Electoral Interventions: a Suspiciously Naïve View of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World

by TIMOTHY M. GILL JULY 9,2020

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If there has been one overarching silver lining to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it is that it has sparked a broader discussion of U.S. intervention abroad. In his new book, Rigged: America, Russia, and 100 Years of Covert Electoral Interference, David Shimer, a New York Times correspondent, pursues the ambitious agenda of examining the last century of U.S. and Soviet/Russian electoral interference. In doing so, Shimer conducted dozens of interviews with high-ranking U.S. foreign policy elites, including CIA members and individuals who served in recent U.S. presidential administrations. In the end, though, he offers up a highly naïve and suspiciously uninformed portrait of U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it involves U.S. state activities in the post-Cold War world.

In its first chapters, Shimer provides a clear view of U.S. intervention in Italy following World War II, as well as U.S. efforts to keep former Chilean President Salvador Allende from coming to power and then collaborating with opposition forces, including General Augusto Pinochet, to have him ousted in a violent coup. The elephant in the room of these discussions, however, is that U.S. intervention existed long before efforts in Italy in the 1940s. Since the inception of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the U.S. had formalized its self-proclaimed dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Shimer admittedly only sets out to examine the last century of intervention; however, there’s hardly any mention of U.S. interventionist policies particularly in Central America and the Caribbean during the early 20^th century – in places such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua. During the past century and before the Cold War, such policies extended even beyond the hemisphere into the Philippines and Guam. All of this is a serious omission from the text.

All together, Shimer seemingly excuses U.S. behavior during the Cold War due to existing global relations with the Soviet Union. According to him, the Soviet Union posed a serious threat to the U.S. and, as a result, the U.S. couldn’t absolutely pursue its allegedly natural interest in democracy. In doing so, he offers very little in the way of criticism of U.S. support for dictatorial governments. Instead, he opts to humanize many of the actors who manipulated elections and deceived foreign citizens abroad. This is somewhat fascinating at times, but paired with the overall tone of the book, it feels rather celebratory.

In the post-Cold War world, Shimer views the U.S. as finally able to pursue its mission all along: democracy promotion. However, there is next to no critical attention paid to the type of democracy that is promoted, what parties and individuals receive assistance, and what actors are sidelined in the process. There is no critical interrogation of U.S. agencies and their objectives, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (and its associated groups: the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute), and the U.S. Agency for International Development. There is next to no engagement with literature produced by social scientists or even by former employees of the NED/USAID, some of whom have deeply criticized the partisan nature of U.S. democracy promotion. Instead, Shimer believes that such efforts are truly non-partisan in most instances and that funding flows to any democratic actor interested in receiving it.

Research on this topic, though, has shown that funding does not simply flow to any actor interested in it. Rather, it primarily flows to actors that U.S. state elites view as maintaining a similar geopolitical worldview as the U.S. Research has also shown that the U.S. promotes a liberal form of democracy, which while it might include some form of civil and political rights, any emphases on social and economic rights are largely absent. More concretely, support has largely flowed to parties that accept or at least do not challenge U.S. global power, such as the right-wing opposition in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Shimer’s characterization of this sort of funding as “above board” and out in the open is equally suspect. The NED and USAID provide very little information to the public on what it is they do with taxpayer money abroad. In fact, I waited nearly seven years to receive all of the documents I requested from the NED through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on its activities in Venezuela. This is hardly transparency; it’s public relations management that has apparently fooled some into believing that the U.S. engages in no more covert action. Indeed, much of the discussion hinges on the term “covert,” a term that the NED surely detests what with its Cold War connotations. I know this, of course, because the group requested that the Washington Post alter a headline given to an article I published with them on NED funding in Venezuela in February 2019 initially titled “The U.S. has quietly supported the Venezuelan opposition for years.” As a result, the term “covertly” was changed to “quietly” several hours after its publication. (The link itself, however, contains the original headline.)

We can agree that the NED and USAID at least list the locations they work around the world on their respective websites and within their brochures. But, does it disclose to existing leftist governments that they are helping opposition groups develop campaign platforms? Does it disclose that they work with student groups that protest their leadership? Does it disclose they are funding rock bands to critique them? Does it disclose they are creating fake community groups, and designing all of their materials in order to change the political affiliations of poor, barrio residents?

