Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Bryan Dyne |
URL | https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/18/pqwz-m18.html |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 01:51:05 |
Language | en |
Abstract | [One can and should ask, who benefits from the silence surrounding the challenges to the official narrative of Barnett’s death?] The death of Boeing whistleblower John “Mitch” Barnett, the 62-year-old former employee of the aerospace corporation, was declared a suicide two days after he was found dead in a truck parked in a hotel lobby. There are ample reasons to question this narrative. At the time, Barnett was in the middle of a deposition in Charleston, South Carolina, in which he was providing testimony for a civil case he was pursuing against Boeing. Barnett worked for Boeing as a quality manager for most of his 32-year career, during which he raised many serious questions about the safety of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner commercial aircraft. The suit charges Boeing with harassing him on the job, stalling any promotions and ultimately forcing him to leave the company 10 years before he planned to retire. Barnett completed two days of his deposition on March 7 and March 8, and, according to his lawyers Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, he was tired but committed to giving his third and final day of testimony. When he did not arrive in court on March 9 and did not answer their phone calls, Barnett’s lawyers called the hotel where he was staying to check on him. Hotel employees found Barnett dead with a gunshot wound to his head. The Charleston County coroner ruled that the cause of death was “a self-inflicted wound,” and a police report stated that officers had found “a white piece of paper resembling a note” near Barnett’s body. However, Barnett’s lawyers immediately challenged the claim that their client’s death was a suicide. They released a statement saying: << We didn’t see any indication that he would take his own life. No one can believe it. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public. No detail can be left unturned. >> A more revealing comment came from one of Barnett’s family friends, Jennifer, who told an ABC affiliate on March 15 that Barnett had warned her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” Jennifer’s stunning revelation would, in a world based on reason, justice and the protection of the public, be the starting point for investigations into other causes of Barnett’s death. Instead, the corporate media has for the most part failed to report her statement, even as it continues to report on various near-disasters involving Boeing planes over the past several months. It is worth contrasting Barnett’s death and its aftermath to that of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was found dead in his jail cell in February. The news outlets, along with President Joe Biden, wasted no time declaring, with no evidence, that Navalny’s death was the work of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet when there is more than enough evidence to suggest foul play in regard to a whistleblower against Boeing, the evidence is ignored. Barnett had a history of speaking out about Boeing’s dangerous and negligent practices after he left the company in 2017. In a variety of interviews, he described how Boeing compromised quality control in a manner that was “catastrophic” for passengers on Boeing planes. The overriding goal, according to Barnett, was to “make the cash register ring.” In an interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter, Barnett exposed the role of Boeing’s military connections, inherited from its merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. “The entire team came down… from the military side,” he said. “Their motto was, we’re in Charleston and we can do anything we want. They started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected.” The most infamous disasters of Boeing aircraft remain the deadly crashes of 737 Max 8 planes in October 2018 and March 2019 which killed all 346 passengers and crew aboard the two planes. Both crashes were caused by a relatively unknown piece of software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Leaked documents and congressional hearings revealed that Boeing’s leadership knew that MCAS could cause crashes by forcing a plane into a nosedive, overriding pilot control. The corporate giant nevertheless went ahead with the installation of the software on all of its new planes. Top management also went out of its way to conceal the existence of the system from pilots, airlines and regulators until it was forced to after the first crash. But even then, Boeing insisted that the Max 8 planes were safe—until the second crash, which triggered the global grounding of the aircraft. No executives were ever tried for the crime of developing and deploying a defective, deadly aircraft. Federal investigations let then CEO Dennis Muilenburg and current CEO David Calhoun off the hook. Muilenburg made more than $80 million during his time as CEO, and Calhoun made $22.5 million in 2022 alone. Boeing plays a massive role in the American economy and the US military-industrial complex. It is one of the country’s largest manufacturers and exporters, and is a key supplier of the vast sums of war materiel purchased by the US government. Nobody should doubt that it is capable of defending its profits and the interests of American imperialism by any means necessary, including the silencing of a troublemaker. Barnett is not the first to come to a suspicious end just before providing potentially damning evidence against a critical force in American capitalism. Journalist Michael Hastings was found dead after crashing into a tree at 100 miles per hour while investigating then CIA Director John Brennan. His last story, “Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans,” was published by BuzzFeed on June 7, 2013, 11 days before he died. Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich, thought to be behind the leak of 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee showing extraordinary corruption in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was shot in an apparent mugging in June 2016. Financier and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019 after investigations into his business threatened to reveal sordid connections to high level executives and politicians in the US and around the world. In every case, a story is worked out by the corporate media that is politically palatable for the bourgeoisie: car crash, robbery gone wrong, suicide by hanging. There is no serious investigation or follow-up, whether by the police or those purporting to call themselves “journalists.” There can be no doubt that Barnett had more to say that would have further exposed the criminality of Boeing’s leadership and of American capitalism as a whole. The commercial and military aircraft giant remains in business only because it is protected at every level by federal regulators, whose penalties for deadly practices amount to less than a wrist-slap, and politicians who design laws allowing the production of machines as complex as aircraft with essentially no oversight. These forces themselves serve Wall Street bankers and corporate executives who comprise the oligarchy in the US and internationally. For them, the waging of war and extraction of profit towers above questions of safety and the protection of human life. |
Website Title | World Socialist Web Site |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Jonathan Watts |
Author | Tural Ahmedzade |
URL | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/16/scientists-divided-record-heat-acceleration-climate-crisis |
Publication | The Guardian |
ISSN | 0261-3077 |
Date | 2024-03-16 |
Section | Science |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 01:29:33 |
Library Catalog | The Guardian |
Language | en-GB |
Abstract | [Some believe global anomalies are in line with predictions but others are more concerned by speed of change.] Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown. Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño, which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year. Scientists are divided about the extraordinary temperatures of marine air. Some stress that current trends are within climate model projections of how the world will warm as a result of human burning of fossil fuels and forests. Others are perplexed and worried by the speed of change because the seas are the Earth’s great heat moderator and absorb more than 90% of anthropogenic warming. [INFOMAP: "February sea surface temperatures reached record-breaking highs" Sea surface temperature, monthly mean anomaly, February 2024 compared to 1991-2020 average." Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of the Pacific Ocean, had peaked and there was an 80% chance of it fading completely between April and June, although its knock-on effects would continue. The WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, said El Niño contributed to making 2023 easily the warmest year on record, although the main culprit was emissions from fossil fuels. When it came to oceans, she said, the picture was murkier and more disturbing: “The January 2024 sea surface temperature was by far the highest on record for January. This is worrying and can not be explained by El Niño alone.” [INFOMAP: "Sea surface temperatures are at record highs" Average daily sea surface temperature, 60S to 60N, C.] Sea surface temperatures in February were also hotter than any month in history, breaking the record set last August, according to Europe’s Copernicus satellite monitoring programme. Worldwide, the heat above the land and sea was remarkable. Between 8 and 11 February, global temperatures were more than 2C above the 1850-1900 average. Over the month as a whole, Europe experienced heat that was 3.3C above that benchmark. [INFOMAP: "February 2024 hottest on record" Surface air temperature, monthly mean anomaly, February 2024 compared to 1991-2020 average.] Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said it was a taste of what was to come because of the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: “Unless we manage to stabilise those, we will inevitably face new global temperature records and their consequences.” Heat records are becoming the norm, but the extent of the anomaly above the seas has prompted concern. Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s most influential climatologists, said no climate model accurately predicted how high sea surface temperatures would reach during the past 12 months. Given the continued heat over the sea, he said 2024 was likely to be another unusually hot year for the world as a whole. The anomaly is strongest in the North Atlantic, where Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, calculated the deviation from statistical averages as a one-in-284,000-year event. “It has been record-breaking warm for an entire year, often by seemingly impossible margins,” he tweeted. He has described the trends as “deeply troubling”. [IMAGE: "Global temperatures have reached record seasonal highs" Daily average two-metre global temperature (above both land and sea), C.] Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at Berkeley Earth in the US, said global sea and surface temperatures were “quite high” but he said they were still well within the projections of climate models: “We don’t have any strong evidence yet from observations that suggests the world is warming faster than anticipated given human emissions.” The impacts on corals and other forms of marine life are incalculable. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is suffering its fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. Meteorologists warn that high surface temperatures may also presage a longer and more active hurricane season. Raúl Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the growing possibility of a cooling La Niña between June and August could bring respite from the global heat, but this would only be temporary: “All recent temperature records will likely be broken sooner rather than later. The situation will continue to deteriorate until we halt the burning of fossil fuels.” |
Item Type | Blog Post |
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Author | Chris Hedges |
URL | https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/joe-bidens-parting-gift-to-america?r=1sw5pk&utm_medium=email |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 01:07:41 |
Abstract | [The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.] Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages. Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars. The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.” Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay. A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.” The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration. Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away. Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution. The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes: << [C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues. >> But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear. The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide. Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry. He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant. Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized. “Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.” The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country. The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump. There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws. Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude. The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs. Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair. They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them? |
Blog Title | The Chris Hedges Report |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Tom Hall |
URL | https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/18/sand-m18.html |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 00:53:53 |
Language | en |
Abstract | [The hearing was the latest in a series chaired by Sanders to stump for the corrupt trade union bureaucracy, which is enabling the automation-driven corporate jobs bloodbath.] On Thursday, Bernie Sanders held a Senate hearing on reducing the workweek from 40 to 32 hours with no loss in pay. The hearing was conducted by the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which Sanders chaired. Among the witnesses called was United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. In addition, Sanders has sponsored legislation, which is dead on arrival given opposition from both Republicans and his fellow Democrats, to reduce the workweek to 32 hours. In his opening remarks Thursday, Sanders pointed to the contradiction between “massive growth in technology and worker productivity” and the fact that workers are working “longer hours for lower wages.” Sanders pointed to shocking statistics which found that 28.5 million Americans work more than 60 hours a week, and 40 percent work more than 50 hours a week. Americans, he said, work “204 more hours a year than employees in Japan … 279 more hours than workers in the United Kingdom, and 470 more hours than workers in Germany.” Sanders’ assertion that huge increases in productivity due to technology could be used to shorten the workweek with no loss in pay is certainly true. It is an indictment of the capitalist system, which is driven not by meeting social need but maximizing the extraction of surplus value from the working class, that the exact opposite has taken place. But instead, Sanders presented the issue as not capitalism, but of “bad” policies to be replaced with “good” ones. This is in keeping with the specific role of Sanders, the self-described “democratic socialist,” within the Democratic Party, which is to use reformist demagogy to cover for the party’s right-wing policies and prevent the growing radicalization of workers and youth from escaping its control. The hearing was also the latest in a series chaired by Sanders to stump for the corrupt trade union bureaucracy. In November, Sanders chaired another hearing, which was also attended by Fain, as well as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson. That hearing allowed the bureaucracy to posture as the friends of workers even as they enforce historic sellouts that have paved the way for the corporations to use automation and other technologies to carry out mass layoffs. In the auto industry, only months after the phony “stand-up strike” called by the UAW, thousands of jobs have been cut so far. This is only a down payment: Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be on the chopping block in the next few years as the industry moves towards electric vehicles, which require less labor to build. At UPS, following another sellout contract by the Teamsters, over 12,000 jobs are being cut, and new automation is being introduced with the potential to eliminate 80 percent of all warehouse jobs. There is enormous and growing opposition to this in the working class, who hold the bureaucracy responsible for these cuts. Earlier this month, fired temporary workers with the Rank-and-File Committee to Fight Job Cuts marched to the UAW headquarters to denounce the union bureaucracy and demand their jobs back. Sanders’ hearing was aimed at diverting this growing anger before it escapes the control of the bureaucracy or the Democratic Party. Remarkably, even though the hearing was ostensibly centered on the implications of automation for jobs, Sanders did not even acknowledge the issue of layoffs. To even admit they were happening would invite acknowledgment that Fain and the union bureaucracy are helping to carry them out, and that the so-called “historic contract victories” were huge lies. In his testimony to the hearing, Fain bragged that the UAW had raised the issue of a 32-hour workweek during its “stand-up strike” last fall. But this demand, which the bureaucracy had no intention of fighting for, was raised only to capture rank-and-file opposition. The fact that tens of millions of American workers stay on the job for 60 hours a week or more is the product of decades of sellouts by the union bureaucracy, which has bargained away virtually everything that workers won through generations of struggle. While it dishonestly claimed to be fighting for a 32-hour week, the UAW in fact long ago gave up even the eight hour day under the so-called “Alternative Work Schedule,” and autoworkers are forced to stay on the job for seven days a week in some cases. Sanders also presented the issue of automation and the workweek in purely national terms, as a problem essentially unique to the United States. Sanders pointed to European countries such as France, Denmark, Norway and Belgium, where legislation already exists establishing the workweek at less than 40 hours, as models for the US to follow. In fact, the capitalist governments in all of these countries are carrying out savage austerity measures aimed at rolling back such concessions to the working class. In France, “President of the Rich” Emmanuel Macron rammed through huge pension cuts without even a vote by parliament, while responding to mass protests with police violence. Another key aim of Sanders’ campaign over a 32-hour workweek is to stump for Biden’s re-election, under conditions in which he is deeply unpopular due to his right-wing policies. In fact, the economic policy of President Biden, whose re-election Sanders is vigorously campaigning for, is to impose mass layoffs to curb wage growth and beat back the rising wave of strikes by US workers. In addition to increasing interest rates, Biden also relies on the union bureaucracy to impose sellout contracts and limit strikes. When workers have rebelled against sellouts, as railroad workers did in 2022, Biden did not hesitate to ban a strike and impose the contract workers rejected. Sanders himself played a key role in ensuring the swift passage of the anti-strike law, while also giving the Democrats some measure of political cover. The UAW in particular enjoys exceptionally close ties with the White House. In November, Biden appeared with Fain in a pro-contract rally in front of a banner instructing autoworkers to get “back to work.” Biden has made several appearances since with Fain, while the UAW bureaucrats have helped to block or throw out anti-genocide protesters from the meeting halls. The Biden administration’s labor policy is also a critical element in the mobilization of American society for world war. In his State of the Union address earlier this month, given over to rants against Russian president Vladimir Putin and the need to bring China to heel, Biden once again invoked the “Arsenal of Democracy,” the propaganda term for the US war economy during World War II, in which a “no strike” pledge by the unions played a key role. Biden also gave a shout out to Fain, who attended as a guest of the First Lady Jill Biden, as a “great labor leader.” Fain, for his part, pledged at a recent event in Detroit to “go to war” for the president. One other aspect of Sanders’ hearing last week deserves special attention. In his remarks, Sanders invoked Walter Reuther, UAW president during the post-World War II period. Sanders cited a Senate hearing from 1955 where Reuther advocated for a shorter workweek, where he declared, “The reduction of the workweek to 35 or 30 hours in the coming decade can be an important shock absorber during the transition to the widespread use of automation. It can both reduce the impact of sharp rises in output and increase the manpower requirements in industry and commerce.” Reuther, a socialist in his youth, adopted in a highly diluted form demands originally raised by Leon Trotsky in the Transitional Program for a sliding scale of wages and working hours. Reuther did this to provide himself with credibility while in fact he was moving towards a total abandonment of any nominal opposition by the UAW to capitalism. In the 1950s, Reuther and the UAW bureaucracy purged the union of the socialist militants who had built the organization during the Great Depression and signed, for the first time, contracts explicitly recognizing “management rights.” Reuther is often held up as the antipode to the current crop of bureaucrats who run the American trade unions. In reality, his policies paved the way for them. His upholding of capitalism could be combined with improvements to wages and working conditions only under the temporary conditions of the post-war economic boom, which was based on the unchallenged dominance of the US over the world economy. But with the end of the boom in the 1970s, US corporations abandoned the previous policy of buying labor peace with concessions, and the bureaucracy responded by integrating itself with management, helping to enforce mass layoffs and ripping up everything workers had won. Reuther’s proposal for a 30-hour workweek remained a dead letter because of his own policy of subordinating the working class to capitalism. The lesson for the working class today is that the fight to defend jobs and working conditions requires a frontal assault on the “right” of corporations to a profit, and a rebellion against the union bureaucracy and the pro-corporate parties which enforce it. |
Website Title | World Socialist Web Site |
Item Type | Web Page |
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URL | https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/18/sand-m18.html |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 00:53:06 |
Language | en |
Abstract | The hearing was the latest in a series chaired by Sanders to stump for the corrupt trade union bureaucracy, which is enabling the automation-driven corporate jobs bloodbath. |
Website Title | World Socialist Web Site |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Ray Acheson |
