publishing a piece filled with lurid descriptions and what it called evidence of systematic, mass sexual violence by Hamas on October 7. The Times immediately came under intense scrutiny, which has developed into sustained criticism. In addition to its reliance on an organization called ZAKA, widely exposed as one of Israel’s official propaganda sources, the piece titled “Screams without Words . . .” was called a “disgraceful ‘investigation’” and shamed for claiming to provide readers with definitive evidence while actually offering no evidence at all of mass rape in a widely circulated petition issued by Speak Up, an Egyptian feminist organization. But when investigative journalists at The Intercept revealed that one of the three authors of the New York Times report, Anat Schwartz, was a former Israeli Air Force intelligence official with little journalistic experience who had liked a social media post calling for Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse,” the piece was met with internal newsroom criticism at the Times that shook up its editorial staff.

Criticism of the story from internal and external sources soon reached a fever pitch, with critics high- lighting major discrepancies in the reporting. Even a Times editorial staffer admitted that “basic standards” had not been applied to the story and it “deserved more fact-checking.” With no public editor since 2017, the paper remained silent. But by April 30, 2024, scholars and professors across the country wrote an open letter demanding that the Times “immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

A fundamental problem with the Times’s mass rape story—and, more generally, most corporate coverage of Gaza—was the unquestioned acceptance of the original Israeli narrative of October 7. But the narrative began to unravel soon after October 7, when investigative reporters uncovered evidence from victim testimony revealing that the Israeli army killed many of its own citizens. During the Hamas attack, the commander of the base at Erez called in an airstrike on his own position. Further, Yasmin Porat, the Kibbutz Be’eri survivor, told the Israeli state broadcaster Kan that when Israeli special forces arrived, “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages . . . There was very, very heavy crossfire.” As Hamas operatives fled with Israeli hostages, many Israelis were killed by fire from Israeli helicopters. As Gareth Porter wrote, “No one knows how many were killed by each side, but the 28 Israeli helicopters were firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to guide their shooting.”

Additionally, many of those killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7 were “soldiers or armed police on active duty, not civilians,” Mnar Adley reported for MintPress News. And as Ramzy Baroud pointed out, Western media rarely reported that many of those “slaughtered” by Hamas had been directly involved in the Israeli siege and previous massacres in Gaza. Such actions are consistent with an Israeli military practice termed the Hannibal Directive, which does not spare any Israeli who might be taken hostage by the enemy. As Colonel Nof Erez told Haaretz, the Hannibal Directive “was apparently applied,” and October 7 was “a mass Hannibal.”

Reviewing establishment media coverage, Chris Hedges observed in March 2024, “The start of Operation of Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 was accompanied by a deluge of Israeli propaganda.^” Claims of beheaded babies, mass rape, and other heinous atrocities allegedly committed by Hamas “circulated far and wide,” Hedges noted. Months later, experts have debunked the most outrageous claims, but the damage has already been done. Israel’s propaganda campaign provided cover for Israel in Gaza, and US corporate media have done similarly, making them complicit in these crimes. The egregiously imbalanced coverage of the genocide stands as a major indictment of US establishment media.

Adapted from State of the Free Press 2025, edited by Mickey Huff, Shealeigh Voitl, and Andy Lee Roth, and published on December 3, 2024, by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

The post How the Establishment Press Bolster Genocide: News Abuse in Corporate News Coverage of Israel’s Assault on Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: K. Kendall – CC BY 2.0

Sometime in the 1970s, probably at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area, I heard Audre Lorde read a poem.  I don’t remember the poem, but do remember her reading of it demanded my attention.  I was slightly familiar with her work up to then, mostly because of my female friends, gay and straight, whose bookshelves often included a couple of her books.  In addition, the Kitchen Table Press, which she helped found, was an inspiration to my friends and I who hoped to write and publish something ourselves someday.  The two books of Lorde’s I was most familiar with were From a Land Where Other People Live and New York Head Shop and Museum.  The former was nominated for a National Book Award and the second had an intriguing title with poems that demanded both an intellectual and emotional reaction.

Lorde’s place in the book of American letters was long ago assured.  Despite her insistence on her identification as a lesbian and a Black woman, the power of her work and its ultimately universal nature guaranteed that her place would not be denied.  At the time of Lorde’s decision to identify as such, doing so was not just an act of militancy, it was also a potential death knoll for one’s career in the field of letters. Lorde wasn’t just Black, she was also a woman who defined herself as a lesbian; all of this at a time when being Black was still reason enough for academia and the world of writers and publishers to shut one out.  God forbid one also came out as a gay person of any gender.  The latter identity caused waves and created anger among quite a few of her Black male colleagues, whose understanding of gender and sexuality did not include lesbians at the time.