It’s also stunning how despite the legacy of CIA deceit and lies, Shimer thinks that the former CIA employees he interviews are providing him with the truth. His conclusion from his interviews with CIA members is that the organization no longer attempts to influence electoral outcomes. His evidence, again, are his own interviews with CIA members. It’s quite a feat of naïveté to take such individuals at their word.

Only a few years ago, for instance, former CIA Director John Brennan lied to the public about the CIA domestically spying on Senate staffers investigating CIA use of torture. Earlier, he had lied about the extent of civilian casualties amid the CIA drone warfare program.

Why would any CIA officer tell Shimer the truth about their activities abroad, particularly while on the record? Why would they disclose to him whether or not they are manipulating elections? These sections involving contemporary CIA activities read like propaganda and parody: “I asked the CIA if they manipulate elections these days. Their answer? No, or perhaps very rarely. So there you have it.”

There is a rich, social scientific history involving contemporary forms of U.S. intervention abroad. It shows how the U.S. still engages in partisan forms of intervention. In my own research, members from both USAID and NED told me this: they want geopolitical allies around the world. Even if Hugo Chávez or Evo Morales are democratically elected, so what? If they oppose major aspects of U.S. foreign policy, then the U.S. democracy promotion community will work to change minds and enhance opposition parties. In the instance of Venezuela, this even included working with actors who had undemocratically sought to depose Chávez in a coup in 2002.

As for Shimer’s sections on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, there is nothing new.

It’s a deeply unfortunate book. Shimer gained access to all sorts of political elites, from Bill Clinton to several former heads of the CIA. Yet, he comes away with nothing insightful or nuanced – just a regurgitation of their carefully crafted statements, all of which you could find in their institution’s mission statements. The book has received accolades from The Guardian and the New York Times, to Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, and Hillary Clinton. The latter is not surprising. For a book all about recent intervention, there is little mention of Clinton’s own attempt to keep the democratically elected and undemocratically toppled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from running in elections in the post-coup period.

Hillary herself sought to whitewash her memoirs by removing this information from subsequently published copies of her book. The NED carefully selects adverbs to describe its uniformly non-transparent funding. And we now get an author drinking it all in and providing a suspiciously uninformed and under-explored treatment of U.S. intervention abroad. Look elsewhere for the truth.

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Timothy M. Gill (@timgill924) is an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

The Long Goodbye to Organized Religion

by HOWARD LISNOFF JULY 9,2020

It was the notice of an online meeting of a local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace that made me think of my long and troubled relationship with organized religion.

I grew up during a time in the 1950s and 1960s when membership in a temple or synagogue was a given for most Jews. And there were advantages in belonging to organized religion then. There was the sense of community and there was the sense of duty to some theological premises that seem to me like believing in the tooth fairy now. Community was the big issue then and everyone knew each other in my small Rhode Island community and it seemed as if people came through for one another in troubled times like during economic downturns or seismic life changes. Had it not been for that community, my father would have remained unemployed during an economic downturn in the late 1950s when he lost a business.

It was when I reached young adulthood that I realized all of that had changed along with the society. First, there was the Vietnam antiwar movement that espoused a critical stand vis-à-vis Israel that often got carried away in what I sometimes consider a garden variety of anti-Semitism. The positive result of that critical analysis of US/Israel relations was that it cast a bright light on the war policies of both countries and the gross injustices that came from those policies. There were other injustices in the larger world, but they would require a long alphabetized list.

But, it was joining a temple as a young adult that was the first major wake-up call for my dabbling in the waters of faith. At a ceremony for the naming of our first child, I asked the rabbi in charge of the temple we belonged to if he could give me the name of someone in the community and temple who could provide childcare for our daughter when my wife Jan returned to work (sexism is implicit here). Although that rabbi had an enviable history in the civil rights movement, he castigated me outside of the temple before the ceremony for thinking there would be someone of the social milieu that childcare providers come from who would also be a temple member. The obvious message was that childcare was beneath the dignity of temple members.

My next interaction with organized religion came when a member from a temple in our new community (we did not belong to this temple) asked me to speak to the membership about homelessness. When I finished my presentation… I was the grant writer and volunteer at a recently formed homeless shelter in the community… a representative of the group questioned me and expressed his belief that some homeless people were using the shelter to avoid meeting their life responsibilities such as working. I really didn’t know how to answer that kind of nonsensical and thoughtless inquiry. Choosing homelessness seems, in most cases, the course of last resort. I found this person’s opinion toward homeless people not representative of the progressive view of the majority of Jews in the US about social issues.