URL | https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/17/cop-cities-borders-and-bombs/ |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-19 00:20:28 |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | Last month, organizers and activists from around the United States gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a nationwide summit to Stop Cop City—or, more accurately, Cop Cities. As new research has revealed, there are at least 69 militarized police training facilities in the works across the country. Each was put in motion in or after 2020, clearly a direct response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings that dominated city streets for months to condemn racialised police violence and demand the defunding of police. It’s important to note that the police have definitely not been defunded. In fact, in most US cities, police budgets have actually increased since 2020. The Cop Cities now under construction or in the planning stages are part of this shored-up investment in police violence. Each facility is projected to cost between $1 million and $415 million. The military compounds, euphemistically called “public safety training centers” or other similar titles, are meant to train police to repress social movements and engage in urban warfare. The movement in Atlanta Atanta, Georgia has been the focal point for action against this form of police militarization for the past few years. The Cop City compound, to be built in the Weelanee Forest, would include a mock city complete with houses, a school, a gas station, a bank, and a community centre; it would also feature a Black Hawk landing pad, shooting ranges, and a bomb testing site. At 85 acres, it would be the largest police training facility in the United States, a destination for cops from all over the country and the world to practice urban warfighting with the latest military technologies. Organisers in Atlanta have opposed Cop City since it was first proposed. They worked to get hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions, engaged in protests, and contributed 17 hours’ worth of commentary to public hearings at City Hall. After the plans for Cop City were approved, an even broader movement formed to defend the forest against destruction. Some took up residence in the forest while others continued organising against the corporate backers and construction firms. In response, Atlanta and Georgia police have cracked down on protestors. They murdered one forest defender and charged more than 40 others with domestic terrorism. The state of Georgia has since indicted more than 60 activists under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—essentially declaring that being involved in a social movement against organized state violence is in itself organized crime. The city and state have also gone after folks organizing bail funds and distributing flyers along with those who have destroyed construction equipment being used to bulldoze the forest. Political officials and prosecuters have attempted to argue that mutual aid, the use of Signal or burner phones, or writing the telephone number of legal aid groups on one’s arm at a protest, are part of a criminal conspiracy of activists against the state. Violent antecedents The repression of the movement against Cop City it Atlanta is fierce, and getting worse. Nevertheless, organizers are persisting. But as those gathered in Tucson for the nationwide summit discussed, the US government’s plans to repress social resistance through city and state police forces are not just emerging now—they have been gearing up for this for quite some time. One participant highlighted the Cop City antecedent of MOUT—the US military concept of Military Operations on Urban Terrain. MOUT involves training US soldiers to fight in cities around the world—to prepare for this, they train in fake cities in the United States, such as at Fort Ord in California. The 51-acre “pretend war zone,” built by the US Army in 1987, contained a gas station, civic centre, public square, apartments, and bunkers. War profiteers are also engaged in MOUT; private military and security companies (PMSCs) like Cubic and 4C Strategies have offered MOUT training to US soliders. The MOUT concept and training exercises are clear precursers for Cop Cities—as does the existing “exchange of worst practices” between US police, border, and military forces, and their counterparts in Israel. The tactics and technologies shared between the US and Israeli institutions of state violence include racial profiling, spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders. Cross-border cooperation for border enforcement These connections were at the forefront of attention at the Stop Cop City summit in Tucson—including Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and increasingly militarized borders globally. Stop Cop City activists have been clear about their solidarity with Palestinians, noting that Gaza has been a laboratory for experimentation with repressive policing, surveillance technologies, and weapons development that have direct connections with US policing. It should be no surprise, then, that it is Israeli technology deployed along the US-Mexico border, including not far from Tucson. Elbit Systems, the largest Israeli weapon manufacturer, whose bombs and missiles have been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians over the past few months, is also the architect behind the Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT) that cut through the Sonoran desert and the Tohono O’odham Nation’s land. The 55 towers, which use artificial intelligence, have put the Arizona border under constant surveillance. “This technology was first rolled out in the surveillance sensors for Israel’s separation barrier through the West Bank, a barrier that the International Court of Justice ruled to be illegal way back in 2004 but still stands today,” lawyer and academic Petra Molnar recently wrote for The Border Chronicle. Interestingly, Elbit beat out one of Tucson’s top employers, Raytheon, for the IFT contract. Despite being headquartered in Tucson, the US military contractor lost the bid for the surveillance towers to the Israeli firm. While Raytheon protested the decision, it has not prevented the two companies from working together on weapon systems. Nor has it affected Raytheon’s standing as the second largest weapon-producing company in the world. In addition to producing US nuclear weapons and delivery systems, Raytheon’s conventional weapons are currently fueling wars around the world, including Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Among other things, Raytheon supplies missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. In October, as Israel began its current genocidal campaign in Gaza, Raytheon’s CEO Greg Hayes said that Israel’s action would boost the bottom line for the company. “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking,” said Hayes to a Raytheon earnings call. Deadly technologies, dangerous crossings Even as they help Israel commit war crimes in Gaza, back in Tucson, US and Israeli military contractors are also making a killing off the border, and off of the two governments’ commitment to developing new technologies of violence. Molnar noted that Israeli start-up XTEND was recently awarded a US military contract for its drones that have a “human-guided autonomous operating system.” First deployed in the Gaza Strip, they are now being tested in Arizona. Technologies like this are increasing autonomous functions not just in surveillance drones, but also in weapon systems. Israel is leading in such technological developments, along with the United States, Russia, and a handful of other countries that have for more than a decade been blocking diplomatic efforts to ban autonomous weapon systems while they work with technology and military contractors to develop them. If not stopped, it is only a matter of time before these weapons will be deployed on the battlefield, at borders, and in cities. Meanwhile, as the border is already being increasingly militarized, it becomes increasingly dangerous. Already hundreds of people die trying to cross the US-Mexico each year, pushed by “deterrence policies” into trying to cross at ever-more remote locations. “According to the International Organization for Migration, the U.S.-Mexico border is the deadliest land crossing in the world,” noted analyst Adam Johnson in a recent interview with The Border Chronicle. “And so if you double the enforcement, and triple the broader security apparatus, bring in more surveillance drones, more weapons, invariably more people will die. There is a real human cost to this type of militarization.” One of the reasons the Arizona crossings are so deadly is because of the heat and lack of water, especially in the summer. Tucson in February, when the Stop Cop City summit convened, is relatively mild. By June it will be scorching hot. Last year, the city hit record temperatures, with 18 consecutive days with temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celcius). These temperatues make border crossings deadly. The feedback loop of the climate crisis, anti-migration policies, and militarization mean there are profits to be made from these deaths. US militarism and warfighting, and the broader military-industrial complex, directly contribute to climate change. They also provide weapons, training, and troops for Border Patrol and Customs and Immigration Enforcement, which routinely leave people to die in the desert or abuse those they detain. Thus, the structures of US militarism profit from border militarization, which causes deaths in the desert that are exacerbated by hotter temperatures from the climate crisis, for which the military-industrial complex is in part responsible. And the violence at the border is exacerbated by the military-style training border cops receive and the devaluation of human life produced by militarized approaches to security and enforcement. Collective action for abolition All of this provides context for the Cop Cities being built around the country. The organisers and activists that gathered in Tucson last month understand the connections between these structures of violence—and the need to abolish them as a collective project. Whether folks are working to prevent the construction of a Cop City in their area, or working to dismantle ICE or against deadly border enforcement tactics, or stopping the development of oppressive surveillance equipment or autonomous weapon systems, they are working on the same project of protecting life and dignity for all. The state is organising its violence against people and the planet; collective action is where we can find strength, strategy, and solutions. |
Website Title | CounterPunch |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Julian Borger |
URL | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/gaza-floating-port-aid-palestinians-impact |
Publication | The Guardian |
ISSN | 0261-3077 |
Date | 2024-03-08 |
Section | World news |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 23:35:26 |
Library Catalog | The Guardian |
Language | en-GB |
Abstract | [‘You need drivers, trucks and a distribution system that doesn’t exist,’ says president of Refugees International aid advocacy group.] The US plan to build a floating port off the Gaza coast is a bold move, reminiscent of the Mulberry harbours built after D-day in Normandy, but there are serious concerns that what relief it brings will be too little too late for Palestinians facing starvation. “When we talk about the sea route, it’s going to take weeks to set up and we are talking about a population that is starving now. We have already seen children dying of hunger,” said Ziad Issa, the head of humanitarian policy at the ActionAid charity. US officials have presented the plan as Washington taking leadership and “not waiting for the Israelis”, but the Israelis will still have a say on how effective it is in delivering aid, especially in the north, where the threat of famine is most imminent. Israeli inspectors will be in the Cypriot port of Larnaca, scrutinising cargoes of aid going into southern Gaza, and the inspections will provide Israel a tool with which to regulate the flow in the name of security vetting. That might be harder for Israel to do when dealing directly with US military logistics officers rather than aid officials, but there are many other ways the Israeli government, a coalition that includes ministers who oppose any aid entering Gaza, can play an obstructionist role. “People say this is a complex situation, but it’s very simple,” Issa said. “Israel is not allowing aid to get to the Gaza Strip.” The plan involves US military engineers building a floating pier off the Gaza shore, on which shipborne food aid can be unloaded from ships from Larnaca, and a causeway for it to be driven onshore. The question is, then what? Most of Gaza’s population, most of whom have been displaced several times over, are not concentrated at the beach. “Who is going to distribute it?” asked Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group. “The aid organisations’ presence in northern Gaza is pretty close to zero because the Israelis have wanted everyone out and then have been restricting access to the north ever since.” The proposed maritime aid corridor, Konyndyk said, “doesn’t obviate the problem of obstruction by Israel, but rather than being a problem at the entry point, now it’s going to be a problem at the distribution stage”. “You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” he added. In the short term, it might involve communities near the shore distributing the food among themselves. To get assistance around the strip would not just require trucks and drivers but also some sort of security, as desperation has taken over and looting is rife. The Israeli army has escorted some small NGO food deliveries, but an attempted delivery on 29 February on the outskirts of Gaza City ended with the killing of at least 115 Palestinians after Israeli soldiers opened fire after people rushed for the food trucks. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed most of the casualties had been caused by a crush, but UN officials and doctors said the overwhelming majority of injuries were gunshot wounds. “Even if there is a ceasefire, it is going to be very messy for the initial period, because the security apparatus that used to exist has collapsed, the clan structures and community leaders who would provide assurances and safety have also been very splintered,” Konyndyk said. “And from what we saw in the incident last week, the Israeli military is not a reliable security guarantor. “It’s very tough and I think it’s worthwhile to try this,” he added. “I think they’re going to be figuring a lot of it out as they go, and I think that’s OK. I’m in favour of anything that helps at this point. “But let’s also just be realistic about why this is necessary, and it’s necessary because of five months of obstruction of access in the north by the IDF and five months of intentional degradation of humanitarian capacity in the strip,” Konyndyk said. “And frankly the US has tolerated that for five months.” |
Short Title | ‘Who is going to distribute it? |
Item Type | Blog Post |
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Author | Chris Hedges |
URL | https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-trojan-horse?r=1sw5pk&utm_medium=email |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 23:29:43 |
Abstract | [The “temporary pier” being built on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza is not there to alleviate the famine, but to herd Palestinians onto ships and into permanent exile.] Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians. If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships. It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza. Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military. “You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group told The Guardian. This “maritime corridor” is Israel’s Trojan Horse, a subterfuge to expel Palestinians. The small shipments of seaborne aid, like the food packets that have been air dropped, will not alleviate the looming famine. They are not meant to. Five Palestinians were killed and several others injured when a parachute carrying aid failed and crashed onto a crowd of people near Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp. “Dropping aid in this way is flashy propaganda rather than a humanitarian service,” the media office of the local government in Gaza said. “We previously warned it poses a threat to the lives of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and this is what happened today when the parcels fell on the citizens’ heads.” If the U.S. or Israel were serious about alleviating the humanitarian crisis, the thousands of trucks with food and aid currently at the southern border of Gaza would be allowed to enter any of its multiple crossings. They are not. The “temporary pier,” like the air drops, is ghoulish theater, a way to mask Washington’s complicity in the genocide. Israeli media reported the building of the pier was due to pressure by the United Arab Emirates, which threatened Israel with ending a land corridor trade route it administers in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to bypass Yemen’s naval blockade. The Jerusalem Post reported it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who proposed the construction of the “temporary pier” to the Biden administration. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has called Palestinians “human animals” and advocated a total siege of Gaza, including cutting off electricity, food, water and fuel, lauded the plan, saying “it is designed to bring aid directly to the residents and thus continue the collapse of Hamas’s rule in Gaza.” “Why would Israel, the engineer of the Gaza famine, endorse the idea of establishing a maritime corridor for aid to address a crisis it initiated and is now worsening?” writes Tamara Nassar in an article titled “What’s the Real Purpose of Biden’s Gaza Port?” in The Electronic Intifada. “This might appear paradoxical if one were to assume that the primary aim of the maritime corridor is to deliver aid.” When Israel offers a gift to the Palestinians you can be sure it is a poison apple. That Israel got the Biden administration to construct the pier is one more example of the inverted relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, where the Israel lobby has bought off elected officials in the two ruling parties. Oxfam in a March 15 report accuses Israel of actively hindering aid operations in Gaza in defiance of the orders by the International Court of Justice. It notes that 1.7 million Palestinians, some 75 percent of the Gaza population, are facing famine and two-thirds of the hospitals and over 80 percent of all health clinics in Gaza are no longer operable. The majority of people, the report reads, “have no access to clean drinking water” and “sanitation services are not functioning.” The report reads: << The conditions we have observed in Gaza are beyond catastrophic, and we have not only seen failure by Israeli authorities to meet their responsibility to facilitate and support international aid efforts, but in fact seen active steps being taken to hinder and undermine such aid efforts. Israel’s control of Gaza continues to be characterized by deliberate restrictive actions that have led to a severe and systemic dysfunctionality in the delivery of aid. Humanitarian organizations operational in Gaza are reporting a worsening situation since the International Court of Justice imposed provisional measures in light of the plausible risk of genocide, with intensified Israeli barriers, restrictions and attacks against humanitarian personnel. Israel has maintained a ‘convenient illusion of a response’ in Gaza to serve its claim that it is allowing aid in and conducting the war in line with international laws. >> Oxfam says Israel employs “a dysfunctional and undersized inspection system that keeps aid snarled up, subjected to onerous, repetitive and unpredictable bureaucratic procedures that are contributing to trucks being stranded in giant queues for 20 days on average.” Israel, Oxfam explains, rejects “items of aid as having ‘dual (military) use,’ banning vital fuel and generators entirely along with other items essential for a meaningful humanitarian response such as protective gear and communications kit.” Rejected aid, “must go through a complex ‘pre-approval’ system or end up being held in limbo at the Al Arish warehouse in Egypt.” Israel has also “cracked down on humanitarian missions, largely sealing off northern Gaza, and restricting international humanitarian workers’ access not only into Gaza, but Israel and the West Bank including East Jerusalem too.” Israel has allowed 15,413 trucks into Gaza during the past 157 days of war. Oxfam estimates that the population of Gaza needs five times that number. Israel allowed 2,874 trucks in February, a 44 percent reduction from the previous month. Before Oct. 7, 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily. Israeli soldiers have also killed scores of Palestinians attempting to receive aid from trucks in at least a half dozen separate incidents. These attacks include the killing of at least 21 Palestinians, and the wounding of 150, on March 14, when Israeli forces fired on thousands of people in Gaza City. The same area had been targeted by Israeli soldiers hours earlier. “Israel’s assault has caught Gaza’s own aid workers and international agencies’ partners inside a ‘practically uninhabitable’ environment of mass displacement and deprivation, where 75 percent of solid waste is now being dumped in random sites, 97 percent of groundwater made unfit for human use, and the Israeli state using starvation as a weapon of war,” Oxfam says. There is no place in Gaza, Oxfam notes, that is safe “amid the forcible and often multiple displacements of almost the entire population, which makes the principled distribution of aid unviable, including agencies' ability to help repair vital public services at scale.” Oxfam blasts Israel for its “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on “civilian and humanitarian assets” as well as “solar, water, power and sanitation plants, UN premises, hospitals, roads, and aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposedly ‘deconflicted’ after their coordinates have been shared for protection.” The health ministry in Gaza said Monday that at least 31,726 people have been killed since the Israeli assault began five months ago. The death toll includes at least 81 deaths in the previous 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 73,792 people have been wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing, many buried under the rubble. None of these Israeli tactics will be altered with the building of a “temporary pier.” In fact, given the pending ground assault on Rafah, where 1.2 million displaced Palestinians are crowded in tent cities or camped out in the open air, Israel’s tactics will only get worse. Israel, by design, is creating a humanitarian crisis of such catastrophic proportions, with thousands of Palestinians killed by bombs, shells, missiles, bullets, starvation and infectious diseases, that the only option will be death or deportation. The pier is where the last act in this gruesome genocidal campaign will be played out as Palestinians are herded by Israeli soldiers onto ships. How appropriate that the Biden administration, without whom this genocide could not be carried out, will facilitate it. |
Blog Title | The Chris Hedges Report |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Pete Dolack |