There’s a new biography of Lorde out in the world.  Titled Survival is a Promise:The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, it is by no means a conventional biography.  Yes, Lorde’s life—from her childhood that began in Harlem in 1934 to her death in St. Croix in 1992—is chronicled, albeit not in a linear or even traditional sense.  The author of the book, Alexis Pauline Gumbo, is a poet, author and (as she writes in her bio at the book’s end) a queer Black feminist love evangelist.  The text itself combines those impulses and lifework with Lorde’s life work, thereby creating a piece of poetic prose that brings to life Audre Lorde’s vitality, creative spirit, love of the planet earth and its inhabitants.  It is also a description of her anger at those who would destroy those things and her approach to dealing with those phenomena and the humans behind them.  As the title suggests, the text is also about Lorde’s approach and attitude towards survival: as a Black woman, as a lesbian, as an antiwar and anti-racist and on a very personal level, as a person with cancer.

The eternal life referred to is a reference to that life almost every human aspires: to be remembered after one leaves their physical body.  That is a reason we have children, whether we are conscious of that fact at the moment of birth or not.  It is certainly the reason artists create art, musicians create music and writers write—all in the slight hope some part of what we create will carry on into history.  Ideally, the works we create will do more than be a mark of time or a notation.  In addition, one hopes they will effect the human consciousness going forward.  It is this reviewer’s understanding of this biography that the author Gumbo believes Audre Lorde has done (and continues to do) this very thing.

The reader is welcomed into Lorde’s life as uncovered by her biographer.  Her father who was distant, died when Audre was nineteen and uncertain how to express his love.  Her mother whose sternness was her means of survival.  A librarian in the public library branch in Harlem whose mentoring and encouragement of Audre’s reading and writing when she was young. Lorde’s first crush and Lorde’s lovers.  Her successes and frustrations, from the first science fiction story published in Seventeen magazine while she was in high school to the difficulties being published in the white-dominated world of Hunter College and beyond.  Then there are the biographer Gumbo’s contemplations of Lorde’s works and her emotions.  The latter are accompanied by insights drawn from Gumbo’s life and understanding.  The images she draws are reminiscent of an impressionist painting filled with light that force the viewer to perceive the shadows—shadows that seem to make the light possible.

Survival is a Promise is a work of prosaic prowess.  Poetic in its sensibilities, it tells a tale of a life, a time, a heart, a mind and a soul.  As I read it, I entered into a reality that was clearly set in the lifespan, surroundings and books of Audre Lorde; it was also something that included her love of the earth’s mysteries, her hopes and fears for humanity and her determination to survive the obstacles we exist with.  Reading Survival is a Promise is a sublime experience.

The post Poetry and Revolution: Audre Lorde’s Prayers to the World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It has become background noise. We know it is happening, but we can almost forget that it continues at a barbaric rate. The United Nations deputy special coordinator for Palestine, Muhannad Hadi, released a statement on December 13, 2024, that simply makes no sense: “I am very concerned about the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Gaza.” How can anything deteriorate in Gaza? Isn’t the situation as bad as it could get, the genocidal war of the Israelis grinding on?

If you are paying attention, you will find that every day there are more and more reports of bombing in northern Gaza. These bombings pulverize entire buildings and massacre entire families. On December 17, the commissioner-general of the UN Palestinian Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini put the situation clearest: “We are getting out of words to describe the situation in Gaza…. My colleagues when they come back, they basically describe a post-apocalyptic environment, and people are just living among [garbage], sewage water, in the rubble, and struggling because they are confronted on a daily basis with death, hunger, and disease.”

Dead Bodies

The day before Hadi made his statement, an Israeli airstrike hit a housing development in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed large numbers of the al-Sheikh Ali family. It has become part of counting the death toll to track the elimination of entire families by Israeli bombs. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report from October 2024 showed that 3,500 Palestinian families in Gaza “have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Of these, 365 families have lost more than 10 members, while over 2,750 families have lost at least three.” These numbers will need to be updated. The Euro-Med report is called De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order.

On December 11, 2024, before this round of bombardments and killings, a startling press briefing was given by Mounir al-Bursh (director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health) and Mahmoud Basal (spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense Agency). Al-Bursh said that the Israeli troops fired on ambulances and prevented rescue workers from getting to the buildings to recover the injured and the dead. As a result, he said, “bodies are left in the streets and are eaten by dogs.” Basal, meanwhile, said that many of the injured were dying under the rubble because the rescue teams no longer had regular access to the bombed buildings and did not have the equipment to save people. This means that the Israelis are not only bombing residential areas and killing unarmed civilians, but they are also preventing the injured from being rescued and the dead from an honorable burial. Journalist Hossam Shabat, reporting from northern Gaza, wrote, “Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead, and now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”

Reports

Over the past few months, two reports have been published whose honesty enables the reader to feel the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.

First, in October 2024, the remarkable UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, published her 32-page report for the UN General Assembly. Her finding is clear: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated, and prosecuted.” The legal case for the end not only of genocide but its basis, the occupation, is made very strongly. Anyone who reads Albanese’s report with an open mind will come to that conclusion.