Because I stand out in a community for left ideas and left causes, I needed to speak with a person who could advise me about harassment that I suffered in the community in which I now live. I chose a rabbi at a local synagogue, and while he agreed that the harassment that I documented had the earmarks of anti-Semitism attached to it, he was about as interested in spending time with me on these issues as Donald Trump is in becoming anti-racist.

My last foray into organized religion, and I hope this will be the last (I am admittedly a slow learner), was joining a temple in upstate New York following the horrific massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The temple seemed like a welcoming place based on my experience at a memorial service for victims of the massacre, but that sense of community was soon spent.

A few months following our joining that temple, the rabbi gave a benediction at a ceremony at the Vietnam moving wall, a replica of the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. I’m absolutely not against memorializing the dead from that horrific and immoral war (which war is not?), but the rabbi’s words were so full of national chauvinism and militaristic statements that I had to catch my breath after reading them in the temple’s newsletter. Forget the atrocities of Vietnam perpetrated in hundreds of documented incidents; forget the massive bombing; the napalm; the use of Agent Orange; the murder of innocent women, children, and older people; and the expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia. The US had absolutely no business in Vietnam’s civil war, and especially because the US was an enormous superpower at the time and fought against a militarily weak opponent. The rabbi’s celebration of war stunned me, especially since I was both a resister to that war and a veteran of that era. I thought enough is enough at that point.

The rabbi’s call: I wrote a long goodbye letter to the final temple to which we belonged. The rabbi called me and we had a long conversation about her benediction at the moving wall. She stated that it was her responsibility to honor those whose names were on the wall. I countered that there were those who committed mass atrocities whose names are on that wall. I find it exhausting to revisit the immorality of that war again and again and again. Making it a “noble cause” by Ronald Reagan in the minds of some for the purpose of justifying future wars does not cleanse the guilt of the murder of the innocent. The Nuremberg Principles and the Geneva Conventions say differently, but past immoral wars have to be sanitized for new wars. The 2003 war in Iraq would have never taken place if lessons had been learned from the mass atrocities of the Vietnam War and the gross immorality of that war. If the US gave a damn about the veterans of that war, then they would have been taken care of properly following the end of the war, but they were not.

As a Jew, I look to the ethics and brilliance of scholar Norman Finklestein (“Is Israel a racist and criminal endeavor?” The SwissBox Conversation, May 18, 2020), and not the phenomenon of the so-called “tough Jew” that coincidentally arose during the belligerent Reagan administration and the continued growth of the far right in Israel. Even the horror of the Holocaust was weaponized by the far right against critics of Israeli policies and they, the critics, immediately and falsely became anti-Semites.

The sense of community attached to religious affiliation is long gone for me. Believing in fairy tales is not for me, especially if they are accompanied by the celebration of war. A person can hold strong secular beliefs about freedom for the Palestinian people (“Nettanyahu Plans To Annex Parts Of The West Bank. Many Israeli Settlers Want It All,” NPR, June 18, 2020), fair play for the little person, a commitment to learning, and the hope and intent to act for a better world without kneeling to illusions in the sky.

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Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).

The World Can Show How Pharma Monopolies Aren’t the Only Way to Fight COVID-19

by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA  JULY 9, 2020

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world. After making America sick again, Trump is trying to compensate for his administration’s failure by buying Gilead’s production for the next three months for the U.S., leaving nothing for the rest of the world.

This makes it all the more urgent for India and other countries that featured prominently in previous drug license fights against Big Pharma in the U.S. and around the world for more than a decade to break Gilead’s patent and issue compulsory licenses to manufacture the drug locally. The patent laws of most countries and the World Trade Organization’s 2001 Doha Declaration have clear provisions for compulsory licensing during a health emergency or an epidemic. COVID-19 obviously qualifies on both accounts.

On July 1, the U.S. reached a point of more than 50,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, about 23 percent of the 218,000 new cases worldwide that day, making it the global leader on how not to fight the COVID-19 epidemic. As of July 1, Brazil and India were in second and third place, respectively, for new cases.

