How the US Constitution Fails to Protect the Environment

BY KATRINA FISCHER KUH – JAMES R. MAY

 MAY 3, 2024
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Pulp mill and export dock, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

By Katrina Fischer Kuh and James R. May

Even a healthy U.S. democracy would struggle to respond effectively to the “wicked” problem of climate change. As humans, we would have to overcome innate cognitive limitations to accept the connection between everyday actions like driving and attenuated effects on climate. As voters, we would have to appreciate the importance of addressing a problem with limited immediate salience primarily for the benefit of future generations. Politicians would need the courage to fight for policies that would yield no visible benefits for voters in their political lifetimes.

Change would have to occur over the tooth and nail opposition of the fossil fuel companies—among the most powerful corporate special interests in the history of our country. We would need to be open to transformative change and a rethinking of values and priorities to develop a shared vision for a future radically different from settled expectations, all while reckoning with the ways that historical injustices—most notably colonialism and racism—produced and remain embedded in the systems that brought us to this precipice.

But our democracy is decidedly not healthy. Corporations pour money into elections virtually unrestrained and face no consequences for flagrantly lying to the public—most notably for present purposes about whether climate change is real and dangerous and what causes it—to maximize their profits. The right to vote is now more theoretical than real, with federal protections dismantled and many state and local governments adopting measures that make voting harder (especially for disfavored people, including communities of color).

The votes of those who make it into the voting booth are counted—our electoral system is sound. However, it is not perceived as such; ideological fantasies of voting fraud cause vast swaths of the public to reject legitimate electoral outcomes. And myriad pathologies in the information environment, from social media algorithms to purposeful disinformation efforts, have fractured our ability to talk to and reason with one another.

Nor is our climate system healthy or stable. We already limp from unprecedented crisis to unprecedented crisis—the Pacific Northwest heatwave in 2021, deadly fires in 2023, a hurricane that made landfall in Louisiana in 2021 and drowned 11 peoplein New York City basement apartments—with hardly a chance to catch our breath in between.

This rapidly changing physical reality adds further stress to our ailing democracy. We face the daunting task of attempting to transform our society, law, and economy to cease emissions and sequester carbon while also trying to adapt to ongoing and worsening dislocations from climate change.

In short, our democracy must somehow martial focus, purpose, and resources to address climate change’s long-term challenges to life and justice while enduring increasingly frequent and extreme climate-related events that take lives, exacerbate injustices, and put unprecedented strain on democracy and governance.

How the Constitution Obstructs Climate Policy

How and why does the constitutional status quo fail to meet the climate crisis? It begins with constitutional design. The Constitution grants the Supreme Court and such lower courts, as Congress establishes, “judicial authority.” Federal courts were thought to be the “least dangerous branch” and less prestigious appointments than, say, supreme courts in Virginia or New York—among the reasons some of the first appointed Supreme Court justices, John Jay and John Rutledge, quit the bench.

But the import of judicial review was transformed in Marbury v. Madison when then-Chief Justice John Marshall famously declared that it is “emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is,” as it has done in more than 20,000 decisions since its inception in 1789.

Since its inception to June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court has had 116 justices. Yet very few have acknowledged that catastrophic climate change is happening and has been caused by humans. Even those justices who acknowledge climate change believe that Congress, not the courts, should address it.

The U.S. Constitution’s 4,543 all but ignore environmental concerns. It was crafted to address separation of powers, federalism, and civil liberties. There is an extensive taxonomy of the sources and limits to federal and state authority to reach climate change. Virtually nothing is uncontested, giving rich context to former Chief Justice John Marshall’s maxim that “we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” But, forget it or not, the Constitution has failed the climate.

Constitutional Omission

The Constitution presumes the existence of an environment capable of supporting a flourishing society but does not explicitly recognize or protect the environment. Indeed, it was historically uncertain whether the Constitution empowered the federal government to act to protect the environment at all. The textual silence of the Constitution with respect to the environment is mirrored by the judicial silence about how the environment supports other rights explicitly recognized in the Constitution.

Despite the obvious fact that life or liberty cannot exist without functioning ecosystems, courts in the United States do not recognize any federal constitutional environmental rights, even to the extent that an environmental right might be deemed appurtenant to explicitly enshrined constitutional rights.

The constitutions of many countries explicitly protect the environment, and in many others, the courts have interpreted nonenvironmental constitutional provisions to necessarily include environmental rights. That is not the case in the United States. The Constitution does not explicitly protect the environment, nor is the protection of the environment recognized as being required to protect other constitutional rights.