Second, in December, Amnesty International released a 296-page documentcalled You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. The most painful section to read is the evidence presented clinically by Amnesty of the genocidal words of Israeli officials that are then enacted by their soldiers. It is worth reading a few sentences from the Amnesty report:

Amnesty International analyzed 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, high-ranking military officers, and members of the Knesset made between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024] which dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them. Of these, it identified 22 statements that were specifically made by members of Israel’s war and security cabinets, who included Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Minister of Defense Gallant and other government ministers, by [high-ranking] military officers and by Israel’s president between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024]. These statements appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts.

Also, the language used by Israeli officials was frequently repeated, including by soldiers in Gaza, apparently explaining the rationale for their [behavior]. This is evidenced by Amnesty International’s analysis of 62 videos, audio recordings, and photographs posted online showing Israeli soldiers in which they made calls for the destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.

For example, before the Israeli offensive on Rafah, Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich said at a public event, “There are no jobs half done. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, destruction! Blot out the memory of [the people of] Amalek from under heaven.” This genocidal language was then replicated on the ground. Amnesty’s report affirms strongly that there is no other way to understand the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza than as a genocide.

Rascal Children

The Ministry of Health in Gaza says that since the genocide began, the Israelis have killed at least 45,059 Palestinians. Of them, at least 17,000 are children. Israel and its Western allies have spent considerable funds to deny these numbers. The right-wing Henry Jackson Society (based in the United Kingdom) has published a 40-page report that belongs in a juvenile debate. To complain about this or that individual case and not to see the extent of the bombardment and destruction, as revealed by reputed human rights organizations, is disingenuous. They would like to justify the killing of children by their dispute over statistics.

In 2014, during a previous terrible bombing of Gaza by the Israelis, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote about the children being killed then. Then, the Israelis killed 551 children, as recorded by the official UN inquiry. This time the number is 30 times as high and climbing. No debate about the exact numbers will change that.

Oh, rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back—
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…

The post The Genocide Drags On appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi, 1504.Uffizi, Florence. (public domain)

Christmas is a dangerous time, for it threatens social instability, political disorder, even revolution. At the culmination of the story, kings kneel before a helpless baby; the powerful pay tribute to the seemingly powerless. To understand the destabilizing potency of Christmas, one has only to recall Andreas Karlstadt, an iconoclast in the literal sense, shouting the words of institution in German—not Latin— and offering both the communion cup and the wafer to the trembling hands and lips of the unconfessed laity in Wittenberg on December 25, 1521, in the first years of the Lutheran Reformation.

Martin Luther’s 1522 sermon on the Epiphany can be read as part of his larger project to shore up the political order threatened by the radicalism of Karlstadt and others. In Luther’s view, the heavenly king had not come to earth in order to topple the political order, even though the tyrannical Herod and those invested in his authority misinterpreted the divine birth as a direct threat. Luther’s account of the Epiphany relies on his Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, which posits one realm ruled by God and the other subservient to worldly regimes. But Luther couldn’t help but be attuned to the restive spirit of Christmas, acknowledging that Herod “feared that an insurrection would drive him from his kingdom.” The great insurgency unleashed by the Reformation, the Peasants’ War of 1524-5, was itself propelled by the centrifugal social forces Karlstadt had helped to set in motion.

The elaborate music Bach produced for the Christmas season two centuries after Karlstadt was not intended to make explicit the latent political dimensions of the Christmas story. Yet they are there in the music.

Bach’s cantata for the second day of Christmas, Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes (For this God’s Son has appeared), BWV 40, first performed in Leipzig on December 26, 1723, upends the political order, even while paradoxically buttressing it.

The martial tones, ringing with princely hunting horns, make clear that Christ has come to earth not to gurgle and coo, but to wage a bloody campaign against the devil’s influence. The babe will be a fearsome warrior for good:

For this the Son of God has appeared,
That he destroy all the works of the devil.

The text is by an unknown poet, who, in the recitative that follows deploys formulaic courtly language to dramatize the inversion of political hierarchies:

… the great son of God
leaves the throne of heaven
and it pleases his Majesty
to become a small human child.
Consider this exchange, you who can think of it;
The King becomes a subject,
The Lord appears as a vassal
and is for the human race
– o sweet word in every ear –
born for our comfort and salvation.

The descending arc of the vocal lines, punctuated by upward exclamatory leaps, might be heard to convey the Godly movement from heaven to earth, that is, steeply down the ladder of power, from the throne of heaven and out into the world turned upside down.

This recitative is followed by an inward-turning chorale, which juxtaposes the suffering of sin with the joy brought by Christ. After the communal reflections of the chorale, a bass aria bursts forth onto the field of battle. With its galloping bass line, spurred on by jaunty unison violins and pointed appoggiaturas at phrase endings, the opening ritornello leads into the spirited bravery of the hero’s music:

Serpent of hell,
are you not worried?
He who will snap your head
Has now been born,
and the lost
shall delight in eternity.

In this bloodthirsty piece, melodic fragments are cut short with angular leaps and finished off with appoggiaturas as cutting as steel blades, rather than as soft as the aural silk more typical of these ornamental figures. Bach’s brutally graphic treatment of the word “zerknickt”— snap in two—with its sharp, dislocating scansion and bludgeoning repeated notes followed by gasping breaths is blood-curdling. This is ghastly, no-holds-barred combat. The unassuming baby is apparently capable—at least on the allegorical level—of bloody, violent acts.