URL | https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/17/why-should-we-give-all-our-money-to-landlords/ |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 22:24:53 |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well. As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible. This is simply “market forces” at work. If there isn’t enough housing, and especially insufficient lower-priced housing, the owners of that commodity in short supply will raise prices. Several decades of allowing the “market” to handle the supply has led to the result of renters struggling with high rents and facing the impossibility of obtaining an affordable mortgage. Despite what judges have ruled, rents do not rise without human intervention. The “market” in housing are landlords and developers, and their interest is the maximum amount possible of profit, regardless of cost to everybody else. The magic of the market, indeed. One new aspect of housing markets, at least in North America, is the entrance of financial speculators, a trend that appears to be gathering momentum. In both the United States and Canada, “investors” are buying up housing at an extraordinary pace, doing so to extract large short-term profits through raising rents and swift evictions. The gains of speculators are your losses — less housing is available and not only does the rent charged for these homes bought for speculation go up faster than they would have but fewer homes are available, thereby further driving up rents. Once again, Wall Street and Bay Street find a way to profit off a crisis. Increasingly unaffordable rents as the result of decades of housing costs rising much faster than inflation or wages over decades is not limited to North America, of course. Capitalism is a global economic system, and it is therefore no surprise that the cost of housing is similarly rising around the world, perhaps most acutely in Britain but certainly not only there. Nonetheless, financial speculation has added an accelerant to North American unaffordability. As always, Wall Street profits off everybody else’s misfortune In the United States, speculators are gobbling up multifamily apartment buildings in places such as New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area as well as single-family homes in the Southeast, the Midwest and elsewhere. The latter seems to be drawing most of the speculative money. Investors bought one-quarter of all U.S. single-family houses that sold in 2021 with five states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Nevada and Texas — seeing nearly one-third of sales made by investors. A lack of regulation is fueling this trend. And many a political officeholder wishes to keep it that way. In Georgia, for example, a bill introduced by Republican state senators would have made it illegal for local governments to enact any restrictions against predatory behavior. Strong pushback caused the bill to die in committee but it could be resurrected. Rising rents, mass speculator buying and faster evictions are intertwined problems in places such as Atlanta, to which we will return. By 2030, by one estimate, 40 percent of U.S. single-family rental homes may be owned by institutions. Predatory investors did not appear out of the blue, but were encouraged by federal government policy, a development not independent of the 2008 financial collapse that led to massive foreclosures and evictions. Local Initiatives Support Corporation, an advocacy group that calls itself a “bridge” between government, foundations and for-profit companies on the one hand and residents and local institutions on the other, summarizes the factors leading to the current speculation-driven market. Julia Duranti-Martínez writes: << “While predatory investors aggressively capitalized on tenant and small landlord distress to increase their market share through the pandemic, their entry into the housing market was facilitated by financial and regulatory reforms from the 1980’s-90’s, and dramatically increased in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, when investors scooped up distressed homes in hard-hit communities through bulk sales. These acquisitions are part of a long history of displacement and wealth extraction targeting low-income and BIPOC communities—particularly Black and Latinx households, who suffered higher rates of foreclosure than white homeowners and lost nearly $400 billion in collective wealth during the Great Recession—who now find themselves excluded from homeownership and paying more in rent to corporate landlords for worse quality housing.” >> Although they would of course invert the moral signposts, investors themselves acknowledge that, for them, single-family homes are an “opportunity.” One institutional investor, based in Alabama, gleefully noted that scooping up single-family homes as rental properties “offers the potential for higher returns” and have become a target of institutional investors whereas these sorts of homes, prior to the 2008 financial collapse, were a “mom-and-pop asset class.” Computerization is also driving this: “[S]ophisticated real estate investors on Wall Street can partially or fully automate the process of appraising, acquiring, renovating, leasing, operating, and maintaining single-family rentals.” This report also, with a straight face, asserts that Wall Street ownership leads to “greater tenant satisfaction.” It surely does not, as we will presently see. Seeking to unload foreclosed properties, the government-sponsored mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began a program to encourage institutional investors to purchase these properties. This was done in 2012. Reuters quoted the then acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Edward DeMarco, as saying, “This is an important step toward increasing private investment in foreclosed properties to maximize value and stabilize communities.” Maximizing value for Wall Street it certainly has done. Reuters at the time reported that the Obama administration sought to “shore up the housing market.” Given the proclivities of the Obama administration to see neoliberal austerity and “market” solutions as the answer to all problems while giving a thin moderating veneer to otherwise right-wing concepts, it should come as no surprise that leaving renters and distressed mortgage holders to the tender mercies of Wall Street was cooked up. Par for the course for the intellectual dead end of liberalism. U.S. government tells speculators to get to work and they do There appears to be no letup. In March 2023, 27 percent of single-family houses sold in the U.S. were bought by investors, and that figure was virtually unchanged at 26 percent for June 2023, the latest figures I can find. The number of non-institutional purchases of single-family houses, meanwhile, declined by half from July 2020 to January 2023, according to CoreLogic data. Years of such massive purchasing by institutional investors adds up: Urban Institute researchers found that large institutional investors (those owning at least 100 single-family houses) collectively owned 574,000 homes as of June 2022, and most of these by investors owning at least 1,000 single-family rentals. This trend is occurring in metropolitan areas around the United States, but appears concentrated in the Southeast. How does this play out? One study, published by the Housing Crisis Research Collaborative, found that private-equity and other institutional investors seek not only profits but capital gains, which are notoriously taxed at lower rates than income. “The focus on capital gains is exemplified by purchases of distressed properties in low income, historically nonwhite neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment, but where gentrification or real estate cycle dynamics predict medium term price increases,” the Collaborative report states. The federal Opportunity Zone program, instituted as part of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act and described as “an uncapped, loosely targeted” policy that “provides capital gains tax shelters for investors that invest in low-income communities,” has seen “nearly all” of the funds generated by it go to real estate investment rather than business investment. Focusing their research on Atlanta, Miami and Tampa, the Collaborative researchers found that “large corporate single family rental and rent-to-own investors purchase in highly segregated, predominantly Black and non-White Hispanic areas, while avoiding high poverty neighborhoods and areas with low levels of owner-occupied housing stock.” This included areas “hit hard by Covid-19.” As a result: << “Large corporate landlords are associated with high rates of housing instability due to frequent rental price increases and aggressive eviction practices. These firms have higher eviction rates than small landlords. Investor purchases of multifamily have been found to cause spikes in evictions-led displacement, and to accelerate displacement of Black residents at the neighborhood level.” [internal citations omitted] >> This study found that large institutional owners of single-family rentals “have an established record of high hidden fees, aggressive rent increases, high eviction rates, and poor maintenance.” Similarly, a study led by Elora Lee Raymond of Georgia Tech found a “spatially concentrated evictions rate” in Atlanta. An incredible 20 percent of all rental single-family homes received an eviction notice in 2015; in some Zip codes, 40 percent received eviction notices with more than 15 percent being evicted. Institutional investors are much more likely to evict: “We find that large corporate owners of single-family rentals, which we define as firms with more than 15 single-family rental homes in Fulton County, are 68 percent more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics, tenant characteristics, and neighborhood.” Another research report reached similar conclusions. Stateline reports that “Institutional buying in Georgia has focused on a ring of middle-class Black suburbs south of Atlanta, according to research by Brian An, an assistant professor of public policy at Georgia Tech. An said buying since 2007 was concentrated in southern Atlanta suburbs with mostly Black populations, low poverty, good schools and small affordable houses considered good starter homes.” Heads, Wall Street wins and tails, you lose Although the process is further along in certain cities, financialization of housing is an economic phenomenon, not a geographically specific one. Under financialization, housing is seen as an asset class used to generate financial profits, similar to stocks and bonds. Benjamin Teresa, writing for the affordable-housing publication Shelterforce, sums this up: “The financialization of housing is part of a long-term transformation of the economy, and so it has to be understood and analyzed not as a phenomenon of specific markets, such as expensive cities or supply-constrained regions, but as an emerging set of investment strategies and management practices that present real challenges to affordable housing advocates, tenants, and community development organizations.” U.S. government policy has facilitated financialization. The 1990s reversal of the separation of commercial and investment banking put into law during the Great Depression; elimination of caps on interest rates on loans, encouraging higher-risk speculation; bailouts of banks and Wall Street that reward high-risk behavior; and the government creating a corporation to allow banks to offload their foreclosed homes instead of stabilizing tenants and owners of single homes during the Savings and Loan crisis all contributed. The Shelterforce analysis concludes: << “Financialization of housing does depend on housing scarcity, but it’s important to recognize that housing scarcity is produced in multiple ways, including by financial actors themselves. It’s not an inevitable condition financial firms are merely taking advantage of. Indeed, creating and maintaining housing scarcity through hoarding housing, gatekeeping housing, and evicting people from housing is a central preoccupation of financial investors. State-imposed austerity measures that prioritize short-term deficit reduction over functional social programs consistently reduce state support for housing, which in turn increases housing scarcity. And an attitude toward financial risk that prioritizes support to the banking and financial system above keeping people housed also produces scarcity.” >> All this adds to the upward pressure on rents, already long subject to increases well above the rates of inflation or increases in wages. A May 2023 report by Moody’s Analytics — a pillar of the economic establishment hardly likely to embellish anything that would reflect badly on capitalism — found that half of U.S. renters are rent-burdened, defined as those who spend 30 percent or more of their gross income on housing. That is the highest percentage that has been recorded. A housing study conducted by Harvard University researchers also found that half of U.S. renters are rent-burdened and that the number of homeless people is at a record high. It’s not only renters who are in difficulties: When including those carrying mortgages, the Harvard researchers found that 42 million U.S. households are cost-burdened, or one-third of all U.S. households. Being rent-burdened is bad for your health, a separate study unsurprisingly found. The study, “The impacts of rent burden and eviction on mortality in the United States, 2000–2019,” published in Social Science & Medicine, found that higher rent burdens, increases in rent burdens and evictions resulted in measurably higher levels of mortality. Evictions with judgments resulted in a 40 percent higher risk of death. And higher rent burdens are quite common. From 1980 to 2022, rent increases in the United States averaged 8.9 percent. That has accelerated, as average U.S. rent increases were reported as 18 percent for 2021, 14 percent for 2022 and 12 percent for 2023, according to Azibo, a financial services company for the real estate industry. Thus it comes as no shock that rents in the U.S. increased twice as fast as inflation from 1999 to 2022 while real wages were essentially unchanged during that time. If you want the numbers, rent growth in that period was 135 percent, income growth was 77 percent and inflation was 76 percent. Canadian rents rise beyond too damn high The housing situation in Canada is no better and may actually be worse than it is in the United States. Rents in Canada rose 4.6 percent in 2021, 12.1 percent in 2022 and 8.6 percent in 2023 from already high rates. As a result, an astounding 63 percent of Canadian renters are rent-burdened! Although inflation arose in Canada as it did in much of the world, rent far outstripped inflation: Canadian prices rose a total of 11.3 percent for the period of 2021 to 2023. Thus rents in these years rose more than twice the rate of inflation. As it is south of the border, rents in large Canadian cities are higher than elsewhere. On a countrywide average, according to National Bank of Canada data, a Canadian needs half of a median income to be able to pay the median condo mortgage — well above the 30 percent mark at which a household is classified as cost-burdened. Condos, in turn, are less expensive than other owned housing and are often seen as “starter” homes in Canada. Overall, for all mortgages, 65 percent of a median income is necessary to pay for a median mortgage. In Vancouver, more than 100 percent of a median income would be needed. In Toronto, nearly 90 percent. How many can afford that? Nor is any improvement on the horizon. The National Bank of Canada, in its housing affordability summary, said, “While homeownership is becoming untenable, the rental market offers little respite. Our rental affordability index has never been worse.” The bank concluded: “The outlook for the coming year is fraught with challenges. While mortgage interest rates are showing signs of waning in the face of expected rate cuts by the central bank, housing demand remains supported by unprecedented population growth. As a result, we expect some upside to prices in 2024. On the rental side, in a recently released report by the [Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation], Canada’s rental market vacancy stumbled to a record low of 1.5% which leaves little room for an improvement in rents.” The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is an unaffordable C$2,700 in Vancouver and C$2,450 in Toronto. Mass investor buying of homes has also reached dangerous proportions in Canada. Investors bought 30% of Canadian homes in the first quarter of 2023, up from 22 percent in 2020. Investors already owned more than one-fifth of all homes in five Canadian provinces in 2020. There is no accident here — one-third of all new properties in metropolitan Vancouver were built specifically for investment. Marc Lee, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives speaking with CBC, said, “So much of the wealth ladder in Canada has been based around real estate. I think it’s come at the detriment of quality affordable housing for the majority of folks who are renters.” Rent controls are used on a wider scale in Canada than they are in the United States, but that hasn’t seemed to slow the dizzying rise in rents and the cost of housing in general. Ontario, for example, has instituted a province-wide cap on rent increases of 2.5 percent for 2024. That is the same cap as was promulgated for 2023. But there are catches. The conservative government of Doug Ford in 2018 enacted legislation that exempts from rent caps any home built or first occupied after November 15, 2018, nor when a tenant leaves. As a result, although tenants who remained in their rental in 2022 received an average 3 percent increase in rent, units in which there was tenant turnover saw an 18 percent increase. Preliminary calculations imply there was a 25 percent rise for units that saw tenant turnover in 2023. Don’t wait for the “market” to correct this situation. At the same time as homelessness swells and prices rise beyond affordability, there are about 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada — about 9 percent of the country’s total. This is the fifth highest total of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member country. (The United States has the most vacant homes, 15.6 million, and among all OECD countries, 10 percent of homes are vacant.) Rents increased seven and a half times faster than wages from 2000 to 2020 in Canada. In part this is due to Canadian housing prices not taking a hit as happened in the United States in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. But there is no downplaying the massive buying of homes, especially newer ones. And although cities such as Toronto and Vancouver draw the most attention, speculators are hungrily eyeing housing across the country. Better Dwelling, a housing news outlet, reported that investors own more than one-third of the housing and three-quarters of “recent completions” in the small northern British Columbia city of Fort St. John while snapping up more than half of new builds in another small B.C. city, Prince Rupert. “[I]nvestors are driving up home prices based strictly on the expectation home prices will always rise,” Better Dwelling said. “When this occurs, the market can become more vulnerable to an economic shock.” “Free market” or with rent controls, European renters pay more Across the Atlantic, rent is also too damn high. Perhaps nowhere in Europe is rent higher than in Britain. Half of all United Kingdom tenants are rent-burned with London tenants spending on average 41 percent of their income on rent. Although investors buying up homes appears to be becoming more common — investor borrowing is reported to have reached £18 billion in 2022 — it has not reached anywhere near North American levels yet. Nonetheless, British rents are up 25% since the start of the pandemic. Interest rates have been high the past couple of years, but not having a mortgage to pay seems to be no barrier to British landlords. A survey by Shelter, a tenants-rights advocate, found that two-thirds of mortgage-free landlords are raising rents anyway. It must be nice to let the money roll in while you sit with your feet on the desk: Average profits per tenant are now £800 per month. I am unable to find any equivalent of the rent-burdened statistic for British tenants (that is, those paying at least 30 percent of their gross pay for rent) but there is no shortage of those paying too much. About one-quarter of U.K. renters are paying 40 percent or more for rent, the highest total in Europe. (Norway and Spain are next.) British rents are up 56 percent since October 2019, The Guardian reports. By comparison, real wage increase for British workers from 2019 to 2024 totals a paltry 5 percent. One thing in common on both sides of the Atlantic is the crisis level of homeless people. Shelter reports that more than 300,000 were homeless in England at the end of 2022, nearly half of them children. That’s 14 percent more than a year earlier. So pervasive is this social problem that a separate Shelter report found that half of England’s teachers work at a school with homeless children. “For years, successive governments have failed to act on the ongoing and deepening housing emergency by failing to invest in enough social homes. The only alternative available to families is to rent privately. But rents for family homes have skyrocketed and have outpaced incomes, shutting off all options for many people,” the organization says. Rents are high not only in England. Dublin, Paris and Oslo are reported to be the European cities with the highest rents. Despite a 3.5 percent cap on rent raises in Paris, Parisian rents rose 6.5 percent from mid-2022 to mid-2023. Reports Le Monde, “Non-compliance with rent controls is an open secret. Despite this measure, 30% of new rentals exceeded the maximum rent allowed in 2021, according to the latest available data from the Observatory of Rents in the Paris Conurbation. ‘It’s even worse for small spaces: 80% of studios don’t comply with rent control,’ said Ian Brossat, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing (Communist).” A recent city survey found that 35 percent of Paris rental properties are rented at prices higher than allowed under rent-control rules. Rents in Dublin reached €2,102 per month in August 2022, with new tenancies 9 percent more expensive than a year earlier. The rest of Ireland appears to be catching up; although rents outside the capital are much less expensive the overall rent increase for Ireland as a whole was almost 11 percent for 2023. Rents in Oslo are reported to have risen 17 percent in a year with country-wide rents in Norway up 12 percent. Recent large increases in the price of buying a home have forced more Norwegians into the rental market, so much that a recent pause in real estate prices has not caused rent increases to slow. Housing as a commodity rather than a human right OK, I’ve likely provided more numbers than many readers might care to digest. So let’s ask why rents are too damn high and why they have risen much faster than inflation for so many years. As long as housing is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, housing costs will increase and we’ll remain at the mercy of landlords, who, under gentrification, decide who is allowed to stay and who will be pushed out of their homes. And as pristine markets exist only in the minds of orthodox economists, not in the real world, the wealth accrued by landlords and developers enable them to exert powerful influences on local, state and provincial political office holders, and thus push laws to their benefit. Rent controls are prohibited or not in existence in most places, especially in the United States, and often those that are in place have loopholes or weaknesses that allow landlords to raise rents anyway. And as luxury housing for the wealthy is more profitable than other housing, that is what developers will build when “markets” are left to determine what gets built. Market forces are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the largest industrialists and financiers. Markets do not sit high in the clouds, dispassionately sorting out worthy winners and losers in some benign process of divine justice, as ideologues would have us believe. There is no magic at work here. Neither housing, nor education, nor a clean environment are considered rights in capitalist formal democracies, and if you live in the United States, health care is not a right, either. Democracy is defined as the right to freely vote in political elections that determine little (although even this right is increasingly abrogated in the U.S.) and to choose whatever consumer product you wish to buy. Having more flavors of soda to choose from really shouldn’t be the definition of democracy or “freedom.” That is because “freedom” is equated with individualism, a specific form of individualism that is shorn of responsibility. Those who have the most — obtained at the expense of those with far less — have no responsibility to the society that enabled them to amass such wealth. Imposing harsher working conditions is another aspect of this individualistic “freedom,” but freedom for who? “Freedom” for industrialists and financiers is freedom to rule over, control and exploit others; “justice” is the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists. Even in the United States, rent control has been used successfully in the past. In parallel with price controls on consumer goods and government guidance of the economy during World War II, the federal government established caps on rent to prevent profiteering that the government deemed a threat to civilian morale. After the war, when federal government controls were ended, rent control was devolved to state governments; not surprisingly denunciations of rent control went hand-in-hand with the anti-communist scare mongering that was quickly fanned to dampen political dissent. A brief wave of new rent-control measures was overturned in the 1980s, when Reaganism was instituted; this neoliberal turn was intended to restore corporate profits at the expense of working people. As to this latest turn, Oksana Mironova, writing in Portside, said: << “The anti-rent control push was part and parcel of a revanchist political turn that championed deregulation, austerity, and carceral solutions over measures that not only were of no benefit to marginalized people, but also dehumanized and actively harmed them. As the social safety net frayed, rent control became a convenient scapegoat for declining housing conditions, increased homelessness, and even increases in street crime.” >> Housing reform is increasingly on the agenda, and there is no reason why such an activist upsurge can’t continue. Reforms advocated by housing activists such as much enhanced rent control laws and a massive increase in publicly funded housing would certainly be welcome, as would redirecting tax breaks to be used only for buildings that will have 100 percent affordable units. Any short-term solutions that can ameliorate the high cost of housing are welcome. Ultimately, however, unaffordable rent increases beyond inflation levels or wage growth will not be history until housing is no longer a capitalist commodity. Public intervention, not markets, is the solution. Why is housing not a human right? |
Website Title | CounterPunch |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Anna Phillips |
URL | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/18/chrysotile-asbestos-ban-epa/ |
Publication | Washington Post |
ISSN | 0190-8286 |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 21:46:47 |