The absence of clear and broad constitutional authority to protect the environment—explicit in the Constitution’s text or understood by courts to reside within other enumerated powers—limits the scope of federal environmental law. One aspect of this limit is foundational. Finding constitutional authority on which to adopt our core federal environmental laws required judicial willingness and stretching of doctrine.

What might the laws coming out of our great public awakening to modern environmental problems in the 1970s—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—have looked like had they been adopted against a backdrop of clear and broad constitutional authority?

The dearth of constitutional authority limits not just the structure of our core federal environmental statutes but also how they are interpreted and applied. Internalized understandings of the limits of what is constitutionally possible constrain our policymaking imagination when it is imperative that we bring about systemic, transformational change to respond effectively to today’s environmental challenges.

One side of the coin is the absence of clear and broad authority to protect the environment. In addition to failing to give the federal government clear power to protect the environment, the Constitution also fails to impose clear limits on the federal government’s power to harm the environment, let alone impose a duty on the government to prevent ecological damage.

The Constitution’s failure to identify limits on government harm to the environment compounds the lack of express power to act to protect the environment. The Constitution is (at least as a matter of express text) silent when it comes to protecting individuals from government destruction of the ecological necessities for a healthful life. And, unlike in the case of constitutional power to legislate on environmental matters, courts have been largely unwilling to read such limits into the Constitution.

To appreciate how constitutional silence on the environment contributes to constitutional hostility to environmental protection, it is important to recall that the Constitution affords other values—private property, speech, and states’ rights—explicit recognition and protection. The constitutional omission of the environment thus diminishes the importance of environmental interests when considered relative to other interests explicitly protected by the Constitution. One-sided constitutional protection for private property, for example, hobbles adaptation policy by dissuading governments from restricting new development in climate-vulnerable locations out of fear of triggering an obligation to compensate private landowners.

Judicial interpretation could overcome the textual constitutional omission of the environment. For example, during the Progressive Era, scientists, attorneys, and politicians succeeded in persuading courts to interpret the Commerce Clause to give the federal government significant constitutional environmental authority.

There are many powerful arguments that—despite the lack of explicit text and a historical, doctrinal focus on the Commerce Clause—the Constitution can and should be understood to afford broader environmental powers and impose environmental limits and duties on the government. To date, however, courts have largely abdicated their institutional role in the development of climate policy.

The constitutional structure of our representative democracy thus creates an obstacle to mitigation. While courts withdraw from engaging on climate change policy, reasoning that it would be counter-majoritarian for judges to weigh in, the reality is that the political process that produces climate change policy is not, by design or in practice, majoritarian. In the context of climate change, the Senate and Electoral College resolutely skew against climate change mitigation, allowing a public and political minority to obstruct the adoption and implementation of robust mitigation law.

Moreover, it is not simply that courts decline to exercise their constitutional authority to engage with climate policy out of a mistaken belief that it would be “undemocratic.” Courts affirmatively exacerbate the obstacle that our constitutional structure poses to adopting mitigation law through interpretations of the Constitution that limit voting rights (thereby decreasing majority voice) and elevate the rights of corporations (thereby increasing corporate voice).

Judicial interpretations of the Constitution help to produce, sustain, and afford veto power to the minority public and political block obstructing federal mitigation policy. Fossil fuel interests, gifted a First Amendment right by the Supreme Court to make effectively unlimited donations to political campaigns in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, orchestrated a well-documented and effective campaign to convince a relevant swath of the American public and their representatives—the group with a smaller population but greater representation through the Electoral College and Senate—that climate change is not real, not human-caused, not dangerous, and or/not imminent.

In lawsuits brought by plaintiffs against fossil fuel companies seeking to hold them accountable for their lies, the companies, without shame, respond that they have a right to lie under the First Amendment, especially if they lie to influence public policy.

The constitutional status quo, defined by a series of judicial interpretations and decisions, fails on climate because it fails more broadly on democracy. It neglects to protect fundamental rights like the right to vote while enshrining new rights for corporate interests.

The Constitutional Status Quo Fails to Meet the Climate Moment

The Constitution, as presently worded, interpreted, and applied, is obstructing the development of a robust societal response to climate change, partly by failing to protect healthy democratic processes and advance real social justice.

We could, of course, amend the Constitution to explicitly support the protection of the environment, better protect democratic processes, and advance social justice. We could also encourage new understandings of existing constitutional texts that recognize the fundamental value of and right to a healthy environment, more effectively support healthy democratic processes, and go further to advance social justice. Any new approach will require an open-eyed reckoning with how and why the constitutional status quo is failing to meet the climate moment.