Remdesivir is the only drug that in drug trials has shown some benefit in fighting the virus infection. Remdesivir works by reducing the replication of the virus in the human body, and this helps in shortening the hospital stay of the patient by about 25 percent. If the patient progresses to a more serious stage, needing oxygen support or ventilation, remdesivir is of little help. Here, anti-inflammatory drugs like dexamethasone become important. Dexamethasone has shown efficacy treating COVID-19 patients in clinical trials, and, unlike remdesivir, it works by reducing lung inflammation arising out of the infection, rather than by fighting the infection itself. Dexamethasone is off-patent and is widely available at low costs.

But if remdesivir cuts down the infectious period, not only is it beneficial to the patients who receive it, but it is also useful for society. By reducing the patient’s infectious period, it lowers the rate of virus transmission.

I have argued previously that after the battle for access to cheap AIDS drugs, the next big battle would be fought over COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. In the World Health Assembly, the U.S. was the only country that opposed the resolution that all medicines and vaccines should be put in a common patent pool, and accessible to all countries at reasonable costs.

We now know the reason for the U.S. opposition. It wants control over medicines and vaccines for the fight against the pandemic. One reason is to make U.S. citizens feel that Trump is looking after them by providing medicines, even if his administration has failed miserably in the fight against COVID-19. The second reason is that by controlling the medicine for the rest of the world, Trump can bargain with them and try to regain the global hegemon status that the U.S. has lost.

With this step, the U.S. has also made clear its intention regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. has backed a set of five companies with a $13 billion purse, as a part of its Operation Warp Speed to support vaccine development. One of these five is Moderna, a U.S. biotech company, and one of the frontrunners in the current vaccine trials. The other four backed by the U.S. are AstraZeneca (in consortium with Oxford University); Johnson & Johnson; Merck; and Pfizer with BioNTech. If any of these vaccines succeed and others do not, we can expect the U.S. will guard that vaccine as it is doing with COVID-19 medicine in the case of remdesivir. Fortunately for the world, there are a total of 17 vaccines in the World Health Organization’s list of ongoing clinical trials, and another 132 in the pipeline.

Apart from the U.S. buying up almost all of the remdesivir stock, the other issue in making remdesivir accessible to those who need it is the price at which Gilead is selling this drug. For U.S. patients, the cost is about $3,000 for a typical five-day course (which consists of six vials of the drug—two on the first day, and one per day after that). Gilead has granted a handful of licenses to drug manufacturers in other countries—including three Indian companies, Cipla, Hetero and Jubilant—to sell generic remdesivir. This means a full course of remdesivir to Indian patients will cost about $400 (at $66 per vial, for six vials).

What is the actual cost of a course of remdesivir? According to an article in the Journal of Virus Eradication by Hill et al in April, the active pharmaceutical ingredient for one day’s treatment should not cost more than $1. If we add to that the cost of making it into the typical five-day course of six injections, the total cost should not be more than $6. Calculations by two authors from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review in the U.S. use Hill’s data to estimate that the price of remdesivir for a full course of treatment (they use a longer course of 10 days) in the U.S. should be less than $10.

Why should a full course of remdesivir, costing less than $10 to produce, be priced at $3,000, or 300 times its cost of production, in the U.S.? Even at Gilead’s concessional price of $400 for India, it is still 40 times the cost of its production! Gilead’s argument is that because its medicine decreases the duration of hospitalization, it saves COVID-19 patients about $12,000 each in hospital bills—and by charging only one-fourth of that, even if it is 300 times the cost of production, Gilead is doing the customers a big favor.

As we know from the results of the clinical trials, remdesivir fights the virus, but if the patient becomes seriously ill, it does not have a statistically significant impact on mortality rates. If it did, Gilead’s price probably would have factored in lifetime earnings saved by remdesivir, and its price would probably have been even 10 times higher!

But even if remdesivir becomes significantly cheaper, it is uncertain that it can get to countries outside the U.S. thanks to the U.S.’s plan to buy almost all of Gilead’s stock of the drug. So what can the rest of the world do? It may need to prepare to fight a long battle, as India and other countries did during the AIDS epidemic against the U.S. and its drug cartel allies like Switzerland, France, the UK and Germany.