In the cantata’s final aria Bach enlists a smaller contingent of hunting instruments—a bassoon and a pairs of horns and oboes—to sally forth with a single voice. Breathless and agitated, valiant and undaunted, they are eager to join battle with the foe. In this melee, Jesus offers protection and comfort. The metaphor of chicks taken under the wing of their mother offers protection from——or at least solace after—the grim combat depicted by the music. The music challenges the performers, for they too are locked in struggle with their instruments, Bach putting them to the test. This musical face is hot with bravery and flushed with the heat of hell:

Christian children, be joyful,
though the kingdom of hell rages,
Satan’s fury need not frighten you
Jesus will deliver you:
Will gather his chicks to himself
And enfold them with his wings.

An equally militaristic tone animates the swashbuckling chorus that concludes the last of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s most beloved seasonal offering, the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248): “Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen” —“Now you are well avenged, / for upon the host of your enemies, Christ has broken, that which was against you.” This is not music of peace and goodwill.

After the martial ritornello opens the movement, the chorus sings not in echoing polyphony, but presents the unadorned chorale in rhythmically unified four-part harmony, resolute and assured. The text is set to the melody of the Passion Chorale:

Now are ye well avenged
Upon your hostile host,
For Christ hath fully broken
All that which opposed you.
Death, devil, sub and hell
Are completely debilitated;
With God the human race
now has its place.

At the Epiphany, when the newborn baby is adored by earthly kings, the crucifixion looms. Marshaling his forces, Bach raises the cross above the battlefield.

Bach was not a revolutionary. He courted the patronage of princes and generally flourished under their aegis while chafing against proto-democratic civic authority as Director of Music in Leipzig.

But what if the musical weapons he fashioned for Christmas should fall into the hands of real revolutionaries?

The post The Infant Revolution in Bach’s Christmas Music appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Pau Casals.

The illusion that the Democratic Party could be transformed into a workers party has kept the Left, social movements, and unions trapped as at best its loyal opposition and blocked us from forming a party of our own. As a result, we were bound to a party that failed yet again to stop the far right.

Now we face a clear and present danger. In January, Trump and his party will complete a hostile takeover of all branches of government, from the White House to Congress and the Supreme Court. They will act quickly to implement Trump’s authoritarian populist project of turning the United States into a managed democracy like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary.

Trump has nominated a team of lackeys that, however ideologically diverse and internally divided, are loyal not to the U.S. state and its constitution but their leader. These include more mainstream Republicans who are recent converts to the MAGA faith such as “Little Marco” Rubio and hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to militarists like Mike Waltz, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, crackpots such as anti-vaxxer and renegade from his liberal dynastic family Bobby Kennedy, former executive of a professional wrestling empire Linda McMahon, conspiracy theorist and Vladimir Putin sympathizer Tulsi Gabbard, and Zionist attack dogs Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee. QAnon apologist, and nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel promises vengeance on the “deep state”.  While Fox News host, and accused sexual assaulter and white supremacist, Pete Hegseth, rounds out the team as Trump’s nominee as Defense Secretary.

Flabbergasted by this cast of characters, the commentariat has sought a term to describe it, finally settling on “kakistocracy,” a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Precisely.

Trump will either ram through these nominees through a willing Senate or install them through recess appointments. Regardless, he will launch his domestic program starting January 20, when he promised to be a dictator, but just on “day one.”

Padding the pockets of the rich and scapegoating the oppressed

The Trump administration’s top domestic priority will be to implement a toxic combination of America First protectionism and neoliberalism. Trump has pledged to extend and expand tax cuts for the rich, strip regulations on corporations, undue as many advances on climate change as possible including repealing Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and impose an unprecedented increase in protectionist tariffs.

He will also follow through on his promised assault on key oppressed groups. He has threatened to deport all 12 million undocumented migrants, but will probably start with targeting those convicted of crimes and rescinding Temporary Protected Status for approximately one million people from countries like Haiti and Venezuela.

Trump has gone so far as to threaten to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, but also the U.S. military, as well as state and local police, to arrest people in their communities and at work. Already private prison corporations Core Civic and the Geo Group are preparing to incarcerate people in their jails before deportation, and their stocks are soaring as investors gush over potential profits from mass internment and expulsion of human beings from the United States.

Trump’s other main target will be trans people. Already he is threatening to curtail their rights, starting with barring their participation in sports for women and girls, and restrict or ban gender-affirming care. No doubt his attack will expand to the rest of the LGBTQ community. These threats are sending calls to crisis hotlines skyrocketing as people fear imminent assault on their very existence.

Activists also fear that Trump will not uphold his pledge to not ban abortion nationally. Anti-choice fanatics are already lobbying for him to invoke the Comstock Act to ban the shipment of medication abortion across state lines. Since that is the most common form of abortion, it would in effect ban it nationally, robbing people of control over their bodies.