This is an adapted excerpt from Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David Orr © 2023 MIT Press. It is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 by permission of MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, adapted and produced this excerpt for the web.

Katrina Fischer Kuh is the Haub Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and co-editor of Climate Change Law: An Introduction and The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change: United States and International Aspects. She is a member of the Environmental Law Collaborative and serves on the board of Green Amendments for the Generations. James R. May, Esq. is Distinguished Professor of Law and founder of the Global Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University Delaware Law School, former visiting professor and Haub visiting scholar at the Elizabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, and recipient of the American Bar Association’s Award for Distinguished Achievement in Environmental Law and Policy. He is the co-editor of Environmental Human Rights in the Anthropocene and Human Rights and the Environment, editor of Principles of Constitutional Environmental Law, and co-author of Global Environmental Constitutionalism. May is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the American College of Environmental Lawyers.

Caravaggio/Andy Warhol/Keith Haring: Three Cases of Radical Innovation

BY DAVID CARRIER

 MAY 3, 2024
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Keith Haring drawing in the New York subway. Image Singulart.

Sometimes development in the history of art involves a break with tradition. Consider three examples. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) inaugurated his career by painting naturalistic genre scenes. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) started out as a commercial illustrator. And Keith Haring (1959-1990) first become known for making graffiti in the New York subway. They all created new works which were so radical-looking that they were often said not to be art at all. In a creative exercise of deskilling, these artists renounced the accepted ways of understanding art making, in favor of novel conceptions of a painter’s skill. At the time, their works looked all wrong to the connoisseurs. Caravaggio’s figures looked too naturalistic to be artworks, Warhol’s illustrations images of subjects too banal to be acceptable, and Haring’s drawings too simplified to be interesting. Responding to such radical originality can take time.

The Yale art historian George Kubler developed a conceptual tool which is useful here, the entry point. How an artist can develop depends upon the resources available in her or his visual culture. The very diverse achievements of Caravaggio, Warhol and Haring depended upon their very distinctive entry points. And so, to understand their art we need understand the options available within their art worlds. Caravaggio arrived in Rome when there was an established market for small genre paintings, and a place for novel ambitious sacred works. Warhol got to New York when, Abstract Expressionism has created a strong market for contemporary American art. But that movement was spent and so it was time for something new. And Haring arrived there when life down-and-out in downtown Manhattan was very cheap, art school education was affordable and there was an newly developed international market for novel American artworks. Caravaggio’s Rome, like Warhol’s and Haring’s New York was a great place to study recent developments. These entry points created an opening for their radical innovations.

In all three cases there was clearly such an obvious art world destination for an ambitious artist, Rome in 1600 and New York in the mid and late twentieth century. Had Caravaggio remained in Milan, Warhol in Pittsburgh (where he was born), or Haring in Pittsburgh (where he first went to art school), then they would have become at best successful provincial artists. That’s what defines an art world center, which is a place where ambition may be rewarded. Had anyone with their particular skills arrived in the centers of the art world a couple of decades earlier, it is hard to know what they could have made of the situation, for the art world was not yet ready for them. And a couple of decades later, it would have been too late. Needless to say, identifying the character of these entry points is only to pick out the necessary conditions for serious achievement.

In retrospect, the achievement of radically innovative artists can be understood historically. There were precedents for Caravaggio’s naturalism, Warhol’s pop subjects and Haring’s line. And when we do that, then continuity is restored to our history of art. What, however, can be harder to see is what happened right when radically original work appeared. Consider the case of Haring. There was a great deal of graffiti on 1980s subway cars. But he seems to have been the one artist who saw the potential of the blank panels, which waited to be covered by commercial advertising. There was a vast audience for drawing on these sites. And, of course, he had the skill needed to work very quickly, which was necessary because doing this public art making was illegal.

Once their early work attracted attention, these three men entered the art world by upscaling their work. Caravaggio moved from genre painting to sacred narratives; Warhol went onward to making Pop Art; and Haring began doing murals. They thus discovered that their basic skills were adaptable to these novel situations. And so Caravaggio did radically original altarpieces; Warhol a variety of subjects borrowed from mass media; and Haring public street art. There were a lot of ambitious painters in Rome, circa 1600 and in Manhattan in the 1950s. And many gifted young people doing graffiti in New York in the 1980s. But, so far as we can see, none of these contemporaries of Caravaggio, Warhol or Haring had their skills of adaptation. Looking just at Caravaggio’s early genre paintings, Warhol’s commercial work in the 1950s, or Haring’s subway drawings circa 1982, it would not have been easy to predict their later accomplishments.