Big Pharma priced AIDS drugs around $10,000-15,000 for a year’s worth of treatment in the U.S. and Europe, and a ‘concessional’ price of $4,000 for poor countries. Indian companies were manufacturing the generic version of these drugs at a fraction of these prices, but countries who wanted to import AIDS drugs from India faced lawsuits and political pressure from the U.S.

This battle was fought for nearly a decade. In the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round in 2001, the Doha Declaration accepted that in the case of a health emergency or an epidemic, any country has the right to issue a compulsory license for producing lifesaving drugs. And the license to produce the drug could be issued even to a company outside the country’s borders. Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla could then supply the AIDS drugs at $350 for a year’s course to a number of countries, which would otherwise have been completely bankrupted by patented drugs’ higher prices—or else they would see their AIDS patients die in large numbers without medicines.

The victory to secure cheap generic AIDS drugs sets a precedent for the current pandemic. COVID-19 has already killed an estimated half a million and infected more than 10 million. No one can dispute that is both a health emergency and a pandemic. The remedy of using a compulsory license already exists in most countries’ patent laws and in the Doha Declaration.

Why, then, are other countries not starting the manufacture of remdesivir? Are they hoping that Gilead and the U.S. will behave better than they did earlier during the AIDS epidemic? Or are they afraid of the threat of retaliatory sanctions from the U.S.?

Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against countries that don’t comply with its patents. India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco to sell the cancer drug nexavar for less than 3 percent of Bayer’s price of more than $65,000 a year. After India issued the compulsory license on Nexavar, Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, said, “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”

In April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi buckled under Trump’s threat and exported hydroxychloroquine to the U.S. even though it was under an export ban at that time. Will he—and the leaders of other countries—be willing to stand up to the U.S. on remdesivir? Or will they agree with Trump that remdesivir should be reserved for only U.S. patients, even if they have the capacity to produce it for their people?

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Tribes Defeat Trump Administration and NRA in 9th Circuit on Sacred Grizzly Bear Appeal

by COUNTERPUNCH NEWS SERVICE JULY 8, 2020

Chief Arvol Looking Horse. Photo: Alter-Native Media.

San Francisco, CA.

The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals handed tribal nations an overwhelming victory Wednesday (7/8) in its ruling on the Trump administration-led appeal of a US District Court decision on Crow Tribe, et al v. Zinke. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana sought to reverse the September 2018 ruling by Judge Dana Christensen that returned the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections.

It was the second major defeat of the week for the Trump administration, following Judge James Boasberg’s ruling in US District Court in DC that the Dakota Access Pipeline had to be shut down pending an environmental review. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is a plaintiff in both cases.

The 9^th Circuit panel upheld Judge Christensen’s ruling, and validated key arguments made on behalf of the 17-member tribal plaintiff alliance, who again prevailed over intervenor-defendant-appellants, Safari Club International, the NRA, and a coalition of trophy hunting organizations, Big Ag, and ranching interests.

Tribal plaintiffs raised serious concerns about the FWS’s acceptance and facilitation of state-sponsored trophy hunts of the grizzly, and the impact those hunts would have on the already fragmented grizzly population. Tribes contended that trophy hunts would end any credible possibility of linkage zones between the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem populations and would further diminish genetic diversity in these ostensibly island populations. Both would make actual recovery untenable.

The Appellate panel agreed that the Trump administration’s Department of Interior had failed to adhere to its criteria of using “the best available science” in its decision-making process.

“Because there are no concrete, enforceable mechanisms in place to ensure long-term genetic health of the Yellowstone grizzly, the district court correctly concluded that the 2017 Rule is arbitrary and capricious,” the panel wrote in its decision.

Tribal grizzly bear treaty. Photo: Alter-Native Media.

Several of the indigenous community’s most-respected spiritual leaders are among the tribal plaintiffs, including Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Blackfeet Sun Dance leader Nolan Yellow Kidney, Zuni Religious Society headman, Kenny Bowekaty, and Cheyenne Sun Dance Priest, Don Shoulderblade. The tribal movement to protect the grizzly began when Shoulderblade founded GOAL Tribal Coalition.

The spiritual leaders all attested to the immense cultural significance of the grizzly bear. The abrogation of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act by the federal government in its attempts to delist and trophy hunt the grizzly was a significant element in tribes’ opposition.