Library Catalog | www.washingtonpost.com |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | [Environmental Protection Agency bans chrysotile asbestos, the only form of the cancer-causing mineral that the U.S. still imports and uses in new products.] The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday finalized a ban on chrysotile asbestos, part of a family of toxic minerals linked to lung cancer and other illnesses that the agency estimates is responsible for about 40,000 U.S. deaths each year. The federal ban comes more than 30 years after the EPA first tried to rid the nation of asbestos but was blocked by a federal judge. While the use of asbestos in manufacturing and construction has declined since, it remains a significant health threat. “Folks, it’s been a long road. But with today’s ban, EPA is finally slamming the door on a chemical so dangerous that it has been banned in more than 50 countries,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. The agency’s ban targets chrysotile asbestos, also known as “white asbestos,” the only one of the six forms of the mineral still being used in the United States. Resistant to heat and fire, the mineral is used by companies that make vehicle braking systems and sheet gaskets. Chemical manufacturers have also defended its continued use in making chlorine, which utilities use to purify drinking water, as well as in pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Michal Freedhoff, who heads chemical safety and pollution prevention for the EPA, called the ban historic, saying it is the first time the nation’s updated chemical safety law has been used to outlaw a dangerous substance. That law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, was so weakened by the federal courts’ decision in 1991 allowing continued asbestos imports and use that “it was rendered almost powerless to protect the people who needed protecting the most,” Freedhoff said. In 2016, America’s long delay in confronting asbestos prompted bipartisan concern among members of Congress, who voted to overhaul the law, giving the EPA sweeping new authority to protect people from toxins. Yet years passed with little action. When the Trump administration came to power, it shrank the agency’s staff, leaving the chemical safety office too small, underfunded and demoralized to accomplish its mission. Finally banning asbestos was at the top of Freedhoff’s to-do list when she became the agency’s top chemical regulator in 2021. As a congressional staffer, she had helped write the 2016 legislation. On a call with reporters Monday, she described the new rule as “a symbol of how the new law can and must be used to protect people.” The trade group representing the chlorine industry, the American Chemistry Council, has staunchly opposed the administration’s proposed ban since it was announced two years ago, on the grounds that chrysotile asbestos is still used by about a third of U.S. chlor-alkali plants that produce chlorine. The industry group warned that banning this form of asbestos would make it difficult for water utilities to buy chlorine, threatening the safety of the nation’s drinking water. Freedhoff said that once the EPA decided some of those concerns were valid, it changed its original enforcement timeline. Instead of having two years to phase out the asbestos diaphragms used to make chlorine and sodium hydroxide, the eight American companies that still use this technology will have five years, or in some cases more, to switch to alternatives. Yet imports of new asbestos diaphragms will be prohibited immediately once the rule takes effect, 60 days after it appears in the Federal Register. Imports of asbestos-containing brake blocks, which have exposed car mechanics to the deadly airborne fibers, will be phased out after six months. And asbestos gaskets will be banned after two years. While the change in compliance dates was a concession to chlorine manufacturers, most of which have already transitioned away from asbestos-based technology, the chemical industry did not greet it with enthusiasm. In a statement, Steve Risotto, the American Chemistry Council’s senior director of chemical protects and technology, said supply chain bottlenecks and contractor shortages meant the industry needed more time to comply. “ACC has consistently advocated that a 15-year transition period is needed to support an orderly transition and to avoid a significant disruption of chlorine and sodium hydroxide supplies,” he said. Environmental and public health advocates praised the new rule and urged the Biden administration to go further by addressing the other types of asbestos, arguing that anything less than a full ban doesn’t protect public health. “I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re not done,” said Linda Reinstein, president of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. In 2006, her husband died of mesothelioma, a cancer closely tied to asbestos exposure. Wary of federal rules that can be overturned by courts or weakened by future administrations, Reinstein is advocating for legislation that would outlaw all asbestos fibers — and all uses. She’s skeptical of the EPA’s claim that chrysotile asbestos is the only form in use in the United States today. “If you haven’t done product testing, if you haven’t searched for asbestos in consumer products, then you don’t know if it’s not being used,” she said, adding that, over a decade ago, laboratory testing conducted at her group’s behest identified five products with different combinations of asbestos fibers, including a children’s toy. Although the use of asbestos has declined, in large part because of liability fears, construction workers, firefighters, paramedics and others who spend time in old buildings are still being exposed. Once building materials containing asbestos are demolished or otherwise disturbed, the mineral’s fibers can stick to skin and clothing, ultimately finding their way into people’s lungs. There is even a name, “asbestosis,” for a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling asbestos. |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Haaretz |
URL | https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=123d5a0ead&u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=fde6ac580e |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 19:11:42 |
Abstract | Israel's Mossad chief landed in Qatar for another round of talks for a hostage release/cease-fire deal. The IDF said it arrested more than 80 people in a raid on Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital after "concrete evidence" showed that Hamas was using it as a command center. Israel denied the head of UNRWA permission to enter Gaza. PM Netanyahu spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden on the phone for the first time in over a month but didn't release a read-out of their conversation. Here's what you need to know 164 days into the war: WHAT HAPPENED TODAY ■ GAZA: The IDF said it had arrested more than 80 people during an overnight raid on Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital, after "concrete evidence" showed that Hamas terrorists were using the hospital as a command center. Sources in Gaza told Haaretz that the IDF evacuated women and children from the hospital area and environs. The operation is still ongoing, the IDF said. • Fa'aq Mabhouh, the head of Hamas' internal security, was killed in the Al-Shifa operation, the IDF said. • The IDF released a recording of a conversation it said was between the head of Israel's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration and the director-general of the Hamas-controlled health ministry, Dr. Youssef Abu Rish. The IDF representative is heard saying: "We see that Hamas is continuing its military activities inside hospitals ... Our simple request is to immediately stop all terror activity in hospitals." Abu Rish replies: "We've received your message and I promise that we're on the same page, hospitals need to be places for providing services." • The IDF believes that the second in command of Hamas' military wing in Gaza, Marwan Issa, was killed or at least seriously wounded from an air force strike last week on the tunnel where he was hiding. • Israeli authorities denied permission for the head of UNRWA to enter Gaza, UNRWA and Egypt's foreign minister said, calling it an unprecedented move. • Across Gaza, the number of people facing "catastrophic hunger" has risen to 1.1 million, about half the population, the report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said. UN Secretary General António Guterres said "this is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded" by the initiative in the decade of its operations, "anywhere, anytime." • EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Israel is provoking famine in Gaza and using starvation as a weapon of war. Israel's foreign minister said it allows extensive humanitarian aid into Gaza, adding that "It's time for EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell to stop attacking Israel and recognize our right to self-defense against Hamas' crimes." • Al Jazeera claimed that the IDF arrested one of its journalists in Gaza, and demanded his immediate release. • The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza said at least 31,726 Palestinians have been killed and 73,792 have been wounded since the start of the war. ■ HOSTAGES/CEASE-FIRE: Mossad Director David Barnea landed in Qatar for another round of talks for a hostage release/cease-fire deal. This round of hostage talks will take at least two weeks and will be conducted directly with Yahya Sinwar, who is currently believed to be in the tunnels under Gaza, rather than Hamas officials in Qatar, a political source said. The framework for a deal is a 42 day cease-fire in exchange for 40 hostages. • The IDF announced on Sunday that Capt. Daniel Perez, 22, thought to have been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, was killed during Hamas' assault, and his body was taken captive to Gaza. • Families of American hostages held in Gaza released a statement calling on the Biden administration "to keep pushing all parties to strike a deal that brings every single hostage home." They also demanded that the international community "put pressure on Hamas to lay down their arms and return our family members to us now." "The slow progress of the negotiations has been criticized by members of the war cabinet, as well as the experts dealing with the hostage issue. The government is in no hurry to move" - Amos Harel ■ ISRAEL: PM Netanyahu spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden on the phone for the first time in over a month. The two discussed "the latest developments in Israel and Gaza, including the situation in Rafah and efforts to surge humanitarian assistance to Gaza," the White House said. Netanyahu's office did not publish a readout of the conversation, as it usually does. • Before his conversation with Biden, Netanyahu told an AIPAC delegation that claims in America that he is isolated and beholden to far-right extremists in his coalition are "deliberate lies." • The IDF has announced that Staff Sgt. Matan Vinogradov, 20, was killed on Monday in northern Gaza. • Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that 100,000 civilian gun permits have been handed out since the war began. ■ WEST BANK: EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell said that he was confident the EU would agree on Monday to impose sanctions on both Hamas and violent Israeli West Bank settlers. ■ HOUTHIS: The IDF said that a suspicious aerial object entered Israeli territory from the Red Sea and fell in an open area near Israel's southernmost city of Eilat. ■ LEBANON: The IDF said that it fired an interceptor missile towards a suspicious aerial target launched from Lebanon. The IDF said it attacked Hezbollah military targets in Lebanon's south. |
Website Title | Haaretz |
Short Title | Israel at war |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Tom Dale |
Author | Cindy Corrie |
Author | Craig Corrie |
URL | https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/18/rachel_corrie |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 17:49:07 |
Language | en |
Abstract | [We mark the 21st anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old U.S. peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a military bulldozer on March 16, 2003. Corrie was in Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement to monitor human rights abuses and protect Palestinian homes from destruction when she was killed. To this day, nobody has been held accountable for her death, with the Israeli military ruling it an “accident” and the Supreme Court of Israel rejecting an appeal from her parents in 2015. Rachel Corrie has since become a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and her legacy must be used “to direct attention back to Rafah” and prevent an escalation in the war, says her friend and fellow activist Tom Dale, who witnessed her final moments. We also speak with Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, who say they have met many Palestinians over the years who continue to honor their daughter’s memory. “For Palestinians everywhere, Rachel’s story has been very important,” says Cindy Corrie. “They tell us over and over again how much it meant.” After Corrie was killed, they devoted their lives to her cause and founded the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice.] AMY GOODMAN: Saturday marked the 21st anniversary of the death of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. She was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16th, 2003, three few days before the U.S. attacked Iraq. Rachel was 23 years old. She was an Evergreen College student from Olympia, Washington. She went to Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement, which formed after Israel and the United States rejected a proposal by then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to place international human rights monitors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a U.S. Caterpillar bulldozer that was run by the Israeli military. She had been trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Rafah near the border with Egypt. Eyewitnesses say she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest. She was in full view of the bulldozer’s driver, as photographs show. In June 2003, the Israeli military concluded her death was, quote, “an accident.” Human rights groups condemned the Israeli’s army investigation as a sham. A year later, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told Rachel’s parents he did not consider the Israeli investigation credible, thorough or transparent. Rachel’s parents initiated lawsuits against Israel, the Israeli military and the Caterpillar corporation, but a U.S. federal appeals court ruled they could not sue the company because that would force the judiciary to rule on a foreign policy issue decided by the White House. In its ruling, the three-judge panel said the case could not go to court without implicitly questioning, and even condemning, U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In 2015, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Rachel Corrie’s parents after they had sued the Israeli Ministry of Defense for a symbolic $1 in damages, and upheld a lower court’s ruling that cleared the military of responsibility, saying Rachel’s death had taken place in a, quote, “war zone.” In a minute, we’ll be joined by Rachel’s parents and one of her colleagues with the International Solidarity Movement. But first, this is Rachel Corrie in her own words, from a documentary about her by Concord Media called Death of an Idealist. << RACHEL CORRIE: I’ve been here for about a month and a half now, and this is definitely the most difficult situation that I have ever seen. In the time that I’ve been here, children have been shot and killed. On the 30th of January, the Israeli military bulldozed the two largest water wells, destroying over half of Rafah’s water supply. Every few days, if not every day, houses are demolished here. >> AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Olympia, Washington, by Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. After she was killed, they devoted their lives to what Rachel Corrie lived and died for, and founded the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. Cindy is the foundation’s president; Craig, the treasurer. They’ve also gone on interfaith peace missions to Israel, Gaza, the West Bank. Also with us in London is Tom Dale, a writer who’s worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis and journalism in the Middle East. His new piece for Jacobin is headlined “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine.” In 2002 and ’03, he, too, volunteered in Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement, alongside Rachel. On March 16th, 2003, a little after 5 p.m. in Rafah, he witnessed this U.S.-made bulldozer run over Rachel. He held her hand as she lay dying on a gurney in the ambulance taking her to the hospital. Welcome to all of you. I want to begin with Tom. Describe that day. What motivated you both? And what motivated Rachel to stand there in front of this bulldozer with that fluorescent vest on as it came forward and crushed her? TOM DALE: So, to give some context and background, the International Solidarity Movement group in Rafah at that time were mostly concerned to protest against the and oppose the demolition of homes that were being carried out on the border with Rafah and Egypt. And there was no allegation, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that these homes were being demolished due to anything that the people who lived in them had done. They were being demolished simply because Israel had decided that its soldiers based along that border strip wanted a tactical advantage, and that involved clearing a 300-meter strip full of family homes, the overwhelming majority of which were refugees. Now, at the particular time Rachel was killed, a bulldozer turned toward one of those homes, the home of Dr. Samir Nasrallah. And Dr. Samir and his young family were friends of Rachel. She had stayed with them. She had lived with them. She knew them intimately. And she placed herself in between the bulldozer and the home, as we had done so many times before and, indeed, as we had done earlier in that day. And what we had learned, over the course of several months, is that the bulldozer drivers were able to see us, were able to recognize what would be too far, and they were able to stop or withdraw at an appropriate moment. But on this case, the bulldozer driver just kept on going. Rachel was sort of forced to climb up a kind of roiling mound of earth in front of the bulldozer. I think you heard earlier Cindy quoted saying that her head was above the top of the bulldozer blade. That’s absolutely accurate. It’s almost as if the driver would have been able to look her in the eye. But as he kept going, ultimately, she lost her footing, and she was sucked down into the earth and terribly, horrifically died. At that point, I ran to call for an ambulance. I learned then that Dr. Samir himself had seen the incident, too, and had called the ambulance. And we had been living with these families. As I say, Rachel had been living with the Nasrallahs. I had been living with other families along the border. And that was an expression of a really deep commitment to the principle of shared humanity. And Rachel took on the cause of those families as if that cause was her own, and she made that cause her own. And that’s what motivated us to take that stand. AMY GOODMAN: You quote Rachel’s diary. It’s absolutely amazing. She wrote this, of course, before her death, and she said she had a dream. Do you have it in front of you? Or I’ll read it. TOM DALE: Please do read it. Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: Rachel wrote she dreamed that she was falling — quote, “falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react … And I heard, 'I can't die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.” If you can talk about what it means to hear Mohammed right now talking about how Rachel is remembered, Tom, and what happened to you as — you went in the ambulance with her to the hospital? TOM DALE: Yeah, that’s correct. So, I mean, regrettably, by the time we got to the hospital, Rachel was dead. As I say, like, on the way, I had been sort of just steadying her hands on her abdomen. You know, of course, it was, like, a terrible moment. We were all distraught. We knew Rachel. We cared for her greatly. She was one of us. And then, immediately, of course, we were pushed into the cycle of responding to the series of bizarre lies that were being told by the Israeli Defense Forces. And in terms of what it means to hear Mohammed say that right now, well, of course, you know, I’m very grateful. It means a lot, given that, of course, the situation that Mohammed and his family and all of Rafah are in now is so terrible, that he even has a thought for someone who was standing there 20 years ago is really remarkable and speaks to sort of the power of Rachel’s message. And I really hope we can sort of repay that in the international community and use this just as an opportunity, as another spur to direct attention back to Rafah, direct our energies back toward putting the pressure on politically to protect Rafah, and Gaza, in general, from a future onslaught. AMY GOODMAN: Tom, I want to bring in Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, speaking from Olympia, Washington. That’s where Rachel went to college. In fact, I think I met both of you for the first time back in 2003. I just happened to be giving the graduation address at Evergreen College that year. It was the largest graduation class ever. But it was missing one student who was supposed to be graduating, and it was your daughter Rachel. And so, Cindy, you gave an address to the graduating class, as well. Twenty-one years later, I offer my condolences again to you. And I’m wondering your thoughts as you listen to Mohammed, on the ground in Rafah, talking about your daughter and what she has meant for the people of Rafah, Gaza and beyond? CINDY CORRIE: Thank you, Amy. I had a bit of difficulty hearing Mohammed, but what I know from our experience this past 21 years is that for Palestinians everywhere, Rachel’s story has been very important. They tell us over and over again how much it meant that someone from Olympia, Washington, that had no reason to be in Gaza, except that she had learned about the situation and knew that they were greatly in need, that she came to them, and that she stood to try to prevent the demolition of the — the many demolitions of Palestinian homes that were happening at the time. And Rachel connected with the community. That was important to her. She worked with women’s groups, with children’s groups. Not only were homes threatened, but wells were threatened. She slept at the wells with other activists. Rachel was there with Tom and with others from the U.K., from the U.S., and people from other countries during the early time that she spent in Gaza. We’re also often approached by younger people who have heard the story, some when they were children that remember it, and tell us that it changed their lives, changed the course of the direction of their lives, that they then felt that there were meaningful things that they needed to look for, meaningful ways to contribute in this world. AMY GOODMAN: And, Craig, your thoughts, as well, 21 years later, with Rafah once again in the news, with President Biden saying that an Israeli invasion of Rafah is a red line, but not saying there would be consequences if the Israeli military went over that line? CRAIG CORRIE: Yes, when I was listening today, I was thinking that, for me — and it’s different for other members of the family, but we were using Rachel’s memory and what she was doing as a portal for people to understand — from the United States, to understand what was going on in Gaza, what was happening to her friends, and, partially, the horror that’s going on now. And I think at this point we have to be looking directly at the Palestinians and hearing their voices, as you allowed today. There’s never been a red line that any American president has — well, that’s not quite true — but, recently, enforced against Israel. And to me, as long as Israel is coveting the lands and the homes of Palestinian people, there will not be peace in Israel and Palestine, and neither the Israeli people nor the Palestinian people will be safe. So, I think, really, the difference between Rachel, Tom, the rest of the ISM, the difference between them and the rest of us, is that they refused to look away when all of this was going on, and the rest of the world did look away. AMY GOODMAN: You know, one of the ways Rachel’s words have been preserved was because of Alan Rickman. And, Craig, I just read a piece you wrote after the actor and director Alan Rickman died. You wrote it in The Guardian. And you talked about what a difference he made in making those words into that play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, based on her diaries and her emails. I’m looking at a piece — six weeks before opening night, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing the production, the move that was widely criticized as an act of censorship, finally opened in October 2006. And if either of you could comment on the canceling of people in this country and around the world now who express concern about what’s happening in Gaza, and also talk about your trip to meet with the Nasrallahs, the Palestinian pharmacist’s family, whose home Rachel was protecting? CRAIG CORRIE: That’s a lot to talk about. AMY GOODMAN: Yeah. CRAIG CORRIE: I’ll start with Alan and the play. And I guess in that article, what I thought of is that that play, what people won’t understand about it is that it’s actually funny. He managed to get Rachel’s sense of humor. And he edited those words along with Katharine Viner, and we’re grateful to both of them. But he managed to get Rachel’s humor into the play, and I think that brought her personality. It made her human. And I’m grateful forever for that. The play has been seen on every continent in the world, except Antarctica. And we, Cindy and I, have seen that, I think, in maybe six countries, in seven different languages. So, it was delayed in opening in the United States, but it had two runs in Great Britain, in London, before that. And it did eventually open in New York City. And since then, it’s been also all over the United States. And actually, there’s going to be a reading in a few days in Seattle again. So, I’ll let Cindy talk, I think, more about the other. CINDY CORRIE: We visited the Nasrallah family in September of 2003. It was our first trip to the region. It was very important for Craig and me to see the place where Rachel had stayed and where her life ended. We traveled to Rafah with the help of our Palestinian friends, who met us at Erez Crossing. And we were taken — the very first day that we were there, we were taken to the area where the Nasrallah home still stood. And it was the only home left in that entire area. What I remember saying and feeling at the time was that house was sitting in a sea of rubble, because the Israeli military was destroying homes wholesale. Later, Human Rights Watch said that happened in the absence of military necessity. And over 16,000 people, I think, from 2000 to 2004, lost their homes at the time. That day, we sat on the floor in the Nasrallah family’s home and ate a wonderful lunch meal with Umm Kareem, with Abu Kareem and with their very young children at the time. We were taken to the spot by Abu Kareem, showing us exactly where Rachel had been when she was killed. It was a very emotional day. We hugged. We saw the rooms in the house where Rachel had spent time with the children and the family. They pulled off their Arabic-English dictionary from the shelf and had me read, try to pronounce the words in Arabic, and they told me how Rachel was so much better at it than I was. And we saw also the space at the foot of the Nasrallah parents’ bed, which was at the backside of the house, where Rachel would sleep, she said, in a puddle of blankets with the children, because military people and machines would drive through that border area at night, and they would shoot into the houses. And there were bullet holes marking the entire home. AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, and I just wanted to get your final comment, either Cindy or Craig, on what is happening today. CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, that family did everything they could to hold onto that house. They were eventually forced out of that house, and some of them went through seven other houses. Now we hear that they want out of Gaza. After 21 years of trying to hold onto their homes and their lives and their futures and their pasts in Gaza, like so many people, they want to survive, and they want out. I can’t imagine what drives them to do that, but that’s the situation in Gaza. AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, again, Craig and Cindy Corrie, speaking to us from Olympia, Washington, and Tom Dale — we’ll link to your piece in Jacobin, “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine” — joining us from London. |