In a classic essay “Other Criteria,” originally presented in 1968, Leo Steinberg argued that the birth of post-modernism, the tradition coming after modernism, required new evaluative criteria. His analysis is highly relevant here, for the same is true, in a more dramatic way, of the painting of Caravaggio, Warhol and Haring. Initially their art was very hard to understand because it broke with accepted standards. In crowded art worlds, the ability to swiftly innovate gets well rewarded, for it allows an artist to stand out. And so it’s the essential task of the art critic to also respond quickly, and prepare the public to understand what is happening. These three men worked in very different situations. And so it’s surprising to see the deep analogies in their situations.

David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. His Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art and Lawrence Carroll (Bloomsbury) and with Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Penn State University Press) were published in 2018. He is writing a book about the historic center of Naples, and with Pissarro he conducted a sequence of interviews with museum directors for Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

STUPIDTY AND ECOCIDE

Burning Plastic Waste is Not an Energy

Solution 

BY JOHN K. WHITE

MAY 3, 2024
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Photo by Claudio Schwarz

The world has a plastics problem. Never mind the horrifying pictures of a seahorse riding a cotton swab or a beached whale found with hundreds of plastic bags in its stomach. Plastic pollution has now progressed up the food chain to our diets, ingested as microplastic particles and even transferred from mother to fetus.

Each year, 400 million tons of plastic are thrown away, equivalent to 73 million barrels of oil, representing an ongoing threat to ecosystems and waterways across the globe. Landfills are now 25% plastic, while a plastic swathe twice the size of Texas swirls around in an endless gyre in the Pacific Ocean.

Coffee cups, condiment containers, and cutlery have all been plasticized for our convenience. Over one trillion plastic bags were thrown away last year, while massive piles overflow landfills and litter our beaches. Composed of various long-chain hydrocarbon polymers, plastic can take from 20 years (bags) to 500 years (bottles) to decompose, essentially another forever chemical, prodded by an unregulated packaging industry. Only 9% has ever been recycled.

So what to do with all the plastic? Continue burying in ever-increasing dumps (business as usual), reuse as “upscaled” consumer products, reprocess to petroleum feedstock for recycling, convert to fuel in various depolymerization schemes (e.g., steam cracking and pyrolysis), incinerate, or burn as refuse-derived fuel (RDF) to make electricity or heat?

The best is to reduce our reliance and cutdown on plastic packaging, requiring improved governance, education, and infrastructure. Sticking colour-coded recycling bins on the street and wishing for compliance isn’t good enough. The worst is to burn as fuel in a “waste-to-energy” plant, essentially incineration – as toxic as the replaced coal in terms of pollution and greenhouse gases. The exact opposite of decarbonization.

In various waste-collection centers, the plan now is to convert more plastics into RDF pellets. But one of the problems with plastic waste is the varying composition, such as PET (bottles), PVC (tubes), polypropylene (yogurt cups), and Styrofoam (takeout containers and packaging material). All are polymer hydrocarbons, difficult to separate into easily recyclable batches or break down as plastic feedstock or burnable fuel.

After processing, the RDF contains a mix of plastics as well as heavy metals and other toxic contaminants. In one such center in Asturias, Spain, 150,000 tons per year is produced, representing about 40% of household waste, where the reformed fuel will then be sold on to power plants for burning if allowed to proceed, including a nearby biomass plant (Hunosa’s La Pereda plant in Mieres). Other units in the US, the UK, and Sweden have already set up RDF waste-conversion plants to provide plastic fuel for electricity generation, district heating, and high-temperature manufacturing industries (i.e., steel, cement, and fertilizer). Expect more to come as plastic waste continues to increase, disastrous for the environment.

Better solutions are available, although each comes with unique challenges. Plastic recycling is difficult, breaking down the polymers into smaller units for reuse but is mechanically weaker than virgin plastic. As Aachen University professor of fuel engineering Peter Quicker noted, chemical recycling produces “an inferior product, such as a low quality oil that has to be treated with great effort in order to turn it back into plastic.”

Other schemes include plastic-eating bugs and bacteria, plant-based biodegradable plastic, and substitution, such as asphalt-enhanced roads, interlocking mortarless construction blocks, and even upscaled textiles. A UK-based company has created an organically combustible packaging material that breaks down in weeks.