“The grizzly bear is revered as sacred in a multitude of tribal cultures. The grizzly is our relative, a grandparent. For us at Hopi, the grizzly is our brother; a teacher of ceremonial and healing practices,” said Ben Nuvamsa, spokesman for the Hopi Bear Clan. “We don’t trophy hunt our grandparents. To some tribes, the grizzly is a deity. How can the trophy hunting of a deity not impact your religious and spiritual freedoms?” he asked.

Both tribal and environmental plaintiffs argued that FWS prioritized political favor, not science or the established regulatory mechanism, and “gerrymandered” data and its population estimates to fit the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel-oriented agenda. The 9^th Circuit found that FWS’s failure to fully commit to recalibration should new methods of population estimates be employed by the three states – each of which Trump carried in 2016 – again contravened the ESA:

“The FWS violated the ESA’s directive to make listing decisions ‘solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data’ when it failed to include a commitment to recalibration despite the FWS’s acknowledgment that a failure to provide such provision could threaten the Yellowstone grizzlies.”

The panel also noted how the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana were “deeply involved in the adoption of the Conservation Strategy” and how they “objected to any recalibration commitment.”

Despite petitions led by then-Oglala Sioux Tribe President, John Steele, and present Vice President, Tom Poor Bear, tribal nations were omitted from participating in the formulation of the Conservation Strategy, which was one of numerous violations of the federal-Indian trust responsibility committed by Interior.

Throughout the struggle, tribal plaintiffs emphasized that the Trump administration’s determination to delist the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone was a “Trojan Horse” with far-reaching consequences beyond the matter of federal protections for the Great Bear.

The federal government failed to uphold government-to-government consultation mandates, and the record demonstrates that it did not engage in “thorough” or “meaningful” consultation, but instead offered “alternative facts” to the media, which resulted in one tribal plaintiff, the Northern Arapaho Elders Society, filing a cease and desist order.

As the 9^th Circuit highlighted, the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana were instrumental in formulating the post-delisting policies and regulations. Documentation exposes how FWS wanted tribal nations with grizzly bear populations on their lands to adopt what were essentially state management plans which would, stated plaintiffs, have undermined tribal sovereignty, and set a “dangerous precedent.”

The federal government has long acknowledged that Greater Yellowstone is ancestral land to some 27 tribal nations, the Pawnee being the latest to be recognized. Prior to taking the issue to federal court, tribal plaintiffs explained how removing ESA protections from the sacred grizzly bear would concurrently remove protections from their sacred lands, and open the door to extractive industry and livestock interests to exploit a greatly diminished regulatory process for land leases. Several tribal organizations testified to this at a fall 2018 US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

“This is a historic day for tribal nations,” said Chief Stan C. Grier, Chief of the Piikani Nation. “Today I once again ask President Trump and Interior Secretary Bernhardt, a veteran fossil fuel lobbyist, this question: How can you possibly manage the sacred? One cannot manage the sacred; one seeks, reveres, and stands humbled by the presence of the sacred.”

“To the People of the Land, our tribal nations, our relatives, this momentous decision is a step towards reclaiming that which was taken from us. The future of my children and grandchildren, and yours, depends upon us protecting the environment and halting climate change. The grizzly bear is foundational to that fundamental struggle,” stressed Grier.

Grier became a prominent voice in the grizzly cause. The Piikani Nation introduced the “Grizzly Treaty,” which is now the most-signed tribal treaty in history with over 200 tribal nation signatories. The treaty was authored by Rain Bear Stands Last, then-chief of staff to Grier, who is now executive director of the Global Indigenous Council. Rain managed the tribal plaintiffs’ litigation with lead counsel, Jeff Rasmussen, of Patterson, Earnhart, Real Bird and Wilson, LLP. He also directed the short film, Not In Our Name, that was entered into the Congressional record at a May 2019 hearing on the grizzly bear.

The tenets of the Grizzly Treaty inspired The Tribal Heritage and Grizzly Bear Protection Act that was introduced by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman, Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ).

“Make no mistake, this is a seminal case and moment for Indian Country. Look at the forces arrayed against us, and yet we prevailed. We not only saved the sacred grizzly bear, we saved our religious freedoms, our ancestral lands, and defended tribal sovereignty and our treaty rights. We held this administration accountable for its failure to uphold the federal-Indian trust responsibility,” said Tom Rodgers, President of the Global Indigenous Council.