Transforming and weaponizing the state

While he carries out this vicious scapegoating, Trump has assigned his fellow far-right billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency) to carry out their long-planned war on what they call the “deep state.” They want to gut the administrative bureaucracy typical of the modern capitalist state, slashing and even abolishing whole departments, firing workers, and nixing any regulations that interfere with capitalist profiteering.

In an ominous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they promise to “hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”

While they may trim some wasteful spending in the Pentagon, they will not cut its budget but will take aim at what remains of the welfare state, with Vought, the new nominee for the Office of Management and Budget, singling out Medicaid, Medicare, Health and Human Services, Education, and even Social Security for austerity, onerous new requirements to receive benefits, privatization, and delegation to the states. Musk intends to cut an astonishing $2 trillion out of the annual $7 trillion budget through laying off government workers, replacing them with technology, and slashing programs.

Finally, Trump plans to weaponize the U.S. state’s repressive apparatus—its military, cops, and courts—against his identified “enemies within.” To carry this out, he first wants to purge the leadership of this apparatus of those who previously bucked his dictates and replace them with loyalists.

With such lackeys in place, Trump plans to bring the full weight of the state against his political opponents and the broad progressive movement, especially Palestine solidarity activists and the Left, but also against liberals in higher education, departments they control, courses they teach, and programs in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” they oversee.

He will intensify the bipartisan New McCarthyism pioneered against the movement in solidarity with Palestine. Already, the House voted to pass H.R. 6408 to give the Treasury Department to strip NGOs designated as supporting terrorism of tax-free status.  A conservative group has published a target list that includes a broad range of Left organizations from Jewish Voice for Peace to Tempest. While this particular bill may flounder in the Senate, there is no doubt that the incoming Republican Congress will pass it and others to enable Trump to carry out their planned war on domestic resistance.

The uncontrolled demolition of the post–Cold War order

Trump’s regime will be just as disruptive in the international state system. If Biden’s muscular multilateralism carried out the “controlled demolition of the post-cold war order,” Trump’s transactional nationalism will be the “uncontrolled demolition of it,” fundamentally upending the trade structures of global capitalism, degrading if not ditching alliances, and escalating great power rivalry, especially with China.

That strategy will fail to restore US imperial dominance, but, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. Amidst that growing vacuum, other imperial powers as well as regional ones will become more assertive, intensifying conflict between states over a failing capitalist system.

Contrary to some characterizations, Trump is not an isolationist but an economic nationalist out to make deals with both friends and foes to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. In pursuit of that, he will definitively put an end to the U.S. imperial strategy of superintending neoliberal globalization.

At the heart of Trump’s economic program is protectionism and tariffs. He plans to jack up tariffs on all imports by 20 percent, including from Washington’s geopolitical allies in Europe, and by 60 percent on those from China. Already he has threatened to impose 20 percent tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China for their supposed refusal to crackdown on migrants and fentanyl smuggling. Such protectionism against Washington’s three largest trade partners, as well many others, would alter globalization as we have known it.

Trump’s nationalism will lead him to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or extract the United States from them entirely. While he has flirted with exiting NATO, he will likely increase the bipartisan pressure on European states to foot their own defense bill.

In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, he will tend toward bilateral deals with U.S. allies. Like he did during his last term, he will withdraw the U.S. government from the Paris Climate Agreement and many other such agreements, which he sees as restricting Washington’s power and regulating capital’s profiteering.

No one should mistake this as opposition to U.S. imperialism. In fact, despite his bombastic claims on the campaign trail to be anti-war, he showed no compunction in using U.S. military power in his first term. As Michael Galant argues, Trump escalated “conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost.”

He expanded the Pentagon budget, escalated the war in Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s horrific war on Yemen, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran, abandoned the various treaties on nuclear weapons, and threatened to nuke North Korea. With the United States embroiled in more conflicts throughout the world, we should expect more brinkmanship and exercise of military power in his second term.

Trump’s main priority will be great power confrontation with China. While his last administration’s National Security Strategy identified Russia as a great power adversary, he was predisposed to cut deals with Russia for his own opaque reasons and also to split it away from Beijing.

That is likely to continue in his second administration. To confront China, which the GOP platform and Project 2025 identify as Washington’s key adversary, he will complement the new tariff regime with a buildup of U.S. industrial capacity to manufacture the conventional, nuclear, and high-tech weaponry necessary for war with Beijing.

Escalating imperial conflict and war

Trump will confront three pivotal flashpoints of imperial conflict—Palestine in the Middle East, Ukraine in Europe, and Taiwan in Asia. While unpredictable, precisely because of his transactional strategy, which makes him prone to vacillate between bellicose bluster and cutting deals, he is likely to escalate all three conflicts.

These flashpoints involve both struggles for national self-determination by oppressed nations, as well as rivalries among regional and various imperialist powers. Thus, any escalation could morph into much broader geopolitical, economic, and military confrontations if not war.

In the Middle East, Trump shares with the exiting Biden administration Washington’s commitment to dominating the region, controlling its strategic energy reserves, and backing off regional and imperial rivals, especially China.