Website Title | Democracy Now! |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Craig Corrie |
URL | https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Message-from-Craig-Corrie-Marking-21-Years.html?soid=1103380029413&aid=MOmfxpund-0 |
Date | 2024-03-16 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 17:48:12 |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | On March 16, 2003, our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed as she stood to protect the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah in Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death by the Israeli military under a militarized, Caterpillar, Inc. D9R bulldozer, supplied by our United States government, paid for by our tax dollars. Now, twenty-one years later, we are witnessing the entire Gaza population being crushed by the Israeli military, using planes, bombs, shells, tanks and, yes, even bulldozers supplied by the United States. Genocide. Paid for by our tax dollars. In some ways you could see this coming: soldiers never held accountable for their war crimes, human rights violations by the army of a country feeling entitled to the land of another people. We know this story, and we have seen this genocide. Ask any native American. Our family worked for almost two decades to secure accountability in Rachel’s case, first through diplomatic means, and when that failed, through a civil lawsuit in Israeli courts. Some of the court testimony is particularly telling. An IDF Colonel responsible for training stated that there are no civilians in war zones, and the officer responsible for the military police investigation into Rachel’s killing testified that he thought Israel was at war with everyone in Gaza, including the peace activists. And all the time, the Israeli defense team referred to the people of Gaza – Rachel’s friends, our friends – as “the terrorists.” Even the Israeli high court said that international law did not apply to the actions of Israel in Gaza. How telling. Repeatedly, the U.S. supplies weapons to Israel that are used in ways giving probable cause of human rights violations. But when the U.S. asks for investigation, Israel replies with reports that are far from the result of the thorough, credible, and transparent investigation required of, or in Rachel’s case promised by, Israel. Citing that violations cannot be proven, the U.S. continues military aid – rather than withholding more funding until our questions are properly answered, as allowed by U.S. law and dictated by common sense. The U.S. routinely rewards IDF war crimes with increased military aid, rather than sanctions. When that aid is abetting genocide, as it has since October 7, 2023, the aid itself is a war crime. The time to avert the massacre of October 7 and the genocide that has followed was during all the prior years of the Israeli occupation. Repeatedly, Palestinians, often joined by Jewish Israelis, have protested nonviolently to have their rights respected. Cindy and I have joined them for Friday afternoon protests in the olive groves west of Bil’in in the West Bank and have been met by teargas and small arms fire from the IDF, even though we never left Bil’in land. I remember stumbling up the hillside while an Israeli friend helped Cindy to medical aid for gas inhalation. We have watched a landowner weeping as her olive trees were being uprooted to make way for a great wall to divide her forever from her crops. We watched from afar the Great March of Return in Gaza, again met by gunfire – often targeted at medics, journalists, and even children. Had Israel and the U.S. been moved by any of these nonviolent protests to respect the rights of Palestinians, then the violence of October 7, 2023, and the more than five months of carnage and destruction in Gaza thereafter might have been avoided. To have peace, there must be justice, and there is nothing peaceful about the daily injustice of the occupation. On a larger, even more depressing scale, I remember in grade school wondering how it was possible that any nation could ever let the Holocaust happen. It was personal. Linda, the girl I shared a desk with, was Jewish. Now, as I watch in horror at the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza and rationalized in Washington DC, I see how genocide happens: by nations making excuses and looking the other way. That is where we come in – by refusing to look the other way. And an amazing number of us around the world have done so. Activists on the street corners, in city council meetings, in front of the White House, on state capitol steps, many for the first time in their lives, refusing to hear the excuses, refusing to look the other way. We are heartened by each one of you and by the visible, constructive actions you are taking. You have joined with Rachel, who wrote to her mother more than two decades ago, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.” Craig Corrie (Rachel’s dad) March 16, 2024 |
Website Title | Rachel Corrie Foundation For Peace and Justice |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Zvi Bar'el |
URL | https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-14/ty-article/.premium/gazas-distribution-dilemma-as-hunger-spreads-donors-seek-private-firms-to-handle-aid/0000018e-39fd-d3fc-adff-b9ff1f180000 |
Publication | Haaretz |
Date | 2024-03-14 |
Section | Israel News |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 17:21:02 |
Library Catalog | Haaretz |
Language | en |
Abstract | [The first shipment of maritime aid – 200 tons of food and medicine – has left Cyprus for the Gaza Strip, but the logistical difficulties will make the process complex and the U.S. administration has no solutions.] On Tuesday, the ship Open Arms set sail from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip laden with more than 200 tons of food and medicine that had undergone strict security checks at the Cypriot port of Larnaca. But big news is still far off for the hundreds of thousands of Gazans trapped in what the United Nations calls "extreme hunger." The plan is to move the cargo onto small boats and barges that are being towed by the ship and are able to land on the Gazan coast. But it's not clear who will unload them, where the aid will be stored, who will distribute it and who will secure it. U.S. President Joe Biden's announcement of a plan to build a temporary pier in Gaza will also have to wait at least two months before all its parts arrive in Gaza and are put together into a 500-meter-long platform down which the cargo can be ferried. And meanwhile, the administration still has no solution for the complex logistical and operational challenges involved in transporting the aid, even as the aid issue has developed into a strategic crisis. Biden made it clear that no American soldier will set foot in Gaza. But someone will have to connect the pier to the shore, guard the American engineering teams and, above all, take the aid ashore and distribute it. The government is now looking for private companies willing to take on this project and, no less important, raise funds for carrying it out. One of the leading contenders is Fogbow, which owned by former military and intelligence personnel. Its president is Sam Mundy, a former general in the marines who commanded U.S. troops in the Middle East, and its vice president is Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer who once served as an adviser to the secretary of defense. The company has been involved in similar operations elsewhere in the world, and it has already begun seeking funding from Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates as well as European countries. It also plans to set up a special fund for donations. Financing is a fundamental condition for operating the project, because the U.S. government can't finance it itself, especially without a bidding process in which other companies could compete. But even if the funding issue were solved, on the ground, any company responsible for moving the cargo will have to secure the pier area and the warehouses where the aid will initially be stored. Israel has apparently agreed to provide the outer perimeter of security around the pier and to prevent either civilians or armed men (members of Hamas or other Palestinian organizations) from reaching the pier and seizing the aid shipments. But it's still not clear who will be responsible for guarding the shipments en route from the pier to the warehouses and then from the warehouses to Gaza's residents. An Israeli source involved in the issue said the plan is to assign this task to unarmed local Palestinians. Nevertheless, he added, "the issue of guarding them, and how to prevent incidents like the one two weeks ago, in which a mob descended on the aid convoy and more than 113 people were killed, still hasn't been solved." One possibility under consideration is to use the Gazan branch of the private Palestinian company Padico, which was formerly involved in building an industrial zone in Gaza and apparently has the knowhow and capabilities needed to store and distribute the aid. "But it's possible that in the end, there will be no choice, and Israeli soldiers will have to secure the entire process of distributing the aid, from the pier to the urban distribution centers," the Israeli source admitted. But whatever logistical solution is found will have to wait for temporary pier to be built. And that will take time that Gazans, languishing from hunger, don't have. According to horrifying reports about the hunger and sanitation situation in Gaza, residents have begun slaughtering dogs and cats to feed their families. On March 9, veteran New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof quoted from text messages sent by Mohammed Alshannat – a Gazan who, before the war, was doing his doctorate remotely at Rhodes University in South Africa – to a colleague at the university. Their chilling exchanges took place between October 11 and February 29, when contact with him was lost. In one text, he wrote, "Rice, on which we have been living off in the last four months, has completely disappeared from the markets. Me and my wife have decided to eat a meal every two days just to keep our kids alive as long as we can. What is left for us is hay. We have started grinding it, bake it and eat it. Because we have started eating the hay bread, we now defecate blood mixed with hay." On Tuesday, for the first time in around three weeks, a UN aid convoy entered northern Gaza. It carried only enough food to feed roughly 25,000 Gazans for a short time, which is a minuscule amount compared to the enormous needs. Moreover, it's not clear how long convoys to northern Gaza will be able to continuing using the military road that runs along the fence between Gaza and Israel. Meanwhile, huge quantities of aid have piled up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, waiting their turn for Israeli security checks before entering Gaza. Within Egypt, there is growing public pressure to open Rafah completely and allow the free movement of goods into Gaza, with no Israeli security checks. On Tuesday, for the second time, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry rejected a request from a group of social activists for a meeting to discuss letting Egyptian volunteers, including doctors and employees of aid organizations, enter Gaza. By advertising on social media, the group – headed by Dr. Mona Mina, who used to head the Egyptian Doctors' Syndicate – managed to sign up thousands of people, including many doctors, who want to volunteer in Gaza. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry hasn't explained its refusal to meet with the group. But so far, the Egyptian government has refrained from violating its agreements with Israel and America governing the entry of aid shipments and professionals seeking to volunteer in Gaza. Control over the pace at which aid enters Gaza through Rafah is one of the key levers of pressure Egypt still has over Hamas. But it's not clear how effective this pressure is, especially when Egypt is bound by agreements with Israel and the United States. According to reports leaked to the media by the Egyptian government, there is still a chance for a breakthrough in the negotiations on a deal for the hostages' release, and the government has once again invited a Hamas delegation to come to Cairo in the coming days. But a senior Hamas official, Moussa Abu Marzouk, said Wednesday that he is unaware of any such invitation. Another report said the U.S. administration is examining the possibility of a short humanitarian cease-fire that would be used to send medicine and medical equipment to the Israelis held hostage by Hamas. The report added that Hamas has conditioned such a cease-fire on the entry of medicine and medical equipment for Gaza's hospitals. But it's not clear whether Israel would be willing to agree to a humanitarian cease-fire. As one Israeli official said, its fear is that a humanitarian cease-fire will at best achieve "better maintenance of the hostages," but won't advance a deal for their release. |
Short Title | Gaza's distribution dilemma |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Mohammed Abu Lebda |
URL | https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/18/rafah_update_mohammed_abu_lebda |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 16:49:45 |
Language | en |
Abstract | [We get an update from Rafah as the World Food Programme warns of worsening catastrophic hunger in the Gaza Strip and Israel continues to block most aid from entering the territory. Despite growing international criticism, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he plans for a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah, where over 1.4 million Palestinians are penned in after repeated forced evacuations from elsewhere in Gaza since October 7. “I’m hoping from the U.S. government to put a serious pressure on the Israeli government in order to prevent such a catastrophe,” says Mohammed Abu Lebda, a poet and translator from Rafah, who says an Israeli ground invasion could kill up to 100,000 more Palestinians. Abu Lebda describes the daily hardships in Rafah, including the severe mental toll, Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has unleashed. “I’m not sure that I’m going to be the person that I used to be before the war,” he says. “I’m 100% sure that I was changed, and I was changed forever.”] AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where humanitarian agencies say a small amount of flour has been delivered in northern Gaza for the first time in months, as the U.N. food agency warns famine is imminent and 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger. This comes as UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, is reporting one in three children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza is now acutely malnourished as Israel continues to block most aid from entering Gaza. On Friday, a ship carrying 200 tons of aid arrived in Gaza from Cyprus, but aid groups say far more aid is desperately needed inside Gaza. Despite growing international criticism, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to move ahead with a full-scale ground invasion of the southern city of Rafah, where over 1.4 million Palestinians are now seeking refuge. For more, we go to Rafah, where we’re joined by Mohammed Abu Lebda. He’s a poet and a translator. He used to translate Edgar Allan Poe but now translates for the International Medical Corps. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mohammed. Thank you for joining us today on Democracy Now! Can you describe the situation on the ground in Rafah and tell us about your city? MOHAMMED ABU LEBDA: OK. Hi. It’s my pleasure to be here. Actually, as you may see in the background, I’m talking about the tents that are here, and I want to say that every single street in Rafah city is full of tents, because after people were forced to be displaced from the rest areas of the Gaza Strip, from north until Khan Younis in the south, and they didn’t find any shelter but Rafah city, which — actually, let me say that the border towns — Rafah is a border town, and the border towns usually are neglected. And it’s not known — it’s not even known, only for geographers or even border guards. So, Rafah was suffering in the normal days from bad infrastructure, lack of many basic life needs. So, actually, let me say, in the war of 2014, the people of Rafah were demanding to have a hospital, because we here, until now — we are in 2024 — we don’t have a suitable hospital that can provide good medical services to the people of Rafah. To just describe the horrible situation that Rafah is living, Rafah used to have a population of 250,000 people only. Now we have more than, over than 1.4 million people, without any suitable infrastructure or without providing them with the necessary basic life needs. OK, the situation in the north of Gaza is really horrible. But let me say, in Rafah, there is no big difference, actually. People here are suffering from several things. Actually, you need to wait in lines, and maybe you can — you may spend the whole day in lines just to have some bread or even to have clean water, because most of the water here is polluted, and it’s not suitable for the human use. And it’s important to mention that, above all of this, the shooting and the bombing is still continuing here in Rafah, actually, even if Rafah was declared as a safe place. AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed Abu Lebda, the Biden administration has said they have a red line, that would be the prime minister having the Israeli troops engaging in a full ground invasion in Rafah, if he doesn’t present a plan for how Palestinians would be dealt with on the ground, civilians. Israel announced it wants to transfer most of the more than million Palestinians in Rafah to what it calls humanitarian islands in other parts of Gaza. Can you explain what that means and what people are saying, how they are preparing? MOHAMMED ABU LEBDA: OK, actually, to be honest, I don’t know what does it mean even, because I never heard about something called safe islands or something like that in Gaza Strip. So it is the first time I heard it, after reading the news. Actually, there is no effective plan that can easily transfer or move over than 1.4 million people here from Gaza Strip — from Rafah city, I mean, even to another areas, where the IDF is still working there. So, to be clear, it’s not an effective plan. Actually, to be honest, me and the rest of the Rafah people don’t know even what they are talking about, because it is the first time to hear about this. But I can ask that the American government is to put real pressure and serious pressure on the Israeli government so they can prevent them seriously and honestly to invade Rafah, because invading Rafah means that there is a true catastrophe that is coming, even if we are still living in a catastrophe, actually, because the situation here cannot be described. So, invading Rafah means that you will end the little, the tiny hope that is still — we still have. So, what does this mean to me, actually? I am actually a little bit worried about the safety of the entire people here, because invading Rafah, which means that hundreds of thousands will be killed if something like that happened. So, I’m expecting and I’m hoping from the U.S. government to put serious pressure on the Israeli government in order to prevent such a catastrophe to happen. AMY GOODMAN: What would it mean for your family, Mohammed, if the Israeli military does launch a full-scale invasion of Rafah? And can you describe what the process is for people to leave, to make their way into Egypt, the thousands of dollars that must be spent? I think, on average, it’s something like $5,000 per adult and $2,000 or $2,500 per child? MOHAMMED ABU LEBDA: Let me say, first, leaving Gaza Strip toward Egypt, I mean, the entire people here, if there is an invade or march or there is any march into Rafah, actually, most of the world, including the U.S. government itself, actually they refuse that entirely. The Palestinians will not be moved. They refuse that entirely, to be moved to the Sinai or the Egyptian side. But let me say that I’m already displaced, because I lost my house by bombing some near houses near my house at the same square, so I forced to move to another place in the same area, Rafah city, because I’m from Rafah. And the same thing for the people who were displaced from the rest of Gaza Strip cities. For me, or for my experience, for me and my family, we suffered a lot first when we were at our house in order to provide the basic life needs, as I mentioned, the basic food even. If there is any food here, you will find very, very high prices that the normal citizen or the normal civilians cannot really afford. So, it’s impossible to the people in such a situation to afford any kind of food. And let me say that anything that is entering from Rafah cross-bording, anything, literally, it’s not even enough for maybe half a million. We are talking about a number that — over than that with a big thing. So, from my experience, I face several things. First of all, we face, actually, very, very real threats — and it’s not once, it’s not even twice; we are even facing that daily. This is according to the physical thing. And also I want to mention that we are facing severe symptoms related to our mental health. Actually, I’m not sure that I’m going to be the person that I used to be before the war when the war ends. I’m 100% sure that I was changed, and I was changed forever. It’s not me only. I’m talking about my family and the rest of the people here of Gaza Strip. We are facing severe symptoms when we are talking about the mental health. We are talking about children that are raising in such situations. Of course, they are going to have severe symptoms and many, many horrible things for their mental health, and they will carry that to all entire life, their entire life. So, from all sides, people here are really suffering, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed, you are a poet. You translate Edgar Allan Poe. Now you are a medical translator. Can you describe your work? MOHAMMED ABU LEBDA: OK, yeah, I used to work to translate novels as a literary translator. But this war, or this catastrophe, let me say — I don’t prefer to use the word “war” because what we are witnessing is a catastrophe that cannot be described. Anyway, yeah, I used to translate literature, which means that I’m a sensitive person with many emotions. So, you need that in order to translate poetry or translate novels or something like that. So, then, this catastrophe changed us forever, all of us, even our jobs. So, yeah, I moved to be a medical translator and a medical interpreter at a field hospital here between Rafah