Images courtesy of Alter-Native Media.

Back on the List: A Big Win for Yellowstone Grizzlies and the Endangered Species Act, a Big Loss for Trump and Its Enemies

by MIKE GARRITY – ERIK MOLVAR JULY 9, 2020

Yellowstone Grizzlies. Photo: National Park Service.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling today on the litigation over the 2018 de-listing of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population under the Endangered Species Act, affirming a District Court order that blocked the de-listing of the great bears and kept them listed as a ‘threatened species’ under the Endangered Species Act. Today’s ruling keeps grizzly bears under federal management, and blocks sport hunting of the bears in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

This is a major victory for the embattled Yellowstone grizzly bear population, and a big win for science.  The court clearly recognized that the Fish and Wildlife Service was bowing to political pressure from the states in stripping grizzlies of their ESA protections, while ignoring the very clear scientific evidence that this bear population is too small and too isolated to be assured of long-term survival.

The Circuit Court ruled that because there were no concrete, enforceable mechanisms in place  to ensure long-term genetic health of the Yellowstone grizzly, the district court correctly concluded that the 2017 Rule was arbitrary and capricious in that regard. The Circuit Court also affirmed that “FWS’s decision to drop the commitment to recalibration in the conservation strategy violated the ESA because it was the result of political pressure by the states rather than having been based on the best scientific and commercial data.

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling is very important because the Yellowstone grizzly bear population is expanding but not growing. The population has not been growing for the last 20 years.  Grizzlies are expanding because their food sources are declining, whitebark pine trees and Yellowstone cutthroat trout populations have been decimated.  Yellowstone grizzlies have been moving out of their core habitat in a desperate search for food.  As these bears move out to their former habitat.

Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are desperate to start shooting grizzly bears which still need to be protected because they will not be recovered until we have one connected population.  The current situation of isolated populations will lead to inbreeding. Once a population is inbred, it is finished.  We are thrilled that the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Endangered Species Act requires that species be managed based on science, not politics.

The plaintiff group of Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Western Watersheds Project, and Native Ecosystems Council was one of five conservation and tribal plaintiff groups (plus one individual) who sued to reverse the de-listing of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, winning a District Court victory in 2018. They were opposed by state and federal governments and trophy hunting
groups including the National Rifle Association and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, seeking to strip grizzlies of protection.

COVID-19 Exposes the Weakness of a Major Theory Used to Justify Capitalism



by RICHARD D. WOLFF

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A cornerstone of orthodox economics is the idea that capitalists’ decisions about investing and producing are inherently “efficient.” This means that capitalists select among all alternative courses of action those whose costs are minimal and whose benefits are maximal. Keeping costs to the lowest possible level while producing goods and services that yield the most possible revenue is what maximizes profit, the difference between costs and revenues. Capitalism, we are told, is the best system because it drives all those in charge of production (the owners and top executives of enterprises) to maximize profits and thus economic efficiency. Capitalists get profits, and the rest of us benefit from the efficiency of production within a capitalist system.

COVID-19 exposes the sham of orthodox economics. It was not profitable for capitalists to produce and stockpile adequate quantities of tests, masks, gloves, beds, etc., to be prepared for the virus. Given the costs to produce these commodities, there was no way of knowing how long they would need to be stockpiled before there would be a demand for and purchase of them. Stockpiling costs. So do monitoring stockpiles for deterioration and replacing deteriorated stocks or insuring against deterioration. There was, in short, no way to know (and thus be able to calculate) the costs in the manner fantasized by orthodox economics.

Likewise, there was no way for capitalists to know or calculate the prices they might receive for selling the commodities they might stockpile. If no major disease arrived, revenues might be very small and take a long time to materialize. If a pandemic arrived, high prices might be charged, but when? If a national emergency brought in the government as the single buyer of such commodities (then delivered freely to the people in need), the prices would likely be much lower. If the United States cooperated with other countries on producing and distributing these commodities, and if such cooperation included pricing, that too would impact revenues from selling them. In short, capitalists cannot know or calculate revenues in the manner fantasized by orthodox economics.

