On Divesting–and Voting–in “The End Times”
Image by Unsplash+.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like these days all the right and the left can agree on is that we’re living in The End Times. We’ve got a world of right-wing mega churches and home school militias just jonesing to belly up to the bar for another shot at transforming the U.S. into a theocratic, transphobic, patriarchal hellhole presided over by none other than the pussy-grabbing, Bible-hawking, daughter-ogling, wannabe King Leer. A guy who demonstrates less moral awareness than your average Peeping Tom, and who, if elected, will have far greater capacity for organized sexual violence. (Who imagines Trump wouldn’t love to preside over his own personal Abu Ghraib?) We’re talking a guy who might as well be wearing a T-shirt with an arrow pointing upwards that reads “I’m with Beelza Bubba.” A guy who spews so much bile, It seems like only a matter of time before his head starts spinning like Regan’s in The Exorcist.
And then there’s the odd AK-wielding, trash-talking Christian Gun Moll Moms in Congress, who, judging from their Christmas cards, run a substantially higher legal risk than the average American of being charged as accessories when one of their little darlings decides to cosplay the Columbine shooting. One can only surmise their plan is to flash their cash at the pearly gates, and if St. Peter still won’t cave, just Rambo his ass.
Given the state of the planet, perhaps it’s no wonder that so many Christians are desperate to get raptured up. And let’s acknowledge that for all their current embrace of Netanyahu, far right Christians view a Jewish convergence in “the Holy Land” as the requisite celestial semaphore needed to summon their muscular Bad-Daddy-Trump-Jesus. As the Bible must surely saith somewhere, once enough Jewish people are assembled, the Christian right’s Personal Savior and Candyman can be counted on to use his intergalactic light saber and transporter to whisk them all off to their all-white, all-gentile-all-the-time country club in the sky, and simultaneously banish Jews, Muslims, Jains, Buddhists, Rastafarians, et al, along with various Christian heretics and riff-raff, to be tortured for all eternity.
Speaking of hot places, we really are in quite a deep planetary pickle, having rapidly ripped through the 1.5 degree Celsius limit recommended in the toothless Paris Climate Agreement. The world, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently warned, is “teetering on a planetary tightrope. Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster — with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most.”
Millions of young people are being born into a world that’s starting to hemorrhage methane, a world where tornados and “once in a century” hurricanes, typhoons, and historic floods are becoming routine occurrences. A world in which their personal data is routinely surveilled, marketed, and monetized before they graduate high school. A world in which social media has enabled millions of them to watch the bone-crunching child- annihilating genocide unfold in real time in Gaza, brought to you by U.S.& Israeli Bombs & Surveillance R Us.
In the past year alone, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, “U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting.“ Since 1959, “[a]djusted for inflation, total U.S. military aid to Israel stands at $251.2 billion….” And so, many young Americans are starting to ask how else that money might be spent in their own communities, what it might buy in the way of universal healthcare, Head Start programs, and tuition-free college education. The good news is The National Priorities Project enables people to see just how that kind of “trade-off” might work. Check it out, kids, and see what you’ve been missing!
In contrast to the U.S., Israel has had universal healthcare since 1995. And, according to a website recruiting new settlers, in Israel, “tuition costs are regulated by the government at around $3,000 per year,” and, as the site goes on to explain, the cost of university in the U.S. is “nowhere near the low price of college in Israel.” But particularly since the start of the “War on Terror,” more and more money in the U.S. has been siphoned off from domestic spending and redirected to subsidize the world’s largest carbon-sucking, global death-delivery vehicle.
One of the few hopeful developments in the midst of the unspeakable violence being committed in our names and with our tax dollars is that more and more university students and professors, at substantial risk to themselves, are taking a magnifying glass to their own university investment portfolios and demanding that they divest from death-dealing corporations in both the U.S. and Israel. How can we remain silent while tax dollars that could fund universal healthcare and free higher education in the U.S. have instead been used to kill or maim thousands of students, teachers, and professors in Gaza and to raze schools, universities, libraries, and archives? All twelve universities in Gaza were bombed within the first 100 days of the war alone. According to The Lancet, as of June, the death toll in Gaza was already approaching 40,000, not including the more than 10,000 believed to have been buried under U.S. and Israeli-made rubble.
It only makes sense both morally and strategically for activists pressing for universities to divest from fossil fuels to also throw their support behind campaigns for divestment from U.S. and Israeli companies that are profiting from the genocide in Gaza. Divestment organizing needs to take up concerns with not only the domestic costs of U.S. militarism, but also its carbon impacts. A January 2024 study in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) conservatively estimates the carbon “emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war [as] greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.” So, the same bombs that are laying waste to Gaza are blowing huge holes through our collective planetary carbon budget.
The carbon-intensive militarized gauntlet that has laid siege to Gaza has also reduced water access in Gaza to a mere trickle. UNICEF estimated that in December 2023, “displaced children in the southern Gaza Strip” had access to between half and two-thirds of what’s needed “[f]or survival alone…” let alone to feed children’s growing bodies. And the carbon impacts of all those bombs and all that military infrastructure are contributing to water shortages that are hitting far closer to home. The U.N. Environment Programme notes that “Two of the largest reservoirs in America, which provide water and electricity to millions, are in danger of reaching ‘dead pool status,’ a result of the climate crisis and overconsumption of water.”