city and Khan Younis city in the south of Gaza Strip. Actually, my work as a medical translator, it was the first time to be in the field, actually, in such situations. And I can say that I’m witnessing very, very, very horrible situations. I’m witnessing daily many casualties that are arriving to the field hospital, because we don’t have any — we lost every governmental medical services because of the destruction of many, many hospitals, even the only hospital here in Rafah, which is al-Najjar Hospital. It cannot provide the necessary medical help, services. And the field hospital, which was established by the IMC, the International Medical Corps, they are actually — in only two months, they performed about 1,000 major surgeries, which is really, really a great thing to have. And even related to the outpatient departments, we are talking about consultations of maybe 30,000. So, yeah, we are trying hard to provide our people with the necessary medical services, as well as the mental health and the CP, which is the child protection. We are doing our ultimate efforts in order to try hard in order to provide the people or the civilians and the innocent people here, to provide them with the medical services and other services. And let me use what Michel Foucault once said: Because we are no prophets, our job is to make windows where were once walls. So, we are trying hard is to create windows on the walls that this catastrophe is trying to build. AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mohammed Abu Lebda, we’re going to be joined by Rachel Corrie’s parents and the activist who held her hand as she lay dying. This is 21 years ago in Rafah. She was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. You shared with us a picture from Rafah in 2003 — you were a little boy at the time — with the caption “my grandmother with her neighbor and my sister Rozan after their home was destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer,” right around the time Rachel was trying to protect homes as a U.S. activist. Your thoughts on her significance? And how is she remembered in Rafah? MOHAMMED ABU LEBDA: OK, let me say that Rachel Corrie is being remembered. Every single person here in Rafah, and in Gaza in general, in Gaza Strip in general, and especially of Rafah, every single person knows Rachel Corrie, even the late generations, all of them. Allow me to tell you the main reason. Actually, Rachel Corrie became an icon, not only here in Gaza Strip and not only for the Palestinians, the Palestinian people, but for the rest of the world, because she was — she passed away or she was killed because of her — because she was trying to deliver a very important message. It’s the most important message in the world, which is peace. And, actually, for me, this is the main thing that we need to focus on, in order to achieve what Rachel Corrie was dreaming to achieve, which is a peace for the Palestinians. So, what matters for me in Rachel Corrie’s story is that she left her home, she left her parents and her family, and she came to a very — to a country that she never visited before. And, actually, she came into a conflict zone, which is considered as a dangerous zone. So, even her ideas to come to here, actually, it’s a bravery. She’s really — actually, I want to say that she is being remembered here because of the story and the message she tried to deliver. And this, actually, this and Rachel Corrie’s story, should strengthen us here while we are living these horrible situations. We need to remember Rachel Corrie and her courage to come to a dangerous area, not only that, trying to defend the people, the voiceless people, to be the voice of the voiceless people here and to stand in front the ultimate power. She stand in front tanks and bulldozers, trying to defend the people here in Gaza Strip, which, actually, I don’t know what is a greater — what act will be greater than Rachel Corrie dead. So, I’m really grateful for Rachel Corrie. And I want to say that people like Rachel Corrie will never die, ever. AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mohammed Abu Lebda, poet and translator from Rafah, thank you so much. Your words are being heard around the world and by her parents, who are going to be joining us next. I’m looking at your GoFundMe page, Mohammed, which quotes another poet. You say, “All what we seek for is to live, like any human being in this earth. Helping us means that you are taking action, supporting humanity because the famous poet [Dante] said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.'” Thank you for talking to us today on Democracy Now!, Mohammed Abu Lebda. |
Website Title | Democracy Now! |
Short Title | “A Catastrophe That Cannot Be Described” |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Shayna Jacobs |
Author | Jonathan O'Connell |
URL | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/18/trump-civil-fraud-judgment-bond-450-million/ |
Publication | Washington Post |
ISSN | 0190-8286 |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 16:15:52 |
Library Catalog | www.washingtonpost.com |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | [The former president’s lawyers said in a court filing that Trump and the Trump Organization have been unable to get a surety company to accept property as collateral.] NEW YORK — Donald Trump has been unable to finance an appeal bond for at least $450 million to cover a judgment in the New York attorney general’s business fraud case against him and is seeking a reprieve from an appellate court to keep the state from seizing assets, according to a court filing Monday. The former president’s lawyers said in the filing that Trump and the Trump Organization, the real estate hospitality and golf resort company he solely owns, have been unable to get a surety company to accept property as collateral — stalling any efforts to obtain a bond that is due to be posted in a week. “Critical among these challenges is not just the inability and reluctance of the vast majority of sureties to underwrite a bond for this unprecedented sum, but, even more significantly, the unwillingness of every surety bond provider approached by Defendants to accept real estate as collateral,” Trump’s attorneys wrote. The legal team behind the Trump, a Republican campaigning against President Biden in the 2024 election, recently failed to get an emergency appeals judge to put off the 30-day deadline that the attorney general has imposed to give the company time to fulfill its appeal bond obligation. That judge also rejected an offer of a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. A full panel will soon examine the same issues. Trump, his company and several current and former executives were found civilly liable in Manhattan state court this year for engaging in illegal acts to defraud banks and insurance companies by lying about the true value of his assets to falsely obtain profits and savings in business over a decade. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the case, said Trump misstated the value of his properties and other assets by up to $2.2 billion a year from 2011 to 2021. |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | OCHA OPT |
URL | http://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-141 |
Date | 2024-03-18 |
Accessed | 2024-03-18 16:12:55 |
Language | en |
Abstract | One of the few remaining UNRWA distribution centres in Gaza was hit by an Israeli strike on 13 March. |
Website Title | United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - occupied Palestinian territory |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Bryan Harris |
Author | A. Anantha Lakshmi |
Author | Joe Leahy |
URL | https://www.ft.com/content/8703874e-44cb-4197-8dca-c7b555da8aef |
Publication | Financial Times |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Section | Chinese trade |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 21:35:11 |
Abstract | [Investigations reflect fears of flood of cheap Chinese products but could strain Brasília’s ties with Beijing.] Brazil’s industry ministry has launched a number of investigations into the alleged dumping of industrial products by China as Latin America’s largest economy reels from a wave of cheap imported goods. At the request of industry bodies, the ministry has in the past six months opened at least half a dozen probes on products ranging from metal sheets and pre-painted steel to chemicals and tyres. The Brazilian measures come at a time when the world is bracing for a flood of exports from China as the world’s second-largest economy struggles with excess capacity amid a property sector slowdown and weak domestic demand. To stimulate its economy, China is investing in advanced manufacturing, especially in solar energy, electric vehicles and batteries. In addition to Brazil, China’s steel exports to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have risen sharply in recent months. Developed markets have started taking extensive measures against imports from China, with the EU launching an anti-subsidy probe into Chinese EVs and the Biden administration recently raising security concerns over the Asian country’s vehicles. China’s exports grew 7.1 per cent in the first two months of this year, far outpacing growth in imports. “Prolonged declines in China’s export prices may cause trade tensions between China and some major economic powers to rise,” analysts at Nomura said in a research note on Friday. China’s exports to and imports from Brazil both rose by more than a third in the first two months of the year, according to Chinese customs data. “Last year saw one of the most critical situations in the entire history of the national chemical industry,” said André Passos Cordeiro, president of the Brazilian chemical industry association. “We see temporary increases in import tariffs as an indispensable regulatory tool for combating these predatory operations and preserving the domestic market.” The trade tensions create a dilemma for leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has sought to both nurture relations with Beijing and protect and develop Brazil’s national industries. Since returning to the presidency for a third non-consecutive term last year, Lula has put industrial policy at the heart of his economic strategy. But Brasília is also likely to try avoid a confrontation with Beijing, which is its largest trading partner and significant purchaser of commodities such as soyabeans and iron ore. Last year, Brazil exported more than $104bn worth of goods to China, while importing $53bn. Of the 101mn metric tonnes of soyabeans shipped from Brazil last year, 70 per cent, worth about $39bn, went to China. One of the most recent investigations was launched earlier this month following a request by CSN, a large Brazilian steel producer, which alleged that between July 2022 and June 2023 imports of particular types of carbon steel sheets from China rose almost 85 per cent. In opening the probe, which is scheduled to take 18 months, the industry ministry said there were “sufficient elements that indicate the practice of dumping in exports from China to Brazil . . . and damage to the domestic industry resulting from such practice”. Brazilian steelmakers have requested the government slap tariffs of between 9.6 per cent and 25 per cent on imported steel products. Overall imports of steel and iron from China rose from $1.6bn in 2014 to $2.7bn last year. [GRAPH: "Steel and iron from China have flooded into Brazil"] Soaring steel imports are a particular sore spot for the Brazilian government as the Latin American nation is one of the world’s largest exporters of iron ore — a primary ingredient in steel production. Chemicals and tyres are also points of contention, with the industry ministry launching separate investigations in recent months. According to official data, imports from China of the chemical phthalic anhydride rose more than 2,000 per cent in volume terms between July 2018 and June 2023. In the same period, imports of tyres grew more than 100 per cent to 47mn units from 23mn units, with roughly 80 per cent coming from China. Brazil is not the only emerging market to voice concerns about the surge in industrial products from China. In Thailand, the government has accused Chinese companies of evading anti-dumping duties, while industry groups have warned of big losses from cheaper steel in the market. Vietnam’s government has launched investigations into dumping of wind towers and some steel products from China after complaints from the local industries. In August last year Mexico imposed tariffs of 5-25 per cent on imports of hundreds of goods from countries with which it does not have a free trade agreement, with China being one of the countries most affected. The tariffs were put in place amid increasing pressure from US officials, who have suggested that Mexico is not doing enough to clarify the origins of steel imports from third countries, in what trade experts say is a reference to China. The Chinese government did not immediately reply to a request for comment. It has consistently attacked what it calls “protectionism”, particularly by the US and the EU. |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Thea Renda Abu El-Haj |
Author | Fida J. Adely |
Author | Jo Kelcey |
URL | https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-ruined-76-percent-of-gazas-schools-in-systematic-attack-on-education/ |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 20:24:01 |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | [Denying Palestinians’ right to education has been central to Israel’s settler-colonial project for eight decades.] Gaza has become a “graveyard for children.” Israel’s bombing has killed least 12,300 children — and more than 31,000 people total — since October. Thousands more are unaccounted for and are likely to be found under the rubble of their destroyed homes and shelters. In addition to the relentless bombing, Israel has been waging a starvation campaign: While all Gazans are facing food insecurity, 1.17 million Gazans have reached emergency levels of hunger, and half a million are at catastrophic levels. Against this backdrop of extreme violence, Israel has also been perpetrating a very particular form of violence that has disproportionate and long-term effects on children and youth: “scholasticide,” or the systematic destruction of the entire education system. The destruction of Gaza’s education system has garnered less attention than has that of the health care system. But the consequences for children, youth and future generations of Palestinians are severe. In late January 2024, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that Israel had destroyed or damaged 378 school buildings (76 percent of the total school buildings in Gaza). Many of the schools that are still standing have been transformed into displaced persons camps to accommodate some of the 1.9 million Gazans forced to flee their homes. Children who started the new school year with dreams of becoming teachers, nurses or doctors are now sleeping on the floor of their classrooms, with hundreds of people sharing a toilet. Still there’s no safety. Schools serving as shelters are being bombed and besieged, sniped at and blown up. Schools that haven’t been totally destroyed have been emptied of their furniture and textbooks, which were burned in the absence of needed fuel. Gaza’s higher education system has also been decimated. All 12 universities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The almost complete closure of the Gaza Strip has also prevented 555 students from taking up scholarship-funded studies abroad. Even more devasting, Israeli forces have killed 100 Palestinian academics in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Among them were professor Sufian Tayeh, killed with his family on December 2. He was a prominent scientist and the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, the Strip’s leading academic institution. On December 7, Refaat Alareer, professor of world literature and creative writing at Islamic University, and the editor of Gaza Writes Back, was killed along with six of his family members, with at least one report that he had been informed by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces that he was a target. On February 20, 2024, professor Nasser Abu Al-Nour, dean of the faculty of nursing at the Islamic University in Gaza, was killed along with six of his family members. As with all statistics coming out of Gaza, these numbers severely underestimate the real toll. In January, in response to the video of Israa University being blown up, a UN special rapporteur posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education system should constitute a distinct and new crime under international law: “educaricide.” In fact, Palestinians have been sounding the alarm about this for some time. Educaricide — or scholasticide — speak to the wholesale and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education system by the Israeli state. Little wonder then that a group of Palestinian children in Gaza recently asked a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) official why the organization bothered to teach them human rights when these values clearly don’t apply to them. In the face of this destruction, the overwhelming majority of U.S. government officials have said nothing. Instead, the response of the U.S. government (and many of its allies) to the still unproven Israeli accusation that a small number of UNRWA’s approximately 13,000 employees were involved in the October 7 attacks has been suspension of all aid to the organization. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian organization in Gaza and one of the primary educational providers. In contrast, the U.S. Congress is trying to send Israel another $14 billion in military aid, in spite of the recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel and third parties do everything they can to prevent death, destruction and acts of genocide from happening in Gaza. Gazan Education in Context Before October 7, the K-12 education system in Gaza included 625,000 students who attended public, private and UN-run schools and 22,564 teachers. Palestinians are among the most educated populations in the Middle East. In spite of the 17-year siege, frequent Israeli bombings and disruptions to education, Gaza’s students often rank among the top performing students in the Palestinian territories. Statistics tell only part of the story. The significance of education to Palestinians is rooted in their anti-colonial struggle. It was Palestinians who set up the first refugee schools in 1948. By the mid-1960s, almost all Palestinian refugees completed the compulsory cycle of schooling at access rates that were far in advance of the public systems in some of their host states. As the Palestinian national movement gained traction in the 1960s and ‘70s, education emerged as integral to Palestinian nonviolent resistance. In the 1970s, for example, the Palestine Liberation Organization developed a dedicated philosophy of education, mobilized youth to provide literacy classes to first generation refugees, and supported the publication of children’s books designed to provide young Palestinians with a sense of their history and identity. Later, during the First Intifada, popular community-based education initiatives were created to overcome Israel’s prolonged closure of schools. When the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in 1994, one of its first acts was to assume control of the education system and develop a dedicated Palestinian curriculum. In recent years, Gaza’s educators have been at the forefront of educational innovations in the region. UNRWA’s online learning platform was, for example, developed by teachers in Gaza who sought to continue schooling through the periods of disruptive violence. Subsequently developed into a regionwide platform, these efforts supported continuity of learning for Palestinian refugees in other countries. Palestinians are not unique in the value they ascribe to education. Refugees, migrants and racially marginalized communities everywhere often refer to the importance of education for a better future. However, the extreme oppression that Palestinians live under — especially those in Gaza, 70 percent of whom are refugees — lends education a particular importance and urgency. Education and knowledge are portable assets that can transcend dispossession, diaspora and statelessness. Education is also a key social and cultural institution — one that simultaneously assures a continuity with the past and an orientation toward a better future. For a population whose history, national identity and rights have been consistently denied, education has a formidable potential. This is precisely why the denial of Palestinians’ right to education has been a persistent feature of Israel’s settler-colonial project over the last eight decades. Alongside killing, arrests, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, land appropriation, domicide and the targeting of health and media sectors, Israel’s history of targeting Palestinian education is designed to erase Palestinian presence in the land of historic Palestine. For decades, schools have been bombed, bulldozed and forcibly closed. The Israeli military has arrested and beaten students and shot them in their classrooms. The Kafkaesque restrictions on Palestinians’ right to movement (including checkpoints, earth mounds, the wall and restricted residency laws) also make it difficult, if not impossible, for students to attend school and universities. Palestinian citizens of Israel face large funding inequities, and unrecognized Palestinian communities are denied the right to have their own schools. These attacks on education extend to accusations leveled against the Palestinian curriculum. Across the West Bank and Gaza, including in UN-administered schools, students learn the curriculum developed by the PA. This curriculum was first developed in the late 1990s by the renowned Palestinian educator and academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Like any curriculum, it offers a shared narrative and projects a collective vision for society. Yet unlike almost any other contemporary curriculum, it is taught in a context of military occupation and settler-colonial dispossession. Consequently, it must contend with the oppressive political context that has shaped the lives of generations of Palestinians. Since the late 1990s, several highly partisan organizations have accused the PA curriculum of promoting hatred and antisemitism. The fact that these accusations have come from extremist polemical organizations whose methods and findings have been called into question time and again has had no impact on U.S. and EU officials who continue to promote these damaging falsehoods. Nor is there any discussion of the ways in which the Israeli curriculum is promoting anti-Palestinian violence and hatred. The result has been sustained and obsessive focus on the content of the PA curriculum by major Western donors and significant pressure on the PA and UNRWA to decontextualize education. The Right to a Palestinian Education The famous philosopher John Dewey argued that the proper role of education is to foster cooperation on real world issues of direct importance. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire took this idea further, articulating a pedagogical vision that directly engaged with the source of his students’ oppression. Palestinian educators understand this all too well. As many Palestinian teachers we know have told us, “knowledge is our only weapon.” Perhaps it is this fundamental truth that best explains Israel’s determination to destroy the education system in Gaza, in an attempt to retain its oppressive status quo. The destruction of the entire system of education in Gaza cannot be counted only in terms of the lives lost and infrastructure destroyed. More than 200 out of 325 cultural sites have been destroyed or severely damaged, including museums, libraries, archeological sites and publishing houses. When this latest round of violence ends in Gaza, there will likely be another infusion of international humanitarian projects that seek to rebuild schools, teach a new generation of educators, and launch trauma-informed programs to address the psychosocial needs of Palestinian children and youth who have grown up entirely under siege and war. However, these programs will only address a fraction of what is needed to challenge the colonial oppression, dispossession and violence that have affected generations of Palestinians. Palestinian children, youth and educators in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora need and deserve to learn in safety. But for Palestinians, safety goes hand in hand with contesting the oppression that frames their daily lives and preserving their cultural identity. This can only be achieved through “dangerous” knowledge that challenges the realities of dispossession, colonization and statelessness, and teaches each new generation the historical and cultural wisdom necessary to secure a free and just future. Protecting the expression of this “dangerous” knowledge in the U.S. is also critical at this historic moment in which academic freedom is also under attack, especially on college and university campuses. Student activism was key to enlightening and changing U.S. public opinion about the horrors of the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa. Given the outsized role that the U.S. government plays in supporting Israel’s current war on Gaza and its apartheid policies, it is imperative that we in the U.S. fiercely protect academic freedom and spaces for “dangerous” political critique and analysis that is central to education for justice. |