Capitalists in general—and U.S. capitalists in particular—calculated that profits would be greater in other investments than those that could have produced the items needed to prepare for and contain COVID-19. The results (negative revenues) of having inadequately prepared and inadequately contained COVID-19 far outdistance whatever it might have cost to make adequate preparations. Efficiency in dealing with the pandemic was not what capitalism achieved: quite the opposite.

Most orthodox economics textbooks—those actually used now in most college and university economics courses—teach the simple-minded cost-benefit or cost-revenue “model” as if it captured capitalists’ decision-making. Profit-maximizing capitalism is thus justified, as “efficient” society gets the most return for the least effort. The magical sleight of hand here requires that students be told that the model captures the essence of what capitalists actually do.

But that is false. The model captures nothing of the irreducibly unknown and unknowable in both costs and revenues. Instead, the model blithely assumes the opposite, that costs and revenues are in general knowable and known. Only then can the textbook claim that capitalism is efficient. And that is the point of the model and of the textbook: to justify and rationalize a capitalism that would otherwise risk the exposure that COVID-19 now performs.

Actual capitalists know perfectly well how they must constantly guess about costs and revenues, how their guesses are often wrong, and how the fortunes of their enterprises rise and fall as their guesses encounter realities. The difference between economics textbooks and capitalist reality explains the difference between academic departments of economics and “business schools.” Most U.S. universities include both. They don’t have two history or anthropology or English departments. There is a reason for two separate faculties: In economics departments, capitalism is justified and rationalized by “models” such as those based on calculating costs and benefits. In business schools, the models are mostly ignored in favor of examining how to run actual businesses confronting irreducible unknowns (not only in costs and revenues but also in personnel management, enterprise organization, and financing).

One desperate effort of orthodox economics to banish the unknown from their models is worth considering because it seems to have persuaded some. They can admit that the costs and revenues they refer to are not known for certain, but that the “probability” of specific costs and revenues occurring can be known. We can then speak, they tell us, of costs and revenues that are 50, 30, or 1 percent certain, and that can then allow for efficient capitalist decisions based on the known probability of outcomes.

This is yet more magical sleight of hand. Simply put, to know the probability of any specific cost or revenue requires that we know the full range of possible costs or revenues and how frequently each specific cost occurs (how costs are “distributed” across all possibilities). But that is precisely what is not known or knowable. Poor capitalists: in fact, they can know neither what their costs and revenues are nor what all the possible costs and revenues might be nor what probability attaches to each of them. Uncertainty and unknowability are irreducible; they always were.

Thus capitalism does not generate, let alone guarantee efficiency. It’s all a mirage of ideological justification. Capitalism serves capitalists first and foremost. That minority occupies or selects the occupants of most of the dominant positions in society. In this they are like the masters and lords in slave and feudal societies. In those societies, the self-justification of their dominant minorities concerned their physical, mental, or moral superiority and/or their special relationship to God or Gods. Capitalist societies that broke from slave and feudal predecessors also rejected those systems’ self-justifications. Capitalism had to find a different kind of self-justification.

It found one: the fantasy of “efficiency” as guaranteed by capitalists’ profit maximization. We are all supposed to bow down to capitalism the way our ancestors bowed down to slave masters, feudal lords, and kings. COVID-19 exposes what is at stake in continuing to believe in this fantasy.

For centuries, capitalists undertook investments that were “profitable” only because they did not know (and thus miscounted or ignored) all the ecological costs entailed. It was capitalists who moved enterprises from one part of the world to another for higher profits who did not know (and thus did not take into account) the social and human costs involved. It was capitalists who found more profitable investments than to prepare for and stockpile the needed protective equipment to defend public health against COVID-19. They did not know either.

Moreover, it was partly belief in the fantasy—that private profit-driven enterprise is the “most efficient” economic system—that hobbled governments around the world. They did far less than they could and should have done to compensate for capitalism’s failures adequately to prepare for or contain the virus. Across the globe, the more entrapped in that fantasy (as in the U.S., the UK, and Brazil), the worse the death and destruction of COVID-19. Where entrapment was less (as in New Zealand, Vietnam, and Japan)—sometimes because of competing traditional values not or not yet displaced by the capitalist fantasy—death and destruction were minimized.

A positive outcome of the coronavirus disaster would be a wider appreciation that liberating ourselves from capitalism requires rejecting its self-justifying ideology of efficiency.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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More articles by:RICHARD D. WOLFF

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.