As I’ve written elsewhere in Counterpunch, “Who can blame anyone whose families have been burned or buried alive by 2,000 -pound bombs, if they cannot bring themselves to vote for Harris?” But as morally bankrupt as the Democrats have, in the main, shown themselves to be with respect to Gaza, a Trump presidency-cum-monarchy promises to rapidly foreclose any semblance of democratic norms and pathways to change course on Gaza and the climate.
Universities today are critical sites of social struggle for both Gaza and the planet with endowments that collectively approach a trillion dollars. They are also high on Herr Trump’s encompassing hit list of “enemies from within.” Is anyone surprised that Trump, Roy Cohn’s eager acolyte, is eager to fan the flames of a McCarthyite witch hunt in higher education? As Henry Giroux recently noted in Counterpunch, J.D. Vance “has publicly branded professors as ‘the enemy’ while Trump has pledged to cleanse universities of so-called ‘leftists,’ whom he denigrates as ‘vermin.’ “As Giroux also notes, for Trump, “labels like ‘leftists’ and ‘Marxists’ serve as sweeping condemnations for anyone who dares engage in critical thinking or challenges the status quo.” And why wouldn’t Trump jump at the chance to carve out, privatize and sell off these public assets at fire-sale prices to corporations for his own personal profit?
Domestically, fossil fuel companies that routinely push for draconian penalties for civil disobedience are likely to find a more than eager ally in Trump. Herr Trump’s bloodlust for violence against just about anyone he disagrees with–and certainly against protesters–is well-documented. As reported in a 2021 book by Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Bender, General Mark Milley put the kibosh on Trump’s orders to “’crack skulls,’” “’beat the fuck out of’” and “’just shoot’” protesters involved in the George Floyd racial justice uprising. But Project 2025 is an indication that the second time around Trump will be far better prepareagainst such constitutional restraints. Protesters going up against Trump-appointed judges stand a far better chance of incurring draconian sentences. And prospects for appeals or reprieves may recede into the distant future if Trump keeps his promise to Christian theocrats and other allies that they “won’t have to vote again.”
Far too little has been said, moreover, about the links between the unfolding genocide in Gaza and oil and gas just off the coast in the Levant Basin. Trump’s complete disregard for the Emoluments clause in the Constitution, and the carte blanche he’s been given by his pussy-grabbing cronies on the Supreme Court, give him every incentive to want to profit from the unfolding genocide and “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza. And, as Patrick Wintour reported in The Guardian, at a 2024 talk at Harvard University, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner “praised the ‘very valuable’ potential of Gaza’s ‘waterfront property’ and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it ‘cleans up’ the strip.”
The Biden administration’s actions on climate have definitely fallen short of his rhetoric and far shorter still of what’s needed to pull us back from the edge into a habitable world. But his policies have also been a far cry from those of the climate-denying Trump, with his mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and his open, unabashed invitation to fossil fuel CEOS–during a lavish dinner at Mar-a-lago–to eviscerate climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion dollars in support for his reelection.
The $391 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Biden signed within two years of taking office is definitely, at best, a mixed bag. It opens up public lands to drilling and offers subsidizes to companies peddling nuclear power as “green.” But Earthjustice also credits the bill with “supercharg[ing the] process of replacing our deadly fossil fuel economy with clean energy while investing in critical air monitoring technologies, pollution reduction programs, environmental justice priorities, and efficient permitting processes.”
But let’s be clear that whatever legislative inroads were made under Biden were not the product of his largesse, but rather were hard-won by a diversity of tactics: from local legislative and electoral victories to sustained environmental lobbying, lawsuits and other legal challenges, to people putting their bodies on the line in direct actions in an exhausting game of fossil fuel whack-a-mole. Still, if you want to get a sense of the key differences that all those oil executives chowing down at Mar-a-Lago likely see between Trump and Biden’s would-be successor Kamala Harris, check out The American Petroleum Institute’s list of grievances against the Biden administration. Personally, having had the sphincter-bracing experience in Portland in 2015 (alongside dozens of far braver kayaktivists) of trying to stop Shell’s Fennica icebreaker on its way up to the Arctic, I have a hard time being dismissive of Biden’s decision–on his first day in office–to cancel drilling leases in the Arctic.
A May “Open letter by Gaza academics and universities administrators to the world” calls for domestic and global support to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza.” The letter also asserts Palestinian resilience in the face of unspeakable horrors made possible by U.S. tax dollars: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.” In the U.S., our integrity as educators and as humans mandates that we redouble our efforts to stop the genocide and redirect funds from the U.S. and Israeli war economies to rebuilding Gaza.
And alongside rebuilding Gaza’s schools and universities, let’s commit to reinvesting in and revitalizing schools and universities in the U.S. As Giroux has argued, “Today, the role of educators as public intellectuals aligned with broader social movements has never been more vital, especially when far-right extremists around the globe seek to turn education into a force for indoctrination.” Whatever the results of this election, it’s provided vivid and chilling examples of the lethal cost of ignorance in the U.S.
And finally, even if it sometimes looks like we’ve definitively answered the question of whether the world will end in ice or fire, let’s not short-change the apocalyptic possibilities of a nuclear winter. Seriously, isn’t there a biblical adage like, “Knoweth ye not that if thou canst not trust a man with his own daughter, thou definitely canst not trust him with the nuclear codes”?
Desiree Hellegers is affiliated faculty with the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver; director of The Thin Green Line is People History Project and a member/producer with the Old Mole Variety Hour on Portland’s KBOO Radio. Their web series “How I Learned to Breathe Thru the Apocalypse” is airing on Portland’s Open Signal Cable TV . More information on their work can be found at https://labs.wsu.edu/desiree-hellegers/
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