Reduction is something we can all do. Carrying a reusable cotton grocery bag in our pocket is simple. Do bananas, oranges, and apples need to be wrapped? We can all start by cutting down and watching what we use and throw away. Of course, the packaging industry must be held to account via globally accepted regulations, which may not apply for years, even decades.

The fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4) met in Ottawa in April to develop an international legally binding policy on plastic pollution. As noted by Inger Andersen, the UN executive director of the UN Environment Programme, “the public is heartsick of plastic pollution,” adding that circularity is needed to avoid exposure to harmful chemicals and protect human and ecosystem health.

Indeed, we have to do something to stop the excess. But we should never burn plastic for fuel or heat. We need a new model to generate energy, not more wasteful power plants that produce even more pollution and greenhouse gases. When countries have started to phase out coal, it is retrograde in the extreme to burn plastic refuse as a replacement. We need only look to the sun and wind to meet our energy needs.

John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com

Why Does the US Government Support And Fund Israel?

By We Advocate Through Environmental Review (W.A.T.E.R.)

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Environmentalists have learned the investigative rule to “follow the money”. At the core of important environmental issues, it is NOT good vs bad guys, nor cultural wokeness vs anti-wokeness, nor smart vs stupid, nor Republican vs Democrat. Rather, at the core, somebody or something (a group, a corporation, an individual) is making money or acquiring power by supporting environmental destruction. The capitalist economic system allows for that, even encourages it.

The same rule applies to foreign relations. This is no surprise, since foreign relations and environmental destruction are often intimately connected. “Follow the money” is a guide to understanding some of today’s most awful events, such as the ongoing massacre of Gaza. Who gains? Who loses? In particular, why does the US government support and fund Israel? Most Democrat and Republican politicians say the bond between the US and Israel is “ironclad”, “unbreakable”, with “no daylight” between them. Why?

At the core, the motivation is NOT concern over which side hit back against the other side’s retaliation first, nor a “clash of civilizations”, nor a dispute over supposed property rights granted in the Bible.1 It is NOT important that (as Trump’s Middle East envoy and son-in-law Jared Kushner said), “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable”2. It is even NOT the desire to claim control of a pocket of underwater natural gas recently discovered off the coast of Gaza. Rather, for the US government and the wealthy corporate and financial elite circles that populate its policymaking bodies, the core issue is a source of far greater private wealth: Middle Eastern oil.

At first this conclusion seems all wrong because Israel itself has no oil, so what is the evidence? One clue comes from a 1995 statement by past right-wing senator from North Carolina and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms: “If Israel did not exist, what would U.S. defense costs in the Middle East be? Israel is at least the equivalent of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East.”3 Helms was referring specifically to costs, but the meaning can be generalized: Israel is essentially a major US military outpost, a forward base, an “aircraft carrier” for power projection.

Iran is the target

The main target of this power projection has long been Iran, which is oil rich. Iran has been a major target of world powers since 1946, when the US and the Soviet Union made competing oil concession claims, which devolved into one of the very first nuclear bombing threats. The Soviets had tried to enforce, with tanks, a WWII agreement between the US, Britain, and the USSR to split Iran’s oil. Backtracking on the prior agreement, the US delivered an ultimatum in March, 1946: either remove your Soviet troops from northern Iran in 48 hours or “we” (the US) will nuke “you” (the USSR). The USSR withdrew in 24 hours.4 (Some historians believe, with good evidence, that the earlier nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done mainly to impress the Soviets in anticipated situations such as this.)

Then years of hypocrisy and eventually savagery ensued. On September 11, 1947, U.S. ambassador George V. Allen publicly decried intimidation and coercion used by foreign governments to secure commercial concessions in Iran, and he even promised full U.S. support for Iran to freely decide about its own natural resources. All that sounds good and fair. But then in 1952, a progressive nationalist non-secular government was elected by the Iranian people, headed by Mohammed Mosaddegh. His administration instituted social security, land reforms, and women’s rights. His government’s most significant policy was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. Evidently, the US saw this “freely decided” decision about natural resources as going way too far. The US CIA thereby was deployed to overthrow the progressive Mosaddegh government and institute a harsh, basically fascist dictatorship under a previous royal family member (the Shah Pahlavi). The Shah then provided Western oil companies with 50% ownership of Iranian oil production. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 re-nationalized Iran’s own oil, much to the chagrin of the U.S.