That said, Trump has sent contradictory signals on Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. On the one hand, he has promised to reach a settlement to end it. On the other, he and his incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, support Israel’s colonial expansion into the West Bank and Gaza, something that would dramatically escalate its war and inflame the Palestinian resistance.

Moreover, Trump shares Israel’s determination to wipe out Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. In line with his previous policy of “maximum pressure,” he will back Israel in launching another round of military strikes on Iran, which would further destabilize the Middle East and potentially trigger a regional conflagration.

Similarly, Trump has also taken conflicting positions on Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine. On the one hand, he has pledged to cut a deal between Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin and end the war. But, on the other, he allowed his GOP underlings to approve the latest arms shipment to Ukraine, sustaining its resistance to conquest.

Trump would like to make a deal, but it is altogether unclear that one is possible. Why would Putin agree to one, when he is slowly annexing more and more of Ukraine? Meanwhile, neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian people are willing to give up parts of their country and its inhabitants to brutal Russian rule.

Therefore, Russia is likely to continue to prosecute the war, despite its huge economic and human cost, hoping for the United States and Europe to tire and abandon Ukraine. Such defiance could trigger the ever erratic and irascible Trump to lash out in anger, issuing threats that could escalate the conflict.

Or he could throw in the towel, rewarding Russia’s aggression and thereby greenlighting Putin’s project of rebuilding of the Russian empire by imposing its will and even seizing other countries in its former colonial sphere of influence. Either way, the war is likely to continue and potentially escalate.

Taiwan is perhaps the most important of all of these flashpoints. China sees Taiwan as a renegade province it wants to seize, while the United States has traditionally used it as a pretext to justify military deployment to contain and deter China’s rise as a regional power. Both do not care about Taiwan’s right to self-determination.

As with the other flashpoints, Trump and his advisors have made contradictory statements. Trump has implied that he is unwilling to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression, but he increased arms sales to Taiwan in his previous term as part of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.

Given Trump’s escalation of great power confrontation with Beijing, this contradiction will be resolved in one direction or the other. Certainly Project 2025 signals that the United States must defend Taiwan as part of a strategy to contain China. It declares, “The most severe immediate threat that Beijing’s military poses, however, is to Taiwan and other U.S. allies along the first island chain in the Western Pacific. If China could subordinate Taiwan or allies like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan, it could break apart any balancing coalition that is designed to prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia. Accordingly, the United States must ensure that China does not succeed.”

The stakes of this conflict are not just geopolitical, but also economic, since Taiwan produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips, which are central  high-tech commercial production and the most advanced weapons systems, from fighter jets to AI cyberwarfare. Given his determination to contain China’s challenge to the United States, and China’s determination to annex Taiwan, Trump, despite his ambivalence, will likely bend to his more sophisticated advisers and make the defense of Taiwan a priority, intensifying their rivalry over the island and its people.

Provoking crisis and chaos

Trump will attempt to impose his authoritarian populist program at home and abroad, exacerbating global capitalism’s multiple crises. Such conditions will provoke opposition from above by elements of the capitalist establishment and from below by workers and the oppressed.

Trump will brook no opposition to his project, provoking a constitutional crisis in the state. He will override not only norms but also laws he considers unfavorable to carry out his campaign of revenge against political opponents, gutting of entire departments, and weaponization of the state to repress domestic dissent.

Already, he delayed signing traditional transparency agreements as part of the transition process and has yet to sign one allowing FBI background checks of his cabinet. Moreover, he has pressured GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune to allow recess appointments of his most extreme appointees in clear violation of the Constitution.

This is just a taste of things to come. Trump wants to use his right-wing Supreme Court’s rulings to justify use of presidential authority unprecedented in recent history to bypass Congress and enact policy through executive orders.

To empower DOGE, he wants to revive impoundment, a power that allowed presidents to override the distribution of funds approved by Congress, until it was banned under Richard Nixon. He wants to resurrect Schedule F, which he attempted to use in his first term, to fire federal bureaucrats and whole layers of federal workers, especially in departments that refuse to obey his orders and replace them with obedient lackeys.

If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy carry out their most extreme threats, including abolishing whole departments, they will not only undermine constitutional norms, but also important functions of the state like that of the Department of Education in reproducing U.S. capitalism and others such as the State Department in enforcing its imperialist hegemony. They seem willing to risk such disruption to Orbanize the United States.

As part of that project, Trump has promised to curtail the power of Democratic Party governors and mayors who vow noncooperation with his assertion of executive authority, especially on his key initiative of mass deportation. He wants to rip up state and city laws that bar cooperation between ICE and the police to arrest, detain, and deport migrants. If elected leaders resist, as some of them have pledged to do, Trump has threatened to withhold essential federal funds that will undermine the functioning of their states and cities.

In perhaps his biggest threat to Constitutional restrictions on presidential power, he wants to weaponize the repressive apparatus, from the Justice Department to the FBI, against his political enemies. As he unsuccessfully tried to do in his first term, he has threatened to deploy the military against protests against his orders.