Website Title | Truthout |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Haaretz |
URL | https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=123d5a0ead&u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=6085ede719 |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 19:26:52 |
Abstract | Israel's war cabinet is set to discuss the departure of an Israeli delegation to Qatar for negotiations on a deal with Hamas. Trucks of flour reportedly reached areas of northern Gaza that have had no aid in four months. After meeting with Jordan's king, German Chancellor Schulz met PM Netanyahu saying "We cannot stand by and watch Palestinians starve." Netanyahu slammed Sen. Schumer's call for early elections in Israel as "totally inappropriate." Here's what you need to know 163 days into the war: WHAT HAPPENED TODAY ■ GAZA: The IDF said that its engineering corps destroyed a 2.5 kilometer tunnel, the longest yet discovered in Gaza, used by Hamas to mobilize forces between the Strip's north and south. • Israeli officials believe Hamas' deputy military chief, Marwan Issa, was killed in central Gaza last week, The Guardian reported. Following the attack on the tunnel where Issa was staying, internal communication between senior Hamas officials was terminated for 72 hours, standard procedure after a significant Hamas loss during the war, the report said. • The Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported that Palestinian sources said Issa was wounded in the attack, but did not know whether he survived. • The large number of civilian casualties that would be caused by an extensive Israeli operation in Rafah would make regional peace "very difficult," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday after talks with Jordanian King Abdullah. In Israel, meeting with PM Netanyahu, Scholz said "We cannot stand by and watch Palestinians starve." • Trucks of flour reached areas of northern Gaza that have received no aid in four months, Palestinian media reported. The Hamas-linked Home Front media outlet reported that the aid was distributed by the "Popular Committees," a group that includes powerful clan leaders in Gaza, with security from Hamas personnel. • European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Gaza was facing famine and there must be a rapid ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. • The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza said at least 31,645 Palestinians have been killed and 73,676 have been wounded since the start of the war. ■ HOSTAGES/CEASE-FIRE: Israel's war and political-security cabinets are set to meet Sunday night to discuss the negotiating position of the Israeli delegation on a cease-fire/hostage release deal with Hamas prior to the delegation traveling to Qatar on Monday. "After more than 160 days of war, Israel has no time left for games. In order to achieve the release of the hostages, it will have to show some flexibility. The time for settling scores with Hamas for the massacre will come. Those who claim that the price Hamas demands is too high should compare it to the expected price in hostages' lives if these talks fail" - Amos Harel ■ UNITED STATES: PM Netanyahu criticized Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's watershed speech calling for elections in Israel, saying it was "totally inappropriate" on CNN's State of the Union. "Israelis understand if we were to have elections now, before the war is resoundingly won, we would have at least six months of national paralysis, which means we would lose the war," he claimed. • Schumer said that "too many people are turning against Israel because of their dislike for Netanyahu…I felt an imperative to show that you could be against Netanyahu and still be very pro-Israel, which of course I am." • Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, one of the key pro-Israel voices in the House, told CNN that "the fact that Israel's most staunch defender in the U.S. Congress should be making these remarks should be an earthquake in Israel." Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Schumer's speech was "an act of courage, an act of love to Israel." ■ ISRAEL: PM Netanyahu said during a government meeting that some in the international community "are trying to stop the war now, before achieving all of its goals…by making false accusations against the IDF, against the Israeli government and against the prime minister of Israel." Israel, according to Netanyahu, "must not give in to this pressure." • Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said military pressure in Gaza "is the key" to both a military victory in Gaza for the return of the hostages, "through operational means or through negotiations." • Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded that PM Netanyahu stop the next round of appointments in the IDF, claiming that Chief of General Staff Herzl Halevi does not have a mandate to promote officers following October 7. • A magistrate ordered four Israelis detained Saturday night during a protest near PM Netanyahu's home in Caesarea to be released and criticized the police's conduct, calling their claims "absurd" and stating: "Woe betide us if we do not allow demonstrations for or against the government." • Israel's Knesset designated the Hebrew date of the 24th of Tishrei as the national memorial day for the October 7 Hamas massacre. Since the 24th of Tishrei falls on a Saturday in 2024, this year's memorial day will be marked on the 25th, which happens to fall on October 7. ■ WEST BANK: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke with Qatar's Emir Hamad al-Thani about aid to Gaza, as well as the "urgent need to stop aggression against the Palestinians" in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and conditions for worshippers visiting Al-Aqsa during Ramadan. ■ HOUTHIS: CENTCOM said that it had destroyed five unmanned vessels and a drone launched by the Houthis towards the Red Sea, which posed an "immediate threat" to merchant ships and U.S. Navy ships in the area. ■ LEBANON: Rocket sirens sounded in northern Israel. The IDF said that one rocket fired from Lebanon fell in northern Israel and an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon toward the city of Afula exploded before reaching it. Israel's air force attacked Hezbollah targets in four areas in Lebanon. |
Website Title | Haaretz |
Short Title | Israel at war |
Item Type | Magazine Article |
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Author | Eric Foner |
Reviewed Author | Dylan C. Penningroth |
URL | https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/a-wary-faith-in-the-courts-before-the-movement/ |
Volume | 2024-04-04 |
Issue | 6 |
Publication | The New York Review of Books |
ISSN | 0028-7504 |
Date | 2024-03-13 |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 19:02:13 |
Library Catalog | www.nybooks.com |
Language | en |
Abstract | [A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.] Reviewed: Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth Liveright, 465 pp., $35.00 ___________________________________ During its heyday in the 1960s the civil rights movement caused deep divisions in American society. More recently it has been absorbed into a whiggish narrative of progress in which a system resting on white supremacy was superseded by one that, while hardly perfect, is considerably closer to the ideal of equal justice under law. Participants in what is sometimes called the “freedom struggle” included courageous activists who put their lives on the line in the Jim Crow South and a cadre of civil rights attorneys, exemplified by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, who in a series of landmark cases persuaded the federal courts that the legal system institutionalized around 1900 in the southern states violated the constitutional rights of Black Americans. Before this triumph of the rule of law, according to what Dylan Penningroth calls the “master narrative of civil rights,” Black southerners had little faith in the legal system and did their best to avoid contact with it. This makes intuitive sense. Why would African Americans believe they could achieve fair results in courts dedicated to upholding white supremacy? Better to steer clear of southern courtrooms entirely. Penningroth, who teaches history and law at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that current scholars’ understanding of the emergence of the civil rights movement rests on a series of misconceptions about Black Americans’ “legal lives.” He sets out to demolish them. Even during the days of slavery, he insists, they knew a lot more about legal principles than one might imagine. From experience and observation, they developed what Penningroth calls “goat sense” (following the coinage of the Black tenant farmer Ned Cobb, the protagonist of the 1974 best seller All God’s Dangers)—a working knowledge of legal rules and concepts. Far from avoiding the courts, they utilized all the legal tools at their disposal. From the late nineteenth century to the era of the civil rights movement, he writes, “Black people poured out their family stories” in legal cases, exhibiting a “wary faith” that the courts would uphold their claims to what he calls the mundane “rights of everyday use”—rights that derived from ownership of property, the signing of contracts, the “associational privileges” of membership in Black churches, and legal claims, such as inheritance, acquired through marriage. Rather than heroic freedom fighters courageously confronting repression or victims avoiding the courts at all costs, Black Americans emerge in this telling as ordinary folk using the law to help make the best of difficult circumstances. Penningroth’s conclusions emerge from an epic research agenda in which he and his students examined some 14,000 legal cases, identifying 1,500 with Black litigants, most but not all in the South. These were civil litigations, matters of private law whose documentary records long lay unexamined in local courthouses. As has lately become common among historians, Penningroth intersperses his account with his own family’s experiences from the time of slavery to the twentieth century’s Great Migration as a point of departure and reference. Before the Movement begins with a revealing incident involving Penningroth’s enslaved ancestor Jackson Holcomb, who owned a small boat in Virginia. In the final days of the Civil War, Holcomb successfully demanded payent to ferry Confederate soldiers fleeing the Union army across the Appomattox River. Legally speaking, the boat and everything else Holcomb claimed as property belonged to his enslaver. But the desperate Confederates did not challenge his ownership of a boat or his right to charge a fee for transporting individuals across the river. Whatever the letter of the law, custom throughout the slave South accepted that slaves could acquire property of their own. Penningroth devotes particular attention to the widespread practice of allowing slaves to till small garden plots on which they grew crops for sale at local markets. He acknowledges that for slaves, cultivating “garden patches” in what was supposed to be their free time was a form of “superexploitation”—the owner shifting to the laborers themselves part of the responsibility for providing food for enslaved laborers and their families. Nevertheless he views such plots as the basis of an “informal economy” that allowed numerous slaves to earn income that would finance the acquisition of land after the Civil War. Over time, privileges won by slaves morphed into customs, and customs into rights. While slavery existed, property ownership by slaves was not enforceable in court. That would change in 1871, in the midst of Reconstruction, when Congress established the Southern Claims Commission, charged with compensating former southern Unionists, slaves included, for property appropriated by the army during the war. Something similar had transpired a few years earlier with regard to Black families. Slave marriages had no standing in law, but enslaved men and women married anyway and local communities, white and Black, recognized the existence of their unions, though this did not prevent their disruption by sale. Although Penningroth does not draw attention to it, in March 1865 Abraham Lincoln signed a law freeing the immediate families of Black Union soldiers. Slaves’ family ties suddenly acquired legal standing in the eyes of the federal government. One consequence was that the widows of Black veterans became entitled to federal pensions. As for Jackson Holcomb, in the years after his encounter with fleeing Confederates, he married, purchased land, and paid his property taxes. He appreciated the importance of adhering to legal rules. In order to make sense of the vast archive he and his students have created, Penningroth divides his history into four parts—slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the “movement era.” For each he delineates how Black citizens used the law and how their efforts helped to produce an evolution in the concept of civil rights itself. Many readers may find the first chapter, “The Privileges of Slavery,” surprising. Penningroth freely grants the incongruity of the idea. But he shows that throughout the South, slaves were able to wring concessions from their owners and to create customary entitlements that over time evolved into rights recognized by “community opinion.” “Slaves owned property in every legal sense of the word,” he writes, “except that no court would protect their ownership as a right.” Readers may well consider this a significant exception, but Penningroth makes a strong case that their experience with property ownership and trade equipped slaves to become “key players” in the South’s “market economy,” and that as a result many were prepared for participation in a free labor system. Emancipation, he writes, was “a much less sharp break” in the lives of the enslaved than historians have assumed. (Penningroth has a penchant for ex cathedra pronouncements like this that need more supporting evidence than he provides, and he sometimes fails to make clear which historians he is taking to task.) Penningroth’s discussion of slave property rights brings to mind the work of perhaps the post–World War II generation’s leading scholar of slavery, Eugene D. Genovese. Current trends in scholarship about the Old South have somewhat diminished his posthumous reputation. The stress now is on the institution’s physical brutality and its central role in the expansion of modern capitalism, calling into question Genovese’s portrait of southern slavery as a paternalistic, precapitalist institution whose functioning rested on mutual concessions between owner and slave. Genovese was interested in how ruling classes acquire legitimacy and exercise authority. Toward the beginning of his classic study Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), he included a brief section entitled “The Hegemonic Function of the Law,” delineating how it serves the interests of those holding power in repressive regimes to ensure that the legal system operates with a modicum of fairness, even if it means that persons like them do not always win in court. The belief that the courts actually dispense justice can help to obscure vast imbalances of power. Like Penningroth, Genovese wrote of rights based on custom enjoyed by slaves. In the late nineteenth century, thanks to the laws and constitutional amendments enacted during Reconstruction, Black men for the first time were serving as justices of the peace and holding other judicial offices, mostly in the South. This helps to explain why more and more Black southerners were inspired to go to court, a pattern that continued well after the advent of Jim Crow. But, Penningroth was surprised to discover, very few of the thousands of cases he examined identified the race of the individuals involved. In cases revolving around property rights, he says, it made no difference if parties were Black or white—race “had no legal meaning.” Despite the pervasive hold of white supremacy, moreover, not all white people shared the same interests. In rural areas of the South, for example, some white farmers strongly opposed the presence in their neighborhoods of Black landowners, while others welcomed their availability as temporary laborers at harvest time. Because of census records and other digitized sources, Penningroth was able to identify the race of many individuals who appeared in court documents, yet the legal records suggest that even in the days of Jim Crow civil law did not always operate along racial lines. In his sections dealing with Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, Penningroth emphasizes that the post–Civil War emergence of the Black family as the central institution in Black communities forced African Americans to familiarize themselves with the nuances of family law. Black litigants engaged in “waves of lawsuits” about divorce, the sale of property, financial support of the elderly, child custody, and other family matters. These intra-family conflicts, he writes, challenge the romantic view of the Black family as a harmonious institution guided by a communal ethos, which he claims too many historians have embraced. He also points out that, judging from lawsuits, Black churches were often riven by dissension. For example, Penningroth relates the experience of the Mount Helm Baptist Church in Mississippi, “engulfed in controversy” in 1899 when a group of parishioners sued to bar the minister from preaching because he had been performing faith healing services in the sanctuary. The state supreme court ruled in their favor. Black litigants were sometimes more willing to trust the judgment of local courts than the decisions of other family and church members. In her memoirs, published in 1898, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled that Reconstruction << involved the reconsideration of the principles of our Government and the natural rights of man. The nation’s heart was thrilled by prolonged debates in Congress and State legislatures, in the pulpits and public journals, and at every fireside on these vital questions. >> Penningroth examines how the nationwide debate she describes reconfigured Americans’ grasp of the concept of civil rights. Before the war, rights were divided into three categories—civil, political, and social—and enjoyment of them varied from state to state. Civil rights encompassed those entitlements necessary for participation in a free-labor economy: signing contracts; testifying in court; owning, buying, and selling property; and suing and being sued. Even in the South, many free Black people enjoyed civil rights, but not the other two. They could own property and testify in court (although often only in cases involving other Black people), but throughout the country voting and “social” rights such as equal access to public transportation, hotels, restaurants, and places of amusement were generally restricted to white men. In 1866, over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, Congress passed the first national civil rights act, which declared all persons born in the United States citizens by birthright, with the exception of Native Americans (considered members of their tribal sovereignties). The measure severed the connection between citizenship and race, overturning the Dred Scott decision of 1857—in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney limited citizenship to white Americans—and for the first time delineated the rights the former slaves were to enjoy along with white citizens, essentially civil rights (the rights of contract) but not political or social rights. As Reconstruction progressed, African Americans and their white allies, drawing on arguments popularized by the pre-war antislavery movement, demanded full legal equality for the emancipated slaves. Increasingly, various kinds of rights merged together. Many Republicans came to include the right to vote as part of an expanded definition of civil rights (except for women). In the Fifteenth Amendment they wrote Black male suffrage into the constitution. In 1875, shortly before the end of Reconstruction, Congress enacted the second civil rights act, which made it a crime to deny any citizen access to transportation, public accommodations, or a variety of other venues. “Civil” rights had now expanded to include what once had been considered discrete political and social prerogatives. In 1883 the Supreme Court declared the 1875 law unconstitutional, adopting the view that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law regardless of race applied only to “state action”—that is, racial discrimination by public officials, not private businesses. But, Penningroth points out, the process of redefinition continued well into the twentieth century, as civil rights became more and more linked to race. By the time Congress and the Warren Court had dismantled legal Jim Crow, the right of racial minorities to be free of invidious discrimination had overshadowed the definition of civil rights as the basic entitlements of all free persons. This transformation, he speculates, made it more difficult to persuade white Americans that the struggle for civil rights was relevant to their own daily lives. Despite losing rights of many kinds, Black southerners in the Jim Crow era enjoyed some remarkable achievements. By 1910, Penningroth relates, more than half a million Black families had managed to acquire land, amounting to more than 15 million acres. Yet as time went on, the way they dealt with landownership generated serious problems. Frequently, property was owned jointly by members of extended families. Any decision to sell required the agreement of all co-owners, causing deep family divisions. When individual co-owners died without a will, their portion of the land was divided into small plots among surviving children and grandchildren. Because of the Great Migration, the disposition of landed property in the South frequently involved relatives living in the North, with whom southern family members had little or no contact. Land became the subject of intra-family lawsuits in which litigants claimed to have been cheated out of their share of what came to be known as “heir property,” and elderly family members sued relatives who reneged on promises of monetary payments to help them survive old age. As landownership fragmented, generations of Black farmers had no choice but to master the legal complexities of such transactions. The Jim Crow era also witnessed a proliferation of Black institutions, including churches, societies for mutual relief, fraternal orders, and schools and colleges. African Americans had to learn the nuances of laws regulating the powers of corporations and associations. As with family and church disputes, they used what they learned to file lawsuits. Finally, Penningroth turns to the “movement era.” Many readers may consider his judgments in this section unduly harsh. He agrees with most current scholars that rather than being brought to the South by NAACP lawyers and other outsiders, the civil rights movement drew on a long history of local legal activism. In keeping with his emphasis on the vitality of Black traditions, he reproaches the civil rights workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who courageously entered the South to help secure the constitutional rights of Black citizens for misunderstanding the local culture. Offering little direct evidence of their views, he writes that the civil rights volunteers assumed that local people had little experience with legal processes and approached the court system from behind a veil of “legal ignorance.” These outsiders were under the mistaken impression, he claims, that Black southerners were “ignorant of their rights” and in need of intervention to galvanize a movement for change. Both Black and white activists, he suggests, adopted a condescending attitude toward the people they were seeking to organize; some went so far as to attribute southern Black poverty, in part, to a “plantation mentality” inherited from slavery. Penningroth’s section on this era includes a valuable discussion of the evolving status of Black attorneys. Drawing on Kenneth Mack’s influential book Representing the Race (2012), he notes that before the mid-twentieth century most Black attorneys, like most white ones, worked as general interest practitioners who spent the majority of their time representing clients of modest means in minor local cases. At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans filed at least 17 percent of the civil suits he examined, probably more. Such litigation did not directly challenge white supremacy—nearly all these lawsuits pitted Black people against one another. But even at the height of Jim Crow, Black travelers were able to win lawsuits for damages against railroads that had subjected them to demeaning treatment, and white judges ordered whites to pay their debts to Black creditors. Where the white South drew the line was at Black lawyers’ practicing cases of legal significance. Nearly all the lawyers in these thousands of cases appear to have been white. One reason cited by Penningroth was the creation by prominent white attorneys of lily-white bar associations, racially exclusionary gateways to the profession. Whatever the