Ever since 1979, the US has tried to overthrow the Iranian government and seize back control of Iranian oil, including CIA subversion, kidnappings, and attempted invasions through proxy armies.5 One proxy army was that of neighboring Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, who the US supported at the time although he was known as a dictator. In 1982, the US supplied Iraq with arms, money, and materials to make chemical weapons with which to attack Iran in the Iraq-Iran War that began in 1980. The direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2021 had direct motivations (in part, control of Iraq’s oil and control of Afghanistan’s rich lodes of lithium and rare earth minerals). Neither nation was defeated. But if they had been defeated, that would have enabled the US to militarily surround Iran, with Iraq on the long western border and Afghanistan on the long eastern border. The US also imposed a long series of severe economic and banking sanctions on Iran ever since 1979, in an effort to foment a counter-revolution.

Prior to 1979, Israel was friendly with the dictator Shah regime in Iran. But since then, Israel (like the U.S.), has viewed Iran as an enemy with both Israel and Iran accusing the other of terrorist attacks, including multiple covert assassinations and bombing operations by Israel on Iranian soil. Back in 1986, then Senator Joseph Biden announced how Israel provided the US with an essential military foothold in the Middle East. He said that supporting Israel “is the best three billion dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her (U.S.) interests in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel”.6 The U.S. and Israel share an extensive and deep overlap in military, intelligence, military secrets, surveillance, and high tech weaponry industries.

An ironclad ally

The U.S. now views Israel as a committed (“ironclad”) ally, should they decide upon a military attack against Iran. Behind the scenes, the two nations’ war planners may or may not have different views on when and how to initiate such an attack. Israel clearly wants to attack now and presumes the US will join, a case of the tail wagging the dog. The US is somewhat more cautious, perhaps waiting for the opportunity to establish public acquiescence with a phony pretext, much as it did in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin “incident” (to escalate in Vietnam), or the 2003 allegation of weapons of mass destruction (to invade Iraq), or even the Sept. 11, 2001 commercial airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (which were real but falsely blamed on Afghanistan, which had little to do with the attacks). Or perhaps the U.S. government is waiting for an opportunity to promote a subversion and assassination program in Iran (typical of its attempts at regime change around the world) in coordination with Israel, all with plausible deniability.

Israel and the U.S. are likely to act as one in an attack upon Iran, making sure each has the other’s back. Indeed, such an attack has now begun in slo-mo, with a lethal Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, and the US providing defense against the fully expected retaliation. Fortunately, the Iranian retaliation, with several days’ warning against purely military targets, has been restrained and designed to “make a statement” without killing anyone and without (they hope) escalating the situation.

Given the history, it is no surprise that Iran feels threatened by both the US and Israel and especially by the combination of the two. As a defense, Iran has established close ties with foreign political parties and resident armed militant groups in the Middle East including Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Houthis (in Yemen) and Hamas (in Palestine).

In all of this, it has become clear that a major purpose of US support for Israel has been to use it as the tip of the spear in a long-desired invasion of Iran. Needless to say, being used in this manner by the U.S. does not increase Israel’s actual security at all, no more than a hired hit man achieves a secure life.

One could argue that the U.S.’s “ironclad” loyalty to Israel is all about the election contributions from the billionaire “Israel Lobby” in the US, or about biblical support for Zionism or opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, or about DOD contracts to U.S. weapons manufacturers, or about blame for who committed which terrorist act first. But at the core, US involvement is really about control of oil. The US itself already has a lot of oil (because of environmentally destructive fracking), but to control the international supply provides the controller the power to turn on or off the spigot and affect prices at will to both “adversaries” and competitors. Without the U.S. seeking that control, conflicts in the Middle East more likely would remain local and not involve horrendous massacres funded by outside interests, such as the Gaza massacre, which has been bankrolled and supplied mainly by the U.S.

It is indeed unfortunate that the people of Israel, of Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan and (soon) of Iran have been caught in the middle of natural resource extraction and military target zones. US support of Israel is not “ironclad”; it is “oilclad”. And if the war escalates to nuclear (which is likely, if Israel uses any of its nuclear weapons in the attack on Iran with US support and if Russia then gets involved in Iran’s defense), then the registry of unfortunate populations may well expand to everyone in the world. And all this for corporate control of a resource that, in the interest of environmental protection, we should not be using anymore.

College Administrators are Falling Into a Tried and True Trap Laid by the Right

By Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Source: The Conversation

Image by Fuzheado, Creative Commons Zero

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the right

Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.

Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.

From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.

Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.

Cops on campus

Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.

In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.

With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.

Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.

President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.

Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.

For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.

Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.

The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?