To intimidate generals who might put the Constitution before obedience to the president, Trump has flirted with recalling retired military leaders so that he can court martial them for refusing to obey his orders to repress protests in his first term. It remains to be seen if the Pentagon brass will resist or buckle to his dictates.

If Trump implements his economic program, it will provoke an economic and budgetary crisis and exacerbate class and social inequality. His massive tariffs would drive up the prices of consumer goods, triggering another bout of inflation and hammering workers’ standards of living.

His plans for mass deportation will not only violate human rights on an unprecedented scale, but they will also create a severe labor shortage in agribusiness, meatpacking, food processing, and construction, driving up the cost of groceries, rent, and homes. On top of that, his planned tax cuts will drive up the government’s deficit and debt, precipitating a fiscal crisis that can only be resolved by massive austerity measures, especially if Musk and Ramaswamy get their way in gutting critical benefits for workers.

His imperial strategy of transactional nationalism and especially his greenlighting of Israel’s expanding aggression will not only destabilize the world, maiming and killing ever higher numbers abroad, but also exacerbate conditions for the majority here at home. More war in the Middle East could spike the cost of oil globally, intensifying inflation in the United States and globally.

Conflict in the palace and with its subjects

Such policies will tend to break up Trump’s so-called electoral coalition, which is really just an unstable amalgam of classes with contradictory interests—rogue billionaires, petty bourgeois reactionaries, and desperate workers from various racial groups.

The trouble could start in the palace itself. While far more coherent and united, Trump’s regime remains internally divided between industrial protectionists, Wall St. neoliberals, libertarian opponents of the deep state. These factions differ on essential questions like tariffs.

Musk, for example, does not support the level protectionism Trump has proposed because of Tesla’s huge investments in China. How long will those two billionaires’ bromance last if Trump cuts into Musk’s profits by starting a trade war with China?

Trump’s inflationary policies could also drive a wedge between him and most corporations. While capitalists are overjoyed at the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation, whole sections of them are threatened by the rest of his program. As examples, agribusiness opposes mass deportation because it needs criminalized workers and multinationals oppose protectionism because they need unfettered free trade. Already a host of companies are voicing their displeasure.

They are also unhappy with Trump’s threat to fire Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell. He is using that threat, which he is unlikely to carry out, to pressure Powell into lowering interest rates to spur growth. That not only will undermine the independence of the Fed, a problem for capital, but could also compound inflation, creating more problems for small businesses and eating into workers’ standards of living.

In the end, Trump will fail to overcome any of capitalism’s systemic crises, and instead exacerbate them, creating conditions that will spark resistance from workers and oppressed groups against his rule. Just as he did in his first term, Trump will respond to such dissent and opposition with ever more scapegoating and repression.

That in turn will spur his far-right and fascist allies to function as proxies against any and all progressive resistance. Already white supremacists have sent text messages to Black people across the country with instructions to report to the nearest plantation to pick cotton. Nazis have also begun to march in cities across the country. These forces mobilized in defense of Trump last time and will do so again this time—and they have grown in number and are now far better organized and sophisticated.

The Democrats’ fake resistance

The Left, social movements, and unions must build a new resistance against a second and far more dangerous Trump regime. That resistance must be independent and not look to the Democrats to either lead the struggle or offer any kind of genuine alternative in upcoming elections.

Already, Biden and Harris are promising Trump, who they called a “fascist,” a smooth transition back into power. If they were serious about that charge, they would be doing everything in their power to block his presidency, proving that their rhetoric was just electioneering to terrify us into voting for them.

Even their campaign workers are shocked by their bosses’ decision to aid and abet Trump’s assumption of power. “It was detached from the reality of what happened,” said one staffer. “We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, ‘We’ll get them next time.’”

On top of that, the Democrats have told their followers that they will not support a protest strategy against Trump. As the New York Times reported, “the party’s early preparations to oppose the next Trump administration are heavily focused on legal fights and consolidating state power, rather than marching in the streets.”

What resistance the Democrats will offer will be ineffective. So far, they are threatening lawsuits to obstruct Trump’s most extreme attacks on laws, regulations, and government departments. But, with the courts stacked with Republican appointees all the way to the Supreme Court, their legal cases will yield few results.

Already, in a preemptive capitulation to the constitutional norms that Trump disregards, prosecutors have suspended his sentencing for convictions as well as planned court cases against him. They have deferred to the Supreme Court’s upholding of nearly unlimited presidential immunity, which essentially guarantees Trump rule with impunity.

The only other major initiative is from governors trying to insulate their states from Trump’s assertion of power. California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken action to protect his state’s various programs and regulations from Trump’s attacks. Billionaire Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Colorado’s Jared Polis have launched Governors Safeguarding Democracy to coordinate such efforts.

They promise to protect state courts, laws, and elections from the Trump administration. But, in a sign of their spinelessness and predisposition to manage rather than resist Trump, several governors that initially were listed as signatories to the group withdrew their names.

The group’s legal strategy faces courts that are rigged against them, and, given their respect for constitutional order, they are unlikely to defy court rulings to resist Trump. If they do, it will provoke a deeper constitutional crisis between the federal government and their states.