outcomes of individual lawsuits, the cases handled by Black attorneys rarely produced fees or damages sufficient to sustain a legal career. This was especially true of cases litigating civil rights, which did not produce much income for the lawyers. With the movement’s legal successes this changed. For the first time, Black attorneys could make a living as civil rights lawyers, litigating cases arising from new federal statutes and regulations that prohibited racial discrimination. But this development brought significant pressure to bear on Black attorneys to represent the entire “race,” not simply individual clients or their own self-interest. Complaints arose that lawyers were too aloof from Black communities, or charged fees that were unaffordable for most Black clients. Not until the 1980s, Penningroth points out, did white-controlled corporations and law firms, able to pay higher salaries than Black lawyers were used to receiving, begin to hire Black attorneys in significant numbers. Penningroth believes that recent scholars of Black legal history have been studying the wrong cases, paying too much attention to national leaders and too little to the communities from which the movement sprang. Their focus on the great constitutional rulings of the Warren Court slights many other kinds of Black encounters with the legal system. Unlike most such works, Before the Movement examines very few Supreme Court rulings. Penningroth insists that the standard narrative, what he calls “civil rights history,” “has left Black people disconnected from our own legal commonsense”—that is, how ordinary people thought about the law and tried to use it in their day-to-day lives. Penningroth does not hesitate to chide previous historians for what he considers mistaken interpretations. But it is also true that his work builds on that of recent scholars such as Martha S. Jones and Laura Edwards, who, like him, have expanded the terrain of legal history to include the role of law in everyday life. Like Penningroth, they have argued that law is created not only by legislatures and courts but also by people who have limited representation within these venues yet are able nonetheless to carve out rights for themselves. Before the Movement presents an original and provocative account of how civil law was experienced by Black citizens and how their “legal lives” changed over time. Inevitably, given the broad scope of Penningroth’s investigation, important questions remain to be answered. What was the impact of segregation and widespread racial violence—pillars of the Jim Crow system—on the functioning of the law? What would the analysis of Black political ideologies and practices add to the discussion? The long disfranchisement of Black southerners was a national scandal that did much to shape the lives and opportunities of both Black and white Americans, as well as structures of power in the South and the nation’s capital. As Frederick Douglass noted during Reconstruction, in a putative democracy, exclusion from the right to vote is more than an inconvenience—it marks the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the body politic. Penningroth roots nineteenth-century definitions of civil rights in that era’s antislavery politics. But as the book progresses, politics mostly drops out of the picture. Perhaps this stems from Penningroth’s conviction that the measure of race relations may be found in the legal system, not the ballot box, or his complaint that recent historians have imposed what he calls “the politics of the 1960s” on their accounts of the civil rights movement. Was the movement a victory, a defeat, or something more ambiguous than either? The legal edifice of Jim Crow was dismantled and numerous embodiments of white supremacy uprooted. But a look around our society today, with its stark disparities in wealth, life expectancy, education, and other indices of individual and social well-being, suggests the transformation was incomplete. Civil rights gained a powerful foothold in the nation’s laws and legal consciousness. Yet something was lost, Penningroth believes, when legal issues were turned into moral ones and civil rights became a matter of race rather than of common citizenship. Did the movement itself, as he contends, encourage the transformation of “civil rights” from entitlements that should be available to all citizens into the narrower concept of nondiscrimination—a shield protecting only racial minorities and thus making it more difficult to enlist other Americans on the movement’s side? On this and other questions raised by Penningroth’s ambitious, stimulating, and provocative book, the jury is still out. |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Aanu Adeoye |
URL | https://www.ft.com/content/ceb60f8c-59fa-43e1-bb0c-a333b9a5e621 |
Publication | Financial Times |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Section | Niger |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 18:51:47 |
Abstract | [Move by junta raises prospect of increased Russian influence in region.] Niger’s junta has ended a military accord that allowed US troops to operate in the west African country, dealing a blow to Washington’s agenda in the region and raising the prospect of increased Russian influence. Regime spokesman Colonel Amadou Abdramane said in a television broadcast late on Saturday that the 2012 military agreement between the two countries was “illegal and violates all constitutional rules” and that it was “profoundly unfair” to Niger’s people. Although he stopped short of calling on US troops to depart the country, revoking the defence co-operation agreement in effect ends their mission in the nation of 25mn people. The announcement comes days after a US delegation, including assistant secretary of state for African affairs Molly Phee and head of the US-Africa Command General Michael Langley, visited the Nigerien capital Niamey for talks with government leaders. The US maintains more than 1,000 soldiers and civilian employees in Niger and runs two drone bases to monitor affiliates of the Islamist groups Islamic State and al-Qaeda that are active in the Sahel, the semi-arid region south of the Sahara. Abdramane described the US officials as “condescending” towards the Nigerien government and people. “Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” Abdramane said. “Also, the government of Niger forcefully denounces the condescending attitude, accompanied by the threat of retaliation, from the head of the American delegation towards the Nigerien government and people.” The junta, known as the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP), seized power in Niger last July when it deposed the democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum in a coup led by the head of the presidential guard. Under the leadership of General Omar Tchiani, Niger has cut ties with former colonial power France, ordering the departure of 1,500 French troops and expelling the French ambassador. Niger has drawn closer to the military rulers of Mali and Burkina Faso, who have distanced themselves from western powers since toppling leaders in their own countries. All three nations have threatened to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States — the regional bloc that originally vowed to invade Niger if the junta did not reverse last July’s coup — and have established closer ties with Moscow. Mercenaries from Russian paramilitary group Wagner are deployed in Mali, and last year Moscow reopened its embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, after a three-decade absence. In January, Russia’s defence ministry said Niger had agreed to deepen defence co-operation with Moscow. “The parties noted the importance of developing Russian-Niger relations in the defence sector and agreed to intensify joint actions to stabilise the situation in the region,” the ministry said in a statement. US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the statement made by the Niger junta followed “frank discussions at senior levels in Niamey this week about our concerns with the CNSP’s trajectory” and that Washington remained in touch with the regime. |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Tom King |
URL | https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/03/marx-in-memoriam |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 18:29:48 |
Language | en-GB |
Abstract | [Karl Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery 140 years ago today. The philosopher's iconic grave has a turbulent history which reveals the struggle to define his legacy – and the enduring power of his ideas.] Karl Marx’s funeral was poorly attended. Estimates vary, but it’s unlikely more than two-dozen mourners were present—a modest gathering indeed for the father of historical materialism and prophet of capital’s demise. ‘An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man,’ eulogised Fredrich Engels, Marx’s friend and patron, in a graveside address to the lucky few, on Saturday, 17 March 1883. Exiled, stateless and recently widowed, Marx had died three days before at home in London, with bronchitis and pleurisy at the age of sixty-four. ‘By a strange blunder … his death was not announced for two days,’ said The Graphic newspaper. ‘When his friends and followers hastened to his house in Haverstock Hill, to learn the time and place of burial … he was already in the cold ground.’ In 1924 the fledgling Soviet Union, surely aware of its founding father’s rather underwhelming send-off, ‘petitioned the Home Office for permission to remove his body from Highgate Cemetery,’ the Daily Express reported, and take them ‘to Moscow to be re-interred in the Red Square with suitable honours’—presumably beside Lenin, recently embalmed in January of that year. Marx’s remaining family refused, with evident pique: ‘his remains and his memory should not be monopolised by the present Russian type of communist,’ wrote his grandson, the French socialist politician Jean Longuet, to prime minister Ramsey MacDonald. But that didn’t stop the humble grave from becoming a place of pilgrimage. Eventually, on the night of 23 November 1954, at the behest of a newly formed committee, Marx—along with his fellow interred: wife Jenny, daughter Elanor, grandson Harry Longuet and housekeeper Helene Demuth—was moved to ‘a site more suitable for the erection of a memorial,’ further up the hill. The marble plinth (encasing the original headstone) and gargantuan bronze bust, together forming one of only two Grade One Listed grave monuments in Britain (the other being the Soane family mausoleum at Old St Pancras Church), were designed and sculpted by the artist and communist Laurence Bradshaw (1899 – 1978). He chose the inscriptions too: Marx’s peroration from the Communist Manifesto—‘Workers of all lands unite’—and the concluding lines of his Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.’ The icon was, he maintained, ‘not a monument to Marx as a portrayal of his physiognomy,’ but rather ‘the dynamic force of his intellect and the breadth and vision and power of his personality.’ Bradshaw may have been idealistic, but he was also pragmatic: ‘As a person who had been involved for some troubled time in the struggles of the socialist movement, I felt there were bound to be some attacks and attempts on this tomb. We, therefore, employed some of the methods of construction known to the military engineer.’ He wasn’t wrong. In January 1970, a bomb exploded at the base of the tomb, swastikas were daubed on either side and a hack saw was taken to Marx’s nose. On other occasions, the bust has been knocked off completely. Most recently, in February 2019, the original headstone was permanently damaged by several hammer blows while ‘doctrine of hate’ and ‘architect of genocide’ were spattered across the marble in red paint. The site is now monitored by CCTV. The Marx Grave Trust has held an oration at the tomb nearly every year since 1956. Last Sunday, almost 140 years to the day since the philosopher’s death, a group of fifty or so gathered at Highgate Cemetery, but the dish of the day was veneration, not destruction. Wreaths were laid, photographs were taken and the brief ceremony ended with a rendition of the Internationale. The cemetery trees were stirring into life and the daffodils were out in force; the birds sang more tunefully than the crowd. |
Website Title | Tribune |
Item Type | Web Page |
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Author | Richard Whiddington |
URL | https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/royal-portraits-edited-2451037 |
Date | 2024-03-13 |
Extra | Section: Art History |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 17:31:26 |
Language | en-US |
Abstract | [The Princess of Wales joins a long and illustrious list of historic royal portraits which have been edited.] It’s hard being a royal these days. There was a time when the public demanded little of their monarchs. The public didn’t expect the royals to cut ribbons, attend charity galas, or send out seasonal family photos. If the public was concerned about the health of a royal, it had a simple recourse: prayer. If the public wanted to know what the ruler looked like, a solitary glance at a coin sufficed. The claim that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, digitally edited her Mother’s Day family photograph before posting it on social media provoked a swift, sanctimonious backlash. It shouldn’t have. A more fitting response might be sympathy and a glance at historical royal portraits. For sympathy, consider the plight of a royal family now required to produce portraits in-house (admittedly, it’s a nice house) with prince as photographer and princess as photoshop editor. Then there’s historical precedent. Manipulating portraits is what royal families have always done. The only difference is that in the past they hired a professional. Have a look at some notable examples of painters manipulating the image of their royal subjects. [IMAGES] |
Website Title | Artnet News |
Item Type | Newspaper Article |
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Author | Toby Helm |
URL | https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/17/our-chances-zero-and-getting-worse-inside-a-tory-edeath-spiral |
Publication | The Observer |
ISSN | 0029-7712 |
Date | 2024-03-17 |
Section | Politics |
Accessed | 2024-03-17 17:16:42 |
Library Catalog | The Guardian |
Language | en-GB |
Abstract | [Frank Hester, Lee Anderson, an unpopular budget … as the catalogue of Conservative disasters piles up, discipline seems to be breaking down, and any hope of election victory fading.] Asked what chance his party had of winning the next general election, a former Tory cabinet minister, who had occupied a senior government post until not long ago, threw his eyes skywards and replied in an instant: “Zero.” It was last Wednesday afternoon in the Palace of Westminster. The former minister then paused, grimaced, and added that with every passing day, as the chaos grew, the chances were likely to diminish further – into negative territory. Another ex-cabinet minister – also from the right of the party – had a different way of answering the same question minutes later. There were two possibilities for the Tories to drag themselves back from the brink, he believed. One was for Rishi Sunak to be bolder and abandon more green policies while also abolishing inheritance tax. “But he won’t do that,” he added. “He is just too cautious.” The other was for the party to replace Sunak with another leader: “But that would be madness. It won’t happen.” He too saw no real hope of a miracle recovery for his party before the next election. The two were speaking exactly a week after Jeremy Hunt’s budget, in which the chancellor had thrown another 2p cut in national insurance at working people, in the desperate hope of improving the national mood and the Tories’ electoral prospects. But the post-budget polls quickly showed most people had clocked that the overall effect of Hunt’s measures – one of which was to freeze income-tax thresholds again – would actually be to put taxes up, and that the spending cuts necessary to fund them would hit public services. Voters saw through it. Labour’s poll lead – already suggesting a landslide – increased. Over recent days, the Tories’ already dark mood has worsened perceptibly, adding to a sense at Westminster that they are now locked into an irreversible doom spiral in which discipline is abandoned as fast as hope. The idea that the budget would be a turning point has already been consigned to history. Disaster has followed disaster. On Monday morning, a former deputy chairman of the party, Lee Anderson, defected to the populist rightwing Reform party, having refused to apologise for saying that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, had given the capital city away to his Islamist “mates”. Then, on Monday evening, the Guardian revealed that the Tories’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, had said that looking at Labour MP Diane Abbott made you “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”. The news came little over a fortnight after the prime minister had stood outside Downing Street warning of the dark forces of extremism sweeping the country, following the return of George Galloway to parliament as MP for Rochdale. The government’s response to the Hester revelation was, disastrously, initially to defend their man, until cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch, a future leadership hopeful, went public, saying: “The idea of linking criticism of her to being a black woman is racist.” Two hours later, but too late, Sunak followed, agreeing that the remarks had indeed been racist. But the party is still refusing all subsequent calls to hand Hester’s money back. In normal times, even when things are going badly, MPs and others in a governing party will at least try to look for positives, particularly with a general election approaching. But after 14 years of running the country, with five different leaders, the Conservatives are exhausted and terribly divided. Many of the most senior MPs in their ranks will admit privately that they are too riven by factions to muster any real attempt at unity amid the gathering chaos. George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, put it succinctly in his podcast with Labour’s Ed Balls last week. Sunak’s authority, he suggested, was already waning and the sharks were beginning to circle. “In politics you get these spirals,” Osborne observed, “which is when you’re weak or when people don’t think you’re going to succeed politically at the election. The patronage starts to dissipate, the authority goes, people say ‘well, he’s not going to be around much longer, I need to hitch my wagon to one of the leadership contenders’. That feeds off itself and that’s where you get this downward spiral where you get more and more undermining of authority, which makes the government even weaker.” Osborne also noted what he called a paradox at the heart of Sunak’s recent approach to extremism – that in the same week that the Tories were announcing a new policy of refusing to give cash to extremist groups they were “taking money from someone who appears, by their own definition, to be an extremist”. Sunak’s core problem has been that none of his plans to relaunch the party have seemed credible to his own party or out in the country. Last autumn he tried to position himself as the “change” candidate against Keir Starmer and Labour. He dumped some green initiatives and then the northern leg of the HS2 high speed rail line. But after 14 years of Conservative government, trying to disconnect himself from what had gone before stretched credulity. Gavin Barwell, formerly Theresa May’s chief of staff, says Sunak had his chance to stamp his authority on the party at the start of his premiership, and flunked it. “I don’t think there is anything they can now do to avoid losing,” he said. “Rishi Sunak would be in a much better position if he had taken over directly from Johnson. The most calamitous damage was done by Liz Truss. “If you could go back in time to the moment he took over, he could have much more clearly differentiated himself from Truss. He could have said he wouldn’t allow her to stand as a candidate. The basic problem he has got is that he is going to go into the election and his main message to people is going to be that he has stabilised the thing after a complete train crash. “The problem is his own colleagues caused the train crash, and those people are still standing as Conservative candidates and they are still writing their agenda. So he is hamstrung. The argument he should be making, he can’t make.” This weekend, however, even Sunak’s claim to have delivered a measure of stability, relative to Truss, is in some danger. Amid the pessimism has come talk of plots to oust him. The Daily Mail led its front page on Saturday with talk of a plot to replace Sunak with the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, in a “coronation” in the next few weeks. The vast majority of Tory MPs believe having yet another leadership change would be madness, and that it would inevitably hasten a general election, with resulting carnage in terms of seat losses. “Even if it happened, which it won’t, she would be an even shorter-serving prime minister than Liz Truss,” said another former cabinet member. “The calls for a general election would be irresistible, we would lose by a mile, and she would be out. It is completely insane as an idea.” Mordaunt herself is said to believe the stories are part of a plot by people wanting to damage her and harm any attempt she might make after an election defeat to lead the party, were Sunak to step down. “It is complete lunacy on every single level,” said another former minister. “But there are colleagues with quite big majorities of 14, 15, 16,000 who are now beginning to wonder if they will hang on at the next election who are really panicking. That is how bad it is.” Last week, as his troubles mounted, Sunak finally ruled out a general election on 2 May, which some Tories had believed was the best chance to avoid a heavy defeat, on the basis that things would only get worse if he left it for longer. The most likely month is now November. Some optimists in the party still see a possibility that the economy will improve over the summer in a way that will allow Sunak to tell a story of hard-won success during an election campaign. “It could be that he can say inflation is at 2%, interest rates are coming down – in the end, it will be ‘the economy, stupid’,” said one senior party figure. “The truth is, it is a fast-moving world and things may change.” The effects of two budgets may also feed through, he said. “The Treasury rule of thumb is that tax cuts don’t register for six months. After two or three months of having more in their pay packets, people begin to think: ‘Oh hang on, I can afford to go on holiday.’ It takes that long.” This week, Sunak’s Rwanda deportation bill returns to the Commons, beginning what could be a prolonged period of “ping-pong” between the lower chamber and the Lords. But the upper house is unlikely to hold it up for long and the Tories are confident it will be on the statute book soon, possibly allowing flights to take off to Rwanda before an election, barring probable legal challenges. “It could be a gamechanger,” said one senior Tory. But few Conservatives seriously expect public opinion to shift much before an election campaign proper if thing start to improve, and even then most believe any narrowing in the polls would not be enough to prevent a Labour victory. Paul Goodman, the newly ennobled former Tory MP and ex-editor of ConservativeHome, said: “His [Sunak’s] best hope is that people give him a second glance once the election campaign proper starts. It is unlikely there will be a significant change of sentiment before then, if it happens at all.” Increasingly, accompanying the Tory malaise, a sense prevails at Westminster that this parliament, and this government, have both run their course and run out of steam. There is little more in terms of government legislation in the coming months that will keep MPs busy or up late. More and more MPs are announcing they are quitting parliament altogether, either exhausted or disgruntled, adding to an end-of-term atmosphere and a feeling that they are merely playing out time. This week the Commons Public Accounts committee will publish a report on the future of social care which will underline yet again how successive governments have failed to tackle the issue. Last week, the Financial Times published research showing that working days for MPs have been shorter on average in this parliament than in any other in the last quarter of a century. The former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman – who will retire at the election having been first elected in 1982 – tells Rachel Cooke in today’s Observer New Review how parliament seems these days: “On a good day it’s like a zombie film. On a bad day it’s worse. We’ve got ministers but they’re sort of holograms.” The Tory MP William Wragg, who is also leaving, adds: “I’d just like it to be over now, I think.” As to the growing perception that this has become a “zombie parliament”, Barwell says that could makes things even worse for Sunak and the Tories. “The danger is, if it looks like it is just a shambles all the way through to the election, the result can get even worse. You just build up the voters’ determination to finish the zombie off, essentially.” |
Short Title | ‘Our chances? |