They will avoid this at all costs. So, their efforts will more likely devolve into a platform for these politicians’ aspiration for leadership in the Democratic Party for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

In those contests, which seem in the distant future for those facing immediate attacks,  the Democratic Party will at best offer an anemic liberalism to shore up the wretched existing order, delivering none of the fundamental reforms required to address the needs of the vast majority. Their disappointment will open the door for Trump’s successors to return to power with an even more draconian, far-right program.

For independence, struggle, and organization

It is high time to break free of the entrapment of the Left, social movements, trade unions, and our collective resistance in the Democratic Party. It is not a workers’ party but a capitalist one, and we cannot use it to advance our interests, let alone support it as a lesser evil to stop the greater evil on the right. It is to blame for Trump return to power.

In building a new resistance to Trump’s regime, we must learn from the two key failures of the last one. First, the mass uprisings, from the Climate March, to the Women’s March, the mobilization for migrants, and most importantly Black Lives Matter, did not build new permanent organization for long-term struggle for our demands.

Second, the largely liberal leaders of the resistance funneled these movements into an electoral project in the Democratic Party, first in Sanders’ doomed primary campaign and then into Biden’s presidential run. In the process, they demobilized the struggle, moderated their demands to those acceptable to the Democrats, and became at best the loyal opposition within a party fundamentally opposed to them.

This time, our resistance must be independent, build organization and unions for the long haul, and remain focused on fighting for our own demands. In the first instance, the resistance must be in defense of those groups Trump has targeted for immediate repression—migrants, trans people, and Palestine solidarity activists.

Against the Democrats, who will not resist such scapegoating, we must rally to the defense of anyone attacked. Importantly, this resistance must not push Palestine to the side, but embrace the struggle for its freedom from Israeli colonialism as a key part of our struggle for collective liberation.

This is not a moral injunction. Given the strategic significance of Israel and hegemony over the Middle East to U.S. imperialism, solidarity with Palestine is in fact a strategic lynch pin to our struggle against the right, capitalism, and empire.

That must begin with principled defense of Palestine solidarity activists’ right to free speech, assembly, and organization. If they can deny these frontline fighters those rights, all of our rights will be in jeopardy.

One of our key defensive struggles will be mass action against the marches of the Right and fascist groups, which are already on the march. Our model should be Boston’s protest in 2017 that mobilized tens of thousands of people to chase fascists out of the city.

In all this organizing, we must agitate inside unions for them to play a central role in the new resistance and use their power to strike against Trump and the far right. Already unions are heeding the United Auto Workers” Sean Fain’s call to schedule their contract negotiations for 2028 so that workers can jointly shut down whole industries.

While that is a good effort and must be supported, it will be far too late to stop what Trump has planned against workers and the oppressed. So, rank-and-file militants must agitate for immediate responses, especially to austerity measures and job cuts to federal and state workers.

The Chicago Teachers Union is already combining their fight for a contract with opposition to Project 2025 and its planned demolition of public education. The Left in unions must argue for and organize job actions outside normal contract negotiations, especially in the public sector, which is literally on Trump’s chopping block.

Toward a new workers’ party

In this new resistance, the Left must help cohere a new militant minority of activists, build new mass organizations to sustain struggles, and pull together rank-and-file formations in unions. We also must argue that such struggles have to remain not only independent from the Democrats, but also set their sights on building a new workers’ party to challenge it and the far right.

Such a party will not be built by any existing group declaring itself a party. None has either the roots in the class nor the size and influence to make such declarations remotely credible. Nor can it be built by a regroupment of existing small socialist organizations.

Building a party cannot be done by proclamation, only through a process of struggle and political debate with real forces. Revolutionary socialists must argue for one from within the resistance and among the emerging militant minority.

That party’s main priority must be organizing class and social struggle, not electoral campaigns. Any candidates we do run must be on our own ballot lines, especially in the one-party districts across the country where the spoiler charge has no traction.

Those candidates must be accountable to our party, organizations, and unions. And their role if elected should be as tribunes of the resistance and its demands, using their  office to build movements with no illusions that victories can be won without mass disruptive protests and strikes.

The politics of any new workers party cannot be prescribed in advance, but forged through common organizing, discussion, and debate. But, given the intensifying conflicts between imperialist and regional powers often over oppressed nations and peoples, at the heart of its politics must be principles of anti-imperialism against the US as well as all other great powers and of solidarity with all struggles of the oppressed and exploited, without exception. Such internationalism is necessary to meet the challenges of our epoch.

We are entering into an unprecedented period of far-right rule in the United States. The whole existing Left, social movement organizations, and unions will be challenged to rally to our mutual defense and opposition to looming attacks on workers and the oppressed.

Out of this period of reaction and resistance, we must build stronger infrastructures of dissent, mass organizations for social struggle, rank-and-file groups in unions, and a new workers’ party. Faced with global capitalism’s multiple interacting crises, which seem increasingly apocalyptic, our choice, now more than ever, is socialism or barbarism.

This piece first appeared in Tempest.

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